The explosion hurled her forward and she struck pavement, rolling, smashing knees and elbows as she slammed into the front tire of some cookie-cutter SUV.
Groaning, swearing, her head throbbing, she stood and turned to stare at the fire that licked up over the side of the bridge. It flared high, the wind blew it across the road, cars rushed forward or jerked into reverse, smashing bumpers to avoid the flames. The fire died down in seconds, but people were climbing out of cars, rushing away from the spot just in case.
Deputy Hughes exhaled. A minivan had been badly scorched, but the family inside was piling out, some of the Sanibel cops rushing from the other side of the pass to escort them.
Then a section of the bridge gave way.
She stared as the southbound side, where the boat must have struck the pilings and the fire had blazed up, collapsed into the storm surge in the pass below. The scorched van and two other cars went with it, the van empty but the cars loaded with passengers whose screams could be heard only on a single gust of wind before the storm swept their voices away.
Behind Deputy Hayes, the driver of a little black convertible laid on his horn.
She turned and stared at him. “Are you kidding me?”
The convertible wasn’t getting off Captiva Island before the hurricane hit.
Neither was anyone else.
CHAPTER 5
Broaddus was virtually alone in the Institute. A scientist named Natalia Rocco and her unshaven research assistant were in the overnight quarters, which puzzled Broaddus because the clock hadn’t even rolled around to lunchtime. Dr. Rocco, whom everyone called Tali, had holed up in the overnight quarters from the moment they had arrived. Tali and Philip, the unshaven assistant, had volunteered to stay behind because at least one staff scientist had to stay, just in case something went horribly wrong. Broaddus had volunteered, but he was only a security guard, and in the midst of a hurricane there might not be any way to phone someone with the right answers.
He imagined Tali and Philip in the quarters watching television until the storm took out the cable signal and the Wi-Fi, then maybe playing board games. Maybe they would drink a few beers or make a meal. His stomach rumbled at the thought, but Broaddus had plans that did not involve lunch.
It occurred to him that Tali and Philip might be involved with each other, though that kind of fraternization would be frowned upon amongst the staff. Of course they might have just been close. He knew he should not make such assumptions about people, but now that it had occurred to him, he remembered so many times he had seen the two of them laughing together, and the way Tali would touch Philip’s arm, and the times they had stayed late together or arrived for work in tandem.
If they were intimate, that would make things easier for him. They would be that much more distracted if they weren’t just hiding out from the hurricane. If they were having sex, riding out the hurricane in each other’s arms, they were even less likely to wonder what the one security guard on duty might be up to.
His key card let him into the behavioral lab. The pad beeped and a light turned green and he heard the door unlock. With a deep breath, he pushed through the door and closed it quietly behind him. The lights flickered automatically to life as he moved quickly to the nearest computer terminal. There were a dozen desks in the lab, which looked much more like an office than a laboratory. All of the computer screens were dark, but this one flared to life the moment he tapped the mouse. A password field appeared, blinking, and Broaddus hesitated.
You’re crazy, he told himself.
But even here in the lab, he could hear the distant howl of the storm. He would never get an opportunity like this again, never be so alone in the Institute. Plus he had already swiped his key card to get into the behavioral lab. Someone would notice that and ask him why he had entered, and that line of inquiry might lead to him losing this job.
“Fuck it,” he whispered, and he tapped in the override password that only the director of security used. Only the sirector of security was supposed to know it, but Broaddus had seen him use it to access the system seven months ago and knew he kept it written on the back of a takeout menu from the Hungry Heron, stuffed into the bottom drawer in his desk.
The system blinked to life.
His heart tightened in his chest, but he began clicking around immediately, searching for the files he needed. One of them opened a live-feed camera that showed him the shark tank. The sharks were swimming in languid circles, almost floating like manatees, without the sharp air of sinister purpose that other sharks seemed to carry with them. Just the sight saddened him.
“Jesus,” he said. “What have these assholes done to you?”
But the question felt empty. Broaddus might not know the nitty-gritty details, but he knew what the Institute had been doing to sharks and he knew why. He had overheard enough, asked enough questions of researchers eager to discuss their work, and dug up enough information in his online research. He knew what they were up to.
Various governments, including Israel, Russia, and the United States, had been using trained dolphins for surveillance and espionage since the 1960s. The Department of Defense, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, had been doing research into controlling sharks’ brains for years. Though the Institute would never admit their government connection or the percentage of their research financed by tax dollars, they had started over a decade before, implanting electrodes into a shark’s brain to cause certain neurons to fire at certain times, attempting to elicit certain behavior on command. It should have been ridiculous, the kind of Cold War lunacy that had been left behind in the twentieth century. When Broaddus had gotten one of the researchers to explain it to him, she had asked him to imagine what would happen if they could make a shark’s brain think it had smelled blood from a certain direction, when no blood was present. They could make the shark swim in that direction. If they could trigger certain responses, they could make the shark do virtually anything, from following a boat with a camera attached to its body to attacking a small vessel or anyone in the water to killing until the shark itself exploded from eating all it had killed. Broaddus had felt sick, listening to that description. Sick, then furious.
