The Vigil

“They can’t get us in here…can they?”  the youth asked.

“I dunno,” Billington replied, letting his gaze rove around the interior of the blockhouse, wrinkling his nose at the stench of urine and excreta, the soil floor a carpet of litter, empty ring cans and broken bottles.  He noticed a used French letter lying almost apologetically across a crisp packet like a slug that had crawled on it in search of scraps and been killed by the salt.  Christ, you had to be pretty desperate to fuck in a place like this; you had to be desperate to come in here at all.  They were, all four of them.  He switched his gaze to the girl with the young child.  She was damnably attractive in spite of the pallor of her features and her dirt-stained bikini.  He could have fucked her in here all right, given the chance.  Who knows, he might get that chance.  There was no way of knowing how long they were going to be cooped up in here.

“It’s awful,” the girl felt that she had to say something.  “This place stinks, it’s no place to bring a child.  You could catch some awful disease amongst all this filth.”

“You could catch a lot worse out there,” Billington tried to make a joke out of it but it did not sound funny.  Nothing was funny anymore.  “We’re lucky.  There’s an awful lot of folks less lucky than us out there.”  Because they’re dead, ripped to pieces and eaten by crabs as big as cows that nobody believed existed until they came up out of the sea.

Silence.  Billington’s thoughts went back a few hours, to just around mid-day.  A crowded holiday beach on the Welsh coast, a heatwave that the experts forecast was going to break by tomorrow.  Crowds, kids laughing and yelling, building castles and paddling, doing all the things that children did on a holiday beach.  He had been stretched out on the soft sand, eyeing up that bird a few yards away, considering chatting her up.  She had a kid but there was no sign of a husband.  Perhaps her marriage had broken up.  He was trying to figure out a way of approaching her when all hell had broken loose.

People were screaming, fleeing out of the tide in blind panic.  And the giant crabs were coming in their hundreds, behemoths that moved fast in their lust for human flesh and blood.  A half-moon attack, planned with uncanny military precision so that scores of holidaymakers had their retreat cut off, herded into a circle and slaughtered by those vicious pincers.  Their bodies ripped apart, the monsters fighting amongst themselves over severed limbs, masticating with a revolting squelching noise.

Some made it to the headland, If Billington had chosen to sunbathe nearer to the Marine Parade he would probably have made it too.  But the crustaceans had blocked that escape route from further down the wide golden sands.  Behind were sheer unscaleable cliffs and way beyond the coastline levelled out again.  A mile at the most, if you ran like hell you might just make it.  On his own he might have done but he had stopped to help that auburn-haired girl and her child and that slowed them up, giving the crabs time to deploy another unit.  Trapped!

Then he had spied the blockhouse, an old wartime fortification at the end of the cliffs, a concrete pill-box whose only use these last thirty years had been as a beach toilet.  Slitted windows and a narrow entrance.  Their only chance, the bastards wouldn’t be able to reach them in there.  At least he didn’t think so.

It was only when they reached the blockhouse that Billington was aware that the youth had tagged on to them, an eighteen year-old wearing only a pair of frayed and filthy jeans.  Resentment, because even in the midst of this carnage Billington was thinking about the girl.  He had saved her, so far at least, and she would have to be grateful for it.  Play your cards carefully, we’re going to be stuck in this stink-hole for some time.

He wished he had a watch.  It was difficult to determine the passing of time but looking out through the nearest vent he judged it had to be early evening.  The tide was in, damn it, and there were still crabs about.  ”How much longer are we going to have to stay here?”  The youth was scared to hell, biting his fingernails.  “Surely they’ll come and get us out before long.  There are coastguard choppers flying up and down all the while.”

“They won’t come for us because they don’t know we’re here,” Billington thought he sounded supercilious.  “And without going outside we’ve no way of letting them know.  If you want to try it, son, that’s up to you, but there’s a crab on the edge of the tide about twenty yards away and he knows we’re in here.  Me, I’m going to sit it out with the lady here but you please yourself.  You don’t have to take orders from me.”

“I’m thirsty and hungry.”

Now that was a damn-fool thing to say, sitting here in the stifling heat and stench with empty coke and beer cans and a litter of crisp bags mocking you like an oasis mirage in the middle of the desert.  A reminder that they could have done without.  The girl winced, closed her eyes, and the child began to cry again.

“What’s your name?”  Billington tried to change the subject.

“Frank.”  A sullen reply.

“Mine’s Marie,” she made a valiant attempt to smile, “and this is Emma, Mr…?”

“Billington,” he forgot the crabs for a moment.  “Ed.”

“Do…do you think we’ll make it.?”

