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Tommy set the handset down on the thin metal casing of the CB radio and breathed a sigh of relief. They weren’t back to shore yet, but at least now he could count on a couple of squad cars and ambulances when they got there.
He looked at Macy, sitting with Tanner’s head on her lap. At Bark, stretched out on the bench across from them, unconscious and fading fast. Stacy sat in silence at Bark’s feet, staring into the distance.
“You think Bark’ll make it?” Tommy asked Miriam.
“I don’t know,” she replied, hesitating. “I-I’m sorry that I shot him.”
Tommy didn’t answer right away, trying to process the complex emotions surging through his veins. Probably Miriam had done the right thing, but Tommy still felt guilty, as if letting Bark shoot him might have brought Bark to his senses and put an end to all this madness.
“You did what you had to,” he finally said.
He bent over and picked up one of the harpoon guns they’d stacked on the floor, then a bolt of ammo. Loading it proved easy enough, and soon Tommy felt a little bit safer.
“Those bolts are heavy,” Miriam said while he worked. “And slower. You’ll have to aim higher than you would with a gun. It’s a different kind of skill.”
Tommy nodded, understanding the truth of what she said without really processing the reality of it. He hoped he wouldn’t need it.
They stood next to each other in silence while Tommy recapped the entire bizarre situation in his head. They’d left the Mayhem severely damaged, on the precipice of the deepest waters in the gulf. The ship had taken its secrets with it, and that meant Tommy would never get the luggage that Miriam had seen. He wondered how Bark had done it. Overpowered two co-eds before dismembering them and, he could only assume, feeding them to that creature.
And then what? He’d taken Hannah’s hotel key, gathered up the luggage, and left the key in the room so it looked as if she’d just checked out? He might have been old and ragged, but Bark was clever. So clever that Tommy never suspected him, which made Tommy feel foolish and naive.
He turned to Miriam. “Here’s the thing I don’t understand about your parasite theory.”
Miriam nodded with a look on her face that told him she welcomed the intellectual challenge.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“So, the kraken attacks and then they get infected. Makes’em want to get back to the kraken. Take care of it, I guess. But what about Emma?”
“What about her?”
There had been no time for Tommy to tell Miriam about Emma, but she was the missing piece that he couldn’t fit into the parasite theory. “I talked to Emma before I came out here. She seemed fine. Scared. Worried. Never wanted to set foot in an ocean again. That doesn’t square with all of this.”
Miriam shrugged. “Maybe it has some sort of incubation period? That would make sense, right? Maybe she’ll change her mind still.”
“Maybe,” Tommy admitted. “We’ll keep an eye on her just in case, but she was attacked before Tanner. And he already seems to be smitten with that thing.”
Miriam stared out at Tanner for a few beats before responding, “There’s something we don’t understand.”
Something? There were a million things they didn’t understand. Tommy couldn’t keep up with the number of things that currently perplexed him. The fact that Miriam just kept moving forward, as if the world hadn’t been turned upside down, amazed him. He was tired, hungry, and running out of the will to continue. Someone would have to hunt down this kraken, but if he could just get them all safely back to shore, he’d make sure it wasn’t him.
“How much further?” he asked.
“Not long. Ten minutes maybe.”
Tommy took his harpoon gun and stalked out to the back of the Mama Jean, staring out across the endless, abyssal ocean. The moon bounced brightly off the water, rendering every crest a tentacle, every shadow a fleshy mass protruding from the water. Tommy had never particularly liked the ocean, and now he felt the stirrings of a proper phobia.
Soon, though, he could get back to normal police matters. Like arresting the murderer bleeding out on the other end of the boat.
It would be a hard road from here. For Bark. For Tommy. For the entire city of Cape Madre. Everyone loved Fred Barker. And even after what Bark had done, Tommy couldn’t quite convince himself that Bark deserved the derision.
As he surveyed the waves, he thought he saw a loop arch out of the water. Then another. He squinted and focused, hoping that the shadows played tricks on him, but he couldn’t ignore the rounded tip of a tentacle that popped out of the water mere feet from the boat, the suction cup glinting in the moonlight. He thought his body didn’t have anything else to give, but he felt his heartrate rise, the blood pounding in his ears.
“She’s here!” he hollered as loudly as he could.
Miriam’s head stretched out of the cockpit, trying to see what Tommy saw, but she couldn’t get the right angle without leaving the wheel. Miriam had only one job right now: to steer. The kraken had to be his problem.
He sprinted to the opening beside her. “Just drive. I’ll hold it off.”
She looked dubious, but didn’t protest. Tommy moved back to the aft section of the Mama Jean and raised the harpoon gun to eye level, trying to remember what Miriam had told him about the weight and the speed.
