Episode Two: The Claws That Catch: An infestation of intelligent, giant lobster creatures tests the courage and abilities of Dr. Danielle Taylor.
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The Claws That Catch
August 2, 1955
“If I hear one more person say ‘I used to love lobster,’” Dr. Danielle Taylor hissed, “I’m going to wring their goddamn neck!”“S-sorry doctor—” Bobby Williams fell silent under her glare, then Dani turned back to the new patient and saw that despite everything, his heart had stopped. Looking at what the Devilfish claws had done to his body, she wasn’t surprised.
And I gave him the last of the morphine. She raised her head and stared at the fifty-plus patients lying around the second floor of Miller’s Department store. And we’re going to need more.
“You were right, doctor.” Peeling off her scrubs, she looked over at Dr. Martha Knight, whose ebony face showed no expression behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Triage. Don’t waste morphine.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Taylor.” Bobby fumbled nervously with the pipe he seemed to think would compensate for his baby face. “I thought humor would break the tension, but—”
“Uncle Milty you’re not. Marie, help him sterilize the instruments.” The candy striper, who’d been heating hot water on the demonstration range, scurried to obey.
Dani wiped her sweaty hands on her dungarees and walked over to Knight. She forced herself to smile and nod at the patients, much as she’d rather not look at the claw-crushed arms, missing legs, or the National Guardsman curled into a fetal ball from battle fatigue. They lay on beds, tabletops, sofas, and on the few cots Martha’s husband Hal had scrounged from somewhere.
At least Shirley and her new baby are doing well, and the two Guardsmen we found Tuesday aren’t badly off. Accidentally shot by their own people, Jesus!
And the cholera patients are holding on. They were in children’s furniture, as far away from the others as possible, four Japanese tourists who’d escaped from the Devilfish after being dragged half a mile through the Boston sewers.
“Any chance we don’t need drugs?” Knight asked Hal, turning away from Dani, who felt as if she’d been dressed down by Taylor Hospital’s chief of staff. “Anything new on the radio?”
“Just the usual bulletins.” The tall electrician ran a hand over his scraggly beard as he adjusted the controls of the TV/radio/hi-fi set. Hal refused to take the store’s razors when he had no money to buy them. “Stay inside, lock the doors, the government hasn’t forgotten you. Sure, Beacon Hill isn’t forgotten, but black folks?”
“Let’s make up the list, then,” Dani said. “Morphine, antibiotics if there’s any left, surgical thread—”
“I’m sure the Guard will beat them soon,” Marie said. Like Bobby and Dani, she’d been cut off during the first Devilfish attack outside Boston harbor, ten days earlier. “Or maybe the lobsters will get sick and die like the Martians did.”
“The shelled bastards breed too fast,” Hal said. “Goddamn Professor Poirier and his goddamn nuclear-powered rocket—”
“We don’t know the rocket explosion has anything to do with it!” Marie protested, flinching a little from the cursing. “The AEC said the radiation was harmless.”
“Jesus, didn’t you pay attention to the Dorman hearings?” Dani snapped. Marie flinched again. “The government’s known about the mutation risk ever since Hiroshima, and covered it up. That’s why the AEC is looking at jail—”
Glass shattered on the floor below and everyone froze. Hal turned off the radio. In the silence that followed, they heard the faint, horrifyingly familiar scrape of chitin-covered feet on the linoleum of the first floor.
Damn, damn, damn. With their hearing, all it would take is Shirley’s baby to start bawling…The scurrying grew louder, like several dozen had entered, and then they heard the clattering of the claws that seemed to serve them for communication. Then the claw sounds were drowned out by the smash and clang of shelves and shop goods hitting the floor. The Devilfish were smart, but they didn’t seem to understand human furniture or machines—or they just didn’t care.
But they understand stairs. Dani drew out her grandfather’s six-shooter, while Bobby and Hal, the latter limping and leaning on his cane, moved silently to the .30 caliber machine guns Hal had scavenged and placed at the top of both stairs. But they say anything less than a bazooka will only chip their carapace, if they look behind all the junk and boxes we piled on the stairs…
From somewhere below, a machine gun roared, something exploded out in the street—Dani would have looked, but they’d boarded over all the windows—and cries and barked orders mixed with a chitinous clattering.
“We’re saved!” Marie’s eyes lit up as she ran over to Dani. “We can call them, they can—”
“Be quiet!” Dani hissed. “We can’t call, remember what almost happened last time?”
“But I can’t keep hiding here! I’ve got to get home!” Marie drew in her breath for what Dani knew would be a hysterical scream, then Dr. Knight slapped the girl hard, thrust her down in a leather armchair and clasped a hand over her mouth.
