Now on his feet, Augustus turned around and trudged back up the beach, heading toward the walkway that led to his secured private gate. He couldn’t explain the feeling he had, but he’d never been wrong before regarding his instinct. And this morning his instinct was telling him that something bad was heading in from the ocean.
TWO
South Pacific Ocean
They were a hundred miles off the coast of South Africa, on a shoot for Discovery Channel’s upcoming Shark Week event when Dave Thomas noticed something peculiar going on in the ocean.
He frowned and pointed to an area about twenty yards away, opposite of where Doug Chambers and the camera crew had gone down in the shark cage to capture stock footage. “Check that out,” he said to Todd Perry, the ship’s first mate.
“What?” Todd was a beanpole thin white South African who owned the fifty-foot yacht they’d commissioned for the shoot. He shielded the glare of the sun from his eyes and looked to where Dave was pointing. “Oh, that? That’s your basic flounder and tuna going ape-shit in these waters.”
“That’s not flounder and tuna,” Dave said, trying hard not to sound annoyed. This was his second trip to these waters as Producer of Shark Week. Each time, he’d had the misfortune of being paired up with Todd and his yacht. Dave liked the yacht, but its owner was an arrogant prick. Todd didn’t seem to care for Dave either, so Dave made sure he annoyed the man every chance he had when they were on shore. “It isn’t their migration season. In fact, whatever’s making those splashes is a lot bigger—”
Jack Becker leaned forward, squinting in the water. He was Dave’s assistant. “Those are lobsters.”
“Lobsters?”
“Yeah.” Jack pointed at a spot to Dave’s left. “See that claw. Jesus, that’s a big one! Those are probably North Atlantic Lobsters.”
“What’s a North Atlantic Lobster doing in the South Atlantic ocean off the Cape Horn?” Dave asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine, mate,” Todd said. He kept his gaze at the water, trying to follow the splashing sounds. “But they’re chasing the fish. Take a look at that!”
Dave saw. Sure enough, he could see fish of all shapes and sizes zooming through the water as if in a blind panic to escape. The giant lobsters, or whatever they were, seemed to be chasing them. “This is weird.”
“You said it, mate,” Todd said. “Gotta wonder if your crew is getting this action on film down below.”
“I hope so,” Dave said, watching with amazement. “I can’t wait to take a look at this footage later tonight.”
As much as Dave loved his job as a Discovery Channel producer—his specialty was producing original programming on sharks, large carnivorous lizards, giant pythons, bats, and giant spiders—he hated this part of the Atlantic. South Africa was fine. He’d once produced a still-unaired documentary about a rumored thirty foot African Rock Python that had killed and eaten seven full-grown human beings. The footage he and his director had shot were still unassembled, and the powers-that-be at Discovery Channel wanted him to complete it by venturing into the South African veldt with a team of poachers to kill the monster serpent. Dave refused. He saw no reason to tamper with mother nature like that. A snake that big deserved to be respected; it was only doing what genetics had programmed it to do, and that was attack, kill, and devour anything warm blooded that it could get. People should realize that and not venture out into the veldt unprepared. If a giant snake ate you, well, you deserved it.
Rather than head inland to the veldt to appease his bosses (and kill an animal that was really doing mankind a favor by eating people too stupid to take precautions), he’d elected to put up with Todd and shoot another shark feature. Dave loved sharks more than any other creature. Great Whites and Tiger sharks were his favorites. He loved them the same way he loved all large carnivorous animals. They commanded respect due to their sheer power. He understood this, and insisted that his cinematographers, scientists, and assistants who went down in the shark cage were always well prepared. He made sure everybody followed all safety precautions. They never took any unnecessary risks while getting shark footage. They’d never had an accident in ten years of work.
Which was why when he saw the explosion of bubbles from below, followed by a frothing mass of blood that billowed to the surface, it felt like his heart stopped. The foamy blood quickly spread outward in concentric circles and Dave gasped. “What the fuck?” He suddenly called out. “Peter!” He turned toward Bob Thurman and Peter Oldsdale, who worked the crane that lowered the shark cage in the water. “Pull him up!”
