Shark Beach

by Chris Jameson

  He shouted in panic as he fell, slipping, and managed to grab hold of one of the pilings. A soaking wet rope tied around the post gave him some traction, and he managed to stay on the dock as he watched the rolling duffel blow right off into the sound, sinking instantly into the waves that crashed against the dock.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, squinting against the rain.

  A stream of profanity followed, but with the wind stealing his breath and the rain pelting him, his fury ran out of steam quickly. The things he’d stolen from the Alvart place and the home of a New York investor were worth enough, and the items in the overnight bag across his shoulder were the most valuable he’d found in the Marchand house.

  “Don’t get greedy,” he told himself through gritted teeth, and then he laughed. His life had gone to shit. The people he had just stolen from were greedy. All he had been doing was taking crumbs from their table, getting a little justice from a world that wouldn’t dole it out willingly.

  He held onto the post and glanced at his boat. Waves were crashing against it, splashing onto the deck, high enough to swamp a lesser seaman. If the sea was this rough over here, with the island blocking the worst of the storm, he could only imagine how bad it must be on the Gulf side of Captiva.

  Time to get to shelter.

  Past time, really.

  Waiting for a lull between waves, Lennox rushed along the dock and climbed aboard his boat, hoisting the remaining rolling duffel bag behind him. The wind blasted him, but he braced himself against it and dragged the bag into the wheelhouse. He set it down along with the overnight bag he had stolen, the latter of which he took great care not to jostle too hard.

  Back on the deck, he again waited for a lull and then he cast off from the dock. His heart hammered in his chest. Hot rain plastered his hair to his scalp and soaked through his clothing, but all he could think about now was gunning his boat across the sound. On the deck, he took one last glance at Captiva and saw something that made his breath catch in his throat. Half a foot of water came flowing around the home he’d just robbed, cascading across the carefully manicured lawn and spilling off the edge of the property into the sound. Captiva had begun to flood. The Gulf of Mexico was washing across the island.

  Lennox had stayed out too long.

  A wave lifted his boat and smashed it against the dock. Only the bumpers saved the craft from being shattered there, as he hung on for his life. As the wave passed and the boat dipped into a trough, he bolted for the wheelhouse and fired up the engine. The boat tilted to starboard, slamming into the dock again, and he heard a crack that he prayed was only the fiberglass ridge along the deck.

  He spun the wheel, aiming directly into the next wave, and throttled up hard. The boat speared through the wave as he rocketed away from the dock. Lennox cranked the vessel around and headed for Buck Key at top speed, the engine roaring and choking as he forced it over the waves. His chest ached and his knuckles hurt from the grip he held on the wheel and the throttle. Once a wave caught him sidelong and he thought he’d capsize, but the boat seemed to fly in that moment; and when it slammed into a trough, he saw the opening into Buck Key and aimed for it.

  Lennox roared into Buck Key with the hurricane at his back, the boat propelled forward by the tidal surge. All around him, the mangrove trees were swamped, but the thick tangle of the woods blocked the worst of the wind, and he navigated back to the spot in Braynerd Bayou that he had chosen that morning. There were half a dozen other boats taking shelter there, but he saw nobody on deck. The owners and captains had moored their vessels and left them, heading back to safer havens, which suited Lennox just fine. No witnesses to his late arrival.

  Of course it also meant that he would have to ride out the hurricane right here on his boat, in what shelter Buck Key provided. But when the storm passed, if he and his boat were still above water, his life would have changed forever.

  All he had to do was wait, and try not to sink.

  * * *

  Deputy Hayes sat in her patrol vehicle and stared out at the storm. The engine hummed and the wipers squealed across the windshield, but she could barely hear them over the wind. Even the rain pummeling the roof became background noise as the wind tugged at the car, rocking it back and forth. The emergency lights flashed blue ghosts all around her, transforming the road into a haunted place, which seemed only right to her. People had died today. If they were lucky, perhaps there would be no additional fatalities, but she had no doubt there would be others who would be foolish or unlucky in this storm, someone she ought to have evacuated earlier … like the thousands who even now were hunkered down on Captiva, waiting.

