by Steve Alten
I circle the dead creature, my current disturbing its slumber.
The dead woman’s eyes flash open.
“Huh!” I shot up in bed, my heart racing, my mind holding fast to the image of my mother, her face pale in death—melding into Anya’s, my girlfriend, hovering over me.
“Kwan, are you all right? You were yelling in your sleep.”
“Nightmare. Anya, get this IV out of me; I’ve had enough. What time is it?”
“Almost one in the afternoon. Dr. Becker sent me in to wake you. They’re discussing ways to fix your DNA.”
The conference room was located on the second floor. It was small and still smelled of last night’s Chinese takeout. Seated around an oval table that looked as old as the building was Dr. Becker, her assistant, Nadja Kamrowski, Joe Botchin, Li-ling—and a new but familiar face.
Jeff Elrod was a heavyset man in his midfifties. He had blond hair that had whitened with age and he wore it long to cover a receding hairline, and I suppose because wearing a ponytail probably made him feel cool. He had thin lips and a wide smile that reeked of ego, but the eyes were dangerous—hazel lasers that locked onto you and burned a hole into your soul.
I knew Mr. Elrod—he associated with my father, but never with others present. It would be a midnight visit for a walk in our backyard or a chance meeting at the mall with “Uncle Jeff.” I had last seen him four years ago lurking in my father’s study at some ungodly hour of the night and it was his presence that compelled me to hack into the Admiral’s e-mail where I managed to cross-reference a rough identity. Elrod’s waistline had thickened since then, but I doubted the former CIA field operative had moved to a desk job.
His eyes locked onto mine the moment Anya and I entered the room.
Dr. Becker stood to make the introductions, but Elrod cut her off. “That’s unnecessary, Doctor. Kwan and I are old friends, aren’t we, Kwan?”
I took a seat across from him, his smile unnerving. “You were my father’s friend. We spoke twice in fourteen years.”
“Three times, actually. You’re forgetting about the time you and your pal Clark Newsom hacked Dad’s computer. Good times, huh?” And he smiled at me like a serpent.
“Why are you here?”
“Why am I here? Well, I’m here as a friend. And I’m here representing a group of investors. See, kid, Dr. Becker led us to believe that she had finally developed a cure for cancer—an immune system booster we expected her to be mass-producing by now. Thanks to you, we know this cure still has a few bugs in it. Of course, Dr. B. wasn’t exactly volunteering that information, but we have other means of obtaining updates. Isn’t that right, Dr. Kamrowski?”
Nadja Kamrowski turned to Dr. Becker. “I’m sorry, Barbara. But time is of the essence. Like it or not, we have a human test subject. We need to use him.”
“How?”
“We place Kwan in the observation tank and allow the full effects of his metamorphosis to come out. Then we use the filtration system to feed him high doses of the three beta-blockers we’ve been working with. Whichever drug or combination of drugs causes his symptoms to abate gets added to the protocol. It’ll take ten days to complete the tests, during which time we can bring in the extra personnel and equipment needed to mass-produce the sharks’ stem cells.”
Jeff Elrod’s eyebrows rose. “Wow, Kwan. Looks like your involvement in this project could shortcut a cure for cancer and make you a national hero, except no one can know about it.”
“Why not?” Anya asked innocently.
Elrod’s eyes took her in. “Anya, right? My, you’re a pretty young thing, just like your mother, Elizabeth. No wonder your father fell in love with her at Cambridge. How is Dad? Still teaching economics at FAU? A tenured professor . . . you and Mom must be so proud. And look at you, following in the old man’s footsteps. The future sure looks bright for our young immigrant . . . unless, of course, you overstep your boundaries. Then it’s bye-bye citizenship, bye-bye Boca, hello New Delhi. But hey, there are worse things than being deported. By the way, my condolences about your big brother—his death was a real tragedy . . . but I digress. You asked me a legitimate question about keeping our work here a secret, and I went off on one of my famous tangents.”
Anya reached beneath the tabletop and squeezed my hand, her limb trembling.
