As It Was in the Beginning

At the stroke of midnight, a mirthless silence settled over the shoreline. 

Shadowed figures came out of the water, in ones then twos then dozens. They possessed two legs, two arms, the size of a man and the eyes of a deep-water fish, but that was all they had in common. 

Some stood straight, some hunched under grotesque backs, some loped on all fours. A few were covered in patches of spines and brandished wicked needles for teeth, while others sprouted tentacles where a man’s face would be and wore scales all over. 

They were but heralds for a greater horror, which only now followed in the wake of its children. If the creatures before, however repulsive, could still be connected to the idea of man, then what came after was utterly removed from humanity.

At first, the sole sign of its passage was a shimmering glow in the water like green oil, drifting inexorably towards the spot where the medal sank and swallowing the smaller glow before stopping short. 

There it stayed, waiting on a sign known to nothing but itself, and for an eternal moment the breath of the present-day was stifled by the antediluvian. There was not a single sound, but for the waves further out. 

Then it breached the surface in all its terrible glory. And the Thing moved over the face of the shallows.

***

Ema emerged from her troubled dreams into a waking nightmare. All of a sudden, she found herself on a beach with water up to her feet, surrounded by horrors that should have caused her to faint. 

But she didn’t. No matter how much she wanted to flee with her legs, they would not move. No matter the voice inside her screamed, she could not open her mouth. It screamed all the louder when the Thing revealed itself. 

It came closer to her, not so much walking as gliding, until her every involuntary breath burned with the overwhelming stench of a thousand fathoms and a thousand-thousand years, and the unclean whiteness of its belly and glistening of spikes along its flanks cut her eyes like a knife. 

It stopped just shy of her, and looked down. Its eyes. The Thing’s wet yawning eyes opened up into a darkness deeper than all light in the universe could ever dispel. Ema’s heart beat faster and faster. It inched closer and closer, reaching for her with tenuous limbs. 

They almost did, when the Thing did something utterly inexplicable.

It flinched. 

Its terrible eyes bulging all the more, it reeled back its limbs with frightful speed. Over the consuming terror, some part of her thought– unbelievably– that what she saw in the recoiling Thing’s eyes was shock.

***

“Five minutes to shot.” Wolf whispered into the mic. No reply. 

No wings on the big guy. It was almost the size of an elephant, but if that statuette was any indication then this wasn’t the real head honcho. In the back of his head he knew they had a reporting name, but in the heat of the moment he preferred to call ‘em as he saw them: a sicko’s idea of a cross between fish and man. Fishmen. 

Whatever new name the bean-counters gave them, they were the old enemy. They and their boss would be a good catch, if he could pull it off.  

The plan was simple. Cut off the head. Get the civvies out. Blow the beach to kingdom come. 

There was little room for error; once things kicked off, he wouldn’t be able to make adjustments to the naval artillery. As far as their “borrowed” ship knew, the island was abandoned, and the scheduled bombardment was all just a training exercise.

Not so much for Wolf. It was a tight script, and any deviations ran the risk of catching frag. That wasn’t to mention the mob of monstrosities that’d be doing their level best to turn him into a smear on the sand. But the old enemy were still creatures of flesh, creatures that bled. And he knew how to make them bleed. 

He shifted in the slightest. The fish were already well into the net, but the opener was running late. His hands were starting to get clammy in their gloves. As the Thing crept up to Ema, reaching out to the girl with its feelers, his finger tightened on the trigger in spite of himself. 

Then, Theo heard what he was waiting for. The brittle buzzing was not for long lost against the sound of waves before it rose to the squall of a massive hornet. The timing was perfect; the Thing was peeling away from the girl when the drone slammed into it.

 

The quadcopter drone connected with its target at a modest speed of forty miles per hour.

Enhancing its equally modest bulk was an assembly bolted to the bottom. Its main body was a cylinder; an irrigation pipe from a deserted field. A thick aluminum disc formed the front end, made from cutting up and pressing the bottoms of scrapped cans. This is what made the drone deadly.

For when the three inch standoff fuze– copper wire ripped out of an abandoned house– hit a solid surface, the grenade-sourced detonator set off the three pounds of C-4 explosive packed behind the disc. The confined explosion sought the path of least resistance: forwards, collapsing the disc into a solid slug.

Propelled in an instant to over two-thousand meters per second, the aluminum slug could punch through a couple inches of steel. Markedly inferior penetration compared with other materials, but it had a nasty secondary effect the others didn't: On impact, the aluminum ignites, bursting into sheets of silvery fire even as it bores into the target.

