Ryan Lockwood - Below

He flipped the lights on. The surrounding ocean went from black to deep blue in the patch of artificial daylight. In it, more flotsam appeared on the surface. Sturman’s gaze paused on an object bobbing in the swells near the sinking boat. A body, floating face-down. Sturman’s heart lurched, but when he trained the light on the inert figure he saw that it was not Val. This was an older person, probably a man, with a mess of wet, graying hair moving in the surge.

He nosed Maria slowly toward the body, avoiding the masses of netting just below the surface. As Sturman neared, he saw several large, submerged shapes around the floating figure retreat as the lights reached them. Squid. A dark cloud in the water around the corpse gradually became bloodred as the light touched it. Bone showed on the man’s limbs, where flesh had already been devoured. Sturman spat into the water.

“You sons of bitches.”

He turned the helm away with a mixture of revulsion and anger and fear. There was nothing to be done. This man was already dead.

He needed to find Val.

As Val paused to draw in air in the darkness she heard the unmistakable drone of a large motor. Another boat was nearby.

The subdued beams of what had to be very bright lights above began to appear a short distance away and fought their way down through thirty feet of dark water as the vessel approached the submerged seiner where Val and Karl hid. Will. It had to be his boat, with so many lights directed down into the water. Her heart pounded as she felt the tonic of excitement, hope, and something else. He had found them.

She thought of making a rush for the surface. But there were too many squid just outside the safety of the vessel, and Karl was a poor swimmer. They had only been under for a few minutes, entering the water once there was nowhere left to stand on the Centaur , but already the shoal had pursued them. She looked at the whites of Karl’s eyes as he churned through the air in his tank in a fast pant. She couldn’t blame him for being terrified. Unlike him, she had spent many hours underwater near Humboldt squid, but even she was frightened by the aggressive behavior this shoal displayed.

At the edge of her visibility, two more pale shapes loomed into view, pausing ten feet from the submerged cabin opening where they huddled inside like two hermit crabs that would become an easy meal outside the steel shell in which they hid. Her light found a black, lidless eye resting in one of the smooth bodies, just above a nest of unfurled tentacles. As the light hit the pair of squid—or were there more than that?—their bodies blossomed into an angry red color and they disappeared in a swirl of tiny particles.

My God, they’re enormous.

These were the biggest Humboldt squid Val had ever seen, longer than Karl was tall, mantles the size of punching bags, skin the color of human flesh and blood.

She swore to herself. There would be more of them, just outside the range of their lights. A lot more. She used to joke with the Mexican crews that Humboldt squid were like cockroaches—for every one you could see, there were at least a hundred more nearby.

She had worked with these animals for years, and now her instincts told her they needed to stay within the safety of the seiner as long as possible. Something about the shoal made her certain they were confused, desperately hungry, or simply angry, as though aware of their capture and who was responsible. Nonsense, Val. Leaving the safety of the sinking vessel might be suicide, but she knew they couldn’t simply stay inside the structure. It was going down, and probably very soon. Sturman had arrived, and his boat would offer safety. They had to try for the surface eventually.

Val turned to Karl and looked into his panic-stricken eyes. He exhaled a huge cloud of bubbles, then another an instant later, then another. He was breathing much too fast, hyperventilating. She needed to get him out of there before he ran out of air. He grabbed Val’s arm and squeezed, pointing to the illumination from Sturman’s boat. He motioned for them to move toward it. She held her palm out to him, indicating that he should stay put, then slowly moved out of the dark recess in the boat for a better look. She flinched as a dull boom sounded, air under intense pressure erupting from somewhere below, inside the boat. A wave of bubbles rushed past Val as she leaned out of the cabin.

Suddenly Karl grabbed her shoulder and pushed past her, kicking her head with his fins as he surged out of the seiner toward the lights. Apparently they were going to make a rush for it now. Fuck it, why not?

She began to follow Karl out of the wheelhouse, but he turned back toward her as abruptly as he had left. She raised her light to try and read his expression. In the beam of light, something pink appeared on his shoulder.

He turned his head toward it and tried to swat it away. As he tilted his body forward to kick back to the seiner, several more fast-moving shapes emerged from the blackness. Their color shifted from pink to red as they closed around him with astonishing speed.

She tried to frighten off the attacking squid with her light, but they hid behind their quarry. All she could do was shine her light on Karl from a body-length away and watch as more squid closed on him, some scattering when the light found them, sending them retreating into the darkness, but others taking their place. She felt anger suppressing her fear and finned out of the cabin toward her friend.

Something brushed her arm, then slowly curled itself around her elbow, testing. As she recoiled, she imagined small teeth from hundreds of tentacles cutting into her neoprene wet suit. She twisted her body and shined the light over her shoulder, and the feeling disappeared. She saw nothing behind her but minute particles swimming in the beam.

Then something wrapped itself around Val’s thigh, almost gently, and followed with a powerful squeeze. She reached down and felt the rounded firmness of a Humboldt squid’s muscular tentacle twisted around her leg. As she began to direct her dive light toward her attacker, another squid propelled itself against her shoulder, breaking the airtight seal on her mask. Water flooded inside, blinding her. Unable to clear her mask of water, she tried to shine the light where she thought the animal’s eyes might be.

Then they started to bite her.

She wasn’t sure how many there were, but they pulled her away from the structure, toward the open water, and she knew they were increasing their advantage as they overpowered her and she struggled clumsily to move back to where she could grab hold of the boat again. Val glanced at Karl one last time. He was too far away to make out his face anymore. She watched as the powerful arms of one of the massive squid clinging to Karl’s back—each of the arms thicker than her own—encircled him, its eyes shielded from her lights by his body. She could only watch helplessly as the beast took her struggling friend down into the blackness. His light was soon swallowed up by the abyss below her.

The soft bodies of the squid pressed eagerly against her, their hunger unmistakable.

Sturman tore open the wooden lid of a gear compartment mounted in the stern of his boat, against the rear of the cabin. Beneath the chipped white-painted lid were his wet suit, BC, mask, and other dive gear. He dropped each piece of equipment onto the deck at his feet, then flipped open another large compartment. Tossing out dirty towels, canvas tarps, and fishing gear, he finally found what he was looking for at the bottom of the bin. From beneath a box of fishing lures came the metallic gleam of small, shiny rings. Grunting, he heaved the oily, heavy garment out onto the deck and dropped it next to the other gear.