“No, you don’t fight!” It was his father. “You go to the bridge, now,” he yelled over the gunfire.
He must have seen Will and run down here.
“I have to fight!” he argued, getting his footing and grabbing at the gun in his father’s hands.
“Will, I mean it.”
“Dad, you have to let me. I can do this.”
“You almost killed people. You can’t use a gun, and not one of these for sure.”
Will grabbed his father’s neck and screamed into his ear. “Get back to taking care of the ship. I got this.”
His father’s dark eyes looked hollowly back at him. “We’re dead in the water, stuck on ice.”
Will glanced back at the imposing chunk of frozen water they’d been forced upon, then back at his father. “Then we fight together,” he said.
His dad’s eyes narrowed for a moment, thinking, and then he took Will’s arm and led him at a run to Sir Mallory.
“Give him grenades. Give Will grenades, Mallory.”
Sir Mallory had just tossed one, which exploded near a fin in the air, doing no damage. He turned, wild-eyed, saying, “Here, here.” He pulled four grenades out of the pockets of his parka and handed them to Will.
His dad demonstrated how to use the grenade, mimicking pulling the pin and throwing. “Got it? Don’t be a hero.”
“Got it. I won’t.”
His dad turned to the rail, braced his elbows on it with the gun propped in aiming position, and began to fire. Will saw the smaller Megalodon’s thin, white fin instantly explode at the top, gushing black blood like a geyser. No longer coming to a point, the fin submerged in retreat.
Sir Mallory hurled a grenade to where the shark had just been, and Will took note and pulled the pin on a grenade in his hand. The other three he’d tucked into his pockets.
“Throw it!” Sir Mallory beckoned him.
He chucked it hard toward where he’d last seen the fin, but the Megalodon was surfacing right in front of them, its white face spotted with bullet holes, its mouth opening with a most putrid smell. Will’s grenade went off underwater behind it, but he hardly noticed as the shark’s teeth, some missing from its maw, popped out at Sir Mallory, his father and the green-suited man fighting there.
“No!” Will screamed, imaginings flashing through his head of his father being devoured alive by the beast like he’d seen so many be massacred.
Its bottom teeth got stuck on the ship’s metal, but the top half of its mouth clamped down on the green-suited man, front teeth sawing him completely in half from the top of his head to his crotch. The man didn’t even have time to scream, and Will hoped he also didn’t have time to realize what was happening to him. The man’s innards spilled out all over the deck, and his face landed in a pile of blood and guts. His eye sockets were empty voids, the eyeballs having been forced out of his skull. They rolled away from the man’s body parts as the ship careened with the shark attack’s force.
The Megalodon struggled to free itself from the ship, but its teeth were locked on tightly. It shook its head from side to side, blood flying all over the deck, the green-suited man’s body parts taking to the air and landing around the remaining fighters. The boat rocked, but the ice held it firmly in place from the madly frustrated Megalodon.
His father made a rush at the shark’s open front teeth, knelt right in front of a missing tooth, inches from the Megalodon’s nose, and emptied the machine gun into the gap. Sir Mallory joined him, chucking a grenade in the tooth hole, too.
Will’s father yelled angrily at Sir Mallory as the grenade went off.
All at once, the giant shark’s head exploded with the sound stinging Will’s ears. Shark brains, flesh, and blood sprayed all over him and the others, and the Megalodon’s lifeless, headless body sunk into the sea, leaving its bloody teeth still clamped to the deck and hull. A part of its face was still attached to the teeth, and one black eye seemed to turn and look at Will dead-on, and then it rolled back, turning white.
Will’s father had a reason for chastising Sir Mallory. The ship’s hull had taken damage from the grenade that had been tossed so close to it. The railing where the top teeth were stuck and parts of the green-suited man’s body still lay was blown out, and Will could see through the teeth out to sea, where the mama Megalodon’s fin had stopped circling and now sunk into the water.
