Gargantua (7 page)

“Might?” Paul interrupted. “C’mon. Joe, it’s kinda obvious that they—”

The chief interrupted right back, “Yes, Paul,
might.
The two causes of death are different, and kindly don’t pull that all-knowing-reporter-makes-fun-of-dumb-cop crap on me, all right?”

Paul seemed taken aback. “Sorry.”

Joe turned back to the president. “But I’ve also been getting reports all day about weird sightings in the ocean. Much higher than the usual, and they’re all pretty similar.”

“A large reptilian head with a small horn at the center,” Jack said.

Everyone—except for Hale and the president—turned to him. “Yes,” Joe said, only momentarily surprised. “You saw it, too?”

“No, but my son did.”

Derek finally spoke up again: “So, based on two dumb tourists, one dumb local, and a boogey man, you’re gonna shut us down?”
Knew the silence was too good to last,
Jack thought.

Before anyone could answer, Alyson came out of the clinic. She removed a pair of latex gloves with a telltale
snap
and placed them in the pockets of her lab coat.

“What did you find, Doctor?” the president asked.

Alyson took a breath before answering. “Well, keeping in mind that I don’t have the facilies, nor the qualifications, to do a proper autopsy . . .” Manny nodded in understanding and she went on: “Based on initial observation, I’d say he died of severe blood loss, possibly also trauma to major organs. He also had a blunt trauma to the head, but I don’t think that contributed.”

“Jibes with what Kulani said,” the chief put in. “She said he hit his head on the skis as he fell in.”

“We’ll need to ship the body to Kalor for a proper autopsy. However, I can tell you for sure that the blood loss was due to several bites all over his body.”

Hale asked, “What kind of bites?”

“That’s the weird part,” Alyson said, blowing out a breath. “I have seen bites from every type of animal known to this island and its surrounding waters, and I have never seen
anything
that matches this.”

Jack turned to the president, an expectant look on his face. To his mind, Alyson’s report simply confirmed that the waters should be closed until he could investigate.

If the gravity of the decision weighed heavily on President Moki, he didn’t show it. Jack had the crazy thought that he’d never want to play poker with the man. He simply looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Very well. For the time being, no sea craft are to sail from Malau’s shores.” He turned to Joe. “See to it.”

The chief nodded and moved off to his jeep.

Derek threw up his hands. “I don’t bleedin’
believe
this! Manny, this is nuts, we—”

“I have made my decision, Derek,” the president said, his calm inversely proportional to the fisherman’s anger.

Hale stepped between Jack and the two other men, as if to say,
Let these two hash out their own problems—we’ve got our own.
“We’ll have to leave at first light.”

Jack nodded. “Brandon and I’ll meet you at the airport at dawn.”
Airport,
he thought,
right. It’s a one-story building and a strip of tarmac.

Hale made an odd face, like he had news he didn’t want to impart. “Actually, what I’ve got is a seaplane; it’s out at the pier. And I’m afraid it’s only a two-seater. No room for the little bloke.”

Disappointed, Jack nodded again.
Brandon would’ve enjoyed coming along,
he thought.
Ah, well. He’s a bright kid. He’ll understand.

“I don’t understand,” Brandon said the next morning in the hotel room.

He had been asleep by the time Jack finally got back. He and Hale had talked to the police chief some more about the various sightings, all of which were indeed eerily similar to Brandon’s quick glance the day before. Then they’d gone to Hale’s bungalow to hastily map out an itinerary for their flyby.

Jack outlined the game plan while he tossed a few items into a backpack. Brandon was thrilled right up until the part when Jack told the boy he couldn’t come along.

“This isn’t fair,” Brandon continued. “I always get to go along with you on stuff.”

“I know—I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. “But Doctor Hale’s plane is just a two-seater.”

“How come when you need me I’m your ‘assistant,’ but when you don’t need me, I’m just your kid?”

Jack shook his head. Brandon was so mature, so capable, that sometimes Jack forgot that he was still a twelve-year-old boy.
I should’ve known better than to expect a grown-up reaction. He’s a kid—how would a kid react to this?

