After what felt like hours, but was really only a few seconds, his father took notice of Will’s behavior, because he grabbed the microphone and called out over the ship, “All hands, prepare for battle! The shark is starboard side! Get ready, she’s coming fast.”
Will regained his abilities and shot out of the seat just as Ellen jumped out of hers. “No!” she squealed, staring out of the window.
“Ellen, stay here. Will, you too.”
“I want to fight again!”
His father turned to him, looking down into his eyes with a pensive look. “You did well last night, but now’s not the time. We’re ready for her. You’re safer here.”
“We’re not ready for it! Look at how few people there are left. If she rams us with all her strength like the other one did, we’ll need every hand we have. I can help. I can fight,” he argued.
“If she hits the ship that hard, it’ll rip us to pieces.”
Will put his hands in his hair. “All the more reason to be on deck, to get to the lifeboats, to at least end up in the water.”
His dad scrutinized him, and then sighed deeply.
“Let the kid go, Captain. He’s right,” Don Mack chimed in.
“Alright. Alright. Stay with Mallory. Get weapons.”
“Sir Mallory gave me three grenades.”
“Good. Use them sparingly, and put them to the best use. Three isn’t much.” He gazed over Will’s head at the oncoming fin. “Go.”
Will ran out of the cabin, zipping up his parka and pulling the hood over his head, wrapping his bare hands in thick gloves.
The air was as frigid as ever, and after being in the warmth of the bridge for so long, the sleet and snow felt like bee stings all over the parts of his face that were exposed. He squinted his eyes against the elements as he ran down the stairs and onto the deck, scanning for Sir Mallory.
He spotted him starboard, bracing the rocket launcher against the rail, with James holding the back of it. It was still tied to the fire pit, but the ropes had been loosened, giving slack enough for it to reach this fighting position. Sir Mallory screamed out in the fading light at the fin. “Come on, you bitch! You slimy, fat spawn of a whore!”
The remaining crewmen had stopped ship work and had taken up handguns, the techie whose name Will still didn’t know had one of the three machine guns, and the two green-suited men had the others.
The fin came on, but slowly, as though trying to intimidate them all with its sheer oncoming size in slow motion. Will had seen how massive its head was, how wide its mouth, teeth and bite were when it killed Lady Katherine. They all had.
That head and those gigantic teeth were coming right for them, intent on revenge for killing its babies. Will knew it.
The Megalodon had held back the night before, but now, it had no intention of such caution. It took its time, knowing it was twice the size of the ship and had them at its mercy, firepower be damned.
It was as though it knew they were almost out of fight, almost out of weapons that would even come close to touching it, if that. Sure, the little ones went down, but the mama didn’t get to its size by having the same impulsiveness of attack that its offspring had had the night before, bringing them to their deaths. God knows how long it took the enormous prehistoric predator to get to this size, what it had survived to live long enough to be seventy feet.
“Come on!” Sir Mallory continued. He was mad with fury and rage, his once-pale face now red, his eyes wide and bursting out of their sockets as he stared down the imposing white fin leisurely coming their way.
“What’s taking you so long?” he beckoned. “You lazy cunt!”
Will glanced back at James, who looked afraid. He pulled out a grenade, put his finger on the pin, and waited, remembering his father saying for him to use them wisely. His gloved hands shook around the grenade.
Its excruciatingly slow descent upon the ship began to pick up speed, and within a few tense moments, the fin was right upon them. Its head surfaced, showing two enormous black, soulless eyes examining its battlefield. Just as it reached the side of the ship, its mouth came out of the water. The head, oh God. It was even bigger close-up than it was from afar on the beach at the compound. It took up half the ship’s side. Its open mouth let out a ghastly, reeking, and putrid scent as the teeth prepared for the now-familiar lunge they seemingly used like magic, coming right out of its mouth before it attacked.
Sir Mallory snapped just then, because Lady Katherine’s head was still impaled on the tooth. Now, her face was barely recognizable, blue, bloated, with empty eye sockets. Her bottom jaw was completely gone.
