The sub commander spun the wheel on the watertight door and pushed it open. The first thing that hit him was the smell. It was terrible; even through the filters of his hazmat suit, it reeked. Something must have leaked somewhere and gone rancid. Or they had lost power and the refrigeration had failed. Spoiled food? No—it was worse than that.
He stepped out into the hallway and froze. His brain worked as fast as it could to try and recognize something. To make sense out of anything he was looking at. A naked man? No. What was it? It had a human form, in a way, but it certainly wasn’t human. He looked into huge black eyes set in a pale bluish-white face with a giant crimson tongue hanging to its chin. It raised its arms and spread what almost looked like fingers, but were covered in tiny suction cups.
On the floor were a few dozen things that could only be described as body parts. Except they were moving. Wiggling. Crawling. There were a few on the walls as well. What the fuck was he looking at?
Something hit his faceplate. A big white gob. And then a few more splattered on his suit from several directions at once. He saw something move on the wall to his starboard—an arm? Was that an arm attached to the wall at the elbow? He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing would come out. What should have been fingertips fired blobs of white mucous at him. He finally found his lungs and let out a scream.
The rescue diver hanging from the hatch jumped down into the sea lab as Tony screamed “No!” and tried to grab his arm. The crewman, Ethan, ran toward the door in time to see something collide with the skipper and literally tear him in half. The spray of blood and tissue filled the bridge doorway and sent a cloud of organs and goo at him. He froze in his tracks. Tony hung down from the DSRV and screamed at the young sailor. The kid was frozen, staring at something plunging its face into his commanding officer’s body cavity and slurping up his guts as it threw pieces of flesh and tissue all over the bridge and hallway. The kid began screaming uncontrollably in his suit.
“Move! Run!” Tony yelled, hanging upside down from the hatch. “Over here! Hurry up!”
The kid turned and ran, stumbling and screaming as he went. He tripped and fell, sliding across the floor and leaving a smear of his commander’s blood and entrails. Tony jumped down to the bridge from the DSRV, Jessica and Theresa screaming hysterically from inside. The other member of the DSRV crew headed over to the hatch to see what had happened. The two pilots who were sealed in the forward compartment were barking questions over the intercom, but no one was listening to them. Tony grabbed the kid by the back of his suit and shoved him at the ladder.
“Go!” he screamed. Tony grabbed one of the water bottles filled with alcohol and unscrewed the lid, then threw it at the doorway. From the hallway came a shriek as Ethan scrambled up the ladder, his crewmate pulling him up. Tony raced up after him, screaming as he went.
The sailor pulled him up and Tony began screaming “Go! Go! Go!”
Ethan began spinning the locks and release pins to detach from the Challenger. The petty officer next to him shouted, “What are you doing? Where’s the skipper? What happened?”
“We gotta go now!”
“Where’s the skipper?” the petty officer repeated. He moved closer to Ethan and pushed him away from the hatch, then saw the blood and pulpy mess all over his suit. “What the fuck happened down there?” he screamed in shock.
“He’s dead! We gotta get off this ship! Now let go of me!”
The petty officer wouldn’t let go. “We’re not leaving the skipper down there! What the hell’s the matter with you?” He shoved Ethan hard and slid down the handrails of the ladder down into the bridge. On the DSRV, it was chaos, with Jessica, Theresa, Tony, and Ethan all screaming at the top of their lungs. The DSRV pilot, listening from his forward compartment, called again over the ship’s intercom. “What’s going on back there?” But no one paid any attention to him in the chaos.
Down on the bridge, the petty officer followed the blood trail to the door. The door was open and as he got closer, he saw something hunched over on the floor. He stared at it and tried to comprehend what he was seeing. Was it a man? A lizard? A fish? What the fuck was that? It was on all fours like a wild animal, with its face buried in . . . the skipper?
The petty officer froze in horror and looked on in shock. The “thing” looked up at him. It now faced him directly. Gobs of blood and mucous and human tissue ran down its face—its tongue. The terrified sailor couldn’t get his head around what he was witnessing.
A tongue?
That huge?
