Kronos Rising: Kraken (vol.1): The battle for Earth's oceans has just begun.

by Max Hawthorne

  Stacy felt her mouth go slack. “I . . .”

  “You what?” Dirk demanded. His hands dropped to his side and he took a step toward her.

  He stopped in mid-step as an ominous grunt split the air.

  Dirk spun around and his eyes went wide. Behind him, Gretchen reared up out of the water, her scales streaming water like some sea serpent of old. The fifty-ton pliosaur’s toothy jaws were agape and her ruby orbs studied him with undisguised interest.

  “You’re upsetting her,” Stacy warned. “Keep your voice down.”

  Dirk swallowed nervously and she could tell he was trying to decide whether Gretchen was capable of dragging her substantial bulk up out of her pool paddock and flattening the ten-foot fence that separated them.

  Dirk lowered his voice. “Look, I saw you go into the utility room. Seconds later, the power got cut to every camera down here. And it’s been that way ever since. I know you were responsible. So before I present the evidence to Grayson, I’m asking you why.”

  Stacy felt a pain, deep in her chest. To have the man she loved believing she’d gone rogue, and be so quick to turn on her on top of it, was like a vampire getting a stake to the heart.

  “I . . . I can’t tell you,” she said, her eyes dropping to the floor. She shook her head sadly then looked up at him. “But it’s nothing bad. Can’t you just believe me and forget it, please?”

  “Believe you?” Dirk echoed mockingly. His expression turned ugly and he moved closer, only to gnaw his lower lip in frustration and back off as a growl vibrated the concrete under their feet. “Why should I?”

  “You know why.”

  When he just stood there with a stupid look on his face, Stacy shook her head in disgust. She turned to leave, then uttered a yelp of fear and surprise as Dirk grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her roughly back around.

  “You’re not going anywhere! I want to know what you’re up--”

  Dirk froze as Gretchen’s bellow shook them to their bones. His hands were still gripping Stacy’s shoulders as he held her at arm’s length. They both turned to look. Before their astonished eyes, the infuriated pliosaur threw one of her ten-foot flippers over the side of the pool and raised a third of her massive back up out of the water. She glared menacingly at Dirk. Her head was cocked at an odd angle and she started drawing deep, shuddering breaths.

  “What’s she doing?” Dirk asked, stunned that something so heavy could hoist itself up like that.

  “She’s scenting us!” Stacy shouted, alarmed and a bit frightened that Gretchen could and would ever consider leaving her pool. “And deciding whether to attack!”

  “Deciding based on what?” Dirk seemed unable to move, his hands glued to her shoulders as he locked gazes with the infuriated marine reptile.

  “On what’s happening! She’s not sure whether you’re attacking or trying to mate with me!”

  “Trying to . . . what?” Dirk’s jaw dropped.

  As his fingers continued to dig into her deltoids, Stacy caught a whiff of his aftershave. It was the one she’d given him for his birthday. The familiar, manly scent, combined with his intensity and sudden assertiveness, were a huge turn-on. She found herself wishing he’d always been like this, instead of a wishy-washy--

  Suddenly, Stacy had an epiphany.

  “Kiss me,” she ordered. “Quickly!”

  Dirk’s head whipped toward her, his expression pure incredulity. “W-what did you say?”

  “You heard me. Do it!”

  There was a tremendous splash as Gretchen’s other pectoral fin emerged from the water. It came down with a thunderous slapping sound, flattening a wheelbarrow and spraying brine in every direction. A low rumble echoed from the pliosaur’s toothy jaws and the muscles that powered her broad flippers began to bunch up.

  Stacy grabbed Dirk by the front of his t-shirt and pulled him close. “She thinks you’re harming me and I’m not wearing a controller. If you don’t want to die, be a man and fucking kiss me!”

  His panicking eyes scrolled down her face, along the slope of her nose, until they hovered above her parted lips. A second later, he yanked her toward him. Their mouths met and Stacy felt herself melt. The kiss started off aggressive but awkward, their tongues no longer used to one another. A moment later, however, and they fell back into their old groove. What started off as a survival tactic became much more. Six months of deprivation, stirred by furtive glances and occasional bouts of flirtation, were compressed into a single moment. The floodgates weren’t opened, they were shattered.

