Clickers III (3 page)

it is Tony does. Rick got even more famous. And I’m here, on this beautiful island, doing what I love. We all lived happily ever after.

Except that they hadn’t lived happily ever after. She knew this, deep down inside. None of them had escaped unscathed.

Richard had been happy for a couple months. Then, one night, his wife and their adopted daughter were killed by a drunken driver. The accident had happened only a mile away from the new home they’d just moved into. The other driver rear-ended them at sixty miles per hour, slamming their car into a bridge abutment. The airbags didn’t deploy. Richard’s wife was ejected from the car and died instantly. Their daughter passed away while en route to the hospital. Two weeks after the funeral, Richard had checked himself into a hospital. He hadn’t come out since.

Jennifer had no idea what had happened to Tony. He’d vanished. That, in and of itself, didn’t bode well. She could imagine several different scenarios accounting for his disappearance, each one more sinister than the last.

Rick’s press junket continued—but probably not in a way that he would have preferred. Within a year, he’d begun a very public and very grim slide. His fall from grace—the angry outburst during his
Rolling Stone
interview, his arrest for drunken driving, his subsequent arrest for cocaine possession, the fist fight with some paparazzi, a second fist fight with some people at a horror convention where Rick was Guest of Honor, and the public accusations from his publisher regarding missed deadlines and breach of contract had all been plastered across the tabloids and gossip websites.

And then there was Livingston. He’d become President of the United States of America. How bad could that be? Well, as it had turned out, very bad indeed. The Republican National Committee had swayed public opinion enough that Congress officially investigated allegations that the Livingston Administration had engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the real reason behind President Tyler’s death. That storm passed, with no wrongdoing found and no credibility to the accusations and internet rumors. But then it was discovered that Livingston had signed an executive order to detain the remaining key members of Tyler’s administration, on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, fraud, and embezzlement. Former Advisor to President Tyler, Donald Barker, was taken into custody and imprisoned at an undisclosed location. The ensuing uproar had dominated the headlines for most of the last year. The stress showed on Livingston’s face. He hadn’t been a spring chicken when he accepted the nomination. Now, he looked positively ancient. Jennifer doubted he’d last the rest of his term, let alone long enough to run for reelection.

As for herself, well, she was just fine, wasn’t she? She’d come through the whole ordeal unscathed, unless you counted post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic depression, an increased reliance on alcohol and prescription medication, no social life, general malaise, and an extreme aversion to marine life—the latter of which made her occupation quite interesting.

The birds shrieked louder, disrupting her ruminations. Jennifer opened one eye, and was surprised to see that it was now dark. She sat up, frowned at the fourth and fifth crabs scuttling past, and then brushed sand from her hair and arms and the back of her neck. She’d have to get back soon. The others would be worried about her.

Jennifer had come to the island not only to escape the past and reinvent herself, but because it was the first scientific find in a long time that actually excited her. When the word first broke that remnants of an ancient primitive people had been discovered on the South Pacific island of Naranu, Jennifer hadn’t paid attention to the story. Paleontologists found the artifacts at the bottom of a cliff located deep within the island’s jungle—faces similar to the famous figures on Easter Island—carved out of stone, with eyes, nose, mouth and teeth all detailed. But mixed in with them were other carvings. Some bore a striking resemblance to the Dark Ones. Another depicted a hideous, hulking creature with the body of a man and the face of a squid. Carbon dating placed the artifacts at forty to eighty thousand years old. Further study of the island had unveiled over three dozen marine and tropical species that had previously been thought extinct—everything from frogs to worms to fish. As a journalist for
National Geographic
had referred to it, Naranu was like “the Garden of Eden.”

The scientific community had converged on the island. In addition to Jennifer’s team from the National Aquarium, scholars, scientists and researchers from universities and research centers across the globe had joined the rush. Jennifer had made friends with several of them—Dr. Edward Steinhardt, director of Paleovertebrates at UCLA, and doctors Susan Ehart and Wade Collins, leading researchers in human prehistory from the University of Michigan.

Finished brushing the sand from her body, Jennifer stood up. As she did so, she heard a strange noise. It sounded like the chattering bark of a dolphin, but it was louder than the surf. Indeed, it was louder than the screeching gulls still circling overhead. She turned slowly, glanced down at the beach, and gasped.

