Megalodon In Paradise

by Hunter Shea

Lae looked to the pile of junk against the door.

  Composing herself, she said, “Lotano is the, the slave of the ocean goddess Mannanu. When she is displeased, she can control the winds and the clouds. She calls forth Lotano to set things right.”

  “What the fuck is she talking about?” Steven said, hands on his hips, staring down at the distraught woman.

  Lenny understood. Closing his eyes, feeling his pulse beating against the charred end of his arm, he said, “She means the shark, dumbass. That shark is Lotano.”

  Lae nodded vigorously, dropping the candle. Tara took her in her arms.

  Sighing as he contemplated giving in to the unrelenting pull of bleak, blessed unconsciousness, Lenny said, “Well, at least we know what to call it.”

  There was a tremendous crash in the belly of the lab. All eyes turned to the open door, unable to pierce the gloom into the adjoining sections. The floor rumbled.

  It appeared Lotano knew they were here, and it was making its way to the cylinder to get them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Empty,” the Jamaican, Bami, reported breathlessly.

  “All of them?” Nacho said.

  Bami nodded.

  This island was supposed to be deserted. Now, not only did they have someone trying to kill them, but it appeared people were actually living out here.

  In one way, it was a small relief. Regular people defending their home were a lot easier to kill than other men like himself.

  Oh, and he would kill whoever had shot at them. He would kill them all.

  But where the hell had they gone?

  Nacho still couldn’t wrap his mind around the creature that had destroyed their boat. It had been so startling, they had forgotten all about their coke-laden gunnysacks.

  That it ate the crew didn’t bother him a bit. They were all next to worthless. None of them would be missed.

  That whale, because what else was that big, had eaten their only means of getting off this hell. And with the coke probably washed out to sea, they’d need something seaworthy and big enough to get them way the fuck away from here, or anywhere close to civilization.

  Retirement had come earlier than he expected.

  The roof groaned as a heavy gust slammed the bungalow.

  “What happened in here?” The Somali, Cambuulo, waved them into the kitchen.

  “It smells like the devil’s shit,” Escargot, the dusky Frenchman said, waving his hand in front of his nose.

  There was black muck and blood everywhere. Nacho spied a lumpy mass on the floor.

  “Is that a hand?”

  Mofongo peered over his shoulder. They both kept a good distance from the vile-smelling room.

  “It kinda looks like it. I think I see fingers. But look at it. Even Akura’s skin isn’t that black.”

  Nacho’s scar felt as if it had been dipped in poison ivy. He worked at it until he could feel the flesh split.

  What the hell was going on in this place?

  The bungalow shook violently.

  “This place is going to collapse!” Bami exclaimed.

  Nacho looked out the window as an uprooted palm tree speared the front of the nearest bungalow. Next, the roof peeled away like an orange rind.

  “We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Nacho growled.

  “Where the hell are we gonna go?” Escargot asked, his usual calm demeanor cracking from the wild turn of events.

  Nacho spat onto the kitchen floor. “The only place stronger than this storm.”

  ***

  Ollie was so amped, he felt as if his bones were about to leap free from his skin. He took a few deep breaths and stood before Lae, trying his best to exude a sense of calm in the literal storm.

  Everyone’s attention was fixated on the hub of the lab.

  It wasn’t as if the shark could pop out of that big tank and wriggle its way in here. The Land Shark was a Saturday Night Live skit, and there was nothing funny at all about what was going down on his damn island.

  “Lae,” he said, taking her hands in his. “You’ve seen that shark before?”

  With downcast eyes, she slowly shook her head. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.

  “So how do you know it’s this Lotano?”

  That got her to look up. It seemed as if everyone in the room was holding their breath. The tension in the room was denser than lead.

  “A shark that big can only be Lotano, Mr. Ollie,” she began. “The heavens are angry. This happened before, in my parents’ time. It was not long after the war, when they were testing their bombs. Lotano returned after a century’s long slumber. He terrorized the islands. Many, many people went out on the water and never returned. Then a great storm came, washing away whatever Lotano couldn’t reach. When it was over, Lotano disappeared.”

