That didn’t mean she had to swim idly by and let it happen. If all she had was seconds then she was going to make them count. The first goal was to get some sense of orientation. She could swim for dear life all she wanted, but none of it would matter if, in her panic, she swam deeper into the ocean rather than toward the surface.
While the massive circle of sharks around the seamount had mostly broken up in the chaos, she could still see the largest portion of them in one particular direction. Using them and their orientation as her guide, Maria looked around until she could finally see the light of the sun filtering down from above. Okay, so she knew which direction she had to go. Now it was just a matter of getting there while she was missing a flipper on one leg and bleeding out from the other.
She wasn’t sure exactly how much distance there was now between her and the surface, but she could see that Teddy Bear had brought her up closer. A quick glance down and around her showed several hammerheads circling and getting ready to go in for the kill. There was no way she could out-swim them. She did, however, have one last desperate idea that might buy her enough time.
Maria did her best to swim up as far as she could before the first hammerhead reached her. Even as she moved she undid the clasps on her scuba tank, getting ready to shed it. She took several deep breaths as she watched the first shark approach, then twisted around so the tank was between her and the shark. Maria shed the straps and pushed herself away from the tank, using it to give herself a little more momentum to get to the surface. If she’d timed it right then the hammerhead would get a tank right to the snout and, if she was lucky, temporarily get tangled in the straps. She didn’t dare turn to make sure, though. From this point on, she couldn’t look back. It was the surface of bust. Or get torn apart. Or drown. Whatever.
With her lungs full of a last bit of air, Maria did her best full stroke, kicking furiously with legs that didn’t want to move and were probably leaving a trail of blood like breadcrumbs for the hammerheads to follow. She couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t think about how her chest suddenly burned with the need to breath. She couldn’t even think if she was going to come up anywhere close to the Zodiac or if she would be so far away that the sharks would rip her into lunchmeat before Cindy and Simon could reach her. Instead, as darkness began to creep into the corners of her vision from a lack of air, Maria thought of the soft bed she had left behind at the house on the Baja Peninsula, of Kevin curled up next to her as his light snores vibrated the unruly hairs of his beard. She thought of days spent on the Cameron, watching whales breach so close nearby that she could reach out and occasionally touch their smooth, tough skin. She thought of her family back home in California, her mother and father and two younger brothers blissfully unaware that she might only have seconds more to live. She didn’t want to lose any of it. And in that moment, any fear that might have been threatening to overpower her gave way to pure, unadulterated determination. She could be afraid later, back on the deck of the Cameron, as she realized what impossible feat she had just pulled off. But here in this moment it would do her no good.
She closed her eyes. Seeing how close she was or was not to safety wouldn’t help. Maria just kept herself oriented up and pushed her body as hard as she could, her muscles burning at the effort, her entire being screaming for more air. Behind her eyelids she saw flashes of light, the signs that her air was giving out and, any moment now, her mouth would reflexively open to breathe and get nothing but lungs full of saltwater for its effort.
Oh God, I’m not going to make it. I’m not…
Her head broke above the water. Maria gave a great screaming gasp at the strangely delicious taste of fresh sea air.
“There! She’s over there!”
In her adrenaline rush, she almost didn’t recognize the voice as Simon’s. In fact, it took her several moments to recognize the sounds as words at all. She was too busy relishing the fact that she was actually alive.
Of course, as long as she was in the water there was the possibility that she wouldn’t be living for long. Maria looked around for the Zodiac and found it about five hundred feet to her left. She took a deep breath and started to swim in that direction, but it became obvious quickly that she had already used most of her inner reserves just reaching the surface. Thankfully the Gutsdorfs took the hint and piloted the Zodiac to meet her. Maria kept expecting one of the hammerheads to come up behind her and pull her back below at the last second. That was usually the way of it in Simon’s movies, at least. But again, as she had repeatedly told him before, this wasn’t fiction.
Simon reached over the side of the Zodiac and pulled Maria in. Now that she was out of the water the full extent of the damage she’d taken hit her, and every tiny movement as he pulled her all the way in was searing agony. She looked down at her right leg as it came out of the water, thinking at first that she must have been seeing some trick of the light. Cindy’s choked back gasp of shock, however, told her that she wasn’t hallucinating. She couldn’t rightly be said to have a right calf anymore. There were certainly parts dangling from her ravaged leg that could still be identified as a calf if someone squinted, but that would require that person to look at the bloody mess to start with. Maria looked at it and didn’t think much about it at first. She was more curious about the visible insides of her leg’s anatomy than anything else.
Oh, I see. I guess this is what real shock feels like, she thought dispassionately.
“Oh God, we’ve got to get her back before she bleeds out,” Cindy said.
“Wait… signal the Cameron,” Maria said. She was surprised at the weakness of her own voice. “Tell Kevin… to activate the transmitters.”
“We radioed him as soon as we saw you, just in case he didn’t see himself.”
“Oh. Good.” Maria felt the overwhelming need to lie back in the soft bottom of the Zodiac and take a nap. It didn’t have to be a long one. She was just so tired. As much as she tried to force herself to stay awake, she didn’t think she could stay conscious much longer.
