Chapter 29 - Clawful Evil

  My hands and arms were sore, but Cliff the triceratops was worse off by a long shot. A few bits of fossilized bone had snapped off when I tossed him down against the pavement, and cracks spiderwebbed more than a few of his bones. The dino staggered back to his feet, almost looking dizzy. Once he had all four feet back underneath him he planted them like he was getting ready to charge again.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t sure how much more of this either of us could take, but I was ready for it. I gave him a little ‘come at me’ gesture with my hand. “If you want another round, let’s go.”

  Cliff snorted, then opened his mouth. Instead of the roar I was expecting, though, what came out was a pathetic-sounding “Cheep!”

  He sounded for all the world like an upset chicken squawking. It took all my willpower to stop the chuckles that wanted to spill out. I had to remind myself that even if the undead dinosaur looked cute, it was still a major problem. I closed my hands into fists and took a step forward. It was time to finish this fight.

  Cliff had other ideas in mind, it seemed. He froze when I took the first step, but as soon as I took a second he turned and bolted toward the Cambridge side of the river, running full-tilt as fast as he could manage.

  I stood there shocked for a long moment as he sprinted away, then started laughing. What else could I do? It was funny!

  “Go after it!” Alex called out. “Quick, before it gets away!”

  I turned to look at him. “He’s too fast, and I’m too worn out after that fight. I have a feeling Cliff is going to be more wary of humans from here on out, anyway. He didn’t like getting tossed around like that.”

  Alex crossed the distance between us, still staring after the fleeing dinosaur. He let out a little chuckle. “I bet he didn’t. Just a shame to let all those crystals go. What tier was he?”

  “Five.”

  “Who knows what he would have given us? A tier five crystal is nothing to shrug off.”

  He was right about the value of a crystal that big. We could certainly use all of them we could get. I just didn’t feel right killing for something like that. It smacked of hunting bears for the gall bladders and similar stuff. In the case of a real threat, like the ants, I was all for fighting as hard as I could. But Cliff’s eyes had been astonishingly expressive; all he had was a flickering flame deep in the socket, but it was enough, especially there at the end. He’d been shocked when I tossed him, and he wanted nothing more to do with me. I had a hunch he’d actively avoid people from now on.

  If he wasn’t hurting anyone, I was inclined to leave him alone. It wasn’t like there was a shortage of monsters actively attacking and hurting folks. I figured it was better to focus there.

  “Well, we wanted to get you more water based crystals anyway, right?” I said. “We should go do that, not worry about chasing one fast-moving dinosaur.”

  Bringing up that goal mollified Alex. He nodded right away. “Good point. You want to check out the museum, first, make sure there’s nobody inside?”

  “Sure, we can check it out first.”

  We wandered in through Cliff’s exit hole. It was dark within; only the windows gave us illumination, but there were enough of them to give us dim but steady light.

  A few bodies lay scattered about inside, but we didn’t see anyone alive. I called out, but again, there was no response. After a moment, Alex set off down the hall, making toward the main entrance. I wasn’t sure where he was headed at first, but then he turned into the gift shop.

  It was smashed up, but he wound his way through the mess like he knew exactly where he was going. There in the middle of things, amidst shattered glass, broken toys, and strewn about t-shirts, he found two bins to rummage through. I went to his side.

  “Help me grab some of this stuff,” Alex said, hauling packages out of one bin.

  “What is it?”

  “Freeze-dried ice cream,” Alex replied, grinning up at me. “It’ll last forever, it’s light, and it’s caloric. Nice treat, when we need it. But these are the things I was really after.”

  He showed me the second bin. It was full of glow sticks, a lot like the ones I’d used in the rail tunnels. I helped myself to a pile of the things, stuffing my bag full. Who knew when we’d be able to get more? Having light in the darkness had saved my life and that of the kids. Plus Alex’s as well, come to think of it. We didn’t want to run out of working lights.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Once we’d packed as many chem lights as we could—and a few packets of the ice cream—we set out again, moving back over the bridge to the Boston side and following the waterline east.

  We ran into a pair of tier two daddy-long-legs in Nashua Street Park. Each of them had legs about ten feet long. They towered over us, about the same height as most of the trees. I found myself really missing my spear, but I managed to take one down quickly enough by just jumping high enough to grab its body. My weight dragged it down to the ground and from there, the rest was pretty easy. While I finished that one, Alex distracted the second with Create Water. Unfortunately, without the Control Water stone he couldn’t maintain the distraction for long, but it was enough to keep it busy. He tried smacking the legs with his baseball bat, but the monster kept picking the legs up every time he swung.

