“Yes, a frog. Go catch one.”
Luke sprang from the table, letting his fork clatter to the floor.
Kala laughed a little and picked up the fork. Her mother was off the phone with her father now and back in the kitchen, presumably cleaning up after their dinner. She must be upset. She didn’t even come to the table to eat.
After a minute of contemplation, Kala picked up her and Luke’s plates and walked into the kitchen with them. She scraped the plates into the trash, and then set them on the counter next to the sink basin, which was filled with warm wash water.
“Dad working late tonight?”
Her mother didn’t stop doing the dishes she was working on, but nodded.
“Sorry.”
Her mother shrugged a little. Kala knew she was lonely. This was the time of year her dad seemed to be working constantly. Kala went to leave the room and thought better of it. She came up behind her mother and wrapped her arms around her from behind.
“I love you, Mom.”
Her mother squeezed her arm with her soapy hands. “I love you too, sweetheart. I’m not so bad, am I?”
Her mother’s voice was small and hopeful.
“No Mom, you’re not bad at all. I think we both just get in our moods.”
Her mother nodded.
“Luke’s gonna hang with me for a while.”
“Fine, don’t keep him up too late, though.”
Kala’s phone buzzed lightly in her pocket and she walked away from her mom. “Good night, Mom.”
Kala pulled out her phone as she left the kitchen. There was a text from her friend, Abbie. It read, “OMG, so freaking bored. What r u doing?”
Kala’s fingers moved quickly over the clear touchscreen, “Bout to kill a frog, u wanna come 2?”
Kala waited for Abbie’s response, it took a couple of minutes. “WTF is wrong with you?! Ugh, c u tomorrow.”
Kala smiled and pushed open the door to her bedroom. Luke had already returned and was sitting up to the worktable with a big grin on his face and a slimy, squirming sacrifice in his hands.
“I’m ready for you, Doctor Kal!”
“Excellent, Igor, excellent.”
Chapter 4
Lieutenant Brisbane, who Jack decided was actually a bit of a smug little wench, had a nasty sneer on her face when she led him onto the deck of the ship. Jack was not prepared, obviously, for what he found on the decks of the Darwin. So unprepared, that after only a few steps, he vomited into his white fabric respirator, filling it with jalapeño burger and onion rings.
When he had finished retching, the woman spoke to him.
“As you can see, Mr. Wolfgang, we have quite a situation on our hands here.”
Jack, his eyes red and watering, stood up and wiped mucous from his mouth. He nodded.
“We need to know what happened here, but earlier today, one of our investigation team members was bitten by a large spider. It was pretty dramatic, and to be honest, no one wants to go back down below until the spiders have been taken care of.”
It seemed crazy to Jack at the time, that a spider, even a big one, would frighten tough military personnel. Even though arachnophobia is the single most common phobia, these military types were supposed to be professional and fearless, or as close as you might come to fearless. Apparently they aren’t as tough as we all think.
The lieutenant took him to the stairwell that led down into the belly of the ship. There she bid him farewell.
“Wait. Ma’am, where did the ship come from? Knowing that could help me out.”
“You and me both,” she replied, and then walked away, out over the deck that was strewn with disgusting body parts.
That was forty minutes ago. Jack watched the lieutenant walk away, then got to work. Impossible though it was, he tried to ignore the carnage he saw on deck and focus on the bug problem. There were large spider webs covering many of the corners and overhanging surfaces on the deck of the ship. Even the stairwell, he saw, had once been coated with webs, before the previous crew had been down there.
“Well, webs indicate a species that relies on catching flying insects, mostly by chance,” he said to himself. Unlike spiders that travel on the ground or forest floor, such as the wolf spider or the wandering spider, these web-building spiders are typically not very active, or aggressive. They sit calmly on their web, or just within reach of their web, waiting for their prey to come to them. From what the lieutenant had told him, one of these spiders aggressively attacked a member of her crew.
“That just doesn’t make sense,” he muttered, then started pumping his B&G sprayer. The B&G is a one-gallon stainless steel pesticide sprayer that is widely used in the pest control industry. Connected to the small, hand-held sprayer was a four foot section of red hose, with a long brass wand attached to it that was used to spray any number of solutions, emulsifiable concentrates and wettable powders.
He stood up abruptly in the middle of pumping and said to himself, “It must be two different species. Probably tropical orb weavers up here, because they make huge webs.” The tropical orb weaver can create a web of ten feet in diameter in just a matter of hours – one of nature’s most industrious and talented builders. They’re pretty harmless to humans, but like most spiders – they do bite. Then there must be another species down in the bellows of the ship, where the man was attacked. Jack snorted a little when he thought of a spider attacking a human; it just wasn’t something that happened.
Jack gave his sprayer a few more pumps, until he could feel the pressure tightening within the tank. From the sling bag over his shoulder, he pulled on a second white fabric respirator and a pair of Dewalt safety glasses. They had amber lenses, which made seeing in dim places (like the belly of a creepy ship) easier for him, while still protecting his eyes from the chemicals he used.
