Peter Benchley's Creature (31 page)

The creature exploded.

A thick crimson mist filled the chamber; globules of blood and pieces of flesh struck the porthole, and stuck.

55

CHASE stood in the hospital lobby, waiting for an elevator, and looked at his watch. He was more than an hour late.

He had wanted to be there by two, but he had gotten stuck on the phone with Rollie Gibson and Nate Green, and had had to fulfill his promise to give Nate a detailed, exclusive story for the paper about what had happened on the island.

Then, when he had arrived ashore, Rudi Franks had been waiting for him, alone and bearing a gift: an old, cracked black-and-white photograph of Ernst Kruger and Jacob Franks operating on Heinrich Guenther.

Finally, there had been the confusion at the bank. He had stopped to cash a check, and one of the bank's officers had wanted to see him about something that made no sense whatever to Chase, something that had to be a mistake.

The elevator arrived; Chase got out on the fourth floor and walked to the nurses' station.

"You took your sweet time," said Ellie Bindloss, a short, chunky woman with whom Chase had gone to high school. "We're not equipped to handle eight-hundred-pound gorillas around here, y'know."

"Sorry," Chase said. "Where is he?"

She pointed down the hall. "Can't miss him," she said. "You'll hear him before you see him."

As Chase approached an open door at the end of the hall, he heard Tall Man's voice shouting, "Sorry! What d'you mean,
sorry!
You just shafted me, and you did it on purpose."

Then Max's voice, laughing and saying, "Tough, chief. Move your man."

Chase paused outside the door, not sure what to expect, then stepped inside the room. "Hi," he said.

"Don't 'Hi' me," said Tall Man. "This vicious kid of yours has beat my butt four games in a row. We oughtta feed him to the fishes." He laughed, then grimaced and clutched the bandages that surrounded his chest and bound one arm to his side. "Christ," he said, "laughing's no fun. But it's better than coughing."

Max sat on the foot of the bed; between him and Tall Man was a board game littered with plastic cards and colored pieces. Amanda sat in a chair beside the bed, a newspaper in her lap.

Chase hadn't seen Tall Man for two and a half days, not since he had ridden with him in a police helicopter and brought him to the intensive-care unit in New London. Then, Tall Man had been covered with blood and dirt, his color a dusty gray, his breathing rattly and weak. It had taken the doctors two hours to stop the bleeding, suture and reinflate the collapsed lung and begin the first of many transfusions. They had shooed Chase away from the ICU and, that evening, when they were confident Tall Man would survive, had urged him to go home and sleep.

Chase still wasn't sure what had happened to Tall Man. He had started to search for him in darkness, but hadn't found him until nearly dawn, stuck between two boulders on the shore, unconscious. Tall Man claimed not to recall much, only that he had cut the creature several times, and then had felt himself stabbed in the right side and shoulder, lifted off his feet and thrown onto the rocks in the sea.

There was a purple lump on Tall Man's forehead, and a line of stitches extending from his left eyebrow across his temple.

"You don't look too bad," Chase said, stepping toward the bed. "Considering."

"Yes, I do, I look like a mile of bad road," said Tall Man. "And don't you even
think
about touching me; I feel like a train wreck."

Chase smiled. "Ready to go?"

"Damn right. If I stay here long enough, they'll starve me to death or stick me to death . . . or both." Tall Man leaned forward, swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, leaning on the wall for support. Chase helped him on with his trousers and draped his shirt over his shoulders.

Ellie Bindloss appeared, pushing a wheelchair. "Sit down," she said.

"Never," said Tall Man. "I can walk—"

"Sit down before I knock you down."

Tall Man smiled, then laughed, then coughed. "You're a hard woman, Ellie Bindloss," he said, and he flopped into the wheelchair.

Max pushed the wheelchair down the hall, Ellie walked beside it and Chase and Amanda followed behind.

Chase told her about the photograph Rudi had given him, then said, "We've got to stop at the bank on the way back; I want to clear something up."

Amanda hesitated before saying, "Clear up what?"

"I don't know, the damndest thing. One of the officers told me the bank isn't holding my paper on the island anymore. He said they sold it."

"Really?"

"To a partnership. I thought for a minute they'd screwed me, sold it to Finnegan or somebody else who'd want to take over the island. But then the guy said
I
was one of the partners."

Amanda didn't say anything, she just kept walking, looking ahead.

"You ever heard of something called the Pinniped Group?"

"It must be new," she said.

"What kind of name is that, the Pinniped Group? You know what pinnipeds are?"

"Sure."

"They're . . ." Chase stopped, and as the sense of what he was about to say hit him, the thought occurred to him that he had never felt so stupid in his life. "Sea lions. A pinniped is a sea lion."

Amanda smiled and took his arm. "We'll talk about the details later," she said. "We'll have plenty of time."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After graduating from Harvard, PETER BENCHLEY worked as a reporter for
The Washington Post,
then as an editor at
Newsweek
and a speechwriter in the White House. His novel
Jaws
was published in 1974, followed by
The Deep
(1976),
The Island
(1979),
The Girl of the Sea of Cortez
(1982),
Q Clearance
(1986),
Rummies
(1989) and
Beast
(1991). He has written screenplays for three of his novels, and his articles and essays have appeared in such publications as
National Geographic
and
The New York Times.
In addition, he has written, narrated and appeared in more than a dozen television documentaries.

Table of Contents

Start

Table of Contents

Start