Indian Ocean.
Tuesday, July 31, 3:30 p.m.
The alien breathed earth air for the first time. Transported from the wet dark place, it experienced surroundings bright with a warm light that imbued it with immediate strength. Somewhere in its extraterrestrial DNA it had wanted, waited, to be up here. It didn’t know what air was, or sun, or light, just that it made it strong.
But then, suddenly, all that ended.
It was wet again.
And dark.
Like before.
And that was too bad.
The tiny alien, no bigger than a nickel, had fallen off of Clark’s shorts in the tussle when she had been hauled aboard the Tulsa.
Nobody noticed the grisly space creature as it dropped off the side of ship, fell thirty feet and hit the water with a little splat.
It sank slowly, weighing only ounces.
Gradually, the bright daylight spackling the ocean surface turning the sea to blue faded, and the waters became darker and darker. More familiar.
Warm things moved in the ocean around it.
The extraterrestrial passively sank, sank, and sank.
Some of the smaller fish considered swallowing the sinking organism but something about it was strange to their primordial senses and they gave it a pass, swimming on into the deep for more familiar prey.
One predator didn’t give it a second thought.
It ate anything in its path.
The great white shark was eighteen feet from nose to dorsal, its four foot jaws gaping with savage rows of blade-like teeth. The carnivore’s black button eyes didn’t blink as its powerful tail swished, propelling it forward with tremendous power, its maw gaping wide.
The great white swallowed the alien in the violent intake of water, along with several other fish. The earth food went right down its gullet to be digested and later excreted.
Not so the space creature.
The extraterrestrial instantly lodged to the huge shark’s palate a few inches behind the rows of teeth, hooking into the cartilage, and beginning to invade the great white’s cellular structure.
It had found a new host.
But this one was different from all the others.
The alien knew that as its tendrils penetrated, explored, insinuated and absorbed—beginning the bimolecular process to usurp its new host. The extraterrestrial felt a pure and fundamental compatibility with this organism, more so than all the others in the universe it had encountered.
This host felt like kin.
Over the next few hours, the great white shark underwent biological mutation with the invading alien organism at an alarming rate. The space creature was fusing its own physiognomy with that of the sea predator’s, adapting to and transforming the body of its host to suit its needs.
Five additional rows of jagged razor-sharp teeth were splitting through the cartilage of the shark’s gullet, behind the two rows it already had. As it swam, the extraterrestrial devoured everything that came in its path, for it was very hungry and needed mass quantities of nutrients to support its growth. The alien shark had grown to more than twice its size, nearly fifty feet in length. The monster plowed through the ocean with terrific speed, powered by a mighty tail that had sprouted extra fins for propulsion. Meat and blood streamed from cavernous jaws that had taken new fearsome shape and become vastly more powerful—the nose of the shark had been mutated so the head of the space creature was entirely made up of upper and lower jaws containing slashing rows of foot long teeth. At the size and strength the maw was now, it could swallow and bite in half an automobile. The sandpaper scales of the side of the shark had become as tough as serrated metal and protected the alien like body armor. Tentacles and tendrils extended now out through the gills, although the gills were becoming rudimentary since the alien did not need oxygen to breathe as the shark formerly did.
The alien was mastering the powerful shark senses now available to it—its keen sense of smell, and radar ability to feel vibrations of prey in the water miles away. For the first time on earth, the extraterrestrial could sense fresh warm hosts in the global ocean that surrounded it, and was able to hone in on them from vast distance.
Finding hosts were no longer the extraterrestrial’s problem.
The space creature swept its monstrous head back and forth, sniffing the water, sensing hosts in a hundred mile radius—it could actually hear them.
Naturally, it steered for the largest target.
The sperm whale was migrating west. It was a sixty two foot long bull, fifty tons of mammal.
The stately whale was unsuspecting. It was bigger than almost anything in the ocean and had no real enemies.
It wasn’t afraid of predators, other than man.
Nothing it knew was anywhere close to its immense size.
The mutating shark alien torpedoed through the warm upper ocean waters, hitting the whale at seventy miles-per-hour, teeth first. Its torso corkscrewed as it struck its prey, nine rows of twelve-inch teeth carving like a gigantic drill bit. It exploded through the flesh and blubber of the whale’s body like a humongous mortar shell, blasting the whole whale into two severed section pieces of head and tail, as thousands of gallons of blood splurged through the ocean. Killed instantly, the huge bull never knew what hit it. By the time the creature not of this earth swung back to gobble up the remains, what was left of the whale in the sea looked like dynamite had hit it.
Swimming off, gorged on whale blubber, the extraterrestrial was soon hungry again—the space creature was rapidly evolving, and sustenance fueled its regeneration.
The brain of the shark was in remission, absorbed into the alien’s hive cognition that replaced it, an extraterrestrial intelligence now informed with the great white shark’s instincts as a killing machine.
That fearful intergalactic combination made the shark alien the most dangerous creature on the planet earth.
For many miles, the other fish in the sea intuitively sensed an immeasurable threat was in the sea with them, and got the hell out there like an aquatic wildlife stampede fleeing a forest fire.
Even the other great whites in the area sensed a strange new mortal danger and swiftly relocated.
The alien swam through empty ocean, its radar senses registering the sudden absence of warm hosts and food.
This perplexed it.
The extraterrestrial collated the loss of hosts, in a constant learning curve about its new planet.
But fifteen minutes later, it sensed movement in the water.
Something big.