Flesh Wounds, page 10
“What is it, Mr. Cooper?”
“Cheryl.”
“Someone you want us to contact? We called your office at Fort Monmouth. They said—”
“Girl that... was with me last night.” He choked, struggling with the dryness that had taken up residence in his mouth. The nurse returned. The doctor took a cup from her hands and slipped George a piece of ice.
“Easy now. Suck on that ice. You say there was someone with you last night?”
George nodded.
“Nurse, go get that police sergeant.”
“Cheryl,” George repeated, realizing he couldn’t remember her last name. The ice was soothing his raw throat, numbing the pain, making it easier to talk. “Picked her up in the bar. Cavalier Hotel.”
“Easy now. Let’s wait for the officer so you only have to tell this story once.”
Sure, George thought, no hurry. It’s just a beautiful young woman washed up somewhere dead. His mind flashed back involuntarily to the image of her pulling her blue dress off over her head.
Eventually they found the cop, a sour fellow who introduced himself as Sergeant Willis, no first name that he cared to share with George. George told Willis what he knew. Her first name was Cheryl, last name something that began with an M: Monroe, Moore, or something like that. He’d picked her up at the hotel bar and they’d gone for a midnight swim, something had tried to take his leg off, and he had swam fast as he could for the beach. End of story.
Willis made some quick phone calls. One to the Coast Guard to get them looking for Cheryl in the water. The other to his precinct to get some officers back out on the beach. There didn’t appear to be anything else he could do.
“Where was she when you were swimming to shore?” Willis asked when he’d finished with the phone.
George closed his eyes and felt shame spread like some volatile substance across his face. “Still in the water. I panicked. I thought she would follow.”
“Doesn’t appear she did,” Willis commented dryly.
An awkward silence followed in which Willis eased towards the door and, without comment, slipped out. George seemed not to even notice his departure. “What hit me?” he asked of no one in particular. “A shark?”
Doctor Fennimore stepped forward to answer. “We’re not sure, Mr. Cooper. I can tell you that it definitely wasn’t a shark. Your leg looks as if someone wrapped a piano wire about it and tightened down to the bone. Nothing living could have made a wound like that.”
“What did then?”
“My best guess is that you ran into some sort of floating garbage. Something sharp rolling about in the surf. An old timber with a hunk of metal embedded in it perhaps. You got your leg caught in it, twisted, and did all that damage.”
Bullshit, George thought. He was remembering the sounds he had heard just prior to the attack. That hadn’t been a drifting hunk of pier that slapped the surface of the water. Cheryl had even thought it was something living; she’d said dolphin when he’d guessed shark.
“Mr. Cooper, we need to talk about your medical condition.” Fennimore’s tone indicated that he was talking about more than George’s leg.
“You mean the cancer.”
“Yes.” There was some relief in the doctor’s voice. He’d obviously been worried that George didn’t know. “Therapy isn’t helping?”
“The radiation.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t been taking the treatments.” George chafed at having to explain this for the thousandth time. He cut straight to the punch line. “I want to die with some amount of dignity. And how I die is about the only say I have in the matter.”
Fennimore nodded solemnly, surprising George by accepting his decision. “I understand, Mr. Cooper.” A slight shrug of his shoulders. “Thoracic cancer is not something the medical profession has had much success with. You know it’s metastasized to your brain?”
“Six months to less than a year is what they told me a few weeks ago. Relax, Doctor. I know all about it.” George waved in a never-mind kind of gesture. “Tell me about my leg.”
“I can save it, but...”
“But it hardly seems necessary,” George supplied.
Fennimore looked away.
“Save my leg, Doctor. I want to walk through whatever time I’ve got left.”
It would be two weeks, and as many operations, before Doctor Fennimore released George. Two weeks in which the only trace of Cheryl to be found was the shoes she’d left in the rental car. Sergeant Willis checked at the Cavalier. No Cheryl M. had been registered that or any night within the past month. The bartender and waitress did remember seeing her leave with George. They corroborated his description of the missing redhead, but knew nothing about her. The waitress thought maybe she’d seen her in the bar once or twice before, but couldn’t remember who she might have been with. No one reported a missing redhead, no one found a body washed up on the beach, no one knew anything. Cheryl was a complete mystery.
