His guess that the spaceship would shield him from the blast of radiation was obviously correct. As he left the weird, white interior of the vessel, he felt fine. Better than fine, even considering he still had a broken nose and rib.
After all, he’d been inside an alien spaceship. He knew the secret behind the Bermuda Triangle. All of these would be mere footnotes to his legend, by the time he was finished.
Of course, there was also the question of where (or when) the ship had taken him, but he didn’t believe it would be a problem. Destiny wouldn’t bring him this far just to desert him. Even the ghost of his father inside his head agreed with this assessment.
At first, when Eric stepped outside, he thought it was approaching evening again. But no, that couldn’t be it. The sunlight was dim, but not the kind of dimness that comes with twilight. Eric looked up and found the sun was no more than a tiny, red ball floating in a murky brown sky.
And it was cold. Much colder than the Caribbean ever got. He could see his breath pluming in front of his face.
He got back in the lifeboat. It took him almost three hours to row his way out of the derelicts, and his arms felt like jelly by the time he was clear.
But he could see land on the horizon to the north, judging by the position of the sun.
He had no idea what it could be other than Bermuda. In which case, he would deliver the statue, call his father, and the man would be so pleased, he’d have a private jet waiting for Eric at the closest airport.
Eric grinned and started rowing.
By the time he reached land—a long stretch of yellow sand bordered by a jungle full of dead, brown vegetation—he was exhausted. It had taken him hours to reach this place, surely long enough for night to fall, but the sun had never really seemed to move from its position.
It didn’t matter. He was so thrilled to be on dry land again, he didn’t care where he was, as long as there was a bar and five-star resort nearby. He lay on the sand with the statue and closed his eyes, drifting into sleep.
Some time later, he heard the roar.
He opened his eyes. Something big was scrambling through the dead tree line. Like, dinosaur big. He could only see quick glances of black, leathery skin and two-foot long spines of jutting bone.
Eric got up from the sand and backed away, but there was no place to run, just the ocean behind him and miles of empty sand to either side.
The trees parted. The thing on the other side shoved its head through, an oblong disc that seemed to be mostly teeth and jaws, and eyes the size of car tires. It caught sight of him…
And smiled.
As the creature charged forward, smacking its gigantic lips, Eric began to doubt, for the very first time, that this had been his destiny at all.
TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE OPENING
CHAPTERS OF RUSSELL C. CONNOR’S
NOVEL WHITNEY!
The creature swam.
It pushed into the warm currents of the Gulf, gliding on webbed feet that churned as mechanically as a metronome. The speed reduced it to no more than a green glimmer in the water.
Little in its head besides thoughts of feeding, feeding, always feeding. Even now, it swooped and dove, snatching fish from teeming schools and tearing them apart in a mouth overflowing with razor-sharp incisors. The claw-tipped appendages it used for this were close enough to hands to send any marine biologist into conniptions.
Each kill released a cloud of blood and viscera into the murky waters that every shark for a hundred miles could detect, but even the hungriest of them was deterred by the scent of the thing performing the slaughter. Their kind had faced this species again and again since the dawn of time, and they invariably came out on the losing end.
The creature’s usual hunting ground lay deep in the abyssal belly of the Atlantic, beyond the last of the eastern seaboard’s shipping lanes, but its current condition had outstripped its regular food sources. Hunger had forced it to creep closer—with timidity at first, and then with the assurance of the unopposed predator—to the dull wall of noise eternally reverberating from what it thought of only as Water’s End.
Sated, the creature turned back, preparing to migrate home and sleep with its fellows.
That was where it ran into trouble.
It encountered resistance at the opening of the Gulf, a churning disturbance that lit up its array of delicate senses like flashing neon signs. It recognized the source: one of the destructive wind circles that scattered fish in droves.
The creature kicked hard and fast, a torpedo in the water, and attempted to slide by the pressure of the impending storm on the northern side of Cuba. Rough seas and shallow waters made the route dangerous. Normally it would ride out the violence beneath the surface…but there was more than just its life to consider.