EFP. An explosively formed penetrator– a very bad day for anything short of a tank. The guerrilla marriage of robotics and energetics blew into a million pieces, and the Thing’s elephantine head was engulfed in billowing smoke and flame.

The second the big guy went down in a bigger splash, Wolf went over the top; sliding down the berm and hitting the ground running, straightaway to Ema and the other civvie. 

Speed was their security– not least because there were at least a couple dozen slimy fishmen scattered all over, but there was also a rain of naval arty incoming in five. No time for anything sophisticated.  

The lesser creatures were still in a state of shock over the attack from an unexpected quarter, their eyes drawn to where their master lay looking like some monstrous beached whale, the surf breaking against its massive body. 

They bleated and bayed at intervals as he ran up against the first of them, with twenty meters left. It stood there, still distracted, but there was no way to slip past. 

Wolf needed an on-the-spot solution, and the Howa Type 89 in his hands belched out its all-tungsten, 110-grain answer. The rounds pounded against fishman flesh, sounding like an sickening squelch in the silence as they shredded its insides. 

The creature crumpled into the dirt, and Wolf’s less-than-professional curiosity was sated; the Type 89’s twist-rate was fine with the special 5.56 after all. That was a nice grouping of shots. He quickened his pace; even with a suppressor, the noise of the shots would no doubt alert its buddies nearby. Sure enough, the braying was coming in thick and fast now.

By the time he reached Ema, the unidentified man had gotten her out of the water, and they were huddled together under the sagging eaves of a crumbling house. He figured that this must be the father. 

After a big fright on their part as he approached and was briefly mistaken for another horror, they saw his weapon and the human eyes through his balaclava. He told them that they were getting out of here, and waved them urgently to follow. Already, the other fishmen were wising up; with his civvie charges in tow he ran into another one before coming out of an alley. 

The creature saw them and reacted instantly; it stretched its arms about in an obscene dance and croaked loose syllables of power that hurt the ears. The air was charged with that familiar odor of burning rubber, and a sheet of living lightning leapt from its webbed fingers.

Wolf positioned himself between the civvies and the attack. It closed the distance in a second, a wall of crackling color filling his vision. Wolf levelled the rifle, found his point of aim, and waited; just before the lightning hit, the civvies screamed. It crawled right up to his feet, reaching for him hungrily– 

And sputtered out into sparks, then to nothing, and he had a clear shot. The creature’s gaping face could never bear expression, but Wolf thought that he could see surprise in its eyes as he pulled the trigger.

Tracers chased each other down the alley as he racked up his second kill, walking the fire up until the creature’s head popped like a melon. Not a second sooner, the Type 89 seized up, failing to eject the last round fired. 

Shit. 

There was another one coming. Wolf rushed to swap to his secondary– 

BOOM.

Half-hidden around the corner, the earth leapt up in a hissing fountain. A smoking shard streaked past, spiriting the creature’s head away with it. Debris tumbled in the blast wave, knocking the body down into the dirt, and the ruined house next to them gave up its last standing walls. Choking dust limited visibility to a few feet before settling. 

That was the ranging shot. The arty was right on schedule, but the trouble was that Wolf and the civvies were supposed to be a safe distance by now. He recalled the fire plan: contact-fuze, airburst next, then something special. That was when they really wanted to be out of here. Another round came screaming in, caving in a roof about a block away. 

Expertly clearing the jam as he went, he urged his civvies on faster. Under cover of the intensifying bombardment, they were able to pick their way through the ruins and reach the woods on higher ground without further encounters. 

But that was the extent of their luck– the creatures were already rallying, far faster than he counted on, and a number had managed to come around their flank. None used magic; now they knew they had to close in, flopping and hopping between the trees to gore him with claws and teeth, and Wolf answered with fire. 

It was the devil’s own time keeping the civvies safe. He had just staved off the first assault when Maho, who had eschewed her usual office style for outdoor wear, finally turned up.

Late for once, but none too sooner. Behind, the gunners had switched to airburst, drumming up dull blossoms of shrieking shrapnel above the village, occasional stray pieces pattering near their position. The guns cut out briefly, and Wolf threw the civvies then himself to the deck.

There was an enormous boom that seemed to tear several seconds out of their lives.
It sounded like the entire beach had exploded; “something special” had arrived.
Multiple rounds, simultaneous impact.

