"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 ou—"
"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 form 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 oid, 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 humanoid... 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 chief's 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 phone lines 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. 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.
They did nothing, only squatted in the bushes.
The bird noises had stopped, and the squirrel sounds.
It moved slowly to its left, until it had a clear path toward them. It would take them easily, first one then the other, and drag them back to its den.
The fat one first.
* * * * *
"What was that?" Chester said.
"What was what?"
"A noise, back of us."
Toby turned and looked, but saw only bushes. "Forget it," he said. "We're the hunters here, you think something's gonna sneak up on us?"
"I hate woods," Chester said. "I... Toby!"
* * * * *
The fat one had seen it, was looking at it, pointing at it, making a noise.
It sprang from the underbrush, took two swift strides and was upon the fat one. It dug one set of claws deep into the fat one's chest, the other into his scalp and eyes, bent his head back and, with its teeth, ripped at its throat.
The fat one died quickly.
It turned to the other.
* * * * *
"Oh God... oh Jesus... oh God... oh Jesus..."
Toby staggered backward. Something had Chester, something huge and grayish white, and blood was flying everywhere because... oh God, oh Jesus... the thing was eating him!
Toby's back struck the trunk of the tree.
Now the thing was turning toward him. It had yellowish hair and steel teeth and eyes as white as cue balls, and it was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Toby jerked the crossbow up and held it in front of him, and he tried to say something but no words came out. He pulled the trigger.
The crossbow bucked as the graphite bolt flew from its slot. He saw the bolt hit the thing and sink in, and there was a little squirt of what looked like blood.
But the thing kept coming.
Moaning in terror, Toby dropped the crossbow, wheeled around the tree trunk and ran.
* * * * *
It felt a burning sensation in its side, below its ribs, and it looked down and saw some
thing protruding from its flesh. It wrapped a hand around the thing, pulled it from its flesh and cast it away.
It was not badly wounded, none of its vital functions were impaired, but the pain slowed and distracted it. It stopped and watched the human blunder away through the bushes. It returned to the fat one, intent on dragging him back to its den.
Then, for the first time, it experienced foresight: the other human might come back, return to hunt it. With others. It was in danger, it would have to make a plan.
It sat down against the big tree, willing its brain to work, to project, to sort, to innovate.
Its main priorities were clear: to staunch the flow of blood, to survive. From the floor of the forest it gathered leaves, and moss from the trunk of the tree, and it crushed them and packed them into the wound.
To nourish itself, it used its claws to cut strips of flesh from the fat one; it consumed them. It ate as much as it felt it needed, then forced itself to eat more, until it sensed that another bite would trigger regurgitation.
Now, it knew, it must escape, and find a different, safer place.
It arose and walked to where the trees ended at the shoreline. It stood in the shelter of the trees, to be sure it was alone, then it entered the water.
It could not submerge, but it could swim; it could not feed in the sea any longer, but it could survive until it reached different land.
As it had become aware of its past, now it was beginning to fathom a future.
41
The sea was flat, there wasn't enough breeze even to raise ripples, so the Mako rose quickly to a plane and cut through the glassy surface at forty miles an hour.
"I wonder who came up with the ten grand," Tall Man shouted over the scream of the outboard motor.