Meg: Hell's Aquarium (6 page)

“Sweet Jesus.” Jonas grabs the walkie-talkie from its charger on his wife’s desk. “Dani, get out of there. Clear the deck! Dani, can you hear me? Dani!”

Danielle Taylor’s earpiece is tucked snugly inside her shirt collar; she can hear nothing but the echo of cheers and groans as the Meg races around the oval tank like a mad bull. The lagoon is essentially a giant bathtub, the female’s moving mass creating an ever-increasing ebb and flow that lifts a mountainous swell at one end of the tank, a retreating valley at the other, the inertia building, each swell growing exponentially higher until . . .

Dani backs away from her perch beneath the A-frame, falling, stumbling over the concrete base as an eighteen-foot wall of water rolls out of the tank, its towering crest blocking the arena lights from her view.

Sound disappears, followed by an intense ocean roar as Danielle Taylor is lifted off her feet and launched backwards over the suddenly submerged deck, her head striking the concrete riser in the second row. The wave pounds the south bleachers and blasts skyward, drenching the audience twenty rows up with bone-chilling water and foam before its backwash, an eight-foot, retreating torrent, rolls back into the lagoon, dragging the Institute’s two guest handlers with it.

Submerged beneath the wave, Andy Murch, a staff photographer at
Shark Diver
magazine, claws at the concrete sea wall, his left hand somehow maintaining its grip on painted cinder-block as he fights and kicks like mad against the powerful current, trying to outlast the wave before it sweeps him into the lagoon. Just as the water level recedes, he’s struck by the floundering figure of the second guest handler, twenty-one-year-old Jason Francis, a varsity soccer player at usc.

The crowd gasps as the two men surface in the south end of Angel’s Lair.

Having heard his best friend yelling to Dani over the walkie-talkie, James “Mac” Mackriedes races out of his office in the new Meg Pen annex and out onto the lagoon’s main deck, confronted by chaos.

Two men in orange handler jump suits are floundering in the water.

Drenched fans in the lower southern bowl seats are climbing over people in the upper rows to get to higher ground—

—while in the main tank, Angel is riding a two-story swell that could easily wash her over the five-foot sea wall and twenty feet of decking—all that separates the lagoon’s waters from the Meg Pen.

Mac holds his breath, watching as the albino creature submerges a split second before the wave crashes against the sea wall, the wall of water rolling across the northern deck and into the Meg Pen.

Hurrying to an equipment closet, Mac grabs a rescue ring and rope from a hook—

—while on the far side of the arena, Jonas exits the eastern stairwell. Slogging through ankle-deep water, he searches for his daughter.

Three stories up, his wife shouts commands to him over the walkie-talkie, “Jonas, I see her! She’s in Section D, in one of the front rows.”

Jonas rushes to Dani. Cradling his unconscious daughter in his arms, he looks up, bracing his legs against the aluminum bleacher in front of him as another swell—this one even higher than the last—breaches the lagoon sea wall. Pinching Dani’s nose while maintaining mouth-to-mouth, Jonas breathes air into his oldest child’s lungs as the wave crashes atop the concrete deck and submerges them.

He holds on, closing his eyes as the surge threatens to rip him from his refuge.

Finally, the wave recedes, dissipating across the deck and returning the evening light.

Jonas struggles to his feet. Dani is breathing, but her head is bleeding badly. He yells into his radio for an ambulance before carrying his daughter out of the southern end of the arena, racing to get out of the bowl before the next swell arrives.

Terry drops the walkie-talkie and dials 911 on her office phone.

David grabs the radio, changing frequencies. “Dr. Stelzer, it’s David! Angel’s going berserk! Shut off the acoustics, now!”

Mac emerges from the equipment room with a life ring and a hundred feet of towline, his eyes searching the lagoon’s chaotic waters for the two missing men.

Jason and Andy are being dragged toward the center of the tank, struggling to tread water in a tumultuous sea, unable to reach the eastern wall as the water level beneath them suddenly drops from its eighty-foot depth to a mere forty-five. At the northern end of the tank, Angel is knifing beneath the surface, catching up to a thirty-foot wall of water rolling towards the Meg Pen.

The crowd gasps as the wave washes over the northern sea wall into the juvenile’s tank, beaching Angel as it recedes. Caught by surprise, the fifty-one-ton shark flounders like a giant eel along the flooded deck until she manages to slide back inside the lagoon.

Shaking its head, the stunned creature draws in mouthfuls of sea to breathe—

—as the reverberations in her brain suddenly cease. The predator calms. She zigs, then zags, regaining her senses, which immediately lock onto the heartbeats of the two life forms that have entered her domain.

Mac runs along the eastern sea wall to get a closer shot at the two men. The crowd noise beckons him to turn around.

The white dorsal fin rises like a sail as the Megalodon heads for the southern end of the tank.

Christ, she sees them.

Andy and Jason see the telltale dorsal fin, too . . . just before it disappears beneath another rolling mountain of water. They start swimming toward Mac, who throws the life ring at them, the nylon rope feeding out sixty feet.

