Reef of Death (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  PC groaned as Maruul tied open the cabana flaps to let the morning sun hit him in the face.

  “Wake up, lazy,” she called out. “Skipper’s ready.”

  PC got up and grabbed a cup of coffee in the skiff’s galley. He put on a wet suit and came up on deck as they were cruising south along the outer edge of the reef. Maruul watched off the starboard.

  “You and Arnhem came this way in the kayak?” PC asked.

  “Yes,” Maruul said. She coughed as she felt a painful mixture of sadness and fear grip her throat. “I remember Arnhem was sure we were at the point marked on the map. It looks different today. We came at high tide. All the reef was underwater.”

  PC shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun. The water was crystal green. Sections of the reef protruded above water, some volcanic rock and coral ledges rising as much as six, seven feet. The ocean waves rolled gently up onto the reef, then broke into small white crests that blended with the tidal pools and lagoons.

  A black freighter was anchored off the reef in an area of the sea that was darker, rougher. “What’s that boat doing there?” PC asked, pointing ahead. It had Anemone stenciled on its bow in big white letters.

  Maruul, her brow wrinkled, looked toward the freighter. “I remember it was nearby when Arnhem decided to dive.”

  “It flies a Malaysian flag,” Cliff said. “I checked it out before leasing the platform. Belongs to some big corporation. It’s been converted into a floating research lab.”

  “A lab?” PC said.

  “That’s what the Coast Guard told me. There are underwater volcanic vents in the ocean here. Under-water mineral towers. The Australian government gave the Anemone permission to test for chemicals. Temperatures. That sort of thing.”

  A pained expression crept onto Maruul’s face. “There was a sound of a motor coming from the freighter. Something different from a regular ship’s engine. It made an earsplitting noise while Arnhem was diving. It was strange, because the deck was deserted.”

  “It could have been the sound of an underwater drill,” PC said. “They’re probably drilling.”

  “They’re not supposed to,” his uncle said.

  A recess with shining ledges had been eroded into the reef for a hundred yards along the surface. One turquoise-and-pink shelf jutted out ten or twenty feet before a blazing white underwater cliff dropped into an abyss. PC noticed Maruul’s body stiffening. “You recognize something?”

  “This is definitely where Arnhem and I were in the kayak. I remember the whiteness.”

  “A chalk wall,” Cliff said. He slowed the boat to a crawl. “A mixture of coral, dolomite, and zinc oxides from the sea vents.”

  Maruul looked toward the freighter, then back down to the underwater cliff. “Arnhem thought the treasure would be here.”

  “This is right according to the map,” Cliff said. He maneuvered the skiff until it floated above a strip of volcanic rock, then dropped anchor. “We have to be careful. Some of this coral can cut a dive suit to pieces. You and Maruul explore the cliff in the sub. I’ll check the ledges, then catch up.”

  “There might be a marker only I would recognize,” Maruul said. “A sign of my village.”

  PC nodded. “She’s right. You two take the submersible.”

  “No. The ledges are too shallow. Waves will crash the sub.” Cliff stepped down to the stern swim platform and readied the sub for boarding. “You take it alone,” he told PC. “We’ll meet on the cliff face.”

  PC put on a pair of rubber tennis shoes. He slipped into the sleek fiberglass cockpit of the sub and closed the steel shark bars over him. “Don’t dive much deeper than a hundred feet or so,” his uncle said. “The nearest decompression chamber’s forty minutes away at the Cape.”

  PC fit snugly in the forward bucket seat, his legs stretched out in front of him. Cliff passed him his fins to store in a netted side compartment. “In case you want to leave the sub and explore. Take this, too.” He handed over a two-and-a-half-foot black stick with a thickened tip.

  “A bang stick?” PC asked.

  “Yes. Explosive head like the ones we trained with off Cancún. This one’ll handle a mako. No bullet. Kills by impact.”

  PC secured the weapon and started the sub’s motor. The rotors whirled powerfully, silently, like a fan. He felt uneasy about leaving Maruul with Cliff. He might show off as he had in Mexico. Take chances. “You guys be careful,” he called.

