Loch (The Zone Unkown)

by Paul Zindel

  They spotted John Randolph cutting across the base in a jeep. “Have you seen Dr. Sam?” Loch called.

  “He’s on The Revelation,” Randolph shouted back.

  Loch and Zaidee walked toward the dock. The old brown fishing trawlers were backed up to the shore with their crews feeding shiny metal netting from two flatbed trucks onto the boats’ huge, rusted spindles. To the left of the Sea-B several dozen men were helping guide a large, sleek boat into the water to join the fleet of skiffs.

  “What kind of boat is that?” Zaidee wanted to know.

  “Looks like a converted PT boat,” Loch said. He remembered seeing them in World War II footage on TV and knew they were famous for their speed; some were some still used by the Coast Guard for running down harbor drug traffic.

  When they reached the dock, supplies were being unloaded from trucks onto the water taxis. Zaidee held Loch’s hand as he guided them through the horde and up the gangplank onto the yacht.

  They found Dr. Sam in the control room with Cavenger, Emilio, and several other electronics technicians.

  “Dad,” Loch called from the doorway.

  Dr. Sam looked up from calibrating the graphic recorders. He was surprised to see Loch and Zaidee.

  Cavenger saw them too. “Get rid of them,” he ordered Dr. Sam.

  Dr. Sam moved quickly to the door, his face flushed. “What are you doing here? I told you the base was off-limits today.”

  “We’ve got something to tell you—” Zaidee started.

  “Not now,” Dr. Sam cut her off, sharply.

  “It’s important, Dad,” Loch said.

  “I told you to stay at the trailer.” Dr. Sam raised his voice, wanting Cavenger to know it wasn’t his fault the kids had shown up. Loch picked up on exactly what his father was doing. He really hated it whenever his dad was afraid to stand up to Cavenger even when it just meant taking a minute out to talk to his own kids.

  “Daddy, something wonderful—” Zaidee tried to get the words out.

  “Look. Just leave. And I mean on the double,” Dr. Sam yelled at them, acting like a stranger as he practically pushed them out the door.

  Zaidee stared down at the deck. She wanted to cry. They had the most wonderful news in the world to tell their father, and he wouldn’t even give them a minute.

  Loch put his arm around his sister. “Sorry we bothered you,” he told Dr. Sam.

  “It’s just not the right time,” Dr. Sam said, guilt crawling into his voice now. “You’re going to get me fired.” He went back into the control room and slammed the door.

  “He doesn’t mean it,” Loch told Zaidee.

  “Yes he does,” Zaidee said.

  Loch kept his arm around Zaidee as they walked along the deck. “What do you say we go down to Sarah’s cabin?”

  Zaidee ducked out from under his arm and glared at him. “No thanks. She’s probably having a bad hair day. You’re not going to tell her about Wee Beastie, are you?”

  “No,” Loch said. “Let’s just see how she’s feeling.”

  “That’s a definite pass.”

  “You used to like her,” Loch reminded Zaidee. “I don’t get it. Lately, all you do is put her down.”

  “Because she’s turned into a really horrible, spoiled, rich brat, that’s why,” Zaidee said.

  “How can you say that?”

  “It’s easy. Her father gives her everything she wants, and she’s got too many Harrods and trendy store shopping bags.”

  “What does it matter how many shopping bags she has?”

  “She always has them on display in her room, with all the brand names and logos of her clothes staring at us. Remember last year I had this nice new blouse from Penney’s and it had a little fox logo on it, and she saw it and kept asking, ‘Who has the fox, oh, who has the fox?’ Remember that? Her father lets her buy so much junk, nothing means anything to her, including people.”

  Loch flicked his hand up the back of Zaidee’s neck. “Zaidee, don’t be jealous.”

  “Look, just don’t tell her about Wee Beastie is all I’m saying,” Zaidee pleaded. “He’s ours.”

  “Okay,” Loch said.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Excellent,” Zaidee said. “In that case, I’ll wait on the rear deck. I’ll be lounging.”

