“Don’t be a jerk,” Max said. “She’s nice. Her ex was a SEAL.”
“Huh,” Shane said. “Maybe that’s why she has a tail.”
“I said not to be a jerk,” Max replied. “You don’t have to talk about her ass.”
“Not her ass, dumbshit,” Shane said, nodding towards the black pickup truck that pulled out behind Helen’s minivan. “I mean that right there. Tinted windows. No plates. She’s being followed. And we both know who uses vehicles like that when they need to.”
“Fuck,” Max said. “Cartel.”
“Cartel,” Shane nodded. “Where’s the Jeep? I think we have an adventure on our hands.”
***
“No video?” Espanoza asked as he watched three blips on a GPS monitor. “Just red dots? That’s not what was promised, James.”
“There will be video and boosted audio communications,” McCarthy said. “There hasn’t been time to fine tune the communications systems yet, like I said.”
“So until then we just watch these blips?” Espanoza frowned. “Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.”
“For now,” McCarthy nodded. “But once we do get the com systems dialed in you’ll have HD video streaming right to your monitors.”
A shrill noise sounded and Dr. Morganton leaned forward, her brows furrowing as one then a second of the blips on the monitor disappeared. She looked at McCarthy, panic in her eyes.
“What happened?” Espanoza asked. “Where did they go?”
“I…I don’t know,” McCarthy replied. “Their GPS transponders must have shorted or something.”
“Or they disabled them,” Diego Fernandez said, Espanoza’s right hand. “Trying to make a run for it.”
“With my product,” Espanoza snarled.
“No, they wouldn’t do that,” McCarthy said. “They know what will happen to their families.”
“What families?” Espanoza grinned, looking at Diego. “Send word. Kill them all.”
Diego nodded and left the room.
Espanoza looked at the stricken faces of Dr. Morganton and McCarthy.
“What?” he asked, looking honestly perplexed. “They were warned.”
Water streamed into the sub as John fought to regain control.
“Mayday!” John shouted into the com. “Mayday! I am taking on water and, well, uh…”
He looked at the two video monitors that still worked and shook his head.
“Uh…I’m under attack from a giant fucking shark!” he finished.
The video monitor showed the right side of the sub and the massive shark that gripped it in its jaws. The sub shook as the shark wrenched it back and forth, trying to saw through what it thought was a whale’s body. Oil and hydraulic fluid leaked out around the shark’s head, but it wasn’t daunted as it dove, driving the sub deeper.
“John….me…teeth…,” the faint voice of Bart said over the com.
“Bart! I can’t hear you, man!” John yelled. “Are you alright? Talk to me!”
There was no response except for a loud burst of static. John ripped the headset off and threw it against the monitors. He tried to push more power to the propulsion system, but the sub was designed to look and act like a whale. The only way it moved was by its specially designed, undulating tail.
That wasn’t going to fight off or outrun a shark the size of the one that had him.
John gripped the controls, his knuckles popping, and held on for the fast descent to the bottom as he heard the hull around him groan and warp.
***
“John!” Bart shouted. “John! Can you hear me?”
There was no response. The com was dead. And as Bart watched his cockpit fill with water he knew he was dead soon too.
Unless…
He let go of the controls as his eyes found the depth gauge.
“Shit,” he muttered as he watched the depth increase from 500 feet to 550 feet to 600 feet rapidly. “I better do this now.”
He popped open a small compartment in the floor, grabbed a rebreather and a pair of hand fins. Not having the bottom halves of his legs made flippers useless. He settled the rebreather over his head and onto his shoulders, strapping the apparatus around his chest and back.
650 feet, read the depth gauge.
“Fuck,” Bart muttered as he put the mouthpiece in.
He tucked a hand fin into his belt then reached up and twisted four bolts in the cockpit hatch. He yanked hard on a lever then slammed it back home and the hatch exploded outward. Cold ocean water rushed in at Bart and he held himself steady until he was completely immersed.
Then he slipped on the other hand fin and pushed himself up and out of the sub.
He was an ex-SEAL, and trained to fight his fear, but his wet suit became suddenly warm as he pissed himself at the sight of the shark that had his sub gripped in its jaws and was steadily pushing it towards to bottom of the ocean.
The thing had to be over sixty feet long. It was an impossible creature.
