Sharkbait

I woke up and looked at my phone; it was six in the morning. My text messages had blown up, and I’d missed dozens of calls. I scrolled through the list as I laid in bed, stopping at a caller ID from WALA Television in Mobile, Alabama. She had left a message. “Vicki, this is Shannon Eckersly from FOX10 News in Mobile, Alabama. I was the reporter who interviewed you last night after the rescue? Our phones have been blowing up with callers wanting to know more about you and the rescue! I just got off the phone with Fox and Friends, and they want to interview you in the morning! Can you believe it? Millions of people watch that show every morning! I was hoping to talk to you, but please call the news desk back, and they will give you the details. The morning show would interview live in our studios here in Mobile. Call me back! I’m so excited for you!” She left the phone number and hung up.

I checked the other messages, mostly people congratulating me, and butt-scooted my way to the bottom of the bed. Leo was up already, sitting at the table with his coffee while reading the news on his tablet. “Morning, Sharkbait,” he said as I dropped to the floor.

I kissed Unka Leo on the cheek and went over to the fridge to grab a Mountain Dew. I needed caffeine, but I hated coffee. Sitting down across from him, I stole one of the donuts off his plate. “You were up early,” I said.

“I’m always up early, Sharkbait. That’s what happens to old men,” he said with a grin. “Your interview has thirty-seven thousand views on Youtube so far. I recommend you don’t read the comments; you’d think these kids had never seen a girl in a bikini before.”

I rolled my eyes as I pulled up the site on my phone and found the video. “I got a message from the news station in Mobile,” I said.

“I know. The station called your Mom, and Liv called me.”

I bit into the chocolate bismark, sucking the custard out of the center. “I’m not interested in being a celebrity, Leo. I just followed my training and got lucky.”

He nodded. “That may be the case, but you might want to reconsider the whole celebrity thing.” I looked at him quizzically. “Who is your hero?”

“Ocean Ramsey,” I said quickly.

“And how does Ocean get her message out to the world?”

“She’s famous,” I agreed as I figured out where he was going. “She used her looks and her diving to make videos and photos that went viral.”

“Exactly. Get people to watch, then teach them about sharks. It’s not fair, but it’s true. If Ocean hadn’t been hotter than Georgia asphalt in that wetsuit, no one would have heard of her.” He set the last donut aside for Adrienne as we each took another.

“You want me to do the interview,” I said.

“Yes. Face it, Vicki; you are young, smart, and beautiful, and people want to know about you this morning. By next week they will have moved on. Today you have a chance to talk about the sharks you love, and your plan to massively expand the tracking of sharks so we can better protect them. When else will you have a chance to reach tens of millions of people at once?”

He was right; I wouldn’t. “Strike while the iron is hot?”

Leo nodded. “Exactly. I already told the station you would do the interview. The helicopter will pick you up in,” he looked down at his tablet, “Forty-two minutes.”

My jaw dropped. “WHAT? I just woke up!”

“Get in the shower as soon as Adrienne is out, and wear something nice. Adrienne is going with you. Don’t worry about hair and makeup; the helicopter will ruin your hair anyway. They’ll fix you up at the station.”

“GAAAH!” I gobbled down the rest of the donut and washed it down with the rest of the can of Mountain Dew. I finished washing my hands as Leo walked back to the bedroom, giving me privacy as Adrienne exited the shower into the common area. “Aunt Adrienne! You knew about this?”

“Of course, dear. You needed your rest, but NOW you need to get in the shower. Chop chop!” She started to get dressed as I pulled off my jammies and headed into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, I was back out with a towel wrapped around me.

I didn’t have a lot of choices in clothing, as a ball gown and cocktail dress weren’t appropriate, and we’d traveled in comfortable clothes. I went with the shark-patterned blue sundress and white sandals, while Adrienne wore a patterned skirt and white silk blouse. “You look beautiful,” Leo said as he came back out. He was in a suit, ready to head back to the meetings that Alphas endured all weekend.

“Thank you,” I said. “For everything. I don’t know where my head would be right now if I didn’t have the two of you here with me.”

