Part V
With your belly full for the moment you are brought back to your full strength and your mind is sharp again. You realize you had left yourself in a dangerously weak position by waiting so long to feed. You swim more vigourously now, following the course of the river, for you sense the nearness of the ocean. The water is becoming brackish, a familiar salty taste from long ago.
And you sense something else too. Overhead are more flying machines; huge flying machines, smoothly descending to some point you judge to be near where the river opens into the ocean. Perhaps these are the means for you to find your true home.
You have put some distance between yourself and the sunken tugboat and you see this is good for already far behind you boats are converging on the drifting log-raft. The humans will begin searching for the missing boat. They may be stirred into activity sooner than you had thought. You are glad your stools, dense with partially digested bone and heavy with bits of the indigestible metal carried by your prey, do not float. You have left no other trace of your victims since you arrived in the river, but you expect, somewhere a day’s travel upriver from here, there are humans who are carefully examining all of the plentiful evidence you left of your size, nature and capabilities in your first joyful frenzy of killing, destroying and eating. Some of these humans are hunters, too. But others are prey. You consider their weapons and wonder idly to what extent they prey on each other.
You know you could extract a living from the humans in this city. By careful hunting, by exercising caution and foregoing some of the bloody displays of your triumph that is your birthright, you could hid in their midst and still eat well. When they finally spooked, like any herd will when enough of its calves and stragglers are taken, you could move on. Clearly, no place in this world would be very far from a source of human prey.
But that is not your way. You know your rightful place is at the top of any food chain you inhabit; it is contemptible to live like a scavenger, hiding in your weakness from the destructive power of the humans. If you cannot dominate this world, you must find the world where your own kind is dominant.
Overhead you see the lights of another huge aircraft descending and you see your judgment was correct- it is landing in a large flat open island at the mouth of the river. It is a place of many bright lights, long stretches of flat, open ground and huge buildings, but closer at hand you see something that piques your interest, for the moment, even more.
Up ahead and low on the river bank, in one of the few places still surrounded by bush and trees, you see the flickering light of a small fire and the silhouettes of a few humans sitting near it and passing something back and forth between them. You are pleased with your good fortune, for this is one of the few spots along the river where there are no lights or other human activity, and your body needs more food to execute the plan you are beginning to form in your mind.
You emerge from the water and stretch to your full height, reveling for a moment in your own fearsome power. The four humans around the fire leap up and stumble awkwardly, one actually falls into the flames. You smell that they are sickly, diseased, but you do not hesitate- they are prey and you will eat them even if they are the weakest of the herd. You bite one in half and spear the other two with your tentacle claws. The fourth one is scrambling up the bank and nearly reaches the top before you catch it and bite off one of its legs. It wails and struggles, but soon bleeds out and falls silent.
You quickly eat all four of the humans and drag some drift logs from the riverbank over the spot to obliterate your tracks. You know the blood will be visible to any that may come here in daylight, but you do not mind. You will be far away by then.
You have been observing the airport for some time. You have swum around the three sides of it that are open to water, avoiding a fourth side with its many roads and bridges and the narrow channel lit like daylight from the many streetlamps and buildings. It is fortunate that the tide is nearly high, for long mud-flats stretch out to seaward and you would have been in an exposed position as well as having to leave deep and obvious tracks had it been low water. Many different kinds of aircraft fly in and out of this place.
You examine them doubtfully, pressed flat in the tall sea-grass outside a flimsy mesh fence. You have an idea of the size of this world, having roamed it for countless ages and having known the shape and nature of its magnetic field and its gravity. You conclude that if any of these aircraft are capable of leaving this planet, they must only be the very largest.
And still you have doubts, but you must try. You sense it will be dawn soon, and the darkness is the only cover you will have. In this open, brightly lit place, it is little enough. But you know you must act while you still digest the nutrients from the last of your prey.
It begins to rain, sporadically at first, and then steadily. This good fortune gives you the final impetus to act. You tear a small hole in the fence and wriggle through, keeping low.
One of the biggest kind of the humans’ aircraft that you have seen here is taxing out from the sprawling mass of brightly-lit terminal buildings. A tall tower stands up among them and you can just see the tiny distant forms of the humans inside; they have a perfect vantage point. It should be easy to see you, but between the darkness, the rain and the bustling activity elsewhere in this busy place you believe you have a chance.
