100 Fathoms Below

by Steven L. Kent

  The hatch opened the rest of the way, and Matson walked into the torpedo room. Behind him came COB Farrington, holding a lantern. Jerry had a limited view from his hiding place, but the light from Farrington’s lantern helped him see.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to come in?” Farrington asked. “I thought it was still a quarantine.”

  Matson didn’t answer. He closed the hatch behind them. Jerry wriggled in the tight space, trying to reposition himself to see better. It wasn’t easy to do. Pinned into place between the torpedo tubes and the bulkhead, he didn’t have enough room to turn his head.

  “You’re sure you haven’t seen Lieutenant French at all?” Farrington continued. “The captain said he came down to the lower level a few hours ago, but he hasn’t reported back. And with everything else that’s going on, this boat doesn’t need another missing officer.”

  Jerry wanted to yell at Farrington to get the hell out of here, but he couldn’t. It would give him away, and he was wedged in too tightly, his arms pinned to his sides. If Matson found him, he would be trapped like a rat in a rain barrel, and the next thing he knew, he would be in a body bag next to Lieutenant French, or filling in for the missing body of Steve Bodine.

  Matson circled around Farrington like a hungry shark. COB Farrington was in his 50s, older than Matson by at least a decade, but he was no slouch. He was a tall man with the physique of someone who had kept fit all his life. Jerry had no doubt that if they were to square off, Farrington would reduce the corpsman to a wet smear on the deck. So when Matson put one hand on Farrington’s arm and effortlessly threw him across the length of the torpedo room, Jerry had to bite his knuckle to keep from crying out in terror.

  Then both men were out of his line of sight. He heard a dull clang as Farrington fell against a torpedo, followed by another thump, which must have been his dropped lantern. The beam of light juddered and bounced. Farrington shouted—a short, sharp exclamation that wasn’t a word so much as a cry of pain and alarm. There was the scuffle of feet, a hand desperately slapping the side of the torpedo, and then silence.

  Matson came back into view, and Jerry watched as he lowered Farrington’s body to the deck. He couldn’t see Farrington’s face—just one arm that flopped to the floor alongside his torso. Jerry risked moving closer to the mouth of his hiding place for a better view. On the deck, Matson knelt beside Farrington and bent his head directly over Farrington’s neck. What followed were soft sounds, barely audible, but in the silence of the torpedo room, Jerry could discern them. He thought he was going to be sick. They were the sounds of sucking, of drinking.

  A few hellishly long seconds passed, and then Matson was finished with whatever unspeakable thing he was doing. He lifted Farrington’s limp body off the deck as though it weighed no more than beach ball. Jerry got a good look at Farrington’s face as Matson carried him closer to the torpedo tubes. His eyes were open, staring vacantly in terror. There was blood on the side of his neck.

  There wasn’t a lot of light to see by, so Jerry tried to convince himself the blood could be a shadow on Farrington’s neck and nothing more. But when Matson dropped Farrington’s body onto the deck, the light from the COB’s fallen lantern hit his neck just right, and Jerry saw slick red blood. He wondered whether, underneath that blood, there were two raised welts, just like on Lieutenant French’s neck.

  Bite marks. Matson had bitten Farrington, and then … what? Drunk his blood like a vampire? But that was ridiculous. Vampires weren’t real. And yet, those same welts had been on French’s neck, and LeMon’s …

  And the dead were up and walking again.

  Matson left Farrington on the deck and went to the torpedo control panel between the tubes. Jerry shrank back into the shadows. Matson fiddled with the panel, clicking buttons and throwing switches that Jerry couldn’t see. Maybe he should make a break for it—slide out of his hiding place and bolt for the hatch. But it would take too long to extricate himself from this tiny space. Matson would be on him in a second, and he had already witnessed the corpsman’s unnatural strength. He had thrown Farrington across the room like a football.

  He heard a soft whirring that reminded him of unscrewing the lid from a jar. It was the breech door of a torpedo tube, he realized. What the hell was Matson doing opening a tube? But even as he asked himself the question, a chill swept over him. When you wanted to hide a body on a vessel as small as a submarine, where would be the best place to put it?