“Christ, she’s fading,” someone said. Maria thought it was Cindy, but she could no longer be sure. A noise jolted her to a higher level of wakefulness for just a few seconds. Her addled brain took abnormally long to recognize it as the Zodiac’s motor as they rushed back to the Cameron.
“Did you do it?” someone else – Simon maybe? – asked.
“Do what?” Maria mumbled.
“Get the transmitters on Teddy Bear?”
“Oh. Sure.” With hands that barely worked the way they were supposed to, since they were now cramping up from the death grip she’d had on Teddy Bear’s fin, Maria reached down to her pouch and pulled out the last transmitter. “Even have one left.”
“Oh shit, no,” Simon said.
“What?” Cindy asked.
“Don’t you see? She still has one left.”
“So?”
“So that’s not the way it works in those damned movies. There’s always some dramatic thing where the hero has to accomplish the last task at the last moment. If she still has one then it means that this isn’t over yet.”
Maria roused herself just enough to make her indignation heard clearly in her voice. “For the last fucking time. This… is
not… fiction.”
Teddy Bear hit the Zodiac from below.
Maria suddenly had to wonder if Simon was right. Maybe this was a movie. Because in a movie, that final dramatic moment often tended to be in slow motion so the audience could see the final time where the hero acted like a badass. And for the next several seconds time felt slower to Maria giving her one last brief period of complete lucidity before she lost consciousness.
The Zodiac rose up beneath them. Maria imagined that, to the people still on the Cameron, they looked exactly like Murphy and Mercer had earlier in the day right before Teddy Bear chomped Murphy into bloody bits. The angle that Teddy Bear came at them, though, must have been different because the raft spun as they all flew in the air,
allowing Maria one last long look at the majestic and terrifying creature with an idiotic name. Teddy Bear was below them at an angle, trying to snap at Cindy as she fell but coming up far short. From here, though, Maria could clearly see the spot where the transmitter should have been on Teddy Bear’s dorsal fin. It was gone. That probably explained why the hammerhead wasn’t as precise in her strike as she had been earlier. The one transmitter was enough to mess with her navigation, but not enough to control her outright.
Even as she flew up in the air and began to tumble back down, Maria realized she still had the last transmitter in her hand. One last chance to save everyone.
Maria reached out as she fell, her hand brushing Teddy Bear’s skin one last time, almost as though she were caressing a beloved pet. Despite her terror, she felt an instance of strange affection for the hammerhead, an appreciation for its savage beauty even as it made a final attempt to kill her.
The transmitter’s hook went into Teddy Bear’s skin, this time on her head exactly where it was supposed to be. Maria didn’t have the time to feel any triumph, though. That was when time felt like it sped up again, and she hit the water before she realized what else was happening.
And everything went black.
21
Maria woke up two days later in a hospital with a cast on her left foot, various abrasions and braces on her arms, and more tubes going in and out of her body than she was capable of counting in her groggy state. It took her several additional minutes of trying to take in her surroundings before she realized that the shapes under her blankets stopped just below her right knee.
A couple minutes later, after a nurse came in and found her awake, they sent a doctor in to explain to her what she had already realized. In broken English (and then clear Spanish when she said she spoke it), the doctor explained that when she’d finally been brought in she was close to death, and the medics on the Navy ship that had rescued the Cameron had needed to use defibrillators to restart her heart at one point. In the midst of it all someone had determined that the only way to save her was to lose what remained of her right lower leg. Maria thanked the doctor calmly, told him that she would be fine by herself for a moment, and then cried the moment he left the room.
Kevin was in soon after. The tears were still fresh on her cheeks and he didn’t even need to ask what she was crying about. He crawled onto the bed next to as best he could and let her cry herself to sleep on his shoulder.
When she woke up again, he was sitting in a chair by her bed, a tablet in his lap and earbuds in his ears. She tried to crane her neck to see what he was watching without disturbing him. All she managed to see was a brief view of the water before he saw she was awake and tried to hide the tablet.
“What was that?” she asked.
“It’s probably not anything you need to see just yet.”
“What, are you afraid whatever it is will break me or something?”
“I don’t know. Will it?”
Maria looked back down at her mangled body. She still hadn’t had the time to process any of this, so she couldn’t rightfully say how this would affect her in the future. It was entirely possible that the loss of a limb could send her into a terrible depression, that she would be afraid of the sea from now on, that her life would change in drastic and horrible ways that she couldn’t predict yet.
But maybe it wouldn’t. She believed she was strong enough to take whatever came next.
“No,” she said. “Show me.”
Kevin raised an eyebrow but said nothing else as he unplugged the earbuds and handed her the tablet. He’d paused it in the middle of a video on YouTube. Maria set it back to the beginning and watched.
It was a clip from one of the major news channels. A quick look at the suggestions on the side of the page showed Maria many more, with sources ranging from the other major news outlets to Inside Edition and even TMZ and Entertainment Tonight. And in half of them her face was prominently displayed in the teaser image.
