TITANOBOA
A Thriller by
VICTOR METHOS
PROLOGUE
The enormous fish glided silently through the sea. Skimming the surface, it didn’t perceive the vibrations of prey nearby. The ocean species scattered when such a large predator neared.
The fish tilted its right pectoral fin, almost like a fighter plane, and slowly arched another way. It hadn’t eaten for three days, and the hunger inside of it, the hunger that came with pregnancy, was ravenous. This litter was particularly large. Her brain was too small to form the correct thoughts, but somehow, instinctively, she knew that many pups depended on her eating soon.
Her half-moon tail slowly swept from side to side as she attempted to pick up any indication of prey in the water. Gelatinous sacks on her snout, ampullae of Lorenzini, detected the electromagnetic signals all living prey gave off. They could even sense a heartbeat from nearly half a mile away.
Suddenly, the shark stopped, its tail frozen mid-sweep. It detected a slight movement of muscles that gave off an electrical impulse. Farther down in the sea, it was rising, unaware of the massive fish waiting for it near the surface. The fish decided to sweep around and come up from under the prey. Like a heat-seeking missile, it could launch vertically through the ocean and collide against its prey with such force that their hearts could stop.
The fish swept around but detected something odd. The prey wasn’t continuing on its journey up. It had moved directly under the shark.
The fish had never sensed fear. It could comprehend danger, but the only danger in its adult life was around larger sharks. The sea was a safe place for it, and it didn’t understand the prey’s movements. The fish just swam farther out, still attempting to get underneath the prey.
But, as it had last time, the prey followed it.
The fish exhibited only two reactions in a situation that confused it: fight or flee. And, forced by hunger and the growing pups inside of it, it decided to fight. It swung down directly at the prey, whose movements it now sensed. The movements had increased; it rose faster. The fish opened its mouth as if in anticipation. They were on a direct collision course.
And then, a jolt of something akin to fear, but not quite, traveled through the great fish. Some deep, prehistoric shock its primitive brain had buried inside of it. A warning that it needed to flee.
The prey was not prey at all. And as the shark began to recognize the enormousness of whatever was rising beneath it, it now understood that it was in the realm of a greater predator. In its hunger, it had made a mistake.
The shark quickly banked left and pounded its tail in a flurry of movement. It sped like a torpedo through the water, its sheer mass creating its own current. The fish could swim at over twenty-five miles per hour, one of the fastest fish in the sea. But the faster predator below it was closing in.
The shark, now panicked, swam closer to the surface, so close that its dorsal fin cut through the water and skimmed the top. It saw clear blue ocean ahead of it. But it had nowhere to go from a quicker predator.
Its tail beat furiously, the tip of the crescent, the caudal fin, rising from the water. But exhaustion for an animal this size fell quickly. The muscles in its tail weakened, its heart beating so fast it could’ve burst. It couldn’t keep this up for long.
And whatever was underneath it was close.
The shark gave one last push. It veered sharply to the left in a way only a fish in water could. Made almost entirely of cartilage, it could bend in half. In an instant, it was going the same speed in a different direction.
But it didn’t matter.
The predator was faster.
Something the shark had never felt tingled within it. It didn’t have the brain capacity to identify it, but it was something new. Something unwanted. Fear. For the first time in the great fish’s life, it was afraid.
The predator burst underneath it so fast, the shark didn’t have time to move. A force against it like a massive wave knocked it clear out of the water into the warm air. Sun blinded it for only an instant, then blackness as something wrapped around it and sucked it back into the ocean.
It wrapped around the entire length of the fish’s body, from its caudal fin to its snout. The slithery, slick surface of something touching every part of its body all at once. The shark struggled, trying to whip free. But it felt pain so intensely it could hardly move. Fangs sank into its snout, and whatever had wrapped around its body slowly squeezed. It crushed the great fish, its teeth cracking against each other, its liver exploding with such force it tore open its belly, releasing a cloud of blood and gore.
The shark’s last sensation before it died was that of being eaten alive.
1
Professor Craig Millard took the podium and adjusted his Mac before clearing his throat. They had told him to start with a joke, but as he looked out over the sea of faces, all he wanted to do was get through this as quickly as possible.
The symposium was supposed to cater just to herpetologist undergraduates and graduate students, but they weren’t the only people in the crowd. Most herpetologists knew about the groupies, people that loved reptiles. He was one of them, but he never kept a dangerous one in his home as most of the groupies did. Reptiles were unpredictable and possessed no emotion. The fact that someone raised it meant nothing.
“Um…” He cleared his throat again. A joke didn’t sound that bad. Only one came to mind. “A woman found a snake with a broken back in the road, a rattler. She picked it up and took it into her home. She fed it, cleaned it, took care of it, and eventually the snake got better. When he was fully healed and ready for release back into the wild, the woman lifted him to place him outside, and the snake bit her in the arm. As the woman lay dying on her floor, she asked the snake, ‘Why would you do that? I loved you. I took care of you. How could you kill me?’ To which the snake replied, ‘Listen, chick, you knew I was a snake.’”
