by Russ Watts
As his hand fell to his side, he brushed his pant leg and felt something small and hard tucked into the inside pocket. He pulled it out and clasped it in his hands. It was pitch black now and he had to work out what it was by touch. His thumb caressed the three-inch long plastic and he laughed. He could picture it now, the naked woman sunbathing on that tropical island. He laughed again, and felt a rush of cold water swarm over his legs, completely taking his breath away.
Thank you, Stacy.
He flicked the wheel down and a tiny flame erupted from the tip of the lighter. Don’s shaking hand carried it toward the oil drum. Any moment now and…when he was all but half an inch away, the flame went out, caught by a droplet of flying water. As the water rose higher, up to his chest, there was another creaking sound and he thought the galley door was going to give way. It held, just, but the pressure on it had undoubtedly increased, and he knew he only had seconds left. The dark room was abruptly pitched into silence. The monster’s barking stopped and the only sound Don could hear was the beating of his own heart.
As he held the lighter up above the seawater, he felt the warmth on his back. The strong African sun took away the chill of the water. All around him was gunfire and shouting. It was chaos and he didn’t know if the bullets whistling past his head were friendly or not. Someone yelled in his ear to detonate, but he knew he couldn’t. His brother was still inside the mosque, and the terrorists were too close. If he blew them up, he would take his brother out too.
Robert, where are you?
The detonator was right there, all he had to do it was push it. But, Robert was there. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t blow it up, not now. He had to go and save his brother. There was a chance he could make it. There was always another chance.
Guilt and tears welled up inside him as the churning seawater numbed his lower body. His left arm was broken, useless, and his head pounded. He held the lighter and his thumb rested on the ignition wheel. If the monster didn’t find him in the next five seconds, then the churning rushing water would. The pantry would flood and Don’s lungs would fill with seawater. The world would turn icy black and the trawler would sink to the depths with the Ocean King free to roam the seas of the world. All Don had to do was flick the ignition and unleash the payload. The oil would erupt as long as it still had enough oxygen to ignite.
Do it, do it now.
Don’s salty tears shimmied down his face and fell into the ocean’s saltwater. His brother whispered in his ear.
I’m sorry, Robert. Forgive me. I’ll see you soon, brother. I’m waiting for you. It’s not your fault. I can’t do this again.
It was a no-win situation; that was what the debriefing had revealed. The insurgents had rigged the mosque with enough explosives to level it twice over.
“Perhaps, if O’Reilly had blown up the outer doors when he had the chance though,” said the prosecutor, “well then, perhaps more would’ve lived. Navy Seal, Robert O’Reilly, would certainly have been spared the agonising death we all saw he suffered and his brother would not have his own brother’s blood on his hands.”
Cold water mingled with African sunshine and Don shivered. Fear had paralysed him before, and couldn’t let it happen this time. His fear and shame and guilt dissipated, flowing out of him like the blood flowed from his arm. Don felt clean and knew what he had to do. The man in the yellow shirt smiled and waved. Don’s eyes glazed over as the galley door gave way and a thunderous tumult of water crashed into the black room.
I’m sorry, Mom. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry, Robert, I couldn’t save you. I’m letting you go now, but I’ll see you soon, brother.
The Ocean King appeared, its jaws drooling with excitement, and the wooden walls splintered apart as the galley collapsed. Don briefly saw the gigantic teeth of the Ocean King approaching, as he calmly flicked the lighter’s wheel and the tiny flame erupted for one last time. It caught onto the oil and there was a spark as the oil drums ignited. The last of the oxygen in the room was sucked up into the explosion and Don closed his eyes. The world went a hellish, fiery black.
The End
Read on for a free sample of Leviathan
Acknowledgements
The impetus to write ‘The Ocean King’ came from my fantastic publisher at Severed Press. I urge you to check them out along with the innumerable quality novels they have produced at www.severedpress.com
This story and all the characters are fictional, but there are undoubtedly outside influences that affect my thought process, and can lead the plot in directions I would never have thought of. I have to thank my wife for standing behind me and putting up with the nightmares.
Finally, if you have enjoyed this, then please consider leaving a review. Thank you. Feel free to visit my website www.russwatts.co or view my other titles by Severed Press:
The Afflicted
The Grave
Devouring the Dead
Devouring the Dead 2: Nemesis
1
Johnny Horowitz knew he was onto something when he saw the beach.