  Matson swung the heavy breech door open, and a sound filled the air that made Jerry bite his knuckle again. He heard a deep, greedy gasp from inside the open torpedo tube, as though someone were desperate for air. He heard a cough, a desperate moan—not just one voice, but a chorus.

  There were people in the tubes. Dear God, the son of a bitch had loaded men into the tubes! Was that where the missing sailors had gone? Duncan, Penwarden, Lieutenant Commander Jefferson—were they all just an inch away from him now, slowly asphyxiating in the tubes, desperate for air that was only replenished each time the watertight breech door was opened? Just an inch away, but an inch of thick, unyielding steel. There was nothing he could do, not unless he wanted to share Farrington’s fate. He cursed himself for his cowardice, but Matson would kill him in a heartbeat.

  The corpsman effortlessly lifted Farrington’s dead body off the deck and carried him to the open torpedo tube. Jerry closed his eyes, knowing what was coming and not wanting to see. But he heard it all—Matson stuffing the body in, the desperate, terrified gasps for air coming from inside the tube in response, and then the heavy clank of the breech door closing again. The torpedo room fell deathly silent once more.

  Now that Matson had eliminated Farrington and hidden the evidence, Jerry hoped he would leave again. He didn’t. He sat cross-legged on the deck instead, half illuminated by Farrington’s fallen lantern, and stared into the darkness. Damn. Jerry’s heart beat so fast, it seemed about to break free of his rib cage. How long could he last in his tight hiding spot without giving himself away? How long could Tim?

  As uncomfortable as it was in this tiny space, it was unimaginably worse for the men in the torpedo tube. There were four tubes in all, each 20 feet long. Four men could fit easily inside a single tube, but when Matson had opened one, it sounded like a lot more than four men in there. He pictured sailors crammed so tightly together they couldn’t move, suffocating as the sealed breech door cut off their air. How many? Six? More? The idea made his stomach jitter.

  But now he was starting to understand a few things too. When he had gone to wake Tim earlier, he noticed that several of the racks, maybe a third of them, had been empty. The mess had been empty too, and the bottom-level corridor. Were all those men in the tubes?

  Fast-attack submarines like Roanoke fired Mark 48 torpedoes 21 inches in diameter. The last time Jerry bought a suit, the tailor had told him his shoulders were 18 inches wide. He would fit in a torpedo tube with three inches to spare. But if Jefferson was in there, with his build …

  Jesus.

  Jerry’s back ached, and his shoulders were painfully tight. Still, he endured it, knowing that his only other option was to be shoved into that tube, dead or alive. He stayed put and he stayed quiet. And then, finally, Matson rose from the deck as though in response to some silent call. He walked to the hatch, opened it, and went out into the bottom-level corridor. Jerry waited until he heard the hatch close, then waited a few more seconds to make sure Matson was really gone. When the corpsman didn’t return, he wrestled his way out of the tiny space.

  The way out of the torpedo room was clear, but he didn’t take it. The only thing he cared about was getting the men out of those tubes. Nothing else mattered. As soon as he was free of his hiding place, he went to the closest torpedo tube, grabbed the handle on the breech door, and pulled. The door didn’t budge. He pulled again and again, frantic, thinking of the sailors suffocating in there. How much air did they have left? It couldn’t be much. Maybe a matter of minutes …

  Tim sl
id out from beside the bulkhead and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Jerry turned around to see Tim looking at him with sad, shocked eyes.

  “We have to get it open!” Jerry hissed. “Help me!”

  But Tim only shook his head. “Flooded,” he said so softly that Jerry didn’t understand at first. But the tone of his voice made him freeze in place. He followed Tim’s horrified gaze to the warning lights above the tubes.

  They were lit, indicating the tubes had been locked and flooded with water. Jerry stared in disbelief. Matson had filled the tubes and drowned his prisoners in the near-freezing water of the North Pacific. The inhuman bastard. When Matson came back, he would probably purge the tubes and flush the evidence out to sea.

  Tim tugged at his arm. “We’d better go. We have to tell the captain.”

  “Wait,” Jerry said.

