The Book of Cthulhu 2

“Once More, from the Top . . .”

A. Scott Glancy

“This is the fourth time,” the old man grumbled, shifting his gaze out the window to the sparsely planted grounds of the VA hospital. “How many more times do we have to go through this?”

“Just a couple more, Sergeant Hennessey,” said Levine, stooping to plug the power cord into the cracked and yellowed wall socket. “Your memory being what it is, we need to go through this as many times as possible. You added some details the second and third times through. Maybe you’ll remember something more this time.” As Levine busied himself with the camera, his partner, Henry Parker, unpacked the files and laid them out on the card table in front of Sergeant Hennessey, like he was dealing out a game of solitaire.

Hennessey angrily gripped the arms of his wheelchair with trembling hands. “It’s been seventy years! That’s more years than the both of you and ‘Sambo’ stacked together. You can’t know what it’s like trying to remember that far back.”

“You’re right about that,” Levine said as he laid his jacket over the back of a folding chair and loosened his tie. The staff kept the veterans’ hospital uncomfortably warm. But, that’s why people retire to Florida, Levine thought. To warm their bones. “Of course, some things are harder to forget than others.”

“Seventy years,” Hennessey sighed as he ran a gnarled hand over his snow-white hair. “Why the hell is the Navy interested again after seventy years?”

“They didn’t tell us,” Levine lied as he sighted the video camera on Hennessey and hit the record button. “‘Need-to-know’ means they don’t need us to know.” Levine checked to see that the camera was running and then took his seat across the table from Hennessey. “After a lifetime in the Marine Corps, you must’ve learned that if you’re not cleared for the answer, don’t ask the question.”

“I suppose,” Hennessey said, eyeing the pair of men as they settled into their seats and continued unpacking their files. Levine, the younger of the two, was thin, with glasses like an accountant and fingers like a pianist. As part of his cover, Levine had cut his hair to military regulation for this op, but he figured Hennessey could tell he wasn’t really Navy. Levine was a civilian from his scuffed shoes to his J.C. Penney suit. Parker, on the other hand, was military to the bone, thick-featured and barrel-chested, his ebony scalp cleanly shaven, but nonetheless a “landlubber.” If he was getting steamed about Hennessey calling him “Sambo,” he wasn’t showing it.

As he pulled out his notepad and pen, Levine could feel Hennessey dissecting them with his eyes, trying to figure out what they were really up to and who’d really sent them. Being kept in the dark was grating to Hennessey. Levine supposed it was almost ironic. Seventy years ago Hennessey and the rest of the 3rd Battalion walked into a small town in Massachusetts without a clue as to what they were facing. Somewhere up the chain of command somebody, probably someone who hadn’t joined Hennessey and his fellow Marines on their little excursion, made the decision that the guys on the ground just weren’t cleared to know what was going on. And here they were, seventy years later, debriefing Hennessey about a mission he never learned the particulars about and lying to him about who was asking the questions. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Of course, thought Levine, if those men had told the truth, told Hennessey and the other Marines what was waiting in those rotting piles of moldy stone, he never would have believed them. But if he had…if he had believed the unbelievable, he would have deserted before ever setting foot in Innsmouth. Levine wondered what Hennessey would do if he knew the truth about why he and Parker were there.

“So? Ready to begin?” Levine asked without much enthusiasm.

“Ready?” Hennessey spit back. “Ready to dredge up the worst fucking night of my entire life? Ready to get the shakes and not be able to keep down the swill they serve here or even close my eyes all night ’cuz if I do I’ll be right back there in the middle of it all killing those things in the snow?” Hennessey tried his best to rivet the two of them with a withering stare. It may have worked on Marine recruits forty years ago, but it had lost much of its power since then.

Embarrassed and resigned, Levine quickly glanced to Parker. Parker remained as inscrutable as one of those Easter Island statues. With no apparent support from Parker, Levine answered weakly, “Uh, yeah.”

Hennessey rolled his eyes. He bowed his head to pinch the bridge of his nose, as if warding off an impending migraine. “Sure,” he mumbled. “Of course. Let’s get to it then.”

“When did you first get wind that your battalion was being tasked for something special?” asked Levine.

Hennessey shifted uncomfortably in his wheelchair. “We knew something was up when the entire battalion was assembled in Punta Gorda. Companies and platoons that were dispersed all over the country chasing Sandino were suddenly called back to the coast and immediately herded onto a Navy transport. Everyone knew the big brass had something in mind. Rumor was, even the Colonel didn’t know.”

Levine scribbled a few notes. “Do you remember the ship’s name?”

“No. I told you that the last time. I thought Jews were supposed to be smart.”

“I’m not Jewish,” Levine said without looking up from his notes. Levine figured it was the only way the old bastard could get back at the two of them for making him go through the story over and over again. Since he couldn’t intimidate them, he would suffice with insults.

“Yeah. Next you’re going to tell me he ain’t a nigger either.” Hennessey laughed mirthlessly. One again, Parker didn’t even blink. Something in Parker’s poker face told Levine the big man was thinking, ‘I bet you’re going to die soon, old man.’

“Where were you first briefed on the details of the Innsmouth operation?”

“The Boston Naval Annex; the same day our ship docked.”

“And that day was?” Levine volleyed.

“It was February 23rd, 1928. They marched the entire battalion into a warehouse in the Annex and sat us down on these wooden benches. There were already about a hundred guys in suits in there, T-men we were told, and nearly a dozen Navy officers in their faggoty dress whites. They had this big map of the town and all the approaches. Plus a screen set up for the movie and slides they showed later.”

“Do you remember the name of the operation? What was it code-named?” Levine interrupted.

“Just what I told you before,” Hennessey said irritably. “It was something biblical, like Project Moses, or Pharisees, or something. Y’know, Old Testament.”

“And who gave the briefing?” Levine prodded.

“There was a Captain from Naval Intelligence and a T-man. I got the impression he was Secret Service. I don’t remember their names ’cuz I never saw ’em again. There was one fella, though, I seen plenty of since.”

“We know,” interrupted Levine. “You already mentioned Hoover.”

Hennessey glared at Levine and leaned forward onto the table. “Are you going to let me tell the damn story or not?”

“Sorry,” said Levine, leaning back to keep the distance between them. “Please continue.” Levine felt a flush of embarrassment at the clumsiness of his questions. He was an Elint Specialist, not an interrogator. Listen in while the Kremlin orders out for pizza? No problem. But interrogation? And Parker? As far as Levine could figure, he was some DOD mechanic currently on loan to the Company. If this was the best debriefing team Alphonse could put together, it meant that either this was a low priority op, or things at Delta Green were well and truly fucked.

“‘Military support for civilian law enforcement’ he called us,” Hennessey hissed. “But the operation the brass laid out was more like the kind of thing we’d been doing for United Fruit in Nicaragua.”

“What exactly had you been doing for United Fruit?” asked Parker.

“Whatever we were told to do,” Hennessey snapped, glaring angrily at Parker’s interruption. But Hennessy’s watery eyes couldn’t hold Parker’s cold stare and he quickly looked down to his own trembling, knotted hands. After a second, Hennessey cleared his throat and looked up. “’Bout the same thing our boys did in Vietnam. ’Cept we didn’t have TV cameras breathing down our necks. We’d move into a pueblo that our officers said was supporting Sandino, round all the spics up, shoot those that gave us any trouble, burn the corn and rice in the field, torch the huts, and march everyone out to a ‘controlled area’ where they couldn’t support Sandino. ’Course, often as not those same corn fields would be turned into banana plantations by the next time we marched through, but what the hell did we care. It ain’t changed much since ’27 as far as I can see.”

“The film,” said Levine.

“Huh?”

“Could you tell us again about the film they showed you.” Levine had not only undone his tie, but also rolled up his sleeves. He could feel the sweat in his armpits and around his collar. Parker, however, didn’t spill a drop—lotsa jungle work.

“Did I leave that out? Well, there was some film shot from an airplane. It showed the town and the surrounding countryside. The captain described the main features of the town, pointing out this road and that. The last part of the film showed a small, black, rocky island, or maybe it was the top of a reef poking out of the sea. But they stopped the film before that got too far along. The captain acted like it was something we weren’t supposed to see.

“Then there were the slides. Someone, probably one of Hoover’s boys, had wandered through town with a hidden camera in a suitcase. The shots weren’t very well aimed and most were out of focus. The camera must’ve been hid real good and run real quiet because some of the locals were awful close when he snapped the shutter. One just about looked right in the camera lens. When that blotchy, goggle-eyed face flashed onto the screen, I guess I must’ve gasped along with everybody else. Everybody except Paskow, of course. Fucker’s heart pumped ice water.

“But that face…it was like something out of Lon Chaney’s makeup kit. The head was all wrong. During Korea I saw a kid in Seoul with the same kind of head. ‘Water Heads’ they’re called. The skull was somehow soft and bloated-looking. The guy’s eyes were bulging and watery, and even though it was just a still shot, those eyes seemed not to have any lids. That’s when I knew this was going to be worse than anything I could imagine.”

* * *

“You Marines better get used to that face; you’re going to be seeing a lot of that the next couple of days,” roared the Captain from Naval Intelligence. “The federal agents who’ve been conducting surveillance of the town have reported a high incidence of …inbreeding.” The Captain said the word “inbreeding” like he could taste it. “This town has been isolated from the rest of Massachusetts for nearly eighty years. The people up there have been marrying their second and first cousins for three or four generations. During the Civil War federal draft agents determined that over half the males of combat age in Innsmouth were unfit for military service.” The Captain paused to let that sink in. “Do not be surprised by anything you see. Appearances to the contrary, they’re not congenital idiots. They’ve used their appearance as part of their propaganda campaign to keep the uninvolved locals quiet and outsiders away.”

Private First Class Robert Hennessey sat there in that drafty warehouse, on those polished benches and listened aghast to that Navy prick spin a yarn about rum-running, drug smuggling, white slavery, murder, piracy and an elaborate scare-story crafted to frighten away the curious. The captain pointed out the objectives with a collapsible metal pointer. As he ticked off the objectives, he struck the map like he was disciplining it for getting caught in the liquor cabinet.

