Sea Monster's Revenge Page 25

  Sylvia looked at Luz. "Pretty good day, you said. How so?"

  She had gotten a job at Calderon as a data clerk, entering and checking data, filing incoming information, doing some preliminary analyses, and so on.

  "I thought you wanted to be an actress."

  "Still do," the woman said, capturing some vegetables on a fork. "But this gives me a fall-back, and keeps me from taking any old job they offer me."

  Genie'd had a good interview with an accounting branch of Calderon and was supposed to have another interview the next day. She hoped they'd then offer her a position.

  The two jobs supported Sylvia's guess that the two were police, or maybe spies. Both jobs would give someone smart a look behind the surface of a business.

  The following day Sylvia took a bus up the highway toward the airport and Iguazú Falls. At the Falls she joined a tourist group which took a boat ride on the river just downriver from the largest cataract, Garganta Diablo, the Devil's Throat fall. Its height was almost 300 feet and the mist rising off the water floated up at least a third of that height.

  The boat came near the roiling water where the mist rose. At that point the sound of the water was less a hiss than a roar, and the monster felt the beating pulse of the sound deep inside her. Her body began to react to it, but she pushed the urge down. God knew what kind of being she would transform into. She just knew she wanted to plunge into the thunderous depths and play.

  On Wednesday she took a guided tourist ride into the three cities. Half the day was spent in Paraguay, the other half in Brazil, where the tour included a Portuguese-flavored dinner and dinner show.

  Thursday the monster returned to exploring the lake. And made a disturbing discovery.

  Chapter 28 - Discovery

  Thursday Sylvia still had not heard from Carlos about a buyer for her Candy persona. She had expected this would happen. He was home and no doubt had much business to pay attention. And perhaps he simply hoped she'd disappear if he ignored her.

  The sea monster side of her urged her to explore the lake, the marine biologist side agreed. So she again rented a small motor craft and set out to find a good place to park it in the lake while she went over the side and explored.

  Serpentine Lago Eva Perón had a half-dozen almost hair-pin bends and as many larger areas more than a mile across. There were more than two dozen legs which intruded into the land, and 13 residences at the end of those legs.

  Two of the homes were little more than shacks, most were upscale middle-class, and one seemed to be a rambling millionaire's summer home complete with large grounds surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Each home had a boat dock on the lake and a private road which linked it to the Argentine highway system. The "millionaire" residence was on the north side of the lake and its road connected to the north-east airport-Iguazú highway.

  She'd parked in the largest area of the lake, closest to Puerto Bossetti, the first day of her explorations. This time she left the boat in a smaller area around the second bend in the lake. Under water she went to the lake bottom and began to travel in a spiral around her boat's location, surveying the marine life and vegetation. Periodically she widened the spiral, not in a regular fashion but as whim and the sub-terrain suggested.

  Several times she caught fish and surfaced to eat them.

  At about noon she surfaced again to look about and ensure no one in the half-dozen craft on the water was curious about her boat. None were .

  She briefly considered returning to the village to have a meal. She was only a tiny bit hungry after the several fish she'd eaten but the human side of her liked the variety of flavorings of human food. She thought better of the impulse and continued her examination of the lake bottom.

  A little before 2:00 she discovered a human skeleton.

  It was that of a big man. He'd died from a small-caliber bullet to the back of his head. The condition of the remains indicated that he had been deposited here at least five years before.

  She stood upright and stretched the flotation sacks in her upper chest to increase her buoyancy. This let her rise slowly in the water without flexing her limbs. As she rose she de-focused her "gravity radar" so that she could see more of the lake bottom but with lesser detail.

  She "saw" what her intuition had prompted her. There were more bodies. They were closer to the northern shore and scattered over roughly a two-hundred foot circle. She counted 21.

  She swam toward the next nearest the shore, looking down at it but not approaching. It was of another man, perhaps stabbed because a bullet wound could not be seen with her eyes or her radar.

  The third skeleton was of a woman. Sylvia swam down to examine it more closely.

  These remains were perhaps three years old. It was hard to tell. Though the biologist was well acquainted with mammalian skeletal structure she was no forensic biologist. It was a highly specialized field.

  She could not tell how the woman had died. There were no marks of violence she could see on the skeleton. Of course the woman's flesh might have shown some but decay and fish had long cleaned the bones .

  She had been a young woman, however.

  A suspicion began to nibble at her mind. She ignored it.

  One more man. Then several women. Every one of the women had their wrists bound behind her back by plastic tie-wraps. Each had a strip of tape over their mouths. All of them had been young women. All had been well-formed.

  She forced her suspicion back. It fought to stay in her conscious. She exercised iron control to keep from letting it come to full fruition and finished her survey of all the remains.

  The last was just a few months old. An esoteric probe of a thigh bone revealed some bone marrow still remaining inside it.

  Sylvia took it in two hands and cracked it open. Then she touched the marrow with one finger.

  The genetic code unwound itself to her biological laboratory senses and reshaped into an image of young blond woman, quite pretty, with blue eyes.

  Not unlike she herself. The night she had been kidnapped and killed.

