Michael Bray - Feed

Liam walked to the transom, sitting on the rear of the boat and putting on his flippers. Tyler joined him, the muffled sounds of the world giving him no comfort. He sat next to Liam, unable to resist a glance into the artificially lit depths. He put on his own flippers, wondering if his hands would shake and pleased to see that they were steady. Liam stood and turned to Tyler. ‘You ready?’

Tyler nodded, then remembered he was supposed to speak. ‘Yeah. Good to go.’

‘Alright. Then just remember to follow my lead. I’m pretty sure you’ve never done this before but my dad wants you out there to help. Just do as I say and everything will be fine. Got it?’

‘Yeah, I got it.’

‘Then let’s go.’

‘What about the flotation balloon?’

‘We don’t need it yet. This trip is just so we can go look and see if there is anything down there. If there is, we’ll come back for the balloon.’ Liam walked to the ladder set into the transom and climbed down it, his feet inches from the waterline. He folded his arms across his chest and pushed off backwards, disappearing into the water, his mass becoming a blurred black shape below the waterline. Tyler stared at the water, his chest drumming its higher tempo again.

‘You coming or not?’ Liam’s voice said in Tyler’s facemask. Although he couldn’t see him, Tyler could imagine the arrogant look on his face.

‘Yeah, on my way’ he said, also climbing the ladder. He looked across the deck at Nash, who was watching him intently, one good eye judging and curious. Then, with less finesse than Liam had managed, Tyler dropped into the water, ready to face whatever waited for him beyond.

#

Fear became secondary to wonder as Tyler kicked in ten feet of water. The lights from the boat illuminated his world, microscopic life drifting and undulating on the currents. Liam was ten feet below and waiting. Tyler couldn’t see his face but thought he was probably getting impatient. Tyler angled towards him, reluctant to leave the light generated by the boat.

‘I thought you’d lost your nerve,’ Liam said as Tyler fell in alongside him.

The jibes were making Tyler angry, but he managed not to react, knowing it wasn’t the time or place. The younger version of himself would have responded with sarcasm or aggression, but he wasn’t about to get drawn into petty squabbles, as they were now in a hostile environment. Instead, he focused on his surroundings, the darkness swallowing them as they made their way deeper. He saw Liam activate his exterior facemask light and realised he didn’t know how to do the same.

‘Hey, uh, how do I do that? The light,’ he said, hating that he was so needy.

‘The cuff on your wrist. Turn the dial.’

Tyler complied, turning the dial on the Velcro cuff and feeling better as the darkness was expelled by the array of LED lights in his facemask. He hoped to see fish darting around his field of vision, but instead saw only the water and the drifting tide of microscopic life within it. There was a sense of serenity beneath the surface that banished his nerves even though he was aware of just how vast his surroundings were. He was a tiny creature in a huge and thriving ecosystem, something which was both humbling and terrifying at the same time.

‘How are you both doing?’

Nash’s voice disturbed the crushing silence and reminded Tyler that he was there to do a job.

‘We’re fine. How is it looking up there?’ Liam replied.

‘All good up here. Drones are with you in a perimeter formation.’

Tyler looked around, surprised to see the drones so close. He had been completely unaware of their presence and was impressed with how silently they were able to move through the water.

‘How is visibility?’ Nash asked.

‘Not great,’ Tyler said, unsure if it was him who was being addressed. ‘I still don’t understand why we couldn’t wait until daylight to do this.’

‘I told you already, it wouldn’t have made too much difference. Sunlight will only reach so far. Just relax and focus. You should be seeing the bottom soon.’

‘There it is,’ Liam said.

Tyler couldn’t see it at first, just the black waters and microscopic life. He was about to ask what he should be looking for when the sandy bottom melted out of the darkness below him.

‘Dad, are you seeing this?’ Liam said, for once without attitude or arrogance.

‘Yeah, I see it.’

Tyler could see it, too. He had expected to see a little bit of floating debris at best, maybe some man-made rubbish that had been tossed into the ocean and forgotten. Instead, he found himself looking at what he could only describe as a boat graveyard. There was a barnacle-encrusted fishing trawler to his left on its side, half-buried in the soft sand. Ahead, the skeletal ribs were all that remained of a larger vessel. The more Tyler looked, the more he saw in the widening debris field. ‘This is incredible,’ he whispered, more to himself than anyone else.

‘Hang on,’ Nash said. ‘I’ll power up the drone lights.’

Seconds later, the full scale of the debris field was fully illuminated as Nash activated each drone’s powerful spotlights, banishing the darkness and illuminating their surroundings.

‘Jesus, just look at it,’ Liam muttered.

Tyler could think of no way to reply. He licked his lips, aware of just how dry they were. The extra visibility exposed more wreckage. The shattered bow of a trawler. Rusting sheets of steel panelling on the ground which were teeming with rusticles as nature claimed the man-made waste. More than anything, they could see the gold. The powerful lights making the seabed glow like fire as the gold bars scattered across the debris field became visible.

‘You were right, Dad. There’s gold down here. A lot of it.’ Liam was breathless and excited, and Tyler couldn’t help but feel the same way.

‘There are so many wrecks down here,’ Tyler said, his voice sounding strange in the enclosed environment of his facemask.

‘You’re telling me. I never imagined there would be so many.’

It was the first time Liam had been civil with him, and Tyler hoped that the hostile attitude had been some kind of initiation and done with, or, alternatively, that the sheer thrill of discovery had made him forget the sizeable chip on his shoulder.

‘This is going to take a few trips. There is so much gold down here we can’t bring it up in one trip.’ The excitement in Liam’s voice was hard to ignore. Tyler was staring at the wrecks, some still nothing more than shadows on the periphery of the spotlights, hulking bones yet to be discovered. Tyler was staring at the outer edge when something caught his eye. He flicked his head around, staring into the distance and recalling the landscape as it had been. He was certain he had seen something move, and now one of the large shapes on the edge of the reach of the lights wasn’t there anymore. His instinct said there was definitely an object, something large and tapered at one end like—

The nose of a shark

—a bow of a large vessel, but now there was nothing. He supposed he could have been mistaken or shifted position and had lost his bearings, but even as the thoughts occurred, he knew neither of those things had happened.

‘Hey, you helping or what?’ Liam said as he kicked towards the seabed.

‘Yeah, sorry I just… I thought I saw something.’

‘Saw what? What did you see?’ The desperation in Nash’s voice made Tyler even more uncomfortable.

‘Nothing, it’s… nothing,’ he muttered as the blood pounded around his body thick in his temples. He willed himself to calm down and tried to convince himself that he had made a mistake. The problem with trying to do that was that he knew he hadn’t. He had seen something out there, something large that was now gone. He—