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Clickers.

J. F. Gonzalez & Mark Williams.

Dedicated to Mark Williams.

(1959-1998).

Who first came up with the idea.

And Cathy J. Gonzalez.

For being there when the going got rough.

Acknowledgements.

Clickers took about six months to write, spread out over a period of three years between our various other writing and film projects. Our intention from the beginning stages of this novel was to create a tale that will entertain-this was a book born of our love for 1950s horror/science fiction *B' movies and the early novels of James Herbert, Richard Laymon and (in Mark's case) Guy N. Smith. In short: pull up a chair, make yourself some b.u.t.tered popcorn, pour yourself a tall gla.s.s of soda, turn off all the lights in the house (except for the one by which you are going to read), and pretend you're curling up on the sofa watching a late night Creature Feature on a dark and stormy night.

Thanks and acknowledgment must be given to Craig Spector, Matthew J. Pallamary, Cathy J. Gonzalez and the late Mike Baker for their encouragement and keen feedback on the first draft of this novel. Thanks are also due to Pat LoBrutto for his initial enthusiasm and suggestions; to Mary Z. Wolf at Hard Sh.e.l.l Word Factory for giving Clickers its first home as an e-book; to Bob Strauss for helping me with proofing; and to David Nordhaus, Butch Miller, and Keith *Doc' Herber at DarkTales Publications for giving Clickers the home it always deserved in paperback.

More thanks: Ray Greer for information on deep sea fis.h.i.+ng; Buddy and Holly Martinez; Debbie Smith; all the writers who appeared in Phantasm Magazine; Cathy J. Gonzalez (for being the best wife a writer could ask for); the much-missed Afraid Magazine; Kurt and Amy Wimberger; Brian Hodge; the Friday Night Guys Without Dates Club-Tim Murphy, Brian Benison (I can't wait to quit!) and Ted Newsom (especially to Ted for all his work in the aftermath and helping to clear rights); Brian ”Skippy” Moore; Rikki Rockett and the Poison guys; Alice Cooper and Brian *Renfield' Nelson for giving Mark work; The Shroud; Rikki (again), Malina s.h.i.+rley, Riki Valentine, Shon Kornfeld and anybody on the No Mercy Comics Staff I may have missed; Dave DeCoteau; Charles Band and Full Moon Productions; Dave Schow; Pete Atkins; Doug Clegg and Raul Silva; Gary Zimmerman; Del & Sue Howison & Dark Delicacies Bookstore for providing a second home; Art Cover and Lydia Morano & Dangerous Visions Bookstore; John Skipp; Ramona Pearce for being way too cool; Trish and Tim Chervenak; Jesus and Glenda Gonzalez; Ivan Graves; and last but not least, anybody who paid Mark to write scripts and make cool monsters for movies. Well...almost everybody!

JFG,.

28 Jan, 2000.

Pasadena, CA.

Foreword.

This is the sixth edition of Clickers to see print (seventh if you count the recent, and brief, eBook appearance from Mundania Press...more on that in a moment). It is my first published novel, and has been in print consistently since its original publication as an eBook in 1999.

Editions prior to the Delirium reissues in 2006-2008 were riddled with varying degrees of typos and bad copy-editing. Some of the fault is mine. I was still green, more concerned with being published and making sure the story was king than with proper grammar and punctuation. Don't get me wrong a grammar and punctuation was important to me, and I took it seriously. But back then, my method of correcting and proofing my own work was radically different than it is today. Back then I had no copyeditors, proofreaders, or pre-readers. It was all me. I would write it, revise, edit, do the best I could with proofing, then send my work out with fingers crossed. Most of the time it was rejected, but sometimes I was able to place my work.