“Ah-hem,” he said, clearing his throat loudly, then, as if to prepare himself, “here we go.”
Jack was nervous walking down further into the ship. Not about the bugs, mind you, those were just bugs. Bugs could be sprayed, stepped on, squished with your hands, whatever. He was worried that he would find the same type of bloodbath he had seen on the decks above.
Jack entered the macabre laboratory as if he were entering a warehouse that needed extermination, swinging his sprayer wand from side to side, coating the floor and several feet up the walls with insecticide. He only made it into the room ten feet when the spider appeared. It startled him.
The room was completely black except for the beam of light that extended from his headlamp. One minute there was nothing but floor tiles in his light, then there it was! Large, bold, walking straight toward him on the floor. Deliberately, as if it had nothing to fear.
Jack watched the spider approach and then raised his wand to spray it. The moment he depressed the trigger, the spider leapt for him. The jump was far and incredibly fast. The spider was flying directly at his face. With speed he did not know he possessed, Jack ducked his head to the side, swung the brass wand at the spider, and struck it. He was off-balance though, and Jack fell to his knees. The spider landed somewhere out of view for the moment.
Jack’s feelings about bugs were changing rapidly as he crouched on all fours, panting. Six feet in front of him, on thin, orange and black, spindly legs, a predator was stalking him. The spider wasn’t small, but not the biggest either, of that he was sure. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. The legs were thin and sharply jointed, making them perfect for maneuvering about an intricate web. The body, however, wasn’t the frail, fragile body of a web dweller. It was long and hairy, and a nest of eyes in an aggressive semi-circle adorned its tall cephalothorax.
The spider was not afraid of him.
That’s not right. Even “aggressive” arthropods are instinctively afraid of humans. This spider sho
wed no fear, but fear was what it was instilling in Jack. There was something very different and very unsettling about this species. He saw it right away, or rather, felt it – right down into his bones.
Jack’s face was sweating profusely as he watched the spider. He shuffled back a foot and as he did, the spider moved toward him, the same distance. Its chelicerae (the furry pinchers in front of a spider’s face) were long; they contracted and released several times, indicating to Jack that the spider was preparing for a strike. Concealed in each chelicera was a needle-sharp fang, the spider’s primary weapon.
Also freaking Jack out was the fact that he couldn’t see behind him. He knew this wasn’t the only spider down here. The whole room felt like it was watching him.
Jack was just starting to get up when the spider charged him again, this time coming at him from the left. It flew over the white tiles too fast for Jack to follow, so he rolled twice in the opposite direction, smearing sweat all over the dirty floor. He just wanted to get the hell out of there.
Money be damned, Jack, who had never been afraid of spiders, wanted nothing more than to be miles away from this one. Its calm, calculating, fearless movements were unnerving.
The B&G sprayer lay on its side next to him, and Jack still had the wand in his hand, which was planted on the floor. Slowly, he arched the tip of the wand so that it was pointed at the menacing spider. Praying that he had enough pressure left in the tank to cover the distance between them, Jack squeezed the trigger.
A thin jet of milky white pesticide shot from the end of his wand. It arched through the air in front of him. The spider, who had been observing calmly, tried to skitter back a few feet. No use, the pesticide splashed over its large, hairy body, where Jack knew it would soak in through its exoskeleton.
The spider shuffled back and forth a few times, looking confused and upset. Then it turned back to Jack. A cold chill ran up and down his spine as the spider started to advance toward him.
“Shit,” Jack muttered. Now he was committed. “I guess the EPA didn’t tell this species that bifenthrin is just as effective as chlordane at spider control.”
Jack snorted at all the environmentally friendly measures that had been implemented on pesticide sales and use. Sure, they were better for the planet, but he sure could use some of the good old harsh stuff now.
In a move that was admittedly very ninja-esque, Jack dove for the steel spray canister. He reached it and launched it through the air at the oncoming spider. In a cruel yet crucial twist of fate, the sprayer he had hurtled toward the brightly covered arachnid was stopped short by the rubber hose attached to it.
“Oh no!” he cried out, but at the very moment he threw the canister, the spider had tried to rush forward, so when the sprayer stopped in midair, the creature was directly underneath it. The big spray canister dropped directly onto it, making a loud clang, and then a crunch.
“Oh Jesus, thank God!” Jack dropped his head, but only for a moment. In his standoff with the black and orange beast, he had been distracted from the fact that there were sure to be many more lurking about, and he definitely did not want to run into them.
Jack hopped off the floor and scooped up the brass wand. He ran for the dark hallway, the light from his headlamp shaking back and forth as he dragged the sprayer behind him. Diving through the passage, Jack slammed the heavy steel door closed behind him. He sat for a moment, breathing heavily, with his back against the door. He casually slapped away a mosquito that had alighted on his arm.
“Screw this!” he shouted into the dark hallway. “I’m going home.”
Brisbane wanted an account of what transpired on board the ship. Jack wouldn’t give it to her. He said only that it was uneventful. She knew he was lying. He was shaken, nervous, even stuttered a little when he was recounting his very vague account of exterminating the ship.
