Epilogue

 

The great fish glided through the rising plumes of warm water, her alabaster skin casting an incandescent glow upon rows of billowing chimney stacks.  Somewhere ahead lurked the surviving offspring of the adult Kronosaurus the shark had ravaged months earlier.  But as the Megalodon neared the edge of the vent field, she was seized by an involuntary spasm that caused her to break from her course.

Thick dorsal muscles contorted, locking Angel's back in a rigid arch that constrained her movements, forcing her to swim in tight circles.  Within moments her abdomen began quivering, overcome by a series of monstrous contractions.

Angel stopped swimming, her oviduct widening.  Then, with an agonizing push, a completely formed, twelve-foot, one-thousand-pound male pup was expelled from its mother's womb.

With rapid movements of its tail, the young hunter accelerated past its parent and disappeared into the pitch-black gorge.  Moments later, a second male was birthed; this one, at nine feet, slightly smaller than its sibling.  The pup darted away from its mother's outstretched jaws, following its brother to the north.

It took the exhausted female more than a dozen strokes of her caudal fin before forward momentum could be reestablished.  In an instant she was tracking the two male pups through the abyss, intent on killing the very life she had birthed.

Registering the vibrations of their pursuing parent, the pups swam faster, gradually distancing themselves from each other as they darted among black smokers and clusters of tube worms.  For the newborn predators, survival now depended upon their ability to avoid their insatiate mother, as well as the wrathful packs of Kronosaurs.

Unable to catch the faster pups, the female slowed, opening her mouth wide as she struggled to breathe in the oxygen-poor environment.  Although she had become used to existence in the shallows, nature had condemned her species to the warm waters of the gorge.  The huntress would remain there—provided her hunger could be satiated.

Angel resumed her southerly course, homing in on the young Kronosaur.  One day, perhaps, the predator would kill of the last of these pliosaurs, ending forever the abyssal food chain that had sustained her kind for more than one hundred thousand years.  On that day, nature's greatest killing machine would be forced to return to the surface, driven by primal instincts to survive—guided by memories of flesh and blood and bone.