Sir Mallory yanked the Megalodon tooth Will had once handled out of his pocket, and sliced the ropes holding the missile launcher. He then grabbed it up in his good arm and hand, and in a crazy and surprisingly daring move, jumped right inside the gigantic mouth bearing down on the deck.
All in a quick movement, he landed on his feet on its tongue, and then wedged the rocket launcher in the Megalodon’s mouth, propping it open, screaming curses the whole time through the howling wind and whirling snow.
The Megalodon was stunned, and its approach stopped dead as it began swinging its head violently from side to side, trying to dislodge the object bracing its mouth open, keeping it from breathing. Will wondered briefly why it didn’t submerge, but maybe it couldn’t with the missile launcher stuck like that.
Sir Mallory held on to her front teeth with his good hand, and braced himself against the rocket launcher at his back. He reached up to the tooth holding his dead beloved wife’s impaled head with his treasured Megalodon tooth in his left hand, and dug into the root of the tooth, blood pouring over his head, face, and shoulders. He truly looked like a madman then.
Still, the gargantuan shark swung its head side to side, making the water around the ship violent and tumultuous. The ship rocked hard in the now even rougher sea.
Sir Mallory made quick work with the sharp, polished tooth, and dug out the giant’s tooth bearing what was left of Lady Katherine’s head, and held it out, screaming victory curses at the roof of her bloody mouth. His face was entirely dark red and slick, and the only thing that made him recognizable as Sir Mallory was his eyes.
He looked, for once, like he might just have fulfilled a new life’s desire: revenge.
“Shoot the rocket launcher, Mallory!” Will heard his dad call out over the speakers. Mallory either couldn’t hear him or didn’t care. He kept holding up the tooth and crying out to the storm and the ship and the gods themselves. Will saw streaks of his pale skin appear down his cheeks and realized the man was crying.
“Shoot it! You’ve got her!”
Just then, all at once, the missile launcher slipped as the Megalodon finally thought to shift its tongue. It slid to the side inside its mouth, landing to the left of its tongue and against its bottom teeth, lodged there loosely.
The shark took full advantage of its freedom, and wasted no time in closing its sharp, serrated teeth around Sir Mallory.
Will watched in horror as it began to chew up the man who had become one of the people who had influenced Will’s life the most in such a short amount of time. He saw Sir Mallory’s stomach rip open as it chewed, and his face went blank as his innards spilled out into its huge mouth. Strings of intestines hung from between its bottom teeth the next time it opened its mouth, and now both of Sir Mallory’s legs were completely severed from his body. Still, he was alive, stunned, yet holding desperately to the tooth with Lady Katherine’s head on it.
In one last bloody gush, it finished him off, swallowing hard, and then submerged. Its dorsal fin still towered above the ship, and the fin circled with intent all around the ship as though trying to find a weakness, a way to get them without taking any damage as the machine guns fired. Nobody had wanted to shoot while Sir Mallory was in her mouth.
There had been a moment of true hope when Sir Mallory had the chance to blow the top of her head open with the rocket launcher. Will’
s dad had seen it, and even tried to get through to the devastated and broken-spirited man, but his madness had gone too far.
Will swallowed hard as he glanced over the rail at the tooth with Lady Katherine’s head still on it bobbing in the wild sea.
People ran from side to front to back to side of the boat, trying to keep up with its frantic and fast moves, firing the guns and missing. Bullets would run out soon, and then what would they have? The rocket launcher was gone.
Will kept ahold of his grenade, staying starboard through the whole thing, stunned by what he had just seen.
Then, it started testing the ship for weakness. It rammed the port side of the boat almost gently compared to the real damage it could do, almost as though testing the beast that was the ship itself like it was a giant predator, that the tasty snacks living on it were parasites it could pick off, but that they were of no consequence. Of course, that’s what it would seem like to the huge shark.
The boat rocked to the side, and people fell and slid on the slick deck.
