Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller (17 page)

Chapter 33

Not long after they started for Door 6, Coco heard a ruckus somewhere behind them. The trammel of footsteps, shouting, people calling out. Coco stopped running, and held out a hand.

“Wait, you hear that?”

White and Caesar slowed, but did not stop walking toward the next pressure door. White spoke into his radio.

“Dan, what’s going on with the doors?” No reply came from the marine technician.

They heard the crowd drawing near while waiting for a reply. Looking outside the hotel, the reef was lit below, but above, the sky was dark.

“Mr. Wang?” White prompted.

“Here they come,” Coco said as the people ran into view.

Then White’s radio blared with Wang’s voice. An Asian-American who dropped out of engineering school to become a technician because he claimed he wanted to make money instead of owe it, Wang had a solid reputation at Triton for getting things done, though White knew he was relatively inexperienced.

“James, we’ve got a problem with the pressure door system. Number Four shut early on us, and we can’t get it to open again, over.”

White’s fingers gripped the radio hard, like he wanted to crush it, while he shook his head. The guests were calling out to them now, “We couldn’t get through! There’s a wall!”

“I show that Six is still open, James, you should get through now before—“

“Water’s coming in,” Coco declared, splashing her foot.

“—the water from the lobby breach is redirected your way when it bounces off Door 4.”

White’s eyes looked as though they were about to bug out of his head. “You mean to say we’re about to flooded here, in the main hallway, right now?”

The radio reply was quick. “Water will be coming that way James, and a lot of it, if the flow meter accuracy is anything like it should be. You should get you and your party on the other side of Six, and then I’ll seal it off, over!”

“Copy that, I’ve got a big party crossing over Door 6 now, Dan.
Don’t let it close yet
, over.”

Coco was the first of them to greet the panic-stricken faces that ran their way. She calmed them down enough to be heard over their worrying. “Follow us this way, they’re going to close a pressure door after we pass through it.’

“Is that what happened back there?” John Rudd, the NFL player asked. His girlfriend, the model, shivered in his arms while he spoke. “They closed it before we got to it? Isn’t there some kind of communication?” He directed this latter question right to White, who merely waved an arm for him to follow, and started down the hallway.

“Water’s coming! Water’s coming at us!” a child of about ten shouted. Coco asked her father to carry her until they passed through Door 6, and then told the group to follow her.

“We’ve just got a little ways to go, people, then we’ll be in a dry area of the hotel. Stay with me, and let’s go.”

Coco turned to move out in the opposite direction toward Door 6, and immediately slipped on the slick floor, landing hard on a knee. She winced in pain while she felt water flow over the hand on the floor supporting her weight. She felt a hand grip her arm, pulling her up, and turned to see a well-known Internet entrepreneur help her to her feet.

She told him thanks, and he said, “No problem. When we get out of here, though, I’d like to discuss some automation software that would help out a lot around here.”

She didn’t mention that that was the last thing she was going to care about after she got out of here, but instead said “Good idea,” and proceeded to jog with the group toward White and Caesar, a few paces ahead of them.

It soon became clear that the water was entering faster than they had anticipated. Like a swift-flowing river, it was only up to their knees, but moving so quickly that it constantly knocked over the guests. With the lobby window caved, the hotel was truly flooding now. Coco could hear White up ahead yelling into his radio, but the oncoming water noise, along with the loud voices of the guests, made it too hard to hear what was being said. She hoped it wasn’t something about how Door 6 wasn’t working and wouldn’t be able to close, or even worse—that it was already closed, and they’d be trapped in here with the rising water...

Coco snapped out of it when she saw White and the engineer stop running on the other side of the track where Door 6 would come down. At least it hadn’t closed already. Yet the incoming water seemed to rise faster still, and with more intensity than before. Coco looked out the window to the reef, hoping she’d see the megalodon out there, because for some reason she found it disturbing to think of the extinct mega-fish swimming around the hotel lobby.
Could it fit in the hallway?
She glanced back down the hall, took in the domed ceiling, gauged the width...it seemed high enough but perhaps—hopefully—a little too narrow. Nevertheless, the young marine biologist couldn’t keep from imagining that powerful set of jaws inside that yawning, gaping maw barreling down the hall, scooping all of them into its mouth, and washing them down its black, raspy gullet.

She heard words coming out of White’s mouth into his radio that she could understand now, and that jarred her back to the moment.

