Gargantua Page 11

  Placing the pulley by the shark cage, the two of them carefully lowered the trough into the cage. The big lizard remained submerged up to its neck, leaving plenty of room for the trough to swing on the pulley as they lowered it.

  Once the trough was about halfway down the abovewater part of the cage, Jack said, “Okay, let’s hold it there.” They secured the rope.

  The creature then rose up out of the water slowly. Paul swore the thing looked like a vulture as it arced up and over the trough. It smelled the contents for a moment, then shoved its snout in. Within seconds, it was hungrily devouring the contents.

  “It recognizes the taste,” Jack said. He pumped his fist and said, “Yes! Finally!”

  “Nice work,” Paul said.

  “Well, the Iozima Ridge is its home.”

  Hale approached just then. “Found the right diet, yeah?”

  “So it would seem,” Jack said proudly.

  “Well, I’ve got news. It looks like your suspicion was right, Jack. I found traces of DDT in the water sample.”

  Paul frowned. “Meaning?”

  “DDT accumulates in the fatty tissues of organisms,” Jack said, “and becomes more concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.”

  Paul rolled his eyes. “Meaning?” he repeated, more forcefully.

  “It means that this creature is not a biological anomaly. It was mutated by a concentrated diet of artificial chemicals.”

  Jesus Christ, what is it about scientists that they can’t speak English? For a third time, Paul said, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, we created a monster,” Jack said, “and it’s probably not the only one of its kind.”

  Paul decided he liked the scientific gobbledygook better.

  SEVEN

  Pierce Askegren reached up as high as his right arm would go and pressed the button on his Nikon just as the five men entered the hotel lobby and went out of sight. He sighed, hoping that he actually got one of the band members in the shot and not just a piece of ground or the wall of the hotel’s second floor or something.

  Pierce made his living as a freelance photographer, specializing in candid photographs of celebrities. Unfortunately, thousands of others made their living the same way. If you weren’t lucky enough to be at the front of the throng when a particular group of celebrities made their appearance, you had to count on unreliable shots like the one he just took.

  He lit a cigarette, then stared at the light flickering from his Zippo. For a minute, he imagined Marissa Michaels, his editor, standing on the flame, her feet burning in agony. Damn her anyway, he thought with a snarl as he blew smoke into the South Seas air. Okay, so George Clooney got that restraining order against the paper. Is that my fault?

  According to Marissa, it was, and as punishment, he got saddled with following around the hot new rock band, a group with the semi-ironic name of the Don’t Quit Your Day Job Players, on a world tour promoting their album TKB. As far as Pierce was concerned, they were just a bunch of white guys with long hair—except for the drummer, who was a white guy with a buzz cut.

  Ah, well, he thought, it could’ve been worse. She could’ve given me the Spice Girls.

  Pierce took another drag on his cigarette, then wiped the sweat from his bald pate. A Washington, D.C. native, he hated the humidity of this insipid little tourist trap of an island. But the Don’t Quit Your Day Job Players had a stop in Kalor—to be followed by dates in Manila and Tokyo—and so he was stuck here until they left.

  A voice with a thick Italian accent said from behind him, “Ah, bello!”

  Sighing, Pierce turned around to see Marcello Silverio. Pierce first met the paparazzo when they both had the David Hasselhoff beat three years earlier. They re-encountered each other on the plane to Kalor—apparently the DQYDJPs were huge in Italy.

  “Hi, Mark,” Pierce said with a dearth of enthusiasm.

  Marcello winced. He hated being called Mark, which is why Pierce kept it up. “I got a lovely shot of the band. Perfecto.”

  Pierce sighed. Days like this, I think I should’ve listened to Ma and become a plumber.

  “Lads!” came another voice, this one belonging to John Hawkins. Pierce had known and respected Hawk for years. The man always managed to get the most amazing shots. He also had a handsome face and was eloquent as hell. As a result, he was perfect for playing the public face of celebrity photographers whenever there was a backlash of some sort against the practice. After Princess Diana’s death, Hawk had gone onto some BBC news program or other and carried on for half an hour about the dignity of the press and the necessity for freedom of expression, and various other bits of bullshit. The next day, he was hiding in Fergie’s bushes, trying to get a shot of her sunbathing.

