Prehistoric Beasts And Where To Fight Them

by Hugo Navikov

  It swept within ten feet of him and then rose sharply, actually dragging the submersible upward a bit in its wake.

  “Gigadon,” he gargled to himself.

  Could he shoot it with the laser? No, that wouldn’t do enough damage, and besides, the leviathan was too far away already.

  Maybe a grenade? Or one of the eight missiles mounted on his underwater coffin? No, there was no way a missile would go fast and true enough to even catch up with the damned dinosaur, no matter how much thrust it had …

  Thrust. Newton’s Third Law. Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. That’s how missiles—rockets, essentially—worked in the first place: Fuel was consumed and created a force out one side of the missile, and so it moved in the opposite direction with equal force.

  This thing had eight missiles on it—missiles powerful enough to move through the densest water on Earth.

  But what missiles were was independent rockets. But it wasn’t like Ocean Vengeance was like a space shuttle, with booster rockets attached to it. The missiles would detach from the submersible and then take off. Unless …

  Damnit, where’s Crockett and Mickey when I need them? Oh, right, they’re connected to that ship I uncoupled from. Brilliant.

  He had worked very closely on the design of his own expedition’s sub, and of course he had been heavily involved in the outfitting of Ocean Vengeance, but the training he received on the sub’s weaponry was pretty perfunctory, since nothing he had on the vessel would really hurt an attacking ginormous dinosaur. But he had paid attention, he had listened … hadn’t he listened?

  Apparently not, because he had absolutely nothing.

  However, what he did have was the waterproofed—like everything inside the purposely flooded bathysphere, of course—checklist for each of the weapons systems. The whole sub had been floating upward in the wake of the Gigadon, but now he was inching back down again toward the hydrothermal vents and his doom. Noticing this, he hurriedly pulled from a pouch on the bulkhead a set of ring-bound, protected sheets—

  Wait, hold the phone, Sean’s mind said with disdain. What happened to ‘I want to die on the ocean floor, just like my beloved dinosaurs’?

  Sounding like a drain backing up, he said out loud, “I meant I was prepared to die. I didn’t want to die.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? When he was drifting downward to his death, he felt a sense of completion. A feeling that if he had to die—and everyone has to die, of course—this would be the perfect moment, at the apotheosis of his career, at the height of his vindication. No—his redemption! He would not be going back to prison …

  …not for the accident with Kat, anyway.

  But no loyal crew membered would be able to shield him from the fact that the world watched him shoot up and sink two fishing boats. Jake Bentneus may have been able to hold off arrest and prosecution until Gigadon was caught, but even a billionaire couldn’t protect someone from the entire world’s cries for “justice” for long.

  But now, seeing the Creature to his Frankenstein—and Sean did create him while in his solitary cell as sure as the good Doctor brought that corpse to life, he did—pass so closely, Sean Muir got it. He could beat this thing. He could win.

  Forget the billion dollars. He could win and be hailed for not only his scientific brilliance, but also his courage to hunt and destroy his own malignant maleficence.

  He flipped through the stiff pages until he came to the checklist for firing the missiles. He skimmed the part that he knew, aiming and priming them, arming the weapon, firing them, but there was something he was looking for, something that literally was his only chance not to die down here with these goddamned abominations, a chance to return to the surface and get Bentneus his Gigadon’s head on a platter. Maybe slaying the monster would calm the TV-watching lynch mob slavering to throw him back into solitary confinement.

  Finally, he found it:

  PROTOCOL OVERRIDE FOR EMERGENCY MISSILE LAUNCH

  He remembered now that this protocol, barely touched on in his training but for some reason remembered in the depths of his mind, was to dissuade or even kill a dinosaur that was right up on your sub. It was dangerous, but not as dangerous as being crunched and spit out like Jake Bentneus.

  Would this work? This could work!

  First, he aimed each missile upward, locking in a straight vertical trajectory. Then he purposely skipped the step of setting the missiles to uncouple from Ocean Vengeance when they fired. This could melt his bathysphere, he supposed, but that was a chance he’d have to take. Again, he was relying on the liquid inside his iron ball to keep him from experiencing too rapid, too fatal, a rise in temperature.

