A Monster's Tale

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

They started off with him seeing her naked.

Kelly Lindsey often sunbathed in the nude. The Flying Witch was her boat after all, all sixty-five, high-powered feet of her. With the canvas blinders up, one would really have to be determined to catch a glimpse of her from the dock. And the handgun she kept next to her drink on the stand kept her from feeling naked.

The Sun had bleached out even the minor traces of brown in Kelly’s hair, and baked her skin to a warm bronze. She was far too beautiful to be taken seriously on first sight, except during those few months when she’d worked as a stripper in Florida—just out of high school and eager to be on her own. But that was six years ago. She had a better way to make money now, and it was usually legitimate.

“Knock, knock. Anyone home?” The voice came from behind her.

Kelly flipped over and out of her lounge chair, in the same movement pulling her gun off the table and training it on the man standing there. She didn’t care one damn bit that she was nude.

He didn’t either, not with a gun pointed at him.

“Hold it, please. I’m sorry I’m Dr. Fred Fryling. Your passenger? You know? The cruise line hired you to take me around.”

Slowly she relaxed her grip on the gun, though she didn’t drop it yet. “Next time you want to come on board my boat, you holler from the dock first. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kelly put on her robe, not tying it particularly tight, and offered Fred a chair. “I have a few questions I ask clients, Dr. Fryling.”

“Please, call me Fred, unless you expect me to call you ‘Captain.’ ”

“OK, Fred. I want to know why the cruise line hired my boat. They were adamant that no other boat would do.”

“Because you’re the only person in the Caribbean who owns a charter boat with an MHD drive. A big drive, too, for a boat this size.”

“I see,” Kelly said. “So where’s your cargo? Can you load it by yourself, or should I help you?”

“I don’t have any cargo. I mean, not anything other than my luggage and some special equipment. What kind of cargo do other people bring?”

“That’s a question I try not to ask,” Kelly said. She looked over her passenger again. He was quite attractive, she decided, though she wondered if he could even find his ass with both hands. And a doctor, too. Wouldn’t mom be happy if she could hook up with someone like that—instead of having her remain a vagabond independent shipper. “What kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m a marine biologist,” Fred answered. “That means I don’t drive a Porsche. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Fred. I’ve had this pain in my ass ever since you came on board.” Then she burst out laughing and he joined in.

“We didn’t get off to the best start, did we?” Kelly said.

“No. But I think we’d better learn to get along if we’re going to hunt sea monsters together.”

“What did you just say?”

He explained it to her over drinks in the galley, after she’d dressed in shorts and a bikini top.

“I was on board the cruise ship Caribbean Lady, on one of those gambling, drinking, and dancing cruises. The Lady happens to be a huge MHD drive ship. By the way, do you know how your drive works? The principle of the thing?”

Kelly set down her drink and used a napkin to wipe perspiration away from between her breasts. “Why, no. Why don’t you tell me?” She was watching him closely. He failed to notice her sarcasm. Yet there was something about Dr. Fred that she either loved or hated, though she couldn’t tell which.

If you have a magnetic field pointed the right way, Fred explained, and you have a wire in the field with a current going through it in the right direction, the wire will be repelled. In the case of the magnetohydrodynamic drive, you run current through conductive sea water as it enters the drive tubes. The superconducting magnets cause it to be repelled out the back. “Simple physics, but the Japanese own the patents, and they’re cleaning up,” Fred concluded.

“Fine. But you missed the part about avoiding freshwater outflow from big rivers. It wrecks conductivity,” Kelly put in, smiling.

Fred looked at her, said, “Well…” and continued telling her about the cruise. “We were well on our way to Rio when there was a bump during the night. The engineering crew noticed a loss of efficiency in the starboard drive tube. Captain Porter ordered us to continue on at one-half speed and in the morning had one of his guys dive down to inspect the starboard tube. The outside looked OK so they told him go inside. On the Caribbean Lady that tube is thirty-five feet across.”

“What was inside there?” Kelly asked.

“There’s only supposed to be a few trim fins to control the water flow. The captain thought there might be a tree trunk—one of those big ones that sometimes come floating out of the Amazon—stuck in there. But what they hauled out looked like a twelve-foot-wide section of green plastic sheeting, but with scales on it.”

“Scales?”

“Yeah. That’s where I come in. I was jogging on deck that morning and saw them pull it out of the water. Captain Porter wondered if it was a fin from some kind of squid or big fish. I told him it was like nothing I’d ever seen.”

