White Shark (42 page)

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Though they could see little through the fog swirling
in the chamber, they heard the sound... a piercing yowl of an animal in agony.

"Its ears are going," Chase said.

"No wonder," said Amanda.
 
"I've pressurized the chamber to two
hundred feet in five seconds; its ears can't equalize fast enough.
 
It's gotta be hurting something fierce."

The shrieking stopped.

"Its eardrums must have busted," said Chase.

"
Which means the pain's gone;
it's deaf but it's equalized.
"
 
Amanda looked at the gauge on the control panel.

Something slammed against the porthole.
 
Tiny spiderweb cracks appeared in the glass.

"Hurry," Chase said.
 
"Christ... it wants to break that
porthole, and if it does, the chamber'll go off like a bomb."
 
He turned to Max and Elizabeth, who stood
beside Amanda.
 
"Go outside,"
he said.
 
"Fast."

"But..."
 
Max seemed perplexed.
 
"Go
where?"

"Anywhere... just
go!
"

The children ran toward the kitchen door.

"It's at three hundred feet," Amanda said.

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*

As quickly as it had come, the pain had vanished, and
now the creature perceived only
a dullness
in its
head.

Though it could not know what was happening to it, it
could identify the cause of its pain:
 
the human staring at it through the glass.
 
Its focus changed; no longer concerned with
survival, now it sought vengeance.

One of its feet struck something hard.
 
It
bend
down, picked
up the thing, hefted it and lunged at the glass circle.

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*

It's got a wrench!
"
Chase
shouted
,
recoiling as the heavy head of the steel tool
crashed into the porthole.
 
New cracks
appeared in the glass.

"Six hundred feet," Amanda said.
 
"Six-fifty."

"We've gotta do it, we've gotta do it now."

"But we don't know—"

"It'll work," Chase said.
 
"It's got to."
 
He pressed his face to the porthole and
strained to see through the fog.
 
He saw
the creature crouched, its arm cocked, the wrench held in its hand like a
club.
 
"
Do
it!" he shouted.

"Coming up," Amanda said, and she pushed a
series of buttons.
 
There was a deafening
rushing noise, and the fog in the chamber swirled violently and began to
dissipate.

Chase saw the creature tense, saw through the gray fog
the white of its eyes and the silver gleam of its teeth.

It sprang at the porthole.

54

The creature seemed to stop in midair, as if struck by
a bolt of lightning.
 
Its body contorted,
its eyes popped wide, it collapsed to the floor of the chamber and clawed at
its own flesh.

"Five hundred feet...
"
Amanda
said.
 
"Four-fifty..."

"It's working," said Chase.
 
He couldn't take his eyes from the
porthole.
 
"My God..."

With the chamber pressurized to six hundred and fifty
feet, the squeeze on the creature — on its sinuses and lungs, on its stomach
cavity and every other pocket in its body that contained air — had been nearly
three hundred pounds per square inch.
 
Now, as Amanda brought the chamber back to surface pressure, the air
within the creature was escaping with the speed and violence of a balloon
bursting.

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It could not see, it could not hear, it could not
breathe.
 
Every joint and sinew felt
aflame.
 
Its stomach seemed to want to
invade its chest, its chest to swell into its head, its head to fly to pieces.

It had no conception of what was happening, could not
know that the air inside it was decompressing at a rate far faster than its
body could accommodate, that bubbles of nitrogen were scattering through its
tissues, lodging everywhere and growing inexorably, tearing the tissues apart.

Desperately it clutched itself, as if to force its
misshapen body back into form.

*
         
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*

Chase watched, fascinated, as the creature caromed
from one side of the chamber to the other.
 
Blood leaked from its mouth and ears; its eyes bulged, straining at
their sockets, and it raised a hand as if to contain them.
 
But before the hand could reach the face, one
of the eyes launched itself from its socket — like a grape squeezed from its
skin — and dangled grotesquely by red strands of muscle fiber.

The image was surreal — a writhing, pulsing, swelling
figure that might have been created by a lunatic sculptor and controlled by a
mad puppeteer
..

"Two-fifty," Amanda said.
 
"Two hundred... what's happening?"

"Its' on its knees," said Chase.
 
"It's... holy shit!"

The creature exploded.

A thick crimson mist filled the chamber; globules of
blood and pieces of flesh struck the porthole, and stuck.

55

Chase stood in the hospital lobby, waiting for an
elevator, and looked at his watch.
 
He
was more than an hour late.

He had wanted to be there by two, but he had gotten
stuck on the phone with Rollie Gibson and Nate Green, and had had to fulfill
his promise to give Nate a detailed, exclusive story for the paper about what
had happened on the island.

