Beneath the Lake Page 21

  Leonard doesn’t need to be invited. He tromps out and spears through two smaller waves before catching the third. Colt edges out up to her waist, and even Francine looks more excited than afraid. They surf for less than an hour, and Warren feels like he is ten years old again. To a man who’s been through war and raised children, that’s not a feeling that comes around too often. He doesn’t want to let it go.

  Megan’s people make their way down the beach, watching, curious and cautious. Warren and Leonard encourage them, promising them it’s safe. The husband goes first, then the son. The wife loses her footing, but no one thinks much of it.

  It seems to happen in a matter of seconds, the change that comes over them.

  One minute they are all surfing, chasing new sets. The next, Warren looks up to see Megan’s father punching his wife in the mouth. He is swimming for them when the husband starts to strangle her, the kid cheering his father on, and Warren knows they have a real problem. The man is big and the kid has a screw loose, is on drugs, maybe all of them are, he thinks. He can hear Francine screaming behind the roar and crash of the waves. Warren is confused, then scared, then just madder than hell these fucking idiots are screwing up such a rare day.

  The fighting breaks out. A mess in the waves, bodies slamming into one another.

  At some point Francine is screaming about everyone drowning, the three of them are all face down, the waves rolling them closer to the beach, and the only people Warren really cares about are standing. Scared, crying, but standing. The whole thing seems like a set-up, an ambush. Vile, poisoned people looking for trouble from the start. He is in a sort of combat mode. Eliminate the threat. Account for your troops. Administer help to our guys first. Worry about the enemy fallen and take hostages later.

  The labor of dragging them up onto the beach takes its toll. They are soaking wet, with sand stuck in their eyes and mouths and ears. The hell of it is, the lake seems to keep reaching after them, the waves surging over new dry sand every time they think they are in the clear. The Mercers groan and heave in a tug of war, until the three bodies are clear, on dry sand at the bottom slope of the cliff.

  Warren goes through the paces of CPR but gets no response. He can’t find a pulse in any of them and none is breathing. Not enough time seems to have passed. He can’t understand why they are so lost. It’s as if the waves have filled them solid and slammed the door, and nothing is coming back out.

  Warren tells Leonard and Colt to go back around the point, try to find another party, send someone for help. Barring that, Leonard needs to drive the Bronco back down. Francine stays with her husband, and they take turns on the three of them with no success. They are exhausted at this point, dizzy, in danger of passing out. Francine pulls Warren off the kid and they sit back on the beach, trying to recover their wind.

  The minutes feel like hours. They begin to worry about their children, who have not come back. As much as they want to help these poor people, they fear it’s too late, and they can’t risk losing track of their own. They head back toward the point.

  Colt is on her way back, waving and hollering, but they can’t understand her. Leonard, they later discover, is back at his tent looking for the key to his cycle so he can race on down to the store and call the police. Warren tells Francine to go on with the kids, get everyone in the Bronco and come back down to help him get the bodies out of here.

  He walks back to Megan’s family, but halfway there he knows something is wrong. Something is different. They’d left three drowned bodies on the beach, but that isn’t what Warren sees now, halting about a hundred paces away while his mind works to find a reference for the scene, a logical explanation.

  The bodies are gone.

  In the spot where Megan’s mother, father and brother had been left unconscious, dying or already dead, there are now three black blobs. Imperfect orbs, like long eggs or swollen body bags. Someone has thrown a tarp on the bodies, Warren thinks, but he knows immediately this isn’t the case. The skin is too organic, membranous. He knows it is a natural phenomenon, like insect cocoons. Freakish but a product of nature nonetheless. He remembers oil spilled from a Navy ship in Thailand, the tar balls floating in the sea and washing up on the beaches for weeks after. These are similar but larger, longer…

  And they are stirring.

  Warren has been walking closer and closer in hypnotic fascination, but now he stops. The cocoons are arranged in a loose triangle, head to toe, though he has yet to consider exactly why the smoke-colored surfaces of them are expanding and shrinking like balloons, like lungs. He wants to believe they are some kind of freshwater squid, jellyfish, a trio of nests containing thousands of smaller eggs laid by some prehistoric ancestor of the channel catfish… anything but hosts to the three bodies he left here.

  The sacs burst open as if slashed from inside, deflating as thick black fluid spills over the sand and the bodies crawl out.

