The Monster Missions

by Laura Martin

  “What seems wrong is only getting two hours,” Garth said. “We’ll barely be into anything good and it will be time to head back in.”

  “You’ll find something good,” I said. “Besides, do you really want just Gizmo in your ear for more than two hours?”

  “Solid point,” he agreed with a smirk. “With all your tinkering, you should figure out a way to turn his mic off somehow.”

  Gizmo cleared his throat loudly in front of us, and we snapped our mouths shut.

  “Better,” he said with a scowl that pulled his dark eyebrows so far down they practically connected in the middle. What hair our boss was lacking on the top of his head, his eyebrows more than made up for. “Now, if there aren’t any questions, let’s do this.” He turned and headed out of the room, his own flippers tucked snugly under his arm. We followed obediently down the hall and up the short flight of stairs to the dive deck. Positioned near the bottom of the ship, the deck sat about ten feet above the waves. It had been designed to be levered out from the side when the ship was docked and then ratcheted back in when it was on the move. The result was a flimsy metal platform that barely had enough room for us and the small crane and lift we used to bring up the salvage.

  In front of us, one by one, the other scavengers walked to the edge of the deck. Each of them took a few seconds to carefully secure the face mask that fit snugly from chin to forehead before making the jump. The masks not only cycled oxygen through to the diver, but also made a protective bubble around the face that allowed us to communicate with each other via a tiny speaker embedded in the side. They were a far cry from the diving equipment that had been available right after the Tide Rising. My grandfather used to tell stories about clunky oxygen tanks and face masks that didn’t even cover your entire face. The human race had quickly realized that diving was essential to its continued survival, though. Only limited resources had been brought onto the boats, and the only way to replenish supplies was to wrestle them from the wreckage beneath the waves.

  Desperation often breeds invention, I thought, as I carefully situated my mask so it fit snugly against my chin, forehead, and cheekbones. I wondered if I’d ever invent something so useful. Suddenly the small metal box under my arm felt basic and stupid. It was essentially a glorified flashlight. I let that depressing thought swirl around in my head while I waited for our turn to jump. As the two youngest on the crew, Garth and I were always relegated to the back of the line. A fact that meant we were usually last to the easy-pickings salvage and were stuck dredging up the harder stuff.

  Soon enough we were at the end of the deck, and I looked down at the rolling blue waves as the divers in front of me disappeared below the surface. My stomach did a sickening flip, the same one it always did right before I went under. It used to bother me, that surge of fear, but it didn’t anymore. Fear was just a part of life, and if I let it eat at me, I’d never get anything done.

  “Wanna stick with me today?” Garth asked before sliding his face mask down. I nodded, more than happy to tag along. Garth had a sixth sense about scavenging that I somehow lacked. Sure, I was useful if you had a small dark hole you needed to stuff someone down, but if anyone was going to find something of value on a dive, it was usually my best friend. Garth leaped off the deck, hit the water, and disappeared. I was the last one, and I adjusted my own face mask a final time, stepped forward, and jumped. As I slipped beneath the surface, I placed one hand on my mask so it wouldn’t slam upward and break my nose as the water, cold and icy blue, rushed up to meet me.

  I kept my feet together and my body tight as I plummeted downward. Below me I saw the rest of the crew already turned and paddling toward the sprawl of wrecked buildings spread out below. Garth was to my left, and I turned and kicked hard to catch up with him.

  “Remember,” came Gizmo’s voice through the speaker in my mask, “iron is at an all-time high. Don’t pass up anything.” I felt the pressure on my ears as we went deeper, and I took the half second I needed to acclimate. We could dive much deeper than our ancestors thanks to the improvements they’d made on our gear, but some things, like water pressure, had to be dealt with the old-fashioned way. This dive was fairly shallow for us, only about thirty or forty feet below the surface, but it still felt like descending into a whole other world.

