The Deep 2015.06.23

by Michaelbrent Collings

  She rocked with the force of the blows. Pummeled this way and that.

  Something big came into sight. A snub-nosed shark, somehow managing to look both ponderous and sleek, powerful in the way that only predators could be. It hit her shoulder and neck, then she felt its skin rasp its way to her face. Her mask went sideways, the edges grinding into her cheeks and the bridge of her nose as it fell away from its proper position. Seawater flooded her vision, stung her eyes. Everything had already been a blur of motion and movement as the fish descended en masse, but now there was even less to see, each individual fish becoming nothing but a speck in her vision.

  Something huge came at her.

  Sue reared back, her hands flinging themselves in front of her, an automatic reaction. Punching a shark in the nose or gills might dissuade it from attacking, she knew. But she also knew with utter clarity that doing so while being attacked was all but impossible. Humans, supreme on the land above, were nearly helpless in this place they were not designed to be.

  The frenzied waves of sea life thickened around her, obscuring even the huge shape that loomed.

  The thing hit her.

  She twisted, fighting in a panic. Felt something wrap itself around her. She pushed on it, trying to force it away from her, to throw it away or at least throw away its tanks –

  Tanks?

  She realized in that moment what she had been struggling against, and relief flooded over her as thoroughly as the water in which she swam.

  Tim.

  It was him. She couldn't see the other diver with any clarity, but she knew to a certainty that it was him. There was no one else that could have come looking for her, no one else that could have found her.

  She wrapped her arms around him. Felt him pulling her, knew he must be yanking them both along his go-home line.

  The fish were still everywhere. Surrounding her so completely there was no way she could have seen anything even with her mask on. Just bodies swarming, pummeling at them from every direction.

  Then, just as suddenly as they had come, the fish parted. Like the cleaving of the Red Sea for Moses, they split apart, creating a narrow corridor with Tim's go-home line in the middle. She had time to wonder at the event, a split-second to think that perhaps whatever was causing the fish to swarm this way was in fact trying to help them.

  That's crazy. That would mean something's doing this. On purpose.

  No. No way.

  Then a form drifted down into the same corridor through which she and Tim were moving. It drifted oddly, a black blot with what looked to her like dozens of tentacles extending from its body.

  Then she heard the scream. Realized it was Tim. A shriek that, even under uncounted tons of water, thousands of pounds of pressure, could be mistaken for nothing but perfect terror.

  He kept pulling, though. Kept yanking them along. Toward the anchor line… toward the black form.

  And then they were close. So close that even she, with eyes burning and half-closed against the saltwater, could make it out.

  Geoffrey.

  His face was a mass of red and purple, bruises from capillaries that must have burst by the thousands. One eye was rolled back so far it was only white. The other seemed to have burst. As though something inside him inflated to the point where the pressure popped his eye like a bung from a barrel. Something had burrowed into his cheek, some kind of fish that had been goaded to insane aggression and now had its tail outside Geoffrey's cheek, its head deep in the man's mouth.

  She couldn't understand what the tentacles were, though. What it was she had seen that had made him appear so alien.

  Then she saw. Saw and, like Tim, shrieked. The scream rang clear and clean through the water, and the fish all around them seemed to back off. As though they had heard the sound and feared it. Or perhaps feared the dark form that had wrung the noise from her lips.

  The tentacles were Geoffrey's innards. Something had slit him open from neck to groin. Some of his intestines remained partially attached to their moorings within, floating like the many legs of a nightmare arachnid.

  Most of him, though, most of what should have been inside him – heart, lungs, spleen, the vast majority of his GI tract – was just gone. Ripped away so perfectly and completely that what was left was just a hollow shell.

  Just like that diver. Just like the first one. The one we found. Just like we're going to be. Oh no, no-no-no, just like us.

  Geoffrey bobbed toward them. At first she thought he was swimming toward them –

  (no how's that possible how can he move like that what's he doing what's he going to do to us?)

  – then she realized Geoffrey – his body – was simply pushing toward them because they were headed into the current, and he had no motor function to combat the water's pull. Just swaying like a large leaf in a gentle breeze, moving toward them.

  What am I going to do if he touches me? I'll go crazy. I'll lose it and that'll be it.

  He bobbed toward them. And now she realized that Tim was kicking, angling them slightly up. Toward Geoffrey.

  "What are you doing?" she wanted to scream. But she gagged back the words. They would have come out as meaningless garble around her regulator. Beyond that, she thought if she started screaming things like that – even if she was the only one who understood what she was saying – she would spiral into a panic from which she could never emerge.

  In the next moment she realized what Tim was doing. He let go of his own go-home line long enough to push Geoffrey's corpse out of the way, then grab the line that trailed from its center. He slashed it with a knife that seemed to appear in his hand by magic, then looped the loose end through his gear.

  He was going to bring Geoffrey's body. Wasn't going to let him stay here, but was going to bring him up.

  Sue was torn. Admiration for Tim's dedication and care warred with the very real desire to grab Tim's knife and use it to cut Geoffrey free. Not only was he disgusting, horrifying, he was also slowing them down. Too much?

  She didn't know.