Will miraculously kept his balance by grabbing the handrail at the last minute before impact, and his dad righted the ship just in time for the Megalodon to slam into the front of the ship, with more force this time.
Will fell back, but kept his death grip on the rail. Once it had hit, the fighters recovered quickly and ran to portside where Will was stuck to his spot, following the monster’s fin to where it intended to hit next.
The gunfire deafened Will momentarily. He closed his eyes and worried about Ellen for a brief moment, and then opened his eyes, seeing one of the guns take chunks out of the fin, and blood sprayed out, and then leaked down the length of it. Dark red against gleaming white in the storming snow.
A green-suited man aimed down as it approached, now furious with pain and coming fast. Will saw it tuck its head under through the water’s surface as it came in for a hit, but the green-suited man fired directly into the top of its head a stream of bullets that had to do damage, yet still, it rammed the ship.
Hard.
They all fell back, and Will lost his grip on the grenade. It rolled away and over the side of the deck, into the water, forever useless to him.
“Damn it!” he muttered as he caught his breath, having landed in the center of the deck. Had the green-suited man done anything? If not, they truly were screwed. The machine guns in the hands of the green-suited men were their deadliest weapons. Will’s confidence in his grenade abilities was low, and he wished he hadn’t lost that precious one of three. How stupid of him. He should have been holding on tighter.
The Megalodon hit starboard again, not as hard, yet deeper in the water than its other hits. The ship lunged to the side.
Will’s mind’s eye kept seeing Sir Mallory’s guts, his eyes, his tears streaking the blood covering his face.
He snapped. He couldn’t take anymore.
Will got up and ran to the bridge. He fell again and again with the tilt of the boat and the slickness of the ice on deck, but he made it to the stairwell to the bridge. He climbed it in three leaps and barged onto the bridge.
Ellen was balled up in a corner, and Will’s dad and Don Mack were yelling to each other to be heard over the gunfire. “Taking on water! Taking on water!”
Will grabbed his father, and spun his around from the controls to face him.
“Now’s not the time, son.” He tried to twist out of Will’s grasp and get back to sailing the ship.
“Dad…” And then he threw up all over the side of his father’s clothes.
“Will!” he exclaimed, whirling around to him.
“Dad, Dad. I saw Sir Mallory, I was right there. I saw…I saw…please, Dad, save us, you have to save us! I know you can. Please.” Will’s voice broke, and he ducked his head, wiping bile from his lips.
His father grabbed his face and put his forehead to Will’s. “I’ll get you and Ellen out of this. I swear to god. Do you still have your grenades?”
“Uh, two of them.”
“Good. Good. Now—”
Just then, the Megalodon hit the port side with enormous force, and even Will heard the crushing metal of the hull breaching. Now the ship was taking on water on both sides.
“Dad, please,” was all Will could say.
“I’ve got you, no matter what.”
Chapter 17
Because the second hit was below water, the ship didn’t fly across the sea. It was, however, enough to send Don Mack into a fit with the microphone. “Abandon ship! All hands, abandon ship!”
“Let’s go,” Will’s dad said to him, and then grabbed Ellen up and to her feet. She seemed so panicked to Will, and she looked to their father with such despair that it hurt Will to see her like that.
“Get to the lifeboats, I repeat, get to the lifeboats,” Don Mack continued, and then dropped the mic. “Let’s go!”
They ran off the bridge as the ship tipped to portside, where the damage must’ve been terrible under the water’s surface. The ship was, indeed, taking on a lot of water down below, and fast.
Will numbly ran with the others, worried about being on a lifeboat. How could they possibly survive on a lifeboat after what the Megalodon had done to the ship?
He slid and skidded all the way to the lifeboats, of which there were four. The two crewmen left were lowering on one as Will, his father, Don Mack and Ellen reached them.
A green-suited man could be heard firing a machine gun into the water, maybe in some desperate attempt at one last shot at killing her, albeit a stupid idea.
