Chapter ONE: The Hordes from Below

Anyone but Webb Fallon would have been worried sick. He was down to his last five dollars and quart of Scotch. His girl Madge had sketched him categorically in vitriol, and married somebody else. His job on the Los Angeles _Observer_ was, like all the jobs he’d ever had, finally, definitely, and for all time, cancelled.

Being Webb Fallon, he was playing a fast game of doubles on the volley-ball court at Santa Monica Beach, letting the sun and the salt air clear off a hangover.

When he came off the court, feeling fine and heading for the water, big Chuck Weigal called to him.

“So the _Observer_ finally got wise to you, huh? How come?”

Fallon grinned, his teeth white against the mahogany burn of his hard, lean oval face. His corded body gleamed in the hot sun, and his slanting grey-green eyes were mockingly bright.

“If you must know,” he said, “I was busy drowning my sorrows on the night of the big quake, two weeks ago. I didn’t know anything about it until I read the papers next morning. The boss seemed to think I was a little--er--negligent.”

Weigal grunted. “I don’t wonder. A quake as bad as the ’Frisco one, and you sleep through it! Phew!”

Fallon grinned, and went on. About half-way down the beach a bright yellow bathing suit caught his eye. He whistled softly and followed it into the water. After all, now that Madge was gone....

He knew the girl by sight. Fallon had an eye for blonde hair and Diana-esque figures. That was one thing Madge and he had fought about.

The girl swam like a mermaid. Fallon lengthened his stroke, came up beside her, and said, “Hello.”

She blinked salt water out of sapphire blue eyes and stared. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Webb Fallon.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You needn’t be. I know a girl named Madge, too.”

“Oh.” Fallon’s grey-green eyes narrowed. His lean face looked suddenly ugly, like a mean dog. Or more like a wolf, perhaps, with his thin straight lips and slanting eyes.

“What did Madge tell you about me?” he asked softly.

“She said you were no good.” The blue eyes studied his face. “And,” added the girl deliberately, “I think she was right.”

“Yeah?” said Fallon, very gently. He hadn’t yet got over his cold rage at being jilted for a dull, prosperous prig. The girl’s face was like a mask cut out of brown wood and set with hard sapphires. He made a tigerish, instinctive movement toward it.

A wave took them unawares, knocked them together and down in a struggling tangle. They broke water, gasping in the after-swirl.

Then, quite suddenly, the girl screamed.

It was a short scream, strangled with sea-water, but it set the hairs prickling on Fallon’s neck. He looked past the girl, outward.

Something was rising out of the sea.

* * * * *

Webb Fallon, standing shoulder-deep in the cold water, stared in a temporary paralysis of shock. The thing simply couldn’t be.

There was a snout armed with a wicked sword. That and the head behind it were recognizable as those of a swordfish. But the neck behind them was long and powerful, and set on sloping shoulders. Members like elongated fins just becoming legs churned the surface. A wholly piscine tail whipped up gouts of spray behind the malformed silver body.

Fallon moved suddenly. He grabbed the girl and started toward shore. The Thing emitted a whistling grunt and surged after them.

Waves struck them; the aftersuck pulled at their legs. They floundered, like dreamers caught in nightmare swamps. And Fallon, through the thrashing and the surf and the sea-water in his ears, began to hear other sounds.

There was a vast stirring whisper, a waking and surging of things driven up and out. There were overtones of cries from unearthly throats. Presently, then, there were human screams.

Fallon’s toes found firm sand. Still clutching the girl, he splashed through the shallows. He could hear the wallowing thunder of creatures behind them, and knew that they had to run. But he faltered, staring, and the girl made a little choked sound beside him.

The shallow margin of the sea was churned to froth by a nightmare horde. The whole broad sweep of the beach was invaded by things that, in that stunned moment, Fallon saw only as confused shadows.

He started to run, toward the hilly streets beyond the beach. The creature with the swordfish snout was almost on them. A fish, out of the sea! It reared its snaky neck and struck down.

Fallon dodged convulsively. The sword flashed down and buried itself in the sand not five inches from his foot.

It never came out of the sand. A tail-less, stub-legged thing with three rows of teeth in its shark-like jaws fastened onto the creature’s neck, and there was hot mammalian blood spilling out.

They ran together, Fallon and the girl. The summer crowds filling the beaches, the promenade, the hot-dog stands and bath-houses, were fighting in blind panic up the narrow streets to the top of the bluff. It was useless to try to get through. Fallon made for an apartment house.

Briefly, in clear, bright colors, he saw isolated scenes. A starfish twenty feet across wrapping itself around a woman and her stupefied child. A vast red crab pulling a man to bits with its claws. Something that might once have been an octopus walking on four spidery legs, its remaining tentacles plucking curiously at the volley-ball net that barred its way.

The din of screaming and alien cries, the roar of the crowds and the slippery, thrashing bodies melted into dull confusion. Fallon and the girl got through, somehow, to the comparative safety of the apartment house lobby.

They found an empty place by a bay window and stopped. Fallon’s legs were sagging, and his heart was a leaping pain. The girl crumpled up against him.

They stared out of the window, dazed, detached, like spectators watching an imaginative motion-picture and not believing it.

