“We’ve got everyone!” Amani yelled up at the helicopter. “Go up! Up, up, up, up!”
Quinne knew the last thing she probably wanted to do in this situation was look down, yet she couldn’t help herself. The helicopter jerked upward, a move that would have caused Quinne to lose her grip if Amani weren’t hold her so hard that the young woman’s fingernails tore up Quinne’s arm. The view below them was breathtaking, and amazing, and horrible, and a thing out of nightmares. Tentacles now swarmed every part of the Lucky Lady Duck, and the ship sank below the water faster than it had any right to.
As the helicopter went higher and higher, desperate to get out of the way of the few tentacles still trying to grasp for it, Quinne’s view of the chaos and destruction became more complete. Huge sections of the ship had been broken off or else pulled off, and many translucent tentacles grasped for each piece, greedily yanking them down into the deep blue. There were still some people down there, tiny thrashing specks in the water, but many of those vanished as Quinne watched, sucked down by something no one could see. Up, and up, and up, and now Quinne could see the shades of darkness in the water, a slowly expanding round patch of shadow showing that something was under there, something massive, something that had somehow become bigger than the ship it was swallowing up and still even appeared to be growing. As much as the curiosity taunted her, Quinne decided she most definitely did not want to see what created that dark blue blob in the Arctic Ocean. If she did, she didn’t think she would ever be able to sleep again.
The helicopter kept rising. The winch controlling the basket whined as it slowly raised them up. Below them, all signs that there had ever been a cruise ship here, along with untold numbers of families, workers, and various vacationers, completely vanished into the deep.
“I’m not sure how much longer I can hold on,” Quinne said to Amani, trying to keep her voice at a volume that only the young woman would have been able to hear. It was difficult, though, trying to still be heard over the buzz of the helicopter rotors, and Wanda and Jimmy must have been able to hear.
“Jimmy, I just want you to know that the brief time we were married was the happiest in my life,” Wanda said. “I love… Ow! What are you doing?”
“I’m tightening my grip so you don’t do something stupid like let go thinking that less weight will somehow save us. Did you honestly think I didn’t know you were going to try something like this? I’ve changed your bedpans, honey. I know you far better than you think.”
“Jimmy, please. I’m as good as dead anyways. Don’t sacrifice yourself just for…”
“Stuff it, Wanda. You didn’t think I married you just out of pity, did you? I love you, and I’m not going to give up any of my time with you. Period.”
“Very romantic,” Quinne said through clenched teeth. “But I still don’t know how long I…”
The sea erupted below them. Quinne looked down to see the megalodon jumping out of the water. She could see immediately, with the perfect clarity that is supposed to happen in the moment before someone dies and their life flashes before their eyes, that with its mouth wide open like that, and given its speed and size, that it would get them. At the very least it would snap Wanda, Jimmy, and Quinne out of the air. Quinne’s eyes went up to Amani, and they exchanged a look that was both terrified and meaningful. Amani was probably about to die as well, and possibly everyone on the helicopter, if the megalodon had just the right amount of height. Quinne wished she had the time to tell Amani how good it had been to spend her last hours with the young woman, that, while there obviously hadn’t been the time to fall in love or anything silly and romantic like that, that Quinne still cared, that if they had lived she would do what she could to help Amani come to terms with her sexuality, that their time on the doomed cruise ship would not have been the end. And Quinne thought she could see something similar in the way Amani looked back at her.
Quinne closed her eyes, waiting for the megalodon to snap its jaws shut around her.
“Holy fucking shitballs!” Amani yelled.
Quinne opened her eyes and looked down again just in time to see a final mass of tentacles whip up into the air. They were fast, faster than Quinne could have possibly imagined, and they grabbed for any last morsels they could get. They were probably long enough that they could have snatched the three hanging from the basket with no problem. But instead there was something in their way, something bigger, something more filling. The tentacles snapped around the megalodon, constricting so fast and tight that they managed to squeeze off the creature’s massive dorsal fin, which separated from the megalodon in a shower of blood and fell back to the water.
Before the fin could hit, the ocean beneath it opened up.
Everything happened so quick, less than a second, that Quinne would spend the rest of her life debating what exactly it was she saw. All she would have were fractured memories and images. There was a whirlpool, a vacuum opening in the middle of the sea. There was something in the middle, something dark, something throbbing. There were long white things, possibly teeth.
She wouldn’t be able to put all these shards of memory together until later, when she would come to the conclusion that the enormous, gaping hole in the ocean had to be a mouth, the mouth of something so large, and possibly still pulsing with growth, that the human mind didn’t have the proper context to fully understand.
The tentacles yanked. The megalodon fell back down before it could get its final meal, and disappeared as the waters crashed back down to cover the brief glimpse of the thing that had been hiding below the Arctic Ocean.
And when the waters were calm again, the massive bulk of the black shadow under the sea was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
“Quinne? Quinne! Come on back. You’re drifting from us again.”
Quinne blinked, only now realizing that she was in the helicopter. “Huh?”
