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  Praise for KRONOS RISING

  “A word to the wise: if you bite your nails, you'd better wear oven mitts when reading Kronos Rising. It will drag you down to the depths of fear and take you back for a breath of air as fast as you can turn the pages. Readers beware: a new master of marine terror is in your bookstore, and his name is Max Hawthorne!”

  –Stan Pottinger, NY Times Bestselling author of THE BOSS

  “Max Hawthorne explores the sinister side of the dark abyssal world with a new kind of beast, one that makes white sharks and giant squid as threatening as guppies and tadpoles.”

  –Doug Olander, Editor-in-Chief, Sport Fishing Magazine

  “Until today, the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean remained an impossible mystery. But no more – a violent earthquake has finally unleashed a wonderfully horrific secret waiting to eat you alive. From the opening scene of black market shark hunters invading forbidden waters, Kronos Rising sweeps you onto a surprising, wildly inventive, thrill ride. A fabulous debut by Max Hawthorne. Simply put, it's got teeth. Big ones!”

  –Christ Parker, screenwriter (Vampire in Brooklyn, Mulan II, Battle of the Year, Heaven is for Real)

  “What a ride! An adrenaline pumping, non-stop descent into terror, Kronos Rising will do for this generation what “JAWS” did for the last one. Forget going into the water; I’m not going near it!”

  –Mara Corday, sci-fi classic star of Tarantula, The Black Scorpion, and The Giant Claw

  Praise for MEMOIRS OF A GYM RAT

  “Max Hawthorne’s raunchy, revealing memoir is certain to induce bouts of calorie-burning

  laughter, embarrassed grins, and reconsiderations of one’s gym membership. A smutty and enjoyable exposé of life behind health club doors, Memoirs of a Gym Rat is both a scandalizing and edifying read.”

  –Foreword Clarion Reviews

  Also by Max Hawthorne

  KRONOS RISING & MEMOIRS OF A GYM RAT

  KRONOS RISING

  KRAKEN

  (VOLUME 1)

  A NOVEL

  Max Hawthorne

  Kronos Rising: KRAKEN (Volume 1) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Max Hawthorne

  ISBN-13: 978-0692658147

  ISBN-10: 0692658149

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact: Far From the Tree Press LLC.

  Published in the United States by: Far From the Tree Press, LLC.

  Visit Far From the Tree Press, LLC online at: www.farfromthetreepress.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “lost and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  For my dad, Joe, who bought me my first Prehistoric Scenes model when I was five. Here’s to nine kids in one car, Rockaway Beach bungalows, museums, mammoth bones, and Megalodon teeth. Not to mention all the fishing trips, Star Trek reruns, and Ray Harryhausen movies we could muster. This one’s for you, Bluegill King.

  “How many things are now called the worst evil, which are only twelve feet wide and three months long? But some day, greater dragons will come into the world.”

  --Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thus spoke Zarathustra

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is with great humility and pride that I acknowledge the following individuals for their support and/or contributions.

  First and foremost, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to my intrepid publishers at Far From the Tree Press. Thank you for believing in my vision and for giving me the leeway to let my imagination run wild.

  I’d also like to extend my thanks to my ever-growing list of publicity and marketing contacts. Without your professionalism, consideration, and tireless toiling, many would never know the Kronos Rising series exists.

  A special shout-out to my friend and mentor, screenwriter extraordinaire Chris Parker. Thank you very much for your patience and guidance in the beginning and your recent (and ongoing) efforts to make me a passable screenwriter. Rock on, my brother.

  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the individuals who were kind enough to read and contribute to Kronos Rising; KRAKEN during its conception and editing stages. This includes my intrepid brother Steve, AKA “Jaws”, my go-to graphics girl, the talented Amara Celine McKenzie, and my Grammar Nazi-slaying friend, Willis Beyer. Without their combined efforts, this book would not be what it is today. Thank you for contributing some much-needed feedback and for giving my manuscript that last bit of spit-and-polish every novel needs.

  Last, but certainly not least, to my incredibly supportive family: my everlasting devotion. And to my readers, including the always enthusiastic “LEGIONS OF KRONOS,” thank you for your ongoing support. I’m honored (and at times surprised) that you continue to allow me and my monsters into your hearths and hearts. You have my ongoing promise to always do my best to keep you entertained.

  Or if that fails, to at least shock the hell out of you.

  Max Hawthorne

  CHAPTER

  1

  The old gods hungered.

  Fifty miles off the coast of Florida, the male Physeter macrocephalus the world called Avalanche descended through the frigid waters of the Blake Plateau. With deceptively gentle strokes, the bull sperm whale’s twenty-foot flukes powered him along, propelling his giant body ever deeper into the void. The sunlit phototropic zone was already far behind him and the bull emitted a noisy series of broadband clicks as he traveled. The thousand-yard cone of sonar reverberated back, giving the great beast a detailed picture of the eerie seascape surrounding him. At the 1,500-foot mark, Avalanche slowed. The entrance to the vast submarine canyon known as Ophion’s Deep lay directly ahead. Extending from its unplumbed depths, a network of mile-long crevasses spread like hungry tentacles, splaying forth from the Ninth Circle of Hell.