“What did he say to that?”

“Nothing. Another guy came over from the crowd that had gathered. I recognized him from the night before. He’d been barfing drinks over the side. He told us what he saw when he was throwing up.”

“And what did the drunk say he saw?”

“A sea serpent. A long, thick, snaky, dragon-headed sea monster. Said it reared up fifty feet out of the water then dove back under, and that’s when the bump came.

“So that’s the story. The captain reported it, a cruise line rep came out to look into it and decided there might be a good advertising angle here if the line could substantiate things scientifically. Since I was qualified and already knew everything, he hired me on the spot.”

Kelly got them each another margarita. “OK, Doc, now I know why you’re hunting sea monsters. But why my boat? The Witch is fast, but she’s hardly unique in that department.”

“Your MHD drive, Kelly. My theory is that the sea serpent came by our ship because it was attracted to the engine’s EM fields. Lots of water life is sensitive to electrical effects. Electric eels, for instance. Why not the sea beasty? And sea serpent reports dropped off markedly after the invention of steamships. Sea monster believers account for this by assuming that the things just plain don’t like the noise. MHD drives are quiet.”

“So you’re hoping that my big engine will turn on any local sea monsters and bring them around? How big did you say this thing was again?”

“My guess is that it’s between one hundred fifty and two hundred feet long, and probably fifteen feet thick at its widest.”

“Aren’t sea monsters supposed to crush ships and eat what they find floating in the water?” Kelly asked, then burst out laughing. “Fred, if I actually believed we’d find anything out there, I’d throw you overboard and cut out like nobody’s business. But since I don’t, I’ll just take your money and ferry you around anywhere you want to go.”

Fred frowned. “You don’t believe me? Or that we’ll succeed? Why?”

“Why? Because it’s silly. I’ve been on the water for a long time, and I’ve talked to old people who’ve been on it their whole lives, and none of us have seen sea serpents. We have our share of strange stories, but no sea serpents. I’ve never heard of any scientific evidence—”

“What about the fin?”

“Could have been something else.” “How about what happened in 1930? The research ship Dana brought up something in her nets. A Dr. Bruun dissected it and determined it was a six-foot-long larva of some kind of giant eel.”

“I never heard of that.”

“Neither did I until I looked. Science is often like that. But the bottom line is, it’s a big ocean. And there don’t have to be a whole lot of them in it. They could have been missed.”

Kelly sighed. “There don’t have to be any.” She put their drink glasses in the sink. “Stow your gear, sailor. You get the port cabin. The bow is mine. You’re not allowed in there unless I invite you.” She smiled. She noticed that he didn’t return it.

Even though he was almost twenty years her senior, he was handsome, and likable. And he had a driving passion, too. She liked that. OK, so he could find his ass with both hands. He might even get a chance to find hers, she thought.

The first few days of the expedition, as expected, were uneventful in terms of monster hunting, but pleasant in other ways, Fred had to admit. He’d come aboard in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and they’d set off down the chain of the Lesser Antilles. The Flying Witch really could fly, pulling fifty knots if need be, and Kelly enjoyed showing him just what her boat could do.

He asked her once how she’d managed to acquire such a fine boat. She’d frowned, then said, “I upheld my end of the bargain, and the man I got the boat from upheld his. And part of the deal was that I wouldn’t talk about it.” She took him below deck and showed him a closet, inside of which was a small arsenal, everything from pistols to a double-barrelled shotgun. “I also have a machine gun mounted on the bow. That’s that thing wrapped in canvas up there,” Kelly said. “I have these things for a reason. Piracy on the high seas isn’t dead yet.”

“Ever had to use any of this stuff?”

“No. But the Witch is my life. Nothing and no one is ever going to take her away from me.” The grim, determined passion in her answer Fred found revealing. This was more than a boat to Kelly. The Witch was home. But Kelly was young—Fred wondered what had happened to her previous home.

They stopped in Guadeloupe, and Kelly took him to a restaurant she knew. Another docking in Grenada allowed Fred to make it even by getting her a genuine souvenir of the invasion of three decades previous.

The Caribbean nights were spectacular. He’d never seen the sky so black nor the stars so capable of bejeweling the heavens.

It was hard for him not to think about Judy and Joy as he looked up, wondering if their souls really were out there somewhere. The accident that had taken his wife and daughter away was ten years behind him chronologically, but only chronologically.

