Extinct (13 page)

“Whew,” Armon said, wiggling his nose. Paul looked in the direction of the strong stench coming from the trees off to the side as the rest of the boys started unloading the trailing boat.

Except for the pair of blond-haired brothers in the group. Ten and twelve years old, and almost identical in looks except for a slight difference in their heights, they slipped their life preservers off, lifted their backpacks over their shoulders, and stepped back to the boat for the cane fishing poles lying lengthwise along its center. In a moment they were walking around the edge of the slough.

“Don’t overload yourself,” San-hi called after them.

The older blond suddenly began to struggle with the weight of the few poles he carried across his front. Staggering awkwardly back and forth beside his smiling brother, he continued toward the mouth of the creek at the end of the slough.

San-hi stepped to Paul and took the sleeping bag and backpack from his arms. Unbuckling the top of the backpack he slid the soggy sleeping bag under the flap, pulled the straps back through the buckles and pushed the backpack into Paul’s hands. Paul smiled and slipped it around his shoulder.

Armon stared at the two. “When you finish baby-sitting…,” he said. He stood beside the trailing boat, unloaded now except for the boxing equipment.

As San-hi walked toward him, Armon placed one foot over inside the craft to hold it steady against the bank. He began to stack San-hi’s arms with tubes of tape, small boxes of gauze, jumping ropes, and headgear. The last thing the stocky youth lifted from the boat was the heavy-bag, big around as a tree trunk and heavy as a bag of cement.

Balancing the bag on its flat end on the bank, he looked toward the other boys. It took two of the smaller ones, one at each end of the bag, to carry it toward the creek.

Armon stared into the trees and wiggled his nose again.

“Something big,” Fred said.

He stared at the smallest boy on the team, up on top of the dam and disappearing over the jumble of protruding logs and limbs into the gap at its center.

“Come on, Edward, get out of there.”

The boy didn’t answer.

Fred waited a moment. Edward was the only boy on the team who couldn’t swim.

“Edward!”

The boy’s head reappeared.

A moment later he came back along the top of the dam. He carried a bill cap and a rod and reel in his hands.

*   *   *

Admiral Vandiver had a thought. He had several thoughts, actually, all of them leading toward the same possibility.

He had said to his nephew,
So why, Douglas, I ask you, if any creature was originally present down there—why would he not still be there?
He had quickly made light of his question by saying he wasn’t suggesting the possibility that megalodons might actually still be present, but only that they lived a lot longer than was popularly thought. What else could he say and keep any credibility with a nephew he wanted to be especially observant when he studied the bottom where the Coast Guard had found the tooth? To emphasize to Douglas how much he
didn’t
believe megalodons still existed, he had stated that with the modern technology now probing the seas in the form of submarines, submersibles, and robot probes, it was hard to fathom that the giant creatures could still be alive and not have blundered into something that would have recorded their presence. Certainly a full-grown megalodon, not only alive but moving into water as shallow as that between the Keys and the Everglades, would have likely been seen somewhere during the many days and nights it would have taken for it to travel from the nearest great depths. There was one possible explanation.

The white shark was the only shark that marine biologists credited with intelligence—not simply instinct. Whites were known to stand up with their heads out of water and look around, observing what was outside their kingdom as well as within it. Other sharks had that physical ability, but they didn’t do it. Whites obviously distinguished between boats and the people within them. There were several cases in particular when whites had tried to come up over the sides of boats after the occupants. And whites, when attacked, would almost always come after the attacker. The tiger shark, the hammerhead, the oceanic white-tip, and the other giant so-called man-eaters usually fled when injured, unless already engaged in a feeding frenzy or an attack they had launched themselves. It was instinctive to flee when injured.

But what Vandiver thought most about was the notion held by some experts that whites were possibly even capable of planning.

If nothing else, the white’s preferred method of attack suggested this. While other sharks were generally known to attack their victims from whatever angle they originally spotted them, or circle in clear view of the victim before attacking, whites, when given the opportunity, preferred to dive deep after spotting a victim and come up under them, unseen. More than one swimmer, treading water, had been jerked under the surface by his legs. More than one surfer had fallen prey to an attack after first being bounced into the water by a white slamming into the bottom of the surfboard to dislodge him.

