Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

But suddenly they stopped.

They leaped off the floating piece of meat and swam away.

Something was coming. Something much larger and considerably more dangerous than they were. One of the adults had left its hiding place in the depths and come to steal their spoils. The smaller animals couldn’t see it yet, but they sensed it. They had first sensed it rising twenty minutes earlier but had been so focused on the hunt, they’d ignored it. But the massive animal was too close to be ignored any longer. They wouldn’t challenge it. If it wanted their food, it would have it—and without a fight. They swam farther from the corpse and looked down. Never before had the juveniles seen an adult come to the surface, not once. An adult that would do so had to be on the verge of starvation. Its massive pumping body slowly appeared below. The juveniles backed farther away still. They didn’t want to be close to it.

They drifted lower, glancing up at the watery moon. Then the gargantuan form rose up in front of the white orb, its curtain-size wings slowly flapping. When the animal reached the floating piece of meat, its purpose was unmistakable. A pair of jaws wide enough to swallow two men whole stretched open, then thundered closed, severing the dolphin in half. The jaws quickly chewed and the animal swallowed.

The juveniles didn’t move.

Another corpse, an inedible infected one, they had determined, was floating nearby. The huge creature swam toward it. Again, the jaws opened and thundered down. But this time, there was no chewing. The creature sensed what the juveniles had: the meat was infected. It deserted the severed pieces and dove down, descending toward the darkness.

After the great animal was gone, the smaller ones returned to the surface. As they edged their horns out of the sea, they heard it: faint, high-pitched screams echoing across the watery plane. A few of the slaughtered dolphins were still alive, hanging on, their cries an offering of fresh meat to whoever could reach them first. This group wasn’t interested. Their stomachs were filled, and they were too tired to swim. They wanted to rest before they continued north again. They slowly descended. Then, floating like a cluster of enormous starfish, they simply closed their eyes.

The ocean’s surface became perfectly quiet. The only sounds were from the wind and the waves. The cries of the dolphins were no more.

IT WAS 7:30 A.M. on this day in the first week of October. The sky was a bleak gray, without a trace of sun anywhere. Good fishing weather. Three tuna fisherman, Don Gilroy, Kurt Hicks, and Mark Balson, had been trailing a pack of seven dolphins for an hour and were now in the waters off of Santa Cruz, a few miles north of Monterey. Tuna fisherman regularly followed dolphins to help them locate their catch. Biologists still didn’t know why, but dolphins and tuna often swam together, dolphins near the surface, tuna a couple hundred feet below it.

The gods appeared to be smiling on the fisherman this morning because the dolphins abruptly stopped swimming forward and began circling. This was unusual behavior. Normally, dolphins slow gradually as they tire. The men didn’t suspect there might be a reason for this. They’d seen relatively few dolphins recently, so now that they’d actually found a small pack, they weren’t asking questions.

The fishermen let out a massive weighted seine net. It drifted down to the tuna below, caught them, then began to tighten and ascend. In compliance with the Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972, the men watched carefully as one by one, all seven of the dolphins leaped over the net and swam away. In less than a minute, the mammals were gone—apparently. The three had to be certain. The Marine Act had a second procedural requirement stipulating that someone had to paddle out in a rowboat and physically check that every dolphin had escaped. Many fishermen regularly ignored this rule, but not Gilroy, Hicks, and Balson.

Balson had gone last time, so Gilroy and Hicks flipped a quarter to see who would go now. Kurt Hicks lost. Paddling out in a tiny rowboat in his overalls, he noticed a single strand of kelp, oddly shredded, but didn’t give it much thought. He reached the middle of the net, then rolled into the sea with a mask. Holding it against his face, he scanned for any stray dolphins.

Back on the boat, on a peeling wood plank that doubled as a bench, Balson and Gilroy made small talk.

“So what do you got going this weekend, Gilroy?”

“Ah, nothing much. Watch the baseball game, get drunk with Darlene.”

Balson chuckled and glanced toward Hicks. “What’s Kurt doing out there anyway?” It normally took all of ten seconds to confirm the dolphins were gone, but it had already been longer than that.

“Ah, who knows, probably playing with himself.” Gilroy stood. “Hey! What are you doing out there, Hicks?!”

Kurt Hicks raised his sopping head from the water. “There’s something down here! I’m gonna go see what it is!” He put the mask on completely and disappeared.

Gilroy sat. “So, what do you got going this weekend, Balson?”

“Ah, I’ll probably watch the ball game myself. Maybe the Giants can win one, huh?”

They continued to chat casually for another minute when Gilroy realized that Kurt Hicks still hadn’t come back up. He eyed the empty rowboat nervously. “Think he found a dolphin tangled in the net or something?”

Balson hesitated. “I only counted seven and I thought I saw every one of them swim off.”

“Maybe there was an eighth we didn’t see.” Gilroy checked his watch. “Let’s give him another thirty seconds.”

Exactly twenty-five seconds later, Kurt Hicks still hadn’t come up.

Gilroy stood. “Son of a bitch. Maybe he did get tangled up down there. All right, I’m gonna go get him….” He ripped off his shoes, grabbed a life preserver, stood up on the gunwale, and… Kurt Hicks popped up, gasping for air.

Gilroy shook his head. “What the hell were you doing down there, Hicks?!”

Kurt Hicks didn’t answer. He frantically swam toward the rowboat.

“Hey, are you all right?!”

Again, Hicks didn’t respond. He just swam to the little boat.

Gilroy put binoculars to his face and saw that something was behind Hicks, swimming after him.

Hicks swam as fast as he could—but not fast enough. The thing was getting closer.

He reached the boat and climbed in.

Then Gilroy realized that whatever was behind him wasn’t actually swimming. It wasn’t even moving. It just seemed to turn over when a wave struck it. But what was it? “What’d you find down there, Kurt?”

Hicks paddled forward as fast as he could, still not answering.

That’s when Gilroy realized. It was a dead dolphin.

Gasping for air, Hicks climbed onto the boat and collapsed on the peeling wooden deck.

“We didn’t kill that thing, did we?”

“No.” Breathing heavily, Kurt Hicks looked up at Gilroy. “But something else sure as hell did. We gotta tell somebody about this.” He blew out a deep breath. “Call the Coast Guard.”

“ Anew species—you’re sure that’s what it is?”

Jason nodded to his cell phone as he and Craig followed a uniformed coast-guard officer down an ugly, brown-tiled hallway. “Absolutely sure, Harry. The analysis of the teeth confirmed it. It’s a new species.”

Ackerman’s voice remained calm and matter-of-fact. “That’s fantastic. As we agreed, you and your team will have another year on your contracts. Do you think you’re close to finding it?”

“We’re certainly trying to.”

“Well… do it, then.”