  Her police radio squawked, the burst of static cutting through the wail of the storm.

  “Deputy Hayes, this is Sheriff’s Official, please respond.”

  She glanced at the radio, then sighed as she picked it up. “This is Hayes.”

  “Hang on, Deputy,” said the voice on the other line, the words tinny and hollow amidst the din.

  A moment later, another voice came on. “Where are you, Agnes?”

  She’d know that voice anywhere. Arturo Reyes had been Lee County Sheriff for only two years, but he had been in the department for nearly twenty. Even now, there in the dark with the blue ghosts spinning around her in the storm, she could picture his stern, craggy face and his kind eyes. He had been hard on her over the years, but they had developed a bond of trust that she found difficult to describe. Other people might say Sheriff Reyes had become a father figure to her, but Agnes disliked the idea of father figures. Her own father had been a garbage human being. Just because she had met an older man who had been kind and wise and set an example for her—who had expectations for her—that didn’t make him a father figure. It made him decent.

  Under oath, though, she would have had to admit that sometimes Sheriff Reyes acted as if he were a father. Now, for instance, with that admonishing tone. She glanced out across the parking lot at Blind Pass, jammed with cars that had been abandoned by the people who had made it across the pass before the fishermen had given up their efforts as too dangerous. That had been hours ago. Now waves crashed into the parking lot and swamped the cars. One Prius near the edge of the lot had already been swept over the edge, tumbled down the rocks, and carried through into Pine Island sound. If the storm surge rose any further, more would follow.

  In the glow of her headlights, water washed across the road.

  “Dammit, Agnes, are you listening? Are you there?” His voice held a tinge of worry, and she felt suddenly guilty for causing it.

  “I’m here, Sheriff.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Blind Pass. Just making sure nobody else tries to make it across. I turned two cars away in the past half hour, people finally realizing how dangerous it is on the island and trying to make a run for it now.”

  Sheriff Reyes swore loudly. “What is wrong with these folks? Every news station has reported that the bridge is closed.”

  “Power’s out, Artie.” She smiled to herself, knowing how much it grated on his nerves when she used his first name over the radio. “Some folks didn’t try to leave when it went to mandatory evac. Now they’re scared. Storm surge is on the streets and they’re panicking.”

  Static blasted through the radio and she flinched at the sound. She could practically hear Reyes thinking.

  “You need to take shelter now, Deputy,” he said. “Water’s still rising. I’m not risking one of my deputies for anyone stupid enough to make a run for it now. Get somewhere safe.”

  The storm screamed around her, almost as if it were laughing at the suggestion that anywhere might be safe. She wondered if there was anyplace on Captiva that might fit that description.

  “Will do, Sheriff,” she said. “I’ll check in when I’m stationary.”

  He replied, but the words were lost in the roar of a wave that crashed into what remained of the Blind Pass bridge. Water smashed down onto the parking lot, swept cars into one
collision after another, setting off shrieking alarms. The remains of the bridge buckled outward and then simply collapsed in relative silence, slabs tumbling into the water and washing away.

  Deputy Hayes flinched as if she’d been slapped awake. Heart racing, she threw the car into Drive, skidded into a U-turn—tires sending up their own waves from the water on the street—and started back down Captiva Drive. The wind buffeted her vehicle. Branches littered the road—long since vacated by the cars that had waited in vain to escape the island. It had taken her hours to get them all turned and headed back to find shelter.

  A coconut thumped the hood, dented it, then struck the windshield and bounced up over the roof as she drove. Her lips moved, and Deputy Hayes realized that she had begun to pray. Ahead of her, a pair of trees had fallen across the road, one atop the other like lovers in a last embrace. She jerked the steering wheel to the left, went off the road into the brush at the front of some millionaire’s property, took out the flamingo mailbox—and then a wave came flooding across the driveway. Debris rolled in the wave and it swept up bushes as it came onward. Deputy Hayes cut the wheel to the right and hit the gas. The wave hit the car broadside, lifting it, turning it, and she cried out with her hands locked onto the steering wheel.

