Extinct

by Charles Wilson

  “Hang on,” he said. “I’m going to try and give them a chance.” The craft leaned on its side and swept down toward the Zodiac.

  * * *

  Alan looked up as the sound of the helicopter overpowered the sound of the Zodiac’s motor. He stared directly into the pilot’s face. The landing skid to that side moved toward Alan. He wrapped his arm tightly around Paul, already clinging to his neck. The shark put on a burst of speed. Alan came to his feet, swayed as he tried to keep his balance, and reached for the skid, just out of his reach.

  The downdraft from the spinning rotors battered the Zodiac. The steering arm began to turn. The craft’s bow moved slowly around, then turned abruptly to the side. Alan grabbed the skid, locking his elbow over it as the helicopter swung hard to the side. He was jerked forward out of the craft and to the side. His feet splashed into the water. Pain tore through his shoulder. Paul had his eyes closed, his face buried into Alan’s neck. Alan’s arm slipped. His elbow came up at a right angle to the skid. The helicopter couldn’t lift the combined weight of the two people inside it and the two hanging on beneath it. Alan’s feet splashed against the water again. The shark’s head, five feet behind them and racing, began to rise higher in the water.

  The helicopter jerked upward. Alan revolved on the skid, his arm wrenching. The shark came by under their feet. The helicopter turned toward shore. Alan’s arm slipped off the skid. He fell a foot, his hand, somehow, still clasping the damp metal of the skid.

  Two hundred feet to the island.

  His hand slipped loose, and they plummeted the fifteen feet to the water, slammed into it hard, skipped across it, and disappeared under the surface.

  * * *

  The Intuitive, racing as fast as it could with only one prop and its hull filling ever deeper with the water seeping into its interior, came toward them in a direct line paralleling the shallow shoal extending out from the island.

  * * *

  Alan splashed frantically toward shore, Paul hanging onto his neck with one hand and trying to help swim with the other.

  Spray mounted above the shark’s fin as it drove directly toward them. The head rose above the water. It rose more as the hard shoal underneath the creature’s stomach angled sharply upward.

  Forty feet between them.

  Thirty.

  Twenty.

  The shark’s stomach scraped bottom. It lunged ahead.

  Ten feet.

  The bow of the Intuitive slammed into the creature’s side. This time, with the shoal against its stomach, the shark wasn’t forced down into the water, but rolled hard over onto its side, the Intuitive riding up on the thick body. The craft’s heavy tonnage, made even heavier by the hundreds of gallons of water filling its hull, crushed down into the shark’s body, and the bow angled up above the creature, the ribbed keel cutting deeply into the thick skin.

  The shark, pinned under the boat as the craft slammed to a stop atop it, flopped on its side like a fish lying on dry land. The Intuitive bounced as if juggled nervously in a giant, moving hand. The boat leaned sharply to the side.

  The shark flopped violently.

  The hull’s bottom caved in, sat back down onto the thick body beneath it, then leaned sharply to the side and began to turn over as the shark flopped a last time and moved out from under the craft.

  * * *

  “Dive! Dive!” Alan shouted from where he stood chest-deep in the water toward the island.

  Carolyn shot from the boat in a racing dive. Douglas splashed into the water behind her. Vandiver didn’t leave the cockpit.

  * * *

  The shark rolled in the water, hit its side hard on the bottom, and rolled back upright. It leaned to the other side. Blood seeped from its mouth and from the long gash across its back and flank.

  * * *

  Douglas looked back over his shoulder at his uncle and quit splashing toward shore.

  “Dive!”

  * * *

  The shark slipped backward into deeper water. Its head began to submerge. The fin slowly turned off toward the rear of the Intuitive.

  Alan caught Carolyn’s hands and pulled her toward him.

  She grabbed Paul into her arms and nearly went under before her feet touched the shoal.

  The fin moved in a straight line now, toward the tip of the island a hundred feet out in front of the shark. It moved slowly, a dark stain spreading out behind it.