“Tell me again what happened inside the laboratory area,” Brisbane said as she leaned over her simple wooden desk toward Jack, who was sitting restlessly across from her.
“Well, I already told you.”
“Tell me again, Jack.” Emily’s voice was neither pleasant nor harsh, just simple, and direct, the military way.
Jack shifted from side to side on the wooden chair. He was sweaty. “Well, I couldn’t get to everything in there with all the cages and tables.”
“So that’s when you used the gas canisters?”
“Yeah-yes, I just rolled a few bug bombs through there, ought to clear everything out.” He had actually crouched by the door of the laboratory and thrown in the six bug bombs two at a time, everything he had in the truck.
“You seem nervous, Jack, are you sure there isn’t anything else you need to tell me?”
“I’m not nervous, I’m just tired. I’ve signed your agreement. You can be damn sure I won’t ever speak about, or even think about the things I saw out here tonight.” Jack stood up from his chair, seeming to regain some of his bravery.
“I sprayed down the entire ship with EPA regulated and approved pesticides at the dosage and rate of application stated on the product labels. I have done my job.”
Emily leaned back. She sighed and then nodded at him. “Yes, you have. Fine. Thank you.”
“Goodnight.”
“So you’ll send us a bill then?”
Jack was already out the door.
She sighed as he left, then picked up the spiral bound notebook she had retrieved from the ship’s bridge earlier that day. Its edges were furled, and the yellow cover was scratched and creased. She ran her finger over the word Mead. She’d had the same type of notebooks back when she was in school.
There was no blood or other telltale gore on the outside of the notebook to foreshadow the contents. She opened the notebook and riffled through the pages. The captain’s handwriting was a compact cursive that was difficult to read because of its small size. His penmanship was impeccable, and Brisbane was appreciative of how much time he must have taken every night to fill out these detailed logs. There were about a hundred pages in the notebook, and it was nearly filled with the neat cursive. Most ship logs were kept electronically; clearly, this had been a captain who had been in the business a long time, long enough to prefer the old-school way of recording his ship’s journey.
Emily flipped to the very last entry. It read:
“We should have never gone to Isla Perdida.”
An involuntary shiver raced through Brisbane. Isla Perdida, never heard of it. She thought about Googling it, but then turned her attention back to the notebook. The log wasn’t that long and she wanted to know everything, so she flipped back to the beginning and began reading again. To her surprise, the passages were entered in a style more akin to journal writing. Once she got past the tiny handwriting, it was easy to read.
Chapter 5
I’ve worked with researchers of all types throughout my career, including an adventurous man in the Indian Ocean who lost his life during my charter. He had become very close to a school of tiger sharks off the KwaZulu-Natal coast of South Africa. By very close, I mean he was physically near them often. To the young, daredevil researcher, the sharks’ tolerance of his proximity indicated a “relationship.” He felt, I know this because he told me on week two of the charter, that the sharks had accepted him as part of their school. At first I argued this point with him, citing research that he himself had written, that sharks can seem docile and almost friendly in waters in which they are not currently feeding, especially when they are amongst their own kind. He started to rebuke me immediately and I let it go with no further argument. At my age, I just don’t care that much any more. Besides, during that time in my life I was drunk almost all the time.
Jeromé, the young researcher, began taking more risks at that point, and was determined to show the caring and accepting nature of those sharks. Ha! Can you bel
ieve that? And these people have gone to school for six or seven years to study this stuff!
The accepted and widely used method of tagging most shark species (I’ve been on several of these types of trips) is to bait the shark using chum, then catch them on a line. Yep, a fishing pole and a harness on Captain Bart - which is really pretty exciting.
The shark fights and runs and fights some more, but eventually with a little luck, the pole handler can get the shark up next to the boat. Once there, the crew has to carefully loop a rope around the shark’s tail and then some poor fool has to reach in and grab one of the pectoral fins and heave, which flips the shark over onto its back. Still in the water, of course, the shark settles into a state of what’s called “tonic immobility.” It’s a zombie-like trance the shark goes into on its back for some reason. Once it’s all zoned out like that, it can be measured, tagged, even operated on if necessary. As long as there is water going into the gills, the shark is fine.
Well, that wasn’t intimate enough for Jeromé, who was kind of a muscular hippy. He wanted to be with the creatures where they were most comfortable. That’s how he ended up on the ocean floor with a female Tiger we named Lilly. His camera woman, a beautiful Amazonian woman, was the only one who went down with him.
Lilly was a medium-sized tiger shark about twelve feet long. She probably weighed 1,000 pounds and had a nice girth to her. Jeromé was sharing what he would have described as a moment of silent introspection with the gray and brown fish when she began to swim circles around him. He would reach out to touch her flanks as she went past, even as her circles were growing ever tighter.
He may have been building up to a pivotal moment of understanding with the 12-foot shark. We will never know. She paused mid-circle, swam away from him two dozen feet, and then quickly darted toward him, her jaws open.
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