Nick Cutter - The Deep

Abby jackknifed up in bed. “Zach?” she said. “What is it, baby?”

Luke could just make out the shape of his son in the finger of moonlight falling through the motel window. He was curled inside the Pack ’n Play. His face was pressed to the breathable mesh, which distorted his features.

Luke snapped on the bedside lamp. Zachary was shrieking, these lung-shredding sounds Luke had never heard before. He leapt out of bed. Zachary’s face was beet red and alarmingly puffed. Luke picked his son up and pressed the boy to his chest, a calming gesture.

Luke’s heartbeat skyrocketed when he felt something squirming against his own chest. Something inside Zachary’s sleeper, trapped against his son’s skin.

Zach’s piercing screams unlocked this dreadful hysteria in Luke; each one shot a jolt of scalding acid through his veins. The boy thrashed and squealed as Luke gripped him under the armpits, his little face a balloon ready to burst.

Jesus oh Jesus fuck what IS that?

Something was moving under Zach’s sleeper. Luke saw these terrifying whiplike motions in the left leg of Zach’s sleeper. It looked like a big fish caught in a net, trying to fling itself free. Luke made a dry gagging sound, the panic swelling in his throat like a sponge.

He tore the sleeper open. There, curling around his son’s ankle and all the way up his thigh, was the largest insect Luke had ever seen.

A long torsional tube. Its black body was segmented, sinuous, reflecting the room’s meager light. It looked the same at both ends, so Luke couldn’t tell where its head was. Luke saw inflamed divots all over Zach’s chest where the fucking thing must’ve bitten his boy.

It moved— was moving, even as Luke stared slack-jawed—with subtle undulations, powered by a dizzying multitude of legs. It released itself from Zach’s ankle, slipping up the back of his leg and around the frilled, absorbent ridge of his diaper. It was enormous, at least eight inches long; it kept coming and coming like a freight train steaming out of a tunnel, kinking and unwinding and flexing its revolting body.

Luke caught the final half inch of it—disgustingly warm, with a greasy sheen; it reminded him of grabbing the fireman’s pole at his old playground, the metal hot and slick from the hands of a hundred children.

He pinched his fingers with the desperate hope of snaring the bug, ripping the fucker in half, but it shimmied free and slithered under his son’s back.

Abby tore madly at Zach’s sleeve, trying to yank the sleeper off. The fear chewed into the sensitive wires in Luke’s brain, paralyzing his nerve centers. He pushed Abby away forcefully, too panicked to notice, flipped Zach onto his back, and pressed down on his sleeper, finding the bug—a millipede, he knew by then—and trapping it in the fabric. He freed Zachary’s arms, then leapt off the bed with the balled-up sleeper. The millipede whipped in his grip; Luke absorbed a series of bites as painful as the stings of a wasp.

Luke’s only thought: This fucker’s been doing that to my son .

He threw the sleeper down and stamped on it with his bare heel. A satisfying metallic crunch, like stepping on a beer can. He stomped again and again, fueled by a rage as primordial as any he’d ever experienced.

Die, you fucking brainless monster! Die, you awful thing!

He stepped away, panting. Abby cradled Zach; he was still bawling, but his cries had lost their death-struck pitch.

Luke’s gaze returned to the sleeper. Amazingly, it was moving.

The millipede crawled out of one sleeve. Skittering hesitantly, leaking viscid pus-yellow fluid, it curled into a cochlear coil on the carpet.

“Oh no,” Luke breathed. “Oh no-no- no .”

He retrieved his heavy-soled dress shoe and slammed it down. The bug actually leapt up, bouncing off the thick, nappy pile. With the same shoe, Luke flicked it through the open bathroom door and onto the tiles, muttering “ Fucking thing oh you fucking thing,” and knelt on the tiles, slamming the shoe down furiously until the insect was nothing but a jamlike smear…

…AND RIGHT THEN,alone in the Trieste ’s tunnel, this was the memory Luke’s mind conjured:

That slippery whush-whush in the cavernous dark was the whush of a millipede stalking toward him, chitter-clattering on its million-skillion legs.

This wasn’t your garden-variety one, either. Oh, no. The darkness nursed it into something new entirely. A millipede the size of a fourth-generation Aleppo pine, thick around as a trash can. Something primeval, hailing from the Permian age, where the scale of life was all out of whack. Its mandibles, sharp as hedge shears, clashed silkily: the sound of a razor drawn down a leather strop.

Whush-whush… pause… whush-whush.

Chitta-chit-skriiitch-chizzt-chit-chit .

It advanced slowly, in no rush. Where was there to go? It had all the time in the world.

Impossible , the rational center of Luke’s mind insisted. Even if it did exist anywhere on earth, which it absolutely fucking does not, how would something like that get down here? It’s nothing. Nothing at all, for fuck’s sake , nothing at ALL .

His mind took a sickening lurch. That reasonable (if increasingly shrill) voice in his head held no sway down here. Maybe his brain had conjured this nightmare bug out of nothingness. But it was still here —if only in this moment.

Either he’d created it…

— or the Trieste had —

…or he was coming down with a case of the sea-sillies already.

Your seabag’s leaky, sailor. Isn’t that what they said in the Navy when a guy went batshit? Your seabag’s leaking its guts all over the friggin’ place, swabbie. You’ve gone Section 8, ya fookin’ loonybird —

Whush-whush… WHUSH-whush…

You think that’s nothing, Luke? his mother said mockingly, with that throaty chuckle of hers. Ohh, I think we both know it’s something. After all, the dog can feel it, too, wouldn’t you say? Can’t you feel her shivering against you? Oh yes, it’s something all right, and whatever it is, Luke, it’s coming for you.

Luke pushed the dog behind him and butt-bumped toward the locked hatch. The tunnel narrowed. His breath came in hot, nauseous gusts.

Whush-WHUSH …

Luke swore he could see the segmented shape of the millipede’s gargantuan and somehow gothic body, the plating of its exoskeleton exuding its own sick glow. It was approaching with a mincing sidewinder movement.

Jesus, no, this is not happening… there’s nothing—NOTHING—!

He flattened his back against the hatch. The dog was tucked and trembling behind his knees. Luke leaned forward slightly, terror buzzing in his skull like angry yellow jackets…

Whush-whush-WHUSH-WHU —

The airlock hissed behind him. The hatch fell open. Luke’s heels stuttered back and hit the metal lip. He squawked, toppling backward as he scrambled away from the chattering noises in the hallway.

Light flooded his eyes. A familiar face stared impassively down at him.

“Hello, brother.”

CLAYTON NELSON’S FACEwore a particular expression a good deal of the time. It had begun to grace his features as a child, and although his face had changed over the years, the expression had not. There was a noticeable thinning of the lips and a flaring of the nostrils; the flesh drew tight at the top of his nose where it met the edges of his eyes, while his eyebrows tented in an inverted V. It was the look of a man who’d sniffed something foul, but could not determine the source of the odor.