Gargantua (10 page)

It took Paul a moment to realize that it really
was
a nine-foot-tall lizard running on its hind legs.

That’s impossible. Big scaly monsters don’t exist outside of movies.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

The lizard had the permanent forward lean common to amphibians, like it was expecting to have to move on all fours any second. Covered in dark green scales, it also had a series of tiny horns running up and down its back and tail, culminating in two not-so-tiny horns on top of its head—a big one right above the bridge of its nose, and another, smaller one right behind that.

It reared its head back and let out a sound that could have been a scream, or maybe a moan.
Right, like I’m going to judge the emotional state of a nine-foot-tall lizard.

Paul noticed two of Joe Movita’s cops—Mal and Jimmy—going in after it on scooters, each of them armed with rifles.

“No, for God’s sake, don’t kill it!”
That was Jack, screaming at the two cops who, for their part, were ignoring him, though they hadn’t started shooting yet, either. This didn’t surprise Paul—both cops were part of a weekly poker game that Paul also participated in, and they were both quite proud of the fact that they’d served as police officers for as long as they had without ever discharging a weapon outside of the firing range.

“Where’d you store your gear, Jack?” Hale asked.

“Over here,” Jack said, running toward a small shack about thirty feet in the other direction down the beach.

Paul and Hale followed behind the marine biologist. “What’s he got that’ll help?” Paul asked.

“Tranq gun,” Hale said.

Jack ran inside the shack. By the time Paul and Hale joined him, he had thrown open the lid of one of the crates and was loading darts into a huge rifle.

Paul had finally gotten over the shock and accepted the fact that, yes, a giant monster was loose on the island. This was news. In his head, he started laying out the multi-page coverage of the lizard’s attack for his special edition of the
Weekly News.
He also finally remembered the camera around his neck—bringing the camera to his eye, he ran off several shots of Jack loading the rifle.

Ignoring Paul, Jack finished loading, then turned to Hale. “C’mon.”

As they got back outside, rain started pouring down.
Heck of a time for a storm,
Paul thought, annoyed. The rain would only serve to muck up his pictures.

The three of them ran toward the jungle. Chief Movita was approaching the jungle in his jeep, siren blazing.

“Chief,” Jack cried out, catching up with Joe’s jeep, “we can’t kill this thing, it’s—”

“Excuse me?” the chief interrupted, putting on the brakes and sparing an annoyed glance at Jack’s rifle. “This is not a good place for a civilian—”

“I have tranquilizer darts, Chief. I can bring it down unharmed.”

Joe seemed to consider this, then: “All right, Ell way, I’ll give you a
chance,
but if you can’t bring that sucker down, we will. Hop in.”

Jack, Hale, and Paul all clambered into the jeep. Before Paul even had a chance to settle into his seat, Joe took off into the jungle.

Paul once again started taking pictures—he wanted to get the verdant atmosphere of the jungle in the shots from here on in; the rain would fog the images a bit, but also make it even more atmospheric.
Of course, there’s a limit as to how atmospheric I can get in black and white on newsprint. Wonder how much Kal would charge for color?

It wasn’t hard to figure out the creature’s path—nine-foot-tall lizards didn’t exactly move with subtlety. Paul didn’t know a lot about animals in general—he spent most of his time in biology class drawing moustaches on the pictures of sperm—but he was pretty sure that lizards that size were
not
found in nature.

Besides, the thing was wailing like a banshee.
It almost sounds afraid.

As soon as the jeep was close enough, Jack aimed the rifle and fired.

The dart struck the lizard in the left leg.

It didn’t even slow the thing down.

Paul cursed as he snapped picture after picture—he only had about ten exposures left and his spare film was back at the office.

Jack shot a few more darts at the lizard, and this time it did slow down—and screamed.

When he was eleven, Paul’s father took him on a trip into Sequoia National Park. While hiking amidst the massive redwoods, he heard a scream like what the lizard had just uttered. It was a dog that had been trapped under a huge branch. The branch—which had the thickness of a small maple tree trunk—had apparently fallen from one of the trees. The dog was unfortunate not to have been killed instantly. Instead, its legs had been shattered.

