Visions of a Dark Horizon

This story was a finalist in the ‘House of Shadows and Ink’ Patreon flash fiction contest. There were so many great stories submitted; being a finalist was definitely a great feeling!

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The Deep 

Humankind knew they were killing the planet. For years there were warnings: the melting of the ice caps, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, microplastics, and industrial waste spills. There were severe weather patterns, flooding, glacial catastrophe, and species collapse; those were things the scientists expected, even predicted. What no one predicted was–

Them.

They initially came ashore in Florida, because of course Florida. They scuttled up onto beaches in the Gulf of Mexico in the dead of night. Shuffling, misshapen things that reeked of a diseased low tide and made terrible clicking and whistling noises that pierced the night. 

Only a few of them appeared at first, about the size of German Shepherds, all legs and pulsating sacs, skittering around the beaches and heading inland. One was reported near Key Vista, off Baillies Bluff Road, where a car had hit it. When rescue teams arrived, it was still crawling, dragging its mangled remains back towards the surf with a horrifying combination of legs, claws, and tentacles, leaking shiny black ichor and making a horrible whistling noise. 

A sheriff’s deputy shot it three times, trying to put it out of its misery, but it didn’t stop moving, didn’t stop its terrible whistling. It was calling out in pain and distress, and soon two more of the things arrived and retaliated. In the end, they killed eleven people. 

Those were the first wave, and looking back on it, some people believed they might have been scouts; they were smaller, faster specimens sent up from the ocean’s depths to do reconnaissance and explore the world of humans, to gain a better understanding of what the people were up to, and perhaps identify potential threats.

Sadly, it turned out that humankind didn’t pose much of a threat. 

 Reports were coming out of all coastal areas, from Florida to Washington State, the U.K., and the Azores. When news of the attacks on Australia and Japan came in, it was already too late; it became clear to those in charge that an invasion had begun, attacks surging around the globe from the most unlikely of places.   

They came from the deep, from the crushing depths of the oceans that humans had only begun to explore, but it was impossible to determine if they were some new species or something very, very old, finally making themselves known, retaliating for the damage we had done to their home in the depths. They were horrific, impossible things, and before we knew it, they were everywhere; every shoreline, every beach, every rocky ocean outcropping, and they kept coming.  

The second wave was when humanity fully realized the threat, and people began to mount a defense. But how do you defend against millions of two-hundred-pound crustacean monstrosities covered in scales and crude armor made from slabs of plastic waste, with claws that were capable of tearing steel? Bullets didn’t bother them, you couldn’t shoot them in the head– they didn’t seem to have heads, in the conventional sense. 

They flooded the shorelines at night, line after line of lumbering creatures so foul, their stench hit you long before you could see or hear them. They tore through National Guard regiments and SWAT teams; the humans’ defenses did not even slow their relentless march inland. In North America, the creatures had near-total control of everything within a hundred miles of the shorelines within a week, and still they pressed inland. 

People evacuated the low-lying areas near the seashores, then kept moving inland with lines of refugees dozens of miles long, making their way around roadways choked with dead and burned-out vehicles. If the horrible sounds or the foul, damp smell of the things hit them, they would run, scattering in all directions to make it harder for the creatures to pick them off, but the invaders were fast, and there were so many of them. Thousands of people died—hundreds of thousands. 

A month after those initial attacks, the Americans had established a solid perimeter almost 200 miles from the coast, consisting of trucks, concrete barriers, shipping containers, and any other materials that could be pulled, pushed, driven, or dragged to the line. The creatures would be able to swarm the barricades at full strength, but it became clear that the further they were from salt water, the slower and weaker they became. Their limit was about a hundred and fifty miles, give or take. 

That was when humanity regrouped and started planning a counteroffensive. Military commands around the world– wherever there was still a viable military left –coordinated bombing runs, dropped napalm, sent in special forces, and deployed entire tank battalions. The attacks caused significant damage, taking out tens of thousands of the abominations, but they just kept coming. In a war of attrition, there was no way humankind would be able to win against these twisted creatures from the depths. So the people sat behind their barriers, hundreds of miles from the oceans, and attempted to resume a semblance of everyday life. 

Then the third wave came, emerging from the waters with sickening malice, the end-game of the creatures becoming clear. Giant crawling mollusks, two hundred feet long, dragged themselves out of the ichor-blackened ocean onto the land, huge glistening feet reaching out from their shells and pulling them deliberately over the ground, leaving massive, rough ditches behind them, their onyx shells reflecting the sallow moonlight. They were surrounded by battalions of the hideous, scuttling creatures that appeared to be protecting the giant mollusks as they moved. 

Whoever was still in charge of the military response called in an airstrike against a line of them on the West Coast, a last desperate attempt at turning the tide of a battle already lost. Sorties of jets dropped bombs and launched missiles, but their weapons barely scratched the shells of those monstrous blasphemies. The things continued to crawl, mile after mile, for days, until they reached that hundred and fifty-mile limit. Then those giant cephalopods began to burrow themselves into the dirt, until their feet were deeply buried in the ground, and their massive, twenty-story-high shells protruded straight out of the earth. Thousands of them, dotting every coastline, onyx towers jutting into the sky and swaying languidly, constantly making those terrible sounds. 

The titan bivalves, entrenched in the earth, then spewed a cloudy, foggy substance, like wet smokestacks billowing noxious clouds into the sky, smelling of dead fish and the ancient ocean’s depths. 

And then came the rain. 

Thick, heavy clouds blanketed the planet, and the rain poured down, day after day, week after week, month after month. The deluge continued, and the oceans began to rise. 

Soon, the things from the deep will advance again, and this time, there will be nowhere left for us to run.