Shark Island

by Chris Jameson

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  He turned to follow their progress, see if they had a destination in mind, and only then did he see the boat plying the waters, rising and falling like a plastic ship in a child’s bathtub. There were seals by the hundreds—by the thousands—that seemed to be following the boat, and now he saw a tall, curved fin in the water and realized there were sharks as well.

  Beyond the boat, six hundred yards from the rocky shore of Deeley Island, the rusting signal tower on Bald Cap stood stark against the gray, rain-blotted sky.

  As Jim Talbot watched, the boat’s skipper throttled down as it slid toward Bald Cap, and the seals and the sharks began to gather around it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Kat stood on the prow of the Thaumas as Captain N’Dour navigated straight for Bald Cap. The rocky sprawl barely earned the right to be called an island. Maybe forty feet across at its widest breadth, Bald Cap was not much more than a fist of stone thrust up from the sea, likely an extension of Deeley Island, despite the distance involved. During the Second World War, the U.S. Army had built a metal watchtower on that stony outpost and bolted it to the rock. Sentries would be assigned watch duty in pairs, sleeping in shifts in the small enclosure atop the tower—not much more than a box. Now the watchtower had rusted badly and three sides of the enclosure had fallen away or been removed for safety. As N’Dour eased down the throttle and they began to glide toward Bald Cap, Kat could make out the rusted signs all around the base of the watchtower, warning boaters to keep off. The view from the small platform, more than thirty feet above the rocks, would be a natural temptation.

  Not in this weather, she thought, wiping rain from her face.

  There would have been stairs in the original construction, maybe bolted to the side like a fire escape. It appeared they had been removed to discourage boaters even further, just in case the signs weren’t enough.

  Slowing, the boat surrendered more easily to the undulations of the sea. Kat kept one hand on the railing as she turned to look at the seal herds. The wind raged, but it seemed to her that the clouds had lightened just a bit, so that it no longer felt like the middle of the night at the end of the world. Rain still poured down, but she could make out the seals a bit more clearly. She spotted a fin but barely noticed it. The sharks weren’t her focus.

  A shiver of pleasure ran up her spine and she found herself grinning. The grin turned to a laugh and she raised a hand to mask it. The others were moving about, or tending to their tasks, or watching the seals just as she was. Tension had been coiled inside her ever since they had set out from Woods Hole nearly twenty-four hours earlier, stress she had refused to recognize or address. This project had required countless hours of research, late nights writing grant applications, dozens of phone calls, hundreds of e-mails, not to mention all the time she had spent romancing potential donors. Kat might not be as tone-deaf as Wolchko, but she had never been very good at the social element of her job, pitching herself and her research. It made her impatient, having to smile on cue, made her want to retreat to her lab or her office. Her safe space.

  Today, though, the lab would have felt like a prison. Laughter bubbled up inside her again and she threw her head back, welcoming the rain that pelted her face. It had been too long since she’d had a straight-up win in her life. Performing for donors could be exhausting, but hiding in her lab had started to cause her soul to atrophy, so much that she’d begun to forget what it was all for. Her relationship with Tye had contributed to that spiritual withering, she knew. The support and alliance had been almost as great as the wonderfully filthy sex, but she liked simple clarity in her personal interactions and the thing with Tye had become muddied so fast. Every moment at the lab had turned into a negotiation, and the work had suffered. Breaking it off with Tye had begun to clarify things for her, but the need to navigate around the wreckage of the relationship had kept her preoccupied.

  Now, though … now. In the midst of this storm, farther than she’d been from her lab in more than two years, her mind felt uncluttered at last. The donors would not need romancing after this. Success was its own aphrodisiac where research funding was concerned. And things would become cleaner with Tye. He might be her junior on the project, but his name would be on it—if he wanted to, he could leave Woods Hole entirely or maybe get his own project going at WHOI, with his own funding.

  The weather notwithstanding, it was Kat’s best day in years.