“First Company will deploy along the docks on both sides of the Manuxet. Your mission will be to prevent anyone from fleeing the city by sea. First Company’s Second Platoon will move with a detachment of Treasury agents and secure the Marsh Refinery and the company offices. Second Company will be assigned to hold a perimeter along Southwick Street in the north while its Third Platoon will move to the Marsh estate and secure the Mansion and assist the Treasury agents in serving the arrest and search warrants. Second Company, Second Platoon will move to secure the former Masonic Hall on Federal Street, which now serves as the headquarters of a quasi-spiritualist group calling itself The Esoteric Order of Dagon. There are three churches—here!—” cracking the map again—“along Church Street. Current intelligence indicates that all three have lost their original congregations and are now used by the Esoteric Order of Dagon.”

Hennessey hung on every unbelievable word. He’d done sweeps of hostile pueblos down in Bananaland, but this was Massachusetts, for Christ’s sake. Hennessey turned to Lance Corporal Charlie Paskow, who was sitting with his elbows on his knees. A Camel hung limply from his mouth, slowly dripping ash. “Hey, Charlie?” Charlie turned and pushed a lazy cloud of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. He raised an eyebrow to invite the question. “Are they serious? Are we really going to attack a town here in America?”

“I certainly hope so,” Charlie hissed. His thin mouth was wrinkled into something akin to wry amusement. Once, outside Bluefields on the Mosquito Coast, Hennessey had seen Charlie shoot a ten-year-old kid out of the saddle from two hundred and fifty yards. Charlie’s only comment, as he ejected the spent round from his Springfield, was, “Spics oughtn’t give rifles to kids.” Charlie was as cold-blooded a fish as Hennessey had seen in the Corps. It should have come as no surprise that Paskow was getting a chuckle out of doing to an American town what they’d been doing to Nicaraguan pueblos.

The Captain had already run through the information on the “Esoteric Order of Dagon.” Some kind of creepy South-Seas religion as far as Hennessey could follow the Captain’s lecture. Like something out of a Fu Manchu pulp. Idolatry. Secret initiations. Murder and human sacrifice. It was all too much. Maybe this kinda thing could happen in Borneo or the Amazon, but this was America, less than thirty miles from Boston Common.

Hennessey’s head was spinning by the time the lecture was done. His company, the Third, was to cross the Manuxet to the north side of town, then cut west along Martin Street to Phillips Place. There they would break into four platoons and begin “internment operations.” They were to round up everyone in a four-block area and march them to the old railway station, where battalion HQ would have a processing center set up with the Bureau of Investigation to sort out the “criminal aliens” from the rest of the townsfolk. When their blocks were cleared, the company would work its way eastward, clearing the next four blocks and so on until they reached the harbor. To the north, Second Company would be doing the same, while on the south side of town, Fourth Company would be spread out along Garrison Street clearing blocks and moving north. The noose would be drawn tighter and tighter until everyone in town was accounted for and “sorted out.” A couple platoons of Marine sappers were standing by to begin “excavating certain structures” once the population was clear. Hennessey figured that when the Captain said “excavate,” he probably meant “blow up.”

After the briefing, the battalion was marched out by platoons to a staging area. Cold-weather gear, helmets, and winter camouflage was passed out. Then came the weapons. It looked like jungle warfare all over again. Most Marines were issued a pump-action Winchester trench gun or a Thompson submachine gun, with only a few bolt-action Springfields and Browning Automatic Rifles thrown in. After all, if they were going to be operating in a town, there wasn’t going to be much call to shoot anyone two or three hundred yards away. Everyone was also issued four grenades, and a Colt .45 sidearm, too. Clearing blocks of teetering old tenements room by room would be claustrophobic work, often without the luxury of enough space to maneuver a rifle or shotgun. It looked to Hennessey like the Brass had put some thought into the weapons mix.

Which is why the flamethrowers really scared him. Hennessey counted at least six flamethrower teams. Plus the quartermaster was handing out white-phosphorous grenades and satchel charges like it was the Battle of Beallue Wood all over again. “They wouldn’t be handing those out unless they were expecting us to have to burn the locals out their houses.”

Hearing Hennessey’s comment, Charlie Paskow looked over at the Marine sappers strapping the tanks of jellied gasoline onto their backs. Paskow’s bayonet-thin figure was practically swallowed by the heavy winter greatcoat and steel helmet. He shrugged noncommittally as he shouldered his trench gun. “I s’pect so.” Paskow turned away to join the rest of Third Company, Third Platoon by the four military trucks that would soon be bearing them north up the Ippswich road to the doomed town of Innsmouth.

The drive north was bitterly cold. Snow was fresh on the ground and shone pale in the moonlight. The sea winds blowing in along the shore cut right through the canvas-covered truck. It froze the Marines’ helmets to the tops of their ears. The draft tugged at their clothes and swept their steaming breath away like the exhaust from the rattling tailpipe. A few silently cursed the T-men, who were making the trip in a long train of big, black Packards. The others gripped their weapons upright between their knees, curled up inside their fear and adrenaline, and tried to focus. Focus on not getting killed.

As their truck crested the top of yet another hill, Lieutenant Cobb shouted a warning from the cab to the men bundled in the rear. “We just topped the last hill. We’ll hit town in three minutes! Nobody does nothing until we deploy.” The driver ground the gears as he down-shifted for the descent into town. That’s when the stench hit them.

At first Hennessey thought they’d passed some road kill, some dog or farm animal on the side of the road. But the smell was more like rotten fish than any other smell he could think of.

“Jeezus,” choked Deerborn. “What the hell is that?”

“Smells like the crack on a two-pesos whore!” Lyman gasped, holding his nose.

“Shut the hell up, Marine,” barked Sergeant Miles. The Sergeant preferred to dispense discipline with the butt of his Thompson. No one said a word after that, even though the eye-watering stink just kept getting worse.

Hennessey’s first glimpse of the town was lost in the glare of the headlights of the trucks behind his. Now and again he could see windows staring back, like the empty sockets of a skull. It just seemed incredible that any of the buildings could possibly be inhabited. They were crumbling heaps. Regardless, they were going to have to clear those heaps room by room. Clearing an intact building is hard enough, but when the walls look like Swiss cheese and you can see the attic while standing in the basement, there’s just no way to know where that next shot is coming from. No way to know if that wall to your back is going to give way to a sniper’s killing zone. It made Hennessey’s guts twist just thinking about it.

Suddenly they were crossing a large square. The Gilman Hotel leaned drunkenly to the right, on the left the First National Grocery. In the blink of an eye, the trucks were rattling across the Federal Street Bridge and into the north side of town. Just across Dock Street they sped past the columned facade of a Romanesque building. Its granite pillars and steps were fleetingly illuminated as one of the trucks from the convoy peeled off and began disgorging troops. Hennessey could just make out the building’s graven title above the door: “The Esoteric Order of Dagon.” The building was out of Hennessey’s sight even before the Marines began vaulting up the front steps, their bayonets flashing in the passing headlights.

As their trucks drove deeper into Innsmouth, the buildings along Federal Street grew even more dilapidated; some were little more than four hollow walls cradling collapsed roofs and floors. Crossing Church and Martin Streets, more trucks veered off to their targets. Hennessey’s truck and three others made a hard left onto Martin and gunned their engines. “First squad!” barked Lieutenant Cobb from the front cab. “You will move south and secure the southwest block. Round everyone up and get them ready to move to the train station. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Sir!” came the chorus. Hennessey looked across the truck to Charlie Paskow. Hennessey knew that faraway look meant that Paskow was winding his clock springs. Hennessey loved having Charlie with him in a firefight: the guy moved like a wind-up soldier. No hesitation, no frenzy, just one fluid action after another.

The truck turned right again, shot forward maybe thirty yards, and jammed on the brake, skidding slightly as snow chains bit into the icy cobblestones. “Go! Go! Go!” barked Sergeant Miles as he jumped down from the truck, hoisting his Thompson in one hand while waving the men forward with the other. Hennessey jumped down, holding the barrel of the Thompson skyward, slipping slightly in the ice. “Corporal Paskow! Take Hennessey, Lyman, and Boyle and clear that house there!” Miles indicated a sagging heap that had once been a quaint, gambrel-roofed Georgian home. In any small town in America, it might have passed as a haunted house. Here in Innsmouth, a city of haunted houses, its intact windowpanes made it look upscale.

Paskow got to the door first and began pounding with his gloved fist. “Open the door! This is the U.S. Marine Corps! Open up!” Hennessey hung back with Lyman and Boyle at the foot of the steps, keeping an eye on the windows. Boyle, a steady Tennessee farmboy, had been in Hennessey’s company for six months in Nicaragua. Hennessey had no worries about him. Lyman, on the other hand, had just gotten off the boat from Camp LeJune when the battalion was turned around and sent back to the States. He was nervous as a cat and kept dancing around, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like he had to pee.

The owner was fairly slow to come to the door, but that was to be expected. It was 2:00 A.M., after all, and his reactions were dulled from having to wrench himself out of a warm winter slumber. For a half awake fella, dressed only in his nightshirt and facing four Marines armed with bayonet-tipped shotguns and Thompson machine-guns, the man took it fairly well.

“What th’sweet Jay-sus is gowin’ ahn!” he shouted. Hennessey sincerely hoped the ol’ fella didn’t give Paskow too much trouble. Last fella who did, Paskow put out most of his teeth with the butt of his Springfield.

“Town’s being evacuated. You and anyone else you’ve got in there are going to have to go with us. Right now,” Paskow said flatly. It wasn’t much of an explanation. For a second Hennessey thought the old man was going to give Paskow an opportunity to do a little more dental work. Instead he smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, what with more than a few teeth missing or gone gray with rot, but his face lit up like they’d just reported the end of Prohibition.

“Y’all are Marines? Yav come t’clear the town?” he beamed.

“Yes we are and yes we have,” Paskow answered.

“Thank th’ Lawd! Ah just need t’get dressed!” Without closing the door the man turned and ran back into his bedroom leaving the four slightly puzzled Marines on his doorstep.

“Maybe we won’t need to burn ’em out after all,” Hennessey said hopefully.

In less than four minutes the old man had himself, his wife, and his two sons dressed and out the door. Then it was on to the next house. This time when Paskow pounded on the door, the only answer he got was a curt “Go ahway!”

“We are authorized to use whatever force is necessary to evacuate the inhabitants of this town, sir!” Paskow bellowed back through the door. “If you don’t open up right now, we’re kicking the door in!”

