Meg: Hell's Aquarium (43 page)

The marine snow grows heavier, forcing David to extinguish his exterior lights. They pass 20,000 feet, the water pressure approaching 9,000 pounds per square inch.

Stay focused . . . you’re doing fine
. . .
everything’s fine. Don’t think about how much ocean is above you
. . .
everything’s good.

The sudden jolt causes his heart to flutter, sweat breaking out across his body as red lights bloom across his command center.

Kaylie grips his right arm. “What was that?”

“I’m not sure.” The sub shudders and shakes beneath them, the turbulence unnerving. David eases back on the left pedal, then the right, isolating the problem. “It’s the starboard prop, feels like something’s caught on the shaft. I’ve got to shut it down before I lose my boss nut.” He slows the sub, decreasing his angle of descent. He glances at Kaylie, who’s gripping her seat as if paralyzed, her face deathly pale in the LED’s glow, her eyes filled with terror.

Oh, shit, she’s bugging out . . .
“Kaylie? Hey—” He shakes her by the shoulder, inducing hyperventilation.

“Take me back! Take me back, David, please!”

“You’re okay. Just breathe.”

“I can’t! I can’t breathe! Just get me back to the chute! Just a few minutes back at the hole—”

“Kaylie, calm down.” Reaching behind her seat, he grabs a bottled water. “Here, drink this. Slow sips. Wet your face.”

She struggles to unseal the cap. Takes a sloppy swig, her quivering hands spilling water down her sweatshirt—

—her eyes locking on to the depth gauge as it flips past 21,500 feet. “Oh God, oh my God, oh God . . . ten thousand more feet . . . that’s nearly two miles! David, I can’t go down another two miles. What was I thinking!” She clutches his right arm in both hands, her fingernails digging into his flesh. “Take me back, now! Now, David, take me—

“—ahhhhhhhh!”

With a vertigo-inducing lurch, the sub is flung sideways, flipping wing over bow.

David squeezes his eyes shut as his limbs pump at the controls, his stomach queasy, the propellers useless against a force of nature too powerful to challenge.

G-forces drive Kaylie’s body into the contours of her bucket seat, the burning vomit rising in her throat, her eyes squeezed shut, her fingers knotted around the edges of her seat, her mind drowning in fear, blotting out all rational thoughts, time reduced to a final few precious particles of sand in the hourglass of her life as she holds her breath and waits to die . . . waits for that final moment, the moment the cockpit implodes, the moment her brain matter splatters inside her skull, the anticipation of the moment far worse than the actual event.

Her body coils, her lungs ready to deliver one final scream as the moment arrives . . . only it never does. Just as suddenly as it came, the turbulence is gone, the ride level and smooth, as if they’ve entered the hurricane’s eye.

Still hyperventilating, she opens her eyes, her mind fighting to resurface from the panic, a seed of thought telling her the sub has indeed stopped spinning, that she’s still alive!

The sensation of relief comes with a price. Fumbling for an air-sick bag, she leans forward and pukes, her blood pressure blasting through every vessel in her head like a cleansing wave.

When she’s done she seals the bag and lays her head back, adjusting the air vent so it blows on her sweaty, pale face.

David hands her the water bottle. “You okay?”

She nods. “What . . . happened?”

“Bad current. Must have been a half mile wide, running like a flooding river through this entire depth. Real bitch.”

“How—”

“My father taught me to treat currents like riptides. Best thing to do when you’re caught is to ride it out—swim parallel to shore.”

“Where are we?”

“About a mile east of where we need to be.”

“David?”

“Shh. Close your eyes and rest.”

She awakens with a start. David has changed course, dropping them once more into a vertical descent, his almond eyes harsh as he focuses on piloting the sub while listening in on sonar.

She glances at the depth gauge: 29,265 feet. A hot flash of panic shoots through her, but she forces it aside, too exhausted to deal with it again.

“Kaylie, listen to me. Forget those numbers, they mean nothing. You want to be topside? Get your headphones on and find the bottom so we can finish the job and get the hell out of here.”

She nods. Wiping away her tears, she traces the missing headgear by its wire then repositions it over her ears. “I’m going active.” Before he can object, she releases the loud, echoing sound wave—

Ping!

