Reef of Death (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  Maruul heard Wally shouting. She ran back to the recess and saw a dingo head pinning him to the ground, clutching the old man’s throat.

  “No!” Maruul shouted as she ran, swinging the shovel upward. While the guard was looking up at Maruul, Wally’s hands shot above his head and grabbed a stone. He smashed it into his attacker’s head.

  Again.

  And again.

  PC rolled on the ground, trying to get away from the crusher. But the shaman caught him by the arm and threw him against the safety railing, shattering it. Pieces of the wooden railing slid down to mix with the chunks of magnesium. The huge steel cylinder lifted, sucked the wood and metal into the crushing chamber, and dropped.

  BAM.

  The pieces of wood and magnesium were a solution of shreds sucked up out of sight.

  The shaman grabbed PC by his feet, thrust him over backward, and began shoving him headfirst toward the gaping mouth of the crusher. PC felt a vacuum as the cylinder lifted. He fought against being pulled into the machine. The shaman smiled as he lifted PC’s legs, pinning his shoulders down. He began to slide PC in.

  BAM.

  The cylinder socked down just beyond PC’s head. He felt shards of magnesium cutting into his back, and a rush of air as the piston lifted again.

  “Let go of him! Let go of him!” He heard Maruul and Wally yelling, trying to pull the shaman off. Suddenly, PC kicked his legs free and wrapped them around the neck of the shaman. The shaman stopped laughing as PC yanked him over, headfirst, toward the crusher. The shaman felt a flutter in his dog-skin cape as the cylinder rose. He tried to pull away from the vacuum, but the cape was sucked in and he along with it.

  PC sprang to his feet in time to hear the shaman screaming out from behind the transparent wall. Maruul covered her eyes.

  BAM.

  One moment, there were shreds of flesh and bone crushed into the bed of magnesium. The next, all was red and silvery—death being sucked up into the Anemone.

  PC pointed in the direction from which the shaman and the dingo-headed guards had appeared. “That must be another way out of here.” He began to run, with Maruul and Wally fast behind him. The tunnel dead-ended at another grotto pool. Diving gear and several battered but streamlined submersibles lay ready at the pool’s edge.

  “The Executive Lounge,” PC said. He ran to one of the submersibles. “This is how Doctor Ecenbarger and her top dingo boys travel back and forth to the freighter. VASH subs with closed cockpits.”

  “What’s VASH?” Maruul asked, checking out the diving equipment.

  “Stands for variable altitude submersible hydro-foil,” PC said. “They can travel on top of and under the ocean.” He checked out the diving gear, grabbed three rebreathers, and tossed them onto the floor of the sub.

  There were sounds of guards heading down the tunnel toward them as the trio fastened their gear. PC slid in behind the controls of the sub, found the magneto switch, and started the engine. Maruul squeezed in behind him.

  “Hurry, Wally,” PC shouted.

  “Sardines in can,” Wally said, squeezing in after Maruul.

  PC cruised the submersible around the edge of the pool. A dozen guards and dingo men ran toward them with guns drawn. They started to fire.

  “Duck,” PC yelled.

  Bullets ricocheted off the grotto walls. PC held one hand on the steering wheel of the sub; the other grabbed for the dive-flap control. He opened the throttle wide, slid the canopy into place, and dropped the flaps. The VASH sub dove below the surface. The single nose headlight gave off a shaft of laser-bright light that burned through the darkness of a tunnel.

  “Too fast,” Maruul yelled.

  “That’s all these babies do,” PC said. “Fast.”

  He brought the throttle back, but the craft began to shoot upward, slicing off several of the hanging tips of stalactites.

  “Find bigger flooded lava tube, eh,” Wally shouted.

  “I’m trying,” PC called out.

  The sub shot through the flooded tunnel, racing around one curve and then another. The walls started to narrow. PC tried to hold the speeding sub to the center, but it began to scrape and bounce off the walls. Suddenly, the narrow tunnel gave way and they shot out into a wider section of the underwater labyrinth.

  “Oh, no,” Maruul said, seeing a half dozen lights in the passageway they had just come from. “They’re after us.”

  Wally turned in his seat. “Dingo heads.”

  A long, thin object headed for them.

