"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” Richie let a prolonged shriek out from the depths of his chest as the alligator’s prehistoric jaws snapped closed inches from his face.
He was overturned on a sagging dock that was leaning heavily into the water, ready to capsize from the weight of the reptilian beast stride it. It clung to the slope like a nightmarish aquatic gecko, and Richie was spilled into the bay pool within the darkened marina storage place. He sputtered cold saltwater as he was dunked under, and felt frigid jolts of cold bite into him. Only the urgency to avoid the actual bite that threatened him allowed Richie to more or less completely shrug off what should have shocked him into stillness and meek treading of water. Instead, he swam as an olympic lap swimmer might, frantically racing for stable ground again.
Richie threw his half-submerged form against an opposite dock and scrambled to mount it. On his heels he could swear he felt the snapping of the gator’s teeth. He rolled over, coughing out wayward droplets lodged in his throat, and jumped to his feet again in a frenzied crouch, eyes darting all around for sight of the predator. He heard subtle splashing at his back and turned, seeing the end of the beast’s tail disappear under the surface, leaving a ripple.
Then, there was only silence. That was worse than the bellowing and the roaring, and Richie felt cold terror at knowing that that thing was planning something. There wasn’t a chance it gave up that easily, not after how it had pursued him when they first met in Richie’s closet portal.
Richie took a knee and placed a palm to the surface of the dock. He felt a growing vibration.
“Oh shit.” Richie said, and leapt to the railed deck of a white cabin cruiser with a dark blue awning stretched over the back deck.
That same instant, the dock Richie had swam to was raised out of the water with startling uproarious speed from below, the gator having dove deep to the bottom and charged the underside like a missile, ramming it. Before Richie could get a good look at the beast again though, it was gone under the water once more, just like that. Other boats were rocking about and slamming into each other all around the marina, and Richie swiveled his gaze in a circle, watching them all.
Trying to disorient me?
He knew by now though that the gator would try to attack him directly wherever possible. He rolled to the side, slipping on the unstable deck into a kind of improvised summersalt, as the massive boney armored bludgeon that was the beast’s long tail fell atop the boat, having sprung from the water at its side. The shield-like window of the boat’s cab caved in, safety glass cracking in spider ringlets from the heavy blow, and the metal frame twisted and deformed like soft plastic. Richie was thrown onto his back, and widened his eyes as he saw the tail rise from where it had struck - but not drop back below the surface again.
“Oh no.” Richie muttered.
He rolled to the left, right, and left again as the tail slammed into the boat three more times, each time splintering wood and ultimately dealing fatal damage to the cruiser. Richie spilled off of the bow onto another outcropping dock, and watched the boat, caved in half, lilt and sink. The tail slammed into the surface of the bay, scattering liquid debris, and the spray flew in Richie’s face.
Shit!
The sneaky bastard was more clever than Richie gave it credit for, using a blinding tactic like that. Richie instinctively jumped, and that ended up being the right call as the sweeping scythe strike of the gator’s tail passed under him, skimming the surface of the dock. His left leg was a bit lower than his right when he jumped, thrown off by the subtle tidal changes moving the dock, and the top of the gator’s tail clipped Richie’s shin, throwing him, spinning, into a far wall of the enclosure. Richie grit his teeth as the wood splintered on his back and shoulders, and he dropped belly-down into a crate of deck-swabbing supplies and carpentry pieces, banging his right hip and spilling them across the wood.
Richie looked up through one watering eye - the other squeezed shut - and gaped in horror as the gator charged him, mouth wide open and ready to chomp Richie and the dock down in one bite together. Richie hooked his arm through the handle of an overturned, half-spilled tin pail of red paint (of which great splatters now stained his legs), and tossed it into the gator’s open maw. Sparks spurted where the inverted bottom of the metal pail scraped the beast’s upper teeth, and it landed midway down the gator’s long tongue, lodged partially in its gullet and staining its pulpy pink mouth bright red.
The gator recoiled from the chemical taste and the partial throat obstruction, and dove under the water moments before crashing into the dock. Richie instead felt it break through the back wall of the marina, and the rush of night wind on his back. The dock swayed, and he pinwheeled his arms for balance, only barely managing not to tumble headfirst into the brine again as he widened his stance to keep his balance on the shaking dock. Immediately after he regained his foothold, Richie turned to the hole opened up in the shed - there was only open water, the nearest walkways twenty or thirty feet from him. He couldn’t make that jump, at least not from a standing position with no momentum on an unstable platform.
