Hotel Megalodon: A Deep Sea Thriller (9 page)

Chapter 17

Coco stood in the long, wide hallway of the underwater hotel in a daze. What to do now? The Arab family walked past her, glancing curiously at her wet swimsuit. She decided to go back to the dive locker, and change back into her clothes so that she would be more comfortable roaming the hotel and deciding her next move.

That done, she retraced the same route, past the train control room, the door to which was still shut. She could hear White and Kamal conversing inside with someone on the radio, and she considered going inside and trying to retract her resignation, but then she thought about what that jerk White had said to her. The feelings were dredged up inside her again, and she kept walking until she reached a fork in the hallway. To the right the sign read,
Neptune’s Bounty Restaurant
, and she went that way.

The underwater eatery was supposed to be a gourmet dining establishment, and the food was good—mostly local fish and shellfish dishes with a curry flair—but in her opinion not any better than what one could get in the regular restaurants around Fiji. But the view, of course, was unparalleled. All that underwater panorama did for Coco now, though, was to rekindle the terror of her recent scuba dive...the ruined tunnel that now cut them off from land, the dead tourists, the megalodon...

Coco walked through a grandiose entrance, passing between twin two-story golden tridents to a lobby where a hostess decked out in a slinky cocktail dress actually stood waiting at a podium.
Do any of these people know anything about what’s going on?
Coco
wondered.

“
Hey
girl!” she said upon recognizing Coco as she walked up. She was also an American transplant, but from the mainland, brought here because of her good looks and native U.S. English skills, so as to add to the international resort’s cosmopolitan appeal. She wore her blond hair up in a bun with a pair of chopsticks through it, and a sapphire twinkled on her pert, upturned nose in the sunlight that filtered through the clear domed roof.

“Hey Tricia.” Coco could not muster the energy to fake a peppy greeting.

“You dining alone?”

“Actually, just want the bar.” She looked past Tricia to an alcove of the restaurant that jutted out over the reef from the rest of the hotel. A sign reading
The Wet Bar
hung over a full-service horseshoe-shaped drink station, around which a good number of patrons were currently seated.

“You and everybody else! You waiting for the next tram out of here too? I heard there’s some kind of problem with it.”

Coco flashed on the bodies floating past her in the flooded tunnel, the tram knocking around inside.
Some kind of problem with it, yeah.
Yet she didn’t have the fortitude right now to break the news to Tricia. She just wanted a drink.

“It’s going to be down for a while.”

Tricia frowned. “How about the A/C? Is that going yet? At least we have the fans in here.” She tilted her head skyward, where a conveyor belt system pulled a series of thatched blade fans. No wonder so many people want to be in here, Coco thought. She hadn’t noticed it when she walked in because her mind was spinning with the recent events, but it was noticeably cooler in here than in the rest of the hotel.

“No A/C yet, either. Time to hit the watering hole. Feel free to join me if you get the chance.”

Coco headed to the bar, and found an empty seat facing the reef outside. Reflexively she scanned the coral for signs of the megalodon, but saw none. A few reef fish even darted about like normal. Then the bartender caught her eye, and flashed his best sexy smile while he mixed a drink. He must also be clueless as to the current reality of this place, she thought, watching him flip a glass in the air, and then catch it like a cheesy imitation of Tom Cruise in that movie Cocktail. Still, she returned the smile because she needed a drink bad.

He dispensed the drink to an older woman from Germany, and then sauntered over to Coco.

“Aloha, Coco! Lemme, guess...mai tai?”

“Hey Aiden.” Like Tricia, Aiden was a young American brought from the mainland. Supposedly he’d been trained at one of the top mixology schools in the U.S., but although she wouldn’t tell him, she didn’t think his mai tai’s were as good as the ones back home. Still, they reminded her of Hawaii, so it was what she usually ordered.

“Extra strong.”

“Whoa, rough day with the fishes, eh?” He grinned at her while he began mixing the drink.
If you only knew
, she thought, but did not say. Apparently the restaurant and bar were a bubble for the uninformed. She knew that Aiden pictured her like some kind of mermaid, flitting about the reef with a rainbow of tropical fish trailing behind her. If only it were so, she thought, looking around at the other patrons while he moved off to finish her drink.
If only it were so.

She could overhear the customers discussing when the tram would be operating again, and she was glad she was wearing personal clothes, and not a Triton uniform. The anonymity was short-lived, however, because when Aiden set her mai tai down in front of her he said, “A lot of my clients want to know when the train starts rolling again. You heard anything about that?”

Strangely, even with so much more to worry about, it still annoyed Coco to hear Aiden call them
clients
, as he always did, instead of customers or regulars or something less pretentious.

“Not my problem, Aiden,” she said, sipping from the drink.

