Peter Benchley's Creature (28 page)

"They never caught him?" Tall Man asked.

"No. He drowned, or so they say, a few years ago off a beach in Brazil. There is said to be forensic proof, but for me, Mengele will never die. The fact that such a man could exist, that God would permit it, means that a little bit of Mengele must exist in the darkest parts of each of us."

"And your doctor," Chase said, "this Kruger . . . was he like Mengele?"

"He was vicious like Mengele," said Franks, "and as brutal. But Kruger was smarter, and he had a stronger vision, warped as it was."

"Which was?"

"To usurp the power of God. He truly wanted to create a new species."

Tall Man said, "What the hell for?"

"To some extent, to see if it could be done. But then, as he did more and more work and the impossible began to seem possible, as success followed success, word reached high into the Nazi hierarchy.

Money, encouragement flowed back down to him. Kruger's vision became true megalomania: he decided to try to create a race of amphibious warriors."

Tall Man began to say something, but Franks cut him off.

"This was the nineteen-forties, remember. There were no nuclear submarines with infinite bottom time, scuba diving had barely been invented, man was still a stranger to the sea. Imagine a creature with the intelligence, the knowledge, the training and the brutality of man, but combined with the capacities of an apex marine predator."

"Jesus," Chase said, "Nazi killer whales."

"Not quite. More versatile, even," said Franks. "Whales must breathe; Kruger's creatures would not. They would stay underwater indefinitely, dive to a thousand feet, set explosives, spy on shipping. His dream was for them to have the potential for unlimited mayhem."

"Meaning he was nuts," Tall Man said.

"Not necessarily," Chase put in. "I remember reading about a professor from Duke who tried the same thing during the sixties. He started with mice, got them to breathe liquids without drowning and found that liquid-breathing eliminates the possibility of getting the bends. One time he decompressed a mouse from thirty atmospheres to surface pressure in three seconds, which would be like a diver going from a thousand feet to the surface at seven hundred miles an hour. The mouse survived. He saw no reason the same thing couldn't work with humans. He only stopped experimenting because of a lack of need: robots came on the scene, ROVs, submersibles; they could do a better job in deep water, with no risk to people. But he was convinced he could have created an amphibious human."

Franks nodded and said, "In theory, creating a water-breathing human being should not be very difficult. We come from water-breathers, after all; fetuses survive on liquid, and in various stages of development they show evidence of flippers and even gills. And we are all liquid-breathers already, in the sense that our lungs contain fluids without which they couldn't function."

"So you're saying Kruger succeeded?" Chase said.

"Almost," said Franks. "If the war had gone on longer, he might actually have done it. What held him back was the quality of his subjects; they were weak, sick, malnourished—slaves. Many developed infections from the initial tracheotomy surgery, and because there were no antibiotics then, they died. Some failed to survive the flooding of their lungs with saline solution and fluorocarbons. But Kruger had an inexhaustible supply of patients, so he pressed on.

"And then, from somewhere high in the chain of command, perhaps Hitler himself, came a gift: a perfect subject. Heinrich Guenther was the Aryan physical ideal, six and a half feet tall, muscled like a Greek statue. He had won medals in the nineteen thirty-six Olympics in the shot put, the javelin and the hammer throw, and he became something of a national hero. He joined the SS, secured a commission and, when the war came, seemed destined for a brilliant future. He was fearless and ruthless. He was utterly without conscience. He was a killer.

"He was also not quite sane, though that wasn't evident at the time. A solitary man, he lived alone, and apparently he had been murdering people—prostitutes, lowlifes for the most part—for years. That only came out after he went berserk in a beer hall one night and killed three people. Today I suppose he would be diagnosed as a sexual psychopath or a paranoid schizophrenic; in nineteen forty-four he was labeled a homicidal maniac. He was sentenced to be shot, and was about to be, when someone decided that he could perform one last service for the Reich. They sent him down to us."

"You worked with the guy?" Chase asked.

