Return to The Deep (From The Deep Book 2) by Michael Bray Page A

the truck into gear and setting off, nudging Jim's beaten pickup aside and leaving the dead driver by the roadside. Cars were pulling to a stop now to see if they could help. Jim picked up speed, arms hacking at the wheel as he struggled to control the truck.
    "This fucker's heavy," he muttered.
    Clayton didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled off his balaclava and stared out of the window.
    "Hey, I’m talking to you," Jim said.
    "You killed that man back there," Clayton croaked.
    "It wasn’t my fault. He should have done as I told him. Anyway, we don’t know he's dead for sure."
    "We watched him die!" Clayton screamed.
    "Shut up, we don’t know for sure. He might have just passed out or something."
    "We're gonna go down for this, Jim. Both of us. Don’t you realise what you've done? This isn’t something petty like shoplifting or carjacking. This is murder."
    "Relax; it will never come to that,” Jim said, trying to convince himself just as much as Clayton. “Besides, nobody knows who we are. Nobody knows what we've done."
    "Your truck is at the scene!" Clayton said, slamming his fist on the dash. "They can link it to you. They'll hunt you down for murder, Jim. You've crossed the line. You can’t go back now."
    A cloud of uncertainty passed over Jim’s face. Clayton watched as his friend came to terms with the reality of the situation. "Well, it might be okay," he said, barely able to muster any conviction. "Like I said, he might just be wounded. It might be alright. Besides, it never would have happened if he hadn’t gone for the gun. I mean, who the hell does something like that?"
    "Why did you load it?" Clayton asked quietly.
    "I don’t know,” Jim shrugged as he pulled off his mask. “I was thinkin’ maybe I could intimidate the guy if he didn’t go along with it. I was gonna fire a shot into the air, scare him a little, like they do in the movies, you know? Then the old prick came at me and things got out of hand. Hell, you were there, you saw it. You can vouch for me, right Clayton?"
    "You need to turn yourself in. We need to stop the truck right now and you need to give yourself up. The longer you run, the worse you’ll make things for yourself."
    "Then I'll have done this for nothing. At least if we do this, they'll see why, they'll see the reason. That will help my case, won’t it?"
    Clayton hated the pleading tone in Jim’s voice almost as much as the waxy tone of his skin and desperate set of his grin.
    "Yeah, Maybe," Clayton mumbled, choosing his words carefully. For as much as he didn’t think Jim would hurt him, he also didn’t expect him to have ever gone as far as shooting a man for no reason. Either way, it was plain to see that he was a man with nothing to lose, and he knew well enough that desperate men do desperate things when they have to.
    "Promise me you won’t tell the others what happened."
    Clayton looked at his friend, trying to see past the desperation. "They'll find out soon enough, this will be all over the news. You can’t hide this from them."
    "I know that, but don’t make this all for nothing. As soon as we get this thing back in the water, I’ll turn myself in. Explain how it was an accident. How nobody else was involved."
    "Okay, good idea," Clayton said, not having the heart to tell Jim that freeing a blue whale wasn’t going to hold water and give him any kind of a free pass against a murder charge, no matter what the initial intention was.
    "Let’s just hope the others are ready for us," Jim said as he wrestled with the wheel, changing direction and heading up the up the Florida coast. In the back, Andrews’s staff stayed in position through a combination of fear and sense of duty to the creature. They could ony stay as helpless passengers as the truck rumbled closer to its destination.
     
     
    IV
    Minutemen Causeway,
    Cocoa Beach, Florida.
     
     
    Fernando, Emma, and Tom, waited on the beach, each nervous and excited in equal measure. Already the golden sands