“Fire,” Paskow hissed. “It don’t like fire! We gotta seal off this bridge with flamethrowers!” Whirling around, Paskow stopped and stared at two Marines stumbling out of the crashed truck. They were shrugging their flamethrowers off their backs and turning to run.
“You!” shouted Paskow. He let go of Hennessey’s equipment harness, sending him sprawling into the snow. “Get over here with those torches!”
“Fuck you!” screamed the ashen-faced kid, his acne scarlet against his snow-white skin. Paskow shot the kid right in the face. Paskow turned the .45 on the second Marine.
“Are your tanks full?”
He nodded furiously. Paskow shot him through the heart for good measure. Jamming the .45 in his belt, Paskow jerked Hennessey to his feet and hurled him towards the first flamethrower. “Strap that torch on!” Hennessey was weeping with exhaustion, but did as he was told. Meanwhile dozens of Marines raced past them, heading for the Arkham road and out of town. Out of Massachusetts if they could manage it. Fuck Innsmouth. Fuck Massachusetts. Fuck New England. No fucking way were they slowing down before they hit Tierra del Fuego.
Paskow snapped the chest buckle from the flamethrower’s harness into place and ran to the truck. He flipped up the canvas flap and began rummaging in the back. Hennessey was just shrugging the tanks full of liquid fire onto his shoulders when Paskow said, “Bob! Heads up!” Hennessey turned in time to catch a pineapple-sized white phosphorous grenade. Paskow tossed him two more. Then, shouldering a satchel charge, he craned his neck and looked back behind them; his pupils widened. “Move your ass, Bob!” Hennessey saw the rolling obscenity coming down Dock Street right towards them. It wasn’t alone. Right behind it, hopping and leaping around the fat, greasy bag of slime were more of the sea devils, barking and croaking. One carried a human arm as a club. And alongside them were men, men like Mr. Sergeant, carrying shotguns and rifles and cleavers and scooping up the weapons of the fallen Marines.
Paskow pulled the fuse pin from a second satchel charge and tossed it into the back of the truck. It landed right between the three cases of white phosphorous grenades and the six cases filled with bricks of TNT. “Runrunrunrun!” Paskow and Hennessey tore across the bridge with fifty pounds of jellied fuel sloshing on their backs. Just one hot fragment! Just one! was the only coherent thought in Hennessey’s head. As they reached the south end of the bridge, they peeled off to the right around the grimy Waite and Sons’ Restaurant, with its swinging placard showing a fish-head impaled on an enormous barbed hook. A moment later, Hennessey saw the searing flash of light and earth-shaking concussion send the placard airborne, flying over New Town Square.
The blast wave surged outward like an invisible wall of cement traveling at the speed of sound, trailing a cloud of debris that included head-sized cobblestones. Laying flat on their faces, their hands over their ears, Hennessey and Paskow would have been torn to rags if not for the thick walls of the Waite and Sons’ Restaurant. As it was, over a hundred yards away, they still felt the concussion suck the air out of their mouths and noses. When the wind subsided, Hennessey heard the townsfolk screaming, heard the fish-men braying and then a horrible unearthly keening, louder than the rest. They dragged themselves off the cobbles and emerged in Federal Street to find that most of the abandoned mill, which had been just yards from the truck, had disintegrated and its water wheel blown out of the ice. The Esoteric Order of Dagon was gone. The side of the building facing the explosion had smashed through the opposite wall, squeezing the shattered interior onto Federal Street. Flaming shards of its timbers lay all about amid far more magnificent fires: the three cases of white phosphorous grenades, with the assistance of the TNT and satchel charges, had spread their contents over most of the area in front of the north end of the Federal Street Bridge. Those made of bone and meat who hadn’t been disintegrated by the concussion had been showered with a downpour of burning metal; everywhere figures flopped amid the rubble, skin and clothing ignited by white-hot fragments like a thousand little suns.
The source of the keening revealed itself then, as the polymorphous horror emerged from the wreck of a nearby warehouse, a hundred mouths boiling out of its flesh amid blazing chunks of phosphorous. It rolled towards the river, crushing the faint life out of a dozen or so maimed and burning townsfolk. The faster it sped, the more the air whipped its coat of stars to new brilliance. The thing somehow knew it had to get back to the sea; it crashed into the ice and poured like lightning through the hole.
Unfortunately, phosphorus burns just as well with the oxygen in water as it does with the oxygen in air. The water under the ice began to boil.
Hennessey began laughing like a fool. It was so fucking beautiful. The whole north end of the bridge was an inferno. All along Dock Street blazing scarecrows that used to be men, and less wholesome things, ran back and forth trying to extinguish themselves. Some rolled down the embankment to dive into the river, its uniform sheet of ice now a broken tangle of bergs. “Burn! Burn, you sonzabitches! Burn!” Hennessey sang as he danced in a circle waving his arms, the nozzle of his flamethrower clattering against the cobblestones at his feet.
But then the groan of the rending ice brought him back.
“Light your torch!” shouted Paskow. Charlie’s eyes were still black and hot, and Hennessey dared not disobey. Cranking the ignition nozzle to full, he lit the blow-torch-like stream of gas off a burning fragment of the mill’s water wheel. Over the thick granite railing on the bayward side of the bridge, about forty yards from where they were, Hennessey could see a two-foot-thick sheet of ice being levered out of the river by a muscular pseudopod. The thing began flowing out onto the ice like a rope uncoiling in reverse. Glittering black eyes winked open across its steaming surface. Alone but for Charlie, not a single Marine in sight, Hennessey wasn’t even remotely scared. They burn, he thought gleefully. They burn and they scream! The fifty pounds of jellied gasoline on his back didn’t scare him anymore, either. He loved it.
Paskow ran to the railing’s edge. The shiny black thing was done shitting itself out of the hole it had punched. “I’ll get its attention,” he grunted. First, he pulled his .45 out of his belt and emptied the magazine at it. The bullets dimpled its plastic flesh with no effect other than to send it rolling towards them. They each uncorked a phosphorus grenade, Paskow barely breathing, Hennessey giggling like a girl.
“Wait,” murmured Paskow. The thing was at the river’s edge and rolling up the bank. Sweat stung Hennessey’s eyes.
“Closer,” Paskow hissed. At ten yards, Hennessey could see mouths and eyes rolling over the surface of its twenty-five-foot-wide amoeba-like surface.
The black tide hit the bridge supports and flowed upwards, grasping and reaching hungrily. “Now!”
Hennessey hurled his grenade after Paskow’s down into the flabby bulk and then ducked behind the bridge’s stone wall. The sizzling splash of phosphorous was followed by the hideous wail of a pipe organ made from burning men. Rising up to bring his flamethrower to bear, Hennessey could see tongues waving like snakes in dozens of mouths. Despite the phosphorous, the thing rolled forward. Some of those mouths were no longer screaming; instead, their teeth were bared in what could only be a grimace of hate. Hennessey cackled like a maniac as he hosed it down with blinding flame.
Like burning water, the jellied gasoline filled every open orifice. At first, the thing kept coming, stupid with hate and pain and wanting to kill the tiny thing that was hurting it. But suddenly it must have realized that it was not just hurting, it was dying. It hesitated in Hennessey’s shower for a second, before retreating under the bridge.