“Sounds like a good plan,” she said then, after taking a deep breath, added what she had already known she would say throughout the whole conversation. “Too bad it’s a plan I can’t be a part of.”
“I had a feeling all along that you were going to say that. Are you sure, though?”
“Nope. Not sure at all. That’s the problem. You saw the way I was the other night. For several seconds there, I was absolutely convinced that Teddy Bear was coming for me. Nothing would convince me otherwise. It’s dangerous, and I can’t force it on anyone else. That wouldn’t be the right thing to do.”
“There are still other ways we can do this. Hell, I bet with some camera trickery, we can even make it look like you’re closer than you really are. We’ll just need to use both Zodiacs…”
“No. No trickery. Reality or nothing at all. It’s time we both face the facts: I wasn’t ready for this. I pushed too hard, and I came out here when I wasn’t mentally prepared. If I keep pushing, then who knows? Someone could get killed. And I can’t have that.”
Kevin nodded. “Do you know why I love you?”
“Because I know the best way to use a riding crop?”
“Besides that. I love you because I knew you would say that.” He gently kissed her on the temple. “I’ll go tell Merchant. No one will fault you if you go back down below deck.”
“No. I can watch you play the hero, at least. Give me that much credit.”
She stood off to the side as the others inflated one of the Zodiacs, then loaded it with supplies. They didn’t need much: a cooler full of meat that was just as likely to attract the local white-tipped reef sharks as it was their quarry, equipment to steady a camera, a long pole with a needle on the end that they hoped to use to collect a DNA sample. Although no one expected to need it, Kevin also included a scuba tank on the off chance that he thought he needed to dive to attract Call It George. Personally, Maria thought that last bit was pointless. If he ended up in the water with something capable of swallowing someone whole, it was too late for him to do anything except possibly bleed to death.
While Kevin put on his wetsuit, there was some discussion among the TV people about who would be in the Zodiac with Kevin and who would film from the Cameron. Merchant eventually decided that she wanted her more experienced camera people trying to get the wide shot from as many angles as possible, which left Ted Shirr to go in the Zodiac. As soon as this was announced, Maria heard Simon snickering quietly to himself off to the side.
“What’s funny?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“No, really. What?”
“It’s just the writer of our show is displaying her sense of humor again.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Never mind,” Simon said, then walked away before she could further press him for an explanation.
“Okay, looks like everything is ready,” Simon said once Ted was in his own wetsuit. “Time to get moving if we want to do this when the tide is right.”
Before he got on the Zodiac, Maria gave him a kiss. “Go get the money shot.”
“I’m not sure if that phrase means what you think it means.”
“I know what it means. And if you get this shot, I’ll make sure you see the other kind later.”
He smiled. “Looking forward to it.”
As the Zodiac motored away from the Cameron, Simon and Cindy came up to her. “That wasn’t actually very smart,” Simon said.
“What wasn’t?”
“Getting cutesy with him immediately before he goes into danger.”
“Jesus, Simon, shut it,” Cindy said, but Maria couldn’t help but notice a sudden worried tone in her voice.
“Simon, that doesn’t mean anything’s going to happen,” Maria said. “What would it take to convince that we are not in some kind of work of fiction?”
“Well, for starters, nothing bad could happen right now,” Simon said. “In fact, Call It George would have to not even show up. Because there’s nothing story worthy about that.”
Monica, who had been watching the Zodiac from nearby with a pair of binoculars, called out. “Hey, I think I see something moving in the water.”
Maria turned to Simon. “Sometimes I think I kind of hate you a little.”
“Shit,” Cindy said. She tapped her fingernails on the railing for a moment in thought, then turned to the stairs, grabbing her brother’s shirtsleeve and tugging him along with her. “Come on, little boy.”
“Where are we going?” Simon asked.
“Lord help me, I’m taking you seriously for once.” They were gone before Maria could ask her to clarify what she meant.
The Zodiac had begun to approach the spot where they’d seen the mouth come up out of the water, but it stopped short at what Kevin must have thought was a safe distance. He apparently saw Monica frantically gesturing at him and looked to the dark shadow that had appeared in the water closer to the island. In the daylight, it was easier to see that, whatever Call It George might be, it was massive, bigger than they had initially thought.
“Which might mean it’s longer, too,” Maria whispered with a deep sense of dread growing in her stomach.
Ted pointed his camera at the shape in the water while Kevin slowly yet pointedly maneuvered the Zodiac away. From this distance, it was difficult to tell what the shadow might be doing, but Kevin’s posture slackened. He didn’t seem to think there was any danger.
Shit, Maria thought. She knew exactly what came next.
To the best of her knowledge, the mysterious shadow beneath the crystal blue waters never moved. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe that hadn’t been Call It George after all. It couldn’t be, really, because Call It George came at the Zodiac from a completely different direction. Kevin didn’t even have the time to turn as the water beneath and behind him suddenly boiled with violence.
It’s happening again, Maria thought. She’s back. She’s here. It’s Teddy Bear with the same tricks. Her scarred mind continued to insist that even as the thing rose up out of the water. It was fast, yet not as fast as it had been the other night. All of the cameras, except probably for poor Ted’s, caught an image of it crystal clear.