  Whooooosh.

  It flew by

  “Dingo heads with spearguns,” Maruul added.

  Wally saw shining cylinders rotating on the sides of their attackers’ subs. “Spear machine guns,” he said.

  “I had to pick a sub without any!” PC said. He looked at a radar screen on the control board. He saw the trail of spears closing fast.

  Whoooooosh. Whooosh.

  He turned the sub sharply into another tunnel, and the spears missed. But the lights followed. The attackers were only two to a sub. Faster.

  Much faster.

  The tunnel began to narrow again. PC slalomed between a row of pinnacles and rocks. Ahead he saw the roof of the tunnel appear to break away. He slapped the front flaps up.

  “What are you doing?” Maruul screamed.

  The sub angled upward. Higher. Higher.

  Suddenly, it shot ten, fifteen feet into the air, then fell back down into the water. Maruul screamed. Wally saw a shower of aluminum spears break the surface and fall wide of their mark.

  Wally laughed. “We not easy target, eh.”

  One of the attackers’ subs surfaced and went airborne into a rock. The craft exploded like a bomb, sending the flaming torsos of its driver and gunner flying through the air.

  “Oh, God,” Maruul said. Then another sub shot up and landed close to them.

  PC got the hang of diving and jumping. He gave the VASH sub another leap. And another. For a moment he believed he could outmaneuver the dingo heads.

  “Dead end!”Maruul cried out.

  PC yelled too when he saw the tunnel wall. He yanked at the steering wheel as he sent the submersible upward. It shot out of the water, twisting, turning a hundred eighty degrees. The engines screamed in air. The sub slowed, hovered, then dropped headfirst like a fish. One of the attackers’ subs flew over PC’s, hit the dead-end wall, and burst into a fireball. PC opened the throttle again. The sub leaped forward as the other subs raced at him on a collision course. PC dodged them. Spears ricocheted off the sides of the sub.

  “I WANT THEM KILLED!” Dr. Ecenbarger shouted in the control room of the Anemone. She threw a switch. A sound machine—identical to the one at the grotto pool—was mounted below the waterline of the freighter. It began its high-pitched shrieking. She had watched the images of the three intruders on the monitors. She saw them climb into a VASH sub and disappear into the flooded maze of the lava tubes.

  She knocked one of her lab assistants out of the way and looked up to a digital readout on the electronic detonator that would set off the dynamite in the opal wall.

  Eighteen minutes, twenty seconds … Eighteen minutes, nineteen seconds …

  EEEEE. EEEEEEEE.

  Her eyes welcomed the dark shadow moving across the screen of one of the monitors. She bit gently on her lower lip and smiled.

  11

  FINAL BLOOD

  “They’re gone,” Maruul said. “No dingo heads.”

  PC checked the rearview mirrors on the craft and saw nothing. He eased back on the throttle. But a new blip appeared on the control panel’s sonar screen. “The sonar says there’s something behind us,” he said. “Something coming fast.”

  “Does our sub have rear spotlight, eh?” Wally asked.

  PC looked at a cluster of levers next to the headlight switch. He flicked each of them on and off until he hit one that sent a wide shaft of light behind them, illuminating the tunnel for nearly three hundred feet. “Can you see what it i
s?”

  The sub began to rumble and shake. A cloud of bait fish began to swim frantically around them. Black crabs scurried to hide in the niches of the tunnel’s walls. Maruul saw something emerging out of the darkness far behind them. It became thicker, glistening, until it looked like a shadow the size of a locomotive was speeding toward them.

  “It’s the thing!” Maruul screamed. “The fish!”

  Wally’s stomach did a flip-flop at the sight of the fish creature. The ganglia of its brow were swept back into tufts snapping above its head. Its mouth opened, the great slabs of cartilage parting to expose enormous, dagger-shaped teeth. The rear spotlight bounced off the creature’s eyes, making the fish look like a demon barreling out of Hades.

  “IT’S GOING TO GET US!” Maruul screamed.

  PC opened the throttle wide. Maruul’s head snapped backward from the acceleration. He turned the sub left sharply into another tunnel. The body of the monstrosity twisted, and it flicked its tail to follow. In a straightaway, PC was able to pull away, leaving the creature in darkness. He turned again and again, weaving through the network of twisting tunnels, hoping the fish would be lost.

