Ryan Lockwood - Below

“Oh my God! Help me!”

The men rushed over to where Joe had fallen, but instead of kneeling to help Val, they merely stopped and stood motionless. She took hold of his shoulder and turned over his inert body. She gasped and covered her mouth with her palm as Joe’s arm fell limply to the deck.

He no longer had a face.

Where Joe’s nose and left eye had been was a gaping hole, the remaining eye white as it rolled back into the socket, twitching slightly. His tongue was visible inside his mouth, where the upper palate and teeth had also caved inward. Broken teeth slid down his tongue.

Val looked up at Karl. He shook his head, then reached down to squeeze her shoulder. Joe kicked her leg and she yelped, recoiling from the touch. She watched his legs jerk and extend on the deck, and then he was still. Karl tried to hug her. Ari had stopped sobbing. He yelled something inarticulate. The deck shuddered again as the shoal made a run.

Joe couldn’t actually be gone, could he? Had two men really just died in front of Val in the last few minutes? She felt as though she was watching some sort of sick dark play in which she was merely a spectator.

“He’s gone, Valerie. I’m sorry.” She realized Karl was still embracing her, trying to turn her away from Joe’s body. She knew Karl was right. She looked away from the warm corpse toward the ocean around them.

“My best mate’s gone, too.” The captain spat into the ocean. “And soon, so will be these goddamn squid.”

Val wiped at a tear and watched the man stride toward the front of his vessel, vaguely wondering why he wasn’t headed to the net to free it somehow. He climbed the steel stairs to the wheelhouse and disappeared inside.

She looked down to the water and saw the outline of the net near the surface. Tomás’s body was now bobbing against the hull of the Centaur in the dark waves. She leaned against Karl, watching, uncertain what the captain was planning to free the shoal. The boat lurched again as the squid made a run, and Karl held her shoulders to keep his balance.

“Valerie, we should move from here in case something else gives. Valerie?”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

“It is okay. But we need to move—” Karl stopped and stared at something over her shoulder.

She turned to see what he was looking at. The captain had reappeared from the cabin of the vessel and was hurrying toward them. In his thick hand was a stick of dynamite.

Its fuse was already lit.

When Val saw the lit dynamite coming her way, she ducked behind a raised metal box on the deck that opened into the hold. Karl crouched down beside her. The captain strode past them without a glance as he headed for the stern.

“Valerie! Come with me!”

She realized Karl was pulling her along by the elbow. Together they raced toward the front of the vessel, away from the threat. She glanced back and saw the captain yelling at the shoal below, the fuse burning down in his hand.

The fuse was much longer than Val would have expected on a stick of dynamite, with another foot or more still unburned as the sparks inched toward the cylinder of nitroglycerin-based high explosive. The captain was yelling loudly enough for Val and Karl to hear his words.

“Goddamn you, you ungodly bastards! It’s you today, not me! And not my vessel! I’m sending you back to hell! You hear me?”

He paused to look at the explosive in his hand, only about six inches of fuse left now. Val and Karl had paused as well, in the doorway to the wheelhouse, each holding their breath and unable to pull away from the drama unfolding on the well-lit deck below them. The captain said something to himself, this time too quiet to be heard. Then he hurled the dynamite well away from the boat, into the water where the shoal was gathered inside the net.

The shoal was resting.

A visual cue had rippled through the mass of squid, a signal, as millions of photophores in their mantles lit up in a patterned response. After the signal flashed through them, they had gradually ceased moving.

Their attempts to escape confinement required great exertion. And individual sacrifice. Some of them now drifted lifelessly in the dim seawater, having been crushed against the wall of the net by the force of the others.

Yet not all the members of the shoal acted in unison. Within the hovering mass of motionless squid, several agitated individuals continued to flash from within, bumping into their passive brethren as they darted in every direction. Like the others in the shoal, the one-eyed female made no effort to calm the agitated rogues or cease their activity. She simply disregarded them in an effort to retain energy.

One of the rogue squid darted past her. It bore a new injury—a long tear in its left fin, just above the mantle. The obvious wound momentarily triggered an attack response in the one-eyed female. The injured rogue would be easy to overcome, but the impulse faded. Her instincts were clouded by confusion, her motivation to act lacking a clear direction in which to focus her energy. She watched the rogue jet upward through a clump of her gathered siblings, bouncing lightly off their soft bodies as it passed. Another larger female—it was her badly scarred sister—lashed out in response, tearing into the injured rogue’s mantle as it passed. It ignored the attack and continued to move toward the top of the shoal.

As the rogue neared the surface, the one-eyed female detected a powerful stimulus in the water. Light. A brightly lit object was descending from the ocean surface. The small object bore the signs of possible prey, and the rogue had turned to intercept it.

The object was painfully bright, its light faltering, yet somehow still burning with a fierce intensity. The rogue appeared immune to the damaging light. It snatched the thing up and darted away from a pursuing squid also seeking to claim it.

Intent on keeping the prize to itself, the rogue propelled its body horizontally through the dark water, but it quickly encountered the rough net wall. The one-eyed female watched as the squid changed direction and jetted sidewise, parallel to the inside of the net and away from her. It neared the massive, smooth structure on the surface that had been generating the deep sonic pulses. There the structure loomed alongside the net wall.

Although the large female retained a faint impulse to avoid the huge object as a possible threat, the rogue did not. It instead moved closer to it to escape its pursuer, but its rival flicked a tentacle out and briefly caught hold of the prize.

The rogue squid sent a burst of water through its siphons, hurtling itself against the net wall and colliding with the smooth surface. Just as it made contact, the light clutched in its arms winked out.

The captain had backed away from the gunwale, waiting for the detonation. Karl tugged at Val, and together they backed into the safety of the wheelhouse.

She peeked through the aft window and watched Ari move through the shadows on the deck, stumbling over Joe’s lifeless body. He stopped at the side of the seiner, leaning against the gunwale and looking toward the water where the dynamite had disappeared. Val knew there was a risk to him standing that close to the side, but the captain said nothing to him.

She opened her mouth to yell at him, but Karl pulled on her again and she ducked below the window and crawled toward the hatchway that led into the boat’s berthing area. As she and Karl scrambled around a corner into the first inner doorway, a small room on the portside that contained two stacked bunks covered in boxes, a deafening explosion thundered through their bodies.

Pain erupted in Val’s ears as the shock wave passed through the steel vessel.