  A minute turned into two, then three as the fin kept moving slowly in the same direction, leaving an ever-widening dark stain in the water behind it.

  They stared silently now.

  The fin began to rise. The upper body rose above the surface, the water dropping farther and farther down its sides. The shark came to a halt.

  “It’s grounding itself on the shoal,” Carolyn said.

  The shark lay there, not moving, then slowly began to move its tail back and forth until, with a last sideways motion of its thick trunk, it turned and faced back toward the boat.

  “It’s coming back again,” Douglas said.

  “It’s dying,” Carolyn said.

  The stain in the water around the creature continued to widen.

  A white film settled across the black eyes, leaving them only a blurred shadow behind the film.

  The mouth slowly cracked open.

  A barely perceptible, high-pitched sound began to rise from deep within the creature.

  It grew louder, growing shriller as it mounted in intensity, until finally the air was filled with a sound not unlike a baby’s piercing, crying scream of pain.

  They were walking toward shore now, up only to their knees in water, but Douglas stopped, feeling the same kind of chill pass over him as he had experienced when his uncle had played the tape from the submarine.

  Then the sound began to lessen in volume. The mouth slowly closed. The dorsal fin tilted slightly to the side.

  Alan saw Paul looking at him with a questioning expression on his face.

  Alan nodded.

  “My God!” Douglas suddenly exclaimed.

  Two hundred yards beyond the shoal, out in the deeper Gulf water, a fin stood stark and enormously thick in the dim twilight. Already twice as tall as the fin of the shark lying silent on the shoal, it continued to rise into the sky.

  Alan felt Paul’s hand clasp his trousers.

  It still rose.

  Sixty to seventy feet in front of the fin, the water mounded, as if a great bubble of gas were lifting it from beneath. A gigantic head broke the surface, water pouring down its sides. Black eyes as big as truck tires and set thirty feet apart rose above the water. The swells rolling in from the Gulf caught against the creature’s sides and broke into foam as if they had run into a two-hundred-foot-long cliff suddenly emerging from the water. The giant head moved forward. Douglas stepped back involuntarily.

  “Damn,” Stark said in a low voice, almost a whisper, and looked toward Vandiver, now up on the Intuitive’s partially demolished flying bridge and looking toward the head.

  A sound.

  Coming from the giant.

  Barely perceptible at first, then rising in volume, something like the sound the shark on the shoal had made, but deeper in tone.

  The sound rose, became louder and louder until, finally, it filled the Gulf air with its intensity, sweeping across them like a giant’s groan broadcast over a loudspeaker turned to its highest volume.

  Paul moved his hands to his ears.

  “Look,” Carolyn said.

  The shark on the shoal had moved. Slowly, its tall, crescent tail began to swipe sideways. The head moved. The trunk arched to the side now, and the tail swept with a greater motion. The body began to slip backwards, and then to the side. The tail swept again.

  The blood that had dwindled to a slow seep from the wound across its back began to run down the dark body again. The shark moved farther sideways on the shoal, its actions stronger now. It twisted again, and slipped sideways into deeper water. The body began to move fo
rward toward the giant two hundred yards out in front of it. The giant’s head began to move slowly backward. The distance between the two gradually closed.

  The helicopter moved above the pair.

  In minutes, the smaller fifty-foot shark was passing to the side of the giant’s head. And then the giant turned behind it.

  They moved slowly in the direction of deeper waters, the helicopter keeping pace above them.

  Another minute.

  The giant head slipped lower into the water and submerged with a rush of water and the surface swirling into a whirlpool, only the towering fin remaining in sight.

  Soon, it, too, slipped under the swells.

  The smaller fin remained visible for a moment, tilted to the side, straightened, then itself slid beneath the green water.

  “Mother,” Paul said. He was looking back toward the Intuitive, past it in the direction of the barrier islands.

  Moving toward them was the Coast Guard forty-one, its bow throwing wide white waves out to its sides. Everyone looked toward it.