  Steven slapped the sides of his head. “This is crazy.”

  Ollie ignored him. He noticed Marco had broken away from the group, hovering by the piles of office furniture jammed against the door, his thumb in his mouth like a child.

  “So this shark is no stranger to these waters,” Ollie said. He looked to Tara. “You think it’s a mutated shark from all the radiation the military poured into the atmosphere and water? You know, like Godzilla?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I seriously doubt that Megalodon is Godzilla. If it were the end product of nuclear fallout from the fifties, there just hasn’t been enough time for a mutation that extreme to have enough generations to cause it to grow that big.”

  “Maybe the military spread the old myth around to keep people away from the island,” Heidi said. Her contribution surprised Ollie. A few seconds ago, she barely looked capable of coherent thought. Sealing themselves off from all of the madness and taking a moment to catch their breath was helping settle her down.

  When he moved a candle closer to her, he had to stifle a gasp. She looked horrid. The skin on her neck was bruising, as if someone had tried to strangle her. Bloodshot eyes stared back at him.

  “But then what about the missing people?” Tara said.

  Lae went quiet.

  Steven said, “That’s easy. They off a few here and there to make the story seem real.”

  Ollie vehemently shook his head. “Look, I know terrible things were done here, but I honestly believe it wasn’t intentional. Hindsight is 20/20. They had no idea of the long-term consequences from radiation. I can’t see our military willingly offing innocent civilians just to prop up a cover story.”

  “Don’t place so much trust in them,” Steven said. “They sold this bridge to you, didn’t they?”

  Ollie bit his tongue. Steven had him there.

  Lenny coughed, then hissed in pain. He cradled his right arm against his chest.

  “Maybe the nuclear testing was the cover story,” he said.

  “Come again?” Ollie asked. Lenny wasn’t well. He was probably delirious. Ollie didn’t want to dismiss him and make things worse.

  He tried to sit up but ended up collapsing back into the chair. “I’m not saying all those nukes were a cover story. But maybe there was more going on here than history tells us. Just think. We snagged all those Nazi scientists in Project Paperclip and put them to work on jet propulsion, nuclear energy, biochemical weapons, you name it. Most of these guys were straight eggheads, only interested in progressing science, whether for the Nazis or the Americans. It didn’t matter to them so long as they had a place to do their work and financial support.”

  A racking cough stopped him. Ollie noticed the bandage at the end of his arm turning red. Tara noticed it too. She quickly went to his side, examining it without touching it.

  “Take it easy, buddy,” she said.

  When Lenny settled down, he resumed his theory. “But there were other, more esoteric guys who came here. We saw in the ledger that the place was crawling with Germans. Some of those Nazi freaks were into eugenics and altering genetic lines, mixing it with the occult and paranormal. Maybe, just maybe, they found a way to bring back the M
agalodon. Why? To weaponize it, of course. But something that big can’t be controlled. Not to a large extent. It gets loose, a storm hits, and an old myth is reborn. That might explain why this lab is one giant fortress. They didn’t want anyone seeing inside. I just can’t figure out where the shark went all this time and why it’s back now.”

  Steven, who had been pacing in the dark, said, “Because six dipshits decided to make this place a home and woke the damn thing up. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.”

  Ollie snapped his fingers. “Cooter, you may be right. When I hit that button on top of the tank, remember all those sounds and the place rumbling? Then those bones and goop spilled into it.”

  “So it was in suspended animation?” Tara said.

  Shrugging, Ollie said, “I don’t know.”

  “You rang the dinner bell,” Lenny said. “Woke it up and fed it. I’ll bet whatever was on those bones was some kind of Megalodon chow they cooked up in the lab. It would explain why it was so…so wet. If it had been up there for decades, everything would have dried out by now.”

  Lae raised her hand as if she were in a classroom.

  “Lotano is not something from a science lab. It lives deep in the ocean . . . in every ocean.”