  Tye had gone to the starboard side, looking down as the seal herds began to gather around the boat. Now he glanced up, spotted her, and started toward her with his arms out to either side as if he were walking a balance beam.

  “You look happy,” he said as the boat rocked beneath them.

  “Happy? I’m absolutely delighted.”

  They grinned at each other like a pair of fools. Kat couldn’t help herself—she dragged him into an embrace. It started awkwardly, all strange elbows, and then they settled into it, fitting together as comfortably as they once had. She knew she shouldn’t have hugged him, feared sending the wrong signals after all they’d been through, but this moment belonged to them both.

  Kat pushed back from him, held him at arm’s length, and beamed. “It feels like a victory.”

  “Screw feels like. It is a victory. For us and for Wolchko, especially,” Tye said, and they both glanced back toward the wheelhouse to see the acoustics specialist at his computer, scanning through data. “The real breakthroughs always create more questions than they answer. You told me that, Kat, and if this doesn’t fit the bill, nothing does.”

  Her brow furrowed. “There’s no way of knowing how long they’ll stay here. If they’ll change their patterns. If we can influence them enough to get them to start nesting here somewhere down the line. I mean, we can broadcast the signal from Bald Cap, but we don’t know the effects it will—”

  Tye grabbed her shoulder, bent down to stare into her eyes. “Stop. Enjoy it for an hour, at least, before you start tearing yourself apart with what comes next.”

  Kat laughed again. Together, comfortable at last, they turned and looked back out at the seal herd. The boat dipped hard to port, the waves pushing them too close to the rocks, and Kat felt a moment of trepidation before Captain N’Dour throttled up a bit, the engine coughing as they started to circumvent the tiny island.

  “Picture time!” Naomi said, making her way carefully across the slippery deck. The storm whipped at her, but her hair had been plastered to her head by the rain and she looked like something hauled up from the deep in a net.

  Tye put his arm around Kat and she allowed it. They smiled for Naomi’s camera. Then Kat extricated herself from that arm.

  “Now a professional one,” she said, hoping he took the gentle admonition well.

  “Like this?” Tye asked, dropping into a double-thumbs-up pose worthy of a college frat boy.

  “Exactly,” Kat said, mimicking his pose.

  Even Naomi laughed.

  Wolchko remained in the wheelhouse with the captain, but Bergting stood with Rosalie at the starboard railing. Naomi turned and took a shot of them both, which caused Kat to focus on them in that moment. Bergting was the silent type by nature, kept his head down and did his job, and though they wouldn’t be out here on the water without him and Captain N’Dour, he wasn’t a part of this project. Rosalie, however, had a lot invested in their success. She was working toward her PhD and being a part of this project would certainly elevate her in comparison to other job candidates once she’d received her doctorate. But as she stared down at the seals and looked across the water to see them nesting on the shores of Deeley Island, Rosalie seemed unimpressed and less than enthused.

  Kat called to her. Beckoned for her to join them. “You should be in these pictures!”

  Rosalie stood twenty feet away, almost unrecognizable in her rain gear. A lock of wet hair striped her face.

  “Come on, Rosalie!” Naomi echoed.

  Tye threw his arm around Kat aga
in. “You worked hard to get here. You should be in these shots.”

  “I’m good,” Rosalie said, her words barely audible over the wind and the engine and the barking of the seals. “This day belongs to the two of you.”

  Something about the way she said it tweaked Kat’s thoughts, and suddenly she felt so stupid. She might not be as perceptive as some women, but she would never have thought herself dense enough to miss this. Now the note of resignation and jealousy in Rosalie’s voice gave her away, and Kat wondered how long their doctoral candidate had been holding a torch for Tye. Kat had been so wrapped up in her own complications that she’d entirely failed to see it. Arm around Tye, she let Naomi take their picture before pulling away, not wanting to make anyone uncomfortable. But when Kat glanced at Tye, she realized that he knew Rosalie was interested. Somehow this guy who’d never really been great at understanding Kat’s feelings had recognized Rosalie’s before Kat had.

