by Hunter Shea
“What about the masks?” Steven asked.
“Best not to take any chances,” Lenny said. He opened his pack, took out the slim gloves and slipped them on. Everyone got the hint and did the same.
“Okay, so even the cushion can kill you,” Tara said, centering her light on a table littered with broken glass and steel pipes that looked like something out of the Mousetrap game. “And you do this for fun?”
Lenny weaved his way around crooked workstations. “Believe it or not, market research isn’t big on adventure.”
“Then pet strange dogs or call out bingo at a packed bingo hall when you don’t have it,” Tara said, chuckling.
“That bingo idea is called suicide,” Ollie joked, feeling a little better. However, his breath was vile. He hoped no one else could smell it, even through the mask.
The interior building was hotter than the first. They wouldn’t last long if some of the heat didn’t dissipate.
Marco and Steven went through the file cabinets, having to force some of the drawers open. The screeching metal was worse than nails on a chalkboard.
“Find anything?” Lenny asked.
“Just this,” Steven said, holding up an empty bottle of J&B.
A steady click-clack caught Lenny’s attention. He shined his headlamp on Ollie, who was standing by the wall flicking the light switch.
“Hoping that electricity will magically appear?” Lenny said.
“Sorry. A bit of my OCD kicking in.”
“You still do that thing with the light switches?” Steven asked. Turning lights on and off, counting to ten before getting into bed . . . always on the right side . . . and a few other oddities had plagued Ollie when he was younger. It got worse during times of stress, like finals week. They used to try to get him to stop but realized holding him back just made it worse.
“That’s funny. I haven’t done anything like that in years,” he said.
“A place like this is easy to go nuts in,” Tara said, gently removing his hand from the switch. “Or pass out. It’s pretty hard to breathe in here.”
“I agree,” Heidi said.
Lenny knew he was losing them. He’d leave the doors open overnight and come back tomorrow. But first, there was one more door that must lead to the central building, the tallest one in the entire lab compound.
It was so hot and damp, their clothes stuck to them like a second skin. Steven had unbuttoned his shirt. His chest and stomach glistened with sweat.
“How about we do a quick look-see in the central building?” Lenny said.
“I like the word quick,” Heidi replied. “Think I’ll jump in the ocean the second we get out of here.”
“Oh yeah. There’s n-no way I’m waiting until we get back to the house,” Steven said, giving her arm a squeeze.
For just a brief moment, Lenny wondered if Heidi was into skinny-dipping. Sure, she was his friend’s wife, but he was still human . . . and a man to boot. It was impossible not to hope.
Lenny jammed the pry bar into the door.
“Everyone have their masks on tight?” he asked before applying an ounce of pressure. They all looked to Ollie.
“Very funny, guys.”
Lenny tried to turn the knob but it wouldn’t budge.
“Okay, give me room, in case I go flying again.”
This time, the door wouldn’t budge. Lenny tugged so hard, he farted, which got them all snickering like grade-schoolers.
“Yes, yes, yes, everybody farts. I read it in a book,” Lenny said. “Cooter, you want to lend me a hand?”
Steven gave him a hard look. “I don’t respond to that anymore.”
“Cootsy-wootsy?”
Heidi laughed at that, shoving him towards Lenny. “Go on, open the door so we can get out of here.”
Steven grabbed the handle with Lenny. “Ready Stump Dick?”
“Sticks and stones,” Lenny said. “On three. One. Two. Three. Pull!”
They threw their combined weight against the pry bar. The door wailed as if it were a living thing, protesting the invasion of its privacy. One of the hinges snapped and the door cracked. It opened with a heavy moan just as the pry bar broke in half.
This time, a dust cloud wasn’t there to greet them.
“Do you hear that?” Tara said.
Lenny shined his light inside. It landed on a stone wall seven feet into the room.
“Sounds like the surf,” Steven said.