  The lab vibrated again. They heard a tremendous influx of water spill over the cylinder two rooms away. It could have been a gust from the storm.

  Or not.

  “Guess it doesn’t like us talking about it,” Heidi said.

  “You think it can hear us?” Ollie asked.

  “I’m no shark expert, but I’d say no way,” Tara replied. She smoothed some sweaty hair from Lenny’s forehead.

  Lenny said, “With the storm brewing, there’s nothing around for it to eat. So it’s coming back to the place where it was trained to get its reward.”

  “I don’t know what’s crazier—a genetically resurrected Megalodon, or a vengeful creature sent by an angry goddess,” Ollie said.

  “Who gives two shits?” Marco blurted. He kicked something small and metallic across the room. “Either way, we’re fucked.”

  Tara motioned for him to be quiet. “The name of this lab was . . . it was . . . Let me think—Deep Sea Rebirth. Holy crap. That’s what it said on the ledger. It didn’t make any sense to me before. If Lenny’s right . . .”She lapsed into silence.

  So much water began to run under the sole door to the outside, it sounded as if the place had sprouted a creek.

  Ollie put his arm around her. “And here we are, locked in a giant tomb with a killer shark below us and a half dozen killers outside.”

  His mind ran through so many possible scenarios, his temples throbbed.

  He was going to find a way to get them all safely out of this.

  Judging by the steady flow of seawater spilling into the lab from both sides, he was going to have to think awfully damn fast.

  ***

  Steven closed the door to the other room so they couldn’t hear what was going on deeper in the lab as much. Each splash of water or thud had them jumpier than neurotic cats.

  He’d been acting like an ass all day, but Tara was grateful he did it. The way things echoed in the empty lab, she was imagining all sorts of things going on in there. She kept picturing the massive shark shattering the tank, ramming through each section of the lab until it swallowed them whole.

  Sure, it would die from being out of the water, but only after they had suffered one of the worst deaths imaginable.

  Wrapping her arms around herself, she checked on Lenny and Heidi. Lenny appeared to be rallying. Some color had come back into his face. Or was it just a trick of the poor, flickering light?

  Heidi sat next to Steven on the floor with her head between her legs. She’d started to wheeze and was disturbingly quiet.

  Tara could only imagine what that poison was doing to her. She wished there was a way she could help them both, other than to sear a limb closed and wrap a bandage.

  She crept to the entrance, careful not to trip on the legs of the chairs the guys had thrown into the pile. The storm raged on outside, battering the door, water sluicing in between the cracks.

  “When the hell is it going to let up?”

  “I wish I remembered to bring the radio,” Ollie said, cursing under his breath. The rifle was slung over his shoulder. Every few minutes, he gave it a thorough once-over. Normally, Tara would have brought it to his attention so he could stop his obsessive behavior. Right now, it was wisest to make sure the rifle was okay, as it was their only means of defense if those men decided to seek shelter in the lab.

  The men.

  They’d been so obsessed with the Megalodon, or Lae’s Lotano, no one had bothered to ask Marco who had invaded their island.

  “Marco,” she said. “Who were those men you were shooting at?”

  Keeping to the shadows, it was hard for her to see his face, but it looked like he sneered at her. “Does it matter?”

  “Hell yes, it matters,” she snapped.

  Ollie came up next to her. “She’s right, Marco. Everyone in here has a right to know. All of our lives are in jeopardy because of you.”

  For a second, in the silence, Tara thought Marco was going to deflect and put their attention back on the shark or the storm. To his credit, he didn’t.

  He balled his fists, looking like he wanted to fight them rather than tell the truth. Then he shook his head, heaved a great sigh and leaned against the reception desk.

  “You guys should know I’ve been nothing but a total fuckup.”

  “We figured that,” Steven said, cradling Heidi’s head in his lap. Black vines crept under her flesh, reaching toward her cheeks and mouth.

  “College was it for me, man,” Marco said. “It was supposed to just be the last rung on the ladder until we were set free and really made something of ourselves. And for a while, it was. Then I threw it away. And what I somehow managed to hold onto was taken from me.”