For the rest of the trip, Paul heard that dog’s cry in his dreams. But he got over it soon enough.

Now, over a decade later, he remembered that dog as the lizard cried in an almost identical manner.

Shaking off the memories, Paul peered back into the viewfinder. The lizard had backed up against a large tree, and was thrashing about. Paul snapped another picture—

—just as Jimmy got too close on his scooter. Three pictures in Paul’s roll chronicled the creature pulling one of its forelegs—no,
arms
—into a backhand motion; the arm slashing through the air right at Jimmy’s chest; and finally, Jimmy being thrown from his vehicle, blood flying in all directions from his thorax as the backhand sweep finished its arc.

Stunned, Paul kept snapping photos, but now he was on autopilot. He just kept his lens aimed at the creature as Jack fired dart after dart into it.

Just as the chief said, “Okay, that’s it, move in,” the creature gave out another yell and—with a dozen tranq darts protruding from its scaly hide—fell to the ground with an impact that rivaled the recent tremors.

Paul hopped out of the jeep and moved in closer, as did Jack, the chief, and Mal.

Suddenly, the creature reared its head and tail, and Paul leapt back involuntarily, his finger brushing against the camera button.

The creature fell again to the ground, its beady eyes now closed. Paul sighed—the last picture in the roll would probably be of the top of one of the trees.

Chief Movita ran toward Jimmy and knelt down beside him. “Mal, get Doctor Hart in here
now.”

Mal nodded and dashed off.

The chief looked up angrily at Jack. “So glad you were able to bring it down unharmed.”

“I—” Jack started.

“Save it,” Joe said, rising and walking away.

Hale put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You did the right thing, mate. Now we can study the thing properly.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. Paul wondered what was going through the marine biologist’s head.

Before anything else could happen, Brandon popped out from behind one of the bushes, crying, “Dad!” Paul blinked in surprise. Jack had been looking for his son all day. He and Hale had come into Paul’s office in search of Brandon that morning, but Paul hadn’t seen him. When Paul went to lunch at Manny’s, Tari said that Brandon had been in earlier, but she had no idea where the boy was at that point.

“Brandon?” Jack said. “What’re you doing here?”

“Uh, I, ah, saw everyone was running in here, so I wanted to see what happened.”

The kid’s lying,
Paul thought without hesitation. He knew that guilty look—he had it himself as a twelve-year-old when he lied to his parents.

Based on the look on Jack’s face, the lie had gone as far over his head as Paul’s had to his parents. He seemed completely accepting of what Brandon said.
Interesting—wonder what the kid’s been doing.

Brandon looked over at the. prone creature. “What
is
that thing?”

Jack pulled his son into an embrace. “You shouldn’t’ve come in here, Brandon, it was dangerous.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t—I mean—”

“It’s okay,” Jack said, breaking the hug. “To answer your question, I have no idea what it is. What say we try to figure it out together?” He smiled.

Brandon nodded, and smiled back.

Well, they’re all one big happy family again,
Paul thought as he rewound the film in his camera,
but what about tall, green, and scary here?

FIVE

D
erek Lawson had to admit that it was a good setup. At the direction of Hale and that American jackass Ellway, they had set up an oversized shark cage to house that thing they had captured the night before. It was hooked up to the pier and rigged it with buoys in such a way that it was part underwater, part above water.

Derek stood with Kikko, Naru, and a bunch of other people near the pier. The three of them had missed the excitement, sadly. They were washing down the trawler—a Japanese tourist that they had taken on a fishing jaunt proved more prone to seasickness than she thought she would be—and by the time they found out that a nine-foot lizard was on the loose, it had already been brought down.

Derek shook his head and looked at Kikko. “Thought I’d seen everything the sea could chuck up, but that thing is un-bloody-believable.”

“What do you think they’ll do with it?”

“Turn it into cash for themselves, most like,” Derek said with a snort.

They were held back about twenty feet from the pier by Marc and Mal, two of the local cops. Derek didn’t know why they bothered. While everyone wanted to see it, nobody really wanted to get all that close to it.