She’d been right. Call It George obviously had some relationship to a turtle or tortoise, although it was also evident that it didn’t quite belong to either family. Its mouth wasn’t quite as large as Maria remembered from the other night, but it was still large enough that it could lift the Zodiac up in its wickedly sharp grayish-green beak. The skin beyond the beak was mottled and scaled, and the thing had two jet-black eyes each the size of a human head.
The thing almost looked familiar, and it took Maria a second to realize why: that old Japanese monster movie. What had it been called? Oh, right. Gamera.
Her boyfriend was about to be eaten by a baby Gamera.
Its jaws were open wide enough that it could almost but not quite grip the Zodiac from both sides as it lifted the raft into the air. For a moment, the gigantic head and long neck hung there, almost in defiance of gravity. Ted appeared to be screaming even as he tried to point the camera at what was below them. Kevin also looked panicked, but unlike Ted, he didn’t act it. Maria saw him reach for the scuba tank and desperately try to get the rebreather into his mouth.
Then Call It George’s mouth snapped shut.
In her head, Maria imagined an audible crunching noise, but it never came. The material of the Zodiac folded over on Kevin and Ted, wrapping them up yet preventing Call It George from getting a decent grip on them. That didn’t appear to matter to it, though, as the moment it looked to have any kind of hold at all on the boat the creature yanked its head back down below the water, pulling its two neatly wrapped victims down with it.
The Cameron erupted with a chorus of screaming. I wonder how many more times we have to see that kind of thing before people on this boat stop doing that, Maria idly thought, right before realizing that her own voice was among the plaintive cries.
“Kevin!” she scr
eamed. “Oh my God, Kevin!”
The water stopped churning. For several seconds, they could still see several dark silhouettes below the water, and then they faded into the blue.
“Gutierrez!” Maria yelled, not even sure exactly where he was. “Get the Cameron closer! We have to get them!”
From somewhere else on the deck, she heard him say, “But that thing could…”
“Now, you asshole!”
For many precious seconds, nothing happened. She had a vague awareness that Monica and the TV people were frantic and screaming, and some of them might have even been asking her what they should do, but Maria couldn’t move. She simply kept her gaze on the place where the Zodiac had disappeared, waiting, hoping, knowing something would likely come up and wishing that whatever it was, it wasn’t just a body part. When the Cameron finally moved, her paralysis broke. She ran to the side of the boat where it would pull up along where they had disappeared. Seconds before they got there, she thought she saw shape rising to the surface from below.
“Oh God, it’s coming back!” Gary yelled.
“No, it’s too small,” Maria said. Too small to be a giant mutant turtle, but just the right size to be…
“Kevin?” she whispered.
The wet-suit clad body hit the surface, face down. Maria didn’t see any blood, and the body seemed to be whole, but there was no movement. Whichever one of them it was, he appeared to be dead.
“Monica, get the first-aid kit!” Maria said. “Charlene, put down the fucking camera and grab one of those poles over there with the hoops on them.”
Merchant’s voice was a whisper near her ear. “Maria, I don’t think…”
“Everyone just get your asses moving! We can still save him.”
Maria helped Charlene with the pole, and together they were able to wrangle the body onto the deck. Their combined strength gave out as they pulled him over the railing, and he flopped limply onto his back on the deck. She’d been right. He wasn’t breathing.
He also wasn’t Kevin.
Ted’s lips and skin were blue, but he probably hadn’t been in the water so long that he was beyond saving. Maria mentally psyched herself up to give him CPR, but Monica was on her knees next to him before she could get there.
“Shit,” Maria heard from behind her. She turned to see that Cindy and Simon had returned to the deck, a plastic tote held between the two of them. She didn’t take any time to check and see what they had thought was so important.
“Everyone give Monica some room,” Maria said.
“You shouldn’t bother,” Simon said.
“Simon! Jesus! Learn when to shut up,” Cindy responded.
“Look, it’s a tragedy, but it was obvious he was going to die from the beginning. I mean, his name was…”
Monica pulled away from Ted as he sputtered sea water and took a couple of deep, desperate breaths.
“Oh,” Simon said, sounding almost disappointed. “I get it. The television writers are just messing with us again.”
Maria didn’t look at him, but she clearly heard Cindy smack him upside the head. She wanted to ask Ted what had happened, where Kevin was, but he was spending all his energy at the moment just remembering how his lungs worked. She ran over to the railing again, expecting that Kevin had bobbed up while they’d been distracted by Ted, but the water was empty.
Cindy came up next to her put a hand on her shoulder. “Maria, he…”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say it. Don’t you dare. He’s not dead.”
“That’s not what she was going to say,” Simon said as he came up on her other side. “She was going to say that he needs you to save him.”
“Wait, what?”
She finally turned around and looked at the tote they had brought up from below. In it was a wetsuit, a scuba tank and rebreather, a single flipper, and a black plastic case that Maria recognized but hadn’t brought herself to open yet. Cindy also carried a duffel bag with a few other things in it, while Simon had a harpoon gun.
