Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller

by Rick Chesler

  Coco walked up to the button, and pressed it before anyone could protest. Instead of the usual whirring and humming sounds, there was nothing. Silence. The door didn’t budge.

  “See, it’s broken,” she said, removing her hand from the button, which still blinked red.

  “So now we can’t dive?” a woman asked. “I’m getting hot in this wetsuit.” She tugged at the collar of her neoprene suit, largely unnecessary in the tropics, but she had insisted on wearing it, so Coco had obliged her. “Better warm than sorry,” she’d said. But now it looked like she was sorry she was so warm. She began stripping off the wetsuit as Coco shook her head in reply.

  “Is there another airlock in the hotel?” Hatem, the would-be spearfisher asked.

  Again, Coco shook her head.

  Chapter 27

  Mick Wright was tense, on edge, as he waited in the Zodiac, idling in shallow water by the beach. Moments before he’d seen the towering dorsal fin of the megalodon plying the waters above the airlock. He shaded his eyes with a hand as he continued to scathe water over the hotel, but noticed the sun was sinking lower in the sky. He was glad Coco was going to be out of there before nightfall.

  His boat radio crackled with Clarissa’s panicky voice. “Mick, Tursi’s not responding to my whistle signals. She was acting weird the last I saw her.”

  “Megalodon is in the lagoon, by the hotel west tower. Must be spooking her.”

  “Can you take me out there so we can give her an escort, Mick? Please?”

  Mick pondered this while he stared at the ocean over the hotel. No signs of divers. Coco had apparently made it inside, but had not yet come back out, or at least had not yet surfaced with her dive group. He snagged a pair of binoculars, and focused on the surface of the water, searching for scuba bubbles, but he couldn’t see any. He wasn’t looking forward to giving her his reply, but he didn’t see any way out.

  “Clarissa, I can’t leave my post here. I told Coco I’d be on standby in case she and her dive group need a lift on their way back in. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to put humans before dolphins.”

  There was a beat too lengthy for ordinary radio chat pause, followed by: “You sure it’s not that you put certain humans before other humans, Mick? Forget it. Let my dolphin get mauled.”

  Mick exhaled heavily. About what he expected, but it stung all the same. He’d lose her over this, though, he knew that. And Coco...well, let’s just say they weren’t there yet. He’d like them to be, but they weren’t. She was a little wilder, independent. He supposed he could keep an eye on the lagoon for divers while he escorted the dolphin. If he saw any sign of Coco and her party, he’d abandon the dolphin to shoot over to them...

  “Okay, Clarissa, listen up. Be ready in front of the dolphin lagoon. I’ll pick you up. On my way.”

  He put the motor in gear, and accelerated the small craft out in an arc away from the beach and toward Clarissa’s dolphin lagoon. He kept glancing out toward the hotel as he went, watching for diver’s heads, watching for the megalodon, watching for anything that confirmed what he was thinking: you shouldn’t be distracting yourself with the dolphin when people’s lives are at stake. Thinking with the wrong head again.

  Then he was coasting up to Clarissa, who stood with a stern look on her face in the shallow water in front of a closed dolphin gate.

  #

  “So we’re all stuck in here now?” The wife of Egyptian diver Hatem Safar harangued Coco with the same question for the fifth time. She felt like the pied piper as she exited the dive shop out into the hotel’s main corridor, a procession of divers trailing behind her.

  “When we get to the main lobby, I should be able to get more information for you. We’re doing everything we can, trust me.”

  At least I’m doing everything I can. I’m not really sure about the management.

  The group cast nervous glances through the glass out onto the reef, which was now a shade darker as the afternoon wore on.

  “Can it bash in the regular glass here, like it did the train tunnel and the airlock?” one of them asked.

  “Highly unlikely,” Coco returned, although she meant unlikely it would want to do that, not unlikely that it could do it. They’d already seen what it could do after all. She wasn’t even sure how unlikely it was that it would want to do it, though, seeing as it had already struck twice. Why are you doing this, shark? Your whole life you spent in darkness in the canyon, and now you come up to the reef...what for?

  They heard voices ahead, and soon the hallway opened into the main lobby, a cavernous room with a domed, clear ceiling above which fish usually swam, but not now. It was hot in here despite the large size of the room. James White was talking animatedly to a small group of employees, while another group of guests milled about further away, some checking their cell-phones, even though they were told before checking in that there was no cell service on the remote island, and even if there was, the signal would not be able to get out through the underwater hotel. The hotel itself had hard wired lines running over the reef to a land-based terminal, and short-distance, higher frequency two-way radio signals were effective, but that was it.

  White saw Coco and the divers enter the room, and immediately excused himself from his conversation to approach them. His fake smile threatened to tear off his face as he neared.

  “Coco, I thought you’d be on the beach by now—did everyone decide they’d like to stay down here a little longer?”

  No one laughed or even smiled. The intensity of White’s smile fell back a notch. He eyed Coco, who broke the news to him, explaining that something—presumably the megalodon—had destroyed the airlock.

