Gargantua (20 page)

Of course not,
Jack thought bitterly.
We’ve just proven it’s no match for us.

“Could there be others out there?” Hale asked. “A family—or colony?”

“I hope so,” Jack said. Everyone turned to look at Jack like he had two heads after he said that. By way of explanation, he continued, “We discover three members of a brand-new species and immediately reduce it to two. We’re the human predator at its worst.”

“I won’t play that game, Ellway,” Wayne said angrily. “We did the best we could.”

“That’s what the predator always says.”

“Look,” Wayne said, “if it’s a choice between that thing and human lives, it
isn’t
a choice. Do you read me?”

“Oh yes, Colonel, loud and clear. If you had just waited—”

Wayne interrupted. “Between them, these two creatures have killed at least five people, maybe more. If I didn’t give the order to fire, that number would have tripled.”

Paul came running up before Jack could reply to this. “Well, it was inevitable. Fox News got wind of this. They’re on their way. And God knows who else is in their wake.”

President Moki shook his head. “Our island will never be the same.”

You ain’t kidding,
Jack thought, though that was true the minute the nine-footer got tangled up in the same fishing net as two women from Minnesota.

He looked at Colonel Wayne. “The carcass needs to be shipped someplace to be preserved and studied,” he said in a mild tone. “I’m going to contact the National Institute of Science.”

Wayne spoke in a gentle tone as well: “I have to inform the Brigadier General in Okinawa of what’s going on here. In the meantime,” he turned to two men wearing captain’s bars, “I want this beach cleared and guarded until further notice.” The two captains nodded and moved off. Wayne turned back to Jack. “We’ll keep the scavengers away till I get my orders.”

“Dad,” Brandon said. Jack turned to see his son now standing close by, the three-footer by his side. “What’s gonna happen to
him?”

Jack considered. “Well, he seems to trust you. I guess you’ll just keep looking after him for the time being.” He thought about it for a moment. “We should take him back to the room and examine him. The most important thing right now is to make sure he eats.”

“Who’s making sure that you guys eat?” Alyson asked.

Jack hesitated, realizing that he had no idea when his last meal
was.

Before he could reply, Alyson said, “I’ll bring you some dinner, okay?”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

Hale stretched his arms and announced, “I, for one, need to lie down before I fall down.”

Jack grinned at that. Hale probably hadn’t had a nap in as long as Jack hadn’t had a meal. He put his hand on Brandon’s shoulder, and led him and Casey off toward the hotel.

Derek didn’t hear about the giant monster’s return until after it was all over. He had heard the commotion, and the firing of some kind of large weapon or other, but he hadn’t seen any of it—the main beach wasn’t visible from the clinic verandah, situated as it was behind the building.

As soon as he did hear, though, he was on tenterhooks waiting for Kikko to come out from his little visit with Naru. As soon as Kikko’s head poked out of the doorway, Derek grabbed him. “C’mon,” he said.

“What is it?”

“One of the soldiers that went by says they nailed the mother lizard. I wanna gander.” They started walking toward the beach. “How’s Naru?”

“Sedated, like the doc said,” Kikko replied. “He’s lucky the thing missed hitting anything important. Just shredded a lotta skin and broke a coupl’a ribs.”

“That’s good news, mate.”

“Yeah,” Kikko said, not sounding like he meant it.

Within minutes, they arrived at the beach—or, at least, the edge of it. A bunch of Marines were keeping anyone from getting too close.

Anyone, that is who actually lived on the island. Once again, Derek saw that Hale, Bateman, Ellway, and his dumb kid all got to be in where the good stuff was happening. Or had happened, in this case, since the magnificent creature that had stalked the island now lay dead on one of its beaches. “What a bloody waste,” Derek muttered. “The money that could’ve been made from this thing . . .”

He thought again about that Indonesian bloke.

“The nine-footer could still be around,” he whispered to Kikko. “It’s wounded—might be easy to catch.”

“Derek—” Kikko started.

“We’ll have a look in the morning. All may not be lost.”

A Marine walked up to them. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you people to move along. We need to clear this entire area.”

Bloody yanks, tellin’ us what to do,
Derek thought angrily. He was well and truly sick of that.