  Except Vandiver. He continued to stare at the spot where the giant head disappeared. In his mind he was looking at the captain who told in 1963 of seeing a shark over eighty-five-feet long pass under his freighter. And he was listening in the presence of David G. Stead in 1918 as the fishermen told him of the shark over a hundred and fifteen feet long that had swallowed their lobster pots. And he was paddling with the Polynesians who looked from their dugout canoes to see monster sharks nearly a hundred and fifty feet long slashing through the waves in front of them.

  And he had bested them all.

  A faint smile crossed his face … then went away as he looked back over his shoulder at the bright orange life preserver floating alone behind him.

  CHAPTER 42

  The workboat and Carolyn’s speedboat floated empty, side by side down the Pascagoula River. The twenty-five-foot twin of the shark that had been killed by the dynamite had already left the river, responding to the deep call that had vibrated through the water from off the Chandeleur Islands.

  Ahead of the twin, in the twilight dimness at the bottom of the Gulf floor south of the barrier islands, long, shadowy shapes slashed in and out around the carcass contained in the ripped and gaping net. Hammerheads, sand sharks and bull sharks, their mouths agape, repeatedly smashed into the great bulk, shaking their heads violently as they bit down.

  Suddenly, they began darting away from the body to disappear quickly in the twilight water beyond the carcass.

  In only a moment nothing could be seen but small particles of flesh suspended in the water slowly settling to the sandy bottom.

  Stillness ensued.

  At the fringe of the dark green curtain fifty feet from the carcass, a rounded nose tapering back to a streamlined head appeared. With pectoral fins set to its sides like airplane wings, one of the first Great Whites to reach this northernmost part of the Gulf in years swam slowly into sight.

  Able to know that its quarry was dead by the first scent that had reached its nose a mile away, the sixteen-foot adult dispensed with the stealth it would have shown in tracking a live victim, swimming directly toward the carcass.

  A magnificent creature, king of the seas for hundreds of thousands of years and neither instinctively nor consciously fearing anything that swam temperate waters, the white kept all its senses directed at the carcass.

  Its nose lifted and its bottom jaw dropped, its great mouth unhinging so that it could take as large a bite as possible. Gleaming white, razor-sharp serrated teeth set in rows in its gums reflected the dim light.

  From out of the dark to its side came a shape swimming so rapidly as to appear almost blurred. The twenty-five-foot twin, its mouth gaping, its great teeth a shiny brown, plowed into its cousin of a million and a half years’ distance, driving the White sideways through the water, biting it nearly completely in half with the first crushing pressure of its jaws.

  Then, gulping the moist, bloody meat down its cavernous gullet as it turned, the megalodon came back to bite off and swallow a second large portion of the body before the White had time to settle next to the carcass of its ancestor.

  Moments later, the twenty-five-foot twin put on a burst of speed toward the south.

  CHAPTER 43

  The buoy was found late that night by a forty-one conducting a search. Neither the net nor carcass of the twenty-five-foot megalodon was ever found. Maybe someday somebody would discover one of the teeth that for one reason or another wouldn’t be quickly covered by silt being spread out toward the Gulf’s depths by the many tributaries draining the lower Mississippi Basin. But Vandiver knew that would prove nothing to the surprisingly large number of skeptics who still insisted on discounting the evidence of the teeth that had been cut from the megalodon’s mouth and couldn’t be dated as anything but of recent origin. And, with the WLOX reporter having let her camera slip out the helicopter door into the Gulf, and thus no video around for proof, very few scientists put much stock in the report of a two-hundred-foot giant. Not that the scientists doubted his or any of the others’ honesty. But it had been twilight, nearly dark, at the time of the sighting, the skeptics argued, and it would have been possible for a whale to have momentarily visited the northern Gulf—though of course, not a two-hundred-foot whale. Again, it was nearly dark.

  * * *

  But Vandiver didn’t care about the skeptics. For that matter he didn’t care about the many who did believe. As far as he was concerned, he had all he really wanted out of the incident, to know for certain what he had always felt.

