Sandy started to turn away, meaning to check the hutch for the rope, and just as he did there came another thump. It was strong and flat and unemphatic. The trunk-lid shivered, dimpled up in the middle for a moment, then went back down. It looked to Sandy as if the Roadmaster actually rocked a little bit on its springs.
‘There! You see?’ George said. He started to add something else, and that was when the Buick’s trunk came unlatched and the lid sprang up on its hinges and the fish fell out.
Of course, it was a fish no more than the bat-thing was a bat, but they both knew at once it was nothing made to live on land; it had not one gill on the side they could see but four of them in a line, parallel slashes in its skin, which was the color of dark tarnished silver. It had a ragged and membranous tail. It unfolded out of the trunk with a last convulsive, dying shiver. Its bottom half curved and flexed, and Sandy could see how it might have made that thumping sound. Yes, that was clear enough, but how a thing of such size could ever have fit into the closed trunk of the Buick in the first place was beyond both of them. What hit the concrete floor of Shed B with a flat wet slap was the size of a sofa.
George and Sandy clutched each other like children and screamed. For a moment they were children, with every adult thought driven out of their heads. Somewhere inside the barracks, Mister Dillon began to bark.
It lay there on the floor, no more a fish than a wolf is a housepet, although it may look quite a bit like a dog. And in any case, this fish was only a fish up to the purple slashes of its gills. Where a fish’s head would have been — something that at least had the steadying sanity of eyes and a mouth — there was a knotted, naked mass of pink things, too thin and stiff to be tentacles, too thick to be hair. Each was tipped with a black node and Sandy’s first coherent thought was A shrimp, the top half of it’s some kind of shrimp and those black things are its eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ someone bawled. ‘What is it?’
Sandy turned and saw Herb Avery on the back step. His eyes were wild and he had his Ruger in his hand. Sandy opened his mouth and at first nothing came out but a phlegmy little wheeze. Beside him, George hadn’t even turned; he was still looking through the window, mouth hanging slack in an idiot’s gape.
Sandy took a deep breath and tried again. What was meant for a shout emerged as a faint punched-in-the-belly wheeze, but at least it was something. ‘Everything’s okay, Herb — five-by-five. Go back inside.’
‘Then why did you — ‘
‘Go inside!’ There, that’s a little better, Sandy thought. ‘Go on, now, Herb. And holster that piece.’
Herb looked down at the gun as if unaware until then that he had drawn it. He put it back in his holster, looked at Sandy as if to ask was he sure. Sandy made little flapping gestures with his hands and thought, Granny Dearborn says go back inside, dad-rattit!
Herb went, yelling for Mister D to shut up that foolish barking as he did.
Sandy turned back to George, who had gone white. ‘It was breathing, Sandy — or trying to.
The gills were moving and the side was going up and down. Now it’s stopped.’ His eyes were huge, like the eyes of a child who has been in a car accident. ‘I think it’s dead.’ His lips were quivering. ‘Man, I hope it’s dead.’
Sandy looked in. At first he was sure George was wrong: the thing was still alive. Still breathing, or trying to breathe. Then he realized what he was seeing and told George to get the videocam out of the hutch.
‘What about the r — ‘
‘We won’t need the rope, because we’re not going in there — not yet, we’re not — but get the camera. Fast as you can.’
George went around the side of the garage, not moving very well. Shock had made him gawky. Sandy looked back into the shed, cupping his eyes to the sides of his face to cut the red sunset glare. There was motion in the shed, all right, but not life’s motion. It was mist rising from the thing’s silver side and also from the purple slashes of its gills. The bat-thing hadn’t decomposed, but the leaves had, and quickly. This thing was staring to rot like the leaves, and Sandy had the feeling that once the process really got going, it would go fast.
Even standing outside, with the closed door between him and it, he could smell it. An acrid, watery reek of mixed cabbage and cucumber and salt, the smell of a broth you might feed to someone if you wanted to make them sicker instead of well.
More mist was rising from its side; it dribbled up from the nest of tangled pink ropes that seemed to serve as its head, as well. Sandy thought he could hear a faint hissing noise, but knew he could just as well be imagining it. Then a black slit appeared in the grayish-silver scales, running north from the tattered nylon of its tail to the rearmost gill. Black fluid, probably the same stuff Huddie and Arky had found around the bat-thing’s corpse, began to trickle out — listlessly at first, then with a little more spirit. Sandy could see an ominous bulge developing behind the split in the skin. It was no hallucination, and neither was the hissing sound. The fish was doing something more radical than decomposing; it was giving in. Yielding to the change in pressure or perhaps the change in everything, its whole environment. He thought of something he’d read once (or maybe seen in a National Geographic TV special), about how when some deep-sea creatures were brought up from their dwelling places, they simply exploded.
‘George!’ Bawling at the top of his lungs. ‘Hurry the hell up!’
George flew back around the corner of the shed, holding the tripod way up high, where the aluminum legs came together. The lens of the videocam glared above his fist, looking like a drunk’s eyeball in the day’s declining red light.
‘I couldn’t get it off the tripod,’ he panted. ‘There’s some kind of latch or lock and if I’d had time to figure it out — or maybe I was trying to turn the Christly thing backward — ‘
‘Never mind.’ Sandy snatched the videocam from him. There was no problem with the tripod, anyway; the legs had been adjusted to the height of the windows in the shed’s two roll-up doors for years. The problem came when Sandy pushed the ON button and looked through the viewfinder. Instead of a picture, there were just red letters reading LO BAT.
‘Judas-fucking-Iscariot on a chariot-driven crutch! Go back, George. Look on the shelf by the box of blank tapes, there’s another battery there. Get it.’
‘But I want to see — ‘
‘I don’t care! Go on!’
He went, running hard. His hat had gone askew on his head, giving him a weirdly jaunty look. Sandy pushed the RECORD button on the side of the camera’s housing, not knowing what he’d get but hoping for something. When he looked into the viewfinder again, however, even the letters reading LO BAT were fading.
Curt’s going to kill me, he thought.
He looked back through the shed window just in time to catch the nightmare. The thing ruptured all the way up its side, spilling out that black ichor not in trickles but in a flood. It spread across the floor like backflow from a clogged drain. Following it came a noisome spew of guts, flabby bags of yellowish-red jelly. Most of them split and began to steam as soon as the air hit them.
Sandy turned, the back of his hand pressed hard against his mouth until he was sure he wasn’t going to vomit, and then he yelled: ‘Herb! If you still want a look, now’s your chance!
Quick as you can!’
Why getting Herb Avery on-scene should have been the first thing he thought of, Sandy could not later say. At the time, however, it seemed perfectly reasonable. If he had called his dead mother’s name, he would have been equally unsurprised. Sometimes one’s mind simply passes beyond one’s rational and logical control. Right then he wanted Herb. Dispatch is never to be left unattended, it’s a rule anyone in rural law enforcement knows, the Fabled Automatic. But rules were made to be broken, and Herb would never see anything like this again in his life, none of them would, and if Sandy couldn’t have videotape, he would at least have a witness. Two, if George got back in time.