Richie clicked his tongue and doubled back, sprinting for the locked gate at the end of the marina.
He lost traction several yards into his sprint from the puddles intersecting across the dock, slipping and sliding as if on smooth ice. His stomach lurched and his arms splayed out for balance, and he ended up overcorrecting, hunching over too far and nearly landing on his face. As he did an awkward skip to try to catch up with his own upper body, his right ear - nearest the shed wall - caught the sound of rushing water displaced by accelerating mass.
The gator burst through the wall, sending pulverized boards and nails flying, and flipping the portion of the dock immediately ahead of Richie. Richie tumbled onto his side and scraped his knees nearly sliding right over the newly-formed edge. The force of the gator bulldozing through the barricades too quickly to immediately turn and lunge at Richie again ended up bending the back half freely along the wake in the water. Only that sudden turn ended up neutralizing Richie’s forward momentum, and he slowed to a crouch facing the path back from whence he came. He clicked his teeth, realizing that he had to backtrack far enough to cross the span of the pool to a dock on the other side of the shed, which in turn meant he would have to leapfrog off boats that had been torn loose in the gator’s continuous rampage.
Before Richie had time to gauge his distances, the gator completed a hard u-turn and raced toward him again. Richie, who had barely started a building trot back down the dock, was thrown back on his ass by the barreling gator, and gaped in horror again as the gigantic reptile sheared straight through the walkway with another huge chomp. The separate fragment of dock Richie straddled now ran maybe a dozen feet long total, and was sent spinning by the gator’s own colliding currents, as if in a momentary whirlpool. Richie dropped to his stomach and clutched his fingers between the cracks in the planks, feeling ridiculously as though he were riding a rodeo bull.
The runaway dock crashed into another cruiser, which in turn crashed toward another row of boats, cushioned by a crumple zone of side-tethered digneys. Richie stumbled and ran across the decks, vaulted over another deck awning, and slid across the slickened surface it had formed. His parkour escape run across the Station Bay rooftops flashed through his mind, especially his frightening accidental plunge off the side of the sloped glass. This time however, it wasn’t a cushioned landing of treetops and flower beds beneath him - it was the spread-open jaws of a titan crocodilian.
Richie focused all of his muscle power into his quad muscles at the last moment, feet planted on the safety rail of a tilted boat, and sprang up and across to the netting of a small sailboat whose mast promised a high ground above the persistent scaly brute. Richie scarcely scrambled up the rough meshwork unto the rungs leading up to the crowsnest when the gator effortlessly sabotaged this effort as well. It burst halfway out of the water again, slamming its bulk onto the side of the sailboat’s deck. Its height was such that it leaned belly-first against the mast, jaws merely inches below Richie’s feet. The mast creaked ominously. Richie had precious little time to dread what would happen before the gator chomped down on the mast, breaking it in those clamping jaws like a toothpick.
The mast began to collapse like an axed tree, down toward the forest bed of docks and baywater. Richie screamed as his feet left the lip of the crows nest perch, and then he was hanging from the ceiling of the boathouse with his hands holding a white knuckle grip on the crisscrossing inner rafters.
The enraged gator, apparently losing patience with Richie’s annoyingly simian escape maneuvers and evasive athletics, slammed and smashed the clipped sailboat to flotsam. When it finished its terrifying temper tantrum, it glared at Richie and let its body begin to sink below the surface again, leaving only its glowing orange eyes and flaring nostrils as the last things visible for several seconds before it submerged completely.
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Richie never felt heavier than when he was dangling from the ceiling by rough, splintery beams over a watery death trap. Even from here and in the dark, his fear-stricken senses perceived bubbles rising to the sea’s surface, and the enlarging shadow of the gator speeding up to explode out of the pool from below.
Richie looked up into the rafters he hung from, and saw that the intersecting beams ran the length of the subtle slope of the marina’s cover. They didn’t look unlike the fixtures of a strange jungle gym of wooden monkey bars and balance beams, or a skinned attic space. Richie took a deep breath and flexed his biceps, pulling himself up into the rafters to crawl out of the gator’s incoming line of fire.
