by Russ Elliott
John was silent for a long moment. “Have there been any other attacks or anything else unusual in the news.”
“The beachings. During the last couple of days, there have been several whales beached along the southern coast, just west of Natal. But I haven’t heard of any attacks on humans. I guess it’s a good thing we have those shark barrier nets along the more popular beaches.”
John felt a new sense of urgency. “That might help the swimmers, but it’s not going to do much for the boaters. There’s not much time. We’ve got to get to the Navy ASAP, and then try to talk to that Sharks Bureau they have out here.
“You mean the Natal Sharks Board?” Kate asked.
“Yeah, that’s the organization that monitors the shark barrier nets and tries to protect the beaches, right?”
Kate nodded. “Did you notify anyone from the boat on your way in?”
“Just the Navy, but I’m not sure how much they believed me.”
Kate thought for a moment. “Chances are, no one in their right mind will believe a word we say until they see the tooth. And even then, who knows? I mean I’ve seen it, and I barely believe you. The Navy could say that it just looks fresh. I mean, just because it’s white doesn’t prove it’s organic. There are plenty of ancient fossils that have been permineralized in white stone.”
John nodded. “We need to prove its authenticity. But carbon testing could take weeks.”
“There may be another option. If we could have someone well respected in the field examine the tooth, that just might be enough.” Kate glanced at the instrument cluster. “Before heading to the Navy, there’s one stop we need to make.” She smiled and glanced at the tooth. “Steven . . . I sure hope you’re sitting down when you sees this.”
But how would they find it? The creature could truly be anywhere, thought John. He looked down through the window and wondered what new evidence he would hear about once they landed. Worse yet, what gruesome images would he see when he flipped on the news? He tried to relax and eased back in his seat.
The flight seemed to last forever.
Chapter 20
MISDIAGNOSIS
Doug wrapped his arm around Samantha while doing his best to console her in the Keurboom beach parking lot. Trembling, she leaned back against the side of the ambulance, her makeup streaked from tears. Across from them, Officer Marimba continued to take her statement. He was an exceptionally thin black man. His cheeks were hollow, and his face was weathered in a way that made it difficult to determine his age. Samantha’s eyes kept going to a thick vein that protruded from beneath his officer’s hat and trailed down the side of his forehead. He looked up from his pen and pad. “So it was just the two of them that were supposed to meet you here today?”
“Yes,” she sniffled.
“And you’re sure about the . . . tattoo?”
Samantha nodded and wiped her eyes. She glanced down at her ankle then looked up at the water. A police boat slowly idled across the surface, a cable trailing from its stern. “How long are they gonna keep doing that?”
“They’ll probably keep dredging into the night or until they find something,” said Officer Marimba, folding up his pad. Now that the questioning was over, his voice held compassion. “You don’t have to wait around. We’ll call you if anything happens. You’ve been through a lot. You should go home and try to get some rest.”
Samantha’s gaze at the boat on the water never wavered. She watched Joe walk to a section of beach and point to the water where he found the first surfboard. Dozens of people surrounded him, taking pictures, hanging on his every word. She looked away. How pathetic. He seems to be enjoying the attention.
She felt the ambulance rumble as its engine started. The side door popped open. The driver looked back at Officer Marimba and waved him over. The officer excused himself from Samantha and Doug and walked to the driver’s side door. After glancing back at Samantha, he nodded at the driver. “Okay, I’ll follow you.”
Officer Marimba jogged back to Samantha and Doug. “You go on home like I told you, try to relax. We’ll handle this. I have to go check out an accident just down the road, then I’m going to come back. I promise I’ll call you if there’s any news.”
Samantha nodded, and Doug took her by the shoulder and led her back to the van.
Doug waved over to Joe with a shout, “I’m gonna take Samantha home. Are you staying?”
Joe looked back through the crowd of anxious bystanders. “Yeah, I’m gonna stick around for a while!”
“I’ll be back later to pick you up then.” Doug looked over at Paul who was standing beside a police car. “What about you?”