  “I just overheard a couple of tourists who’ve been on Malau,” Hawk was saying. “Some kind of creature was captured over there.”

  Hawk may have been a master, but he tended to let his imagination run away with him. For years, he had insisted that he had genuine Loch Ness Monster pictures—“Not fakes like those other johnnies, this was the goods, pictures of the whole bleedin’ Loch Ness Monster family!”—so Pierce couldn’t help but say, “Yeah, right. Elvis’s alien baby.”

  “No, this is legit. They both saw it. A nine-foot lizard that can walk on its hind legs.”

  Pierce scratched his ample belly. “How much you have to pay for this ‘legit’ sighting?” he asked, sarcasm still lacing his tone.

  Hawk looked indignant. “Please. I am a member of the free press. I have standards. I overheard it like any proper journalist.”

  Lightning arced in the twilight sky, followed moments later by a thunderclap.

  Pierce sighed. “All right, fine, a couple guys in Hawaiian shirts with disposable cameras in their khaki shorts pockets think they see a big lizard—”

  “Actually, they were dressed in T-shirts and denim shorts, and one of them wore a Harvard ring. Class of ’88.”

  Marcello frowned. “How close were you?”

  Hawk shrugged. “Good ears and a telephoto lens. Look, do you want to sit around waiting for a bunch of rock stars to resurface from their drunken orgies long enough to pose for a bad picture, or do you want a scoop?”

  Pierce had to admit to himself that Hawk had a point. But, as another bolt of lightning struck, a thought occurred. “Since when does John Hawkins offer to split a scoop?”

  “Ah yes, well, you see, in order to find the thing, we’ll need to rent a boat.”

  “Find it? You said it was captured.”

  Hawk rolled his eyes. “You’re being too bloody linear, me old mucker. Remember my Loch Ness photos? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s one big lizard—”

  Marcello smiled. “There’s got to be a famiglia. Excellente! So where is the boat?”

  “Ah, yes, well, that is the problem, my dear old friends and colleagues, you see—I’m a bit strapped for cash at the moment, and—”

  “Strapped?” Pierce said, incensed. Hawk always wore the most expensive clothes, had top of the line camera equipment, and threw money around like he had it to burn.

  Marcello asked, “What happened to Signor ‘Hello Ladies, I Have a Full Expense Account, Come Have Sex with Me,’ hanh?”

  Hawk at least had the good grace to look abashed. “Well, er, you see, I’m afraid that my full expense account is all, as it were—filled up. Cutbacks, you know.”

  “If we split the boat three ways down the middle,” Marcello said, “I will go along.”

  “Fair enough,” Hawk said.

  “Look,” Pierce said, not bothering to point out that a three-way split by definition couldn’t be down the middle, “there’s no way in hell I’m paying money to go out in the rain and look for a hypothetical monster. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Oh, come now, Pierce, that lightning doesn’t mean anything. And we can rent a motorboat for next to nothing. Come now, what do you say?”

  “I say forget it. No way.”
>
  Two hours later, Pierce sat in a motorboat for which he’d paid a third of the rental cost. The rain was coming down in buckets. How the hell do I let myself get talked into these things?

  “Quite invigorating, isn’t it?” Hawk said with the kind of grin that you just want to punch. “Why, all we need is a dog, and we’d have a Jerome K. Jerome book.”

  Pierce blinked. “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot, they don’t read in your country, do they, Pierce?”

  Snarling, Pierce said, “Yeah, well, we ain’t got rulers who’re inbred mutants, either.”

  “Nor do we, old chum. The royal family are simply a distraction to keep the general public from realize that the country is run by incompetents.”

  Shaking his head, Pierce said, “This is nuts. We should turn back.”

  “Niente,” said Marcello, “I have sailed in worse.”