“See, sweetheart, sometimes it’s better for business not to air your dirty laundry. Growing gills . . . that’s dirty laundry. Dunking a basketball—that’s good stuff. Which is why your boyfriend here is going to be allowed to be a star athlete after he cooperates with Dr. Kamrowski. By the way, Kwan, I spoke to Oprah’s people and let them know you’d be rescheduling your interview while we finished doing all the necessary medical testing—that way our biotech partners can help other paraplegics dunk basketballs, too. But, hey, let’s not put the cart before the horse—first we’ve got to get those beta-blockers in your system, right Dr. B?”
Dr. Becker nodded nervously. “Yes, right. Kwan, we ordered breakfast for you—why don’t you and Anya eat while we—”
Jeff Elrod slapped his palms on the table, the acoustic blast causing everyone to jump. “Breakfast . . . the most important meal of the day. Except my watch says it’s already thirteen hundred hours, which means breakfast is over. And since lunch is for union workers and other useless dregs of society, why don’t we get junior here in the freakin’ tank and if he gets hungry you can feed him a fish.”
I turned to the black ops agent, my eyes burning into his, the muscles in my upper back contracting. “Maybe you should join me in the tank, asshole.”
Anya held on to me, Joe Botchin and Dr. Becker hurrying around the table to join her lest I grab Jeff Elrod by his throat. “He’s testing you, Kwan. Remember what we spoke about last night? Stay in control. Let it go.”
I took a deep breath—only to find myself wheezing through the partially closed esophageal membrane in my throat.
Dr. Becker probed the side of my neck. “His gills are more pronounced. Get him into the tank—now.”
Anya dragged me out of the room, Jeff Elrod’s smile unnerving.
27
I was in serious trouble by the time we made it out to the catwalk. Johnny Roig was standing by the open top of the forty-foot-wide, thirty-foot-deep cylindrical aquarium, the tank’s water level nearly reaching the rim.
“We’ve had the heater running all night; if it’s not warm enough for you—”
I pushed the man aside and jumped in.
For an anxiety-filled thirty seconds I couldn’t breathe, my chest on fire. And then I burped a long belch of air that seemed to squeeze my stomach flat and crushed the cavity beneath my rib cage as my lungs collapsed, sending a sizzling trail of bubbles out of my mouth.
With every molecule of air gone, I opened my mouth and inhaled my briny surroundings until my gills opened and I could breathe again. The instant the air was purged, I sank feetfirst to the bottom of the tank.
Within seconds, my body adapted to my underwater environment. My sinus passages pinched beneath my nose and eyes, flattening the contours of my face. My ear canals pressed together until the cavities were sealed. Protective membranes slid over my cornea and eyes and my fuzzy liquid world came into focus as if I were wearing swim goggles.
I kicked off my shoes and socks, then pulled off my jeans and shirt and stood on the Plexiglas bottom to take inventory of myself and my surroundings, still wearing the bathing suit I had worn to the beach party.
I was neutrally buoyant, standing on a grilled surface that vented filtered water into the aquarium. The slightest push off the bottom and I rose ten feet, the slightest twist and I spun.
How did I feel? There was a part of me that felt petrified . . . I mean, after all, I was changing both internally and externally, and that’s pretty scary. At the same time I was breathing underwater, and that was just beyond s
ick.
The tank was cylindrical for a reason—the shape allowed sharks to swim in a perpetual circle in order to breathe—something that I could accomplish simply by opening and closing my mouth. Above my head, the circular opening revealed the catwalk and the ceiling lights above. Otherwise, I was surrounded by the aquarium’s curved glass walls, which distorted the periphery of the observation room, rendering it a convex fish-eyed world.
Turning slowly, I discovered my audience.
Dr. Becker and Dr. Kamrowski were jabbering away, though I could hear nothing. Joe Botchin was setting up folding chairs for himself and Li-ling. Jeff Elrod paced back and forth, his eyes wide with wonder, even as he videoed me on his iPhone.