Bart knew his sharks well enough to quickly see that the thing wasn’t a great white. He had no idea what the hell it was.
He took a large breath from the rebreather, oriented himself towards the surface, and started to swim, glad for the strength the hand fins added. But they weren’t the same as flippers on feet. In a minute, he was exhausted and had to struggle to control his breathing.
He slowed himself, very aware that if he surfaced too quickly he’d get the bends and nitrogen bubbles in his blood stream would end up in his brain. That would be bad. Deadly bad.
***
The sub, and monster shark, came to a crashing halt as it smashed into a formation of volcanic rock. Frustrated by the lack of blood from its prey, the shark thrashed its head back and forth, desperate to tear open the faux whale’s belly.
But instead of the delicious red that it sought, out came a steady stream of white. The shark chomped over and over, crushing the subs cargo hold, releasing kilo after kilo of drugs into the Pacific Ocean. The white powder dissolved quickly in its new saline environment, mixing perfectly with the seawater.
The shark pulled back, alarmed by the strange substance that filtered through its massive gills. The drug raced through the creature’s bloodstream and the shark whipped about, its senses heightened to a level that even science couldn’t have imagined.
Sixty feet of drug fueled shark sped through the water, ready to eat every damn thing in sight.
***
Suddenly, Bart had other bubbles to worry about than just the nitrogen ones in his bloodstream. Huge air bubbles rose from below. They slammed into him, bursting around his body, and he was surprised to find that when they broke, the water became milky white.
The cocaine.
Bart figured the shark must have finally ripped through the sub’s hull and into the cargo hold. All of those kilos of cocaine were now leaking into the Pacific Ocean. Bart stared as the bubbles kept coming, then grew even more alarmed because he suddenly realized the water was too murky for him to see.
That meant he wouldn’t know if anything was coming at him.
He said fuck it to worrying about the bends and started to swim as fast as he could.
Digging deep, pulling from his training, he reached above with his hand fins and stroked over and over. He’d once been offered special flippers that could strap to his shortened legs, but he’d refused out of pride. He felt like an idiot for that decision as he could have used the extra speed right then. But that was a worry best left for when he got out of the water.
And Bart actually believed that was possible as he rose higher and higher, his arms screaming with exhaustion.
He spread his fingers as wide as possible in the hand fins, hoping for more lift, but it didn’t matter, his muscles were nearly spent. The cocaine bubbles continued to burst around him and he almost wished he could get some, if just for the energy boost.
But none of that mattered, not the exhausted muscles or the fanciful coke wishes, because from his right side came a nightmare. He was so focused on swimming, and waiting for the attack from below, that he never even saw the shark that came at him from the side. The shark hit him at full speed and Bart felt his pelvis shatter, his ribs crack, his flesh tear from bone.
Water streamed into his lungs as the rebreather mouthpiece fell away from his lips and the bright red of his life drained quickly into the ocean, turning the cocaine clouds from white to pink.
***
“What the hell do the cartels want with a mom and her two little kids?” Max asked as he kept the Wrangler at a safe following distance from the black pickup.
“I don’t know,” Shane replied. “Kinda weird, though, that this John Sherman guy is recruited by another ex-SEAL and now a cartel hit squad is tailing his wife.”
“Ex-wife,” Max corrected.
“Yeah, you’re counting on that, aren’t you?” Shane smiled.
“Fuck you, bro, she was a nice lady,” Max said.
“And she didn’t freak at your horrid appearance?” Shane asked.
“Fuck you, Patchy McPatcherson,” Max responded. “She did not.”
Shane shrugged. “Yeah, she’s probably seen worse. She was married to a SEAL who got his legs blown off. Makes your lack of an ear and melty skin kinda weak.”
“Hey, my melty skin is plenty scary, dude,” Max said. “Don’t knock the fear factor my face has.”
“Are you taking pride in your hideousness now?” Shane laughed.
“I am a unique human being,” Max said. “I am beautiful because I exist.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Some self-help book Aunt Marsha sent me when I first got back from Afghanistan,” Max replied. “It really helped me with those rough few nights.”
“Dude, some fat bowls of Northern California Lime Haze is what got you through those nights,” Shane countered.
“Oh, right,” Max smiled. “Speaking of…”
“Got it right here,” Shane said as he opened the glove compartment and grabbed a box of rifle cartridges.