Scrambling across the beams, with their frightening gaps between them that threatened a plunge back down to ground zero in the event of a single careless misstep, Richie further aggravated his knees on the sandpaper-like texture of the boards he was forced to army crawl upon. His right palm came down hard on an exposed nail, piercing his hand halfway through and eliciting a muffled shriek of pain. This sudden flare up partially distracted Richie from the cataclysmic crashing just behind him as the gator flew with a geyser-like splash from the bottom of the marina. Its jaws and head crashed through the rafters Richie had first grabbed, and lodged itself up to the throat in the ceiling.
Richie looked over his shoulder at the smooth, checkered underbelly of the thing he was quickly starting to consider his archnemesis. His terror was somewhat eased by the realization that the stupid thing got itself stuck, and was grunting in frustration as it fruitlessly tried to dislodge its head from the hole. Looking down, Richie saw that only its tail still hung down to the water itself, tip hidden a few feet down under the surface.
“Hah! Serves you right, you hypercarnivorous pea-brained fuck!” Richie frothed at the mouth at the gargantuan Jurassic relic.
It was close enough, and Richie was offended enough, that he wasted time rapidly throwing short heel kicks into its heaving chest, not caring that he was doing little if any damage - it was a matter of principle at this point.
Then, the hairs on the back of his neck raised as he felt a familiar chill. Drawn to the scent of blood, the shades found him, and began seeping down through the cracks in the roofing overhead like black goo, congealing on the beams and forming into their twisted shadowy bodies.
Richie decided to call it a draw with the gator, and continued scrambling through the hanging tunnel, the shades scraping and gibbering after him with darting tendril tongues.
Ultimately, a destabilized section of wood gave out from under Richie, and he fell back to the bottom of the marina, landing in a debilitating belly flop on the surface of a final dock. Stars faded in and out of vision as tears welled up in his eyes, and Richie felt as though his organs had just burst, crippling his breath. But his fluttering eyes focused on the sight immediately in front of him - a short set of steps to the marina’s gate, a metal door with a viewing window set in a wall of mesh fence running to the ends of the building in either direction.
He was right there. Suck it up, soldier.
Richie forced himself to stand and scramble up the stairs, hearing the hooting shades, taking on the aspect of demonic monkeys, swinging across the rafters after him.
He threw himself against the gate, clawing at the handle - locked up tight. After tugging on the door fruitlessly for a few seconds, Richie rapidly beat at its surface, banging as loudly as he could.
“Help!” he cried out.
Behind him, the shades were slithering to the edge of the beams where Richie had fallen, preparing to drop down after him.
Richie jumped as a speaker system hidden somewhere blared to life, and the staticy screech birthed Leon’s inappropriately calm voice.
“You made it, good.” Leon said. “Hang on, let me get you the security code.”
Richie’s heart dropped. He turned back to look, and saw the shades crouched in the splintered rafters above him, glaring and swinging their creepily long arms like pitch black orangutans. They jumped down to pounce from above, only to be blown away when the albino alligator at last dislodged itself free of the break in the ceiling, flinging wood beams and tearing down sections of roof as it slammed back into the water, sending miniature tidal waves slamming against the sides of the marina. Richie heard both of the shades splash into the bay - and sink like stones.
Modifying their bodies into ape-like forms had the consequence of mimicking the dense bones and musculature of them as well, negating any and all ability to float in water, much less swim. Richie didn’t know if they had lungs to drown, but it was only cold comfort - the gator was rearing its ugly head again, sidewinding up along the pool toward Richie.
“Hurry up, goddammit!” Richie punched the door with his punctured hand, then groaned and clutched it, grimacing.
“Ok, I think it’s 38386.” Leon said.
Richie found the keypad in an attached box built into the mesh wall to the door’s right and punched in the code.
He received a harsh buzz of rejection - the password was invalid.
“Leon!” Richie cried.
“Wait, no, 3686?” Leon sounded distressingly unsure.
Nope.
Nor was it 86833.
“These digits are so chicken-scratch, I can’t tell the 3s from the 6s from the 8s.” Leon said over the tinny speaker, mildly flummoxed.