Panic swept through its brain like brushfire.
No place to hide, no place to run.
No place…except shoreward, toward the land-dwelling beings with all their endless hammering and yammering. Perhaps it could find shelter in one of the bays or coves along Water’s End. If the waves drove it out of the ocean, it could breathe air quite comfortably for short periods.
But it would have to feed.
Its belly would remain quiet only so long before driving it to berserker frenzy.
A sudden thought occurred to the creature: perhaps the land-dwellers themselves might serve in a pinch. It had never tasted their flesh before, but as long as it was meaty and filled with blood, they would suffice.
Humor, or as close as it could get to the concept, flashed briefly in its alien mind as it continued swimming.
WHITNEY -91:17
“Are you seeing this storm potential?” Kirby asked, balancing the phone on his shoulder as he took his popcorn out of the microwave.
“Yes, doofus, we’ve been tracking that rotation since day before yesterday,” Nielsen answered. Kirby could imagine him with the faux snakeskin heels of his wannabe-cowboy boots up on his desk in the fancy control room of the National Weather Service’s Center for Environmental Prediction down in Miami. Kirby had met the man only once, at a convention in Anaheim, and he could say with certainty that Erik Nielsen was about as much a cowboy as he was an astronaut. “It’s your move, by the way.”
“And you guys aren’t worried about it? I mean, this thing is shaping up to be an asskicking of biblical proportions.” Kirby rechecked the data on Whitney it had taken the rickety printer in his office nearly twenty minutes to spit out, then sat down at the chessboard on his desk.
He, on the other hand, was at the Atlantic Meteorological Advisory in Brunswick, Massachusetts. The station, which routinely gave little more than local projections of winter storms for the northeastern states, was about the size of a spacious closet, manned by one person at any given time (said person paid by government stipend that made employment at McDonald’s a viable career move), and outfitted with equipment that would’ve been obsolete during Carter’s presidency. Your tax dollars at work, Kirby thought, as the last of the paper rattled off the printer. On the three-color monitor in front of him, the bright blue, rotating eye of Whitney glared forth.
“Fer chrissake, Kirby.” Shuffling papers and a creaking chair as Nielsen swung those so-green-they-were-almost-iridescent boots off the top of his desk in agitation. “Who cares, as long as that asskicking is being administered to our friendly neighbors in the good nation of Cuba, and whatever dolphins are stupid enough to get in Tropical Storm Whitney’s way. Now, are you gonna play, or do you wanna get an early start worrying about next year’s storms too?
“Oh…this is rich.” Dawning pleasure spread across Kirby’s face. The moment was savory enough to taste. “Knight to B7.”
“What’s rich? Bishop to E9.”
“Queen to F2. You, uh…you haven’t updated the world Doppler model in the last couple hours, have you?”
“Noooo.” Hesitation in his smarmy voice for the first time. At this time of night, there was usually no need, not wh
en they were all so sure Whitney would fade away into meteorological history. The depression had started out southeast of Cuba, turned into a mother-of-a-storm just before making landfall, and was already losing strength when predicted it would limp northward and die quietly over the mid-Atlantic. Just one of the many alphabetized storms every year most Americans paid no more attention to on the evening news than they did to the local PTA bake sale. “Queen to A7. Why?”
“Why don’t you do that now? I’ll wait. And rook to A1.”
Nielsen didn’t answer, didn’t even comment on the devastating checkmate Kirby had just performed, but there was the click of keys as he followed the suggestion.
Wait for it, wait for it…
“Holy shit,” Nielsen muttered, and Kirby thought he could’ve died happy right then and there. Imagine him getting the drop on the NWS all out here by his lonesome, and on what was sure to be one of the most destructive storms in U.S. history. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Kirby assumed he meant the new visitor from the north. “Sprang up from that pressure system in the Arctic and gained strength from the winds out of Canada. That little depression you see moving south is going to bounce this girl back our way as neat as a cue ball.”
