by Hunter Shea
It dies instantly.
“So, that’s all we had to do?” I mutter.
The steady thumping of the creatures against the ailing tour boat sets my teeth on edge. They’re going to reduce it to kindling way before it sinks from the grenade’s blast hole.
I look to Austin. “Okay, what’s next?”
“I’m all out of ideas.”
“And I’m out of weapons,” Henrik says, tossing the handgun down.
“There can’t be many more.”
Henrik shakes his head. He’s shivering. Shock must be settling in. “Four. Maybe five.”
“Do we just give them what they want?”
Austin puffs up. “Hell no.”
“But the kids…”
“We’ll figure something out.”
“We don’t have much time.”
Henrik slumps next to me. Blood is oozing between his fingers plastered to his side. “We’re not going to make land. It will be close, but close won’t save us.”
Austin helps me stagger to the bow. It’s so close. I can see the crowds and the dead Nessies. There must be hundreds of people now. Word spreads fast in the Highlands, even without phones or social media.
There are police and ambulances there, too. I can just make out their flashing lights.
We’ll have some ‘splaining to do.
Or, if we survive – which is a big fat if – maybe we can just melt into the crowd and make our escape.
But we need medical attention. And with that will come questions. People will finger us as the folks who brought an arsenal to stir up the creatures in the loch.
The remaining creatures know where we’re headed and have made a barrier of themselves between us and land. Christ on a cracker.
I look to my brother. Nothing has turned out the way we planned it. And if Henrik wasn’t here, we would have been dead ten times over.
If we go by the eye for an eye philosophy, I’d say we’ve come out on top. Twenty of those things for my mother and father. Still, I want more.
“Well, this is it. McQueen’s last stand.” I look around for a weapon and see only scared people.
Austin is lost in thought, biting his lower lip like it’s a cheap steak.
The ship’s engines suddenly die.
The monsters raise their heads from the water in a synchronized moment of bowel emptying terror.
I’d brace myself, but my body hurts too much to hold the tension.
We drift into their midst. We’ll be right where they want us in five seconds.
Four
Three
Two
O…
Chapter Thirty-One
Rob Rayman storms the shore with the assault rifle in his hands, looking like Rambo if Rambo was older and an accountant with a score to settle.
The creatures, their long necks and heads exposed, clumped close together, have made themselves an ideal target.
I yank on Austin’s arm and pull him down to the deck. I turn back to everyone behind us and order them to do the same.
Then the shooting starts. Bullets zip overhead, burrow holes into the ship.
All I can hear is otherworldly shrieking and the crash of water. People on the boat and shore scream for their lives.
And then it stops.
The tour boat continues its lazy but steady course to shallow water.
There’s a roar of applause, then cheering.
Austin and I barely manage to stand. The crowd on the shore has surrounded Rob and lifted them on their shoulders. He’s being paraded around like a conquering hero.
I look over the side of the ship.
The heads of the beasts have been separated from their necks, bobbing on the water like rotten apples.
Rob deserves all of their accolades. He’s a true blue hero.
He sees me and winks. Not only will he have the best footage of the most insane battle between man and nature, but he’ll also be the man who conquered the mythic, saving dozens, if not hundreds, of people.
I bet he’s glad he came over to my RV now.
None of our wounds are as bad as they feel. They stitch Henrik right up in the ambulance. I’m told I have to go to the hospital for X-rays. I promise them I will, on my own, soon. There’s so much going on, I just walk out of the ambulance and find Austin. He’s watching TV crews interview Rob.
“I got to him before they came,” he says. “Made him promise not to say a word about us. You think he’s good for it?”
“Yep. He’s going to be famous. People will make movies about him.”
Austin shakes his head. “You think once he settles down and all of this shit sinks in that he’ll be able to live with himself, knowing he killed the creatures he only wanted to prove existed?”
Rob is beaming into a camera. There’s a fresh bandage wrapped around his head and his face is covered in tan Band-Aids. Someone was nice enough to clean the blood off of him. There are over a dozen microphones in his face. It’s a freaking melee. You’d think George Clooney just dropped in to announce he was running for president.
Rob Rayman. I never would have pegged him for a hero. If anything, I thought I’d be the one saving his life. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know jack shit.
I tug on Austin’s arm. “Come on. We should find Henrik and get out of here before people start to question us.”
“No need to go very far.”
Henrik has a big bandage around his waist. He looks a little better, which is a shade less than death.
“I made a go bag before we left. I just need to stop at my RV, grab it, and we can get in your nondescript pink van and vamoose.”
In for a penny, in for a hundred pounds, we spot a running car, its occupants part of the throng, jump inside and take off. There’s no way we could walk back to my RV. Not in the shape we’re in. We leave the car on the main road so it’ll be easy to find.
I grab my go bag and Austin gathers his stuff. We throw it in the back of Henrik’s van. I run my fingers over the painted rainbow.
Yep. No one will suspect a trio of monster killers are in this puppy.
