Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller (20 page)

Coco raised her head straight, took a deep breath while looking at the radio (
How much battery is left in this thing, anyway
?
That’s another reason to get on with it
...). “Okay, okay. I’m ready. Let’s try it. And Mick?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for doing this.”

“No worries.”

Coco heard the sound of an acetylene torch searing the outside of the bathroom wall.

Chapter 38

Ten minutes later, while Mick was still working away with the torch, Coco saw water seeping under the bathroom door from the gym. She clutched her radio, the only link now between herself and Mick, between herself and possible survival.

“How’s it going out there?”

His instant reply and unwavering voice gave her confidence even more than the actual words he spoke. “If only I were half as good at piloting this thing as you, I’d have been done already. I keep having to back off and come back in, usually too low. But even so, the torch seems to be working, and I don’t think it’ll be long now.”

“Try just bumping that thruster control. Don’t hold it down at all. Just tap it when you’re moving in close.”

“Thanks for the tip. Back to work. Standby...”

Oddly, with nothing else to do, and forced to stare at a toilet for so long, Coco felt the urge to use it.
Might as well. Going to want to be as comfortable as possible for this stunt, no need to feel the urge to pee while I’m dodging megalodons or even worse, actually pee and give off a chemical scent for it to home in on.
Although she was mostly joking with herself to lighten her dark mood, as a marine biologist she knew it to be true that sharks could pinpoint and zero in on not only blood, but just about any kind of bodily fluid, even when present in very miniscule amounts.

She finished her business, and then her radio crackled again with Mick’s voice.
Can’t a girl get any privacy around here?
And she actually managed a smile as she exited the stall—laughing at herself when she went to flush (
what the hell difference does it make now
)—but Mick’s words wiped the smile off her face real quick.

“Megalodon’s coming down to have a look.”

“Are you almost through?” Never in a million years would she have imagined that she would be looking forward to having the only air source available to her flooded in the presence of a monster predator, but here she was, practically begging for it. Because a chance at life was still a chance. Staying in here...she forced herself not to dwell on it.

“Looks like it. You should be able to see the flame pretty soon through the wall, can you—“

“I see it!” As Coco stared at the wall she watched the orange flame—dull through the material, but in actuality a bright, sun-like orange—as it crept along the wall in a rough oval shape.

“Hey, am I going to be able to fit through that? I’m flattered you think so much of my figure but really...” The shape the torch was describing looked mighty small indeed. She understood that time was of the essence, and it was quicker to cut a small shape than a large one, but still, she had to be able to fit through it. She doubted there would be enough time to expand the hole if she found out the hard way that this one was too tight.

“Funny girl. You’ll fit. Might have to swim sideways or something, but you’ll fit. Almost there; stand clear, and brace yourself.”

Stand clear, and brace yourself...

The words both frightened and galvanized her. She did as he directed, moving to one side of the cut area. She began to hyperventilate to saturate her lungs with oxygen, again visualizing freediving in her home waters of Hawaii, where the most dangerous shark she had ever seen was a tiger shark.
That thing out there would chomp the biggest tiger you’ve ever seen down like a snack.

But first things first. Forgetting for a moment about the megalodon, Coco reminded herself that untold tons of ocean were about to come waterfalling into the bathroom, and when it did, she was going to drown if she couldn’t stay conscious and swim through the hole in the wall Mick was making...and then find her way to the surface after that.

Piece of cake...

“Okay Coco...get ready for—“

She never heard the rest of his sentence, because at that moment the wall burst apart. She was not at all prepared for the violence of the liquid incursion. The portion of the wall Mick had been cutting suddenly flapped open like a door, pushed by tons of seawater. The loose wall piece smacked the radio out of Coco’s hand.

She hyperventilated one final time, knowing she had to hold this last breath, that she had to fill her lungs with air in order to have sufficient oxygen in her system to make it to the surface alive. She felt her lungs stretch to the bursting point, and then that was it—the water was rising startlingly fast—already up to her chest. She eyed the opening Mick had cut for her, and rejoiced in the sight of the sub’s external lights flicking on. Mick showing her the way.

Quickly she placed her hands on the ragged edge of the burned aperture. She could not afford to lose track of where it was, and could picture herself tumbling around in here like a surfer wiping out and going through the “spin cycle,” as her friends back at home on the North Shore called it. She did not have the air for, and had no desire to be found dead in the shitter of all places.

Gripping the ragged edge just as her head was submerged, Coco pushed off the floor and tried to angle through the opening. Her first attempt was way off. The top of her head bumped hard into the still-intact wall above the cut opening. Knocking herself out would be one hundred percent fatal in this situation, she knew. But the water was starting to swirl inside the bathroom now, and pretty soon she’d be in that spin cycle. She had to get through that hole. Now.

