by Tim Waggoner
She felt a prickle on the back of her neck then, as if someone was watching her. But when she looked around, she saw nothing.
Maybe it would be a good idea to wait for Enrique in the truck. But before she could start back toward her vehicle, a wave rolled into shore, and when it receded, it left something behind. Something that looked very much like Enrique’s head. The grisly thing lay on its right side, eyes wide, mouth open. It had what looked like teeth marks on its forehead, and its neck was a ragged stump. Part of her hoped this was some kind of fucked-up practical joke, that Enrique had made a replica of his head and left it here to scare her. If so, it would be a complete dick move, and no way in hell would she go out with him then, but it would be far better than the alternative – that this was real and Enrique was dead.
And then she saw the fins break the surface – many, many fins – and they were all heading for the beach. She saw the crimson veins on the fins, and she had the crazy thought that these were the headless shark’s friends coming to avenge their dead comrade. She felt a cold tightness in her gut upon seeing so many sharks advancing toward her, and she took a step back, ready to make a dash for the truck. But then she stopped herself. She might not be a marine biologist, but it didn’t take a degree to know that sharks were only dangerous in the water. They might look scary, but so long as she remained standing where she was, they couldn’t hurt her. She continued watching, feeling a bit better now. She assumed they would slow as they drew closer to shore and the water became shallower. She figured they’d break off and head back out to sea or start swimming in circles offshore. But before either of these things happened, she wanted to get a picture. Otherwise, who’d believe her when she told this story?
She carried her phone in her back pocket, and she quickly pulled it out, opened the photo app, and held the device in front of her face. On the screen, she saw a smaller image of the crimson-threaded shark fins coming toward her. She tapped the screen to focus the camera and then began taking pictures. She took one shot after another, as fast as she could, but as she did, she realized something that caused her stomach to roil with nausea. The sharks weren’t stopping.
As the first ones came onto shore, she thought they’d beached themselves, but they kept moving forward, undulating like insects. Their bodies – seven, maybe eight feet long – were covered by those strange red veins, and their eyes were the same red. Weird pink frond-like growths extended from their gills, pulsing as they came. They glided across the sand, trailing red umbilical cords that were attached to their bodies behind their dorsal fins. At first, she had no idea how the sharks managed to move on the shore, and then she saw their undersides were covered by tiny hair-like structures, thousands of them, that functioned like miniature legs. A word that she hadn’t heard since high school biology class popped into her head: cilia.
What she was seeing wasn’t real, couldn’t be real. It had to be some kind of elaborate special effect. The movie people were filming a scene, and she’d wandered onto a live set without realizing it. So what if no one else was around, if there were no signs of any actors or crew members, if Enrique wasn’t here to supervise the effects? (Because his head was lying on the wet sand.) Since it was impossible for this nightmarish scene to be real, it was fake, which meant it was part of the movie. End of discussion.
So she stood and watched as more and more sharks crawled out of the water and onto the sand. Although she was fairly certain sharks didn’t make any sounds, she expected these creatures to growl and snarl as they came. Didn’t the shark in Jaws IV roar in that movie? But these creatures were silent, save for the soft scuttling sounds made by their cilia-like legs.
She didn’t know what broke her paralysis. Maybe something about these monstrous sharks finally convinced her they were real. Or maybe her mind simply decided she couldn’t afford to take any chances. Whatever the case, she turned and ran toward her truck. The sand gave beneath her feet, slowing her down, but it didn’t have the same effect on the sharks. The first one to reach her managed to snag hold of her left sneaker, bringing her down. She fell onto the sand, the impact driving the air from her lungs. But she didn’t get a chance to catch her breath again. Sharks fell upon her like a pack of starving dogs and tore her apart within seconds. She died so fast that she didn’t even have time for a final thought.
Several of the sharks carried the largest chunks of her body back toward the ocean, intending to deliver them to the Mass. The rest of the sharks continued moving up the beach, heading toward Bridgewater, umbilical cords lengthening as they went.
* * * * *
Inez was pleased by the successful test run. Now it was time for the main show to start.
Lights . . . camera . . . action!
CHAPTER SEVEN
Boyd Campbell had wanted to be a screenwriter for as long as he could remember. The first time he became aware that there were people behind the movies he watched was when he was eight. Normally, he paid no attention to the names that appeared on the screen before and after a movie, but for some reason this time he did. He was sitting on the living room couch while his mom was in the kitchen making lunch, and when he saw a person’s name appear on the screen beneath the words Written By, he got up and walked into the kitchen. His mother was mixing tuna salad in a plastic bowl with a long wooden spoon, and when she noticed Boyd standing behind her, she stopped mixing and turned to look at him.
“I want to write a movie,” he said.
She didn’t laugh at him, didn’t tell him he was too young to do such a thing. Instead, she smiled and said, “That sounds like fun.”
