George and Cushing backed away, but Marx was not moving.
Gosling dropped his crowbar, came around the side of the Hummer in front. It was facing outward and he clicked on its headlights, two pillars of light stabbing through the darkness and fog. But there was nothing out there, nothing at all. Just the fog swirling about, the glistening expanse of weeds.
Then there was a splashing sound like something heavy had fallen back into the sea followed by a squeaking sound like a finger drawn over glass.
But what had caused it, no one could say.
They were all watching the fog out there in the Hummer’s headlights. It was thick and boiling and damp. There was another of those rustling sounds and then a tentacle came sliding out of the mist. It emerged with a sort of scraping, scuttling sound like some fleshy, blind caterpillar looking for a juicy leaf. It crept up the boarding ramp, looking almost curious. A slimy and undulating thing about the width of a pencil at the tip and bigger around than a man’s waist where it disappeared into the weedy depths. It was bright red with pebbly flesh and obscenely bloated, stout and powerful and flexing with muscle.
It carried a sharp, gagging stink of ammonia about it.
“Jesus lovely Christ,” Gosling said.
Marx was stepping back now, too.
The tentacle had not come up into the cargo bay as yet, it was busy searching around on the ramp itself like an investigative worm, like it knew something appealing was there… or had been.
Sure, George found himself thinking, us.
It coiled about on the boarding ramp, fat and full. Its beaded red flesh was the color of boiled lobsters and beneath, they saw, were triple rows of dun yellow suckers, puckering and expanding, a brown chitinous hook like a cat’s claw emerging from each one. These are what made the scraping sounds.
“Squid,” Marx said. “Big, shitting squid. Saw this big mother floating off the Canaries once, it-”
But he never finished that, for the tentacle shuddered and froze-up like maybe it had heard him, it twisted up upon itself, exposing those puckering suckers and hooks, and then slid back off into the fog. And you could almost feel the relief spread through the men, but it was short-lived. Very short-lived.
Two more tentacles came out of the mist. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth. They came out fast, sliding up the boarding ramp like blood-red pythons searching for something to constrict. Marx barely got out of their way and he didn’t get out of the way of the sixth and seventh. They darted out of the mist like rattlesnakes striking, one corkscrewing around his waist and the other looping around his left arm.
It happened just that fast.
So fast, in fact, that everyone managed to gasp and that was about it. Those tentacles found him like they knew exactly where he was, like they could see him. There was no hesitation. They came out of the fog and wrapped him up and with such force, all Marx had time to do was utter a low grunting, ummfff as if he had been kicked in the stomach, the wind knocked right out of him. The hatchet-hammer fell from his fingers about the same time and clattered to floor of the cargo bay.
“Oh my God,” Gosling said, simply surprised.
Those tentacles twined him up like a fireman’s hose, tightening and squeezing and Marx screamed, a high and shrieking sound of primal agony. And then like a vise, those vibrant red tentacles crushed him with immense strength. You could actually see their alien musculature flex and contract like a clenching hand. Marx’s eyes bulged and his face went a vibrant red, just as red as those tentacles, then purple and finally black. The tentacle around his waist had squeezed his midsection to the thickness of a forearm and you could hear bones snapping and things pulping to sauce inside him. He looked like a livid water balloon a child had squeezed in its fist… his torso and head, legs and hips swelled-up to the point of bursting from internal hydrostatic pressure. He gagged out foam and blood in snotty tangles and something bleeding and fleshy which might have been his stomach or intestines.
He looked like a deep-sea fish that had undergone fast, massive decompression.
And this happened in the span of about five seconds.
Five seconds that passed with disturbing, hallucinogenic clarity for the men that witnessed them.
George screamed and fell on his ass.
Gosling came running, shouting and screeching, the crowbar magically in his hands again and he made it right to the bloody, smashed hulk of Marx just as those tentacles gave him a final squeeze to make sure the fight was taken out of him. A gout of blood and tissue vomited from Marx’s distorted mouth and splashed across the front of Gosling’s shirt, but it didn’t even slow him down. He came on swinging, hammering the crowbar into two slimy tentacles that sought him out. They recoiled instantly and were replaced by two others that did not recoil.