He focused on the water, trying to ignore the growl of the motor, hoping he’d be able to hear the splash of the kraken. Anything to zero in on his target. When he found nothing off the aft section of the boat, he moved to the bow, where Macy sat clutching Tanner’s hand, fear reflecting from her eyes.
That girl had saved him from Bark back on the Mama Jean, and that meant something to Tommy. He’d lay down his life to keep her safe. To keep all of them safe. He told himself this more than he felt it, because he needed courage. He needed something to push him forward into the insanity of trying to fight a giant octopus, armed only with a harpoon gun meant for taking down sharks and rays. Fearsome creatures that somehow seemed laughable now.
Something slick and slimy arched out of the water, too close to the bow for Tommy to react. The boat moved too fast for him to get a shot off.
“Watch out!” he yelled.
The boat swerved at his command. Miriam’s eyes focused on the horizon before them. Despite Miriam’s best efforts, the Mama Jean skipped across the tentacle lying in the water and bounced into the air. Tommy squatted and held on to the edge of the boat as Macy and Tanner likewise braced themselves. The boat landed back into the water hard, sending Bark toppling to the deck. Stacy didn’t even react.
Without thinking, Tommy set his harpoon gun down on the bench Bark had vacated and knelt beside the old man. He felt for a pulse and found one, faint but thumping away. He considered hefting Bark back onto the bench but decided the deck might be more stable.
“Tanner!” Macy yelled behind him.
Tommy spun to see Tanner propping himself up so that he could stretch his muscled arm across the gap. He fell back into his seat, with Tommy’s harpoon gun in tow. At first, Tommy reasoned that Tanner being armed could only be a good thing, but when the barbed end of it trained directly on him, he knew nothing good would come.
Tommy didn’t know Tanner, but a universal understanding of humanity told him all he needed to know. Tanner was panicked, worried. Angry.
“She won’t hurt us,” Tanner said. “Leave her alone.”
Macy looked helpless next to Tanner’s hulking form, confused and terrified. Tommy calculated the situation. The harpoon gun, slow and heavy. Tanner without the use of his legs. How quickly could he react? How much experience did he have with such weapons? If Miriam was any indication, the answer was plenty.
Tommy held up his hands, trying to simultaneously meet Tanner’s gaze and scan the horizon for another breach from the kraken. “I’m just trying to keep everyone safe.”
“Stop it!” Macy yelled at Tanner, slapping at his bicep but causing no shift in his aim. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to hurt anyone,” Tanner said calmly. “And neither is she.”
Tommy had his doubts, but for the first time the claim did make him wonder whether the parasite worked both ways. He assumed the kraken had followed in a mad frenzy before, but now he considered the possibility that she had come to save Bark and Tanner. He thought back to the attack on the Mayhem, trying desperately to remember any detail that would prove the theory. Then again, maybe it didn’t matter.
While having been zoned out for much of his hostage negotiation training, Tommy tried to summon up anything he could remember. “Mr. Brooks. I don’t want to hurt anyone or anything. I just want to get everyone to safety.”
“We’re already safe,” Tanner replied.
Tentacles danced alongside the boat, arching out of the surf on both sides as the Mama Jean skimmed across the water. How did such a creature move so incredibly fast? It seemed even more surreal than the kraken itself.
Tommy turned towards Miriam, her eyes wide. She cocked her head gently to the right and Tommy took the meaning. As soon as his eyes turned back to Tanner, the boat swerved suddenly, causing Tanner to lose his balance.
Tommy lunged forward, grabbed the muzzle of the gun and forced the pointy end of the harpoon toward the sky. With Tanner seated, Tommy had leverage which he used to his advantage, twisting the gun out of Tanner’s hands just as the boat came to a sudden halt. The motor still ran, sputtering and whining, louder now, as if the entire mechanism had been pulled from the water. Then the boat began to tilt forward, just slightly, the way a bus might as it slammed on its brakes.
Miriam yelled from the cockpit, “Get the motor back in the water!”
Tommy shot Tanner a stern look and bounded off to the aft section of the boat, unable to make out the scolding that Macy spewed Tanner’s way. To his left, he saw the faint lights of Cape Madre. The fishing ships lining the docks. The flashing blue lights of the reinforcements. The fading dim bulbs of the Shady Shark “No Vacancies” sign. They were almost there. Tommy just had to free the boat from a kraken.
The writhing mass of flesh at the back of the boat seemed omnipresent and indistinguishable as any one piece of the animal. He supposed he stared at tentacles, but they’d wrapped around one another, engulfing the top of the motor while impressively avoiding the dangerous part at the bottom. Knowing very little about boats, Tommy worried that a harpoon might go through the flesh and into the motor, leaving them dead in the water.
