Ryan Lockwood - Below

“ Tranquilo , bro!” Travis forgot his Spanish. “I’m trying to help!”

Travis somehow managed to move the struggling man next to the swim platform on the stern. As he drew the man closer to the lights on the transom, Travis could see that he was seriously injured. He was moaning. Even in the dim red stern light, holes and tears were visible on his clothing, his torso.

Travis reached down to grab the injured man. Maybe he could slide him onto the boat. The man’s body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. As Travis tried for a better grip, his hand entered a warm, wet hole in the man’s thigh and he felt his fingers brush against something smooth and solid.

Bone .

He recoiled, realizing that he had just touched the man’s exposed femur. He regained himself, and grabbed onto the man’s wet shirt and dragged him onto the transom with the help of a small wave.

He could now see that the man was bleeding badly, the dark fluid spreading in swirls before seawater washed over the white transom. Travis didn’t want to pull a bleeding, dying man into his dad’s boat.

Travis looked at the apparently unconscious man illuminated by the red navigation light on the stern. Blood poured from a gaping hole in his right thigh. There were a few smaller holes lower on the leg. And the foot was missing on that leg. No right foot at all, just empty space below the shin. Surprisingly little blood was draining from the stump. What the hell had happened? This couldn’t have been the other boat, could it? A shark?

“Tiburón? Fue un tiburón?”

He asked the question several times, but the man just lay supine with his eyes shut. His body was splayed out near the back of the boat, as far up as Travis had been able to drag him. Travis managed to form a crude tourniquet around the mangled leg using a length of rope from the boat’s bumper, but he could tell it might be too late. Blood had spread across the bottom of the boat and was slowly draining down the stern. Travis stood and looked around the dark ocean for the others. A few flashlights were visible nearby, bobbing on the waves. Travis shouted several times, but nobody answered.

They were all gone.

Travis really wanted a joint. He was torn between starting the boat and getting the hell out of there, or staying in the hopes that there might be a few other men in the water. Hector had said there were fifteen of them.

Fifteen.

But there was only one now. It didn’t matter. Sharks or something had killed them all. Travis was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to flee. He’d already been there too long. But what the hell was he going to do with the guy in the stern?

He made up his mind, knew what he was going to do. He took two quick strides toward the man’s body. He would check for a pulse, then he was going to dump the body and get the hell out of here if he was dead.

Travis paused over the bloody man splayed out in the stern.

“Wake up, goddammit. Tell me what’s going on, man, or I’ll leave your ass out here!”

The man didn’t answer. His breathing was very quiet.

As Travis leaned down to grab his shirt, the man’s eyes began to slowly open, staring empty at the moonless sky, unblinking in the bright white cabin. He was older than Travis, probably in his thirties, with a weathered face and wet, black locks clinging to his forehead. Travis realized he was watching the man slip away and started to cry.

“Come on, man, don’t die. What the hell am I supposed to do with you? What the fuck happened here?”

Travis grabbed the man’s head and shook it. Suddenly, the man lashed out and grabbed Travis’s wrist, their eyes locking. Travis yelled out. The man spoke.

“ Los diablos.”

“What? What did you say? What do you mean, los diablos ?”

The man’s grip weakened, and he began to relax again, his eyes glazing over. He took a slow, shallow breath, met Travis’s eyes, and whispered the words a final time.

“Los diablos. Los diablos rojos.”

The diver descended the anchor chain into blackness.

Every few feet farther from the surface, he felt the water pressure building in his ears, forcing him to equalize the pressure by pinching his nose and blowing into his sinuses. Hand over hand, he gripped the heavy, algae-coated chain to keep his bearings in the cold, dimly lit water and prevent the current from sweeping him away from his destination on the bottom a hundred and twenty feet down—a sunken Canadian destroyer.

The only sounds Will Sturman could hear were the hiss of air flowing through the diaphragm of his regulator as he inhaled, followed by the loud burst of bubbles rushing past his ears as he exhaled in the deep.

He glanced at his digital depth gauge as the readout reached ninety feet. Looking off into the gloom, he began to notice the pale, hulking shape of the destroyer emerge from his otherwise uniform field of view.

Sturman felt something bump into his scuba tank.

He paused with one hand on the anchor chain, then rolled over in the water to face upward, shining his dive light up toward the surface. In the beam of light, directly behind him, was one of the divers he had brought down. A middle-aged woman. Above her, through drifting organic particles, he counted the rest of the divers by their lights. Four. Everyone was still behind him, all within thirty feet or so. They were almost to their destination, a silent mass of rusting steel that never saw daylight.

The HMCS Redemption lay upright on the sandy bottom, just as she had gone down. Intentionally sunk to form an artificial reef, it was regardless a stroke of luck that she had come to rest upright, just as she had plied the surface. Many a planned and purposefully sunken ship accidentally ended up on its side, despite the best efforts of those sinking it. All that was visible to Sturman in the darkness a hundred feet down was the span of the ship from bridge to prow; blackness consumed the rest of the three-hundred-and-seventy-foot leviathan.

This was the first of two dives today, so he would bring the group down deeper and let them explore inside the hull if they wanted. On the later dive, nobody would be allowed as deep or permitted to stay under as long. The demolition crew that had sunken the Redemption had removed her doors, cut holes in the side of the hull, and had otherwise made her diver-friendly before setting off the charges to sink her, so it was easy to navigate by wreck-diving standards. He would still need to keep a close eye on these folks, though; they were relatively experienced divers, but if they got turned around in the darkness of the hull he wouldn’t have much time to find them before they ran out of air. At this depth, many divers burned through their air supply in less than twenty minutes.

As Sturman reached the bottom of the anchor chain, really a permanent mooring line fixed to a buoy at the surface, the current began to weaken. He noticed a lingcod as big as his leg below him, resting on the deck where the chain was bolted to the wreck. That lingcod was always here. The fish looked as though she might be dead and never even twitched in his presence, but he knew she was just conserving energy. The mooring chain next to her was affixed on the foredeck of the destroyer. Divers usually started here and followed the length of the ship and explored as time permitted in the lighter currents near the vessel.

Sturman let go of the chain and passed the lingcod, and began to move over the deck with smooth strokes of his swim fins. He took deep, slow breaths to minimize his air consumption, and looked over the ship in reverence. He had seen this vessel in its final resting place hundreds of times, but he never grew tired of looking at it. He liked being down here. In the darkness.