Henrik is at the wheel. He looks like he’d rather be sleeping. “I mapped out an escape route. There’s a safe place for us to stay a little over an hour from here. That’s about all I have left in me right now.”
Austin sits in the front, next to him. “I hope I have that much, buddy.”
We drive away. I wave goodbye to my VW Bug. “So long, Eileen. I hope someone nice adopts you.”
I can’t help shedding a few tears as I watch my former life disappear, wondering if anyone besides Mrs. Carr will really miss me.
“Henrik, I can’t thank you for all you’ve done. We wouldn’t have made it through all of that without you.” I rest my hand on his narrow shoulder.
“I’m glad I could help.”
Without Henrik and Rob, all of those years of anticipation and plotting ways to exact our revenge would have come to nothing but our deaths. I guess I’m not the badass I pretend to be. Maybe it’s something about Austin and me. We attract trouble. Except this time, we had good people to pull our asses from the fire.
The rain isn’t letting up. The wipers are working overtime.
Isn’t rain supposed to stop at moments like this?
Hollywood, this isn’t.
“Pull in over there,” I say.
Austin looks at me as if I’ve lost the few marbles I have left. “We have to get the hell out of here.”
“We’re fine for now. Everyone is down at the Loch. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.”
I dash out into the rain. The bell above the door tinkles. I have to get real close before Mrs. Carr recognizes me.
“Oh my, dearie. Have you heard about the commotion?”
“There’s a commotion?”
Her hand flutters to her mouth. There’s a big smile on her face. “They say they caught the creature.”
“You mean Nessie?”
“The one and only.
Isn’t that wonderful?”
It’s safe to assume she doesn’t know Nessie is a bunch of creatures and they’ve been slaughtered.
“Now we can show the world we weren’t out of our heads, that’s right.”
I reach out and pat her hand. “It sure is.” I shock her by kissing her cheek.
“Now that’s two surprises in one day.”
“I just wanted to thank you for always looking out for me. And speaking of that, do you still have that box of books?”
She’s rooted to the spot for a few moments, I think more stunned by my kiss than the discovery of Nessie. “Ah, yes, yes, right over there, behind the mops and buckets.”
I let her know I’ve got it before she tries to scoot out from behind the counter and lift it.
“How much for all of the books?”
“You might now want to read all of them, dearie.”
“No matter. I like options.”
“Just take them. I’m in a celebrating mood today.”
I lay a hundred pound note on the counter, out of her line of sight. “Thanks again, Mrs. Carr. If they found Nessie, I expect you’re going to be very busy for a while. Celebrate while you can.”
“Oh, I will. How was Billy Firth’s boat?”
That makes me cringe. I have to anonymously send him a load of cash to pay for his boat which is now on the bottom of the loch. Make it double.
“It was great. Just what I needed.”
The bell tinkles again as I leave. The rain pelts the closed cardboard box.
“Can we actually go now?” Austin says.
“Yes, yes. Hit the road.”
The van fishtails in the mud and we’re off.
After twenty minutes of driving in numb silence, Henrik says, “I think it’s best we take a few months to recuperate. We’ll need to restore our strength. And I don’t mean just physically. I have a wonderful place in mind. You’ll both love it.”
Austin says, “I don’t care where it is, as long as it has a comfortable bed. I plan to sleep for a month.”
My own eyelids are heavier than bank vaults. “Some R&R sounds good to me.”
Henrik smiles. “And I’ll teach you all you need to know about where we’re going in Indonesia. We won’t have to worry about being found out by the locals, unless you’re concerned about being seen by monkeys.”
Indonesia.
Orang Pendeks.
I’m too damn tired to worry about it.
Sighing, I open the box lid and sputter with laughter. The book at the very top is a yellowed copy of Jaws.
Cradling the book to my chest, I lean back in the seat and close my eyes.
So I sleep, and hope this time, if I see my parents in my dreams, we can sit and talk and enjoy our company. It would be really, really nice to hear the sound of their voices.
The End
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PEHISTORIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIGHT THEM
PREHISTORIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIGHT THEM
One of Katherine Muir’s favorite things about taking a panoramic submersible down was watching the bubbling waterline crawl up the viewing windows, letting her see the old, familiar world get replaced by the new, exciting one under the surface. But that was about the only thing she regretted about the design of her new vehicle, this sleek and solid lozenge built with viewports that were much stronger than those of any panoramic-view vessel, but much smaller, too.
Those bubble subs were wonderful for examining coral reefs, fish, and other sea life. Watching the amazing octopus as it changed its color, pattern, everything to make itself completely invisible to predators. The times she had watched them deploy such camouflage, the only way she even knew they were there was because she followed silently behind them and waited until they felt a threat. Then they slapped themselves against whatever surface was nearby … and disappeared. Truly, studying ocean life in the panoramic submersibles was a joy.