“Dammit t’Hell, Jawsef!” the old man cried from the street behind the Marines. “They’ah from th’government! They’ah here t’help!”

Paskow was just about to tell the old man to keep quiet when the front door unbolted. “Ah can’t believe it,” said the weathered face that peered out. “Afta all this time. Yav come t’put it right then?”

Paskow gripped his trench gun a little tighter in frustration. “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout that. My orders are to move everyone to the train station for evacuation.”

“Ever’one? Even th’ others?” the man asked tentatively.

“I don’t know anything about any others, but if you don’t open the door this second, my men will smash it in.”

The man looked resigned and cast his eyes to the floor. “What’ll Ah need t’bring?”

“Warm clothes is all,” Paskow urged. “And make it fast.” Once the weathered face disappeared back into the house, Paskow turned to Hennessey. “It’ll be a damn shame if we don’t get to use the flamethrowers.” Hennessey was fairly sure this wasn’t meant in jest.

As the weathered man bundled his wife and daughter down to the sidewalk, he turned to Hennessey and hissed, “Be careful of th’ Sahgents. Ah ain’t seen his waaf for better-on four months. Ah think she’s beginnin’ t’turn.” Hennessey hadn’t the slightest clue what the fella was talking about, but he could still see the genuine fear in the man’s watery gray eyes.

“Thanks, sir. We’ll watch out for that.”

By 2:30 A.M., Third Company had cleared all the blocks north of Pierce Street and west of Phillips and was ready to move south towards the river and east towards the bay. Now the situation was beginning to rapidly change. Lights were on in many of the windows on Hancock Street. It made it a lot easier for the Marines to pick out which doors to knock on, only now the inhabitants were beginning to resist. Up and down Hancock Street Marines were kicking in doors and smashing open windows with their buttstocks. Despite the quality and state of repair of the houses on this street, the attitude of the locals was one of defiance and loathing. At one house, Hennessey saw a woman standing at her front door brandishing a frying pan and screaming, “Ah won’t stand far it!”

“Get off mah yaad,” was the reply from the first house they came to.

“Open this door or we’ll smash it in!” Paskow said loudly, but without a hint of anger.

“Yav got no right t’be turnin’ us outta our homes in th’dead o’night!”

“I’ve all the rights I need right here.” Paskow worked the action on his trench gun with a resounding “cha-chak!” The door opened without much more to-do about “rights.” The man who greeted them was stooped and bowlegged. His age was hard to determine, being somewhere between thirty and fifty. He had big bulging eyes and a wide, thick-lipped mouth that probably turned down at the corners even when he wasn’t being rounded up in the middle of the night. His fat eyes were filled to the brim with fear and loathing for the men outside. Hennessey could not help but think that the hate wasn’t because he and his fellow Marines represented the unbridled power of the government. Instead this parody of a man hated them for being straight-backed and clear-skinned. He hated them for being normal. His wife and children showed many of the same signs as their father: over-large eyes, rough, scaly skin, too-wide mouths. Even his fat wife was showing signs of encroaching baldness. As she called the children together, the woman’s voice sounded badly scarred. Maybe it had something to do with the thick wrinkles on her neck? The family had to be prodded and pushed down to the street where a crowd of equally repugnant locals was being gathered together.

The name on the mailbox of the next house read “Sergeant.” A rickety-looking motor coach, dirty gray in color, was parked at the curb. The half-illegible sign in the windshield read “Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb’port.” Whoever was inside the house was awake with a light on. He croaked at the four Marines before they even got to the first step. “Ah can’t leave th’house! Mah wife’s very sick. She can’t be moved.”

“We’ll have a doctor look her over,” Paskow called back.

“She can’t walk. She’s an invalid.”

“We’ll get a couple of medics to carry her on a stretcher.”

“No, she’s too sick. Go away, d’ya hear? Ah’ve got a shotgun and ah’ll use it!”

Paskow stepped to the right side of the door and motioned Hennessey and Lyman to take the left and Boyle to join him on the right. “You shoot at us and we’ll damn well toss a grenade in there with you. You want to be blown to Kingdom Come?” Paskow took the silence to mean that Mr. Sergeant was thinking about it. “Now open the door and toss the shotgun out!” The four held their breaths as they listened to the bolts turn in the door. The hand that held the shotgun barrel and placed it on the doormat was as dry and scaly-looking as any from the last house full of inbreds, only this one was webbed up to the second knuckle.

As Sergeant released the shotgun, Hennessey, with a nod from Paskow, threw himself against the door. At age twenty, Hennessey was a horse of a man: six-foot-two and two hundred and twenty pounds of combat-honed muscle. Under that kind of force, the door swung open like a spring-loaded trap and struck Sergeant in the chin. He stumbled backwards and landed hard on his rump. Hennessey put a boot in his chest and shoved him back down on the floor. “Stay down! Don’t get up!”

True to what his hand had suggested, Sergeant presented another fine example of Innsmouth’s poor breeding habits. He was thin, with stooped shoulders. Like his neighbors, he had the same flaky, peeling skin, almost like he’d been sunburnt. His eyes, mouth, and lips were disproportionately large, and his sloping forehead and chin seemed to simply fall into his strangely creased neck. “Where’s your wife?”

The question filled Sergeant’s bulging blue eyes with terror. “Ya can’t take her. She’s too sick ah tell ya.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” Paskow said as he coolly surveyed the interior of the house. The furnishings seemed oddly antiquated, as if Sergeant lived in a house full of his grandfather’s furnishings. The room was lit by a single oil lamp. “Boyle, check the rooms on this floor. Lyman, check upstairs.” Boyle quickly set off, but Lyman hesitated a moment. Paskow’s bark of “Get a move on!” sent him scurrying up the stairs.

“Don’t go up thar!” Sergeant croaked from the floor. As he began to pull himself off the floor, Hennessey put him back down again with the boot.

“Stay there!”

“Ya don’t understand!” Sergeant looked absolutely panicked now. “Ma wife, she needs me!”

“If he tries to get up again, shoot him,” Paskow said with finality. On that note Hennessey pulled back the action lever on the Thompson’s bolt and aimed the muzzle right at Sergeant’s face. His complexion, already quite gray, grew considerably less healthy.

From upstairs Lyman called down, “I think I found it, Corporal. There’s a padlocked door.”

Paskow looked down at Sergeant. “Where’s the key?” Sergeant just looked away at the floor. “Fine. We’ll break it open. Boyle! Get back here and watch the prisoner.” As Boyle came back in through the dining room from the kitchen Paskow turned and trudged up the stairs.

“Just sit still,” Hennessey warned. “We’ll have your wife down in a jiffy.” Despite the reassurance, Sergeant looked like a coiled spring. Hennessey could hear the crunching thuds of a shotgun butt smashing at the padlock upstairs. Once. Twice. The third crack was followed by a sharp crash, and then a scream.

No, not a scream. More like a roar.

What followed was a scream, like nothing Hennessey had heard since the time his uncle gelded one of the horses on his Oklahoma ranch: high-pitched and piercing, almost like a whistle. Both Hennessey and Boyle reflexively looked up to the source of the sound. That was when Sergeant made his move. He swung his leg with speed and strength so shocking that Hennessey had no time to comprehend before he landed flat on his back. Sergeant gained his feet in a flash, and just as fast jumped across the room to grab Boyle’s trench gun and try to wrench it away. Boyle was a strong man, strong as an ox, and he swung Sergeant around and sent the two of them crashing into the dining room table.

Hennessey rolled to his feet just in time to jump clear of two figures tumbling down the stairs together. One was a Marine; the other, something out of a sideshow. Sparse strands of hair were plastered to a head the size and shape of a pumpkin. A sheen of moisture extended from its scalp down its back. The thing had rubbery, bloated skin, mottled gray in color, gone green in patches, and peeling like someone was halfway through skinning it when it tumbled down the stairs. Its feet were huge with widely splayed toes that showed more of the curious webbing between them. The same was true of the hands, except these were tipped by hideously curved nails over two inches long. The Marine it had locked itself around screamed hysterically and beat at its back and sides with his fists. Hennessey couldn’t open up with the Thompson for fear of shooting the man to pieces. Instead, he swung the machine gun’s buttstock down onto the thing’s skull. The noise was like Joe Jackson hitting a home run, but it didn’t let go. He brought the weapon down again and again. Still nothing. Then the Marine’s screaming cut off with a wet tearing sound.

“Get th’hell outta the way.” Paskow’s voice was strangely calm. He stood at the top of the landing, taking careful aim with his trench gun, blood running from a pair of long scratch marks from just under his left eye down to his jaw line. Hennessey jumped back and Paskow blew off the back of the thing’s upturned rump. The thing sat bolt upright, its huge, lidless eyes and its mouth locked open in an almost comical look of surprise. Rows of pointed teeth hung clotted with bits of Lyman’s throat. Hennessey could plainly see the blood-red gills on the sides of its greasy neck open and close spasmodically. Then most of the head above the eyes exploded in a fine mist as Paskow put it down.

Over in the corner of the dining room, Boyle still grappled with Sergeant for the trench gun. Paskow calmly walked down the stairs, stepped over the two corpses, and bellowed, “Boyle! Hit the deck!” Boyle got the message and let go of the shotgun, dropping to the floor. Sergeant looked up just in time to see the muzzle flash before the contents of his chest splashed the dining room’s brown, peeling wallpaper.

Hennessey looked away and became transfixed by the thing sprawled atop Lyman. Now that he could see the front of it, he noticed details of even more terrible proportion. It wasn’t that it was inhuman. No, the problem was that it was so very human. Pendulous breasts would seem to signify a mammal, but the other features suggested a mix of fish and frog, as did the rotting, nearly choking stench.

Suddenly Hennessey remembered to see if Lyman were still alive. Most of the kid’s throat had been torn out. His esophagus was laid wide open and the gleaming bones of his vertebrae were clearly visible. No blood pumped from the severed veins.

Someone appeared at the door.

“What the hell’s—” Sergeant Miles’ demand was cut short when he saw the bloated woman-thing. “Jesus! I…I’d better go get the Lieutenant.”

Pulling up a chair at the overturned dinner table, Paskow plopped himself down. “Yeah. I’m sure Cobb’ll know just what to do,” he muttered sardonically.

