Crustaceans Read online

  Newman hung up.

  Porter looked up from the phone to see the crab looking straight at him. It had developed a large pair of round staring eyes. It watched him, unblinking.

  “Do you like?” Porter said in a high-pitched imitation of Sarah.

  The crab banged hard on the glass. There was a loud crack and a spider web of fine lines appeared.

  Little fucker will be far too strong soon.

  But then the zoo could deal with it.

  And I’ll have the loot.

  He took a long swig from the rum bottle.

  “Okay doll,” he shouted. “The coast is clear.”

  He heard more splashing outside. He headed for the door.

  “Come on in Sarah,” he shouted.

  There was a louder splash, and a clack as loud as a gunshot.

  Behind him, in the tank, the crab went wild, rapping ever harder against the glass. The cracks spread, but the glass held.

  For now.

  Sarah screamed, a high wail that chilled Porter all the way through despite the heat. He ran out onto the deck, and got there just in time to see a huge white claw grab the girl around the waist.

  She looked straight at him and screamed.

  “Do something!”

  Porter couldn’t get his legs to move. He stood, gaping in awe. The claw was near as long as Sarah herself. It had raised a wound around her waist that was already bleeding heavily. He could see a portion of the back of the crab. From what he could gauge it was more than six feet across.

  “Help me Joe,” Sarah screamed. “Help me.”

  A second claw raised high over her head and came down fast.

  Snick.

  Her head came cleanly off. Red froth bubbled as the torso aspirated water. The crab lifted the body above its head while the other claw clacked eagerly.

  Snickety-snick.

  Sarah’s arm and half her rib cage fell into the bay. Most of her internal organs slithered behind with a soft splash that Porter was afraid he would be hearing in his dreams for the rest of his life.

  A second snick and her legs fell, two separate splashes. The crab dropped the lump of meat that was all that remained of the stripper. It looked up. White eyes the size of saucers stared straight at Porter.

  His legs still refused to move, even as the crab started to come towards the dock.

  Time to get the fuck out of Dodge, Joe. Git moving.

  Finally his legs agreed. He was headed for the back yard and the safety of his truck when he remembered the crab.

  The thought of the zoo’s money overrode his fear. He went back inside and lifted the aquarium tank off its legs. It was too heavy to carry, and he had to drag and manhandle it across the floor to the rear door. He eyed the crack warily, but it held.

  For now.

  The young crab beat a tattoo against the glass.

  Clank, clank, clankety-clank.

  Loud clacking from the Bay responded in time as Joe half-fell out into his back yard, dragging the tank behind him.

  The clacking from the Bay on the other side of the cabin sounded like someone letting off a shotgun. He lifted the aquarium and heaved it into the back of his pickup, his heart leaping to his mouth as the tank tipped and almost spilled back to the ground. All the while the crab kept up the beat against the wall of the tank.

  Outside on the front deck the newcomer pulled itself out of the water. Timber split and cracked as it attacked the front door area. The whole cabin swayed and groaned as the noise rose to a cacophony. Porter jumped into the pickup and slammed the door behind him. The rear view mirror showed timber and roof joists being flung aside like matchsticks. A huge claw waved in the air above the shack then came down with a crash. The shack sagged in the middle like a broken-backed horse. But it held… for now.

  Porter had a bad moment when he thought the truck keys were still on the table in the kitchen. He had started to turn towards the door when he found them in his pocket. His hands shook, and he had to concentrate like a drunk finding a lock before he managed to turn them in the ignition.

  More wood broke in the shack, loud cracks like gunfire.

  The engine chugged but didn’t take.

  He tried again.

  Still nothing.

  “Come on you fucking piece of shit,” he shouted

  Behind him the huge crab smashed the back wall of the cabin onto kindling. The young crab rattled against the aquarium glass again, just as the pickup engine caught and Porter slammed his foot on the accelerator.

  The big crab snapped its claws together, matching the rhythm coming from the tank.

  Porter could still hear it as he drove away, even above the rattle of the old engine.

  Click, click, clickety-click.

  5

  Shona spent a large part of the next two weeks studying the stomach contents of the whale. They only confirmed what she, and her father, already feared.

  The stomach had been filled with partially digested fish, sea-urchins, large squid, a barrow-full of rock… and remnants of chitinous claws and shells. Shona hadn’t needed to look at the pieces long to know what she looked at.

  The crabs are back.

  Their pieces were scattered, not just in the whale’s stomach, but in the body cavity itself, and also in the lungs. The whale also seemed to be short of most of its blubber, only empty space where the fat layers should be. And there were bits of crab everywhere.

  Judging by the size of some of the fragments she found, they were big.

  Big as horses.

  She showed Stark a white claw nearly four feet long.

  “These things can produce thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch,” she said. “Something this big would be capable of taking a modern car apart in seconds.”