Was the hull under the water damaged? Will felt the vibrations of the deck under his feet, surprised he had this instinct. No, the ship would be okay for now, he could tell.
The guns quieted.
Will looked around. There was blood everywhere, shark and human. Pieces of both clung to the deck and walls of the ship, too. There were so few people left and it sickened Will.
His father turned to him, walked over, and clapped him on the shoulder, giving him a hard look that Will couldn’t interpret. He looked younger, eyes wild and fierce. “Now, go to the bridge, tell Don Mack to announce that we need to get off this iceberg. Whoever is left needs to help.”
Will stared at him.
“Go on, go! The big one isn’t coming back tonight.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Go.” He turned away and dashed below deck, and Will assumed he was checking the damage with his own eyes.
He turned and ran to the bridge stairwell, up the stairs, and onto the bridge to do his father’s bidding.
Chapter 15
Not many people were left, but of those who were, they were able to rescue James off the ice. He’d flown out there when the little Megalodon hit the hardest time, and nobody had noticed. When everything had died down, he’d called out and the four remaining crewmen had pulled him aboard with ropes.
The whole ship was covered in blood, pieces of flesh, and guts. Will’s father, Don Mack, and the crewmen worked to get the ship off the ice throughout the night, and Sir Mallory, the two remaining green-suited men, James, and the techie Will had shot the rocket launcher with kept watch for the massive Megalodon still out there somewhere. All Nancy’s girls were gone, as were the rest of the tech crew.
Will and Ellen stayed on the bridge where it was somewhat warm. Will didn’t need an open window; his stomach still felt steady. Ellen didn’t say much, and halfway through the long night, she fell asleep.
Will thought he’d never sleep again.
The sun rose, and the blizzard died off enough to show where the shining star was in the sky on the horizon through the clouds. Gales of forty to fifty miles an hour rocked the ship as, at daybreak, the crew was successful in detaching the boat from the iceberg. Will’s father and Don Mack were on the bridge in a flash.
“Is everything okay?” Will asked them right away.
His father nodded as Don Mack said, “Little bit of damage to the hull, but we’re not taking on water.”
Sir Mallory entered the bridge then, looking pale and frail, but wild-eyed and fiery at the same time. “It didn’t come back. It didn’t come back.”
“Good,” Will’s father said, seeming to appease Sir Mallory as he sunk into a chair near a window.
“Never thought we’d see sunlight again there for a minute,” Don Mack said.
Sir Mallory’s hair was matted with frozen red blood, and his face was streaked with it. He had a piece of someone or something’s flesh stuck in his eyebrow. “Have you reached anyone on the radio?”
“No,” Will’s father said. “Static. But we’ve called out all night, and had the distress signal out since we left port. Now, we sail north.”
“North? That’s right through their territory!” Sir Mallory said.
“No,” Will’s father said. “We don’t know where their territory is, exactly. We just have her to deal with. She’ll be back, she’s still around. We have to go north, straight to Argentina, as fast as we can move.”
“We should go east, then north,” Sir Mallory replied.
“No. That’ll take too long in case our radio signals never got caught. Someone
would be here by now if they had, most likely. Listen.” His father turned up the radio. Sizzling airwaves came back at them.
Sir Mallory slowly nodded. “You know best, Captain Miller. I trust you.”
Will’s dad gave the Englishman an indescribable look, and then turned to the controls of the ship. “Will, help Mallory and his people watch the sea. Warn us of anything, and tell the others the same.”
Will hopped up. Was his dad including him like an equal? He had to make sure he did a good job if that was the case.
As if he wouldn’t either way. A seventy-foot-long Megalodon was most likely hunting them now. He was tired of sitting on the bridge feeling useless and helpless. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, and joined Sir Mallory. He glanced back as they left, and his father was watching him with a curiously dark expression.
“Come with me, Will,” Sir Mallory said. His shoulder had been cleaned and bandaged in the night, but he still favored it, not moving his left arm much.