The operations were to return some mobility to George’s leg. Whatever it was that had cut him had literally cut to the bone. A specialist was flown in from Boston to reconstruct the damaged muscles, tendons, and ligaments in George’s leg. The doctor put in long hours of surgery in which he gathered together and repaired the severed tissues. George would never walk without a metal leg brace or crutches again, but he would at least walk. And he got to keep the leg.
So, two weeks later, George left the hospital and returned to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He tried to immerse himself in his work at the Advanced Weapons Laboratory, to forget that night in Virginia, to forget the woman he’d almost lost his virginity to, and to forget the thing that had come swift and silent through the water to ruin his leg.
But it plagued him.
He knew there was something in the water off Virginia Beach, something alive and innately evil. If it hadn’t been for Cheryl, he might have been able to, if not forget about it, at least put it behind him. There was a nagging voice that said Cheryl wasn’t dead, that she was somehow associated with whatever lurked in the water. But there was a stronger voice, one that set his heart to racing, that said she couldn’t possibly mean him harm and, if she was still alive, he wanted to finish what they’d started.
If not for the cancer he might have been too terrified to return. But what did he really have to lose? The more it went around in his head, the more he knew he had to do something or go crazy.
Walt Leeke, George’s supervisor, was an understanding man, but when George requested annual leave Walt was worried that George was abandoning his research projects, many of which were beyond the other engineers in the office. And everyone knew George’s time was limited. George assured Walt that he just needed time to get over the accident, just a little R & R as it were, and then everything would be back to normal. As a sign of good faith, George put in several fourteen-hour workdays. Working late into the night, George finished up several technical reports Walt had been asking for, documentation that would allow others to carry-on where George was fated to leave off. Pacified, Walt approved George’s request for a week of annual leave.
Virginia Beach. Just under 300 miles away. George drove this time, the rear end of his Nissan Maxima riding low under the weight of the items he’d borrowed over several late nights working at the lab. Interstate 95 took him around Philadelphia, down to Highway 13. Thirteen carried him south through Delaware to Cape Charles and then across Chesapeake Bay to Norfolk and Virginia Beach. He had no idea what, if anything, he’d find at the beach, but he was as ready for it as any man could be.
As he stumbled out of his rented Pontiac, Earl Youngblood thought what a hot night it was. Certainly hotter than he’d expected for Virginia, even if it was summertime. The car door banged sharply against the side of somebody’s Datsun (or did they call them Nissans now?) causing a good size chunk of the import’s gray paint to chip off into the darkness, but fuck it, weren’t nothing but one of them goddamn Jap cars anyhow. Earl thought he could see the owner, a scrawny little fellow way up the beach, mucking about in the surf with some kind of net. There was a little wagon nearby, loaded with what appeared to be Mason jars—kind of hard to tell at this distance. Some kinda geek ocean scientist, Earl decided. Long as the little geek kept his distance, Earl didn’t care what he did.
Cheryl Anne’s tight ass was already heading for the water, so he hurried. Still, he remembered to grab what was left of the twelve-pack out of the car. They’d been working at it, but half the cans remained in the carton. Earl’s daddy had taught him to never waste good beer.
Damn, but she was a fast little filly. “Wait up, darlin’,” he hollered at her retreating backside.
There were a few other things the old bastard had taught him that were worth remembering, like how to ride a horse even when it don’t wanna’ be rode, how to spotlight deer from a canoe along the North Canadian, how to find the good holes when noodlin’ for catfish, and never, ever turn down free pussy. But for the most part, Daddy’d been one worthless ass sonabitch, drunk on the couch damn near all of his adult life, beatin’ Mama when he wasn’t drunk (and sometimes when he was), and chasing every split-tail he saw. Earl hadn’t even much gave a damn when they shoveled the old bastard under. But damn, he’d had the right idea about that free pussy. Especially when it looked as nice as Cheryl Anne did. It was one thing to let it run your life, chasing after it to the extent that you’re never sober and can’t hold down a job (like Daddy), but there wasn’t nothin’ wrong with taking good poontain when it dropped in your lap.