I got pulled into a group hug as the emotions hit me. “Don’t get snot on your dress,” Adrienne said after a few moments. I nearly choked as I pulled back and laughed. Leo handed me a handkerchief, and I dried my eyes. “Now come on, we have to get to the clearing behind the main house to meet the helicopter.”

I followed my Luna out the door, and we started walking towards the main house. “What about Luna Karen? She and Terry did CPR, so she was part of saving the boy too!”

“Karen doesn’t want to be involved,” Adrienne replied. “You’re the photogenic one.”

“And Terry?”

“He’s helping his mate at the hospital; the boy was kept overnight for observation, but they say he will be fine. You should talk about their efforts, though.”

“I will.” We had reached the back, and someone had spray-painted an X on the lawn for the landing spot. I could hear the helicopter coming. “I’ve never been in a helicopter before,” I said.

“It’s a rush,” Adrienne said.

The news helicopter flared out and landed, the engines spooling down. The right-side door opened, and a man in a flight suit came over to us. After telling us the obvious point that we should keep our heads down, we moved to the door and climbed in. He helped us get strapped in and put headsets on us to cut the noise. “Press this button, and you can talk to us,” the pilot said before he climbed into his front right seat.

I pushed the button. “Thank you for coming to get us,” I said.

“It’s our honor, Miss Lawrence,” he said said. He gave me a quick brief of the controls, which I could see from the seat behind the copilot. “Do you want a gentle or fun ride?”

“FUN!”

The pilot twisted the throttle with his left hand until the engines were at full speed, then he raised the collective lever to make us rise into the air. He used the pedals to swing us around as we accelerated forward; in moments, we were speeding across the lawn at head height. As we approached the trees, he pulled back on the cyclic. The nose went up and we rose quickly above the trees. Less than a minute later, we were cruising at two thousand feet and two hundred knots to the west. The flight didn’t take long, and when we touched down on the rooftop of the television station, I was disappointed it was over. “We’ll take you back when you’re ready,” the pilot told us as he shut the engines down.

“Thank you! That was SO fun!” I’d taken videos and a lot of photos on the flight, which was MUCH more fun than a plane.

Thirty minutes after we arrived, I’d been sprayed, combed, powdered, and buffed until I was ready for the three-dimensional high-definition cameras. A young woman led me to a studio where a producer sat me down on a chair. On the screen across from me was the feed from the network feed of Fox and Friends. The cameraman, producer, and Adrienne were the only ones in the room when the door closed. “You’re up next, after the commercial break,” the producer told me. “Lance and Nikki will tease the interview before they bring you in. The red light on means the camera is live.” The screen I was watching was directly under the camera. “Talk into the camera when you can, and relax. You’re going to do fine,” he said.

“You got this, Vicki,” Adrienne told me.

I used my breath tricks for diving to help calm my heart rate down as the commercials came to an end. The show came back, with Lance talking to the camera. “Welcome back to Fox and Friends Weekend. Yesterday, strangers on a remote beach near Pensacola, Florida, responded to a frantic Mom’s cries for help. Her seven-year-old son had disappeared under the waves, and time was running out. Thankfully, a hero was there to save the boy, and she is with us this morning. Please welcome Vicki Lawrence, from Apple Valley, Minnesota.”

The red light came on as the main feed showed a crowd shot of people applauding. “Thank you for having me on,” I said.

Nikki picked up the questions. “I’ve watched the video a half-dozen times, Vicki, and I still can’t believe it. Can you walk us through what happened yesterday?”

“I was walking along the beach with a friend, Terry Foster, and my stepmother, Karen Volkov, when we heard the Mom screaming for her boy. We ran over and found out her son was gone. She pointed to where she last saw him, and Terry and I went into the water to find him.”

“We have cellphone footage showing what happened next,” Lance said. The video showed four of us in the waves, my thong bikini bottom prominently featured by the person recording the video.

“We were looking through the shallow water, and we didn’t see anything. There was a dropoff a little farther out, and a bit of a rip current. I figured the current might have him, so I dove in and swam with the current as I looked along the bottom for him.”

There was a clock along the bottom, counting up. “The clock shows the time you spent underwater in this rescue,” Nikki said. “You weren’t afraid?”