She looked around at the interior of the helicopter. Someone was closing the doors, so Quinne assumed there wasn’t going to be any more attempts at rescues. Strangely, it looked like she had spaced out during the rescue of some other people: in addition to Amani, Wanda, Jimmy, Lundgren, and the teen girl, there were three more passengers, all of them dripping wet and huddled under blankets. In addition to the survivors there were two men and one woman that were obviously part of the rescue crew, as well as a pilot and co-pilot in the front. Given the size of the helicopter, it was sobering to see how much of the space was free rather than crammed full of passengers of the doomed Lucky Lady Duck. The only good thing about this was that the few survivors were able to get food, blankets, and medical attention immediately.
The female rescue worker was in the process of looking over Quinne’s arm and praising Jimmy for the job he’d done on it under the circumstances. Amani was on her other side holding Quinne’s hand. Quinne squeezed it, and Amani squeezed back.
“What happened?” Quinne asked. “Did I pass out?”
“It looked like you were still conscious,” Jimmy said. The makeshift bandage over his missing eye had been replaced by something sturdier and more sanitary, but that didn’t make him look any less rough. Wanda was asleep and snoring gently beside him. Quinne couldn’t blame her. Her body, such as it was, had probably been working harder to keep her going than any of theirs had. “Your mind just took a little break, is all. Wolfe over there didn’t seem too concerned as long as you came out of it at some point.” He pointed at the female rescue worker, who nodded at Quinne in response. When Wolfe moved off to check on the teenager, Amani leaned over and whispered in Quinne’s ear.
“By the way, she’s probably too much of a professional to say anything, but given the way Wolfe looked at you when she pulled us in, I think she might be a fan of yours. Or, at the very least, she recognized you.”
Quinne made a mental note to give the woman an autograph at some point as a show of appreciation, provided she could bring it up in such a way that wouldn’t make Wolfe feel awkward.
Hol
y shit, what the hell am I even thinking? Now is not the time to think about giving autographs, Quinne thought. Or maybe it was. Maybe her brain desperately needed to latch onto something normal, or at least as normal one could get when it came to the idea of signing naked pictures of oneself. All of these people here, rescue crew included, had been through something horrendous.
“The other rescue helicopters,” Quinne said. “What about them?”
Amani shook her head sadly. “I overheard some of the chatter from the pilots,” she said quietly so the rescue workers wouldn’t hear. “Of the five choppers, two went down. The pilot of one was recovered, but everybody else on those two…”
“Gone,” Quinne whispered. Amani nodded. Gone just like thousands of people who had simply wanted to go on a fun, out of the way vacation. Just disappeared into the icy waters, and no real explanation for any of it. Would any of this ever get explained, Quinne wondered, or would the sudden appearance of three prehistoric monsters and one, well, one something else just become a mystery that would haunt people for generations, like the disappearance of the Roanoke colony or the unknown fate of the crew of the Mary Celeste? Hell, would anyone even believe any of the survivors at all when they told stories of what had come out of the ocean that night? Would there be any proof, or would late-night pundits just try saying that the survivors suffered from some kind of group hallucination?
“Two other helicopters,” Quinne said in hushed tones. “Did anyone else get rescued?”
“One helicopter found two more people,” Amani said. “The other was going out to check on something they thought they saw. The pilots are spooked, obviously, but they’re going back out anyway. Apparently there’s more on the way, but no actual ships will come within a certain radius.”
“They’ll probably declare the area a radiation zone or something, some kind of waste spill or something else like that they can use to cover it up,” Jimmy said. “I highly doubt any of this incident is ever going to get looked into. At least not by anyone that doesn’t wear a black suit, sunglasses, and report to a government agency without a name.”
“So that’s it,” Quinne said. “Us in here, two others, and whoever they might find still floating out there. Out of everyone.” She thought about Becky, the girl in the Lucky Lady Duck suit, and Sarah, the woman who had asked for Bobby in her final moments. She thought of the boy who had been reading in the hall during the first attack. Hell, she even thought of the asshole in the red trucker’s cap. He would be dead, too, and he deserved it just as little as anyone else had. People might try to tell stories about what had happened here. News organizations would interview the few survivors repeatedly. Shit, someone would probably get a book deal out of it, although Quinne already swore that wouldn’t be her. Everyone who hadn’t been here would try to find someone to act as the hero that Masterson had so desperately wanted to be. But there were no heroes in situations like this. Just some people who happened to live, and many, many more who hadn’t.
While Quinne would have normally thought that the insides of helicopters would be too loud to hear anything, these apparently had something in them to cancel the noise, all owing Quinne to hear talk from the co-pilot about the last helicopter out looking for someone. There were two objects in the water, apparently. Quinne hoped that, whomever it was, they were still alive.
“And any more sign of that… that thing?” Quinne asked.
“It seems to be gone,” Amani said. “No sign of it. Just vanished as mysteriously as it appeared. The rescue people still don’t want to take any extra chances, though.”