  They are the people the Mercers tried to save from drowning, and they are not those people any longer. They are not really people at all. The bodies have turned pearl-white inside the layers of black and gray sludge that sloughs off as they struggle to find their footing. They appear naked in the way of newborns, or in the way of the unborn. All the requisite human aspects – eyes, fingers, ears, nose, teeth, genitalia – have been remade or sealed over with rigid white skin that seems fused to new bone structure. The basic shape has not changed all that much. Two legs, two arms, a torso, a head. But everything else, everything crucial to mobility, has somehow been streamlined. They seem unfinished, larval, even now remaking the bodies inside.

  They crawl around on all fours, blindly searching for something. Less than a minute later Warren knows they have sensed him and decided he is of interest. He backs away, unable to take his eyes off them, still coming to grips with their reality. Other than being repulsed and generally shocked, he is not yet experiencing real terror.

  This is a mistake.

  At first it is only a slow progression down the beach, one that later will make him think of a very wide open field with three dogs off in the distance. The dogs are blind, clumsy and slow, but they are also rabid, their mouths dripping white and black mucus by the bucket. You fear that if one bites you, you will die, or become something monstrous like them. You turn to run, and you are faster than them, but they can smell you. They are patient, moving a little faster with each new step, coming together in a formation, tracking you.

  They are learning, rapidly.

  The dogs are not dogs at all, but adult human-sized children made of wet black mucus and bright white bones. The heads are bald, the faces flattened save for one feature, a single black orifice at center, gaping and closing repeatedly as if starved for breath, or food.

  They aim their flat faces at him, their spines arching, heads lowering, and then begin to scramble on all fours in a clumsy but increasingly stable rhythm.

  At last, Warren turns and runs.

  His wife waves from the tip of the point, screaming for him to hurry. He catches up with her and together they run down the other beach, back into the cove. He shouts for her to get up to higher ground, back to the camper, to stay with Raymond while he finds Colt and Leonard. The things are loping after him, swerving and colliding with one another, but finding their way nonetheless.

  Warren wants to fetch the guns from inside the tool box inside the Bronco, but he can’t leave the beach until he has Colt and Leonard. The two teenagers are waiting at the end of the cove, beside the beached catamaran, and Francine shouts at them before breaking away, running up the boat ramp. Colt and Leonard are pointing beyond their father, and he looks back.

  Three black-hole mouths bob and snap as they crab along on all fours, moving at a clip at least three times their original speed. The membrane layers shed in long strips, leaving a trail of dead jellyfish stuff in the sand.

  ‘Get into the woods!’ Warren screams. ‘All the way back to the road and wait for your mom and me back there! If we’re not t
here in twenty minutes, follow the road and go for help. Now, run!’

  They all look back once more to see the gray and white creatures bounding along, their bones knifing through layers of slug-flesh, then Colt and Leonard dash off for the trees. They know the trails, the short cuts. Warren believes they will be okay so long as he can fend these things off. But with what weapons?

  He runs to the boat and turns the gear bag upside down. There is rope, the anchor chain, the anchor itself lodged in the ground, and not much else. A few wrenches and tools for repairing the sail or tightening a cleat.

  Warren uses the sailing knife to cut the anchor rope and hauls it into a coil along with the chain. The anchor is too damn heavy to swing quickly, but it’s better than nothing. The knife is too small, but he has no intention of getting that close to the things. The only other possibility is a rubber mallet, the one they use for hammering in the tent stakes. He has no idea how it wound up in the boat kit, but later will remember using it to pound a strip of loosened rubber trim around one of the pontoons before the epoxy could harden.

  Before attempting to challenge the three of them, Warren tries to get out of sight, on the slim chance they are not actually hunting but simply running in blind panic. If they head for the trail leading behind the cove, where Leonard and Colt went, he will chase them down and bait them to protect the kids. If they pass the other way, perhaps they might all escape this mess without a confrontation.

  Warren is no fool, but he is in denial.

  He makes it hardly twenty steps with the anchor, chain and other tools in his arms, running toward the first line of trees beyond the boat, when the bone-slugs change course and close in around him. He brings up the chain, using a six- or eight-foot lead to swing the anchor overhead, hard and fast as he can, helicoptering the twenty-five pound satellite before they can strike. The motion seems to confuse them, slow them for a few steps, and then they crouch, scurrying in low to the sand.

  It is beside the point their skins are almost solid black now and he can no longer see the mouths and white bone beneath. He aims for the heads, bringing the chain down in a final sweep. The anchor bounces off the sand and jumps up into one creature’s side, smacking it with enough force to break half a dozen of a man’s ribs. The thing topples sideways and rebounds from the beach. The other two are already arcing to his left, circling, learning on the fly.

