Candace Cho was pissed.

  She never realized the sheer enormity of human stupidity, until she became a Surf Lifeguard. She had spent most of her adult life as a professional sportswoman and a coach of Swimming Australia. But as her performance sagged with age, and her occasional juicing became more than occasional, the Powers That Be decided she was a ‘bad role model’ and should be kept away from the swimming youth, or rather from tarring the organization’s pristine public image.

  She had found herself migrating from one wet-job to another, and finally settled as a lifeguard in Cottesloe. A job that was supposed to be a stress-free time of lounging on the sand and staring at the ocean meditatively, turned into the most infuriating game of Catch A Dumb Teen Before They Drown Themselves.

  What started as a heart-racing, stressful challenge at first, turned into annoying monotony after she pulled her hundredth suicidally overconfident kid out of the surf. And so she was, chasing another pair of idiots that got sucked away from the beach by a backwash current, and were in the process of paddling in circles on their tiny inflatable dinghy, while slowly inching toward the horizon.

  She swam like the well-maintained and trusty machine she was, the powerful muscles in her shoulders and thighs singing like steel cables under the skin.

  She finally reached the dinghy, which was swaying wildly, as two terrified teenage girls tried to beat the laws of physics by paddling it against the surf.

  “Oi!" she shouted, reaching them, and nearly got hit in the face with a paddle "Stop that! Go left, parallel to the beach!

  “What?! Help us!" one of the girls screamed back.

  “I am trying to help you! Stop trying to fight the surf, go parallel to the shore… " She saw their confused and scared faces "Oh for fuck’s sake, paddle left! I’ll push you!”

  “What?!”

  “Left you fuckwit! There!" she gestured wildly.

  Finally, the terrified duo got the hint and started paddling across the current and not against it. She grabbed the back of the dinghy and pushed it gently towards the beach so that they would slowly approach the land at an acute angle. Twenty minutes later, her thighs and calves were burning, and they were still not there yet. She saw a pair of her fellow lifeguards jump in and swim towards her to help, but with the backwash being that strong, they were more likely to over-shot instead of reaching her. Where is the damned IRB when you need one?

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Her thoughts were cut by a blood-curdling scream.

  “Shaaaark! Miss, there’s a shark! In front of us!”

  “There’s no bloody shark, it's just your imagin-"

  There was a bloody shark.

  Candace knew these waters like the back of her hand, and swam with sharks many times. Nine times out of ten, sharks were just big, stupid, harmless lumps with tiny brains, who would nose a swimmer out of curiosity and swim away. You were more likely to drown from the sheer panic caused by encountering one, than die from the shark attacking you.

  And yet, if nine out of ten sharks were harmless, there was the tenth shark to worry about, wasn’t it?

  “Stop paddlin’! Legs up, paddles up, and do not move!”

  She took a deep breath, and dove under the dinghy. In the shade of the inflatable, her eyes soon adjusted to the murky blue of her surroundings. And there it was, a big, fat, stripey 'Noah', twice her length easily. Oh, how she wished it was a white pointer instead, they were huge but docile. Tiger sharks on the other hand were unpredictable idiots who tried to eat everything they could fit in their jaws.

  The shark turned a lazy circle and swam past her, then dove down into the blue darkness.

  Oh oh.

  She did not like this. A shark you cannot see is much worse than one prowling the surface, and their favorite trick was to dive down and then explode upwards, hitting their prey from below like a giant toothy uppercut from Mother Nature.

  She did not think the shark would actually try to eat her or the girls, but it hardly mattered. Its weakest exploratory nibble would tear meat off their bones, and the sheer power of the attack would likely knock her unconscious, and she would drown, leaving the two girls to fend for themselves.

  She had a dive knife sheathed at her strap, but it was ridiculously tiny compared to the size of the damn fish, it would barely tickle it.

  No way to fight off this thing, but maybe distract it? She flattened herself against the bottom of the dinghy, tucked her limbs close, and untied her rescue can. With gentle tugs of the string, she made the can jump and dance over the waves, making a hollow noise easily audible underwater. She did not have to wait long. A striped gray-tan torpedo launched from the darkness and hit the can with such force that she was pulled along before she reacted and released the strap. The shark spat out the can, did a rapid somersault in the water, and rushed straight at her.

  Candace did not have time to react to her imminent death, because at that moment she, the girls, and the motherfucking shark, vanished in a flash of pain.