by Tim Waggoner
“The burn damage was relatively minimal, and it will heal soon. I’m the Mass now, and the Mass is me. It’s kind of cool. I was a fan of horror movies, and now I get to actually be a monster. And I got to have an adventure alongside my favorite actor. No regrets there.
“I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I’m low on Hunters, so I need to restock. Sharks are great, but I’m thinking of heading to Las Dagas and snagging a few pliosaurs. I think they’d make kick-ass Hunters, don’t you?
“Don’t worry; I won’t hurt anymore. So long as the ocean’s full of food, I won’t need to. I’m glad you survived, and I hope you enjoy the time you have left. You’ve earned it. Goodbye, Jarrod.”
“Goodbye, Tasha.”
Jarrod turned and began walking up the beach. He didn’t look back.
The End
Read on for a free sample of Megalodon In Paradise.
1954
The whole thing had gone FUBAR faster than two eagles fucking in mid-flight.
Chet Hardy knew it would the moment they’d deployed him here, but he’d kept his opinions to himself. Doing otherwise would have landed him in deep shit.
Would it have been deeper than this? Not a chance. Imprisonment in the brig back home in Norfolk for desertion would have been preferable to this.
Oh well. It was too late for that now.
A crashing wave nearly tipped the life raft over. Chet’s ass left the bench for a terrifying moment, his short life flashing before his eyes, lungs stinging from the salty spray. He landed back inside the raft with a heavy thud, his teeth clacking so hard, he felt one or more of his molars pop like light bulbs. Daggers of pain speared his face from his jaw to the top of his skull. He winced, tears fleeing from the corners of his eyes.
There was no time to wallow in misery. The next wave came barreling toward him. He screamed, his voice drowned by the fury of the ocean.
This time, he missed the brunt of the wave, but there was another hot on its heels. He had to get the motor going and push past it or he was going to drown.
“Come on, come on!”
Yanking on the pull chain with the little strength he had left, Chet alternated between cursing and begging for mercy from a god he hadn’t prayed to since grade school. Blood poured from his mouth, the taste of old pennies cutting through the brine.
Bracing for another impact, a shard of tooth stabbed into his newly exposed gum. For a moment, his world went black. He didn’t even feel the wave as it tossed the boat into the air.
Somehow, both he and the boat landed in one sodden piece.
Angry fingers of lightning danced on the horizon, as if searching for him, drawing closer . . . closer.
If there was thunder, he couldn’t hear it over the angry belching of the ocean. His ribcage rattled deep enough to upset the rhythm of his heart.
Chet went back to coaxing the outboard motor to life. But no matter how hard he pulled, it stayed silent and dead.
Just like everyone else.
A wave splashed down ten feet behind him, pushing the boat toward what remained of the destroyed shore. He kicked the engine, flopping onto his back, staring up at the black and gray swirling clouds.
Even if you get this bitch running, then what? he said to himself. If the storm doesn’t kill you, that, that thing will. How many people get to choose the way they die?
More tears came.
He should have demanded they listen to him. And if they hadn’t, he should have kept insisting until they chalked him off as mentally incompetent and shipped him off this damn hellhole. He wouldn’t be the first guy to lose his shit and get sent packing.
Now he was the last man standing, or floating, and there was no hope of getting back home to Portland, Maine.
A powerful gust of wind slammed the boat, skittering it over the churning water, flying against the current.
Jesus H. Christ! That had to be almost eighty miles an hour. It air dried his face and threatened to flay the flesh from his skull.
Now he was further from the demolished beach, back to the drop point for those man-killer waves.
He wasn’t even sure how he ended up in the life raft. He remembered watching everything unravel—the warning klaxons, people running to man their positions, the shouting followed by screaming, the roar of gunfire, the cracking of the ship’s hull, more screaming, water gurgling as it consumed the ship, people begging for help, others wailing in their death throes, someone barking orders that no one could understand, and worst of all, the sickening crunch of bones as they were masticated to powder.
Something had exploded behind him and there was fire. The orange glow gave light to the horror around him.
It charged and retreated, taking bloody souvenirs each time. Chet had a bead on it once, but his hands shook so much, he dropped his gun in the water. Not that it would have made a difference. Shooting the abomination was like taking a pellet gun to the side of the Empire State Building.
Chet Hardy looked back and his heart froze.
The onrushing wave dwarfed all of the ones previous. This motherfucker could wipe out a baseball stadium as easily as a gorilla could swat a fly on its back.
He was good and fucked.
But at least he would die quickly. He wouldn’t have to suffer through the agonizing, terrifying process of drowning. No, this sledgehammer was going to break him in half the moment it touched him. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t feel a thing.
If life were fair, he’d have a cigarette handy. Even traitors were allowed one last puff before getting put down by the firing squad. His hand patted the pocket by his chest where he kept his Zippo lighter. It was still there. His mother had given it to him as a going away present four years ago.
Little did either of them know how far he’d be going.
“I can’t come back from this one, Ma,” he said, his eyes widening as the wave reared up, cresting higher and higher.