  Tim pulled them. A moment later she reached out and pulled as well. They engaged in something like a three-legged race: each unwilling to let go of the other, each using their free hand to pull in syncopated movements that dragged them forward.

  They arrived at the anchor. A sight both mundane and more magical than anything Sue had ever seen before.

  Tim didn't spend time untying from the line. He just slashed his own go-home line and started pulling up. Pulling fast, then faster. She couldn't keep up with the motion of his arms, and their progress became a continuous, lurching ascent.

  He's panicking. He's lost control.

  He won't stop at the deco points.

  She shook him. Hard. He didn't stop, kept going up.

  She flicked the front of his mask.

  Tim jerked back, his motion that of someone who's been stung on the nose. She knew her tap couldn't possibly have hurt him, but knew as well that it would have startled the crap out of him, coming out of nowhere the way it did.

  That was what she wanted. What he needed.

  Tim flailed for a moment. Let go of the anchor line, and that seemed to remind him where he was and what he was doing. He leaped forward, grabbing the line and then just hanging there. He looked around – left, right, up, down – with the jerky motions of a cornered fox in a hunt.

  Nothing. They had climbed far enough that their lights no longer illuminated the wreck below. No fish. No nothing.

  She felt his body slacken. Some of the terrified tension left his muscles, and with that she realized that every part of her ached with the pain of unremitting tension that had flexed every muscle she had into a tight ball.

  Tim looked at his dive computer. Wrote on his slate. "THANK U." She nodded, and he wrote, "DECO POINT IN 10." She nodded.

  They were going to make it.

  Unless something else happened.

  She looked at Geoffrey's corpse. Still dangling from Tim by a line that stretch
ed seven or eight feet away. A few of the entrails drifted close enough that she could have reached out and touched their flailing ends.

  Geoffrey rotated in the current. Stared at them through one white eye.

  She looked away. But knew he was still there.

  Still watching.

  BODY

  ~^~^~^~^~

  At the second deco point Tim finally allowed himself to think about what had just happened.

  What's with the fish? What's going on down here?

  It seemed that Geoffrey had run out of air. But why? He should have had plenty left to go on, or at least enough that attacking Tim the way he had would have made no sense.

  Narced. Narced beyond belief.

  That had to be it. Tim had heard tales of people completely losing it underwater for no reason at all. Just the influence of gases that had once been inert suddenly influencing their minds in strange and unpredictable ways.

  And Sue?

  That was easy, too: she was obsessed with finding her sister. Focused enough on that one goal that she was willing to go into danger without thought for safety protocols.

  Mercedes?

  He remembered the way she had looked when he saw her at the anchor line: eyes wide, lips pinched and white around the regulator. What had happened to her?

  What had she seen that scared her so badly she looked like she was halfway to the grave? Like her soul was escaping even as she watched, and she was helpless to do anything about it.

  He didn't know. Nor did he understand the strange motion of the fish: here one moment, gone the next; normal foraging and swimming, then sudden schools that turned ten thousand fish into one malicious monstrosity.

  What's happening?

  Something tugged on his line. Geoffrey had floated up, hanging ten feet above them. Tim didn't look at the body. He couldn't. Couldn't handle seeing the wreck that the man had become.

  Just like the first diver they found.

  Sue suddenly twitched.

  Then the twitching turned into a tremor. The tremor to a series of shivers.

  Tim looked at her. She popped out her regulator and sliced a hand against her throat.

  He understood the motion instantly: No air left.

  He looked at his dive computer automatically. Plenty of air left for him. Enough to make it to the top. Barely.

  What had happened with her?

  She must have been hyperventilating the whole time they swam through the fish. That plus the exertion of swimming against the current must have depleted her tanks. At one-hundred-fifty feet, the pressure was over four times higher than at sea level. That meant air pressed out of the tanks at four times normal density, breaths took up four times more pressure to equalize the internal pressure of the lungs against the massive force bearing down on them. A natural event that no one had any control over.

  It also meant that panic used up air at a tremendous rate. And Sue's tanks were smaller than his: fine for a woman her size, unless she just burned through them because of panic and exertion.

  He didn't think beyond that. Just pushed his octopus at her. She didn't take the spare regulator. Shook her head.

  He didn't understand. Pushed the octopus at her again.

  She grabbed his wrist. The slate. Wrote, "I breathe we both die."

  Tim knew she was right. The dive computer confirmed it, but even without that he would have known it.

  Still he tossed a thumbs up at her. Wrote, "I got this," on his slate. Another thumbs up.

  She took the octopus. Bubbles began escaping her mouth as she inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled.

  He smiled around his regulator. Crossed his eyes at her. She smiled back.

  But she looked pinched. Not just afraid, but exhausted. She was running on fumes. They both were.

  Literally.

  In spite of his cheery outward appearance, Tim felt a fist in the center of his gut, clenching around his insides and drawing everything tight.

  He didn't have enough air to get them to the surface. Not nearly enough.

  But he knew someone who did.

  He motioned to Sue to close her eyes by squinching his own eyes shut and then pointing to her. He had to repeat the motion a few times before she got what he wanted.

  She shook her head. No way.