Sitting behind the machine gun, Bobby stared in mute shock at the sight of a Negro slapping a white woman, but he had the sense not to move. Dani felt just as shocked, but she knew Knight had been right. If the Guardsmen heard Marie, so would the Devilfish.
Nothing came up the stairs, however, and the sounds of battle shifted toward the street, the shots growing fewer, the screams louder…then nothing. Dani realized her cigarette had burned down to the filter and crushed it out.
“Add some Valium to the list.” Knight said quietly, lowering a Coke bottle from Marie’s mouth. “Just gave the girl my last one. Then give the list to Bobby—”
“No.”
“You’re needed here.”
“Not as much as more morphine. And I’m not losing another intern.”
“You know how many of them have complications,” Knight said. “I can’t do it alone if—”
“Then I’ll just have to make it back.” I’m not going to look Bobby’s father in the eyes and tell him I let his son get killed. She shouldered her empty knapsack over her cotton t-shirt, girded on the ammo belt she’d taken from one of the Guardsmen, slipped the Colt into the holster and the walkie-talkie onto the other side. And what would Dr. Paul Taylor say if he saw the way his daughter was dressed? She slung a full loaded carbine across her back and headed for the elevator.
“Doctor Taylor, I’m sorry.” Bobby planted himself in her path, doing his best to speak around the stem of his pipe. “Dr. Knight’s right, you’re the experienced one, I can’t let you—”
“If you try to stop me, I’ll ram your pipe so far down your throat it’ll end up in your kidneys.” He tried to meet her eyes, then hung his head and stepped aside. “If it’s safe, and anyone’s alive down there, I’ll call. If not, come down and get some weapons, ammunition, C-rations if they’ve got any. Get Marie back to sterilizing the instruments as soon as she can, check the sutures on Cromartie, and listen to Dr. Knight this time, is that clear?”
He didn’t look happy, but he nodded obediently and Dani strode to the elevator shaft and slid open the old, manually-operated doors. She pressed the button and descended, thanking God this part of the city still had power.
She stepped out onto the first floor and saw a man with his head ripped off, dead in front of her, a lake of blood mingling with a trickle of Devilfish blue.
Despite her best efforts, she vomited up breakfast.
I should be stronger than this. I saw death during the Invasion, I saw what the Martians left of Mom, Dad, Elaine— She saw another corpse; the man had thrust his bayonet through a Devilfish eye as he died. She kept throwing up until the last shred of food was gone.
Dani tried to make herself stride forcefully through Miller’s, the way she imagined her father would have done, but the carnage, extending from the elevator through ladies lingerie to men's wear, seemed to fasten lead weights to her ankles. Every Guardsman seemed to have his necks or limbs broken or twisted, and even the far fewer Devilfish corpses made her stomach want to heave again.
Dani’s hand fell to her grandfather’s Colt. Was it this bad for you in the trenches? Did you feel this helpless? No mustard gas in Boston, but at least you could negotiate with the Huns, even have truces…There’d been no more success at talking to the Devilfish than with the giant ants in the Southwest. The radio said those explosions last week were depth charges dropped on the nests…but Cromartie said there’s a rumor they’ve already spread to Maine.
She crouched low, trying to stay hidden as she crawled toward the front of the store, doing her best not to let too much blood soak into her blue jeans. I imagine Dad would accept my clothes under the circumstances.
But he’d have a fit I didn’t send Bobby.
She reached the front of the store, where moist air rolled in through the shattered windows. There were bodies up and down the overcast street, slightly more of them Devilfish; across the road, a jeep drenched in blue blood had crashed into a bakery.
Dani didn’t move, scrutinizing every detail, every shadow, before she called Bobby and told him to check the bodies. Heart pounding, she turned off the walkie-talkie and stepped onto the street. A twenty-minute walk, that’s all it’ll take to reach the Knight Clinic.
Shorter if I have to run.
As she headed down the road, pausing every so often to check, she remembered the Invasion. The Martian attack on Boston had been brutal, but the week of destruction seemed impersonal in hindsight; the Martian ships destroyed humans along with everything else, but they didn’t hunt them or target them like the Devilfish.
Her thoughts jumped, for just a second, to the night near the end of the week, hiding in the church, dragging those teenagers from their jalopy with Steve’s help. And the evening together—Why do you still think about that? He left; you never anything to him but a quick lay. Everyone was doing it, you were stupid to think it meant more.
But I could sure use a guy like him right now.
Dani reached the next corner, started to turn—and heard claws clacking together somewhere near. She slipped into the doorway of an abandoned bookstore and crouched behind a display of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Funny, I was thinking about buying a copy before everything went to hell.
A half-dozen Devilfish emerged out of an alley, opening and closing their claws rapidly. Even though Dani had seen their corpses, the sight of live ones, moving and walking, made her shudder.