He didn’t have a girl back home to mourn him, but he worried about his mother. They’d lost his brother at the battle in Clervaux and it had nearly killed her in the process. How much could a mother take?
He pictured her sitting in their living room, he and his brother on either side of her, laughing about the time Randall put on that magic show in the yard, charging people a penny for admission, every trick going wrong. Randall plowed right on, undaunted by his mounting failures. Chet, his assistant, broke down and cried after getting water poured in his pants when the funnel trick failed.
The roar of the wave was deep enough to dislocate his bones, snapping Chet from his reverie.
Please, oh please, don’t let it hurt.
A continuous barrage of lightning strikes illuminated the dark wall of water.
Chet looked into the eyes of his death and shit himself.
The wave wasn’t alone.
It was swimming within the deadly tide, mouth wide open, headed straight for him.
Chet feebly raised his arms, as if they had the power to stop the cold certainty of his demise.
“No, dear God, no!”
Like old Jonah, Chet and the life raft were swallowed whole, descending into the blackest, foulest chasm this side of Hell.
CHAPTER ONE
PRESENT DAY
Ollie Arias was a small man and only seemed to shrink with age. Born two weeks late, he came into this world a wailing, dripping, pink tangle of stunted limbs. Despite his “extra roasting time,” as his mother like to say, his appearance and lung development were that of a premature baby. The doctor doubted his own estimation of Sarah Kay Arias’s pregnancy term later that day in the dark and comforting confines of his wood-paneled office. Little Ollie spent his first three weeks free from the womb in NICU, much to the worry of his parents.
Being short of stature wasn’t much of an issue until middle school, when all of the other kids seemed to sprout overnight, leaving him deep in the dust. That’s when the taunting began. He could endure shrimp and short stuff and even midget, but for s
ome reason, when they called him alligator arms, he’d fly into a rage. His mother spent many a day alongside him in Principal DaCosta’s office, his knuckles sore or bleeding. He may have been small, but he was a furious fighter, even with his limited punching reach.
By college, he was a veteran barroom scrapper. Topping out at five feet, he was often the subject of cruel, beer-balls induced jokes. He was always happy to show them the error of their ways. It got to the point where even his tightknit crew of college friends didn’t want to be around him. Who wanted to go out for a night with someone that was going to get them in a fight, arrested, or at the very least, thrown out of the very place they wanted to be? Ollie didn’t blame them, but he sure as hell missed them. His senior year, which should have been fun and full of the promise of better things to come, was instead lonely and melancholic.
So Ollie stopped going out, closed his rabbit ears and sank deep within himself where it was safer, though not much fun. Like a chameleon, he could disappear in any setting, rendering himself invisible at will.
Invisibility was easier. It kept him from getting too hurt, from taking big chances and making big mistakes.
His father used to joke that he’d inherited the old man’s luck, which he equated to a three leaf clover or a twisted horseshoe. Ollie was quite adept at zigging right when he should have zagged left. Ollie used to say he was King Midas’s evil twin brother, his touch turning gold to lead.
Because of his propensity to anger and his inability to find success, he was wary of making any waves, big or small.
So he chose inertia.
It was his ability to fly under the radar that kept him in his job with Envirotech, a large, multi-national company with over fifty thousand employees. Ollie worked in their Minnesota branch, just five miles from where he was born, and ten from his alma mater. Waves of layoffs and reorgs always passed him by, as few others than his supervisor were even aware of his existence. He’d once changed his nameplate on his outward facing cubicle wall to read COG. No one seemed to notice, so he’d left it that way. It had been there for over three years.
A homebody, Ollie had two passions: movies and playing the lottery.
When it came to movies, he loved everything. The classics, B-movie horror, art house, big-budget special effects orgies, romcoms, foreign films, documentaries—it didn’t matter. He subscribed to every streaming service out there, ensuring that he wouldn’t miss a thing. After work each night, he’d go home, make dinner (he was a good cook who kept a neat house) and watch two or three movies before drifting off to sleep in his plush lounge chair, the most extravagant purchase he’d ever made. It was more comfortable than his bed.
As for the lottery, he played them all: the daily numbers, Lotto, Mega Millions, scratch offs, Powerball, and even Keno if he had time to kill. He was the guy who made you groan with frustration if he was ahead of you on the lottery line, spending up to $50 a day, rattling off numbers at a feverish pace.
Overall, he’d break even on good years, come up a little short on most. The thrill he got every time he checked his numbers—spine stiffening, gut clenching, heart racing—was the high point of his day.
His other, smaller passion was going to the annual knife show in St. Paul. He loved knife fight scenes in movies like Crocodile Dundee, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and just about any karate movie ever made. He’d bought a couple of cool-looking blades but stuck them deep into drawers. He didn’t trust himself to carry one around. If the wall he’d built around his temper ever cracked . . . well, that was another world of trouble he didn’t need. It was fun just to look at the knives and relive some of his favorite action-packed scenes within the safety of his own head.