The thing was staring at him. Ripples seemed to run over its body as it locked its dead black eyes on the man in the strange suit. A long, low groan came from its hideous mouth, its tongue getting longer as it dripped blood and God knows what else all over the floor. The petty officer was frozen. Somewhere outside, small creatures scurried across the walls and floor of the hallway, making their own repugnant noises. The big one—the one covered in his commander’s blood—seemed to go tense. And then, in an instant, it was flying through the air and shooting a huge white gob at the sailor. The mess hit him in the faceplate and he stumbled backward. From the hatchway above, Ethan hung upside down screaming at the top of his lungs for his comrade to get out of there.
The thing moved so fast.
The petty officer managed to turn and run to the ladder, grabbing ahold of it a split second before the creature leapt on his back. Ethan grabbed the sailor’s hand and tried to pull him up, but whatever that was on his back had his suit shredded in an instant. Ethan locked eyes with his terrified friend, both of them screaming. Tony climbed over Ethan’s back and reached down, also trying desperately to help pull the man up. A huge splash of blood covered both of them. Ethan fell back into the DSRV, still holding the hand that was no longer attached to the sailor. Tony was screaming as he looked down below, watching that wild creature taking the man apart, sucking and slurping and eating like a school of piranha attacking their prey. From the hallway, dozens of hideous things slithered and hopped and leapt into the bridge, going for morsels scattered around the bloody deck. The creatures tackled pieces of flesh and tissue and rolled, like puppies playing with small toys. They were all in a feeding frenzy.
Tony pulled himself back up into the sub, screaming like a wild man for Ethan to get the DSRV off the Challenger. The poor kid was still staring at the gloved hand, bleeding from the severed arm all over the DSRV deck.
“Now! Now!” bellowed Tony.
The pilots up front, sealed from the rear compartment, couldn’t see anything but knew something was terribly wrong. No one would answer their calls over the intercom, and they were stuck up there with no way back into the aft passenger area. Ethan threw the severed hand down the hole and began spinning releases and flipping levers. Tony watched and repeated his actions on his side of the hatchway. They slammed their hatch down and spun the lock as fast as they could. Ethan stumbled to the rear intercom and slapped the talk button.
“Go! Go! Go! Get us up! Now!”
“What’s going on back there?” demanded the pilot.
“Get us the fuck outta here!” screamed Ethan, now completely hysterical. Jessica and Theresa hugged each other, crying and trying to hold themselves together. Tony watched a small monitor inside the DSRV that showed the Challenger below.
There was a huge burst of bubbles below them as the DSRV broke the seal between the ships and seawater rushed into the open hatch of the Challenger. The eruption of air forced the DSRV up at an awkward angle, spilling the women off the bench and onto the deck. Tony and Ethan grabbed handrails to keep from falling.
Up front, the pilot screamed into the intercom. “What happened? We just lost a seal! Did you seal that hatch?”
“No! I didn’t seal shit! Get us up! Get us up!” screamed Ethan.
The DSRV rocked and rolled in the torrent of bubbles as it was shot to the surface. Below, the rush of water blasted through the bridge, sweeping the creatures back out into the hallway. They were at six hundred feet, and in the dim light, Tony watched the air bubbles rushing out of the Challenger, which was no longer ascending.
The separation between the two vessels expanded rapidly as the DSRV rode the bubbles up and the Challenger filled with seawater and began sinking ever faster. Tony knew that the thing that used to be Jim had to have opened the watertight doors to get up to the bridge. Obviously, they had never resealed them, and the Challenger flooded quickly.
Inside the sea lab, the creatures floated through the flooding decks, attaching themselves to walls, floors, and ceilings as they went. Jim rode the water through the hallways, arms wrapped around his legs in a small ball, like a retracted coral polyp. When the flooding slowed, he picked a spot to anchor and sucked his feet and hands against the wall.
VAL announced the final epitaph of the Challenger.
“Emergency. Emergency. System failure. Hull breach. Initiate ascent. Emergencyyyyyyy...”
A Crackle. Static. Silence.
VAL’s voice ceased when the seawater fried the circuits and electrical supply that were still working on the bridge. The emergency lights flickered for only a moment and then went dark as the last computers, batteries, and any semblance of human technology died. The dark ship picked up momentum as it plummeted into the black depths of the ocean.