[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

key into the ignition. The car fired up and he threw it into drive, kicking
up gravel as he pulled away.
 Wait, your shoes are on the roof.
 He can have them, Catfish said.  They better than the ones he ate last
time.
 He? What the hell was that? You know what that was?
 I ll tell you soon as I m done havin this heart attack.
five
The Sea Beast
The great Sea Beast paused in his pursuit of the delicious radioactive aroma
and sent a subsonic message out to a gray whale passing several miles
ahead of him. Roughly translated, it said,  Hey, baby, how s about you
and I eat a few plankton and do the wild thing.
The gray whale continued her relentless swim south and replied with a
subsonic thrum that translated,  I know who you are. Stay away from me.
The Sea Beast swam on. During his journey he had eaten a basking shark,
a few dolphins, and several hundred tuna. His focus had changed from
food to sex. As he approached the California coast, the radioactive scent
began to diminish to almost nothing. The leak at the power plant had been
discovered and fixed. He found himself less than a mile offshore with a
belly full of shark and no memory of why he d left his volcanic nest. But
there was a buzz reaching his predator s senses from shore, the listless re-
solve of prey that has given up: depression. Warm-blooded food, dolphins,
and whales sent off the same signal sometimes. A large school of food was
just asking to be eaten, right near the edge of the sea. He stopped out past
the surf line and came to the surface in the middle of a kelp bed, his massive
head breaking though strands of kelp like a zombie pickup truck breaking
sod as it rises from the grave.
48 / Christopher Moore
Then he heard it. A hated sound. The sound of an enemy. It had been
half a century since the Sea Beast had left the water, and land was not his
natural domain, but his instinct to attack overwhelmed his sense of self-
preservation. He threw back his head, shaking the great purple gills that
stood out on his neck like trees, and blew the water from his vestigial lungs.
Breath burned down his cavernous throat for the first time in fifty years
and came out in a horrendous roar of pain and anger. Three of the protective
ocular membranes slid back from his eyes like electric car windows. allow-
ing him to see in the bitter air. He thrashed his tail, pumped his great
webbed feet, and torpedoed toward the shore.
Gabe
It had been almost ten years since Gabe Fenton had dissected a dog, but
now, at three o clock in the morning, he was thinking seriously about taking
a scalpel to Skinner, his three-year-old Labrador retriever, who was deep
in the throes of a psychotic barking fit. Skinner had been banished to the
porch that afternoon, after he had taken a roll in a dead seagull and refused
to go into the surf or get near the hose to be washed off. To Skinner, dead
bird was the smell of romance.
Gabe crawled out of bed and padded to the door in his boxers, scooping
up a hiking boot along the way. He was a biologist, held a Ph.D. in animal
behavior from Stanford, so it was with great academic credibility that he
opened the door and winged the boot at his dog, following it with the be-
havior-reinforcing command of:  Skinner, shut the fuck up!
Skinner paused in his barking fit long enough to duck under the flying
L. L. Bean, then, true to his breeding,
The Lust Lizard Of Melancholy Cove / 49
retrieved it from the washbasin that he used as a water dish and brought
it back to the doorway where Gabe stood. Skinner set the soggy boot at the
biologist s feet. Gabe closed the door in Skinner s face.
Jealous, Skinner thought. No wonder he can t get any females, smelling
like fabric softener and soap. The Food Guy wouldn t be so cranky if he d
get out and sniff some butts. (Skinner always thought of Gabe as  the Food
Guy. ) Then, after a quick sniff to confirm that he was, indeed, the Don
Juan of all dogs, Skinner resumed his barking fit. Doesn t he get it, Skinner
thought, there s something dangerous coming. Danger, Food Guy, danger!
Inside, Gabe Fenton glanced at the computer screen in his living room
as he returned to bed. A thousand tiny green dots were working their way,
en masse, across the map of the Pine Cove area. He stopped and rubbed
his eyes. It wasn t possible.
Gabe went to the computer and typed in a command. The map of the
area reappeared in wider scale. Still, the dots were all moving in a line. He
zoomed the map to only a few square miles, the dots were still on the move.
Each green dot on the map represented a rat that Gabe had live-trapped,
injected with a microchip, and released into the wild. Their location was
tracked and plotted by satellite. Every rat in a ten-square-mile area was
moving east, away from the coast. Rats did not behave that way. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]