"The Beast of Trash Island" is a horror/suspense novella by Steve Metcalf. It gets much, much worse.
Chapter Six, Danger Close
NO ONE WAS IN POSITION to hear the insistent warning klaxons. Between the research room command center and the bridge, half a dozen systems were sounding off to alert anyone within earshot. Unfortunately, no one was aware of the close danger until the yacht was rammed suddenly on the starboard side.
As if a giant had teed up the Aqua Tom and kicked it with full force, the boat shuddered and slid sideways through the water. From above, it would have looked like a child’s toy in a bathtub. After forty yards, the yacht slid to a halt and rocked violently from side to side.
Whether from the initial impact or the forces acting on the boat from an unnatural direction, two of the four electric pod drives—the two on the port side—were crushed inward.
As the yacht stopped rocking, people started picking themselves up from the deck. Those on board were sprawled across every surface. Some were unconscious, some were struggling with broken arms and dislocated shoulders.
Micah stood up and walked to the end of the hallway. He stepped over debris—books, food, a videogame controller—and knelt next to a friend of his from last quarter’s creative writing class.
“Jerry. Hey, man,” Micah said. “You okay, buddy?”
Micah reached down and shook the young man by the shoulder. There was no response.
“Hey, dude, up and at ‘em.”
It was only after Micah turned Jerry over that he could see the man was dead. His neck was bent at a horrible angle. Jerry’s mouth was open, tongue hanging out and eyes were bulging out of their sockets.
“Jesus,” Micah said and scrambled to his feet.
At that moment, a woman staggered out of a room on the right side of the hallway. She was holding her forehead...blood streaming over her fingers, across her face and down the front of her blouse. It took precious moments for the scene to register, but as soon as she forced her way through the concussive fog, she screamed. She ran the five steps that separated her from her date and fell to the floor next to him.
“Jerry,” she yelled.
“I’m sorry,” Micah said. The horror of this adventure was now grasping at him like cold, gray claws. This was supposed to be fun seemed to echo through his mind.
James saw the dark cloud that was creeping across Micah’s face. He put his hand on Micah’s shoulder.
“We should get back to the control room and see if the equipment picked anything up.”
Micah nodded, turned and walked away.
Jerry’s girlfriend’s wails melted off into the distance.
* *
Had the four taken a short detour, they would have noticed that Edmund’s room was now empty. The bodies and the bloodstain were completely gone.
* *
Moving along the outer walkway of the yacht, they noticed that they were now more than 100 feet into the mass of floating garbage that they had come to explore. The North Pacific trash vortex was attempting to swallow them whole.
“What the fu—?” James said, and then stopped.
An enormous black tentacle exploded up out of the water to his left. Twenty feet off the port gunwale, the huge tentacle was three feet in diameter at the water level and tapered off to a point 15 feet above the highest point of the Aqua Tom.
Water and trash were cascading down the length of the tentacle, and the ocean around the base was bubbling in a ten-foot circle.
“Holy fuckin’ shit,” Ai said as she slammed her back against the wall, facing the water. She was crying, arms outstretched, fingers splayed. She started murmuring in Japanese, staring unblinking at the oil-black tentacle. From her position, she couldn’t see the spiked tip of the appendage as it started to flail around well above the bridge deck of the boat.
She also didn’t see the smaller tentacle slide up over the deck rail. This tentacle, also black, tapered down, but then flared out to have a flat bunch of muscle at the end. It looked like a shovel, shaped like a diamond...and was about three feet across at its widest point. With a shocking quickness, the broad, flat end of the tentacle slid along the floor and wedged between Ai and the wall like an organic spatula.
Ai’s scream was cut short as the upper edge of the flat end of the tentacle wrapped itself around her body—including the lower half of her face. With incredible speed, the broad, flat tentacle pulled her away from the wall and squeezed. Ai panicked as the air was squeezed out of her lungs. Her hands hung out the bottom of the meat burrito and she tried to push and pull the tentacle away from her body. In a fit of pure hysteria, she began running in place, but the tentacle held her tight.
For their parts, James and Micah leapt into action.
Micah began hammering at the tentacle with his fists. It was like hitting a wet truck tire; there was almost no give.
James yanked a fire extinguisher off the wall and started pounding on the spot of the tentacle where the tapered end flared out to the flat portion. The only result from both attacks, however, seemed to be increased grip strength around Ai’s body.
