CHAPTER 62

Eric stood, dripping water, beside a small crowd at the top of the flooded stairwell, looking helplessly into the dark water. He could only see five or six steps down, with the water stirred up and the lights in the submerged tunnel now shorted out. A woman’s body had just floated to the surface. She was a resort worker, in a turquoise shirt. Like the one Ashley was wearing.

“Oh, no.”

He moved toward her. But he quickly saw that it was not Ashley, and felt guilty at his relief. It was the heavier woman, and before he or anyone else could reach her body to fish it out he could tell by the massive head wounds that she was already gone.

When he’d first arrived at the stairwell, an old woman had miraculously popped up in the churning water, still alive but choking on water, wet strands of gray hair clinging to her ashen face. He had plunged down the steps with a few other tourists and helped pull her out. Once up the stairs, she began to cry, talking about a missing grandson. She had been whisked away to an ambulance, seemingly having heart trouble.

Moments later, another person had floated up into the opening between the stairwell and the angled ceiling. That one had been facedown. He appeared to be one of the young resort guards. Others had helped fish out the man.

Eric looked over to where he was now splayed on the wet concrete twenty feet away, one arm flopped grotesquely off to the side as a young woman still stubbornly administered CPR to revive him. Eric knew it was probably too late.

He helped two other men fish out the heavyset woman’s body, and drag it irreverently up onto the cement by its arms, like some clubbed seal. Then he turned and looked at the pool. The underground tunnels appeared to be completely flooded. There was no way down there, where he was almost certain Ashley, Sturman, and many others had still been when the glass gave way. Even if there was a way down, something else was down there now.

The ruined tank had refilled, through the breach in the man-made wall that had previously separated the tank from a natural lagoon. These state-of-the-art aquariums had been built below sea level, utilizing the cay’s natural submarine caverns to create the incredible display. Seawater must have always remained in this cavity throughout the construction process, unless they had pumped it out at some point to complete the project. Now, with the hydrostatic pressure in the tank suddenly gone, the lower cement wall on the opposite side from the tunnels also had collapsed. Where the broad fissure had opened up, the surrounding rock had also come free, and jagged boulders the size of small cars had crashed down into the water in the tank.

A security guard arrived and began relaying the information to the local emergency services over his radio. He made Eric and the others move back from the stairwell as some semblance of order was established.

It didn’t matter. It had been too long now for anyone to make it out by holding their breath alone. He had to check the other exits to the tunnels, to see if anyone had come up alive there. He took a deep breath to calm himself, feeling hot despite his clothes being wet up to his chest. There was still hope.

He hurried back toward the opaque pool where the aquarium had been. A number of tourists stood in groups around it, staring down in awe as security guards tried to herd them away. Something moved in the water.

He looked down into the clouds of suspended sediment in the tank, where the clear waters of the aquarium had been not ten minutes ago, squinting to see past the rippled surface. After a moment, he saw something move again, out of the corner of his eye.

There was a wave, on the far side of the pool, created from the upward movement of something below. Something big. Just below the surface, the dark shape was rising. He looked at a couple still near the water. He had to warn them.

Shouting, he ran down the broad, cobbled path toward them. He cut off into some landscaped perennials, racing along the edge of the pool. A groundskeeper listening to music through ear buds as he hacked at some brush with a machete jumped back as Eric hurtled past. Eric brought his forearms in front of his face as he crashed through the screen of vegetation at eye level.

The woman screamed.

Near the center of the pool, the elongated tip of a huge tentacle rose vertically out of the calm surface, ten feet or more, snaking skyward with the last foot or two dangling back down. Long rows of pale suckers, visible even from here, ran up one side all the way to the end.

Several other appendages followed, dripping water as they fanned out like reddish serpents. They extended rapidly in all directions. The two tourists turned to run.

Two of the arms danced across the water in seconds. One seized the man, coiling around his torso. The octopus silenced his cries of terror with a squeeze, the meaty coils thickening as they applied pressure. There was the sound of bones breaking before the tentacle flung his lifeless body through the air.

Before the body even landed in the water with a loud splash, the other arm caught the woman and crushed her. It tossed her body sideways, headfirst into the rocks. More arms rose, and moved toward a family trying to gather young children to flee.

The groundskeeper behind Eric muttered something, and he turned to see the man drop the machete and run.