The hand clutching him had latched onto his right side, just below the ribcage. Its fingers were swarthy, tips digging into his flesh. Jakes dropped his rifle and clawed at the grip with one arm while trying to keep himself from being pulled through the door with the other. Both were losing efforts.
“Jakes!” Grimm rushed forward and grabbed the man’s shoulders, paying no attention to the gun barrel protruding from the next compartment.
But the rifle disappeared. The Serpent needed its hand for something else.
“The door! It’s trying to shut the door!” I yelled. The SEALs didn’t move. All had raised their weapons, but except for Grimm, none showed any capacity for action or speech.
Jakes’s wails hit another register, then disappeared into a high-pitched whisper as his throat gave out. The hand’s grip had intensified, judging by the paleness of its knuckles, and the fingers now seemed to disappear into the SEAL’s sweater. But despite the strength displayed there, Jakes wasn’t moving through the doorway.
Was Grimm winning this fight? No. There was no way. The Serpent was using Jakes as a shield.
“I got him! I got him!” Grimm yelled, trying to keep his hands from being pinned between his comrade and the hatch’s edge. But he didn’t have him. He had to know that. “Come on, somebody help me!”
“No! Shoot through him! Shoot through him!” My voice again, and I couldn’t believe the conviction I heard there, didn’t know where it was coming from. Someplace deep inside me, I was certain what was going to happen next. “It’s going to close the hatch! Shoot now!”
I heard a wet, muffled pop as one ofJakes’s ribs failed. He wasn’t going to survive this encounter. If his liver hadn’t exploded from the pressure being applied there, his innards were mangled beyond repair. But I knew the man-the thing-behind him had no intention of leaving it at that.
“Goddamnit, Grimm, get out of the way!” I had brought the pistol up to a shooting position, and my finger tightened on the trigger.
“Belay that! Belay that!” It was Larsen this time. “Hold your fire, all of you. Myers, don’t you shoot!”
He moved toward the door, directing as he went. Above all the confusion floated Jakes’s continual, wispy scream.
“Moretti, Reyes, grab his arm! Shoot when he’s clear of the door!”
“Larsen, no! It’s going to get away! Open fire! Someone fucking… shoot through Jakes!”
If the SEAL in question heard our debate over his fate, he didn’t show it. His eyes were staring at something far in the distance, unfocused by the white-hot anguish anchored in his lower torso.
Then the brown orbs crossed, a comical expression that seemed horrific and nauseating now. His body jerked once, twice. I heard thumps accompanying the movement, a hollow sound like someone being punched in the sternum.
Grimm fell backward, pulling Jakes on top of him as the Serpent released its grip. The hatch swung shut at the same time.
A combat knife was buried in Jakes’s back between the ribs on the left side. Right into the heart, I knew without examining him.
“Oh, fuck! Jakes! Jakes, man, are you OK?” That was Grimm. Either he hadn’t seen the weapon protruding from the SEAL’s back or he didn’t realize what it meant.
“He’s dead,” I said, dropping the pistol to my side.
Grimm looked up at me, an innocent, hurt expression more appropriate of a child than a soldier.
“I tried to save him,” he said.
I didn’t reply. I knew what he had been trying to do, but I also knew he’d had no chance of success. I felt my energy fall away, leaving me too drained to scold or praise. All the resolve that had guided me-steadied my aim and detached me from my emotions-deserted me.
Reyes stepped forward, reaching for the hatch’s wheel. His rifle was balanced on his hip with his other hand. Open the door, then shoot; that was his plan.
“Wait! Don’t do that! Don’t open the door,” Moretti said, beating me to it. At best, Reyes’s weapon would be ripped out of his hand. At worst, his arm would be ripped from its socket. No matter how he positioned himself, he would be in close quarters with the Serpent, and that had proved fatal to everyone who had found themselves in the same situation.
The SEAL stopped, then stepped back. But he kept his rifle pointed at the hatch. That decision I agreed with.
“You did the right thing,” Larsen said, kneeling next to his de facto second-in-command, who still was trapped under Jakes’s body.
No, he hadn’t. Moretti and Reyes were looking back and forth between Larsen and me, their faces unreadable.
“And you… how dare you give the order to shoot one of my men!” Larsen said to me, standing up and pushing his way through Reyes. His feet straddled Ridder’s head, but he didn’t look down.
“The Serpent was killing him with its hand,” I said. “And it was using its other hand to close the hatch door. Jakes wasn’t going to survive. Now we may not, either.”
He knew I was right. I could see the hopelessness in his eyes, the look of a leader whose affection for his men had pushed him into the wrong side of an impossible decision.
“I’m sorry Jakes died,” I continued. “He didn’t deserve that, and he didn’t deserve to be shot by his friends, either.”
No anger now. Now Larsen stared down at the puddle of cooling blood around his boots. He didn’t blink, his mouth twitching with halfsaid words, as the two other SEALs helped Grimm to his feet.
“It keeps getting worse,” he said, speaking at me but not to me. “Unreal. Fucked-up. Shit in a blender.”
I had no quarrel with that assessment.
“Sir?” It was the chief.
Larsen shuffled his feet, turning to face Moretti.
“Sir, what do we do now?”
It was as plaintive a question as a professional killer could ask. The honesty in it was obvious, and so was the importance of a direct, decisive answer. I doubted Larsen was up to it.
But as he had so many times already, he surprised me.
“We figure out some other way to kill it. It wants to make sure it’s the only thing getting off this boat. I want to make sure it’s unloaded in a casket.” His body language had changed with each syllable. He had begun speaking as a beaten man, but now his spine was straight, unafraid. “Surrender isn’t a choice. It never was, never has been and isn’t now. We fight until we win. That’s the only outcome.”
Then the lights flickered and expired, thrusting the world into invisibility and our fears into full view.
XI
The SEALS’ reactions were quick and, I’m sure, instinctual. They may have saved us.
“Lights! Lights!” Larsen yelled.
All their rifles had flashlights mounted under the barrels, and before his command disappeared into the darkness, the SEALs had switched them on. There was a swirl of beams, each isolating a fragment of the scene as they swung through the compartment.
Grimm’s face, no longer stunned or melancholy. Jakes’s body, seeming like a prop, a piece of scenery caught in a spotlight. The empty crew stations. Tendrils of gunsmoke suspended in the dead air. The never-ending contours of the walls and ceiling, which now appeared more organic, like the veins and arteries of a monster. Flashes of hands, belts, guns, boots.
Then, without further orders, all the beams were focused on one spot: the door. It still was closed. The locking mechanism was motionless.
“It’s dogged, sir,” Reyes said. It sounded like his clipped Latino accent, anyway. All the SEALs’ features were just another part of the darkness.
“Keep ’em on the door. Nothing’s getting through,” Larsen said.