Predatory Instinct: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  Porter furrowed his brow.

  It looked as though the man had been attacked by a wild animal while he slept. He hadn’t even attempted to kick off the covers.

  What in the name of God could have done such a thing? And worse, was it still skulking through the darkened rooms with them right now?

  His entire perspective changed in a heartbeat. He hadn’t considered the possibility that this ship could have been smuggling endangered species. Great cats fetched huge cash on the open market. For all he knew, there could be a dozen starving tigers with a taste for human blood stalking him at this very second. While he hadn’t relished the idea of dealing with lawless pirates, he vastly preferred it to the scenario that now played out in his mind.

  He ducked back out into the hallway and cautiously cleared the next three rooms before he encountered the fourth victim. Another man was dead in his bunk, savagely attacked while he slept. The same type of wound to the neck, the same arterial sprays on the wall, the same lack of defensive wounds. What kind of monster killed so quickly and violently, but didn’t consume its prey?

  Suddenly, the ship was alive with the sounds he hadn’t paid attention to before. He heard every creak, every buckling rivet, every scream of the wind, every single raindrop, every thump of the rough waves.

  He unholstered his transceiver and turned up the volume. They each carried one that had been set to a common frequency while they were still in the air.

  “Porter here,” he whispered. “I’m on the shelterdeck. We have a much bigger problem than we thought.”

  “If you’re referring to the nature of the wounds, we already know.” He recognized the voice of the CSRT’s lead investigator. Sondra Galiardi spoke in a clipped manner, as though she nipped off the tail end of each word. “I take it you found more bodies.”

  “Two more up here. Killed in their sleep. Same MO. No sign of a struggle.”

  “Any indication of what could have done this?”

  “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

  “I won’t have anything even remotely conclusive until we can create an odontological mold of the bite marks.”

  “Care to wager a guess before I stumble blindly into it on one of the upper decks?”

  “The teeth marks are distinct. Dentition could almost pass for human.”

  “No human could have done this.”

  “I didn’t say the marks were definitively human. I’m basing my observation exclusively on the shape of the maxillary ridge. That’s the arch of the front teeth.”

  “Thanks, Sandra. You’ve been incredibly helpful.”

  Porter dialed down the volume before she could reply. If there was one thing he knew with complete certainty, it was that whatever attacked these men in their sleep hadn’t been even remotely human.

  He slowed at the end of the hallway and surveyed the stairwell leading up to the two remaining decks, then advanced upward into the darkness on the swaying steps. He cleared the landing and swept his beam into the silent corridor. This level was maybe half the size of the lower two, the doorways spaced farther apart to accommodate the larger cabins for the more important personnel. The officers’ quarters to either side were empty, the beds unmade, the linens draped across the floor as though they had followed the abruptly awakened men across the room toward the door. He found the chef in the second room on the left, beside the head, sprawled prone on the floor. The hairy man was as wide as he was tall, his swollen bulge of a neck torn open like a punctured tire. His grease-stained white smock was a stark contrast to the puddle of black blood that had dried beneath him.

  In all three instances, the attacker had gone straight for the carotid. The cessation of blood flow to the brain would have rendered them unconscious in a matter of seconds. They would have bled out in under two minutes.

  He cleared the captain’s cabin last. Everything appeared to be in place, save for the contents of the wardrobe, which must have tumbled out onto the ground when control of the vessel was handed over to the raging sea.

  There were still six men unaccounted for. It was possible that they had sought refuge in the hold when the attack commenced, but, judging by the foul aroma that intensified with each step up the remaining staircase, he had a pretty good idea what he would find in the pilothouse.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  After performing a quick head count, he radioed down to the others.

  “There are five more up here,” he said. “They took their stand in the wheelhouse.”

  “Then we’re still missing one,” Galiardi said.

  “Assuming our initial information was correct.”

  “Which means he could be our perp.”

  “Or another victim.”

  “Then he either—”

  “Found a way off the ship,” Porter interrupted, “or he’s down in the hold.”

  He holstered his transceiver and took a mental snapshot of the room, taking note of the splintered bullet holes in the paneling around the doorframe, the arcs and spatters of blood on the walls and the bridge, the corpses pressed up against the wall beneath the bank of windows and tucked under the console as though they had run out of room to retreat and tried to become one with the walls. The watery horizon yawed wildly through glass beaded with blood on one side and rain on the other.

  Porter inspected everything other than the faces of the men at his feet, then hurried out of the pilothouse toward the stairs. The crime scene unit would be able to tell him precisely what transpired in here soon enough. For now, he had more pressing concerns.

  He needed to find out what was in the hold.

  TWELVE

  Seattle, Washington

  7:28 a.m. PST

  Russ Tarver made his way down the commercial pier, his third McMuffin in one hand, his second cup of coffee in the other. These were the simple pleasures for which he had longed during the endless months at sea. Never in his life had he felt as content as he did right now. Four hours of uninterrupted sleep in his own warm, dry bed, a belly full of food that didn’t taste as though it had been rehydrated with bilge water, and hundreds of thousands of dollars waiting for him just fifty short yards away down the warped, weather-beaten planks. He smiled for the first time in so long that muscles unaccustomed to use ached in his cheeks.