"Worked
on
him. With Kruger. For months. He was treated like a tiger. He was caged between surgeries, fed raw meat and vitamin injections, anesthetized and programmed in ways that are sophisticated even for today: biofeedback, subliminal conditioning. He was almost finished, Kruger had only one last step to go, when the Allies closed in on the camp. But Kruger was obsessed; he refused to abandon the experiment. He took Guenther with him when he fled . . . like most of the Nazis who knew they would be branded war criminals, Kruger had been given an escape route to South America.

"So we flooded Guenther one final time, packed him in a bronze box full of concentrated fluorocarbons and enriched saline solution and loaded him onto a truck. Kruger left on foot, he headed north toward the sea. I never saw either of them again."

"What about you?" Chase asked. "What happened when the Allies arrived?"

"They freed me ... they freed all of us."

"And that was that?"

"Why should it not be?"

"Because you hadn't just survived," Chase said.

"You'd worked side by side with that monster while he killed people."                         -

"Well . . ." said Franks, again with what sounded like a weary smile, ". . . perhaps they thought I had suffered enough."

He leaned forward in his wheelchair, and the glow from the television monitor fell on his face. He removed his sunglasses. One of his eyes was normal, but the other was a deep, egg-yolk yellow. Then he touched the tube to his throat, but this time after he had inhaled he used his fingertips to pluck away the ascot around his neck.

There were three diagonal slashes on either side of Franks' neck, healed decades ago into ridged purple scars, and in the center of his throat was a black and ragged hole that led down into his gullet.

"My God ..." Chase said. "Are they . . . you've got . . .
gills
?"

"I was an early experiment . . . and a failure," Franks said. He replaced the sunglasses. "And I am the only survivor. My lungs were too weak to absorb the fluorocarbons; over and over again, I drowned . . . to the brink of death. Kruger could have let me die, but he didn't; he would raise me upside down on a chain hoist and let gravity drain me, then restart my lungs with what passed in those days for CPR. He kept bringing me back to life because, he said, he needed me." Franks leaned back, out of the light. "I never recovered fully, I never will. But I don't want to meet God without one last act of penance. I want to kill this . . . this ultimate abomination."

"If that's what it is," said Tall Man.

"It is, I'm certain of it. We know that Kruger never reached South America. The Nazi-hunters who tracked down Mengele and Eichmann and the others never found a trace of him. The U-boat he was traveling on was listed as missing."

"How do you know he got on a U-boat?"

"There are records. The Nazis were fanatics about keeping records. Kruger's work had a code name, and it was mentioned in the archives as having been loaded aboard U-165. The boat sank, or was sunk, I assume somewhere in the mid-Atlantic."

"How could the thing travel across a couple thousand miles of ocean bottom," Tall Man asked, "and survive all this tune?"

"Kruger had slowed Guenther's metabolism to the edge of clinical death, a state way beyond hibernation. The chemicals in his box could sustain such basic life as there was, and his need for food would be nil, at least for a very long time. Eventually, like a bear woken by hunger in the spring, his body would have demanded food, and I guess he found something to eat."

Franks paused; Chase and Tall Man stared at each other.

"The answers are there," Franks said, "if you know what to look for. I stopped searching for Kruger long ago. All the evidence pointed to his having died. An uncle had brought me to America and put me to work in his chemical business; I built a new life, I had a son—Rudi—and I prospered.

"But I never forgot. A part of my mind was always looking for clues, hints that Kruger or Guenther had survived. And then I saw a newspaper item about a
National Geographic
photographer disappearing from a research vessel near Block Island."

"We heard about that," Chase said.

"The story said that a bronze box the size of a big casket had fallen overboard and disappeared . . . a box the researchers had brought up from the wreck of a submarine in the Kristof Trench ... a German U-boat."

"You said Guenther's programming hadn't been finished, there was one step to go. What was that?"

"Kruger's ambition was to create a truly amphibious killer," Franks said. "A half-human weapon that could survive equally well in air or water, could go back and forth between the two. He conditioned Guenther to breathe water, then taught him how to drain his lungs and breathe air. What he had not had time to teach him was how to reverse the process when he wanted to return to the water. Once on land, Guenther would become what is called an obligate air-breather. He would be trapped there. So, you see, it is very urgent that we destroy him before—"

"Christ!" Chase said suddenly, and stood up. "Puckett didn't tell you? The thing's already been ashore! It killed a dog in Waterboro." He turned to Tall Man and said, "Get on the horn to Rollie Gibson, he keeps the radio in his office tuned to sixteen. Tell him what the thing is, and it may be loose in town, or maybe in the woods."

