PREDATOR ISLAND (Sea Lab Book 2)

CHAPTER 50

After Jake gave Sarah a final hug, he walked up to Tony and knuckle bumped his fist. Later, he'd go into detail about what transpired in the cave and how he escaped, but a lot of things went unspoken. Like the fact he was alive. That said most of what needed to be said.

Jake turned to Dylan and gave him his pistol back. "The magazine has nine rounds. Use them wisely."

"I take it you didn't kill it?"

"Nope, but I wounded it. Three blasts from a double-barrel twelve gauge messed its head up pretty bad...but it kept coming...however...I feel confident that the last shot scarred it up and blinded it in one eye. It may be deaf on that side too because one of my other shots took an ear off."

Tony looked grim. "So we're dealing with a bloodthirsty predator with half its senses intact, but more ticked off than before. Nice."

"But we'll have a better chance of sneaking up on it," Savannah said. "That means we can finish it off."

Jake wondered if she wanted the predator dead so they could survive the island, or so she could claim the treasure? He'd seen the way she looked at Dylan before the cat showed up on the scene. She appeared to be human...at times. With Tom Logan as a father, he suspected she felt the need to live up to his legend. Jake knew what it was like to have a father bigger than life. One that had cheated death more than once, surviving being lost at sea, weathering countless storms, only to go down with a sinking ship in the end, a.k.a. the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter. The weakness of Savannah's old man was gold, the downfall of Jake's had been the sea. But her father was still alive, maybe Jake would give her the benefit of the doubt.

Jake passed Dr. Graham's little revolver to Tony and winked.

"Nice-er...I get the smallest handgun out of all of us." He opened the cylinder and checked the rounds."Even more nice-er...three baby bullets."

"If you'd like to take point on this hunt, you can have the shotgun?"

"On second thought, I'm good, thanks."

Jake suppressed a chuckle. "We ready to hit the cat trail?"

"Have you three lost it in the midst of your male bravado?" Sarah stepped between them, shaking her head. "If you go after it like a bunch of deer hunters, you'll come back with less appendages, or worse, you won't come back at all."

"I think we can handle this."

"Oh really?"

"Why don't you wait until daytime anyway?" Rachel said.

"Yeah, you could track it better then." Savannah's eyes grew large as she talked. "It's bleeding. It's blinded and deafened on one side. We could go to its lair, where ever that is, and kill it."

"To begin with," Dylan replied, "to do that, we'd have to enter a dark cave, because obviously it doesn't like light."

"Savannah, I think you've made several good points, but I'm not talking about waiting till tomorrow," Sarah replied. "I'm talking about making it fight according to our rules."

"I think I get where you're going with this," Jake said. "We do it at night while it's out in the open, but we don't go after it, we lure it to us."

Sarah nodded. "That way we control all the elements."

"We can use its blindness and deafness to our advantage," Savannah added.

"I like the way you're thinking," Dylan replied, drawing a warm smile from Savannah. The two held each other's gaze for a long moment that everyone noticed.

In the next hour, Jake formulated a plan that would take into consideration Sarah's idea of a trap, and Savannah's idea of using the animal's weaknesses against it. It was good they were using all of their brain power, looking at it from different perspectives, spotting weaknesses in the plan before they went into action. The strategy would also employ their strengths, and they only had three: a shotgun, a pistol, and a tiny revolver. Those strengths were limited to a total of twenty rounds. That was it. Twenty bullets and the predator had better be dead.

With Dylan shining a flashlight on the ground, everyone watched and listened to Jake's scheme in silence. He felt like a kid drawing lines in the dirt with a stick, but they had to work this out down to the last detail...and expect something to go wrong. The only problem with that, was they didn't know what would go awry. Whatever happened, they'd have to react on the fly if they wanted to live. He used six small rocks and one big one to represent them and the cat, respectively.

Once finished with the plan, Jake grimaced and said, "Of course, for any trap to work we need someone to use as bait. Any volunteers?"

He beheld their solemn faces as everyone contemplated the harsh reality that someone had to lure the predator toward the guns. When Sarah raised her hand, Jake refused her adamantly. But one look around the group, left him with a question he found difficult to answer. If not her, then who?

The answer to that question was obvious.

Himself.