“...on the other side now. Go ahead.”

White saw Coco, and waved an arm to get her attention. She walked up to him. He continued to wave an arm at the guests, ushering them onto the other side of the door track.

“Dan says they initiated the door close procedure.”

“Shouldn’t we keep going farther down the hall, away from the water?” a woman asked. Clearly frightened, she hugged herself as though cold while she stared down at the seawater rising past her knees.

“Don’t worry, a steel pressure door will be sealing us off from the other side momentarily.” White beckoned for the woman to take a few more steps on the other side of the door track. She did, but had a sour look on her face.

“You keep saying not to worry, but things keep getting worse and worse!” Clearly the sentiment was shared by at least a few in the group, as several of them nodded. White appeared to be composing a response when he was saved by the bell—his radio erupted with Dan’s voice.

“Okay, here we go—you have your people ready now, James?”

White looked away from the woman, and focused intently on his radio as he spoke into it.

“Copy that, Dan. We are ready here on the west side of Door 6, over.”

He looked back up at the crowd gathered before him with a smile oozing with false confidence, as if to say,
See, I told you I have this all under control
!

More water rushed in, and as Coco looked back toward the lobby, she saw full-on explosions of whitewater jostling and bouncing down the hallway as the water levels grew higher still. She made eye contact with White.
This thing’s gonna close, right?
Just as she began to doubt that it would, she felt and heard the now familiar rumble of the door mechanism unlatching, and preparing to drop.

Then the steel barrier slammed into place, and they heard the drumming of torrents of water beating on the other side of it.

“It worked!” White beamed, but the fact he seemed so surprised that it did was more worrisome than uplifting. Everyone looked around at the floor and at the bottom of the pressure door to see if water would seep through, if they were in fact on dry territory. But the door was watertight, and looking further down the hallway, it was all dry.

“Where to?” Coco asked White.

White appeared to think about this for a moment, scratching at the stubble on his chin while he stared out at the artificially lit part of the reef. When he spoke, he addressed only Coco and Caesar. “Let’s head for the MCC, and have a little chat with Dan and see if we can’t get things properly sorted, shall we?”

The Master Control Complex housed the technical nerve center of the underwater hotel, with the exception of the now flooded train station controls. It occupied the second floor of the other cylindrical tower, opposite the one that housed the formerly grand lobby.

“Is that far from the water damage?” the woman who’d slipped in the water asked.

White nodded. “As far as you can get and still be inside the hotel.”

“Then let’s go!”

The soggy group trod down the hall toward the far end of the hotel, passing the row of suites on the way. A blank wall faced them where an entrance vestibule used to be, like a gap-toothed smile, a sobering reminder of the lost escape pod and the fact that they were now in a very deadly situation.

Coco’s radio sounded with Mick’s relatively stress-free voice. “At the sub now, firing her up. How’s things in there, over?”

Coco looked back at the sealed pressure door, at the wet pant legs and footwear of the guests, out at the dark reef, at White’s eyes challenging her to tell Mick how bad things really were down here. “Lobby window collapsed after the shark hit it, we made past a pressure door, dry for now.”

“God damn it, stay focused!” White moved with alacrity, his hand swiping out and grabbing Coco’s radio.

“What are you doing?”

He opened the battery compartment and removed the battery. Just before he did they heard Mick’s voice: “Coco, you need to—“before it went dead.

White handed Coco back the now useless radio, pocketing its battery. “I’ll handle Topside Communications from this point forward, okay?”

Clearly the display of power made the rest of the guests uncomfortable, but none of them said anything. White was the boss, and Coco was the employee, after all. Coco was about to throw the radio onto the floor, to shatter it in a display of disgust and anger, to let White know how fed up she was with his bullshit, but as she started to raise her arm, she checked the motion and merely clipped the radio to her belt instead. She remembered that she’d put on a pair of jeans after the aborted dive, and in those jeans she’d gotten into the habit of keeping a spare, charged battery for the radio. She got used to yapping on the thing all day long, admittedly for some chats with Mick on a privacy coded channel, as well as a lot of official business, but still, after the battery had ran out on her a couple of times before the day was up, she’d procured another one, and started carrying two. It was a habit she was glad for now, although she didn’t want White to know that she still had comm. She’d have to wait to put the new battery in the radio when he wasn’t looking.