Unlike all the others on Seagull Island, this one was empty. No sunbathing tourists, no children frolicking at the edge of the surf, no teenagers swimming the currents. Not a thing, in fact. And that was the most disturbing thing about it. That was what took hold of him and held him there, would not let him go.
True, Hurricane Amelia was on its way but it would be at least a week before it even got close to Seagull. So…what then? What explained this?
It was weird.
In fact, the desertion was almost eerie.
He sat there on his rented bicycle, the hot sun of the Carolinas basking his balding head, burning the hairless flesh red. Regardless, he waited, thinking and wondering. He wasn’t certain why, but this place was telling him something, speaking to him in a tongue he just couldn’t quite decipher. But its meaning was all-too apparent.
Come down here, Johnny. Come see about me.
If he had been a lyre, then one of his strings had been plucked. It kept ringing out in his head.
He put the kickstand down with the heel of his battered Nike and left the winding dirt road and moved through a forest of grass down the hill. The beach was fenced off with a faded red storm fence. KEEP OUT SEAGULL ISLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT, a weathered sign said. The storm of the other night had flattened a section of it so now there was no reason to keep out.
Shit, he thought, where in the hell would I be if I listened to rules?
Nothing like authority telling you not to do something, he thought with amusement, that makes you want to do it. But it had been that way his entire life. When he was a teenager they said don’t smoke and don’t drink alcohol, so he smoked and got loaded every weekend. Don’t do drugs, they said, and avoid premarital sex, so he toked right through high school and jumped on anything that had a hole in the bottom. And now here he was, a fortysomething man with a steadily evaporating bank account on the downward spiral of a once lucrative photography career and he was once again thumbing his nose at authority and all because of curiosity.
This is more than curiosity and you know it, he thought. This is bigger. This a gut feeling. Christ, it’s practically a premonition.
He walked over the flattened section of fence and to the perimeter of the beach itself. It was incredible, really. The beaches on Seagull were crowded this time of year, three days after the Fourth of July, and here was this huge, empty expanse of white sand licked by the Atlantic.
Why the hell didn’t they open this up?
Why were there no hotels around here?
He chewed his lower lip and just studied the scene. The beach extended nearly a half a mile in either direction, possibly more. It was flanked by towering, black cliffs on either side, hemmed in by the ocean and that eyesore length of fence with the signs tacked to it. It was only accessible if you were to hop the fence (or find a broken section). There was no way you could skirt the cliffs. They were sheer and deadly, the ocean battering against them with
angry force. And it wouldn’t be easy to land a boat: the breakers were huge and thundering as they shattered against jutting fingers of barnacled rock and subsided into swirling tidal pools. A hundred yards offshore the conflicting currents of the riptides turned the sea into a maelstrom of churning, cascading water. No, it would be suicide trying to get a boat ashore in that.
Every three-hundred feet or so there were more signs sunk into the sand.
ABSOLUTELY NO SWIMMING
STRONG UNDERTOW
SEAGULL ISLAND POLICE DEPT.
No, no conspiracy. This place was just too dangerous.
Johnny could well imagine all the swimmers that had been lost here. Once upon a time, of course, they probably even allowed sunbathing, but people in their infinite stupidity just wouldn’t stay out of the water.
Yeah, that was the reason, all right…yet, what were the vibes he was getting about this place? They were strong and clear if not necessarily specific. This goddamn place was talking to him. It had a story to tell and he just had to know what it was.
He stepped out into the sand. It was like some waveless, windless sea of white broken only by rocky islands of grass and seaweed deposited by the tide. An endless expanse of alien geography. Save for the tumultuous, hammering ocean, it was silent and still and waiting. Holding its breath. And the real crazy thing was that there was not a single seagull or tern to be seen. On an island practically infested with them that was more than just a little strange.
Johnny moved along, his feet sinking in the sand, the Atlantic spray cool, the sun hot. All in all, it was just another beach. He sat down on a rock outcropping and mopped the sweat from his brow.
He was about to leave when he saw it.
About two-hundred feet from the shore, half-buried in the sand were bones.
Human bones.
The yellowed staves of a ribcage. The jutting broomstick of a femur. The jawless grin of a skull. A black sand spider casually left an eye socket and went on its way.
Johnny went on his way, too.
He went and got his camera.
2
Johnny trusted his vibes.