The night he watched Where’s Poppa, a very black comedy from the 70s starring George Segal who played a man trying to scare his aging mother to death so he no longer had to care for her, Ollie’s heart raced and raced and raced until he almost called an ambulance. During the movie, he’d plucked his phone to check the latest Powerball drawing. The pot was the third largest in history, a staggering eight hundred and ninety million dollars.
When he saw that all six of his numbers matched the night’s drawing, he dropped the phone and ticket. The phone landed in his tumbler full of Dr. Pepper. It quickly shorted out. Barely able to pause the movie, his fingers suddenly the size of sausages, his bones fusing together, nerves struck with palsy, he walked on unsteady pegs to his bedroom where he kept his laptop.
After booting it up and going to the lottery website, he realized he’d forgotten the ticket. His feet barely touched the floor as he ran to retrieve it. Panting, his vision going fuzzy, he checked again.
“Holy crapping Christ!”
Ollie passed out.
When he came to, he checked the numbers again, just to make sure it wasn’t all just a dream or hallucination.
It wasn’t.
He spent the rest of the sleepless night reading up on what should be done when one wins an enormous lottery. The Internet was chock full of horror stories of past winners now wallowing in debt, but there were some very helpful sites as well. The web giveth as easily as it tooketh away, as Ollie liked to say.
The next morning, he called a lawyer that he’d vetted through Angie’s List and was in the office by midday. Opting to get the single payout, it was estimated he’d be the recipient of over four hundred million dollars.
“I’d like it if we can make it official in a few days,” Ollie said.
His fancy new lawyer, Tad Fulhaber, a man as tall as he was wide with disturbingly red, chapped lips and a lazy eye, said, “That would be best. We have quite a few things to get in order first.”
There was one thing Ollie very much wanted to get in order.
It was just like any Tuesday at work. The office was quiet, people sipping coffee and checking email. Ollie was quiet, but he wasn’t deleting junk mail and prioritizing work requests. No one seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t come in the day before without explaining why he’d taken the day off.
That wasn’t surprising.
Just before eleven, he jumped from his chair, shut down his computer and rolled his neck, bones cracking. Walking past his desk, he ripped the COG nameplate from his wall and stuffed it in his pocket. He opened his supervisor’s door without knocking.
“Bill, you got a minute?” he said.
Bill Chapman looked confused, studying his face as if he were seeing him for the first time. He pulled his lips back in a tight line and said, “I’m a little busy at the moment Ali…guy.”
Ollie knew full well that Bill referred to him as Alligator Arms when he thought Ollie wasn’t around. He’d heard him say it more times than he could count. Everyone loved Bill, but Ollie knew he was a complete dick. If only they could have blended in with the wallpaper like he could, his secret superpower, and hear the things Bill said about them behind their backs.
Ollie closed the door. “Yeah, well, I don’t give a shit.”
When he reached into his pocket, Bill stiffened, his eyes going wide.
At first, Ollie was confused.
Then he realized what had gotten Bill’s asshole so puckered.
He tossed his nameplate on Bill’s desk. It bounced off the top rack of his Inbox and skittered across the desk, knocking a pen and some paper to the floor.
“What, did you think I was going to shoot you?”
Bill stared at the nameplate, then narrowed his eyes at him.
“Are you out of your mind?” Chapman said, spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth.
“Maybe.”
When Ollie jerked his arms up, fingers curled into claws, Bill flinched. That made Ollie laugh.
Bill did his best to recover. “I’m two seconds away from firing you.”
“That’s one second too slow, because I quit, asshole.”
Bill smiled. “That works for me, though it means no unemployment for you.”
“I’m not going to be needing that.”
> “Didn’t anyone teach you not to burn bridges? Whatever job you must have might not pan out. Then you’ll be begging me for a reference and it isn’t going to happen.”
Now Ollie smiled.
“The only person who’ll be begging is you, Bill.”
Bill dropped the nameplate in the garbage and looked down at a pile of paper, dismissing Ollie. “I’ll have security up in a few to make sure you only take what’s yours.”
“You might want to ask them for a few empty boxes. You have a lot of crap in this office.”
Bill looked at him as if he were a leprechaun speaking Portuguese. “Look, you quit and you said your peace. Good for you. As you can see, I really don’t care. You’re not irreplaceable, you know. I’ll have a temp agency fill your spot by tomorrow.”
Ollie rapped twice on his desk. “Good luck with that. Well, you have a wonderful life.”
Bill clicked his mouse a few times, eyes now trained on his computer screen.
Ollie paused before he opened the office door. “You might want to check your email. I think I accidentally selected all employees when I sent my goodbye present to you.”
That got Bill’s attention. He straightened in his chair, pulling closer to the screen.
“What the hell is this?”
Ollie so wanted to stand behind him right now and see the slew of replies to the email. But it was much better to watch the color drain from Bill’s face.
“That is a bunch of short audio files I collected of you over the years. You have a big fucking mouth. I don’t think there’s a single person you haven’t torn down when their backs were turned. For once, being short and inconsequential came in handy.”
Bill clicked through email after email. He then opened one of the files, the one where he was talking to someone on the phone how much he’d like to bang Evelyn, the head of HR. In his words, “I’d love to break my cock off in that big ass.”
