by Nick Thacker
Ben took advantage of that moment and swam a few paces away from the alpha male.
He reported the threat, raising his arms up and over his head to call the croc toward him.
Julie pulled herself out of the water, then turned around to watch the display out in the water. There was nothing she could do for him from up here. Ben was writhing around, making the same motions Julie had been, trying to dodge the massive croc’s attacks. The crocodile was taking a long, wide arc around to prepare for the next attack, giving Ben time to swim a bit closer to the wall. He went slowly, however, so as not to give the other crocs any reason to attack.
Ben was the designated meal of the alpha croc, and the others weren’t going to touch him until their leader had finished. Julie only hoped the leader was playing with him and would allow Ben enough time to get away before he decided it was time for a snack.
Please, Ben, Julie thought. Hurry.
They were standing on a makeshift pier, a long, narrow section of concrete that extended out into the larger tank. And from this vantage point, Julie could tell that it was, indeed, a tank.
The shuttle had stopped in the middle of the tank, Ben had broken the glass, and they had found themselves swimming up through crocodile-infested waters.
This can’t get any worse, Julie thought. There was nothing out here to use as a weapon against man or reptile, and there was no rope or ladder to throw toward Ben.
To top it off, she hadn’t seen Reggie or Sarah surface. She knew there was no possible way they could hold their breath this long, and since the crocodile tank was a closed structure, there was no way they’d found another way out. The entire pool was about a hundred feet square, and there was nothing else to hide behind, meaning she would have seen them surface by now.
Unless this just got worse.
Just then a loud klaxon sounded from behind her. She turned and saw a pole with loudspeakers pointing down and out on opposite sides barking the siren toward her and Susan.
She instinctively reached up and covered her ears. “What the hell is that?” she yelled at Susan.
Susan’s face was sheet-white. She, too, had been watching Ben’s progress as he faced off against the saltwater croc, but now she turned and stared at Julie.
“It’s… it’s an alarm. Telling the staff that someone’s initiated an unscheduled command.”
“An unscheduled command?” Julie asked.
Susan nodded. “Most of the animal facilities are automated as much as possible, to save on overhead costs. This one included.”
“Okay,” Julie said. “What does this unscheduled command mean?”
Susan’s face didn’t change. It hung there, hopeless and down. “It means someone called the order to start their feeding time.”
Julie closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe. The sirens seemed to only be growing louder in her ears.
53
THE CROC HAD FINISHED ITS arc and was about to turn and make its final lap down the long straightaway between it and Ben’s location. Ben was watching it out of the corner of his eye, focusing on the rest of the herd in his peripheral vision, and simultaneously making for the edge of the pier where Susan and Julie were standing.
He was going to have to dodge the croc’s attack at least one more time, but the croc wasn’t going to attack the same way again. It had learned that its prey was smarter than expected, so it would attempt to strike when Ben was least expecting it.
Which meant Ben put his odds of survival somewhere between ‘swallowed whole’ and ‘bloody mess.’ He preferred the first, but he still focused on the task at hand.
Get out of the water.
He’d never wanted to be on dry land more than right now. He’d trekked through the Amazon, splashed through shallow piranha-infested river beds, and had brief encounters with anaconda and black caiman, but this was something else entirely.
He was not interested in playing cat-and-mouse with a prehistoric apex predator any longer than absolutely necessary.
The other crocs’ heads were floating, their eyes and snouts poking above the surface of the water. Cold, evil eyes. Ancient eyes. Whatever it was Crawford needed them for, the two seemed a good fit for one another. Saltwater crocodiles and their reptilian leader, Adrian Crawford. A soulless, cold-blooded lizard.
The croc started in on him. What’s the plan, Ben? he thought. Dodge left? Straight down? He couldn’t win an underwater battle, and he was never going to out-swim the beast, so his only plausible chance was to dodge one way or the other and hope he’d guessed correctly.
The croc sped up, and Ben could see the water spraying up from behind it as it cut through the water.
A klaxon sounded from somewhere up in the distance, the noise ripping through the air and reaching Ben’s ears as his head rose and fell in the lapping waves. It was a strange sensation to hear the sound waves from above and below the surface of the water, and it only added to the confusion and chaos.
The hell does that mean?
He looked around, and noticed that the crocs were stirring. Their steady, completely still bodies were now sliding left and right, bumping into one another. He dared a glance back over his shoulder to see how far the alpha had before it was on him.
It had stopped.
Ben squinted, taking his hand out of the water to rub the ocean out of his eyes, and looked again.
It wasn’t moving. It was staring at Ben, glaring with those cold, evil eyes, and then it shifted and looked away.
Suddenly it flashed into motion, rolling to the side and swimming to the left. Ben watched it, then realized the others were following.
A crane had appeared above the water, swinging out slowly from behind a wall farther out. Ben watched the crane and saw that it held something in its claw.
A seal.
The seal was alive, kicking its fins and bleating like some kind of terrified goat. The claw reached out toward Ben, the crocs all watching with distinct anticipation.