  He knew there wasn’t anything he could do for those sailors anymore, but there was a way he could even the score, a way to make Matson pay for what he’d done. He snatched Farrington’s lantern off the floor, then unzipped Lieutenant French’s body bag once more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The stateroom door shook in its frame as Ensign Penwarden—if the man with those enormous teeth and inhuman eyes was truly Penwarden—threw himself against it again and again. Luckily, Gordon had slammed the door and dogged it down seconds before Penwarden leaped at him. The door was flimsy, nothing like the thick steel of the boat’s watertight hatches, and he doubted the lock was strong enough to keep Penwarden out for long. He and Oran braced the door with the metal-framed desk chair, but the way the door shook with each blow made him think that wouldn’t be enough, either. Nothing would be enough to keep that thing out.

  “The circuit!” Gordon shouted, pointing at the heavy phonetalker mounted on the bulkhead. “Get the captain in the control room, now!”

  Oran picked up the handset and listened for a moment. He tapped the switch hook a few times, then shook his head. “There’s no answer, suh. It’s like no one’s there.” He hung up.

  The door rattled from another blow. Gordon leaned with his back against the door, adding his weight to the barricade. “How can there be no one in the control room?”

  Oran frowned. “Maybe they got the rest of the crew already and we the only ones still alive.”

  “They?” Gordon said. “You mean there are more of those things out there?”

  “It’s like I told you, there’s never just one rougarou,” Oran said. “They multiply like cockroaches, suh.”

  Gordon still wasn’t ready to accept a supernatural explanation for this. Rougarou didn’t exist. They were just legends of a semiliterate swamp culture. He saw Penwarden’s teeth in his mind again, long and sharp, and reminded himself that vampires didn’t exist, either. They were folktales, stories to scare children into eating their vegetables and going to bed on time. They were creatures in black-and-white movies he caught on TV on Saturday afternoons, played by Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney. And yet, he’d seen the teeth, the blood on Ensign Van Lente’s neck.

  Penwarden threw himself into the door again, so hard this time that the impact nearly knocked Gordon forward. The door cracked. He clenched his teeth hard to keep from screaming. Oran ran over to the door and pushed against it next to him, helping to keep it braced.

  Okay, so barring any rational explanations his brain was still scrambling for, what if Penwarden was a vampire, what then? What could kill a vampire? He went through everything he remembered from the stories. Sunlight. They hated the sun; it burned them. Well, being hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, they were shit out of luck.

  Another blow shook the door. The crack grew deeper.

  Wooden stakes would work too. Put one through a vampire’s heart and it was supposed to die. But where the fuck was he going to find wood on a submarine? There wasn’t even any wooden furniture they could break up into stakes. Everything was made of metal or plastic so it wouldn’t weaken and rot from moisture. The wood paneling on some of the stateroom bulkheads was fake. If they were lucky, maybe they could find some genuine wooden hangers in a wardrobe, but other than that, he couldn’t think of anything. He didn’t even have a wooden spoon in the galley.

  Penwarden’s voice came from the other side of the door. It sounded like a whisper, but it carried like a shout. The sound of his voice made Gordon shiver, but it wasn’t Gordon he was talking to.

  “Do you miss your brother, Oran? LeMon is with us now. I made him one of us.”

  Oran put his hands over his ears and shook his head. “The rougarou are liars, Lieutenant. Don’t listen to him. Cover your ears.”

  “It’s no lie, Oran. I found him while he was sleeping. He thought I was just a dream until I sank my teeth into his neck. Then he knew just how real I am. Pain doesn’t lie.”

  “No!” Oran shouted. “He had the fever—”

  “We are the fever!” Penwarden hissed.

  Gordon’s breath caught in his throat. Oh, God, of course. Now it was starting to make sense. He racked his brain, trying to trace it back to the start. Warren Stubic, the petty officer who had killed himself in the freezer, was the first one they found. But Gordon already knew Stubic from previous ops—ops that had gone a lot smoother than this one. So if Stubic was the first vampire, something must have happened to him before the underway, something that changed him. Bodine had gotten sick next. Stubic must have bitten him and then, perhaps from guilt or perhaps while delirious and looking for a place to cool off from the fever, he had climbed into the freezer to die. Bodine had spread it to Penwarden, then Penwarden to LeMon. Who knew how many others were infected by now? Outbreaks were rarely linear, he knew. They tended to expand geometrically as more and more people were infected. He imagined that the spread of vampirism was no different.