“Here,” Miriam said from behind him. She held out a machete that Tommy didn’t even know they had. “I found it in the cockpit. Give me the gun.”
Tommy obeyed, handing over the harpoon gun and taking the machete. Could he hack his way through this? He didn’t have time to worry about it, slamming the machete’s dull blade into the mass of flesh and slicing the slimy skin. It was too large and thick to cut through, but blood oozed encouragingly from the cut.
Miriam stood beside him, the harpoon gun pointing out to the water, moving jerkily from tentacle to tentacle as they swarmed around them. Yet she never took a shot, as if she was waiting for something.
As he brought the machete back for another whack, something grabbed his wrist. Without looking, he knew what it was. A hot poker of pain shot down from his wrist into his chest.
Miriam fired the gun. A loud, squishy thunk as the harpoon plunged through the tentacle holding Tommy at bay. Almost immediately, the grip loosened then snaked back into the water, the lodged harpoon clanging against the side of the Mama Jean as it disappeared.
“Dammit,” Miriam exclaimed. “Needed that one for the head. I’ll be right back.”
She sprinted to the cockpit for more ammo. Tommy took another whack at the slimy mass engulfing the motor. His wrist yelled with pain. As he pulled back up, he saw the tentacles rising toward him from both sides of the boat this time. She wouldn’t let him hit her again.
He ducked and dodged and hit the deck to avoid the tentacles coming for him. From a sitting position, he swung the machete wildly, hoping to force them away.
Miriam came around the corner in a flurry, holding a loaded harpoon gun in each hand. At first, he thought she’d somehow wield both at the same time, but she leaned one against the back of the cockpit, trusting the gravity of the boat’s tilt to keep it in place. Though he expected her to shoot at the tentacles slowly writhing towards him, she instead ducked under them, looked towards the motor and fired.
K’thunk!
The tentacles swarming Tommy retreated in an instant and he scrambled up beside Miriam. The boat dropped suddenly as the twisted-up tentacles around the motor slid back into the water. Miriam dropped the gun and raced back to the cockpit. Tommy followed.
“How’d you do that?” he asked, quickly realizing that she couldn’t be bothered to answer.
The lights of the shore drew closer, streaking towards them as quickly as the Mama Jean could push. Behind them, the waves rumbled and boiled, evidence of the kraken skimming beneath the surface of the water. They raced her now, and Tommy feared that they wouldn’t come out the victors.
“Get the rope,” Miriam yelled. “Get ready!”
Tommy made his way to the mooring rope coiled up on the deck and grabbed the end of it. The docks approached quickly, and Miriam showed no signs of slowing down. After a few more feet, Tommy could make out the uniformed officers on the dock, then paramedics hanging back near their ambulances. Surely, they could see the speed of the approach. They needed to move.
Tommy yelled above the whine of the motor, “Move!”
Closer.
Confusion danced across their faces.
“Move! Now!”
One of them seemed to catch on this time, scurrying away and motioning to the cop beside him.
The boat swerved hard, knocking Tommy to his knees, rolling Bark across the deck, causing Macy to hop from one bench to the other. Tanner and Stacy managed to brace themselves effectively. The side of the boat skimmed towards the dock at an ungodly speed. Miriam cut the motor just as the Mama Jean slammed into the side of the dock. The force of it almost knocked Tommy down again but he held his ground, vaulted over the edge, and planted his feet on the wooden planks of the dock.
The boat tried to careen away, bouncing off the docks and back into the deeper waters, but Tommy put all of his muscle into keeping it alongside him. After he managed to contain the momentum of the boat, he looped the rope around the mooring anchor, surely in a completely inappropriate way, but good enough to keep the boat close.
The cops and paramedics rushed in, following Tommy’s direction to go for Bark and Tanner first. Stacy and Macy stumbled off the boat and retreated far into the parking lot, still visible but out of harm’s way. Miriam jumped down soon after with a loaded harpoon gun, a handful of harpoon bolts, and the machete that Tommy had carelessly left on the deck. The Mama Jean’s hull caved and cracked where it had collided with the dock. Tommy briefly wondered whether Newt had insurance.
Then, the cracks and dents didn’t seem to matter so much, as tentacles slammed down over the Mama Jean. On the other side of the boat, Tommy saw it for the first time. The bulbous mass of its head. The dark, knowing eyes. And a huge beak, open wide and revealing rows of terrifying, serrated teeth.
It seemed impossible. Surreal. A legend come to life. Fear coursed through him, but also the slightest hint of something else that he didn’t like and couldn’t suppress...
She was beautiful.