  “Of course you have,” Pierce said, “you’re insane.” Marcello got his start by hanging upside down from the roof of a very famous—and very reclusive—Italian actress and getting pictures of her changing clothes, then walking into a local newspaper with the photos. Said roof was two hundred feet off the ground, as the actress lived in a villa in the Tuscan hills.

  Marcello let loose with a string of Italian curses, which Pierce couldn’t understand a word of, and so wasn’t insulted by.

  “Lighten up, lads. We’re about to be famous.”

  Yeah, right, sure, Pierce thought. What the hell am I doing here? This is nuts. This is absolutely, positively, cuckoo-bird—style nuts. I should—

  He cut his thought off when he heard a sound in the water.

  “What was that?” Marcello asked, relieving Pierce, as that meant that someone else heard it, too.

  Pierce leaned forward, trying to filter out the sound of the rain coming down on the motorboat’s canopy and the rrrrrrrr noise of the motor.

  Suddenly, for the first time, it hit him. We’re out here looking for the relatives of a nine-foot lizard. This is nuts. This is dangerous.

  “A porpoise, maybe?” Hawk ventured.

  “Can we just get the hell out of here?” Pierce said, suddenly nostalgic for the humidity of Kalor and the monotony of chasing rock stars around the world.

  Marcello shushed him and cut the motor.

  Great. Now we’re sitting ducks.

  Pierce heard the sound again.

  Then something bumped the boat.

  Oh hell . . .

  Marcello tried to start the motor, but it just coughed and died. Pierce pushed him out of the way. “Move it, Mark, you couldn’t flush a toilet if instructions were written on the handle.”

  Pierce tried desperately to get the motor to turn over, but the thing just sputtered and died. The points are probably all wet. Why the hell did that jackass turn the motor off?

  Before he could try again, he heard the noise again, this time accompanied by the boat rocking severely. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. He whirled around to see a massive, green, scaly head break through the water. The head looked to be at least seven feet from neck to top, with tiny, beady eyes, a huge snout, and what looked like razor-sharp teeth.

  Pierce had never seen anything like it in real life. It looked like some kind of weird dinosaur.

  Faced with a creature whose head was as big as the boat he sat in, a monster with teeth the size of Missouri, a big lizard that could probably eat Pierce alive without even having to chew—Pierce did the only thing he could do.

  He took its picture.

  Next to him, Hawk and Marcello did the same.

  Damn, Hawk was right, Pierce thought, all thoughts of recalcitrant motors and certain death banished from his mind, replaced with the image of showing these pictures to Marissa and seeing the look of abject gratitude on her face as she begged to pay him three times his usual fee. We are going to be famous!

  Two huge arms broke through the surface only a few feet from the boat, causing it to rock even more. The arms moved up to shield the creature’s eyes from the three flashes that probably seemed like a strobe light.

  Then it dove back underwater.

  This might not have been much of a problem—beyond the fact that it meant no more pictures—but for one feature of the creature’s anatomy. Pierce had been wondering what the rest of the thing looked like, how many legs it had, that sort of thing.

  He and the others found out the hard way that it had a tail, for when it dove back underwater, the tail flipped up above the surface, impeded only by the small motorboat.

  Pierce didn’t get a good enough look at the tail to see how large it was, but it certainly was big enough that the motorboat wasn’t much of an impediment.

  As Pierce went flying through the air and crashing into the Pacific Ocean, his first thought was, Damn, the salt water’ll ruin the film!

  His last thought before blacking out was, Sorry, Ma, I should’ve been a plumber.

  EIGHT

  The sun shone brightly through a cloudless sky, the fish obediently swam into the nets to be caught, and the humidity had fallen as low as one could expect for midsummer on a tropical island. It was the sort of day that inspired poets to write lines like, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.”

  Derek Lawson barely noticed it.

  He thought about a nine-foot-long lizard. He thought about an arsehead of an American scientist and his arsehead son, and an Australian gob with too much time on his hands, and an American journalist with what the yanks called an attitude problem.

  He thought about Fiji, and his ex-wife, and his clapped-out trawler.