The original eBook edition by Hard Sh.e.l.l Word Factory wasn't proofed or copy-edited very well. My editor there made some good suggestions for revisions to the story (including the ending...the original ending Mark and I wrote was included in the limited edition Delirium published). But when it came to a detailed line-edit, the ball was dropped. I did my best on my end when I received the galleys, but I had read the book so many times that I was not the best judge. My old friend Richard Laymon helped me through the first third, but there were a lot of errors. I corrected as many as I could find and sent them off.

About half of those errors were corrected in the final version. When Hard Sh.e.l.l issued the book as a trade paperback six years later, I sent along a more polished copy but they never used it. Instead, they relied on that original error-ridden file.

The first trade paperback edition (from now defunct but much-missed DarkTales publications) was much cleaner. My editor there, Butch Miller, prided himself on being a grammar-n.a.z.i and we were able to clean up much of the text. Still, a few things were missed, but for the most part, the DarkTales edition was pretty clean and typo free.

Ditto the Delirium editions. Enough time had pa.s.sed by this time that I was a stronger copy-editor of my own stuff. Plus, I had a network of pre-readers and proofreaders to fall back on. Shane Ryan Staley had great copy-editor too, so between all of us we got the job done right, for once. The Delirium trade paperback (and the preceding limited edition hardcover) consisted of what I felt to be the corrected and preferred text of Clickers. I wish those few readers who had the misfortune to pick up the Hard Sh.e.l.l trade paperback had gone for this one instead.

The Mundania Press eBook is the more recent edition, and it was this edition that was the primary cause for rus.h.i.+ng these new editions to print. Long story short a Mundania Press bought Hard Sh.e.l.l Word Factory and an employee at MobiPocket a a company that basically pushes out the various eBook formats to all the distributors and vendors - inadvertently put the entire Hard Sh.e.l.l catalog back into print, including t.i.tles in which the rights had reverted to the authors (of which Clickers was one).

Oops. You can imagine all the angry letters and emails the folks at Mundania got from authors angry that their work was available (in clear violation of copyright). I was one of them.

Because Clickers had enjoyed such a long and fruitful life and readers were still being introduced to it for the first time, many people downloaded this edition when they discovered it available. Unfortunately for them, when MobiPocket transferred the files, they used the old error-ridden version from Hard Sh.e.l.l Word Factory. To make matters worse, somehow the text got even further mangled (probably during file transfers to create the this edition). The result was the first time I received feedback from fans telling me ”I bought the eBook edition of Clickers but I couldn't understand it.” The first such email sent me on an Internet search and that's when I learned of the mishap. As a result, the Mundania Press eBook editions were recalled. If you are among those that bought a copy of this edition, my apologies.

If the Delirium edition was the unofficial corrected and preferred edition, this edition makes it official. Accept no subst.i.tutions. Typos be d.a.m.ned! Cheap and pulpy narrative...well, that stays. After all, first and foremost, Clickers is a pulp horror novel. It was not written with the intent to be considered great art or literature. It was written by two huge fans of pulp horror and 1950's SF/Horror B movies. It is an homage. Nothing more, nothing less. So grab the beverage of your choice, rustle up some b.u.t.tered popcorn, turn on the light, and let's travel to Phillipsport, Maine, where people are about to meet something rather nasty from the depths of the ocean.

J. F. Gonzalez.

July 27, 2010.

Altoona, PA.

Prologue.

North Atlantic Sea.

October 20th.

It was unusually cold that day.

The chilling wind licked at the surface of the water, causing frigid whitecaps on the churning waves. This section of the Atlantic, roughly fifty miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, was always cold, but never like this. Captain Kim Isaac had never seen the ocean behave this way in all his twenty years of experience at sea. It was just too weird.

Kim stood on the upper deck of the Lucky Mariner- a weathered fifty-six foot Seine Boat that he'd bought ten years ago-as it crested a rising swell. A spray of foam splashed over the railing. The burst of cursing that rose from below told him that a good portion of his crew was drenched with the icy brine.