In his job, you got so you went on instinct and instinct alone sometimes. He worked freelance for three of the country’s leading tabloids—the Globe was one of them—snapping photos of celebrities when they least expected it and knocking out some copy on the same. Although others considered him a member of the much-maligned paparazzi—or a “shit-crawling worm that slithered on his belly like a reptile”, according to Alec Baldwin—he considered himself a photojournalist. It was his job to give people what they wanted and if that entailed digging in the dirt and crawling through shit, so be it. The checks cashed all the same.
He’d been at it for fifteen years now, ever since he got fired from the Chicago Trib for drinking. But that was the great thing about the freelance business: nobody gave a shit how drunk you were as long as you produced the goods. And Johnny had produced them. Like a hen putting out eggs, he filled Middle America’s insatiable hunger for sleazy celebrity photos. Whether that was a disheveled Lindsay Lohan leaving a treatment center and flipping him the bird or Charlie Sheen exiting a high dollar whorehouse in a frantic cocaine rage, Paris Hilton stumbling drunk and sloppy out of a limo from a hard night of clubbing or Princess Kate sunbathing topless, the royal jewels on full display, he always brought home the goods.
He had been threatened, sued, beaten-up—Jean Claude Van Damme had once kicked him in the nuts—but like a woman’s monthlies, he always returned with unsettling regularity. “Parasite? Your damn right I’m a parasite,” he had been quoted as saying. “I’m a parasite feeding off the carcasses of celebrities who are sucking the blood of the general public with their questionable, over-hyped talents.”
He considered one of his most redeeming qualities to be his sense of moral ambiguity. It wasn’t his place to judge, only to report. He would take his photographs and write a few inflamed paragraphs, stir things up a bit as was his way, lead the viewer and reader in a certain direction and let them run wild with it. He felt no pangs of guilt over any of it and never had. He provided a saleable service. People wanted shit. He sold shit. They liked the smell and taste of it and he kept shoveling it. He was no different than McDonald’s in his somewhat narrow world view. People wanted hamburgers, so they sold them hamburgers, and never once did they suffer moral pangs over the preservative-laden monkey mulch they slapped between two smoothly-engineered buns. They just counted the cash and smiled brightly. He did the same.
He was loved by his editors and loathed by nearly everyone else. But it didn’t bother him. He laughed all the way to the bank. Or had, until recently. Things started to add up and his enemies grew more powerful. The lawsuits had gotten as thick as bluebottle flies on juicy turds until it wasn’t just him getting sued, but the rags he worked for. He currently had six restraining orders on him (he wasn’t, for example, allowed to come within 150 feet of Beyonce) and a dozen more going through the courts. The gravy train, as it were, had run out of gravy.
As Janet Baum over at the Star had told him, “Just back off for awhile, Johnny. Lay low, take a vacation. Celebrity memories are short. In a couple months you can come back strong as ever. Trust me, these overfed, narcissistic pukes will still be drinking and driving, still be fucking their children’s au pairs, and still be snorting coke off their agent’s desk two months from now. Other than posing in front of mirrors and hawking their latest tepid remake, it’s what they do.”
Good advice. The problem was, Johnny didn’t know if he could wait two months without a goddamn check. He had a really, really bad habit of liking good booze, gourmet food, and fast cars. The payment was coming up on the Jag again and he had to make good on the timeshare in Key West. And given the state of his finances, he knew damn well that trouble was coming. Big trouble. He needed some cash and he needed it quick. Given that stalking Justin Beiber with a camera and hiding in Matt Damon’s bushes was pretty much out of the question by this point, he needed to come up with something.
Janet seemed to feel that this was a golden opportunity to find himself.
Johnny laughed at that one. He wanted to find himself about as much as Cameron Diaz wanted to find pictures of her bedroom in the Globe that time.
No, Janet probably meant well—that was debatable—but it just proved that she did not know him. He was not about to retire or hang out a shingle and take shots of puppies and babies or open a fucking clam shack in Cocoa Beach. He was good at one thing and he knew it. When it came to dirt, Johnny Horowitz was in his element. He’d been crawling through it for years and knew it like your average earthworm.
That’s why the beach was calling to him. It had a story to tell and, judging by those well-picked bones, it was one that was probably ghastly and gory and that got his blood pumping to the old levels of sheer excitement.
There was something here.
Something good.
Something dirty.
And nobody knew dirt better than he did.
Leviathan is available from Amazon here