Megatooth: A Deep Sea Thriller Read online

  Of course, after she got back to the boat there were still no guarantees. But for now, she’d take what she could get. She swam quickly but moved her limbs as little as possible. She gave long, hard strokes with her arms and barely kicked her legs. It was difficult, as the water was still choppy from the helicopter wreckage.

  She came up for air, surprised to find that she had nearly reached the boat. A few more strokes got her to the edge. The boat was almost entirely turned on its side, the majority of the wrecked in now submerged. In the bit of the damaged portion that remained above water, she was saw one of the rails from the back of the boat. It had become dislodged and bent but was still attached to the boat. It hung down like a crooked ladder, almost too inviting. Further overhead, she could see the strange vacuum contraption that Carl had seemed so secretive about. It clung to the side of the boat and looked very heavy—additional weight she was sure the damaged boat absolutely did not need. As for the ROVs that had been so neatly nestled along the back of the boat, she saw no sign of them.

  She reached up and grabbed the edge of what she assumed was the pump’s base. The moment her hand was on it, she heard her name from above her. She peered up and saw Steve. He was looking down at her from the crooked floor of what remained of the un-submerged second floor deck where the central cabin had been.

  “Quiet,” Emily said. “Stay as quiet as you can.”

  He nodded his understanding and watched her, waiting for her to get far enough up to be of help. She climbed up the pump as well as she could, but there were very few flat surfaces to take advantage of. Still, once she got a firm grip around the top, she was able to use her feet along the side of the boat to make it up a good distance.

  As she climbed up, there was a large splash from behind them. This was followed by a scream that she was unable to not turn around to investigate. She turned to see the megalodon splashing back down into the water. Its mouth missed the pilot that had been bobbing in the water a few feet away from the raft. When the shark hit the water and went down, so did the pilot. He disappeared underneath it, carried down by its weight.

  “My God,” Steve whispered. “He was crushed, he was—”

  But then the pilot came back up again, still screaming. There was blood on his face and he looked like a phantom in the moonlight. His screams were cut off in a gurgling sort of sound as he was jerked violently to the left. He was pulled hard in that direction, going at an incredible speed. They watched him glide like that from the waist up for a few seconds before he sank lower and lower. Finally, he was pulled violently underwater, one final wail of agony that was cut off as his head went under.

  After that, there was silence.

  Emily whimpered and pulled herself up by the pump’s base. Her arms were trembling and every muscle in her body begged for her to take a break and allow herself to weep—to become the vulnerable woman that had earlier sank into Steve’s shoulders. She tried to push it aside, but she was crying by the time she was high enough up the side of the boat to reach out and take Steve’s offered hand.

  As he pulled her up and into the ruined and quickly disappearing central cabin, she saw Carl peering down at them from the stairwell. He had to lean against the opposing wall to keep from falling. Everything was skewed and out of place, so much so that it took Emily a few moments to get her bearings straight.

  “You okay?” Steve asked

  “No,” she answered with a whimper. “But that’s okay.”

  “Come on, you two,” Carl said. “The more weight that I have down here, the worse off we are. Come in up to the top.”

  “Is there a plan to get to safety?” Emily asked. “I mean, what the hell are we supposed to do?”

  “There’s nothing now,” Carl said. “I can only hope that the pilot was able to make some kind of distress call before the chopper went down.”

  “I was hoping the same thing,” Emily said as they scrambled up the crooked stairs. She moved quickly and lost her balance twice but was able to make it onto the top of the boat—which was really the left side—without falling. “Someone will have to come looking for them when they don’t respond, right?”

  “I sure hope so,” Carl said.

  They gathered together on the edge of the boat. It was tricky, as they had to go out on the top of the boat and then take a sliding step back down to rest on the edge which, less than twenty minutes ago, had been mostly submerged under water in its normal state.

  “Someone explain this to me,” Steve said, his voice bordering on hysteria. “I know nothing about sharks but even I know that noise would probably attract them. So wouldn’t a helicopter be the absolute worst thing to send for a rescue?”

  “There’s no way they could have known just how…how monstrous this thing is,” Carl pointed out.

  “With a simpler shark,” Emily said, “they would have successfully rescued us.”

  The stared out to sea, taking in the situation. There was wreckage and debris everywhere. The black life raft bobbed like a shadow in the midst of everything, clinging to a piece of scrap from what she thought was a remnant of the deck from The Gull. She also saw what she thought was a portion of seat from the helicopter.

  She felt like she was riding on a storm cloud. Everything was dark and brooding. There was no hope anywhere. The only hope she was able to muster was the fact that she could see no signs of the megalodon.

  But she had seen just how quickly it could come to the surface, its maw opened wide to tear into anything over its head. She knew that she could be dead at any moment; there may as well have been a sniper out there somewhere with her head in his scope.

  “So,” Carl said. “I guess the game plan is to just stay quiet and hope the Coast Guard sends someone else?”

  “That seems like the only thing we can do,” Emily said.