  I had to take that one down, too. I looked around and spotted a six foot sapling tree. With a yank, I had the thing pulled out of the ground. I threw the tree like a spear straight into the monster. The tree punched straight through, and the daddy-long-legs staggered to a halt, then collapsed a moment later.

  We got two tier two stones from that one, each of them Agility. I kept one and gave the other to Alex, and then we moved on, continuing out patrol.

  The massive birds we’d taken to calling ‘rocs’ had completely infested the Bunker Hill bridge. Since neither of us could fly and we didn’t have any attacks that could hurt something at a distance, we opted to bypass that site. The birds were scary big, and they could hit us anytime they wanted, while we would have to wait until they came at us to fight them. That seemed like a recipe for disaster, at least for now. We snuck through the train tracks and mess of twisting concrete paths and roads all around the Boston side of the bridge, instead.

  As we walked, we saw flickers of motion here and there in the shadows. There were definitely things out there, watching us, seeing what we were up to, maybe even measuring us. None of them attacked us, though, so we pressed on.

  Soon we were past the bridge and its avian guards, moving northeast along Commercial Street. There were a bunch of athletic fields out on the water there, and even at a distance we saw a ton of movement that way. We opted to advance with care, moving from one area of concealment to another so we could avoid notice as long as possible. That seemed to work. We got ourselves to the skating rink and slipped around on the river side of the building, moving as carefully as we could.

  What we found was weirder than most of the other things we’d seen so far, and that was saying something. We watched in silence for a few minutes, trying to take it all in.

  “I guess it’s fitting,” Alex whispered at last.

  “Why?”

  “For Boston to get eaten by ‘lobstahs?’ Makes sense to me,” he replied with a grin.

  I groaned.

  He wasn’t wrong. The baseball and football fields ahead were both full of movement, scores of creatures scurrying around, setting up defenses and hauling supplies about. The ‘lobstah’ comment was because they looked for all the world like someone had mashed a human and a lobster together.

  These creatures weren’t quite the sort of horror-movie thing Lovecraft would’ve envisioned, though. They were almost cute, in a weird-but-tolerable way. They still had lobster heads, tails, and claws, but these lobsters had built-up rearmost legs, thickened to the point where they could easily stand on the rear six legs and support their enlarged body weight.

  The legs right below the claws were one of the strangest changes, as they’d been adapted to look more like human arms, complete with hands on the ends.

  All together, the effect made them look something like human-sized muppets. They had a strange gait that got them around quickly but moved their tails side to side as they walked, making it look like a waddle—that didn’t help make them look less like muppets, let’s put it that way.

  The whole thing had a very uncanny valley feel to it.

  Unlike the goblins with their walls made from trees, these lobster-things were building structures from mud. As we watched, another squad of them emerged from the water, each carrying a large bucket. They dumped the buckets onto the slowly-rising walls where others of their species spread the mud around while the bucket-brigade went back toward the water to get more.

  The buildings were clearly fortifications, even if they were made from mud. They had a long wall looping around their encampment, stretching from the shore, out around the camp, and back to the shore again.

  “I’ll bet they drop water crystals,” Alex pointed out.

  “Probably, yeah.” I hesitated, though. There were a lot of them down there. At least a couple dozen that we could see, and it was difficult to tell how many more might be out there under the water. Most of them were tier one or two, although I saw a few tier three lobster-things crawling around the outer perimeter of their encampment.

  We sat there watching them for a few more minutes as they slowly built up their base. It felt like a beachhead, like that were setting up a base of operations from which they could move deeper into the city, and I wanted to know why. Were they helpful or friendly? Or were they going to be trouble?

  Alex was the one who spotted the answer. “Look there.”

  I turned toward where he pointed. A squad of armed lobster-men marched up Commercial Street from the south. At first I thought maybe it was a scouting party or something, but then I spotted the humans walking with them.

  They’d tied a dozen people together with a long rope. As Alex and I watched, they half led, half dragged their prisoners up the street toward the camp. One of the prisoners fell, and a captor jabbed them mercilessly with the butt end of a spear. I half stood at that, but Alex grabbed my arm.

  “I’m with you,” he said. “But we need to be smart about this. We’ll save those people, but let’s not be idiots about it, eh?”

  I let him drag me back down below our cover and gave him a nod. My blood was hot after seeing that, but he was right. “Yeah, sounds good. You have a plan, I take it?”

  “Absolutely. Here’s what we’re going to do…”