Part 12 (2/2)

The man rushed forward to save his son only to be stung by in the stomach by a clicker. The force of the blow sent him reeling on his b.u.t.t. The man sat on the sand for a moment, eyes wide open. His hands clutched at his full belly as he moaned in pain. The creature advanced on him and popped him again, this time stinging his neck. The man shrieked as the venom inflated his neck like an inner tube and simultaneously dissolved the flesh. His stomach expanded and finally burst like a ripe melon. It looked like a balloon filled with sausages soaked in barbecue sauce exploding.

Rick watched the action as it went down in slow motion before him.

The boy's chest began expanding, the flesh bubbling as he fell to his knees. The clickers swarmed around him, stuffing pieces of his flesh in their mandibles.

The woman remained standing in the sand screaming as more clickers surrounded her and took her down. Stingered tails rose and fell and the audible clicking of pincers snapping at flesh rose in Rick's ear.

The man sat on the sand, his inner organs spilling out of his split belly, covering the creatures in a sticky, red mess. The man continued screaming and kicking out at the feasting crustaceans even as he was being eaten alive before his very eyes.

Jack bent over and vomited into the wet asphalt of the parking lot. Rick stared at him as if in a fog. This was far worse than he could have imagined. There were dozens of the things scurrying up out of the water now to get their piece of the late tourist family. There were G.o.d knew how many more farther along the coast, scurrying farther inland. He didn't want to think about what was happening to other unfortunate people the creatures came across. The clicking sounds hurt Rick's eardrums.

He grabbed Jack by the shoulder, pulling him to his feet. ”We've got to get the h.e.l.l out of here and warn everybody!”

Jack focused on Rick with fear in his eyes. He looked like he was going to be sick again. The nausea seemed to pa.s.s over his face again and watching it made Rick want to throw up.

Finally Jack gained his composure. ”How? The phones are out...”

Rick thought for a moment. ”We'll have to go door to door...there aren't that many people in this town-”

”Not many people?” Jack panted. ”There's close to a thousand...”

”Compared to Philly that's nothing,” Rick said. But he knew what Ripper meant. ”If we could get some help-” The clicking cut him off as it intensified. They looked toward the beach as dozens and dozens of the things came bubbling out of the surf. It looked like the entire beach was alive with the red things. It looked like there were thousands of them making their way onto the sh.o.r.e.

Rick grabbed Jack by the coat and pulled him along down the pier, leaving Janice's car forgotten. They headed back to town, toward the mall.

Chapter Sixteen.

Glen Jorgensen was sitting in the rear examining room, the one where the freezer was kept, examining the remains of the two creatures that Rick Sychek had his run-ins with.

He sighed and sat back from the desk he was working at. The severed claw and tail segment were resting on carefully placed trays, which, in turn, rested on two towels. He had stowed both samples in the freezer the moment they'd come into his possession, both to preserve them for better study later, but also because they fascinated him. And with good reason.

Glen had been born and raised in this town. Had walked its beaches at night, swam in the ocean, fished off the pier. And he'd never seen, nor heard of, anything remotely resembling the monstrosities that emerged from the ocean that caused so much fear and bodily damage. When Rick brought the claw to his office yesterday he'd racked his brain trying to come up with a plausible explanation. He'd searched through all his textbooks on crustaceans, arachnids, Atlantic sea life, Maine wildlife, everything he could find. And he'd found nothing.

And then today-the scene at the beach, Bobby's hand...

Glen Jorgensen shuddered at the thought that was skittering in his mind.

He stood up and walked out of the room toward the receptionist area. The waiting room and reception area were brightly lit against the darkness that was raging outside thanks to two battery-powered lanterns placed on the reception counter. The rain was coming down in hard torrents, the wind howling, ravaging the trees outside, making the big oak tree outside the house scratch its branches against the north side of the building. The screeching sound the branches and leaves made against the wet gla.s.s of the windows was enough to give anybody the w.i.l.l.i.e.s. Couple that with what lay in the metallic trays in the rear office, and- But no. To think about that now would be to go mad.

After dropping Rick off at the pier, Glen had trudged back to the office. Janice was already coming out of sleep and Barbara was tending to her when he arrived. Glen told her that Rick had gone to fetch her car and he would be dropping it off at the house. Janice had nodded groggily and asked if he would take her and Bobby home. Glen had given her a quick look-over, p.r.o.nounced her fit yet exhausted due to stress and prescribed a night in bed. Bobby was still pa.s.sed out. With Glen's help, Janice got out of bed and hobbled to the bathroom while Barbara helped him bundle Bobby up for the trip.

With Barbara's help he got Janice and Bobby into his car and drove them home. He carried Bobby upstairs to his room and helped Janice set things up; his favorite blanket, his X-Men comics at his bedside should he feel the urge to delve into comic book world when he awoke.

Glen had left a bottle of tranquilizers with Janice with explicit instructions not to exceed two every six hours. Janice nodded, saying she understood, she'd get some rest, she was going to take care of her little boy and thank you. Glen smiled, told her to call him at home if she needed him-she had the number-and then he and Barbara left.

After dropping Barbara off at her modest little cottage on the outskirts of town, he'd driven back to the house. He'd double locked the front and back doors of the house and shut himself up in the office where he proceeded to study the segmented tail and severed claw again.

