Extinct Read Online Free Page A

damn it. Quit fooling around.”
    He brought his hand up to scratch the side of his face.
    A moment later he stuck the butt of his pole in the soft soil and started around the curve of the slough toward the dam.
    Nearing the rough structure, he caught the stench again. He had been upwind from it while he fished. He looked into the trees, then back to the dam. Luke must be sitting down. The moon was bright enough to see him standing.
    “Hey, Luke, ole buddy?”
    Eddie climbed up on the dam. A puzzled look crossed his face, then he frowned. “Hey, Luke, I’m not in the mood for no games.”
    He walked a little way along the structure. The break in the thick tangle of branches and logs was easy to see now. The only place Luke could be and not be seen was sitting down over the edge of the break by the water. Or taking a dump, Eddie thought.
    He glanced toward the trees on the far side of the slough. But Luke would’ve had to go through the water to get there. If he had come back this way, I’d have already passed him.
    “Luke, now damn it, you know I scare easy.” He was close to the break now, steeling himself for Luke suddenly springing up and growling at him.
    He noticed something at the edge of the break.
    Luke’s rod and reel.
    He walked to it—and spotted Luke’s cap floating in the still water at the bottom of the break. His stomach tightened. Luke’s chest had been bothering him lately.
    His brow now deeply creased, Eddie worked his way around the protruding branches and limbs to the bottom of the break and reached for Luke’s cap.
    He didn’t know why, and he never had time to think it out, but, suddenly, he felt a cold sensation run down his back to thud at the bottom of his stomach.
    Its great jaws agape, its cavernous maw red, the creature’s wide head thrust up through the surface in an explosion of water and seized him, lifting him off the edge of the break much as an alligator might snatch a rabbit off a floating log.
    Eddie’s arm stuck out of the great, partly closed mouth. His hand opened, then closed, as the giant fish sank beneath the surface. The water boiled. Bubbles rose to the surface.
    In a moment, the water was quiet again.
    The small aluminum boat, its bow rope pulled loose from the dam by the buffeting of the water, drifted slowly out toward the middle of the channel, the rope trailing along the surface behind the craft.
    *   *   *
    Alan drove slowly along Interstate 10 on his way back into Biloxi. Across the median the eastbound lanes were crowded with traffic, vacationers on their way to Florida.
    That’s where his parents had been going, he thought. He remembered his aunt shaking him awake with the news they had been killed in a car accident. He had been nine.
    He remembered the terrible grief and instant loneliness, the men patting him on the head, some of the women hugging him, everybody saying how sorry they were. But he also remembered nobody thinking to ask a nine-year-old if he had any questions. Mixed in with his grief had been his wondering who but his parents loved him enough to take care of him with them gone, even such simple things as who was going to take him to school each morning—was he even going to be allowed to keep attending school? Thoughts that wouldn’t occur to an adult, but questions very important to him at that time. But he couldn’t ask anybody what he wondered—how could he be so selfish as to be worrying about himself when his parents had been the ones to suffer, he remembered thinking at the time.
    Carolyn had said she was worried what might be going on in her son’s mind. Why didn’t she simply ask him?
    And Alan wondered why he hadn’t told her that.
    *   *   *
    The bow rope trailed the small aluminum boat, drifting backward down the channel.
    A long ripple behind the craft.
    The massive head thrust up through the water. Water streaming in rivulets back around its black eyes, the head continued to rise until several feet of the great