  Loch went down the stairway to the lower deck. What he really needed was a minute to himself to shake off the way his father had treated them. He knew the whole power play around Cavenger was very complicated, but the bottom line was that his father jumped whenever Cavenger blew his whistle. It seemed to be eating away part of his father’s very being.

  The second cabin on the left was Sarah’s. Loch combed his hair with his fingers and knocked on the door.

  “What?” came Sarah’s voice.

  “It’s me,” Loch said.

  The door opened. Sarah stood there, looking sleepy in pajamas. “Loch, what’s the matter?” she asked, when she saw how flushed he looked. She had come to know the look, and knew what caused it.

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Zaidee and I stopped down to see Dad,” Loch explained. “She’s up on the sundeck. How’s it going?”

  Sarah brushed her hair back from her face. “All that riveting and hammering going on around here is driving me crazy,” she said. She closed the door behind them. “I really needed sack time. I had a hundred and forty-three nightmares about that horrendous monster trying to kebab me!”

  “Yesterday was a nightmare” was all Loch said, knowing he couldn’t tell her about Wee Beastie. “Looks like your father’s still going to try to catch one of the creatures.”

  “That’s all he talks about every second,” Sarah admitted. “I think he’s starting to go a little psycho. He knows if he gets one, it’ll be his vindication against all the people who have said he was nuts for going on crazy expeditions all his life. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Okay.”

  “I just have to throw on some clothes.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  “You can just turn around.”

  Loch turned his back, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot while she threw off her pjs and put on a top and jeans.

  “Do you remember how you used to drive me crazy pretending to eat out of dog-food cans?” she asked. “And you’d lift the cheese off a pizza and wear it on your face?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t Mighty Dog?”

  Sarah laughed as she slipped on multicolored leather boots. “I guess we both always liked weird things.” She led the way out into the hall and up to the sundeck. Zaidee was stretched out on a chaise longue reading a magazine. She made a face when she saw Loch had brought Sarah.

  “Hi, Zaidee,” Sarah said.

  “Hello,” Zaidee said. She grimaced at the sight of Sarah’s boots and went back to reading her magazine. Sarah and Loch went to the railing and looked down at the dock below to watch all the activity.

  “Say, do you think you can borrow some wheels tomorrow?” Loch asked.

  “Sure. Dad always lets me take one of the jeeps. What’s up?”

  “I need to get a few things from town.”

  An armored vehicle pulled up to the edge of the dock. The driver got out, unlocked the rear doors, and threw them open to reveal a few racks of high-caliber rifles. Randolph was on hand with a clipboard, assigning the guns and ammunition to the fleet crews. Sarah started walking to the bow. “Why all the artillery?” Loch asked, following her as the riveting started in again, vibrating through the entire yacht. “Nobody would want to kill a plesiosaur. They’d want to study them. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  “Tell that to Erdon,” Sarah said.

  Loch stopped at the railing. He stared down at the construction in progress at the front of The Revelation. A welder in a protective mask held a blowtorch, sealing a seam on a metal base. The riveters worked securing an immense steel harpoon gun to the deck
. Nearby, its lethal ammunition lay in a heap—monstrous steel arrows to harvest a leviathan.

  “Dad told me he doesn’t need to take a creature alive,” Sarah said. “He says even a fin or a tail, any piece of one of them, would prove they exist.”

  7

  THE LOGGING MILL

  Jesse Sanderson stood up, went to the refrigerator in the kitchen of his cozy apartment above the boathouse, and took out another beer. He had just finished watching the last of three laser discs on his new Sony entertainment system. The realism of the bullet sounds and throbbing music made the ruddy-faced old-timer marvel at the advances of technology.

  From the picture window in the living room he could see the sunset and the first fingers of night fog crawling in from the water. It was on a night like this that he had sighted the creature far out in the lake, the creature with “a head the size of a big barrel,” as he liked to tell the story at the local bars. The night of the sighting he’d had a great deal more to drink than usual, but he was certain he had seen it anyway and swore by it. Whether it was really some appalling prehistoric creature of the lake or a swimming moose did not matter to him at all. The only thing that concerned him was that nothing happen around Lake Alban that would make him lose his job and comfortable apartment.