“Christ Almighty,” Boyle whispered after retrieving his shotgun. “What is that thing?”

“That guy on the other street knew,” Hennessey muttered. “He said to watch out for Mrs. Sergeant. He said she was beginning to change.”

“Change into what?” Boyle sounded shaky.

“Nothing good,” Paskow added as he lit a cigarette with his lighter.

Just then, Lieutenant Cobb strode in and boggled at the sight of the thing that had torn the throat out of one of his Marines. It took him a second to compose himself enough to ask Paskow what had happened.

Without bothering to put out his smoke, Paskow stood and faced Lieutenant Cobb. “This fella on the floor barred our entry, so we had t’force our way in. Then this thing over here, which the first fella had padlocked in a room upstairs, busted out. It opened up my face and tore out Private Lyman’s throat with its teeth. I had to kill it and the other fella since he was trying to take Private Boyle’s weapon away from him.”

“I think it’s his wife,” Hennessey added weakly.

“What?” snapped Lieutenant Cobb.

Feeling all the eyes in the room on him, Hennessey felt himself shrink. “One of the other folks on the last street said something about Mrs. Sergeant changing and that we ought to watch out for her.”

“And you think this…this aberration is his wife?” Lieutenant Cobb shot back.

“He did say his wife was in the house, sir,” Paskow said, tapping his ash. “And there’s nobody else here but him and her…or it, if you prefer.”

“She must have slipped out of the house while you were fighting with this…thing.”

“I don’t think this is the only one of these things we’re going to find, sir,” Paskow continued painfully. “I think we’re going to find one of these in every attic.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cobb said, without much conviction. The Lieutenant’s rejoinder was cut off by the sound of gunfire out in the street. Facing something as mundane as bullets was infinitely preferable to puzzling over the dead heap on the floor. “C’mon, men! Let’s go!” Lieutenant Cobb turned and bolted out the door. The other Marines followed him into the yard and were greeted by the sight of three Marines spraying the front of a brick house with their Thompsons. Sergeant Fields was stumbling around holding a glove to a bullet-hole in his upper left arm. The gunfire quickly subsided and the three Marines charged up the front steps and kicked in what was left of the bullet-ridden door.

“Got ’er,” one called down after a quick look inside.

“Sergeant! What’s the situation?”

“The woman shot me, sir!” the Sergeant roared. “She pulled out an honest t’god revolver and started shootin’!”

“Did you provoke her?”

Sergeant Fields looked sincerely insulted. “No sir. We told her we were comin’ in and she started shootin’ is all.”

Just then they heard a hoarse caterwaul from the basement window to the left of the front steps. As the Marines peered into the darkness, they were startled by the sound of breaking glass. A long, rubbery-looking arm groped through the window’s clinging shards and rattled the bars beyond. “Mah-ree!” it croaked. “Mah-ree! Whar’s mah waaf? Whaat ave yoo dun t’ mah waaf?”

Again, those nearest the window hit a choking, fishy odor. Lieutenant Cobb’s face wrinkled in an expression of confusion and disgust. He turned to Sergeant Miles and gagged out the order, “Get the Captain.”

Captain Kardashian didn’t exactly look like the guy on the recruiting poster. He was short but straight-backed, with olive skin and a bad complexion. His black eyes and mustache could have been found on a Hollywood villain. Rumor was, he’d come up from the ranks with a battlefield commission during the Great War. He was accompanied by one of the T-men bundled in a dark topcoat and fedora.

As soon as he approached, Cobb said, “There’s one in that basement, sir. My men killed another one across the street in that house there.”

“Let’s have a look at this one here, Lieutenant.”

The creature bellowed and cried for its wife, Mary, and shook the bars with its webbed hands. After a few moments of staring noncommittally, Kardashian announced, “I’ll see the dead one now.”

Hennessey and some other Marines had begun to follow the entourage across the street when Sergeant Miles turned and roared, “What th’ hell d’ya think yer doin’! Don’t stand around like a bunch’a ducks in a shootin’ gallery! Spread out and form a perimeter to secure this block!” The Marines scrambled into position instantly.

Although they were supposed to be watching the streets and windows, many of the Marines were asking each other what was going on and trying to get Boyle, Hennessey, or Paskow to tell them what they’d seen in the Sergeant house and what had happened to Lyman. Paskow kept his views to himself, but Boyle and Hennessey ended up repeating the story about a dozen times.

Then, from the east, towards the docks, the sounds of a full-scale battle shattered the calm. The avenue echoed with the clattering of Thompsons and the booming of shotguns. All the Marines looked east like dogs catching a scent. It wasn’t like the earlier gunfire. Once or twice before they’d heard the odd angry shot, but this was something else. Those who’d seen the fields of Flanders in the Great War had heard the sound before: a “Big Push,” hundreds of men charging across No Man’s Land into the blazing muzzles of enemy machine guns and barbed wire. But it wasn’t quite the same. Instead of the roaring hurrah of the advancing troops, there was another sound. Something like a swamp filled with frogs, only deeper and fuller. Then they saw the flare pop high to the east. Under its parachute, the white magnesium glare threw stark, crazily jumping shadows down alleys and through hollow windows. Hennessey stood transfixed, watching it drift behind the building and into the midst of the still-raging battle.

“Marines! Listen up!” It was Captain Kardashian standing atop the hood of the dilapidated motor coach in front of the Sergeant house. “These are your new orders concerning evacuation. Any local who looks abnormal is to be treated as a hostile. Take no chances. If they resist for even a second, shoot ’em. If you come across any locked or padlocked doors, don’t open ’em. We’ll just keep the things in there bottled up until we’re ready for ’em. Mark every house where you find one of those things with an ‘X.’ Carve it in the front door and move on to the next house. Do you understand?”

The cry of “yessir” went up all down the line. Just then a young Marine came charging up Martin Street and onto Phillips at a dead run.

“Captain! Captain Kardashian!”

“What is it, soldier?”

“Captain Frost sent me, sir,” he gasped. “First Company is under attack on the docks. We need reinforcements immediately!” A spatter of blood marked his white winter camouflage.

Kardashian spun around on Lieutenant Cobb. “That’ll be you, Bill. Get your platoon down there right now! Double-time!”

“Yessir! Third Platoon to me!” Cobb shouted. Hennessey and the rest of the men quickly converged and set off at a jog down Martin Street to the sea. As they ran, the pounding of thirty pairs of boots thumped in counterpoint to the rattling bullets in the Thompsons’ drum-magazines. Even above that din, Hennessey could hear the battle raging in front of them. Another parachute flare arched skyward. Even eight hundred yards away, down the sloping hill to the harbor, the Marines could see flashes of gunfire.

As they crossed Lafayette Street, the brooding shape of the Marsh Mansion loomed above them to their left. The grounds stretched all the way along Martin between Lafayette and Washington, while the mansion itself, with its wide-terraced parterres, towered three stories. Its top was crowned by an iron-railed widow’s walk. Big black Packard sedans and military trucks filled the driveway and yard. Flanking the front gate and door, pairs of dark-coated T-men in fedoras cradled their Thompsons. Marines were lifting some kind of stone statue into the back of one of the trucks while a nervous T-man kept saying, “Easy! Go easy with that!” More Marines prodded a handcuffed figure down the front walk with their bayonets. Whatever it was, it wore a bloodied nightshirt and stumbled along with a curious hopping limp. Four Marines had been laid out on the front lawn, side by side, their helmets placed over their faces, their white camouflage torn and crusted with blood.

The docks were five more blocks ahead, nearly four football fields away, down a corridor of crumbling warehouses and office buildings, obviously long-abandoned. Hennessey’s lungs burned as he ran. He could now hear screams, shouted orders, and cries of agony. And behind that din, the chorus of croaking and braying rumbled. Suddenly out of the blackness a baby-faced Marine emerged running straight for them. His face was as white as his camouflage. He didn’t slow down for a second, just swerved to the right and flew right past Hennessey’s platoon, tears of mindless panic streaming down his face.

On Water Street, right in front of the wharf, Thompsons and Browning machine-guns fired such long bursts they should have melted the barrels into slag. Marines ran this way and that. It appeared at first as if every Marine in First Company was trying to spend every last round as quickly as possible by firing into the blackness under the docks. A wild-eyed corporal ran past Lieutenant Cobb, a can of belted machine-gun ammo in each hand, screaming, “They’re under the docks! Get ’em! Get ’em!”

The air burned with cordite. Every breath scalded the lungs. But even above the scent of war, a more ponderous stench asserted itself, the old rotting smell of dead fish, now grown monumental. It displaced the air and seemed to steal the last usable oxygen. Hennessey almost believed that his stomach would surrender its contents to the stink, when he noticed the croaking, bellowing chorus rising from the wharves of Innsmouth blending with the splashing of hundreds of flailing limbs. The men of Third Company, Third Platoon stumbled forward to the edge of the sea wall, peering down among the jumble of ships’ masts and pilings. Hennessey followed, straining into the dark tangle. And at that moment, everyone wished they were back in the jungle with Sandino.

Below the docks, outlined by the strobing muzzle flashes of nearly a hundred weapons, clinging to wharf pilings, hanging from the masts and rigging, and crouched on the listing decks of Innsmouth’s worm-eaten fishing fleet, squirmed an army out of drowned nightmares. Two arms, two legs, and a bloated, lolling head—each stood like a man with a cork-screwed spine. But the similarity to terrestrial life ended at that, for these were creatures of the deep. The white gleam of the flare reflected in hundreds of pairs of fat, oily eyes mounted on the sides of scaly heads, the eyes of creatures crafted by evolution to strain every last particle of light from their environment. Wet, lazy gills opened and closed on the sides of their stout necks. Their taloned, webbed hands and feet, like baseball gloves, were splayed wide. Their bottom jaws dropped open like the cavernous mouths of sea bass and again those barking croaks issued forth. “Iä! Iä!” came the war cry from the deep. “Iä!”

Nobody had to give the order to open fire. It erupted in a spasmodic fusillade that sent dozens more of the barking horde tumbling into the black waters. Hennessey brought his Thompson to his shoulder and began firing bursts into the thickest knot of them, chopping through rubbery hide, sending gouts of scarlet and other colors over the rotten timbers. They fell, only to be immediately replaced by a dozen more. The Marines, Hennessey included, were all screaming now, nearly drowning out the croaking of the fish-men. But they could not slow the charge. Pump-action shotguns worked with blinding speed, Thompsons raked over the braying throng, but it was not enough. Within seconds the things gained the sea wall and began to climb.

