Ryan Lockwood - Below

So many things had somehow worked out. If the other boat hadn’t arrived when it did, if the tether hadn’t held, if her CPR hadn’t been successful…

But he was alive.

She slid a chair next to the bed and sat down. His eyes opened.

“I think the guy you’re looking for is in the next room.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. He would have trouble speaking for several days, since his inflamed lungs had been full of seawater. He coughed a little, wincing.

“Hi there, sleepyhead.” She smiled and put a warm hand on his stubbly head. “You’re kind of cute without your cowboy hat.”

He managed a weak smile. “Your squid thought so, too. Like a bunch of groupies.”

Val laughed. “How are you feeling, cowboy?”

“I’m alive.”

She smiled and moved to sit on the bed next to him. She squeezed his good hand. “I’m glad.”

“Did you see Joe?”

Val swallowed, nodding. “Yes. I said good-bye to him. Mike said the funeral is going to be a closed casket, with a memorial, but I don’t want to be some stranger around all his friends and family. I said good-bye from both of us, just in case you can’t make it.”

“Bullshit. I’ll be there. You should come, too.” Sturman coughed, then spoke in a whisper. “He would have wanted you there.”

“Let me think about it. Will… he’d be happy to know that you’re alive. Remember that. Live for him.”

Sturman reached his good arm up and touched her face. “I owe you my life, Val.”

“No more than I owe you mine.”

“I mean it.”

“Thank the shoal. If it hadn’t shown you some mercy, you wouldn’t be here now.”

Val remembered how the weight at the end of Sturman’s line had suddenly disappeared, just when the tug-of-war was threatening to tear the man apart. For some reason, the shoal had released him. She still couldn’t understand why the squid would have let him go.

“Only thing I remember is seeing a face—your face—as I lost consciousness. Funny…” He looked away and swallowed hard. “I remember thinking at the time it was Maria.”

Val gently squeezed his hand. “Maybe it was.”

In late September, the squid began to wash up on the beaches north of Los Angeles, after most of the tourists had left for the season.

Sturman woke Val one morning in their motel room by softly shaking the Sunday paper in front of her. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, squinting at the newsprint in her face. She read the headline:

The shoal had more or less disappeared after their last dramatic encounter and Sturman’s time in the hospital. There hadn’t been any more attacks on people, and the Weston Institute had been unable to locate the shoal when a new set of researchers headed back out after their ordeal with a Fathometer like Karl’s.

In the rented motel room, Val and Sturman made love and then threw some clothing and gear into a few duffels and went shopping. They bought two large plastic coolers, a few boxes of garbage bags, several bags of ice, and some tarps, and headed north to Santa Barbara in a rented SUV. They spent most of the day cruising up the Southern California Bight from San Diego in the light weekend traffic. The early-fall weather was warm and pleasant, an onshore breeze blowing through the windows of the vehicle.

Val had stayed with Sturman and his dog in the San Diego motel for the past month, tending to his wounds. With three of them in the small unit, the conditions were cramped. None of them minded, though—least of all Bud, who seemed especially fond of his new friend.

She had expected that such close-quarters interaction might result in some friction, but the time they had spent on his boat in the weeks before had apparently paid off. And Sturman made his feelings for her clear. She couldn’t remember being so happy.

He had been pretty useless since he left the hospital, unable to work and struggling with the cast on his arm and shoulder sling. It didn’t really matter anyway, though, since he had lost both his home and business when Maria went down.

Val took care of him each night and morning, helping with chores and his bathing. She had spent most of the daylight hours in the lab examining the Humboldt specimens or working on her new paper—a case study detailing the shoal’s parasitic hosts. Her schedule and his lack of one had left Sturman a lot of time to think. He went for walks. He said he thought a lot about Joe. He didn’t drink, and he had almost completely given up smoking.

True to his word, he hadn’t missed Joe’s funeral, and Val had joined him. He had already visited his friend’s grave regularly as he healed, and visited his family often. Val could tell that his guilt was slowly subsiding. His other guilt seemed to subside as well. He had even told her he knew Maria and Joe would both be happy for them.

They reached the beach described in the newspaper just before sunset. The breeze smelled of seaweed and rotting fish, and there were several groups of curious observers who had probably also seen the article about the dying squid. Val realized they should have left Bud in the car as they approached the largest squid on the beach and the dog rushed up to investigate, ignoring Sturman’s shouts. The huge squid helplessly flopped its fins on the sand just above the surf line. Sturman yelled at Bud again, just before he could lick the dying animal’s mantle, and he sat down a few feet away and looked at it.

“Dumb bastard never learns,” he said.

“They say a dog takes after its owner….” She smiled at him.

They stopped next to Bud, and Val set down the large cooler she had been carrying. Perhaps the squid was harmless now, but after what they’d been through, they weren’t taking any chances.

“Look at this old fighter. I almost feel sorry for her.” Sturman poked at the huge, flattened squid with the toe of his shoe. The badly scarred animal, which was missing an arm and the tip of one fin, didn’t seem to feel the touch. It was clearly dying.

Val figured the massive specimen, maybe eight feet long, had to be a female. “Yeah, I know what you mean. They look so pathetic out of the water, don’t they?”

Sturman pointed at the other squid drying out on the sand, which were spread over hundreds of yards down the beach. Gulls screamed as they fought over the rotting flesh. “You think these are all from our shoal, Doc?”

“I don’t know. But they’re incredibly large for Humboldt squid, aren’t they?”

“Beats me. I guess I’ve never seen a small one.” He grinned.

“By their size, I’d say they certainly could be from the shoal we encountered.”

Val snapped a photo of the reddish animal at her feet. Its eye rolled slowly in the socket, its arms turning slightly on the wet sand as a wave rolled up the beach high enough to wet the doomed animal’s flesh. Its arms tensed and reached toward her convulsively. She felt an unexpected twinge of fear, and fought the urge to step back.

Sturman put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Val. This one’s pretty damn big, but it isn’t going to hurt you.”

“Right.” She took a deep breath. “Once we get a few back to the lab, I’ll see if they’re infested with the same parasite as the others. We’ll probably never know for sure if this is the same group, though.”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

“No. I guess not.” Val patted the cooler. “Well, it was pointless bringing this.”

“I won’t say I told you so.” He began to unfold a tarp on the sand. “Maybe we can drag her back on this.”