CHAPTER 71

“Wait!” Val yelled, jumping and waving her arms in the rain near the edge of the ruined tank. The crane operator probably couldn’t hear her, sitting inside the cab fifty yards away. Lightning flashed, followed seconds later by the crack of thunder.

“Rabinowitz, go tell him he’s in the wrong place. We need to focus near the center of the tank. That’s where the pipe opening would be.”

Rabinowitz ran over to relay the message. He leaned in and spoke with the operator—an American contractor named Mark, who wore an orange hard hat and had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He reached forward and adjusted some levers. The long cab and steel lattice boom pivoted, and the massive clamshell bucket suspended from the cables swung slowly over the gap, ten feet above the water.

With the naval officer’s help, Val had convinced the construction crew to bring the massive crane over. From up on the rock wall, she looked down into the deep water of the tank, but could see nothing. Where the hell was the octopus?

Despite the lightning, the rain had slowed some, at least for the moment, increasing visibility. But rubble obscured the bottom of the tank, and the octopus was nowhere in sight.

The operator lowered the metal claw. A minute later, it returned to the surface, water pouring out between its teeth. Filled with tons of rock dredged from inside the aquarium, it pivoted and dropped the load onto the cement near the tank, backing up two policemen there to keep others away. He swung the arm back over the water and lowered the claw for another load.

He withdrew a boulder, and then dragged a long piece of Plexiglas off the bottom and out of the tank. He lowered the claw again, filling it with debris. He was raising it again when the octopus revealed itself.

 

 

Two enormous, reddish arms erupted out of the water beneath the clamshell. They slammed into the side of the boom, causing it to sway. A third arm darted up the claw, sliding over it and spiraling up the cables toward the head of the boom.

As a blob of flesh the size of a shed emerged out of the water beneath the arms, Rabinowitz scrambled behind the cab. He saw the policemen running away. He considered jumping from the crane, running after them. But he couldn’t go without the operator. He started back around the crane platform.

The operator stepped outside the cab, to see why the load had stopped moving. Val yelled at him. When Rabinowitz joined in, the man finally saw the beast. He turned to jump from the machine. But just as his front foot left the tracks of a skid, one of the tentacles found him. It encircled his torso and lifted him lightly into the air. He screamed and struggled. Then his limbs whipped to one side as the tentacle cracked like a whip.

The monster slammed his limp body against the crane’s metal framework, and there was a sharp report as his hardhat blew apart. His head was now bent impossibly far backwards, bouncing off his own spine, his mouth agape, as the tentacle shook him like a terrier worrying a rat.

Rabinowitz ducked behind the cab as the octopus pulverized the man’s lifeless body, smashing it against the crane until his head came free. With a sudden flick, the tentacle tossed the headless corpse thirty feet into the air. Val jumped back as it thudded onto the rocky ground ten feet away.

The octopus was distracted. Without thinking, Rabinowitz hurried around the cab and moved inside the crane. He heard Val yelling at him.

But he had watched the operator, and thought he knew what to do. He fell into the torn black seat and seized the levers. A moment later, the claw began to move again. The crane groaned as it cleared the water.

A huge tentacle slithered up the wet cables above the claw, then another, each seeming to test the machine. The crane shuddered under the weight as more of the steel attachment rose into the rain. Two more of the octopus’s arms slid above the waterline, stretching upward to grasp the lattice boom. Rabinowitz looked out the door, toward the safety a short distance away. But he knew why this thing was here. Why people were dead. He gritted his teeth.

The claw continued to rise. And the crane held.

The arms tugged at the steel frame, squirming like earthworms that had just felt the pierce of a barbed hook. If the tentacles slid Rabinowitz’s way, they would easily reach the open cab.

He pivoted the arm away from the pool and over the wet concrete, the claw still rising toward the pulley at the tip of the towering boom. Suddenly, there was a huge flash of light, and searing pain behind his eyes.

And then everything went black.

 

 

Val was sitting on the ground. She was unable to see, and her flesh tingled. There was a high-pitched, steady ringing in her ears.

There had been a blinding flash, and a deafening boom. She realized a bolt of lightning had just struck the crane directly. Burned into her retinas was the momentary image of the jagged bolt descending from the clouds to course over the crane and the octopus’s outstretched body, like molten fire.

Rabinowitz was in the crane. He might have gone into cardiac arrest. She had to get to him.

Her vision returned some. The octopus had disappeared back into the water. Val stood unsteadily and moved toward the crane, groping slowly around the pool. After stumbling into a railing and then moving a few steps along it, her vision fully returned. She hurried around the pool, until she could see Rabinowitz slumped inside the cab. A bolt of lightning could heat the adjacent air to 50,000 degrees, and carried hundreds of thousands of volts.

She wondered if he was still alive.