  He didn’t once think about the ghost ship they had chanced upon out on the open sea. Calling it in to the Coast Guard had absolved him of whatever guilt he might have felt. Today was a new day, a day to start his life over again. The past was now his shadow, trailing at his heels as he embraced the bright future he deserved, that he had earned.

  The sounds of morning were all around him: gulls squalling as they wheeled overhead; cranes and winches grinding; engines churning up flume; a chaos of competing voices on the PA systems mounted to the roofs of the harbor master’s shack and the fish market; containers clanking; foghorns blaring. The air smelled of petrol, oil, and brine, with an undercurrent of fish guts and fishermen’s sweat. He took all of it in and savored it. Captain Anders was going to be pissed that he was almost thirty minutes late, but he wasn’t about to let anything spoil this most perfect of days.

  Storm clouds hovered over the horizon where they fed the Pacific, promising rain in a matter of hours. The sun beating on the back of his neck reminded him that he no longer had to care. Never again would he be forced to haul nets in a freezing deluge. From here on out, when the weather wasn’t to his liking, he could simply go inside the new double-wide he would soon be purchasing with cash. Nothing fancy, nothing to draw the scrutiny of the IRS. Just something he could slap down on a little chunk of land all his own, where he could ride out his days with the stacks of money he prepared to disinter from beneath tons of pollock, mackerel, and cod.

  Russ paused at the end of the pier, fastened the suspenders of his rubber waders over his chest, and started down the slanted ramp toward the Dragnet.

  He had half expected to find the captain standing on deck, shouting at him for
being late when he arrived, but he was pleasantly surprised to find no one topside. Nothing could ruin his perfect day, after all. Two massive wheeled bins nearly the size of Dumpsters waited for him at the bottom of the ramp. He slipped on his stiff work gloves and shoved the first one across the gangplank to where another pair were already stationed and waiting to be filled. Neither of them appeared to have been used yet. Perhaps he wasn’t the only one who had gotten a late start on this most gorgeous of mornings. Or maybe the captain was still haggling pennies on the price of their catch. That would be just like Anders, trying to squeeze blood from a turnip while they were already sitting on a fortune.

  “So are we doing this thing or what?” he called as he thumped down the stairs into the hold. “There’s a new F-150 out there calling my name.”

  He passed through the cramped room he had shared with the other sweaty men for too many consecutive months and ducked into the corridor leading to the climate-controlled units. The thudding of his footsteps on the metal floor beat a counterpoint to the hum of the generator that powered the coolers.

  “Don’t tell me you all waited for me to start unloading all this crap.”

  Russ stopped halfway down the hallway. Matching pressure-sealed doors to either side led into refrigerated units the size of single-car garages. Ahead, the engine room was a jungle gym of pipes and shadows. He jerked open the door on the left and was struck in the face with frigid air that reeked of innards. The room inside was so dark he could barely discern the mountain of fish. He closed the door and yanked open the one to his right. Same thing. Nothing and no one.

  “Where the hell—?”

  He stopped midsentence. His blood ran cold.

  What if the others hadn’t gone home when he had? What if they had simply divvied up the cash without him and absorbed his share? Had they merely left him a fraction of his earnings in fish as a joke?

  His heart raced and his palms grew clammy.

  It wasn’t like he could go to the police if they screwed him over. What would he say? He’d been swindled out of his cut of the money they’d been attempting to secret from the government?

  He tasted blood and realized he was biting his lip. His face reddened with anger and his fists curled so tightly that his knuckles cracked.

  There was no way he would allow things to go down like this. Russ Tarver was not a man one ever wanted to cross, not while he still had a pulse.

  His money had damn well better be there or he would find the others, wherever they tried to hide, and take back what was rightfully his. No. He would take all of it, so that they fully comprehended the severity of the mistake they had made.

  Russ threw open the door to the freezer on his right and toggled the light switch. A single bulb bloomed under a frosted glass dome high on the rear wall. He debated retracting the room-size hatch that was the roof, which allowed them to dump entire nets full of fish into the unit from the deck above him, but there was just enough light for his purposes. He knew exactly what he was looking for and where they had stashed it. The cash had been bundled, bricked, and sealed inside newspaper wrapped in countless layers of cellophane. He didn’t remember precisely how many bundles there were, but they had been a tight fit inside the meat locker freezer they had shoved into the back corner and buried under the mountain of mackerel and cod that nearly reached the ceiling. And it had goddamn better well still be there.

  “There’ll be hell to pay of you jacked me!” he shouted. “You hear me? I’ll find you wherever you go!”

