By then Cushing was on George, pushing him back. “Enough,” he said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough, George.”
But maybe from where George was sitting, it wasn’t. His teeth were clenched and his mind had gone stupid with hatred. The color drained from his face and he took a deep breath, his body going limp. “That fucking idiot… spouting that shit, spouting that shit at a time like this.”
Pollard just stared at it all dumbfounded.
Chesbro was whimpering now, something in him just shearing open at this latest indignity. He was hugging himself, rocking back and forth on his ass while his mouth filled with blood and it trickled down his chin.
“Just take it easy now, everyone,” Cushing said. He pulled a bandage out of one of the green nylon medical bags and made Chesbro press it to his mouth until the bleeding stopped.
Then he took a good look at Gosling. A real good look.
The bandages George had wrapped around his ankle were already turning red, same for the ones at his chest. Cushing was hardly a medic, but he’d been through a couple Red Cross first aid classes when he’d worked at a foundry years back. He searched through the Army medical bag. It had just about everything you could imagine, most of it centered around treating battlefield wounds. He saw the suture sets and given the enormity of Gosling’s wounds, he knew a good medic would be thinking of stitching him up. But Cushing didn’t know the first thing about suturing and now wasn’t a good time to learn, he figured.
He removed the bandages at Gosling’s chest and poured some QuikClot, clotting powder, into the deeper ones. Then he took out a pre-loaded syringe of what the label told him was triple antibiotic and injected it right into one of the gashes from the squid’s claws, hoping he was doing this right. Then he placed self-adhesive fast-clotting bandages over the wounds and repeated it all at Gosling’s ankle. But he wasn’t too hopeful with the latter. The tissue damage was so severe, he doubted anything less than a modern medical team would be able to fix it.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” George asked him.
Rubbing his trembling fingers against his legs, Cushing said, “Some of it from first aid courses, the rest I winged.”
If nothing else, the clotting agents and bandages stopped the bleeding or slowed it to an acceptable rate.
“Let me take a look at your mouth, Chesbro,” Cushing said.
But he just shook his head.
Cushing told Pollard to keep an eye on Gosling and George and he slipped up behind the remaining Hummer. From the light thrown by the lantern, they could see that the nylon line they’d tied off the lifeboat and raft with had been snapped.
“Oh, shit,” George said. “If that raft is gone…”
And Cushing understood the implications of that just fine: marooned. Without the raft or lifeboat, they were marooned. Trapped in the steel coffin of the C-130 and like candy in a dish, the monster-squid would keep coming back until said dish was empty.
“I wish this goddamn night would end,” George said.
“We just have to hang on.”
George said, “If I can get at those satchel charges, we can take care of that ugly bastard.”
“No,” Cushing said. “You go back there… no, you’d be exposing your ass to that thing.”
Pollard came walking up. “I think… I think the First is coming around.” He looked out into the mist. “That thing… it can’t get us way in the back, can it?”
“No,” George told him.
But it was a lie and they all knew it. Cushing had gotten the only real good look at the thing out of any of them. And from the dimensions he’d seen, however briefly, he knew the squid was at least a couple hundred feet in length, maybe more. The tentacles themselves, he figured, were probably well over a hundred feet long. What they’d seen were just the ends. If the squid wanted, it could easily crush the plane or root around in there until it got all of them. Cushing was certain of this. Those tentacles would find them even in the cockpit.
“Look,” George said. “Jesus Christ, look…”
The weeds and mist were glowing again, which meant the squid was still there, still waiting. There was a gentle, rolling splash and a tentacle slid out of the sea and up the loading ramp, uncurling as it came on. It was one of the specialized tentacles with the convex, hooded club at the end. The club was very smooth and shiny, reflecting the glare of the battery lamp hanging above. Cushing figured it was six or seven feet at its widest point and probably nearer twenty feet in length than sixteen as he’d originally thought. The tentacle it was hooked to, was smooth and suckerless, big around as a centuried oak where it vanished in the weeds.
George made an involuntary gagging sound. “What the fuck is that?” he said.
But Cushing was beyond words.
The club rose up vertically as before at the edge of the cargo bay, revealing its pink, moist underside and the barbed spines gleaming at its perimeter. That pink flesh shriveled back from that immense concave mouth and black gnashing teeth. They all saw that circle of red orbs and were all certain they were watching eyes. Pink slime was dripping from the mouth, dropping in clots to the ramp.
“Don’t move,” Cushing told them, locked down hard inside like January ice.
Nobody did.
They just stood there, peering around the Hummer.
It was an insane, nightmarish scenario. The club moved up into the cargo bay inch by terrible inch. Once inside, the tentacle itself paused, but the club turned slightly to the left and then to the right like the head of a man looking or listening for something. Cushing had a sudden, unsettling memory of watching the movie, War of the Worlds, as a boy. That part where the couple are trapped in the farmhouse with the Martian war machine hovering outside and the sensory probe that looked like a Martian head came sliding in through the shattered window, trying to locate them. This was very much like that, for he had no doubt whatsoever that this club was looking for them.
No, no, not looking, but sensing, it occurred to him. It can’t see. Those things look like eyes, but they’re not eyes, not really. More like the eyespots around the bell of a jellyfish… looking very much like eyes, but actually light-sensing ocelli. Except in this case, maybe not light-sensing at all, but possibly heat-sensing like the pit organ of a desert rattlesnake.
It was sheer speculation on his part, a wild leap of logic at best based on what he understood of sensory physiology, but it sounded about right.
Yet, it was hard not to believe those orbs weren’t eyes. When that hooded club swept around, they glittered like jewels, like something with awareness and intelligence behind them.
Cushing was wondering if maybe that monstrous cephalopod and its attendant tentacles might just leave, figuring the food source in the plane had made its escape. But he would never know because Pollard was getting antsy. He was shaking like a man with a tropical fever, sweat rolling down his face in rivers.
“I can’t do this,” he said under his breath. “I can’t do this.. .”
And then he moved, turned and ran back towards the cockpit. The club jerked back suddenly like a startled cobra and that mouth hissed in alarm. It had sensed Pollard’s whereabouts now, whether through motion or heat or maybe both. And the sea beyond the ramp began to boil and the mist began to blow around as dozens of tentacles came pouring out of the weeds and up the ramp, coiling and looping like serpents from a snake charmer’s basket.
George and Cushing ran back to join the others.
Ran back and looked at those sweating faces and shocked, glassy eyes that were expecting to hear what their plan was. Hear about their defense or escape route, except George and Cushing didn’t have one. Because this was it. This was endgame.