  She smiled again, this time at how blind she’d been. Kat wanted to tell Rosalie that there might be obstacles impeding a potential romance with Tye, but that she wasn’t one of them. But Kat would not have that conversation today. It would wait until they were back at WHOI, not all stuck together, unable to retreat to their corners to sulk or ruminate or fume.

  Naomi took a couple of more subdued shots, more professional, and in that quiet moment Kat realized that she herself might be just a little bit jealous. Silly, she knew. She had been the one to end things with Tye, but there had been a lot to cherish about their time together. She rolled her eyes at the absurdity of the feeling and exhaled, letting it go.

  “That’ll make a great shot, you rolling your eyes,” Tye said. “What did I do this time?”

  Kat barely heard him. Naomi had lowered her camera and moved toward the railing, face blank with uneasiness, and Kat walked toward her, following her gaze to see what had frightened her. Side by side, they looked out at the water, and Kat understood immediately. The sharks had become almost invisible to her, given her focus on the seal herds. But there were a lot of sharks out there, prowling the water and attacking seals. Enough seals had died that Kat thought she could smell their blood mingling with the salt air.

  “Hey,” Kat said, touching Naomi’s arm.

  Naomi flinched and glanced at her, gave a wan smile, pretending to be all right.

  “You’re good. We’ll be here an hour or two and then we head for home, signal off. If you’ve been fighting your fear to be out here with us, I’m pretty sure you’ve won that battle. And if you want to go below—”

  “They don’t make you nervous?” Naomi asked, turning her head to keep an eye on a cluster of three fins as the boat kept churning the water. “It’s not freaking you out that there are so many?”

  “It’s natural they’d follow the seals. And there aren’t that many.”

  Tye had scuffed carefully across the deck to join them. “But there are,” he said. “Dozens of them.”

  The boat tipped hard to port and they all staggered back a few steps. Naomi grabbed Kat by the arm, unsteady on her prosthetic or simply not used to the sea. Suddenly Kat wanted to go below, to have the distraction of raw data as they made their way home, asking all of the questions that would be born of this journey.

  “You’re suggesting the signal’s had a similar effect on the sharks as it has on the seals? That we’ve lured them with something other than the movement of their food source?”

  “Maybe,” Tye said. “Rosalie and I have been monitoring them and we’re sure they’re exhibiting unusual behavior.”

  Rosalie and I. Kat frowned, not in jealousy but with a flicker of uneasiness. Why hadn’t they brought this up to her?

  Kat turned to Naomi. “It bears study, of course. We’ll have to investigate all of this. But there could be fifty Great Whites out there and it wouldn’t matter. We’re just observers here. We won’t be engaging with the sharks at all. Nobody’s diving, and we won’t be hauling one onto the deck for study. Not this trip. You’re fine.”

  Naomi shook her head, embarrassed. “I know it’s stupid—”

  “It’s not stupid,” Kat said. “Not after what you’ve been through. But we’ll be home by this time tomorrow. The Globe is going to love this story. We’re all going to come out winners from this. And if you get really freaked out, you tell me, and I’ll ask N’Dour to bring us into port and you can go ashore, make your way home from there. Your job is done. The rest of us have a ton of work to do now, but we’ll have plenty of funding to do it. Even Wolchko has to be happy about that.”

  Naomi hesitated a moment before meeting Kat’s eyes, her own face full of surprise and gratitude. “Thank you. I’m going to stick it out, but I didn’t expect … I mean, I really appreciate you being so kind.”

  “Don’t get used to it,” Tye muttered, but his smirk said he was only teasing, and that was okay with Kat. They could tease. It was whatever else she now thought might be simmering underneath the teasing that worried her.

  When Bergting raised his voice, Kat frowned at first. He talked so little that for a second she had wondered who was speaking. Then he raised a hand and pointed, a troubled expression on his face, and he spoke again.