The reverberation races outward in all directions, reflecting off every inanimate and organic object in the surrounding sea.

“Got it. Four hundred seventy feet. Found the barracuda, too. Come to course zero-eight-five, thirty-five-degree down angle.”

He adjusts his course, reducing their forward speed to fifteen knots. “Kaylie, next time ask me before you ping. The sound travels—”

“Shh! I’ve got a fix on the lab. Five degrees to starboard, then two hundred twenty yards due west.”

David adjusts his course. The Manta Ray moves ahead slowly, coming to within forty feet of the volatile sea floor. Clouds of methane gas disburse like steam from a city sewer grate in winter, releasing a timeless outpouring of cold, sulfurous chemicals that seep from countless crevice-like vents.

“I’m activating the docking station.” Kaylie presses the green button on the newly installed control switch by her right knee. Seconds later, she hears a low rumble over her headphones—

—as a dull yellow sliver of light appears out of the darkness ahead, growing larger, illuminating the silty bottom.

“I see it.” David aims for the bulbous shape and slows the sub, allowing it to hover fifty feet away.

“David, what are you waiting for?”

“We have a guest.”

Silhouetted between the Manta Ray and the luminous artificial yellow hue is a dark shadow—a morphing organic blob nearly as large as the lab. A pair of sinister bioluminescent-blue, demonic eyes stare back at them in the darkness, unblinking.

David dims the control console’s LED lights to see better. “What the hell is that?”

Kaylie whispers, “It’s watching us.”

“Something’s not right.” David feels for the exterior light control switch. Dialing from standard white lights to red, he powers on the external beacons—

—illuminating a puffy gelatinous mass, possessing tentacles covered in seven-inch, needle-like spikes.

“Wow. It’s
Vampyroteuthis infernalis
—the ‘vampire squid from hell.’ ”

“It can’t be a vampire squid. Vampire squids are less than a foot long. This thing must be twenty-five feet across.”

“And great whites only grow to twenty-feet, only my family owns one that’s as big as two tractor trailers. It’s probably some prehistoric cousin. And those blue lights—they aren’t even eyes, they’re light organs—photophores. It turned itself inside-out. It’s a defense mechanism.”

“God, if we could only capture it.”

“Thirty minutes ago you couldn’t wait to leave, now you want to capture it? I just want to move it out of the way. Let’s see how it likes bright light.” David switches the red lights back to white.

Blinded by the strange creature, the squid turns itself right-side out, its deep reddish-brown tentacles instantaneously pursing together as it propels away into the darkness.

“They got the ‘hell’ part right when they named that thing. Let’s take a look at this lab.” David flies the Manta Ray toward the lab’s spherical hull, the sub’s lights revealing a titanium shell covered in crusty barnacles and silt. Beneath the nearly unrecognizable habitat is an oval structure, its flat bottom hidden beneath four titanium legs, the docking station yawning open like an alien two-car garage.

The barracuda hovers close by—a robotic sentry.

Now it is David who registers waves of panic as he positions the Manta Ray directly beneath the lab’s flooded docking chamber. Peering up through the sub’s cockpit, he inspects the interior of the illuminated hanger, his eyes searching for any telltale signs of problems.

“David?”

“Shh. Headphones. Listen!”

“What am I listening for?”

“Metal fatigue. Instability.”

She presses her headphones to her ears. “Some groaning and creaks, nothing worse than the sub. David, if we’re going in let’s go. Hovering along the bottom’s freaking me out.”

Thirty-one thousand feet above the submersible, Brian Suits operates the ROV from its laptop inside the
Dubai Land I’s
wheel house. He can see the Manta Ray on the barracuda’s night vision camera, the sub hovering below the flooded docking station, refusing to enter. “Come on, Taylor. What the hell are you waiting for?”

The other pilots huddle close by and watch, Jason Montgomery among them. Monty had come aboard an hour after David and Kaylie had departed. The Iraq war vet wonders if he will ever see his naive young friend again.

Brian yells over to the pilot manning the trawler radio. “Marcus, call down to Spiderman. Tell him to relay a message: The longer Taylor waits—”

“—the bigger the strain on the open dock hangar.”