As soon as he approached, Cobb said, “There’s one in that basement, sir. My men killed another one across the street in that house there.”
“Let’s have a look at this one here, Lieutenant.”
The creature bellowed and cried for its wife, Mary, and shook the bars with its webbed hands. After a few moments of staring noncommittally, Kardashian announced, “I’ll see the dead one now.”
Hennessey and some other Marines had begun to follow the entourage across the street when Sergeant Miles turned and roared, “What th’ hell d’ya think yer doin’! Don’t stand around like a bunch’a ducks in a shootin’ gallery! Spread out and form a perimeter to secure this block!” The Marines scrambled into position instantly.
Although they were supposed to be watching the streets and windows, many of the Marines were asking each other what was going on and trying to get Boyle, Hennessey, or Paskow to tell them what they’d seen in the Sergeant house and what had happened to Lyman. Paskow kept his views to himself, but Boyle and Hennessey ended up repeating the story about a dozen times.
Then, from the east, towards the docks, the sounds of a full-scale battle shattered the calm. The avenue echoed with the clattering of Thompsons and the booming of shotguns. All the Marines looked east like dogs catching a scent. It wasn’t like the earlier gunfire. Once or twice before they’d heard the odd angry shot, but this was something else. Those who’d seen the fields of Flanders in the Great War had heard the sound before: a “Big Push,” hundreds of men charging across No Man’s Land into the blazing muzzles of enemy machine guns and barbed wire. But it wasn’t quite the same. Instead of the roaring hurrah of the advancing troops, there was another sound. Something like a swamp filled with frogs, only deeper and fuller. Then they saw the flare pop high to the east. Under its parachute, the white magnesium glare threw stark, crazily jumping shadows down alleys and through hollow windows. Hennessey stood transfixed, watching it drift behind the building and into the midst of the still-raging battle.
“Marines! Listen up!” It was Captain Kardashian standing atop the hood of the dilapidated motor coach in front of the Sergeant house. “These are your new orders concerning evacuation. Any local who looks abnormal is to be treated as a hostile. Take no chances. If they resist for even a second, shoot ’em. If you come across any locked or padlocked doors, don’t open ’em. We’ll just keep the things in there bottled up until we’re ready for ’em. Mark every house where you find one of those things with an ‘X.’ Carve it in the front door and move on to the next house. Do you understand?”
The cry of “yessir” went up all down the line. Just then a young Marine came charging up Martin Street and onto Phillips at a dead run.
“Captain! Captain Kardashian!”
“What is it, soldier?”
“Captain Frost sent me, sir,” he gasped. “First Company is under attack on the docks. We need reinforcements immediately!” A spatter of blood marked his white winter camouflage.
Kardashian spun around on Lieutenant Cobb. “That’ll be you, Bill. Get your platoon down there right now! Double-time!”
“Yessir! Third Platoon to me!” Cobb shouted. Hennessey and the rest of the men quickly converged and set off at a jog down Martin Street to the sea. As they ran, the pounding of thirty pairs of boots thumped in counterpoint to the rattling bullets in the Thompsons’ drum-magazines. Even above that din, Hennessey could hear the battle raging in front of them. Another parachute flare arched skyward. Even eight hundred yards away, down the sloping hill to the harbor, the Marines could see flashes of gunfire.
As they crossed Lafayette Street, the brooding shape of the Marsh Mansion loomed above them to their left. The grounds stretched all the way along Martin between Lafayette and Washington, while the mansion itself, with its wide-terraced parterres, towered three stories. Its top was crowned by an iron-railed widow’s walk. Big black Packard sedans and military trucks filled the driveway and yard. Flanking the front gate and door, pairs of dark-coated T-men in fedoras cradled their Thompsons. Marines were lifting some kind of stone statue into the back of one of the trucks while a nervous T-man kept saying, “Easy! Go easy with that!” More Marines prodded a handcuffed figure down the front walk with their bayonets. Whatever it was, it wore a bloodied nightshirt and stumbled along with a curious hopping limp. Four Marines had been laid out on the front lawn, side by side, their helmets placed over their faces, their white camouflage torn and crusted with blood.
The docks were five more blocks ahead, nearly four football fields away, down a corridor of crumbling warehouses and office buildings, obviously long-abandoned. Hennessey’s lungs burned as he ran. He could now hear screams, shouted orders, and cries of agony. And behind that din, the chorus of croaking and braying rumbled. Suddenly out of the blackness a baby-faced Marine emerged running straight for them. His face was as white as his camouflage. He didn’t slow down for a second, just swerved to the right and flew right past Hennessey’s platoon, tears of mindless panic streaming down his face.
On Water Street, right in front of the wharf, Thompsons and Browning machine-guns fired such long bursts they should have melted the barrels into slag. Marines ran this way and that. It appeared at first as if every Marine in First Company was trying to spend every last round as quickly as possible by firing into the blackness under the docks. A wild-eyed corporal ran past Lieutenant Cobb, a can of belted machine-gun ammo in each hand, screaming, “They’re under the docks! Get ’em! Get ’em!”
The air burned with cordite. Every breath scalded the lungs. But even above the scent of war, a more ponderous stench asserted itself, the old rotting smell of dead fish, now grown monumental. It displaced the air and seemed to steal the last usable oxygen. Hennessey almost believed that his stomach would surrender its contents to the stink, when he noticed the croaking, bellowing chorus rising from the wharves of Innsmouth blending with the splashing of hundreds of flailing limbs. The men of Third Company, Third Platoon stumbled forward to the edge of the sea wall, peering down among the jumble of ships’ masts and pilings. Hennessey followed, straining into the dark tangle. And at that moment, everyone wished they were back in the jungle with Sandino.
Below the docks, outlined by the strobing muzzle flashes of nearly a hundred weapons, clinging to wharf pilings, hanging from the masts and rigging, and crouched on the listing decks of Innsmouth’s worm-eaten fishing fleet, squirmed an army out of drowned nightmares. Two arms, two legs, and a bloated, lolling head—each stood like a man with a cork-screwed spine. But the similarity to terrestrial life ended at that, for these were creatures of the deep. The white gleam of the flare reflected in hundreds of pairs of fat, oily eyes mounted on the sides of scaly heads, the eyes of creatures crafted by evolution to strain every last particle of light from their environment. Wet, lazy gills opened and closed on the sides of their stout necks. Their taloned, webbed hands and feet, like baseball gloves, were splayed wide. Their bottom jaws dropped open like the cavernous mouths of sea bass and again those barking croaks issued forth. “Iä! Iä!” came the war cry from the deep. “Iä!”
Nobody had to give the order to open fire. It erupted in a spasmodic fusillade that sent dozens more of the barking horde tumbling into the black waters. Hennessey brought his Thompson to his shoulder and began firing bursts into the thickest knot of them, chopping through rubbery hide, sending gouts of scarlet and other colors over the rotten timbers. They fell, only to be immediately replaced by a dozen more. The Marines, Hennessey included, were all screaming now, nearly drowning out the croaking of the fish-men. But they could not slow the charge. Pump-action shotguns worked with blinding speed, Thompsons raked over the braying throng, but it was not enough. Within seconds the things gained the sea wall and began to climb.