Megalodon In Paradise

by Hunter Shea

  In the past, they screamed at Marco, SELL!

  Now, they shouted, KILL!

  Marco pulled the trigger, aiming for the bearded guy in the lead. The crack of the rifle echoed, piercing the whistling of the escalating winds.

  A plume of sand shot up near the man’s foot.

  “Shit,” Marco murmured.

  The men dropped their gunnysacks.

  All of them had formidable-looking guns.

  Marco didn’t even flinch as he pissed himself, hoping they couldn’t see him.

  INTERLUDE…1952

  “It’s getting too damn big!”

  Dr. Lancaster slammed his fist on the table, glass bottles jumping, several breaking on the floor.

  “We can’t keep feeding it. We can barely control it. What happened yesterday should be all the proof we need that the entire project needs to be shut down. And I mean immediately.”

  His face was so red, Dr. Laughton worried he was on the verge of a stroke. He’d worked with Lancaster for a long time and was alarmed by the growing stress the man was under.

  Maybe stress wasn’t quite the right word. They were all stressed.

  No, his bookish contemporary was angry. Livid.

  “You need to calm down,” Dr. Laughton urged. “Here, sit down and have a drink.”

  “What’s the point? We can’t drink our worries away.”

  “I’m not implying we do that. But it wouldn’t hurt to take the edge off.”

  Obeying his own orders, Laughton knocked back two fingers of scotch. He barely felt the burn.

  He’d been rattled since yesterday’s test run with the Megalodon. It was their fourth Operation Hansel and Gretel and it had been a complete disaster.

  Using pieces of irradiated bodies that had been loaded into a submarine, the Navy had doled out small portions to the shark—just enough to keep it fully functioning, but not enough to get it even close to a quarter strength. The sub released the “food” in stages, like breadcrumbs, leading the Megalodon to the target, which in this case was a scuttled destroyer off the coast of Australia.

  The idea was that once they got to the destroyer, they would give the shark a heavy dose of its special food and observe how it attacked the vessel.

  Dr. Laughton and the other scientists knew that once the Megalodon was allowed to get to a certain level of consciousness, it would destroy everything around it.

  Operation Hansel and Gretel was filmed extensively so footage displaying the potential military might could be sent to Washington. That would then lead to a greater influx of funding, which they were blowing through at an alarming rate. Resurrecting the Megalodon and maintaining it was as costly as it was miraculous.

  No one said miracles came cheap.

  What they hadn’t anticipated was one of the “breadcrumbs” being jettisoned too close to the previous. The Megalodon, infused with a fury of energy, not only smashed the sub in two, it also attacked a fishing trawler on the surface. The ship and everyone on board was devoured in minutes.

  They had to wait for the shark to sate itself, and for its adrenaline levels to flat-line, before they could send a retrieval unit out to corral it back into its cage.

  All in all, seventy-three men had been lost, including the civilians on the trawler.

  Of course, no one was to ever know what became of the trawler. It would be just another ship lost at sea.

  Dr. Laughton’s stomach churned, curdling the scotch. Dr. Lancaster paced the room.

  “If we tell them unanimously and in no uncertain terms that the Megalodon cannot be controlled, they’ll be forced to put it down,” he said, just under a shout. “The key is, we have to be unified.”

  “It’s gone too far to turn back now. Besides, there’ll still be Mueller whispering in their ears. He’s the genius to end all geniuses. Our aquatic Dr. Frankenstein. Except this mad doctor has a host of organizations behind him, along with more money than you or I could spend in fifty lifetimes.”

  Dr. Lancaster slumped into a chair. “Then we’ll just refuse to work.”

  “They’ll replace us with someone else . . . or make us disappear.”

  Lancaster’s eyes went wide. “You don’t think they’d actually do that!”

  Laughton nodded. “I do. Look how many men they sacrificed yesterday. Are we any better than them?”

  “No, we certainly aren’t,” Dr. Lancaster sighed. “We helped unleash this demon. We don’t deserve to breathe the same air as those brave men.”