Then, when he had arrived ashore, Rudi Franks had been
waiting for him, alone and bearing a gift:
 
an old, cracked black-and-white photograph of Ernst Kruger and Jacob
Franks operating on Heinrich Guenther.

Finally, there had been the confusion at the
bank.
 
He had stopped to cash a check,
and one of the bank's officers had wanted to see him about something that made
no sense whatever to Chase, something that had to be a mistake.

The elevator arrived; Chase got out on the fourth
floor and walked to the nurses' station.

"You took your sweet time," said Ellie
Bindloss, a short, chunky woman with whom Chase had gone to school.
 
"We're not equipped to handle
eight-hundred-pound gorillas around here, y’know."

"Sorry," Chase said.
 
"Where is he?"

She pointed down the hall.
 
"Can't miss him," she said.
 
"You'll hear him before you see
him."

As Chase approached an open door at the end of the
hall, he heard Tall Man's voice shouting, "Sorry!
 
What d’you mean,
sorry?
 
You just shafted me,
and you did it on purpose.

Then Max's voice, laughing and
saying, "Tough, chief.
 
Move your man."

Chase paused outside the door, not sure what to
expect, then stepped inside the room.
 
"Hi," he said.

"Don't ‘Hi’ me," said Tall
Man .
 
"This
vicious kid of yours has
beat
my butt four games in a
row.
 
We oughtta feed him to the
fishes."
 
He laughed, then grimaced
and clutched the bandages that surrounded his chest and bound one arm to his
side.
 
"Christ," he said,
"laughing's no fun.
 
But it's better
than coughing."

Max sat on the foot of the bed; between him and Tall
Man was a board game littered with plastic cards and colored pieces.
 
Amanda sat in a chair beside the bed, a newspaper
in her lap.

Chase hadn't seen Tall Man for two and a half days,
not since he had ridden with him to the intensive-care unit in
New London
.
 
Then, Tall Man had been covered with blood and dirt, his color a dusty
gray, his breathing rattly and weak.
 
It
had taken the doctors two hours to stop the bleeding, suture and reinflate the
collapsed lung and begin the first of many transfusions.
 
They had shooed Chase away from the ICU and,
that evening, when they were confident Tall Man would survive, had urged him to
go home and sleep.

Chase still wasn't sure what had happened to Tall
Man.
 
He had started to search for him in
darkness, but hadn't found him until early dawn, stuck between two boulders on
the shore, unconscious.
 
Tall Man claimed
not to recall much, only that he had cut the creature several times, and then
had felt himself stabbed in the right side and shoulder, lifted off his feet
and thrown onto the rocks in the sea.

There was a purple lump on Tall Man's forehead, and a
line of stitches extending from his left eyebrow across his temple.

"You don't look too bad," Chase said,
stepping toward the bed.
 
"Considering."

"Yes, I do, I look like a mile of bad road,"
said Tall Man.
 
"And don't you even
think
about touching me; I feel like a
train wreck."

Chase smiled.
 
"Ready to go?"

"Damn right.
 
If I stay here long enough, they'll starve me to death or stick me to
death... or both."
 
Tall Man leaned
forward, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, leaning on the wall
for support.
 
Chase helped him on with
his trousers and draped his shirt over his shoulders.

Ellie Bindloss appeared, pushing a wheelchair.
 
"Sit down," she said.

"Never," said Tall Man.
 
"I can walk—"

"Sit down before I knock you down."

Tall Man smiled, then laughed, then coughed.
 
"You're a hard woman, Ellie
Bindloss," he said, and he flopped into the wheelchair.

Max pushed the wheelchair down the hall, Ellie walked
beside it and Chase and Amanda followed behind.

Chase told her about the photograph Rudi had given
him, then said, "We've got to stop at the bank on the way back; I want to
clear something up."

Amanda hesitated before saying, "Clear up
what?"

"I don't
know,
the
damndest thing.
 
One of the officers told
me the bank isn't holding my paper on the island anymore.
 
He said they sold it."

"Really?"

"To a partnership.
 
I thought for
a minute they'd screwed me, sold it to Finnegan or somebody else who'd want to
take over the island.
 
But then the guy
said
I
was one of the partners."

Amanda didn't say
anything,
she just kept on walking, looking ahead.

"It must be new," she said.

"What kind of name is that, the Pinniped
Group?
 
You know what pinnipeds
are?"

"Sure."

"They're..."
 
Chase stopped, and as the sense of what he was about to say hit him, the
thought occurred to him that he had never felt so stupid in his life.
 
"Sea lions.
 
A pinniped is a sea lion."

Amanda smiled and took his arm.
 
"We'll talk about the details
later," she said.
 
"We'll have
plenty of time."

—
THE END
—