  Stacy gave a purr of delight as Dirk’s passion resurfaced. Their embrace became that of long lost lovers, their hungry kisses increasing in urgency and growing ever more avaricious. As he tried to come up for air, Stacy pulled him back down, pressing herself tightly against him. His groan as her body melded itself to his aroused her even more. She breathed hotly in his ear, her tongue lapping at his earlobe, her teeth gnawing the side of his throat in ways she knew drove him wild.

  Twenty yards away, Gretchen froze. Like a colossal snake, she continued to scent them, her eyes blinking repeatedly as she took in the heated exchange. Her growl began to reduce in volume.

  “Jesus . . .” Dirk panted. His eyes closed and his breathing grew more and more ragged as Stacy continued to writhe against him. When she saw his incisors cutting a groove in his lower lip she knew he was as aroused as she was. She locked her hands on his hips and started grinding her pubis against his in circular movements. “W-what’s she doing?” he gasped. “Is she still . . . ready to attack?”

  Stacy extracted her pearly whites from Dirk’s neck long enough to give Gretchen a sideways glance. She frowned as she realized the pliosaur was beginning to calm. Her jaw tightened and she extended her free hand in her charge’s direction, signaling her. A split-second later, the beast spread its slavering jaws and uttered a deafening roar.

  “I-I don’t think she’s buying it!” Stacy cried. She grabbed the collar of Dirk’s v-neck and ripped it from throat to navel. Her nails raked his sweat-soaked chest and she began pinching his nipples. As he rocked back on his heels, she grabbed the zipper front of her own bodysuit and yanked it all the way down. She saw his jaw drop as her magnificent, caramel-colored breasts sprang free.

  Dirk sucked in a gasp and stammered. “What . . . what are you--”

  “Shh!” she hissed. “We have to convince her!” With Gretchen’s growl still reverberating, she grabbed Dirk’s thick, black hair at the crown and, before he could utter a word of protest, forced his head down onto her nearest breast.

  Any complaints from her now-aroused ex were silenced as his mouth yawned wide and he began arduously sucking and licking her areola and nipple. Stacy emitted a throaty wheeze of delight as his hot tongue did the Devil’s doing. Soon, her nipples were so engorged with blood they actually hurt. She could hear her own breath coming in pants and felt her heart booming inside her chest.

  She signaled Gretchen to growl once more and then, taking advantage of the resultant distraction, thrust her hand inside Dirk’s khakis. As she latched onto his rapidly-growing member, his mouth opened wide around her swollen nipple and he uttered a wail of ecstasy.

  Fearing Dirk might somehow find the willpower to break her spell, Stacy pulled him hard against her chest, force-feeding him a mouthful of her other breast. He latched onto it like a ravenous infant, voraciously mouthing and suckling. With her other hand now free, she reached down and tore open the front of his pants. In an instant, she had him out and free and was stroking his rock-hard manhood like a well-oiled piston. She let slip a sigh of anticipation that matched Dirk’s as she reveled at his lengthy rigidity.

  God, he was big . . . She’d forgotten how girthy he was, it’d been so long.

  Still clenching his member in one hand, Stacy seized Dirk’s hair once more and lifted his mouth free from her saliva-soaked chest. She guided him up, back toward her waiting lips.

  “Is she . . . c-calm?” he managed, swallowing hard as hi
s body swayed hypnotically from the force of Stacy’s continued handiwork.

  Her sinful eyes held him prisoner as she continued stroking him. She could feel him wet and throbbing in her hand and knew he was dying to explode.

  “Let me check,” she whispered. Before his yelp of wanton surprise could escape his lips, she dropped to her knees and had him in her mouth. As he stuttered and stammered, trying to remember the English language, she gripped his shaft with one hand and cupped his testicles with the other. Like a python engulfing a gazelle, she began working him down her throat. Her hand started doing the trip-hammer thing, rebounding off his pubic bone and meeting her lips with perfect timing as her head bobbed smoothly up and down.

  “Oh . . . God! You’ve . . . . got to . . . stop!” Dirk hissed. His eyes were saucers rolling wildly around. He was obviously worried they’d get caught, but seemed disinclined to pull her hungry mouth free.