  Dr. Laughton pushed away from the table. “Come with me.”

  They walked to the central lab, ascending the stairs until they stood atop the observation tank. Powerful lights above and below the water illuminated the slumbering giant. Every time he came up here, Dr. Laughton’s knees grew weak.

  When they had first brought the Megalodon back to life, there had been unbridled exaltation. They had defied the laws of death and perhaps redefined the future of man and beast.

  Several years ago, the Megalodon had been half the size it was now.

  At just under sixty feet, the massive creature was terrifying to behold, even as it floated in its cage, dreamless and motionless.

  The catwalk around the observation tank was lined with soldiers. Bright lights shone down into the dark water, illuminating the slumbering beast. Dr. Laughton found it laughable that the creature that could consume the lab and island with unmitigated ferocity needed guarding by puny humans.

  In a low whisper, Dr. Laughton said, “We could always inject Dr. Mueller with poison and feed him to his damn creation.”

  Just picturing throwing the Nazi scientist down the tank gave Laughton a shiver of pleasure. Those had been hard to come by lately.

  Dr. Lancaster chuckled. “It would make for a fitting ending to this whole debacle.”

  The Megalodon twitched in its sleep, its tail fin banging against the cage.

  “You stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back,” Laughton said.

  “I’d happily believe in God if Mueller and his pet somehow come to a tragic end before more lives are lost,” Lancaster said.

  Laughton looked around to make sure no one was listening to them. “Let’s just hope we’re still around to see it if it happens.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nacho didn’t like the look of that sky. The weather report called for one motherfucker of a storm. All he wanted to do was make the drop and get the hell off this place.

  Hitting the water with the heavy sack on his back, he felt the need to itch the ropy scar on his face.

  Trouble was brewing.

  It sounded ridiculous, but that itchy scar had saved his ass more than once. In fact, most of his luck had run bad until the day he’d been bequeathed the scar from the end of a British gangbanger’s blade. It had flayed his face practically in half. There went any hopes for a career in modeling.

  He never had a “woe is me” moment, even during his initial recovery. In his line of work, a scar like that only made him look meaner. It gave him an edge.

  And now it was telling him to be very careful.

  It could just be the storm. He didn’t need a lucky itchy scar to tell him things were capable of going sideways real fast.

  A heavy breaker crashed into his back, almost knocking his gun out of his hands.

  If things got worse, they would have to get everyone off the boat and spend the night in the abandoned building. But where would they moor the boat?

  One problem at a time.

  Nacho scanned the empty beach, the wind kicking up the sand and limiting visibility.

  “You see anything?” he asked Mofongo in Albanian. It was the one language everyone who worked internationally for Donovan Bailey had to learn so they could communicate with one another. He didn’t know why Bailey had picked Albanian and didn’t care. The entire crew went by nicknames, all of them based on food from their native countries. Mofongo hailed from Puerto Rico and had eyesight like an eagle. He had the breath of a diseased c
ow, so everyone tried to stay upwind of him. In this wind, his putrid breath was snatched away the moment it left his mouth.

  “Where?”

  “Around the building, pendejo.”

  They waded cautiously through the water.

  “Nah, I don’t see nothing.”

  “Anything,” Nacho corrected him. “You don’t see anything.”

  “That’s what I fucking said.”

  Nacho gritted his teeth and sighed. He couldn’t wait to get cycled off this crew. Bunch of retards.

  Right now, he just wanted to drop off the bow and blow the hell out of here.

  He turned to the men at his back. “Bami, Akara, Cambuulo, Escargot, keep alert.”

  Akara, the dark skinned Nigerian, said, “For what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nacho scratched his scar as they walked onto the beach, dropping their hefty gunnysacks.

  “See, I told you there was nothing,” Mofongo said.

  A shot rang out. Nacho flinched. The sand at his feet exploded.

  “We’ve got a shooter!” Nacho yelled. All of the men brandished their weapons. For all they knew, a rival group had been lying in wait this whole time. There was a fortune in cocaine in those bags. Cocaine most likely headed for America, where the real money was.