As the clouds of burnt powder obscured the leaping, flopping carnage, Hennessey saw some of the creatures haul themselves atop the docks and begin running toward the wall. He sighted the Thompson and fired a burst. Two of the things dropped like stringless marionettes, but eight more leapt forward. To his right, Charlie Paskow was calmly racking round after round through his trench gun, ejecting spent casings that sizzled in the snow. Hennessey could see he’d never get a bead before the things crashed into the Marines. “They’re on top of the docks!” he screamed. Paskow jerked his head up and put his next 12-gauge round into the closest thing’s chest, blowing it off its feet and into the bay. PFC Grodin, a tough kid from Pittsburgh, snapped off a load of buckshot that caught the next beast in the leg, nearly severing it at the knee. And then they were among the Marines, webbed, talon-tipped fingers raking into winter coats.

The mayhem was total. Private Franklin, a Marine from Second Squad, went down under two of them, his Thompson crushed to his chest. Razor-sharp talons sliced divots out of his jawbone and tore open his equipment harness. One clawed at his face and neck as he struggled to kick away and bring his weapon to bear. The other thing threw itself onto his legs and sank its fangs into his groin. Franklin’s keening scream was broken as the first tore out his throat. A private by the name of McVeigh, his bayonet driven up to its hilt in the belly of an onrushing fish-man, danced in circles as the beast tried to claw its way up the Springfield rifle to get him. After desperately chambering a fresh round, McVeigh blew it off the end with a resoundingly wet report. Grodin put a load of buckshot into the head of the beast shredding Franklin’s throat and, with a scream, drove his bayonet through the neck of the beast locked to Franklin’s crotch. He twisted the trench gun, wrenching its jaws open as it gargled madly, spraying angry red blood from its twitching gill slits. “Die! Fucking die!” He stepped over the thing, straddling its back, jerked out the weapon and thrust it into the thing’s spine, quelling the spastic twitch of its limbs. Meanwhile, Paskow held his empty trench gun in his left hand and serenely dropped one charging nightmare after another with careful slugs from his .45 automatic.

Hennessey brought his Thompson to bear in time to catch the second wave, which was running—no, hopping—across the docks. He held the trigger and hosed them down with a twenty-round burst, barrel low, the barrage knocking seven off the dock as they croaked in shock and anger. Hennessey’s mind was running on little more than adrenaline and boot-camp training. The fifty-round drum was empty and there was no time to change magazines. He dove to his left, rolled the slippery monstrosity off the corpse of Private Franklin, scooped up the fallen Marine’s Thompson, and spun on the icy cobblestones to loose another stream of fire.

Privates Bromley and Helms thrust their bayonets at the creatures scrabbling up the stone sea wall, bursting the soft, fat eyes like egg yolks. One screamed an almost human wail, clutched its oozing eye with both claws and pitched backwards onto its fellows. A creature straddling Private Dean’s back sunk its teeth into his shoulder, and tore loose a bloody chunk of meat and wool just a second before Paskow blew off the top of its skull with the .45. Meanwhile, McVeigh and Boyle were finishing off two wounded creatures. The flopping abominations croaked and brayed pathetically, gagging on their blood as the Marines thrust and twisted their bayonets. Boyle jerked his bayonet out of the creature at his feet just in time to turn, reverse grip, and swing the butt like a golf club into the face of one struggling to hoist itself over the sea wall. Grodin loosed another’s grip on the wall by pulping its head with a load of buckshot.

Hennessey had exhausted a second drum when the things gave up rushing along the tops of the tattered docks. But they were still scrambling up the sea wall. Most of the trench guns had quickly emptied their five rounds and were slow to reload. With the onslaught coming so fast, there was little time to shove the shells into the tube one at a time. The battle at the sea wall was rapidly coming down to buttstocks and bayonets against raking claws and dripping fangs.

A rushing sound and rising light caught Hennessey’s attention as a ball of flame rose up from one of the fishing boats, splashing gasoline over the rotten timbers. At the northernmost end of the docks, a Marine from First Company was pouring a can of gasoline over the sea wall onto the scaly, flopping horde while another lit them with a flare pistol. Burning, keening beasts tossed themselves back into the bay, extinguishing the flames, and then scrambled right back over the mounting dead at the wall’s base. Another Marine tossed a gas can onto the deck of a fishing boat and was followed by a shot from Lieutenant Cobb’s flare pistol, sending it up with a cheerful whump.

Hoskins, a private from Second Squad, held tight to his trench gun as one of the creatures below grabbed the barrel. He went over the side like a Vaudeville comedian getting the hook, shrieking loudly. But not for long. Within seconds something at the foot of the sea wall tossed his head back up onto Water Street, still seated in its helmet and trailing a few links of spine. Hoskins looked more surprised than upset. The demonstration had its effect. All along the sea wall the Marines backed away from the edge, just long enough for the things to haul themselves up. It was one thing to kill the monsters from atop the wall while they tried to climb, but another to face them on equal ground. All along the edge, the sea wall was topped by another wall, this one made of slippery green flesh and glittering talons, rearing up as if in triumph. Or, at least, until the Browning opened up.

The first tracer Hennessey saw looked like it passed about a half-foot in front of his nose. He slipped and scrabbled on the icy cobbles, trying to backpedal in time to avoid getting mowed down. To Hennessey’s right, in front of the Marsh fish-packing plant, First Company’s water-cooled Browning gobbled belt after belt of ammunition, turning Water Street into a shooting gallery. The things hopped forward into the crossfire like a wave, dozens and dozens of them. Bullets and tracers ripped down Water Street, a wall of invisible razors shot through with lightning. The beasts charging through it simply came apart. Everywhere, monsters burst from a thousand miraculous stigmata. Most squawked and croaked as they crashed to the ground, but even stitched with dozens of bullet wounds, a few crawled forward, sliding over the bodies of their brethren, dragging themselves on hemorrhaging stumps and trailing ropy intestines. From behind their invisible fortress of screaming metal, the Marines desperately reloaded their weapons and blasted any lucky enough to cross the barrier of flying lead and magnesium.

“Grenade!” bellowed Sergeant Miles, holding one of the metal pineapples over his head. “Grenade!” With that, he lobbed it over the sea wall. The grenade exploded with a dull, wet thump, punctuated by inhuman shrieks of agony. Mud and other less wholesome semi-solids flew into the night air. Marines began tearing grenades from their harnesses, ripping the pins out, and hurling them after the first. Hennessey ripped a grenade off his harness and tossed it clear into Innsmouth Bay. Then the air was torn apart by a staccato barrage of ear-splitting explosions. It looked to Hennessey as if a dozen photographers beyond the wall were snapping flashbulbs at some Broadway celebrity. The Marines kept throwing their grenades over the side, some laughing hysterically. Within thirty seconds, the only thing answering the explosions was the sound of debris pattering to the earth or splashing into the harbor.

Nothing climbed up the sea wall now. No tracers screamed down Water Street. There was no movement except the slow, painful wriggling of the dying. Slowly the Marines began picking their way through the tangle of carnage. Hennessey felt drunk, lightheaded. As he inched through the dead, he jumped at the crack of gunfire as here and there a Marine delivered a perfunctory coup de grace.

In the light from the fires, Hennessey could now see that the area beneath the dock was awash with broken bodies. Fins, scales, and gills glistened in the orange flames. They’d killed far more of the creatures than Hennessey had suspected. The scene was almost like that of a beach after a red-tide fish-kill. And at the base of the sea wall, the bodies piled one atop the other in a bloody pyramid. The pile of gutted and boned fish-men had brought the shoal at least six feet higher. Hennessey had never seen such a slaughter, not even in picture books about the Great War.

A few of the fishing boats moored beneath the drunkenly listing docks still had fuel in their tanks. As they cooked off one by one, they sent fireballs roaring skyward. It wouldn’t take too long for the docks to turn into a twisted maze of blazing timbers and planks. Hennessey strained for any movement in the thick gray haze. There was nothing. The fish-men had had enough. For the moment.

“Sound off by squads, you fucking apes!” bellowed Sergeant Miles. “First Squad!” Only five out of eight men barked out their names. As the rest of the platoon sounded off, Hennessey took a quick mental inventory of the remaining men in his squad. Lyman…he was still lying at the foot of the stairs at the Sergeants’ house. Paskow was dropping the magazine from his .45 and slapping another in place. He didn’t even look out of breath. Boyle’s pants were torn open at the left knee and his boot was wet with his blood. McVeigh and Grodin were panting like dogs but unmarked. The other two, Baldwin and Rhodes, had ended up on the north end of the defense line and had come through unscathed.

The rest of Third Platoon was mauled. Four Marines were dead, including Franklin with his throat torn out and balls bitten off. Eleven men were wounded, two so badly they’d soon be joining the dead. Out of the thirty-two men who comprised Third Platoon, only twenty-one were still able to fire a weapon. By some miracle, seven of them were in Hennessey’s squad. There was a platoon from Second Company stumbling about with just seventeen men still standing, and the two platoons from First Company who’d begun the defense of the sea wall couldn’t even form a full platoon between them. The wounded screamed and moaned; the others prayed and even wept. The only sounds of sanity came from Sergeant Miles bellowing orders to the survivors, policing up weapons and the dead.

At that moment, Lieutenant Cobb was standing next to First Company’s Captain Frost. The Captain was screaming and gesturing wildly with his .45. “They came out of the sea, goddammit! Right out of the sea! They were all over us before we knew what was happening. It’s a goddamn miracle it was only a dozen or so to start with. If they’d hit us with that second wave first…” Frost’s quavering voice trailed off and then rose hysterically again. “We gotta get the Navy! We gotta get depth charges!”

“Sir! Sir!” Cobb hissed, shaking the man. “Calm down, sir. I need to know what you want us to do?”

“Do?” Frost shrieked. “What can we do? We’ve got to get out of here is what!”

“Dammit, sir, if we pull out, those things will overrun the town.” Cobb gripped the Captain’s shoulders in a vise-grip. “The battalion will be overrun. We’re all spread out policing up the locals. If we’re overrun, it’ll unravel. It’ll be a slaughter!”

