The Montauk Monster (21 page)

Jason couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Using the dying Roman candle, he lit two more, directing their blazing multicolored balls of light at the bizarre, wet animals that were still advancing from the water—five monsters straight out of one of his and Tom’s coveted horror flicks. They were truly hideous. Each looked similar to the other in body type and size, but their faces, those alien faces, were the stuff of night terrors.

Annie screamed, then her cousins.

Skeets, too far gone to realize these were certainly not dogs, approached them, offering a stick of beef jerky.

“Get the hell back here!” Tom shouted at him.

Once the monsters got within the full range of the Roman candles, they flinched, scampering sideways like crabs to avoid the searing light. Jason turned to Tom. “Dude, get all the Roman candles and come over here.”

Skeets shouted, “Careful, Jay, you might burn them.”

“Those aren’t dogs, Skeets. Just walk back here, slowly.”

He turned his back on the lurking monsters, smiling. “What’s the matter with all of you? If they were sick or crazy or something they would have tried to bite someone by now.”

Kara, stifling her cries by pressing her hand over her mouth, stumbled away from Skeets. Her feet tangled up with her brother’s and they dropped onto the sand.

Two of the monster sprang, brushing harmlessly against Skeets’s sides and pouncing on the siblings.

“Oh my God!” one of the boys shouted.

“Tom!”

The box of fireworks dropped at Jason’s feet. “Light me up,” Tom said. His hand shook violently and it was hard to transfer the flame.

“You aim at the three back there, I’ll try to get those two off Kara and Woodie,” Jason said.

Red, blue, green and white balls of sizzling fire rained down on the monsters. Tom was able to hold the three that stayed back in position. Jason fired shot after shot into the monster’s sides. Their beaklike muzzles were buried in Kara’s and Woodie’s throats. There was no saving them now. All he could hope to do was drive them back into the water.

“Annie, I have some M-80s in there. Grab one for me.”

She had been shivering, heaving with tears, her cousins surrounding her, a wall of sisterhood. “I . . . I don’t know ... what it looks like,” she sobbed.

Her cousin Tara said, “I do.” She picked what looked like a miniature stick of dynamite out of the box, lit it and handed it to Jason.

“Perfect,” he said, launching it at the creature atop Kara. It landed by her shoulder. The M-80 went off like a bomb, punishing everyone’s eardrums. It turned Kara’s shoulder to chopped meat, but also blew the monster back about ten feet. It bled like a water fountain from the side of its head. Its eye rolled out of the socket and plopped on the sand.

Finn and his friends ran to the fireworks box. Lighting up candles and rockets and M-80s, they fired at the monsters with everything they had. The reports were deafening. The monsters scattered around the beach, which was lit up like it was midday.

“You wanna fuck with us?” Jason screamed.

They had the monsters on the run. A couple had been hit and were clearly wounded. If it weren’t for Kara’s and Woodie’s bodies bleeding into the sand, Jason would have jumped in triumph. They hit them with everything they had in a steady barrage. The girls huddled behind them.

At one point, there were so many explosions, it was impossible to tell what they were shooting at. One last M-80 and cascading rocket went off, blinding everyone, and then it was back to impenetrable darkness.

Pinching his eyes, Jason huffed, “They’re probably running halfway to Queens by now.”

“We have to get the police out here,” Tom said. “What the hell do we tell them, Jay?”

Jason knew none of them would pass a Breathalyzer and they all smelled like weed. Even if they were stone-cold sober, it would be a tough sell. But they couldn’t just run away from their friends, even if they were dead.

His ears were ringing something fierce. It was hard to hear his friends, impossible to catch the crash of waves.

“Someone will have to stay with the bodies,” Finn said.

Two monsters leapt out from the high beach grass behind them. They crashed into one of Finn’s friends, snapping and tearing at his upraised hands and face until his cries turned to wet gurgles.

“Run for the cars!” Tom shouted.

A quick turn, several steps, and they stopped. The remaining three monsters, dripping blood, sporting scorch marks, glaring at them venomously, stood before the cars, barring their escape.

