Demon Key

by David Brookover

  Both Lapis brothers were in their fifties, with Munro approaching sixty. They were Everglades fishing veterans from diapers to the present, and they kept a wary lookout for invading alligators that loved to mooch off their fish stringers. So far, there were only three bass on their stringer.

  Munro’s pate was sun-spotted clean, while Morris sported a full head of tangled silver locks that reached his shoulder blades. Both were thin and wiry, and clutched a bottle of beer in one hand and a fiberglass rod in the other. Their rugged faces were wrinkled raisins, and their mouths had large gaps between tobacco-mottled teeth.

  Morris cast his lure back out into the water. Rainwater leaked through his rain jacket and dampened the front of his blemished white tee shirt. He swore and slowly reeled in the lure. With the water levels high like this, the bass drifted farther south in greater numbers than usual. Bites were far and few between. Morris glanced at his stone-faced brother, who stared blankly into the saw grass.

  “What’s eatin’ you?” Morris demanded.

  “Nothin’”

  “Nothin’ shit!”

  “If you must know, I was jest wonderin’ where all the gators was, that’s all. We ain’t seen one the whole fuckin’ day,” Munro replied, with a shrug.

  “Yeah, you gotta point. I wonder where the fuck they’re hidin’?”

  Munro cocked his head toward Demon Key. “Mebbe it’s got somethin’ to do with that place.”

  Morris followed his gaze. “Ya mean the monster? Shit, Munro, you’re closin’ in on sixty, and you ain’t never laid eyes on no monster out here.”

  Munro cast his lure into the swamp lilies and slowly reeled it back toward the boat. “Hey, don’t crawl over my shit, hear? I was just wonderin’, that’s all,” he drawled sullenly. “There ain’t no law against that!”

  Morris laid his empty beer bottle at his feet on its side, opened the mud-splattered blue cooler, and grabbed another brew. He popped the cap from the amber bottleneck with his remaining left molars and spit the cap into the water.

  It appeared as if it was going to be a long, fruitless day. They hadn’t had a strike in an hour. He silently cursed the foul weather.

  The creature slid through the slender breach in the notched limestone wall that divided the cavern lake from the swamp encircling the key. It immediately sensed food close by and swam cautiously in that direction.

  A twelve-foot gator resembling a rotting log floated lazily atop the water. Only its protruding eyes betrayed its presence.

  The grotto creature immediately spotted the alligator at the surface and silently moved into an attack position so as not to alert its enemy. After swimming within striking range, the creature’s tail propelled it upward, and its great jaws seized the gator’s armored body and elevated it high into the air. Both dropped back into the water with a tremendous explosion of water.

  The stunned alligator thrashed in the crushing grip; its tail frantically lashed out at the creature, but slapped only water. The cone-shaped teeth crushed the gator’s armored skin, severing both the head and tail. The creature released the lifeless body, unfit for consumption. It had successfully defended its territory.

  It quickly continued south beneath the swamp’s now placid surface, searching for that meal.

  Munro leaped from his seat at the raucous struggle north of them in the mist and nearly swamped the johnboat. “What in the Sam Hill was that? Sounded like a damn plane crashed!” he hollered.

  “Dunno,” Morris replied, his voice anxious. “Now sit the hell down before you swamp the boat and drop us both into the drink!”

  Reluctantly, Munro eased his taut frame onto the seat and rapidly reeled in the lure.

  An alligator bellowed loudly as if in terrible agony.

  “Jesus, what could be tormentin’ a bull gator like that?” Munro shouted. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  Morris glared at his chickenshit older brother. “Have it your way.”

  Munro realized that Morris was as scared as he was, or he would’ve pitched a fit at quitting their favorite pastime.

  The swamp suddenly fell silent. There wasn’t a sound except the rain plinking into the water and the saw grass rustling in the breeze.

  Munro retrieved the muck-glazed anchor from the bottom, and then plucked another sweaty bottle of beer from the cooler. Morris spit on his arthritic hands and vigorously rubbed them together before gripping the pull cord of their antique Johnson forty--horse outboard engine. He was about to yank the cord for all he was worth when a giant shadow swam beneath their boat.