After that day, he put on his own “movies” using action figures to perform the parts he’d created. When he reached middle school, he wrote and directed short videos he made with friends. After graduating high school, he moved to California and studied film at UCLA, eventually going on to get an MFA in Film and Television Production. When he graduated, he imagined himself writing films that mattered, that changed the way people viewed cinema, themselves, and their culture. So why was he now sitting cross-legged on a bed in a moldy hotel room, laptop open before him, reworking a shitty script about sea monsters?
His scripts had been good enough to land him an agent, and when she contacted him to say that Imagitopia was interested in his work, he was guardedly optimistic. Imagitopia was a small studio, so it had some indie cred, but the films it produced weren’t exactly works of art. Inze brought him in for a meeting, and while she said she liked his scripts, she had a specific project in mind that she’d like him to write a script for. He’d since learned that Inez liked working with young screenwriters because they were cheap and usually so desperate to get a start in the industry they pretty much did whatever she told them.
When she told him about her idea for Devourer from the Deep, he’d wanted no part of it. But then she started telling him about her true intentions for the film. Under the guise of a simple monster movie, she wanted to tell a story about how modern humans had lost touch with the past, and indeed, the very planet they lived on. The monster in the film – a pliosaur – would be a symbol of that disconnection. And the pliosaur wasn’t merely an imaginary monster. Dozens of the damn things had been discovered in the ocean off the western coast of South America. Because of this link to reality, the movie’s themes would hit audiences harder.
By the time the meeting was over, Boyd was convinced Inez wanted him to write a metafictional postmodern take on B-movie monsters as metaphors for the human race’s stubborn refusal to accept they were killing themselves by the way they treated their environment. Plus, he’d get credit as sole writer on the film. Inez sent a contract to his agent, she reviewed it, told Boyd that it wasn’t great, but what more could he expect as a new writer, and he signed it. And now he was on location in Texas, trying to figure out how to write monster attack scenes when they didn’t have a functioning monster to film with. Not exactly how he pictured his first Hollywood gig would go.
He’d written prec
isely ten words since Inez had sent him off to do yet another revision on the script – which at this point bore little resemblance to the first draft he’d written – and of these words, he’d deleted eight. And he was thinking about cutting the other two as well.
“Shit!”
He closed his laptop and got off the bed. It was going to be a long night, and if he hoped to finish the revisions by morning, he needed some serious caffeine. The Sea Breeze provided in-room coffeemakers, but the staff only left a couple prepackaged filters every day, and he’d already used those. Plus, the water from the sink he’d used to make the coffee made it taste musty. Instead of going to the front desk to ask for more filters, he thought he’d go down to the small coffee joint located a few blocks from here, in an entertainment district called Sailor’s Walk. It wasn’t Starbucks, but the coffee was a hell of a lot better than what he could get here. He’d take his laptop, sit at a table, and drink coffee until the place closed. Plus, on the way there, he’d pass by a number of buildings that had been damaged by Hurricane Janae and abandoned. He found the sad, empty structures inspirational – symbols of loss given three-dimensional life. He might even incorporate them into a future script someday.
He put on his shoes, grabbed his room key, and then picked up his computer and tucked it beneath his arm. He knew a big part of the reason he was relocating was so he could put off getting to work a little longer, and he was fine with that. He’d had a professor in college who’d said procrastination was a writer’s middle name. Boyd wholeheartedly agreed.
His room faced the ocean, and the light of the setting sun colored the water molten orange. Normally, he would’ve been struck by the beauty of the sight, might’ve pondered using the image in a script, maybe as an opening shot. But he barely noticed the ocean because his gaze was fixed on the creatures emerging from its water. The beach was covered by sharks that seemed to be swimming across the sand. The sight of these things – which also had strange growths protruding from their gills and long umbilical cords attached to their bodies – was so startling that for a moment all Boyd could do was stare at them.
The sharks headed inland, a number of them coming toward the Sea Breeze. As the first of them drew close, Boyd saw the red veins beneath their skin, saw their blood-filled eyes, and he thought If I put these things in a script, no one would take them seriously.
The section of the beach closest to the hotel had been reserved for filming, so it was empty, except for the mechanical pliosaur and a tow truck. The hotel wasn’t empty, though, and as the sharks approached, several people stepped out of the rooms to gaze upon the absurd and nightmarish scene spread out before them. One of these people was a middle-aged man who worked the front desk. He took one look at the sharks trundling toward the hotel and said, “What in the holy jumping Jesus are those things?” And then a shark leaped toward him, angling its head as it did so, and caught hold of his torso in its jaws. The man tried to scream as the shark bore him to the ground, but the only thing to emerge from his mouth was a gurgling fountain of blood.
The hotel clerk going down made everyone realize that regardless of how crazy this situation was, these sharks were real, and they could kill. People screamed. Some ran back into their rooms and shut their doors, while others – spurred by panic – fled. Sharks brought down the latter in short order and leaped through windows, shattering glass, in their attempts to get at the former.