Everyone scattered, the girls shrieking, the boys loosening a string of curses. The monsters went after the fleeing pack. Jason saw one of Annie’s cousins get taken down, then Annie. Tom heard her cry and turned around. Trying to come to her aid, he fell forward. His legs were stuck, ankle-deep in quicksand.

Skeets was wailing. Jason saw that he was up to his knees in another pool of quicksand, struggling mightily and sinking faster. In fact, as he pivoted on his heels, everyone was trapped in the stuff, like a captive buffet.

The monsters shifted their attention from Annie and her cousin, whose faces were ruined beyond recognition, to the remaining four imprisoned in the muck.

“Holy shit, Jay, you have to help me!” Tom implored. Everyone was crying for his help. The monsters, realizing there was no longer a need to rush, separated from one another as if deciding which morsel each would take for itself.

Finn, who had screwed himself in quicksand until he was up to his waist in the stuff, was the first to scream. Two monsters attacked him from each side, their sharp muzzles meeting at the center of his throat. His head fell back, rolling away from his body, sinking into the wet sand.

Jason scampered to Tom, careful where he planted his feet. He took off his belt and handed it to him. “Hold on, I’m going to try to pull you out.” He’d seen it countless times in jungle movies. Throw a vine to the trapped person and just pull.

The air around them was electrified with the shrieks of the dying.

“Pull, Jay, pull! Don’t let go. I can feel myself getting loose.”

Tom’s body slowly broke from the quicksand, inch by agonizing inch.

Where the hell do we go once I get him out?
Jason spotted Kara’s car in the distance. Between them and the car were the five feasting monsters. They’d have to be faster than the Flash.

“I’m almost there,” Tom said. His elbow popped but he kept his grip on the belt.

Jason struggled, felt the veins throbbing on the sides of his head. The quicksand held firm to Tom’s calves.

“Just go slack,” Jason said between grunts.

He could see tears in Tom’s eyes by the diffused glare of a headlight. Calling up every reserve of strength he had, Jason scrunched his eyes closed and tugged harder.

Somersaulting backward, he saw the stars roll by. The belt, now free, was still in his hands. His fingers cramped shut. He didn’t think he’d be able to flex them enough to drop it.

Struggling to his feet, he yelled, “Come on, Tom!”

His heart stopped beating when he saw all five monsters burrowing into Tom’s back.

“Tom.” His best friend’s name slumped from his mouth in a whisper. His chest constricted and his eyes burned.

The blustering roar of a passing motorboat caught his attention. A tiny spotlight bobbed along the waves. He ran to the shore, not really caring if the monsters were in pursuit. His only purpose in getting away was to have another chance to get back at the murderous creatures.

He made it to the water without being followed. Splashing into the surf, he knifed through the incoming tide. Five years as a lifeguard made him an excellent swimmer. It wasn’t long before he pulled alongside the two-seater boat. A woman, covered in drying blood, was at the wheel. She startled when he pulled himself into the boat, causing it to tilt dangerously.

She looked like she was in shock.

I’m probably no better
, he thought.

Neither said a word. She continued piloting the boat, keeping close to the shoreline. He sat beside her, thinking she looked familiar, at least what he could see through his tears.

Dr. Greene barged into the FEMA command center. He was no longer the embodiment of the dapper man in control. One side of his hair was filled with bits of dirt and grass, as was his suit. His eyes were wild and his hands shook at his sides.

Dr. Ling wasn’t faring much better. Both looked like they had been run over by a mob—which they had.

“Christ, don’t tell me you were in the middle of that,” Don Sorely said.

“We had to be,” Dr. Greene said, close to shouting.

“People were . . . they exhibited signs of a deadly pathogen just minutes after coming in contact with—”

He paused, at a loss for words. His gaze pulled inward, hands trembling.

“They’re called
war machines
,” Sorely said. “From everything I’ve read, close to a hundred of them were engineered and raised to full maturity. We’re extracting a team from Plum Island now, but not before we downloaded and grabbed every file we could. It’s been dangerous work. There are a dozen or so of those monstrosities still on the island. We lost quite a few men.”