The huge aircraft has gained the runway and the air is filled with the roar as it runs up its engines. You creep forward, keeping a little behind it, like flanking a herd of brontosaurs in the long-ago time, getting closer before the final spring. The aircraft begins to move down the runway and you bolt or it with every bit of speed you can muster. It almost is not enough. Despite its huge size, the massive flying machine quickly accelerates to a speed greater than even the cars you had run down to get the human prey inside.
But by now you are galloping along underneath it, in the chaotic, screaming roar of the engines. Your jump upward and twist around in the air. Your tentacles fling upwards and the claws cut easily into the soft metal skin of the machine’s belly. You extend the barbs on the claws and try to pull yourself up, but the metal is too thin and soft for your weight and tears easily.
For a horrible instant you are being dragged by the machine as your claws cut long gashes into the soft skin of its underside, but suddenly the barbs catch on some solid framework and you can pull yourself clear of the ground just as the nose lifts. In another few seconds the wheels leave the ground and you cling to the aircraft’s belly, your tentacles stretched tight and your tail spike stabbed in to hold you in place while the dexterous claws of your fore and hind feet also one by one punch into the machine’s skin.
On either side of you the wheels of the aircraft retract into its body. In minutes the lights of the airport are far below you and then abruptly obscured by the layers of cloud. The machine is climbing steadily and you are being blasted by the thin, cold air, air colder than it was at the time of the great ice.
Your doubts that this machine could continue beyond the earth into the empty space that your mother told you lies between stars grow to a certainty. You realize the fragile, easily-torn skin of this machine is nothing like the light but incredibly strong material that covered the spaceship you explored with her all those eons ago. Your eagerness and inexperience has led you into a mistake like that of a hatchling on its first hunt.
You had not considered the damage that would be done to the machine by your entering it and having never been this high above the earth, you had not considered the difficulty of continuing to cling to the outside of the aircraft in the face of the incredible cold and the thinness of the air. You can absorb air from water, and you can go without breathing at all for considerable periods of time- indefinitely when you are hibernating- but right now, you need air to keep maintaining your grip on the belly of this aircraft, and it grows too thin to breathe, and too cold for your muscles to continue to work. You must act now.
You tear away pieces of the metal sk
in with the claws of your forelimbs, creating an opening between the heavier frames of the aircraft. There are hoses and wires like those things you thought were the veins on the very first machine you attacked only yesterday morning. Bunches of these hoses are running along the frames. You are careful not to damage them as you release your tentacle claws and pull yourself up into the hole; you know they are very much like the veins of an animal and you could easily kill this flying machine of the humans by tearing them out. Above you is a flat barrier, and you can feel the vibrations of humans walking around on it. It is not despair you feel. Such emotions are outside of your kind’s ability to experience, but you feel like you have run hard only to let your prey escape.
You are alive. You have done much, and you have learned much. But you have underestimated what would be needed to find your way through the vastness of space to the home world of your kind. You know now you are stuck here on this planet that once was your own private game preserve and your power has been usurped by these weak, cunning bipeds that emerged while you slept for ages in your cavern. It is the closest thing to defeat that you have ever felt.
But you can sense there are many humans just on the other side of the barrier. Your frustration gives form to rage. It would be just like in the large vehicle that was full of them. They are trapped in here. There is nothing that can oppose you. You will feed. You will thrill to the blood-glut frenzy, slay them indiscriminately, fill your belly with them and then kill this flying machine of theirs.
You punch through the ceiling above you and an unexpected blast of warm air explodes in your face. The warm wind coming from inside the aircraft is even stronger than the bitterly cold wind outside and scraps of paper, clothing and debris of all kinds whip at your face, but it makes tearing the cabin floor open almost effortless.
The wind from inside the machine is so strong it even caries some of the humans with it. One is flung right into your jaws and another bounces off of you and then off of the framework of the aircraft’s structure and is sucked out the hole in the bottom and vanishes.