Boyd stood in front of his room’s closed door, unsure what to do. This seemed to be a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. An excellent dilemma to put a movie hero into, but a truly shitty situation for a real person. He only had seconds to make a choice, and since it was obvious he couldn’t outrun these things, that meant he really didn’t have a choice, did he? He pulled his key from his pocket – dropping his laptop in the process – and opened the door. He ran inside, laptop forgotten, and slammed the door shut a split second before one of the sharks collided with it. Out of reflex, Boyd engaged the door chair – like that was going to help – and hurried toward the bathroom. He was halfway there when the window exploded inward and a shark flew into the room. The creature hit the floor then crawled up onto the bed, giving Boyd a glimpse at the hundreds of tiny legs protruding from its underside.
What the actual fuck?
He ran to the bathroom, shut the door, and threw his weight against it, bracing it. The shark struck the door, but this one wasn’t as sturdy as the room’s outer door, and Boyd felt it bow inward with the horrible sound of cracking wood. He thought the frame had been damaged, but the door held. For now.
The shark struck it again and again, and each time the frame broke a little more. Boyd had the strange feeling that the shark was purposely toying with him. As big as the damn thing was, it should’ve had no trouble breaking in. A single blow should’ve been sufficient. So why draw it out? The answer that came to him was insane, but it felt right.
To make it more suspenseful.
There was a pause, and Boyd allowed himself to hope the shark had given up, either to go in search of easier prey or because despite its weird gills, it could only remain out of water for so long and had to return. But then it slammed into the door again – much harder this time – and the door burst inward, tearing free from its hinges and falling onto Boyd. The shark crawled onto the door, and its weight pressed Boyd down to the tiled floor. As he lay there, he realized that he’d gotten the attack scenes in Devourer from the Deep all wrong. When he’d written about people getting eaten by the pliosaur in the script, he’d described them as filled with terror and on the verge of losing their sanity. But the reality was far different, at least for him. He was scared, sure, but most of all, he was pissed off. Not only was he going to die before his first film was released, he was going to be killed by a monster even more ridiculous than the one he’d written about. One good thing about dying, though: at least he wouldn’t have to pay off the rest of his student loans.
He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and waited for the shark to find a way to get under the door and begin tearing at his flesh.
But that didn’t happen.
After a moment, he heard the shark scuttle backward, and he felt its weight lift. He waited several more moments, fearing the shark had retreated only to prepare to attack once more. But when it didn’t, he pushed the bathroom door off of him, slid out from under it, and stood.
There were two sharks in his bedroom now. The closest he presumed had been the one that had battered down the bathroom door. The other stood on the bed, it too having come in through the broken window, Boyd figured. This second shark held something in its mouth, and it wasn’t until the creature dropped it did Boyd realize it was his laptop. The sharks looked at him for a moment, and although their faces were incapable of expression and their eyes remained an unchanging red, he had the strangest sensation the animals were trying to communicate with him somehow. Then the second shark bent its head toward his laptop and nudged it.
Boyd frowned.
“You want me to . . . write?”
Neither shark responded to his words. They regarded him a moment longer before moving backward across the floor and through the broken window.
Easier to keep their cords from getting tangled that way, he thought.
And then they were gone.
Boyd didn’t move for a long time. When he finally worked up the courage, he walked to the broken window and looked outside. The sun was down now, but it still wasn’t completely dark, and he could see dozens of umbilical cords stretching from the water, across the beach, and into town.
“That’s not good,” Boyd said. But he couldn’t help thinking that what had just happened would make a hell of an opening scene.
* * * * *
Tamara lay atop a blanket spread out on the floor of what had once been a small saltwater taffy shop. She was naked, her legs lifted high in the air. Shari Dawson – equally naked – pressed her face against Tamara’s vagina, her tongue working its ma
gic. Tamara gripped Shari’s hair and every once in a while, she gave it a hard tug, and Shari would moan and laugh. Tamara wondered if Shari could taste the residue of her husband’s cum inside her. If she did, would it turn her on or would she be pissed to learn Tamara had been fucking Pete? Tamara briefly considered telling her about Pete right then to see how she would react, but she decided against it. Why spoil the woman’s fun? Or hers, for that matter?
Tamara flirted with pretty much everyone she met. Most of the time, she did so unconsciously, and she managed to attract a great many lovers this way. Shari had been one of those cases. Tamara had had lunch with Shari at an Italian place in Sailor’s Walk the first day they’d started filming. Shari had said that getting to know Tamara would help her better portray her when she filled in during action scenes. The sexual energy between them was immediate and strong, and before lunch was over, they’d finger banged each other in a restroom stall. Unlike her husband – who Tamara seduced the next day – Shari liked to have sex in public areas. She said she enjoyed the risk factor, and that was fine with Tamara. Not only because it was exciting, but because this way she didn’t have to worry about Pete and Shari accidentally running into each other at her hotel room.