  He thought about a nine-foot-long lizard and how it could make a lot of the other things he thought about go away. And he thought about the phone call he’d made that morning.

  “Hey, Derek, you alive in there?”

  Naru’s voice brought Derek back to earth. “Sorry, just thinkin’. And dreamin’ ”

  “Well, now I’m scared.”

  “Ha ha ha. Look, I had big dreams when I was your age, mates. Very big dreams. Funny how a little back alimony and some unpaid income taxes can stuff up the best-laid plans, but—”

  Kikko rolled his eyes. “Not the ‘best-laid plans’ speech again.”

  Naru laughed and covered his ears. “Not again, not again!”

  Normally, Derek wouldn’t mind the japing, but today he was in an especially foul mood. “My life’s a joke, is it?”

  “C’mon Derek,” Kikko said, “enough of this. You got a great life. You live in the tropics, you own your own boat—”

  “A boat that’s almost ready to be scuttled,” he said, just as the wheel pulled to the left, as it often did when he let his attention drift.

  Naru picked up the ball. “We make nice money from the tourists, we’re saving up for Fiji—”

  “It’s a pipe dream, mates,” Derek interrupted. He was sick of pining for something he couldn’t have. “Let’s be honest, hey? Our little restaurant on the beach, lying in the sun all day, drinkin’ beer with the tourists at night, settlin’ down with sweet little native nymphs—we’ll never have the money for it. Not in this lifetime.” Derek sighed. Bloody wonderful, now I’m depressing myself.

  He thought about a nine-foot lizard.

  The hell with Ellway. That sucker’s mine, and nothing’s gonna stop me from makin’ my mark with that monster.

  “But what the hell,” he said with a smile, “right?”

  “Right, boss,” Kikko said, slapping him on the back.

  “Besides, I may have a line on something that’ll give us a little something extra in the cash department. Remember that Indonesian bloke we took deep-sea fishing? The one who was in the market for exotic species?” Kikko and Naru both nodded. “Well, I rang him up. Told him about our nine-footer. He’s interested.” Derek smiled. “Very interested. If he likes what he sees, he’ll buy it from us for a bloody fortune.”

  Kikko and Naru exchanged glances. Naru s
aid, “But it isn’t ours to sell.”

  Derek rolled his eyes. “Now you’re sounding like that American bastard. It’s ours as much as anybody’s. All we’ve gotta do is haul it over to Kalor.”

  Again, Kikko and Naru looked at each other. Then Kikko asked, “How much is ‘a bloody fortune’?”

  Derek smiled, but before he could answer, something hit the boat with a light thump.

  Derek looked around, but saw nothing untoward. So what the hell was that?

  Another thump.

  This time he traced the noise to the port side. He ran over to the railing, Kikko and Naru on his heels.

  Peering over the side, he saw a small motorboat, capsized, bumping up against the trawler. As he was about to make a disparaging comment about tourists leaving their crap lying about, he noticed a person clutching onto the side of the boat: a balding white bloke, wearing some kind of rain slicker, and with a camera around his neck.

  “C’mon,” Derek said, “let’s haul him up out of there.”

  Jack had come to the clinic searching for Brandon, only to find the place abuzz with activity. Down the street, Derek and his two hangers-on were heading toward the police station with Chief Movita. Great, what did that idiot do this time?

  As he stepped up onto the verandah, Alyson came out. “Hi,” she said, momentarily startled by his presence.

  “Hi yourself. I came looking for Brandon, but, uh—Well, what’s going on?”

  “Derek found some guy clutching to a capsized motorboat that washed up against his trawler. He was pretty badly injured, so he brought him here.”

  Jack tried and failed to feel guilty about his disappointment that Derek hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

  Alyson continued, “His wallet identifies him as Pierce Askegren. He’s got a batch of press credentials, and he had a fairly sophisticated camera around his neck.”

  “How badly is he hurt?”

  “Not too awful—a few bumps and bruises, and some nasty scratches. Familiar-looking scratches.”