He thought back to himself as a twelve-year-old, and how he felt on vacations with his family. Usually, the parts he looked forward to was when they’d go off to do something he thought was boring and they’d leave him alone to fend for himself.
So let’s try that approach.

“You’ve got a whole day to run around the island on your own. No responsibilities.”
No money, either,
he remembered, then fished in his pocket for cash, pulling out a ten-dollar bill. Luckily, American currency was good on Malau—indeed, Paul had said the day before that the local merchants preferred American dollars to Malauan ones. “You can buy yourself lunch at Manny’s, and then you can take the camcorder and go exploring—”

“I thought I was ‘on my own,’ ” Brandon said, defiantly. “Why’re you telling me what to do?”

Jack realized that he wasn’t going to win no matter what, so he held up his hands in surrender—the ten bucks still in his right hand. “Fine, whatever. I was just making a suggestion.” He handed Brandon the ten.

Brandon just looked at it, then back up at his father. “This is supposed to last me all day?” He had a smirk on his face.

Intimately familiar with that smirk, and taking it as a conciliatory sign, Jack returned it with a grin, and fished out another ten.

As Brandon took the two bills, Jack’s grin fell, and he put on his most serious expression. “And stay out of the water.”

“Okay,” Brandon said casually.

“I mean it, Brandon.” He put his hands on his son’s shoulders. “Leaving aside the danger from whatever might be out there, it’s illegal to go into the water right now. I’d hate for Paul’s next front page to be
AMERICAN SCIENTIST
’
S INTERN
—”

“Assistant,” Brandon corrected.

Jack smiled. “Fine—
AMERICAN SCIENTIST
’
S ASSISTANT JAILED ON CHARGES OF STUPIDITY.
”

Brandon laughed. “Okay, Dad, I’ll be careful, don’t worry.”

“Good.” He kissed Brandon on the head and let go of his shoulders. “President Moki gave us until sunset, so I’ll be back by then.”

Brandon wandered aimlessly down the main beach of Malau. For most of the morning, he sat in the hotel room, sulking and reading through a couple of his prized
Captain Marvels.
Around noon, though, his stomach started to rumble, so he followed Dad’s advice and had lunch at Manny’s, which turned out to be a mistake. Derek and the Derek-ettes were once again seated at the bar swilling beer and being obnoxious. They didn’t actually bother Brandon—and, thank God, Derek didn’t come over and toussle Brandon’s hair again—but they looked at him like everything was his fault. Derek did talk to some of the other people sitting around, who looked pretty upset.
Probably other people who wanted to be in the water,
Brandon figured. Manny wasn’t there either, so the atmosphere was real unpleasant.

Thanks for leaving me behind, Dad,
he thought, annoyed.

He ate lunch quickly, then took the camcorder he had retrieved from one of the duffels and decided to wander around the beach. He started from where he and Dad had been doing their initial work, picked a direction, and walked. Occasionally, he filmed something that looked interesting: a peacock spreading its tail here, a flock of birds there. At one point, he saw a few dolphins frolicking, jumping into the air in tiny arcs. He videotaped that, remembering that Mom always loved dolphins.

Stop thinking about that.

After about ten minutes, the sand started getting rockier. He looked ahead to see that foliage started to creep into the beach as the coastline veered sharply to the left. Brandon recalled from their flight in that one end of Malau was jungle—it covered a little less than quarter of the island. It wasn’t much of a jungle, as jungles went; but, as Dad had said in the plane, it added to the island’s character.

Sighing, he shifted the camcorder to his left hand, picked up a few pebbles with his right, and started skimming them into the water.

His uncle had shown him how to skim pebbles like this when Brandon was six and they visited him in Pennsylvania. “Gotta throw sidearm,” Uncle Scott used to say, “just like Kent Tekulve.” To this day, Brandon had no idea who Kent Tekulve was, but he kept practicing throwing sidearm until he could make almost any pebble skip at least four times before sinking.

It was after he made one nice flat pebble go seven times that he saw it.

At first he thought, crazy as it was, that one of his pebbles had turned around and was coming back.

Then it came out of the water and zipped into the foliage.

Brandon couldn’t really make out what it was, but it was green, and it was big. In fact, he was pretty sure that it was the same color green as that thing he saw the previous day in the water.

