by Hunter Shea
Marco gripped Lae’s shoulders. “Wait, did they leave yet or are they planning to leave?”
Lae tilted her head, perplexed. “No, Mr. Marco. They were headed toward the dock.”
Ollie felt his blood run cold. “Crap. We can’t let them go out there.”
“Why?” Lae asked.
Ollie sprinted past her. There was no time to explain.
He couldn’t let Titus get in that water.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ollie ran as fast as his short legs and the soft sand would allow. He lost a sandal but not his momentum.
“Titus!”
Ollie turned to see Marco right behind him.
They made the turn around the housing complex, toward the dock. Ollie saw Titus and his two younger helpers for the day jump into the gently rocking boat. The sun’s dappling reflection off the water blinded him.
Marco shouted, “Titus, hold up!”
The boat’s engine rumbled. There was no way Titus would hear them over it. Ollie searched for a higher gear, his lungs burning, a stitch forming in his side.
Marco, with his longer stride, overtook him, waving his arms and yelling.
The boat veered from the dock, heading for open water.
Ollie scanned the horizon. There were no dolphins rushing about. With any luck, they’d led that shark miles away by now.
His feet slapped hard on the dock. Marco was bent over, hands on his knees, back heaving. The boat was too far gone now. Titus was a man who walked around with blinders on. When he had a task to do, he focused on it to the exclusion of everything around him.
“You think they’ll be all right?” Marco asked, squinting at the rapidly departing motorboat.
“I hope so,” Ollie said. He looked everywhere for that enormous dorsal fin. Just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t out there, just below the surface.
“Of all the days for them to have to head right back out,” Marco said.
“Let’s face it, we’d be uncomfortable as hell if they knocked off late in the day.”
“True. But does that mean Lae can’t leave? I don’t think she’ll be happy to be under island arrest.”
Ollie gently rubbed his hand over his bruised ribs. Each hard breath felt like a rabbit punch. “If her husband makes it here to pick her up later, I’ll feel better that the coast is clear.”
“Wait, we can’t just let him head out here and possibly come across that thing. I’ll tell Lae to call him. Maybe it’s better he waits a day.”
Ollie sighed. “Uh, did you forget who Lucky Malolo is? That man loves his woman to the point of distraction. There’s no way in hell he’ll leave her out here if he thinks there’s any danger to her.”
“As long as she’s on land, there isn’t.”
“Did you forget about those skulls?”
Marco walked up and down the small dock. “They’re history. I’m not worried about that. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a killer hiding on the island. And if the person who did that to them was still here, he’d be old as fuck by now. You saw them. They’ve been stuck in that muck for a long ass time.”
Ollie wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure about a damn thing.
Looking out at the ocean, he could still see Titus’s boat. “We have to call Titus and tell him not to come back.”
“Agreed.”
“And we have to find out what the hell kind of shark is out there.”
Marco said, “I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Tara is already busy doing just that. I just hope she doesn’t screw around with my files.” He got a faraway look, gazing back where the houses were around the bend and over the rise. “In fact, we should go back and see what she’s come up with.”
Ollie was about to do just that when he saw an enormous shape leap out of the water. It headed straight for Titus’s boat.
“No!”
Marco’s head snapped to the same direction Ollie was pointing.
One second, the boat was there, cruising on a sunny day, the next it was gone, the giant sea creature pouncing on it so quickly and efficiently, it vanished in the blink of an eye.
Whether Titus and his men were in the ocean or the belly of the shark was impossible to tell. They were too far away for them to see.
“Do you have binoculars?” Ollie said, his senses stretched to the snapping point.
Marco stood at the end of the dock, mouth wide open, arms limply at his side.
“I don’t believe it,” he said.
“Marco, do you have binoculars?” Ollie wanted to see if he could spot Titus or his helpers on the water. If they were in fact alive, maybe there was a chance . . .
A chance of what?
If Ollie got in his boat and headed out to pluck them out of the water, he’d be the next meal for the shark.
What was the equivalent of the Coast Guard out here?
“I had binoculars,” Marco muttered.
“Where are they?”
He pointed out across the Pacific. “I lent them to Titus last week. I forget why he said he needed them. I assumed it was to look at girls on the beach over the weekend.”
Ollie eyed his brand new Pursuit tied to the next dock. He’d bought it for necessity as well as future water sports and some big time fishing once everyone had settled onto the island. It wasn’t all that big, but it was comfortable and had a kick ass engine. Ollie didn’t know squat about boats but he knew he liked his Pursuit. He’d named it after his mother, who had passed away when he was in high school. The Sarah Kay was a sweet ride and he was looking forward to taking everyone out on her someday.
He did not want to take her out on a suicide mission.
If anyone was still alive out there, they wouldn’t be for long. That shark would get them way before the Sarah Kay could make it that far.
“Jesus, look,” Marco cried.
The water churned and splashed. It must have been massive for them to see from so far away.
It only confirmed Ollie’s worst fear.
