White Shark (33 page)

The strongest spoor of prey came from an
alien object near the living things.

Its capacity for making decisions was
poor, its sense of options undeveloped.
 
It craved everything, but sensed that it had to choose.

And then, as if a gate had suddenly opened
in its brain, it received a message telling it that it could have
everything.
 
It must only decide what to
have first.

It willed its gills to
close,
it rose up on its powerful arms and sprang forward.

33

The girl had fallen asleep, though she
hadn't meant to; it was the cardinal sin for a baby-sitter with a two-year-old
near the water.
 
Her sleep was light,
barely deep enough to accommodate a fluttery dream about Princess Diana asking
her to be her roommate and help care for the two little princes.
 
All of a sudden, out of nowhere, one of the
princes was crying — shrieking, actually.

She bolted upright, knocking the magazine
off her face, and turned to look for Jeremy.

He was there, sitting on the sand where he
had been, and she was flooded with a rush of relief.

He was howling — head thrown back, mouth
gaping, eyes closed — and she knew kids well enough to know that this wasn't a
howl of temper or anger, but one of pain or terror, as if he had burned himself
or cut himself or been bitten by a dog.

She went to him, and stood over him, and
said, "What's wrong... you hurt?"

He didn't answer, not even with one of his
dumb baby words, he just shrieked louder.

"Jeremy...
don't
be a wuss... tell me where it hurts."

He opened his eyes and raised his arms,
begging to be picked up, which surprised her because he never wanted her to
pick him
up,
he didn't like her any more than she
liked him.
 
Their association was based
on mutual tolerance, the tacit recognition of a bad situation that neither of
them had wanted but both had to endure.

"Forget it," she said, shaking
her head.
 
"You think I need poop
all over my clothes?"

He howled again, even louder, and
stretched his arms up to her.

Flustered, she said, "Jesus... shut
up, will you?"
 
She looked around to
see if anyone was watching.
 
"What
is
it?"
 
An idea occurred to her.
 
"Asshole
burn, that
what it is?
 
Yeah, that must be it.
 
Well, if you wouldn't poop in your pants all
the time, your asshole wouldn't hurt."

She half expected her logical conclusion
to provide consolation, but it didn't.
 
He still sat there like some yowling Buddha.

"Fuck!" she said, and she bent
over, put her hands under his arms and lifted him up and, holding him as far
away from
herself
as possible, walked toward the
water.

He squirmed and kicked and screamed, and
the closer she got to the water, the more violent he became, as if whatever it
was that had frightened him or hurt
him
was out there
in the water.

She fought to hold on, probably gripping
him too tightly but not caring, and when she was in the water up to her knees,
she dunked him to his waist and peeled off the adhesive strips that held the
diaper on and let the diaper float away.
 
The she swirled the child around, hoping the water would clean his
bottom.

After a minute or so, she hauled him out
of the water and, still holding him at arm's length, walked back up the beach
and set him down on his feet.

His crying subsided into breathless,
staccato sobs, but still he begged for her to hold him, and when she wouldn't
he grabbed her leg.

"Let go, goddamnit!" she said,
and she raised a hand to slap his arm away from her leg.
 
But the instant she felt the impulse to
strike the child, her anger vanished, replaced suddenly by fear, fear of
herself, of her power over the little child and the damage it could do... to
him and to her.

Fear quickly transformed into
sympathy.
 
"Hey," she said,
"hey... it's okay."
 
She knelt
down and let him wrap his arms around her neck, and put an arm under his bottom
and lifted him up.
 
"Let's go watch
TV, what
d’you say
?

As she crossed the beach back to where she
had left her towel, she noticed something awry, something missing.
 
Then she saw tracks in the sand, as if a
heavy object had been dragged into the water, and she realized that the trash
barrel wasn't there anymore.

She looked out into the harbor and saw —
maybe twenty-five yards out, no farther than she could throw a stone — the
black neck of the empty barrel as it floated on the surface.

"D’you
believe
it?" she said,
soothing the child with the sound of her voice.
 
"Those guys fill the trash can with all that crap, and then they go
and throw it in the harbor so it can wash up on people's lawns.
 
I tell you, Jeremy, the bottom line of life
is, people stink.

She gathered up her towel and tote bag
and, with the child settled on her hip, made her way through the gate and onto
the sidewalk... talking nonsense to keep the child quiet, and vowing to herself
that next summer, no matter what, she would find an easier way to earn five
crummy bucks an hour.

34

Enraged, it flailed through the shower of
dispersing garbage, grabbing random bits of flotsam and gnashing at them, as if
violence would somehow force them to yield nutrients they did not contain.
 
A few pieces were nourishing, but very few,
only enough to make it yearn for more.
 
Most were worthless, and there was no way it could tell one from
another.

Its gills labored, clogged with alien
things that lodged in the flaps and impeded motion.

It had chosen wrong, following scent
rather than instinct.