“Well, they can’t get at us in here and they can’t just sit out there forever waiting for us to come out.  It isn’t as though we’re in some remote place.  There’s a town less than a mile and a half away teeming with troops.  We’ll have to sit it out for a few hours but once the tide’s gone out the crabs’ll have to go with it because they can’t live on dry land.”  At least I hope they can’t.  “It’s just a question of being patient.  We were bloody fools to come to the beach after what happened at Shell Island last night.  The authorities should have closed all the beaches.”

“I don’t think even they really believed it,” she replied.  “Crabs as big as cows.  But it’s real enough, we’ve seen it for ourselves.”

“Maybe your husband will come looking for you?”  A loaded question, the thing he wanted to know most of all.

“I don’t have a husband.  He left me two years ago, when Emma was barely twelve months old.  We’re trying for a reconciliation but it won’t work, I know it won’t.”

Ed Billington’s pulses raced.  Maybe in a backhanded way these crabs had done him a big favour.  “You stick close to me, we’ll get out of this.  Frank here can please himself.  He can either stay or try and make a run for it.  He’s old enough to make up his own mind what he’s going to do.”

Frank stared balefully but did not answer.  Flies buzzed, found some excreta and settled on it to feed.  It seemed hotter than ever now and you found yourself drawing breath consciously, your body lathered with sweat.  Golden evening sunlight slanted on the filthy floor, scintillated on a crumpled Pepsi can.  You’re thirsty, aren’t you?  You’ll be even thirstier before this lot is over.

“This is stupid.”  Frank stood up, went to the nearest window.  “I can’t see any crabs.  They’ve all gone.  A couple of hundred yards and you’re on grass, a field.  They can’t follow you then.”

“You please yourself, son.  As I said, you’re big enough to make up your own mind.  Don’t let me stop you if you want to go.”  Fuck off and leave us to it.  Billington’s eyes alighted on another crumpled French letter amidst the garbage and he knew he was going to get an erection.  He knew also that the youth was going to try and make a break for it.

It was about another ten minutes before Frank stated in a voice that quavered, “I’m going to leave you to it.”

Frank hesitated, swallowed, and then he went, a rush that took him out through the narrow doorway.

“Oh God!”  Marie muttered and held Emma close to her.

Billington crossed to the nearest window from where he had a narrow view of the beach outside, a line of sand and shingle with the evening tide lapping at it.  So natural, so peaceful.  He was aware of Marie at his shoulder, felt her tenseness, the way she caught her breath, afraid to look but compelled to.

Frank was sprinting, heedless of the sharp shingle, slowing when he came to a patch of soft sand.  The tide came right in here in a kind of miniature estuary.  He would have to wade for maybe three or four yards, and then he would be safe.

“He’s going to make it,” she breathed.  “Ed, maybe if we went, too, and…”  Her voice trailed off, gave way to a shrill scream of terror.

The crab had been lurking in that patch of water, totally submerged, as though it knew that that was the track the humans would take if they made a break for it.  It surfaced, a hideous living U-boat, antennae waving menacingly, claws spread wide, sweeping inwards.  Frank screamed just once before he was guillotined, an instant decapitation that plopped the bloody head into the water, the trunk spouting crimson blood as it was lifted aloft and borne towards those cavernous jaws.

The horrified watchers saw the headless body being stuffed into the mouth, the slurping of flesh that still quivered, the grinding and snapping of frail bones.  The creature crouched there munching, tiny red eyes that seemed to penetrate the interior of the blockhouse.  Seeing and understanding.  You can’t escape, we’ll get you in the end.

Billington thought Marie was going to faint, slipped an arm around her.  Emma was awake and crying.  And inside the concrete building it seemed more stifling than ever, those empty drink cans grinning at them in the sunshine.  You’re trapped.  You’ll die of thirst if the crabs don’t get you.  Nobody will come to help you.

“It was horrible,” Marie sank down to her knees cradled Emma in her lap.  “I…don’t believe it.  It’s some kind of nightmare and any minute we’ll wake up.”

They stayed like that, squatting amidst the filth of what had become a beach lavatory over the years, just looking at each other until the dusk crept in and reduced them to silhouettes.  Neither of them spoke because there was nothing to say; their predicament was clear enough.  Listening, hearing the gentle swish of the sea on the

beach, gulls calling, and somewhere there was sporadic gunfire.

Billington’s thoughts returned to Marie.  Just himself, her and the kid.  Fate had thrown together his earlier fantasies in a macabre way.  They were going to spend a night together but not in the way he had dreamed.

“I’m sorry about your marriage,” he was glad really, but it was a starting point.  Go on, tell me the lurid details.

“We weren’t suited,” she answered him out of the darkness and there was a note of sadness in her voice.  “We both realised that, but we were trying to make it work out for the sake of Emma.  This holiday was to be a break apart whilst we thought things over.  We’re getting together again next week, but it’s a waste of time really.  We had to give it a go. Though.  How about you?”