Oh, crap.
Ben suddenly knew what the klaxon meant, and what was about to happen.
He felt a bump as one of the crocs pushed against him. The crane pushed the seal out farther, now right above Ben.
And then it dropped.
“Ben!” Julie shouted. “Get out of the —”
Ben didn’t wait to hear the rest of her sentence. He felt the panic rise in his chest, the adrenaline coursing through his veins as they tightened and every muscle in his body screamed in pain as he surged forward.
He didn’t watch the seal, but he saw a crocodile leap out of the water, fly over him, and then splash back down behind him, the croc’s heavy tail landing just to the right of Ben’s head. The force of the water’s impact with his head pushed him a foot to the side, and he almost took in a mouthful of water.
He heard another splash behind him — the seal, probably — and then immediately the sound of thousands of pounds of instinctually driven flesh tearing at one another to get to the meal.
Ben swam faster than he knew possible. His arms stung, his legs kicked, every foot agony, but he wouldn’t stop. He felt two more crocs bumping against him, and when he put his head below the water he made the mistake of opening his eyes.
The alpha was there, swimming straight up at him from the depths.
His heart caught in his throat, but he refused to hesitate. He squeezed his eyes shut once again and threw his arms out, pushing with his right and pulling with his left, the water making everything a struggle. He turned, rolling to the side just in time.
He hoped.
The croc’s massive body came halfway out of the water, one of its thick, scaly legs striking Ben below the chin. It was an accidental uppercut, but it was extremely effective. Ben saw stars, but he gritted his teeth, refusing to black out.
Get… to… the… dock…
The words repeated in his mind. Over and over again. The croc fell, the tidal wave it created pushing Ben faster away from it, and he plowed on.
He couldn’t move. He was already dead, unsure of whether it was his mind playing tricks on him or if this was some sort of extended hell he’d fallen into.
The hands grabbed at his shirt, his legs, one holding onto his hair. It hurt, but not really. He could feel it, but he wasn’t truly experiencing it.
Sounds of thrashing and tearing from behind him. And somehow squeals from the still-dying seal.
The water was frothy, foaming and white with the chaos, as if the ocean was now playing along with the sick game happening all around him. It had become a character here, a guide in Ben’s personal version of Dante’s hell, and it was laughing at him.
You can’t escape.
There were voices now — the ocean was trying to mock him? The crocs themselves?
More pulling, tearing, his hair hurt but it felt far better than the rest of him. He waited, squeezed his eyes shut, probably for good.
More voices. The seal? Begging for help?
No, these were womens’ voices. Gentle voices. Soothing, pulling him back out of it.
He was alive. It was hot, sunny.
He wanted to open his eyes, but the sun was there, too bright and menacing. He kept them closed.
He tried to breathe, then felt the water. It was still inside him.
He coughed, twice, then again a third and fourth time. It hurt, coming back out. It splashed around, making his wet clothes feel wetter, the humidity and sunlight and heat and cold all hitting him at the same time.
He groaned, then rolled over and threw up.
“Ben,” the voice said. “Ben, are you there?”
What kind of question is that? Where is ‘there?’
He threw up again, coughing bile and seawater.
“Ben, come back,” the voice said.
Finally, after deciding it was worth the risk, he opened his eyes.
Julie was there, kneeling, sobbing, holding him. He breathed, finally feeling like his body was able to provide the involuntary action without causing more pain.
“Ju — Jules,” he whispered.
She nodded.
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
She leaned down farther and held his head up, then kissed him.
He was about to enjoy the kiss, but suddenly a shadow fell over the sun, blocking it out.
The Hawk was there, along with two of his men.
54
“GET TO THE SECOND RING, now!” Crawford yelled into the phone.
“Sir, we have a team there already. Our own office is right below, and Garza is already —“
“I don’t care where the office is! I want every Ravenshadow soldier on that ring in thirty seconds.”
The kid on the other end of the line hesitated. “Sir, I don’t think that’s a —“
Crawford hung up. He didn’t need to hear the kid’s particular flavor of insubordination. ‘Sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ or ‘Sir, I don’t think that’s possible.’ Neither was an appropriate answer.
He was too upset to think. Too upset to plan a strategic attack on the CSO group. He had hired Garza for that job, and so far all Garza had done was upset the crocodiles in the research tank. He’d watched the crane being swung out from its hoist, watched the live feeding take place from his office above the hotel, watched Harvey Bennett get pulled out of the tank by the two women, Juliette and one of his own employees.
A useless waste, he thought. Changing the crocs’ diets would force his team to restart an important — and expensive — line of testing. The insulin levels in their blood would have massively spiked, not too mention thrown off every other carefully calibrated reading they were trying to collect.
It would take a week to normalize the crocs’ behavior enough to get a satisfactory blood sample.
He’d slammed his fist onto the top of his desk after seeing the charade of garish power his security contractor had displayed. He made sure to use his left hand. That was the hand he could no longer feel.