Which left the final pleasure, that of the captain herself. She was spunky and sharp. And a tremendous delight to watch walking along the deck in clothing appropriate to the climate. Which only made it harder to conceal both the fact and the bitterness of his decade-long inability to close the emotional wound and put the past behind him. A few times he’d been certain that Kelly was open to an advance, to which he had studiously pretended obliviousness. Good thing he had work to do out here. Work had been his savior since the deaths.

They stopped in Trinidad to top off the batteries. “We’re good from here to Africa, now,” Kelly said after the charging cables were removed. “But we’ve been a little short of sea monsters so far.”

“Actually, the Lady was about a hundred miles off the north coast of Brazil when we had our encounter. I never expected to meet up with one in the Caribbean,” Fred said. He called up the charts at the nav station. “Here,” he said, pointing. “We’ll follow this course down the South American coast for a thousand miles. Then we’ll do a slow drunkard’s walk back toward the Lesser Antilles.”

Eight days without a bite, Kelly thought. Not from a sea monster, and certainly not from Fred. The failure of a sea serpent to show itself was expected. Fred’s failure to take advantage of his situation was not.

Contrary to what the sailors in every Caribbean port thought, Kelly was not a bed hopper. Her brief time as a stripper was not indicative of the girl she had been before, nor of the one she had become, though she rather enjoyed the image that had been attached to her. Still, her relationships tended to get physical very quickly. She was not one to put off the inevitable.

As the days slipped by, she’d found herself more and more attracted to her passenger. She’d been delighted along with him when his scanners seemed to pick up something big following below them, and shared his disappointment when the echo would simply dissipate into the deep blue. She laughed at his initial fear during his first ocean storm on such a small craft, but was impressed with how he overcame it and helped her secure the Witch for the weather.

He was a decent man, a genuinely nice guy, in a world that knew too few.

They were returning to Trinidad, would be there the next morning, when she caught up with Fred sitting with his feet hanging over the side. She sat next to him. “Looks like the mighty fisherman is heading back with an empty bucket,” she said.

“Sure does,” he replied. “Too bad, too. I really had my hopes up. I just hope the line will finance another venture like this.”

“So do I,” she said.

“You? I’m surprised. You never believed we’d find anything anyway.”

She paused a moment, then said: “But I did find something.” She reached to put her arm around his shoulders, and felt him stiffen and bristle.

She jumped up in frustration. “OK, what the hell is the matter? Are you married? You don’t have a ring! Are you really not attracted to me? What?”

“Fear,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“What?”

“I lost my wife and daughter in a car accident ten years ago and I haven’t been able to per—have a relationship since. Does that help? Yes, I find you attractive. Incredibly so. Any other man would fall all over himself to be with you.” The reemergence of long-suppressed anger and frustration had brought tears to his eyes.

She was able to hold him, then, in a warm embrace that promised nothing except that she understood and cared. He was invited into the bow that night.

And even though fears of impotence (memories from a relationship attempted too soon after the loss of his wife) went unrealized, for the first time in her life, Kelly understood how unimportant the physical side of love could be.

They docked the next morning in Port of Spain, Trinidad. While Kelly took care of the recharging, Fred left to head into town. He’d told her that he needed to contact the cruise line because he had an idea that might get them another charter right away.

After last night, Kelly was eager to give Fred his chance, though she wished he’d been more forthcoming about what his idea was.

He returned with a bounce in his step. Kelly hoped at least some of that bounce was the result of the fireworks from last night. “We’ve got another charter;” he said.

“Great. We leaving soon?”

“No. Not until next week. I’ve already got my plane ticket. I stopped at the airport on my way back.”

Kelly tried to take the news in stride. “You’re flying out from here? You aren’t even going back with me to Puerto Rico?”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen. You’re very important to me, Kelly. I’ll be back. Soon. But I thought of something last night that may help me catch my sea serpent, and—”

Again her heart softened. “It’s OK,” she said. “Go and do what you have to do. I’ll wait for you here. But one thing…”

“What?”

“It’s our sea serpent now.”

The weather stayed beautiful the entire time Fred was away, but Kelly found few reasons to leave the Flying Witch. Once she ventured out for groceries, and on the way back from the store spotted a voodoo shop, offering fortune telling, genuine souvenirs, and something else that really caught her eye—aphrodisiacs. She was tempted to go in and see what was being offered, actually took one step, then caught herself and decided not to.