For many years, the Institute had been trying to perfect the process, finding new and better ways to program the firing of those neurons. As far as Broaddus could gather, they had done precisely that with a combination of stem-cell therapy to overgrow the areas of the brain that influenced preferred behavior and a liquid vanadium battery developed by the army at Fort Devens up in Massachusetts.
An old Soviet-era program had once used dolphins to plant explosives on the outside of ships. The Institute’s behavioral lab had made sharks that would do that and so much more. They had made sharks that were weapons.
Broaddus hated them for it.
He watched the lethargic sharks drifting in the tank on-screen. The lights flickered—the effects of the hurricane—but he wasn’t worried. The Institute’s generators would kick in if the power went out.
With the computer’s mouse, he clicked around to find the master behavioral control. This was far from the first time he had used the director of security’s override password to access these files. He had read most of them, familiarized himself with the program, watched the researchers every moment he could, and eavesdropped, and it had been easy. As much as he liked many of the scientists, in spite of the work they did, to a woman or man they all thought he was stupid.
Maurice Broaddus was anything but stupid.
He checked the aggression levels on the master control. So low. Like a mental hospital keeping its patients drugged and complacent, the Institute kept the sharks calm this way. It was unnatural, hideous, shameful behavior. and it broke his heart.
With a click and drag of the mouse, Broaddus woke the sharks from their stupor, brought them up to their natural aggression levels.
Then he brought up the program that would allow him to open the shark tank. A flooded pas
sage led from the tank to the vast outdoor saltwater pool, which itself was separated from the Gulf by a high seawall. Broaddus had always felt it was cruel to let them swim so close to freedom, but never set them free.
When the door slid open inside the tank, the sharks swam into the passage with startling speed and ferocity, fighting one another to get through and out into the pool.
They were awake now, and angry.
* * *
For Rick, the worst part of sitting in the traffic on Captiva Drive came from knowing his boiling frustration would do nothing to speed them along. All of that anxiety, all the fury he was bottling up with every minute they sat unmoving, or even when they rolled forward a few feet, had nowhere to go. He tried to be mindful, like he’d read about in a book Corinne had not-so-subtly given him on her own birthday, but the tension would not leave his body. His hands were tight on the wheel, his shoulder muscles rigid. In the back of his mind, in this calm and rational chamber of his brain, he knew that he and Corinne and their girls were in this together, but his nerves felt so frayed that he was on edge, ready to snap at them with any provocation.
He took a deep breath then let it out.
“You okay?” Corinne asked.
Rick smiled through his teeth. “Not even close. Trying to practice patience, but I’m no expert.”
“That’s the truth,” Emma said, from the back seat.
Kelsey giggled, and the sound made Rick exhale. His smile relaxed, turned genuine, and for a moment he was able to let the tension bleed out.
“I hate to say it,” Corinne observed, “but does it seem slower to you? I’m not sure we’ve moved more than fifty feet in the last ten minutes.”
Rick nodded. “I didn’t want to mention it.”
“You think there’s an accident or something?” Kelsey piped up.
“Almost inevitable in a situation like this,” Rick told his daughter. “And with a road this narrow, there’s hardly any room for emergency vehicles. If someone broke down or had a bad accident, we could be here till Christmas.”
Corinne sighed. The girls settled in their seats. Kelsey started humming to herself while Emma tapped away at her cell phone, texting or posting or whatever she did with her friends. Rick glanced at his wife out of the corner of his eye.
“I know,” he said. “You don’t have to say it.”
She frowned. “Say what? I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“That if we had left yesterday like you wanted, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
Corinne gave a small shrug. “Maybe we would have. It doesn’t matter now.”
He tsked at her, clucking his tongue. “Those words are coming out of your mouth. But I know you.”
“Maybe not as well as you think,” she replied.
Rick glared at her. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. Look, all we need to do is be patient. The evacuation is mandatory. Everyone’s going the same direction and the local authorities are on this. We’ll be fine,” she said.
He glanced in the rearview mirror. His daughters were quiet, but they were watching and listening. If he had learned anything as a father, it was that children heard everything, so though he wanted to point out that they would not be at all fine if they were still in the car when the hurricane made landfall, he forced himself to stay quiet. Rick had embarrassed himself on the beach yesterday, and he knew the girls must have been mortified. He felt as if he had done nothing but screw up again and again for a while now, and he figured the rest of his family must be as sick of it as he was. He did not have a lot of practice keeping his thoughts to himself, but he wanted to learn.
“Driving game?” he asked. “To pass the time?”
“Yeah. Ask me movie trivia,” Emma said. “But it has to be something I’ve seen.”
“Me too!” Kelsey chimed in.
“You’ve barely seen any movies,” her sister argued. “You’re too little.”
That set off a chain reaction argument that made Rick roll his eyes. He glanced at Corinne, who smiled knowingly and patted him on the leg.
