“What the fuck is going on?” Anna asked through the headset as the copter took off.
Brooks looked at each of them in turn. “If I’m right, you three are the first ones in over 70 years to face something from out of this world and survive. I need to know how.”
“Why?” Ekkow asked.
“Because I think there are more out there. I’ll explain it all when we get to base. There’s drinks and snacks in that cooler. Get some rest. You’re going to need it.”
As Ekkow passed candy bars and bottles of water around, Calder sat back in his seat. He watched the ocean pass beneath him. The sun was starting to rise on the horizon, and the steady rhythm of the rotor blades had a soothing quality to it.
He knew he had more nightmares in his future. But for now, he could slip into a dreamless, fatigue-driven sleep.
THE END
Read on for a free sample of CLAWS
Chapter 1
Gianna Madera knew she’d never get out of this alive.
The cramped aft compartment of the ship stank of ancient sweat and stale seawater. If she hadn’t disabled the enormous diesel engine beside her, the noise and heat would have degraded the atmosphere from miserable to unlivable. She knelt and clamped a small silver tube to one of the trawler’s propeller shafts. A green light at one end of the sonic charge glowed.
Someone pulled at the bulkhead door from the other side. The rope she’d tied around the handle stretched tight, but held.
“She’s in here!” a woman shouted.
Footsteps pounded against the deck. Whispers conspired in the passageway.
“Gianna!” the captain called. “It’s a little late in the game to cause all this trouble. The work is done.”
“But I can make sure it never gets ashore,” Gianna said.
“No you can’t. Listen.”
She did. Rotor blades whined from somewhere above the upper deck.
“That’s a helicopter I radioed to come pick up the emitters. They’re already gone, off to do good work.”
“I doubt that. If they were going to do good work, you wouldn’t have kidnapped me and forced me to make them.”
“That was about expediency,” the captain said. “Sometimes timelines get compressed, and we have to cut corners. But as I’ve always said, you’ll be well compensated. Since we’re finished, we’ll forget about this little incident, and you’re free to go home on this chopper if you want. And we’ve explained your absence to your employer. You’ll have no problems.”
Gianna worked in a black ops section of Silenius Imports. The people on this boat had the combination of magnificent minds and missing morals that made them prime candidates to have connections there. But if this crew had legitimate government sponsorship, they wouldn’t have had to resort to kidnapping, and would have been forthcoming about the ultimate plan for the sonic emitters she’d been forced to perfect.
Everything the captain spouted had to be a pack of lies.
“Forget it!” Giana shouted.
“Then you’ll never get off this boat alive.”
“Neither will any of you,” she said to herself. “And neither will the emitters.”
With a small screwdriver, she flipped a microswitch on the sonic charge attached to the propeller shaft. A green light turned red. The cylinder began to hum. Gianna scrambled to the other side of the big engine and ducked.
The charge spooled up and emitted an escalating, high-pitched scream. The driveshaft began to flex back and forth, as if the steel had turned to rubber. It clanged against the mounts at either end. The people in the passageway shouted in confusion.
The charge frequency peaked at a painful shriek. Giana covered her ears, but the noise seemed to penetrate straight through her skull.
The mounts sheared. The driveshaft ripped clear of the hull and tore a gaping hole in the transom. Water rushed in and swept the sonic charge into the sea before it could do more damage. The stern angled down. On the other side of the door, the passageway filled with the sounds of people scrambling away for the upper decks.
Gianna splashed through the rising water to the bulkhead door. She tried to untie the rope, but the others yanking at the door had cinched the knot tight. Water pooled around her calves. Her wet fingers slipped against the hard, nylon line.
“Damn it.” She gave the rope a frustrated pull. The nobility of sacrificing herself to stop this unknown evil suddenly did not outweigh self-preservation.
A brainstorm struck. She pulled the tiny screwdriver from her pocket and wedged the tip into the heart of the knot. She wiggled and wiggled until the knot began to work free. Cold sea water lapped at her knees and her pulse throbbed so hard it made her hands shake. The boat angled further down.
The knot broke loose. She whipped the rope free of the door and tried to push the door open. With the boat angled back, the door seemed to weigh a ton. Her feet slipped on the submerged steel deck.
She took a deep breath, dug in, and heaved. The door slowly rose, then past the halfway point, then slammed down on the other side as gravity started to work for instead of against her. Water surged out of the engine room and into the empty corridor.