  Maruul gave a small wave. “You, too.”

  PC set his mask and breather in place. He nudged the throttle forward and taxied, circling at the surface until Maruul and Cliff had their masks and fins in place. They rechecked the regulators and air tanks, then dropped backward off the swim platform. PC trailed them as they went under and swam for the shallows of the long, glistening ledge.

  After a few minutes, PC got the feel for the mini-sub and was able to compensate for the strong undercurrent near the reef. He stayed thirty feet off the face of the chalk cliff until he was solid on the controls. A fissure in the whiteness of the wall made him turn, travel slowly to explore its cavity.

  At the mouth of the fissure, a coral tower rose from the ocean floor. As PC circled it, a harmless, small Port Jackson shark passed him, looking for food. A cloud of butterfly fish and purple basslets swarmed into the open water. There were shining angelfish. Huge, gracefully diving green sea turtles. A brilliantly yellow rabbitfish. Mushroom coral, sea fans, and black, spiny sea urchins were clustered in startling colonies.

  If he had a treasure, PC thought, he would hide it in this beautiful place.

  EEEEEEE. EEEE.

  Maruul heard the high-pitched sound and recognized it at once. She signaled to Cliff that she was swimming to one of the shallow ledges. When she reached it, she managed to stand in her fins and lift her head up into the air. She slid off her mask and breathed deeply. Cliff joined her.

  “That’s the sound I heard before,” Maruul said. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach.

  Cliff looked out beyond the anchored skiff to the distant freighter. “It’s drilling, all right.”

  Her mind still hadn’t retrieved all of her last day with Arnhem. The bright sunlight. Whiteness. The kayak. She had been convinced that the monstrosity she’d drawn on the computer screen was fiction, a bad dream from a dark, cryptic corner of her brain—but her mind was still playing tricks. She had felt confident a minute before, swimming along the edge of the reef, excited that at any moment she might find the treasure.

  “Maybe we should get out of the water,” she said.

  “Hey, we’ve checked almost the whole ledge,” Cliff said. “We might as well finish the rest of it; then you can go with PC in the sub.”

  Maruul’s thoughts turned to sharks. If there was no monster, there might well be a great white. Even in her village she’d heard people could be attacked by sharks in shallow water. An Aboriginal woman had been taken by her ankles—devoured in front of children and tourists at a beach near her boarding school.

  She tried to push her fears away.

  “I’ll swim in front,” Cliff offered.

  “Okay,” Maruul said.

  Cliff dove, his flippers kicking above the water, then sinking slowly. She followed him under and continued to scan the ledge. But the bad feeling came again.

  GET OUT OF THE WATER.

  An inner voice echoed in her mind.

  GET OUT

  PC, too, had heard the high-pitched sound. It was like a drill, he thought. He was certain the sound was coming from the freighter. By now, the maneuvering of the submersible had become automatic. He followed a school of batfish deeper into the winding passageway of the fissure. A glittering ribbon, a striation running down the center of a rock wall, caught his eye. The band started two feet from the surface, then plunged down a hundred feet into blackness. The undercurrent was gentle here. He brought the sub in closer.

  The shining strip looked like silver. He loosened a buckle on his suit and used it as a tool.
The metal was malleable, soft enough to shave. He slid the sample into a pouch in his diving vest, then reached back to the shining strip.

  Suddenly, the dark, ugly head of a fat eel flew out from a hole in the rock wall. Its long, slimy body rippled like a flag as it sank its needlelike teeth into the arm of his wet suit.

  YOW!

  PC’s startled cry released a rush of bubbles. His eyes were wide behind his mask.

  A second ghastly head shot out from the hole and locked onto his wrist. He yanked his arm back, but the eels held on like bulldogs. Their bodies thrashed, churned against him inside the cockpit.

  PC had never seen a moray eel attack divers unless they’d accidentally prodded it in its den. The eels shook their bodies savagely, powerfully, each determined to tear off a piece of his flesh. The sub spun out of control and careened toward the mouth of the fissure.