  Then he armed every explosive payload. Maybe it wouldn’t work—maybe there was some kind of failsafe to prevent them from exploding so close to the submersible—but maybe it would work, maybe it would.

  Finally, and this took some near-panicked fiddling to figure out, the ticking clock being the increasing yellow light filling the porthole as he fell toward the hellfire, he coordinated each set of missiles, one of each on opposite sides to keep him going vertically, to fire just as the previous pair ran out of juice.

  The two at the bottom would fire last, boosting him—he hoped—hard and fast enough to get him all the way to the surface. But seven miles of dense water … hell, maybe it wouldn’t work. But maybe it WILL, you overgrown bucket of bait.

  “Ready, Teddy,” he burbled, and lit the candle.

  ###

  “Where’s the Navy? Where’s the battleships? Those sumbitches are in American waters and just set off a nuclear weapon!”

  “Actually, chief, is was just a low-yield atomic weapon,” Popcorn said.

  “Whatever it was, man! We got goddamn Communists 200 miles from an American territory!”

  “They were allowed to register, Mick,” Holly said. “Brought the whole sub with them, remember? Maybe Jake Bentneus promised the rest of his fortune to powerful people who could have the U.S. make a deal with the North Koreans that they could hunt Gigadon however they wanted, but if their submarine was used to try to launch some kind of attack, we would erase their entire country from the map.”

  The semaphore flags went up again, and Mickey picked up the binoculars. “Now what … he’s using letters again. ‘F,’ okay, now an ‘I’—write these down, would you, Holly?”

  “Oh, I must be a secretary, ’cause I’m the girl.”

  “No, ’cause you got a pen in your hand.” Mickey kept reading. “Now ‘V,’ uh-huh, ‘E’ …”

  Holly wrote down the sequence, stopping when it repeated:

  F-I-V-E-M-I-N-U-T-E-S

  “Five minutes?” Mickey read with confusion. “Five minutes until what?”

  “I don’t think I want to know,” Holly said. “And yes, Popcorn, I know you would love to know.”

  Popcorn sniffed, but not without irony. “I would love to know all I can.”

  Mickey smiled ruefully and said, “I guess we’ll know in five minutes.”

  “We can make an educated guess,” Popcorn said. “It stands to reason, based on their earlier belligerent and threatening communications, that they will attack our two remaining ships if we do not show signs of vacating the Marianas area within the next five minutes.”

  “Oh, hell,” Mickey said, a hand to his forehead. “I bet you’re right.”

  “For once, I’d rather not be.”

  “I’m calling the captain over on Sharkasm.”

  “Wait,” Holly said, “where’s our captain? Where’s Looper?”

  Mickey raised the comm. “Captain Looper, come in, this is Luch up on the bridge.” Silence. “Captain?”

  One of the maritime crewman said, “I’ll get him. He might be in the head.” He went up the spiral steps to the Captain’s quarters.

  Mickey changed the frequency and said into the receiver, “Calling Captain Brady on Sharkasm. Captain Brady, this is Mickey on Spit.”

  “Copy.
”

  “I’m gonna assume you saw the messages from the submarine?”

  Brady sighed and said, “Never a dull moment around here.”

  “True. Sir, what did you take that message to mean? ‘Five minutes’?”

  “They obviously want us to think they’re going to shoot at us or sink us or something horrible like that. When I was in the service, these brown-water Navy assholes were always threatening everybody, just like Kim Jung Whatever does every frickin’ week. They just want us to leave in case their bomb—you guys realize that, right, they set off some kind of atomic device to generate heat?—actually does bring up the Gigadon. We aren’t going anywhere, Mick. If the monster makes an appearance, our boats will bag it and bring it to shore. Subs don’t have a lot of maneuverability up top like the three of us do.” He paused. “Where’s Looper?”