“Fuck them!” Frost giggled hysterically. “We’ve gotta get out of here!”

Suddenly, the loudest noise on the docks was the sound of Lieutenant Cobb slapping Captain Frost’s face. Frost trembled with anger, his red-rimmed eyes jumping in their sockets. “I’ll see you broken for that.”

Cobb drew in a measured breath and set his jaw. “Yes, sir. And if you run, or do anything to incite others to run, they’ll be trying me for murder as well.” Then he turned to Sergeant Miles. “Put the Captain someplace where he’ll be out of the way, Sergeant.”

For the next ten minutes, Lieutenant Cobb turned into Blackjack Pershing, barking commands in rapid succession, imposing order through his own force of personality. He sent the severely wounded off in a truck to the Battalion HQ with a situation report and request for reinforcements. He got the rest of the men to police up the extra ammo off the dead, tip the slain creatures back into the bay, and set the Browning machine gun up in the second-floor window of an abandoned warehouse at the end of Pierce Street.

Across the river, along the docks on the south side, Hennessey could see a couple of Brownings raking back and forth across the docks and shore. Then a tongue of liquid fire leapt out and showered the docks with jellied gasoline. As soon as Hennessey saw that, he knew that the fish-men would quickly figure to give the north docks another try.

“There they are!” A stout Montana Sergeant named Dollins stabbed a trembling finger towards the bay. Bobbing on the surface about a hundred yards out, scores of squat heads listed atop powerful shoulders. Their fat eyes reflected the orange light from the fires on the docks.

“Let ’em have it!” roared Cobb. With that, the Browning cut loose. The fusillade peppered the water, tore open misshapen skulls and sent the rest of the creatures diving under the waves. “Cease fire!” Cobb called up to the machine-gun nest. “Hold your fire!”

Hennessey waited silently. None of the Marines spoke. No one breathed. The sounds of the little battles behind them in Innsmouth faded from their perception as they focused on the black waters of Innsmouth Bay. Every fiber of their beings reached out to try to pick out a sound, a movement, anything that would tell them where the attack would come. But nothing came, nothing moved but the waves lapping against the shore and the horrible bodies stacked along its edge. Hennessey waited in the snow with the rest of the Marines and listened to the waves breaking.

Charlie Paskow broke the silence. “Tide’s comin’ in,” he whispered. Hennessey, lost in concentration, didn’t bother to answer him. “Tide’s not due till dawn,” he continued gravely. Hennessey was about to shush him when he caught Paskow’s eye. He was looking at the waves cresting against the shore. They were strong and insistent. And they didn’t wash back out. They just kept pushing one atop the other against the shore. The tide was coming in all right. In one single surge of water. Then Hennessey saw it. One of the fishing boats, nearly burned down to the waterline, rose as if a whale, pushing thousands of gallons of water before it, had just passed beneath. Before he could even register what he’d seen, Hennessey saw one of the dock’s still-standing pilings plow under, like a road sign struck by an out-of-control truck.

“Under the water!” Lieutenant Cobb bellowed. “They’re under the water!” Marines surged forward to the edge of the sea wall to fire down into the submerged beasts. But it wasn’t a horde of sea devils.

It was just one.

Hennessey would later describe it to his Naval Intelligence de-briefers as being like an avalanche. An avalanche of tar that jumped up out of the sea.

A fair description. Except it was far more than that. An avalanche may be animate, but it is lifeless. The thing that erupted from the sea was anything but lifeless. It veritably boiled with life, like a steaming, maggot-filled turd. There were the eyes, and the mouths, the teeth, the tongues, the tentacles, the pincers, the claws, the talons. It was the whole Bronx Zoo boiled down to a thick, viscous paste and then filled with lightning. Even the parts that looked like little more than fibrous snot moved and coiled with a terrible strength. Within a second, it rolled straight up the sea wall. Private Rhodes was standing right on the edge when it reared up like a wave cresting in reverse and then slapped its weight down on him. His helmet slammed down onto his bootlaces and most everything in between shot liquidly out the sides.

Mere feet away, Sergeant Dollins screamed, along with almost everyone else who could find their voice, and opened up with his Thompson. A slimy rope jerked him into a gaping mouth and for a second the Marines nearby could see his muzzle flash through the semi-transparent slime. Then the bulk coiled up and Sergeant Dollins was squeezed back out an aperture roughly the size of an egg, like the suppurating contents of a lanced boil. About half the guys in Dollins’ squad were now either running blindly or trying to get their Sergeant out of their eyes.

All the while, every Marine blasted away with everything he had. Bullets splashed into it and vanished with no more effect than firing into a lake. Hennessey was trying to seat a second drum magazine when he was jerked backwards off his feet. “Waddaminit! Waddaminit!” he screamed. Charlie Paskow didn’t wait a minute. Swinging Hennessey around by his equipment harness, Paskow dragged him stumbling down Water Street towards the boarded-up customs house at the corner of Elliot. Hennessey couldn’t believe what the hell he was doing. Why am I running? he wondered as he fled along the loading docks.

Behind Paskow and Hennessey the other Marines were scattering in every direction. Most weren’t fast enough. As the thing sucked Sergeant Miles into its obscene bulk, he pulled the pins on the two grenades on his belt. He died quicker than Lieutenant Cobb, who was being used by a tentacle to smash a military truck’s cab into junk.

Hennessey lost track of where he was for a second. For some reason, he thought he saw McVeigh put his .45 under his chin as he was being sucked into the monster. Then Paskow shoved him through the front window of the customs house. Inside was blackness, the floor a maze of broken furniture and coated with shards of glass. Paskow kept pushing Hennessey forward until they emerged out the back, onto the corner of Church Street. Hennessey looked over his shoulder back towards the docks. Paskow was right behind him, his eyes burning like magnesium. “Don’t look! Keep running!”

They were passing something like a churchyard when a shot from one of the second- or third-story windows kicked a piece of the cobblestones loose just a foot or two to their left. With no time to slow down, no time to determine where the shot came from, they ran straight for one of the abandoned office buildings on their left. Not even slowing to try the doorknob, Hennessey threw his shoulder into the darkly stained wood, which burst apart like a rotten log, spilling him inside onto the floor. He got up, took a step, and fell screaming into open air. He pictured twisted, rusty machinery rising out of the blackness, a dozen lethal points.

He was wrong, of course. Nothing waited but a stone floor. Hennessey landed extremely well, keeping his feet together and rolling forward. Even so, he could feel something stab his left ankle and he cried out as he rolled on his side.

From above Paskow yelled down, “Bob! Bob!”

“I’m okay, I think,” Hennessey added weakly, suddenly realizing that he couldn’t see his Thompson anywhere.

“Stay put. I’ll find the stairs.” Hennessey could hear Paskow picking his way over the creaking timbers above. Alone in the dark, he began groping for the submachine gun. His gloved hands ranged back and forth over the cold stone for what seemed like forever. Then, with trembling relief, he lit on the still-warm barrel and pulled it to him, hugging it like a lost child. For a moment, Hennessey almost sobbed his relief. Then he heard the movement.

Something was with him in the dark.

He backed up until he hit the wall, bringing the Thompson up to his hip, but there was nothing to see. Nothing but blackness. Even so, he caught that fishy smell again, pricking at his nose. “Charlie! Don’t come down here!”

“What?”

“There’s some of those things down here! Stay upstairs!” Hennessey tested the weight of the weapon and figured he had better than forty rounds left in the drum. Plenty for what he was going to try. Holding tight on the fore grip to keep the barrel low, Hennessey squeezed the trigger and swung the barrel in a long arc from left to right. Suddenly the cluttered basement was illuminated by the strobing muzzle-flash. Then the things started jumping and moving, scrambling from between the rotten crates and collapsed shelves. Hennessey swung the Thompson and hosed them down. First one, then another, then two more went down howling. Then nothing. Silence.

“Bob? Bob, are you okay?”

Hennessey felt dizzy with relief. “Sure. I’m fine. C’mon down.” To his right Hennessey could hear the stairs creaking under Paskow’s weight. After peeling off the exhausted drum, Hennessey replaced it with a thirty-round stick and began to pick his way through the rubble to the stairs. A moment later the room was bathed in white light by another parachute flare, gleaming through the Swiss cheese holes of the roof. Gaping craters in the floors above were plainly visible for the second it passed overhead. And so were the four bodies of the family Hennessey had slaughtered.

The mother and father had the signs. The bulging eyes, the fish-like mouths, the skin that seemed too dry. But the two kids—the girl maybe six, the boy just a toddler—they looked just fine. It was hard to tell, of course. Firing from the hip, Hennessey had caught each in the head with a whopping .45 round. “Ah Jesus!”

Paskow looked down at the scene just before the flare drifted away and took their light with it. “C’mon, we gotta go.”

“Jesus, Charlie, I fuckin’ killed ’em.”

“Nice shootin’.” Paskow grabbed Hennessey’s equipment harness and pulled him up the stairs. “Now move it!”

“But—”

“They ain’t people,” Paskow hissed. “They’re deviates. Sub-humans. Understand this, Bob, we ain’t Marines tonight. We’re exterminators. This town, and everyone in it…We’re gonna hafta burn it all.” Paskow looked positively gleeful at the prospect. “But first we gotta get out of here.” With that, Paskow pulled Hennessey up the steps and out a door onto Fall Street. To their left was the Manuxet River and the Federal Street bridge back into the south side of town.

All around them the operation was coming apart. Men ran every direction, screaming, firing their weapons at who knows what. At the intersection of Fall and Dock Streets, Paskow and Hennessey were nearly run down by a careening truck full of Marines. It took the turn onto the Federal Street Bridge rather poorly and slammed into the railing at about forty miles an hour. The driver shot out through the front window like a human cannonball, arching through the air, his arms pinwheeling until he slammed into the frozen Manuxet river with a crack that was part ice, part bone. The Marines on the truck fell over themselves pouring out the back.

Then there was a crash like thunder behind them. Six feet tall and spread across Dock Street like an enormous black mound of dough, the horror from Water Street rolled into the fish-packing plant five blocks away and splintered the loading docks like dry kindling. It was a freight train. An avalanche. A tidal wave. Hennessey was distantly aware he’d shat himself.