  The tunnel became dangerously congested with rocks and pinnacles. PC slowed the sub and guided it through the strange seascape. The front headlight picked up the end of the burrow—a brown, pockmarked wall of lava rock.

  Maruul and Wally squirmed in their seats and stared out the Lucite shield of the cockpit. The light from the sub spilled across a cave of unbroken walls. PC turned the craft slowly until it faced out of the dead end.

  “Dingoes,” Wally yelled. “Dingoes.”

  A single VASH with a pair of dog-head killers blocked the tunnel behind them. Their ammunition canisters were empty

  “Good. They out of spears, eh,” Wally said.

  The dingo men slid their cockpit open. They were smiling. The rear guard leaned out clutching a steel tube.

  “Not so good,” PC said. “They have a torpedo hand launcher.”

  A small, sleek torpedo shot out of the tube, heading right for them. Its rear turbine churned the water behind it, and it closed fast. PC pushed the dive flaps down and tapped the throttle. Their sub dove as the torpedo raced overhead and hit into the dead end.

  The explosion blew off the top of the lava tube, and a pressure wave tossed their sub against a rock. Chunks of stone fell.

  A cloud of mud.

  Sand.

  The motor roared, spit out broken rotor blades, and died. PC hit the magneto switch.

  Again.

  And again.

  The sub was dead.

  “We’re cornered,” Maruul cried out.

  “Not if that was the ocean bottom that fell in,” PC said. “The blast must have opened the top of the tunnel.” The dingo-head guards circled and raised the torpedo launch tube again. “We’re sitting ducks,” PC yelled. He grabbed the rebreathers from the floor, and passed a pair of them to Maruul and Wally. “Put them on QUICK!”

  When they had their rebreathers in place, he threw open the cockpit and shouted at Maruul and Wally. “Get out!”

  The three of them scrambled over each other and kicked free from the seat. PC saw the guard pointing the launch tube directly at them.

  Suddenly, there was a blurring from the right, something huge and phantasmagoric shooting out from a passageway. An enormous mouth opened. There was a tumult of water and a loud snapping as enormous jaws closed on the dingo men and their sub. The torpedo gun fell, dropping into blackness as the guards’ death screams cut through the water.

  Maruul and Wally stared through their dive masks at the horror.

  “They were just the appetizers,” PC yelled into his buddy phone. “Follow me!” He thrust himself upward toward the cloud of mud. Maruul kicked after him, with Wally close behind. The visibility dropped to less than a foot. Finally, they saw an aura of light.

  There was warmth.

  Gases rose about them.

  Higher, PC recognized the terrain of the volcano vents. He saw the narrow lode of magnesium ribboning along the ocean floor toward the reef.

  “Keep coming up,” PC called into his buddy phone. Maruul and Wally heard him. They broke out of the tunnel ceiling at the base of the chalk wall where Cliff had died.

  “Hurry,” PC shouted.

  Maruul felt vibrations in the water as though an earthquake was happening.

  “IT’S COMING!” she screamed.

  The trio locked and thrust out their hands to grab at the water in front of them. They were a dozen feet from the base of the undersea white cliff when the roof of the lava tube behind them broke wide open. The huge fish crashed up through the fissure, shaking itself loose as if it was being born from the bowels of the sea.

  PC reached a crevice that had been eroded into the base of the chalk wall. He slid into it sideways like a crab. The fish creature came fast. PC grabbed Maruul, pulled her under the ledge. Together they yanked Wally in with them.

  The creature bit violently at the niche, trying to get at the prey. It could see them. Smell them. It turned on its side, shook its body, and thrust its arsenal of fins into the crack.

  “Don’t move,” PC said.

  Two of the creature’s sharp, barbed fins swung inches from Maruul’s face. The fins dug, waved frantically, and ground off chalk into a milky cloud.

  “Make it go away,” Maruul said. “God, please make it go away.”

  She heard a buzzer and felt something strange moving on her skin.

  “WHAT IS THAT?” she screamed at PC.

  “Change rebreathers with me,” he said.

  “Just tell me!” Maruul demanded. “It’s some kind of automatic alarm built into the re-breather, isn’t it?”