Looking up, I saw Anya descend from the catwalk’s spiral stairwell. Pushing away from the bottom, I swam up to her—and was suddenly overcome by the bizarre sensation of my skin thickening over my entire body. I opened and closed my hand, the muscles taut. The pigment along the back of my arms appeared to be darkening to a grayish-brown, and it felt almost alien in texture—like rubberized sandpaper. A closer inspection revealed triangular-shaped dermal denticles that rubbed smooth from head to toe but bit when stroked the opposite way.
Within seconds my flesh had become living armor. Not only was it protective, but it seemed to channel the water! With a flurry of kicks, I felt myself accelerating across the width of the tank as if it were filled with oil.
While my new shark skin gave me speed, I still swam like a human, and humans are awkward in the water, certainly no match for sharks. Worse, I looked freakish and felt like a sideshow exhibit—all of which contributed to a building sense of anxiety.
How long did I have to remain in here?
How soon would those beta-blockers start to kick in so I could go home?
I torpedoed over to Dr. Becker and her colleagues—and suddenly realized I had no means of communicating. Their voices were muffled—until I pressed my hands to the acrylic wall and discovered something else about my skin: my shark epidermis possessed neuroreceptors that registered the tiniest vibration, acting like an inner ear.
Touching the aquarium glass, I could hear everything outside the tank.
“Becker, what’s he doing?”
“It would appear, Mr. Elrod, that he’s trying to communicate.”
“He wants to know how long he has to stay underwater,” said Li-ling, reading my lips.
“You think he can hear us?” Joe asked.
Dr. Becker shook her head. “The glass is far too thick. Besides, look at his ears—his ear canals have sealed to prevent damage from the water pressure.”
I was about to correct Dr. Becker when Jeff Elrod pulled her aside. “By pressure, you mean he’s capable of diving into deeper waters. How deep?”
“That’s impossible to say.”
“Well, how deep can a shark dive?”
“As far as I know, there aren’t any limits.”
“Does the kid have limits?”
“Again, it’s impossible to say.”
Elrod’s face was reddening. “Let’s play a game, Doctor. Let’s pretend your life depends upon you providing me with accurate answers.”
“Are you threatening me, Mr. Elrod?”
“Very much so. Now how deep can the kid dive?”
Dr. Becker appeared flustered. “Whether it’s ten feet or ten thousand feet, water pressure only affects things possessing air cavities—lungs, sinuses, and ear canals in humans; steel hulls in submarines. In order to breathe from his gills, Kwan’s air cavities must collapse.”
“Then he may not be susceptible to the dangers of extreme depths?”
“In theory. The only way to know for sure is to subject him to hydrostatic pressure testing. For our purposes, that’s not necessary. We want to reverse the mutation, not quantify it.”
“What would it entail, this hydrostatic pressure testing?”
Dr. Becker was about to object, but thought better of it. “When you test a dive watch, you place the watch in a container of water inside a hyperbaric chamber and increase the pressure to simulate submersion at depth. With a human—it’s never been done.”
Jeff Elrod smiled, patting the geneticist on the back. “Good talk. You can go now.”
I heard tapping sounds and traced them to Anya. She had typed a message to me on her iPad, dictated to her by Nadja Kamrowski.
Dr. Kamrowski says you must remain in the tank at least ten hours. We cannot begin the beta-blockers until your metamorphosis is complete; otherwise any latent symptoms may become resistant to the drugs.
Seeing my despair, Anya pressed her hand to the glass as a gesture of support. I did the same—the nerve endings in my dermal denticles so sensitive that I was able to feel the vibrations of her pulse.
It was going to be a long day.
Three hours passed. I had held out hope that the mutations had ceased when my feet started to change. The deformity began as a hunk of cartilage which protruded from the back of my heels like a two-inch spike, only it continued to thicken and grow. By five in the afternoon, the prominence had peaked into a pair of gruesome fourteen-inch-long bony structures—my feet now resembling a miniature pair of concave skis, the curvature preventing me from standing.
I was petrified. Would my entire body begin sprouting these mutant growths?
My handlers were perplexed. None of the rats had developed these foot deformities.
