Support tender Tulsa.
Lower deck.
Indian Ocean.
Tuesday, July 31, 8:01 p.m.
Beneath the port and starboard bow, the two heavy iron anchors descended from their hitches on clanking, unfurling, thick chains. They hit the ocean in huge, twin splashes and sank below.
The shark alien was hurtling around the front of the ship, its tail propelling it with tremendous speed and driving it mouth first into the anchor chains. Several teeth were knocked out, which instantly grew back. The extraterrestrial twisted and tangled in the links, getting itself caught up and coiled in the anchor chains. Energized by the oxygen rich upper waters, the snagged space monster fought back against the shackles with unearthly fury and power.
Pinned in place by the dropped anchors, the small ship powered forward with its propellers, meeting the resistance of the chains and slewing sideways in the water.
On deck, the crew was knocked off their feet.
The alien battled the chains trammeling it with monstrous rage and violence, churning up the sea.
Swimming straight down trying to pull itself free.
The chains didn’t come loose.
It was firmly shackled to the ship.
The Tulsa began to tilt forward.
The spinning screws left the ocean, whirling in the air, dripping with water.
In a deafening screech and groan of tortured steel, the stern of the vessel rose out of the sea as the bow was winched downwards by the submerged anchors pulled by impossible force.
The nose of the Tulsa dipped below the heaving waves.
Ocean flooded over the bow and the flailing crew started sliding down the slanting deck, grabbing onto anything they could to break their fall into the churning seas and what waited there. Desperate hands snatched ladders, clawed at ropes, at cleats. The back of the ship was now tilted at a forty-five degree angle. Screams and shouts filled the air. Thousands of gallons of water splashed over the bow, completely submerging it.
The center of gravity of the boat had shifted—now hundreds of tons of steel was pressing downwards on the bow, forcing it farther under water.
The Tulsa was sinking.
Holding on to the skewed railing of the tipping ship, Clark screamed as she helplessly gazed at the first mate, Calloway, tumbling down the slippery wet deck.
He bobsledded toward the waves bursting over the sunken bow as if on a water theme park ride.
A pale, blunt silhouette, wide as a truck, reared out of the ocean at the front of the ship. Gigantic, hinged jaws with rows of jagged fangs extended. It resembled the biggest shark she had ever seen but yet it wasn’t—the creature looked different, mutated somehow, like a great white on steroids. Behind the savage rows of shark-like teeth, an alien beak was where the gullet should be, and Clark felt a shudder of recognition.
She had seen it before.
The first mate was slip sliding down the angled deck straight into the monster’s mouth. Seeing where he was headed, the man’s eyes bugged out of his head. He screamed like a girl, fingers clawing themselves bloody for useless purchase on the deck.
The nose of the extraterrestrial shark hyperextended, gums and snout cartilage pushing out, the razor sharp walls of triangular teeth beckoning like a meat grinder.
Calloway’s legs slid right between the upper and lower crusher teeth and the beast clamped down, cleanly severing his legs below the knees in bright arterial sprays of red oxygenated blood that splattered of the space creature like a vision out of hell. Clark winced, turning her head to avert her gaze from the spectacle—she didn’t want to watch him get eaten alive, but couldn’t close her ears to the hideous, high-pitched, dying screams of the pitiful wretch.
Roy had one hand clamped firmly on her wrist, pulling her back, his other arm and elbow locked around the railing. He stared down in abject terror and disgust as the monster swung its steam shovel jaws wide open and the first mate slipped halfway down its gullet. The enormous fanged maw slammed shut again and split the man in two pieces at the sternum. A fusillade of gore splattered the deck in dripping smears as piles of guts landed with wet plops. Opening its intestine and meat-strung blade toothed jaws, the creature devoured the rest of its meal whole.
In a sudden surge of tremendous power, the sea monster catapulted itself upwards onto the section of sunken bow with a sweep of its submerged tail and fins. Half its body was now on the upended vessel, adding its crushing mass to the weight already sinking the bow of the Tulsa.
