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."