They watched another news van pull into the parking lot. Paul said, “I’ll stay too!”
“Looks like nobody wants to miss any of the action,” muttered Doug, closing the door of the van. Through his rearview mirror he saw the flashing lights of the ambulance and police car winding along the road until they disappeared in the distance. The gold van pulled out of the dusty parking lot and headed in the same direction.
Keeping one eye on the road, Doug took a box of tissues from the glove compartment and handed them to Samantha. “Here you go, hon. It’s going to be okay.”
Samantha pulled a tissue from the box and wiped her eyes. As the van came around a corner, she looked up and saw the flashing lights of the ambulance in the distance. The van slowed, keeping to the opposite side of the road while they passed the accident scene. Samantha tried not to look, but in the glow of the ambulance lights, she saw the top of a cream-colored station wagon with surfboard racks protruding from the ditch.
“Stop!” Samantha screamed. “That’s Dorian’s car. Stop, stop!
“How can it be? Are you sure?” Doug slammed on the brakes.
“Yes, it even has the surfboard racks on it. Stop!”
Doug pulled the van over on the shoulder of the road, careful to stop far enough ahead of the ambulance so he didn’t block its exit path. Samantha sprang from the door and ran toward the man on the stretcher. Her white robe waved in the breeze.
Officer Marimba stopped her just short of reaching the paramedics and grasped her by the shoulders. “Samantha, what are you doing here? You should be going home.”
She craned her neck to look over the officer’s shoulder. In the flashing light, she saw a dark-haired man, blood streaming from the front of his wetsuit. The paramedics were bringing him up from the ditch. “It’s Ron, Dorian’s friend,” she cried. “The one who was supposed to be with him at the shoot today.”
“Are you sure?” asked Officer Marimba.
Doug walked up and placed an arm around Samantha’s waist, helping to hold her back. “Yes, I’m sure!” said Samantha. “Dorian showed me pictures of him. That’s him in Dorian’s car! He’s wearing a wetsuit!” Her teeth began to chatter, and Doug and Officer Marimba tried to steer her back to the van. Still, she asked questions. “It looks serious. What happened to his chest? Is he going to live?”
“He’s lost a lot of blood. Miss, you have to stay back.” Officer Marimba reassured her, “They’re doing all that they can.”
“But what happened to his chest? Was it from the steering wheel, the impact?”
The officer looked troubled. “That’s the strange part. He claims it was from some enormous sea creature.”
~~~
Beneath the rhythmic sound of the helicopter’s chopping blades, John mentally rehearsed his impending conversation with the Navy. Would the tooth be enough evidence to win them over? Although John’s eyes had been closed for nearly twenty minutes, he hadn’t slept a wink. He slowly opened his eyes, feeling them relax while he gazed into the distance. The faint mountaintops slowly became clearer, revealing their jagged crevices.
He peered down through the side window. The dark aquamarine water lightened into a beautiful shade of green as it met the shore. A stretch of beach flashed by, and tall sandstone cliffs reached up toward the helicopter. Finally, he was over land.
John’s earphones crackled.
Kate looked over. “Feel any better?”
“Definitely,” John said, looking down through the side window. “Yesterday I didn’t think I’d ever see land again.” He reached down and rubbed the chimp’s head. Even she seemed more relaxed. “So where are we?”
“Cape St. Francis, about fifty miles east of Port Elizabeth. I need to stop for fuel first, don’t have quite enough to make it back. I must warn you, though . . . this isn’t the nicest place to stop for petrol. But it’s the closest.”
As long as they have a TV to check the news, John thought. His mind kept going back to the Motanza. If the creature was already here, he knew that attack was only the tip of the iceberg.
The helicopter flashed over another mountain and a small patch of asphalt appeared in a distant clearing. John looked down through the small window in front of his feet. Drawing closer, it looked like an abandoned gas station beside the shortest landing strip he’d ever seen. “Is that where we’re stopping?”
