Peter Benchley's Creature (26 page)

Puckett watched the man approach. He was tall, a couple of inches over six feet, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, a guy who took care of himself, probably worked out. Puckett guessed he was in his late forties: hair that had once been blond was light gray, and swept straight back from his forehead. He wore a gray suit, a white shirt and a dark tie. His skin was pale . . . not sickly, just pale from never seeing the sun. Puckett decided he looked like an undertaker.

"May I join you?" the man asked.

Puckett gestured at the stool beside him and thought: European, no question.
Join
came out
choin.
German, maybe, or Dutch, or one of those pissant countries that kept breaking apart over there.

The man said, "There is a gentleman outside who would like to meet you."

"Why?"

"He has heard of you . . . of things you have said."

Puckett paused, then said, "Okay, so bring him in."

"I'm afraid that's not possible."

"Why?" Puckett laughed. "Too big to get through the door?"

"Something like that."

Somesing
. . .
somesing
like that. German. Had to be. "Hey, Ray," Puckett said, "you got no rule against fat guys, do you?"

Ray didn't laugh.

"Would you please come outside?" the man said. "I think it would be worth your while."

"Worth my while how?"

"Financially."

"Well, hell, why didn't you say so?" Puckett stood up. "Keep my seat warm, Ray. If I'm not back in ten minutes, call nine-one-one."

A van was parked across the street. It was black, its windows were tinted so no one could see inside, and Puckett noticed that its license plates were New York handicapped permits.

"Fuck is this?" he said. "An ambulance?"

The man slid open one of the side panels and gestured for Puckett to climb in.

Puckett leaned over and glanced inside. It was dark and, as far as he could see, empty. For no good reason, he felt a chill. "No way," he said.

"Mr. Puckett—"

"Look, Hans, I don't know who's in there, I don't know you, I don't know nothing. All I know is, I'm not gettin' in there. Tell him to come out."

"I told you—"

"Forget it. You want to do business, we do it in the sunlight. End of story."

The man sighed. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Yeah, well ..."

Puckett never saw the man's hands move, but suddenly he was spun around, his feet were off the ground and he felt himself flying into the darkness of the van. He hit the carpeted floor and lay there, dazed, listening to the side panel slam and the engine start, and feeling the van begin to move.

39

CHASE pulled the last page of the fax from his machine, read it quickly. "Another
oid,"
he said disgustedly.

"Which one this time?" asked Tall Man.

"Elasmobranchoid:
manifesting the characteristics of the cartilaginous fishes." He tossed the paper onto his desk. "Some of these guys must take advanced degrees in covering their asses. They're geniuses at stringing together sentences that sound great and say nothing."

For the past forty-eight hours, Chase had faxed every marine scientist he had ever met, sent photocopies of Polaroids of steel teeth and claw marks on dead animals, described every incident that had happened since the discovery of the Bellamy brothers and pleaded for opinions—guesses, speculations,
anything;
he had promised to keep them confidential— about what kind of creature they might be dealing with.

The few scientists who had deigned to reply had been vague and guarded, none venturing to identify a
specific animal, all hedging their bets by attaching the suffix o
id,
which told Chase nothing he didn't already know.

"So now," he said, "we've got
carcharhinoid
—it could be a class of sharks;
ichthyoid
—it could be a fish;
pantheroid
—it could be a seagoing lion or tiger; and
elasmobranchoid."
He stared for a moment at the pile of faxes, then thumbed through them and selected one. "You know the only one that makes any sense to me? This one, from the cryptozoologists."

"The sea-monster people?" said Tall Man. "But they're—"

"Fringe. I know. Pseudoscientific, nobody takes them seriously. But they're the only ones with the guts to use the
oid
I like:
humanoid.
"

"Come on, Simon." Tall Man shook -his head. "You know the stats better than I do. The thing that killed the sea lion was at least two hundred feet underwater; there were no bubbles on the tape, so it wasn't wearing scuba gear. And nobody free-dives two hundred feet, not long enough to kill and eat a sea lion."