But there were also a number of other, more dramatic instances of the white’s actions which led to the speculation that they could plan. Probably the most dramatic was the story of the English sloop
Byrum
in the late 1800’s.

A white shark followed the sailing vessel for days, eating the garbage the cook threw overboard every night. During the day the white stayed next to the ship. Day after day. The crew became accustomed to seeing the great fish. Sailors on the vessel swore afterwards that they had noticed the white’s eye rolling up to follow them when they passed along the rail. But, in any case, they became comfortable with the creature’s presence. One day one of the men went around the outside of the rail to work on some lines to the rigging. The white, witnesses say, swimming some thirty feet from the vessel’s side at the time, suddenly veered hard toward the hull and came up out of the water and snatched the man off the rail—almost as if the shark had been waiting for that moment.

Planning? Waiting patiently for days to execute that plan? Or simply an easy meal presenting itself to the white? Who would ever know with certainty? But even putting that action aside, there was still the evidence of intelligence in the mere fact of the white rising to look around and in not reacting to a base survival instinct and fleeing when under attack, but rather responding—turning on its attackers.

Was the megalodon, the direct ancestor of the white shark, as intelligent as the white of today? Or more intelligent? In either case, was it possible that the megalodon had enough reasoning ability to simply avoid being seen if it didn’t wish to be seen … for whatever the reason?

*   *   *

The blond-haired brothers stared at the fishing pole, its butt pushed down into the soft ground at the edge of the bank and the line hanging limp from its end into the water.

Fred stopped behind them.

Three bass, their bodies swollen and blue, floated on their sides a couple of feet out in the water. A stringer ran through their gills and back to the bank where a branch pressed down into the soft ground held the line secure close to a minnow bucket, with its lid half off.

“Snake got them,” one of the brothers said, looking at the round, dark fang marks easy to see against the pale blue color of the bass’s bloated stomachs. Edward looked at the minnows floating in the bucket and twisted his face at the smell. Fred stared at the pole a moment more, and then over his shoulder in the direction of the stench that had been plain at the dam.

“Wait here for a minute,” he said.

“I’ll go with you,” Armon said.

Fred nodded. “Keep the other boys here, San-hi,” he said.

*   *   *

The stench came back as Fred and Armon neared the trees. It became stronger as they walked between the thick trunks. A few steps farther, it became nearly overpowering. A sound like the buzzing of a beehive came from behind the trunk of a wide oak a few feet ahead of them. Fred stepped around the tree to see the swollen carcass of a large boar lying on its side, its thick forelegs held stiff out in the air. Its right rear leg was missing where it had joined the hip. Bloated blue flies buzzed loudly as they swarmed the cleanly severed wound, the boar’s fixed eyes, and its gaped mouth where sharp tusks eight inches long curved out and up into the air.

“You thought it was a body?” Armon asked.

Fred nodded. “Could have been.”

“An alligator got him?”

Fred nodded again. “Must have grabbed him when he was at the bank drinking.” He looked at the ground where the boar had plowed deep ruts with its tusks in its dying agony. In the soil off to their side he saw where the hog had fallen and dragged the stub of its hind quarter, leaving a wide strip of soil darker than the surrounding ground. More flies swarmed a smear of blood low on the trunk of a gum tree a few feet farther back toward the slough.

“Would think the alligator would have at least smelled him and come after him,” Armon said, “wouldn’t you?”

“Something will,” Fred said, and turned back in the direction of the slough.

*   *   *

When they stepped out of the woods, Armon looked toward Paul standing in the middle of the line of boys staring toward the trees.

Armon shook his head in a seemingly worried manner as he neared the group. “Two big old bull alligators fought and killed each other. You never can tell what they’re gonna do when they get like they are this time of year—mating season. Guess someone’s gonna have to stand guard out by the water tonight to keep them from getting into the tents.”

He looked directly at Paul.

Paul grinned. He had been in the marshlands and up and down the river more than any of the others.