She returned to the boat. She wasn’t interested in sex with Fred. She wanted to concentrate on lovemaking.

Finally the time came to get him from the airport. She threw her arms around him in the terminal with a vigor even she hadn’t expected.

“Hey, I missed you, too,” he said. “But I can’t hug you with my hands full.” He was carrying one small trunk in addition to his suitcase. Kelly could hear something sloshing inside.

“What’s in there?” she asked.

“Perfume by the gallon.”

“For me? You shouldn’t have. Really.”

“Sorry, Kelly. It’s for another woman. I ll tell you all about it on the boat.”

“That night we spent together, after you fell asleep, I got to thinking,” Fred said. “Maybe our sea monster has a mate. Follow this for a minute. We know there can’t be too many sea monsters in the oceans, or they’d be a well-known species by now. Also, the oceans are huge. If our sea monsters want to procreate, they’re going to need some way to link up with each other. They may even mate for life, but it might not be necessary.”

“Did you use to explain things to your students this way?” Kelly said from the galley stove. “Start by telling me what’s in the bottle.”

“You have no sense of drama,” Fred complained. “OK, it’s sea monster cologne. Concentrated synthetic sea monster scent. I figured out that our beasties must either find each other by scent or by electrical effects, which would explain why they’re attracted to our engines. Of course, it could be sound, too, but I can’t do anything about that. Then again—”

“Fred?”

“What?”

“You’re just playing another hunch. Admit it.”

“You’re right,” he said. Kelly came to him and sat on his lap. “I wanted an excuse to stay with you a while longer.”

“You could have just asked, you know.”

“I don’t think the Dean of Sciences would have granted me a leave of absence just to go boating with you.” She gave him a deep kiss. Upon surfacing, he said, “Although it certainly would be in my best interest.”

They set out early the next morning, and followed the same route they had before. After lunch, a couple of days later, Fred hauled out his jug of scent. “I had them whip this up for me in the biochem lab. They made it from scrapings off that chunk of flesh from the Lady’s drive tube.”

“How are we supposed to use it?” Kelly asked. She’d been admiring Fred all morning. She tried to conjure the image she’d had of him when he’d first come on board, but she couldn’t do it while looking at him now. Though he was only slightly more tan, and perhaps a pound or two lighter, she saw him through different eyes now.

“I guess I’ll try swabbing some on the sides of the boat. We’re in uncharted territory here ”

They brought the boat to a halt. Fred wanted to jump in the water and have Kelly hand down a sponge full of scent, but she nixed the idea.

“No way. You’re more likely to attract sharks with that odor than you are hypothetical sea serpents.” He settled for dabbing the sides with a sponge attached to a pole.

The rest of the afternoon they enjoyed the sunshine as they scanned the horizon with binoculars. The ocean was remarkably calm, and it was like a casual day of power boating on a lake.

“It’s about time we turned in,” Kelly said after the tropical Sun had finished making its descent. They were throttled down to two knots. “And no argument this time. You’re sleeping in the bow with me. I bought your little ‘I’m real tired from traveling’ speech these last few nights, but I’m lonely.” Kelly pressed up against him. “I want your companionship.”

“Is that all?” Fred asked.

“No.”

He laughed, then hugged her, kissed her. “You’re way too good to me. You go ahead and get ready. I’m going to put more scent on the sides and take a shower.”

As promised, he joined her in her bunk a short time later. It was even better than the first time.

Later, lying there in the quiet, Kelly started to talk.

“There’s only one thing in my life I’m really ashamed of,” she said.

“What’s that?” Fred asked. “But before you say anything, you don’t owe me any confessions.”

“You’re the first man to ever make me realize how much I wanted to.”

“OK.”

“It’s about how I got this boat. You asked, remember?” She saw his outline nod in the dark. “I never got along with my mom. She and dad divorced when I was twelve. He was a cop. I left home at eighteen to be out on my own. I made a mess of it, did drugs, woke up in an alley some mornings. But I had too much pride to go home. Eventually I wound up as a stripper in Miami. From there a man… oh, hell, might as well call him what he was—a drug lord—spotted me and took me away to live with him.

“I hated it. I was a kept woman. It was worse than living with mom. I wanted out. But he wouldn’t let me.”

“How did you escape?” Fred asked gently.