Kim gripped the metal railing and gazed out at the ocean. He took a long pull off his old walnut pipe, letting the scented smoke warm his lungs. His mood was pensive. This excursion had been plagued with unnatural occurrences from day one. After three days at sea, his crew of seven had hauled in less than seven hundred pounds of fish. Cod and herring were usually plentiful in these waters at this time of year. He had brought in nearly two tons of Cod on one trip alone last season, but now there was almost nothing. The s.h.i.+p's cook, Danny Walters, told him that it could all be blamed on the overfis.h.i.+ng. That was the rational explanation for it.

Directly above the main cabin, Kim heard his first mate, Dave Johnson, curse as he swung the wheel to avoid another swell that was rapidly approaching. The waves had been rising steadily during the past hour and the wind whipped from the north, blowing freezing cold air across the bow. The black ma.s.s of clouds from the east indicated that Mother Nature was going to bless them with a mighty storm. There had been nothing about it in the latest weather forecast. Kim shook his head in dismay. Great, just f.u.c.king great!

One of the crew sat in a skiff fifty yards out, maneuvering the far end of the gill nets. They had been dragging the nets for the past four hours and had come up with nothing-another oddity. Gill netting was constructed with a lighter gauge weave. It floated in the water, creating a purse-like shape that trapped fish in currents like the scoop of a shovel. The fishes' gills got hooked in the netting and they couldn't wiggle free because the rest of them would pile in behind, trapping the whole school. When you thought about it, it was pure torture.

But for some reason the fish were getting out this time. They were tearing themselves from the nets, leaving b.l.o.o.d.y strips of flesh and scales tangled in the weave. They were swimming madly, as if propelled by some unseen force. It had happened the day before as well. It was the first indication that this trip was in no way normal.

The second indication was when the bottom-dwellers had come up in the nets earlier that morning. Flounder, lamprey and others of their ilk were rarely seen by surface fishers. They preferred to stay on the ocean floor and suck up anything that happened to settle there. Usually they stayed far below the bottom edge of the nets.

Kim had stood on the deck and watched the men haul them up in disgust. Most of the bottom-dwellers were worthless on the open market except for the flounder and a few specialty fish. The creatures just seemed to spew up from the depths in an unending h.o.a.rd, as if they were being driven up by...something.

Forty minutes after the first wave of bottom dwellers, one of the crew yelled that they'd caught a large lobster in the nets. They tried hauling it up but before they could bring it to the surface, the net was torn apart and the creature scurried away into the deep. A moment later, another was captured. And then another. And another.

Kim had hopped down to the lower deck to catch a glimpse and couldn't believe what he saw; it was some type of crustacean, roughly three feet long. Its sh.e.l.l was deep red, darkening to black around the edges; its claws were a good foot long and serrated, making sharp little clicking sounds as it snapped at the net. Round, black marble eyes glared from long, wavering stalks. Its tail was segmented, tapering down to a needle protrusion that whispered stinging pain. In all, it resembled a cross between a mutant crab and a giant scorpion.

Kim saw the creature as the net came up in a spray of foam. The men beside him yelped in surprise as the thing clipped and wriggled through the net with a snap of its claws and slipped beneath the ocean's surface. The cut section of net floated limply in the water.

Some of the crew helped Kim bring the net up and he held it in his weathered hands. The thing had snipped through it as neatly as scissors through string. Quite a feat, considering that this was a wire-based net built to withstand the power of thousands of pounds of thras.h.i.+ng fish.

Kim watched the creatures periodically get caught, only to escape before the crew could drag them aboard. He tried getting Ralph Hodgson, the lead crew man, to shoot them with the high-powered rifle kept on board to fend off sharks and barracudas, but all his shots went wild or missed altogether due to the awful thras.h.i.+ng the boat was taking from the stormy sea.

His heart raced furiously. He looked out into the rough sea, turning his head to watch as a couple of his crewmen brought up another of the creatures amid excited yells. It snipped through the weave and scurried away with a splash as Ralph popped off a few more useless shots.