  Jesse’s employment as caretaker of the logging mill earned him twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, enough to keep him in good beer and gold teeth, he always joked. His job, paradoxically, was to make sure work was not done. In the age of political correctness and environmental awareness, the owner of the mill was being given a lot of money every year to ensure the propagation of certain fish and eels by keeping the logging mill closed. The salmon grid was one of the governor’s little babies, and as long as the mill was kept in working order, but not used, the government would continue to pay.

  Jesse liked living alone. He had grown up on his own. He hated pets. It probably went back to his childhood, when he had been bitten by a stray Doberman and had had to have two weeks of rabies shots. His dislike of animals had made him a good trapper and put a few extra dollars in his pocket every month. The log pond and feeder stream were alive with beavers. He would set several traps at once, close to each other, so when one animal got caught, another would try to eat it and get caught, and so on. Whenever he made the rounds of the local taverns, he enjoyed telling everybody the only really good pet he had was his shotgun.

  He opened the beer, his sixth since late afternoon, took his dinner out of the microwave, and went back to his favorite chair in front of the picture window. He put on the television to watch the evening news when he heard the sounds again. He had long ago learned to discount the regular noises from below, the slap of waves or the knock of the outboard and canoe hitting the cushion tires of the boathouse slips. The sounds this evening were the same, but louder than those he’d heard over the last few weeks—more like a kind of singing.

  Kids with a radio was what he had thought it was on the other nights, and it drove him crazy. Tonight the sounds were louder, closer, and he felt it was definitely kids who were trespassing and were going to make his dinner get cold.

  Jesse had seen his share of town kids using the mill road as a lovers’ lane. Why was it that people, especially young people, had to be so damn annoying! Jesse looked out the side windows. He didn’t see any cars parked or campfires. He took his shotgun, checked to make sure it was loaded, and started down the boathouse stairs.

  The fog rushed at him as he checked the motorboat and canoe tied up in the double slip of the boathouse. Once he had caught a couple of kids rowing from the lake into the slips. They got as far as untying the canoe before they were looking down the barrel of his gun. He had to laugh remembering the look on their faces. They knew it wouldn’t have bothered him very much to have pulled that trigger, but that night he gave the boys a break.

  Jesse took a few deep breaths of the moist, crisp air. He could really feel the beers now. The only thing he could smell was the thick scent of pine and sweet bass. The singing seemed to come from the pier. He opened the door of the boathouse and started out toward the sounds.

  BAM.

  He fired his shotgun into the air. “You lousy kids and your radios keep out of here!” he brayed out at the lake. “I can see your boat!” he lied. “I’m coming out there and I’m gonna blast it!”

  Jesse reloaded his gun. A single shot usually got any kids to take off, but there were still sounds. Now that he was out on the pier, the sounds changed. They became something different. Now they were some sort of low hum he had never heard before. It was a little confusing at first, what with the racket of the crickets in the bulrushes and cicadas in the trees.

  He stopped, took a good listen. He decided whatever it was, it wasn’t human—maybe some kind of water insect or small mammal. That made him relax. One thing he didn’t need tonight after those beers was a lot of legal paperwork and hassle for blowing some trespassing kid’s head off.

  He pulled back both hammers on the gun and moved farther along on the pier. The weather-beaten boards had grown creaky and slippery with age. A wall of fog marched on him, cutting his visibility down to about twenty feet. The humming was growing louder now. He heard a large bass jump about sixty yards to the left, making a loud splash. When he glimpsed the end of the pier, the humming suddenly stopped. There was some kind of movement in the water below. Whatever the thing was, it had gone under. He looked over the sides of the pier but saw nothing.

  “Hello out here,” he said to the fog, as he knelt down on one knee, his shotgun ready. “Hey, little hummers, where are you?”

