Ryan Lockwood - Below

They needed each other now. For days, they had continued in the same direction, encountering no resistance but finding less and less sustenance. The prey they were accustomed to eating had dwindled in these waters, and their hunger had grown.

Following their daily rhythm, they had risen hours ago. The ocean had yielded little to slake their ceaseless hunger.

Now they desperately needed to feed.

The boat was gone. The group waited helplessly on the dark ocean, bobbing on the surface in the dim starlight.

Miguel noticed that several of the men had already turned on their flashlights underwater. Feet and legs, treading the water slowly, were faintly visible now. A few of the men, most of whom weren’t much older than his brother, were murmuring to one another. The rest were silent.

The ocean had felt very cold at first when it flooded through Miguel’s clothing as he had entered the water. Even in July, the waters off Southern California were cool. By the time the last person had entered the water, and the coyote had started up the panga and sped off to the south, the water felt warmer against his skin. The boat had vanished quickly into the darkness, its drone fading into the lapping sounds of the ocean.

Staying afloat was fairly easy, since the ocean was so saline and Miguel was comfortable in the water. But he was scared of the dark, the cold, the uncertainty. He knew the water would soon feel much colder, if the other boat didn’t arrive on time. And something else had been bothering him since they had plunged from the boat into the dark ocean.

“ Mano , what happens next?” Miguel looked at his brother. “Who is picking us up? Where are we going?”

“ Está bien, manito . Soon we will be safe in America. Everything will be okay.” Elías reached over and squeezed his arm, white teeth flashing in the faint light. But the smile disappeared, and his brother looked away.

Miguel floated next to Elías, each grasping the other’s shoulders. He looked around and realized that none of the other men were holding on to one another as they had been instructed to do. Self-conscious, he let go of his brother and treaded water several feet away from him. It was a calm sea. There was no need to hold on to anyone.

He looked down into the water at the flashlight in his hand. Why should he leave his light off? Besides, nobody would be able to see it underwater. He turned it on and directed it downward. In the bright beam, he could see his legs and feet clearly, but the dark ocean was hungry for the light and quickly absorbed it.

“Turn it off, manito . You don’t want to get caught, do you? Besides, you’re wasting the batteries.”

“In a minute.” Miguel knew his brother was right, but he was anxious.

Below the beam of the flashlight, in the depths beneath him, he saw nothing but immeasurable blackness. He looked at the undersides of the other men’s faces, illuminated eerily by the artificial light refracted through the waves. His gaze returned to his own feet again, and the blackness below them. He watched thousands of minute particles, white in the bright light, floating around his legs above the black, bottomless void.

He wondered what was down there.

The shoal abruptly slowed, in unison. There had been a new stimulus.

Light.

Not the familiar, expansive light from above, but small, moving lights. Possibly the lights of prey. Many large, black eyes near the front of the shoal sensed this. The lights had disappeared, but the stimulated individuals propelled themselves more rapidly upward, toward where the lights had been, followed closely by the rest of the immense gathering.

The shoal ascended quickly. It slowed after a short time, its members sensing that they were now close to where the lights had been. Above them, a single light reappeared. They were very close now.

They approached from below. The enormous mass of predators moved silently, invisibly through the ink-black water, slowly observing the light above. They rose and banked slowly around the light, assessing. There was movement in the light. The eyes in the shoal detected large objects in the weak illumination. Unfamiliar objects. This was not the small prey that glowed, and it was too close to the surface. Yet it was similar; it was living.

It might be prey.

As the light went out, the shoal began to change color, unnoticed even by its own members’ powerful eyes in the darkness. Several of them began emitting faint pulses of light from their bodies. Rapidly the shoal communicated. Many fins fluttered in the dark. The enormous mass of the shoal changed shape. Formerly packed into a huge ball, its members now slowly spread to form a massive circle around the extinguished light.

And moved toward it.

Travis Roche was thinking about the money.

He was floating far offshore in Sea Plus , his father’s thirty-five-foot fishing boat. He sat in the stern, alone in the dark, and sipped a bottle of Mexican beer as the salty breeze played through his unwashed sandy-blond hair.

Tonight’s gig sure paid well, and was less risky than when he had smuggled weed. Another midnight run to deliver a batch of wetbacks into SoCal. Last time, the grateful immigrants had paid him without protest, then hustled away in pairs once they had gotten to the dock, just like he had asked them to. Easy money.

That was it—all he had to do. When he reached the marina, his work ended. Hector had said the money would be even better this time, since there were supposed to be like fifteen guys. Travis didn’t care. There was plenty of room in the boat.

And what did it matter anyway? So many immigrants were crossing the border nowadays that a few more wouldn’t make much of a difference. But helping these ones would sure as hell pay for a sweet month in Baja this fall. Great surf and no crowds.

This far off the coast, Southern California was a different place. Slower, quieter, more relaxed. Travis sipped his beer and sent a stream through the gap in his front teeth, over the side of the boat. It was too humid to make out anything in the distance—even the lights of shore. He was thinking about how long he could surf in Baja with this cash when his cell phone began to chime on the dash.

Hector.

Travis stood, walked barefoot over to check the new text message on the display. He touched a button and read the new message on the backlit screen:

15. 11S 466580 3612210.

The number of immigrants, and the UTM coordinates. A few minutes later, after he entered the GPS numbers into the boat’s Garmin, he flashed his spotlight to the south. Moments later, he noticed a distant light on the ocean, responding from some distance. He watched the light as it flashed four times again in rapid succession. It was definitely Hector.

He was about to make the drop, at the north Coronados location, just as they had planned on Travis’s last trip to Baja. This sort of open-ocean transfer, far from the coast and requiring immigrants to actually enter the water, was a pain in the ass. But they had to smuggle the immigrants this way so the Border Patrol wouldn’t ever be able to use its new toy—an unmanned Predator drone with cameras and infrared sensors. The drone could detect the meeting of two vessels offshore, close to the Mexican border, and a bunch of warm bodies moving from one boat to the other. It couldn’t detect body heat radiating through cold seawater, though, and this way would never record two vessels coming together.

With international terrorism a serious concern, the government was intensifying its security at the Mexican border, and offshore smuggling in particular. Illegal aliens were as desperate as ever to cross the border, and they were trying all kinds of methods to enter the States—tunneling into San Diego to emerge under old houses, navigating the desert on foot, stowing away in semi-trailer loads. And some tried to take boats to California. All the unimaginative boat runners moving immigrants into Southern California were getting nailed.