  Munro’s beer bottle crashed to the bottom and rolled on its side, seeping fizzing amber fluid.

  “What the hell . . .”

  Morris swallowed hard. “Kinda looked like a gator.”

  “Gator, my ass! That tail was more like a Conger eel’s.”

  “And the fucker was near fifty feet long!” Morris exclaimed breathlessly.

  The johnboat spun gently in a circle from the creature’s powerful wake.

  Munro leaned over the edge. “You see it?”

  Morris peered over the opposite side. “Nah. Musta kept goin’”

  “Thank the Lord!”

  Morris wasted little time re-gripping the pull cord. He gave a fierce yank, but the engine only sputtered and coughed oily fumes.

  “C’mon, baby,” Morris whispered. He pulled again. More choking fumes. More coughs.

  “Kick the son-of-a-bitch!” Munro shouted.

  Morris shook his head in exasperation. “You think kickin’ is the cure for everythin’. That’s why you ain’t got a wife no more.”

  “No need to bring up Nelly. She was a no-good louse.”

  “And you’re the no-good drunk who beat her.”

  Munro knotted his fingers into fists. “Jest shut the fuck up, Morris! You don’t know shit. Nelly was a frigid bitch who deserved everythin’ she got.”

  “Except you.” He inhaled deeply and tried to put his aching finger joints out of his mind. “C’mon, sweet baby.”

  The engine coughed, vibrated, and finally roared to life.

  “Let’s put some distance between us and that giant . . . whatever the fuck it was,” Morris yelled over the engine’s smoking misfires.

  Munro grunted, still piqued from his brother’s unwarranted comments. They cut him to the quick, most likely because they were true. He grabbed the sticky beer bottle from the bottom and drained the few remaining swigs as the johnboat lurched forward.

  It heard the dull growl and made a swift U-turn, hugging the reedy depths of the next island’s southern boundary. The noisy dark shape moved sluggishly above, and occasionally there were strange faint noises like shrieking prey. Edible prey. Familiar prey.

  The creature lingered until the chugging object moved directly overhead, before it erupted from the bottom and thrust its open jaws upward at a frightening speed. The grotto creature’s inertia launched its head and half of its bluish-gray body out of the water. Its jaws closed forcefully on the johnboat and crushed it into mangled metal in seconds.

  Morris’s and Munro’s arms and legs flailed impotently in the air as they plummeted toward the water. Their eyes were riveted on the enormous monster, as it plunged downward beside them and proceeded to chew their johnboat into aluminum splinters in its elongated, alligator-like mouth.

  Morris prayed for salvation, while his brother cursed the monster for wrecking their boat and destroying their tackle. Morris knew their only chance of escaping death was for the creature to regard them as trivial morsels and resume its journey.

  Munro screamed at the creature and angrily smacked the water. The monster released the remnants of the johnboat and surged toward the puny surface creature. It sensed the prey’s fear, which intoxicated it — amplifying its appetite and honing its predatory instincts like blood exciting a shark.

  It seized Munro’s legs and torso below the surface and dragged his vulnerable form to the bottom. The creature’s powerful mouth repeatedly ope
ned and closed on its victim, and used the four rows of teeth on the roof of its mouth to force the bloody meat farther down its throat. Its flexible jaw joints finally parted, and its throat expanded. The creature swallowed Morris Lapis whole, like one of the local pythons. The outline of Munro’s rigid body obtruded from the seal-like skin at the creature’s throat before finally disappearing into its stomach.

  Morris swam for all his scrawny ass was worth toward Demon Key, while the monster was busily munching his brother. The shoreline suddenly appeared in the mist like a welcome mirage in the heat-choked desert. If he could only reach it before the beast resurfaced, he would survive the day. Mind-boggling terror spurred his arms and legs to greater effort. He resisted the urge to look back — to see if death was nipping at his heels. Instead, his eyes never left the shore.

  His fingers knifed through an armada of lily pads and then collided with the muddy shore. As Morris scrambled past the cemetery markers on his way up the hillock toward the mausoleum, his feet slipped on the slick grassy surface as if it were green ice.