  Hovering head-down over the nearest chasm, Avalanche scanned it with his sonar before resuming his dive. The ice-cold seawater he drew in served to cool the spermaceti wax stored within his enormous head, adjusting his buoyancy and allowing him to descend without effort.

  As he scattered a frightened school of fish at 3,000 feet, the bull sperm felt the familiar sensation of his flexible rib cage beginning to compress inward. His lungs were collapsing to reduce the inevitable nitrogen intake caused by the crushing water pressure. His heartbeat and metabolism slowed to conserve oxygen as he glided ghostlike downward, a pallid titan of the deep.

  At a solid seventy feet in length and weighing over ninety tons, Avalanche was practically the mirror image of his sire, the powerful alpha male sperm whale that perished in this same region thirty years prior. There was one significant difference between the two, however; Avalanche carried a rare leucistic gene. Whereas every other sperm whale in the world was a dark grayish hue, he was white. From the tip of his battle-scarred snout to the edges of his notched flukes, he was the color of snow. The humans, obsessed with the irascible beast, had hounded him since his birth, some sixty years past. As an adolescent, whenever he’d approached the coastline, they’d pursued him relentlessly with their noisy boats, trying to get close and annoying him to no end.

  The big bull eventually learned to tolerate such humans, however. It wasn’t th
e gawking groups with their tiny flashes of light that he was wary of. It was the murderers – the assassins. They were the cowards that scurried atop their noisy metal ships, belching black poison into clear blue skies as they slaughtered his kind. Their explosive-tipped weapons had claimed over a million sperm whale lives over the decades, with the traumatized survivors carrying the collective memories of the slain.

  But Avalanche knew well the chilled waters where the remaining human hunters lurked and he avoided them. The whaling ships and the heartless men that manned them were not a source of concern for him. Nowadays, the humans had their own problems.

  A sudden shift in pressure drew Avalanche back from his ponderings. In the dark, a second bull sperm whale took up position off his left flank. The big whale shifted in the water, emitting a quick coda in response to the newcomer’s greeting as the pair continued on in unison. Although the pitch-black depths concealed even Avalanche’s milky-white skin, courtesy of their advanced sonar sight, the two bulls could view one another as plain as day.

  As huge as Avalanche was, the newcomer was bigger.

  In fact, he was a giant.

  Measuring eighty-four feet in length, and weighing 152 tons, “Tsunami”, as the humans dubbed him, was the size of the sperm whale that sank the 19th century whaling vessel Essex. The granite-hued behemoth was a genetic throwback. In addition to his remarkable size, there was another abnormality cetaceanists found intriguing about Tsunami – his jaws. Unlike most sperm whales, which had heavy, prey-penetrating teeth in the lower jaw alone, Tsunami was showing indications of an opposing set of dentition beginning to appear in his maxilla as well.

  As the two bulls continued their descent, they made it a point to actively scan the waters around them. The days when the great cachalots were the ocean’s apex predators were gone. They had other carnivores to contend with.

  Worse, they knew what it meant to be prey.

  The first time Avalanche encountered a “whale-eater,” it was unlike anything he’d ever seen: a monstrous, short-tailed crocodile, with four powerful flippers and a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth. It was as big as he was, and incredibly fast. In the resultant battle, the old whale barely escaped with his life.

  Soon, whale-eaters were everywhere: unstoppable predators with insatiable appetites that favored whale flesh above all others. Every cetacean in the sea was vulnerable to attack, from the smallest of dolphins to the largest of blue whales. The defensive Marguerite formation that the cow sperms used against their traditional enemies, the Orcas, was useless against the giant reptiles. A whale-eater would circle a sperm whale pod like a hungry shark, then dash in at a frightful speed, disemboweling a cow or calf, and then returning to gorge while the survivors fled.

  In the end, the traumatized whales did what instinct told them; they changed pod formations and altered their migratory routes, spending their summers in frigid climes in an attempt to discourage their cold-blooded pursuers. For the most part, the tactic worked. The whale-eaters seemed disinclined to follow them and food was abundant. Of course, coldwater regions had threats of their own – human and other. And pregnant cows still had to travel back to temperate waters to birth their calves. Even with young bulls accompanying them as sentries, many were lost.

  As Tsunami drifted a few yards closer, Avalanche focused his sonar on the younger animal. He studied the ragged punctures that ran like rows of bloody harpoon wounds across the top of the huge male’s head and through one flipper. They matched the bite marks he had around his torn-up jaw and eye. The festering wounds were deep and painful, and bore testimony to the pair’s recent life-or-death struggle with a gigantic whale-eater.

  The two bulls had discovered that, by working as a team, they could fight back. Moreover, during their last encounter, they had the good fortune to detect a weakness in their predator’s arsenal, one that could be exploited.