He smiled mischievously at her, watching her suck on the beverage. “I know, you’re a biologist not a technical person or whatever, but I just thought you might know.”

She looked up from the mai tai. “No, what I mean is, it’s literally not my problem anymore.” She gesticulated at the hotel with her hands. “This whole place. I no longer work here. I quit this afternoon.”

Aiden’s mouth dropped, and his eyes grew wide. “You
what
? Quit the best job in the world? Are you shitting me?”

“Nope. I quit.” Coco bent her head to the straw. Aiden hustled behind the bar, got someone a beer, and then returned with a shot of rum that he set down in front of Coco.

“On the house. Wanna tell me what happened?”

Coco stared at a barracuda swimming past the picturesque wall window. “That guy White’s a dick. That’s basically what happened.” She picked up the shot and knocked it back, handing the shot glass directly to Aiden, who shot her a disapproving stare.

“That’s all you’re going to say? What the hell
happened
, Coco? Everybody says you were a rising star of this place, driving the sub, setting up the eco-tours...and with everybody stuck down here now, I’d think they need you more than ever. ”

“He won’t listen to me, doesn’t respect me.” Coco went back to the mai tai, then looked back up at Aiden, and lowered her voice. “He’s
dangerous
.”

“How so?”

“Doesn’t give a crap about anybody but himself. I think he’s been cutting corners to save a buck, and he’s worried he’ll be found liable for everything that’s gone wrong so far.”

“What about the train? When will it be working again?”

Coco didn’t care what White had to say about her telling people the truth, but she didn’t want to start a full-on panic; if it took them this long to fix the A/C, then she guess that tunnel would probably never be fixed.

“Forget about the train. Put a fork in it. It’s done. It’s demolished,” she summed up.

Aiden’s hand stopped wiping the rag around the inside of the glass he was drying. “Say
what
?”

“I wouldn’t repeat this unless you want a full-on panic on your hands, but the entire train tunnel is flooded and useless. People have died.”

Aiden reared his head back, and resumed drying the glassware. “Coco, that’s not funny. Rough day or not...”

“Of course it’s not funny!” She raised her voice a little too loud, and caught one of the customers turning her head to look at her. She toned it down, and continued. “But it’s true.”

“Coco...” Aiden looked around the bar to make sure no one needed him, then held her gaze once more. He eyed her drink. “Hey, is this really about Mick?”

Coco looked puzzled. “Mick? No. Why?”

Aiden shrugged, looked a bit uncomfortable. “I know you and him hang out together, that’s all. And the other night...” He paused while drying a glass.

“The other night what?”

“I saw Mick with Clarissa. Right here. In the bar.” He patted the polished wood surface.

A hot flash burned through Coco as she pictured the dolphin trainer. She didn’t need this right now, and told Aiden so.

“All right, I’m sorry. I know you’ve had a hell of a day.” He looked around the bar again, then lowered his voice.

“Who died?”

“Almost everybody on the last tram out. I saved a couple of them...I think,” she finished, realizing she wasn’t sure if the swimmers had actually made it to the beach or not. They probably did, but she sure would like to find out. She eyed the bar behind Aiden, looking for a telephone. She knew that many areas of the hotel had landline connections or radio with Topside.

“So you’re saying that we’re all stuck in here, with no way to get back to the surface?”

Coco took another drag from her drink and shrugged. “Unless you can scuba dive.”

Aiden reached up, and rang the ship’s bell that hung over the bar. Everyone looked over and he shouted, “Next round on the house for everybody! Drink up!”

Coco covered her face with her hand. “What are you doing?”

Aiden was already busy taking orders. “Hey, I’m from Florida where we have hurricane parties. Now we’re all trapped in an underwater hotel for who knows how long? Let’s get everybody in a good mood before they find out how bad it really is.”

Chapter 18

Stanley and Priscilla Doherty collapsed on the powdery white sand fringing the lagoon. Both of them heaved and choked, still clinging to one another in their sopping wet clothes.

“Priscilla...Dear! Are you okay?”

Stanley’s wife only sobbed in response. But that was good enough for him. She was alive. They were alive. Thanks to that scuba diver. A woman, because he remembered looking into those brown eyes. Even through the dive mask, and even under the extreme duress of the moment, his brain had registered the fact that she was a beautiful young woman. If it wasn’t for her, he had no doubt that he and Priscilla would have died down there in that god-awful tunnel with all of the others...
the others
.

Until now, self-preservation had kept him from really thinking about what he had seen down there. But now, his body idle for the first time since the tram crashed, a ghoulish kaleidoscope of macabre images flooded Stanley’s brain. People he had had the most banal small talk with only minutes earlier had been drowned and crushed in front of his eyes. Swallowed by a sea creature. He tried, but failed to block the gurgling sounds from his memory of a man drowning, a man mere feet away that he had been helpless to aid. He and Priscilla being chased by that monstrosity...