Maybe he wanted to go down with the ship. Wasn’t that what his father was supposed to do? But then again, he promised Will that he would get them to safety. He had no choice but to trust in his father, that he could get them out of this like he said he could.
Will looked back at the wildly tilting deck as Ellen was ushered onto the lifeboat. James was trying to get to them, but kept slipping and falling on his side. At one point, he nearly slid off the deck and into the icy water, but hefted his lower half back up and continued on.
The Megalodon hadn’t made another attack in all this time. Perhaps it was waiting to see what kind of damage it had done, if its last lunge was enough to exact its revenge.
Will was wrong.
Its head appeared beside the boat portside, black eyes rolling back as it opened its disgusting, gap-toothed mouth all the way, right by James.
James screamed when the smell hit him, fell down, and rolled onto his back.
The giant shark’s teeth popped out toward the entire side of the deck, dead-center where James lay.
Crunch. As the teeth closed, James’ body simply turned to a pulp of crushed meat and gushing, spraying blood. He didn’t have time to scream again.
And Will didn’t have time to register it, because the Megalodon had snapped the ship in half.
His father grabbed for his hand as he fell inward toward the collapsing ship, catching Will before he careened into the pit of metal folding inward.
He slung Will overboard, and Will sailed through the snow as though in slow motion, and at the last minute he had the sense to take a deep breath. Then, everything sped up and he hit the freezing, icy water of the Antarctic sea.
Will had never felt cold like this, and his lungs froze up, as did his limbs, upon sinking into the water. His senses were numbed, his brain on overload. He knew he needed to get to the surface, needed to get air and swim, swim far away from the enormous Megalodon, but he couldn’t move. Not at all. He kept swirling in the mad sea, sinking…sinking…
His mother’s face came into his mind’s eye as he contemplated simply inhaling the salty water into his lungs. They burned for air. Will had only seen his mother in photographs, having been too young to remember her, but now, he saw her as though he were lying in a crib. Her long, brown braid swayed in his face and tickled his nose.
“What a good baby!” she cooed at him. “Do you know how much I love you?”
He smiled at her, gurgling, an
d took a deep breath…
An arm grabbed him under his armpits, wrapping around the front of him. He felt himself being pulled upward, out of the crib, and through the coldest waters he had ever known. Upon breaking the surface, he coughed and gasped, but still couldn’t move.
“I got you,” he heard his father say. “I got you, now grab ahold of me under my arms, stay on my back. Going to swim to a boat, come on. Move.”
Will opened his eyes. When had it gotten so dark?
He knew then that the Megalodon had attacked because they’d been so close to being out of her swimming territory. Hadn’t Don Mack said that by night, they’d be in safe waters? Too shallow for the gargantuan shark?
“Come on! We have to find Ellen.” His father tread water in from of him, and spun around. “Grab hold.”
Will made his arms move now that he wasn’t anchored to his father’s grasp. God, the pain from swimming in the frigid sea was torture. He tried kicking his feet to get closer to his dad, but nothing happened and he began to sink again. Just as his head went below the rough ocean’s surface, his father pulled him up again.
“No time, come on. You can do it. You have to. For me, for Ellen.”
Will grabbed ahold of his father’s neck.
“No, under my arms, son. I can’t swim like that.”
With much pain, Will eased his frozen claws of hands under his father’s arms and said in a tight, choked voice, “I’m on. I’m on, Dad. Let’s find Ellen.”
Last Will had seen of her, she and Don Mack were in a lifeboat trying to get her life jacket on just before he and his dad were about to climb aboard the small metal thing.
The Megalodon. It was still out there. Out here. Maybe it was right next to them, about to strike. Its rank odor hung on every air particle as though its open maw might be anywhere.
As Will’s father swam, Will looked back over his shoulder. It took all his strength to do. The icy cold made all his joints and muscles stiff as though he were already dead, his body turning to the lifeless side while his brain still worked.
Megalodon: Apex Predator Page 12