Above the alien, the terrified crew members clung for dear life on to whatever they could. They stared down at the sea monster below in mortal terror—those blood-smeared Kraken jaws gaped up at them hungrily a few yards away, just waiting for them to slip and fall into the creature’s mouth. The sailors desperately pedalled their feet on the slick deck, but their boots and sneakers kept slipping on the surface. A mechanic lost his grip on a hatch and fell headlong down the canted deck right into the monster’s snapping teeth to be bitten in half sideways from groin to skull in a volcanic eruption of gore that drenched the extraterrestrial. The uneaten part of the bloody corpse, raggedly chopped with tooth marks, flopped out of the maw like a grotesquely mangled marionette—a pulped carcass no longer recognizably human. Then with a slurping chomp, the alien devoured that too.
High above on the gangway to the tilting bridge, Clark bent her arms around the rail beside Roy and clung fast with all her might.
Now that she was secure, Enright drew the Colt .45 he had been keeping with him on his belt. Crouching on the gangway, he took two-handed aim down at the beast on the bow below, and started blasting.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Empty shells flipped glittering from the breech as the muzzle of the pistol spat flame.
Roy pulled the trigger again and again.
BAM! BAM!
He hit the alien in the face each time.
Impact holes punched through the tough armor-like outer skin of the nose of the extraterrestrial, but didn’t faze it.
He fired again, three times.
One shot splintered a tooth.
The next popped an eye.
Unharmed, the space monster was still snapping hungrily at the desperate men clinging to the deck above it, waiting for them to drop into its mouth. Its attitude reminded Clark horribly of a baby bird waiting to be fed a worm by its mother. The creature was half on the ship, half off, partially submerged in the roiling sea, and it had chosen its position well, food-wise.
A nauseating stench billowed upwards at Clark and Roy, reeking off the hideous creature like ammonia mixed with excrement—and another strange, gorge-rising, alien smell unspeakably aggressive and foul.
“Kill it!” the woman screamed to the man beside her, who was busy firing away.
“I’m trying!” He shouted back, frustrated and frightened, adjusting his aim. “What the fuck kind of shark is that?”
Then the tentacles came out.
And Clark and Roy both knew it was no shark.
“I know what it is!” Clark yelled in stupefied realization. “It’s the thing that was down there with us! But it’s impossible! It can’t be up here!”
“That’s comforting,” the man replied bleakly.
Greenish, viscous tendrils slithered out of the gill slits on each side of the alien’s head, whiplashing and slapping up the deck, some wrapping around the railing and holding it fast, as other tentacles squiggled and squirmed up the deck to coil around the legs and torsos of the escaping sailors. The foul tendrils yanked them from their perches like a giant squid and stuffed them in the opening and closing jaws of the extraterrestrial. Piledriving rows of fangs turned the men into mangled meat puppets, then bloody lumps of chewed flesh that were gluttonously gulped down and ingested.
The bottom of the ship was a slaughterhouse, the deck red with bloody froth of gory ocean.
Clark shut her eyes, unable to look as other crewmen fell or were snatched, to be gruesomely consumed.
Cursing, Roy flung his empty pistol down at the sea monster and watched the weapon bounce harmlessly off its nose.
A crunching groan of tortured steel emanated like a gargantuan mechanical belch inside the ship as it tipped vertically, plunging fast down into the sea now. Clark and Roy were flung sideways on the upended gangplank as the shadow of the stern and transom loomed suddenly directly above them like a steel cliff. The woman threw a glance straight downward, holding on to the rails with her elbows and knees and any part of her body she could bring into play to keep a grip. Roy had his arms and legs braced on the railing of the gangway.
Directly below, Clark saw the waterline rising fast up the Tulsa’s bow, now covering half the lower deck and ascending in splurging plumes of red sea. Great, black, oily patches of diesel were spotting the waters below in thick globs, and the stench of raw fuel was incapacitating. The vessel would be fully sunk in a few minutes.
Sensing the ship was about to sink, the alien departed—half sliding, half slithering off the bow and submerging into the contaminated seas. It descended into the deep with a propellant swish of its mutated tail, disappearing from view.
“Hang on!” Clark and Roy shared a combustive glance.
“The Tulsa’s lost! We gotta abandon ship!”
“That thing is in the water!”
“We have no choice! The ship is sunk! There’s an emergency life raft on the bridge!”
No time to think.
They went for it.