  “We were just—”

  “Chief! Chief Luch, quick!” the crewman shouted from the Captain’s quarters at the top of the steps.

  Mickey handed the comm to Holly and double-timed it up the stairs. The door to the captain’s cabin was wide open, and Looper was splayed out on the floor, definitely dead. But that does tend to be the effect on a person when a massive explosion just 300 feet away shatters an unprotected window and a huge shard of glass buries itself in your brain.

  “God,” Mickey said, to the crewman but also, even primarily, to himself. “I think we should listen to the nice Communists and get the hell out of here before every single one of us is dead.”

  Mickey instructed the crewman to get a few men together to properly situate the late captain’s body until (what he really thought was if) they got back to shore, notify the maritime authorities in Guam, and any other duties needed in a situation like this. Then he came down the steps and delivered the news. There was no response but covers being removed, heads bowed for a moment, and a respectful silence.

  In that silence, the chop-chop-chop of the Sea & Air Rescue helicopter from the mainland finally could be heard. Maybe their video cameras, always on and recording when the ’copter was on a rescue call, could capture the insanity of what was happening and maybe at least get the government to dissuade the North Koreans from blowing up the remaining boats.

  Popcorn broke the silence. “Please excuse me, everyone, but four minutes and forty-five seconds have passed, at my mark … now.”

  Holly rolled her eyes.

  Mickey barely heard a word his computer supervisor said. In his mind, he could see Sean Muir dead at the bottom of the ocean. He saw Captain Looper, admittedly a bit of an alcoholic content to stay in his quarters and let Mickey do the driving, with his head shot through. He saw every one of his good friends on Sea Legs die violently and horribly.

  And who was responsible? Not Sean or Kat Muir, not Slipjack, not even the North Koreans with their idiot bomb, not really.

  The great and terrible Gigadon was responsible. It was unnatural, it was unholy, and Mickey could hear the words of the Bible as he contemplated the agent of their doom:

  “Come see,” he said, and I saw: behold, an ashen beast; and he had upon him the name Death; and Hell followed with him.

  No sooner had the words resounded in his head did he hear all around him his shipmates screaming as the North Korean submarine launched a torpedo that, in less than ten seconds, reached Sharkasm and blasted it to splinters.

  Chaos ensued on Spit—some sailors tried to commandeer the ship to get it the hell out of there, others blocked them and insulted their manhood or, in one case, her womanhood. The two scientists stared, shocked into silence, on the floating debris, all that was left of Sharkasm. The vessel had sunk so quickly that its fuel and oxygen tanks never got the chance to explode. It was just … gone.

  Holly sank to the deck, mumbling and chewing on the ends of her fingers.

  The SAR helicopter was there, hovering several hundred feet up, and Mickey couldn’t even imagine what they were thinking. Except they were definitely thinking of not getting any closer—he could hear that the chop-chop-chop wasn’t getting louder anymore. Maybe they were calling in the Navy, or asking for airstrikes, or whatever the hell was supposed to happen when this kind of shit hit the fan.

  Popcorn did the only thing he could think to do amid the horror and the bedlam: he slowly stepped to the computer monitors and observed what data he could.

  “Chief Luch,” he said, his voice seeming just to float out of him. “Look at this … if you want.”

  Mickey’s feet felt like they were made of iron and the deck was a powerful magnet. Still, he made his way over to Popcorn and looked at the sonar image the scientist indicated: a huge, huge mass was hurling toward the surface.

  “That’s got to be the Gigadon—we can still kill it! We can have our vengeance—Chief Luch, give us our vengeance!”

  “Have you lost your mind, Orville?” Mickey said, understanding only gradually the words his friend was saying.

  “Yes, I think so!” He seemed downright thrilled by it. “Mister Crockett is at the big gun, right?! And Holly can fire the Honeycomb!”

  “The what?”

  “The Honeycomb! That foam-filled cannonball that expands exponentially when it hits salt water—you’re the one who told me about that thing! Thing! Ha ha, I can’t believe the imprecision of my speech right now! Holly knows the cannon! Let’s do it! Let’s kill that …that … that very bad animal!”