Behind Richie, the gator had caught its second wind, and was charging through the water like a speedboat, blasting through what dock fixtures and floating wreckage still remained in a beeline for Richie, jaws stretched open and eager. Richie could smell raw meat on its breath, and feel the humidity surging outward toward him on its hot exhales.
“OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR!!!” Richie screamed.
Feet from Richie, the alligator was intercepted as a massive form crashed through the ceiling above - Sparta landed atop the gator’s head, slamming its jaws shut under his bulk prematurely. The gator grunted as it bit its outstretched tongue, puncturing deep, bloody marks in the sensitive pink flesh. The gator was shoved face-first under the platform the stairs rose from, crashing into the mesh under Richie’s feet and shaking the whole shed again. Sparta roared in turn, sinking its claws into the rough hide and hunkering down to bite at the reptile’s neck as he turned about on its body.
Then the ‘access granted’ sound effect chimed in, and Richie was able to yank the door open as Leon completed the manual override access command remotely. Richie would later assume he dissociated for a block or so between him and the godforsaken marina behind him. He regained awareness mid-sprint, on a wider pier raised a half dozen feet over the bay. He looked over his shoulder for a few seconds to see the remnants of the marina finally collapse into the sea, off in the dark distance. The torch light sparkling across the black waters at either side of Richie framed the leaping shadows of more pursuers - silky, vaguely insectile shades were darting, ninja-like, across the tops of wooden posts rising intermittently out of the bay.
Richie ran to a wider square of deck that connected to another suburban district of Tide Town, and there decided to hold his ground, having more than a little aggression to work out. The shades dropped onto the deck around him, and one blindsided him out of the corner of his eye with a foot that lashed out at him on an extending, whip-like leg. Richie was kicked in the face, splitting his lower lip, and sprawling him backfirst across a wooden safety rail.
He only stood up straight again, dusted himself off, and spat out a mouthful of blood. He looked at the numerous shades now circling him and swaying in their strange shadowy dance.
“You know what? I’m getting real sick of your shit!” Richie growled.
A shade dashed at him, and Richie darted back, stomping and soccer-kicking a loose lumberwork board into his hands. Gripping the 2x4 solidly, he slammed the board across the shade’s face so hard it snapped the wood directly in half. Without losing a second freezing up under the pained screech of the soul-consuming hunter, Richie jammed the broken point of the board he held - now resembling a classical wooden stake such as for stabbing vampires through the heart - into the dazed creature’s chest, impaling it clear through out the back, between what would have been the shoulder blades on an actual person. It gurgled as black blood oozed around the board from either puncture wound, and slumped over on the deck.
At Richie’s back, another shade had tried to take advantage, rushing to claw at Richie’s flank. Instead, Richie stepped to the side and stuck out a leg, actually managing to trip the abomination, and swung a backfist into the back of its neck as he pivoted to face a trio of other shades. His other hand fell to his pocket and withdrew his swiss army knife, flipping out the longest blade it offered. He ducked under a storm of lunging, swiping claw strikes, stabbing into one of the fiends’ armpits and twisting to throw it into another, always keeping his face turned toward an opponent. He flipped the blade into a reverse grip and glanced a slash across one of their chests, then stepped back out of range of another lunge. He spun the knife back into a forehand grip, clutched it with both hands, and slammed it up under the jaw of a shade, stabbing into its face like a bladed uppercut. His face was a furious tiger’s death glare. The blade was stuck in the screeching monster’s head, so he half-threw, half-pushed the pierced shade into a wooden crate that shattered to boards under it.
Things got a bit grey again after that. Richie was a whirlwind of wild jabs, hooks, heel kicks, stomps, backfists, and elbows. He regained lucidity again mid-action to find himself performing a midair splits to kick a shade at either side in the face hard enough to throw them over the edges and into the bay. Landing from this, he felt his leg bones creak, and realized that they were nearing their limits.
He glimpsed something in the edge of his blindspot, and looked down dispassionately. A black claw was embedded in Richie’s torso at the waist, four long, curving talons of shadow punched through his body up to the knuckles. Following the outline of the hand, Richie looked down the length of an elastic arm stretching back some fifty feet to a shade that was crouched in a boathouse alley.