Tall Man climbed the steps to the wheelhouse while Chase opened the door and went out onto the stern. He ordered Rudi to cut away the baits and Puckett to start the engine, then he returned to the cabin.

"This thing is partly human," he said to Franks, "or used to be. So it should be able to be killed like a human being, right?"

"I wish I knew for certain," Franks said. "Kruger altered the central nervous system, so he—it—lives on a very primitive level. I would say he would be as hard to kill as a big shark . . . which reminds me, Mr. Chase, I never told you his code name. The Nazis referred to it as
Der Weisse Hai. . .
'The White Shark.' "

Tall Man returned from the wheelhquse. "I couldn't get through on the radio," he said, "but it doesn't matter, Rollie'll be on the case by now . . . we're too late."

"What d'you mean?" Chase said.

"The radio's like a friggin' Chinese fire drill, everybody yakking. Some kid was killed over on Winter Point. His buddy swears the kid was killed by a yeti."

"A yeti?" Franks said.

"The Abominable Snowman." Chase turned to Tall Man. "Let's go." He started for the door. "The Mako can get us to town in—"

"Simon ... the thing may not be in town."

"What d'you mean?" Chase said.

"The kid, the survivor, said he saw it dive into the water and start swimming eastward."

"Eastward? What's to the east of Winter Point? There's no land out there except . . . oh my God." The only land to the east of Winter Point was Osprey Island. "Call Amanda on twenty-seven, tell her to take the kids and—"

"I tried," Tall Man said. "There was no answer."

43

"COOL," said Elizabeth.

"Awesome," said Max.

The children stood on the rocks seaward of the sea lion pool, watching Mrs. Bixler's vintage speedboat zoom out of its cove and approach in a high-speed turn. As the boat banked, the late-day sun glittered on the polished mahogany hull and the stainless-steel fittings; it looked like a fantasy spaceship.

Max loved the boat, had begged Mrs. Bixler to let him drive it. "Not till you get to be my age," she had said with a smile. "Only an old fool like me drives an old boat like this one."

Amanda stood behind them; behind her, the sea lions rocked back and forth on their flippers, barking for their supper.

In the shed ten yards beyond the pool, a voice came over the speaker of the VHP radio. "Osprey Base, Osprey Base, Osprey Base . . . Osprey Mako calling Osprey Base . . . come in, Osprey Base."

The voice echoed off the cement walls, unheard.

Mrs. Bixler was wearing an orange life jacket, sunglasses and a baseball cap turned backward so the bill would shelter her hairdo from the wind. She slowed the boat as she neared the rocks, and the roar of the big GM V-8 engine lowered to a growl. She picked up an ancient megaphone from the seat beside her and called through it, "I'm going to town for Bingo; probably spend the night with Sarah. I'll get hold of the police when I get to shore, make sure Simon reported in. They probably already sent a backup boat. I'll call you if. there's any news."

Amanda and the children waved. Mrs. Bixler pushed the throttle forward, and, like a racehorse suddenly given its head, the boat leaped forward, banked around the point and headed west toward the mainland.

In the shed, the voice said again, "Osprey Base, Osprey Base . . . come in, Osprey Base ..."

"Time to feed the girls," Amanda said, and she stepped back toward the pool. "Then we'll go up to the house and I'll fix us some supper." She took Elizabeth's hand, faced her and said, "I'm glad your mom said you could spend the night."

Elizabeth nodded and said, "Me too."

Max stayed on the rocks, looking out to sea. "I wonder where Dad is," he said. "It's getting late."

"On his way home." Amanda hoped her voice carried more conviction than she felt. "We'll set places for him and Tall."

They fed the sea lions, returned the leftover fish to the refrigerator and stowed the plastic balls, rings, triangles and other training tools in the shed. Elizabeth was the last to leave the shed. As she pulled the door closed behind her, she felt a faint vibration in the air, similar to that of a voice. She looked around, but couldn't locate the source, so she shut the door.