White Shark (36 page)

"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.
 
Chrissakes, 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 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 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
build
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 expended,
the more it needed; the more it needed, the more it had to expend to fill the
need.

It had become acutely 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.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"Hells bells!" shouted a young man named
Chester
, rubbing his
leg.
 
"I like to
broke
my foot in the chuckhole."

"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."

"I been here a million times, they don't give a
shit."

"Yeah, then why's all them ‘No hunting, get your
ass outta here’ signs?"

"Insurance," said Toby, who had already
turned seventeen and thus possessed two months more wisdom than
Chester
.
 
"They gotta have ‘em."

"Well, they sic the cops on us, it's you stole
that friggin’ thing, not me...
 
don't
think I won't tell ‘em."

"You helped."

"I watched."

"Same difference."

"Anyhow,"
Chester
said, "I don't know what makes
you think you can hit a friggin’ raccoon with a friggin’ crossbow."

"It said on the box:
 
accurate to fifty yards.
 
‘Sides, maybe we'll see a deer instead."

"Oh, no, you don't.
 
You shoot a deer,
it's
outta season and I'm outta here."

"Don't be an asshole."

They walked on for a few more yards, until they came to
a big tree growing amid a tangle of thick foliage.

"Perfect," Toby said, and he stepped into
the foliage and made his way around to the far side of the tree.

"That's poison ivy," said
Chester
.

"You got long pants on."

"What's perfect about it?"

"Chestnut tree.
 
They'll come
right to it, they love chestnuts."

"What does?"

"Critters... all kinds."

"A lot you know."

"Shut up."

They knelt behind the tree.
 
From a quiver at his waist Toby took a
steel-pointed graphite bolt, eighteen inches long.
 
He set the butt of the crossbow on the
ground, pulled back the drawstring, cocked it and fitted the bolt into its
slot.

"How's that thing fly true with no
feathers?" asked
Chester
.

"The slot here makes it spin like it's
rifled."

"The tip's not even barbed."

"Neither's a bullet, shithead.
 
A thing's got
enough force behind it, it'd prob’ly kill a rhino."

"Or a jogger.
 
That'd be a
fine one to explain to the—"

"Shut
up
,
I tell ya!"

Chester
stayed silent for a moment, then whispered, "So,
whadda we do now?"

"Whadda hunters always do?
 
We wait."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

There were two of them, one fatter than the other,
both slow and vulnerable.... but apparently armed, though with what it did not
know.
 
it
watched, waiting to see what they would do.