  “Sir?”

  At his nephew’s voice, Vandiver looked toward the computer terminal on the far side of the office. Douglas had brought up the artist’s rendition of the megalodon and was looking at the creature, its mouth gaped and its pectoral fins spread wide to its sides, facing out from the screen as if it were about to swim into Douglas’s lap.

  “Sir, did you do this?”

  “The changing of the body color?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Uh-huh, hit the control and C key together and you can have your choice of a brown to grayish-brown upper body and dirty-white underbody, or blue to bluish-gray with white below—but not solid brown anymore. The same colors of whites of today. I thought about making one pink, too, just for the sake of argument. But that wouldn’t be honest, would it?”

  “No, sir. Sir, do you think they’ll come back again?”

  “Certainly. They have for centuries. Give them another fifty to sixty years and somebody will be reporting seeing them again.”

  “But they’ve gone back to the depths now?”

  “They always have, haven’t they?”

  “The megamouth and the adult six-gill haven’t, sir.”

  “No, they haven’t, Douglas.”

  “You think something might be different this time, sir?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, sir—maybe whatever made the megamouth and six-gill come up to stay.”

  “I wouldn’t say the megalodon is exactly the type to play follow the leader, would you Douglas?”

  “No, sir. I don’t guess so, sir.”

  “Well then, let’s just assume they have gone back, Douglas—in case I have to send you scuba diving somewhere again.”

  His nephew looked back across his shoulder.

  And Vandiver chuckled.

  * * *

  Three months later, Carolyn was leaning against Alan’s arm as they stood at the bow of the Intuitive II anchored off the Chandeleur Light. Alan stared out toward the open Gulf.

  “You know,” he said, “I was thinking about Fairley drowning … especially with his body never being found. You remember how Duchess acted that morning? I wonder if there’s any chance that there might have been another—”

  “I don’t want to know,” Carolyn said.

  “And I’ve wondered—if there were only the two—if one was a male and one was a female, and if we were witness
ing the last remnants of a magnificent species.”

  “I don’t want to know that, either.”

  “Mr. Alan,” Paul called as he came up the deck from the fishing cockpit after taking his nap, “don’t you want a sandwich?”

  Carolyn looked back at him. “I’ll fix you one in a minute, Paul. But come here right now. I have a surprise for you I think you’re going to like.”

  She held up her hand with the engagement ring that now took the place of her old wedding band.

  “What do you think about this?”

  “I already knew,” Paul said, and smiled. “He told me first.”

  * * *

  At that moment, several hundred miles beyond the mouth of the Gulf, the fifty-foot megalodon and the twenty-five-foot twin dove at a sharp angle down through the clear, blue water of the Atlantic. Ever deeper they sped, the light beginning to fade around them. They slowed as they approached the pair of great long two-hundred-foot giants swimming side by side, and turned in beside them.

  Staying close to the bottom that angled ever deeper, the four swam slowly toward the dark curtain in front of them, and out of sight.

  * * *

  “Like I said, give them fifty or sixty years,” Vandiver said as he walked out of his office with Douglas.

  Douglas’s mother, her broad back to the office door, stood in front of the receptionist’s desk. Vandiver quickly slipped his arm around his nephew’s shoulders, startling Douglas.

  “Fine boy, sis,” Vandiver said. “Didn’t know you were in town.”

  His sister folded her thick arms across her chest and smiled at the friendly scene.

  The receptionist stared, too.

  * * *

  “What in the hell?” Norman “Bubba” Fitzwald said. He was thirty-five miles south of the Chandeleurs, on one of the oil-well platforms anchored in the clear waters of the Gulf. Smoking was strictly forbidden on any of the platforms and he had moved down the inclined metal steps circling one of the round legs supporting the platform to escape from being seen as he puffed on a Marlboro Light. What he saw now was the long shadow—a hundred and fifty feet long, at least—of something moving beneath the water close to the surface a couple of hundred yards out from the platform.