Megalodon In Paradise

by Hunter Shea

  Now what? I should have shot up the dinghy while it was still in the water. Maybe if they flopped around enough in it, the shark would have come.

  There was no point now playing the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” game.

  Marco may have been a shit heel, but he couldn’t lead these smuggler assholes back to the bungalows. He’d have to find a way to hold them here . . . holding meaning kill them, or at best, get them to decide vacating immediately was in their best interests.

  Take out the leader. It was common sense. It worked with people as well as it did with animals.

  The one with the beard seemed to be the big man in charge.

  Marco raised the rifle, trying to steady his arms so he could get a clear shot.

  Mr. Beard was accommodating, standing perfectly still, trying to see through the swirling sand.

  Getting his breathing under control, Marco took a deep breath, let it out, finger wrapping around the trigger.

  Something hard and heavy landed on his shoulder.

  The rifle swung low just as he fired, the round tunneling harmlessly into the sand.

  The six men looked his way.

  Marco froze, knowing that whoever had crept up behind him wasn’t going to let him exist in the land of the living for much longer.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tara rifled through Ollie’s medicine cabinet. Thank God he’d stocked up. She guessed he had to prepare for just about anything, knowing there were no drug stores just around the corner.

  “Hold on, Lenny,” she called out. His screaming two rooms away was so loud, it was as if he were wailing directly in her ear.

  Considering what was going on with his hand, she couldn’t blame him.

  She dumped what she needed into a bath towel and ran to the living room.

  Lenny was on the couch, clutching his right arm but not touching his hand. Heidi stood over him, holding on to his shoulders, trying to calm him down. Lae sat aghast in the chair opposite him.

  “Okay, I’m going to—”

  When Tara saw his hand, she completely forgot what she was going to say. In just the past thirty seconds, it had swelled even more, his discolored skin splitting in multiple places.

  Tears streamed down Lenny’s face.

  “Please don’t touch it,” he begged.

  His hand was turning gray, parts of the palm blackening. It looked like it was necrotizing right before their eyes.

  Tara held the bottle of peroxide and knew it was going to be less than useless.

  This wasn’t an allergic reaction.

  “Do something!” Heidi snapped.

  Tara could barely close her mouth, much less think of what to do. She wasn’t sure a doctor would even know how to handle this.

  “I, I . . . take him to the kitchen. Now!”

  Heidi helped Lenny up. His knees buckled once, twice, but he managed to walk.

  “Lenny, put your hand in the sink,” Tara said. “Heidi, hold onto his arm. I need to see if there’s anything caught in his hand that’s causing this.”

  She turned on the tap. The second the water touched his flesh, Lenny howled like a wounded werewolf.

  “Jesusfuckshittingfucker!”

  “Hold him steady,” Tara said, bending over the sink to get a closer look. Heidi struggled to keep him from flailing. Lenny was twice her size, but she was determined.

  The rupturing wounds were now leaking black—black!—pus. The smell coming off it was so bad, Tara almost puked. With her hand over her mouth, she went to touch it.

  “No! Don’t touch me!” Lenny shouted. “Don’t get it on you!”

  “Get what?”

  Lenny’s arm shot straight up. Heidi spun away. Lae squealed.

  “God, it burns! Oh my God!”

  Tara didn’t know what to do. She tried to corral Lenny, but he was too strong, bouncing around the kitchen, gripping his forearm.

  “I can’t take it anymore!”

  He slammed his hand down hard on the edge of the counter. A jet of viscous goo hit the ceiling as the back of his deformed hand split like a hot dog in a deep fryer.

  “What are you doing?” Tara said, trying to keep her voice from hitting the hysterical range. Heidi was beside her, crushing her arm with both hands.

  “I have…to get it…off!”

  Lenny smashed his hand again and again, the flesh bursting at the seams, horrid fluids splattering the kitchen. Tara pushed Heidi back. The last thing she wanted was for that stuff to land on either of them.

  And the stench. It was inhuman. If she hadn’t experienced it herself, she’d swear it was impossible for that smell to come out of a living creature.

  “Get off! Get off!”

  To her horror, Tara saw that Lenny was close to accomplishing just that. His hand was hanging on by a few strands of tendons, the wrist bone cracking like walnuts.

  He’s going to bleed right out.

  She looked over at Ollie’s stove and turned on one of the burners, grateful it wasn’t an electric range.

  There was no point urging Lenny to stop now. It was best that he got the infected limb off.

  Each time his hand hit the counter, Lae and Heidi screamed.

  Which was nothing compared to Lenny’s cry of agony and victory when the pulped hand finally broke free. His eyes rolled to the top of his head.

  Heidi rushed past Tara and somehow managed to prop him up, directing him to the stove.

  “You’re not really going to do that, are you?” she said to Tara, eyeing the blue flame.

  Tara looked for a clean spot on Lenny’s arm. He was seconds away from passing out. She yanked his arm forward. His flesh sizzled. The hairs on his arm burned away. If the strange rot seeping out of his hand was bad before, it was even worse roasted.

  Heidi gagged, a long line of thick spittle stretching from her mouth to the stovetop.