“My wife was killed two years ago.”  Damn it, she was drawing him out, making him talk about something he wanted to forget.  Best get it over and done with, though.  “A runaway lorry ploughed into a queue of people waiting for a bus.  Two killed…she was one of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

So am I.  Nobody will replace her, not even you.  But a man has to have a woman and I’ve been too long without.  “I got made redundant a fortnight later.  I thought I might as well kill time here as lounge about at home.  I’ve put the house up for sale.  I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Do…do you think there’s any chance for us, Ed?”

“There’s a chance.” He said.  “Provided we don’t do anything stupid like young Frank.  Hell, we’re safe enough in here, we’ve just got to sit it out.  Tomorrow, the next day, who knows?”

“The heat, the lack of food and water’s going to knock Emma about,” she groaned.

There was no answer to that.

“What are you going to do when we get out of here?”  She just stopped herself from saying “if”.

“No plans,” he smiled to himself in the blackness.  “I guess I’d like to give you a call if things don’t work out for you.

“They won’t,” she replied, and then he felt her hand slipping into his.  Crazy, he thought, I could have spent hours trying to chat her up on the beach and got nowhere but this has thrown us together.

“I’ll think of something tomorrow,” he yawned.  “Maybe when the tide’s far enough out so that no crabs are lurking close by I’ll climb up on the roof and holler like hell.  Somebody’s bound to hear us and then they’ll send a chopper to lift us out.”

“You really think you can?”  New hope, squeezing his hand tightly.

“I reckon,” he answered, and let his head rest on her shoulder.  “At least we can sleep secure in the knowledge that the crabs can’t get in here.  Christ, one would have a job to fit inside here if the roof was off.”

Gradually they slid into an uneasy sleep.

Strange dreams haunted Marie. Ed was with her in a strange place, a crowded street where a guillotine loomed over them with evil purposefulness, blood dripping steadily from its might blade.  And all around them were wizened old hags clad in filthy tattered attire, blood-red headscarves tied down tightly over their heads.  They were knitting with a sinister urgency whilst the blood continued to drip from that instrument of barbaric execution.

Click-click-clickety-click-click.

Drip…drip…splat…drip.

Click-clickety-click-click.

A sea of ghoulish faces were turned towards herself and this man who had been a total stranger only hours ago.  Toothless cavities mouthed mute obscenities.  You’re going to die, just like your child has. That’s her blood dripping now!

Sheer panic had her fighting to surface from the depths of that nightmare, clawing her way out of the darkness into a stifling, stinking, filthy octagonal hovel where bright moonlight sparkled on a pile of empty cans. Ed was here, fast asleep against her; she groped for Emma but the child was not there. No, it was only a dream, she has to be here. She wasn’t.

Click-click-clickety-click.

The sound filled the blockhouse like the aimless clicking of castanets, a thousand knitting needles working tirelessly.  And in the shadows something moved, lurched.  Marie drew back, saw those tiny glowing red pinpoints, felt their malevolence boring into her.  She made out a face, a horrible wizened hag-like countenance with the mouth moving, pouting, munching.  Swallowing.  Slurping.

Tin cans rolled, rattled metallically.  A shell-shape, about the size of a large Alsatian dog, legs that scraped and gouged the concrete floor as it moved.  Another behind it.  And another.  She knew in that instant that this was no crazy figment of a terrified brain, that it was stark reality.  The crabs had found a way in and they had taken Emma, eaten her right down to the last shred of her tender flesh!

Ed Billington was stirring, seeming to have difficulty in dragging himself out of his exhausted slumber.  She wanted to shake him, to scream in his ear, “you were wrong, Ed.  They got in, they’ve eaten Emma,” but no words would come.  Paralytic with terror she could only watch in her own mind she had already surrendered, was offering herself as a blood sacrifice to these crustacean killers from the deep.

“Jesus God Almighty!”  Billington threw off the last dregs of sleep, sat bolt upright.  His brain spun, he wanted to apologise to the girl by his side.  I was wrong, we should have risked it, made a run for it.  At least that way we’d have gone down in the open.  We’re trapped.  Here we don’t stand a chance, not as much as that poor bugger Frank.

“They got Emma.” Marie was surprised how calmly she spoke when her vocal chords functioned again.  “At least it was quick.  She never even screamed.”

He nodded, asked himself one question: How? How did they get inside?

“They’re small buggers,” he grunted.  “Little giant crabs.  Why didn’t I think of it before?  They can’t all be big, they have to be small sometime before they start to grow!”

Four crabs, bloody infantile entrails spilling from their mouths, squatted there looking at the two humans against the wall.  Tiny eyes blazed hate and arrogance.

There was no way their prey could escape them in here.