  He was two grave rows from the top and was thinking about relaxing, when he suddenly noticed a vast black stain on the hillock. His feet clambered like spinning tires, but failed to achieve traction.

  The fifty-three-foot, eighteen-ton creature fell to earth, crushing Morris to a memory and driving the markers down deeper into the graves. After swallowing its crushed snack, it utilized its four wide, flat paddle appendages to push its ponderous frame down the slippery slope and into the mist-shrouded waters.

  Its appetite temporarily sated, the creature swam swiftly south toward the Florida Keys and the Gulf of Mexico in search of its new food provider.

  Chapter 41

  Dex dropped John Redfeather off at the casino and returned to the police station. He found Special Agent Wilkerson and his usual gang of idiots talking excitedly.

  “What’s up, guys?” Dex asked, although he really didn’t care if they answered or not. He was just making polite conversation.

  Ryan Wilkerson pivoted toward Dex. “We’re planning a complete investigation of Demon Key. The heavy crime scene hitters from Washington are en route as we speak, bringing along some of our most state-of-the-art equipment. By the weekend, we should be ready to rock’n’roll.”

  Dex fought the urge to read them the riot act. “Sounds to me like you’re planning to bulldoze the whole friggin’ island!”

  “Does it?” Ryan replied caustically. “You ought to show up and watch. Maybe you could learn something.”

  “Maybe I will.” Dex strode into his office and slammed the door. What was Wilkerson hoping to accomplish out on Demon Key? More than likely, the smart-ass didn’t even know, himself. Clueless, that’s what Wilkerson was.

  Dex rifled through the meager stack of papers that his secretary-dispatcher, Judy Hanson, had placed on his desk. Most pertained to his ad in the Fort Lauderdale Sun for a new patrolman. There were eleven responses. He sighed heavily. Now came the drudgery of background checks and interviews.

  He left the office and instructed Wilkerson to lock up when he left. The agent barely acknowledged the police chief with a waggling forefinger. Dex drove home, took a long hot shower to cleanse away the rain and clammy perspiration. Afterward, he flicked on the local six-o’clock news, Action-10, and caught the lead story. He froze.

  A live video feed showed hundreds of alligators that had abandoned the swamps, lakes, and canals and invaded streets, backyards, and parking lots. The most bizarre shot was a chopper videotape of a three-mile section of Alligator Alley, Interstate 75. Alligators and a few crocodiles blanketed the six lanes and the grassy median just west of the Sawgrass Express interchange. If he didn’t know better, Dex wouldn’t have guessed that there was a highway beneath the vast gator sprawl.

  “ . . . and for some reason, the gators are fleeing the Everglades and adjacent waters in droves. Here’s our Jeanine Smith standing at the Alligator Alley barricades with the report. Hi, Jeanine.”

  Jeanine Smith was a young, too-cute blond reporter fresh out of college. Her eyes danced from the opportunity to report a lead-in news story, but her apparel badly needed some refinement. Dex decided that her knit top hugged her big boobs too tightly and revealed a bit too much cleavage to be sophisticated and fashionable.

  “Hi, Tom. The police and sheriff’s departments’ phone lines have been swamped from nervous residents reporting alligator invasions,” she blurted out, in a voice a bit too shrill to Dex’s liking. “The gators have eaten numerous cats and dogs that were unfortunate enough to be outdoors during this unusual event.”

  She turned sideways and pointed behind her, while the camera panned and zoomed in on the gator population covering the highway.

  “As you can see, these gators have closed down Interstate 75 and snarled traffic as far west as Naples. Miami drivers have been rerouted to surface streets to get home, which are already overcrowded from the closing of the flooded Sawgrass Expressway. Florida State Highway Patrolmen have asked many drivers to get off the bottlenecked highway and spend the night in a local motel, while authorities figure out how to remove the thousands of gators from this busy artery between Naples and Miami. FHP told me earlier that it could become a risky proposition to sleep out here in your car in this snarled traffic, especially if this gator population decides to shift in your direction.