  Stacy paused and extracted his glistening member from her ruby-red lips with a deliberate slurping sound. “Relax, stud. Somebody killed the cameras, remember?” she said, smiling wickedly. “And now you know why!”

  “What? B-but . . . somebody might see us!”

  Stacy stuck her long, pink tongue out, lapping up the milkiness oozing from his engorged manhood, then wiped her mouth with the back of one hand and stood up. Retaining her grip on him, she leaned close, her glistening breasts jutting proudly out. “You wanna go somewhere?”

  Dirk’s head flung itself left and right then targeted the nearby shed.

  “Are you serious?” Stacy asked, still stroking him.

  “Why . . . why not?” Dirk said, his labored breathing synched with her hand movements.

  “But it’s so messy in there . . .”

  An impromptu predatory gleam appeared in Dirk’s eyes, one Stacy hadn’t seen in a long time. He reached out and grabbed her tightly by the hips.

  “It’s about to get a whole lot messier,” he growled as he guided her inside and shut and locked the door.

  Outside, Gretchen relaxed back into the water, her scaly chin resting on the pool’s edge. Her breathing had slowed, but her half-closed eyes remained focused on the shed.

  Like a silent sentinel, she continued to watch and listen.

  CHAPTER

  15

  The hunt was on.

  Slipping forward under cover of darkness, the Ancient continued to track his prey. Like the olfactory range-finders they were, the scoop-shaped nasal passages in his palate repeatedly sampled the surrounding sea, causing him to alter direction until he pinpointed his unsuspecting quarry.

  Descending to a depth of five hundred feet, the giant predator departed the Gulf of Mexico and continued on, invading the tepid waters of the Caribbean Sea. The nutrient-rich basins all around him abounded with marine life and were among his favorite hunting grounds. He gazed about. To his left, lay the sandy coastlines of Cuba, to his right, the craggy cliffs and beaches of the Yucatan Peninsula.

  All of a sudden, the bull’s deepset eyes crinkled up. Whenever he traversed this particular stretch of ocean, he felt the same strange pull. He had no way of knowing it was submerged memories – instincts that spiraled back to the Cretaceous. Nor could he comprehend that those same, migrational blueprints in his brain had been rendered obsolete, along with a good portion of the planet, by the impact of a billion-ton asteroid that struck not far from where he swam.

  He did, however, have a vestigial recollection of the world killer’s fiery impact. It was a gift bequeathed to him by his ancestors – the same forebears who were imprisoned in a nearby caldera and survived the subsequent conflagration that claimed both the dinosaurs and most of Earth’s marine life. They and their progeny had remained there as captives, history’s deadliest predators held in stasis for over sixty-five million years. They stayed until Nature saw fit to shrug her seismic shoulders and unleash them once more upon a ripe and unsuspecting world.

  As the fragrance of fresh whale spoor called to him, the Ancient accelerated. He had scented the group of cetaceans from thirty miles off and was closing steadily. It was a pod of sperm whales. He could sense the movements of their sausage-shaped bodies as they lumbered along. They were a mile ahead, moving at less than ten miles an hour. Although he refrained from utilizing his sound sight out of instinctive caution, based on their individual scents he could tell he was pursuing a large group. It was a fortuitous find; there were plenty of adults and calves, assuring him of bountiful feeding.

  Suddenly, the Ancient’s lips curled upward, revealing the tips of his palisade-like fangs. He could feel wave after wave of the sperms’ noisy echolocation clicks washing over him. The pod was alerted to his presence and had pinpointed his position. He inhaled the heady aroma of fresh whale urine, listening to their frightened squeals as they sped up.

  There was no more need for stealth. Ascending the water column like some humpbacked harbinger of doom, the pliosaur revealed himself to the frightened sperms. His ruby orbs reflected the moonlight and, even without his sound sight, his keen eyes could make out their fleeing forms a thousand yards ahead. Their squarish flukes pumped frantically as they increased speed in a desperate attempt to outdistance him.

  Accelerating to his top velocity of just over fifty miles an hour, the Ancient arced effortlessly around and ahead of the fleeing whales, passing them at a distance of five hundred yards. As he cut them off, the pod stopped dead in their tracks and started milling uncertainly about. They were obviously stunned that their pursuer had gotten ahead of them. The sound of their combined sonar clicks was indecipherable, an annoying broadband barrage as every member of the group focused their echolocation on him.