Dr. Ling opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water, downing half in one long swallow. “War machines? From what I could see, whatever it is they’re spreading does so through fluid contact, both with the war machines and from victim to victim. We saw people seizing and bleeding out everywhere. The more exposure to contaminated blood or mucous, the faster it burns through them. People with severe bites died in minutes, in turn becoming transmitters of the pathogen to anyone who touched them. I’ve never seen anything work that fast, at least on humans.”

Sorely lost his balance when Dr. Greene grabbed his shirt collar. “You said you know what this is. Well?”

“We know the
name
right now. I have men working on decoding the makeup of the disease. It’s called Marvola-6. We think it’s a combination of at least half a dozen diseases, with a dash of something synthetic to increase its efficacy and speed up its gestation period. It’s very much like venom, but from an animal that was never meant to be.”

Dr. Greene let him go. “This is a goddamn catastrophe! I’m going to have to call for more help. Compared to what we’re dealing with, we only have a skeleton crew.” He hit speed dial on his cell phone for the CDC switchboard in Atlanta. His phone remained silent. “We must be in a dead zone. Sorely, I need you to link me in to the CDC.”

The FEMA man shook his head, wearing a face that was as weary as it was guilty of something that he wasn’t permitted to tell anyone about. “I have strict orders that nothing goes out of this area, including phone calls. All of Montauk, and now over to the Hamptons, is on total lockdown. Internet communications have been severed as well. We have to contain this, and that means doing so without causing widespread panic.”

“You’re too late for that,” Dr. Ling said. “After what just happened at that condo, word is going to spread and people are going to run like hell.”

“Then we need to keep it
here
. Anyone trying to leave will be met with military forces under strict orders not to allow a soul to go west of the Hamptons.”

“What gives you the right or even the authority to do that?” Dr. Ling demanded.

“Who do you think? This is the mother of all snafus. You don’t think the powers that be will let this run on the eleven o’clock news or become a sidebar on the
Drudge Report
, do you? Everything stops here. I’ll give you everything we have. I’m just as pissed off as you are. You think anyone’s given me the whole picture? We’re just the fucking janitors here. I don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but if there’s going to be a light at the end of the tunnel, you’re the ones that are going to have to supply it.”

The muscles in Dr. Greene’s arm twitched. He wanted nothing more than to punch Sorely square in the face.

What was his first name
?

Dammit, he couldn’t remember. The not remembering scared him.
How can I find the answers when I can’t even recall a man’s first name?

Sorely added, “We’re all in the same boat. None of this has been my call. I’m just the schmuck that was picked to relay the call. I’m doing all I can to coordinate things so we can eliminate the initial threat, the war machines. But even when they’re dead, we have Marvola-6 to contend with, and for my money, that’s where the real problems start. You can hate me all you want, but while you’re doing that, I need you to comb through everything to find the antidote.”

Dr. Ling slumped into a chair, massaging her temples. “Do you know how long that can take? Weeks! Maybe even months. And that’s if we had a proper team working together.”

There was a dull explosion followed by a bright orange light shimmering against the night sky.

“
That
was Plum Island,” Sorely said, pointing. “You don’t have weeks, or even days. Let’s start with hours, and see where that takes us.”

Dalton cruised down the darkened Montauk Highway with the windows partially open. Meredith kept her gun in her hand, scanning the road and listening for anything or anyone that might need their attention.

“We should go down there,” she said, pointing to Sherman Street on their left. “To get to the condo, those things would most likely have come through there. There’s a connection between them and the water.”

The calm waters of the sound were a couple of blocks from Sherman. She may have a point.

“After this, I’m going to circle back and see if we can get our squad car back. I’d kill for radio communications right now,” he said

“The keys were on the captain.”

The image of Captain Hammerlich’s body twitching as he was mowed down by friendly fire made him recoil. “At least he wasn’t bitten. We won’t have to worry about getting infected.” They
would
have to be careful about coming in contact with anyone else, living or dead, scattered around the plaza.