"I didn't say it
is
a human, I said it may be human
oid
... a kind of human . . . humanlike. Hell, I don't know."

"You're beginning to sound like Puckett. Has anybody found him yet?"

"Nope, he's gone, disappeared, nobody's—"

The phone rang; Chase picked it up. He sighed, covered the mouthpiece with his hand, said, "Gibson," then closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair and listened to the litany: the chiefs budget was out of control; he was running police boats twenty-four hours a day, keeping his officers on double shifts; the press was hounding him; Nate Green's story in the
Chronicle,
headlined MONSTER EATS DOG, in which he had alluded to the unsolved deaths of the Bellamys and Bobby Tobin, had drawn reporters from every news service in the land; a producer wanted to do a TV movie called
The Fiend from the Deep;
real-estate brokers, restaurateurs and the town's burgesses were keeping the police station's phones lit up like Christmas trees.

As always, Gibson's litany ended with the accusatory question: Chase was supposed to be the big honcho scientist around here; what was he going to
do
about it?

"What d'you expect me to do, Rollie?" Chase said when Gibson had finished. "Run around the great big ocean in my little tiny boat? I don't even know what I'm supposed to be looking for. Did the lab boys come up with an analysis of the slime on the floor of the garage?"

"Yes and no," Gibson said. "I think they've got their heads tucked. I told 'em I wouldn't give 'em the time of day till they get the final DNA results."

"Why? What do they think?"

"They say it comes from a kind of mammal."

"What kind?"

"They think ..." Gibson hesitated, as if embarrassed to utter the words. "They say it looks like it could be from a human being. Crissakes, Simon . . ."

Chase hung up, stood and said to Tall Man, "Where's our resident mammal expert?"

"Where she always is, down with the kids and the sea lions."

As Chase and Tall Man started down the hill, they could see Max and Elizabeth in the pool, playing with the three sea lions, and Amanda watching from the concrete apron.

The sea lions had grown increasingly fearful; Amanda said they seemed clinically neurotic. They were avoiding the water, all water—not just seawater. For two days they had adamantly refused Amanda's command to enter their pool.

In desperation, Amanda had called a colleague in Florida who worked with dolphins, and had learned that the intelligent mammals seemed to respond extraordinarily well to children, especially children afflicted in some way, communicating with them in some inexplicable, evidently extrasensory fashion. Amanda had asked Elizabeth to help her with an experiment, and the results had been amazing.

When the animals would no longer obey Amanda directly, they would permit Elizabeth to approach them, stroke them and, somehow, convince them to follow her into the water and play with her and Max.

Amanda had been so excited by the success of the experiment that she was relaying more and more instructions through Elizabeth and encouraging her to make up instructions of her own, in an attempt to stretch the limits of interspecies communication.

When she heard Chase and Tall Man behind her, Amanda pointed at the children and the sea lions and said, "This is fabulous."

"I need to talk to you for a couple minutes," Chase said. "It's about Gibson's lab tests."

"I've been meaning to come up and see you, too, but it didn't seem important enough to stop this. I figured there was nothing we could do about it."

"About what?"

"I just got a call on the radio in the shed from the pilot of the spotter plane."

"I thought you'd paid him off and let him go," Chase said, "since the sea lions wouldn't work anymore."

"I guess he got interested in what we're doing here. Anyway, he was out spotting swordfish for the commercial boats, and he saw a sportfisherman this side of Block, setting out a humongous chum slick. He said he thought we'd like to know. He said it looks like the guy's baiting up white sharks."

"The guy must be certifiable. With all the publicity about the trouble around here, why would anybody go out on the water and spread a chum slick?" Chase frowned. "Anyway, there's nothing I can do about it, there's no
law
against chum slicks."

"No," Amanda said, "but there's a federal law against using juvenile bottlenose dolphins for bait. And that's what the pilot says he saw."

"Dolphins!" Chase said. "He's sure?"