  Out of nowhere, the monster had appeared. Like a white shark tracking an elephant seal, it began stalking them during a deepwater dive, locking onto them with its own sound-sight. There was no mistaking its ratcheting calls, even from a mile away. As it closed the distance, the two bulls dove deep. Then, at the last moment, they split up and went on the offensive. Toothy jaws spread and firing the tightly-focused sonar bursts they used to stun squid, they flew at it like giant pincers. The blasts from their sonar beams had no chance of incapacitating the massive reptile, but when it stopped emitting its telltale sonar clicks and began whipping its wedge-shaped head about, they realized they had somehow scrambled its sound-sight.

  The whale-eater was temporarily blind. At that point, the sperms knew they had the advantage.

  Tsunami rushed forward with youthful recklessness. Hammering into their sightless pursuer, he locked his jaws around the predator’s thick neck and held on with all his strength. With flight no longer an option, the die was cast; this would be a battle to the death.

  As the two titans struggled back and forth in the darkness, Avalanche joined in. Swimming in figure-eights, he rammed their opponent repeatedly. The enraged whale-eater, frustrated at finding itself hamstrung, fought back like a demon, writhing and snapping at anything it could sink its teeth into. Eventually, however, the tremendous bludgeoning forced out its air supply and weakened it, until finally, with a Herculean effort, Tsunami was able to torque his enormous body into a death roll and break its neck.

  Desperate for air and trailing blood, the victorious bulls made for the surface. Behind them, the body of their would-be killer sank soundlessly into the depths, a nightmarish demon returning to the abyss from whence it came.

  Avalanche’s scarred brow wrinkled up at the memory. A spasm of pain shot through him and he shifted his injured jaw from side to side, trying to dissipate some of the ache. An enthusiastic series of clicks from Tsunami told him they were approaching their favorite hunting grounds.

  At six thousand feet, the rocky slopes of Ophion’s Deep temporarily leveled off. The bulls switched to the high-frequency emissions they used to home in on prey and began to hunt in earnest. Beyond pale crabs and a few tiny squid, however, they found nothing.

  Tsunami swept his cottage-sized head from side to side. Impatient and heeding the growls of his prodigious stomach, he moved on. A thousand yards ahead, past the rocky outcroppings and underwater ravines that housed their usual quarry, the canyon made another precipitous drop. This one continued all the way to the bottom; a 4,000-foot fall into oblivion.

  As Tsunami accelerated toward the dropoff, a curt sonar blast from Avalanche stopped him in his tracks. Confused, the giant bull swung back, his head cocked to one side as he absorbed a harsh series of clicks – the sperm whale’s version of a scolding. The message was clear: There were some places even the monarchs of the sea did not venture.

  As they resumed their search, an excited squeal from Tsunami heralded the presence of prey. Pulling up alongside him, Avalanche studied the prospective meal. Their target was a hundred yards ahead – a large school of Saepia inferni. Known as the “Cuttlefish from hell,” the pack-hunting cephalopods were a recent development, and appeared around the same time as the whale-eaters. Reaching thirty feet in length, with tentacles bristling with razor-tipped suckers, the thick-bodied squid were voracious predators that would pounce on anything from full grown sharks to smaller specimens of their own kind. To the two giants closing in on them, however, the mollusks were an irresistible buffet.

  As the hungry whales loomed in the distance, the alarmed squid grew animated. They began to clump together, their bodies and tentacles intertwining until they formed a single, gelatinous mass, every bit as large as either whale. The conjoined colony of squid began to shimmer, emitting angry bands of red and green bioluminescence, with bright white sparks toward the front: a glittering, oval-shaped pattern – like a huge mouth. The entire mass moved deliberately toward the whales.

  Avalanche uttered a snort of amusement. It was an impressive bluff. And a wasted effort. Funneling their sonar emissions i
nto tight beams, the two bull sperms blasted away like giant shotguns at their significantly smaller adversaries. From fifty yards out, they could see their pulses taking effect. The glimmering waves of bioluminescence sputtered and stopped, and the dazed mass of squid began to drift to one side.

  A second later, Avalanche and Tsunami smashed into them like colossal battering rams. Their combined 240 tons annihilated the squids’ defenses, scattering them like leaves as the whales plowed straight on through, their powerful jaws snapping.

  Avalanche swung back in a tight arc, gulping down a frantically struggling squid as he prepared to re-attack. Tsunami was already in the thick of it, his huge jaws, lined with fourteen-inch teeth, greedily snapping up one dazed cuttlefish after another, pulverizing the bony gladius that gave their bodies rigidity and choking them down. For the harried sperm whales, the presence of the new squid represented hope. Food in such abundance was not always to be had. They might die tomorrow, but today they would feast.

  As Tsunami cornered a trio of disoriented squid, a trickling of sand cascading down from an outcropping directly above him drew Avalanche’s attention. He scanned the huge mass of stone with his sonar, increasing the frequency as he sought the source of the disturbance. Something about the rock’s density was off . . .

  Avalanche snorted in alarm as the entire mountaintop above Tsunami suddenly came to life. Spouting bubbles, the white whale uttered a shrill warning cry that echoed like a steam whistle throughout the submarine canyon.