The flare didn’t penetrate far into the gloom, although she got the impression that the cavern was huge. She also got the distinct impression that she wasn’t in here alone. Somewhere out in the darkness, she heard the echo of something scaly or rough scraping again stone. It couldn’t be Call It George. She’d left it back in the tunnel, unless…
Oh wow. She had a thought, but it was too mind-boggling to give any credence. What if Call It George was still back in the main tunnel, but also in here? What if the mutant turtle creature was just that big?
Tentatively, she removed her rebreather and tested the air. Immediately, she had to fight from choking on the rancid stench. She remembered how, two days again, she’d almost been pleased by the natural scent of animal guano permeating the air of Isla Niña. This odor was like that, except there was no way anyone would ever try saying there was something pleasant about it. Turtle shit, she assumed. And, if Call It George was as large as Maria now suspected, probably a massive amount of it. She imagined a steaming brown pile roughly the size of a house and nearly gagged.
After a few breaths to get used to the stench, though, she thought she could detect a few other things. For one, while the air still tasted stale, it was at least breathable. She felt like she could get enough oxygen. That meant that, somewhere on the island, a lava tube must pierce the surface and act as an air shaft. Good to know, in case anyone ever needed a way in that didn’t require diving and then swimming past a sea monster. She also thought she could smell something like putrid meat. Probably Call It George’s food, or at least whatever might be left of it.
As much as Maria didn’t want to admit it, that was likely where she would find Kevin.
Doing her best to follow her nose, Maria gently paddled first one way and then the other. Already she felt like she was lost. The cavern was huge, and without anything to act as a landmark, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to find the side tunnel again. When it was time to beat a hasty retreat, she would have to find another way out.
This is stupid, Maria thought. I’m not going to find anything this way. She thought about it for a second, then called out. “Kevin?” She doubted that yelling into a huge cavern that housed a giant sea monster was the best idea she’d ever had, but she was running out of ideas and adrenaline. And her body, still not used to being in the water, was tiring out fast. She waited for a few seconds, half expecting the giant turtle head to lunge out of the darkness and snatch her from the water.
That never came. But for the briefest of moments, Maria thought she could hear a distinctly human moan.
“Kevin?” she said again, although not quite so loud this time. A heartbeat later, the moan came again. This time, she thought it might sound something like her name.
Maria swam in the direction of the sound, where she soon found rough and ragged rock beneath her feet. The water got so shallow that it was only up to her knees, which made movement surprising difficult. Not only was she still wearing her flippers, which were hardly the best thing to have on in shallow water, but her prosthetic simply wasn’t designed for normal walking. It kept moving in unpredictable ways. No, actually not unpredictable at all. The way the joints kept snapping this way and that, it was like her fake leg was still trying to swim. If she got out of this, maybe there were some improvements she could have made.
Even with the flare, the occasional rocks jutting out of the water were pitch black. That was why it was so easy to see the thin piece of orange-colored material floating in the water nearby. She splashed toward it and picked it up to inspect it. A torn piece of the Zodiac. She had to be close.
“Kevin?” This time, she kept her voice to just above a whisper.
And she got an answer.
“Maria? …here.”
Kevin’s voice was faint, and he was obviously in pain, but his words were clear. Taking more care not to splash and alert anything in the water that she was here, Maria followed his voice until she saw a much larger piece of the raft half submerged in the water, floating under a rough, dark overhang of rock. Although it was folded over on itself, the chunk of Zodiac was still at least the size of a man and, as she watched, it shifted slightly from the inside.
“Kevin?” she said again as she pulled away the torn fabric.
He looked surprisingly good, for someone who had been nearly eaten by a monster sea turtle. He lay in the water, the rebreather still near his mouth, but the scuba tank was practically crushed and a couple jagged pieces of the tank had torn gashes in the chest of his wetsuit. There was some bleeding there, but not nearly as much as there could have been. Maria had been right: the Zodiac had taken the worst of the attack.
His eyes were closed, though, and his breathing seemed shallow. “Kevin? Honey, speak to me.”
He mumbled something.
“I couldn’t hear that.”
He said it again, louder but still too slurred to make out. She leaned in close and put her ear close to his mouth.
“I… said… did you have… a nice… swim?”
Maria backed away, looked at him incredulously, then fought not to laugh. “You bastard. Next time you want to help me overcome my fear of going back in the water, pick a less deadly way to teach me the lesson.”
“Oh, trust me… not part of the plan… was just going to get you to a swimming pool and throw you in.”
She gave him a playful smack in the arm as he struggled to sit in an upright position. He made a sound in return that was half-chuckle, half-grunt of pain.
“Are you okay?” Maria asked.
“Ribs?” he said, sounding unsure. “Ugh. Yeah. I think some broken ribs.” He looked around in the flare light, only now registering their environment. “Where are we?”
“Lave tube caves under Isla Niña,” Maria said. “Apparently, the home of Call It George.”
“Oh.” He tried to get to his feet, but his equilibrium was off and he splashed back into the water. Maria looked around nervously, certain that any moment now their noise would attract the cave’s resident.