“He’d been hit hard by the narco cops. He needed money and had a huge load of white stuff ready to hit Puerto Rico. He had a fast, quiet MHD boat, called the Santa Maria then, ready to take it in. But no driver—he’d lost them in a raid. And, and….”

“And so you did it.”

“Yes. I told him I’d take it in for my freedom and the boat. I’d learned a lot about boats while I was with him. He knew I had a good chance of making it. I did. I called him afterward, he told me where he’d left the Santa Maria’s ownership papers for me, and with them he left me an additional ten thousand dollars—” Kelly stopped as her voice caught.

Fred held her tighter. “A week later I got a card from mom telling me my dad was dead. A shoot-out during a drug raid.”

“Over the shipment you brought in?”

“I don’t know It doesn’t matter. But it made me realize that other people had to pay the price for my freedom. That’s why the Witch is so important to me. She’s what makes me free. I hold her in trust for everyone who lost blood because of me.”

WHOOMP! WHOOSH! KER-SPLOONK! SPLASH!

“What the hell was that?!” Fred exclaimed as the tossing of the boat threw him out of the bunk.

Another wild jolt and Kelly joined him on the floor. “I don’t know,” she said. “A storm? But I don’t hear any wind, and the weather was supposed to be clear all night.”

The Flying Witch was rocking too much for them to regain their feet, and they had to crawl to the hatch and up the stairs to the deck.

“Oh my God!” Fred exclaimed.

The head of the sea monster was something of a cross between a horse and a snake, Fred decided, though much larger than the biggest version of either. The mouth was open and four rows of sharp teeth gleamed in the moonlight. The head, easily four feet across, towered high above the deck. But what was more important to Fred was that he was staring at it from only twenty feet away.

“Kelly! Quick! Hit the engines. We gotta make a run for it!”

Though Fred had pulled on his pants before heading up to the deck, Kelly had followed in the nude. This was one of the few times she really felt naked. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Fred,” she said in awe as she watched the huge head dive back below the waves. Three huge loops of sea monster appeared above the surface, then submerged with the reappearance of the head, a football field away, but turning once again toward them.

Kelly was at the controls when Fred reappeared with his videocam. “Get us moving. It’s looking for its mate, I’m sure. Either that, or it’s stupid enough to think we’re its mate.”

The Flying Witch sprang away as Kelly pushed up the speed. The monster followed along behind them, seeming to have no trouble at all keeping up. She pushed the lever up for more speed: twenty knots; thirty; forty! and it was still keeping up. “OK, I’m going full out, Fred!”

Kelly eased the speed upward. Somewhere around forty-five and forty-six knots the monster was unable to gain on them, though it still wouldn’t give up the chase. Fred kept his camera fastened on the creature, nervously checking and rechecking the power supply and the REG light. He had no intention of being just another case of someone who had mishandled the camera when the find of the century was at hand.

The Sun came up an hour into the chase, which went on hours more. Kelly finally put on some clothes when she was satisfied that the creature wasn’t going to suddenly put on a burst of speed so that her hand would be needed at the helm. Fred continued to record the creature and had talked to Kelly only when he needed the freshly charged spare power pack or another video disc.

While he watched, Fred noticed regularities in how the creature moved. First the head would go down, then the humps would disappear, one, two, three. After ten seconds the head would clear the surface again, the humps would again reappear in sequence, then the head would dive again. Fred also cranked up the magnification of the camera and tried to determine how the creature should be classed. Did it have gills, or did it breathe air? He thought he saw gill slits along the sides just back behind the huge mouth. It seemed unlikely that such creatures would have to regularly surface for air. They certainly would have been documented before now if they did.

He wondered what it would eat. Those teeth were sharp, but the jaw didn’t seem designed well for chewing. Perhaps the great serpent killed and swallowed its prey whole. That would account for why no whales ever turned up with huge round bites taken out of their hides.

And the creature’s stamina was unparalleled.

“Geez,” Kelly said after a while. “That thing’s been following us for two hundred miles. Doesn’t it ever get tired?”

“Staggering, isn’t it?” Fred said, finally setting aside his camera to talk to her. “I’ve been wondering if maybe it travels something like a kangaroo does. You know, a kangaroo is able to use its legs like springs, so it can use energy efficiently. Maybe this thing does much the same, though I don’t know how it would work.”

“What are you going to name it?”

“I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe ‘Serpens Kellias Giganticus’.”

