Pepsi Cola hits the spot,

Twelve full ounces, that's a lot....

Thank God, thank God....

The bottle was half full. He cradled it in his arms, turning his back to the cabin. He took a long, shuddering breath and looked over the stern toward the setting sun. He had seen too many sunsets, it was true, but old age and treachery triumphed over youth and virtue every time.

He lifted his bottle. "Merry Christmas, sun! And Happy goddamn New Year, and many happy returns!"

He twisted off the cap and froze, studying the wake.

The dorados were following the boat, leaping and skipping as if they missed their tank. His eyes narrowed incredulously. Something was following them. Out of the glittering wake a form was rising. It grew in the golden path, dark and menacing.

All at once, from the swirling foam, a huge snout rose. Majestically it climbed and became a mouth, filled with massive teeth. It became white, ghostlike, soaring higher, until it blotted out the sun, and suddenly he was in shadow. He glimpsed an eye, like an ebony plate, staring into his.

Gracefully the great white shark pirouetted, twisted, and fell into the wake, sending up thirty-foot sheets of water.

And then there was nothing.

He peered astern. Nothing at all.

The sun was sinking. The wake was calm. He found himself leaning over the transom, shivering.

He had fished for forty years, in all the oceans of the world. He had never seen a great white shark in the tropics. This one was past belief.

It had not happened. Then why was his shirt so wet? Because he had plunged his arms into the tank. Why had the dorados chased the boat? Why not? What did a bait fish know?

Then what the hell? Had he seen it or not? Where had it come from, where had it gone?

All at once he knew.

He glared at the bottle. The great white lived in there.

And lizards, probably, and dragons. Pink elephants, too, if he kept it up, and monsters past belief.

He screwed back the top and hurled the bottle at the setting sun. It resurfaced and bobbed for a while, and soon he could not see it anymore.

He felt his wife beside him. "What happened? What was that splash?"

He turned and looked into her childish face.

"Nothing, dear, nothing at all."

***

The Christmas tree was fake and the ornaments were glitzy, but Ellen could feel the love in the room. Carla—taking a day off from her "torture chamber" for the first time since she'd returned from Amity—wore a Santa Claus hat with a tassel that dangled over her face. Thea was her elf, picking presents from the pile.

Thea's main present, a red tricycle from her mother and daddy, held center stage. Ellen's gift, a doll that talked and wet and probably drove a car, sat on the tricycle's seat.