  If they lost that coke, they were as good as dead.

  Knowing that didn’t leave room for fear of the shooter.

  But Nacho would make him very, very afraid.

  ***

  When Ollie heard the first sharp crack, he instinctively ducked and covered his head, thinking it sounded like a tree branch breaking.

  “You idiot.”

  The nearest palm tree was fifty yards away. This wasn’t like walking the streets of Minnesota after an early snowstorm, most of the leaves still on the trees, laden with heavy snow, straining each and every limb to the snapping point.

  He stopped, his body buffeted by the wind, getting a face full of sand. It actually hurt. It was like being pegged by hundreds of sharp tacks.

  Something definitely broke. He just couldn’t tell where the sound had come from.

  He jogged to the dock, expecting to find Marco there, rifle trained at the ocean, waiting for the shark to get close enough so he could take his shot.

  Ollie found the shark, the imposing dorsal fin popping up and disappearing quickly, too close for comfort. Marco was nowhere to be found.

  Where the hell did he go?

  Maybe he’d met up with Steven. He could be at the rec center, making sure everything was secure. The last thing they wanted was half the building supplies to spread wings and end up in the Pacific.

  The rec center was empty. It looked like Titus had stowed things away before he left. For a contractor, he’d been exceedingly tidy. Or maybe he’d sensed the weather reports were wrong and the storm was going to take a turn their way. Islander intuition.

  “Marco!” Ollie shouted against the harsh breeze.

  The storm’s front only seemed to make the humidity worse. Ollie’s shirt clung to him like a second skin.

  Grand Isla Tiburon wasn’t so big that Marco could simply lose himself. They’d only built on half of the island so far, deciding to leave the other half alone and let nature keep its hold.

  He had to be back in one of the bungalows.

  Marco’s was deserted.

  Steven stepped outside his bungalow before Ollie could knock.

  “What’s wrong now?” Steven asked. Ollie must have looked as ragged as he felt.

  “Have you seen Marco?”

  A tense darkness washed over Steven’s face, but just for a moment. “N-no, I thought he was with you.”

  “He left a while ago . . . with a rifle.”

  “A rifle?”

  Ollie shrugged. “Yeah. I had no idea he even had one.”

  “What the hell is he planning to do with it?”

  “Shoot the shark I guess. But he’s not at the beach.”

  “Where’s Heidi?” Steven asked.

  “She was with Lenny. They were supposed to take you to my house. We’re all going to stay there until the storm blows over.”

  Steven slammed the door behind him. “Wait, you’re telling me my wife is gone? And Marco, too?”

  “And Lenny,” Ollie added. Steven was acting strange. He kept rubbing his bald head, eyes squinted, jaw clenched.

  “So where the hell is everybody?” Steven asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  The jarring pop of rapid gunfire jolted them.

  Ollie looked past the beach where the dock was located, out to where the lab lay.

  “Why is Marco out there?” he said, more to himself.

  “That’s n-n-ot just one person shooting,” Steven said.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  He was right. That sounded like an awful lot of guns. But who the hell was shooting them?

  Ollie’s skull felt as if it were going to go full Vesuvius.

  What the fuck else is going wrong?

  “Do you have a gun?” Steven asked.

  Ollie stared at him, flinching with each gunshot. “Why would I have a gun?”

  Steven pointed over his shoulder, toward the epicenter of the unseen shootout. “To deal with that, for one.”

  ***

  As soon as Ollie left to find Marco, Lenny and Heidi headed out to her house, telling Tara they’d meet her and Lae at Ollie’s in a few.

  Things weren’t working out as planned. That seemed to be the order of the day.

  “Something’s wrong,” Lenny said.

  Heidi spun around. She had to practically shout over the wind. “What?”