“We have to get back to your place,” Ollie said. “I’ll talk to Lae. She’ll just have to order Lucky to stay put.”
***
The beast fed on the morsels of meat, along with everything else that littered the ocean. Its jaws snapped open and shut with unparalleled speed and ferocity.
Blood in the water excited it, but the food did not trigger the surge of energy it craved.
It was far from going back to the dark, dormant place, but it needed more. Something in its primitive brain knew it could not venture far. To do so would allow the darkness to come back.
No. If it wanted to grow strong, its instinct commanded it remain here.
Food was coming.
***
Marco was right. Tara had been busy looking for anything that closely resembled the shark she captured on her phone.
While she went through web page after web page, Steven, Heidi and Lenny raided Marco’s refrigerator for anything cold and alcoholic to drink. Lenny kept working on the beer while Steven and Heidi had found a bottle of vodka in the freezer.
When Tara hit on an image that looked almost exactly like the shark they saw, she slumped back into her chair and rubbed her eyes.
No. It can’t be that.
She blew up one of the images on her phone, the one that gave her the best, though pixilated, view of the shark’s mouth. She’d captured the very last moment of life for the two dolphins before they slipped down the shark’s gullet. She compared the titanic shark to the artist’s rendering on the website.
Next, she did a side-by-side comparison of the dorsal fins.
It was all very inexact. For one, she wasn’t comparing apples to apples. She had grainy photos, and she was comparing them to drawings, some of them quite detailed. But they were drawings, not the real McCoy.
“Is that it?” Lenny asked, his funk preceding him. She could smell the beer on his breath, which was a welcome relief over the crud from the lab.
S
he gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Yeah, we got a match all right.”
Moving the cursor to close out the page, Lenny said, “Hold on. Let me take a look.”
“Don’t bother.”
Urgent whispering between Steven and Heidi dragged both their attention away from the dueling shark images.
Tara and Lenny watched them step out onto the patio and then walk away, locked in a heated discussion.
“I’ll bet Heidi’s reading him the riot act about packing their bags now and ditching this place,” Lenny said.
“I wouldn’t bet against you.”
Lenny had taken over the laptop, scrolling down to see more images of the giant shark Tara had found.
“How come we shouldn’t bother looking into this?” he asked. “I mean, from what I can see, they’re a pretty close match.”
Tara leaned over his shoulder and scrolled up to the list of facts about the shark.
“Because that’s a Megalodon shark, buddy. It would make sense to think I found our culprit, except it’s been extinct for over two million years.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“We have to get the hell off this island!”
“Babe, you n-n-need to calm down. Flying off the handle isn’t going to help.”
“Flying off the handle? Jesus. I think I’m being pretty damn calm. It’s bad enough that . . . that thing is out there, but now we have dead bodies. Dead bodies! We’d be insane to just sit around and pretend everything’s okay.”
“No one is saying we should do that. But we do n-need to take a moment and approach everything rationally.”
“Rationally. Yeah, right. I knew we shouldn’t have come here. I got caught up in the moment. What the hell was I thinking?”
“You were thinking you wanted to get away from where we lived and spend the rest of our days in safe, comfortable leisure. Anyone would go for that.”
When Steven and Heidi had left their bungalow, they’d forgotten to open the windows. The trapped heat was stifling. Heidi didn’t open them now because she didn’t need everyone to hear them.
“Where’s the phone?” Steven asked.
“I don’t know. Wherever you left it. Who are you going to call?”
“I’ll figure that out once I find my phone.”
Heidi tried her best to calm him down. Ever since Mexico, he’d been prone to panic attacks and paranoia. Back home, in their neighborhood that hadn’t seen a crime since the eighties, he’d had to do three of his so-called perimeter checks each night before coming up to bed.
Even though she wasn’t crazy about being so far away from her family, she’d hoped coming out here would heal some of her husband’s internal wounds. She worried about him so much and loved him more than words could express. That worry made her appear uptight to people who didn’t know her. She was well aware that Steven’s friends hadn’t exactly warmed up to her, but she was fine with that. All that mattered was calming the voices in Steven’s head.
Now, any progress they’d made had flown right out the window.
“What are you going to do, call another boat to come out here?” she said. She could hear him tearing the bedroom apart searching for his cell. “We are not going out on that water. Not today, at least.”
He stormed into the living room, his head reddening, the scar pale and stark in comparison.
That scar was a constant reminder of the day that had changed Steven.
They’d just come out of a nightclub in Cabo. It was their first anniversary and they treated themselves to a kind of second honeymoon.
Drunk and anxious to get back to their room, they’d been accosted by two men wielding knives that looked big enough to chop down trees. Steven kept the agitated men as calm as possible. It was obvious they were both tweaking hard. He’d said he had no problem giving them his wallet, modulating his voice, hands held down to let them know there was no reason to do anything rash .
The problem came when he reached into his pocket and realized his wallet was gone. It had fallen out back at the club, most likely being kicked around on the dance floor.