"Positive. But I thought by the time we called the Coast Guard or the EPA or whoever—"

"Did he recognize the boat?"

"Yes, he said it's from Waterboro . . . the
Brigadier
."

"Can't be ... he's gotta be wrong."

"Why?"

"It just can't." Chase started for the shed.

"What did you want to talk to me about?" Amanda called after him.

"In a minute," Chase replied.

Tall Man followed Chase into the shed.
"Sammy?"
he said. "I can't believe it." They had known Sammy Medina for fifteen years; he was a successful, responsible charter-boatman who had led a recent campaign to restrict fish catches by commercial and sport fishermen.

"That is, if it
is
the
Brigadier
,"
Chase said. "Hard to tell from a plane. But we'll find out soon enough. Cindy'll be straight with me." There was a phone on the wall of the shed, and Chase picked it up, dialed a number, spoke for a moment or two, hung up and said to Tall Man, "I'm a son of a bitch."

"That was Sammy?"

"Himself." Chase nodded. "At home . . . taking the day off, tying flies. He says he got an offer, bare-boat charter, not including him or his crew, just rent the boat, no questions asked . . . for ten thousand dollars a day!"

Tall Man whistled. "What kind of fishing's worth ten grand a day?"

"That's what I wanted to know." Chase paused. "Guess who rented the boat from him."

"Donald Trump?"

"No. Rusty Puckett."

"Puckett?! Puckett doesn't have that kind of dough, nobody around here does. Besides, what does Puckett want with—"

"He's not fishing for great whites, Tall," Chase said. "Sammy says the stupid bastard thinks he's found a monster ... or at least he's convinced some big-hitting sucker that he has. Or can."

40

IT lay in a clump of bushes, listening to the sound of its own breathing, and to the sounds of life in the surrounding woods. It received the sounds and separated them, storing them for later identification.

It was tuning its senses.

Ever since it had emerged from the water, changes had been taking place within the creature, changes it could feel but not understand. The longer its vascular system, its heart and its brain were infused and nourished with the blend of oxygen and nitrogen that was air, instead of hydrogen-dominated water, the more it seemed to comprehend and to remember, and the greater were its abilities to innovate.

As its chemistry altered, so did its life.

It knew, for example, what it had once been. Its mind could put names to various objects and animals, though its voice could not yet articulate them. Words of all kinds caromed around in its brain, words that generated memories of emotions as diverse as anger, hatred, pride and elation.

It sensed the magnitude of its own strength, and recalled—however dimly—the pleasure it had derived from using that strength. It recalled other pleasures, too, from wielding power, inflicting pain and causing death.

It had built itself a shelter by digging a shallow trench and covering it with leaves and branches. So far, it had remained undetected, except by a curious dog, which it had killed and eaten.

It had learned that it could not pursue and catch most of the animals with which it shared the wild, but it was beginning to teach itself how to trap them. Still, it was not able to feed itself enough to satisfy its enormous, and growing, need for energy. As its strength grew, so did its demands: the more energy it expanded, the more it needed; the more it needed, the more it had to expend to fill the need.

It had become actively, not reflexively, cautious, knowing what to avoid and what to confront, what was harmless and what dangerous.

Though past and future remained fog-bound landscapes, patches of the fog had begun to lift, and it now had a goal: to fulfill its mission of annihilation.

It rested now, hearing the calls of birds and squirrels, footfalls of foxes and deer, the rustle of wind through the trees, the slur of little waves on the nearby gravel strand.

Suddenly, new sounds: clumsy treads, heavy and careless, through the underbrush. And voices.

It rolled to its knees, then onto the balls of its feet, and looked through the bushes toward the sounds.

"Hell's bells!" shouted a young man named Chester, rubbing his leg. "I like to broke my foot in that chuck-hole."

"Then look where you're walkin'," said his friend Toby.

"I still don't see why we hadda come alla way out here."

"Like I
told you: it's where the critters are."

"It's private property, too."