Ryan Lockwood - Below

“Let’s find out if that was worth it.”

“Good idea. Can you grab my laptop?”

Sturman returned with Val’s computer, and opened it awkwardly with his crudely bandaged hands.

“Jesus, Sturman! What happened to your hands?”

“Rope burns. I shoulda worn gloves.”

“Are you okay? You’re bleeding a lot.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Sturman navigated on the laptop for her as she toweled off and explained how to open the correct program.

“The research branch of the aquarium I work for has a website researchers can use to track the movements of all our tagged marine animals. Every fifteen minutes, we should get a new location from the tag.”

Sturman zoomed in on a map of their general location on the water, locating several dots that represented readouts since they had turned on the transmitter. “So does this mean it’s working?”

“We need to wait and see if the transmitter takes a new reading now that’s it’s on the squid.” Val paused. “Thanks for trusting me. I’m sure it was hard for you to let me go down there.”

“You kidding? For a while there I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. But I figured I was gonna make a killing when I sold off your state-of-the-art equipment.”

“Asshole. Hey, check it out.” Val pointed at the new dot on the screen, clustered near the others. “It looks like it’s working. He’s still pretty much below us.”

“Now what?”

“Now? Let’s get the hell out of here and go find a late-night diner. I’m starving.”

The first thing Sturman noticed as he entered the lab was the odor. Although it looked very sterile, it smelled like a fish market in all its blood-and-scales-and-fins-and-guts glory, mixed with other smells that brought him back to his tenth-grade biology class—alcohol and formaldehyde.

“Damn, Doc. How do you work in this stink?”

Val looked up from the side of a stainless-steel examination table. “I guess it does smell pretty bad in here, doesn’t it? I suppose you get used to it pretty fast if you want to be a marine biologist. Come on in.”

Walking past metal shelves covered in assorted jars of pickled, giant-eyed fish, marine worms, and other oddities, Sturman took off his cowboy hat and joined Val beside the examination table. She had her dark brown hair pulled back in a neat ponytail and was bent over the table looking through protective plastic lab glasses at a large squid carcass. Based on the size and injuries, Sturman could tell this was the squid that had died on his boat.

They were inside the marine laboratory at the Weston Research Institute, where Val had been granted access to examine the squid. She knew a top researcher, a Swede, at the institute, and had agreed to let him and one of his grad students retain the carcass when she was finished. He also studied Humboldt and other squid species, but focused more on identifying and tracking shoals using a novel technique of sonar imaging.

Sturman pointed at her glasses. “You worried it’s gonna squirt on you?” Running his hand over the stubble on his head, he turned to look around the room. “What are all these things?”

“The specimens? You name it. This lab has organisms from every animal phylum, collected on various projects around the world. It’s pretty cool, but I think the lab keeps them here more for ambience than anything else.”

“Yeah. It’s really got a homey feel to it. You catch any of these critters?”

“No. I’ve never worked for Weston. I hope you don’t mind that I started working on this girl without you. You want to record for me as I start cutting?”

Sturman returned to the table. “Sure. This clipboard here?”

Over the unpleasant smells in the lab, he could now smell Val’s perfume as he stood next to her—an arousing blend of florals and tropical spices. He felt a charge of electricity run through his chest as her hip brushed against his own, but she seemed unaware as she leaned down to peer at the dead squid. He tried to focus on the examination table, realizing he was looking down her shirt at a gold necklace resting in the dark line formed by her cleavage. Sturman cleared his throat and forced himself to look instead at the data sheet on the clipboard.

Val had already filled out a few sections: her name, the capture date and location, and a few other details. He read one filled-out section aloud. “Female… length, one-point-seven-four meters… weight, thirty-nine-point-eight kilograms…”

“She’s a big girl, all right. And heavy.”

“How did you manage to weigh her, and get her up on the table here?”

“That student I mentioned who gets to examine her later helped me. You should’ve seen his face when one of her tentacles snagged his belt loop. He thought she was grabbing on to him.”

Sturman looked down at the lifeless mass of flesh on the cold steel table. Val had stretched it out to its full length. It had flattened out even more than when on his boat, the seawater now drained out of its cavities, and much of the color had left its skin. The animal was now a mottled mix of pale pinks and oranges, resembling a giant, wet balloon that had lost most of its air.

“It’s hard to believe that this sorry-looking thing is so powerful underwater.”

“I know. But you’ve got to remember, Humboldt squid don’t have a skeleton, like we do. They do have a hardened remnant of a shell inside their body—the gladius—but really they use the water itself as their skeleton, to support their body and provide volume to the body cavity. This is pretty much what we’d look like if someone pulled out our skeletons.”

“Huh. Don’t know if I’d look like this. So what are we looking at here, anyway, Doc?”

“Oh yeah, I probably should give you the guided tour. Let’s start at the top.” Val walked over to the pointed end of the squid. “The squid travels in this direction, even though its eyes are on the other side. When alive, she would have turned her body around to hunt or defend herself.”

Val slid her latex-gloved fingers under the meaty, flattened sides of the squid. “These here are her fins. A squid bends and flaps its fins like wings or rudders, to steer and make smaller movements. This whole thing here”—Val ran her hands slowly down the long, tubular main body—“is the mantle. Ever ordered a calamari steak?”

“Good stuff.”

“Well, now you know where it comes from. On Humboldts, the mantle is ideal for cutting into steaks. It’s basically just a smooth, muscular tube with a fairly uniform thickness.”

“That seems a lot thicker than the steaks I’ve eaten.”

“Well, this is a much bigger girl than the squid that normally go to market. Anyway, if we looked at this tissue under a microscope, you’d see the chromatophores that let it change color for camouflage. And inside the mantle are the organs.”

“Yum.” Sturman licked his lips. He looked at the gashes and marred flesh around tears on the body. “It looks like her shoal found her tasty as well.”

“She’s pretty banged up, isn’t she? Her sisters were hard on her. Anyway, moving down here, you can’t miss her big, beautiful black eyes, but harder to see is the siphon.” Val searched the soft, wet carcass using the fingers of both hands, and quickly found a thick extension of the flesh next to eyes as large and dark as those of a cow. “Underwater, this feature looks more conical, like a party hat. The siphon is where she gets her propulsion. She expands her body to draw in water, then squeezes that muscular mantle and forces water out the hole at the end of the funnel—just like a jet engine.”