Kraken

by Eric S. Brown

  They reached the bridge without incident, but what they found there was nightmarish. The main bridge window had been shattered and looked to have exploded inward from the outside as if something massive has had pushed its way through it. The walls around the window were damaged and bent despite being metal. Lex didn’t have a clue what could have done such a thing and wasn’t sure he ever wanted to know what was responsible for the damage. The rest of the bridge was in no better shape. Pieces of the ceiling itself and exposed wiring hung downward, dangling into the knee-high water that filled the bridge. It almost looked like a giant wave of some kind had come crashing inside the ship through the shattered window. The smell of rotting meat was more concentrated on the bridge and it was easy to see why. Here and there, bodies floated in the water. Their flesh was gray and puckered. He and Trish did their best to stay clear of them as they started to enter the bridge.

  “Wait!” Trish called out to him as Lex was about to step into the water. “Those things might be under the water in here.”

  Lex recoiled from the bridge’s entrance in utter terror, nearly losing his footing on the small set down edge into it. She was right. Those things lived in the water. If they were on the bridge, lying on the floor, waiting, the two of them would never know it until it was too late. He could see from looking at Trish that she had never expected to find the bridge like this. Who would? Sure, there were numerous spots on the ship where water had gotten onboard or been carried aboard by the creatures but still…

  “I can see what has to be the radio station from here,” Lex said, attempting to sound determined and brave despite the circumstances.

  “Great,” Trish snorted. “Why don’t you grow some wings and just fly over to it?”

  “There’s no need for that,” Lex said. “We’re both scared and stressed out but we’re still a team, aren’t we?”

  “Sorry.” Trish had jerked up her .38 at the sight of the water and she kept it aim at the stagnate pool that was the bridge’s floor. “You’re right, okay? I was out of line.”

  Lex waved off her apology. “What are we going to do?”

  “What can we do but try for it anyway?” Trish asked.

  “You volunteering?” he asked.

  “No. I was hoping you would since I am the one with the gun,” Trish said, smirking.

  Lex shot her a not-so-happy glare and then stepped into the water before she could say anything else. It was cold. A shiver ran up his spine but he ignored it, plunging further into the water. He splashed across the bridge as quickly as he could, heading for the radio station. He didn’t breath again until his hands were clutching his sides then he looked back at Trish.

  “Okay. I’m here. Any idea how to work this thing?”

  “Pick up the mic-looking thing and start talking into it I am guessing.”

  “Not helpful,” Lex muttered too quietly for her to hear, he hoped.

  He picked up the mic and started broadcasting. “Mayday. Mayday. We’ve been attacked and need help!”

  “Tell them who you are you idiot!” Trish shouted at him.

  Lex gave her the finger and started again. “This is the cruise liner Pleasure Bound. We’ve been attacked and need help.”

  Both he and Trish reeled in disbelief as a voice responded to his call.

  “This is the Peart. We read you Pleasure Bound and are already in route to your position. Do not attempt to power up your engines and alter course.”

  “Thank God,” Lex heard Trish sigh.

  “I don’t think that would even be possible,” Lex said over the radio. “This ship is toast.”

  “Pleasure Bound, could you repeat please? Did you say you were attacked?”

  “Yes! We’ve been attacked. Almost everyone on this ship is dead!” Lex answered.

  “Who attacked you, Pleasure Bound? Pirates? Do you have terrorists aboard you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Lex dodged the question knowing no one would ever believe what had happened without seeing it for themselves. He knew too though that he needed to tell the Peart about the creatures before she and her crew arrived.

  “Just hang in there, Pleasure Bound. We’re on our way,” the voice assured them.

  “They sound like they’re navy!” Lex smiled. “We’re saved! We’re really saved!”