As soon as the taller man saw Steven’s hand come up empty, his eyes went as big and white as hardboiled eggs and he slashed Steven’s head with the knife. Both men ran like hell when the blood started pouring from the grinning wound.
Boy, did it bleed. Heidi looked like she’d sacrificed a pig in some bizarre ritual by the time they got him to the emergency room. And the entire time, all he did was soothingly reassure her that everything was going to be okay. He even asked her to make sure they had dinner reservations at this restaurant they wanted to try the next day.
That was the last time he’d been cool under pressure. By the next morning, he was a changed man. And it wasn’t for the better.
“Got it,” he said, unplugging his phone from the charger by the kitchen counter.
“Can you at least sit down?”
He jabbed at the phone as if it had buttons instead of a touch screen. “Of course, I can’t get any reception.”
“And what happens when you do?”
“I’ll call the police. The military. Everyone. And I’ll find a way to get off this rock, even if I have to hire a helicopter. Ollie can foot the bill. This is all his fault, anyway.”
Shouldering his way out the back door, Steven walked in circles, staring at the phone’s display.
“Honey, I just need you to sit down and take a few deep breaths. Can you do that for me?”
He carried on as if he hadn’t heard her.
What she saw on the water and in Marco’s house had freaked her out, too. She didn’t know what was worse, the skulls or the giant killer shark that might be circling the island as they speak.
But as long as they stayed out of the water, they were safe. And those skulls were old. She realized there was nothing to panic over. Now she needed Steven to realize the same thing.
“Steven, why don’t you sit with me?”
She patted the lounge chair next to her.
He paced the patio, searching for bars.
“And I won’t miss being called Cooter,” he said, as if it were the middle of some internal train of thought, not meant for Heidi to actually hear.
She heard a distant rumble. Getting up, she looked to the sky. It was pale blue with strings of cotton candy to the east, a beautiful day.
Far to the west, there was a wall of dark clouds, rolling toward them like a tidal wave. There was a brief flash within the roiling mass, lightning zigging from one end to the other.
“Steven, are we supposed to get a storm? I thought Ollie said there was a drought.”
He finally put down his phone and looked to where she was pointing. It looked like one hell of a storm, the kind people built fruit cellars to escape from.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s n-not like we get the local news out here.” He punched the side of the house. “Well, there goes our chance of getting out of here by air.”
The island was so utterly exposed. Heidi wondered if they were sturdy enough to stand against the storm when and if it hit.
***
“Where’s Lae?” Ollie asked the second he burst in the door.
Lenny couldn’t take his eyes off the illustration of a Megalodon shark attacking what looked like an aquatic dinosaur. The similarity to what Tara had captured on her phone was chilling.
But Megalodons were extinct, right?
He scratched at his hands. There was a nagging itch in his palms, under the skin, right where he couldn’t get. He looked at them to see if there was a rash. Maybe he was having an allergic reaction to that nasty gunk on the skulls he’d stupidly touched.
No redness, splotches, or weird bumps. Just mild scratch marks from his nails.
“I don’t know. She left not long after you guys,” Lenny said.
“Why? What’s wrong now?” Tara said. She had brewed a pot of coffee, telling Lenny to cut the beer. They needed to be sober. A cigarette dangled out of the side of
her mouth.
“It got them,” Marco said. He’d gone white as a sheet, leaning against the wall.
“Titus?” Lenny said, finally peeling away from the laptop.
“All of them. It waited until they were some distance out, but it attacked them just the same,” Ollie said. “It . . . it happened so fast. They didn’t stand a chance.”
Marco brushed Lenny aside, stomping into his bedroom.
“I have to find Lae,” Ollie said, chest heaving.
“I’ll get her,” Tara volunteered. “You sit down and catch your breath.”
“Before you come back, grab that ledger you found at the lab,” Lenny said.
“Why?”
“It might have some clues. I found a few things, too, aside from the skulls.”
She nodded and dipped outside.
Ollie refused to sit, pacing the kitchen, hands clasped atop his head as if he were trying to keep it from blowing outward.
“It was fucking horrible, Lenny.”
“I know, buddy. Come on, at least have some coffee.”
Ollie waved him off. “Last thing I need is caffeine to make me more jittery.”
Marco emerged with a rifle. Ollie’s eyes went wide.
“What the hell?” he spat.
Marco slung the rifle’s strap over his shoulder. “Being the only outsiders on a remote island, I had to make sure we were protected.”
“A rifle? Really?”
“It’s an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, to be exact. Now I wish I bought some extra magazines. I only have the one. Guess I’ll have to make every shot count.”
Ollie exclaimed, “Have you lost your mind? Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get that? It’s not like you could have stowed that in your carry on when we flew here.”
Marco shrugged. “I bought it during an island excursion. It wasn’t easy. Not a lot of guns out here. But just like home, money talks.”
Lenny would bet his left nut that Marco had never fired anything remotely like it. Odds are, he’d shoot himself before any intended target.
