Nick Cutter - The Deep

Animals were unaffected, for whatever reason. No spotting, no ’Gets. All except honeybees, which had been the first and only.

A few skiffs were moored at the end of the wharf, their rusted bottoms spread with mildewed nets. A haze of flies boiled up at Luke’s approach. One landed on his forearm. A horsefly, its compound eyes reflecting the sunlight like disco balls.

Luke slapped it. The horsefly buzzed, trapped between his palm and the flesh of his arm, a sensation so off-putting that Luke lifted his hand. The fly escaped with cool indifference.

The yacht wasn’t too far off. Luke could swim it— wanted to, in fact. It was goddamn hot, he was dirty, and a weird hum had settled into his bones. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he squinted toward the vessel. He could barely make out a figure on it.

He dropped his duffel into a Zodiac boat. He yanked the engine’s ripcord and steered away from the village’s squat buildings, away from the girl with those terrible specks.

The water was a chilly blue—it reminded Luke of Barbicide, the disinfectant solution the old barbers in Iowa City used to soak their combs in. That stuff’ll kill you dead if you drink it , one of the barbers told Luke when he was a boy, as if suspecting Luke had harbored that very desire.

His gaze trailed north over the crested hills. He spied a church. It must’ve been centuries old, perhaps the very first thing the area settlers had built. It was burned. The spire must have gone up first, the roof beams reduced to cinders until what remained of the steeple had come crashing through the narthex.

Nothing else had been torched in the entire village. Only the church.

THE YACHT WAS ANCHOREDat the edge of a half-moon bay. A man stood on deck. Tall and thin with articulate limbs that reminded Luke, however unfairly, of the mantises on that old man’s skull.

“Dr. Nelson.” The man extended his hand. “I’m Leo Bathgate. So glad you made it safely.”

Luke inspected Bathgate’s outstretched arm—Luke’s eyes strayed toward people’s hands and arms habitually, a reflex action. Research showed that the ’Gets wasn’t spread through physical contact, the transmission of bodily fluids, or as an airborne pathogen. But it had taken a while to discover this, and sadly, several tragedies had occurred before it was fully understood. Men had been shot in cold blood as they had struggled to recall some hard-to-remember fact. The phrase It’s on the tip of my tongue had become the basis for justifiable homicide for a while there.

The yacht was luxurious, everything gleaming. Luke felt as though he was floating on a pile of cold currency.

Bathgate read his face. “I’ve never set foot on anything like it, either.”

A bottle of champagne sat in a bucket. Bathgate shrugged.

“I found it onboard. Figured it’d just go to waste,” he said.

Krug Brut 1988. Pricey suds. Bathgate poured the bubbly into crystal flutes and handed one to him. Luke tipped the glass to his lips, the champagne sending a tickle up his sinuses.

Bathgate said: “How was your trip?”

Endless , Luke wanted to tell him.

Roughly eight thousand miles separated Chicago, where he’d caught the first flight, and Agana, the capital city of Guam. Those eight thousand miles had unfurled like a strange waking nightmare.

On his way out of Iowa City, Luke had stopped at an Exxon off the interstate. The highway wasn’t snarled with stalled or abandoned cars, the way it always is in stories about the apocalypse. Because this wasn’t exactly the apocalypse , Luke had to constantly remind himself. It was just something awful that was happening .

For that reason, or maybe just out of old habit, the important things went along as they had. Ideas of ownership prevailed. The dead were still being buried—not always in cemeteries, but the bodies certainly went into the ground. Rituals were still being observed. And that was good.

The gas station had been empty. The pumps were shut off. The door to the convenience store was open. The aisles were shadowy in the late afternoon. Muggy, seeing as the A/C wasn’t working. Ants trooped up the glass of a cooler case.

Luke could’ve done anything. Unwrapped a Twinkie and wolfed it down. Stripped the plastic off a Penthouse and flipped out the gatefold. There was something very freeing about that—but scary, too.

He’d pulled back onto the interstate. The gas gauge needle had nudged past E when he found a Cenex station… which was bustling. People were gassing up, paying for chips and sodas, blissfully unaware or pretending to be. It had been good to see the lights on. Good to pay for things. That feeling of normalcy returned. The world was still spinning as it always had, right?

That troublesome kind of stuff happened a lot now. You couldn’t find gas, or a new tire if you got a flat. You could set off for a destination and never reach it. A thousand new roadblocks popped up—not always physical or jurisdictional ones, either. Just the system breaking down in little ways.

O’Hare Airport had been surreal. Most of his terminal’s kiosks and shops were closed, the shelves picked over, restaurants offering a reduced menu.

Luke had passed through security without incident; he carried a notarized document that eased his passage. The plane was a twin-prop puddle jumper. It was so full that two U.S. Marines had to sit in the aisle. That would’ve made life tough on the flight attendants, had there been any.

The plane touched down in Denver. After he disembarked, Luke stood before the airport’s windows watching the flights taxi in. He could make out a man at the edge of the landing strip, propped against a chain-link fence. Motionless, with his arms outspread.

A plane roared down the runway; as it rose, it flew directly above the man. His clothes fluttered with the terrific force of the jet’s engines. His body jerked, his head snapping back and forth. Did the pilots have to look at the man every time they took off?

“Somebody should do something about it.”

The woman standing beside Luke was fiftyish, with salt-and-pepper hair and a faint British accent. She tapped the huge window with her knuckles, a fussy rap-rap-rap, as if in expectation someone—a butler?—would appear to deal with her complaint.

“They should bloody well do something about that poor sod, wouldn’t you think?”

She seemed the sort of woman who was used to getting things done. But things didn’t always get done nowadays. People just got on with things the way they were.

Luke’s connecting flight landed at San Francisco International, where he was met by a pair of unsmiling soldiers. They led him to a private airstrip, where a C-23 Sherpa cargo plane waited. Luke was its sole passenger. Resting against the bulkhead, he let the hum of the engine fill his skull. He fell into a black sucking vacuum of sleep—dreamless, joyless. When he awoke, his plane was circling Agana.

“Long,” Luke said, finally answering Bathgate’s question. “A long goddamn trip.”

Bathgate gave a sympathetic nod. “You must be exhausted.”

Luke’s watch was still set to Iowa time. His body clock was reading 5:00 a.m. as Guam’s midafternoon sun beat down on his skull. The champagne mainlined straight into his veins, making him swoon.

“Your berth is down below,” Bathgate said. “Why don’t you get settled?”

As Luke made his way to the sleeping quarters, Bathgate called out: “Dr. Nelson?”

Luke turned to see Bathgate wringing his ballcap in his hard-knuckled hands.

“Your brother…” he said falteringly. “They say he might have the answer to all this. Whatever he’s doing down there in the deep. You think that’s possible?”