It propelled itself slowly to the surface
and waited for its eyes to adjust their focus on the shore.

Empty.
 
The living things were gone.

They were there, however, somewhere, in
company with many more.
 
It knew that.

It knew, too, that they could be brought
within reach.

But another decision
would be required, a decision for which it had been programmed, but one for which
the implementation was — or so the creature sensed — beyond its abilities.

It allowed itself to drift downward again,
and it rested on the mud bottom, lolling like a corpse among the ribbons of
kelp while it probed the recesses of its brain for long-lost keys to
long-hidden locks.

Its brain was dim but not slow, out of
condition but not disabled, and the more it demanded of the brain, the more the
brain responded.

One by one, the keys appeared.

At last, it knew what it must do, and how
to do it.

Energized by new promise, it crawled along
the bottom that sloped up into the shallows.
 
When its back was nearly out of the water, it crabbed sideways into the
shelter of some boulders, and it waited, scanning the shore until it was
confident it was alone.
 
Even then, it
waited a few moments
more,
rehearsing the steps it
must take, reluctant to leave the safety of the world it had known — for how
long?
 
Forever, as far
as it knew — but certain that its life depended on the course it had chosen.

It ducked down, immersing its head and
gills, and pumped water through its system, flooding its blood with oxygen like
a diver preparing for a record plunge.

It raised its head, pulled itself to its
feet and began to walk.
 
The muscles in
its legs were weak —
they had not borne weight for half a century — but
they supported it, and with each step they gained an iota of new strength.

It needed shelter for the exercise it was programmed to perform, and it
needed it soon.
 
Because it had no sense
of time, it did not know what soon was, but it knew that its blood would tell
it:
 
as oxygen was consumed, more would
be demanded, and the brain would lapse into crisis.

Soon.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The streets were empty, doors closed and
windows curtained.
 
Still, it felt
exposed, and so it lurched for the comfort of the shadows between two
buildings.
 
Its ears could now — they did
not only record pressure changes — and they heard raucous sounds not far away.

It passed more closed doors, turned down
another dark street, saw more closed doors and was about to turn again when, in
a niche near the end of this street, it saw an open door.
 
It staggered toward the door, trailing a
smear of slime, beginning to feel the first alarums from its brain, demanding
oxygen.

The door was large, and
broad,
and the space inside was dark and empty.

The creature looked upward and saw what it
needed:
 
large crossbeams supporting the
roof.

It could not leap up to the beams, and
there was no rope or ladder for it to climb; it probed one of the walls with
its claws.
 
The wood was soft — from age
and rot and humidity — and its claws pierced it as if it were wet clay.

Its claws sank deep into the wood, and it
scaled the wall like a panther.

The effort sucked oxygen from its blood,
and by the time it reached the first crossbeam the alarums in its brain were
urgent.
 
It swung its legs over the beam
and hung upside down, a dozen feet above the dirt floor, its arms dangling
beneath its head.
 
Out of its mouth a
trickle of liquid oozed and dripped onto the floor.

It waited for a moment, monitoring the
metabolic change:
 
The metamorphosis was
too slow:
 
before its system would be
cleansed, before its motor could be stopped and restarted, the brain would have
begun to die, starved for oxygen.

And so, as it had been taught to do fifty
years before, as it had done once in practice, it balled its fists beneath its
rib cage and snapped them upward.

Green liquid gushed from its mouth like
vomit.
 
The first spasm encouraged a
second, and a third, until a cycle of convulsions began that pumped water for
the lungs and flushed it through the trachea.

A fetid pool of green fluid formed in the
dirt below, a miniature swamp.

It took only a few seconds for the lungs
to empty and the chest cavity to contract.

When it was done, the creature hung motionless,
its eyes rolled back in its head, eggshells of perfect white.
 
Droplets of slime made their way down its
steel teeth and fell like emeralds.

Its life as a water-breather was over.

Clinically, it was dead.
 
Its heart had not begun to beat; the fluid in
its veins lay still.

But the brain still lived, and it
commanded itself to send one final burst of electricity across the synapses
that would restore life.

The body convulsed once more, but this
time it expelled no liquid.

This time it coughed.

35

Elizabeth
slammed the door behind her, hopped down the sidewalk
and stood still, trying to sense here the parade was.
 
She couldn't hear it, of course, but she
could feel it, as a pulsing on her eardrums and
a faint
tympani on the soles of her bare feet.
 
The drums and the tuba sent pressure waves
through the air, and the pounding of hundreds of feet shocked the concrete
sidewalks for blocks in every direction.

It had taken her longer to find the roll
of film than she had expected, and she guessed that by now the parade was close
to the commercial docks.
 
She wanted to
get the film to Max before the parade actually arrived at the docks, for the
arrival and the Blessing itself were the most photogenic parts of the ceremony.

She took a breath, and held it, and closed
her eyes, turning in the direction of the feelings she was receiving.
 
She was right:
 
the parade was two thirds of the way down