  PC desperately tried to rub the eels off, crush them against the cage bars. They held on. And on. Until a massive, impossible shadow roselike a mountain in front of the sub.

  “Oh, God.”

  Quickly, the eels let go and raced for safety back into the crevice. PC gasped as he watched the new arrival—a huge, dark form—drift closer toward him. The eels were merely a prelude, he realized, to a horror beyond his imagination. He began to tremble.

  A pair of large, yellowing eyes floated closer to him. He saw the giant ganglia rising out of the brow. The fins of the monstrosity churned the water, tilting the sub. The creature shook spastically, furiously, and its jaws opened to reveal its megamouth of teeth. You’re real, PC thought, aghast. You’re real.

  PC was paralyzed for a moment by the sight of the horror, then grabbed the controls and turned the sub sharply farther back into the fissure. The creature followed, crashing violently into the narrowing sides of the passageway. Its mouth closed, then opened again to gnash insanely at the chalk walls.

  EEEEEEEE. EEEE.

  The sound from the freighter was piercing now. PC thought the sound seemed to affect the fish, to infuriate it even more. The water where it snapped and thrashed was a boiling cauldron, its force pushing the sub deeper into the crevice. The frenzied creature was too huge to follow.

  But Cliff and Maruul… he had to warn them.

  He released a blast of compressed air. The sub rose fast.

  Too fast.

  It kept slamming against the sides of the crevice until it burst from the surface. PC swung open the cockpit cage, threw off his mask and tank, and scrambled out onto a strip of exposed reef. His tennis shoes gripped the sharp, cutting coral as he ran. He saw Cliff and Maruul standing waist deep on a ledge. A mammoth shadow moved toward them from the open water. The creature had found them.

  PC’s shout split the air:

  “GET OUT! GET OUT!”

  They turned to see PC yelling, looked out to where he was pointing. They saw the darkness heading for them.

  The sight cracked the last wall of memory in Maruul’s mind. She remembered Arnhem kicking madly for the surface. Arnhem reaching for her hand. The full nightmare. She backed toward the reef wall. Cliff followed her. They threw off their flippers and tanks—and tried to climb. The wall was too steep, too slippery.

  Deep gaps in the reef separated PC from them. He turned and raced back to the sub. No time for mask or tank. He slammed the cage bars closed over the cockpit and raced the sub along the surface.

  Cliff cupped his hands and tried to boost Maruul out of the water.

  “I CAN’T,” she cried. “I CAN’T.”

  The creature was there. Cliff turned to face it. He kept Maruul behind him, hoping the water was too shallow for the fish to strike. The creature’s head rose from the surface, its ganglia hanging like snakes. Cliff threw one of the air tanks, then the other. Both struck the fish. It stopped swimming, confused.

  Maruul screamed at the fish.

  “GO AWAY! GO!”

  The creature propelled itself forward like an orca after seals. PC held the throttle open as he raced through the waves. Each second was an infinity as he turned sharply, hurtling toward the ledge. He thought he knew what was going to happen. He wanted to shout to Cliff and Maruul, tell them he was going to ram the horror—but it was too late. Cliff began to swim along the side of the reef, trying to draw the monster after him.

  The fish hesitated, then thrashed until it was at Cliff’s side. For a moment it seemed as if it had overshot him, but at the last second it made a lightning grab and dragged him under.

  “No!” PC yelled. He revved the motor of the sub, rocking forward so the propeller screamed for a moment in air. He hoped the racket would frighten the fish into letting go of its prey.

  He had to get Maruul.

  He brought the submersible to her side, threw open the shark bars. She slid into the cockpit, shouting.

  “WHERE IS HE? WHERE IS CLIFF?”

  Suddenly, they saw the top half of him emerge from the sea. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Maruul and PC didn’t understand what was happening.

  Then the water below him churned—and they knew.

  The creature pulled Cliff back under. PC remembered the bang stick, grabbed it, and clutched it like a sword.

  The creature rose again.

  Maruul sobbed.

  “DON’T LOOK,” PC shouted.