  The Ancient wheeled about until his scarred muzzle was pointed directly at the pod. Two hundred feet below the surface he hovered in place, his enormous body offsetting the tide’s pull with sinuous flicks of his barnacle-tipped flippers. Knowing his sonar emissions would be masked by those of his prey, the marine reptile began to scan his hapless quarry, his fanged jaws agape in anticipation of the pending meal.

  The pod numbered twenty-four in total. There were twelve large cows ranging from thirty-five to nearly fifty feet in length, six sub-adult males and females in the thirty to forty-foot range, and three calves ranging from eighteen to twenty feet. Being the youngest, and hence the most tender, the calves were the pliosaur’s first choice, meal-wise. As anticipated, their mothers began to bunch up in a circular formation around the helpless youngsters, their flukes pointed at the center and their toothed jaws directed outward.

  The Ancient’s glittering eyes shone as he studied the augmented defensive tactic. The sperms had learned from previous encounters with his kind. In the past, they tried defending themselves with their tails pointed out, attempting to utilize swatting strikes from their powerful flukes. Against a sub-adult pliosaur, the technique was marginally effective. But against a full-grown adult, it was useless. In fact, it made extracting a cow from the formation that much simpler; one devastating strike to the peduncle, right past the flukes, would cripple the chosen female, leaving her flailing helplessly as she bled out. Eventually, the rest of the pod would have no choice but to abandon her to save themselves.

  Now, however, the whales sought to fight back with their teeth. Any predator trying to attack a member of the pod had to risk being bitten on the way in. A grunt echoed from the marine reptile’s massive jaws – the pliosaur counterpart of a chuckle. He had been on the receiving end of hundreds of sperm whale bites over the centuries. In the beginning, when he was smaller, they had been painful, even damaging. Now, they were little more than a nuisance. The big squid-suckers simply lacked the sheer size and power to inflict significant damage. Moreover, their narrow jaws and relatively blunt teeth were designed to grasp soft-bodied cephalopods; they were incapable of piercing his thick-scaled hide.

  But it wasn’t the female sperm’s Marguerite formation the Ancient now had to contend with. Since his species had reappeared and spread throughout
the seven seas, the big cachalots had altered their social structure. Whereas before, large, dominant males led solitary lives, joining up with groups of females only for mating purposes, now things were different. One or more bulls typically traveled with cows and their offspring now, as protectors.

  As it turned out, there were three huge males functioning as sentries for this particular group. Their size made them easy to discern. As they broke off from the rest and advanced toward him, the Ancient sized up his opponents.

  The trio consisted of full-grown bulls in the prime of their lives, ranging in size from sixty-two to seventy feet in length, and weighing from seventy-five to one hundred tons. As they hastened toward him in a flying wing formation, his throat muscles began to ripple. A moment later, he started scanning them with his own, powerful sonar emissions.

  He took the biggest bull – the one spearheading the charge – as the leader. It was a monstrous beast with a massive, gnarled head that was peppered with plate-sized, circular scars and tiny eyes that blazed with fury. Its body bore the marks of numerous other battles, including tooth marks from at least one Kronosaurus.

  The Ancient began to move, his boat-sized paddles propelling him fluidly forward. Despite his tremendous size, he moved with eerie silence as he prepared to attack. He had no doubt as to the outcome of the battle. His speed and maneuverability were far superior to that of his outsized opponents. In seconds, he was six hundred yards away and accelerating.

  As he closed the distance, he felt the inevitable pummeling of the three bull sperms unloading their powerful sonar beams on him. Even from four hundred yards, the sound weapons packed a punch. Against the fragile nervous systems of squid and octopi, they were lethal. He knew. He had observed them in action, thousands of feet down. Against him, however, they were mere fin-slaps; they stung, but little more.

  The Ancient waded through the ongoing sonic barrage, relying entirely on sight and smell. The moment the fusillade began, he closed his jaw tight and stopped using his own sonar sight. He knew from past experience that his own sound imaging senses could be temporarily disabled by the assault. It didn’t matter. Here, near the surface, with the light of the full moon to aid him, he didn’t need echolocation. The cows’ guardians would never abandon the pod by diving to escape.