Finally, it was Li-ling who suggested a potential purpose. Tapping on the glass to get my attention, she held both of her arms in front of her, then pressed her palms together before moving them from side to side.
It took me a moment to comprehend. With my feet and legs pressed together, the protrusions along the back of my heels formed the curved upper lobe of a tail fin!
Rising off the bottom, I pressed my legs together and attempted moving my hips back and forth like Li-ling suggested. It was awkward, sort of like twirling a hula hoop, and my body kept rolling sideways until I figured out where to position my arms. But the combination of streamlining my legs while swishing my feet east-west propelled me through the water so efficiently that in no time it became second nature, and I found myself circling the periphery of the tank, my body undulating like—well, like a shark.
Kwan Wilson—Sharkman.
The more I swam, the better I felt. At some point I closed my eyes, entering a Zen-like state that shut down part of my brain, allowing me to sleep—my skin’s neuroreceptors feeling the interior walls of the tank as I glided and breathed . . .
Glided and breathed.
Glided and breathed . . .
28
Zzzzzzzt. Zzzzzzzzt.
The electrical discharge zapped in my head . . . well, not in my head as it turns out, but from within hundreds of tiny, dark pores which covered my scalp like a crew cut. Filled with a gelatinous substance, this shark sensory system, known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, formed a network of neurons that enabled my rewired brain to detect the faintest electrical fields—electrical fields generated by the moving muscles or beating heart of other life forms.
The disturbance was originating above me. I circled the intruder warily, my rational human mind disconnected from my suddenly dominant predatory instincts.
I was hungry. I needed to feed.
This was food.
A triangular row of teeth hidden within my gums rose into position along the outside of my human molars. Like a torpedo going active, I launched my attack.
“Kwan—stop! Stop it!”
It was not Anya’s scream that snapped me from my predatory state, but her scent—an alluring chemical pheromone. I circled her, rubbing my belly-skin against her flesh until she reached out and violently pinched my throat, ending the courtship.
Anya?
“Kwan, snap out of it! We only have a few minutes—I nee
d you out of this tank.”
Grabbing my wrist, she kicked for the rim of the aquarium, dragging me with her.
With a powerful downward thrust of my legs, I launched my body out of the water and landed on the catwalk—Anya in my arms. I set the stunned girl down, then purged my gills and gasped a voluminous breath of air.
My lungs inflated, opening my sinus passages and ear canals with an internal pop. My blurred vision sharpened—my eyes widening at the sight of Anya’s body, exposed in her bra and panties. I continued to stare while my skin shed its density, the grayish-brown pigment quickly fading away.
My scalp tingled as the ampullae of Lorenzini pores sealed closed. I hocked up phlegm and spit it into the tank—and I could speak—the triangular teeth squeezed back inside my gums.
“Anya? Where is everyone?”
“Eating. We only have a few minutes, so listen. That Defense Department guy—he wants to run some kind of crazy experiment on you . . . something involving your father. The Admiral’s flying in—he’ll be here in the morning. Get out of here, Kwan. Don’t come back, don’t go on TV anymore. You need to disappear.”
She leaned in and kissed me.
“He’s on the catwalk! Don’t let him escape.”
I looked down and saw Jeff Elrod pointing at me. To my left, two men dressed innocuously in blue blazers and khaki pants were sprinting up the spiral stairwell, each CIA assassin sporting a 9mm Glock. The exit door that led outside to the back of the facility was being chained shut by John Roig—and Joe Botchin was approaching me cautiously from the other end of the catwalk, the wrestler-turned-shark wrangler holding a heavy fishing net.
“Easy, Kwan. No one wants to hurt you, only we can’t let you bail out on us. Dr. Kamrowski will explain everything.”
I looked one last time into Anya’s eyes, then sprinted down the catwalk at the Aussie—leaping over the rail at the last second into the flooded channel that connected the medical pool and aquarium with the shark paddock. Holding my breath, I ducked underwater and swam my way through a dark, enclosed tunnel . . . emerging outside . . . surrounded by the night sky and dozens of moving bodies.