“I’ve been a lifeguard and an open-water scuba diver since I was fifteen, and I’ve been free-diving a lot longer than that,” I said. “I just reacted to the situation.”

The clock was past thirty now. “What was going through your head now?”

“I was praying that I would find him before it was too late,” I said. “I had no idea how long he’d been under before we got there, or how far the riptide had carried him. With the surf, visibility was only about ten feet. It was a needle in a haystack.”

The clock was now over a minute, and Nikki kept going. “How long can you hold your breath underwater?”

“Close to four minutes if I have time to prepare. In this rescue, I could only take a few deep breaths before diving, plus I was swimming hard. I was almost to the end of my endurance when I saw an arm.”

“Wow. What was going through your mind when you saw it,” Lance said.

“Get him to the surface,” I said. “I knew if I went up to catch a breath, I might not find him again. I pulled him to my side and kicked for the top.”

The video showed me coming up on the left edge before the cameraman spotted me. “One minute, forty-two seconds,” Lance said.

“My prayers were answered,” I said. “I yelled for help. Terry was close enough to take over and get him to shore, where he and Karen started CPR. I barely had the energy to make it out of the water, as you can see.” No wonder my story went viral; I was on my hands and knees at the water’s edge in a tiny bikini, my boobs hanging down as I breathed hard, and my ass on full display.

“You’re a true hero,” Nikki said as she wiped away a tear. “You are a senior in high school, right?” I nodded in response. “What is in your future?”

I smiled as now I could make my pitch. “Since I was a young girl, I’ve been fascinated by sharks. I plan to get a degree in Marine Biology, and I’ve got a project I’m just starting to help in conservation efforts for sharks.”

“Really? What kind of project,” Lance asked.

“One of the issues we have in protecting shark species is that we don’t know enough about their movements and where they mate and birth their pups. If we learn more about them, we can better target our conservation efforts.”

“How do you plan to do this,” Lance asked.

“My idea to make inexpensive trackers available on a wider basis, and offset the cost by letting people ‘adopt’ a shark they could track online. The University of Miami tried this a decade ago, but the cost of a tracking device and the cost of catching and tagging sharks was very high, and few got tagged. I want to enlist commercial fishermen, anglers, biologists, and government in large-scale tagging and tracking efforts. Sharks are amazing predators; I don’t want to see any more species going extinct like the Great Hammerhead Shark.”

“That would be a tragedy,” Nikki agreed. “Thank you for joining us this morning, and good luck with your project.”

“Thank you for having me,” I said. The light on the camera went off, and I let out a breath as Lance told everyone that the weather would be next after the commercial break.

“That was FANTASTIC,” Adrienne said as she rushed forward.

“I was so nervous,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone had a video of the rescue!”

“I don’t think those shots hurt your reputation one bit,” she said as she pulled me into a hug. “We’re going to have to beat the boys away with sticks.”

“Great,” I said. Everyone thanked me, then it was back to the helicopter.

“How would you like to fly us back,” the pilot asked.

“Are you kidding me? YEAH!”

“Get in.” He put me in the front left seat, the collective sticking up between my legs, and rudder pedals on the floor. After getting me buckled in and the headset on, he went around to the right seat. The copilot sat behind me with Adrienne on the other side. He walked me through the pre-flight checks, and let me start the turbojet engine. “If I say HANDS OFF, let go of the controls and the pedals. I’ll keep control until we are away from populated areas, so don’t touch until I tell you.”

“All right,” I said. As we took off and flew east, the pilot explained what he was doing and why.

“We’ll start simple. I’ll keep the rudder and collective, and you take the cyclic when I tell you. Do you see that creek down there?” I nodded; we were about a thousand feet above the winding water. “Pretend we’re looking for a lost fisherman and follow the river with the aircraft.”

I took the cyclic and started to fly, moving the stick side to side to stay over the water. The pilot even let me dive down to five hundred feet for a bit before we came back up to cruising altitude. By the end of my time, I had all three controls and was FLYING A FREAKING HELICOPTER!

He took over for the landing approach, and set it down right on the mark. I hugged both men and thanked them profusely before following Adrienne back across the lawn. I waved at the two men as they took off again.

“BEST DAY EVER,” I said with a big grin.