As he and Kikko walked away, heading back toward the trawler—if nothing else, they needed to clean Naru’s blood off the deck—he noticed Ellway and his kid walking away from the massive corpse. He also noticed that the kid had something walking alongside him.

Sweet Jesus,
he thought. Next to the boy walked a miniature version of the corpse, only up and walking around.
Must be another part of the family. And it isn’t likely to go around disembowelling people.

Visions of paid alimony, paid taxes, a yacht, and restaurants in Fiji danced in Derek’s head.

While he was no veterinarian, Jack knew enough about animal husbandry to at least do a perfunctory examination of Casey. It lay on the floor while Jack checked it over—the no-frills Ritz only provided one desk, and it was presently laden with Jack’s equipment—with Brandon also on the floor, nose-to-nose with him, feeding him cheese puffs. Jack had wanted to provide a little balance in Casey’s diet by giving him some of the Iozima Ridge water and plant life he and Paul had given the nine-footer the previous day, but Brandon would hear none of it. “I already tried the usual stuff,” Brandon had said. “He’ll just eat cheese puffs.” Jack doubted this to be completely true, but decided to indulge the boy.

“His eyes are clear, his heartbeat steady.” He stood up. “It’s hard to know what’s normal for this guy, of course.”

The examination complete, Brandon sat up and started petting Casey as if he were a dog. “He saw his mother die. That’s the worst thing in the world.”

Jack felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. In the last year, he and Brandon had mostly dealt with Diane’s death by not dealing with it, not talking about it, nothing. The closest he had come was the half-hearted, one-sided conversation they’d had while gathering invertebrates for the nine-footer to not eat.

Dammit,
I
don’t even know how to deal with Diane’s death. How the hell am I supposed to help
him
deal with it? All I’ve done is run away—dash off to Vancouver, run over to Hawaii, scurry away to Maine.

“Well,” he said slowly, deciding to deal with the surface concern, if not the real one, “he’s got you now. When you lose someone—” he hesitated “—someone who took care of you—it helps if someone’s there to take over. Someone else who can love you and protect you.”

Still petting Casey and not looking up at Jack, Brandon asked, “What if it’s not enough?”

Ouch.
“I’m afraid it’s gotta be.”

Brandon looked up at his father. Normally he could read his son like a book, but now Jack had no idea what was going through that twelve-year-old brain.

Suddenly, Brandon leaned over and nabbed a coconut that he had picked up on the way to the hotel. “Would you like to play with him?”

Jack just stared dumbfounded at the coconut for a moment.

“Just roll it to him.”

Ah, what the hell,
Jack thought. He took the preferred fruit and rolled it to Casey.

Casey got up on his hind legs and stopped the coconut’s roll with his arms. Then he rolled the coconut to Brandon.

Jack couldn’t help it. He laughed. The laughter felt good.

It was also infectious, as Brandon started to laugh, too, as he rolled the coconut back to Casey.

Casey, now even more perked up, rolled the coconut back to Jack.

They kept the game up for some time.

“It looked at me. Looked me in the eye. Right when my missile hit, it
knew
who was killing it.”

T.J. sighed as Jace muttered. They had drawn guard duty on the Mother of All Lizard’s remains for the night shift. Ever since they came on at midnight, Jace had been going on and on about the actual kill. The looking-into-the-eye bit was just the latest embellishment. Sure, T.J. had had the impression
at the time
that Mother was heading straight for him, but that was because of all the adrenaline pumping. Now that he had distance, he knew better, knew that he was just a cog in a wheel that brought the thing down.

Jace, though—he made it more personal with each retelling. In another minute, it would have been only Jace’s missile, not both his and T.J.’s, that killed the creature.

All in all, T.J. was starting to get nostalgic for the rant about the choice the judge gave him.

“Will you please just shut up about it, man? You got yourself a damn fine trophy.”

“I guess,” Jace said.

And then he was actually quiet for a minute. T.J. almost cheered.

But it couldn’t last. “Hey,” Jace said, “will you take a picture of me next to it?”

I don’t believe this.
But before T.J. could say anything, he heard a sound.