  Neither he nor Trish saw the creature streaking towards where Trish stood at the bridge’s door until it was too late to do anything but scream. The thing reached Trish before she even saw it coming. One of its tentacles lashed outwards from the water, ensnaring the wrist of her gun hand. She cried out in pain as the tiny hooks that lined the tentacle’s underside dug into her flesh and sent her pistol flying. It splashed into the water and sunk from sight. Two more tentacles snapped up from the water, closing about her legs. Lex threw himself forward, pushing his body to its limit in an attempt to reach Trish before the thing pulled her under. She was fighting hard against the thing in spite of the sheer shock she had to be feeling. Trish managed to wrench her hands around and grab onto the doorway. She and the thing wrestled in a contest of strength just long enough for Lex to close the distance to them. With a rage-filled cry, he raised his makeshift spear over his head and brought it down into the backside of the creature’s body. The creature gave something resembling a squeal of pain and writhed about on the piece of wooden mop that impaled it. Another of its tentacles shot out backwards towards Lex, whipping past his head as he tried to jerk out of its path. It struck so close he could feel the air from the blow on his cheek.

  The voice on the radio cried out, asking what was wrong, demanding to know what was happening. Lex had no means of answering it. There was so much more he needed to tell the ship that claimed to be in route. He hadn’t managed to tell them about the creatures at all. He hoped they wouldn’t arrive just to die like everyone aboard the Pleasure Bound had. If they were really navy, they would be armed. Lex hoped they would prove more of a challenge for the creatures and maybe even kick their butts…not that the things had actual butts.

  Black blood squirted from around where his makeshift speared pierced the thing’s body. It covered his hands. It wasn’t warm like human blood and had a slime-ish feel to it. Lex knew he couldn’t hold the thing with his makeshift spear so he let go of the weapon. The creature, apparently more injured than he dared hope, streaked away towards the other side of the bridge the second he let go. By the grace of God, he saw Trish’s pistol lying beneath the water on the floor in front of him. His hand broke the water’s surface as he snatched it up.

  “Run!” he yelled at Trish, charging straight at her. She was too freaked out to hear him or move from his path. Lex plowed into her, knocking her backwards through the bridge’s door into the corridor beyond.

  He could hear the thing on the bridge moving about in the water and circling around to come at them again. Jerking Trish halfway to her feet, he dragged her along as he ran like hell. Trish righted herself quickly and kept pace with him as they fled. Lex knew there was no outrunning that thing if it really wanted to catch them. He spotted an open door up ahead and pressed onward for it.

  Grabbing Trish and hurling through the open door in front of them, he dove in after her and slammed it shut. A quick glance told him that they must be in the captain’s office. There was a desk with two chairs in front in the room across from them. An open laptop sat on the desk’s top, turned on its side, and there was scattered paperwork and folders everywhere.

  Lex whirled around to make sure the door was locked. It was made of metal so he hoped it would keep the monster out at least for a while.

  Trish had collapsed against the room’s wall. She sat shaking and looking up at him with terrified eyes. “I… I thought I was dead,” she told him.

  “Me too,” Lex agreed. “You’re one lucky lady.”

  The door was solid so there was no way to see if the creature had decided to come after them or not. Lex pressed his ear against the door and listened. If it was ou
t there, it was sure being quiet.

  “Glad you got the gun,” Trish whimpered.

  “How bad did it get you?” Lex asked, reluctantly moving away from the door to check on Trish. He could see red seeping through the cloth of her jeans. Her wrist was a shredded mess of torn and ripped flesh. She clutched it against her breasts as she continued to sob.

  “You’re tougher than this, Trish,” Lex barked at her. “You’re a hell of a lot tougher than me anyway. Let me see that wrist. We need to try to do something for it.”

  “It’s bad,” she said, sounding as if she was calming down despite her tortured expression of pain. “Check the desk’s drawer. Most cabins on TV and in the movies keep a bottle of something strong tucked away there.”

  Lex did as she told him and sure enough, she was right. There was a bottle of Vodka in the drawer. He rushed over to her side again. “This is going to sting some,” he warned her.

  “Stop being a baby and just do it,” she ordered him, sounding more like the woman he had come to know in the last few hours.