Of course, Derek noticed that Ellway wasn’t forced to stay back. He and Bateman were crouched on the pier next to the cage. Bateman’s presence made sense, him being Malau’s only real press and all, but what the hell was Ellway doing there? How did he rate?

He voiced this question aloud to Marc, who said, “He’s the expert—he’s, y’know, a marine biologist. ’Sides, he’s the one that brought the sucker down.”

Derek noticed Manny and Chief Movita coming through the police barricade, along with Hale and Ellway’s snot-nosed kid.
Great, more bleedin’ outsiders getting special privileges. What the hell’s this island coming to, anyhow?

He then fixed his gaze back on the caged lizard.

What a magnificent creature it is,
he thought.
I could make a bundle off that thing.
He smiled. The latest in a long line of fishermen from Matakana, New Zealand, Derek Lawson had relocated to Malau after a particularly messy divorce proceeding that resulted in his being required to make alimony payments that he had neither the interest nor the ability to make. Malau was sufficiently far away from Matakana that he didn’t have to worry about paying that witch Lucille, nor have to deal with those taxes he hadn’t gotten around to.

Besides, here he got a certain amount of respect. In Matakana, he was just one of dozens of fishers. In Malau, he stood out.

But now maybe it was time to move on to something better. He and Kikko and Naru had been talking for years about making enough money to open a restaurant on Fiji, but the honest truth was that they’d never manage it. Lawson Fishing Inc. did well enough to earn all three of them a living, but every time they thought they’d saved enough, some major repair to the boat would come up, or their taxes would be raised, or revenues would start slowing down, or the equipment would need to be replaced, or
something.

Right now, Malau was one of the South Seas’ better-kept secrets. It hadn’t become the major tourist attraction that other locales had become, rather remaining the favorite vacation spot of a comparatively small number of people from around the world. That kept the place a lot more civilized than most, but it also was one reason why Derek and the others would never have the kind of money they needed to implement the Fiji dream.

Maybe it’s about time I change that,
Derek thought.
Make people start talking about Malau in the same breath that they talk about Fiji or Kalor or Tahiti. And make enough cash so that I can pay off the taxes and get that witch off my back. Maybe even open that restaurant some day down the line.

The key, he knew, was that big lizard.

He saw Doctor Hart approach the ever-growing collection of folks near the lizard, and Derek decided that, if they deserved a closer look, then dammit, so did he. He sidled up to Marc and whispered, “Hey, Marc, mind if I get a closer look at the thing?”

“C’mon, Derek, you know the rules. Everyone except—”

“Y’know, your kid’s been talkin’ about fishin’ lessons.”

Marc frowned. “How’d you know about that?”

Derek shrugged. “He asked me. Wanted to know how much the lessons’d cost.”

Marc shook his head. “I told him we couldn’t afford it. I don’t want—”

“You can afford it if it’s free,” he said. “All you gotta do is let me in closer.” He smiled. “C’mon, Marc, lemme get a gander at the thing. For the kid. Hm?”

Marc stared at Derek for a minute, then sighed. “All right—but none of your bullshit, Derek.
Free
lessons, no ‘extras,’ got it?”

“My word of honor, mate,” Derek said with a grin as he walked toward the pier.

Paul Bateman had to admit, he was enjoying watching Jack fawn over the monster he had captured.

Not that there was much to fawn over just at the moment. The creature was still somewhat groggy from the tranquilizers—it seemed to be moving in slow motion compared to the frightening speed with which it had ambulated the previous night. Paul had already taken several photographs of the thing in captivity, as well as a bunch while Hale and Ellway supervised the placing of the monster in the cage last night. If he spent the afternoon writing up the articles and developing the pictures, he figured his special big-lizard edition of the
Weekly News
would be out by tomorrow morning, if Kal came through.

Of course, the primary question the monster’s presence raised was the same one that everyone on Malau had been asking for two days, one it behooved Paul to make the focus of his coverage. So he asked Jack, “Do you think this is what killed Dak and the two tourist girls?”

“Probably,” Jack said. “I took a cast of its claws and teeth for Alyson to compare to Dak’s body. She’ll do that when she has a minute.”