Michael Bray - Feed

The boy kept his eyes closed, wishing he could plug his ears from the wails of the others from the ship being eaten and gored. He nodded against his dad’s neck.

It could have been hours or minutes, but the boy’s father got them to a piece of debris, hauling the boy out of the water before pulling himself up next to his son.

“You can open your eyes now,” he said softly.

The boy didn’t.

“They’re all gone, son. It’s just you and me.”

“And it?” His voice was as weak as a baby pup offering up its first whimper.

“It’s gone. I promise. Open your eyes.”

The boy opened one eye. The sea had settled, and there was more ship debris floating all around them. He closed his eye when he spied what looked like the captain’s arm, still in its skipper jacket, floating a few feet away.

“Don’t you realize what we have just seen?” his father whispered. A freezing wind answered him before he continued. “That—thing. It shouldn’t be here. Did you see its skin?”

He opened his eyes. The boy shook with adrenaline, fear, cold, and pain in his hands, but his father didn’t seem to notice. His eyes gleamed in the starlight settling over the freezing sea, and for a moment, the boy allowed his father’s enthusiasm to sink into him. He had just seen the unbelievable. Yes, he had.

But he had also seen Ms. Engle get chewed up alive by eight-inch shark teeth in a mouth big enough for four people.

His father continued. “The Megalodon. They were giant sharks, dinosaurs. Some say they were as big as sixty feet long. That one, that one was about forty feet, wouldn’t you say, son?”

The boy didn’t want to stop his father’s excitement, but his hands wouldn’t stop bleeding. They had to find some way to land, away from the giant beast, the huge teeth, and the ungodly cold. “Dada,” he started hesitantly. He could barely talk, he was so weak. So much blood lost.

His father’s eyes stayed focused on the ship’s wreckage as he murmured, “Megalodon. There’s one alive, son, and we found it. Do you have any idea what this means?”

“Dada, my hands.”

His father looked down at the boy’s shredded palms. “Oh, son. Oh my god, son.” He wrapped his wet arms around the boy and tucked his head under his chin, rubbing the tops of his son’s arms. “I’ll get you out of here. It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll get out of here, and then we’ll tell the world what we’ve found here today. I know you’re scared and cold, bleeding, but we made it. Now, we have to survive. We have no choice. We must tell the world a prehistoric creature is still alive down here. We have to—”

The boy smelled the rotten fish smell so strongly that he felt bile rise up in his throat again, and he pulled back from his father, peeking over his shoulder to the warm gust of air accompanying the foul stench.

Nothing but jagged, sharp teeth filled his vision. The giant shark was right on top of their little island of debris, their piece of momentary and illusionary safety. At this range, the boy noticed each tooth seemed to have jagged teeth of its own. Teeth with teeth.

Then the jaws did that thing again. They seemed to shoot out of the massive creature’s head, but this time, the beast snapped the chunk of metal they had been floating on in half, leaving the boy alone on his side, and his father in the teeth of the beast.

His father didn’t scream; instead, all the boy heard, because his eyes were shut so tightly he might never see again, was the crunching of his dada’s bones, and harsh, heavy grunts and gasps coming from his father’s body as the shark demolished him into pieces of meat.

The boy balled up with his bloody fists under him and his backbone pointed to the sky, fetal, wishing, hoping, praying that it would just go away.

And if it did, he swore, absolutely swore by the tears in his soul at having heard his father die such a base and terrorizing death, that he would make it to land, and he would make it his life’s goal to do what his dada wanted in his last moments. His dada had wanted it so much he forgot to keep paddling them on the debris.

The boy would make the world know. He would find a way to make sure everybody on the planet knew this thing was here, right here, in the Drake Passage, if it was the last thing he did in his life.