Dean Koontz - The Voice of the Night

The cobalt-blue ocean was unusually calm. The swells seemed to have been tamed with oil; they rolled smoothly, almost sluggishly, beneath the Erica Lynn.

The boat’s engine produced a monotonous noise- chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga- that you could eventually feel as well as hear.

The cloudless summer sky was as blue as a gas flame.

Whiskey and beer. Whiskey and beer.

Colin smiled a lot, spoke when spoken to, but mostly just tried to be invisible.

At five o‘clock the sharks showed up, and the day got ugly after that.

Ten minutes earlier, Irv had started chumming again, dumping bucketsful of stinking, chopped bait into their wake, trying to attract big fish. He had done the same thing half a dozen times before, always without effect; but even under the gimlet-eyed stares of his disillusioned clients, he continued to express confidence in his methods.

Charlie was the first to spot the action from his place on the bridge. He called to them through the loudspeaker: “Sharks off the stem, gentlemen. Approximately one hundred and fifty yards.”

The men crowded along the railing. Colin found a spot between his father and Mike, wedged himself into it.

“One hundred yards out,” Charlie said.

Colin squinted, concentrated hard on the fluid landscape, but he could not find the sharks. The sun shimmered on the water. There appeared to be millions upon millions of living things wriggling across the surface of the sea, but most of them were only slivers of light dancing from point to point on the waves.

“Eighty yards!”

A shout went up as several of the men spotted the sharks at the same instant.

A moment later Colin saw a fin. Then another. Two more. At least a dozen.

Suddenly line sang out of one of the reels.

“A bite!” Pete said.

Rex jumped into the deck-mounted chair behind the bent and jerking rod. As Irv strapped him down, Rex slipped the deep-sea rig out of the steel brace that had been holding it.

“Hell, sharks are just junk fish,” Jack said disdainfully.

“You’re not going to get a trophy for a shark, no matter how damned big it is,” Pete said.

“I know,” Rex said. “And I’m not about to eat the damned thing either. But I sure as hell won’t let the bastard get away!”

Something took the bait on the second line and ran with it. Mike claimed that chair.

At the start it was one of the most exciting things Colin had ever seen. Although this wasn’t his first time on a charter boat, he watched in awe as the men battled their catches. They shouted and swore, and the others urged them on. Muscles bulged in their thick arms. Veins popped out in their necks and at their temples. They groaned and thrashed and held on, pulling and reeling, pulling and reeling. Perspiration streamed from them, and Irv patted their faces with a white rag to keep the sweat from getting in their eyes.

“Keep the line taut!”

“Don’t let him throw the hook!”

“Run him some more.”

“Tire him out.”

“He’s already tired out.”

“Be careful they don’t tangle the lines.”

“It’s been fifteen minutes.”

“Jesus, Mike, a little old lady would’ve landed him by now.”

“My mother would’ve landed him by now.”

“Your mother’s built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

“He’s breaking water!”

“You got him now, Rex!”

“Big! Six foot or more!”

“And the other one. There!”

“Keep fighting!”

“What the hell will we do with two sharks?”

“Have to cut ‘em loose.”

“Kill ‘em first,” Colin’s father said. “You never let a shark go back alive. Isn’t that right, Irv?”

“Right, Frank.”

Colin’s father said, “Irv, you better get the gun.”

Irv nodded and hurried away.

“What gun?” Colin asked uneasily. He was uncomfortable around firearms.

“They keep a.38 revolver aboard just for killing sharks,” his father said.

Irv returned with the gun. “It’s loaded.”

Frank took it and stood by the railing.

Colin wanted to put his fingers in his ears, but he didn’t dare. The men would laugh at him, and his father would be angry.

“Can’t see either of the critters yet,” Frank said.

The fishermen’s hard bodies glistened with sweat.

Each rod appeared to be bent far beyond its breaking point, as if it were held together by nothing more than the indomitable will of the man who controlled it.

Suddenly Frank said, “You’ve almost got yours, Rex! I can see him.”

“He’s an ugly son-of-a-bitch,” Pete said.

Someone else said, “He looks like Pete.”

“He’s right on the surface,” Frank said. “He doesn’t have enough line to run deep again. He looks beat.”

“So am I,” Rex said. “So will you for God’s sake shoot the bastard?”

“Bring him a bit closer.”

“What the hell do you want? You want me to make him stand up against a wall and wear a blindfold?”

Everyone laughed.

Colin saw the slick, gray, torpedolike creature only twenty or thirty feet from the stem. It was riding just under the waves, dark fin protruding into the air. For a moment it was very still; then it began to pitch and toss and twist wildly, trying to free itself from the hook.

“Jesus!” Rex said. “It’ll tear my arms right out of their sockets.”

As the fish was drawn nearer in spite of its violent struggle, it rolled from side to side, writhing on the hook, willing to tear its own mouth to shreds in hope of getting loose, but succeeding only in setting the barbed hook even deeper. Its flat, malevolent head rose from the sea as it rolled, and for an instant Colin was staring into a bright and very alien eye that shone with a fierce inner light and seemed to radiate pure fury.

Frank Jacobs fired the.38 revolver.

Colin saw the hole open a few inches behind the shark’s head. Blood and flesh sprayed across the water.

Everyone cheered.

Frank fired again. The second shot entered a couple of inches back of the first.

The shark should have been dead, but instead it seemed to take a new life from the bullets.

“Look at the bastard kick!”

“He doesn’t like that lead.”

“Shoot him again, Frank.”

“Get him square in the head.”

“Shoot him in the head.”

“You got to get a shark in the head.”

“Between the eyes, Frank!”

“Kill it, Frank!”

“Kill it!”

The foam that sloshed around the fish had once been white. Now it was pink.

Colin’s father squeezed the trigger twice. The big gun bucked in his hands. One shot missed, but the other took the prey squarely in the head.

The shark leaped convulsively, as if trying to heave itself aboard the boat, and everyone on the Erica Lynn cried out in surprise; but then it fell back into the water and was absolutely still.

A second later Mike brought his catch to the surface, within striking distance, and Frank fired at it. This time his aim was perfect, and he finished the shark with the first shot.

The sea foam was crimson.

Irv rushed forward with a tackle knife and severed both lines.

Rex and Mike collapsed in their chairs, relieved and surely aching from head to foot.

Colin watched the dead fish drifting belly-up on the waves.

Without warning the sea began to boil as if a great flame had been applied beneath it. Fins appeared everywhere, converging on a small area immediately aft of the Erica Lynn: a dozen… two dozen… fifty sharks or more. They slashed viciously at their dead comrades, ripped and tore at meat like their very own meat, smashed into one another, fought over every morsel, soaring and diving and striking in a mindless, savage feeding frenzy.