  “LeMon tried to call out for you as I drank his blood,” Penwarden went on. “His big brother was all he thought about when he knew the end was coming. You were sleeping just a few feet away, and you didn’t even know. You couldn’t protect him—not from us.”

  Oran grimaced and pressed his hands harder against his ears.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Gordon said. “He’s trying to make you angry. He wants you to lose control and open the door.”

  “Yes, open the door, Oran,” Penwarden said. “I want to know if your blood tastes as sweet as your brother’s.”

  “Go to hell!” Oran shouted.

  “Hell? There’s no hell, Oran. After you die, there’s nothing. There’s only the grave … and us.”

  “Us?” Gordon said. “What are you?”

  “Why don’t you ask Lieutenant Commander Jefferson?” Penwarden replied. “He’s here too. He wants to say hello.”

  “Bullshit!” Gordon shouted.

  But then Jefferson’s voice came to him from the other side of the door. “Open the door, Lieutenant Abrams. Let me in. It’s my stateroom.”

  Gordon swallowed hard. They had gotten to Jefferson too. Damn. In the back of his mind, he’d been hoping all this time that Jefferson would turn up unharmed, that his disappearance was just a misunderstanding. Now he saw how naive that hope had been.

  “You’re not Jefferson, and you’re not Penwarden!” Oran shouted. “You’re rougarou!”

  On the other side of the door, Jefferson and Penwarden laughed. It was a hollow, haunting, malevolent sound.

  “It doesn’t matter what you call us,” Jefferson said. “Our only true name is ‘inevitability.’ There’s no escape. Join us, Oran.”

  “Join us, Gordon,” Penwarden said. “You don’t know what you’re missing. You’ll wonder why you ever resisted. Join us in the dark. Join us in the eternal night at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “The only price for joining us,” Jefferson said, “is your blood.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tim picked up the bulkhead-mounted phonetalker of the direct circuit from the torpedo room to the control room, while Jerry poked around in Lieutenant Carl French�
�s body bag. He had no idea what Jerry was looking for, and at the moment, he couldn’t concentrate enough to care. After witnessing the murder of Senior Chief Farrington and the mass drowning of the crewmen Matson had locked in the torpedo tubes, he was operating entirely on instinct, falling back on his training, which told him he needed to alert the captain. But what was he going to tell him? Sorry to break the news to you, Captain Weber, but our hospital corpsman is a murderer and …

  And what? He had seen Matson bite Farrington on the neck and slurp up his blood. He had seen the corpsman throw Farrington around like a child’s toy. It was clear Matson wasn’t human anymore. He wasn’t the same man who had started this op just a few days ago. Now he was … something else.

  Tim wanted to push the absurd thought away, but it kept forcing its way back into his mind, demanding to be taken seriously.

  Matson was a vampire.

  I’m sorry to break the news to you, Captain Weber, but our hospital corpsman is literally a dead man walking.

  But as it turned out, Tim didn’t have to worry about what to say after all, because the circuit sat silent the whole time. Finally, he hung up the handset.

  “There’s nobody in the control room,” he told Jerry.

  Jerry turned away from the body bag, pocketing something Tim couldn’t see. “That can’t be right. There’s always somebody in the control room.”

  “Nobody picked up,” he said.

  He didn’t like it. Something must have gone very wrong in the control room. It wasn’t just that no one had answered. There was a row of warning lights in the control room that alerted the crew to any actions taken with the torpedo tubes. When Matson flooded the tubes, it would have tripped those lights. Someone should have seen it and called down for an explanation, but no one had.

  “What the hell is going on up there?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to go,” Jerry said.

  Jerry was keeping a cool head, which Tim appreciated since he himself felt on the verge of panic. He was perfectly happy to let Jerry take the lead, even though he outranked the planesman. They picked up their lanterns, switched them on, and left the torpedo room. The bottom-level corridor was dark as a tomb. All the lanterns that had been mounted to the bulkhead were smashed—Matson’s handiwork, no doubt. As they walked, their footsteps echoed off the bulkheads. The only other sound was their breath. Tim suppressed a shiver and forced himself to keep following Jerry down the corridor toward the main ladder. He had no idea who or what might be hiding in the darkness mere inches from them, deftly avoiding their lantern beams. Maybe Matson, or whatever Matson had become.