You rotate one of your visual sensors down to look at the human that was hurled by the wind into your mouth. It struggles desperately, caught on your teeth. It still tries to grab on to the edges of the hole in the cabin floor, as if there were some hope that it could escape you. You recognize the expression on its little face, the flaring of its beady eyes in uncomprehending terror and pain, the little mouth with its stubby plant-eater’s teeth stretched wide in what would be a scream if anything could be heard above the howl of the escaping air from the cabin and the whistling roar of the engines outside. You gently compress your jaws until you feel its blood squirting warmly up into your mouth. You bite down and sever off the best chunk of its body and spit the rest, to be carried away by the wind out the hole. Then you pull the rest of your bulk up and into the passenger cabin.
It is a space much like a longer and wider version of the big vehicle where you feasted on the trapped humans. Shrieks and screams can vaguely be heard amongst the wind and engine noise. The humans are in a total state of terrified panic, and hardly any of them have even noticed you yet. But once you pull yourself up out of the hole and stand on the fragile cabin floor with your back almost pressed to the ceiling they begin to realize what is happening. You see their little faces transformed into an even greater extremity of terror. It pleases you.
You begin whipping your two shoulder tentacles around, the cutting blades and their retractable barbs fully extended, slashing at the helpless panicking creatures. Blood sprays everywhere, drawn in clouds of red mist to the gaping hole in the cabin floor. You lurch through the aircraft delighting in the fear and pain of your victims. You can smell their fear, their blood and urine, see the madness of utter calamity in their eyes.
You stab, cut and disembowel your prey two and three at a time as they struggle pathetically to get away. Your tentacles and tail spike and the claws of your limbs create a swath of pain and death, occasionally tearing apart chunks of the aircraft’s interior or punching through its skin as you heedlessly cripple and slaughter. You are hindered only slightly by the rows of seats, which you can easily tear out of your way, seats which nonetheless impede the temporary escape of the prey.
You maim some of them, catch others in your jaws and swallow large hunks of their bodies and limbs whole. You are lost in the joy of carnage and the blood-glut, your jaws gnashing and crunching through bone and flesh, driving the screaming, wailing prey before you. Just like when you feasted on them in the bus, they are bunching up in one end of the aircraft, a mass of struggling flesh almost like a single beast.
You feel the aircraft tilting and yawing, the roar of the engines surging and falling off erratically. Somewhere up ahead at the forward end of the machine the humans who operate it are struggling to maintain control. There will not be much time. You sense that the aircraft, for all its size, is delicately built. It is an easier machine to kill than the helicopters that attacked you. You open your gaping jaws and gorge upon the humans, the weak and easy prey, snapping them in half swallowing others practically whole Your belly distends with a full load of meat until you are unable to eat more. Yet still there are masses of them trying to escape. You turn aside and in one convulsive movement vomit a large portion of the contents of your stomach and dive back in to the wretched struggling mass of doomed flesh to fill it again with these despicable creatures that dared challenge your supremacy.
By this point you feel almost weightless. The aircraft is nearly in free fall and you hear the rending of metal as it begins to break up in the air. Your belly full again, you curl yourself into a protective ball and await the impact.
The machine disintegrates round you as it slams into the water at terrific speed. But your heavy armoured hide protects you and in an instant you are swimming freely and effortlessly away from the sinking debris. Large chunks of the airplane impact the water above you and sink around you as you swim away.
You sense the great depth of the ocean; remember it from ancient times when you sought prey here too. You sense there is still large prey to be had in the sea, although nothing like what it was once. You could hunt here though, there would be prey enough, thick-blubbered prey that you could gorge on. And by careful technique you could hunt the humans too, venture ashore and take a few and then vanish. The thought pleases you.
But for now you feel the satisfaction of a full belly, a belly earned in a courageous and fierce exploit of hunting. You know you cannot return to the cave under the lake, but here in the freedom of the sea you know you can evade the humans. You can find other places to go to ground and hibernate should the time come, but you think now perhaps you will stay awake. For you are beginning to realize the nature of the changes that have been taking place in your mind and in your body since you have reawakened.
Inside you a transformation is taking place. You sense the division of cells, the creation of a being apart from you and yet, for the present time, still a part of you. Like your mother before you millions of years ago, your body is preparing to bring forth an exact replica of you, exact replicas of her and the ones that went before her. You know instinctively this is so, and yet this time within you, you can sense a difference, as it happens with your kind from time to time. This time there is more than one. You will spawn several of your kind into this world. A hostile world which you will have to win back from the weak and cunning creatures that have stolen it.
The End
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