  His right hand, which had been itching like the devil before, now felt as if someone was taking a blowtorch to it. He’d jammed it deep in his pocket, afraid to see what the heck was going on with it. The idea was to deal with it later, hope that Ollie had cortisone cream or Benadryl, because he was definitely having some kind of allergic reaction to whatever sludge he’d touched on those skulls. He cursed himself over and over again for being stupid and careless. A flare-up of curiosity had gotten the better of him. He knew better than that.

  “My hand,” he said, bringing it into the fading light for them both to see.

  Heidi gasped.

  “Oh man, that’s not good,” Lenny said, feeling his legs turn to tapioca.

  He’d had a hard time extracting his hand from his pocket. Now he knew why. It had ballooned to twice its normal size. His flesh had turned a startling pink with brown lines, like veins but more haphazard, zigzagging from his palm to his fingertips.

  And it smelled. If it were a cartoon hand, Lenny imagined there would be stink lines waving around it.

  “What did you do to it?” Heidi said, trying her best to remain calm.

  “It was real itchy before. In just the last minute, it started to burn.” His stomach flip-flopped. He put his hand down. If he looked at it any longer, or kept it close to his nose, he was going to pass out.

  Heidi, her eyes wild and desperately searching, suddenly screamed, “Tara!”

  Tara and Lae had left Marco’s house, heads bowed against the wind.

  Heidi waved them over, arms flailing like one of those inflatables at a used car lot.

  “What’s wrong?” Tara said.

  Things had come to the point where they all assumed any new development was bad.

  That’s one assumption that’s absolutely correct, Lenny thought, trying to keep his mind from fixating on the burning and rotten funk.

  “It’s Lenny’s hand,” Heidi said.

  When Lenny showed it to Tara, she stumbled back a bit. Lae was horrified.

  Recovering quickly, Tara said, “Quick, let’s get to Ollie’s house. I’ll check his place for something that might help. You having any trouble breathing? Dizziness?”

  The biting sand felt like piranhas gnawing on the tender flesh of his hand. He tried to put it back in his pocket but
it would not longer fit. If they didn’t take care of it soon, it was going to pop like a balloon.

  “Dizzy,” he said. “But for good reason.”

  Tara grabbed him by the elbow, leading the way. “Just try and stay calm.”

  “Sure, no problem. I’ll pretend my hand doesn’t look like something from a John Carpenter movie.”

  The tropical storm was morphing into a sandstorm. They had to shield their eyes to keep from being blinded. The walk to Ollie’s seemed to take forever.

  Lenny tried flexing his fingers, but it was if they were made of wood. The pain got worse and worse with each passing second. By the time they walked into Ollie’s door, he was screaming and cursing.

  His broiling hand had gone nuclear meltdown. He wished it would explode already and give him mercy.

  ***

  The only thing keeping Marco alive was the storm. It was impossible for the men to see him. All of their shots had been way off the mark.

  But they were getting closer.

  He had to abandon his position. That would mean he’d be out in the open for at least twenty yards before he could slip behind the lab. Twenty yards was nothing unless you had six armed men gunning for you. It might as well have been a hundred acres.

  Thwang!

  A bullet kicked up sand as it sank into the driftwood. Marco dropped his rifle, cowering.

  He dared not pop his head up. The men had fanned out, hands over their eyes like visors, shooting indiscriminately. Sooner rather than later, one of them was going to make a lucky shot.

  Not lucky for Marco.

  Bracing himself, Marco picked up the rifle and darted from the dwindling safety of the pile of driftwood. He sprinted to the lab, afraid to look over his shoulder, his back tingling as he expected to feel the impact of a bullet any second.

  Chips of brick scattered ahead of him. It was either a random shot, or one of the swarthy men had a bead on him. He dove, hitting the sand so hard, the breath was knocked out of him. It took a few seconds, seconds he didn’t have, to recover. He crawled on his belly around the corner of the building.

  Only then did he dare to stand, leg muscles jittering, threatening to go on strike and leave him in a helpless pile.

  Peeking his head around the building, he saw the six men in the same position, still shooting in wide arcs. One of them raised a hand, and they all stopped. It was clear they were listening for him, though the whistling wind wasn’t going to make that easy.