She said, “I’m Ashley. I work here at Oceanus.”
Sturman took his hat off and shook her hand. “Will Sturman. Val’s told me a little about you. You are tall.”
She smiled, looking down at her feet. “The heels add a few inches. Did you come down to see her?”
“I reckon so.”
“Are you getting along again, then?”
He smiled. “We’d have to ask her.”
“Indeed. So Val said you work at an aquarium back in California?”
“That’s right. You done a pretty decent job here. How do you keep the pH, the salinity regulated in such big tanks? And how do you keep the water fresh?”
“Well, I’m no expert, but it has something to do with the high volume flowing in directly from the ocean. The water in here turns over pretty quickly.”
“I’ll be damned. So how you get a job at this place?”
“Well, you could start by asking Mr. Barbas.” She pointed at him. “He’s the owner.”
Sturman nodded, fitting the straw cowboy hat back on his head. “I don’t wanna interrupt him now. He looks busy.”
“We’re almost ready for the release. The helicopter will be coming in very soon.”
“Amazing,” Sturman said.
“I’m assuming you’re both here to watch?”
Mack snorted. “Not me. Just Sturman and Watson. Seen enough helicopters and big fish in my life. I’m headed to the casino.”
“Eric’s here?”
Just then, he came around a corner in the tunnel.
“He had to visit the little boys’ room,” said Mack.
They locked eyes for a moment, and Ashley felt her face flush. This wasn’t the time.
“Well, I’ll make sure they allow you to stay down here, if you’d like. Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to get back to work.” She turned away.
When Ashley walked up, Barbas was pointing at the heavy security doors at the end of the elaborately formed hallway. He and the aquarists had been joined by a few guards. But where was Dennis? He was in charge of security today. Only a handful of VIPs would be allowed down here to watch the entire process, as divers maneuvered the huge ray into a broad hoop net suspended from the aircraft.
Nobody besides the VIPs would see anything but the helicopter arrive and leave with Spirit in the net. All the guests would be invited to watch the spectacle, but only from designated areas above ground. They just wouldn’t be granted access down here, where outer doors would be locked and guards would be posted so that if something went wrong—or Spirit was hurt in the netting process—nobody would be able to film it on an iPhone.
She watched as the manta reappeared, swimming in slow circles around the enclosure. If only he knew that very soon he would have his freedom. Ashley just hoped everything went smoothly.
CHAPTER 58
Sturman stood with Eric beside the aquarium, as the sun’s rays began to light it from above, marveling at the scene inside the huge tank. Mack, without speaking to Eric, had left them to blow some money at the tables.
The divers above them gently drove the massive manta toward a platform of shallower water at the edge of his vision. According to handouts they’d been given, the resort’s plan was apparently to get the oversized critter to move above a net on the platform, where a number of hands would then lift the rigid edges to prevent his escape. When the helicopter arrived, dangling a long rope, they would clip the net harness to it and then off it would go, manta in tow, to a drop-off point in the ocean just past the reef.
“I’ll be damned,” Sturman said. “They’re just wranglers.”
Eric finished taking a picture and glanced at him. “What did you say?”
Sturman nodded at the divers. “They operate the same as ranch hands. They’re driving that manta to where they can lasso him, like cowpokes corralling a steer.”
A group of what looked like reporters, one of them carrying a large video camera and tripod, came down the tunnel and stopped by them. A few other distinguished-looking guests had also arrived.
“You really think this will work?” Eric said.
“I guess so. Your girlfriend there said it’s been done before.” Sturman looked at Eric. “She is your girlfriend, right?”
“Not really. We’ve been on a date. But she’s not talking to me.”
“Join the club.”
Eric smiled weakly. “Too bad Val isn’t here to see this.”
“Yeah,” Sturman said. “I guess. But she’s never been big on aquariums. She likes to see animals in their own environment.”
But Sturman knew Eric was right. She’d really enjoy the novelty of this operation. He was a little surprised she’d backed out, and a little worried. She didn’t look good. And there was something else. Last night, and again this morning, she’d seemed like she’d been hiding something.
He looked over at Ashley and the others. She was talking to someone in a security uniform and to her boss. He was a good-looking older man, with a well-trimmed beard, and apparently the owner of the resort. They’d been joined by a mid-forties blonde in a skirt and jacket, who appeared to be his assistant.
Sturman could tell by their body language that the conversation was serious. Ashley turned away from them, a concerned expression on her face, and passed by the small group of reporters. They were visiting casually with a heavyset young woman who, like Ashley, wore a turquoise shirt with the resort’s logo. He saw that Ashley flashed them all a brilliant white smile, but as she moved away from the reporters, the smile quickly left her face.
She saw him looking over at her and the forced smile returned. She headed back toward him and Eric. As Ashley drew closer, Sturman thought she looked worried. Ill, even. Almost as bad as Val had looked this morning.
She stopped a few feet in front of them, the well-practiced fake smile of a resort services employee still on her face. “It’s almost time, gentlemen. Once they get Spirit netted, we’ll make our way outside so you can watch the rest of the action from above. Hopefully, we can beat this storm, or we’ll have to call it off.”