  He opened the bottle and poured a good portion of the bottle over her wrist. Trish gritted her teeth and her feet kicked out across the floor as her body shook but she didn’t scream. With her good hand, she ripped a piece of cloth from her shirt, taking the Vodka from Lex to pour it onto the cloth before she started wrapping it around her wound.

  “You know we’re going to have to treat your legs too,” Lex said. “God only knows what kind of diseases those things carry.”

  Trish unbuttoned her pants and slid them over her hips. Lex felt a pang of guilt at the feelings stirred in him by the sight of her flesh before she got her pants down far enough for him to see the wounds on her lower thighs.

  “How bad are they?” Trish asked, leaning against the wall, too tired to look for herself.

  “They’re nothing compared to that wrist. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Good,” Trish said, “Because I think I need to pass out now.”

  ****

  Commander Spraker felt like bashing in Captain Marcus’ head but he tried not to take it out on his crew as the Peart poured on the speed towards the civilian vessel, the Pleasure Bound. Marcus grated on Spraker’s nerves to the point of leaving them raw. It had been like pulling teeth to get permission to leave the established patrol course Marcus had assigned the Peart. Marcus had wanted him to simply order the Pleasure Bound away from the area where DESRON 22 was conducting its shakedown maneuvers. If Luke hadn’t finally made contact with the cruise liner, Spraker might have still been arguing with Marcus over how to handle the situation. There weren’t supposed to be any other vessels in this region and the Pleasure Bound’s sudden appearance had caught them all off guard.

  Luke had made contact with the cruise liner though. She was adrift and whoever Luke had spoken with briefly claimed the ship had been attacked. Luke reported that the man he spoke with seemed to have no radio training or understanding of the protocols for talking over the air. He also reported the man had failed to identify himself. That combined with the man’s claims that the cruise liner had been attacked and that most of the people onboard it were dead put Spraker on edge. It just didn’t make any sense. Who attacked a cruise liner? Pirates were the most likely explanation but the cruise liner, according to the data Luke had managed to pull up on it, was in the one hundred and fifty thousand ton range. Her passenger capacity was in excess of thirty-six hundred and her crew was listed at a minimum twelve hundred and fifty members. That meant there were at least forty-eight hundred and fifty souls aboard it. No sane group of pirates would ever attack something as large as her in international waters. The risks and costs of taking such a ship just didn’t justify such an attack unless there was something special about the Pleasure Bound that Spraker wasn’t aware of.

  Terrorists didn’t make much sense either. ISIS and their ilk tended not to target ships. Why strike a target so far away from the population you wanted to instill fear in? Terrorists would have boarded the ship when she left port though and worked from within it but even so, the Pleasure Bound was just so large a target. There was a lot easier prey than her out there on the waves to be had. She was a top of the line ship and her security force was not only armed but armed to the teeth by civilian standards. The blueprints of the ship that Luke had pulled up included two well-stocked armories. The manifests of those armories were impressive as they were on paper, but Spraker knew there would be some extra items the cruise line’s owner or owners had packed in them as precautions that they weren’t going to list on the sort of legal stuff Luke had pulled up.

  As thus, Spraker and his crew were going into this blind with no idea of what was waiting on them. The Peart was a much smaller vessel at only four thousand tons but her engines were military grade and the Pleasure Bound had no chance of out running her. Not that Spraker thought anyone onboard the cruise ship would be dumb enough to try. Plus, being a civilian vessel, the Pleasure Bound had no ship-to-ship weaponry. The Peart could hold back and blow her out of the water if it came to it. Wouldn’t that just look lovely on the six o’clock news? US Naval frigate sinks civilian cruise liner in the middle of the Atlantic, film at eleven.

  Spraker frowned. There was just so much he didn’t know that he needed to as he sat in his command chair watching Philips at the Peart’s helm. They would be coming into visual range with the Pleasure Bound any minute now.