“Is that scuba tank still usable at all?” Maria asked.
“Uh, pretty sure no,” he said.
“We’re going to have a hard time getting out of here, then. I think there might be a way to the surface of the island, but I haven’t seen it. The only way out that I know of for sure is underwater. And also occupied by a sea monster.”
“So we don’t care about using this term anymore? Sea monster?”
“It almost swallowed you. If the name fits, after all.”
“What about your tank?” Kevin asked. “Still plenty of air?”
“Yeah, for the moment. Maybe we can switch off as we swim. You know, you have the rebreather for a few seconds, then me.”
“Going to make for an awkward swim, but probably our only option.” He got to his feet again. This time, he almost kept his balance, but as the ripples of water pushed against his legs, he started to topple again. He reached out and grabbed the overhang he had been under, and for a few seconds, that held him up.
Then he fell again. Not because his legs wouldn’t support him, but because the overhang shifted, moving away from them.
That wasn’t a rock overhang.
Both of them scrambled to back away as the “rock” shifted, moving up and down a little. Maria saw how the light from the flare had cast shadows on it, making the irregular dark surface look like stone. Now that it moved, though, she could recognize the irregularities not as cracks and fissures but as scales. Her eyes followed the “overhang” to where it connected to a “wall,” a wall that was now throbbing with underlying musculature. She followed the wall up, up, all the way up to the ceiling, where it abruptly curved away.
The large overhang was in fact Call It George’s atrophied flipper. The wall was Call It George itself. And the giant turtle’s shell was…
She didn’t see one covering the creature, but now that she had a true sense of the thing’s scale, she understood. It didn’t have one, but it
was still apparently driven on some primal scale to feel like it needed one to hide in.
The lava tube she had come in through was its head hole, which meant that Call It George’s shell was the island itself. For all intents and purposes, the massive sea turtle was Isla Niña.
And they were standing inside it.
“We need to get out of here. Now,” Maria said.
Kevin, unable to take his gaze away from the wrinkled and pocked skin of the ungodly-huge creature, nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Maybe a good idea.”
A harsh, angry-sounding keen echoed through the chamber. The flesh near the flipper bunched as the sound got closer. Call It George was pulling its head back into the cavern. It knew they were there, and it was coming for them.
“Where’s your exit?” Kevin asked.
“Uh, I don’t know.” She looked back in the direction she had come, but as the light of the flare flickered and lowered, she saw that she was completely lost. There was water, there was darkness, and that was it. Any remaining indication of where she had come in was gone.
“Here.” Maria handed Kevin the harpoon gun. “Watch my back while I try to find how I came in.”
Kevin eyed the harpoon. “You know, under any other circumstances, I would be confident that this was enough. Now though? I don’t think it is.”
Maria didn’t get any chance to dive back in the water and try to find the way out. Something loomed out of the darkness, flinching back slightly at the light before coming into full view.
Call It George. A sea turtle. Neither title inspired much awe or fear. Neither one gave the proper to credit to the massive, magnificent, and terrifying beast looking at them.
Its head, curved around toward them on its impossibly long neck that resembled those of the Galápagos saddleback tortoises, was clearly-tortoise like in origin, but there was no one species that Maria would have been able to identify as its closest relative. She could see aspects of green sea turtles, leatherback turtles, various tortoises, and snapping turtles. All of that would have been fascinating enough even if it weren’t for the fact that the head alone was ten feet tall.
Yes, definitely looks like Gamera, Maria said. And definitely bigger than the one that grabbed Kevin. There’s more than one.
For several seconds, she could have believed Call It George didn’t mean them any harm. The way it held its head, Maria was tempted to say it looked more curious than anything else.
Then it opened its mouth, and Maria heard something she’d never thought of in her wildest imaginings: the piercing, grunting roar of a giant killer sea turtle.
It lunged at them.
Maria shoved Kevin aside as the gigantic open mouth hurtled toward them. They both fell flat in the water, but not before she felt the breeze of Call It George’s head passing over them. She wasted no time floundering in the water, instead getting right up, pulling her knife from the sheath, and ramming it up into the turtle’s neck. To something that size, the knife might as well have been nothing more than a thumbtack, but it was large enough for the creature to feel it. It jerked away, almost taking Maria’s knife with it. She got a firm grip on the handle at the last moment, and as she yanked it out, hot blood spattered her face.
Hot blood. Interesting, the biologist in Maria thought, before it occurred to her that maybe she had more pressing things to worry about.
“Kevin, get up!” she yelled. “Run!”
“Where?”
“Hell if I know!”
He was up and splashing away before Maria herself could get her balance again. There was a pause in the noise, as though he were stopping and debating if he were leaving her behind. Thankfully that didn’t last long. Maria could handle herself, even if she suspected that after this she might have a few more traumatic issues to tack onto her previous experiences.
No biggie, she thought. Whatever doesn’t kill me only makes me sing more lines from that stupid song before I stop freaking out.