The comparison to the claw and the tail fit. Both pieces looked to have come from an animal roughly the size of a badger; something approximately three feet long, a foot and a half to two feet wide. The stinger at the end of the tail was a good three inches long and needle-sharp with no barbs. Smooth. Like the stinger of a wasp. It could sting again and again and again.

But was it venomous?

In his opinion, it was. Every critter he had ever run across with a stinger had been venomous in one form or another. During his initial examination of Rick Sychek's right thigh, he'd looked for tell-tale signs of a venomous sting; redness around the wound, swelling, nausea, blurred vision, sweating, shortness of breath. The only symptoms present were the redness and swelling around the wound and those could have been caused by the wound itself-after all, nearly three inches of a sharp, protruding objected had been jabbed into Rick's thigh. But the other signs of a venomous sting-the nausea, dizziness, abdominal cramps, stiffness of the joints, corrosion of the flesh-never showed up. After his cursory examination of Rick, he had immobilized the leg and let him rest up in examination room number one while he turned his attention to Bobby. He waited for something to show up, but Rick had been fine.

Once Bobby was bandaged up, he asked Barbara to draw a blood sample from Rick. He would examine a sample in his lab at the office and send a smidgen of the blood to Bangor General for further a.n.a.lysis. After he sutured Bobby's fingers, he'd given Rick's blood sample a look under a microscope. In short, a healthy sample, with no trace of a foreign substance.

He'd mentioned this to Rick on the ride to the pier. He'd brought up the dry sting theory and Rick agreed. If the creatures were poisonous in some way, he was d.a.m.ned lucky. No telling what they would be up against if it had injected its venom.

Glen stood for a moment, letting these thoughts run past him. If he could only get these samples to somebody in Bangor, they might- Something rose in Glen's mind, eclipsing all thought. He turned and made a mad dash up the stairs to his private living quarters, all thoughts to the specimens downstairs in the metal trays forgotten. He ran to his study and began searching for a book, all the while his mind racing, putting together pieces of a long forgotten puzzle.

He remembered reading something about a fisherman pulling up a giant lobster like the one Rick had come across back in the 1930s. The story had made the local paper, as well as a book on local superst.i.tions. The fisherman had been casting for trout when he and the men he was with hauled a net to the s.h.i.+p with a giant lobster trapped in the mesh. The captain of the s.h.i.+p stated it had been the most gigantic lobster he'd ever seen-well over three feet long-but also unlike anything he had ever come across. It wasn't really a lobster-he didn't know what it was. His men had been dumbfounded and watched in shock as the thing clipped through the st.u.r.dy mesh and splashed into sea. They'd tried casting for the creature again, but it failed to turn up in their nets.

There hadn't been a sign of anything remotely resembling it since then.

Until now.

Glen found the volume on local folklore he was looking for and turned to the story. He scanned it quickly, confirming the events. Late fall, 1935. Ten miles off the coast of Phillipsport.

And then there was another story- He flipped through the book, excitement spurring him on.

He found it in back of the book. An artist's sketch of the creature that had attacked Bobby, Janice, and Rick.

Homarus Tyrannous had been a prehistoric crustacean that lived in the Northern Atlantic Ocean in the latter part of the Paleozoic period, but there was evidence that they survived till at least the middle of the Mesozoic Period. Not much was known about them save for the few fossilized remains that were found embedded in stone and ice in Greenland in the early 1920s when they were discovered. From what scientists had been able to surmise, they bore a strong likeness to modern day crabs and lobsters, and were most likely the linkage between those species' primitive beginnings.

They'd been extinct for over two hundred million years.

This was what sent Glen's heart racing, what sent him racing toward the shelf in search for another volume as another thought exploded in his mind. Sent his hands shaking as he found the book, a slim chapbook published by a local tourist curator shop, and began thumbing through it.

It told the story of the Lost Village...

He'd happened across this little doodad in a tourist shop on the outskirts of town. Amid trinkets of hand-carved figures carved by the local Indians, arrowheads, taxidermied animals, jewelry, postcards and T-s.h.i.+rts bearing the Phillipsport banner, travel brochures and local history books, Glen Jorgensen had found this booklet.

It was written by Paul Hackett, a member of the local Micmac Tribe. Hackett held a Ph.D. in American Literature and Urban Folklore from the University of Maine at Orono and was well versed in the stories handed down to him from his family elders. He was also the owner of the curio shop Glen had bought the booklet from. Glen remembered being interested enough in the booklet to inquire as to where Dr. Hackett was so he might speak to him, but the author was out of town on business. Perhaps if Dr. Jorgensen stopped in again another time? Glen had paid for the booklet anyway, making a mental note to stop in and speak to Paul Hackett himself at some point, but he never got around to it.

Now he flipped through the little booklet, scanning it rapidly.

In 1605, late in the month of October, the entire village of an early English settlement vanished without a trace. The settlers had landed in the area now known as Phillipsport that summer and settled in the area, befriending the Micmac Tribe. While they settled, the s.h.i.+p that had brought them set sail for England for supplies and more of their brethren.

When the s.h.i.+p arrived the following spring they found the village deserted and in ruins. Weather hadn't been the cause of the destruction; the village had been torn apart by something malicious. There hadn't been a trace of the settlers anywhere. Only a few sc.r.a.ps of clothing and the ramshackled structures of their modest settlement remained.

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