Jason is closest to the ring. The college senior lunges for it and holds on for dear life, hooking his elbow around the doughnut-shaped flotation device. Mac tows him in, guiding the ring towards the second man.

Andy swims for Jason and the rope, missing both as he’s lifted by the approaching swell and washed away.

Hand over hand Mac takes up the slack. Staff members rush in to help, their combined effort propelling the usc student-athlete rapidly along the surface of the water . . . like bait on a hook.

Gliding just beneath the surface, Angel rolls sideways onto her left flank, her primordial senses locked in on the fleeing intruder. Her mouth opens, exposing a band of pink gum line and rows of seven-inch teeth.

A bizarre sensation rushes through Jason Bruce Francis’s mind as his body suddenly becomes lighter. Maintaining his grip on the flotation device, he bounces along the surface before going airborne, his body lifted over the sea wall and let down onto the flooded deck—

—while back in the tank, everything below his waist is devoured and swallowed.

Lying on the ground, going into shock, a relieved Jason looks up at Mac and smiles. “Man, that was a close one, huh?” he says . . . as a tide of blood drains from the dead man’s face and out his open chest cavity onto the deck.

Back in the lagoon, Andy Murch is lifted over the southern sea wall by the dying fifteen-foot swell and tossed sideways into the fourth row of seats. Barely conscious, he wraps his arms around the aluminum bleacher and holds on until the wave recedes over his head, and the evening sky returns its breath of cold night air.

Angel hovers near the bottom of the lagoon. Her appetite teased by the morsel of food still caught in her teeth, she circles back into the southern end of the tank and rises. The emotionally spent crowd lets out a collective gasp as the monster’s enormous head and upper torso rise surreally out of the water. The Megalodon’s upper jaw hyperextends as it opens, its retracting gum line, stained red with Jason Francis’s remains, exposing a murderous upper row of triangular teeth that snatches the swaying side of beef like a steel bear trap striking a wild pig. Screams ripple through the arena as Angel whips her garage-size head back and forth on the iron support chain until she rips the entire carcass loose.

The A-frame snaps back on its base. The 102,000-pound predator falls sideways into the water, soaking the already-frazzled crowd in the lower bowl seats once more.

The audience swoons. A few applaud, then are silenced by the sheer horror of what they have just witnessed.

COME SEE ANGEL: THE ANGEL OF DEATH
TWO SHOWS DAILY
ALWAYS YOUR MONEY’S WORTH!

2.

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula
Monterey, California

Saturday night

Terry Taylor sits alone in the hospital administrator’s private office, away from the waiting room’s prying eyes and the plasma TV screen’s never-ending regurgitation of the evening’s events. Though she will be celebrating her fiftieth birthday in the coming weeks, the daughter and only surviving child of the late Masao Tanaka could be mistaken for thirty-nine, her long, onyx hair containing only a few scattered threads of gray, the skin around her almond eyes still smooth. On the outside she remains quite the beauty—

—while on the inside, she is aging rapidly. Stress has taken its toll on her nerves, her right arm and right leg prone to bouts of shaking. She has seen a neurologist, who ran up a nice medical bill before deciding it could be the onset of Parkinson’s or “maybe something else; we’ll have to keep an eye on it.”

Doctors . . . what do they know? Most of them are just “practicing” medicine, diagnosing out of habit, basing their remedies on what expenses insurance will cover, not what is actually needed. But that’s what you get when your entire medical system is regulated by a for-profit industry and subsidized by pharmaceutical companies that give away free trips to Cancun like they’re lollipops. “Here, Mrs. Taylor, take these pills
twice a day for three weeks and we’ll see how it affects you. Abdominal cramps? Hair loss? Double vision? No problem, we’ll just try another prescription until we get it right. Liver damage? Hell,
that
we can replace—”

Terry chases the persona her therapist has dubbed “Angry Annie” out of her head, her mind yielding to “Manager Mary.”

Call your publicist . . . have her issue a public statement. No, better do that in person. Look them in the eye . . . let them know that no words can begin to express your sorrow.

It won’t make much of a difference. In the end they’ll still come after us with guns blazing. Call the lawyers. Make sure those waivers were worth the expense . . . God, how could this have happened? Poor kid. He was a senior in college . . . David’s age. It could have been David . . . it could have been—

—D.J.

The thought of her long-deceased brother sets her right leg to quiver.

D.J. . . . How long has he been gone? Twenty-four years? Is that even possible?

She replays the college student’s death in her mind’s eye.
Is that how D.J. died in the Mariana Trench? Devoured by that male Meg?

She chokes down the bile running up the back of her throat.

Stop it! Just stop! Falling apart helps no one. This was unpredictable . . . like a car accident . . . or a lightning strike. Bad things sometimes happen. You can’t make sense of it. Focus on the to-do list before the insanity hits you like a tsunami wave. Express your grief in public, then step back and let the lawyers deal
with the repercussions . . . call a mandatory staff meeting on Monday . . . readdress the question of safety. Watch their morale—