“That’ll be something to tell my mom: ‘My boyfriend named a sea serpent after me.’ But aren’t there standards for that kind of thing?”

“Sigh. There are, Kelly Sorry,” Fred said. “I won’t even be able to think about a name until I find out if it’s, from a known genus.”

They’d been running about a quarter mile ahead of the serpent, but suddenly Fred noticed that it seemed closer. “Is our friend gaining on us? You didn’t cut back the power, did you?”

“Of course not. I haven’t touched the controls in hours.”

“Well, it’s gaining on us. We’d better see what’s going on.”

After a brief look, Kelly saw that their speed had indeed fallen, and their power consumption kept fluctuating. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “We’re losing speed, but there isn’t any reason we should be. Engine diagnostics check out.”

With that comment, the Flying Witch suddenly seemed to lose power altogether, and the engine shut off. A telltale red light was blinking. “What light is that?” Fred asked.

“Water salinity. It’s never come on before. I don’t know why… oh, dammit! Where are we, anyway?” Kelly raced to the nav station and called up their position. In an instant, positioning satellites told her where she was to within a meter. “Shit!”

“What is it?”

Kelly pointed to the map. “The Amazon. I forgot about the Amazon. Outflow, Fred. Fresh water gets dumped out of the Amazon river by the megatons and desalinifies the ocean way farther out than you’d expect. The water isn’t salty enough for my engines!”

To emphasize her words, the boat suddenly started rocking violently, and from outside they heard a deafening, monstrous scream, as if the serpent was signaling its victory to the world.

“We’re in deep shit,” Fred said.

“Hell, no! Not if I can help it,” Kelly exclaimed.

The boat was shaken by a solid thump which threw both of them to the floor. Kelly sprang up and raced to the arsenal closet, pulled out a large and obviously heavy box. “Help me carry this!”

Fred joined her, took the box away and found that it was ammunition.

Kelly answered the question in his eyes. “For the machine gun on the bow. Let’s go!”

Fred carried the box and Kelly ran ahead. She pulled the knots loose and unwrapped the tarpaulin from the gun. She pointed to a gaping hole in its side and Fred realized that the ammunition box was meant to slide in. With an effort he lifted and shoved it into locking position.

The sea serpent was coming back around. The head rose high above the water, then dove below, and there followed the dance of the humps.

Kelly lowered the gun into position and was trying to take aim. The tail had just disappeared below the waves. “Where is it going to come up?” she unfairly demanded to know, swinging the business end of the gun from side to side.

“Can’t tell you, but I’m getting the life jackets. We may have to abandon ship. It probably just wants the boat anyway because of the scent. It probably won’t even notice us.”

“Bullshit. Besides, we’re going to have one dead sea monster in a minute. This boat is my life. I’m not giving it up without a fight!”

They waited. Seconds turned into a minute turned into two minutes.

“Well, where is it?” Kelly said, not even noticing her white knuckles as she gripped the handles.

“Maybe it left,” Fred answered.

“You really think so?”

“No.”

A huge head rose out of the water to a height of forty feet right in front of Kelly, right in her gunsights. Too startled to fire, she stared for an instant, and the head whipped down and smashed onto the deck.

She fell to her knees, but clung to the gun and quickly pulled herself up. The sea monster lilted its head for another blow. Kelly let loose with a burst. She could see from her tracers that she was missing, but she turned the stream into the green hide looming before her. The slugs tore into the flesh. Huge scales came shattering and flying off. But for all that, the welts that remained didn’t seem to bother the serpent more than needle pricks. It turned aside and belly Hopped onto the water.

Its head almost flattened Fred.

“Fred! My God, Fred!” Somehow he’d been knocked overboard. Fortunately he had slipped his life jacket on as he was bringing Kelly s to her. He was bobbing about in the water.

“Fred!” Kelly screamed.

He didn’t answer, didn’t even wave an arm. He could be dazed, she thought. He wasn’t even trying to paddle away from the monster.

Again Kelly trained the machine gun on the side of the creature and fired. It seemed annoyed, but it was concentrating on Fred.

Kelly checked her ammunition light. She had enough for one more decent burst. That was all. There was another box of ammo down below, but she didn’t have time to get it, nor anything else in the arsenal locker.

When she looked up again, she saw Fred moving. “Fred! Fred!” she called, but he didn’t acknowledge. He was alert enough to his situation that he was squirming out of his life jacket. He was a sitting duck bobbing around on the surface.

