Ryan Lockwood - Below

Prey.

In an instant they changed their body shapes and colors, no longer smooth, pale torpedoes meant for travel but instead fierce red blossoms that opened to expose not petals, but tools meant for violence. They uncoiled their weapons and thrust their bodies upward toward the prey, single-minded of focus.

They intended to kill.

A member near the front emitted an excited series of brief flashes of light, which appeared green in the nutrient-rich water. The light blinded its silvery prey as it lashed out and ensnared the fish before the others could reach it. The one-eyed female arrived at the stricken prey an instant later, thrusting her own weapons through the water and digging their small teeth into the fish as it thrashed in the dark water. Dim light from the distant surface glinted off silver scales as it desperately attempted to free itself.

The fish struggled as the large female drew it toward her powerful maw and violently gnashed into its side, removing a tremendous hunk of flesh. The thin bones in the fish easily snapped inside the great beak, and blood poured from the gaping wound as the fish’s life slipped away.

Around the members of the shoal, thick, silvery fishes with vivid yellow tails and white underbellies were clearly visible to their large eyes. The pulses of light generated by the shoal confused the school of fast, powerful prey as they overtook it.

The aggressors rapidly changed colors as they attacked, their skin turning bright reds and purples instead of their usual pale white. Frequently, they emitted the green-cast bursts of bioluminescent light when they were most excited, for the fish they attacked now were not the smaller fish they had been feeding upon for days, but instead a larger, more dangerous prey that could sustain the shoal with the nourishment it needed to survive and grow. But to attack these fish was to do battle.

Larger than the quarry and greatly outnumbering it, the shoal quickly began to overtake the prey. The shoal attacked in squads, surrounding the school of broad, silvery fish and engulfing its terrified members. Soon all that remained in the black water were the drifting, inedible remains of the fish.

Yet there was not enough food.

The largest females had eaten much of the meaty fish, but had lost some of the flesh to other ravenous members of the shoal. Their hunger remained. As they propelled themselves slowly through the bloodied water, they searched for something larger than the floating bits of tissue around them. The shoal parted in front of them momentarily, and ahead they saw something else. Something that excited them, caused them to again become aggressive and single-minded of purpose.

Ahead of them was a small, glowing object.

This was like the bioluminescent light of the lanternfishes on which they had always preyed. The one-eyed female moved toward the glowing green object, and saw as she approached that there was not just one, but several glowing objects near her in the water. All were moving erratically, as if wounded. She began to pivot in the water to direct her weaponry toward the prey. The small glowing lights had immediately attracted the attention of most of the shoal and now, as she spun her great bulk to overtake the prey, a smaller, faster member of the shoal hurtled past her toward one of the glowing objects. In an instant, the prey began rising rapidly toward the surface, meaning to escape her smaller sister’s grasp. It could not. Her sister lashed out and seized the glowing object, drawing it in.

Then her sister began to struggle.

The smaller object was somehow drawing her up with it, toward the surface, and she was now desperately emitting powerful jets of water, struggling to free herself.

The larger, one-eyed female no longer focused on the glowing object. She now began to focus on her struggling sister.

The large female sensed that her sister was incapable of escaping the object she had seized. She was defenseless, with the dangerous parts of her body still wrapped tightly around her prize, and the soft, unprotected flesh covering the rest of her body exposed.

Focusing on her sister’s flanks with her one remaining dark eye, the enormous female rushed forward and clasped her vulnerable sister in a tight embrace.

And bit into her.

“I’ve got one, Dad!”

John Whittaker’s twelve-year-old niece leaned back, bracing her hip against the gunwale and pulling hard on the fishing pole. Something had just taken her line. From the looks of it, something big.

“All right, Megan!” John shouted. He watched as Megan’s dad, his older brother, put his own rod in a holder on the side and rushed over to help her. Megan was struggling to control the powerful fish that had just struck her jig. John’s niece was a tomboy, and strong for her age, but out here there were some really big fish. If she had hooked a bluefin or albacore instead of a yellowtail, she might easily have a fifty-pounder on the line.

The yellowtail had been arriving off Southern California for a week now, in their seasonal northern migration as the local waters warmed to around seventy degrees. Every summer for the past four years, John had brought his niece and older brother, Daryl, out with him to fish the yellowtail runs and hope for an occasional hefty tuna—both were fish species that lingered off the Southern California coast for a few months each year. Yellowtail amberjacks were John and Daryl’s favorite game fish—they put up a real fight and later yielded a decent homemade sushi. Besides, fishing for yellowtails was probably Megan’s favorite thing to do, and John loved the chance to make his niece smile.

The trio had been out all afternoon, plying the waters about five miles off La Jolla in John’s sturdy boat. He had focused on the area where the continental shelf abruptly ended and the bottom plunged dramatically to the abyssal plain thousands of feet down. Until fifteen minutes ago, they hadn’t had a bite. All John had seen on the depth finder had been smaller fish, and nothing had struck the trolling lines.

Then their luck had finally changed.

Just as the sun was setting over the ocean and John was about to turn the twenty-three-foot vessel for the harbor, he had located a large school of fish below them, maybe a hundred and thirty feet down. Based on the size of the sonar readings, John knew they could be over a school of yellowtails. They had removed the trolling lures and dropped John’s new jigs over the side, letting the line spool out over a hundred feet. Almost immediately, Daryl had hooked a yellowtail and handed the pole to his daughter to reel in. Megan’s excitement as she hauled in the fish had been contagious, and they were all laughing and hooting as they landed three more yellowtail as twilight darkened the sky around them.

John had tried many lures and baits to catch yellowtail over the years, including live anchovies, frozen market squid, and chum, but this time he had brought out his new candy-bar-sized glow-in-the-dark lures. Each hollow lure had three sets of treble hooks and housed a glow-in-the-dark insert that a friend had told him drove the fish crazy. His buddy had been right.

Now Megan and her father were struggling with something else on her line, something much larger than the fifteen- to twenty-pound yellowtails now thrashing inside the bait cooler at the stern as they fought off death. John suspected they had just hooked an albacore—that would be a real treat.

“You guys think you can handle that?” John asked.

“I’ve got a really big one, Uncle John! I can’t reel him in!”

Megan’s straight brown hair hung in her face as she strained to control her fishing rod, despite the fact that her father was leaning over her and grasping the pole with his hand as well.