  Tara’s senses spiraled.

  It was unreal.

  Lenny went completely slack. It was as if he’d gained a hundred pounds in a nanosecond. He was too heavy for Tara and Heidi to keep propped up. He fainted, landing on top of Heidi.

  The impact knocked the wind out of her.

  Tara watched in horror as Lenny’s arm flipped backwards. A stray drop of ichor sailed from the charred stump of Lenny’s wrist, landing right on Heidi’s tongue.

  ***

  “Grab his gun!” Steven snapped, trying to keep his voice down.

  Ollie managed to grab the barrel as a stunned Marco brought it up to shoot them. He instantly regretted it. Even over the howling wind, he could hear his skin sizzle. The barrel felt hotter than a pizza oven.

  “Ollie? Steven?”

  Marco looked like a sleepwalker who had been abruptly woken up.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ollie said. “Who are those guys and why are you shooting them?”

  The three of them took a quick look at the men who appeared ready to charge their position, guns drawn.

  “Because they’re shooting at me,” Marco said. “I can’t explain it all right now.”

  Ollie wasn’t sure how much more he could take. First sharks. Then skulls. A tropical storm that wasn’t supposed to be here. Now a half dozen dangerous looking guys with guns. What else could possibly go wrong?

  We can all be dead, he thought.

  A shiver ran down his spine.

  “Ollie, we need to grab the girls and get on your boat,” Steven said. His gaze was wild to the point of feral.

  “We can’t do that. The storm will swallow us up in minutes, if not seconds.”

  “Don’t forget the shark,” Marco murmured. “The storm is nothing compared to the shark.”

  As if on cue, the first drops of cold rain started to fall.

  Ollie grabbed Marco. “What have you done, man?”

  “It’s a long story and you’re not going to like it,” Marco said.

  “We don’t have time for long stories,” Steven said.

  Marco pushed Ollie’s hands away.
“The only chance we have is to take them all out right now, while they’re out in the open. Are either of you good with a rifle?”

  Ollie wanted to smash his friend’s head into the wall. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. I’ve never fired a rifle before. I’m missing them by miles.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Steven said, palms up. “And I’m certainly n-n-not going to start target practice with people.”

  Ollie snatched the rifle from Marco’s hands. “We can’t let them get to the women, if they’re really out to kill us. They are, aren’t they?”

  Marco avoided Ollie’s gaze. “I . . . I don’t know. I’m not even sure they knew the island is inhabited. It’s just supposed to be a drop off for them.”

  A drop off? All part of the long story that would have to wait.

  “But I get the feeling that they won’t stop until they make sure there’s no one left to talk about what happened here,” Marco added.

  “Just fucking great,” Ollie spat.

  Thunder rumbled long and low.

  Ollie dared to look around the corner again. This time, he spotted a boat not far from shore. It bobbed violently as the ocean grew more and more restless. The men on the beach, the definition of a ragtag crew of ne’er-do-wells, slowly made their way to the lab.

  He thought of every bad guy extra he’d ever seen in movies with Caribbean thugs. One of them even looked a little like a younger Danny Trejo when he was in that Harrison Ford stuck-on-an-island movie, Six Days, Seven Nights. He’d been one of the smugglers out to kill Ford and Anne Heche.

  But these smugglers or whatever they were hadn’t taken a shot since he’d stopped Marco.

  Was Marco the bad guy here? Were they only defending themselves? If Ollie shot them, would he be shooting innocent men, even though they looked far from it? And why were they here in the first place?

  He rubbed some grit from his eyes.

  No. They were all bad guys, Marco included. He knew Marco had run into hard times, but he never thought it was something like this. Whatever the hell this was.

  One of the men at the rear shouted something, pointing at the water.

  Ollie motioned for Marco and Steven to look as well.

  The shark was back.

  The dorsal fin circled the jouncing boat, the tip of the fin level with the highest point of the ship. In fact, the fin alone was almost bigger than the entire boat.

  And Ollie knew there was so much more just under the surface.

  A man with a long wiry beard shouted something and they all ran toward the water. The boat headed eastward, trying to get away from the shark. Ollie saw a few men on the boat running around the deck. He couldn’t hear them, but he could imagine the rising panic in their voices.

  The beached men followed the retreating boat, a few of them taking impotent shots that were sucked up by the turgid Pacific.

  “They’re leaving,” Steven said.

  “But not for long,” Ollie said. “They’re sure as hell not getting on that boat. Which means they’ll be stranded here . . . and pissed.”

  “Just like I knew . . .” Marco said.

  “What?” Ollie said.

  The giant shark suddenly breached the surface, the top half of its massive silver and gray body in full, terrifying view. Its mouth opened wide, massive teeth even visible from their vantage point, gums red and raw.

  “Holy Christ!” Steven exclaimed as they watched the forward half of the boat disappear into the shark’s mouth. It clamped it jaws down on fiberglass, wood and steel, snapping it as if it were kindling.

  Ollie thought he spotted men jumping overboard into the blackening sea.

  The remaining half of the boat tilted upward, its grasp on the surface shifting quickly.

  The shark slipped under the water.