“That’s it,” Kate said, adjusting the collective. They slowly descended before the midday sun. As the landing gear touched ground on the small runway, Kate turned off the engine. “Like I said, this isn’t the nicest place to stop for fuel.”
John rubbed the back of his neck. “As long as they have a TV. I’d like to check the news; see if anything has turned up. So now, how far are we from the naval station?”
“Including time to refuel, we’re about forty minutes away, tops,” said Kate, popping open the side door.
Leaving the tooth on the seat, John stepped from the helicopter and felt the firm asphalt beneath his boots. “Finally, back to civilization,” he announced and released a deep breath. After he closed the door, a high-pitched shriek came from the cockpit.
“Uh oh,” said Kate. “Sounds like we’re forgetting someone, and she doesn’t appreciate it.”
John leaned back into the cockpit and picked up the chimp. “Okay, I guess you need to stretch your legs too.” After setting Crystal gently on the ground, he walked around the helicopter, and past an old rusted Buick that hadn’t seen a speck of paint in twenty years, laying on its side. He saw a small shack-like building beside the runway. Someone emerged from the doorway and ran up to greet them. The small black man wore only a pair of dark-green pants cut off just below the knees.
Kate waved. “That’s Ebo.”
“Ebo,” John muttered, “Interesting name.”
“Yeah, it means born on Tuesday. He has a brother named Ekow . . . that means born on Thursday.”
Kate reached out to shake the smiling man’s hand. “Ebo, how’ve you been? How’s the family?” Leading them toward the building, Ebo glanced at John and said something to Kate in Afrikaans.
Kate laughed aloud. “No, no, he’s just been doing a bit of exploring.”
“What did he say?” asked John.
“He said, ‘What happened to your friend; look like he try to swim with piranha?’”
John looked down at the dozens of scratches evident through his shredded shirt. He lifted his forearm and examined the dried blood covering the numerous gashes. “I guess I could use some cleaning up. But that’ll have to wait. Do you have a TV?”
“Ebo and I will refuel. There’s a TV in there.” Kate pointed to the dilapidated building.
John stepped through the doorway holding one of Crystal’s long fingers and was greeted by a black woman sitting in a chair, nursing a baby. Around her feet, several chickens pecked at crumbs on the floor of the makeshift lobby. From out of nowhere, a goat rushed by, nearly knocking him over as it ran through the doorway. Catching himself on the doorknob, John looked over at Kate who was standing by the fuel pump. Kate smiled and shouted, “Hey, welcome back to civilization!”
John looked down at the slow-moving chimp. “Come on, Crystal.” He reached down and picked her up. After a glance around the room, he asked the woman, “Do you have a TV . . . a television?”
With her free hand, the woman pointed to a dirty glass partition in the back of the building. John nodded. He headed through the lobby, choosing his steps carefully among a myriad of chicken droppings. The broken tile floor turned into dirt when he entered the next room.
It was an office. A little black boy about four years old sat on a milk crate. Oblivious to the intruders, his eyes never moved from a small TV on a bookshelf. The best John could tell, it was playing Scooby-Doo in Spanish. John sat the chimp on the corner of an old wooden desk. The moment he reached up to change the channel, the boy’s face contorted like it was ready for a major eruption.
“Okay, okay!” John said. “I just need to check something, okay? Then I’ll turn it back.”
No sooner than John changed the channel, an ear-splitting scream rang through the office. The little boy sprang from the crate and ran out of the room like he was on fire.
“Oh well . . . I gave it a shot.”
John refocused on the TV. Okay, this is it. He took a breath and braced himself for what he might see when he flipped the channel. A fuzzy soccer game. Another cartoon. Not much on this TV. Two more channels showed only snow. He flipped to another station, and there it was: the enormous net twisted through the sea.
John turned up the volume. He crouched, eye level with the screen. Behind a weary reporter, overturned hulls flashed red and blue in the ambient light of rescue vessels. The water was speckled with divers searching the tangled maze. Thumping rotors echoed above from news helicopters.