“A hurricane?” Sturman said.
“No. But there’s a tropical cyclone offshore, headed our way, and it’s nasty looking. The wind and rain would make it too dangerous for this operation.”
“I didn’t think you got that kind of weather this early in the spring.”
“We usually don’t.”
“Thanks again for allowin’ us to be down here,” Sturman said.
“It’s no problem. No problem at all.” Her gaze dropped, and the smile finally left her face.
Eric finally spoke. “Ashley, is everything all right?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“Look. If it’s me . . . if I’m making you uncomfortable being here . . .”
“It’s not like that, Eric.” She paused, glanced at Sturman, then back at Eric. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I just found out there’s a problem. In another tank . . . the fish, the sharks, they’re all gone.”
Eric said, “What? What do you mean they’re gone?”
“They’re not in the tank. Like somebody somehow came and took them. But that’s impossible. A dolphin is also missing from our enclosure. And . . . I just heard that one of our security guards is missing. A friend. Someone found his radio by the shark tank.”
“Jesus,” Sturman said. “What the hell’s going on?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But something happened in that tank. And to Dennis. We can’t let the media know.”
She stared past them, a faraway look in her eyes, and Sturman felt sorry for her. She began to chew on her lower lip, and Sturman could tell she was fighting off tears. He considered excusing himself from the conversation, so she could talk to Eric, but he figured it might upset her even more.
He said, “Can’t they just postpone this whole circus?”
“Mr. Barbas is insisting we continue—”
Sturman snorted. “Your boss? The f
ancy-looking fella with a beard?”
She nodded.
“What an asshole. Want me to talk to him?”
Eric shot him a look and subtly shook his head. He said, “Ashley, is that why those doors down the hall are now closed off? To keep everyone from going near the shark tank?”
She nodded. She glanced over her shoulder, where Barbas was gesturing for her to come back over, a broad smile on his face. She smoothed her skirt with both hands and took a deep breath. “He’s calling for me again. Please, don’t say anything.”
She hurried off. Sturman looked at Eric and raised his eyebrows.
They stood and watched the operation unfold, as the divers in the tank finished maneuvering the half-ton ray into the net, as the wealthy guests beside them oohed and aahed. Then Sturman heard something over the conversation.
The low, rhythmic thump of helicopter rotors.
She felt the deep vibrations. They were unfamiliar, but not unlike those she had felt recently in the depths. The vibrations from the objects on the sea floor, which since her birth had regularly pulsed through her body. But that now gave her tremendous pain.
Pressed against the unusual, almost tasteless corals in the small enclosure, her body swelled slightly in her agitation, a burst of red patterns briefly marbling her skin.
She was fully sated. Unable to feed any longer, and with nothing left to feed upon, she was desperate to return to her den. To protect her young. And to avoid the bright light of a sun that had recently risen. But she was trapped. She had been unable to locate a way out of this strange lagoon. There was only the way she had come in, from above, in the sunlight. In the air.
The rhythmic thrumming grew louder. Her body swelled with seawater and she finally revealed herself, filling much of the tank’s volume with her own loose form, her great arms uncoiling, still seeking a means of escape. She saw something move on the other side of the glass, but ignored it, pushing her body toward the base of the exhibit. Her sudden movement lifted a wall of water up and sent a wave over the side of the tank, where it crashed down inside the vacant viewing passage below.
The noise, now overhead, throbbed into the water. Ached between her eyes.
Feeling below her, one of her arms met with a small hole. No. A series of holes. She felt water flowing into them.
There was some sort of obstruction blocking a larger hole. One that might accommodate her. She thrust the tip of one arm into the metal grate and tore it free with a muffled clang, casting it aside. Below the grate she felt a round opening. It might be large enough.
The tips of a few of her arms entered the hole first, and quickly met a ninety-degree bend, with narrow tunnels leading in opposite directions. Unthinking, the lead arms wriggled quickly in one direction, and began pulling her colossal form after them.
Overhead, the noise grew louder.
CHAPTER 59
By the sound of it, the bird was directly overhead. The loud, fast whumping generated by the rotor blades passed down the stairwell into the tunnel, through solid earth and cement walls, to reverberate throughout the passage.
Sturman waited in the dim underground tunnel, near the bottom of the exit stairwell. He could no longer see the netted manta ray, as the aquarium glass began a good hundred feet behind him. A small crowd of people milled on the staircase in front of him, waiting to head up to ground level where they could watch the helicopter bring the manta from the tank out to the ocean. But what the hell was the holdup?
When he had walked away from the glass, the crew in the tank had been standing on the shelf at the edge of the tank, in waist-deep water, to prevent the manta from leaving the net. They might at this moment be fastening the rig to the helicopter’s sling. But still Sturman and the others were being held back.
Up on the stairs, he could see Barbas talking with a police officer. Clearly there was some sort of problem. The bearded owner finally nodded at the policeman, who then walked up the stairs and out of sight. Barbas came halfway back down toward the crowd. His blond, birdlike assistant remained at his side. He raised both hands, waved them in the air. A reporter for what was perhaps a Bahamas television station trained his camera on Barbas.
