Tick Tock

reversing yacht came around to port and away from the dock.
    Tommy dropped the empty shotgun, snatched up the Desert Eagle, slipped, and fell backward. He landed on his butt on the bow deck with his feet still in the anchor well.
    The gun was beaded with rain. His hands were wet and shaking. But he didn't drop the weapon when he landed.
    Clambering over the railing, shrieking in triumph, the serpent-eyed Samaritan loomed over Tommy. The moon-round, moon-pale visage split open from chin to hairline, as if it wasn't a skull at all but a strained sausage skin, and the halves of the bifurcated face peeled apart, with the demented green eyes bulging at either side, and out of the sudden gash sprouted an obscene mass of writhing, segmented, glossy-black tentacles as thin as whips, perhaps two feet long, and as agitated as the appendages of a squid in a feeding frenzy. At the base of the squirming tentacles was a wet sucking hole full of clashing teeth.
    Two, four, five, seven times Tommy fired the .44 Magnum. The pistol bucked in his hands and the recoil slammed through him hard enough to rattle his vertebrae. At such close quarters, he didn't have to be as first-rate a marksman as Del was, and every round seemed to strike home.
    The creature shuddered with the impact of the shots and pitched backward over the pulpit railing. Pincers flailed, grabbed, and one of them locked tightly on the steel tubing. Then the eighth and ninth rounds found their mark, and simultaneously a section of railing gave way with a gong-like clang, and the beast plunged backward into the harbour.
    Tommy scrambled to the damaged railing, slipped, almost pitched through the gap, clutched a firmly anchored section tightly with one hand, and searched the black water for some sign of the creature. It had vanished.
    He didn't believe that it was really gone. He anxiously scanned the water, waiting for the Samaritan-thing to surface.
    The yacht was cruising forward now, east along the channel, past the other boats in the moorings and the small marina. A speed limit was in effect in the harbour, but Del wasn't obeying it.
    Moving aft along the short bow deck, clutching at the starboard railing, Tommy searched the waters on that side, but soon the area where the creature had disappeared was well behind them and receding rapidly.
    The crisis wasn't over. The threat wasn't gone. He was not going to make the mistake of taking another breather. He wasn't safe until dawn.
    If then.
    He returned to the pulpit to retrieve the shotgun and the ski jacket full of ammunition. His hands were shaking so badly that he dropped the Mossberg twice.
    The yacht was cruising fast enough to stir up a wind of its own in the windless night. Although the skeins of rain still fell as straight as the strands of a glass-bead curtain, the speed at which the boat surged forward made it seem as if the droplets were being flung at Tommy by the fury of the storm.
    Carrying both of the guns and the ski jacket, he retreated along the narrow port-side pass way and hurriedly climbed the steep stairs to the upper deck.
    The aft portion of the open-air top deck contained a built-in table for alfresco dining and an enormous elevated sun-bathing pad across the entire stern. Toward starboard, an enclosed stairwell led to the lower deck.
    Scootie was standing on the sunbathing pad, gazing down at the foaming wake that trailed away from the stern. He was as focused on the churning water as he might have been on a taunting cat, and he didn't look up at Tommy.
    Forward on the top deck, the upper helm station had a hardtop roof and a windshield, but the back of it was meant to be open in good cruising weather. Currently a custom-sewn vinyl enclosure was snugged to the supporting rear framework of the hardtop, forming a weather-proofed cabin of sorts, but Del had unsnapped the centre vent to gain access to the wheel.
    Tommy pushed through the loose flaps, into the dim light beyond, which arose only from the control board.
    Del was in the captain's seat. She glanced away from the rain-streaked windshield. “Nice job.”
    “I don't know,” he said worriedly, putting the guns down on the console behind her. He began to unzip pockets on the ski jacket. “It's still out there somewhere.”
    “But we're outrunning it now, on the move and safe.”
    “Yeah, maybe,” he said as he added nine rounds of ammo to the Desert Eagle magazine, replenishing the thirteen-shot capacity as quickly as his trembling hands could