  She imagined most of the women had been alive when brought out into the lake. Knowing what was going to happen to them. Terrified.

  She imagined them pushed overboard, helpless, the gags making them unable even to scream or plea for mercy. Imagined them drowning, thrashing as much as the plastic wrap-ties allowed them to. Imagine them dying.

  A great rage grew in her. Hot, inside her belly, her chest, spreading into her limbs, her head. It engulfed her. She let it.

  Her body began changing into a form unlike her others. Her muscles expanded; her compressed fat softened, flowed, reshaped; her skin tingled and changed; her hand-claws and foot-claws elongated, thickened. All her most vulnerable spots, crotch, spine, ribs, mouth, nose, eyes grew armor from the expanding fat.

  The war monster surged upward, surfaced in a great eruption, splashed down again. She expelled all the water from her lungs through her gills and completed the change. Her warform was an air breather.

  She drew in a deep breath, and expelled it in a great shout like the fog-horn of a boat, a great expression of fury and warning.

  The shout eased her anger. Her body cooled, her insides to normal, her outside to water temperature.

  Low in the water, breathing air, she looked about. The people in nearest boats, three motor and one sail, were standing, looking all around. None were looking directly at her, even in the sailboat a mere quarter-mile away, though the three people in it were scanning in her direction.

  She let calm flow over her, zoomed in on farther boats and the mansion at the end of the inlet nearest her. Fewer people farther away were looking about. Some were continuing apparently normal activities.

  One of those caught her attention. Inside the chain-link fence surrounding the mansion a man was soothing three, no four, large black-haired dogs. He carried a short gun on a sling looped over a shoulder.

  Of course. He may not have heard her, being about a mile away, but th
e dogs with their more-sensitive ears would have.

  Suspicion came to her, edged toward certainty. The mansion was the source of the dead beneath her. She had found her kidnappers.

  Chapter 29 - Reconnaissance

  Or at least she had found kidnappers, almost certainly ones who threatened, beat, and raped young women to force them to become prostitutes.

  Maybe they were not the ones who had bungled and killed her, but they would quite nicely serve to ease her thirst for blood.

  She continued watching the guard and the dogs. He was feeding them treats from a bag on a strap over his shoulder. It was opposite the strap supporting an automatic assault rifle, she saw, extending her vision to view it better. In this new form her binocular-eyes were about 5X power, unlike the lesser power of her sea monster or hybrid monster-human form.

  The dogs calmed, they and their manager continued a circuit about the mansion. Sylvia's attention shifted to her new body. The skin was a mottled grey and grey-green and brown, a camouflage pattern. There was also a subtle spider-web pattern embedded within it. Extending her extra-human internal sense into her skin she discovered that the web was armor of sorts, a tough skein which would resist a blade or bullet better than that of her sea monster's leather-like armor.

  She examined her hands visually and with her intra-sense. The claws were skinnier than their sea-monster versions, almost needle-like though about three inches long and mildly curved. They were rigid.

  She placed the one embedded within her index finger on the top of one side of the boat and gently pressed against the tough aluminum. It sliced into the metal as if the aluminum were butter. It flexed not at all.

  On an impulse she sought to retract a claw. It slid smoothly into her finger, shrinking to just a quarter of inch length. Extended, it not only slid out of her finger but expanded. Not like an accordion, but by extruding .

  The biologist side of her wondered at the biochemical nature of the material and the extrusion mechanism, tabled that exploration for a later time.

  "Looking" inside her muscles, she considered their energy needs. They might be a hundred times as strong as ordinary muscle, but they would tire more quickly. They were good for burst-mode activity, not for long use.

  That thought revealed a design flaw in her muscular pain sense. Almost automatically she called upon her alien body wisdom to create warnings to tell her to ease off when her energy reserves dropped below a certain point.

  Her foot-claws were too long to make travel on land easily. She adjusted them to make her a better sneaker and runner, then retracted them.

  For the next hour she floated low in the water, a little of her attention spent on watching about her but most of it on improving this new form, which she thought of as her war form. Then, satisfied, she "finalized" the new form so that she only had to want to change into it and it would happen automatically.

  The sun was halfway down the sky now.

  Sylvia changed into her Candy form and, seeing no one watching her, slid over into the rental and dressed in her shorts, tee shirt, and tennies. With a thought she arranged her long blond hair into a pony tail and started the engine.

  The remaining couple of hours of the afternoon the monster bent her thoughts and shopping to prepare for a night-time reconnaissance of the mansion. She ate three dinners by herself, spaced far enough apart along the beach not to cause comment by any chance observers. Changing into her new form had used up a good bit of her stored resources. And she might be using it again tonight, so wanted to be fully charged up.

  At her fourth dinner she was joined by Genie and Luz. They were full of talk about their new jobs and their co-workers. "Candy" listened with a smile, shrugging off questions about her own day, saying she had wandered a bit and read a book.

  That evening she spent with Genie and Luz watching Argentine TV in their apartment, including some American programming in English and dubbed into Spanish. Sometimes the dubbing was hilarious to fluent English and Spanish speakers, which all three of them were.