  Stark whistled.

  “Imagine what it would do to a body,” he said.

  Shona felt the chill in her spine again.

  “I don’t have to imagine. We’ve both seen the video evidence. I don’t think there’s any doubt what did the killings.”

  Stark fell quiet.

  “It’s what we feared. What are we looking at here? Are there more of them?”

  Shona shrugged.

  “At the moment there’s no way of telling. But things that large will have left traces,” she told Stack. “More traces than we have seen so far.”

  That had been several days ago. Stack had a squad of researchers working on reports of missing people or strange accidents at sea.

  Shona was soon proved right. A pattern was starting to form. From the start some two months ago off Cuba they had been moving steadily northward and eastwards, coming up the coast in a slow but steady manner. They made infrequent forays ashore, as if checking, or searching, then went back to traveling.

  Sometimes livestock had got in the way. Sometimes people.

  Two more dead whales were found just a few miles further south, both burst open in the same way.

  It was Shona’s father who had made the leap of intuition.

  They’re hitching a ride. Like getting on a bus.

  It was hard to imagine, and for Shona with her academic background, almost impossible to believe. It was attributing too much intelligence to something that just didn’t have the nervous system to produce rational thought. She was trying to rationalise the behaviour as a newly learned instinct but that was just too much of a stretch.

  And that’s before I even think about how they survive inside a whale for weeks at a time!

  But there was the evidence to consider… the pieces of claw and carapace scattered though the whale’s body cavity. The scientist in her couldn’t deny that.

  I just can’t explain it. Not yet.

  As she knew he would, her father had several theories, most of which she found outlandish in the extreme.

  “They’re checking out breeding grounds,” he said. That might well be the case, but he also thought there might be thousands of them, an army of sorts.

  She refused
to consider that idea. It was just too outlandish, too far from her view of how the world worked.

  It doesn’t stop Dad theorising though.

  She’d spent several hours on the web-cam now, talking to him at his desk over in Scotland. It was the most they’d talked in ten years or more. Shona tried to keep it professional, but it was difficult. They had always knocked heads, as far back as Shona could remember. He was a hard man to love.

  And a hard man to hate.

  “Don’t underestimate them,” he said. “Remember the damage they’ve done in the past.”

  As if you’d ever let me forget.

  The crabs had started showing up as far back as the ‘70s. Back then there had only been a few encounters with people. When one had first been caught there was a minor uproar in the press, but the papers soon went back to reporting on the doings of celebrities, and people forgot about the giant crabs, mutants born out of man’s own love for chemicals and pharmaceuticals, beasts grown huge on the effluent purged from factories and water supplies all over the world.

  Her father had retired several years ago, but he had been a Professor of Marine Biology at St. Andrews University for many years, and he had worked with the British authorities in the study of the crabs. Secretly. He’d seen at first hand the carnage and mayhem an infestation could cause when they attacked a small fishing community on the west coast of Scotland. Twenty years had since passed. It was covered up as best could be done, and most of the general public never even knew there was a possible problem.

  And who was going to listen to the rantings of somewhat maverick scientist predicting a return of rampaging crustaceans? But the experience had changed him, turned him into the sort of wild-eyed opinionated madman you’d change seats to avoid on the subway. His retirement hadn’t been voluntary, and he’d taken it hard. In recent years he’d become taciturn and withdrawn, but this latest possibility of an outbreak had him re-energised. The old fervour was back, and if Shona wasn’t careful she’d be burnt by the intensity of it.

  Since her first call, two weeks ago, Dad had got increasingly more animated, and it was all she could do to stop him jumping on a plane.

  “You’re retired, Dad,” she said. “Leave this to younger heads.”

  “You never retire from something like this,” he said. And for the first time in her life she realised he was getting old. More than that, he was starting to look his age, and tired with it.

  “You’re better off over there,” she said softly. “Besides. I’m with the Yanks. They’ve got enough weaponry to take anything down.”

  “Weaponry is no use without the skill to wield it.” Dad said. “I’ve seen that myself.”

  Shona didn’t doubt the skill of Stark’s team. But they were getting twitchy at the lack of something to shoot at. They hadn’t yet managed to find a single live specimen. She had found several piles of soft grey scat on the beach that told her that at least one of the attackers was bigger than any crab she had ever seen.

  Much bigger.

  They’d found several of the very large claws inside the dead whale, each nearly four feet long and eighteen inches wide. Shona had run extensive tests on them. They didn’t tell her much that she didn’t know already.

  It’s a crab claw. A bloody huge crab claw.

  There was one other thing, something she had not even told her father yet. She’d only found it this morning and still didn’t quite believe it. She sent the lab test back and had it done again. And again it came back with the same result.

  Somehow evolution had given these crabs a new advantage in their anatomy.