  The car was swept across the road, thrown hard against the trees on the other side. Both passenger windows shattered and cracks spider-webbed the windshield. Deputy Hayes screamed something that wasn’t a prayer at all, but a cry of anguish.

  The wave subsided enough that her wheels touched the ground, some on pavement and some on dirt and grass. The engine coughed but continued to run. Her headlights picked out another brightly painted mailbox, this one on the right side of the road. She hit the gas, drove fifty feet through water that had to be halfway up her tires, and turned into a driveway also partly underwater.

  All sound went silent. She had blocked it out. Even her vision narrowed, so that all she could see was the dark silhouette of the house at the end of the driveway and the screened lanais, which she knew must contain a swimming pool. Deputy Hayes drove, knowing there must be better choices but aware that all of those had now been taken from her. The driveway curved and dipped, and for a few seconds the car sank and slewed sideways, but momentum carried it forward and then she found herself skidding to a halt in front of the house.

  She flung the door open, slammed it shut, and ran for the front steps through water already nearly knee deep. A smaller wave rolled into her from behind, knocked her off her feet, and washed her up against the front steps. With a wild laugh, she ran up the stairs, tried the front door, and began knocking urgently when she found it locked.

  Nobody answered.

  Just her luck. These people had been smart enough to leave.

  Deputy Hayes then broke and entered. She kicked the door in, shielding her eyes from the splintering wood of the frame. Inside, she dragged a heavy chair up against the door to keep the wind from blowing it open, due to the damage she’d just done to the lock.

  She sunk into the chair, head against the door, soaked to the skin, hair full of shards of safety glass. Her heart kept pounding hard and fast, and she waited for it to slow down, waited for her breathing to even out.

  At last, the wind screaming outside, she rose and went to the back of the house, stood and looked out at the trees and bushes in the backyard, at the dock there, and at the sound beyond. The water raged, waves crashing in all directions, as if the sea had come alive with rage, and she thought of the ancient stories about the rage of the gods. For the first time, she understood them.

  With luck, she thought, she would be safe here until the hurricane blew over.

  But she feared for what Captiva Island would look like then.

  * * *

  Broaddus knew right away that he had made a mistake. The trouble was that he didn’t know how to fix it. From the outset, his plan had been to set the sharks free. He had known that the Institute would eventually be able to round them all up, but had intended to send anonymous emails to local and national reporters. There were all kinds of things the Institute could hide while the sharks were inside their walls, but if they were out in the Gulf with a bunch of marine biologists tracking them, an enterprising journalist could get great video of that. Add in the military research contracts and the information he would include in his emails, and he knew he would do lasting damage to their Frankensteinian efforts here.

  But he’d screwed it all up.

  With the hurricane blasting in from the Gulf, an umbrella would have been ridiculous, so he went out to the shark pool in his raincoat and bent against the wind. Hurrying, cursing his own stupidity, he fought his way through the storm and stood at the edge of the pool. The moment he had opened the tunnel for the sharks, the underwater lights had blazed on, so despite the rain and the chop on the surface of the water, he could see the sharks perfectly fine.

  They were trying to kill one another.

  “Goddammit!” he roared, turning away from the wind, shouting at the sky but really screaming at himself. “You stupid son of a bitch!”

  The researchers had implanted the triggers inside the sharks’ brains and built the computer program that controlled them. Maurice Broaddus recognized his own intelligence—he knew he was smart—but he wasn’t a marine biologist and he wasn’t a computer programmer. He had learned the application as best he could, thought he’d understood; but he had not anticipated needing to use that knowledge. When he had opened the tunnel and the sharks were too passive to swim through, he had amplified their aggression a little.