A few chuckles emanated from the crowd. Just enough to relax him. He pushed a button on the Mac, and the projection screen behind him displayed a massive serpent in comparison to an elephant, which it dwarfed.
“This is titanoboa cerrejonensis. The largest species of snake ever found. It’s a recent discovery, but we assume there must’ve been other snakes in its genus, though we haven’t discovered them as yet. After the K-T event, so called because it came right at the end of the Cretaceous and the beginning of the Tertiary in the earth’s history… Um, and for those of you that don’t know, we use K to denote the Cretaceous so it doesn’t get confused with the Cambrian and other epochs—that event ended the reign of the dinosaurs about sixty million years ago, and we don’t know what species survived and thrived on land. For about ten million years after the K-T event, we simply don’t know what lived on this planet. Until we found titanoboa.
“All we’ve found is a few pieces of vertebrae, but we estimate its size as no more than a hundred feet, although we have no real idea how large they must’ve grown. A snake never stops growing, not for its entire life. As long as it has food—and adequate heat, since it’s cold-blooded—it will grow until its death. Say, by aggressive motorcycle gangs of mongooses.”
Another chuckle, this one more subdued. Millard pushed his glasses up farther on his nose as he flipped to another image. This one portrayed a titanoboa eating a prehistoric crocodile.
“The fact is, the older a snake, the larger the snake. Several Amazonian explorers searching for various lost cities, including famed explorer Percy Fawcett, gave us accounts of massive constrictor snakes, the boa and anaconda variety. Some stated there were snakes as large as sixty feet. So it’s not out of bounds to estimate that titanoboa, which was likely the top predator of its epoch, could easily have reached two hundred feet or even more. And it�
�d have to be, based on our projections, about the width of a car to be that long. We can’t even guess as to the force an animal like this could generate. Even a small boa could crush every bone in our body. An animal like titanoboa would simply be awe inspiring, or nightmare inspiring, depending on your perspective.
“As far as behavior, we have to, as most of paleontology does, surmise certain things about its behavior based on the conduct of its modern relatives, the boas and anacondas, pythons, et cetera. It must’ve crushed its prey first, waiting for it to stop movement, and then simply swallowed it whole. One interesting phenomenon that’s been seen in the boa family is this urge to regurgitate prey when new prey presents itself. Boas and pythons tend not to do it, but we’ve seen it in anacondas frequently. We don’t know why they do it. Perhaps their brains are too small to understand that they don’t need to eat again, or perhaps they, for lack of a better term, enjoy killing. Certainly a possibility in the animal kingdom, as squids have displayed this trait, not to mention our own species of course.”
Millard took a drink of water. They’d given him seven minutes, as all the speakers had, and he’d already taken up one and a half. He’d have to cut some of the talk. He decided to focus on ecology, predatory behavior, morphology, and the reason for extinction. The extinction interested him the most.
A top predator like that had no reason to go extinct other than a change in climate. He’d seen in some species of snake the migration from one end of a country to the other as they pursued warmer temperatures. He believed it possible that, as the earth cooled, titanoboa simply followed the warmer temperatures. But it could thrive without migration in places with high mean temperatures. It simply had no reason to be extinct, but that wasn’t unusual. 99.9 percent of all species that ever existed had gone extinct, and only a fraction was due to human action. Extinction was the normal process of life, and each species had roughly, based on current estimates, about 4 million years of life before extinction occurred for one reason or other. Considering modern humans had only existed about 200,000 years, he was confident they had a long way to go, as long as they didn’t destroy themselves. Which was an ability no other species in history ever had.
The more interesting question was what titanoboa would be like if it had survived. By necessity, it would be more intelligent. At least more intelligent than other snakes. It couldn’t avoid detection this long without that. It would need to be a scavenger as well as a hunter and not be selective in its prey. It would have to eat anything that gave it sustenance. And it would probably have gotten larger. Large enough to prey on anything it happened across.
Millard finished his lecture with thirty seconds to spare and thanked the audience as they clapped. He stepped off the stage to allow the next speaker up. He had wanted to stay and hear him, a colleague of his that specialized in amphibian reproduction. He was going to speak about a new method of insemination in frogs that sounded mildly interesting. But Millard felt too wired, as he always did after speaking to a crowd. Something he had gone into biology specifically to avoid.
As he walked around the stage, he decided to sneak out. A question and answer session was slated after all the talks, but he’d just as soon grab some lunch and head back to the airport.
Near the door, a man leaned against the wall with his arms folded. The man wore a suit, an expensive one from the looks of it. He smiled widely. “Dr. Millard. How are ya, brother?”
“Um, fine.”
“Doctor,” he said, putting his arm around Millard’s shoulders as they walked out together, “have I got some news that is gonna make you sweat as much as a whore on nickel night.”
2
Mark Whittaker woke with a start. His shirt clung to him, and droplets of sweat rolled down his neck.
He saw the door of his home opened onto the sandy beach of Kalou Island. He tasted the ocean breeze that blew in, salty with a not entirely unpleasant scent of rotting seaweed hanging in it. He peeled off his shirt and hit the shower.
