Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

They continued moving north.

It was a cloudy mid-August day, and they were thirty-five miles north of Long Beach, the sky filled with big white clouds that blocked out the sun. Darryl narrowed his eyes behind a pair of binoculars. Was that another strand? His eyelids felt heavy, and he couldn’t say for sure. He pointed.

“Craig, go that way, please.”

Summers motored the boat due east, toward the shoreline. They’d been heading northeast for more than a week. While they’d started twenty miles from the coast, they were now just five. From the boat, Darryl reached down and plucked out another dripping strand. He began studying it when from behind him Phil Martino snapped a picture. Darryl felt like cracking him. As busy as he and Monique had been, Phil’s picture-taking had been incessant. How many photos could he take of frickin’ seaweed? Darryl’s eyes were so tired he couldn’t tell if there were markings on the strand or not. He held out the strand to Monique: “May I?” Jason grabbed it first.

Monique shook her head, but Lisa was oblivious, just staring out at the empty ocean. There were much more important things to worry about now than kelp. Real problems were mounting in the Pacific Ocean. Just as in tropical Mexico, the plankton levels here were alarmingly low, particularly around the thermoclines, where they were nearly 75 percent below normal.

Lisa was beginning to suspect that something “of scale” might be going on. She had no idea what, and neither did Craig Summers. Spurred on by Lisa’s constant needling, Craig had increased the frequency of his GDV-4 testing, but just as in Mexico, he found no trace of the virus. What was going on with the ocean’s plankton levels? Summers had no idea either.

As their trek continued, Jason had many other unanswered questions. Why was this alleged new species migrating north? Why suddenly closer to shore? And what were they eating? If the newborns had normal growth rates, Jason figured they could easily grow to weigh a hundred and fifty pounds or more. Perhaps they were great scavengers, adept at finding what little plankton was out there. The Expedition continued following the trail.

AS AUGUST continued, they moved closer still to the shoreline and right up the Southern California coast, past Los Angeles, Oxnard, Ventura, and into the waters just north of Santa Barbara. Along the way, Darryl and Monique battled through many roadblocks, primarily strong surface currents. Currents could easily destroy a trail and send individual strands in every direction. Staying close was the only guarantee of not losing it, and that was exactly what the couple had done. With Jason second-guessing their every move, they worked hard for a solid month, all day every day, searching relentlessly. Darryl didn’t shoot at a single skeet, and Monique didn’t glance at a book or magazine.

Lisa found Monique’s work ethic incredible. Prior to this, she’d never seen Monique do anything other than stroll around in flip-flops, drink Diet Cokes, and read. While Lisa was well aware of Monique’s military background, she’d just never pictured her getting her beautiful fingernails dirty. But every day Monique Hollis came up winded in her wet suit. She’d worked tirelessly, and without complaint. Like Lisa, she was tougher than she looked.

Into September, the Expedition proceeded north, to Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and San Simeon. Jason continued to be relentless with his note taking, even starting an outline for a formal report. Though he remained frustrated with how little the others cared about proper documentation. Darryl and Craig literally hadn’t written down their findings on anything, and Monique and Lisa’s notes, usually in little colored spiral notebooks, were often illegible.

On another gorgeous September day, mid-seventies without a cloud in the sky, Phil headed to the bow of the boat with his cell phone open. “It’s Mr. Ackerman, Jason.”

“Hi, Harry.” The conversation was brief. Ackerman wanted to know if it was a new species or not. “We still can’t say definitively,” Jason said. “All we can do is keep following the trail.”

They did. But as they continued north they had no idea that someone else’s trail was about to come to a violent end.

SETH GETTY was forty-five, about thirty pounds overweight, and recently divorced. He lived in a pathetic one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the massive Los Padres National Forest, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and spent his personal time watching awful sitcoms on television. Heading out to sea, he was by himself. His partner had called in sick today, so he’d decided to do the job alone. Why not? The sun was out, the water was fairly flat, and it would literally be a ten-minute task. Getty’s occupation was fiber-optic maintenance and repair. Normally, this required inspecting his phone company’s central hub, a massive warehouse filled with routers and telcom switches, but twice a month Getty and his partner had to spot-check their portion of the company’s deep-sea fiber-optic cable. Invariably the cable was functioning properly, but the job was to make certain.

Getty was in the company boat, two miles offshore and in no rush to reach his destination. It was beautiful out today. No people, no other boats. Just a ton of kelp strands in the water. Looking forward Getty eyed a few hundred gliding seagulls. A football field away, the birds darted above the ocean, and Seth was pleased to see them. He’d brought along a loaf of Wonder Bread after all. He suddenly squinted. What was that? Directly beneath the birds, two smallish black shapes flew out of the sea then fell right back in. Getty stared at the spot, but as he motored closer, whatever it was didn’t reappear. He cut the engine and threw bread all over the large gray deck. Like vultures, the birds immediately descended, hopping everywhere to eat as much as they could. There were so many they took up the entire deck, but Getty didn’t mind. He squeezed into a too-small black wet suit and reminded himself to go on a diet.

As he jumped into the sea, the birds continued to eat.

GETTY DOVE to two hundred feet, carefully checked the cable’s current readings, and began to ascend. When he was a hundred feet from the surface, however, he noticed a moving black shape to his right. He froze. He couldn’t make it out at all—visibility was very poor—but whatever it was, he thought it was swimming toward him. He glanced up and, far above the surface, thought he saw the gulls gliding in the sun. He turned back. The black shape was much closer now. Then he noticed movement from another direction. There was a second black shape also swimming toward him. Then he noticed a third. Then a fourth. Then hundreds. They were coming from all sides.

Suddenly Seth Getty was terrified. He started to swim up. But then he froze again. Now they were coming from above, too.

“WHAT MISSING repairman?” Jason asked.

On the back of the Expedition, Craig shrugged. “The coast guard just sent out an all-points. Some guy doing maintenance on a fiber-optic cable. Apparently he just disappeared, right around here.”

“Where was he exactly?”

“About ten miles north, off Los Padres.”

Jason paused. “That’s right where the kelp trail’s leading…. I wonder if maybe—” He stopped talking.

“What? You think the rays have something do with it?”

A smile. “Of course not.” That was ridiculous, not even within the realm of possibility. “But whatever got this guy… I wonder if maybe it could get them, too.”

“Come on, Jason. He probably just drowned, then got carried away by the currents.”

But in the exact location they’d tracked the rays to? “Let’s get up there and check it out.”