  He stormed into the room and kicked his way into the stinking heap. A slimy avalanche of carcasses slid toward him and past his thighs. He reached into them and shoved them aside with both hands as though attempting to breast stroke. A mess of entrails wrapped around his wrist. He jerked his hand back and a long, slender reddish-brown cod with three tall dorsal fins and whiskers like a catfish came with it. There was a gaping hole in its gut, the edges ridged as though someone had taken a great big bite out of it and then thrown it back. He flung it behind him and wiped his glove on his bib. He reached into the mountain and found another one. And another. There had to be a good dozen of them, all of them missing chunks of their undersides were their hearts and organs should have been. The stringy bowels dangled from the holes where it looked like someone had bitten right through the ribs and scales.

  What in the hell had gotten in here with their freaking catch? Surely they hadn’t hauled them in here like that.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered other than digging out that locker and making sure that—

  Something warm and wet slithered down the back of his bare forearm. He glimpsed a smear of crimson on his skin from the corner of his eye. He jerked his arm out of the pile and looked where it had been. Jerry Worrell stared back at him from under the jumble of fish. His face was a bloody mask; his wide, sightless eyes shot through with vessels.

  Russ grabbed him by the front of his flannel shirt and pulled him up out of the mess. Jerry’s head lolled back so far it nearly fell off. Black blood the consistency of sour milk oozed from the massive wound on his throat.

  “Son of a bitch,” Russ whispered. “What the hell is going on…?”

  His words trailed off when he saw the tangle of limbs down under the fish where Jerry had been. He recognized the captain’s jacket, the dragon tattoo that spiraled around Juarez’s bicep and coiled around his lacerated throat.

  Memories of the ghost ship they’d encountered far out on the Pacific assaulted him. The blood on the walls, the men crumpled on the floor with their necks savagely opened. He remembered staring back at the Scourge from the deck of the Dragnet as they sped away from it.

  He closed his eyes and his breath froze in his chest.

  He remembered hearing something on the deck of the Dragnet, a noise that sounded almost as though someone had leapt down onto the boat from the factory ship, then the wind blowing the hatch open and closed with a loud thump, thump—

  Thump.

  Russ whirled around at the sound of the freezer door closing. He looked just in time to catch a blur of motion before the light snapped off with a sharp click.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted. “Turn the light back on!”

  He heard the slapping sounds of wet carcasses flopping onto the metal floor.

  “You’d better back the hell off right now or so help me—!”

  The mound of fish around him shifted.

  He slowly ducked and reached down to his left until he felt the coarse fabric of Anders’s jacket. After a moment of blind fumbling, he found the pocket where the captain kept his Zippo lighter.

  More sounds of slippery fish sliding against one another, like so many slithering snakes.

  Russ yanked out the Zippo, snapped back the lid, and struck the flint wheel.

  A golden flame erupted from the lighter.

  It reflected back at him as twin circles from a pair of eyes.

  He saw a flash of sharp teeth.

  Felt the warmth of breath on his neck.

  Then a sudden searing pain.

  He rocked his head back and tried to scream, but heard only the wet sound of fluid spattering the ceiling.

  The lighter fell from his hand and extinguished.

  The darkness consumed him.

  THIRTEEN

  Pacific Ocean

  104 km West-Northwest of the Washington Coast

  7:40 a.m. PST

  The digital camera flashed again and again, strobing her vision as though lightning repeatedly struck through the doorway behind her. The effect was disorienting, but it was imperative that they capture the entire area in painstaking detail, from the position and condition of the bodies to every minuscule smear, spatter, and drop of blood. She had just finished measuring and documenting the wounds to the men’s throats, and was preparing to start mixing the fast-drying latex composite to pour into the gashes in order to begin the process of creating an odontologic cast of the mouth that had inflicted them when she heard the
sound of footsteps pounding down the corridor. She looked up in time to see Special Agent Porter burst into the room.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said. “Now.”

  She glanced over her right shoulder at one of the specialists, who was busy scraping dried blood into a variety of test tubes and petri dishes, then over her left to where Galiardi was supervising the collection of trace evidence with a tape roller, the blacklight search, and the fingerprinting of the remains and the surrounding area. None of them looked up from their designated tasks.

  Porter whistled like he was calling a dog.

  “Hop to it, Layne. I need someone who can handle a firearm.”

  Her anger rose as she set aside the latex mixture and wiped her gloved palms on her pants. She was still wearing her uniform blues and utility belt. She had received the call on her cell phone as she was pulling into her carport at her apartment complex, already imagining herself curling up in her bed for a few precious hours of sleep before heading back to the lab for another unpaid day of internship. There had been no time to change, no time to wash the stench of the underworld out of her hair and clothes if she was going to make it to the chopper in time. She had simply turned her car around and raced toward the State Patrol Lab, where she’d barely been able to inhale a scalding cup of coffee before the helicopter arrived. Her hands shook and her eyes burned from the lack of sleep, but these were minor inconveniences with which she’d learned to function.