Jack Rogan - The Ocean Dark

Voss hated her, but she admired her, too. Six feet away, Tori mirrored her terror back to her. An invisible link tethered them together, two women striving to survive. Two women who couldn’t conceive of letting this one man die. Voss had been hardened by her career choice and the things she had seen, but what had forged that steel in Tori Austin?

Jealousy didn’t suit Voss. She despised it in herself. She loved Josh but had never been in love with him, would never have jeopardized their partnership by pursuing something sexual — something complicated — with him. But they had developed an intimacy that she had never felt with anyone, and intimacy wasn’t easy for her.

Now this woman they ought to be putting in jail had gotten a piece of that, and Voss hated her for it.

But she wanted her to live.

“Come on, Tori!” she snapped. “Don’t let him slow down. We’re racing the goddamn sun.”

And they were. Both women looked down and saw the line between light and darkness sliding up at them, chasing them toward the surface and the sky, and they climbed faster.

Alena’s chest burned. It felt tight and her breath came too fast and she focused on the muscles in her arms, waiting for pain that would be a telltale sign of a heart attack. But that pain didn’t come. The fist in her chest was the grip of fear, as all of her illusions about her life were stripped away. Her work was important — more important, maybe, than she had ever realized — but she thought of her daughter, and the time they could have spent together. Time squandered in favor of adventure and discovery. Alena loved those things — they meant the world to her — but not as much as her family meant.

Her fingers searched for a crevice, found it, plunged in, and she boosted herself a few more feet before reaching for higher toeholds. The shaft angled downward at about eighty percent here, and the climb was getting easier. Faster. Above her, Lieutenant Commander Sykes and one of his men were nearly at the top, the sun limning them in golden halos, like gods coming down from Olympus. Nearer, but still a few feet higher than she was, Garbarino and a sailor she didn’t know scrabbled side to side in search of better grips, moving like spider-men, then pausing to check her progress.

The song of the sirens echoed off the walls, and it had become maddening. She wanted to scream back, and so she did, opening her lips and crying out at them in wordless fury.

“Alena,” David said.

She turned to look at him. So handsome, her grandson. Only a few feet away, he climbed at her side, and now he focused on her, locking eyes.

“We’re almost there. Keep going.”

“Keep going,” she repeated. “Don’t tell me, kid. I’m in better shape than you’ll ever be.”

As he plastered himself to the shaft wall and slid his knee up, boot probing, he actually managed to smile at her, though fear and desperation glittered in his eyes. David hauled himself up a few more feet and Alena redoubled her efforts, keeping pace with him. She glanced down and caught her breath.

The darkness had come within six or seven feet of Josh, Tori, and Gabe. Lieutenant Stone and Voss were only a few feet higher. The sirens clung like leeches to the wall, black eyes gleaming like the volcanic rock. They had fifteen feet or so to reach the rim, and Alena didn’t think they were going to make it.

She reached up, not paying enough attention, and her fingers slipped off a tiny outcropping of rock. She slid, scraping her right cheek on the wall and banging her chest, bruising ribs, but she managed to catch herself.

David put out a hand to steady her, shifting his weight, and his foothold gave way, crumbling beneath him. His eyes went wide and he tried to grab hold of the wall, but his fingers scraped downward. Without a hand or foothold on the right side, and with his weight tilted that direction, he began to fall.

Alena screamed his name. Eyes wide, she watched as he pressed himself against the shaft wall, dragging bloody fingers down the black stone. One foot caught and his knee buckled and he nearly tipped backward but he shook it free and somehow managed to slow his descent and finally stop.

Not soon enough.

Half in darkness now, he looked up at her, his face still in sunlight. Instead of fear, his eyes were full of a terrible sadness and a kind of confusion, as if he did not know how he had come to be there.

Alena started to descend, half climbing and half sliding after him.

“Doctor, no!” Garbarino shouted. “Get out of the way!”

The sharpness of the command forced her to look up. Garbarino clung to the wall with one hand even as he used the other to grasp the strap of his assault rifle and swing it around from where it had dangled against his back. One-handed, he took aim. Beside him, the other sailor did the same, fumbling with the gun, foot slipping, getting a new toehold, barely hanging on.

“You’ll hit David!” Alena screamed at him.

Others were shouting as well, voices merging with the screeching song of the sirens, echoing around the shaft.

Garbarino ignored her, focused on David. “Head down!” he shouted.

Alena twisted again in time to see David press himself hard against the wall, even as he tried to climb with torn and bloody fingers. Garbarino fired, bullets tearing into the darkness, clipping stone outcroppings and ricocheting. Two of the sirens were ripped away from the wall by bullets and tumbled into the darkness, sickly, fishbelly-white bodies uncoiling as they fell.

But Garbarino and the other sailor couldn’t hit the ones coming up beneath David without shooting him as well, and as Alena watched, her grandson began to scream. Panic made him tear his gaze from hers, but she could not look away as the things swarmed over him. One of them, overzealous, scaled his body like a ladder but climbed too high, into the sunlight, where it smoldered and ignited and screamed. Its serpentine lower body twisting, it shoved off from the wall and plunged into the water below, the splash dousing its fire and its cries.

“Damn it!” Garbarino shouted.

From the corner of her eye, Alena caught his movement. He tried to scramble to one side, searching for a better angle, a cleaner shot, and he lost his grip. As he fell, panic seized him and he pulled the trigger, but the bullets chipped at the stone walls with little effect and then Garbarino screamed the rest of the way, following the siren into the water, from which he would never surface.

“Alena!” David shrieked, voice ragged as they tore at him. “Go!”

But Stone and Voss had been in motion all along, and now they opened fire, shooting the sirens that were attacking him. One by one, the creatures peeled off the wall and fluttered into the abyss.

“Climb, David!” Alena shouted.

Somehow, he did. She could see the agony etched into his features and she wondered what his legs must look like after the sirens’ jaws had been at work, and the suckers on their hands had scoured the flesh. But he climbed.

Voss shot at the things that were still coming up as Stone edged over beside David to speed him along.

“Climb, damn it!” David shouted up at her.

That got Alena moving.

“We’re out!” Lieutenant Commander Sykes called from above. “Move it!”

And then Alena felt a hand grip her wrist and looked up to see Voss and Mays reaching for her. They hauled her over the rim, onto a thick mat of vegetation, trees sparse overhead. She climbed to her feet and glanced at the horizon, where the sun slid rapidly into the water. Its light reached only a few feet into the cave they had just escaped, and the leech-white creatures stirred at the edges of the dark, ready to erupt in pursuit the moment the last sliver of the sun vanished in the west.