“Hurry, Earl! The water’s great!” Her dress lay on the sand just short of where the waves washed up shallow. He cursed himself for having ducked in after the beer; she must have shucked the dress when his back was turned. No matter, he was gonna’ see it all in minute or two.
“Gonna’ be in the pink,” he laughed, using one of Daddy’s old phrases. Daddy’d had a hundred of ’em, one for every occasion.
Fumbling with his clothes, Earl followed her to the water, dropping most of the beer on the way. No big deal, he’d pick them up later. Afterward. Stripped to his Fruit of the Looms, he waded into the surf, a beer can in each hand.
“Come on!” Cheryl called.
When he finally reached her, belly-button-deep in the dark waters of the Atlantic, she asked him if all Okies were as slow as he was.
“We do like to take our time, darlin’,” he drawled, pouring the bible-belt accent on heavy because he suspected it turned her on. “‘Fore the night’s over, I reckon as you’ll come to ‘preciate that.”
She moved close, stealing one of his beers and letting it slip beneath the waves. She reached for the second can, but he pulled it back out of her reach.
“Tell me more about your horses, Earl. Tell me how you ride them.”
He stroked her hip, letting his hand trail over and down its smooth contour, beneath the sea, around her velvet thigh and up between her legs. “First thing is to mount up, darlin’. Just grab the saddlehorn and wrap your legs around that old stallion.” He stroked her beneath the waves. “You know how to find the saddlehorn, don’t you, Cheryl Anne?”
She smiled and there was, springing forward like wildfire in that instant, something vicious back of her eyes, some predator that peeked out, sized him up, and decided then and there that he was prey.
Earl threw back his head and screamed. Something had indeed taken hold of his saddlehorn, but it wasn’t the loving embrace he’d expected. He felt the clean, cold bite of razors at his inner thighs—sharp, deep pain. Something heavy and cold, like the hand of a corpse, clamped over his genitals. Bleating like a castrated sheep, he lunged back in the suddenly boiling surf, voiding his bladder. The water about his waist churned a darker, thicker color, swirling syrup-heavy at the surface, flat black in the starlight.
Cheryl Anne licked her red lips and slipped, eel-like, beneath the surface.
Thrashing in the churning water, Earl struggled for the beach. He felt his underwear slip off his clenched buttocks, realizing that they couldn’t have done that unless the front of them was gone. There was excruciating pain radiating from his crotch and far too much warmth there. He was too terrified to look down. He knew he was whimpering and bellowing like a woman, something he’d never done before, not even the time a horse rolled on him and broke his leg in three places, but he had no inclination to stop.
Sand grated against his knees as he reached the shallows. He struggled to his feet and dived for the glistening shore, now only yards away. Something as cold and sharp as stainless steel wrapped whip-like around his ankles and jerked him off his feet. He sprawled face first into the sea, digging up handfuls of sand as he was drug back into the deeper water. He struggled against the drag-line about his ankles, feeling it cut deep, but not caring, knowing only that he had to get away, had to get to shore, had to get out of the water or he was as good as dead.
The restraining line drew taught; he felt it grate bone. A second later he felt one of his ankles pull away. Just like that: Snip! And his leg came down on the ocean floor, an exposed, grating knob of bone and torn flesh. More of the whipcords wrapped about his arms and waist and proceeded to drag him under.
Earl Youngblood struggled to the surface one last time and screamed his agony at the distant stars.
After four nights of unrewarded vigilance, George had fallen asleep. Leaning against his equipment in the deep shadows beneath the palms and sweet-scented pines thirty yards from the surf, he was all but invisible.
Youngblood’s screams awoke him.