  PC slid the shoot bag with Ratboy and the opals off his back. He yanked open the Velcro straps of his vest and switched mouthpieces with Maruul. “We didn’t check the air supplies in the tanks,” PC said. He finished slipping the shoot bag onto his back and took a couple of deep breaths.

  “Take your rebreather back,” Maruul said.

  “Take mine, computer boy, eh,” Wally offered. “I breathe too long anyway.”

  “No,” PC said.

  The fish halted its frantic tearing at the fissure. For a moment it lay still, then glided away from the cliff. It began to swim back and forth.

  Waiting.

  PC felt the level of oxygen in his rebreather falling with each breath. He had to breathe faster.

  “I have to go up,” he said.

  “We can share,” Maruul said, offering her mouthpiece. There was a second buzzer and vibration. A moment later, a third. All three rebreathers were running out of oxygen.

  Maruul looked to PC. “What are we going to do?”

  PC didn’t answer. He reached his hand up to feel the ceiling of the fissure. Its whiteness came off on his hand. Maruul watched, puzzled, as PC swung the shoot bag off his back.

  “What was the last part of the treasure song?” PC asked.

  Maruul ran the whole of the riddle in her mind to get to the last line.

  “… But dawn the beast will slay,” she said.

  PC asked, “What color is dawn?”

  The three of them looked at each other and then at the chalk in which they lay hiding.

  “White, eh,” Wally said.

  PC remembered the white figures rising up through the host of monsters in the painting on the sacred wall. He reached out, grabbed a handful of the whiteness, and began to smear it onto his body.

  “Help me,” he said.

  Wally and Maruul understood. They began to paint his hair and face with the white chalk and clay. For a moment, Maruul thought of her village. The sacred ceremonies. And Arnhem.

  The trio helped each other paint their backs, the rebreathers, and the shoot bag. Soon, they each looked like a ghost.

  “What if the wisdom of the paintings is wrong?” Maruul asked.

  “Believe,” Wally said.

  “Whatever,” PC s
aid, “you two get ready to swim for the top. And I mean that!” Maruul noticed an uncovered spot on PC’s brow. She took another piece of clay and pressed its whiteness gently over it.

  “We are ghosts,” Wally said. “I think we be lucky ghosts.”

  PC saw the fish patrolling the cliff. He slid his arms up along the top of the ledge, let them curl out. The creature halted, hovered. It moved again, slowly, ten feet from the fissure.

  Watching.

  Smelling.

  PC began to slither upright onto the whiteness of the wall until he was a phantom blended into the rest of the blazing whiteness. Maruul and Wally heard his voice in the receivers of their masks. “I don’t think it can see or smell me,” PC said. “Maybe the clay covers our scent, too.”

  PC stayed pressed into the white wall. He crept his right hand higher, tried to pull himself up slowly. To his left, he recognized the shining strip lode of magnesium that violated the cliff. The lode was two to three feet wide in some places, a ribbon cutting down from above and across the seascape for as far as he could see. He kept his arm away from its silvery path.

  Suddenly, one of his hands slipped downward in a quick motion. The creature seemed to notice. It turned and looked straight at him.

  It moved closer.

  Its enormous jaws stopped inches from PC’s face. They opened slowly, pulling in water across its dagger teeth and expelling it through its gills. PC was face-to-face with his worst horror. The fish inched still closer, then turned away and sank back to cruise past the crack where it knew there had been food.

  Wally watched the fish. He inched his way to the brink of the fissure and saw PC above him on the wall. For a moment, fear made Wally remember the safe smell of smoke. The sweet vapors of bushtucker barbecue and the warmth of a home fire. The three of them were warriors, he thought. He wanted them all to live and go back. He wanted Lightning Man and the great Rainbow Serpent to save them. More than anything, he wished he could save the sacred wall of dreaming.

  He heard new sounds. A motor. Something mechanical approaching.

  PC heard the sounds, too. He looked out toward the mineral towers of the volcanic vents. What appeared to be a huge metal crab with spindly, clawed legs stepped out of the curtain of gases and mineral clouds. The freakish contraption floated toward him as the fish became spooked and swam to disappear in the forest of giant seaweed.