  “I spoke with a local gator trapper this afternoon, and he told me that he had never seen or even heard of such a spectacle in his whole life. When I asked him what could have caused such an anomaly, he replied that they seemed to be scared to go back in the water. He and several of his professional associates attempted to coax a few of the gators back into the water, but those they managed to drive into the water quickly crawled back on land a short ways from the trappers’ position.”

  Jeanine was clearly unconcerned with the problem. The situation was a boon to her credentials, and that’s what mattered most. Dex could see it in her smug expression.

  “Dr. Juan Cabrerra, a professor from the University of Miami, has kindly joined me out here.” The camera image widened to allow a dark-complected, stocky, balding man to be seen standing next to the television reporter. “Dr. Cabrerra, have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Cabrerra’s wide smile displayed perfectly straight white teeth. “No, I haven’t, and I’ve studied alligators and crocodiles around the world. This is an unprecedented occurrence, I can tell you that.” He cleared a frog from his throat. “I would have to agree with that trapper who spoke to you earlier that these alligators have been forced ashore from something that has badly frightened them. It could be an unreported virus or bacteria in the water, or perhaps an underwater disturbance like an earthquake.”

  Jeanine jumped right in. “But wouldn’t our scientists have noticed a seismic disturbance that large?”

  The smile shrank. “Perhaps, but these creatures might be sensing a seismic disturbance that has yet to occur. Such animal behavior has been documented for centuries around the globe.”

  Jeanine tried her best to appear scholarly, but in Dex’s eyes, she failed miserably.

  “Some people are speculating that there’s a predator loose in the Everglades that had frightened these gators,” she commented, then shifted the microphone to her guest.

  Cabrerra laughed loudly. “Like the Loch Ness monster?” He continued laughing. “That’s not likely outside the realm of Sci-fi Channel entertainment.”

  “I see,” she responded curtly, visibly perturbed at his rude swipe at her suggestion. She once again faced the camera, and the camera’s image zoomed in on her. “Thank you, Dr. Cabrerra, from the University of Miami,” she announced with a dismissive wave. “Well, Tom, as you can see, there’s still no definitive answer for why the alligators have suddenly gone crazy and abandoned the Everglades. This is Jeanine Smith reporting live from Interstate 75 for Action-10 News.”

  The television picture cut back to a studio shot of the seated anchor, Tom B
radley. He shook his head solemnly. “This is straight from a Stephen King nightmare.” He straightened the papers on his desk. “In a possibly related story, two men have been reported missing in the Everglades west of Gator Creek. Morris and Munro Lapis went out fishing this morning but didn’t return. Their friends got worried when the brothers missed Morris’s grandson’s birthday party this afternoon. They called the Broward County Sheriff’s Department and filed a missing persons report. Of course, the sheriff can’t act until the Lapis brothers have been missing for twenty-four hours.

  “But another fishing group saved the deputies an all-out search when they towed in what was left of the Lapis brothers’ fishing boat. Here’s a live view of the recovery at the Jinlow’s Fish Camp dock.” The Action-10 Sky Reporter hovered at the scene and zoomed in on the mangled craft, as deputies weathered the latest storm to remove it from the mucky shallows. The camera cut quickly to the four bearded men who found it. “These men told deputies that they found the boat nose down in shallow water south of Demon Key, and as you can plainly see, it’s nearly broken in half.” He grinned. “Maybe Jeanine was right about that Everglades monster.

  “Sheriff Stark’s department is remaining mum on the find, but we’ll let you know the minute there is a released statement. Speaking of the weather, here’s our own meteorologist . . .”

  Dex turned off the television and tossed the remote control on the end table. Any jackass worth his salt could predict more rain tonight and tomorrow.

  After drying his hair and dressing, he drove through a steady drizzle to Luke’s Restaurant and Bar on Atlantic Boulevard in Pompano Beach. After giving Luke Russet his menu selection, Dex suddenly recalled his earlier conversation with Teddi at his office.

  The kidnapper might need the women for some kind of sacrifice or ritual. If that’s the case, then why now? What’s so special about this time of year? Or what event has occurred to instigate the ritual?