Reef of Death (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  Books by Pulitzer Prize-winner

  PAUL ZINDEL

  THE ZONE UNKNOWN

  Book One: Loch

  Book Two: The Doom Stone

  Book Three: Raptor

  Book Four: Rats

  Book Five: Reef of Death

  Book Six: Night of the Bat

  The Gadget

  YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

  The Pigman

  The Pigman’s Legacy

  My Darling, My Hamburger

  A Begonia for Miss Applebaum

  Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball!

  I Never Loved Your Mind

  The Undertaker’s Gone Bananas

  Confessions of a Teenage Baboon

  The Amazing and Death-Defying Diary of Eugene Dingman

  David and Della

  The Girl Who Wanted a Boy

  A Star for the Latecomer with Bonnie Zindel)

  To Take a Dare (with Crescent Dragonwagon)

  P.C. HAWKE MYSTERIES

  Book One: The Scream Museum

  Book Two: The Surfing Corpse

  Book Three: The E-mail Murders

  Book Four: The Lethal Gorilla

  Book Five: The Square Root of Murder

  Book Six: Death on the Amazon

  Book Seven: The Gourmet Zombie

  Book Eight: The Phantom of 86th Street

  THE WACKY FACTS LUNCH BUNCH

  Book One: Attack of the Killer Fishsticks

  Book Two: Fifth Grade Safari

  Book Three: Fright Party

  Book Four: The 100% Laugh Riot

  SHORT STORIES

  Love & Centipedes

  Rachel’s Vampire

  PLAYS

  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

  The Secret Affairs of Mildred Wild

  Ladies at the Alamo

  Let Me Hear You Whisper

  And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little

  Every Seventeen Minutes the Crowd Goes Crazy

  The Ladies Should Be in Bed

  Amulets Against the Dragon Forces

  Published by Graymalkin Media

  www.graymalkinmedia.com

  Reef of Death

  Copyright © 1998 by Paul Zindel

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN: 978-1-935169-67-3

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS:

  Zindel, Paul.

  Reef of death / Paul Zindel.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While helping a beautiful Aboriginal girl search for her people’s missing treasure near the Great Barrier Reef, seventeen-year-old PC finds himself fighting an evil scientist and a deadly underwater monster.

  [1. Monsters—Fiction. 2. Great Barrier Reef (Qld.)—Fiction.

  3. Australia—Fiction. 4. Australian aborigines—Fiction.

  5. Buried treasure—Fiction.

  6. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Z647Rh 1998

  [Fie]—dc21 97-21864 AC

  Cover image © 2010 by Andrea Bertaccini

  www.tredistudio.com

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, recording, photocopying or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electric piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://www.graymalkinmedia.com/

  To my editor, Robert O. Warren

  who makes certain that kids always win…

  1

  FROM THE DEEP

  The creature swam in the blackness at the base of the reef, ganglia rising out of its head like glistening, dead eels. It moved gracefully between the white underwater cliff and a world of sulfurous mounds—each the size of a football stadium. The volcanic mounds had been violently exploded up through the ocean floor more than 50,000 years ago—and they were still growing. Towering chimneys shot out minerals in jets of water hot enough to melt lead.

  A young Aboriginal girl leaned over the edge of a sea kayak. The light from the noonday sun penetrated deep into the water and bounced off the chalk drop-off. The girl held a snorkeling mask pressed gently against the roll of the surface water. She could see down clearly, sixty, seventy feet, to where the bubbles from her brother Arnhem’s scuba tank danced up through branches of huge gorgon fans and brain coral. Clownfish milled below the dark, muscular body of the young diver. He was searching today down near the end of light.

  The girl wished she could talk to Arnhem. You have been down too long. Too deep. The air in your tank is nearly gone. There are only minutes left to look for the Secret.

  Arnhem saw the kayak above him as a shimmering, blue twig. He knew Maruul would be worried. He had hoped the treasure might be in a cave along the chalk cliff. Or that he would find a slab of pictographs carved into one of the mineral towers. He cleared water from his mask, and kept swimming with the bold, powerful strokes he had learned in the billabong on his tribe’s homeland: a pond far away, beyond the mountains, where the water was fresh and his eyes never burned.

  He lowered his head, thrust his rubber fins harder, and went deeper. He heard a shrill, mechanical scream.

  EEEEEE. EEEE.

  He believed that somewhere, nearby, a large motor had started.

  Above, the girl had seen Arnhem heading farther down. No, she thought. No! Then she too heard the high-pitched sound. She looked up from the mask. An old, rust-spotted freighter was anchored out beyond the reef. She thought of waving and calling out so anyone aboard would know they were diving in the area. But the ship’s deck was deserted.

  EEEEEEEEE.

  The creature heard the sound, too. It moved its huge tail and pushed water with its immense, powerful pectoral fins. It rose fast up through the hot darkness above the center mound. Its gut shook—contracted—pumped enzymes into its stomach. Through the gnarled sensory lobes on its back, the excited creature crudely understood the sound was its message to feast.