Will followed him to the deck and over to the crate that had held the massive store of weapons that had saved their lives the night before. “We don’t have much left,” Sir Mallory said as he opened it and leaned inside. “One rocket launcher, three machine guns, and six grenades. We have to make these count if she comes back.” His eyes were steely bright and his voice held excitement.
Will paused as Sir Mallory handed him three of the grenades, simply holding the destructive metal cylinders dumbly. “You want it to, don’t you?”
He stopped awkwardly unloading the missile launcher and turned to Will. The wild look wasn’t gone, but he did seem sad. “No, and yes, to be honest. But not for the reasons you think.”
“You haven’t proved it to the world yet, though,” Will said to him. “You had one life goal, and that was to catch a Megalodon. You still want to?”
He shook his head and looked down, and then rubbed his face with his right hand. “No, no. I would say you couldn’t understand, but you can. I know you can.” He looked back up at Will, some of the maddened light leaving his eyes. “It’s about Katty. She took her from me,” he said in a low tone. “Took her, destroyed her into pieces.” His voice broke at the end and he looked down again.
Will paused, not knowing what to say, and then pocketed the grenades in his parka. “I’m sorry,” was all he came up with.
Sir Mallory looked out to sea as the ship gained speed, heading due north. “Hard to explain. Perhaps you could say I had two life goals. The one from childhood being to catch a Megalodon, but the other came later in life. And now, I’ll never attain either.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “What was the other one?”
He shook his head, but laughed sadly. “It was Katherine. When I took the bullet from her, I already loved her from afar. I’d seen her for the first time that very night, and was watching her. Trying to get up the nerve to speak to her. Oh, Will. She was a beautiful young woman.” He met Will’s eyes. “That’s how I saw the gun. I was approaching her with some useless string of conversation planned to get her attention, and there the assassin was. It was instinct to save her, to take that bullet. I couldn’t let anything happen to her.
“Now, all these years later, she’s dead. It’s my fault for bringing her here. I wanted her to be a part of it. I just wanted…” He trailed off.
“Wanted what?” Will urged.
He looked down again. “You remember saying your parents loved one another so very deeply?”
“Yeah, you asked me.”
“I wanted that in my life. I wanted her to love me the way I did her, but she never did. She wouldn’t say it, but I could tell. I felt it. There was so much pressure from society for us to pair and marry after the incident. The romantics playing games with royalty through gossip, as usual. Katty gave in, and I was all too happy that she did. Never said anything, but I knew.” He leaned back into the crate and this time, unloaded the rocket launcher without effort and dropped it on deck.
“Will, take this to James and have him secure it to the deck. We can’t lose it.” His voice was emotionless. It seemed to Will that Sir Mallory, simply by uttering the words aloud, had gone as cold as the Antarctic after. His emotions froze up like the ice they’d been freed of earlier. Now, he faced his own survival being his meaning for living. Will suspected that for someone like Sir Mallory, that wouldn’t be enough.
He hauled up the giant gun, tried to think of something to say to make Sir Mallory feel better, but decided it was better to leave him be.
After James had the missile launcher roped to the fire pit where anyone could operate it or free it from its slipknots, Ellen appeared on deck. To Will, she looked awful, with dark blue circles under her eyes and cheeks pale.
“Hey, Willie,” she said. “God, it’s disgusting out here. Does that smell ever go away?”
Will hadn’t noticed it anymore, but she was right. The exploding Megalodon had left all kinds of rank odors in the pieces of it still on deck. Nobody had time to clean up anything, and Will had a feeling they never would. This ship, if it ever docked again, wouldn’t take to the sea again. Seamen were a superstitious lot.
“You’re covered in blood,” she said, looking him over. Even her voice was strained. Will assumed that was from all the screaming the night before.