* * * * *

There was carnage outside, on the broad sunlit beach. Men and women and children died, some caught directly, others trampled down and unable to escape. But more than men were dying.

Things fought and ate each other. Things of mad distortion of familiar shapes. Things unlike any living creature. Normal creatures grown out of all sanity. But all coming, coming, coming, like a living tidal wave.

The window went in with a crash. A woman’s painted, shrieking face showed briefly and was gone, pulled away by a simple marine worm grown long as a man. The breeze brought Fallon the stench of blood and fish, drowning the clean salt smell.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Come on.”

The girl came, numbly. Neither spoke. There was, somehow, nothing to say. Fallon took down a heavy metal curtain rod, holding it like a club.

The front doors had broken in. People trampled through in the blind strength of terror. Fallon shrugged.

“No way to get past them,” he said. “Stay close to me. And for God’s sake, don’t fall down.”

The girl’s wet blonde head nodded. She took hold of the waistband of his trunks, and her hand was like ice against his spine.

Out through broken doors into a narrow street, and then the crowd spread out a little, surging up a hillside. Police sirens were beginning to wail up in the town.

Down below, the beaches were cleared of people. And still the things came in from the sea. Fallon could see over the Santa Monica Pier now, and the broad sweep of sand back of the yacht harbor was black with surging bodies.

Most of the yachts were sunk. The bell-buoy had stopped ringing.

The sunlight was suddenly dim. Fallon looked up. His grey-green eyes widened, and his teeth showed white in a snarl of fear.

Thundering in on queer heavy wings, their bodies hiding the sun, were beasts that stopped his heart in cold terror.

They had changed, of course. The bat-like wings had been broadened and strengthened. They must, like the other sea-born monsters, have developed lungs.

But the size was still there! Five to ten feet in wing-spread--and behind, the thin, deadly, whip-like tails.

Rays! The queer creatures that fly bat-like under water--now thundering like giant bats through the air!

There were flying fish wheeling round them like queer rigid birds. They had grown legs like little dragons, and long tails.

A pair of huge eels slid over the rough earth, pulled down a man and fought over the body. Policemen began to appear, and there was a popping of guns. The sirens made a mad skirling above the din.

Some of the rays swooped to the crowded beach. Others came on, scenting human food.

Guns began to crack from the cliff-tops, from the windows of apartment houses. Fallon caught the chatter of sub-machine guns. One of the rays was struck almost overhead.

It went out of control like a fantastic plane and crashed into the hillside, just behind Fallon and the girl. Men died shrieking under its twenty-foot, triangular bulk.

It made a convulsive leap.

The girl slipped in the loose rubble, and lost her hold on Fallon. The broad tentacles on the ray’s head closed in like the horns of a half moon, folding the girl in a narrowing circle of death.

* * * * *

Fallon raised his iron curtain rod. He was irrationally conscious, with a detached fragment of his brain, of the girl’s sapphire eyes and the lovely strength of her body. Her face was set with terror, but she didn’t scream. She fought.

Something turned over in Fallon’s heart, something buried and unfamiliar. Something that had never stirred for Madge. He stepped in. The bar swung up, slashed down.

The leathery skin split, but still the feelers hugged the girl closer. The great ray heaved convulsively, and something whistled past Fallon’s head. It struck him across the shoulders, and laid him in dazed agony in the dirt.

The creature’s tail, lashing like a thin long whip.

Webb Fallon got up slowly. His back was numb. There was hot blood flooding across his skin. The girl’s eyes were blue and wide, fixed on him. Terribly fixed. She had stopped fighting.

Fallon found an eye, set back on one of the tentacles. He set the end of the iron rod against it, and thrust downward....

Whether it was the rod, or the initial bullet, Fallon never knew, but the tentacles relaxed. The girl rose and came toward him, and together they went up the hill.

They were still together when sweating volunteers picked them up and carried them back into the town.

Fallon came to before they finished sewing up his back. The emergency hospital was jammed. The staff worked in a kind of quiet frenzy, with a devil’s symphony of hysteria beating up against the windows of the wards.

They hadn’t any place to keep Fallon. They taped his shoulders into a kind of harness to keep the wound closed, and sent him out.

The girl was waiting for him in the areaway, huddled in a blanket. They had given Fallon one, too, but his cotton trunks were still clammy cold against him. He stood looking down at the girl, his short brown hair unkempt, the hard lines of his face showing sharp and haggard.

“Well,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

“To thank you. You saved my life.”

“You’re welcome,” said Fallon. “Now you’d better go before I contaminate you.”

“That’s not fair. I am grateful, Webb. Truly grateful.”

Fallon would have shrugged, but it hurt. “All right,” he said wearily. “You can tell Madge what a little hero I was.”

“Please don’t leave me,” she whispered. “I haven’t any place to go. All my clothes and money were in the apartment.”

He looked at her, his eyes cold and probing. Brief disappointment touched him, and he was surprised at himself. Then he went deeper, into the clear sapphire eyes, and was ashamed--which surprised him even more.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “And why haven’t you fainted?”

“Joan Daniels,” she said. “And I haven’t had time.”

Fallon smiled. “Give me your shoulder, Joan,” he said, and they went out.