Looking down to make sure there was solid ground beneath them, Lenny said, “Why don’t you all come here? We can use all the light we can get.”
They stepped through the doorway, the steady undulations of water echoing in the strange chamber.
“Will you look at that,” Ollie said, tilting his head up, illuminating the sheer wall.
The temperature in this part of the lab complex was considerably cooler. Lenny sparked the flame of his lighter and watched the flame dance close to his knuckles as a cool breeze fanned it from above. The wind chilled the sweat on the back of his neck.
“What the hell is this?” Marco asked.
They slowly and carefully walked around the wall, which was actually a rounded cylinder or tank, almost like the above ground structure of a well. Lenny pointed out banks and banks of floodlights around the top of the cylinder.
“It’s the heart of the lab,” Ollie said. “The only question is, what were they doing in here?”
Heidi was the first to spot the ladder on the side of the cylinder. The outer concrete had worn away in patches, revealing gray steel underneath.
The ladder went all the way to the top, connecting with a catwalk that surrounded the circumference of the structure.
“Looks like an observation deck,” Steven said.
“Wonder what they were observing that they had to stand so far away from,” Tara said.
Ollie grabbed one of the ladder’s rungs. “Only one way to find out.”
“Hold on, cowboy,” Lenny said. “We don’t know if that ladder can support your weight.”
Ollie tugged on the ladder, putting his feet on another rung. It didn’t move so much as an inch. Nor did it make any protestations.
“Seems pretty solid to me,” Ollie said. “Besides, it’s only twenty or thirty feet to the top. If I fall, you can catch me.”
“Don’t count on it,” Steven said. “You may be a little guy, but you weigh a hell of a lot more than a cat.”
Lenny extracted the rope from his bag. “Here, let me tie this around you and I’ll find another—”
“Look, I’m just going to go up real quick and take a peek. I’ll be fine.”
Before Lenny could tell him how incredibly stupid that was, Ollie started climbing.
“Be careful,” Tara said, her eyes glued to Ollie.
Lenny put his hand under his mask to flick some sweat from his brow. He’s gone all macho just to impress Tara. I didn’t realize he still had a thing for her.
Of course, they’d all had a thing for Tara back in the day. Lenny was painfully aware that Ollie was the only one of their group who hadn’t so much as sniffed a date with Tara. She was a pretty big party girl then. Ollie was shy, her total opposite. To compensate, he’d drink, but then he’d go too far and turn into Captain Belligerent Dickhead. He just never seemed to get on the right wavelength.
For the first time, Lenny wondered if they were all here just for the sake of Ollie trying to do what he failed to do in college. If he failed again, or if she turned him down, would he call the whole thing off and send them back home to lives that included no job and no place to live?
Nah, he wouldn’t do that.
But he might break his neck before he ever got his second chance.
“Take it slow, buddy,” Lenny called up to him.
“Roger that.”
Ollie was three quarters of the way up. So far, everything had held steady. “When you get to the top, loop your rope around your waist and tie the other end to one of the bars up there.”
Ollie stopped and looked down.
“Why?”
“In case the whole thing falls apart when you step on it.”
Heidi said, “If things start falling down, will we have enough time to get out of here?”
Because the room was shaped like an oval, they couldn’t see the door where they’d come in.
“I think so,” Lenny said.
Heidi inched toward the exit, tugging Steven by his shorts. “That’s encouraging.”
“It’ll be fine,” Ollie said, his voice echoing. “Everything seems real stable.”
No one spoke or moved for the next minute while Ollie got to the top, tied himself off and stepped onto the catwalk. He remained still for a moment, making sure all was well.
“See, piece of cake,” he said.
“What do you see?” Marco asked.
He’d been exceptionally quiet this whole time, Lenny thought. Probably adding up the payout on our insurance policies.
Their lights barely reached Ollie, He was a vague shape that leaned over the lip of the cylinder.