He felt his face. It was crusty. Looking down over his thick clothing, he saw splashes of brown and black among little frozen chunks of what was once living matter. Man or fish, he didn’t know.
“You should change.”
“I’m okay.”
“It’s not war paint. Go change your clothes and wash your face. Your hands, too.”
“I’m wearing gloves.”
She pointed at his gloved hands. He held them out and looked. They were almost completely black with blood, and stiff from the cold. How had he not noticed his mess? Why hadn’t he realized he’d be covered in the mess like everyone else fighting last night?
“Oh,” was all he said.
“Come on,” she told him. “Come with me. I’ll help. God knows we have to keep our minds off this, off everything.” Her voice choked up with those last words.
As they made their way to below deck, Will looked around through the swirling snow, his breath white in front of him. So few people. So many had died. The ones who had washed overboard…had they simply drowned, froze, or were they eaten, unseen and unnoticed by the others? Their lives chewed up and swallowed like shark sushi without anyone to witness their final painful moments?
His father sailed fast as the storm settled more. The sun continued its path up the sky, and the pair went below to clean Will’s demolished wardrobe and face of blood and guts.
Chapter 16
Will was tired, yet alert. Maybe just his body was tired, he reasoned, because his mind felt sharp as sin. No, he never would sleep again.
They’d been sailing for several hours. Tension filled the snowy air. It seemed colder, the seas rougher, but Will still hadn’t gotten sick again. It was amazing, but not something he dwelled on. He wondered if all this time he’d spent too much energy focusing on being seasick and that was the root of it all. Now, there were other things to worry about, much bigger things.
Probably, though, it was the constant fear keeping him steady. Plus, he had to take care of Ellen. She wasn’t doing well. They’d been on the bridge sitting in chairs, listening to their father and Don Mack navigate, run the ship. Every once in a while, Ellen would melodically mutter under her breath and Will would look over at her. Her eyes would be closed, head down, matted hair swaying crazily around her cheekbones as she rocked back and forth. He didn’t know what she was doing, but figured she was dealing with what she’d seen last night through these shamanic chanting trances. He couldn’t interrupt her or ask. That would be intrusive, she’d say, so he decided the best thing he could do for her was to stay by her side and simply be there.
Besides, for the time being, it was nice to be a warm body without responsibilities except to simpl
y be a warm body.
“We should be in safer waters by night,” Don Mack said as the sun neared the end of the day. The sky had gotten darker and the snow had picked up.
“Why’s that?” Ellen asked.
“Shallower waters ahead,” their father replied.
“Thank God.” She sighed, and then leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t wait for this to be over. This waiting. It’s torture.”
“Ellie, you’re alright. We haven’t seen anything of her since last night,” said Don Mack.
She kept her head back and closed her hollow eyes.
Will looked out of the window beside him at the ocean rushing by. His dad really could sail. He saw they were heading due north, but his father masterfully seemed to predict where ice would be and avoided it while barely skimming off course. Will saw chunks of ice that could ground the ship cruise by as though guideposts on the path to ground and freedom from the Antarctic sea’s horrors.
His breath fogged the window in the warm cabin. He kept doing it, fogging the window, letting it cover back up, then breathing on it again. Eventually, he drew a little frowning face with a big, round, filled-in circle for a nose in his window fog. It faded and he breathed on it again. The face came back, as angry and sad as ever. Faded. He breathed on it again. The face reappeared. Will looked through its nose-window to the sea and wondered how long it would be until night fell.
Then he saw it, right through the circular nose of his frowny-faced character. In the daylight, amidst the storming snow, the long, slender white fin looked even bigger than it had at night. How close was it? Impossible to tell…the sheer size!
Will’s throat closed up. He tried to call out a warning, but not even air came out of his mouth. His lips worked, his hands braced either side of his fading fog face, and he kicked his legs, hoping someone would psychically know what he was trying to scream.
The Megalodon was back, and it was coming right for them.
Megalodon: Apex Predator Page 11