  Except it turned out that either the program had malfunctioned, or he had—and he knew which was more likely.

  “Shiiiiiiiit!” he screamed into the storm, shaking his fists in frustration.

  Broaddus turned and stared into the pool. Blood fogged around one of the sharks and the others twisted toward it, knifed through the water, and attacked, tearing enormous chunks of its flesh away.

  “No,” he said to himself, so quietly the wind stole the word from his lips.

  Frozen in indecision, he could only watch the shark die. He glanced toward the still-open tunnel they’d come through, and then at the seawall at the far end of the pool. The underwater lights showed the large steel panel that was phase one of a three-phase mechanism that would open the pool to the Gulf so that anything in the pool could swim out. It had been designed to bring sea creatures in, and occasionally to set one free, certainly not with any intention that anyone might one day start a mass exodus of their test subjects. But it would work, he was sure of that.

  Or it would have, if only he could have used it.

  A huge wave smashed over the seawall, as if the Gulf had flowed right in. A piece of the Institute’s dock tumbled in the water, blasting across the deck toward Broaddus. He turned to flee and the water struck him from behind, took his legs out from under him, and slammed him on his back on the concrete as the wave subsided around him. With the wind tearing at him, he sputtered rain and sea from his lips as he wiped his face and stumbled to his feet. Whipping around, he wondered why the dock hadn’t killed him, then saw that it had caught in the pool. As the wave spread—most of it caught inside the seawall—the broken dock settled into the pool with the sharks.

  Another wave smashed the seawall, pouring over the top, but smaller this time.

  A gust of wind blasted at him and Broaddus bent into it, jacket flapping around him. He fought it, but another blast knocked him backward and he lost his footing, hit the ground, and rolled several times before he managed to get onto his hands and knees. Behind him, the door to the Institute beckoned. He was soaked through, but there would be a dry sweatshirt at least in his locker. He could change, go out to his car, and leave forever. Put Sanibel and the sharks in his rearview mirror.

  But there were the sharks. They suffered. They had been turned into weapons, and now he had made it worse for them. Struggling to his feet, Broaddus looked again at the tunnel, but as long as their ag
gression remained amplified, they would be hyper-aggressive and there would be no way to force them back through that tunnel and into their tanks without making them docile again. Broaddus did not have the first clue how to accomplish that.

  Idiot, he thought. Of course you do.

  The wind shrieked and he shouted in frustration at the power of it, the way it fought against him as he moved to the pool again. The sharks were still eating the first one to bleed, but as he looked on they began to nip at one another, to dart and bite, and he knew more would die and it would be his fault.

  The researchers had to be able to control their aggression levels remotely. They didn’t have to be in their tanks to be triggered to behave a certain way, or turn a certain direction, because that behavior would be useless to the military without a way to control it in the field. Broaddus didn’t know if he could figure it out before they all killed one another, but he owed it to them to try.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. He would regret this night for the rest of his life.

  He turned toward the building just as the generator failed and the building went dark. The underwater pool lights went out with an audible pop. Night was still hours away, but the storm was so dark that it might as well have been midnight.

  Broaddus wanted to run. What he’d done might not be able to be fixed. He had to try, but already he knew that if it didn’t work, he would just have to leave the sharks as they were and get out of there, hide on the island until the storm subsided, and then get the fuck away from Sanibel, away from Florida entirely. He sure as hell couldn’t release the sharks out into the Gulf with their aggression amplified like this.

  As he started toward the building, another wave crashed the seawall, the biggest yet. It poured over the top and raged across the property, swamping the pool deck. Broaddus met it head-on, let it carry him backward toward the door, but this time there was too much water. He kicked his feet, paddled with his hands, fought the churning white surf, reached his shoes down to try to get purchase on the concrete as the wave began to draw back, pulling him with it. Broaddus fought, tried to swim, and as the wave lost its power he finally managed to stop himself from being swept away. His shoes dragged on the concrete and he stood up, fighting the water.