  “Dr. Cheong,” he said. “What do you make of that?”

  Kat walked to the railing and watched as two fins carved the water off the starboard side. They were fifty yards out and swimming straight for the boat. There were seals all around them and she was sure the sharks would break off, chase something to eat, but instead the fins kept arrowing toward the boat. Ten yards out, the sharks went deeper, the fins beginning to submerge.

  “Hold on to something,” Bergting snapped.

  Rosalie swore as she gripped the railing. “What the fuck is this?”

  They felt the boom against the hull, a tremor through the whole boat. Kat froze for several heartbeats, trying to make sense of it. This wasn’t right. Sharks had been known to attack a kayak or small boat, but behavioral analysis usually provided some explanation. But something like this …

  Her thoughts derailed. She stared out at the water as she saw the sharks circling around as if to make another pass.

  This is not happening.

  Off to her left, she heard Tye call out, but the words were nothing but noise. She scanned the water, taking a mental count of the fins, and then she felt a hard bump against the hull before the boat began to tilt into a trough. Another heavy thump and she fought the tilting deck to grab the railing, to look down into the storm-black water, where she saw a fifteen-foot-long Great White skidding its two-and-a-half-ton bulk along the side of the boat.

  A crest swelled beneath the boat and it began to tilt in the other direction. The first pair of sharks returned, two of them booming into the hull together. Kat felt herself filled with a sort of awe, both of these monsters and of the signal Wolchko had been broadcasting for her. Whatever they had done to the seals, it had struck a very different chord in the sharks.

  Another thump. Then a heavier boom. The boat tilted again. The sharks battered against the hull, and more were circling. Swarming. Kat didn’t recognize the flutter in her chest at first, but after a few moments she realized this was what it meant to feel real fear.

  She blinked as the biggest Great White bashed against the hull again, and for the first time she realized someone was screaming. Had been screaming for a while.

  Kat turned to see Naomi sitting on the deck, hugging her knees to her chest, her camera forgotten beside her. The screams belonged to her.

  CHAPTER 22

  Naomi tried just to breathe. The rain felt like punishment, the wind like mockery. She wrapped her arms around her knees and squeezed tighter. Trying to breathe, finding it difficult … that was how she realized she had been screaming. Now she snapped her jaws shut and took long breaths through her nose, running mental calculations about how far it might be to Bald Cap or to Deeley Island, or for that matter to the mainland.

  The mainland. What the hell were they doing out
here?

  A hand touched her shoulder and she slapped it away, twisting to see it had been Eddie Wolchko’s. He offered that hand to her as if to help her up, but she ignored it, shooting to her feet. The stump of her missing leg ached so badly it felt like the bone had been exposed. It had been aching all day and most of the day before thanks to the rain and the cold and spending so much time standing, but she hadn’t wanted to bitch about it, hadn’t wanted anyone to think she sought their sympathy. Now they all stared at her as if she had lost her mind and she stared back, thinking the same of them. Why weren’t they panicking? Why weren’t they doing something?

  “Naomi,” Wolchko gently prodded. “You’re all right. I know you must be—”

  The deck slanted to port, but she kept her footing as she spun to glare at Kat. “What are you doing just standing there? Even I know this isn’t normal.”

  Boom, on the hull. Boom. Boom.

  A haunting sound. A nightmare sound.

  Boom.

  Her heart beat a frantic rhythm as they began to talk to her—Kat and Wolckho—trying to calm her down, as if any of this were rational.

  “Are you not listening?” she cried over the rain. “You’ve done something to them. Shut it down. You’ve got to…”

  Her words trailed off. She saw from their eyes, the way they studied her, that they weren’t going to listen to her. Why should they? They were the brains here, the brilliant scientists, and who was she? A girl who should’ve died off the Cape Cod shore last summer instead of the surfer who’d saved her.