“But…but…when Whitney hits the system coming in behind it…”
“When that happens, my man, Tropical Storm Whitney is going to become Hurricane Whitney in a big hurry. Based on my current trajectory models, it’ll pick up about 20 times current wind velocity, gain mass like a pregnant woman, then head back north again, this time right up the middle of the Gulf. It’ll be one massive ball of fury when it washes up somewhere along the Texas-Louisiana border. Sound familiar?”
“Katrina.” He whispered the dreaded name of another meteorological bitch.
“That’s right! Gimme an ‘F,’ gimme an ‘I,’ gimme a ‘V,’ gimme an ‘E!’ What’s that spell? Category Five, baby!”
“Jesus…Jesus H Christ,” Nielsen wheezed. “I mean, fuck Katrina. If those warm currents from the south don’t let up, this thing is gonna make Katrina look like a goddamned drizzle. At this rate, it’ll make landfall in…”
“Just under four days.” The glee was gone from Kirby’s voice. He suddenly felt ashamed at his flippancy. Not because people were almost surely going to die, but because this hurricane was going to be one mean SOB, it was going to make Katrina look like a drizzle, and he felt as disrespectful as if he’d just blasphemed in a quiet church.
“I have to go.” Kirby could hear other voices calling out in the background, other meteorologists on the late shift just alerted by Nielsen. “I have to call FEMA, the President has to be notified immediately.”
“Checkmate,” Kirby said softly as the line disconnected in his ear. The baleful eye of Whitney stared at him without blinking.
~ ~ ~
WHITNEY -80:05
When the desk intercom buzzed in the Oval Office, the President of the United States brought an impatient fist down on it. “Is he here, Sherry?”
“Yes sir, but—”
“Don’t ‘but,’ just send him in so I can get this over with.” He cut off the conversation with another smack to the device and then swiveled in his chair, not bothering to smooth his hair or straighten his tie because, frankly, he had far more important things to do than meet with the weasely little Director of FEMA. But here it was a goddamn election year, and, with a timing that half made him believe the unholy Democrats were behind it, Mother Nature decided to see what a monster hurricane would do to his approval rating.
All anybody would remember when they stepped up to the polls in a few months was whether he had clothed and fed every last victim of Whitney with his own two hands. He didn’t have the luxury of lame-duck-itis like Bush after Katrina, visiting the disaster site when convenient and smiling vacantly around at the destruction.
He had to be proactive, dammit, had to prepare himself, and unfortunately this meant sitting through a pre-briefing from that worm David Sinclair, before he and the Joint Chiefs got the full dog-and-pony show.
A knock came on the Oval Office door before it opened just enough for the head of FEMA to slouch through. The President suppressed a shudder at the sight of him. Short and froggish, eyes hidden behind lenses thick enough to see Mars, usually slick with nervous sweat. He came into the room dressed in a ragged tweed suit carrying a sheaf of papers, beady eyes darting right and left, leaving the door open behind him.
The President started to yell for him to close it, until it opened wider and another man entered the room behind Sinclair.
He had no idea who this one was. Mid-forties, tall and lean, packed with rolling muscle. His eyes were cool and confident, and a small scar corkscrewed left of his jaw in a rudimentary sideways question mark. He wore a black dress shirt, open at the throat to reveal a swatch of hairy chest, with the sleeves rolled up. The President’s nostrils flared. This man looked ready to go club hopping rather than meeting with the leader of the free world in his own office, but that was the sort of disarray the President expected from any member of Sinclair’s organization.
“Sinclair,” he greeted, without standing. Mr. GQ gave no introduction, and the President shot him an eyebrow. “Have a seat.”
“Th-thank you, sir.” Sinclair glanced back at Black Shirt as though expecting him to come forward as well. When that didn’t happen, he plopped into one of the chairs in front of the desk. The mystery man gave a knowing little smile, then turned his back and began to examine books on the far side of the room.