  He shrugged. Nodded. She was tough. Willing even after the events of the past minutes to risk whatever was coming.

  And, in truth, he was glad. The idea of having her close her eyes had filled him with revulsion and a creeping kind of dread. If her eyes were closed it was something like her being absent. If they were open she was with him – not just physically, but mentally. He was glad of that. Glad to have her near, glad to have her support.

  He pulled on the line that trailed from Geoffrey's grisly corpse. Sue looked stricken. Also confused. Geoffrey's tanks were gone, and she clearly didn't know what could be done with the body.

  Tim did.

  He hoped.

  SURFACED

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Jimmy J watched the area off the aft deck and the dive platform anxiously.

  It's been plenty of time. Plenty of time for them to go and then come back.

  So where are they?

  He had no answer. Swells lapped against the rear of the boat. He felt something akin to motion sickness, a nauseating sensation that spread from deep within him and tightened both heart and throat.

  He realized he was terrified.

  Too long. Been too long.

  And thinking that, he had to admit that his friend's death wasn't the only thing he was worried about. His arm hurt. A lot. He had awakened that morning scratching at the spot where he had been jabbed by something on the corpse they found yesterday.

  Only yesterday? It seems like forever ago.

  He went to the head right after waking and took off the Everlast Boxing sweatshirt he'd worn to sleep for the past seven years since Tim gave it to him. Looked at his arm. And had to bite back his gorge.

  It was a yellowed, pus-encrusted mass. Reddened skin, dark veins surging to the surface.

  What the hell?

  He didn't know what it was; had never heard of anything like this. He felt the skin, certain it would be hot as an oven, burning up with infection.

  It was cool. Not clammy, not cold, just cool. So no infection fever. But still, there was Serious Wrongness happening.

  He didn't tell anyone. Who would care? Who would be able to do anything about it? Medical attention was still several days away, and there were very seriously crazed things happening today.

  He kept the Everlast sweater on. Long sleeves protecting him from the gruesome sight of his arm, protecting Tim from worrying the way he knew only Tim could do.

  There was nothing that could be done. Just ignore it and move on. He used up the whole tube of antibiotic ointment in the first aid kit, but other than that… just pretending life was normal.

  People have an almost infinite ability to ignore problems and forge on as though nothing is wrong. The most problem-averse ostrich could take lessons.

  Something bobbed to the surface, jerking Jimmy J back to the present. He shouted with joy, pumping his fist.

  "Who is it?" said Cal. "Is it Sue?" The older man had been holding the same vigil Jimmy J had been engaged in. He stepped forward, nearly running to the dive platform.

  Then he reared back.

  Screamed.

  When Jimmy J saw why, he screamed, too.

  HELD

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Out of air.

  Tim took one last draw, and at the same moment Sue felt her air go thin, and disappear.

  Nothing.

  And they were still deep enough that they couldn't surface without bending. No rescue ship for a few days, which meant no way to get into a hyperbaric chamber and decompress properly.

  Dead.

  Tim looked at her. He smiled a strange, melancholy grin. Shrugged. The gesture seemed to say, There are worse ways to go.

&n
bsp; But she knew he was wrong. Knew that drowning was one of the worst possible deaths. Maybe two minutes of convulsions, vomiting, agony. Body spewing forth waste and finally succumbing to a dark, lonely death.

  Tim took her in his arms. It was awkward with all their gear, the kind of motion that should have been ridiculous. But it wasn't. It calmed her. Made her think that maybe there were ways to go. Worse than just hanging here in the deep, hanging –

  Hanging.

  She shoved Tim away. Looked at him, then gestured toward his vest. He shook his head. Didn't understand. A small bubble leaked out of the corner of his mouth. Maybe a second of breath lost.

  They had to move quickly.

  FASTER

  ~^~^~^~^~

  "Faster!" Cal shouted. He felt like weeping.

  Not Sue. Already lost Deb. Not Sue, too. God, please save her, I don't know what I'll do without her, please please please.

  Jimmy J didn't answer. Just kept reeling line, hand over hand.

  "Faster!" Cal shouted again. Then, in a whisper, "Faster." His voice sounded empty.

  Bereft of hope.

  BC

  ~^~^~^~^~

  Tim watched what Sue was doing, and after only a few seconds he understood and mimicked her.

  Sue had grabbed the release valve of her BC. Put it to her mouth.

  The buoyancy compensator was basically a balloon that could float a diver up or down.

  And how did it do this?

  Up: filling with air.

  Down: letting air out.

  Tim shoved the release valve of his own BC into his mouth. Twisted.

  Air.

  He forced himself to breathe shallow. To sip at it rather than gulp.

  He still hadn't gotten his answer from Jimmy J. Didn't know if his friend had even gotten the message in the first place, or how long it would take for him to figure out what Tim needed.

  He looked at Sue. She was grinning around her own release valve. Mouth closed slightly as she inhaled.

  Tim popped the release valve out of his mouth. Said, "I love you," as clearly as he could.

  Sue looked suddenly startled, and he realized how weird that probably sounded. He had meant it only as his most effusive thanks, but she looked – what, worried? – that he might have meant something else. Something ridiculously intimate and even desperate.