She pulled with one hand still on the edge of the opening, slicing her palm deeply in the process. But it worked. She swam through a small cloud of her own blood out of the hotel and into the lagoon, where the submersible was visible to her as a blurry yellow blob a few feet away.

Chapter 39

She was free! Despite the critical nature of her current situation, Coco felt a brief flare of relief at being outside of the hotel. She didn’t allow herself to look up, but instead made a beeline for the sub, to Mick, her ticket to the surface. She swam a sort of combination scissor kick and breaststroke that propelled her quickly through the water toward the sub’s halogens.

Leave the lights on for me, Mick.

Coco reached the sub, and rejoiced in the feel of the smooth metal beneath her hand. She could see into the bubble sphere, lit by the cockpit instrumentation, and there was Mick’s blurry form, waving frantically for her to come on. There was no way for them to communicate any longer except for these blurry visual signals, not that she needed to communicate much. When one had only one breath of air in their lungs, it was clear what one needed to do.

Coco gripped onto the sub’s metal rail, thankful that she was so intimately familiar with the craft that she knew it like the back of her hand, and didn’t need to be able to see it clearly to orient herself. She hoped Mick would hurry up—she would have to abandon the shield of the sub to bolt for the surface if he didn’t—but thankfully, before she even completed the thought, she heard and felt the sub’s twin thrusters revving hard.

She felt her legs flailing behind her as the underwater craft took off at a steep angle for the surface of the lagoon.

Yes—go, Mick!

From her position on the right side of the sub just behind the cabin, she had a decent, though blurred, view of the hotel off to her right. She could make out the lights of the second floor as she rose, and she wondered if they could see her out here, trailing off the sub like a remora on a shark.

On a shark
...that reminded her of the reason she was in this predicament in the first place. In the gym she had thought she’d be terrified not being able to see the megalodon, but now that she was here, she found that not being able to see lulled her into a kind of just-go-for-it, you’re-almost-there trance.
Hang on!

She did, and Mick pulled her up and toward the beach. Just when she allowed herself the faintest glimmer of hope that she might make it, that she would at least live long enough to experience another breath of air, the submersible was slammed hard from the opposite side she was on. The impact was terrible—like a medium speed car accident—and she felt one of her ribs crack as the metal strut she’d been hanging onto rolled into her side.

Even worse for Coco, the blunt contact forced most of the remaining air from her lungs in a sudden and very much unwanted exhalation. Questions swam through her mind like a school of fish darting to evade a predator. How deep were they now? What had caused the accident—did Mick run into the hotel? She wasn’t sure which way the hotel even was anymore after tumbling around through the water. Worse, she was no longer attached to the sub.

She could see it, though, a few feet higher up than she was. Fortunately the moon was high up in the sky. If not for that, she would have been totally disoriented, not even sure of which way was up.

Coco was out of oxygen. Her lungs burned with a painful want for air. She had no idea how long she’d been holding her breath already, but it had to be at least a minute, maybe two. Her documented record, verified with a dive watch, was ninety seconds. But that had been a few years ago already, and in much calmer and more controlled conditions than these. Anything would be calmer and more controlled than this. Anything.

She saw no point in trying to stick by the sub at this point. If she wanted to live she needed air, and she needed it right now. Mick had at least brought her what looked like most of the way to the surface. She kicked toward the world of air, longing for it intensely.

And then out of the blurred peripheral vision her naked eyes afforded her underwater, Coco saw a shape so unmistakable, so unreal in its proportions, that even without a dive mask she knew that the megalodon was coming for her. She felt her sliced palm erupt in pain when she flexed her hand and it dawned on her: she was bleeding!

Great...not only am I about to pass out in the water at night with a prehistoric dinosaur predator, but I have to be bleeding at the same time. Wonderful.
Coco did not dwell on these type of thoughts; they were but a mere reflex, an impulse riding through her brain that she knew how to override. But there was no way she could override the 100
tons of fishy muscle tormenting her now. The megalodon’s snout nosed against the sub, and sent it streaming off with a powerful head shake.

She could no longer worry about the sub or about Mick. She was about to drown, to simply inhale water against her wishes due to involuntary muscle contractions. She knew panic was the enemy, but she was losing the battle with it, and fast. Her legs kicked in a flurry, arms too. At any second she expected to be scooped up into the mouth of the megalodon, sliced apart on its field of teeth like an unprocessed animal through a meat grinder. After a while her mind dropped all processing of any thoughts—only supporting the neural functions necessary to propel her limbs in order to obtain oxygen.

