CHAPTER THREE - Ben
Kodiak, Alaska
Benjamin Reeves had trained for disaster scenarios for the greater part of his life. Earthquakes, forest fires, storms, and tsunamis. Terrorist attacks. He was prepared to help in any situation. Except this one.
He was cruising the long way home in his pickup truck, windows down, summer breeze lifting the hair on his arms. His mind was still on the matte black twin-engine helicopter that Bagh had just shown him—the latest addition to the air wing.
“LM-80 Cormorant. Long-range enough for a medevac from the middle of the ocean. This thing’s designed for anti-submarine, anti-ship, search and rescue, cargo lift, special ops, you name it.”
Reeves was wondering whether said special ops included him when he noticed the group of people gathered in the harbour.
They were pointing at something in the distance, which he at first took to be a huge pod of orcas. Several people were taking pictures.
He rolled to a stop in an empty intersection and squinted through the sun’s glare.
His mouth slowly fell open. Not whales.
The vast shape in the water rose and fell through the surface in a connected wave, bigger than his mind could comprehend.
Sitting in the idling truck, Reeves scrambled to regain his slipping hold on reality. He clung to one certainty like a buoy: this thing, whatever it was, was heading for shore.
He shut off the truck so he could listen. People were beginning to panic. He could hear them shouting. He wrenched his seatbelt off and flung open the truck door.
By the time his feet hit the pavement, the thing was already in the harbour. Reeves cursed as a shower of seawater erupted like a mine.
Several people screamed. Dogs pulled at their leashes, barking frantically. The crowd began to sprint away from the shore as the mammoth creature crested the waves.
On the passenger’s seat, Reeves’ phone rang. He stood in the intersection, frozen by what he was seeing, when the scream of a child cut through the noise.
Propelled into action, he dove across the seat for his phone and then sprinted towards the shore with trained agility, phone at his ear.
The voice on the other end was frantic. “Reeves, I need you to get to the harbour—” It was his superior, Officer Miller.
The screaming girl’s mother scooped her up. She took off towards the parking lot.
“I’m here, sir.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“All I know is we got a distress call from the coast guard, and then we lost contact.”
The tsunami siren erupted, an unceasing wail from the top of several masts along the shoreline. At this, people burst out of nearby homes and shops.
“Sir, it’s unclear what—”
At the end of the docks, something rose out of the water that made Reeves stop in his tracks. It was a black serpent’s head, as large as the moored speedboats, a flare of horns at the back of its skull. A blast of seawater rained from nostrils the size of basketballs. The serpent tasted the air.
“Reeves, you there?”
The serpent closed in, crushing the sailboats in its path and sending swells of water high enough to capsize the rest. Several people on the docks vanished beneath the waves.
Reeves lowered the phone and raced closer to the beach.
“Get out of the water!” he bellowed.
The dock shattered beneath the serpent’s weight. It did not seem to feel the shards of wood and fibreglass dragging under its scales.
People on the shore were running and screaming. Reeves stopped briefly to usher an elderly couple up the steps leading to the parking lot, then turned back in time to see the creature reach land, not a hundred feet away. The scrape of its scales across the pavement rose above the wailing siren and the noise of the crowd.
He pulled civilians back from the shore, shouting at them to get to their vehicles and to pile in as many people as they could.
A series of shrill barks rent the air and Reeves looked around, eyes landing on a border collie that had been left tied to a bike rack. He pelted across the beach and ducked next to the dog, its breath hot and fast on his neck as he freed its collar from the leash. The border collie fled without looking back, nails skittering across the pavement.
There was a deafening boom.
Reeves threw himself behind the bike rack and peered up through the bars.
The serpent’s great head had shattered the boathouse with the force of a crashing meteor. Its horns caught on the roof and peeled the rafters off, throwing them across the beach like twigs in a windstorm. Reeves flung his arms up, protecting his head as one soared towards him. It crashed over the bike rack and snapped in two, the pieces landing on either side of him.
The slit pupils narrowed further as the serpent peered down on the chaos, as if inspecting its own efforts.
Further out, three men shot across the water in a speedboat, fleeing in the opposite direction. The small boat powered over the swells and whirlpools left by the serpent, and for a moment, Reeves thought they would escape unharmed.
Then a second serpent breached the water.
Its massive head shadowed the speedboat like an eclipse. The water cascading off of it was enough to flood the boat, which rocked violently under the deluge. The screams of the men on board carried faintly on the wind.
Reeves scanned the water, breathing hard. Was there an entire pack of them?
The immense jaws hovering over the boat opened with a noise like splintering wood. Saliva and seawater dripped from fangs that were each the size of a man’s arm.
Two of the men dove off while the driver cowered beneath the wheel. None of it mattered. When the serpent struck, its jaws closed over the boat and all.
Reeves watched the men disappear with mounting horror that numbed his body.