She looked at White and nodded. They continued on toward the other end of the hotel in silence, past the pods. Coco made up her mind then and there to get the heck out of here and report this White guy to someone. He was a loose cannon. There’s no way his investors would approve of his behavior. Once she got out of here, she’d quit once and for all.

But how to get out? She was locked inside a Plexiglas prison with a megalodon guard and a psycho for a warden. What’s more, she thought, looking straight up as she walked at the moon now visible through the clear ceiling and the water above, she now had no way to contact Mick—no way to contact anyone on shore for that matter.

Step up your game, girl.
James White is just as bad, if not worse, than the megalodon.
She mentally kicked herself down the hall for allowing him to sweet-talk her back on the job, and not leaving when she could have. That reminded her: where was Aiden now? He was trapped down here somewhere, too, and he was an ally. Last she saw him he was in the lobby. Had he made it to safety? He was a big guy, strong, too, and if it came down to having to physically overpower White, she would definitely want him on her side. She wondered if there was anyone still in the suites they were passing, possibly sleeping through the chaos, or just hunkered down, afraid of it all. There must be a few, since the group they had with them didn’t nearly account for everyone left in the hotel. A few employees were no doubt scattered about, but there had to be a few more guests somewhere, too.

Up ahead the hallway opened into an oval-shaped area with wide passages leading off in three directions. Coco knew that they had reached the giant cylindrical building at the other end of the hotel, and that each passage led to a different section of it. She was also tired of White’s bullshit the more she listened to his voice. As he bellowed at the group to follow him, Coco hung back, allowing the guests to pass her as she smiled agreeably at them. They filed up the middle passage—more like a tunnel really, with the lighted reef visible beneath their feet, and open water on the sides and above.

Coco, White, Caesar, and the guests trooped along the middle tunnel as a great shape shadowed them just outside the cone of light from the hotel’s exterior lights.

Chapter 34

The megalodon swam slow circles around the hotel’s tower. Her nostrils flared as her Ampullae of Lorenzini detected myriad strange electronic impulses. After so long in the deep sea, the lights of the hotel were blinding; maddening almost. But the unknown intrusion onto the reef compelled her to investigate. She had found prey here. Not the fish of the reef. Those were too small to satisfy her. But the warm-blooded creatures were something to which she was almost completely unaccustomed, save for the occasional sperm whale. She would find more of them. Millions of years of evolutionary drive, locked away deep in her genes, was awakening and telling her to improvise, to adapt, to find a way.

#

Mick sat in the sub’s cockpit, frowning as he eyed his radio. Coco had been out of touch for longer than usual. It wasn’t like her to ignore his calls. What was going on down there? Earlier she had expressed concern that White was going off the rails, unstable. It sounded like she’d been cut off mid-transmission. Now, he reflected while he stared at the instrument panel without seeing it, that could be due to any number of reasons. But it also could be due to an action from White, deliberate or otherwise.

He stared at the transmitter, contemplating whether he should use it again to call Coco. She, and therefore White—who had been standing right next to her, and as her boss must have sanctioned the request—had asked him to take the sub down to look at the pod. He had done that. The pod, and all souls aboard, were lost, but the capability he had been hoping to use on it—the acetylene torch jerry-rigged onto the sub’s grab arm—was still potentially useful. Potentially
very
useful, he corrected himself, for there was now no way in or out of the hotel. No tunnel, no airlock, and although there were other escape pods, he doubted anyone was willing to use them after the fate that had befallen the first. And the pressure doors were further dividing the place, sectioning it off like a warren of locked rooms.

But he had at his disposal a tool capable of cutting right through the hotel’s walls—metal or acrylic, although he actually had no experience trying to cut through acrylic with a torch. Still, he was good with cutting steel, and he figured he could cut acrylic if he had to. One way or another, he could open an entrance into the place...

But that would flood it... Coco had SCUBA gear down there, though, or at least she did at one point. He sure as Hell hoped she still had access to it...

Mick drummed his fingers on the sub’s dashboard, lost in thought. He wished he could consult with someone on this—maybe the topside engineering team, but they were super-busy carrying out orders to fix the tunnel and other systems, and would not want to give him the time of day. Not only that, but he didn’t fully trust them. If he asked them to devise the best way to cut into the place with a torch, they’d tell White, and then White would know what he was up to, and would then have the chance to deny the plan or just plain screw it up somehow.