  The town below us had probably been a small one by pre–Tide Rising standards, but it still seemed huge to me. That was what always struck me about the underwater ghost towns we scavenged: all that space. People used to have entire houses to themselves. Houses with more than one room, and huge areas dedicated to nothing but sleeping or cooking or whatever. It was hard to imagine, but I’d been inside enough of them now that I could almost picture it.

  As we got closer, I could see that the houses were only partially revealed, the sand heaped up and mounded around them in the haphazard aftermath of the storm that had unearthed them. The ocean was funny like that, shifting and moving to reveal its hidden treasures. If Gizmo was right, and he usually was, this town had never been scavenged before, which meant we might find some decent stuff.

  Garth and I paddled past the rest of the scavengers who’d already laid claim to houses and toward the outer edge of the town, where we had a better shot of finding an unclaimed spot.

  “Any of these look good to you?” Garth said.

  “I think we should go a bit farther,” I said, but my words seemed to bounce back to me. The speaker in my ear buzzed angrily, and I winced.

  “Did you hear me?” Garth said.

  I nodded and pointed to my mask, making a thumbs-down motion.

  “Your mic is busted again?” Garth groaned. “I swear, our equipment is being held together with hope and Gizmo’s spit.”

  “Gizmo’s microphone is working just fine, Garth,” Gizmo’s voice said in our ears, and Garth winced and mumbled an apology that didn’t sound at all sincere. Gizmo went on. “If Berkley’s mic isn’t working, then make sure you two stick together. And if I hear another comment like that, you’ll be scrubbing down the dive room for a week.”

  Garth rolled his eyes inside his mask, but he didn’t dare answer back. Gizmo wasn’t known for making idle threats, and you never knew when he had the microphones set so that every scavenger could hear your response. Our best course of action was to get to work, so I followed Garth toward the outskirts of the town.

  “I like the looks of this one,” Garth said, pointing to a house on our right, or what was left of it. Since I couldn’t exactly argue with his choice, I followed, although I’d rather have taken the house on the left. The speaker by my ear buzzed again, and I winced, wondering if I could just turn it off and claim the whole thing broke if Gizmo ripped into me after this for not listening to his instructions. Garth stopped in front of what was left of the front window and flipped his headlamp on so he could peer inside. I swam around the back of the house, hunting for an unblocked entry. I ran my hand over the crumbling brick as I swam, and pieces of it fell away, as if the house had been made of clay.

  The back of the house wasn’t nearly as intact as the front, and I found a convenient Berkley-sized hole in the facade and swam inside. The beam of my headlamp lit up the interior of a surprisingly sand-free space, leading me to believe that either the majority of the windows hadn’t broken, a minor miracle, or—and this was more likely—it hadn’t been completely buried. Still, if I hadn’t known that I was inside a house, it would have been hard to distinguish what I was looking at. The ocean was a pirate that commandeered anything she thought was hers, and she’d turned the inside of the place into a habitat for creatures that liked to make their homes in the dark.

  “Find anything good?” Garth said in my ear, and I gritted my teeth in exasperation as he remembered my broken mic and groaned. I got to work, and a half hour later I had a small pile of usable copper piping I’d ripped out of the walls. I flagged Garth down to help me, and together we hauled our find back toward the Atlas. Gizmo was positioned directly under the dark shadow
of the ship with the salvage net and carefully noted what we dropped off before sending us back out. Around us other scavengers were doing the same, bringing bits of this or that to be carefully noted and added to their total.

  Paper money wasn’t really a thing after the Tide Rising. With no place to spend it, people used it for a while in place of toilet paper until the human race rigged all the toilets with bidets. My grandparents had been in their forties during the Rising, and after, my grandfather kept a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket just for luck. Sometimes he’d pull it out and show it to me. I loved when he did that, not because I thought the money was particularly neat—in fact, it was so crinkled and worn you could barely see the image of Ben Franklin anymore—but because he’d sometimes talk about Benjamin Franklin and how people like him had shaped the world. He’d ruffle my hair and tell me that no matter what happened in the future, the creativity and invention that had preceded us would always be needed.