George recognized it immediately as a man’s scream. The scream escalated, climbed several octaves above fingernails on slate, and then died in a wet, gurgling choke of pain and anguish. Beneath the bright stars, the sea was a turmoil of dark swirls and eddies, but of he who had uttered the cry there was not a sign.
George scrambled for his equipment, hands shaking so bad it took him three tries to get the cover off the portable sonar and, for several desperate seconds that stretched like an eternity, he could not remember how to turn it on. When he did get the scope switched on, the screen bleeped to fuzzy white, scaring him with its sudden brightness. Look everyone, here’s George! The white faded to a uniform gray and then, a second later, the scope received, sorted out, and composed the signals from the six transponders George had placed in the surf earlier that day.
On the screen, a huge shadow formed. Amorphous in shape, the thing appeared to be surrounded by millions of streamers undulating in the surf like snakes on a Medusa. The whole contraption, bulbous body and man-of-war tentacles, washed back and forth in the surf like a gently rocking bowl of Jello.
George stared at the screen for several long seconds, disbelieving the proportions the scale across the bottom told him were associated with the alien shape. Ignoring the spread of the tentacles, some of which trailed fifty feet or more in the surf, the thing was at least twenty feet across.
There were two other shapes on the screen. Smaller. Denser, if George was reading the scope correctly. One was swift and streamlined, darting in and out among the myriad tentacles, like a scavenger fish amidst the arms of a sea anemone. The other was still and lifeless, wrapped up in the leviathan’s tentacles, prey to the anemone analog, clutched close like a child’s doll. As George stared at the screen, too frightened to move, the tentacles began to pull the smaller shape apart, dicing and slicing as if the captured object had no more substance than a mannequin of clay.
George slumped to the ground before the scope, eyes locked on its ten inch screen, legs numb, barely breathing. His bowels were locked in a rictus of fear. He’d come here expecting... What? Hell, he didn’t know what he’d expected.
But he hadn’t expected this. This was something all his engineering, foundation upon which he’d built his entire life, could not explain.
What could he do?
Sit tight, Mother would say. It’ll all be over in a minute and then you can go home. Home is safe. Home is comfortable. We have thick walls, locks on the windows and doors, and Mother to keep away enemies, friends, and dates alike. Nothing can harm you behind your locks and your engineering, George. Nobody can touch you behind Mother.
He slipped his arms through the straps of the pack against which he’d been sleeping, shrugged its heavy bulk up on his back, and buckled the waist strap. The sea was churning a viscous black as he ripped the velcro cover from the I/O ports on the side of pack. There was a switch between the two ports. He flipped it on. The load on his back responded with a high-pitched whine.
The dark helmet he’d left setting atop the sonar scope was odd, totally lacking a visor or eye-opening of any kind. Across the face, where a visor would have gone, the helmet’s outer surface protruded beak-like. The raking lines gave the helmet an ancient, medieval appearance, a knight’s headgear minus plume, but the stylish shape was functional rather than aesthetic, designed to house the complex workings of the high resolution viewscreens and the array of microminiature mirrors inside. The viewscreen was the soldier’s window to the world around him, augmented by the best of today’s electronics. The mirror system yielded depth and dimension beyond that of a flat screen. The helmet’s outer surface was honeycombed with receptive facets the composition of which was, and would be for some years to come, highly classified.
George pulled the helmet firmly over his head. His eyes scanned the status panel and the panoramic viewscreen. There was a dangling control feed prodding his lower lip. He took it carefully between his teeth. A cable hung like a donkey’s tail from the back of the helmet. His hands were shaking bad enough that he almost had to remove the helmet to get the cable plugged into the smaller of the two I/O ports on the backpack. It was a connection he’d made numerous times before, though never with himself strapped inside. He got it on the second try, then twisted till it locked.
The status panel below his eyes lit up like Christmas as the helmet powered up. Self test information scrolled across his screen, faster than his eyes could assimilate, but all he cared about was the final line: ALL SYSTEMS