He opened the box and picked out one of the cartridges. He unscrewed the “bullet” and tipped the cartridge. Out came a very thick joint. He flipped the joint to his mouth, catching it easily between his lips despite the wind that whipped into the open topped Wrangler, fished for a lighter in his pocket, then sparked the joint, drawing deeply.
“Nothing like following a cartel pickup while smoking a fatty,” Shane said, smoke billowing from his nostrils.
Max reached for the joint, but Shane took another drag before handing it to him.
“Jesus, bro, you hogged half of this,” Max said, looking at the joint before taking his own long drag. He coughed a little then let the smoke slowly escape from his mouth.
“It was a stressful morning,” Shane said, tapping his eye patch. “Turns out you can’t grow eyes back. Who fucking knew, right?”
“Fucking medical system,” Max said, taking another drag. “Thanks, Obama.”
“Damn liberals not being able to let me regenerate my eyeball,” Shane said. “I blame all the pot they smoke.”
“Damn skippy, dude,” Max coughed.
“Whoa,” Shane said. “Where are they going?”
“The freeway,” Max replied. “Shit.”
“Get up closer,” Shane said. “Fuck being casual. If they are going to do more than just follow, they’ll do it on the freeway so they can escape fast through the chaos.”
“What we got back there?” Max asked, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the covered and locked cargo area of the Wrangler.
“Oh, we got something deadly, I’m sure,” Shane said as he undid his seat belt and crawled into the back.
***
The shark’s jaws were so large that when it bit all the way down, Bart’s body split in half, crushed by several tons of pressure per square inch. The monster shook its head a few times then opened wide and gulped Bart’s top half down in one swallow. It worked its jaws a some more, just to make sure it got every bite, then turned its attention to the lower half. It dove as the truncated legs sunk quickly to the bottom.
The drugs that filled the water passed through its gills and the shark felt a surge of energy it couldn’t even comprehend. With a massive thrash of its tail, it covered the distance to the sinking legs in a millisecond. The taste of the flesh was like nothing it had experienced. Every drop of blood, every ounce of meat, was like bliss as the drugs turned the shark’s hunger up to eleven.
But it wasn’t the only enhanced creature in the ocean.
So busy enjoying the new sensations the drugs brought to its brain, the shark didn’t notice its brother in fins rushing toward it from below.
That shark, the one that crushed Bart’s sub and first found the delights of drug-filled gills, saw only a meal before it, not a fellow member of its genetically cloned species.
The two behemoths met nose to nose in a cartilage crushing collision of teeth and drug fueled rage.
***
Shane casually assembled his .338 MacMillan sniper rifle as Max roared up the on ramp to I-5.
“Are we worried about police?” Max asked, tossing the roach out of the Wrangler as he glanced over at Shane and the large rifle in his lap.
“I don’t know, are we?” Shane asked, twisting the barrel into place. He reached behind him and grabbed a full magazine, one of ten in a case on the backseat, and slapped it home. “Personally, I think we’re good.”
Max shrugged. “If you say so, bro.”
“I do,” Shane smiled, resting the rifle against the dashboard.
They passed a station wagon filled with kids and Shane waved. The kids saw his eye patch and the rifle and just stared.
“They’re passing the minivan,” Max stated. “They’ll come along side and open fire.”
“You think they have guys in the bed?” Shane asked. Two men with sub-machine guns popped up from the pickup’s bed and turned their weapons on Helen’s minivan as they got parallel with the vehicle. “That answers that.”
Shane stood up and braced his legs and feet against the side door and his seat. He settled his rifle on the top of the Wrangler’s windshield frame and sighted through the scope, placing the crosshairs directly on one of the shooters.
“Try to keep it steady,” Shane said.
“Will do,” Max said. He didn’t bother trying to close the distance between the Jeep and the pickup, since the four compact cars in front of him didn’t make a difference to Shane. With the scope he had, it would be like reaching out and lightly kissing the man in the crosshairs.
Shane gently squeezed the trigger and the break happened almost as a surprise like always. The man’s head centered in his scope was vaporized.
“Oh, that was pretty,” Max said then cringed as a mist of blood coated the windshield.
The cars in front of the Jeep, and directly behind the pickup, swerved and braked, causing Max to yank the wheel hard to the left.
“Hang on!” Max shouted.