All of the streetlights along Sherman were out. It didn’t matter, because almost every house on each side of the block glowed. Word of mouth was spreading. People were up and, he assumed, packing to leave. He had a mind to knock on each door and tell them there was no getting out of Montauk, at least for now. That was another reason to get a squad car. At least that had a loudspeaker they could use to warn everyone.

Turning down Circe Street, Meredith reached out to squeeze his arm. “Stop the car. Stop the car!”

They pulled alongside a ranch house perched atop a gently sloping lawn. Bodies and unidentifiable parts of bodies were strewn everywhere. A county cop lay in the middle of the street, his head connected to his body only by his garishly visible spinal cord.

“I think that’s Pete Kenealy,” she said, digging her fingernails deeper into his muscle.

Dalton reached around and grabbed an M16. “Stay here and cover me. I’m going to see who else is out there.”

He immediately became aware of how deep the silence was—as deep and foreboding as the grave. He saw shadows of people standing in windows of the surrounding houses. They were too scared to be outside. That was good. Fear may save their lives.

Careful to avoid stepping into any of the shredded remains, he walked up the lawn. Bile singed his throat when he looked down and saw Sergeant Campos’s ravaged body. One of the creatures had broken through his rib cage, making a sloppy feast of his heart, lungs and stomach. Campos was gruff, but he’d always been good to him, always fair.

He placed Campos’s hat over his face. He wanted to get back to the truck, but there was a shattered window in the house that had to be checked out. If someone was still inside, he needed to get them to safety.

Peering inside, he witnessed the end result of another slaughter. Smashed, bloodstained furniture was everywhere. The bodies of a man and a woman lay on the floor of adjoining rooms. He could tell from his vantage point that neither was alive.

They were too late to be of any help here. He really needed a radio. Without it, he was flying blind. They had to get back to the condo, contagious disease or not.

As he turned away from the house, there was an explosion and flash of light on the horizon. It was too big to be fireworks. The light didn’t diminish. In fact, it intensified.

While he was running back to the SUV, Meredith shouted out the window, “What was that?”

“I don’t know. Something blew up.”

He looked inside the squad cars, hoping someone left their keys in the ignition. No dice. He couldn’t get close enough to their bodies to search their pockets.

He swung the M16 strap down to his wrist so he could throw it in the backseat. His hand froze on the door handle.

One of the creatures slipped out from behind the SUV, deadly rows of teeth bared. The blue of its flesh was tinted red. Blood wept from its mouth.

Before he could get his finger around the rifle’s trigger, it charged.

Can Man scampered deeper into the reeds. Earlier, he’d poured the bottle of water he carried into the dirt. He covered his exposed flesh in mud as a way to camouflage himself, forgetting about his loud Hawaiian shirt. Most of the troops had moved out, but there were still ten men left, all of them up by the old lighthouse. None of them had noticed the steady parade of what he considered demons coming out of the water.

Silently, they padded up the rocky steps to the man-made walkway that circled under the rise that housed the lighthouse.

Another rode a wave onto the pebbled beach, shaking the salt water from the bits of fur still clinging to its muscular body.

“Fourteen,” Can Man whispered, keeping count of the demons as they arrived.

He hoped the mud masked his scent. They looked like dogs or wolves or panthers. It was hard to tell in the dark with only the moon to illuminate the horrors on the beach. If they were anything like any of those animals, they would have a keen sense of smell. He hoped they’d catch only a whiff of the earth when the breeze blew over him.

Sooner or later, the terrifying sea creatures were going to notice the men stationed at the lighthouse, or vice versa. When that happened, hell was going to open wide. If there was a God, Can Man would remain unnoticed, no more significant than a large shell rolled into the weeds along the beach.

The surf pounded with increasing intensity. Looking up through the slender gaps in the sea grass, he watched shadowy clouds scud under the luminescent lip of the moon. A storm was coming.

And another had already arrived.

The sound of a shrieking gull, or was it a man, was quickly drowned by the churning waves.

Can Man held his breath, listening. The angry Atlantic masked all other noise.

There was a flash of light by the gift shop, which was to the bottom left of the lighthouse, followed by an echoing report.

Shivering despite the humid warmth of the night, he shut his eyes tight and prayed.