“Don’t look! Run!” Paskow screamed. On the bridge, Paskow stopped. “Waddaminit!” His iron grip brought Hennessey to a sliding halt. Then Hennessey saw it too. Downstream, past the ruins of the Fish Street Bridge was a second bridge, one linking both sides of the wharf across the Manuxet. The mountain of slime wasn’t crossing that bridge; in fact it was moving away. Someone down there had a pair of flamethrowers going. The long geysers of fire shot out and bathed the creature, driving it back against the fish-packing plant, collapsing the outer wall like something built out of a child’s blocks. The plant disintegrated as the thing rolled through its interior, smashing walls and support beams. It was coming their way now. Right towards their bridge.

“Fire,” Paskow hissed. “It don’t like fire! We gotta seal off this bridge with flamethrowers!” Whirling around, Paskow stopped and stared at two Marines stumbling out of the crashed truck. They were shrugging their flamethrowers off their backs and turning to run.

“You!” shouted Paskow. He let go of Hennessey’s equipment harness, sending him sprawling into the snow. “Get over here with those torches!”

“Fuck you!” screamed the ashen-faced kid, his acne scarlet against his snow-white skin. Paskow shot the kid right in the face. Paskow turned the .45 on the second Marine.

“Are your tanks full?”

He nodded furiously. Paskow shot him through the heart for good measure. Jamming the .45 in his belt, Paskow jerked Hennessey to his feet and hurled him towards the first flamethrower. “Strap that torch on!” Hennessey was weeping with exhaustion, but did as he was told. Meanwhile dozens of Marines raced past them, heading for the Arkham road and out of town. Out of Massachusetts if they could manage it. Fuck Innsmouth. Fuck Massachusetts. Fuck New England. No fucking way were they slowing down before they hit Tierra del Fuego.

Paskow snapped the chest buckle from the flamethrower’s harness into place and ran to the truck. He flipped up the canvas flap and began rummaging in the back. Hennessey was just shrugging the tanks full of liquid fire onto his shoulders when Paskow said, “Bob! Heads up!” Hennessey turned in time to catch a pineapple-sized white phosphorous grenade. Paskow tossed him two more. Then, shouldering a satchel charge, he craned his neck and looked back behind them; his pupils widened. “Move your ass, Bob!” Hennessey saw the rolling obscenity coming down Dock Street right towards them. It wasn’t alone. Right behind it, hopping and leaping around the fat, greasy bag of slime were more of the sea devils, barking and croaking. One carried a human arm as a club. And alongside them were men, men like Mr. Sergeant, carrying shotguns and rifles and cleavers and scooping up the weapons of the fallen Marines.

Paskow pulled the fuse pin from a second satchel charge and tossed it into the back of the truck. It landed right between the three cases of white phosphorous grenades and the six cases filled with bricks of TNT. “Runrunrunrun!” Paskow and Hennessey tore across the bridge with fifty pounds of jellied fuel sloshing on their backs. Just one hot fragment! Just one! was the only coherent thought in Hennessey’s head. As they reached the south end of the bridge, they peeled off to the right around the grimy Waite and Sons’ Restaurant, with its swinging placard showing a fish-head impaled on an enormous barbed hook. A moment later, Hennessey saw the searing flash of light and earth-shaking concussion send the placard airborne, flying over New Town Square.

The blast wave surged outward like an invisible wall of cement traveling at the speed of sound, trailing a cloud of debris that included head-sized cobblestones. Laying flat on their faces, their hands over their ears, Hennessey and Paskow would have been torn to rags if not for the thick walls of the Waite and Sons’ Restaurant. As it was, over a hundred yards away, they still felt the concussion suck the air out of their mouths and noses. When the wind subsided, Hennessey heard the townsfolk screaming, heard the fish-men braying and then a horrible unearthly keening, louder than the rest. They dragged themselves off the cobbles and emerged in Federal Street to find that most of the abandoned mill, which had been just yards from the truck, had disintegrated and its water wheel blown out of the ice. The Esoteric Order of Dagon was gone. The side of the building facing the explosion had smashed through the opposite wall, squeezing the shattered interior onto Federal Street. Flaming shards of its timbers lay all about amid far more magnificent fires: the three cases of white phosphorous grenades, with the assistance of the TNT and satchel charges, had spread their contents over most of the area in front of the north end of the Federal Street Bridge. Those made of bone and meat who hadn’t been disintegrated by the concussion had been showered with a downpour of burning metal; everywhere figures flopped amid the rubble, skin and clothing ignited by white-hot fragments like a thousand little suns.

The source of the keening revealed itself then, as the polymorphous horror emerged from the wreck of a nearby warehouse, a hundred mouths boiling out of its flesh amid blazing chunks of phosphorous. It rolled towards the river, crushing the faint life out of a dozen or so maimed and burning townsfolk. The faster it sped, the more the air whipped its coat of stars to new brilliance. The thing somehow knew it had to get back to the sea; it crashed into the ice and poured like lightning through the hole.

Unfortunately, phosphorus burns just as well with the oxygen in water as it does with the oxygen in air. The water under the ice began to boil.

Hennessey began laughing like a fool. It was so fucking beautiful. The whole north end of the bridge was an inferno. All along Dock Street blazing scarecrows that used to be men, and less wholesome things, ran back and forth trying to extinguish themselves. Some rolled down the embankment to dive into the river, its uniform sheet of ice now a broken tangle of bergs. “Burn! Burn, you sonzabitches! Burn!” Hennessey sang as he danced in a circle waving his arms, the nozzle of his flamethrower clattering against the cobblestones at his feet.

But then the groan of the rending ice brought him back.

“Light your torch!” shouted Paskow. Charlie’s eyes were still black and hot, and Hennessey dared not disobey. Cranking the ignition nozzle to full, he lit the blow-torch-like stream of gas off a burning fragment of the mill’s water wheel. Over the thick granite railing on the bayward side of the bridge, about forty yards from where they were, Hennessey could see a two-foot-thick sheet of ice being levered out of the river by a muscular pseudopod. The thing began flowing out onto the ice like a rope uncoiling in reverse. Glittering black eyes winked open across its steaming surface. Alone but for Charlie, not a single Marine in sight, Hennessey wasn’t even remotely scared. They burn, he thought gleefully. They burn and they scream! The fifty pounds of jellied gasoline on his back didn’t scare him anymore, either. He loved it.

Paskow ran to the railing’s edge. The shiny black thing was done shitting itself out of the hole it had punched. “I’ll get its attention,” he grunted. First, he pulled his .45 out of his belt and emptied the magazine at it. The bullets dimpled its plastic flesh with no effect other than to send it rolling towards them. They each uncorked a phosphorus grenade, Paskow barely breathing, Hennessey giggling like a girl.

“Wait,” murmured Paskow. The thing was at the river’s edge and rolling up the bank. Sweat stung Hennessey’s eyes.

“Closer,” Paskow hissed. At ten yards, Hennessey could see mouths and eyes rolling over the surface of its twenty-five-foot-wide amoeba-like surface.

The black tide hit the bridge supports and flowed upwards, grasping and reaching hungrily. “Now!”

Hennessey hurled his grenade after Paskow’s down into the flabby bulk and then ducked behind the bridge’s stone wall. The sizzling splash of phosphorous was followed by the hideous wail of a pipe organ made from burning men. Rising up to bring his flamethrower to bear, Hennessey could see tongues waving like snakes in dozens of mouths. Despite the phosphorous, the thing rolled forward. Some of those mouths were no longer screaming; instead, their teeth were bared in what could only be a grimace of hate. Hennessey cackled like a maniac as he hosed it down with blinding flame.

Like burning water, the jellied gasoline filled every open orifice. At first, the thing kept coming, stupid with hate and pain and wanting to kill the tiny thing that was hurting it. But suddenly it must have realized that it was not just hurting, it was dying. It hesitated in Hennessey’s shower for a second, before retreating under the bridge.

“Keep it under there!” Paskow yelled as he ran to the opposite side of the bridge. Paskow let loose a blast of fire a moment later. “It’s coming back your way!” The thing’s wailing peaked, hit an octave that was too human. Hennessey greeted it with flame the instant it poked out.

Then the shooting started. A stuttering fusillade of bullets peppered the bridge, knocking razor-sharp chips of masonry loose with their impact. Somewhere across the river, the freakish townsfolk were rallying to the defense of their aquatic angel. One slug missed the fuel hose on Hennessey’s flamethrower by about half an inch. Both Marines dropped to their knees.

“Did you see where it—oh fuck!” Paskow cut himself short. The white phosphorous grenade clipped to his belt was missing its spoon. It had been shot away in the hail of bullets. The fuse was lit on Charlie Paskow. With two grenades, a satchel charge of TNT, and at least forty pounds of gasoline on his back, it pretty much meant Hennessey was fucked, too.

Charlie stood up and, without even meeting Hennessey’s horrified gaze or uttering a word, vaulted over the side of the bridge. Neither the creature nor Charlie Paskow had time to scream.

Hennessey was thrown face down on the stones by the concussion. Twin fireballs rolled out from either side of the bridge, flashing the snow and ice into steam and blackening Hennessey’s white winter greatcoat. Forcing himself up onto his knees, his bones still ringing with the blast, Hennessey immediately thought, I hope Charlie’s okay. With shame and horror, he realized then that he was alone. No, not alone. Those fuckers who’d killed Charlie were out there somewhere.

Hennessey shrugged the tanks of fuel off his back and cast around for a discarded weapon. There were plenty to be had. Spotting a Lewis Gun that still had a magazine loaded, he pulled it to him by its barrel sheath. He checked the drum-pan magazine. Not jammed. Never even fired. He poked his head over the bridge’s upstream wall for a second. The shots came fast, from somewhere downstream. The Marsh Refinery. Hennessey scrambled to the opposite side of the bridge and hugged the wall. He poked his head up again and this time at least three rifles opened up on him. Still, the shots did little more than reveal their positions. The snipers were on the roof, no doubt huddled together for safety. Good, Hennessey thought warmly. Grouped nice and tight.

Hennessey crawled forward about ten yards and then came up again, this time with the Lewis Gun. He balanced the bi-pod the bridge’s stone railing as a bullet bit the masonry right in front of him. He had his sight picture and then he opened up. Hennessey’s first burst got him his range to the refinery’s roof, the second found the snipers’ roost. Then he poured it on. All three flopped like rag-dolls. One lost his weapon over the side.