  When the late-evening news came on Sylvia hugged the two women, an arm around each, tighter than she meant to. This brought a protest from them. She was not sure she would be coming back from the recon. This might be the last time she'd see the women.

  In her room she prepared for bed, lay down, and turned out the lights. Then she dozed.

  At about 1:00 in the morning she got up and peeked out of the windows. No one was near in the motel complex at this time of night except one couple who were returning home.

  Out of the safe she retrieved her Candy passport, credit cards, and money. Folding everything compactly, she added it to their Sylvia Connelly companions inside her belly. Then she bent and stretched a few times to make sure her bulkier interenal treasures would not inconvenience her if she did anything strenuous and athletic.

  Into a flat pack which she could wear strapped to her back she added one change of casual clothing suitable for traveling via air if she decided to leave the tri-state area. To that she added her cell phone and a few other incidentals. Then she zipped up the pack, which was water-tight, and sealed it.

  She dressed in shorts and a tight tee shirt, both in two shades, grass green and grey, in a camouflage pattern. This was a recent fashion and came in all sorts of colors, including shocking pink and purple and somber greys and blacks. The green was a bit dressy but in low light in forest or on grass would act as camouflage, especially when she turned her skin to a matching camo pattern.

  Sylvia last toured the cottage, making sure she had everything she wanted and had left inessentials behind. On the desk top she placed the room key and a tip for the maids. They would not come in until the middle afternoon. If, as the monster expected, she returned to the room she could retrieve the key and cash.

  Listening at the closed and then at the opened door for late-night prowlers Sylvia left the apartment, leaving it unlocked, and walked barefoot leisurely down to the beach. There she trod the shore toward the north, not hurrying. Only a very few people were out at this time of night, and all of them were occupied with their own thoughts—including a couple of lovers who were very occupied with each other.

  North beyond the white sand area she went. The water to her right lapped the shore gently. Further north out of the grey and coarser sand onto graveled then grassy terrain she went also. The mildly industrial area to her left dwindled, then vanished into vacant lots and, further still, to grass and low bushes. Beyond that were a few farms with small plots holding, in a couple of cases, sheep and a few cows.

  At about the two-mile distance from the motel a finger of the water extended westward, becoming a canal to the Parana river further to the west. She remembered passing over the canal in the bus from the Iguazú airport. The long spillway down to the lake blocked her further shore-side walk.

  Sylvia went up the grassy bank to the highway, looked left and right, then mounted it and began to cross the bridge. Near the end of the bridge automobile lights far ahead warned her and she hurried to the end and left the bridge. On the grassy verge beside the road she lay down and turned her skin to a camouflage pattern matching her outfit.

  The car wooshed by and disappeared toward Puerto Bossetti. Sylvia waited until certain it would not return, or another vehicle, then resumed her shore-side walk. The grass was above her ankles.

  Now the lake curved away from its roughly northerly direction toward the east. Sylvia followed it for half a mile, then stopped.

  The monster looked all about, increased the sensitivity of her nose and ears, and stood that way for more than ten minutes, statue-like.

  No one was about. She walked into the lake, changing into her shallow-water form, and when the water was waist high she dove cleanly into it without a splash.

  A brief feeling of suffocation and her lungs changed to water-breathing. The rest of her body completed the change, and she began to swim, her hand- and foot-webs easily scooping the water behind her.

  It was dark un
der the water, without even the faint phosphorescence sometimes seen in saltwater, so faint that human eyes rarely could see it. Nevertheless the monster kept them open. They were adapted to water and were in any case shielded by a tough membrane and further protected by heavy brow ridges.

  Her "gravity radar" "eyesight" was as "bright" as in daylight and as capable of subtle vision. She easily navigated the lake, driving southward to leave the shore behind then curving left and northward to advance toward the mansion.

  It took nearly an hour to near her destination. She surfaced and looked toward the land to the north and east.

  Forest came close to the shore at this point, dense almost to the point of jungle. That was good.

  She submerged and swam close to the shore, then surfaced carefully again, just her eyes above the water. The stars and a sliver moon gave her extra-sensitive eyes enough light for her to see a weird twilight-like half-light view of everything.

  No one was about, as expected.

  The monster approached the shore. When it shallowed enough she stood and waded ashore, changing back to her human form. She took on the persona of Maria as she did so, but with skin the same camouflage pattern as her two-colored clothing.

  She slipped into the forest. It was densely packed with bushes at the edge, not that that was problem to the shapechanger, who had years ago slid easily through much denser foliage. The bushes receded further in and disappeared. During the day they would get too little sunlight to compete with the dense, closely packed trees.

  The mansion was nearly a mile to her right, toward the east. The monster did not close the gap. She wanted to circle the mansion from a distance.

  Sylvia moved at a fast walking pace, nearly silently despite her hurrying. She was superbly adapted to stealthy travel here.

  It took about a half hour to return to the water's edge. Along the way she had crossed the road leading from the mansion to the airport/Iguazú highway. It was a well-kept two-lane blacktop with a narrow but nearly weed-less lawn on each side .