But this new vessel, Deep Thoughts, was made not to explore ocean creatures, but the ocean itself. Katherine and her husband, Sean, had designed the submersible, working hand in glove with some of the most innovative subaquatic transport engineers in the world. It had been a difficult decision whether to create a one-person vessel or one more like the bubble subs, with room for two. She and her husband wrestled with how cool it would be to explore together, but a submersible meant to reach the floor of the benthic depths 20,000 feet below the surface couldn’t be very big. So it came down to either giving up the amount of scientific and observational equipment that would allow a second passenger to ride or giving up the fun of doing it as a couple.
They decided in favor of more science. It was to be a research vessel, after all, funded by a variety of philanthropic and academic sources to expand the frontiers of human knowledge about the still little understood landscape and biome at the bottom of some of the deepest water on the planet. Benthic was as far down as one could go and still investigate “normal” undersea terrain. There were deeper fissures and channels, but the deepest average real estate on Earth was benthic, and scientists still knew near to nothing of what went on in the complete darkness at the bottom of this zone.
This wasn’t an expedition, despite the fact that they had a small documentary and communications ship, The Moaning Mermaid, along with their main launch and support vessel, Sea Legs. This was the second of four tests to make sure the submersible—christened D-Plus by the whole smart-aleck crew (because it was “below C level,” har dee har )—could handle the greater pressure and harsher environment it would encounter the farther it descended.
Katherine took the first test run, this to “just” 5,000 feet. Not terribly deep, but deep enough that a major malfunction would force the crew on Sea Legs to get the winch going and haul her back up by D-Plus’s tether, which also included data lines and fiber optics for communications. At a crisis point, however, the high-tech tether would just be a rope everybody needed to yank on immediately if they wanted to rescue the researcher tasked with making sure everybody got their paychecks.
As expected, however, the first test went off without a hitch, and she and Sean were pleased. Any major hiccups would have been obvious—or at least detectable—at 5,000 feet, so each of the next two tests would be to make sure the things they designed on land worked under the stresses of the deep ocean. Also, going to 10,000 feet exposed the submersible to double the pressure of 5,000 feet, and 20,000 feet would double the pressure again. The second test, with Sean at the controls, would venture almost two miles into the black depths; and the third, this time piloted by Katherine, would dive to 15,000. If D-Plus didn’t exhibit any major issues during the third dive, then the final test would touch down on the seafloor at roughly 20,000 feet and come back up almost immediately. If everything worked the way it had been designed to work—or most everything; no exploration went off perfectly—then the first real mission would spend a few hours at the bottom and see what there was to be seen. Take sediment samples, look at creatures that somehow made a life at four tons of pressure on every square inch, and perform a preplanned battery of observations and measurements. This particular area of the ocean bottom had never been explored, and many in the oceanographic community were watching the Muir mission with great interest.
Katherine took the first dive, and they were supposed to take turns, but somehow her klutz of a husband—they named their boat Sea Legs in honor of his many times he almost fell over on any size of watercraft—had managed to run afoul of a line on board the launch ship and dislocated three fingers on his right hand just that morning as they were setting up the winch for the next test. It was 2016, for the love of God! They weren’t sailing with Blackbeard here—who got caught up in rigging anymore?
Nevertheless, there it was: if a second test was to be performed, it would be Katherine Muir, not Sean, who would take D-Plus down. Piloting the submersible, even a deep-sea vessel going on what was essentially a controlled drop, required both hands and all ten of the
pilot’s digits. But they told only their crew chief, Mickey Luch, about the change, since professional mariners, like those who worked the boats while scientists did their science-ing, were still a superstitious lot. Changes in plans made them antsy, to say the least. So she and Mickey just secured her in the sub without any announcement. Once she was in place, he told the crew they were making a switch—never you bunch mind why—and Katherine would be executing Test No. 2.
There was a small murmur of protest—the winch greaser (a job title that always elicited snickers but was quite important) and the camera specialist on deck were especially superstitious and vociferous—but Mickey just helped Katherine into D-Plus, and the assistants got it locked up tight and ready to go. This crew had overseen 10,000-foot dives many times, and that’s why they were hired as a team by the Muirs.
“Let’s move ’er out and get ’er down!” their chief shouted, and the A-frame winch structure slowly stretched its long crane out over the water. With a thumbs-up between Katherine and Mickey, the winch whined and the submersible was lowered into the choppy sea.
This would be a very awkward and dangerous point to stop the operation, so it wasn’t until that moment that Sean Muir stepped out onto the deck, his first three fingers wrapped in a splint. The next test dive wouldn’t be for two days, and he’d work through the pain if necessary—he was no stranger to the sea, and he had “played hurt” through worse than this. The crew was preoccupied with the task at hand, but when they saw the researcher on the deck, they took a moment to bust his balls and laugh at his “horrible” accident.
Some of them weren’t laughing, though. Sean knew that this switch—obviously due to the injury they could see with one glance at his right hand—would initiate rituals of touching wood (where they could find it) and prayers to Saint Michael, not to mention whispered oaths and grumblings about the expedition leader at the mariners’ table come chow time. Slipjack and Toro and Vanessa—the winch team—looked especially upset, although obviously trying to hide it so as not to visibly challenge Sean.