  “So you’re positive the airlock is not working? I could have Caesar look at it. He’s—“

  Coco and several of the divers all shook their heads at White. Coco spoke for them all. “It’s completely flooded behind the first door, and the button to drain and pressurize it has no effect. I’m pretty sure the outer door is totally crumpled.”

  “Water was flooding into the dive shop when we left,” Hatem added.

  White’s eyes bugged out as he turned to Coco. “Is this true?”

  Coco shrugged. “Maybe flooding is too strong a word, but there was definitely water seeping in from under the inner airlock door when we left, yeah.”

  White raised a hand in the air, and waved for Caesar to step over. The man excused himself and joined White, who asked him if any alarms in the dive shop had been reported.

  The Indian man shook his head as he lifted a mobile device, and glanced at its screen. “Not so far, it’s been—“

  Suddenly the gadget in his hand emitted a high-pitched siren noise, which Caesar silenced by swiping the screen. He held the phone farther from his eyes, as if straining to adjust his vision to small fonts.

  “Well, speak of the devil,” he said without looking up from the device.

  “What happened?” White leaned in over the small screen.

  “The emergency pressure door was just activated at the dive shop. The whole dive area has now been sealed off from the rest of the hotel.” He directed his gaze at Coco.

  “Was anyone else in there?”

  Coco and a couple of the other divers shook their heads. “We were the last ones out,” Coco said.

  “You’re positive?”

  Coco nodded. The engineer breathed a sigh of relief that made a few of the guests wonder how well he and White really understood their own systems. Then White changed the subject.

  “We’re ready to give the emergency escape pod system a try.”

  He looked at Caesar, as if challenging him to say otherwise, but the man remained silent, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. White prompted him for a response.

  “What do you think?”

  This time, the engineer nodded, albeit with what looked to Coco like reluctance. “It is ready to test, sir, but it may be best to test the unit without humans inside first. That’s what we would normally do.”

 
“Well, is it ready or isn’t it?” White’s voice raised a notch.

  “It is ready, sir, as far as I know, but there are many variables.”

  “Which pod should we try first?”

  “Any of the guest suites.”

  “The suites are all emergency pods?” one of the divers asked, his tone incredulous. White nodded.

  “They are indeed. They’re designed to break away and float to the surface in an emergency.”

  “I’d say this qualifies,” one of them said. White agreed with him. He pointed to the group of divers.

  “This group here is the adventuresome one, right? You guys were ready to swim out of here, so, what do you think? Want to give the escape pod a try?”

  The divers looked around at each other, and at Coco. A couple of them nodded, one shook her head, and the others, including Coco, remained unreadable.

  “Those of you who want to go would be placed into a suite—with complimentary food and beverages of your choice, naturally—and then the pod would be jettisoned from the hotel structure.”

  “What does ‘jettisoned’ mean?” the Hatem’s wife asked politely.

  White gave her a smile brimming with bogus understanding. “It means that the individual suite will pop off from the rest of the hotel—with you in it—and float to the surface of the lagoon, where you can be pulled to shore by boat.”

  “Can’t we just open the pod once we’re on the surface and swim to shore?” one of them asked. White deferred to his engineer, who appeared less than thrilled at the prospect.

  “Yes, there is a ceiling hatch—a trap-door in the ceiling—that you can climb out of. Then you will need to slide off the top of the pod into the water.”

  He glanced at Coco and saw her shaking her head, and so continued quickly. “However, it would be best to allow the entire pod to be towed to shore by small boat, and then you can exit directly onto the island.”

  “Yes,” White agreed, “that certainly sounds like the most practical way to do it. We can have Mick pull the pod to the beach in the Zodiac, don’t you think?” He eyed Coco and Caesar in turn.

  “Even a small boat like that can pull it,” the Indian confirmed. Coco was about to mention how Mick was already patrolling the lagoon in the inflatable boat, but checked herself. She didn’t want to let on that she’d already been to the island and back.

  “Make it happen,” White told Caesar, who picked up a radio, presumably to contact Mick.

  “Which pod should we use?” Coco asked, looking toward the row of suites.

  White shouted over to the engineer, now speaking into his radio. “Moon Jelly suite, is it?” The Indian man nodded in return, and resumed his radio conversation.

  “Moon Jelly suite,” White confirmed for Coco. “The entire suite will detach, and float to the surface.”

  A man and his wife standing nearby, not part of the dive group, took off running out of the lobby. “Moon Jelly suite, let’s go, honey,” the man said to his wife.

  “Hold up, please!” White called out. The couple stopped and turned.

  White waved for them to come back. “We need to do this in an orderly fashion. We’d like to have the dive group go first. If anything goes wrong, after all, at least they’ll be able to breathe underwater.”

  The face of the man reddened with pre-rage. “Nonsense! Whoever gets there first should be able to go.”

  “How many people can fit?” the wife asked.

  White looked to the engineer who held up some fingers in White’s direction.

  “Six,” White returned. “But this is only one suite. Each suite can carry six, so there’s more than enough capacity for everyone. This isn’t the Titanic.”

  “They said it was unsinkable, though,” the irate man said. “And look what happened. This place is already sunk, though.”

  “Sir,” White pleaded, “please just allow us to conduct our test run of the pods with this first group of scuba divers, and then you and your lovely wife can be on the very next pod to go, I promise.”