From the deck overhead came the splash of a launching lifeboat and the shouts of the panicked crew.
For the first time since she’d entered the engine room with the sonic charge, Gianna dared to think she might not die today.
She shouldered the red bag that contained her tools and sprinted up the corridor.
Chapter 2
“Jared, you baby. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Tiffany tugged at Jared’s arm. In the moonlight, her long blonde hair seemed to shimmer, and the playful smile he’d fallen in love with practically glowed. In a bikini top and denim shorts, she was more irresistible than ever.
“I’m not afraid,” Jared said. “Just exhausted.”
He had every right to be. The two of them had been dropped off by a friend’s ski boat at Fort Jefferson National Park, a pre-Civil War fortress on an isolated island key in the Dry Tortugas. The fort took up most of the key, leaving a beach and a campground outside the walls. They’d spent the day snorkeling and sunbathing. With midnight approaching, Jared’s personal battery was about depleted. He didn’t want to run it down to zero before he and Tiffany crashed in their tent. He’d spent the day eyeing Tiffany’s bikini body, and he didn’t want to fall asleep and let that go to waste.
“Ugh, seriously,” Tiffany said. “Since graduation you’ve lost your spirit of adventure. Senior summer, baby. Maximize it. Let’s go out to the point and watch the moon over the water.”
The entire key was little more than a glorified sandbar. The eastern point was as far away as they could get from the campground without swimming.
“But I’m so beat,” Jared said.
“Now you can stay here with the Shannons…” Tiffany pointed at the enormous tent the family of five had erected at the other end of the campground. “…or you could join your girlfriend for some fun.”
She slipped a baggie of joints out of her pocket, pinched the sealed end between her fingers, and waved it before Jared. She laughed, and then took off running toward the point.
“Damn.” A hot, stoned girl on a secluded beach in the dark wasn’t anything he was going to pass up. He took off after her.
It took about two minutes to run out of island. Tiffany skidded to a stop in the sugary sand at the water’s edge. The moon lit the beach and wave tips in a soft glow. Jared caught up, wrapped his arms around her waist, and reached into her pocket for the weed. She slapped his hand.
“No head start.” She looked out to sea. “Look, is that a manatee?”
Offshore, something barely broke the surface and then submerged.
Jared squinted at the water. “Looks more like a log, maybe.”
Something splashed in the water, closer, just a dozen yards out.
“It is. It’s a manatee!”
Jared couldn’t see much in the gloom. “Tiff, i
t could be anything. Even a shark.”
“No way. A shark would have a big fin. It’s a manatee, out by itself in the dark. It’s probably scared, maybe trapped in fishing line or something.”
Tiffany waded into the water. Thoughts of sea urchins, jellyfish and a dozen other painful animals came immediately to Jared’s mind.
“Tiff, get out of there. It’s dangerous.”
“You’re going to let a helpless animal suffer? You have really gone lame.”
Any hope of beach tent sex began to evaporate. He couldn’t very well stay back now that Tiffany had plunged forward. He followed her in.
“Here, little boy,” Tiffany called out to sea.
She waded in waist-deep, and then swam out a few yards. Jared stopped as water rose to his chest and sent a shiver up his spine.
A giant claw burst out of the water beside Tiffany. It had to be six feet long and nearly as wide. In the moonlight, it seemed almost transparent.
Tiffany screamed.
The claw snapped open and lunged. It clamped around her waist and jerked her under the water. The sea swallowed her bubbling cry for help, and then she went silent.
Terror ripped through Jared like a bolt of lightning. He panicked, turned, and ran. Or tried to. In the deeper water, every step felt like wading through molasses. His feet sank into the sand. He struggled to go faster but it felt as if the entire ocean wanted to hold him back, to make him a meal for whatever giant crustacean had just taken his girlfriend.
A thunderous splash sounded behind him. His foot crashed against coral and ripped the skin from his toes. He stumbled and went underwater.
A rock-hard claw clamped across his back and chest. He screamed and sucked in sea water. The claw wrenched him up and into the air. He coughed and shook the water from his eyes.
He hung face to face with a giant crab. It reeked like a rancid fish. Black eyes on short stalks stared into his. Its mandibles opened to expose a dark, hungry mouth.
The crab swallowed Jared whole.
CLAWS is available from Amazon HERE!
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