Fred knelt at his backpack and pulled its top flap back. He pushed aside a light blanket and felt down past a flashlight and a bottle of Maalox to a cellular phone. Lifting it in front of him, he punched in a number.

As he waited he stared toward the cane pole, stuck in the mud, its thin end bending toward the water and the bass floating tethered beyond the bank.

“This is Fred Herald. I’m on the Pascagoula, a few miles above the Interstate bridge at what’s left of a beaver dam. There was a rod and reel and a cap hung on a limb near its bottom. Didn’t think too much about that—people always losing something. But now there’s a cane pole stuck in the ground back off a slough here, hook still hanging in the water, a bucket of minnows, some dead fish on a stringer. Like somebody just up and vanished—maybe two somebodies.”

Paul didn’t grin this time.

*   *   *

Fred’s call was relayed from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department to a young, dark-haired deputy standing at the bottom of a narrow dirt landing leading into the river. He looked up the landing at Eddie Fuller’s old Ford pickup. “Might know where they went now,” he said.

The older, gray-haired deputy next to the truck looked down at the younger man and walked toward him.

Their boat sat tied to a tree branch off to his side.

CHAPTER 15

The heavy-bag hung from a limb of a cedar. The limb was springy, and every time Armon pounded his tight, gauze-wrapped fists into the bag, it bounced. He came with an uppercut and the bag sprang several inches into the air.

“Got ’em good that time,” Armon panted, sweat dripping from his dark face. “That’s how I’m going to do it, put them up into the air and catch ’em coming down.”

Fred stared at his stopwatch. “Not with you at only ten minutes and starting to breathe hard already.”

“Rounds are only two minutes,” Armon said, glancing over the shoulder of his T-shirt, continuing to dance back and forth in front of the bag. “Man, I’m working hard, Mr. Herald.”

A few feet away, Edward, not quite six inches taller than Paul, wrapped San-hi’s hand with gauze. He stopped wrapping and stared up at San-hi. “How am I going to get this right if you don’t keep your fingers spread?”

“Shut up, Edward, and wrap.”

“Thirty seconds left,” Fred called out.

Armon dropped lower, squared his muscular shoulders evenly with the bag, and started pounding it with sharp, hard punches.

“Fifteen,” Fred said.

Armon’s fists became a blur.

“Ten.”

The smacks into the bag became one long staccato sound. Paul’s eyes widened.

“Time,” Mr. Herald said.

Armon stepped back from the bag. “He’s dead,” he said. “He should have never climbed in the ring with the Biloxi Pounder.” He raised the back of his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead and looked up into the blazing sun. Paul handed him a plastic squirt bottle full of Gatorade.

“Thanks, man.” Armon leaned his head back and squirted the solution into his wide mouth.

San-hi stepped to the bag.

“Time,” Mr. Herald said.

San-hi started hitting the bag, his blows more crisp jabs from afar than the way Armon had worked.

*   *   *

“Hey!”
the older deputy exclaimed.

The younger deputy looked in the same direction and spun the wheel of the eighteen-foot boat. The craft leaned up on its side toward the small aluminum boat, floating partially submerged and nearly hidden from sight in a stand of tall water grass growing in the shadows of a line of tall oaks leaning out over the river.

*   *   *

Paul handed San-hi the squirt bottle. Edward pounded the heavy-bag. Paul was surprised at how hard the small boy’s smacks sounded. Paul looked at his own hand, and clenched it into a fist. San-hi reached down and pulled Paul’s thumb from inside his fingers. “You pop somebody that way,” the thin Vietnamese said, “and you’ll break your thumb. Keep the thumb tucked down in front of the fingers.” Paul moved his thumb down to the first joint of his forefinger and clenched his fist tighter. San-hi nodded and raised the squirt bottle back to his mouth.

Smacksmacksmacksmacksmack.

Edward’s shoulders were following each punch. He looked like some kind of four-and-a-half-foot puppet being thumped rapidly back and forth. Paul started moving his shoulders. His head moving back and forth in rhythm with his body and Edward’s punches.