The young student let out another muffled scream with what must have been the last of the air in her lungs. Her legs kicked out violently and her fingers splayed apart. With a final squeeze, the tentacle pulled her away from the wall, out over the ocean, and then slammed her back against the yacht. Had she not suffocated, she would have died from a broken neck.
The tentacle unwound itself and let Ai’s lifeless body fall to the deck floor. It seemed to hover over her corpse for a moment. Blood was pouring from every orifice. Her mouth was a gory mess. The grip of the tentacle had crushed her jaw. Pieces of shattered teeth flowed out of her mouth, carried by a river of blood. Her eyes were open, staring up at the three people who stood over her body in stunned silence. In a final move of anger, the tentacle crashed down on her prone body, smashing it into the engineered floor of the Aqua Tom’s outer gangway.
Shocked into action by this horrifying scene, James, Micah and Katya ran to the nearest door and threw themselves into the room.
* *
Alma, Jerry’s girlfriend, stood up and covered her mouth. She was sobbing and didn’t know what else to do. Instinctively, she grabbed her phone to at least record the event.
“I don’t know what to do,” Alma said as she recorded her own face. “Oh, Jerry.” Her body wracked with sobs again as she turned the camera to film Jerry’s dead body as it lay motionless on the floor. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit. He’s dead. Oh shit, he’s dead.”
Various screams and thumps were filtering in from around the boat. She thought she might have heard Micah and James yelling in the distance. Soon after, a violent thump shook the side of the yacht.
“Holy fuck,” Alma said. “Oh shit. What is that?”
She looked up, and back and forth to both ends of the hallway. At one end was the door to the galley and, past that, the buffet saloon. The opposite end was open, and led out to the stern deck. The “party deck.”
Alma looked back down at the body and screamed. This time, however, the body had started moving. It was sliding along the floor as if being pulled by invisible strings. Still recording, oblivious to the chaos that was going on around her, Alma followed the body as it slowly slid out of the end of the hallway to the deck.
The black sphere.
Stoic in the midst of chaos, the sphere rested, unmoving, on the rear deck of the Aqua Tom. There were two giant tentacles waving high above the boat and several smaller tentacles sliding along the various decks. The sphere, however, seemed to be encased in a bubble of calm.
Jerry’s body never wavered and never increased speed. He slid out of the hallway, onto the deck, and toward the sphere with a sort of mechanical precision. Alma continued to film, for no other reason than she had no idea what else to do. Two students whom she recognized from the earlier stages of the trip ran past her screaming—a man and a woman—both jumping over Jerry’s body without a backward glance. They disappeared around the corner, screams fading into the distance. Alma had watched them go without taking the camera’s viewfinder off her boyfriend’s body. When she turned back to Jerry, however, she screamed anew.
“What the fuck,” she called out, voice hoarse from all of the screaming of the last five minutes.
* *
When the yacht was knocked sideways for almost half the length of a football field, both Captain Scott and Mr. Andrews turned and ran for the bridge. Even as the twin tentacles—one on each side of the boat—exploded out of Trash Island, the men reached the bridge and secured both doors of the room.
“Start the power plant,” the captain said. “I’ll send the distress signal.”
“Aye, Sir,” Mr. Andrews said.
The two men went to different ends of the control panel. Mr. Andrews flipped a sequence of toggle switches and pressed a red button with the black lettering “IGNITION.” Unfortunately, nothing happened. The two engine pods that were crushed created a failure in the entire system.
Mr. Andrews looked at the digital readout and called over to his captain. “I’m getting a failure in pods three and four, Sir. It’s causing the system to crash.”
“Reboot,” replied the captain. “See if you can override three and four.”
“Rebooting,” said Mr. Andrews.
Captain Scott pulled the microphone close to his lips and held the broadcast button.
“This is Captain Alexander Scott of the yacht Aqua Tom.” He spoke clearly and urgently. “We are currently without propulsion and seem to be under attack from one or more sea creatures. I repeat. We are under attack and have lost propulsion. Coordinates to follow.” He pressed a button on the console that automatically broadcast the GPS coordinates. The newly recorded message would be bounced off of every emergency satellite within range every 20 minutes.