  The man was not placated. He walked closer to White, breaking from his wife’s grasp in order to do so. “If I say I want to be in that first pod, I’m going to be in that first pod! It’s fucking hot in here! My wife is feeling faint! We are getting on that goddamned pod!”

  The man’s wife called after him, “Steven, please, it’s all right.” He whirled around to confront his wife. “No, it’s not all right! If there’s a way out of this trumped up hell-hole, we’re going to be there.”

  White made eye contact with Coco, and cocked his head toward the hallway, his message clear: Get going. She nodded in response, and quietly rounded up her charges, the six divers, indicating for them to follow her with the same hand signals they used underwater. The angry man saw them leaving and spun around, calling to his wife.

  “C’mon Alice, we’re going with them.”

  Coco kept her group moving forward, not wanting to confront the man. If White wanted to put the pod to use, he’d have to run security. She heard a scuffle behind her, and turned in time to see White and Aiden, who had some experience with nightclub security at least, subdue the man in a bear hug and wrestle him to the floor.

  Quickly she turned back around, pushing her divers forward, hissing, “Let’s go!” They didn’t need to wait around until more people decided they were willing to fight for the right to be in the first pod. As she led the group toward the suite section of the hotel, she reflected on how bad things had gotten for people to be so vehement about their desire to be first to try an experimental underwater technology.

  Considering the failure rate of the rest of the hotel, Coco questioned whether she herself even wanted to be in the first group to try one of the escape pods. Not really, she thought. Why did she really need to go now, anyway? They won’t be diving, except in the most extreme case of things gone wrong. Once she left the hotel, now that the airlock and tunnel were damaged, there was no getting back in. White (he was still her employer, after all) would want her here. If this first pod evacuation was successful, there would be others, too. She would lead them to the pod, but stay behind in the hotel. Plus, Caesar had said the capacity of the pods was six people, and she would make seven, so that settled it.

  Coco glanced to her left through the clear wall that looked out on the reef. Definitely darker now. The sun was setting. She picked up her pace a little as they neared the suites. It would be nice to spend the night on land, she had to admit, but she had a job to do down here. And with Mick involved with Clarissa, spending the night on land was less attractive. It was hot and stuffy down here, though, and the people were testy. Understandably so, but still. Get these people on this pod.

  They reached the suites wing, and Coco found the Moon Jelly suite, the medusa form of a jellyfish etched into the door. As promised, the door was unlocked. She opened it, and held it open for the six divers who filed into the luxury suite with their scuba gear. Coco stood there for a moment before entering, listening down the long hallway for the sound of approaching footsteps. If there was an angry throng coming to demand entry to the pod, she’d rather know about it now.

  Her ears were greeted with only silence, however, so she stepped into the suite, closed, locked, and double-checked the door. She took a deep breath, facing the closed door in case anyone was watching. Stay calm. Be a leader. Be strong. She wasn’t sure why she had to remind herself of that, but for whatever reason it made her feel better, so she did it. It’s up to you to keep these people safe. Do it.

  The divers were standing against the scenic window, looking out on the reef, where the exterior lights had just come on with the onset of evening. “Looks nice enough out there,” one of them remarked. Coco thought, but did not say: Most sharks are nocturnal, and become more active at night. Another answered how she was looking forward to staying in a regular hotel, and just scuba dive on the reef when she wanted to see it. “Amen to that,” another replied.

  An intercom set into the wall near
the door crackled with James White’s voice. Are you ready? Coco walked to the LED touchscreen, clicked an icon, and spoke into the microphone.

  “All seven of us now inside the Moon Jelly suite—escape pod, that is—myself, and the six scuba divers.”

  “Coco, I need you to stay behind in the hotel, if that’s all right with you. We’re short-staffed down here since we can’t do any shift changes, and people have to sleep some time.”

  “No problem, Mr., White. I understand.”

  “Caesar is going to come on now and explain to everyone what to expect, so be sure to gather them around the intercom, and turn up the volume, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  “When he’s done, let them know you’ll be staying in the hotel, and let yourself out.”

  “Copy that.” Coco waved everyone over, and told them to listen to the instructions.

  The Indian engineer’s voice came over the intercom. “None of you need to do anything, but I just want to tell you what to expect. Ideally, all of you should be in a sitting position. It should be a smooth ascent to the surface, but in case you encounter...turbulence...it is safer to be lower to the floor, okay? The pod is designed to float ceiling up, in the same orientation as it is now, but it...”

  “But it’s untested,” Coco completed the sentence for him.

  “Right.”

  Coco looked back, and was glad to see the divers all taking seats of their own accord.

  “It should be a slow but steady rise to the surface. When you reach the surface, one of our boat operators will be standing by in a small boat to tow the entire pod to the beach. Do not open the door yourself, wait for instructions. Coco, you have the walkie talkie?”

  Coco felt along her belt. “Yes.”

  “Please give it to someone in the pod so that they can communicate if necessary with Mick in the boat.” Coco designated Hatem as the one in charge of the radio. She briefly showed him how to use it, and then handed it to him.

  She told the engineer over the intercom that they were ready.