More weapons opened up on his position from the black shuttered windows and doorways across the Manuxet. Hennessey had forgotten all about dying. He was too angry. Angry that these things had wiped out his platoon. Angry that he’d shit his pants with fear. Angry that Charlie was dead. Angry that he’d felt bad for killing the basement family of abominations. Hennessey wound his clock springs and went to work.

First, the one on the crumbling roof at the corner of Fall Street. Then the two down by the shore to the right. Then the one in the doorway nearly a hundred yards along Federal Street. A hunched thing broke for cover on the left and got about two hopping steps. Then back to Federal Street, where four of them tried to advance around the burning debris from the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Then another at the window a block over on Church Street.

Now they were running, turning tail and running. Just like Hennessey had minutes before. Running like women. But not from a monster. Not from a living mountain of shit that gobbled men and shrugged off bullets. No. They’re running from me! Hennessey thought. They’re afraid of me!

“Run!” he screamed, laughing. “Run!” He held the trigger down and chewed the rest of the magazine up in seconds. “Run, you fuckers!”

Somewhere he could hear a Browning machine gun chattering away. Turning back around, he felt a little disappointed to see the bridge filled with Marines, all of them firing past him and advancing by squads. All around him Marines were firing and charging forward. Suddenly two grabbed him by his numb arms and began to pull him back to the south bank.

Are we winning? he thought, and then blearily asked the question aloud to a Marine on his right.

“Jay’sus, lad!” the guy sounded like they’d just whisked him out of County Kildair. “If’n we aren’t, it’ll be no fault’a yore own. Who’dya think yar? Sah’gent Yark?”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“’Bout half the battalion saw you two on the bridge,” said a mustached Marine sergeant, grinning foolishly. “I heard the old man himself say you fellas looked like Horatius times two out there. He’ll want to see you after you’re fixed up.” Some kind of triage station had been set up behind the First National Grocery. Hennessey was gently lowered to the ground. “Congressional Medal of Honor, f’sure,” the grinning sergeant said. “You just sit tight and a corpsman’ll be ’long t’check you out, okay?” Hennessey could do little more than dumbly nod his assent. The night was passing like a blur. Someone came and looked him over, but Hennessey had no idea whether the guy was checking him for wounds or rummaging through his pockets. Sometime later he noticed that his face and neck were burned, and his greatcoat was actually smoldering. He leapt to his feet to shrug off the flamethrower before he exploded like a Roman candle, but suddenly remembered he’d ditched it back on the bridge.

Swaying on his feet, Hennessey could see that he was not alone in the square. It had become a sort of rally point for the battalion. Trucks were rolling in and out. Wounded and dead were being sorted in front of the Gilman Hotel. And there on the southernmost side, two Marines with trench guns were standing guard over twenty or so battered-looking townsfolk.

It only took a few seconds for Hennessey to cross the square to the prisoners. As Hennessey walked along the knot of men and women, he carefully studied each of the bloated, inhuman faces. The only thing he saw in their fat, bulging eyes was hatred. From the mother clutching a wailing brat to her fat breasts, to the men, tattered, bloodied, and bruised from the beatings the Marines had given them, all Hennessey saw was red-rimmed hatred. They didn’t hate the Marines for burning their temples and smashing their idols. They hated them for what they were: normal, clean, and human.

Hennessey didn’t want their hate. He wanted their fear.

He returned a few minutes later with a Thompson he got off a dead Marine at the triage station and killed them all. The two Marines who had been guarding the civilians were so shocked they almost let him load a second drum into the Thompson before they tackled him and wrestled the empty weapon away. Hennessey was cuffed and placed under arrest.

Major Walsh, the battalion’s commanding officer, was a bit disappointed that his nominee for the Congressional Medal of Honor was now a “baby-killing sonuvabitch.” But, as Hennessey heard one of the T-men explain to the Major, “How’re you going to court-martial the man when none of this ever happened and we were never here?”

Later Hennessey was taken under guard to the Battalion HQ outside Innsmouth. He sat and watched a mortar battery dump hundreds of shells onto the north side of town where things were still flopping and twisting in the rubble. Next a convoy of motor coaches arrived. Hennessey watched as Navy doctors carefully examined the captured townsfolk and directed them onto the waiting buses. Some people got to go on the buses on the right; others were sent to the left. To Hennessey the folks going to the left seemed a good deal more squamous.

Hennessey soon found himself joined by three other handcuffed Marines: a captain by the name of Houseman, a sergeant named Dylan, and a private who claimed his name was “Death.” The feeling of kinship was immediate and mutual. After the debriefing back at the Boston Naval Annex’s brig, Hennessey was reassigned to units of the 6^th Marine Regiment based in San Diego. He never again saw the men he’d spent the night handcuffed to in that truck. Except for one, decades later, at the Chosin Reservoir. That had been even colder than Innsmouth. Maybe the coldest place this side of Hell. Hennessey saw Private “Death,” this time sporting a gold oak leaf and quartering a Chinese soldier with an entrenching tool. For a second, recognition passed between them, but nothing was ever said. By the end of that day, the Chinese, like the monsters of Innsmouth, had learned to fear them.

And their fear was all he’d ever wanted.

* * *

“Sergeant Hennessey?” Levine thought the old man was dead. The way he started stuttering and then slumped over with that outrush of breath, Levine was sure he’d just had a coronary. He reached forward and grasped Hennessey’s stick-thin wrist to search for a pulse. As soon as he felt the bird-like bones, Hennessey jumped to life again and snatched his hand away as if the young Delta Green agent were made of red-hot coals. “I’m sorry!” Levine stammered. “Are you all right?”

The question tugged an involuntary and terrible giggle out of Hennessey. “Awl’right? Shit no! I’m not all awlright at all! How many more times I gotta go through that fucking nightmare with you?”

Nearly as soaked with perspiration as Hennessey, Levine glanced to Parker and noted the big Army Major’s nearly imperceptible nod. “I think this will be the last time, Sergeant,” Levine said. “We’ve got all we need, I think. You’ve been extremely helpful, and your government appreciates the service you’ve done us today.”

“And did for us back then as well,” Parker added flatly. That was about as many words as Levine had heard Parker speak at one time.

“That was it?” Hennessey looked more surprised than relieved. “You won’t be coming back?”

“No, sir,” Levine said as he moved to turn off the video camera.

“Are you sure, son? ’Cuz you know, I might remember more next time.” The voice went thin with desperate entreaty.

Levine turned and looked at the old gnarled root of a man coiled in the wheelchair in front of him and instantly recognized that he wasn’t the same man he’d spent the last four days with. That man was filled with hate and jealousy for the men who were still young enough to walk to the bathroom and have a regular bowel movement. This new man was filled with fear, fear that he would die alone in this VA hospital with no one to even notice.

“I’m…I’m afraid we have other duties waiting for us back in Washington.”

“That’s not the only time I saw them fish men, y’know,” Hennessey blurted out.

That stopped them cold. “I thought you said you never saw where they took the prisoners?”

“Not the prisoners,” Hennessey chattered. “Others. And others sorta like them. During the war in the Pacific I got picked up by a section of the OSS. I went on a dozen missions in the Marshalls, the Philippines, Manchuria, and even French Indochina. I saw stuff. I could tell ya all about it.”

“Really?” Parker’s voice sounded like the earth moving.

Hennessey took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Maybe you can answer me one question first? Why is the Navy coming to me for answers? Why ask me when you guys have a whole filing cabinet full of debriefings on this? I ain’t telling you anything I didn’t tell Naval Intelligence right afterwards. So why ask me all over again seventy years later?”

“Sergeant Hennessey,” Levine said evenly, “please believe me when I tell you that I truly wish I could tell you what this is all about. But it’s national security. You understand, don’t you?”

Hennessey apparently tried to look angry, but instead he just looked tired, old and tired. His head dangled at the end of his stumpy neck and he rubbed his eyes with his swollen-jointed fingers. “Maybe you can’t tell me who sentcha, but I can sure as hell tell you who you smell like to me. You smell like those OSS guys. Answered every question with ‘Sorry, that’s Delta Green clearance only.’ I know you ain’t gonna tell me whether I’m right or not, but before I tell you one more thing, there’s something I gotta know. And dammit, you owe me.

“I’ve done a lot of hard shit for my country. Forty-two years in the Marine Corps: Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, Chosin. And those are just the ones I can talk about, if there was even anyone around to listen. After forty-two years in a business where doing anything, including doing nothing, can get you killed, somebody or something should have punched my ticket. Instead I’m propped up in this fuckin’ chair, my legs next to useless, my back and fingers twisted with arthritis. Everything’s failing except my memories. From breakfast to bedtime, all I do all day is wait for my heart to stop. So I’ve paid my dues and done my duty thirty times over and you assholes owe me this answer before I say another word.

“You can’t make me talk. I’m too old to threaten. The only reason I’m still alive is that I’m still a good Catholic and suicide’s a one-way ticket to Hell, so killin’ me would be doing me a big fuckin’ favor. I’m too old to bribe, either. There’s nothing you can promise me that I’ve got the capacity to even enjoy anymore. So don’t even try.

“So if you want to know more, you’ll have to answer one question first.”

“What is it?” Levine asked.

The old bastard looked up. He looked terribly small and frail just then.

“Are we winning?” he asked.

Levine knew the answer to that question. Everyone in Delta Green knew the answer. Some more than others. Some wouldn’t admit it, but they knew. What the hell could Levine tell him? The truth? That rather than face what Innsmouth meant the government had chosen to ignore it? That when others formed a force to fight the war anew, they were disbanded, not once but twice? That all those precious files were either misplaced or destroyed? Could he really look the old man in the eye and tell him that the Delta Green Hennessey knew was now a pack of renegades having to beg, borrow, and steal to fight a war for the very survival of the human species, all because nobody wanted to believe in the things Hennessey fought seventy years ago?

Levine knew that he sure enough owed the old bastard. He’d fought the first battle in a war that raged behind the shadows even today. A war with no end in sight. Hennessey won the first battle and made the first advances. He’d beaten the ugliness back. And then some other assholes had pissed it all away.

Levine owed the old bastard a few restful nights, a few nights of sleep where he could lay his head down and know that he had not sacrificed in vain. That the world was safe. That Jerusalem was delivered from the infidel.

“We’re winning, Sergeant. Of course we are.”

•