  No time to get the anchor chain winging again. The second one hits him from behind like a bull, butting his legs out from under his upper weight, and the third crashes down on him from the right. Their limbs slip and slide over his skin, the flesh hard but still sloughing the last of the membrane. The rest is black, and frighteningly strong. Something pulls his leg, sending pain through his hip socket, and another weight slams down on his chest. The bodies slide, then clamp down. A concentrated sucking sensation pulls at his navel and Warren feels as though his organs are about to be siphoned out of his body. He looks down to see one of the mouths attached to his belly like a giant leech and he begins to scream.

  He punches down, the sailing knife in his left hand. The little blade stabs into the thing’s back, over and over, with no effect. The skin punctures like leather hide, pouring black fluid, and the knife slips from his grip as they continue to swarm over him.

  Warren knows he is going to die soon.

  He swings wildly with his fists, teeth gnashing, kicking and prepared to bite.

  A shot rings out, then another, loud enough to hurt his ears and leave them ringing. Something wet opens overhead and black fluid drains over his waist in a cold splash. Another shot, and then they are scrambling off, shoving his chest and face into the sand as they leap away.

  Warren sits up to discover Leonard screaming and wildly firing the pistol, and it’s probably a miracle he hasn’t put a bullet into his father yet. Behind him, Colette attempts to chamber a round into the rifle and Warren regrets waiting another summer to teach her how. One of the creatures jack-knifes into a squat before launching itself at her, driving into her as the other two split to each side of Leonard.

  Colt screams and goes down, losing the rifle as they drag her away.

  Warren scrambles to his feet and picks up the 30-06. and works the bolt, which has been clogged with sand. He throws it home and marches after the things trying to devour his daughter. He shoots the first in the back, then at the base of the neck up through the top of the head. The second one begs off. Warren shoots the wounded one again, aiming for the heart or whatever vital organs lurk behind the soft shell. Its center carapace explodes and the rest falls still.

  The other two collide with Leonard and he loses the pistol. His arm is thrown out, the small axe they used for picking kindling off the dead trees spinning across the sand. Warren shoots one in the head and it leaps away, shrieking like a dying rabbit. It falls flat and lurches belly down across the darkening beach.

  Warren locates the pistol and fires into the last fighter, catching it in the leg, then once more in the shoulder area, and then the pistol clicks empty. The last of them has rebounded again and comes at father and daughter in a broken gallop. Warren trips over Leonard, spins away, finds the fallen axe in the sand and rises up just in time to split its head open. Black viscous fluid spurts straight up and Warren walks into it as if it were a lawn sprinkler, hacking the thing from chest to face to neck until the axe blade lodges in the sand. The beach has become a black and silver deck of slaughtered membrane. He slips and staggers through it, looking for something else to kill.

  Colt’s crying sobers him somewhat. He carefully reloads the .45 with the extra clip Leonard brought down, and methodically makes a final round, shooting each of the three monsters in the head three times.

  All clear. Dead. Done.

  He pockets his sidearm and tends to his children.

  They walk back to Leonard’s tent to fetch the gas can he used for his motorbike. The plan is to burn the creatures.

  The Mercers are battered, scratched and wandering in a spirit world of post-combat adrenaline wash. But they are together, alive. The storm devoured the afternoon, and now dusk has come. They linger at the tent, recovering their strength, drinking water, ears twitching, still on guard.

  The gas can is all but empty. Not nearly enough to ignite the wet mess on the sand. They may have to bury the remains, but Warren doesn’t trust this second choice. He would prefer to siphon some gas from the Bronco and turn them to ash.

  They return with two flashlights, the guns, Leonard’s pocket knife and the small axe. They aren’t expecting more trouble but they are not going anywhere unprepared at this point.

  When they get close to the boat, Warren notices Francine standing at the bottom of the boat ramp. She is staring at them like she doesn’t know who they are, can’t trust her eyes. When she hears their voices, she runs to her children and hugs them, crying, checking them for injuries.

  Warren walks to the massacre beside the boat. He puts the flashlight on them, and everything he understands about the world goes to pieces.

  They are slaughtered, scattered, broken, bled out. There is no risk of another attack.

  But the dead are no longer as they had been, the larval creatures born out of that black and gray membrane. The shells have disintegrated, and everything else has dried up or been absorbed. Warren runs the flashlight up and down the beach but can find no trace of the alien biology.

  What remains are people. Human beings.

  A mother, a father and their son.

  Megan’s family.

  The Mercer family are brought out of the insanity that has gripped them for the past two hours, only to be dropped into a different kind of nightmare. They are forced to confront the possibility that the cocoons and the creatures birthed from them had all been features in a mass hallucination. Had Megan’s family become infected, changed and then reverted to their human state in death? Or had Warren and his family been made psychotic and violent by something in the water?