A familiar sound.

It was like the churning and rumbling that preceded Mother’s arrival on the beach earlier that night—only a helluva lot louder.

“Did you hear that?” Jace asked.

“Yeah. What was it?”

“Dunno,” Jace said.

T.J. unhooked both the flashlight and the PRC from his belt and moved closer to the surf. Next to him, Jace did likewise.

Then the ground started to shake.

This actually put T.J. at ease.
They have tremors here all the time. No biggie. They’ve been having more of them lately, too, so it’s
really
no biggie. Nothing to worry about at all.

He believed that right up until the water started to churn.

Oh my Lord Jesus Christ, it’s happening again.

Something broke through the water. Something considerably larger than the Mother of All Lizards.

Our father,
T.J. thought,
who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

This time, he didn’t get to finish the prayer.

ELEVEN

F
or the second time in two days, one of the giant lizards had gone missing. Jack Ellway found it pretty difficult to credit this second disappearance. After all, the last time, all that had to be done was get a cage open, and the nine-footer could take it from there. Corpses, though, needed to be moved by something, and very few somethings could move a forty-foot-long reptile.

In fact, there was only one serious possibility.

He was once again on the beach, flanked by Paul and Doctor Hale, discussing that very possibility. A flattened area of sand was all there was to indicate that a huge creature once died on this beach. A wide swath of flattened sand led from that indentation into the sea. Jack presently crouched by the edge of the area where the mother had lain.

“So this just became a rerun of ‘Father Lizard Knows Best,’ or what?” Paul said.

“Something like that,” Jack replied. “Look at the impressions in the sand.” He pointed to the swath. “I can’t imagine what else could drag the mother out into the ocean like that.”

“Not under the noses of two now-missing Marines,” Hale said.

“No.” He stood up straight and sighed. “We’re gonna need to find this thing.” He turned to Hale. “The Topex Satellite—they use that to track whales, right?”

“Yeah, among other things.” The light bulb went off over Hale’s head. “Not a bad idea, Jack.”

Jack looked up to see Colonel Wayne and Chief Movita talking to each other, Wayne also speaking into his walkie-talkie. Beyond them, President Moki was approaching. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s go fill the brass in.”

Upon seeing the trio’s approach, Wayne lowered his radio.

“Talk to me, Ellway,” Wayne said, and Jack was grateful that the colonel was still seeking his input.

“Jack, tell him what you’re thinking,” Hale prompted—unnecessarily, Jack thought at first, but then he noticed the fact that everyone seemed to be paying more attention after Hale spoke. Although no more a local than Jack, Hale did have a reputation behind him, and his support meant Jack would be taken more seriously.

“I speculated before that this was a family situation. I think Dad may have come to claim Mom’s body.”

Moki shook his head. “And so it continues.”

Wayne nodded, as if he’d already thought this
—and maybe he had,
Jack thought—and started talking fast. “All right, we’ll resume the evac plan. I want all civilians safely off island by nightfall.”

However, Jack still had concerns. “And if there is another giant creature, what then? Shoot on sight?”

Wayne let out a loud breath through his nostrils that made him sound like a horse. Tersely, he said, “Give me a
plan,
Ellway.”

“Okay,” Jack said, and turned to Hale.

Taking the cue, Hale said, “We can use the Topex Satellite to locate whatever’s out there. It’s frequently used to track whales, so it’d be pretty easy to recalibrate it. I can have my boys at the Institute handle it.”

Wayne considered this, then, “Fine, I’ll arrange for an AWAC to do the same.”

This took Jack aback. He had expected agreement at best, outright denial and censure at worst. Cooperation hadn’t even been considered. “Good,” he said, “great! Wonderful.”

“Well, don’t just stand there, Ellway, get to work,” Wayne said, then turned his back on Jack and Hale.

Did I imagine it, or was the colonel hiding a smile?

Dismissing the thought, he and Hale started walking toward his bungalow to make the call to his institute.

“The question before us now,” Hale said, “is what we do when we find the beast?”

Jack had actually been giving that matter some thought for several days. “What about luring the creature back to its home?” he asked. “We could use different sounds to attract it and to divert it.”