Peter Benchley's Creature (24 page)

Its eyes, once their lenses cleared, saw living things . . . not just one, but a host of living things, all gathered in a herd, all taunting it with their smells. Adrenaline pumped renewed energy through its veins.

But then its alarms took control, warning it that the living things were
too
many, and too far from the safety of its world. It could not feed on them and survive.

Except for two . . . smaller ones, apart from the rest, alone at the border between the worlds.

But to take even those two would require a complex decision, a decision it had been programmed to make but never had, a decision that could end its life instead of preserving it.

Conflict tore at the creature's primitive brain and incomplete conditioning. Survival had two paths, which warred with each other.

And so it swam back and forth erratically, and the urgency within its body grew into frenzy.

31

A S the parade made the turn around the point in front of the parking lot, band members ducked out of line and grabbed cans of soda from friends among the onlookers; Elks took hits from proffered paper bags; Holy Ghosters accepted linguisas from their awestruck offspring. Even the youngsters in the bishop's entourage were not immune to cajolery: one accepted a lighted cigarette from a compatriot in the crowd— like a relay runner taking a baton—and took a deep drag on it before tucking it under his robe.

Max photographed it all, until, just when he had the pirate smoker in his frame and pushed the shutter release, he heard from within the body of his camera the whirr of rewinding film. He watched the counter click swiftly back to zero, then said, "Damn."

Elizabeth nudged him and raised her eyebrows: what is it?

"Out of film," Max said, pointing at the counter. "D'you know where I can buy some more?"

Elizabeth nodded. She pointed at Max, then at the parade, and said, "Follow." Then she pointed at herself and used two fingers of one hand to portray a running figure. She said something else, something that sounded to Max like "ketchup."

"But how'll I find you?" he said. "How—"

She put her hand on her chest, then took his hand and put it on top of hers, and she winked at him.

"Okay," he said, laughing.

She turned away and darted through the crowd.

It took only a couple of minutes for the final stragglers in the parade—two boys leading a gargantuan Saint Bernard caparisoned like a clown—to round the point and head down Beach Street toward the commercial docks.

The concessionaries were already shutting up shop, extinguishing fires and bagging trash, hurrying to move to another parking lot on the other side of the borough, where they would reopen for the post-blessing feast.

Max bought a candied apple from the last open stand, then ambled behind the Saint Bernard.

As he passed the fence surrounding the public beach, he saw a little child with its face pressed against the wire mesh. Its mouth and hands were filthy, as if it had been eating dirt, and its soiled diaper sagged on one hip. Behind the child, a teenaged girl lay on her back on the sand, a magazine held above her face.

The child's stubby fingers clutched the wire, and its big eyes followed Max.

Max looked at the child, then, impulsively, stepped to the fence, leaned over it and offered the candied apple. "Here y'go, buddy," he said with a smile.

The child beamed, reached up with both hands, grabbed the candied apple by the stick, tried to jam the entire apple into its mouth . . . and fell backward.

The apple tumbled into the sand. The child rolled over, clutched the apple and licked at it, gurgling gleefully. Max turned away and started down the street.

As soon as the last food truck had departed, two volunteers from the Holy Ghost Society appeared on foot and began to clean up the parking lot. The gravel was littered with cigarette butts, paper cups, sparerib bones, half-eaten hotdogs and sandwiches, and sausages that had burst in the cooking and been shoved off the fire. There were eggshells and vegetables, squid rings and octopus tentacles, chicken wings and scattered bits of random entrails. A sickly sweet odor of olive oil and salad dressing and grease hung like a gas over the parking lot.

  The volunteers wore gloves and carried camp shovels, and they scooped the offal into plastic bins.

"People're worse'n pigs," muttered one. "Fuckin' place looks like a slaughterhouse."

"And stinks like a morgue," agreed the other.

Fifty-gallon barrels had been placed around the parking lot to collect trash, and the volunteers lugged a loaded bin to the nearest barrel. It was full, as was the second, and the third.