“It’s like the tip of a volcano up here,” he said. “Except instead of lava, there’s water. I can’t see anything, though. It’s too dark. Kinda reminds me of a bad guy’s lair in a James Bond film. Or Dr. Evil’s summer lair.” They heard him move around. “Wait, there’s something up here. Looks like a big chute or something.”
The lone, piercing shriek of a klaxon sounded, nearly making Lenny jump out of his boots.
It was followed by a resounding, steady thumping that seemed to come from everywhere within the tomblike building, including above and below it.
The floor shook. It felt as if something were moving beneath their feet. Dull, metallic crashes sounded off one after other.
“What the hell is happening?” Steven said, eyes wide, staring at the floor as if he expected it to burst apart any second now.
Lenny wasn’t so sure that wouldn’t be the case.
To him, it sounded like the disengaging of locks on the steel bars in a prison, the ear shattering clanging muffled by water and thick slabs of concrete. Something was either slamming shut or disengaging.
After several seconds that felt like several minutes, it stopped.
The sound of everyone’s short, frightened gasps filled the void. It didn’t last long.
There was a dull buzz, then multiple splashes deep within the cylinder.
“What the fuck was that?” Lenny asked.
Ollie said, “I accidentally hit a button. The trap door on the chute opened and something spilled out. Smells awful. Like a whole cemetery of dead people.”
“God knows what was rotting in there all these years,” Lenny said. “Take some pictures. After you come down, I’ll head up.”
“This is so bizarre,” Heidi said.
“I guess it makes sense,” Tara said. “They called the place Deep Sea Rebirth. You need access to the sea if you’re going to be working on it.”
Steven placed his hands on the cylinder. “Yeah, but why would you n-need to build something like this? Wouldn’t you want to be closer to the water?”
“Or better yet, what were they afraid of?” Lenny said.
When he looked at Heidi, she had the face of a scream queen in mid shriek, except no sound was coming from her mouth.
“Gee, thanks for scaring my wife,” Steven said, pulling her close.
“That wasn’t my intention. I was just thinking out loud.”
Marco put his hands around his mouth and called out, “If you can’t see anything, you should come down. We’ll have to warn the demolition crew about this. Don’t want them falling into the ocean when they knock it down.”
Ollie said, “Just a second. I think I hear something.”
When he didn’t say anything else, Lenny shouted, “Ollie, what is it?”
“I wish I had more light.”
The floor rumbled again. It was like standing on the sidewalk in Manhattan when the subway passed underfoot.
“Ollie, get the hell down from there,” Lenny said.
“We have to get out of here,” Heidi said, dragging Steven like a reluctant dog on a leash.
The sound of the water sloshing in the cylinder escalated. Drops of salty spray rained down on them.
Lenny gripped the ladder. “Ollie, get your ass back down here!”
“I’m coming!”
He looked to the rest of them. “You guys, go. Don’t stop until you get outside.”
“We can’t just leave Ollie up there,” Steven said, resisting Heidi’s insistent tugging.
“I’ll stay. Get Heidi and Tara out of here,” Lenny said.
“I’ll stay with you,” Marco said. When they looked up, it appeared that Ollie was trying to undo the knot he’d made in the rope.
“Me too,” Tara said. “Go on, Steven. We’ll be fine.”
Steven reluctantly followed his wife out the door.
Something struck the side of the cylinder so hard, it sent them sprawling backward.
Ollie cried out.
A wave of icy water barreled down the sides of the cylinder.
Lenny ripped his mask off and screamed Ollie’s name.
Water filled his mouth so hard and so fast, he felt like he was about to drown.
***
The beast awoke from its long, dreamless slumber.
Sounds distantly familiar started the neurons firing in its prehistoric brain. Its coal black eyes opened for the first time in decades. The near-death of its imprisonment ended with noise and shuddering and the scent of nourishment.
Meat, redolent with decay and chemicals, sank slowly in the deep, cold water. The beast’s stomach fired up like an old truck engine.