  The humming sounds started again. This time they sounded like they were coming from right under him.

  “Nice, little hummers, let me see you,” he said. He got down on his hands and knees, slid his feet back, and lay on his stomach. He one-handed the gun now, as he peered over the edge and inched his head out over the water. The humming stopped. He looked back under the pier, ready to thrust the shotgun forward and fire beneath him. There were only the shadows of mold and algae growing up the sides of the pilings. Instinct told him to lift his head and check behind him, but there was nothing. He stayed lying flat on his stomach until the humming began again. Now he was certain the sound came from the water directly off the front of the pier.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “You’re like some kind of garfish, shy of the hook, some kind of bullfrog. Maybe a turtle?” Jesse started to laugh at himself as he lifted his gun into position. “Come on, let’s see you guys so I can give you a nice, little surprise… . ”

  Jesse felt a breeze. The fog bank split open to reveal a pair of eyes set behind a snout. To Jesse, it looked like the head of a small alligator, some kind of reptile not much longer than six or seven feet. He knew the size of alligators pretty well because when he was younger he had spent some time hunting them in Florida. At the time, six feet was the minimum legal size for harvesting and skinning a gator.

  “There you are, nice, little, ugly fellah,” Jesse crooned. The creature was small, whatever it was, and Jesse wanted to nail it with a single shot. He kept talking to it, letting it hum and hum, as he sat up and swung his legs around and out over the pier. He raised his left hand to support the shotgun, as the index finger of his right hand crawled around the trigger. The distance was comfortable. In a moment it would have been over, but the fog closed again. Damn! He would have to wait for the next breeze.

  The humming continued, and Jesse started humming along with it, his eyes glued down the double barrels. After a few minutes another breeze came, slowly pushing away the fog until he could see a good thirty feet beyond the end of the dock. The gator head was gone. The humming was coming from both sides of him now. He turned to look to the left when suddenly a head on a long, black, shiny neck snapped forward from the right. It sank its teeth into Jesse’s right foot. The motion and the pain cut through the alcohol in his brain, making him turn his head to the right, but a second head and neck lurched in fro
m the left, its mouth and teeth locking onto his other foot.

  Jesse cried out in pain and surprise, his shotgun firing uselessly into the air. Instinctively, he kicked his legs, attempting to throw the creatures off. When they finally dropped away, he drew his legs up to his body, reaching down to stop the terrible hurt. He stared in disbelief when he saw the dark and staining rush of blood on the wooden planks. Both of his feet were missing, severed at the ankles.

  Screaming, Jesse threw his body backward, away from the edge of the pier. He tried to stand on his stumps but crashed forward. He started to pull his body back down the pier, leaving a thick trail of blood behind him. His thoughts were insane now. He told himself that if he could only make it back to the boathouse, back up the stairs to his favorite chair and waiting dinner, then he would be safe. He would wake up to find it all was a very bad dream.

  Unfortunately for Jesse, the pair of long-necked heads again rose from the lake and lunged back over the edge of the pier. The creatures bit at his bloody stumps, their mouths snapping forward again and again. He struck at them with the butt of the shotgun, cracked them on their bony, plated skulls. For a few delirious moments, he even thought he was winning.

  Then he heard a louder humming, one that shook his body and the planking beneath. A massive head lifted above the pier like a dark and terrible moon. Immediately, the two smaller creatures scurried off, and as Jesse looked into the massive yellow eyes of the Rogue, he profoundly understood that his life was over.

  8

  THE GRID

  Thanks for saving me some dinner,” Dr. Sam said, sliding into the dining nook of the trailer. Loch and Zaidee had long before made a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and set a plate aside for their father. He forced a chuckle, hoping they would make his apology easy for him. “What was so important with you guys this afternoon?”

  They could tell he was feeling guilty about the way he had treated them on The Revelation, but they were past feeling hurt now. All they were interested in was whether or not they should tell him about Wee Beastie.