No, he thought, brushing the hair off his face, he had to take this on himself. Something did not feel right about the situation downstairs, as he liked to refer to the hotel. Not right at all. He would take matters into his own hands; he had the luxury of being able to say he would have asked permission first, but he lost radio contact.

That settled, Mick eyeballed the acetylene torch on the end of his grab arm, appraising it. It had worked great today in the lab and in the quick test he’d done right here at the dock. Should work. Key word,
should
. But there was only one way to find out.

#

They had almost reached the end of the tunnel where it joined the cylindrical tower, when Coco felt the floor move. It reminded her of an earthquake—she’d experienced several growing up in the Hawaiian Islands—but she knew these vibrations were not attributable to any geologic process. She heard a guest call out ahead of her, “Did you feel that?”

Coco looked down through the clear floor into the dark water below. There were underwater lights at the tower, but none here, which meant she could see nothing below them, and only a grayish shade above. Like a chain reaction, first one guest, then, and another began to run for the entrance to the tower. Even White was helpless to stop it, flapping his arms wildly to the non-caring group.

Then she looked down, and this time Coco could make out a shape, only because it was so close and moving fast. Somehow the light caught it just right, and she saw a glint of white, and then the next thing she knew she was watching the megalodon’s mouth open wide as its head collided with the bottom of the tunnel, knocking her to her feet.

She felt the lagoon water coursing over her leg, galvanizing her to action. The big shark had broken through! Coco felt a jagged Plexiglas shard rip through her ankle as she got up, her blood mixing with the saltwater as she ran for the entrance to the tower. If it were a race with the rest of her group, she’d be in last place, all of them either already inside the tower, or just now entering. A glance to her left showed her an outsized black orb, unblinking, uncaring, unreal, un-everything. The shark nuzzled along the side of the short tunnel, almost as if in a playful mood. Suddenly, though, the unpredictable fish nose-dived, and came up beneath the tunnel right where it joined the main tower itself.

Coco saw the lights of the tower’s interior beckoning, the outstretched arms of two of the guests, White’s impassive stare as he stood back from the group at the door, having been the first one inside. Caesar was there, too, actually walking back toward her, saying something into a radio as he stared down, not at the shark, but at some structural feature of the hotel.

This time the impact Coco felt was no mere bump in the night, but more of a full-on explosion. Coco was flung forward and upward in a shower of acrylic shards, water, and megalodon teeth. Even as she flew through the air, the marine biologist flashed on the fact that the horror on the faces of the people watching her was even greater than if she had been flung by a mere explosion of some kind.

The deep sea dweller visiting the shallows wrenched open its cavernous maw even wider as it lunged for Coco, pushing a wave ahead of its snout that would probably be surfable if not for all of the wreckage being flung out with it. The Hawaiian was shoved into the tower, knocking over a couple of guests in the process. She eyeballed the doorway as she rolled on the floor, hoping against hope that the colossal meat-eater wouldn’t be able to fit its industrial-sized mouth through the doorway.

Then she was skidding to a stop on a carpeted floor, jabbing one elbow painfully into the hard surface as she came to a stop. This tower was one of the few areas of the hotel that had carpet. Since it blocked the view of the reef below, most areas consisted of bare acrylic floors. Her instinct was to look down to see if the megalodon was coming for her, but she couldn’t see through the floor covering, and then, after thinking about it for a moment, it dawned on her that even if she could, she would only be looking down at the first level of the west tower. The tunnel they had taken slanted up to the tower’s second floor, the Main Control Room. To access the lower floor that was directly over the reef, it was necessary to go down within the structure. That floor was the now flooded dive shop, though, already sealed behind a pressure door. A third level waited in the opposite direction, up, and it, too, had a non-see-through floor.

She looked back out into the tunnel, and at first thought that another pressure door had dropped, this one of a different color than the rest. But then it moved, and she realized what it was: the megalodon was actually moving through the tunnel, perpendicular to it. It sawed crosswise through a ruptured section.

Then she watched a hand reach up out of the water, about ten feet in front of the shark. A dark-skinned hand.

Ohmygod. Caesar!

The engineer had gone back into the tunnel to look at something and was now trapped in there, engulfed in rushing water, the effect of which was exacerbated by the huge shark’s thrashing movements. He gripped a protruding support strut, and struggled to pull himself to his feet. Coco sprinted out of the tower again. She could pull the man to safety. He was only a few feet away from the tower door. Just take a couple big steps out into the tunnel, grab the guy, and pull him back in. That’s all she had to do to save his life. White’s lackey or no, she would never be able to live with herself if she did not at least try.