Peter leaped to duty and activated the crane. The engine whined and the crane started lifting the cage up.
Everybody leaned forward, trying to see into the water. The frantic activity of the fleeing fish continued. Something large moved through the water about twenty yards to the left. Dave gasped—it was a fifteen foot Great White; a beautiful animal. It bobbed up then streaked back downward, followed by scores of smaller fish. “What the hell?” Dave asked.
Suddenly, the top of the shark cage came into view. Doug’s fingers were clenched around the top bars. As the crane lifted the cage out, Peter reached out to help Todd, Jack, and Dave bring the cage closer to the boat. Doug was inside the cage, his eyes wide with fright from behind the face mask. He pulled his oxygen tube out of his mouth. “Did you see that?” his voice was high with panic.
“We saw a bunch of blood,” Dave said.
At the same time, Peter and Jack said simultaneously, “Oh shit!” and “Oh my God!”
Dave and Doug turned to what they were looking at and Dave gasped again. Amid the widening circle of blood was large chunks of flesh. A fin floated to the surface. It was definitely a shark fin, lying flat against the water. Bits of the shark’s back still adhered to the base of the fin. Dave looked at the scene in complete amazement and growing horror. The remains of the shark’s rear end floated to the surface—tail fin, rear dorsal. Bits of flesh from that part seemed to be bubbling…dissolving.
“What the hell?” Dave said again.
The cage was now completely out of the water and Doug was rattling the bars, indicating he wanted out. Peter began sliding the cage over to the deck. He fumbled for the door and Doug got out. He threw his face mask off and looked out at the water. He was breathing heavily. His eyes were wide, bulging from their sockets as if he’d just seen something monstrous.
“What happened down there?” Dave asked.
“You saw those lobster things, right?” Doug asked. His eyes were all pupil, large and black in his face.
“Yeah, we did,” Dave said.
“A bunch of them started swimming by me as I was shooting footage.” For the first time, Dave looked at the bottom of the cage to check on the equipment. Doug’s camera was intact, lying on the cage floor. “I didn’t think anything of it at first but then it hit me—they’re fucking huge and they’ve got stingers!”
“Stingers?”
“Yeah!” Doug looked at his producer, the fear evident in his eyes, in his face, in his crackling voice as he spoke. “They got tails like a scorpion, with stingers. And they were chasing everything. Look!” He pointed to the water and they all looked. Dave knew what Doug was getting at. The frenzied activity from the fish, their seeming frantic motions to swim as fast as possible was due to the fact that they were being chased by these monstrous lobster things.
“Some of these creatures were snapping their claws at the fish,” Doug continued. “And I started shooting this. Then…then a Great White, a twenty footer easily, it was swimming by off to my left. I’d noticed it earlier, just sort of cruising around before all this other shit started happening. As this…this migration started whipping by, the Great White swam closer and just barreled in like they usually do. It grabbed the first thing it could, which happened to be one of the lobster things. Chomped it once, then swallowed it. It started moving in on some other fish. I didn’t think anything of it, just kept shooting. The shark swam aw
ay, but then started circling back. That’s when I noticed that it was swimming kinda funny.”
“What do you mean?” Todd asked. The yacht owner looked terrified.
“It was…” Doug seemed to search for the correct words. “It was flopping around, as if it was in pain. It even swam on its side for a minute, like goldfish do when they’re about to die. I could see this weird bulge in its middle and then…I swear to God man, I ain’t making this up…this split appeared in its side, like a fissure, and blood started leaking out. And the more it came apart, the more the water started getting all bubbly and frothy and then the thing just fucking exploded in the water!”
The crew on deck greeted this with stunned silence. Doug was adamant. “I swear to God man, it exploded! The fucking shark exploded! I was so stunned I didn’t know what to do. I think…I think the camera was still rolling, but then the cage started going up and I knew you’d seen it.”
