Napalm bounded over the side, crashing down in fire and smoke on the deck of the Okeanos. But that deck was being torn apart, with great jagged rips opening, as if the entire ship was exploding in slow motion.

  Napalm rained fire down into the gaps and was rewarded with a very human-sounding scream. Then, from the direction of the bow, an arm no longer attached to Vincent’s main body came at Napalm, trailing its ruptured viscera, running on tubular legs like a red torpedo.

  Napalm turned and blew flame at the arm, but it did not stop. It burned, but it did not stop, and Napalm felt rather than saw a second detached arm slithering toward him from the starboard side, crawling up and over the rail like a sea monster rising from the water.

“Burn!” Peaks roared, and he spread his liquid fire everywhere. It rolled across the deck, blistering the paint, seeping down into the holds, lighting up anything flammable, food supplies, scientific gear, specimens, bodies, the ship’s cat . . . and Vincent.

But Vincent’s detached arms continued their advance on Napalm, their tubular legs burning and regrowing, burning and regrowing. They marched like fearless warriors through walls of flame, over blistering magma. They burned and smelled of fish. They burned and sent up an oily smoke. They writhed and twisted and were consumed, and yet kept growing.

Impossible!

The scientist in Peaks, the rational mind that still worked feverishly beneath the animal rage of Napalm, could not believe what it was seeing. Could not imagine that anything biological could so ignore its own destruction. It wasn’t courage; the sections were mindless automata, indifferent to their own survival, driven by the will of the thin boy with the glittering eyes.

Monster, Chapter 25