  Arnhem found no treasure in the underwater cliff. No mysterious drawings on a chilled, dead tower. Then the shadow, a roll of liquid night, exploded into sight beneath him. At first he was confused. He stared down as the huge specter lightened, grayed in its rush upward toward the light. Arnhem realized that something large, something alive and unthinkable, was swimming straight for him. He started kicking frantically for the surface.

  The creature locked on its prey It saw the boy kicking and could hear his rushed, panicked breathing. A second later, it was close enough to smell him.

  Terrified, Arnhem glanced down, saw the mouth of the tremendous fish open into a glowing slab of white teeth the size of daggers. He had been warned about great whites and their jaws that could bite—and slice—three hundred times harder than any animal, sharks that could devour seals, turtles, license plates. But the demon fish he saw now was beyond the crocodile fear of the bush swamps. Beyond the fear of death. Beyond time.

  He kicked violently, thrusting himself upward. His sister saw his face twisted by terror. The huge, mutant fish was closing. She reached into the water. She prayed she could grab her brother’s hands and pull him up into the sea kayak.

  EEEEEEE. EEEE. EEEE.

  Jaws snapped on Arnhem’s torso like a vise. For a moment, he felt release, as thou
gh the wind had been knocked out of him. His arms stretched upward helplessly, his fingers clawing toward the sweet face of his sister. He saw her horror, her hand thrust down toward him. He felt himself shaken violently, then the pain as though a thousand needles were hammered into his stomach. The taste of blood filled his mouth. In his final second alive, he saw a long, red eel bursting out of his waist.

  Maruul screamed. She saw Arnhem’s intestines and legs fall away from him. A shudder racked her body and she began to choke uncontrollably. It had to be a dream, an impossible nightmare! The creature dove to follow the sinking limbs. It snapped at them as the girl saw Arnhem’s torso float up to the surface, saw the white flash of spine and the circle of shredded, raw flesh.

  The great fish rose again and seized what was left of the corpse. It closed its jaws and plunged down through a red cloud of blood, back toward the blackness of the deep.

  Later, when they found the girl, she was shivering in the bottom of the kayak. Her body lay curled tight like a fetus.

  She was still screaming.

  2

  THE CALL

  The second week of summer break, PC McPhee had the distinct feeling his entire family was going down the tubes. His mother had joined a “For Women Only” club, and his father was obsessed with seeing old Jean-Claude Van Damme movies. Even his grandmother Helen had grown weirder than usual. Gone were family Scrabble nights and going to Giants games. There was no more Pictionary or watching the six-o’clock TV news together. They all floated past each other in the hallways of the McPhee San Francisco home as though they were sealed in Glad wrap.

  All PC found himself doing was playing Seven Dirty Dwarves, Magnum Tetris Attack, and Diehard Demon- 3, the computer games that had helped him earn his nickname. His real name was Peter Collins McPhee, but no one called him that anymore.

  No one.

  Lately, on the rare night when his family managed to eat together, everyone got on his case.

  “Your uncle Cliff called for you this morning from Cairns, Australia,” Grandma Helen told PC. “He wants you to fly down and help him and not be a sloth this summer.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” PC said.

  “I just remembered,” Grandma Helen said. “I can’t tell you anything unless I think of it, you know.”

  “It’s probably just one more of his get-rich schemes,” Mrs. McPhee said. “Remember when he had PC fly down to Costa Rica to help him launch an ‘international jewelry enterprise’? That turned out to be three women sitting under a banana tree gluing glitter onto the backs of dead beetles.”

  “Hey,” PC said, “at least Uncle Cliff tried something.”

  “New isn’t always good, PC,” Mr. McPhee said, and started laughing. “There was that summer he had you come down to sell timeshares in a Yucatán lagoon resort and …”

  “And it turned out the lagoon was crocodile infested!” Mrs. McPhee said. She giggled.

  PC remembered that trip well. He had had terrible dreams about being eaten alive by crocodiles for months after he came back. The nightmares had turned into a deep-seated fear whenever he went near water—but he never told anyone about it.

  “All your uncle Cliff ’s schemes earned a big bagel,” Grandma Helen said. “A zero.”

  “Yeah, but I had fun, and he taught me how to scuba dive, kick box, and dance the rumba.” PC pushed a clump of hair out of his eyes and finished chewing a mouthful of roast lamb. “Where’s his number?”

  Grandma Helen passed the mint jelly and a platter of steaming carrots and broccoli. “I don’t know. I wrote it down somewhere, but I think I threw it out with the garbage.”

  PC groaned.

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. McPhee said. “He’ll call back.”

  PC had liked Grandma Helen a lot in the beginning when she had come to live with them, but lately she’d started to act like a crazed Mediterranean witch. She’d started snoring, letting out screams in the middle of the night, and sometimes sounding like she was talking in tongues. It had started to freak out PC’s friends when they stayed overnight. Grandma Helen’s main new shortcoming was that she’d started falling asleep while cooking, and burned pots.

  After dinner, Mr. McPhee came to PC’s room. “Your mother and I have decided to drive to a Native American casino for the night. She’s got a yen to play video poker. I’ll sit at a blackjack table.”

  “Okay” PC said.