It was hungry.
Food—precious, long-ago forgotten food—was so close.
With a swish of its tail fin, longer and wider than a sail, the beast plunged into the cage, nose slamming into coral-encrusted steel. The cage groaned but held steady.
It watched the food sink deeper and deeper until it was out of sight, but never too far to smell.
Ravenous, driven mad by hunger now that its prolonged hibernation had been broken, the beast battered the cage again and again.
For wasn’t this what it had been designed and trained to do?
It was an aquatic Pavolovian creation of fury and hunger. Not that it knew or would ever care about Pavlov.
Eat!
That’s what it needed to do right now.
With one last burst, the beast crumpled the front of the cage. Iron bars bent like sticks of licorice.
It was free!
Diving toward its food, the beast opened its mouth wide, eagerly awaiting the pungent meat that had brought it to life so long ago.
INTERLUDE…1951
It was confirmed. Dr. Brand had died of radiation exposure.
This was a shock to no one. The man took chances, was so engrossed in his work that he wouldn’t stop. And the powers that be were only too happy to let him continue.
Just another casualty in the pursuit of the future.
Dr. Laughton closed the file folder containing Brand’s autopsy results and dropped it on his desk.
“He can still be of value to the project,” Dr. Mueller said, making him jump. He didn’t know the oily German scientist was even in the room, much less right behind him.
Dr. Laughton whirled round to face him, jaws clenched in fury.
“You may not touch him,” he spat.
Dr. Mueller merely smiled.
“It was only a suggestion, considering the good doctor’s dedication to what we are trying to accomplish.”
“I’m sure that was perfectly normal for you in the war, but here, now, we call it barbarism.”
“Is it barbarism when we do the same with my former countrymen?”
Dr. Laughton flashed a wicked grin. “No. That’s called justice. And don’t play a national pride card with me. I know full well you pledge allegiance to nothing ot
her than that thing.”
They all agreed that Mueller was a mad genius. Not the raving lunatic that was depicted in movies. No, his calm, measured demeanor was the perfect smokescreen for the insanity that boiled within him.
There was no doubting his brilliance. Working for the Nazis, the scientist had brought an extinct species of fish, a fish presumed to have been deceased for millions of years, back to life. The discovery of the coelacanth, a fish that could grow to six feet in length, had taken the oceanographic world by storm. Perhaps the world of marine biology had been wrong and the fish, though elusive, had never gone extinct.
Only Dr. Mueller and his associates knew the truth. The coelacanth was just his first success, a remarkable achievement, resurrection of the dead from mere fossilized cells. Even working on the project, Dr. Laughton wasn’t entirely sure of how it was done. Everything was on a need to know basis, each scientist assigned to do their part. Only Dr. Mueller knew how to put all the pieces together.
What they had hatched here was no coelacanth.
Dr. Mueller’s fingers stroked his goatee. He seemed completely unfazed by Laughton’s show of anger and repulsion. The cold bastard.
“That thing will change the world one day. And you should be appreciative that the change will be for the good of you and your country.”
“Only because our side won,” Dr. Laughton said.
Dr. Mueller shrugged. “Science, great science, knows nothing about race, creed, or color. I actually came to let you know that we’re going to do a test run with the creature in one hour. We have several ships at the ready. Care to join us?”
Dr. Laughton turned his back on Mueller, whirled around and punched the smug German scientist.
The blow staggered Mueller, but didn’t drop him. Leaning against his desk, the man pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed the drop of blood from the corner of his lip.
He said nothing to Laughton. The man simply smiled, then went back to his work as if nothing had happened.
Storming out of the room, Laughton slammed the door, expelling the breath he had been holding, waiting to see if his brief flash of violence would escalate to a full brawl.
He was getting very unprofessional, but it couldn’t be helped. This lab was driving him crazy. The project itself frightened him. And he missed home more and more each day.