The President laced his fingers on the desk. “All right, just how the hell bad is this thing gonna be?”
Sinclair’s eyes rolled in their sockets as he shuffled papers. He leaned forward to place a few graphs and satellite photos on the desktop, all of which meant squat to the President. “Well, it…uh…they’re telling me it’s definitely a Category Five, sir. It’ll make landfall sometime around 7:30 on Thursday evening. Winds will, um, probably reach 150 miles an hour, which means we can expect significant structural damage. The storm surge alone is likely to be in excess of fifteen feet, which should cause flooding at sea level or below. It’ll be…catastrophic.”
“And just where is this heaping ball of catastrophe going to land? New Orleans? Galveston?”
Sinclair’s brow wrinkled. “Well…b-both of them, sir. And everything in between. That entire section of the Gulf coast needs to be, um, evacuated. Which is impossible with the resources available and the time we have left.”
“Good God.” The President leaned back in his chair. Sinclair’s unpleasantness as well as Black Shirt’s presence (now leaning to watch the President’s angelfish—Burr and Hamilton—in their aquarium) were all forgotten in the face of this news. What the director of FEMA was describing, in a nutshell, was the complete and total destruction of the southern seaboard on his watch. “Okay, we’ll talk to the Joint Chiefs in an hour as planned, but I’ll go ahead and get the National Guard scrambled and ready to deploy as soon we come up with target areas.”
For the second time, Sinclair turned and glanced uncomfortably at Black Shirt. “Sir, I, uh, I was told, uh, that is, I don’t know if that’s…”
“You’ll have to excuse Sinclair,” Black Shirt spoke at last, sauntering over to the desk with a grin so shiny, it could only come from a politician. “I’m afraid I kept him mostly in the dark as to why I was accompanying him to this meeting. I just thought it might raise less suspicion if I rode in on his desperately out-of-fashion coattails.”
“What are you talking about?” the President snapped. “Sinclair, who the hell is this man?”
Black Shirt reached the front of the desk beside the chair Sinclair sat in, and here something happened so fast the President could barely follow it. The man with the question mark scar flashed a hand in front of Sinclair, like a magician getting ready to yank a quarter from his nostril, and a puff of something white billowed into his chubby face. The director didn’t even have time to protes
t; his eyeballs rolled back, the lids fluttered, closed, and then he slumped in his seat, the rear of his head thumping against the high chair back.
“Jesus!” The President scooted away from the desk before remembering the security button was on its underside.
“Relax, he’s just sleeping,” Black Shirt said. Sinclair’s chest rose and fell visibly. “We need to have some private time, you and me. Which reminds me, would you mind turning off the Presidential Archive in the bottom right drawer of your desk?” He grinned again, only now it wasn’t so political; it was a shark-like expression that never touched his eyes and stretched that scar on his chin almost straight. “Oh, and feel free to press the squawker all you want if it makes you feel any better; it was turned off long before I ever set foot in here.”
The President glared up at him, ran through a list of possible scenarios in his head including assassination and kidnapping, and rejected them. A piece to the puzzle was missing, and as he tried to figure out what it might be, he rolled forward and slid open the indicated drawer. The device that recorded all conversation in the Oval Office was active. He reached inside and switched it off, exercising his ‘presidential prerogative.’ “I don’t need a button for the likes of you, son. I used to box in my younger days. Now tell me who you are before I come over there and take care of you myself.”
Black Shirt waggled a finger at him. “A direct man. I like that. I guess that’s why Aurora put you in office.”
“A-Aurora?” The single word melted his demeanor. The President suddenly felt as pale and jittery as Sinclair usually looked.
“That’s right.” Black Shirt sank into the chair beside the now drooling FEMA director. “The name’s Kyler, by the way. And don’t look so serious. I’m not here to kill you. We play for the same team, your goals are my goals, blah blah blah. I’m just more of a first string player.”
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