The beach was alive with a variety of sea life. Dolphins, fish, crabs, and other aquatic life forms flopped and scrabbled in the sand, struggling farther inland. She glanced out at the ocean and saw more creatures beaching themselves in a desperate effort to flee the water. Despite all of her years in the field, Jennifer had never witnessed a beaching as it occurred. She’d always arrived on the scene in the aftermath. And she had certainly never seen an event like this on such a massive scale. Before now, the largest stranding Jennifer had ever witnessed was on Manila Bay in the Philippines when a pod of thirty-seven dolphins had beached themselves. The scene had been horrific and heart-breaking, but even that paled in comparison to what she was now witnessing. Each time the surf crashed into the shore, the waves delivered more marine life. She heard a great braying honk and a large black hump rose out of the water—a whale. The creature heaved its great bulk forward and then lay still as the waves receded around it.

“My God…”

Jennifer supposed that the dolphins and the whale could be reacting to some underwater disturbance—a severe change in temperature or an earthquake, perhaps. Since both were mammals, she knew that their ears were sensitive to large changes in underwater pressure. If something happened to damage their eardrums, it could disorient them, causing them to float up to the surface and beach themselves. But that didn’t explain the hundreds of other sea creatures that were doing the same thing.

Jennifer glanced to her left and right, and saw that the scene was being played out all along the shore. As far as she could see in each direction, the ocean’s population was suddenly heading for land en masse. The wind shifted and she could smell them. Worse was the noise—the cries of the dolphins and whales, the screech of the birds, the patter of crabs running past her (the crustaceans’ numbers now ran in the hundreds), and the strange sounds the fish made as they flopped on the wet sand and struggled to breathe the suffocating oxygen.

Gaping, Jennifer put her hands in her hair and pulled. She barely felt the pain. She stared at the distressed marine life, unable to turn away. Then she did the only thing she could think of—she began screaming at the top of her lungs for help. If her co-workers shouted in response, Jennifer couldn’t hear them. The cacophony from the beach was too loud. But soon enough, she saw figures rushing towards her from the direction of the research station. She shouted again, frantically waving for their attention.

The first two people to arrive on the scene were Paul Phillips, an expert on polytheistic gods of the South Pacific, and his research assistant Lawrence Stine. Both hailed from Oxford University. Phillips was pompous, belligerent, and quite often said things to deliberately provoke in an attempt to garner more attention for himself. His assistant blindly echoed whatever nonsense the doctor proffered, seemingly having no genuine thoughts or theories of his own. Jennifer loathed both men, but at that moment, she was happy to see them.

“Help,” she shouted a third time, pointing at the beach.

Phillips and Stine stared at her almost contemptuously. Then their gaze turned to the shore. They paused. Their eyes widened. Their jaws went slack.

“Dear God,” Phillips gasped. “What in the world…?”

“They’re beaching themselves,” Jennifer said, annoyed that she had to state the obvious.

“I can see that. But why?”

“Could be a tsunami,” Stine suggested, staring at the mass of flopping, struggling bodies on the sand.

Jennifer shook her head. “No. Look at the ocean. The tide isn’t rushing back out the way it would before a tsunami. And there have been no indications of earthquakes on the monitors. If there had been, we’d have heard. This is something else.”

More staff and researchers arrived, attracted by her cries. Each of them expressed dismay as they spotted the beaching. Then, almost moving as one, they hurried across the sand, and moved among the creatures. Some of the researchers cursed. Many were overcome with stunned silence. A few wept, especially when encountering the dolphins, that chattered at them in an almost pleading tone.

“Jen!”

She turned at the voice, and saw Dr. Edward Steinhardt trudging toward her. He wore wading shoes on his feet, and his wet pant legs were rolled up to his knees. His long, graying hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His face was slate grey, and his expression was one of shocked disbelief. Jennifer ran to him.

“Are you okay?” Edward asked. “Susan, Wade and I were sitting on the veranda, playing cards and drinking margaritas, when we heard you cry out.”

She nodded. “I’m fine. I just…what can we do?”

“I don’t know. This is entirely out of my realm of experience.”

The surf rushed in, lapping at their feet and ankles. As it slowly receded out again, it deposited a layer of white foam and a school of tiny, flopping fish. Wincing, Jennifer stepped backward, trying to

avoid the unfortunate creatures.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” Jennifer repeated. “Why are they doing this, Ed?”