  Their shells are reinforced.

  Shona tested the strength of a piece.

  She hit it with a hammer. The tool bounced off, jerked out of her hand and almost took out a ten-thousand dollar microscope. It did smash into a row of test tubes, scattering glass everywhere.

  Sergeant Matthews ran inside at the crash.

  “Just the man,” Shona said. She showed him the piece of shell. “I’m destruction testing this.”

  Matthews looked at the broken glass.

  “Destruction seems the appropriate word. Let’s see how it handles a real test.”

  He took out his pistol and fired at the shell from close range. The bullet left only a small gouge in the surface as it bounced off and tore a small hole in the roof of the tent.

  Matthews bent over the shell.

  “It’s part of one of the crabs?”

  Shona nodded.

  He banged on the shell with the butt of the pistol. He didn’t even make a dent.

  “We’re going to need bigger guns,” the Sergeant muttered.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Shona said. “These things are going to be tougher to put down than I imagined.”

  Matthews turned the piece of shell over in his hand.

  “If you really are destruction testing it, I’ve got a grenade somewhere?”

  Shona nearly laughed.

  “I think it has proved its point Sergeant, but thanks for the offer.”

  The Sergeant showed no sign of leaving.

  “These crabs,” he said. “How big do they get?”

  She remembered some of Dad’s stories.

  “As big as a horse. Some even bigger.”

  The man went white.

  “I’ve never liked crabs. All that sideways scuttling ain’t natural. They give me the creeps. They’re just too different.”

  Shona laughed.

  “I’m the opposite. And for the same reason. I find them fascinating because of their differences.”

  Matthews wasn’t convinced.

  He holstered his pistol.

  “Fascinating ain’t a word I’d use for them. Scary is more like it.”

  Shona took the shell from him as he left. She was wondering just how big an advantage such armoury would give the beasts in the wild

  Scary indeed. I’m starting to come round to the Sergeant’s way of thinking.

  She spent the next few hours trying to decipher the shell’s secrets. She finally managed to scrape a piece off with the hammer and a chisel. Under high magnification it looked almost crystalline, a tightly woven network of chitin that reminded her of the extra-strong fibreglass used in ocean going hulls.

  She kept going back and looking at it, just to make sure her eyes hadn’t deceived her. She had trouble believing it. It represented a mutation that had leapt up from nowhere in a creature that was already a mutation.

  And if that can happen, then anything can happen. All bets are off.

  She’d just sat up from the microscope when Stark walked in. She smiled and he smiled back at her.

  He should do that more often. It suits him.

  “Any news?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Maybe we’ve got lucky. Maybe they’ve gone back to wherever they came from?” he said.

  Shona shook her head.

  “With these beasts, we can’t make any assumptions. Dad thinks they’re on a hunt.”

  “For what?”

  She shrugged.

  “He says breeding ground. But I doubt we’ll ever know. Unless they find it.”

  Stark sat beside her. She’d noticed over the past few days that he was popping in a lot, and staying longer each time.

  “We’ve got the FEMA people on high alert all up the seaboard,” he said. “Wherever they come ashore, we’ll be ready.”

  Shona stayed quiet, remembering stories from her youth, of carnage and mayhem in seaside towns around the British coasts. It would do no good to tell Stark of her fears. He had the confidence that came with years of serving in the strongest military power on the planet. Thoughts of defeat would never even enter his head.

  “So what next?” he asked her. “What else can we do?”

  “Wait,” she said. “And hope that, when it comes, we really are ready for it.”

  6

  “What so you think of that sucker?” Porter said.

  “Well
, it certainly looks big enough,” Newman replied.

  The crab sat in the tank in the back of Porter’s truck and stared balefully at them. It looked even angrier than ever. It waved a claw as if it was berating Porter for having brought it to this place.

  He was glad to have finally got to the zoo. Even though he’d thrown a tarpaulin over the tank his old battered truck had drawn curious glances all the way through the city. Once, when he was stuck at a set of lights, the beast decided it was time to start banging again. The loud clanging drew the attention of a policeman but luckily for Porter the lights changed and he was able to pull away.

  Now he was parked up in the zoo. He’d had a near fight with security before he finally convinced them he was kosher. And now he was finding out what he’d suspected on the phone. Newman was like oil to his water. He had the stuffy, tight air of a man with a corncob up his ass, and he spoke like a prissy schoolteacher. Porter felt like Newman expected him to scrape and bow.

  Ain’t never been one for much of that.

  Newman had come running quick enough when told of the crab though.

  I guess I caught his interest.

  Porter could almost feel the money in his pocket already.

  I got him on the hook. Time to reel him in.

  “What have you been feeding it?” Newman said after studying the crab from all angles.

  “Other crabs mostly. That, wieners and baloney.”

  “You give it junk food?”