They weren’t as alien as the Martians, but that only made them more monstrous. Two legs, two arms, almost human, but…not. Shell instead of skin, inhuman face, inhuman arms, inhuman in the very way they walked. Why didn’t the lobsters just grow gigantic like those ants? What are the odds of them mutating into something that could walk on land, become intelligent?
The Devilfish met up with another dozen or so, with blood smeared over their massive claws. There was a definite pattern to their gestures, to the opening and closing of the claws, but Dani noticed they kept cocking their head as if listening. Or sniffing. Or maybe using a totally new sense.
To Dani’s relief, they went to the nearest manhole and climbed in, one after the other. What were they doing? What do the damn things want up here? They can’t breathe out of water for more than an hour, what is the point? The street was quiet again, except for a pigeon cooing somewhere nearby. Before the Devilfish, Dani had never heard Boston completely silent.
No longer willing to walk, she raced down the next block, up a narrow alley, paused behind a row of trashcans for another pod of Devilfish to pass, ignoring the stink of a week’s uncollected garbage. As soon as they were out of sight, and hopefully earshot, she resumed running.
The smell of the dead was noticeable before Dani reached Knight’s clinic. The Devilfish didn’t bother with corpses, but the Guard had learned the hard way that reclaiming the dead, their own or civilians, only drew the lobsters’ attention. The Negroes who hadn’t escaped the neighborhood had been left to rot.
The Knight Clinic might be the only door on the block that remained locked; Dani, panting from her run, was halfway inside when she heard footsteps, pained cursing; looking outside, she saw a burly man in a ragged uniform rushing down the street, one arm flapping at an unnatural angle, a half-dozen Devilfish on his tail, and gaining.
Dani seized the carbine and held it at the ready, but didn’t fire. Bullets won’t stop them. And you have 50 patients who need drugs. He’ll just have to run fast.
Despite his arm, he did, leaping over corpses, cursing a blue streak, then his foot caught on an outstretched black leg and he fell, skidding a half-dozen feet before his forehead hit the side of an abandoned Packard. The Devilfish claw sounds rose to a crescendo
“No!” As the lobsters closed on him, Dani leapt into the street and began firing. The gun kicked wildly in her hands, the Devilfish turned to face her and to her joy, one of them dropped where it stood, while another flopped down on the sidewalk as if it were wounded. The others charged; as the clip ran out, she slipped in another and kept firing, backing toward the clinic.
More Devilfish scrambled into the street from an open manhole. A lot more.
Dani almost went inside the clinic, thought what they’d do if they followed her in and raced down the street instead, firing one gun or another as she went. There are those tenements nearby, maybe if I climb through those I can lose them inside, double back to the clinic later—A devilfish rose out of the open manhole ahead. Dani emptied the clip without effect except to stagger it a little, drew an automatic and fired into its head as it reached for her
At that range, its carapace shattered and it fell back down. Dani heard angry clacking inside the manhole from whoever had been under it.
More lobsters came rushing around the corner ahead, cutting off her escape; she glanced around, saw a burger joint with a door ripped off its hinges to her right, and hurtled toward the doorway.
She didn’t see the broken chair on the floor until a second before her foot struck it. Suddenly she was flat on her side, her head cracking against the wall, and the devilfish were crowding into the room and even as she groped for the Colt she realized she was going to die and her patients were going to pay the price.
One of the devilfish reached down and seized Dani under her arm, lifting her off the floor with one claw. It felt as if a giant nutcracker were breaking all her ribs and she knew she should shoot it, but it hurt too much to move, much, much too much—
And then it dropped her. The jarring shock when her ribs hit the floor made her scream, and for a second Dani thought she’d pass out.
The clack of claws echoed through the restaurant, frantic and fast, as the nearest Devilfish staggered blindly, bumping into walls, while others behind them scrambled away, heading for the nearest manhole.
Only a couple of them made it. The rest fell as they ran, then stopped moving.
Maybe it was like the Martians? Dani knew she should get up, go for the drugs, but anything she tried moving hurt too much.
“You okay?” An Italian guy in a National Guard uniform came cautiously through the front door. “No? Here, lemme help you.” He knelt and lifted her to her feet; she couldn’t keep back a moan. “Sorry, sorry—holy cow, Jerry’s screwball idea actually worked, didn’t it? I take back everything I said about that egghead.”
“What—worked—” Dani gasped the words out, but suddenly it seemed to hard to talk, or to move, or to stay awake, and even though she wanted to tell him about Miller’s and the patients and the medicine, the world faded away too fast.
(continued on page 2)
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Science 2: The Claws That Catch
by Fraser Sherman 1 2