The monster tried to strike at Fred, but he disappeared beneath the surface, corning up a few dozen feet away ten heart-stopping seconds later. I lie great beast was too massive to alter its movement midstrike, chomping on the life jacket, but slowly recoiled for another.

Though the episode could not have lasted for more than a few minutes, to Kelly it was an hour of agony. How best to use that last burst?

The serpent made another stab at I red, and again he evaded, but even from the boat Kelly could see that he was tiring.

She clicked the lever to single shot, carefully aimed and led her target, and fired a shot that missed the eye she was aiming at but buried itself in the sea monster’s snout. It bellowed deafeningly, then turned aside from Fred and came for the Witch.

“Steady. Steady” Kelly said to herself. When it got close, she’d go for the eye again. She watched it approach through the sights, carefully lining up her shot. She didn’t want to miss. She couldn’t.

She was too cautious. The monster came faster than she thought and startled her. The jaws came down in a streak, she twisted away, and the loud, sharp snap of the jaws closing told her that it had missed.

Almost. In getting away Kelly had rolled under a deck bench. As she watched the creature, it seemed puzzled at being unable to find her and turned away. It was then she noticed blood flowing from her left arm below the triceps. The gash would need care, but it would have to wait.

Kelly crawled out from her hiding place. While the creature had been pursuing her, Fred had returned to his shredded life jacket, was clinging to it. He saw her looking at him and waved that he was OK, even as the monster was again heading for him.

Kelly returned to the machine gun. Her left arm was going numb. She knew her aim would be terrible.

How many more dodges did Fred have left in him? she worried. Don’t be a fool! He’s dead unless you do something.

Dead in a gruesome way—chewed to death.

Kelly couldn’t let that happen. She had one burst left. She loved him.

Slowly, she swung the muzzle of the gun in his direction.

He must have seen her, must have known what she was doing. He was screaming something.

The serpent had dived down below and come up on the far side of Fred. The head rose high, Fred abandoned the life jacket, and it came down in a mighty splash upon the jacket.

Kelly again trained the gun on Fred.

He was screaming at her while desperately trying to tread water. God, he must be exhausted. She could hardly hear him. What was he saying: “Oot the itch?” No, “shoot the bitch,” that had to be it.

The three humps of the monster were close to disappearing. The head would be up again in seconds.

Kelly was lined up on Fred. She listened to his screams—they’d be the last things she ever heard him say. She knew the words would haunt her the rest of her life—shoot the bitch.

Only now it sounded more like “shoot the witch.”

Or did he mean the Witch?

Could he mean…?

Kelly turned the gun around, pointed it at the deck, and let loose with the last burst.

The bullets ripped the hell out of the deck. Splinters of wood flew all around her. The racket was deafening, the sound of the slugs impacting reverberating and resonating throughout the Flying Witch.

And the ocean below.

The tracers had set small fires. The Witch was dying. But Fred was swimming toward her.

And the serpent was gone.

She helped Fred climb up the ladder into the boat. She wrapped her arms around him but he pushed her away. “We have to put out the fires,” he said.

The extinquishers made short work of the flames, and they found themselves on a listing boat. The Witch had self-sealing compartments, so they’d stopped taking on water. But Kelly knew her boat was dead—the compartments that did get flooded were vital ones.

Their SOS had been acknowledged, and they were waiting to be picked up. Less than ten minutes had passed since the ordeal.

“I’m sorry about the Witch Fred said.

She sighed and leaned against him. “I guess there was someone who could take her away from me. How did you know that shooting the boat would work?”

“I didn’t,” Fred said. “But you were being braver than I was.”

Suddenly, off the port side, the sea serpent sounded, its body coming fully a hundred feet out of the water before splashing down.

And then another one did the same.

“Look!” Kelly shouted, pointing.-“Not again.”

But the two sea monsters seemed oblivious to them, and after swimming side by side for a few hundred yards, humps in harmony, they dove and were gone for good.

“Did you notice that the second one was missing a fin?” Fred asked.

“Our monster was looking for its mate?”

“I think so. Maybe the scent did do the trick.”

“It must be nice to have someone who’ll come looking for you,” Kelly said.

“It is,” Fred said. Then: “You’ll come with me, won’t you? I mean, your home is gone. And I love you. And—”

Kelly put her finger to his lips to quiet him. “Of course I’ll come with you, Fred. But I want you to meet my mom first.”