Call It George’s head and neck swung upward into the darkness just as the flare sputtered out. Making sure that she kept her bearings in the dark as much as possible this time, Maria crouched down and grabbed her last flare with her free hand, but she didn’t ignite it. This one needed to last as long as possible, and there was a possibility she could use the darkness to her advantage. Somewhere behind her, Kevin’s splashing stopped. He said a low curse that she couldn’t quite hear, but that was the last noise he made. She worried for a moment, then figured that if something had happened to him, the sounds would likely have been much worse, like the frantic splashes of someone drowning or the sickening crack of bones as the giant turtle crushed him in its mouth. For these few seconds, everything went quiet. Maria forced her breathing to calm down, knowing her survival over the next minute might rely on her being as quiet as possible. It seemed unlikely that the darkness would hide her for long, given that this was apparently Call It George’s natural state. Its eyesight in the dark was probably pretty good.
Which she might actually be able to use to her advantage, she realized.
For several seconds, there was nothing. Then she felt a breeze on her skin, soft at first, but getting stronger and coming in regular intervals. Breathing. Call It George’s head was nearby, probably sniffing her out.
Something bumped her hand in front of her.
There was no time to think. Maria turned her head away and ignited the flare. The sudden brightness hurt her eyes, even when she wasn’t looking directly into the light. A loud, surprised grunt from the creature, though, told her that it was affected even more.
Without looking, Maria thrust her knife in a downward arc, hoping that she would just happen to hit something important. The knife squelched, digging deep into something soft and spraying a substance that felt like jelly all over Maria’s hand. Call It George made a noise that could only be a scream of pain. The knife was yanked out of her hand, and she fell back into the water. Looking up from her position on her butt, she finally saw what she had done. The knife was sticking out of Call It George’s eye. She’d hit it near the bottom, and a dark puss was flowing freely from the wound.
Before she could move, Call It George lunged downward at her, its razor-sharp beak open wide to rip her apart.
Then there was a harpoon sticking out of the roof of its mouth, protruding through its flesh and presumably into its brain. Call It George thrashed its head back and forth, hitting it on the roof of the cavern and against its own body. Kevin’s hand gripped her by the shoulders and pulled her away as the head fell, causing a massive splash in the shallow water.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Thank you right back,” he said.
Call It George’s one good eye was facing both of them, and it blinked uncertainly in the light. Maria waited a few seconds to see if it would go for another attack, but it didn’t appear to have the energy. Kevin had hit something vital. This massive creature was dying.
Maria got to her feet and took a step forward, her free hand held out to touch it.
“Maria, I don’t think you should…”
“Shh. Can’t you hear it?” Unexpectedly, she was unable to keep her voice from trembling. Although the giant turtle-thing was no longer making those terrifying roar and grunting noises, the sound now coming from deep in its throat was somehow so much more horrifying. It was a sound that transcended species, the sound of pain and fear.
Kevin came up behind her and put his own hand on the creature’s skin. She’d been afraid she would have to explain herself to him, but he was apparently on the same page. Not a minute earlier, Call It George had been trying to eat them, to kill them. But there had been no malice, no hatred in the action. It had been following its nature. They had been following their own in trying to survive. The fact that they had won did not make them superior. They didn’t have the right to crow about their achievement and treat it like a trophy. They’d simply been lucky.
By Maria’s way of thinking, Call It George was not a
n enemy they had vanquished. It was instead a magnificent, beautiful animal whose survival had been at odds with their own. It deserved their respect. Maybe even a little of their sorrow.
A tear ran down Maria’s cheek as she stroked Call It George’s rough skin. She looked over and saw that Kevin was crying as well. Call It George hooted pitifully several times, then went quiet. Its one good eye half-closed, then stopped.
“It’s gone,” Maria said softly.
“She,” Kevin corrected. “At least biologically.”
Maria nodded. She’d already suspected as much. “How can you be sure?”
“Because I found something. This isn’t over.” He waved for her to follow him as he went back the way he had run in the dark. Maria followed, holding up the flare like a torch for both of them to see. Back beyond the enormous flipper, the water grew even shallower, leading up to a ledge of rock just over the water. No, not rock, Maria realized, at least not completely. The volcanic basalt might have formed the base, but it had been shored up with turtle guano and what might have been sea lion bones into a more or less circular shape.
Maria knew what she was looking at even before she saw the contents. At about thirty feet wide, it was probably the largest turtle nest in existence.
She saw footprints and scuff marks in the side of the rough structure where Kevin had blindly run into it. There were a number of shattered, pale pieces of material strewn all over the inside. Next to these were two eggs, each one by itself almost as tall as Maria. The tops had been broken open, and there were scraps of turtle-like bone all around them. Something had eaten their contents.
Maria thought of the breeding habits of the Nazca booby somewhere on the islands above her. When boobies laid their eggs, they always laid two at a time. This was believed to have evolved so that the boobies would have a maximized chance of breeding, one egg acting as a failsafe in the event that the first egg was eaten or failed to hatch. But once the two eggs hatched, the harsh realities of life in the Galápagos would set in. There simply weren’t enough resources for the parent boobies to take care of two chicks at once. The strain would kill them if they tried.
Galapagos Below Page 14