It’s probably just a salamander or something,
he thought, but salamanders didn’t usually come that large.

He considered his options. Following the blur meant going into the jungle. He had no idea what lay within it. On the other hand, how dangerous could it be? And Dad didn’t tell him not to go into the jungle, just not to go into the water.

And he did say I should go exploring.

Of course, Dad had suggested eating at Manny’s in the same breath, and that had turned out really lousy, but Brandon didn’t care. He wanted to see what that thing was.

These thought processes took all of a second, so he muttered, “Shazam,” and dashed into the foliage on the heels of the green blur.

Though he did not possess the speed of Mercury that his hero had, Brandon could move quickly even through the dense, big-leafed trees around him. The plants ahead of him rustled, and he followed the sounds as they led him deeper and deeper.

Just as the rustling stopped, Brandon came to an overhanging tree whose branches drooped down like the flaps of a tent. He pushed the leaves aside to find himself at the mouth of a beautiful lagoon.

Like all the water hereabouts, the lagoon was a deep blue.

However, it wasn’t an undisturbed blue-right at the shoreline near Brandon’s feet, the water rippled, as if something had just dashed into the water.

Brandon smiled.
The wisdom of Solomon tells me that the little dude ran in here.
He squatted down and peered into the water.

Suddenly, a creature emerged from the water. To Brandon’s amazement, it actually did look like a salamander, with two major differences. For one thing, salamanders didn’t walk on their hind legs; for another, they rarely grew three feet long.

Its eyes were huge, like some goofy stuffed animal’s.

Then it went back into the water.

“Holy moley,” Brandon muttered.

He stared at the water for several minutes, wondering when the thing would come back out.

The ripples it made started to slow down. After a little while, the water was completely calm.

Of the creature, there was no sign.

Weird,
Brandon thought.

Jack Ellway’s first thought upon seeing Ralph Hale’s seaplane was,
I’ve got to get my own oceanographic institute. UCSD would never let me have toys like this.
He directed a few more choice thoughts toward his employers as the dinghy took them to where Hale kept his plane.

They spent the day flying around the open ocean, Jack peering through a pair of binoculars, trying to find something that didn’t match with the information regarding local marine life that he’d studied in depth in preparation for his trip here. Hale, for his part, steered the plane unerringly; Jack only felt queasy three or four times, which was a lot less than he expected in so small a plane with such high winds.

Around lunchtime, they landed on Kalor to grab a quick lunch—Jack was not surprised to find that everyone they met knew Hale personally—then went out again.

By late afternoon, they had given up. “I haven’t seen a damn thing that doesn’t belong here,” he shouted to Hale in the front compartment.

“Pity,” he said. “I’ll radio the pier, let ’em know we’re comin’ in.”

It took another ten minutes for them to arrive back at Malau, and another five to take the dinghy back to the pier.

Shortly after meeting him, Hale had commented to Jack that, “You can’t order a pint on one end of Malau without someone on the other end knowin’ what brand you’re drinkin’ inside of two seconds.” So it came as no surprise to find a massive welcoming committee waiting for them at the pier: President Moki, Paul Bateman, Chief Movita, and a number of others, including, inevitably, Derek Lawson and his two hangers-on.

Before the dinghy pilot could even tie the boat down, Paul asked, “Did you see anything?”

Jack shook his head and he climbed out of the dinghy onto the wooden pier. “Nothing unusual—at least, nothing near the surface.”

Hale jumped out behind Jack. Sounding completely undaunted, in direct contrast to Jack, he said, “Sonar would give us a better idea. My institute has a ship that’s equipped with—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” That, of course, was Derek, who looked at the president. “You see, Manny, it’s all nonsense. Lift the ban right now, this minute.”

What a selfish bastard,
Jack thought. Three people had been killed, and all this idiot could think about were his lousy fishing revenues. Forcing himself to remain calm, he said, “I think it should remain. Just another couple of days, till—”

Derek whirled around to face Jack, looking furious.
“You
think?
You
think! Who the hell are
you,
ordering everyone about?”

Stay calm, Jack, don’t let him get to you.
Speaking very slowly, he replied, “I’m just trying to help.”