He reached for the bottle of pills he kept inside the top drawer of his desk. Opening the lid, he slid two of the capsules into his hand, then into his mouth.
I’m feeling too much, he thought. Calm down, just relax.
The pill was something the lab had been testing. He was impatient by nature, and having gotten so close to his ultimate goal — developing the ability to grow back limbs — only made him more zealous for victory.
He’d ignored the warnings given to him by Dr. Joseph Lin and the rest of the medical staff; that the medication was still far from understood. He didn’t care if his doctors didn’t understand the nuances and the intricacies of the new drug — he understood it.
It worked. So far, at least.
That was all he’d needed to know.
The drug had only one known detrimental side effect, but Dr. Lin had been assigned the task of eliminating that effect altogether. He’d failed, but he’d gotten close.
Crawford needed to get out to the second ring, but he pulled up the video of his laboratory that he’d saved to the desktop of his computer. He’d watched it a hundred times, even before Dr. Lin had wiped everything useful and tried to destroy the evidence. Crawford had saved the video long before the server hard drives beneath the lab had been erased.
It was all backed up anyway, and Crawford had ensured that the bulk of the data he would need to move forward was stored elsewhere, on an offsite server.
This video, however, he’d made sure to keep close. It was special.
It was proof.
He felt the effects of the medication hit him as he pressed play, then he sat down in his chair, leaned back, and watched the security footage.
Dr. Lin stepped up to the man’s enclosure — the chief of the tribe they’d captured in the rainforest, now called thirty-one dash three. He reached for the syringe and carefully administered the dosage, then his face saw 31-3’s face behind the glass.
The smile.
The chief of this tribe, smiling back at his captor. His eyes, clearly and cleverly masking the pain he felt.
It should have been impossible.
31-3 was exhibiting symptoms of ‘emotional resonance,’ or, in layman’s terms, he was ‘able to feel emotion.’ The drug was supposed to be able to fully suppress that emotion, to allow for the subject to be placed under severe stress and experience vast amounts of pain without feeling — or at least without reacting.
31-3, up to that point, had taken the drug and exhibited no emotional resonance whatsoever. He had simply sat still, allowed the medication to pass through his system, allowed Lin’s team to document the physical changes to his body, and allowed life to pass him by, just as every other subject had.
Until the drug stopped working.
The man smiled at Dr. Lin, a sign of emotional resonance they had thought was beyond impossible while on the medication.
But Crawford knew it was not impossible.
He knew, because he was personally aware of the drug’s side effect.
Crawford’s laboratory-assigned number was not on any record, and Dr. Lin’s petty actions in destroying the laboratory data would be the perfect scapegoat for why that was. Crawford had ensured that his record was nowhere in the research, that his name or assigned subject value did not exist in the system.
But Crawford knew.
He was the number 31-0.
‘Patient zero,’ he liked to say.
Dr. Lin’s previous assistant hadn’t been removed because of an infraction, or because she had deviated from some protocol.
No, the reason was much simpler than that. The woman had been removed because she knew. She knew about Crawford, because she had been the one administering his dosages.
His daily trips to the laboratory, to ‘check in on his team,’ were driven by a far more important objective: he needed the medication.
And he knew the medication worked well, with
one minor side effect.
It allowed the patient to feel.
He shut down the computer, grabbed the bottle of pills, and marched out of his office.
It was time to put an end to all of this.
55
THERE WAS NO WAY TO remove the tank from its mount and take it with them, and it was probably too large anyhow, so he was now worried they wouldn’t have enough air to get from the seabed to the surface.
Reggie had realized the answer to his problem when it was nearly too late. The oxygen tank was stored beneath the Subshuttle, piped in through vents in the floor, the access hatch and control panel hidden behind the plastic cupboard Ben had found.
He was lucky: there was a plastic hose stretching from the tank to the control panel, where the oxygen level was measured and reported on the LCD screen. He only had to rip open the rest of the wall panels to trace the hose, then pull the end of the hose itself up and out of the floor of the shuttle. He was able to rip the end of the hose from the vent system, then backtrack and pull the hose through the cupboards and out into the open. The air bubbles violently streaming from the end of the hose told him everything he needed to know.
There was oxygen — and pressure — still in the tank.
He allowed his chest to collapse, relieving his lungs of the stored carbon monoxide, then he placed his lips over the end of the hose and took a deep breath. The air tasted tinny, metallic, but in that moment it was fresher than any of the mountain air he had ever breathed.
He pulled the hose over to Dr. Lindgren, who reached for it and took a hit of the precious oxygen. They swapped once again, each taking another deep breath, smiling at one another the whole time.
We might just make it out of here, he thought.
He got to work on her foot, pausing every few seconds to take a breath from the hose Sarah held out to him. It took finding the makeshift wrench Ben had fashioned from the end of the broom handle and using it as a lever to work her foot and ankle out of the space it had been crammed into.