She felt the water wash against her, and waded out toward the downed man, and toward the megalodon which now slinked backwards, back through the tunnel the way it had come. Its head stuck out into the ocean, as well as most of the rear portion of its body. Coco took a couple of more steps toward Caesar, who had slipped while getting up, and went under again.

“Caesar, here!” She steadied herself by kneeling to lower her center of gravity as she reached a hand out to the fallen engineer. It was only when the megalodon’s wide head backed into the space between the fragmented tunnel walls that Coco understood the only thing keeping the chamber from really flooding had been the giant shark’s body itself. The massive head had been acting like a plug, the proverbial finger in the dike. Now that it was free, water raged inside the tunnel unadulterated.

Coco saw Caesar’s hand reach up, and she grasped his wet fingers before losing them to the slippery, weak grip. The body of the megalodon was a dangerously heavy object to contend with now, rolling manically to and fro. Caesar disappeared beneath the roiling water. Coco tracked his position. The megalodon swung its jaws her way, and she jumped back, falling on her backside, and then being pulled toward the predatory fish by hectic currents. The shark’s head beat back and forth in a true frenzy now, seeking a way out of the small area.

She saw Caesar’s shoulders hunched over in the middle of the tunnel, and made a move to grab him before he drifted away again. The shark was too close, though, and the body disappeared once again beneath the maelstrom. Then, after a few seconds, the megalodon lunged backwards, sliding out into the sea.

She saw Caesar’s dark hair on the surface, the top of his head.
Now!

Coco made her move for the engineer. She took two powerful strides forward into deeper water that was rapidly rising as the shark evacuated, and yanked him up by the hair—the only part of him she could reach. His head pulled toward her with surprising ease, and with a sickening realization Coco knew that something had gone horrifically, irrevocably wrong.

Caesar was much too light...
so light...
it should have been a huge effort for Coco’s 115 pounds to wrest the man’s body out of the water.

She pulled hard with one last burst of energy in case she was about to encounter resistance. Caesar came free of the water...

...but it wasn’t really Caesar...it was just his head. She was holding it clenched in one hand by the hair, like a terrorist in a beheading video. A cornucopia of fluids drained from the open neck into the surrounding water.

Coco made eye contact with Caesar’s head, and he blinked at her once.

She screamed, a guttural, feral cry that would haunt those who heard it for the rest of their lives, which in some cases would not be long. Coco let herself fall backwards, toward the tower entrance. Anything to be moving away from this horror.

The megalodon had worked itself into a frenzy with the introduction of Caesar’s entire blood volume into the water. She shoved herself backwards on elbows and heels, mind whitewashed with abject terror. She saw the megalodon’s throat muscles expanding and contracting. It was eating…swallowing Caesar’s headless body as it retreated outside the tunnel onto the reef.

Then hands were pulling Coco to her feet, voices shouting but still indistinct. She was in a disorienting haze of adrenaline, fear, and revulsion. The sheer force the shark was capable of stunned her to the very core of her being. That a mere fish could possess such raw power, such overpowering muscle, was not something she had even come close to comprehending prior to this experience. Sure, she’d read the textbooks, done the lab work, seen normal sharks firsthand many, many times. But none of that stood as any kind of realistic reference point for what she had just witnessed. It both frightened and motivated her; lives were very much in danger including her own, yet at the same time she knew she was witnessing something nature had never intended for human eyes. This fish was a dinosaur, and it killed like one.

White’s take-charge voice broke Coco out of her shark-induced reverie.

“Nothing we can do for him now. You tried. Control Room’s in here. Let’s go.”

Coco collected her wits about her by taking a couple of full breaths and examining her surroundings. While it was true the shark couldn’t reach them right here inside the tower, when she looked back at the entrance to the tunnel she’d been tossed through by the creature, she saw one of the steel pressure doors slam shut, walling them off inside the vertically oriented structure.

Their available space had been reduced yet again by the simple-minded predator—a dumb yet finely tuned beast honed over eons’ worth of evolutionary processes to kill whatever it had to in order to survive, to keep swimming, keep eating, keep reproducing. To a megalodon, Coco knew, everything looked like a nail from the point of view of a hammer.