“Why would it explode?” Dave asked. He was dumbfounded. He looked out at the ocean, his eyes telling him that, yes, those were chunks of Great White shark floating in the bloody water. He noted that parts of the flesh were still dissolving, as if from some powerful corrosive chemical. “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know,” Doug said. “But it is possible, apparently. And get this. As Peter’s pulling the cage up I started shooting again and the thing that shark ate—that lobster-scorpion thing—it was alive! It was alive and swimming around in the middle of all this blood and shark guts like nothing ever happened to it.”
Suddenly, Dave connected the dots. “You said these things have stingers?”
“Yes! Big ones! About this long.” Doug put his palms about two feet apart.
Further out in the ocean there was another spreading pool of frothy blood. Pieces of some unidentifiable fish spewed to the surface. The frantic migration continued around them, more frenzied now.
“I think we better get the fuck out of here and back to shore,” Dave said. “And the faster the better.”
Todd didn’t have to be told twice. He swung down into the cabin, put the boat in gear, and a moment later they were speeding back to shore.
Santa Catalina Island, California
Cathy Hernandez hated Melissa Reinhardt with a passion.
It was bad enough working for the passive-aggressive bitch. It was even worse to be her direct report. Melissa hadn’t wanted to bring the team to Catalina Island for the team building exercise, but it had been Jim Sunn’s idea. Cathy thought it was a good idea, to be truthful. They could use some of the techniques the team building consultant was teaching them today for their work on the mainland, which was on the second floor of a non-descript office building in an equally non-descript office park in Fountain Valley, California, a small suburban community in Orange County just south of Los Angeles. Jim Sunn was the owner and Chief Operating Officer of Sunn Advertising, a small ad agency that handled print, web, and all forms of broadcast media advertising. Cathy was employed as a database analyst. Melissa was her boss—exactly what Melissa’s title was, Cathy wasn’t sure. She was even more unsure of why Melissa was even at the company.
“Okay, we’re on the other side of the island now,” Melissa said. She was standing on a rocky outcrop and turned to Cathy. Wendy Snow, her co-worker and chief confidant, was standing beside her. Both women had been put on Melissa’s team in what was obviously a concerted effort by Jim to foster a stronger team unity among the three women. All the other teams had been broken up with different employees from different departments. It must be really obvious that we don’t work well together, Cathy thought.
“Yes, we’re on the other side of the island,” Wendy said. She glanced at Cathy and shrugged.
“So now what?” Melissa asked.
“We join hands and sing kumbaya?” Cathy suggested.
Melissa frowned. Her brown hair blew in her face from the offshore wind. They had hiked down to this section of the island per the consultant’s directions and diagram on the chart he’d provided to them. He’d divided all twenty employees of Sunn Advertising into groups and scattered them in all directions on the island with the instructions that once they reached their destination they were to observe their surroundings, take stock of the people they were with, assess the situation and act accordingly. “It doesn’t matter what it is,” he’d said, strolling before them in the park on Lime Street where they’d started their day. The consultant was a man in his mid-thirties with an open, sunny disposition, brown hair, blue eyes, giving Cathy the impression he was a typical Southern California native. He’d introduced himself as John. “Some of you may end up at the strand. There might be a lot of kids playing, there might be an ice cream stand, a hot dog vendor, people throwing Frisbees with their dogs. What will you do as a group? Have a picnic in the park? Get ice cream? Start your own game of Frisbee? You will need to make this decision as a team. Another group of you may end up outside a shopping mall with a food court. Do you decide to go shopping? Do you get lunch? If there’s a jogging path near the mall, do you decide to go jogging? Again, you must make a decision on one activity based on your surroundings and you must come to this decision as a team.”