“The whole story has been building up to this point, don’t you see?” Simon asked.
“Jesus Christ, just stop it, Simon!” Maria said. “For the last God-damned time, we’re not in fiction.”
“How sure are you of that really?” Cindy asked.
Maria gave her a stunned look. “Please don’t tell me you’re buying into this.”
“I don’t think I am. But what if he’s right?”
“He’s not.”
“But what if he is? That would make you the hero, and Kevin the love of your life, and this would be the point in the story where you have to overcome all your fears and obstacles to save him.”
Maria looked from one to the other and then back again, her mouth agape. The whole “maybe we’re just in a TV show or movie” bit had been vaguely entertaining at one point, but now they were going overboard. She was real. They were all real. She refused to play the what-if game about this.
But there was one what-if she couldn’t discount: what if Kevin really was alive? Ted hadn’t been eaten, but he’d almost drowned. The last view of Kevin she’d had suggested that he might have gotten his rebreather in his mouth in time, and the folded-over Zodiac could have prevented the worst of the monster’s bites from doing too much damage. Was it really too much to hope that Call It George had simply dragged him some place, that Kevin was alive but trapped and only needed her to overcome her personal demons?
Yes, it was too much to hope that.
But screw it. She was going to hope anyway.
“Alright,” Maria said. “Help me suit up.”
15
One thing that they could all agree on was that she didn’t have a lot of time. The most logical conclusion was that Kevin was already dead, swallowed whole by Call It George and currently digesting in the creature’s stomach. Not exactly an image Maria liked to think about, but there it was. On the very off chance that he was alive, though, they had to assume that he wouldn’t be for much longer. If Call It George hadn’t eaten him already, then it was probably saving him for something, and there was no way that something would be good or even in the distant future. Even if for some reason Call It George did not eat him for a while, there was still the matter of air. Kevin looked like he’d had the foresight to try the rebreather, but it could have been ripped away from him as he was dragged under, or the tank could have been damaged and had less air than it should have. No matter which way Maria looked at it, she had to move if there was to be even the slightest chance to get him out of this alive.
That meant she didn’t have time for privacy as she stripped off her clothes and put on the wetsuit. Thankfully, for exactly this reason she had long ago taken to wearing a bikini under her clothes instead of underwear whenever she was on the Cameron, so at least she didn’t flash the cameras as they caught the whole thing. Before she could put on the wet-suit, however, there was the matter of her prosthetic. She removed the one she’d been wearing, which had been designed for everyday walking and the occasional tough hike, and set it aside as Cindy pulled out the black plastic case they’d brought with them.
“How did you know to grab this?” Maria asked her.
“Merchant was talking about it the other day. She was saying she was afraid she’d never get this moment on film.”
“Have you had a chance to test it out yet?” Simon asked.
“Nope. I haven’t actually been back in the water since Cortez. Not even a swimming pool.”
“This isn’t exactly the best time to try it for the first time, is it?” Cindy asked.
“No, but think of it this way: me using it untested will look good for the cameras, both Merchant’s real ones and Simon’s imaginary ones.”
Cindy undid the latches on the case and opened it. Merchant, although she was obviously very unnerved by all that was going on and looked like she’d rather drop everything to make sure that Ted was okay, continued to direct the camera crew, making sure they got a dramatic first shot of th
e case’s contents.
It contained a leg.
Not a real one, of course. It was a prosthetic just like the one Maria had been wearing, but where that one was rather standard, this one was special. It had been 3-D printed using exact specifications provided by her and Kevin. It looked sleek next to her other one, a fancy sports car compared to a utilitarian truck. It was black plastic and carbon fiber, molded to fit her stump, and hinged in ways her other prosthetic wasn’t. And instead of a foot at the end, it had an attached flipper that matched the other the Gutsdorfs had brought up.
This was Maria’s own personal diving prosthetic, one of a kind.
Cindy pulled it out and tested the joints. “There better not be anything wrong with this.”
“The company that made it for me offered a money back guarantee,” Maria said.
“Well, you can’t get your money back if you’re eaten,” Simon said.
Cindy smacked him. “Maybe talking about her getting eaten isn’t the best for her mental state now?”
“Don’t worry,” Maria said, forcing a smile. “It’s not my money anyway. The network bought it. If I die, they’re the ones who benefit.”
“Can I just state for the record that the network does not want you to die for any reason?” Merchant asked.
“What, no insurance on me?”
“Oh, you’re insured out the yin-yang. But I’m sure that I speak for everyone from TEC when I say we don’t actually want you do die. And it’s not even a ratings thing.”
“Thanks. I think.” Maria strapped on the diving leg, detaching the fin long enough for her to get her wetsuit on over it, then put the fin back on. Cindy strapped the other fin to her other foot as Merchant came up to her.
“I want to strap a GoPro to your head, but your life isn’t worth footage. If you think it will be too distracting at the worst time, just say so and we’ll say screw the video.”
“No, as long as it’s not loose, I think that should be okay. I’ll ditch it if I feel like I have to.”
“Okay, look,” Cindy said as she finished with the fin and went to the duffel she’d brought. “We’ve got a belt here with some flairs.”
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