  His father got his usual accountant’s encased-in-plastic look. “You know, I’m doing the books for a Dial-a-Sleep factory If you don’t get to fly down to see your crazy uncle, maybe you’d like a job this summer delivering mattresses.”

  “Nice.”

  PC stayed awake long after his parents had left. He watched a rerun ofX-Files, Mad Max—Beyond Thunderdome, and a special on the Discovery Channel about burial rites throughout the world. As a last-ditch attempt to fall asleep, he turned to Skin Diver magazine. Seven men and women had written about their most exciting dives. One said his was off Queensland, Australia.

  Visible from the moon, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest living thing. The monuments of humans are humble before the awesome accomplishment of the tiny polyps that have created the reef—the great mystery fringing the splendid outdoor playground Down Under. …

  At three A.M., PC woke up to a shocking scream. He thought a Chilean death squad had broken down the front door of the house and that a shrieking woman was being killed. Ribbons of smoke curled toward the light from his TV.

  “Grandma Helen!”

  PC bolted out of bed. In the hallway, he saw Helen emerging from the black smoke that was pouring out of the kitchen. She looked drunk, waving a big soup pot with its bottom burned out. “Potatoes. I forgot I was boiling potatoes.”

  He shot by her, checked the kitchen for flames. A chunk of residual green enamel was roasting on a cooling electric burner. He opened a window, snapped a towel up at the screeching smoke alarm on the ceiling, then realized he was barefoot stepping on cooked potatoes. “Ouch! You could have killed us,” PC said.

  An odd smile crept across Helen’s face as she came back into the kitchen. For a moment, her eyes rolled up into the top of her head and she looked like an embarrassed little girl throwing an epileptic fit. Then her eyes rolled back down. PC squirmed under her stare.

  “You should go to Australia,” she said. “You’ve had enough of San Francisco. Enough of steep hills and gender benders. Enough of fog. You need to feed koalas and visit termite mounds. Your uncle Cliff said he needs your help with a young girl. An Aboriginal girl. And he wants you to help find a sacred treasure.”

  “A sacred treasure?”PC looked at her long and hard to see if she was making the whole thing up.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that at dinner?”

  “I just remembered that part,” she said. “And oh, yes—he said it was urgent.”

  “Are you sure you threw his number out?”

  “No, I’m not.” Helen began looking through a slew of Day-Glo-green stickies she’d plastered all over the side of the refrigerator. “Oh, here it is,” she said, pleased, grabbing one of the stickies. She pressed it into PC’s hand.

  “Thanks a lot,” PC said. He went to the kitchen wall phone and dialed the number on the paper. After several rings, his uncle answered. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, good buddy,” Cliff said. “I could really use your help.”

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s a nuthouse down here.”

  PC heard the excitement crackling in his uncle’s voice. “What?”

  “Spooky stuff. Right up your alley,” Cliff said. “This time we can have it all, PC! Fortune! Adventure! Fame! Man, it’s the chance of a lifetime for us Down Under in Australia. And your plane leaves at noon!

  The Qantas 767 jet descended to 12,000 feet before it broke free from clouds above the Coral Sea. PC looked down from his window as the dark blue of the ocean met the string of blue-gr
een islands and shoals that made up the Great Barrier Reef.

  He punched some buttons on Ratboy, his laptop. The nickname had popped into his head one day when he was using a mouse. Mouse and Ratboy. Ratboy and mouse. It had made him laugh. Great Barrier Reef, 2,000 kilometers long, off the eastern coast of Queensland…

  PC checked a series of travel agency home pages. Everything that came up gave him an adrenaline rush: Dive with whale sharks. Feed 200-pound potato cods. Explore shipwrecks.

  “All electronics must be stowed” came over the loudspeaker. PC adjusted his seat to the upright position and got prepared for the landing.

  The Cairns airport was crowded with international travelers: women in white slacks and dresses, men in crisp, loud suits. Others were grunge-dressed for the outback. PC’s flight was forty minutes early He washed up, brushed his teeth, and put on a clean T-shirt. He picked up his luggage and made it through customs.

  His uncle stood out—tall, tanned, beaming—in the mob of waiting relatives, tour guides, and drivers greeting the plane.

  “Hey, buddy,” Uncle Cliff said, giving him a hug.

  “Hi.”

  Cliff held him back, looked him over. “You’ve been working out.”

  PC grinned. “Yeah. Running. Weights, three times a week. Swimming.”

  “You’re going to need it all.” Cliff grabbed PC’s large canvas suitcase. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll catch you up on the way.” PC tossed on his favorite cap, black-and-tan camouflage with a Cliff Dwellers patch and Indian stick figures on the front. He carried his backpack as Cliff led the way past the crowded duty-free shop and car rentals out to the short-term parking lot. He stopped at a red convertible, opened the trunk, and tossed in PC’s suitcase.

  “Nice Mercedes.”

  “Special lease from Budget.” Cliff swung behind the wheel. PC knew Cliff had always needed a flashy car. He was his mother’s youngest brother, thirty-eight years old, and still into image. A swimmer’s build. Blue jeans and Italian loafers. The only thing wrong was that when Uncle Cliff had $10,000 in a bank, he usually owed somebody else $20,000.