"Well, shit. . .
now
what're we s'posed to do?"

"What about that one?" The volunteer pointed at a barrel on the beach.

His partner shrugged. "Let's try it. I'm not takin' this crap home with me, for sure."

Carrying the plastic bin, they opened the gate to the beach and crossed the soft sand.

The barrel was empty. As they dumped the bin, they noticed a small child sitting nearby, happily gnawing on something, and even over the rank stench of garbage, they could smell the child.

Ten yards away, a woman lay on her back with a magazine covering her face.

"Hey!" one of the volunteers called. "You this kid's mother?"

The woman lifted the magazine, and they saw that she was in her teens.

"That'll be the day," she said.

"Well, you know how to change a diaper?"

"What're you," the girl said, "the poop patrol?"

Offended, the volunteer said, "Listen, you ..." and he took a step toward the girl.

His partner stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. "Leave it, Lenny. The kid's carrying a load, so what? You mess with the girl, next thing you know you're in court for sexual harassment."

"I'd sooner harass a sheep," he said, loud enough for the girl to hear.

"I bet you do, too," the girl said, and she let the magazine fall over her face again.

"Leave it, Lenny. Just leave it."

The volunteers filled the plastic bin twice more and dumped it into the barrel on the beach, shouldered their shovels and walked home to wash their hands and have a drink.

32

IT lay prone in the shallows, only its eyes and nose out of water.

Most of the living things had gone, and the percussive jumble that had thundered on its tympanic membranes had faded into a distant pattering. Only two living things remained, and they emitted no threat signals, so its alarms were silent.

But the tantalizing odor persisted, a lush stew of flesh scents, stronger than ever, closer than ever. And perplexing, for it did not seem to be associated with the living things.

It inched forward, pulling itself with its claws. Its gills opened and closed rapidly, pumping vigorously; the oxygen content of the surface water was weak and corrupted with impurities.

The strongest spoor of prey came from an alien object near the living things.

Its capacity for making decisions was poor, its sense of options undeveloped. It craved everything, but sensed that it had to choose.

And then, as if a gate had suddenly opened in its brain, it received a message telling it that it could have everything. It must only decide what to have first.

It willed its gills to close, it rose up on its powerful arms and sprang forward.

33

THE girl had fallen asleep, though she hadn't meant to; it was the cardinal sin for a baby-sitter with a two-year-old near the water. Her sleep was light, barely deep enough to accommodate a fluttery dream about Princess Diana asking her to be her roommate and help care for the two little princes. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, one of the princes was crying—shrieking, actually.

She bolted upright, knocking the magazine off her face, and turned to look for Jeremy.

He was there, sitting on the sand where he had been, and she was flooded with a rush of relief.

He was howling—head thrown back, mouth gaping, eyes closed—and she knew kids well enough to know that this wasn't a howl of temper or anger, but one of pain or terror, as if he had burned himself or cut himself or been bitten by a dog.

She went to him, and stood over him, and said, "What's wrong . . . you hurt?"

He didn't answer, not even with one of his dumb baby words, he just shrieked louder.

"Jeremy . . . don't be a wuss . . . tell me where it hurts."

He opened his eyes and raised his arms, begging to be picked up, which surprised her because he never wanted her to pick him up, he didn't like her any more than she liked him. Their association was based on mutual tolerance, the tacit recognition of a bad situation that neither of them wanted but both had to endure.

"Forget it," she said, shaking her head. "You think I need poop all over my clothes?"

He howled again, even louder, and stretched his arms up to her.

Flustered, she said, "Jesus . . . shut up, will you?" She looked around to see if anyone was watching. "What
is
it?" An idea occurred to her. "Asshole burn, that what it is? Yeah, that must be it. Well, if you wouldn't poop in your pants all the time, your asshole wouldn't hurt."

She half expected her logical conclusion to provide consolation, to shut him up, but it didn't. He still sat there like some yowling little Buddha.