“Ladies and gentlemen. May I have your attention? Please.” He shouted at them over the drumming rotors outside. His voice was inflected by some Old World accent.
“I apologize for the delay, but apparently the transport helicopter arrived from a different direction than we had anticipated. There is an approaching storm. The police have informed me that, due to the downdraft from the helicopter, it would be unsafe for us to head aboveground at the moment.”
There were some groans from the VIPs standing near Sturman. He studied the lot of them, so unlike him in their expensive clothes and jewelry, and shook his head. Bunch of entitled pricks. It had to be a hell of a thing in itself to navigate a helicopter in here, near the resort’s huge towers, to make the pickup. Any wind would make it that much harder. But they simply expected a show.
Barbas continued. “Please. If I can finish. Your safety is our top priority. We have two options now. You can move back to the tank, to watch the release from below. Or, if you are willing to wait with me here a bit longer, we may still have the chance to exit the tunnel to watch the helicopter if the captain gives us the green light. The choice is yours. Again, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience.”
A female reporter hurried up the stairs to speak with Barbas, parting the small crowd of people gathered below him, the cameraman at her heels.
Sturman turned to Eric. “Well?”
Eric shrugged. “I guess I’ll wait here. Nothing to see back there now. You?”
Sturman looked back down the tunnel, weighing his options. “I seen plenty of helicopters, and I doubt we’ll be allowed up there in time. I’m headin’ back. Maybe I can find another way out.”
“Don’t get yourself in trouble.”
“Me?” Sturman grinned and turned away from the stairs.
As he headed alone back into the tunnel, the heels of his Western work boots clopped hollowly on the cement. He reached the viewing area a few moments later and walked up to the glass, removing his cowboy hat. If he strained, he could see the helicopter overhead through the distortion of the glass, through the water’s wind-washed surface four stories above him. But there was simply too much chop. No point in watching from here.
He heard a shout, punctuated by a loud slam, and he turned to look down the tunnel. Two younger security guards had burst through the heavy double doors closing off the end of the passageway. The ones that had been sealed off to the public. The ones that led to the shark tank.
A pool of water was spreading beneath their feet, pouring in from the passageway behind them. It was quickly flooding the floor.
The guards splashed toward him, running now. They look petrified, frantic, their white pant legs wet to a few inches above their shoes. Sturman tensed. They were shouting at him in thick Bahamian accents, and he could make out only one word:
Lusca.
One of the guards shoved at him, yelling, as the other man rushed to the recessed door nearby, which by the signs apparently led to a construction zone. He unlocked it and swung it open, flipping a switch inside. Maybe to turn on some industrial sump pump, to clear the water? Then he ran back out and shouted to the other guard beside Sturman, and both men hurried off toward the exit stairwell, leaving the door ajar. Sturman turned and watched the metal doors from which they had come. His instincts told him to leave, now, but he didn’t want to turn his back on whatever they had seen farther down the tunnel.
“To hell with this,” he said.
As the guards’ shouting faded up the tunnel, he turned and began to run after them. Then came another sound: a loud creaking, as of twisting metal, coming from within the aquarium directly beside him.
Sturman stopped and turned to his right, toward the glass. An instant later, there was a loud clang from inside the tank as a round metal grate blew forcefull
y upward. In the cloud of silted water, an explosion of long, orange tendrils followed, erupting from the manhole-sized opening to wave madly through the water. Fish darted away from the wriggling snakes of flesh, which thickened and squirmed forth and displayed a palette of shifting colors—oranges and browns, mottled grays and streaks of incensed red—as they spewed into the water above the hole.
But they weren’t snakes. They were all part of something else. Something even larger.
Yard after yard of the enormous appendages continued to emerge from the small hole, a living, wet eruption of flesh. The colossal arms spread in each direction, and the slender tip of one struck the thick glass near Sturman, causing him to flinch. The tapered arm clung to the clear surface briefly, using the tiny suckers at its tip before twirling back into the water. The fleshy eruption slowed, stalled. Sturman held his breath.
Then the beast emerged. A gigantic, pulpy sac of flesh that popped through the small hole as if by great force. It quickly ballooned outward to fill the tank.
An octopus.
It looked remarkably similar to the creatures he had spent so much time with. The beast before him had almost the same relative dimensions as a giant Pacific octopus, and was similar in color. It even moved the same. But it was impossibly larger, spanning the tank.
The beast’s bulbous body was the size of a fifteen-passenger van, its writhing arms much, much longer. Sturman felt like Gulliver after he had left the tiny Lilliputians behind and arrived in the next land—where everything around him was greatly oversized. He was a mere mouse, looking out from a crack in the wall into a normal-sized aquarium, at the octopus inside it that barely fit.
He glanced up to where water sloshed madly against the glass above him. There was no gap between the glass and ceiling here. He figured the beast could not seize him, not yet, and although the primitive part of his brain demanded he run, he remained rooted in place. Unable to stop staring. Slowly, it turned toward him.
Above where the arms attached to the body twitched two basketball-size eyes. Golden eyes, seemingly turned sideways and bisected by black horizontal slits. The eyes of a cat. A hunter.
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