“A valiant effort, though,” she said.
For a moment, he exhaled and all was well between them. Even the traffic did not seem to matter in those few seconds.
Then he saw the first car headed the opposite direction, back the way they’d come.
“What the hell? They’re going back.”
“Maybe it’s an emergency,” Corinne said. “It must be. They forgot medication, or maybe a family member who needed to get out. Something—”
“Or maybe they’ve just decided that it would be smarter to be back at the house prepping the place for the hurricane than sitting on the road waiting for the storm surge to sweep us all into the Gulf.”
As if in answer to his words, another car went by, followed by a minivan. He craned his neck and saw another vehicle following.
“They don’t all have emergencies,” he said. His fingers opened and closed on the steering wheel as he weighed his options. After a moment, he put his turn signal on and began to pull out of traffic.
“What are you doing?” Corinne asked. “Don’t be crazy. We’re not starting at the back of the line.”
“Dad?” Emma said, in that teenage girl tone that suggested he was out of his mind.
The car in front of them and the one behind them—the Hautalas’ rental—were too close for him to pull a U-turn, so he waited, watching the oncoming lane and glancing ahead and behind. He mentally urged the car ahead of him to creep forward to give him space. He figured the Hautalas could decide for themselves what to do next.
“Rick, I’m serious,” Corinne said. “Do not turn around.”
That command triggered something in him. He glanced at her sharply, and when he spoke, he had no love in his voice and even less humor. “Don’t tell me what to do. Are you blind? Can you not see we’re not making any progress? We’re better off going back to the house. If it’s this bad here, it’s probably this bad all the way through Sanibel and over the causeway. We’ll end up running out of gas, because you know the gas stations will run out. No trucks will be delivering.”
Corinne stared at him with a coldness that equaled his own. “And if it’s just an accident? If some truck crashed and is blocking the road?”
“Then all of this would go much faster, but how likely is that, Corinne? They’d have a lane moving around it. Just sitting here is not making our girls any safer!”
“Neither is staying on an island a few inches above sea level during a hurricane!” she screamed. “Don’t you turn this car around!”
“Goddammit, Corinne—”
Behind him, Kelsey began kicking the back of his seat. She screamed at them. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!”
When Rick glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw that both of his girls were crying. Emma had taken Kelsey’s hand.
“You guys,” Emma said quietly, “you’re scaring her. You’re scaring me, too. Just make a decision and we’ll do the best we can.”
The car ahead of them rolled forward five feet, but Rick could see that this was no real development, probably just a consequence of those cars leaving the evacuation line. He exhaled but it did not help relieve the tension that ratcheted through him.
“Dad?” Kelsey asked gently, as if afraid he would shout at her, too. It broke his heart the way she said his name.
“We’re okay,” he said, a pang of guilt in his heart. He glanced at Corinne. “We’re okay.”
Silence descended amongst them, so overwhelming that the hip-hop thumping from a car several vehicles behind them became loud enough to induce headaches.
“So…” he began.
Then he saw another car pass by going in the opposite direction, driven by a familiar face. “Did you see that? The car that just went by—that Simone girl was driving. Our neighbors have turned around and are going back.”
“They’re college kids,” Corinne said. “They may be smart, but n
obody ever claimed college kids had a good sense of self-preservation.”
The rain pelted the roof and the wind rocked the car. Up ahead, people started laying on their horns, more aggravated than ever now that the creeping traffic had essentially come to a standstill. Rick glanced in the rearview mirror and could barely make out the silhouette of Matti Hautala at the wheel of the car behind him.
Rick clicked on his turn signal again. He glanced into the oncoming lane and saw headlights cutting through the rain, but still a distance away. When the car ahead of him rolled forward a foot or two, he pulled out of line and did a U-turn.
Corinne muttered some bit of profanity. In the back seat, Kelsey whispered that she was scared, but Rick could comfort her later. He rolled down his window and saw that Matti already had his down.
“Man, what are you doing?” Matti called to him, his voice almost swallowed by the wind.
“Going back to the house,” Rick said. “Something’s gone wrong up there. You want to park here and wait to drown, be my guest.”
He rolled up his window and hit the gas, glad to just be moving for the first time in hours.
“You really are an asshole,” Corinne said quietly.
Rick shot her a dark look. “The girls,” he reminded her.
Corinne looked out at the rain. “Oh, the girls already know.”
He glanced into the back seat again, but his daughters—like their mother—were watching the rain.
* * *
The beach felt otherworldly. Rashad moved quickly across the sand, glad for the raincoat that Nadia had loaned him. The wind had gained so much strength that an umbrella’s life would have been marked in minutes out there on the Gulf. The sky had turned a mélange of deep orange, bruise purple, and charcoal gray that grew blacker and blacker out to sea. Enormous waves crashed on the shore, gobbling up chunks of beach that high tide alone could not have touched.
And this is just the beginning, Rashad thought uneasily.
Shark Beach Page 7
