Week 29-1: Gobsmacked
As I remember it, it began as just another normal day. Sheila and I were setting out the latest crab haul in the display case. The truck had come in from the docks a little late that morning. We were desperately rushing about, trying to get product ready for the usual rush of tourists at 9am open.
There wasn't much to be said. It wasn't just because of the hurried context either. When you've been married as long as we have, when you've already worked together basically every day of your adult life, there isn't a lot you haven't already said to each other. Besides, the smell of raw seafood doesn't exactly facilitate pleasant conversation.
I think it was around 8:30 when I felt an earth-shaking impact. Then there was another.... and another. Shortly after that, I could swear I heard screaming in the distance.
Sheila wasn't with me up front; I didn't know if she'd noticed anything amiss. I unlocked the front door of the shop and went out onto the sidewalk to see what was going on.
At first I couldn't see anything. I turned around to face the beach. With no warning, the first explosion hit. It was the big fishing-gear rental shed on the beachfront, just a thousand feet or so up the road. The whole thing went up in a fireball; my vision almost immediately went black. I felt myself swept to the ground with the aftershock. The blistering wind racing past me made me feel like I might just combust myself.
Took a moment for my sight and hearing to partially return, although I could hear practically nothing but ringing in my ears.
I picked myself up fast as I could and looked back toward the site of the explosion. I couldn't really see much of it any more. The line of sight was being blocked by what looked like the Loch Ness Monster, standing right in front of the ongoing fire.
...Well, I say it looked like Nellie, but that's just a starting point of reference. This thing was way bigger, way more terrifying than anything I'd ever envisioned re: sea monsters as a child.
It had the classic dinosaur-dragon sort of profile, sure. But it wasn't green; it was pitch black, with a repulsive, caked-on, swirling sheen that made it look like it had been entirely dipped in fresh oil. It had spinal fins and a tail, but instead of the flippers I'd always envisioned, it stood on what looked like comically (and greatly) enlarged elephant legs.
It looked at least five hundred feet tall and maybe a half-mile long, with the back half of its body still hanging back over the coastline. The thing was so tall that even with its rear legs standing a few hundred feet back in the water, it was more or less completely standing above the water's surface.
Some dumb little part of me briefly compared what I was seeing to Oral Roberts' famous alleged sighting of a nine-hundred-foot Jesus in Tulsa, back in '77. I chuckled. Man, I have no idea where this stuff comes from sometimes.
I looked back the other direction down the road. Everybody was coming out of their storefronts and B&Bs, staring open-mouthed at the same insanity I had just been trying to comprehend. I turned back around again... and saw it moving toward all of us.
You would think something that big would be slow-moving. This was not the case. It would leapfrog forward with the blinding, relative speed of a roach on the run, crushing all the buildings in its path in the blink of an eye. Then it would stop, smash its long neck into the side of another building in advance of its legs, and that building would immediately crumble.
I finally saw its face-- every bit the cliched Hollywood visage of pure evil, eyes burning red with primal anger, an apparent smile comprised of dozens of razor-sharp pointed teeth, each individual tooth the size of a 4Runner.
I guess at that point, I was pretty sure it was a dream. No creature like this surely existed outside of bad B-flicks... and if it did, it sure wouldn't look so much like the invariably-titular creatures in bad B-flicks... of which I'd personally seen far too many.
Yet I also knew that, dream or reality, whatever-it-was would be upon me in moments. There probably wasn't even time to start the Kawasaki parked out front. Damn bike was always so cold-blooded. I surely didn't have time for the usual choke-babying startup routine.
Sheila came running out after me. "What's going on, Don?" She hadn't seen the thing yet.
"Sheila, we need to run. Now."
"Why, what's..." I immediately grabbed her as hard as I could by the arm and began running away from the beachfront, dragging her with me until I felt her legs finally begin to comply. Why is it that women can't ever seem to just do what you tell them to do in a life-threatening situation? Oh, no, they always have to ask twenty goddamned questions first. If I'd waited to answer them, Sheila would have surely been an even slower starter than that damn bike.
As we began running down the street toward the closest intersection, she turned around and finally saw the thing. She screamed. I pulled harder. I ran faster. I hadn't run for any reason in years. It hurt.
I saw everyone in front of us start to run as the monster continued moving directly toward downtown. I banked a hard left at the intersection, hoping we would somehow be able to get out of its path. Everyone else seemed to have the same idea. Thankfully, there weren't enough of us out there yet to create a pedestrian bottleneck.
I heard it still behind us. I somehow knew it wanted us. I somehow knew it would follow us. And I definitely knew it was faster than we were.
I saw it nearly face-to-face as its hideous mouth landed right in front of me, scooping up three fellow would-be escapees in a single smooth motion. As clean a bite out of the crowd as it had been, their blood still rained all over my shirt and glasses as the thing craned its neck back skyward to swallow.
I didn't know what else to do. I just kept running with Sheila's arm in my grip. There was nowhere to hide; it would surely either crush us to death inside a trampled building, or it would eat us. I zigzagged over to the next cross street, and everyone again seemed to have the same idea.
I felt a quick, sharp pain in my arm. I looked back and saw that most of my arm, and all of Sheila, were both missing. I looked up and saw her ankles, identified only by her characteristically ridiculous shoes, hanging out of the creature's mouth.
Every thought in the world impassively raced through my head. I knew she was dead, or now dying, and there was nothing I could do. I hoped she had died quickly. I hoped that she had already died, before she hit whatever this thing had for a digestive tract.
I knew that escape would probably not happen for me at this point, either. And even if I escaped, what was the point? I'd lost a wife, a business partner, an arm-- make that three arms. What would be the point in going on after this?
I felt my pace slow slightly as I debated whether to trust my existential logic or my raw survival instinct. It likely wouldn't have mattered either way, because I was going to end up in the jaws of this thing regardless.
And, mere moments later, I did. I felt my body rocket skyward as it was simultaneously cut in half. I felt sudden crushing, searing pain at every point on my body that remained connected to my nervous system... then, nothing but blackness.
I'd always heard that old wives' tale... the one where if you actually die in a dream, then you're dead for real. I'd had lots of really scary dreams in my lifetime, but none where I'd ever actually died. So, rational as I might normally be, I thought maybe there was something to it... or at least, that our subconscious minds just couldn't truly process the concept of death any better than our conscious minds can.
Add to it that I'd never had a dream this real in all my life. Everything was in exactly the right place as it was in reality. Nobody was "someone but really someone else," you know how that usually goes. I'd seen the faces of people I knew running down that street, people I worked next to every day in our sleepy little beachfront tourist trap. Not one of them was some chick I'd banged once in high school and hadn't thought of in years, or something.
Real people, real places... real death. You can understand why I was freaked out when I looked up and saw that it was still 8:32 and I still had my hand stuffed into the display freezer, pushing crab into it just as I had been. Was it a daydream? I'd never had one anything like that before either.
I looked back at Sheila, through the plastic glass in the front-counter doors, still working at the table in the back. She was looking at me. She looked just as weirded out as I was. Or maybe I was just imagining that too.
Nothing else for it. I shook it off, went on working. We went on not talking. The tourists were coming in thirty minutes, and I sure hadn't chosen this particular day to go insane.