  Staring at the floor, he recounted in agonizing detail everything from his rise in business to the love of his life, Mazie. A love he dishonored by cheating on her the very night she died. It was all a fast run downhill from there. Tara didn’t know whether she wanted to hug him or throttle him. The brash New Jerseyan with the sharp wit and formidable IQ she’d briefly dated in college was gone. She couldn’t find even the tiniest spark left in her old friend.

  Both hands on the rifle, Ollie said, “So you’re saying these guys are goons that work for this Jamaican crime boss, Donovan Bailey?”

  Marco shook his head. “The smugglers may work for someone else who is just doing business with Bailey. It was all on a need-to-know basis. I didn’t need to know and I didn’t wanna know.”

  Ollie suddenly attacked Marco, grabbing him by the collar and driving him to the floor. Tara and Lae rushed to break them up.

  “You fucking son of a bitch!” Ollie spat. “I trusted you. I sank everything I have into this island, into our futures, and you . . . you tainted it!”

  Rearing back, Ollie punched Marco in the face.

  Thwack!

  Then again. And again.

  Tara tried to grab his arm, but it was too powerful, too fueled by rage for her to stop.

  Marco didn’t even raise an arm to defend himself.

  More and more blood poured from his nose and mouth as Ollie pummeled him, cursing the day he ever met him.

  “Steven, help me!” Tara shouted.

  Lae fell onto her rump with a loud cry after she lost her grip on Ollie’s shoulders.

  “Fuck him,” Steven shot back, pulling Heidi closer.

  Lenny rose unsteadily from the chair. “That’s enough, Ollie,” he said, though not loud enough for a raging Ollie to hear.

  Ollie jumped to his feet, panting, Marco’s blood dripping from his fists. Tara stumbled backwards, falling into Lenny. They collapsed into the chair. Somehow, it didn’t break.

  Instead of walking away, Ollie pointed the rifle in Marco’s face, the muzzle inches
from his nose.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right here!” he shouted.

  Tara extricated herself from Lenny and the chair. “Ollie, don’t.”

  When he turned to her, she stopped. There was a fire burning in his eyes she’d never seen on another human being.

  “Stay back,” he ordered her. The rifle moved oh so slightly in her direction before he trained it back on Marco.

  “Tell me now, Marco! Beg for your worthless life!”

  Marco groaned, turning his head from side to side. His nose was in ruins, several of his front teeth hanging on by a thread.

  “Just kill me,” he sputtered, blood frothing from his cracked lips. “Do it, Ollie. You’re right. I am worthless. I’m tired of hurting. Please . . . kill me.”

  Marco tumbled into uncontrolled sobbing, crimson bubbles blowing from his nostrils, popping and dripping down his face.

  Ollie’s arms trembled, or was it a trick of the candlelight?

  Steeling himself, Ollie let out a cry that froze Tara’s heart.

  Lenny reached out for her, trying to get her behind him.

  “Fuck!” Ollie screamed, pressing the rifle hard into the pulp of Marco’s nose. Marco didn’t flinch. He just kept crying.

  With one last grunt, Ollie threw the rifle away. It clattered into the shadows. His legs buckled, and he collapsed next to Marco’s prone body.

  Tara realized she was crying. No one dared move or speak.

  Marco’s sodden bawling echoed in the musty room.

  Ollie trembled, his voice shaking between ragged breaths. “You . . . ruined . . . us.”

  Tara crept toward Marco, leaning down to get a better look at his face. It was bad. He’d need multiple surgeries to repair his nose, dentures, and maybe even a plate in his cheeks if they were fractured. She hoped to God there wasn’t any internal bleeding.

  “Can you sit up?”

  He tried to push her away.

  She cupped her hands behind his neck and pulled slowly. “I don’t want you sucking in all that blood.”

  She fought against her nurturing side, telling herself that Ollie was justified in beating him to a pulp.

  A hand touched her shoulder. It was Ollie.