  Cliff’s limp body was impaled on the creature’s teeth, its massive jaws shaking him.

  The sound of cracking bone.

  He saw Cliff’s rib cage ripped wide—saw his uncle’s lungs and bleeding stomach. With a final bite, jaws closed on Cliff’s skull. His face twisted, seeming for a moment an apocalypse reflected from a fun-house mirror—then burst into blood, brains, and bits of bone. The fish tossed its mutilated prey in a red tide, rolling, bubbling, seething. Finally, the creature swallowed Cliff into oblivion.

  PC cried out, his heart pounding in his chest. He turned the sub toward a cut in the reef. The sub’s power ebbed.

  EEEEEE!

  Maruul looked up.

  “PC. It’s coming again,” she said.

  He saw the monstrous darkness returning.

  “Come on, come on,” he urged, talking to it as if the thing could understand. The huge fish broke the surface, its jaws crashing down, grinding—then opening again. The bars of the cockpit bent, twisted. PC rose high in his seat, fast, lunging with the bang stick.

  Up.

  Up.

  The explosion happened high in the creature’s mouth. There was a flash of fire. Deformed, burned cartilage and skin. It was enough for the fish to stop, to fall away and sink.

  PC and Maruul made it to a strip of the dry reef. They tumbled out of the sub and collapsed. The sounds from the dark, deserted freighter had halted. PC fought tears as he lifted the batteries out of the sub and left them to bake in the hot sun. It would bring back a charge.

  It had to.

  Cliff’s dive mask and one of the air tanks rolled

  in the currents on a reef. Their metal trim flashed as the ocean washed gently over them, touched the reef, and retreated.

  There had been three divers.

  Now there were two.

  The reality rushed in on PC. He knew what they would have to do. He thought of his uncle. Alone. Cliff in a chilling, strange darkness. He began a silent prayer.

  Fly, Uncle Cliff.

  Go.

  Be in a Heaven somewhere.

  A Paradise.

  Let there be a God and angels and saints.

  5

  THE MEETING

  PC waited until the tide had begun to creep over the last dry ledge before he replaced the battery in the half-mangled sub. No aircraft had flown over. No fishing boats passed by. No one had come to rescue them.

  “It—the thing—could be waiting for us,” Maruul said.

  “We have no choice.”

  The voltage of the battery had rebounded in the sun, kicking out enough power to get them to the skiff. There had been no terrible dark shadow. No sounds from the Ane
mone. Nothing. PC pulled up anchor and started the engine. The skiff raced north back along the outer reef. He couldn’t think straight. They’d have to report everything to the Australian Coast Guard. He’d have to call his mother and father and tell them what had happened to Cliff.

  Fear and a terrible sorrow began to consume Maruul. She was damp and hungry. She saw the channel to the main lagoon. She pointed, forced herself to speak. “There’s a Coast Guard base near Cape Tribulation,” she said.

  PC turned the skiff and followed the buoys toward the mainland.

  “Why would the spirits make something terrible like that?” Maruul asked. “How could they create such a monster, a thing that can’t have any reason for being?”

  PC tightened the cables to the battery “I used to lie awake a lot of nights wondering the same thing about dinosaurs—and imagining God sitting around thinking up all the most terrible killing machines that have ever lived. Raptors and T rexes with mouths and teeth meant to murder every living thing around them. Lizards with horns and serrated fangs and razor claws. Why did he make great whites and crocodiles and blood-sucking bats? What kind of God is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Maruul said, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Every time I go into the water, I think I’m going to be eaten alive by something treacherous, but I go anyway. I force myself to remember all the good things God made on this earth. I think we’ve all got to fight the mistakes God made. The treachery and murdering and devouring. I try to believe that all the horror on this planet is caused by a devil. Demons. Not God.”

  “What were the sounds from the freighter?” Maruul asked. “It was the same with Arnhem. The shrieking from the Anemone. Nobody on deck. Just the sounds.”

  “There’s something really weird about that freighter. There had to be somebody aboard. Somebody must have seen what was happening to us,” PC said. “And why are they drilling?”