“I don’t know. As I said, it’s not my area of expertise. I’ve never heard of a beaching on this large of a scale. I suppose an earthquake could be the culprit. Or perhaps a predator?”

Jennifer’s stomach fluttered. Before she could respond, Susan Ehart and Wade Collins walked over to them. Both seemed excited.

“There’s a shark over there!” Wade pointed. “It’s just lying there in the surf, snapping at anyone who gets too close. What the hell is this? What’s going on?”

“We don’t know,” Ed told him. “Right now, all we can do is—”

A scream cut him off. All four of them turned towards the ocean. Dr. Phillips and Stine were waist-deep in the surf. Both men were frantically pointing farther out to sea. The group on the beach followed their directions. Jennifer’s stomach fluttered again.

CLICK-CLICK…CLICK-CLICK…

“No.” Jennifer clenched her fists so hard that her fingernails dug into her palms. “Oh no, no, no…”

Rising from the water was a pickup truck-sized Clicker. Seawater streamed off its carapace. A lean-muscled Dark One sat astride the monster, riding it like a beast of burden. The Clicker raised its pincers and clacked them together loud enough to be heard over the roaring waves, distressed marine life, and sudden shrieks of terror from the group assembled on the beach. The Dark One on its back hissed. The lizard-man’s tongue flicked the air.

Wade stumbled backward. “Is that…?”

“Yes,” Jennifer whispered. “It is.”

“Oh, my God.”

Four more Clickers rose up behind the leader. Each of them also bore a Dark One on its back. The lizard-like figures wore armor made of coral and shells, and carried long tridents and other weapons. During the last invasion, Jennifer had seen them wield similar deadly implements. Compared to then, however, these new arrivals seemed almost empty-handed.

This isn’t an invasion force,
she realized.
They aren’t here for us—or at least, they weren’t originally.

The sea boiled as yet more of the creatures surfaced. There were Clickers with and without riders. The smallest was the size of a cow. The biggest was nearly two-stories tall. One of the latter clutched the carcass of a whale calf in its pincers. More Dark Ones rose up with them, striding ashore with confidence, staring at the humans. Their demeanor seemed surprised, but it quickly turned to contempt.

I was right,
Jennifer thought.
Judging by their reactions, they weren’t expecting to see us here.

Jennifer could smell the briny stench wafting off the Clickers’ shells and hear their claws tapping together as more emerged from the ocean. Venom dripped from the stingers on the end of their long, segmented tails. The Dark Ones hissed and shouted in their own guttural language. One of them pointed at the humans with a long talon-tipped finger, opened its mouth, and shook with rage.

“Run,” Jennifer urged her friends. “Run like hell!”

Susan, Ed and Wade didn’t move. They stared at the monsters, perhaps too afraid to run. Or maybe too mesmerized.

Phillips scampered backward, but tripped over Stine. Both of them fell over. The waves crashed over them. A Clicker surged forward, towering over them and waving its claws. Then, with one quick movement, it seized Stine with its pincers and began to squeeze. Bones cracked audibly and blood began to well.

“Paul,” the hapless assistant shrieked, his voice rising several octaves, “help me! Oh Christ, it’s got me!”

Ignoring him, Phillips scampered out of the way of the monster’s other claw, narrowly avoiding it. Stine turned red, then purple, and then red again as his captor sliced him in half at the abdomen. His lower torso splashed into the water. The sea foam turned crimson. Stine’s upper half was flung aside. Amazingly, the hapless scientist was still alive and conscious. He wailed as he soared through the air, and was silenced only when he splashed back into the water. Seconds later, his upper torso emerged from the waves again, this time in the grip of yet another Clicker. Stine’s head lolled and his mouth worked silently as the beast cleaved the rest of him in two.

Screaming, Phillips clambered to his feet and started to run, but another Clicker speared him through the chest with its scorpion-like tail. Phillips glanced down at the tip jutting from his chest. His expression was one of disbelief. Blood welled from his mouth as he gasped.

Jennifer knew what would happen next. She turned away, tugging at Susan and Wade as Phillips began to squeal, but Susan and Wade refused to move. They stood motionless, transfixed by what was occurring. Reluctantly, Jennifer turned around and watched as the Clicker’s tail pumped more poison into its victim. Phillips’ skin bubbled and steamed. Huge blisters appeared all over his body. Then