Kate entered the room, with a glance back through the doorway. “I see you have a way with children. Come on. Chopper’s ready to go.”
John motioned her. “Look, this is it.”
Kate stepped closer to the TV as the reporter summed it up. “As of now, two fishermen are confirmed to have drowned, and at least eighteen others have sustained injuries ranging from dislocated shoulders to missing fingers and hands from the violent pull of the net.” She glanced down at her desk, “Although divers are searching, there are still several fishermen unaccounted for . . . from what marine biologists are calling an extremely rare humpback whale attack.”
“Okay,” John muttered. “Just maybe . . .”
The reporter spoke up. “But the attack is not without speculation. Mike Boland, who covered the event, still insists that the creature he saw was no whale, and that it had a strange paddle-like fin, something no humpback whale has.”
John felt a rush of dizziness, and his mouth went dry. Although his gut told him the truth, he hoped that by some miracle the culprit really was only a whale.
“Whale!” John turned to Kate. “On top of it all, they don’t even know what it is?”
“You didn’t see the footage. The way it was tangled in the net, they never got a clear shot of the creature.” Kate perked up. “But you could look at that as a lucky break—if the public really knew what was under that net . . .”
“Every yahoo with a boat will be out there trying to find it,” John said, nodding in agreement. He glanced at an old, faded Coca-Cola clock on the wall. “Later than I thought. Come on. We’d better get moving.” He swung the chimp onto his shoulders and headed through the doorway. The trio exited the building with a final wave to Ebo and the little boy.
Heading toward the chopper, John sighed with a glance back. “It’s a shame he has to live like that, under those conditions, especially with kids.”
Kate laughed aloud. “Who? Ebo? He’s loaded! Just past that clearing behind the runway, he has a house three times the size of mine. He just thinks people are more inclined to tip him better if he leaves the place the way it is.”
~~~
The Knysna General Hospital emergency entrance doors crashed open. The two paramedics released the stretcher to a doctor and a nurse. One paramedic followed, helping with the IV.
“What do we have here?” asked the doctor while guiding the front of the stretcher along the bright hallway.
“A car accident,” replied the paramedic. �
�He ran into a deep ditch a few miles west of Keurboom. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“No airbags, huh?” replied the doctor.
“No, it was an early model.” The paramedic lowered his voice. “But that’s the strange part. The injury doesn’t look like an impact wound. It looks more like a deep scrape, like something was raked across it. You should have seen the front of his wetsuit before we cut it off. It looked like it had been through a shredder.”
“Maybe it was from the broken glass from the windshield,” said the nurse.
“Couldn’t have been,” replied the paramedic. “The windshield was only cracked. It didn’t break all the way through. The passenger’s side window was shattered from the side of the ditch, but the glass didn’t go anywhere near his chest.”
With a moan, the young man regained consciousness. He was pale. He brought his right hand to the moist gauze on his stomach, and a nurse moved it away gently. His eyes squinted open. Slowly he rolled his head from side to side while repeating in a faint moan, “Where’s Dorian? Did it get Dorian?”
~~~
Officer Marimba stepped through the emergency entrance doors. Down the long brightly lit hallway, he saw Ron moving his arms like he was trying to say something to the doctor. The officer quickly caught up with the stretcher and put his hand on the doctor’s arm. “What did he say?”
“He keeps asking about Dorian. Was there a second person in the car?” asked the doctor.
“No, he was alone.”
Ron repeated, in a faint moan, “Did it get Dorian? Did it get Dorian?”
Officer Marimba grabbed the side of the stretcher and asked Ron urgently, “Did what get Dorian?”
“The thing . . . in the water.” The words faded into a whisper.
“Were you with Dorian this morning at the beach? Did you see what attacked him—what kind of shark?”
“We were there. Then I couldn’t find Dorian. It . . . was . . . more than a shark,” Ron said, struggling with the memory. “It was . . . the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”