They got up. Maho led the way to the boat, and Wolf looked back at the beach before leaving. 

Even before his mind could process the sight he knew instantly that something was missing.  Something massive, no longer where he’d last seen it. The Thing was alive. The EFP had only knocked it down, and now it was up and about, somewhere. That definitely flipped the script.

More bad news. Not even a few minutes after they set out, he could already hear a wholesale flopping in the woods just beyond visual. 

That could only be the surviving creatures massing for another try, when his group still had a sizeable clearing to cross– a dried-up marsh– before they reached the exfil. If the fishmen succeeded in heading them off there out in the open, they would tear him and company to shreds.

Even now, they came through the trees in twos and threes, slowing them down in nickel-and-dime passes that were adding up. In the thickest brush he had to flush them out with grenades, but his supply was dwindling fast. To Theo, it was crunch time. No avoiding a change of plans now. 

Maho had come through with the drone, come through with their link-up, and now she would have to come through for the civvies.  

“Fuck it. You three, unass this fucking place!” Wolf shouted after blowing a grenade uncomfortably close, using English before he realized it. He forced himself to switch to Japanese. 

“Scratch the plan. When you reach the boat, you gotta get to that warship. It’s your only chance.” he said quietly as he drew in with Maho. 

Wolf handed her his pistol mags, which she accepted in wordless agreement. Her face was chilly as ever, but he detected a familiar trembling beneath it. 

“Even if I draw them off, some will probably still end up your way. Keep your head on a swivel.”

It looked like his counterpart had something to say, but all she did was nod, and kept on moving. Wolf counted them as they passed him: Maho, Ema, and Ema’s father. Ema’s face of unbridled fear burned itself into Wolf's mind. 

Wolf could only spare another glance at their fleeing backs when he was forced to let loose at an oncoming fishman. Before the creature could retreat into the brush, he caught it square in the neck, and it fell writhing. Sprinting over before it could get up, Wolf hit its legs with a burst of fire.

It was his turn at distraction, and he knew just the trick. 

He came up to stand over the still-live fishman. That was when another presence penetrated the edge of his awareness, overshadowing all others. Wolf looked into the thick darkness where the Thing was.

Are you watching?

Wolf drew his knife, and the light of the moon danced on its finely honed edge. 

He smiled a savage smile.

***

For Ema, the flight from that nightmare beach was a disjointed collage from the eyes of someone else. She had control over her body back, but at first she moved like none of it was real. None of it could possibly be real. 

It was the growing awareness of fear that brought the reality of it all home: fear of being plunged so suddenly into this situation, fear for her father, the fear of being caught by these monsters.

After the soldier split off, they were still being chased; horrible frog-like faces dipping in and out of the darkness of the woods as they pounded down the trail, as if taunting them. Her every scrunching step on the forest litter sounded so small. Her clogs were chafing her feet an angry red, but she kept on running. 

The lady in jeans who was running just ahead of them kept on firing. All of a sudden, one of the horrors jumped out the woods from the opposite direction, reaching for her–

***

Maho’s every breath burned. She had given up trying to keep her sights steady, and fired in the general direction of their pursuers whenever they revealed themselves. With how close they dared to hound them now, it had been enough so far. 

Then she heard a cry of alarm on her other side. She made to shift her fire, when something from the direction she’d just turned away from slammed into her hard. Maho fell to the ground with a thud, and heard loathsome croaking that might have been monstrous laughter. There was the odor of burnt rubber in the air. 

They’re playing with us.

With that thought, despair leaned against Maho's chest. There was no more refuge to be found in her head, which felt like it was getting peeled open. It would have been bliss to surrender, but a sobbing sound brought her attention back to the civilians. Both of them looked to her. 

She was out of options. Maho stood up. Her arms quavered as she fumbled over a magazine change, looking this way and that. 

There– a horror flashing out of the forest. Wordlessly, she begun the invocations to open her mind’s eye. Before the creature could reach her, she locked its terrible eyes with hers, and everything was darkness.  

Her first recall was of that madman in the warehouse, and the black pit that had shaken her. But here that void was only a front; behind it was an alien will that humbled her own, and behind that, one even more humbling. But both paled to the immensity of the One behind them all, where the tenuous slobbering thread drawn through these creatures ended. 

It dwarfed them like a mountain dwarfs a pebble, and its unthinking spasms alone would have swallowed her whole. She could not hold on for more than an instant until she fled before that absolute terror of the deep, but that instant was all she needed. 

