by C.L. Bevill
* * *
The next morning I found Zach downstairs with Kara in an immaculate kitchen. Counters were made of black granite, and the appliances were stainless steel. The cupboards were constructed from redwood and stained appropriately. The floors were marble. Some of the prints on the walls I suspected weren’t really prints. Everything was as clean as if a horde of cleaners had just finished and vanished out the service entrance. I said, “Wow. Are we eating caviar for breakfast?”
Kara grinned. She was cutting vegetables from Gigi’s garden on a butcher block table. She flashed a kitchen knife that looked just as expensive as the rest of the house. “If you want,” she answered seriously and motioned at the pantry door, “They have Beluga and American. I looked.”
“Yuck,” I said. “Have you ever tried caviar? It’s disgusting.”
Kara shook her head sadly. “It’s an acquired taste, kiddo.”
“I could catch some fish,” Zach offered. “The previous owner had a fishing hobby and is pretty well outfitted. The beach is just down the hill and a set of stairs.”
I smiled. Fish sounded about as appealing as caviar. What I really wanted were Chili Cheese Tots from a Sonic Drive-In. “Maybe we should put more room between us and…him, before we linger in one place,” I said carefully.
Zach nodded thoughtfully. He’d changed into another t-shirt and jeans. These fit him a little better, and he’d found some hiking boots that were about his size. All of them were on the higher end of expensive, and I had to resist the urge to tease him. But for all I knew, he was used to high-end items. I did know, however, I wasn’t used to teasing someone like him.
So we got ready for another round of them working and me riding. But before that, Kara circumspectively put the two small jars of caviar into her backpack. Who knew when we would run into caviar again? Seriously though, yuck, caviar.
The house was located up a narrow but well-kept road that intersected the coastal highway. Zach spent a little time making sure everything was clear. After we were moving, it took us about an hour to reach Gold Beach. Crossing the bridge over the Rogue River, I called for Zach to stop and pointed out toward the mouth of the river.
Zach slowed to a stop and stared out to sea. “There’s a good one for your notebook,” he said gravely after a lengthy pause.
I agreed silently. Kara stopped a few feet further up and nearly dropped her bike on its side. “Is that…” she started to say. “Is that…what the heyhey is it?”
It was big. That was the best adjective. Big. It was big and greenish. The rounded head emerged from the water and splashed lustily. The tail emerged from dozens of feet away. The eyes seemed as large as dinner plates and reflected light. A school of some kind of fish was before it, furiously scurrying through the churning seas in order to escape. However, the larger animal reared up, shining luminously in the sunlight, and dove eel-like dove into the middle of the school; its mouth was open and ready to feed. The light made the scales on the beast seem iridescent. The sound of the splash when it reached us was as if a Greyhound bus had been dropped into the ocean.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go fishing around here,” I said numbly.
“‘You’re going to need a bigger boat,’” Kara announced as if she was in shock. Then she looked to see if either of us had heard her and shook her head. “No one’s ever going to get that one ever again.”
“A boat?” Zach said. “Who said anything about a boat? I’m not getting on any boat, not with that thing around. It looks like it’s a hundred feet long. What if it thinks humans look tastier than all those fish?”
“Oh, never mind,” Kara said. “It’s not like I’m volunteering to go surfing.”
“Did I tell you about the missing bridge?” I asked distantly, still staring at the ginormous fish/serpent thing before us.
Zach snapped back into the moment. “What, you think that ate a bridge?” He pointed outward.
“That or his iron-deficient cousin,” I decided.
“We should get off the bridge,” Zach declared wryly.
We concurred.