The Simnus came uncloaked at close range, directly underneath her target, a nuke-powered Carrier called Stephen the King. The tactic left the gigantic warship no time to evade, or even reposition to minimize damage. The death-black ship had appeared underneath them as if by magic, arming three Excocet ship-destroyer missiles before the King’s boatswains could so much as gasp in fear. They were still trying to figure out exactly what had happened when the Simnus drew it’s bead, and locked them in-frame. They looked on, helpless, as the Simnus’ radar signature, angry red and blinking, birthed a fast-climbing litter of three.
Admiral Jess Lowery could only stand and witness as the red beams closed. They disappeared and she heard the bridge navigator Thomas Dwight say:
We weren’t even supposed to be here.
And she thought she heard him start laughing before the world turned red.
***
The Glanton Holden - one hundred meters long, nuclear powered and armed, running a silent watch between Patience Island off Jamestown, and the waters of Montauk Neck - had been pressed into search and rescue at the urging of the President. The Simnus, another nuke, had gone missing somewhere in the far North. Going radio and radar-dark during a classified deployment for god knows who. The Glanton steamed northward for forty-eight hours with orders to poke around the scene, but nobody knew where to begin. What were they into? Why the fuck had they been sent here? The entire North Atlantic didn't quite play as a venue for a search and rescue under a skeleton crew. The Men and women aboard the Glanton were not optimistic.
They were given coordinates. A natural shelf, fifty miles off the Grand Banks, tapering down almost fourteen miles beneath the surface. Sailors called the spot “Frozen Keep,” because the angry tumult of tides and currents that marked it were apt to hold a ship hostage, assailing the control of the even the strongest and experienced crew. The orders had taken them from appointed rounds, and not a man aboard knew the why of it. The brass simply said “jump.” They jumped.
But with the entire East Coast under siege, and the giants beginning an inexorable push to the west, the Navy could hardly spare an entire patrol. Instead, the task fell to the Glanton and one nuke Carrier: Stephen the King from Newport News. The King was an impressive ship in and of herself, but the joint chiefs sent her with an entire wing of assault aircraft. Five Army A-10’s (devastating low-level attack-fighters armed with underwater weapons systems and punched up sonar) sat steaming away on her forward decking. There was an assault squadron of F-19 fighter Jets each with two extra fuel pods. There were 12 Apache attack helicopters, each capable of sustained attacks on targets up to 400 miles away.
The Grey Thing had taken the minds of everybody aboard the Glanton before he’d boarded. Snatching their wills as they cruised silently past Quonset Point. Before any of the crew of fifty knew what was happening the Thing had knocked out their memories, their conscious decision-making, their very conception of who they were and what they were doing. In the place of all that, he’d left one message: Obey.
And so they had. Using the Glanton’s Seal Deck - an airlock chamber designed to pluck special forces units out of the water - The Thing had been brought aboard, the killing began right then. Within minutes after boarding he’d used the ships engineer, Robin Stavros, to broadcast the camera feed from Seal Deck on every monitor of the sub. Every man aboard would see what was about to transpire. That done, the Grey Thing began to feed. The first man, Boatswain Ronald Krysanski, came to the beast on legs he no longer controlled as his own, his eyes were tearing and his mouth was twisted in a stressed rictus, but the entire crew watched on the monitors as he stood, facing the Grey invader toe to toe and shaking like a newborn chick. A few seconds passed, as if the terror was deciding what to do with the quivering sailor, and then Ronald Krysanski made his move. He was still staring straight ahead at the Grey Thing as he picked his Ka-Bar knife from the leather holster on his belt. Ronald began to protest through his forced-closed mouth:
No. No. No. Please. No No No…
But his arm acted with no consideration of the pleas. He raised the great black blade in his right hand and began to peel his left hand like a ripe apple. He started at the top of the index finger, and within seconds the thing was flayed, with the bones visible and the blood flooding and containing off his elbow onto the floor. He was saying:
It hurts. It hurts. Oh God, it hurts…
As the knife finished with the rest of his fingers and began to move down the arm.
It took him almost ten minutes to get to his shoulder and by then he was standing in a stinking puddle of his own blood and tissue. He was screaming, and he’d lost consciousness twice, only to be borne up again by the monsters touch and made to continue his awful mission. He finished peeling his arm with a flourish and the Grey Thing made him bow to both himself and the cameras. The rest of the crew looked on amazed, revolted, and - above all - terrified to the point of insanity as Krysanski began the second part of his assignment. Kneeling in the puddle of blood, he put his stripped arm down on the deck palm-down. He raised his knife again, this time using it to cut. The shocked Crew looked on helpless as Krysanski sawed off his flayed digits, one by one starting with his thumb. The shocked silence turned to screams of protest but Boatswain Krysanski wouldn’t be swayed. Finishing up with the pinky, he paused for a moment and gazed into the boney muck as if hypnotized. Then he rolled and sat down with his legs folded under him, looked directly into the security camera, and popped the first finger into his mouth. He chewed and chewed, staring into the camera with his sleepy, vacant eyes. Somewhere between his index and thumb, the doomed man began to laugh. It was then the Grey Thing came up in front of him and swallowed the sailors entire body in two huge bites. The Beast found the meat tastier then he’d even expected, soaked - as it was - in the Ronald Krysanski secreted broth of abject fear and terror.
The Grey Thing continued. Before the day was out Forty-two crewmen of the Glanton had been savaged and consumed on camera by the Grey Thing. He broadcast all the feedings over the ships circuit, each one more delicious and compelling than the last. They’d seen Major Willem Manks stab his own eyes out with a dull number two pencil. Captain’s mate Rick Minnest was forced to drink gallon after gallon of bleach until his insides bubbled and steamed. Bossun’s Mate Juan Carlos Martin was made to stick his arm up to the elbow in the Glanton’s industrial-size cuisinart. He was than instructed to add liquid rat-poison from the ships store to the mix and then drink the horrible slurry until he collapsed, twitching and dying, on the deck.
The Grey Beast moved through them day and night, each murder more graphic and awe-inspiring than the last, until only eight remained (name them and their posts). They were scared almost past the point of insanity, and ripe for the picking but the Beast had searched the minds of everybody on the ship even as he’d been consuming their flesh. The six remaining sailors (Boatswain's Mates Gifford, Owen, and Driesdale along with Weapon's mates Hall, Johnson, and Rickenbacher) were needed and necessary, and so the thing calmed them, and reassured them that the killing was done, and the boat once again secure. Then he turned on the radar cloak and began full-steaming to intercept the Simnus high in the north Atlantic.
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