Ryan Lockwood - Below

His youngest, a slightly plump girl with shoulder-length hair, spoke first. “Alicia won’t let me use the car, Dad.”

“She’s lying,” Alicia replied. “I said she could use it, but not tonight. I’m taking out Tiff and Stacy.” Alicia was eighteen, three years older than her sister, Gabriella, and the prettier of the two. She was taller and slimmer, and drew much more attention from boys.

“Gabby, you’re not old enough to drive alone anyway,” Joe said.

“But Dad, I thought you or Mom could ride with me and I could take Rachael to the mall!”

Joe shut his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Stop whining, mija . I’m not in the mood. We can go tomorrow, okay? Your mom will be off work. Let your sister use the car tonight.” He raised the mug to his lips and took a long pull of hot coffee.

“Alicia is having sex with Corey,” Gabriella blurted. Joe nearly sprayed the table with a mouthful. “Rachael’s sister said that…”

“Gabriella, that’s enough!” Joe glared at her. She looked away and crossed her arms. Just like her grandmother, Joe thought. At least she wouldn’t put up with shit from the boys like her sister. He turned from her to Alicia. Her lack of protest was enough, but when she broke eye contact and looked down at the floor, he felt his face flush. After an awkward silence, he decided to change the subject.

“You working today?” Alicia had taken a summer job at a teenage clothing store. The Rage, or something like that. She was headed off to USC in the fall, which wasn’t going to be cheap. He was paying for her school, but couldn’t afford to buy her the clothes and shoes she brought home every week.

“Duh, Dad. I work every Friday. You getting Alzheimer’s or something?” Like some of the guilty perps he questioned, now she was trying to play it cool.

“Right. So will you be home for dinner?”

“But I just told you I’m taking out my friends. Are you okay, Dad?”

“Yeah, mija . I was just hoping you might eat with us before you head out.”

The room got quiet again. When Gabby retreated to the downstairs couch to watch MTV, Joe took the opportunity to get up from the table. He heard Alicia leave the kitchen behind him.

Joe stood at the kitchen window, staring out at the warm, overcast morning. His thoughts shifted from his daughter’s romantic life to the immigrants who had died at sea. He had dreamed a lot about them. He pictured them all being killed by a school of sharks, like those sailors who died when their battleship went down in World War II.

And he kept thinking of the dead man’s torn body. He still had a lot of questions for that kid about what had happened.

They sensed the ocean floor somewhere beneath them and the surface not far above, and instinctively pressed away from both into the bustle of hundreds of their kind moving through the dark water.

The water here was not deep enough for the entire shoal. Like giant undersea wasps swarming within a congested hive, the immense assemblage of organisms had become densely packed as each member of the shoal sought to avoid the sloping bottom, while also seeking deeper water away from the bright light filtering down from above. Although the murky North Pacific hundreds of feet down would be absolutely black to most creatures, to their kind these shallower near-shore depths were brightly lit.

Most in the shoal rarely brushed or bumped against any of the largest females in the group. They were avoided out of self-preservation, since they were much more powerful and aggressive. Several were three times the weight and nearly twice the length of the others, despite the shoal being a fairly uniform group of mature adults. Their size served as a warning to the others not to aggravate them.

The members of the shoal did not consider their location as they hovered in the dark water. If they had, they would know they were not supposed to be here, that these waters for millennia had been too cold, too full of predators and competitors to allow their presence. Although they had never been able to survive here before, they were here now simply because nothing was preventing their intrusion.

While their migration, the expansion of their species, was new to them, they had continued to follow the same daily cycle their kind had followed for thousands of years. During the daytime, they retreated a thousand or more feet beneath the surface to suppress each member’s metabolism, hidden from the sunlight, the heat, the activity of the surface.

At night, they rose to feed.

The higher oxygen levels and warmth of shallower waters enabled them to increase their metabolisms, intensifying speed and strength and reaction time. Their enhanced abilities allowed them to overtake prey easily in the dark water using their powerful eyes and deadly appendages.

But the water here was too shallow. The shoal had been unable to retreat to a comfortable depth, and most of the massive horde had grown agitated. They were accustomed to the nearly bottomless depths of the deep ocean. Yet the shoal had ventured into shallower and shallower water in recent weeks, following its collective instincts.

And its hunger.

For days, those assembled in the shoal had found little to satiate their unmatched desire to feed. They had happened upon some of the smaller deepwater prey on which they normally fed—anchovies nearer the surface and lanternfishes farther down—but the schools had been small and many in the group needed much more sustenance to survive.

Always the water temperature had remained relatively constant and the directional currents had facilitated the shoal’s migration. Each evening, the shoal had risen with the upwelling of cool waters to feed closer to shore. Each morning, the shoal had retreated to the depths farther offshore, following a sinking eddy current of cold water making its way back toward the abyss. Always the shoal pushed itself in the same direction. As it searched for food, rising and descending in its never-ending cycle, still it continued purposefully in a single lateral direction, drawn away from the place where it had originated.

The members of the shoal gradually calmed when the day began to wane and the bright sunlight from above faded toward black, as another daily cycle progressed into night. The twilit water above was becoming much darker and more familiar, and no longer pained their eyes. They began slowly rising along the steep slope of the bottom, toward shore, to feed.

The largest females moved near the head of the fleet. They would be the first to feed when prey was discovered.

These females had lived longer than most in the shoal. They had attained their great body size by managing to stay alive longer than the others around them, and by being more aggressive than the others at taking prey. This fearless aggression had yielded them more food, which had turned into greater body mass. But it had come at a cost.

The largest of these females had only one eye. A scar of wrinkled flesh covered the place where the other had once been, between the smooth length of her body and her set of appendages. Evidence of past battles for survival blemished her otherwise smooth skin.

One of her sisters, nearly her own size, moved through the water alongside her. Bearing even more scars than the one-eyed female, she had lost the tip of one of her two broad fins when a shark or swordfish had nipped it off when she had been younger and smaller. She bore countless scars along her body, and when she grasped at her prey, she did so without one of her limbs. It was a useless stump of flesh, far shorter than the others since one of her own kind had torn it off.

As the dominant females coursed through the mass of their peers, moving slowly toward the front, their wide, unblinking eyes caught a flash of silver in the darkness above them. Then another.