Quinne wanted to ask what would happen to all of them now, but that would be a waste of breath. That answer could only come in time. How Jimmy would live with one eye, how much longer Wanda had, whether Amani would come to grips with herself and her family, even what Quinne did from here—there were never any easy answers. Quinne gripped Amani’s hand, though, and then also lightly took Jimmy’s in her damaged hand. Jimmy in turn took Wanda’s. Four survivors that only still existed because they had found a way to do it all with someone else rather than alone.
“They’ve found something swimming in the water!” the co-pilot said. “But they don’t think they’re human.”
Every one of the survivors of the Lucky Lady Duck tensed, certain that they were about to hear of yet another creature from the deep coming after them. When the co-pilot spoke again, though, they all relaxed.
“Uh, they say it looks like two huge rats.”
The End
Read on for a free sample of Megalodon: Apex Predator
Prologue
The young boy stood on deck long after everyone had gone to sleep. He liked the rough seas and cold air of the Drake Passage. Even at the young age of ten, he was fascinated by experiencing actual exotic places in real life, and his father indulged his every whim.
The moon was near-full, stars bright and twinkling, and the boy could see the ocean lit up in magical silver and blue. He grasped the frigid handrails with bare hands and tried to see as far as he could into the night.
A slight, freezing breeze picked up, and the boy burrowed into his fur-lined leather jacket. On the wind, the boy could’ve sworn he smelled something like rotten fish parts. Specifically, the kind that already had bugs eating them, lying in the heat for days. But here, it was ice-cold.
Despite his thick coat, his arms brought a chill. He didn’t like that wind and the smell it carried. This wasn’t the ocean he knew. Then again, he had come here to experience a new sea. Right where the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans met, as far south on Earth as he could get. Maybe this was part of these waters, but the boy felt in his gut that smell wasn’t supposed to be there, and it especially wasn’t supposed to be so close and strong.
He wasn’t allowed to be out of bed in the middle of the night, and suddenly, he was so frightened that because he’d disobeyed, he was now going to be punished in a most awful way. Waves kicked up around the yacht and the boy’s tender stomach heaved. He puked right onto his hands, still grasping the icy handrail, as the boat shifted high and low in the now incredibly rough seas.
The boy heard yells, but when he tried to turn and run to the voices, his hands had frozen to the metal handrail. His vomit had stuck them stiff to the bar in moments in the sub-temperature Antarctic night.
“Dada!” he cried out, but his own voice was squeaky and weak. Nobody could have heard him. He turned to the handrail again, hearing more people onboard calling out. The boy yanked as hard as he could on his hands, but they wouldn’t budge. Panic gripped him hard as that god-awful smell hit him again, but this time, it was in a blast of warm air from seemingly nowhere.
The people on deck behind the boy silenced all at once, and he saw flashlights and torches turn in his direction. He started shaking all over, slowly, ever so slowly raising his head to see what the lights had fixed on.
The warm air blew again, bringing the dead scent. He stared right into the most enormous, gaping, pointed-toothed white mouth ever imagined by a boy in his most secret nightmares. Teeth so big they were the size of his arms. His whole body would fit four times over in that mouth…
He dropped his jaw and wailed, “Dada!” He yanked on his hands and freed three fingers, not caring a lick about the blood pouring out from under his grip.
The mouth came closer. It had seemed like it was right about to eat him, but the boy realized the beast was so huge that there was still distance between the boat and the creature. The mouth. The ever-so-sharp teeth. Its breath, so strong it made the icy air warm, and so putrid only death could be the beast’s insides.
He screamed now.
Arms grabbed him from behind. “Got you, son, now let go!” It was his dad. His dad would save him.
“My hands! They’re frozen to the rail!”
His dad wrapped his huge, gloved fingers around the boy’s bleeding hands and pried them off with a quick rip. The boy didn’t make a sound. His eyes stayed fixed on the beast bearing down on
the boat from the water.
He let himself fall limp in his father’s strong hands, one arm under the boy’s tush and the other under his arms with his heavily beating heart pressed against his father’s own. His father dashed them across the swaying, rocking deck to the far side, back of the boat, away from the lifeboats and other people. The boy didn’t ask questions. His hands now ached and he peeked at them. The moonlight showed flesh torn from them in strips, and black blood soaked his palms and fingers. He’d left his father’s coat arms discolored from tops to elbows.
“What is it, Dada?” the boy whispered into his father’s ear.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know, but we have to get away from it.”
As they stood at the edge of the water, the boy couldn’t stand it, and looked over his father’s shoulder. He had to see how close the teeth were because the smell was worse than ever, and a burst of screams had risen up from behind them.
Now the boy saw the side of the thing, and it had to be some kind of great white shark. But it couldn’t be a great white. Great whites weren’t that big! The boy had seen them before. This thing was at least twice the size of one of those. Its gaping mouth rose high into the air above the boat, and it was as though it had neck bones because it turned its massive white head down to the deck, and the boy swore its teeth popped out of its mouth as it demolished the ship easily into a million pieces.
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