  She felt exhaustion sinking in and when Steve scooted next to her, she resisted the urge to rest her head on his shoulder. Feeling not only alone, but in desperate need of some sort of comfort, she reached out and took his hand. He looked at her, confused, but said nothing. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, but she could still feel the tremors going through him—or maybe the tremors were her own. She couldn’t tell.

  The tepid silence between them didn’t last long. It was broken by a mechanical shrieking that sounded totally alien out here on the sea. It took roughly three seconds for her to realize what she was hearing: it was an alarm of some sort.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “The pump alarm,” Carl said, already heading carefully back to the edge of the boat where he looked down into the wreckage below. “It must be shorting out due to all of the water.”

  “Can you shut it up before that thing comes back?” Steve asked.

  “I can try,” Carl said, but he looked worried.

  “What is it?” Emily asked. “What’s wrong?” She had to raise her voice over the noise of the alarms.

  “With the water coming into the boat the way it is, I don’t know that I’ll be able to shut it off. And even if I can…well, I’ll probably get electrocuted.”

  “How bad?” Steve asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  Carl gave a sigh and then turned away from them. He stepped down onto the lower level and slipped inside an area where a window had once looked out to the sea. Carefully angling himself into the tilted shattered window, he lowered himself down into the flooded remains to what had once been the central cabin.

  “Wait,” Emily said. “Carl, let’s try to think this through.”

  The only response she got was that shrill beeping, an alarm that seemed to be getting louder. It pounded into her head and it felt as if the alarm was actually doing nothing more than alerting the megalodon to the fact that it had left a few straggling survivors behind.

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  “So let’s plan for this,” Steve said.

  “Plan for what?” Emily asked.

  They stood face to face with less than a foot between th
em, but the way he stood by her made it clear to her that he meant to protect her if anything should happen. The rain had weakened to little more than a drizzle and Emily realized that she could hear the sound of the ocean clearly now—that rhythmic and almost eternal sort of breathing.

  “If he gets electrocuted down there…if he dies…what the hell are we going to do?” he asked. “Yeah, we can wait for the Coast Guard to show up again, but that didn’t really go so well last time, now did it?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily said. She was still holding his hand. He had a grip on it that made her think he didn’t plan on releasing it anytime soon.

  As it turned out, though, they didn’t have to worry about coming up with a back-up plan. Less than a minute after Carl had gone down into the partially submerged boat below, the alarms came to a stop. They heard some brief scurrying from beneath them and then Carl’s whispered voice from their right.

  “Can I get a hand?” he asked.

  They both carefully walked over to the area where the central cabin door was now completely sideways. Carl was walking along the wall now, arching his back to make it back out through the door.

  “Take this for me, would you?” he asked Steve.

  He handed over a large rectangular device that, to Emily, looked like a really sophisticated remote control for a child’s remote-controlled car.

  “What is it?” Steve asked.

  “Well, if I know what I’m doing—and honestly, that’s a bit of a stretch—that thing might be what saves us.”

  “Okay…”

  It was clear that Steve wanted an explanation. Emily did, too. But she was willing to just let Carl go ahead with whatever plan he had. Even if it was an awful plan, doing something was better than standing idly by on the side of his boat, waiting for it to sink or for the megalodon to come back…whichever happened first.

  “The alarms that went off were to tell me that one of the back-up systems for the vacuum is dead. That’s not surprising, considering the state of the boat. But when I shut them down, I came up with an idea. And yes, I did get a little shock from messing with the computers. Stung like hell, but nothing lethal. But that little shock is what gave me my idea.”

  “And what is it?” Emily asked, now just wanting him to spit it out.

  “That controller,” he said, pointing to the thing still in Steve’s hand, “is a manual way to operate the rovers.”

  “But they fell off the boat,” Steve said. “How are they any good to us now?”

  “They were made to be dropped into the ocean,” Carl explained. “Sure, these weren’t optimal conditions and one of them seems to have been damaged in all the hell that broke loose. But that leaves five that are still operational. I can still see them on the one screen inside that is still working. And if you look here,” he said, tapping a button on the remote control and bringing up a small digital display, “you can also see them. So even if everything in the boat goes dark, those ROVs will still run until they get a shut-off command from this controller. Also, there’s another device that fell off the boat that we call the Collector. It attaches to the pump and we lower it down. Only now, it’s not attached. So it’s just sort of down there. It’s also still operational and landed almost directly beneath us.”

  “Okay…” Emily said, still not seeing where this was going.

  “Anyway, like the vacuum and pump, the ROVs also have alarms. We built them in for testing procedures. Naturally, they’d do no good now, because they’re on the bottom of the ocean and we wouldn’t hear them.”

  “So why do we care about the rover alarms then?” Steve asked.

  “Well, just because we can’t hear them doesn’t mean that certain things underwater can’t hear them. In fact, the alarms are pretty damn loud. Our tests were in twelve feet of water; the alarms had to be loud so we could hear them above ground.”