  It was a lesson the human race had definitely had to learn the hard way. Now, instead of money, we got survival credits. If you wanted to survive, you had to work, and for your work you were paid in credits that could be cashed in for food, clothing, extra heat in the winter, and just about anything else you might need to live your life. My briny burrito that morning had cost my dad a credit, a credit I hoped to more than earn back with our haul today.

  Garth paddled toward the outskirts of the town again, and I wished I had a way to tell him that I didn’t think we had that much time. Gizmo was already giving the half-hour warning, and as soon as we made it there, we would need to turn around. Garth was a faster swimmer than me, though, and when I finally caught up with him, we were back at the house we’d just left.

  “What do you think that is?” he said, pointing to our right, and I followed the direction of his finger to a large mass that was barely distinguishable in the sand. I gave an overexaggerated shrug and shook my head, trying to send the message that we didn’t have time for this, and Garth nodded.

  “Super, I knew you’d want to check it out. Great idea.” I muttered something uncomplimentary, mainly because I knew he couldn’t hear me, and followed him. The closer we got to the mass, the more obvious it was that it was a large building of some sort. Only one story, its roofline almost visible above the sand, spreading back in a T shape.

  “I think it’s a school,” I said, only to have Garth echo me two seconds later. I made a mental note to check my headset before I did another dive mission.

  Instead of trying to find a way inside, Garth paddled down to the flat expanse of sand directly behind the building and ran his hand over it. I swam down to where he was pushing at the sand with his gloved hands. Then I spotted it: a slight knob of metal barely visible among the rocks and shells littering the ocean floor. Garth looked up at me, and I saw his wide grin through his mask.

  “Jackpot,” he said. He put his hand to his ear. “Gizmo?” he said. “You there?”

  “Whatcha got?” Gizmo said.

  “I think it may be playground equipment,” Garth said. “I need the hook.”

  “Send Berkley back for it,” Gizmo said. “And hustle. The captain wants us out of here.” I turned and paddled back up toward the gigantic gray blob of the Atlas, my leg muscles burning.

  By the time I made it back, a hook and rope in tow, Garth had the top eight inches of the play set exposed. It appeared to be one of those bubble-shaped things with crisscrossing metal bars children could climb around on. It reminded me a little of a fishing net right after it was thrown out over the water, only more symmetrical and, well, metal. It was also bigger than I’d thought it would be, and I said a silent prayer that it hadn’t deteriorated too badly. Sometimes when you hooked these things up and the crane started reeling them in, they just fell to pieces. Garth took the hook from me and dove down to wrap it expertly around the middle section of a metal bar.

  Deciding that he didn’t need my help for this bit, I swam over to poke around the building. The sand had kind of mounded up on one side of it, revealing a long line of windows on the other side. To my surprise, most of them were intact, and I glided down to peer inside to see if they were worth breaking open. Unfortunately, the glass was so covered in scum that it was impossible to see anything. Something about the place felt off, though, and I took a second to look around. I’d been doing this long enough to trust my instincts. They’d saved me from a run-in with a great white once, and another time from sticking my hand inside a hole where a poisonous sea snake had taken up residence.

  Then it clicked, what was bothering me: there weren’t any fish. Not a single one was meandering around the building. Turning, I saw that it was the exception to the rule, as rainbow-colored fish of every size and shape poked around the other houses and bits of wreckage. There was something about this building that they didn’t like. Had my microphone been working, I’d have mentioned it to Garth, but he was still busy rigging up the piece of playground equipment. I felt something prickle down my spine, and I shivered, imagining a giant spider somehow making its way into my wet suit.

  Garth looked up and signaled for me to come help, impatient to start reeling in his find, but I shook my head. It was then that I noticed the hole in the roof. It was big, more than big enough for me to fit through, and I swam up to peer in. The inside was practically pitch-black, with nothing but shapeless lumps and mounds visible in the gloom. I switched on my headlamp, but its one narrow beam didn’t do much to illuminate things. It was the perfect time to try out my new light cube.