Kalou Island was one of the largest islands in the Republic of Fiji. The year round warmth was to die for. Other than monsoon season, which only lasted a short time. Even in the colder months, the temperatures only dropped to the mid-70s.
After his shower, he dressed and ate a meal of Captain Crunch with almond milk. Fiji was extraordinarily diverse, but they primarily ate Indian cuisine. The spice always hurt Mark’s stomach, so he preferred his comfort food. Mostly things he ate as a child.
He finished his bowl of cereal and stepped out into the sunlight. A few families were already out on the beach, and he watched them a moment before putting on his sunglasses and heading to his car. The car was nothing fancy. Few of the year-round natives owned anything fancy and cared almost nothing for luxury items. When Mark first moved there, it shocked him to learn that if no one cared about what one drove, one tended to look for practicality rather than flash. He realized just how much other people’s opinions influenced his decisions back in the States.
Mark lived in Kalou’s one major city, Vusa. The population in the off-season hovered around two thousand and swelled to double that with the tourists during the summer months. The city’s intersecting streets provided clear addresses so everyone could find whatever they were looking for quickly. The city was much cleaner than any city Mark had ever been to, partly because the people valued the beauty of their island. And partly because the punishment for littering was a day in jail.
As Mark arrived downtown, buildings switched from a light island blue to reds and yellows as he went farther into the city. A purposeful decision by the city’s selectmen, the equivalent of a city council, to make sure tourists always felt uplifted and happy while there.
Mark’s three-story office building was painted a light blue with depictions of crabs and seashells on the side. The office space rented at one hundred Fijian dollars per month, the equivalent of about fifty U.S. dollars, and came fully furnished with a part-time secretary shared by everyone on his floor.
Island design decorated the interior, with a massive poster of a champion surfer riding a wave on the wall when he walked through the front doors. The carpet was gray and clean. The first floor housed a call center staffed entirely by native islanders. Though Kalou’s official language was Fijian, everybody spoke English, one of three official languages of the country as a whole. The native islanders began learning English when they were five, and by the time they graduated middle school, they were as fluent as any American or Brit. Probably more so, from what Mark had seen the last few times he watched American or British television.
He took the stairs up to the second floor’s executive suites and walked through the double glass doors of suite 200. An attractive young woman named Zahina sat behind the desk, flipping through something on her computer.
“Any messages?” Mark said.
They played that game occasionally. Mark was the island’s only private investigator. A private investigator on an island where things didn’t really happen was not exactly an in-demand job. But Kalou boasted exactly three policemen: a chief, a deputy chief, and a uniformed patrol officer. The three of them, though incredibly warm, friendly men, were about the laziest police officers Mark had ever known. Unless a crime committed on the island affected a tourist, the police couldn’t really be bothered. Unless of course someone paid a bribe.
The bribes were usually quite high, typically more than Mark’s fees, and so a dozen times a year, sometimes less, sometimes more, someone hired Mark for something they needed done. Like investigating who had vandalized their property or stolen their television. He also retained a contract with the chief and was occasionally called out to scenes of car accidents or the more serious crimes and paid by the hour for his services. As former LAPD, he was the only one on the island that had actually gone through a police academy.
Even with all that, he received usually less than four new client calls a month.
“Yes,” Zahina said, “the president called. They want
to give you your medal for heroism in the face of danger.”
“Excellent, I’ll take it in my office. Actually, no… make him wait.”
“Your wish is my command.”
As he opened his private office’s door, he noticed something on Zahina’s desk. A clear bowl with a spider inside. The spider was large, probably about the size of the palm of his hand, and sat perfectly still.
“Ew, what’dya have that for?” he asked.
“Just a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“Just nature. Our place in it. My dad always kept spiders around and told us stories about how they used to be worshipped. You know, nature’s greater than us, and all. He said it kept people humble.”
“Nature’s greater than us? I don’t see any spider cities.”
“Not like that, silly. But, you know, we might not be the dominant animals forever.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Let me know when dolphins make rocket ships, will ya?”
She grinned. “Oh, hey, you did actually have a call. It was a potential client.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“Some lady. She’s coming in at two to meet with you. It was weird; she wouldn’t give me her name. She said she would only talk to you.”
Mark stepped into his office, decorated exactly as it had been the day he moved in. A couple plants, a poster of a fire dance or something on the beach, and a desk and chair. He’d chosen this office because right behind his desk, a massive window looked down onto Kamal Street, the main street running through the island. From here, he had a view of all the major shops, the tourists, the bars and restaurants, and just about everything else. Farther out, past downtown and on the outskirts of the city, he could see the green outline of the jungles.
He sat at his desk and turned on his computer. The old PC took nearly five minutes to boot up. Leaning back in the chair, he put his feet up on the desk and stared out the window. Hard to believe that just four years ago he was in a patrol car cruising Watts, chasing down gangbangers and dope dealers. He charged them with something, got them into a cell, and the next day they were out. The jails were so crowded, if the police didn't deem someone an immediate threat, they had to cut them loose.
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