  “So you’re talking about a simple distraction if the Coast Guard shows up again?” Steve asked. “You want the shark to be snooping around somewhere else when—if, I guess—someone else comes to rescue us?”

  “No,” Carl said. “If I’m being honest, at the rate the boat is taking on water right now, I don’t know that we’d be able to stay out of the water until another attempt is made. No, my plan is to use this controller to direct all of the ROVs around the Collector. I’ll kick on the alarms with and when the shark attacks them, I’ll switch on the Collector.”

  “Is the pump strong enough to hold that thing?” Emily asked.

  “Not likely,” Carl said. “Not for long, anyway. The Collector is really just a large vacuum cleaner, really. There’s a miniature pump in it and that’s where the majority of its strength comes from. The thing we have going for us, though, is that the pipe isn’t connected.” He pointed to the mechanical arm-like structure on the far end of the side of the boat. “When the pipe’s not connected, the system isn’t going to recognize it for a good twenty seconds or so. As such, it will work overtime as it tries to compensate for that extra suction. So it’ll be a bit stronger than usual. At the very least, it will stop the shark for a few seconds—long enough for me to send the command to the auxiliary cutter ROVs. We use those rovers to clear the way for the smaller ROVs that do the real mining. If I can position them just right, the auxiliary cutters will tear into the bastard.”

  “How many of these auxiliary cutters are there?” Steve asked.

  “Two. But the others ROVs, while not as heavily equipped with blades and other digging utensils, can still do some damage.”

  “Will it be enough to kill it?” Emily asked.

  “If I give it full speed and power, the auxiliary cutter has enough strength to plow through three feet of sediment at a depth of about two feet deep. And if the Collector can hold the bastard for even three or four seconds—even if it just slows it down the smallest bit—if it doesn’t kill it, it’s going to hurt it pretty damn bad.”

  “And how will you know when the shark is attacking?” Steve asked.

  “That’s the part that sucks. I’ll have to monitor it from inside the boat to see the feeds from the cameras built into the ROVs. And I don’t know how much longer I’ll have the one good screen to work with.”

  “So we need to do this now then, huh?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you certain this will work?” Steve asked.

  “No. If Trevor—the guy in charge of all of the tech—was still here, it might be pretty easy. But I’m not overly familiar with the ROVs, much less the equipment. This is like the backup quarterback coming in at the fourth quarter, expecting to come from about two touchdowns behind.”

  “Sounds promising,” Steve said. “You a Patriots fan?”

  “No…Chiefs.”

  “Terrible analogy, then,” Steve said with a nervous laugh.

  “I think you should go for it,” Emily says. “It beats sitting around and waiting to see who comes for us first—the Coast Guard or the megalodon.”

  “You both agree to this?” Carl asked.

  “Sure,” Steve said. Emily nodded her approval.

  Steve handed the controller back over to Carl. He did so very cautiously, now understanding the importance of the rectangular device. “Is there anything we can do to help?” Steve asked.

  “Yeah. Try to get to that raft over there. If this works out, we’re still going to need something else to float around on. I don’t see the boat lasting any more than half an hour.”

  They looked out to the raft and saw it bobbing about five feet away from the side of the boat; it was still trapped between the wake from Carl’s boat and the same plank that she had spotted earlier. It was the one promising looking thing out there in all of the dark water and destruction.

  “We can handle that,” Steve said. “Just give is a heads up when the shark is headed for the rovers.”

  “Will do,” Carl said. He looked to the remote control device a bit reluctantly and then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll know within about two minu
tes if this is going to work. I’ll let you know as soon as I can.”

  Emily and Steve only nodded; Emily was still looking to the raft and remembering that the floor of it was coated in the helicopter pilot’s blood. She also recalled how easily he had died and how unexplainably lucky she was to still be alive.

  Something about that made her heart seem to swell. She had made it this far. The last serval hours had been an absolute nightmare but she was still here. She’d seen far too much death and was essentially facing up against a prehistoric monster. The fact that she was still alive clicked on some internal mechanism attached to her survival instinct and she was suddenly determined to get back to land in one piece.

  “Let’s just get it done,” she said.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” Carl said. He then turned and headed back into the boat, holding to what had once been the outer wall—which now served as an extension of the roof in an upside down sort of way—for support.

  “You okay?” Steve asked as Carl headed back inside.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just wish there was more I could do.”

  She again found herself reaching out for his hand. Maybe staring death in the face for a night had made Steve seem like not such a bad guy. She assumed that, like her, he was seeing his ability to die at any moment as some sort of life-changing measurement of the sort of person he was.

  “How about you?” Emily asked. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m scared,” he said. “But other than that, I just want to get out of the ocean.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, the comment coming out of nowhere.

  He grinned at her and said, “If I said I was glad to be here with you, I’d be lying.”

  They both laughed nervously as they waited for Carl to call out to them. Meanwhile, the raft swayed lazily several feet away and the ocean continued to churn endlessly against the side of the boat.

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