  “What are you doing?” came Gizmo’s voice in my ear, and I knew he was peering at us through his specialized binoculars. No matter how far away you were, you were never really out of Gizmo’s sight. “Help Garth with that piece of equipment,” he snapped. “We don’t have all day!” I turned around and held up a finger to show him that I needed a minute. I heard him huff impatiently in my ear, and I carefully turned my back to Gizmo and the Atlas so I could slip the light cube out and turn it on. Light shot out in all directions as I dropped it into the hole.

  I watched it sink slowly and hit the sandy bottom about ten feet below. My cube lit up the space, illuminating rusted desks and broken whiteboards. Everything was in a jumble, tipped over and half buried in the silt and the sand, but even from here I could tell that the metal on the desks wasn’t that tarnished. I was just turning back to signal to Gizmo that I’d found something, when a massive lump moved beneath the sand.

  2

  I froze as the entire bottom of the building seemed to undulate. Something was down there, and that something was big. My mind raced rapidly over all the species I knew of that hid under the sand, but none of them even came close to the size of whatever this was. I watched with horror as first one and then another huge red snakelike coil emerged. I screamed, which was pointless because my microphone was turned off, and threw myself back from the hole and directly into Garth. His hands closed around my shoulders and I twisted frantically, dragging him backward and away from the building.

  “What’s happening? What is it?” Garth said. “Is there a shark?”

  “Did I hear you say shark?” Gizmo said sharply, and even though I was terrified, I saw out of my peripheral vision multiple scavengers pop up out of houses, immediately on high alert. We’d lost more than one scavenger to a shark attack, and everyone had a healthy respect for the creatures. I shook my head vigorously, still doing my best to pull Garth back and away from the building. Garth followed, craning his head back to see what had me in such a panic.

  “Will you two stop messing around!” bellowed Gizmo in our ears. “I’ll slash your credits on that piece of equipment for wasting time, don’t think that I won’t!” I frantically scanned the ocean for somewhere to hide, but all the houses were too far away to be a viable option. In the distance I saw the rest of the scavenging crew return to the houses they’d just left, following the protocol of scavenging until the last possible minute. I had to warn them, but even if my microphone
had worked, my words were frozen inside my throat as panic roared through my veins. I looked back at the wrecked school with its gaping hole in the roof just as two huge luminescent eyes opened up to look right at me.

  The eyes blinked, and slowly a head emerged from the darkness of the hole. At first I thought it was a gigantic moray eel—the long snakelike creature that liked to back itself into a hole and wait for dinner to swim inside its gaping mouth. But this creature wasn’t the murky lime green of a moray—it was bloodred. It had the same ribbon of body as the moray, but the similarities stopped there. For one thing, this thing was huge—its head alone was probably three feet long—and its mouth, when it opened in a silent hiss, was filled with overlapping rows of needle-sharp teeth. It emerged a bit more, its body uncoiling from the building as it stretched itself to what had to be ten feet and counting.

  Gizmo screamed in my ear, the noise so piercing that I cringed from it, causing the creature’s eyes to focus back on me. Gizmo’s terrified scream came again, and around me I saw the other scavengers pop up from the ghost town, their eyes wide behind their masks as they tried to figure out what had made our leader sound like that. There was a moment where everything seemed to freeze—the divers, the monster, time itself—as we took in this completely unknown but utterly terrifying predator, and then the moment was over and chaos broke loose. Every single diver forgot their training and bolted for the surface as fast as their flippers would take them. Well, everyone except Garth, who stayed at my side, his eyes wide inside his mask. My instincts, all of them, were screaming at me to make a break for the surface, but I knew that would be a mistake. The Atlas and safety were too far away. We’d never outswim the thing. Our best bet was to go literally to ground and hide.