"Fuck!" she said, and she bent over, put her hands under his arms and lifted him up and, holding him as far away from herself as possible, walked toward the water.

He squirmed and kicked and screamed, and the closer she got to the water, the more violent he became, as if whatever it was that had frightened him or hurt him was out there in the water.

She fought to hold on, probably gripping him too tightly but not caring, and when she was in the water up to her knees, she dunked him to his waist and peeled off the adhesive strips that held the diaper on and let the diaper float away. Then she swirled the child around, hoping the water would clean his bottom.

After a minute or so, she hauled him out of the water and, still holding him at arm's length, walked back up the beach and set him down on his feet.

His crying subsided into breathless, staccato sobs, but still he begged for her to hold him, and when she wouldn't, he grabbed her leg.

"Let go, goddamnit!" she said, and she raised a hand to slap his arm away from her leg. But the instant she felt the impulse to strike the child, her anger vanished, replaced suddenly by fear, fear of herself, of her power over the little child and the damage it could do ... to him and to her.

Fear quickly transformed into sympathy. "Hey," she said, "hey . . . it's okay." She knelt down and let him wrap his arms around her neck, and put an arm under his bottom and lifted him up. "Let's go watch TV, what d'you say?"

As she crossed the beach back to where she had left her towel, she noticed something awry, something missing. Then she saw tracks in the sand, as if a heavy object had been dragged into the water, and she realized that the trash barrel wasn't there anymore.

She looked out into the harbor and saw—maybe twenty-five yards out, no farther than she could throw a stone—the black neck of the empty barrel as it floated on the surface.

"D'you
believe
it?" she said, soothing the child with the sound of her voice. "Those guys fill that trash can with all that crap, and then they go and throw it in the harbor so it can wash up on people's lawns. I tell you, Jeremy, the bottom line of life is, people stink."

She gathered up her towel and tote bag and, with the child settled on her hip, made her way through the gate and onto the sidewalk . . . talking nonsense to keep the child quiet, and vowing to herself that next summer, no matter what, she would find an easier way to earn five crummy bucks an hour.

34

ENRAGED, it flailed through the shower of dispersing garbage, grabbing random bits of flotsam and gnashing at them, as if violence would somehow force them to yield nutrients they did not contain. A few pieces were nourishing, but very few, only enough to make it yearn for more. Most were worthless, and there was no way it could tell one from another.

Its gills labored, clogged with alien things that lodged in the flaps and impeded motion.

It had chosen wrong, following scent rather than instinct.

It propelled itself slowly to the surface and waited for its eyes to adjust their focus on the shore.

Empty. The living things had gone.

They were there, however, somewhere, in company with many more. It knew that.

It knew, too, that they could be brought within reach.

But another decision would be required, a decision for which it had been programmed, but one for which the implementation was—or so the creature sensed— beyond its abilities.

It allowed itself to drift downward again, and it rested on the mud bottom, lolling like a corpse among the ribbons of kelp while it probed the recesses of its brain for long-lost keys to long-hidden locks.

Its brain was dim but not slow, out of condition but not disabled, and the more it demanded of the brain, the more the brain responded.

One by one, the keys appeared.

At last, it knew what it must do, and how to do it.

Energized by new promise, it crawled along the bottom that sloped up into the shallows. When its back was nearly out of water, it crabbed sideways into the shelter of some boulders, and it waited, scanning the shore until it was confident it was alone. Even then, it waited a few moments more, rehearsing the steps it must take, reluctant to leave the safety of the world it had known—for how long? Forever, as far as it knew—but certain that its life depended on the course it had chosen.

It ducked down, immersing its head and gills, and pumped water through its system, flooding its blood with oxygen like a diver preparing for a record plunge.

It raised its head, pulled itself to its feet and began to walk. The muscles in its legs were weak—they had not borne weight for half a century—but they supported it, and with each step they gained an iota of new strength.