The creature was paralyzed by her audacious attempt at contact, and Maho levelled her pistol. It was the first clear target she’d had tonight, and she poured fire into its disgusting body.

“Watch out!” came a cry from behind. 

Maho remembered the other one. She cursed herself, thinking that she’d just made her last mistake. The second creature sounded too close, and she would never turn around in time– 
she caught only a glimpse of tangled limbs when suddenly the creature was at her feet, and her weapon’s line of fire met the creature’s head mid-arc as she swung it around. 

Maho fired before her conscious mind caught up and emptied her magazine; then there was only the sound of her own breathing.

She realized what had happened afterwards. At the last second, the teenage girl had lunged for the creature’s legs and tripped it with her body. 

She must be out of her mind. Or very, very brave.

The ground fell from under Maho, and she found herself on her knees, her hands clasped to her neck.

Too close. The loathsome touch of the alien will had merely brushed her, but it was still too much.
The stench of the dead creatures filled her nostrils, but vomiting was a remote concern. For long moments, the memory of the abortive contact ritual would not let go; the echo of that despair was a crushing grip around her neck.

The feeling gradually faded, and thought of the mission dragged her back to the forest floor. She had to check on the civilians.

It turned out it was the man who was injured in that first attack, protecting the girl. His shirt was in tatters, revealing a back covered in baroque tattoos. Slashing wounds had cut across along its whole width, breaking the complex patterns and granting the painted faces an even more intimidating aspect. 

What’s a gangster doing here?

He was in no condition to move, but evidently had energy to bat away the attentions of the mortified girl beside him. 

“Never mind me, Ema! You’ve got your own to look after. Listen to me–” he thundered, gritting an impromptu last will through chattering teeth.

Maho made a snap decision. She took an ampule of wine-black liquid from her pack and snapped it open. She hovered over the hamstrung man, interrupting their conversation.

The girl was relieved as she was stupefied as Maho poured the small glass vial’s contents over his back, accompanying it with an invocation in an alien language. The man’s wounds closed themselves in a sight both awful and awesome. He got up, aghast at his own recovery. 

Shakily, Maho got up to her own feet. Two rituals– she forced herself to conform to the official naming– two procedures one after the other was dangerous, but they would be in even more peril if they didn’t get moving. And after her first, this much was nothing. 

There was no guarantee that they were in the clear, and getting back to the long-range radio was of the utmost importance. The boat wasn’t far away now. 

She led them forward, and left the tiniest sliver of herself in that forest as they went out into the clearing; she would never get it back. Maho rarely used magic for good reason, but needs must.

***

The Type 89’s muzzle was red hot, wisps of smoke crawling off the gunmetal. 

There was was no time to think, only to turn and fight. A wall of water surged towards Wolf, but he’d spied the fishman skulking behind it and readied his weapon. The creature was following close to the charging wall, using it to conceal his approach. It lunged before the water could even dissipate into mist in front of him, and Wolf emptied the remainder of a magazine into its torso at point blank range.

That took care of the maneuver element. He shifted to get a bead on the caster, but he was already gone. Wolf kept on pounding feet through the forest, seeing his desperate mission out to the end. 

Suddenly the trees gave way to dirt and rock, and he found himself teetering on the edge of a bluff. Sucking wind, he considered his next direction. Below, the pounding breakers against the jagged rocks. To either side, outcrops of massive rocks. Behind, the bastard child of a cuttlefish and an elephant and its whole menagerie, pissed as all hell. 

The water was a non-starter; better to slit his own throat than take his chances in their home turf. A howling sounded behind him, postponing his decision.

Speaking of.

He groped at his carrier; no more ammo. Wolf had eaten through three-hundred rounds through ten mags of thirty; his full combat load. For all that, he counted just six of the bastards that he knew for a fact he’d zeroed, twice that for the doubtful kills. Three-hundred rounds just to keep from getting torn to pieces by these freaks. 

They were tough bastards, but more than that they were damn smart. Pretty quick they figured he had no answer to the magic they cast on themselves unless he could close in, and with that the effect of his rifle fire was severely diminished. Even if he could score a hit in the seconds they exposed themselves, they just as quickly recovered to go at him again. 

With their guttural language, they worked together better than any human team ever could. That water wall trick he had foiled just now was classic fire and maneuver. 