And on and on it had went. John had tossed out half a dozen other possible scenarios based on the environment they might wind up in. As a group, they were supposed to decide what to do and arrive at that conclusion by working together with minimal arguments. He’d held a football in his hands. “After all,” John had said, “this exercise is all about how you react naturally to the things around you. This isn’t about ladder climbing or jockeying for position to attain another notch in your belt. This is about working together toward a common goal.” Then with a smooth, practiced move, he’d tossed the football at one of the half dozen groups he’d paired off. One of the graphic artists, Andy Saunders, caught the ball, but barely.
“Why’d you catch that ball, Andy?” John had asked.
“Because you threw it toward me,” Andy responded.
“Is there another reason why you caught it?”
Andy had shrugged. “Well, yeah…if I hadn’t caught it, it would’ve hit me.”
“True. It might have bounced off you and hit somebody else in your group, too. Correct?”
There’d been a small chuckle of amusement from Andy’s group. Andy grinned sheepishly as he regarded his team mates. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“By reacting instinctively to that situation, you not only prevented this football from bouncing off you, you also shielded other members of your team. In other words, your reaction to my action benefited your team.” John regarded them. “That’s what this is all about folks. Working together toward a common goal. The common goal is the good of Sunn Advertising. Reacting against sudden actions like my tossing the football may seem like an act of self-preservation, and it is. You may perform acts of self-preservation on the job—working to get that website done before the deadline, for instance. You do it because if you don’t, you’ll get fired, right?”
Jose Garcia, one of Sunn Advertising’s web designer’s laughed. “You got that right, bro.”
John smiled. “So there you go. Go forth and when you get to your destination take in what’s around you. Assess it. Consider the team members you are with. Then, act accordingly.”
Cathy wasn’t sure what to act on in this remote part of the island. John must have picked this spot on purpose just for the three of them. She glanced at Wendy, who shook her head. A silent communication seemed to pass between them. I bet Jim told that consultant that we’re his problem children, that look seemed to say. And he stuck us out here to torture us.
Melissa glanced around at the remote section of beach. “Well, this is just stupid. I don’t know what he wants us to do here! It’s just the three of us. There’s nobody else here!”
“He must have picked this spot for a reason,” Wendy said. She nodded out at the ocean. “Take a look, Melissa. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Melissa glanced at th
e ocean and frowned. The sky had been filled with a bunch of birds earlier that day—seagulls, pigeons, crows. It was like that old Hitchcock movie, The Birds. Cathy glanced out at the ocean and saw what Wendy was getting at. The view from this end of the island, the peacefulness of this spot, the nature, it was very beautiful.
“All I see is a bunch of sand and rocks and water,” Melissa said. She craned her neck around, looking up at the large cliff wall that rose fifty yards and ended in scrub bush above. A second path wound its way steeply up the cliff toward civilization, with residential streets, homes, and apartments. “It’s ugly down here. Why didn’t he lead us up where there’s people?”
“He wanted us to come down here,” Cathy said, trying to wrap her mind around this exercise and what the end of this particular path meant. “He had a reason. Let’s try to figure that out.”
“I think he wanted us to appreciate this,” Wendy said. She tilted her head in the direction of the ocean. Wendy was twenty years younger than Cathy, in her early thirties. She was short, slightly chunky in hip and bust, and wore her brown frizzy hair to mid-back. “I think that when you pluck us out of our environment, which is constantly busy, and you come to this…” She looked out at the ocean, shaking her head. “We seem to get so worked up by such trivial things at the office. You know? The kind of things that don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Who answers the phone first. Not listening to each other when one of us is trying to make a system work, or ridiculing a new process—”
Melissa sighed. “Jesus Christ, this isn’t about the new database, is it?”
Cathy shrugged. “Wendy has a point, Melissa. Jim hired me to create the database and you’ve been nothing but resistant to the idea. It’s made my job kinda difficult.”
“How has it made it difficult? You’re doing such a fine job on it!”
Cathy looked at Melissa as if she’d lost her mind. Wendy chuckled sarcastically.
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