  “We have twenty-two professional sailors to keep this ship afloat. They can keep everything running,” a woman’s voice said from behind them. It was Holly, and even as she wiped the tears from her face, she finished: “while we send that pile of shit back to the goddamn Pliocene!”

  Popcorn patted Holly on the back very gently, keeping any further words to himself but quite chuffed that she had correctly referenced the era during which their enemy had most likely evolved into its present form.

  “The only question now is—”

  POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW

  Every person on board I Spit on Your Grave ducked by pure reflex as the Mark II forward .50 caliber M2 machine gun on the roof—the massive weapon that Sean Muir used to kill two boats full of merchant fishermen—made the entire vessel rattle like it would come apart. And it was deafening, maybe sounding extra-loud without the noisy chaos of a shark feeding frenzy.

  POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPWOPWOPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW

  “That’s Mister Crockett!” Popcorn shouted.

  They all stood again and looked out to see what their weapons man could have been shooting at.

  “He’s blasting them!” Holly said with joy. Mickey’s brain insisted on amusing itself with the almost feral behavior of the scientists.

  Splashes near the North Korean sub were followed by the tink! tink! tink! of large-caliber ammunitions striking the thick steel of the outdated vessel, the sound reaching them a second after each visible spark of a hit. It didn’t seem to be doing the Koreans any damage, but Mickey bet it sounded like Armageddon inside that tin can.

  “Is the maser charged? Did anyone prime it?” he called out to the crew, some of whom had been trained on the different anti-dinosaur weaponry.

  “No, but I can do it now,” one voice responded.

  It was Slipjack. Innocent of murder, but still an asshole most of the time. Fortunately, this was not one of those times.

  “Thank you, Mister McCracken,” Mickey said with a smile. “You may very well save our asses today.”

  Without response, Slipjack made his way to the stern of Spit, where the maser cannon was still in its protective nylon-steel case to keep it from damage by the salty air. It would take a minute to take the case apart and then another minute or two for the gas to be primed, but then they would have something that could cut the submarine in two.

  For that, however, they would have to get closer. Much closer. And Mickey didn’t know if it was worth the risk to get within 200 feet of the submarine, where a torpedo could strike them before Slipjack was able to even aim his weapon.<
br />
  “Popcorn,” Mickey said tightly, “science me. What are we looking at?”

  “The mass I’ve tentatively identified as Gigadon is very near the surface now. Well, in the euphotic zone, which makes up a small fraction—”

  “Stop. Holly, what do we do when that thing gets here?”

  Die? she thought, but said only, “Shoot it with everything? Hope it’s as hollow as Jeffrey Plaid’s video made it look and hope we can puncture it or something?”

  “Gigadon is almost here!” Popcorn shouted, even though he was just ten feet from Mickey and Holly. “What do we do?”

  Die? Holly squeezed her eyes shut and pushed that out of her mind. Its likely accuracy was irrelevant at that moment.

  Over the comm came Crockett’s voice: “They’re firing again! Incoming torpedo!”

  Popcorn cried, “Gigadon is about to break the surface!”

  The torpedo splashed as it was ejected from the submarine and now zoomed in a straight line right at I Spit on Your Grave. They had maybe ten seconds until it hit.

  Mickey: “Oh, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!”

  Popcorn: “Gigadahhhhhhhhhhhn!”

  Then, very near the North Korean sub, a massive gray presence under the water grew impossibly large, impossibly quickly, and Gigadon’s familiar crocodile snout and jaw, as tall as a four-story building, breached the surface, and its enormous body broke the water line …

  … right behind the zooming torpedo, which shot forward unimpeded in its deadly trajectory.

  Some on the exposed deck of Spit thought of diving off the boat; some inside the boat considered ducking down and covering; and some on the bridge made the decision to start running, wildly, in any direction; but every one of them stayed frozen in place, their couple of seconds of remaining life seeming like an hour.