Mere feet away, Sergeant Dollins screamed, along with almost everyone else who could find their voice, and opened up with his Thompson. A slimy rope jerked him into a gaping mouth and for a second the Marines nearby could see his muzzle flash through the semi-transparent slime. Then the bulk coiled up and Sergeant Dollins was squeezed back out an aperture roughly the size of an egg, like the suppurating contents of a lanced boil. About half the guys in Dollins’ squad were now either running blindly or trying to get their Sergeant out of their eyes.
All the while, every Marine blasted away with everything he had. Bullets splashed into it and vanished with no more effect than firing into a lake. Hennessey was trying to seat a second drum magazine when he was jerked backwards off his feet. “Waddaminit! Waddaminit!” he screamed. Charlie Paskow didn’t wait a minute. Swinging Hennessey around by his equipment harness, Paskow dragged him stumbling down Water Street towards the boarded-up customs house at the corner of Elliot. Hennessey couldn’t believe what the hell he was doing. Why am I running? he wondered as he fled along the loading docks.
Behind Paskow and Hennessey the other Marines were scattering in every direction. Most weren’t fast enough. As the thing sucked Sergeant Miles into its obscene bulk, he pulled the pins on the two grenades on his belt. He died quicker than Lieutenant Cobb, who was being used by a tentacle to smash a military truck’s cab into junk.
Hennessey lost track of where he was for a second. For some reason, he thought he saw McVeigh put his .45 under his chin as he was being sucked into the monster. Then Paskow shoved him through the front window of the customs house. Inside was blackness, the floor a maze of broken furniture and coated with shards of glass. Paskow kept pushing Hennessey forward until they emerged out the back, onto the corner of Church Street. Hennessey looked over his shoulder back towards the docks. Paskow was right behind him, his eyes burning like magnesium. “Don’t look! Keep running!”
They were passing something like a churchyard when a shot from one of the second- or third-story windows kicked a piece of the cobblestones loose just a foot or two to their left. With no time to slow down, no time to determine where the shot came from, they ran straight for one of the abandoned office buildings on their left. Not even slowing to try the doorknob, Hennessey threw his shoulder into the darkly stained wood, which burst apart like a rotten log, spilling him inside onto the floor. He got up, took a step, and fell screaming into open air. He pictured twisted, rusty machinery rising out of the blackness, a dozen lethal points.
He was wrong, of course. Nothing waited but a stone floor. Hennessey landed extremely well, keeping his feet together and rolling forward. Even so, he could feel something stab his left ankle and he cried out as he rolled on his side.
From above Paskow yelled down, “Bob! Bob!”
“I’m okay, I think,” Hennessey added weakly, suddenly realizing that he couldn’t see his Thompson anywhere.
“Stay put. I’ll find the stairs.” Hennessey could hear Paskow picking his way over the creaking timbers above. Alone in the dark, he began groping for the submachine gun. His gloved hands ranged back and forth over the cold stone for what seemed like forever. Then, with trembling relief, he lit on the still-warm barrel and pulled it to him, hugging it like a lost child. For a moment, Hennessey almost sobbed his relief. Then he heard the movement.
Something was with him in the dark.
He backed up until he hit the wall, bringing the Thompson up to his hip, but there was nothing to see. Nothing but blackness. Even so, he caught that fishy smell again, pricking at his nose. “Charlie! Don’t come down here!”
“What?”
“There’s some of those things down here! Stay upstairs!” Hennessey tested the weight of the weapon and figured he had better than forty rounds left in the drum. Plenty for what he was going to try. Holding tight on the fore grip to keep the barrel low, Hennessey squeezed the trigger and swung the barrel in a long arc from left to right. Suddenly the cluttered basement was illuminated by the strobing muzzle-flash. Then the things started jumping and moving, scrambling from between the rotten crates and collapsed shelves. Hennessey swung the Thompson and hosed them down. First one, then another, then two more went down howling. Then nothing. Silence.
“Bob? Bob, are you okay?”
Hennessey felt dizzy with relief. “Sure. I’m fine. C’mon down.” To his right Hennessey could hear the stairs creaking under Paskow’s weight. After peeling off the exhausted drum, Hennessey replaced it with a thirty-round stick and began to pick his way through the rubble to the stairs. A moment later the room was bathed in white light by another parachute flare, gleaming through the Swiss cheese holes of the roof. Gaping craters in the floors above were plainly visible for the second it passed overhead. And so were the four bodies of the family Hennessey had slaughtered.
The mother and father had the signs. The bulging eyes, the fish-like mouths, the skin that seemed too dry. But the two kids—the girl maybe six, the boy just a toddler—they looked just fine. It was hard to tell, of course. Firing from the hip, Hennessey had caught each in the head with a whopping .45 round. “Ah Jesus!”
Paskow looked down at the scene just before the flare drifted away and took their light with it. “C’mon, we gotta go.”
“Jesus, Charlie, I fuckin’ killed ’em.”
“Nice shootin’.” Paskow grabbed Hennessey’s equipment harness and pulled him up the stairs. “Now move it!”
“But—”
“They ain’t people,” Paskow hissed. “They’re deviates. Sub-humans. Understand this, Bob, we ain’t Marines tonight. We’re exterminators. This town, and everyone in it…We’re gonna hafta burn it all.” Paskow looked positively gleeful at the prospect. “But first we gotta get out of here.” With that, Paskow pulled Hennessey up the steps and out a door onto Fall Street. To their left was the Manuxet River and the Federal Street bridge back into the south side of town.
All around them the operation was coming apart. Men ran every direction, screaming, firing their weapons at who knows what. At the intersection of Fall and Dock Streets, Paskow and Hennessey were nearly run down by a careening truck full of Marines. It took the turn onto the Federal Street Bridge rather poorly and slammed into the railing at about forty miles an hour. The driver shot out through the front window like a human cannonball, arching through the air, his arms pinwheeling until he slammed into the frozen Manuxet river with a crack that was part ice, part bone. The Marines on the truck fell over themselves pouring out the back.
Then there was a crash like thunder behind them. Six feet tall and spread across Dock Street like an enormous black mound of dough, the horror from Water Street rolled into the fish-packing plant five blocks away and splintered the loading docks like dry kindling. It was a freight train. An avalanche. A tidal wave. Hennessey was distantly aware he’d shat himself.
“Don’t look! Run!” Paskow screamed. On the bridge, Paskow stopped. “Waddaminit!” His iron grip brought Hennessey to a sliding halt. Then Hennessey saw it too. Downstream, past the ruins of the Fish Street Bridge was a second bridge, one linking both sides of the wharf across the Manuxet. The mountain of slime wasn’t crossing that bridge; in fact it was moving away. Someone down there had a pair of flamethrowers going. The long geysers of fire shot out and bathed the creature, driving it back against the fish-packing plant, collapsing the outer wall like something built out of a child’s blocks. The plant disintegrated as the thing rolled through its interior, smashing walls and support beams. It was coming their way now. Right towards their bridge.