CHAPTER 39
Moving silently through the dark water, she sensed a change in the water. A taste. She slowed, testing the currents.
Prey.
She had been unwilling to venture into the abyss. The terrifying vibrations were constant, the sounds of her one enemy pulsing from points everywhere, and if she descended the vibrations brought pain. So she had hunted higher up, just below the reef crest, for the early part of the night. Prowling the offshore depths near her new den, moving in a large circle.
But she had been unsuccessful. Returning to the den now, from a different direction, she pulsed through the water in slow, powerful bursts. As she had moved along the rim of the mile-high escarpment soaring above the undersea canyon, still seeking food, her impulse to hunt had been overcome. By an urge to return to her nearby lair, to continue clearing it, arranging it. The urge to feed had faded.
Until now.
She pulled herself over the top of the steep wall, dislodging a hunk of coral that sank past her into the darkness. Moving over the deep reef, she passed through a groove in the reef crest, feeling the waves crashing into the shallow ridge above, and paused. These shallows were not her usual habitat. But the taste of flesh was strong. She entered the lagoon.
In the shallow water, her eyes began to make out a pale, sandy bottom broken by dark coral and, closer to shore, beds of sea grass. The taste grew stronger.
Rarely had she ever ventured into shallow lagoons such as these. And never recently. But there was something here, now, closer to the shore.
A surge of water ran past her and the sensation became more distinct. She slowed. In the water, the scent was suddenly very strong. Sour. The smell only emitted by carrion.
She was not always a scavenger. Like her smaller cousins, she was designed to capture living prey, subdue it. Her organs were not best suited to digesting decomposing flesh, or deal with microorganisms amassing within it. But to accommodate such a large size at maturity, her kind had evolved to become highly opportunistic.
She continued forward into the sandy flats.
The bottom sloped steadily upward, and soon it was no longer deep enough for her to move freely. Small schools of fish in her path darted away from her shadow. But they were of no interest to her. Flattening her body, she slid her great form along the bottom, her mantle only feet below the surface now, the motion of the waves above caressing her skin. As one long arm groped along the bottom, she suddenly sensed something else.
Vibrations. Slow, rhythmic. Faint. But they were there.
Then, in the water, she began to taste something else. Something alive.
It was not something on which she often fed, but it was familiar. She had fed on this prey recently. Further flattening her immense, muscular body against the sandy bottom, until her entire body was no thicker than one of her arms, she slithered forward. The vibrations grew louder. Off to one side.
She turned, and dragged herself into the surf. Toward the vibrations.
To intercept whatever was making them.
 
 
The dark spot in the surf was a dead whale. At least, Gloria thought it was dead. In the water near her, it wasn’t moving, and the stench . . . just awful. It was definitely too big, too dark to be a dolphin. Even if it was the smallest whale she had ever seen. She looked down the beach, toward the three other dark shapes they had now spotted.
“Do you think they’re all dead?” she whispered.
“I don’t know about the others,” Beth said. “But the smell . . . I doubt they stink like this when they’re alive.”
“What do you think killed them?”
“I have no idea.”
Gloria suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to leave the whale. To get out of the water. “We should go back. Maybe somebody at the resort will know what to do.”
“What’s the point, babe? Even if a few of them aren’t dead yet, there’s nothing we can do.”
“How do you know? Maybe we can help them.”
Beth looked back toward the lit towers of the hotel, which rose defiantly into the night sky. They were a good ten-minute walk away. She looked back at Gloria.
“Please?” Gloria said.
Beth sighed. “All right. But hang on.”
She waded farther into the water, now up to her thighs. She leaned down toward the front end of the motionless animal. Poked it with her hand. “It’s cold,” she said.
“Be careful,” Gloria said. She moved deeper, next to Beth. She thought she felt something lightly brush her calf.
“I am being careful. There’s nothing a dead—”
Gloria suddenly felt herself plunging downward, into the water. Her face went under. She instinctively struggled to stand, to raise her head above the water. She pushed off the bottom, feeling soft sand against her hands and knees. And she felt something else, and she knew.
Something was holding on to her. Wrapping itself tightly around her ankle.
Desperately, she forced her face out of the water. Looked at Beth, who was splashing toward her, wide-eyed in horror.
The thing encasing her ankle squeezed. Hard.
“Beth,” she gasped.
The last thing she saw was her lover reaching for her. Then she was jerked violently under.
 
 
Her chemical receptors tested the writhing creature. Tasted it.
Food.
The desperate prey writhed in the organism’s grasp as she dragged it along the bottom, methodically coiling more of her arm around the flailing appendages. She was dimly aware that one of her other arms was trailing the other small creature now clumsily splashing away, toward the beach, but her focus quickly returned to the prize already wriggling in her clutches. She rolled another arm out to further ensnare the creature to ensure that it would not escape. Two other arms snaked hungrily into the surf line and wrapped themselves around the dead whale, and began to drag it into the lagoon.
Clutching her two prizes, she quickly began to move away from the beach.
As she neared the cleft in the reef and the drop-off to the abyss, the still-living prey began to flail wildly in her grasp. She brought it to her beak and pierced its soft flesh, injecting toxins from her salivary glands. A tactic she used on larger prey. With a final tremble, the prey ceased moving.
She pushed through the gap where the coral-encrusted bottom fell away and began to slowly turn her body in the deeper water. Once it was deep enough, she again maneuvered the meal toward her mouth. Her own bulk blocked her view of the prey, her eyes being on the other side of her body. But she did not need to see in order to feed.
She felt the prey enter her maw. As her beak began to close on the creature, it suddenly tensed a final time. Somehow, it was still alive.
Her jaw clenched, and there was a muffled crack as the creature’s hard, round head split between her jaws, like the thick shells that protected many of her other prey. She continued to force the food farther into her beak, quickly consuming the small animal. Then she turned her focus to the dead whale, still clasped in her other arms. Methodically, she began to scrape the ribbon of her hundreds of teeth against the carcass, each time removing large, ragged hunks of flesh.
She moved out past the vertical wall, continuing to feed as she slowly sank into the depths. Back into the darkness.