The one Kevin had been watching was presumably a more measured account of what had happened than would be on some of the other sources. In this particular clip, Wolf Blitzer was interviewing Vandergraf, of all people, who talked animatedly about the events at El Bajo as various shots Gary had taken played over him. Of course, pretty much all of Vandergraf’s attempts at scientific explanation were completely wrong but that didn’t seem to matter much. His voice was nothing more than additional flavoring for the main course of the video.
And what a dramatic video it turned out to be. There were some of the things that had been filmed earlier, including several shots of the Tetsuo Maru sinking. But the big one, the one that they kept replaying over and over, were those final moments of Maria and the Gutsdorfs in the Zodiac. Despite the distance, Gary had managed quite the zoom, and the three of them could clearly be seen in the raft as it raced back to the Cameron. Even knowing what was coming, Maria was still shocked when Teddy Bear came up underneath them (although Maria was happy that Wolf Blitzer also seemed hesitant to refer to the hammerhead by that name). The network slowed the footage down, eerily matching the speed at which Maria herself remembered the event. Yet that was where the similarities ended, because in the footage Maria looked far more heroic than she remembered. The raft rose up and there was the monster in all its majestic glory, somehow managing to look even bigger on the screen than she remembered. The Zodiac flew in the air and both of the Gutsdorfs went sprawling, neither of them anywhere close to Teddy Bear. Maria, however, appeared to do some complicated acrobatics in the air and come down on the shark’s head. Even though the angle wasn’t quite right to show exactly what Maria did to Teddy Bear, there was a visible impact as the shark balked in what might have been pain. The hammerhead dropped back into the ocean and disappeared with Maria following. She couldn’t help but notice that the network had chosen to blur out most of the gore on her leg, although she suspected some of the less reputable news sources wouldn’t be as scrupulous.
“How many places are showing this stuff?” Maria asked.
“Uh, all of them, as far as I can tell,” Kevin said. “The instant we were within wireless range, Vandergraf had uploaded as much of the footage as he possibly could, and it was viral within an hour. I hear he’s already gotten five more offers from various networks offering to produce reality shows.”
“Ugh, please tell me you’re not going to take any of the offers.”
“What? Oh no, you misunderstand me. Those five don’t involve me. However, three of them would apparently revolve around you.”
“Wait, what?”
“Click on one of the other videos,” Kevin said. “Probably any of them will do. You’ll understand.”
She clicked on one from Fox News. An old white guy started complaining about how Maria Quintero was just a liberal ploy to further the climate change conspiracy. Maria had no idea what that had to do with anything, so she clicked on one from MSNBC. An equally old white guy was discussing in a boring monotone how the video of her fighting Teddy Bear was part of the conservative agenda to undermine the environmental movement. Inside Edition was interviewing one of her exes, who lied through his teeth about how adventurous and domineering she was in bed. Entertainment Tonight speculated on what clothing she might be wearing right now in the hospital. The Onion had an article about how she was an action movie cliché.
“Oh my God. What the hell?” she asked.
“You’re a celebrity, dear. There have been reporters camped out around the hospital for more than a day, each of them trying to find a way to sneak in here and be the first to interview the amazing marine biologist action hero Maria Quintero.”
“You have got to be kidding me. You’re the famous scientist, not me. I don’t even have my degree yet.”
“Maria, you should know by now that people these days treat a degree like it makes you less qualified, not more. You’re the one that was caught on tape delivering the final blow to a real life sea monster. I give them facts and f
igures. You gave them a spectacle. If anything, in this moment at least, people are treating me less like a celebrity scientist and more like your sidekick.”
“Oh man. I am not in a good enough mindset yet to deal with this.”
“You don’t have to. Although now that you’re awake you should probably at least release a press statement.”
“Jesus Christ fried on a stick.” She paused to let herself calm down. She would deal with all that later. For now she still had some questions she wanted answered. “I don’t remember anything after hitting the water, and the videos don’t show much after that. What happened?”
“You mean other than the fact that we almost lost you?” He said it in a way that very clearly implied that was the only detail that mattered to him. He grabbed her hand, squeezed it, kissed it, and then moved on. “It was a hairy hour or so before the Navy arrived. There wasn’t too much damage to your Zodiac, so the Gutsdorfs were able to fish you out of the water before you drowned and got you back to the Cameron. Boleau made a tourniquet and we kept you stable, but you scared us. You scared me.”
“Okay, but what about everything else? Given what most of the video clips are concentrating on, you’d think that final shot was the only thing that happened.”
“Well of course. You are looking at the American media, after all, and the majority of the people who died weren’t American so they don’t care. The Mexican news channels are of course concentrating on the bravery of the Mexican Navy in coming to our rescue, even though it was completely over by that point. I scoured the internet looking for anything that the Japanese media is saying. They’re the only ones who seem to recognize this whole thing as a tragedy, considering it was one of their ships that sank. Kyo’s been very openly speaking out against illegal shark fishing, though. It’s too early tell if this incident is going to change anyone’s minds.”
Ocean's Hammer Page 13