  Snapping his fingers at Arron, Spraker got his attention. “Prepare boarding parties,” he ordered. “Make sure the squad leaders know the folks aboard that ship are civilians and need to be treated as such.”

  “Yes, sir,” Arron nodded and left the Peart’s bridge.

  “And Arron,” Spraker called after him. “Make sure our guys are in full battle gear too. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”

  Spraker turned his attention back to the view of the waves through the Peart’s forward window. He couldn’t see enough for his liking so he left his command chair and walked closer to the window. The Pleasure Bound was out there waiting on them. He could see her huge form growing closer in the distance.

  “Binoculars,” he ordered and stuck out his hand. One of his crewmen plopped a pair onto Spraker’s open palm. Spraker raised them to his eyes and zoomed in on the Pleasure Bound. From how she was moving in the water, it was easy to see she was adrift just as he had expected and the man they had spoken with over the comm. claimed. There were odd blotches of red on the sides of her hull. She was still too far away for Spraker to make out what the red spots were but they appeared to be moving.

  “What in the devil?” he muttered.

  “Sir!” the Peart’s radar/sonar tech yelled at him. “I have multiple surface contacts all around the Pleasure Bound!”

  “What?” Spraker snapped at the young crewman. “What kind of contacts?”

  “I… I don’t know, sir. They’re small whatever they are. Not much larger than man-sized.”

  Spraker knew the Peart’s radar and sonar had just undergone massive upgrades but…

  “Could they be bodies?” Spraker asked and the bridge went silent around him.

  “Maybe, sir,” the radar/sonar tech answered. “But if so, they’re moving and moving faster than anything human could.”

  Spraker had heard of schools of dolphin and other sea creatures gathering around ships like the Pleasure Bound, especially derelict ones, but surely the Pleasure Bound couldn’t have been drifting that long could she?

  “Philips, kill the engines and bring us to a full stop. We need to know more about what’s going on over there before we just go plowing into the middle of it,” Spraker barked.

  “Yes, sir,” Philips answered as his fingers danced over the controls in front of him at the helm.

  “Any further word from the Pleasure Bound?” Spraker asked Luke.

  “No, sir.” Megan squirmed in her seat at the comm. console. She and Luke had been working together from the start of all this madness trying to piece t
ogether what was happening over there aboard the cruise liner. Luke had even been the one to speak with the man aboard the ship when contact had been briefly achieved. “But Luke said it sounded like the man we made contact with came under attack himself and had to leave the Pleasure Bound’s bridge area. I overheard the end of it myself. It really sounded as if the man was fighting for his life,” Megan reminded him.

  “Blast it!” Spraker raged.

  “Should I have Arron hold off on sending over the boarding parties?” Luke asked.

  “No,” Spraker shook his head. “The sooner we get boots on deck over there, the sooner we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Arron reports the marines are ready to go,” Luke informed him while Spraker wrung his hands together.

  “Send them in,” Spraker told him and raised his binoculars again. Within a mere few minutes, a group of small boats bounced across the waves from the position the Peart had stopped at towards the Pleasure Bound. Spraker watched them for a moment before returning his gaze to the Pleasure Bound herself. The red spots on her hull began to drop into the water, one by one. What the Hell? he wondered. It was as if whatever the red spots were sensed or saw the boats approaching the Pleasure Bound and wanted to be in the water, out of sight, before they arrived. Part of Spraker wanted to order his marines back to the Peart, but there were people over there on that liner that needed help and he couldn’t.

  ****

  Lieutenant Page was the CO of the squad in the lead boat heading for the Pleasure Bound. Greg sat at the boat’s rear, steering it. Clark sat next to Page while Diana sat in the boat’s bow, her eyes trained on the large vessel that kept growing larger as they drew closer to it.

  “Any idea what those things that dropped into the water were Diana?” Page shouted over the roar of the boat’s motor.

  “No, sir,” Diana shook her head. “Couldn’t get a good enough look at them, sir.”

  Page frowned at her.