Finished with its meal, the second serpent swung around and followed the path of its mate onto the beach. It reached the shallows and—
Oh, no. The two heads were connected to the same body. This was a single leviathan, a head at each end.
The breath caught in Reeves’ chest. Dimly, he realised he was still clutching his phone and lifted it to his ear.
“Reeves! God dammit—”
“I’m here, sir.”
“We’re sending help. We need to nuke this thing before it takes out all of Kodiak.”
Reeves sank to his knees behind the bike rack, heart pounding. He’d spent his whole life training for this—from Cadets, to the Navy, through every screening, assessment, and boot camp, topping it all off with survival training at the Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment. So why did he feel so ill-prepared all of a sudden?
He looked at the serpent’s body, studying the hundreds of coal-black scales that glittered like armour. His gaze drifted to the water.
“What the hell is the procedure, here?” said Officer Miller. “Is this a natural disaster?”
There. Reeves’ eyes locked onto something that sent a chill through him. Perched on a rock next to a hazard buoy and watching the chaos unfold, black hair dripping beneath a black crown, was an enormous merman.
As Reeves watched, the demon raised and lowered his arms repeatedly. What was he doing? Reeves studied the odd movements, then turned back to the serpent in time to see one of the heads close its jaws around a parked SUV and crush it like it was made of spun glass.
The merman was still gesturing from the rock. Was the serpent responding to this in some way?
The merman raised his left arm as though pushing the air, and the second head moved along the shore, the great black body curling around itself.
With a glance around to make sure no more civilians were at risk, Reeves ran back to the road, staying low. The shoreline was ravaged, ghostly.
“Sir, I think this is related to the mermaids,” he said, panting.
A pause. “How do you know?”
“One of them is out in the water. A male.”
Over the tsunami siren, another wail pierced the air as several police cars peeled into the intersection. The officers leapt out, drawing guns and firing at once. The bullets ricocheted off the serpent’s armour with a series of clinks. It didn’t surprise Reeves that the weapons did nothing.
“I think the merman is controlling the serpent, sir. It’s the way he’s moving.”
As he said it, he wished it wasn’t true. He knew what this meant.
Sure enough, after a long pause, Officer Miller said, “You know what to do, chief.”
Reeves rubbed a hand over his forehead. The siren was starting to make his head ache.
“Sir, Perseus isn’t ready yet.”
“She might not be pretty, but she’s ready for duty.”
The serpent continued to ransack the harbour. The sea demon’s plan evidently involved destroying every man-made structure along the shoreline. Bullets continued to ricochet off the creature’s armour.
“Sir, I think our priority should be to go straight for this merman. He’s got a black crown. I think he’s their king.”
“All the more reason! This is an act of war, Reeves. They’ve broken our treaty.”
“He has broken our treaty.”
“Look, California has gotten four distress calls in the last three days from ships being attacked by mermaids. This is no coincidence.”
Reeves hurried to his truck and slid into the driver’s seat, the sirens muffled only slightly as he slammed the door. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself not to argue.
Memories flashed through his mind as though thrown into the path of a lighthouse, blazing painfully for an instant and fading just as fast. Caramel skin and dark hair. Brilliant brown eyes and a warm smile that left him feeling inexplicably safe.
He had never told anyone about her. Nights when he could not sleep found him wondering if she had even been real.
But he had survived that day because of her.
Miller was breathing hard on the other end of the phone. “I’m contacting the Secretary of State. Operation Perseus is launching as soon as we get the go-ahead. As far as I’m concerned, this is an act of war.”
In the intersection, the police backed away, cast into the shadow of the advancing serpent. Reeves started the truck and threw it into reverse.
An act of war, yes. But on whose orders? Were all merpeople to blame, or this one demon?
If everything he’d ever been told about them was true, Reeves would have drowned during that storm. The icy sea had nearly swallowed him whole. He remembered the panic mounting as he realised, strong swimmer though he was, he could not fight the waves and get to the life buoy cast out by his yelling shipmates. When the veil of rain blocked his view of the ship, that should have been the end.
What that mermaid had done was not an act of war.
“Yes, sir,” he said hollowly.
He couldn’t prove she had been real. He couldn’t prove she’d pulled him to the buoy and placed it over his head. The team had not seen it.
But he didn’t think she’d been a hallucination. He should have drowned that day.
He knew, of course, that mermaids had a predatory drive and an allure that scientists tried to study on a chemical level. He’d heard about the experiments. He had always wondered if the mermaid’s sweetness was a product of that allure.
Either way, he owed her his life.
He shook his head, forbidding himself to go there.
Tomorrow, he would gear up with the rest of his SEAL Team several months ahead of schedule. He would push aside that memory and do what he had been training for. With his team at his back, he would retaliate against this act of terrorism for the sake of his country.
But he would not ignore his intuition. He had spent years learning to trust that feeling. And now, more strongly than ever, it was telling him to hunt down that merman on the rock out there, and kill him.