Cast back on the faith of his youth, pleading with the Holy Virgin, Mother of God, to save him, Tommy pumped another round into the breech, fired, worked the pump action again, and fired a third round, both from a distance of only three feet.
The hands on the railing were not human any more. They had metamorphosed into chitinous pincers with serrated edges and were locked so fiercely that the stainless-steel tubing actually appeared to be bending in the creature’s grip.
Tommy pumped, fired, pumped, squeezed the trigger, pumped, squeezed the trigger, and then realized that he was dry firing. The magazine of the Mossberg was empty.
Shrieking again, the beast hauled itself higher on the pulpit railing as the bow of the reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.
Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.
The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn’t drop the weapon when he landed.
Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it wasn’t a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.
Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the .44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his vertebrae. At such close quarters, he didn’t have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.
The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gong-like clang, and the beast plunged backward into the harbour.
Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.
He didn’t believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.
The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbour, but Del wasn’t obeying it.
Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disappeared was well behind them and receding rapidly.
The crisis wasn’t over. The threat wasn’t gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn’t safe until dawn.
If then.
He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.
The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.
Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side pass way and hurriedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.
The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sun-bathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.