And the old enemy’s cunning was all it was ever made out to be. Wolf had known all along that each encounter was hemming him in closer and closer to the coast, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it– forced to choose between shit and shittier at every turn. Outfoxed by overgrown fish, and now he was trapped. He’d made for a good distraction, at least. 

There Wolf stood on the precipice.

They bled out of the treeline like slime out of a primordial soup. The creatures knew that he was out of ammo, and they taunted him with their display of numbers. After what he had done to that one fishman in the forest, he ventured to think that they had other fates in store for him than a clean death. Wolf taunted them back with a snicker. 

There were too many. But now they exposed themselves blatantly, and in close combat, he could still take his toll. Wolf readied his knife, and fixed his bayonet.

And a festival of violence broke out on that clifftop. 

The fishmen finally abandoned all semblance of tactics to get at him; each blood-mad and eager to claim the revenge kill over the others. 

They moved in a blinding blur of lashing claws and gnashing teeth, but Wolf met them blow for blow. Jaws closed on empty air, claws chipped against ballistic plate and knife steel; his bayonet bit into distended flesh and splattered black blood all over the rocks. He smashed stretched skulls, severed gilled necks and ripped out their entrails. He heaped their corpses at this feet, but still they came, and Wolf waited to die to a claw that was too fast or a spike he could never see.

But it wasn’t to be. A piercing cry froze the festivities, and the crowd of lesser creatures gave up the blood-drenched ground before retreating back to the treeline. An unmistakable shadow had arrived. 

Wolf made the most out of the unexpected reprieve by taking stock: The stock on his rifle was bent all out of shape. A good chunk had broken off his bayonet, lost in some fishman’s stomach, but it still had a useable point; and his knife was more or less intact. He doubted if either could so much as scratch its hide. 

He put a hand to his carrier one more time. No more grenades either, just the old flashbang. The whole rig was shredded; he dropped it after taking the flashbang out. It was a nine-banger. Maybe it could give the bastard an epileptic attack, he thought with the humor of a man at the stake. 

The Thing emerged out of the treeline, and now that it was closer even Wolf could not deny its awesome presence; it was the vivid picture of a primal god.

Wolf stood with death eyeball-to-eyeball. 

If I should die in a foreign field…

Much like the fickle gods of old, it could not help but revel in its power. It spread its arms wide, as though to glorify its victory over the insolent mortal that dared stand against it. It laughed, and all its creatures laughed with it.

The Thing's disdain did nothing to douse Wolf’s fury. It only stoked it, and he fed on its flames as he readied to sell the last of his life as dearly as he could. 

A moment of clarity cut through the red haze of his hate. He swore that he smelled a something in the air other than magic. By a much less obscure impulse, Wolf came back to the question of direction, and he arrived at an alternative answer to a death-charge.

Finally, he picked right, where he had spotted a cleft in the outcropping and felt a breeze coming out of it. There was a hole there, a deep one that couldn’t have been anything but man-made. A fighting hole. 

Behind him, the Thing's croaking laughter intensified at its prey’s apparent failure of courage. Wolf had no time to care, and he sprinted for the hole, barely large enough to fit a man crouching. Before he dived in, he primed the flashbang. 

Pull the pin, let the lever go, throw the nine-banger over his shoulder. He squeezed into the hole, not waiting at all for the tell-tale flash–

WHOOSH.

Wolf turned on a dime and kicked frantically at the entrance, which collapsed just as surging flames licked at his heels. 

Outside a firestorm raged, seeping through the earth and bathing the hole in sweltering heat. A muffled wailing straight out of hell ran just underneath the tumult of the fire. Explosions followed, and for a tense few seconds it felt like the shaking would bury him alive. The tremors subsided. Not long after the unholy scream died, and then there was nothing in the tunnel but Wolf's choking, nervous laughter. 

Wolf crawled in deeper, and started hearing the sound of waves. Relief replaced the adrenaline when he saw where the hole opened out to. It was a space that would have been enough for three men, with a slit that looked out into the sea. It was an old machine gun nest. A fortification.

Thank you, Imperial Japanese Army.

In earlier times, the slit must have been just enough to give a gun clearance, but time had widened it. It was tight, but Wolf managed to squeeze himself out– and fell straight down. It was only a few meters into sand, and he rolled to take off the worst of the impact. 

As he brushed himself off, he saw now that there was path up from the beach, following a draw that he couldn’t see from the top. Wolf soon returned to that spot where he had almost made his last stand. He laughed again, the laugh of a boy who had been ready to die. 

Scattered all over the clifftop were steaming piles of fish meat.