Nothing climbed up the sea wall now. No tracers screamed down Water Street. There was no movement except the slow, painful wriggling of the dying. Slowly the Marines began picking their way through the tangle of carnage. Hennessey felt drunk, lightheaded. As he inched through the dead, he jumped at the crack of gunfire as here and there a Marine delivered a perfunctory coup de grace.
In the light from the fires, Hennessey could now see that the area beneath the dock was awash with broken bodies. Fins, scales, and gills glistened in the orange flames. They’d killed far more of the creatures than Hennessey had suspected. The scene was almost like that of a beach after a red-tide fish-kill. And at the base of the sea wall, the bodies piled one atop the other in a bloody pyramid. The pile of gutted and boned fish-men had brought the shoal at least six feet higher. Hennessey had never seen such a slaughter, not even in picture books about the Great War.
A few of the fishing boats moored beneath the drunkenly listing docks still had fuel in their tanks. As they cooked off one by one, they sent fireballs roaring skyward. It wouldn’t take too long for the docks to turn into a twisted maze of blazing timbers and planks. Hennessey strained for any movement in the thick gray haze. There was nothing. The fish-men had had enough. For the moment.
“Sound off by squads, you fucking apes!” bellowed Sergeant Miles. “First Squad!” Only five out of eight men barked out their names. As the rest of the platoon sounded off, Hennessey took a quick mental inventory of the remaining men in his squad. Lyman…he was still lying at the foot of the stairs at the Sergeants’ house. Paskow was dropping the magazine from his .45 and slapping another in place. He didn’t even look out of breath. Boyle’s pants were torn open at the left knee and his boot was wet with his blood. McVeigh and Grodin were panting like dogs but unmarked. The other two, Baldwin and Rhodes, had ended up on the north end of the defense line and had come through unscathed.
The rest of Third Platoon was mauled. Four Marines were dead, including Franklin with his throat torn out and balls bitten off. Eleven men were wounded, two so badly they’d soon be joining the dead. Out of the thirty-two men who comprised Third Platoon, only twenty-one were still able to fire a weapon. By some miracle, seven of them were in Hennessey’s squad. There was a platoon from Second Company stumbling about with just seventeen men still standing, and the two platoons from First Company who’d begun the defense of the sea wall couldn’t even form a full platoon between them. The wounded screamed and moaned; the others prayed and even wept. The only sounds of sanity came from Sergeant Miles bellowing orders to the survivors, policing up weapons and the dead.
At that moment, Lieutenant Cobb was standing next to First Company’s Captain Frost. The Captain was screaming and gesturing wildly with his .45. “They came out of the sea, goddammit! Right out of the sea! They were all over us before we knew what was happening. It’s a goddamn miracle it was only a dozen or so to start with. If they’d hit us with that second wave first…” Frost’s quavering voice trailed off and then rose hysterically again. “We gotta get the Navy! We gotta get depth charges!”
“Sir! Sir!” Cobb hissed, shaking the man. “Calm down, sir. I need to know what you want us to do?”
“Do?” Frost shrieked. “What can we do? We’ve got to get out of here is what!”
“Dammit, sir, if we pull out, those things will overrun the town.” Cobb gripped the Captain’s shoulders in a vise-grip. “The battalion will be overrun. We’re all spread out policing up the locals. If we’re overrun, it’ll unravel. It’ll be a slaughter!”
“Fuck them!” Frost giggled hysterically. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”
Suddenly, the loudest noise on the docks was the sound of Lieutenant Cobb slapping Captain Frost’s face. Frost trembled with anger, his red-rimmed eyes jumping in their sockets. “I’ll see you broken for that.”
Cobb drew in a measured breath and set his jaw. “Yes, sir. And if you run, or do anything to incite others to run, they’ll be trying me for murder as well.” Then he turned to Sergeant Miles. “Put the Captain someplace where he’ll be out of the way, Sergeant.”
For the next ten minutes, Lieutenant Cobb turned into Blackjack Pershing, barking commands in rapid succession, imposing order through his own force of personality. He sent the severely wounded off in a truck to the Battalion HQ with a situation report and request for reinforcements. He got the rest of the men to police up the extra ammo off the dead, tip the slain creatures back into the bay, and set the Browning machine gun up in the second-floor window of an abandoned warehouse at the end of Pierce Street.
Across the river, along the docks on the south side, Hennessey could see a couple of Brownings raking back and forth across the docks and shore. Then a tongue of liquid fire leapt out and showered the docks with jellied gasoline. As soon as Hennessey saw that, he knew that the fish-men would quickly figure to give the north docks another try.
“There they are!” A stout Montana Sergeant named Dollins stabbed a trembling finger towards the bay. Bobbing on the surface about a hundred yards out, scores of squat heads listed atop powerful shoulders. Their fat eyes reflected the orange light from the fires on the docks.
“Let ’em have it!” roared Cobb. With that, the Browning cut loose. The fusillade peppered the water, tore open misshapen skulls and sent the rest of the creatures diving under the waves. “Cease fire!” Cobb called up to the machine-gun nest. “Hold your fire!”
Hennessey waited silently. None of the Marines spoke. No one breathed. The sounds of the little battles behind them in Innsmouth faded from their perception as they focused on the black waters of Innsmouth Bay. Every fiber of their beings reached out to try to pick out a sound, a movement, anything that would tell them where the attack would come. But nothing came, nothing moved but the waves lapping against the shore and the horrible bodies stacked along its edge. Hennessey waited in the snow with the rest of the Marines and listened to the waves breaking.
Charlie Paskow broke the silence. “Tide’s comin’ in,” he whispered. Hennessey, lost in concentration, didn’t bother to answer him. “Tide’s not due till dawn,” he continued gravely. Hennessey was about to shush him when he caught Paskow’s eye. He was looking at the waves cresting against the shore. They were strong and insistent. And they didn’t wash back out. They just kept pushing one atop the other against the shore. The tide was coming in all right. In one single surge of water. Then Hennessey saw it. One of the fishing boats, nearly burned down to the waterline, rose as if a whale, pushing thousands of gallons of water before it, had just passed beneath. Before he could even register what he’d seen, Hennessey saw one of the dock’s still-standing pilings plow under, like a road sign struck by an out-of-control truck.
“Under the water!” Lieutenant Cobb bellowed. “They’re under the water!” Marines surged forward to the edge of the sea wall to fire down into the submerged beasts. But it wasn’t a horde of sea devils.
It was just one.
Hennessey would later describe it to his Naval Intelligence de-briefers as being like an avalanche. An avalanche of tar that jumped up out of the sea.
A fair description. Except it was far more than that. An avalanche may be animate, but it is lifeless. The thing that erupted from the sea was anything but lifeless. It veritably boiled with life, like a steaming, maggot-filled turd. There were the eyes, and the mouths, the teeth, the tongues, the tentacles, the pincers, the claws, the talons. It was the whole Bronx Zoo boiled down to a thick, viscous paste and then filled with lightning. Even the parts that looked like little more than fibrous snot moved and coiled with a terrible strength. Within a second, it rolled straight up the sea wall. Private Rhodes was standing right on the edge when it reared up like a wave cresting in reverse and then slapped its weight down on him. His helmet slammed down onto his bootlaces and most everything in between shot liquidly out the sides.