Wahoo was glad that the dive knife was sunk out of Derek’s reach-there was no telling what he might do to provoke the gator. Watching the underwater monitor, Wahoo saw her hunkered once again at the bottom of the pool.
“Start your lines!” the director called.
Derek refused. “Not till that silly bloody lizard pops up again.”
Raven leaned close to Wahoo and inquired how long Alice could hold her breath.
“Hours,” he replied.
“Are you serious?”
“Her personal record is three,” Mickey interjected. “Three hours and fifteen minutes. It was during one of the hurricanes.”
“Oh, brilliant.” Raven glanced crossly at her wristwatch. “We don’t have three hours to kill.”
The director said, “Yeah, let’s bag it.”
“No, keep rolling!” It was Derek, now tangled in the lily pads. “Keep rolling!”
Wahoo’s father murmured, “What a jackass,” and headed for the house.
“Where are you going?” Raven asked.
“To get some aspirin.”
“Bring the whole bottle,” she said.
Ten minutes passed, then fifteen more. Derek continued to flounder around the fake Everglades lagoon while Alice remained out of sight.
The man operating the remote control for the underwater camera said the battery was running low. “Want me to put in a new one?”
“Don’t waste your time,” the director said. “This is hopeless. We’ll just use the first take.”
Wahoo looked toward the house and wondered if his dad was all right. He would have gone to check on him, but he didn’t want to leave as long as Alice was alone in the water with Derek…
Five, ten, fifteen more minutes dragged by. Finally the director said to Raven, “That’s enough. Get him out.”
Derek angrily waved them off. “No way! I’ll stay here all night if I have to-”
“Hey!” It was the guy in charge of the underwater camera. “Look at this.”
They gathered closely around the video monitor-the director, the cameraman, Raven and Wahoo. Slowly but surely, Alice was rising from the bottom of the pool. Her great fluted tail fanned the water gently, stirring a haze of greenish mud.
On the way up, the alligator paused with her blunt nose only inches from the camera’s lens. Even with her mouth shut, the lethal downward teeth were on full display, a crooked picket fence along her upper jaw.
“Wow,” said the director. “Check out those pearlies.”
“She definitely needs an orthodontist,” joked the cameraman.
From the pool, Derek shouted, “What’re you looking at?”
Suddenly the picture went black. The underwater camera’s battery was dead.
“Where’d she go?” Raven asked anxiously.
The director stroked his scraggly beard. “This is not ideal.”
Wahoo stepped to the edge of the pond and called to Derek. “She’s coming up!”
“Well, it’s about bloody time,” he said.
“Don’t move!”
“Ha! Are we still rolling, mates?”
During their 150 million years of existence, alligators have survived global upheavals that wiped out thousands of other species-volcanic eruptions, raging floods, sizzling droughts, melting glaciers and crashing meteorites. After all the other great dinosaurs vanished from earth, the hardy gator remained.
The most serious threat to emerge was man, who in the twentieth century began killing the reptiles for their hides, which were used to make expensive purses, belts and shoes. By the 1960s, alligators had been slaughtered to the brink of extinction throughout the southeastern United States, their main habitat. Eventually the government stepped in and halted gator hunting until the species bounced back, which didn’t take long.
Nothing in nature is tougher.
Contrary to media hype, wild alligators are born with the instinct to avoid people and will usually stay away if given a choice. However, gators that become accustomed to a human presence soon lose all fear, which creates serious problems for both species.
It was impossible for Wahoo to know what was going on in Alice’s prehistoric brainpan as she rose to the surface of the pool. But compared with all the epic disasters that her ancestors had endured, a flabby fake Australian probably wouldn’t have been viewed as a serious threat. On the other hand, she had never before encountered a human so foolhardy.
Whether Alice failed to see Derek Badger because he was in the lily pads, or whether he purposely positioned himself to intercept her, the result was the same. Somehow he wound up straddling her back, like a tipsy cowboy on a bronco.
“Wooo-hooo!” he hollered idiotically.
All Raven Stark could say was: “Oh Lord.”
Wahoo was astounded that Alice was holding still. Apparently she was trying to figure out what exactly was on top of her, and if there was any room left in her tummy for dessert. Young egrets and herons sometimes mistook alligators for logs and perched on them, only to be gobbled in a blur.
“Get off!” Wahoo yelled.
Derek hooted back.
The director sternly motioned for Wahoo to be quiet. He didn’t want any voices other than Derek’s on the audio loop of the scene.
Time slowed to a crawl. Wahoo knew that Alice wouldn’t tolerate such nonsense for long. He was alarmed to see Derek lie down lengthwise along the gator’s spine and try to wrap his arms around her, locking his fingers into the rubbery ridges of her hide. It was a pose that lasted for approximately one second.
Members of the Crocodilia order of reptiles don’t buck like horses do when shedding an unwanted rider. Instead, they thrash and spin. Derek managed to hang on for three full revolutions before being launched airborne. Alice was still twirling violently when he splashed down for a landing. Wahoo feared he would be killed.
Both ends of an alligator possess lethal power-the jaws can crush a person like a grape, while a swift blow from the heavy tail can smash every important bone in the human body. Derek happened to reenter the pond at the biting end of Alice, and through pure misfortune his khaki shorts became snagged on two of her eighty teeth. This connection caused him to begin rotating in unison with the spinning reptile, creating a frothy turmoil on the water.
Raven Stark screamed for help, but none of the crew knew what to do. Jumping in the pool to help Derek seemed like a sure way to get mangled or drowned. Wahoo snatched the bamboo pole from the cattails and thrust it outward in the hope Derek might be able to grab on, but Derek was too dizzy and confused.
Wahoo gave up and tossed the pole aside. Jabbing it at Alice would have accomplished nothing but to agitate her even more-the unhappy gator wanted only to be rid of her pesky human leech.
“Shoot that thing!” Raven shrieked, and Wahoo realized she was addressing his father, who’d reappeared at the scene.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” she begged.
Mickey Cray removed the. 45 from his belt and handed it to his son. Then he calmly kicked off his shoes and dove into the water, where he grabbed a fistful of oily, orange-tinted hair as Derek Badger bubbled past.
The director ordered the cameramen to keep the video rolling. Wahoo’s heart was pounding in his eardrums. He was so riveted on the chaos in the pool that he didn’t see Raven approach him from the side and lunge for the gun. She plucked it from his hand and aimed the barrel at the portion of the turbulence that looked more reptile than human.
“No, don’t!” Wahoo cried, yet she pulled the trigger anyway.
Click. Click. Click.
Raven gaped in disbelief at the pistol. It was empty, of course. Wahoo’s father hadn’t loaded a single bullet.