  Ollie gasped when it leapt seconds later like a dolphin, using its body to smash the boat and everyone clinging to it to splinters. They watched in revulsion as it swam back and forth, like a man mowing the lawn, devouring everything in sight.

  Steven tugged on the back of his shirt. “Come on, we have to go back while those guys are preoccupied.”

  He looked to Marco, who could only hang his head in shame.

  “He’s right,” Marco said to the sand at their feet.

  The rain kicked into another gear, coming down in sheets. The temperature had dropped at least five degrees in the past few minutes. Ollie shivered, but he was pretty sure it was from shock.

  “Steven, go to my house and make sure you lock everything up. Stay away from the windows and keep the lights out.”

  “What are you guys going to do?”

  Ollie ground his molars, counting to five until the pain made his eyes twitch. “There isn’t any choice. We’re going to clean up Marco’s mess.”

  ***

  The beast felt the changes in the ocean as the storm raged overhead. The charged atmosphere excited it, confused it.

  But nothing could match its hunger and need to feed.

  There was more meat and foul substances floating and swirling around the ragged bits. The beast masticated them all without prejudice.

  Its olfactory senses scanned the water for any sign of what it craved above all others. There could perhaps be more farther out, but its brain would not let its body go past the boundary of the island.

  For now, there were still the withering remnants of fresh blood. They would have to do.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Steven ran into the biting wind, lungs burning, the skies opening up and dumping what seemed like decades of hoarded rain on the island. The cold realization that there was no way off Grand Isla Tiburon hit him hard.

  They didn’t just need to find a way to wait out the storm.

  Now they had to avoid being spotted by those men. Who the hell were they?

  “Damn you, Marco,” he spat, water spraying from his lips.

  That fucking Jersey wheeler-dealer had screwed them all. It was one thing when he messed with his own life. But now…

  The door to Ollie’s house was open.

  He stepped inside to another nightmare.

  Lenny was passed out on the couch, covered in a sheen of sweat. What looked like a torn up sheet was wrapped around his right hand. The sheet was stained red and black.

  Heidi sat in a chair, her head between her legs, Tara rubbing her back. There was a bowl at her feet. Heidi kept spitting into it.

  Lae stood apart from them, hands clasped together in what he could only assume was a silent prayer.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  The women looked up at him, startled. Heidi sprang from the chair and threw her arms around his neck.

  She tried to speak but her sobbing made it impossible to understand her.

  He looked to Tara who was the only one not shocked or in hysterics.

  “Lenny’s hand was infected,” she said, looking down at him.

  “Infected? With what?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it was, it basically devoured his hand. He…he…it’s gone. We had to cauterize it, and he passed out.”

  Her eyes drifted to the kitchen. He followed her gaze, biting his tongue when he saw the blood and other dark, cancerous stains painting the walls and cabinets.

  “Is Heidi okay?”

  She trembled in his arms, her face pressed to his rain soaked chest.

  Tara crouched next to Lenny to inspect the makeshift bandage. He noticed she was careful not to touch it.

  She replied, “Yes. I…I don’t know.”

  Heidi took a deep breath and pulled away just enough to look into his eyes. She sure as hell didn’t look all right.

  “It got in my mouth,” she sputtered.

  He held her head in his dripping hands.

  “What got in your mouth, honey?”

  She pointed at Lenny. “The stuff that was in him. Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Lae broke her prayer, scooped up the bowl and handed it to Heidi
, who made quick work of filling it up. He couldn’t help but stare into its contents as if they were tealeaves, foretelling the future of his wife’s health. It was just a pink and tan froth of meals past and bile.

  With everything that he’d walked in to, he’d forgotten why he was there in the first place.

  “Tara, Lae, you n-need to turn out the lights and lock the doors. Now!”

  “Why? Where are Ollie and Marco?” Tara asked.

  “There are men on the island. Men with guns. I don’t kn-know who the fuck they are or why Marco was shooting at them.”

  Lae hurried about the room, snapping the lights off.

  “Wait,” Tara said. “Marco was shooting people? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Steven lifted Heidi into his arms as if she were a wounded child and carried her to the bedroom. “Yeah, well add it to the list of things that don’t make sense on this fucked up island,” he said as he stormed off.

  ***

  Ollie was nothing but a tight ball of rage.

  Rage at his friend Marco, the man he’d given a second chance to and had used it to spit in his face—in all their faces.

  Rage at the strange men and the threat they brought with them.

  Rage at the giant shark that had swum from the depths of hell to ruin their paradise.

  Rage at yet another atrocity left behind by the US military. What had the Marshall Islands done to deserve the hand that had been dealt them?

  And rage at God himself for sending this storm their way. The rain was coming down so hard, he could barely see ten feet in front of him. He had to keep blinking to clear the water from his eyes. He couldn’t hear a damn thing over the rain and wind. He knew that Marco was still behind him because he could feel his hand on his shoulder.

  They crept along the beach, now hiding behind a small dune. He couldn’t see where the men had gone.

  A torrent of questions swirled around his brain, questions Marco could answer, but he didn’t want to shout them on the off chance the men would hear him.