Ryan Lockwood - Below

Val’s heart pounded in her rib cage. She willed herself to keep moving the bait. A soft touch brushed down her calf, but when she looked down, there was nothing there. Only her imagination? She thought of the torn flesh on the corpse in the morgue, the missing face. Stop scaring yourself, Val. You’ve been here before.

The shoal descended on her in a mad rush. Val wasn’t sure how many animals suddenly appeared—four, maybe five. A smaller squid in the group went straight for the lure, but before Val could react the animal had grasped it and was pulling it away, causing the open area of the net Val had created to collapse and tangle. The squid stubbornly refused to release the lure, emitting flashing bursts of bioluminescent light in its frustration. Val knew this was her chance. She kicked toward the squirming mollusk, trying to close the net around it. Just as she managed to drag the net over its flashing mantle, she felt a powerful clenching around her thigh, and an instant later she was being dragged downward.

Waiting on the boat, Sturman lit a cigarette to calm his anxiety. Worry was not an emotion he had felt for a long time.

Val had been gone for more than ten minutes, but he hadn’t seen any signs from her yet. He took off his hat and tossed it into the open cabin doors behind him, wiping the sweat off his brow with a thick forearm. Bud wagged his tail and Sturman scratched his ears.

He looked at the two ropes running into the water, each tied to a different cleat, and reminded himself which was tied to Val and which was connected to the net. She would tighten the rope on his left when she had a squid in the net, signaling him to hoist it up; the rope cleated off on his right was her lifeline.

As Sturman took his second pull off the cigarette, savoring the burn of the smoke entering his lungs, the line on the right suddenly drew taut. Val’s line.

Sturman flicked his cigarette into the sea and grabbed the rope. As his hands closed around it, he swore as he felt an incredible weight at the other end and the vibrations of an obvious struggle. He considered pulling Val in, pausing as he remembered her request not to worry about her tether unless she was likely out of air. He glanced at his watch—she probably still had ten more minutes. This is crazy.

The line remained tight for a full minute. He decided not to wait any longer. Let her be pissed—he wasn’t going to let her die down there while he stood idly on the boat picking his nose. He would have to pull her up very slowly, to prevent giving her decompression sickness, so he should probably start the process.

As Sturman braced his feet to begin hoisting her to the surface, the tension instantly left the rope. He slowly drew on the braided nylon, water dripping through his fingers as he passed the now slack line over his palms. He pulled in the line until it ran straight down into the water again, semi-taut, and concentrated on feeling for movement. It was still. Shit.

To his left, Sturman caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked over to see a floating coil of the second rope begin to go under. Something was pulling it down into the water. The second line grew taut, then shuddered off a spray of water as it was jerked tight. He had to make a decision.

He couldn’t pull Val rapidly to the surface—it would kill her. He had only one choice.

Dropping her tether, he grabbed the other rope near the cleat and pulled on it with both hands. Something heavy was thrashing aggressively on the other end. He pushed his knees against the gunwale, took a deep breath and, hand over hand, began to haul in the line. The loose rope began to quickly gather into a messy coil at his feet.

A few times during his struggle to bring in the capture net, Sturman was stopped momentarily by powerful downward jerks as the weight on the end of the line seemed to increase dramatically. Once he watched helplessly as the rope spooled out several feet, and grimaced as the flesh on his palms tore under the friction. Heaving and cursing, his back muscles aching, he continued to retrieve the now-bloodied line. Then he finally saw something nearing the surface.

The lure.

With three more long pulls, the net appeared, tangled around a squirming animal. In a single powerful heave, Sturman swung the heavy catch up out of the water, dropping the sopping mess onto the floor of the boat. He yelled at Bud to stay put.

Inside the net was a squid. It wasn’t nearly as big as the other one they had brought aboard, but it seemed a lot more upset. Grabbing the transmitter and its attachment device, he knelt in the pool of cold water around the squid and hastened to remove the tangled netting wrapped around its body.

Tagging the squid was easier than he had anticipated. Beginner’s luck, maybe. The squid, though powerful when underwater, flapped helplessly and squirted ink-stained water on the floor of his boat. Sturman aligned the transmitter against the animal’s body on the inside of one of its broad fins, just as Val had demonstrated for him on the dead squid, then pierced the fin with the sharp steel point of the attachment device, which looked kind of like a flare gun. After clipping the orange transmitter to the animal, he cinched it tightly against the squid’s body with two plastic loops running out from the transmitter’s barbs, tugged on it twice to make sure it was secure, then grabbed the squid around its smooth fins and, careful to avoid the beak and tentacles on its business end, lifted it off the floor and stepped to the side of the boat.

The squid fired a final defiant burst of inky water all over Sturman’s legs as he threw it overboard. There was a loud splash as it entered the water, and then it was gone.

Sturman turned and looked at the other line. It had grown very slack, several broad loops floating on the surface and drifting into the side of the boat. Sturman looked at his bleeding hands, then desperately down into the water.

And waited.

Never before had Val been happier to be out of the water.

She had spent the last fifteen minutes waiting at her safety stop, just twenty feet below the surface. They had been some of the most frightening minutes of her life. As she lingered in the darkness under the curved, white hull of the boat, kicking awkwardly with one fin, she had fought the incredible urge to sprint to the surface and scramble out of the water. The shoal had robbed her of her other fin, but thankfully had left her alone once she had separated herself from the glowing lure.

As she waited for the nitrogen to leave her body, she had focused on her breathing, and simply counted the seconds until she could surface safely. Then she had rushed topside and heaved herself onto the boat’s transom. Now she sat in the stern, shivering, her gear heaped in a puddle of seawater at her feet.

“Are you cold?” Sturman appeared from the cabin and wrapped a thick towel around Val’s shoulders.

“Yeah. Thanks. So you got it tagged the way I told you?”

“Bet your ass I did.” He sat down next to her. “Glad you’re all right, Doc.”

“So am I. I told you I’d be fine.”

“What the hell happened down there?”

Val explained how the shoal had seized her just as she had first attempted to net the small male squid, and how only the tether had prevented them from pulling her deeper. “These squid were more aggressive than I’m used to, maybe because they’re not getting enough to eat. But as soon as they distinguished me from the lure, they seemed to lose interest in me.”

“How hard was it to get his ass into the net?”

“I don’t really remember, to tell you the truth. He just seemed to work his way inside it, and I pulled on the rope.”