Then it was all just too much, and he broke down in tears alongside his wife, commiserating at water’s edge, at the very boundary beyond which a terror unlike any they had ever experienced must still be out there, waiting...

One didn’t get to own an NBA team without a sense of drive, though, and after a few minutes Stanley convinced his wife to come with him to the reception
bure.
They had to let the hotel staff know about this. Had to let the world know. He recalled the tram tour guide voice saying that the tunnel was the main way in or out of the hotel. Now that it was decimated, did that mean everyone still down there was marooned in the hotel? He supposed they must have some type of communications with the facilities on land, but this was no time to speculate. He helped his wife to her feet.

“I am truly sorry, honey. Never again. You’re right, we should have gone to Tahiti.”

“Let’s go home, Stan.”

“I couldn’t agree more, honey.”

They followed paths that now seemed nauseatingly charming, to the main
bure
, seeing no one along the way.

“Where the hell is everybody?” Stanley wanted to know. His wife was still too distraught to speak, so he answered for her. “With this whole place falling to pieces, you’d think they’d have people crawling all over to fix it. I don’t see anybody anywhere.”

They reached the main building, and ascended its broad, gently inclined wooden steps.

“They must all be in here.” This from Priscilla, her first full sentence since the ordeal.

The sound of chattering people and laughter made its way to their ears before they reached the top of the steps. Inside, Stanley was taken aback to see a near party-like atmosphere in full swing. A row of taxis was pulled up outside, still depositing tourists. Servers armed with trays of complimentary beverages dispensed their wares to travel-weary guests newly arrived to the tropics. Behind the front desk, a pair of young Indian women were busy checking in the new arrivals. Even more unbelievably to the Dohertys, a reporter and cameraman were shooting a live piece.

The reporter, an Australian woman in her early thirties on assignment from a Sydney TV station, flitted about from guest to guest, asking routine fluff questions like,
Where are you from? What do you think so far?
and one which seemed to be her favorite:
Does it scare you at all to stay in an underwater hotel?

“It scares the shit out of us!” Stanley said, hijacking the reporter’s interview from a middle-aged Japanese couple who had arrived minutes earlier. A couple of heads turned his way, and when Stanley saw he had a larger audience, he said, “We just almost died down there!” He swiveled his head to look over at the staff behind the front desk. “Don’t you know about what happened? Why are you still checking people in?”

The reporter hastily thanked the Japanese people for their time, and approached her cameraman, speaking softly to him. Stanley saw the man nod, and then the reporter approached the Dohertys, microphone in hand, extended toward Stanley.

“Sir, may I get your name?”

“I’m Stanley Doherty, and this is my wife, Priscilla.”

The reporter gave a hand signal to her cameraman for him to stop filming, while she flipped through a small notebook. She ran a manicured fingernail down one of its pages until her eyebrows raised.

“Mr. and Mrs. Doherty, owners of the Los Angeles Lakers?”

“Yes, yes, but listen, that’s not important.” Stanley almost choked up as he flashed on the weirdly gigantic shark, its blurry, indistinct form in the tunnel, and then its ungodly presence as its fins sliced through the lagoon’s shallow water, hunting, prowling, pursuing...

Putting his arm around his wife and drawing her closer, he knew what was important now. Whatever time they had left together on this Earth, that’s what was important. Not any basketball team, or any fancy vacations, and certainly not any underwater hotel.

If he could keep even one person safe by telling the world what happened to him and Priscilla, then by God that’s what he would do. He was a businessman, a large employer himself, and he understood fully that owners of businesses responded swiftly to media accusations. If this...what was his name...White, that’s it, this White fellow wanted to play cover-up in order to make a few bucks, well then, two could play at that game.

“What is important, Mr. Doherty? You and your wife appear to be soaking wet. Are you okay? Do you require medical attention?”

Stanley shook his head. “We’re okay, thanks to one brave scuba diving woman. The important thing is that the people still down there get help. The hotel is isolated now. The train tunnel is gone. I don’t know why they don’t know—“He pointed to the front desk.

“Mr. Doherty, what is it that happened down there? Can you tell us?”

He related how the tram crashed in the tunnel, and then the tunnel itself cracked apart and flooded. He spoke of an enormous shark, at which point the reporter gave her cameraman the signal to cut filming. She lowered her head while still directing her eyes toward Stanley.

“Enormous shark? Look, I’m all for publicity, but I need to be sure. This isn’t some kind of promotional stunt for the hotel, is it?”

Stanley retuned her gaze. “I wish it was.”