She was moving, not thinking, when she broke the surface, and felt the sensation of cool air wash over her skin. Rapid gulps of air took precedence over all else. Never in her life had she needed air so badly. The purple spots faded from her vision as she inhaled maniacally.

The surface! She had made it. Even with a prehistoric shark lurking beneath her, she was unable to suppress a joyous surge of triumph—of being alive when perhaps she shouldn’t. She would not ever want to try that Houdini-like escape again—she didn’t put her odds of making it very high, and yet here she was, glimpsing the carpet of stars over the South Pacific that was so thick it was hard to believe they were natural, and so very far away.

A big splash broke her from her reverie. Not ten yards from her, the transparent dome of the submersible gleamed in the moonlight as it broke through into the atmosphere. Something was obviously wrong, since the sub was canted at a weird angle, totally off-kilter. Inside the cockpit, she caught a fleeting glimpse of Mick’s inert form—slumped over the cockpit—before an even larger splash diverted her attention.

The truck-sized fish writhed and thrashed at the surface, having chased the sub up and out of the water. Coco watched, stunned, as it nudged the sub with its snout, attempting to flip it back into the air like it was playing with a seal. For a megalodon, a seal would be a small snack, but the sub, although it wasn’t food, was the right size for a good megalodon meal. Coco wondered if it was possible the shark was mistaking the sub for food.

Then abruptly the great predator changed course, submerging while it swam toward the beach. Coco decided not to swim in that direction just yet. The shark would have no trouble plucking her from the water like a juicy morsel. The dorsal sliced the water like a scythe, now heading toward Coco.

In a full-fledged panic now, she swam for the sub with loud, splashy strokes, speed important above all else. The megalodon already knew she was here, so stealth was out. She was moving too fast and chaotically to tell whether Mick was doing anything inside the cockpit. She didn’t care, though, because one way or another, she was boarding that underwater boat.

Coco knew the shark was closing the gap between her and it, but she maintained her focus on the sub with laser-like intensity that did not waver. At the back of her mind was the nagging thought that the sub might not even do her any good, but she was all out of options. She reached the underwater vehicle which now lay disturbingly on its side, even though it appeared to be watertight.

Instinctively and by rote, Coco placed her feet on parts of the sub she knew she could reach and that would support her weight. She scrambled atop the vehicle’s metal frame, just behind the acrylic dome, which was higher up than the frame, but much slipperier. She was sure she would slide off of it into the sea—into the megalodon’s waiting mouth.

Indeed, the giant shark pushed a wake in front of it that rocked the little sub, almost knocking Coco off the steel structure on which she now stood. But she held on and stayed with her perch, eyeing the monster as it slid into a circular holding pattern around the sub.

She peered into the dome where Mick was clearly slumped over the dashboard, unresponsive. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. She rapped on the dome with her knuckles, hard, trying to get his attention. Blood from her sliced palm sluiced over the dome.

Still Mick remained inert. She didn’t know if he had somehow run out of oxygen in there, and then the shark had prevented him from getting to the surface in time, or if he had experienced some kind of blunt force trauma when the shark had rammed the little sub. Either way, it meant that both his and her situations were dire.

Looking to the beach to see if possibly there might be help available from that direction, she saw only empty sand and gently swaying palm trees. She would have preferred some sort of human presence, even reporters, who would at least document the tragic events unfolding here at this distant island. But she was on her own. No doubt White or his backers had instructed the staff not to do anything that would draw attention to what was transpiring in the hotel.

None of those thoughts mattered anymore, though, because here came the megalodon, its sail-like dorsal appendage parting the water with a small wake as it charged the sub like an orca hoping to knock a seal from an ice floe. Coco now had a newfound appreciation for the fear felt by the seals she’d seen on nature shows, being flopped off of their little piece of ice directly into the shark’s mouth. She did not want to die like that.

Yet, the megalodon was very near now, its monstrous head rising up out of the water, seeking her cowering form atop the effectively pilotless submersible. This was it. She would not be able to withstand the onslaught of this, nature’s perfect predator. Then a burst of last-minute inspiration hit her, and she reached into her pants pocket.

Her fingers swept across an object. Hard. Metal. Something with substance.

The gun.

She quickly pulled it from her pocket, and took aim at the rampaging mega-predator. The big fish was almost upon her, its massive, monstrous maw beginning to crank open in anticipation of an exploratory bite. Coco had no idea if the gun was even loaded or what—she had almost zero experience with firearms—but still she raised it and pointed it at the oncoming aquatic assailant.

She aimed for one of the eyes, since she figured this little gun was but a mere peashooter for an animal the size of the megalodon. Steadying herself as best she could on the rocking craft, she watched the shark’s black eye grow larger and larger as it neared.

When its jaws gaped open even wider, she pulled the trigger.