The captain replaced the microphone and stepped over to Mr. Andrews. The reboot had just finished and they both saw the flashing ERROR message on the LCD screen at the same time. Captain Scott turned away from the monitor and walked to the rear of the bridge.
Mr. Andrews shook his head. “No luck, Sir,” he said. “I might be able to get around the issue by manually switching the primary and secondary pressure valves. I might be able to confuse the system into thinking that pods one and two are actually pods one and three. Theoretically, that should clear the error.” He paused. “Sir?”
Mr. Andrews turned to see the captain opening a locker that was hidden in one of the bridge wall panels. Sliding the panel out of the way revealed a door with two locks. The captain opened them both to reveal the firearm storage. There were two handguns, two shotguns and a flare gun with six flares on a small bandolier. The two men emptied the locker.
“Let’s head downstairs,” said the captain.
* *
Alma stood with her feet spread to shoulder width on the rear deck of the Aqua Tom. She was fighting for stability as the yacht rocked back and forth in the frothing North Pacific Ocean. She could now, for the first time, actually see the two giant tentacles that seemed to be standing sentry above the boat as smaller tentacles wreaked havoc on all of the ship’s surfaces. She tried to take all of this in as her mind fought to process what was happening to the body of her recently deceased boyfriend.
It only took moments for Jerry’s lifeless body to slide along the party deck from the hallway to the black sphere itself. After a few agonizing seconds, he finally reached the sphere. His left foot, shoeless after the bizarre journey across the yacht, made contact with the sphere and the body stopped moving.
For only a second.
There was a strange popping sound that drew Alma a few steps closer. She was disgusted, but kept filming. Mentally, she was having trouble processing what her eyes were now seeing and it seemed to happen in horrifying slow motion.
With what could only be described as a sucking sound, Jerry’s foot began to be pulled into the sphere itself. It was as if the foot was pulled into the sphere through a hole the size of a quarter. Alma could hear the sound of bones crunching and splintering as the foot bent at a terrible angle and started to disappear into the beach ball-sized object. There was an inhuman tearing sound as flesh was ripped from his foot, pulled up around his calf like a sock, and then it was also pulled into the sphere.
Blood spilled out of the wound and slowly pooled around the sphere. Alma dry-heaved when Jerry’s knee-cap popped and the lower half of his leg fully disappeared into the sphere.
Her brain was splintering into multiple voices. One voice instructed her to remain detached and keep filming so she could show this to the police. One voice had not stopped screaming since Jerry’s lifeless corpse began to be pulled through the yacht on invisible strings. One voice, the oddly rational one, was trying to process all that it was seeing. There were two main questions. One, how can you pull a bowling ball, for example, through a drinking straw? And two, how can the sphere be absorbing all of this new mass without growing?
Alma shrugged without really realizing it.
It was true. The sphere had neither moved nor grown the whole time it had been sucking Jerry’s body through a tiny hole.
Crack.
Alma was torn out of her silent reverie by the sound of Jerry’s pelvis exploding. And now the ribcage was being consumed. The speed of the disappearance had been steadily increasing and now, the blood, organs and other internal goop had no place to escape. What little blood remained in Jerry’s body exploded out of his mouth and nose. His body shook with the force of the expulsion. Alma, for her part, kept crying and recording.
Now, the head.
As Jerry’s head was slowly pulled inside the stoic black sphere, Alma waited for his eyes to roll back and look at her, pleading with her to save him somehow. But it never happened. The head disappeared as the rest of the body did. Any of the organs that had escaped his body cavity were slowly pulled into the sphere and what little remained of the blood pooled around the base of the orb.
Alma slowly lowered her phone. Jerry was gone. There were tentacles all over the place. She was stuck in an island of floating plastic in the middle of the Pacific. Her tears were a mixture of fright, helplessness, hopelessness and anger. It was the anger that made her leap toward the sphere.
“What are you?” she screamed. “What did you do?”
She fell to her knees and dropped her phone. A student ran past and kicked it under one of the deck benches. She began to pound her fists on the orb out of frustration. The black sphere did not move even under the constant barrage. The enormous tentacle on the near side of the yacht froze in its undulation.
With the quickness of a lightning flash, the tentacle wrapped several coils around Alma and crushed her. She was able to utter a loud urk sound and that was all. In less than two seconds, Alma was crushed to death.
And the sphere began feeding again.
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