Below (28 page)

A
s Val paused to draw in air in the darkness she heard the unmistakable drone of a large motor. Another boat was nearby.

The subdued beams of what had to be very bright lights above began to appear a short distance away and fought their way down through thirty feet of dark water as the vessel approached the submerged seiner where Val and Karl hid.
Will.
It had to be his boat, with so many lights directed down into the water. Her heart pounded as she felt the tonic of excitement, hope, and something else. He had found them.

She thought of making a rush for the surface. But there were too many squid just outside the safety of the vessel, and Karl was a poor swimmer. They had only been under for a few minutes, entering the water once there was nowhere left to stand on the
Centaur
, but already the shoal had pursued them. She looked at the whites of Karl’s eyes as he churned through the air in his tank in a fast pant. She couldn’t blame him for being terrified. Unlike him, she had spent many hours underwater near Humboldt squid, but even she was frightened by the aggressive behavior this shoal displayed.

At the edge of her visibility, two more pale shapes loomed into view, pausing ten feet from the submerged cabin opening where they huddled inside like two hermit crabs that would become an easy meal outside the steel shell in which they hid. Her light found a black, lidless eye resting in one of the smooth bodies, just above a nest of unfurled tentacles. As the light hit the pair of squid—or were there more than that?—their bodies blossomed into an angry red color and they disappeared in a swirl of tiny particles.

These were the biggest Humboldt squid Val had ever seen, longer than Karl was tall, mantles the size of punching bags, skin the color of human flesh and blood.

She swore to herself. There would be more of them, just outside the range of their lights. A lot more. She used to joke with the Mexican crews that Humboldt squid were like cockroaches—for every one you could see, there were at least a hundred more nearby.

She had worked with these animals for years, and now her instincts told her they needed to stay within the safety of the seiner as long as possible. Something about the shoal made her certain they were confused, desperately hungry, or simply angry, as though aware of their capture and who was responsible.
Nonsense, Val.
Leaving the safety of the sinking vessel might be suicide, but she knew they couldn’t simply stay inside the structure. It was going down, and probably very soon. Sturman had arrived, and his boat would offer safety. They had to try for the surface eventually.

Val turned to Karl and looked into his panic-stricken eyes. He exhaled a huge cloud of bubbles, then another an instant later, then another. He was breathing much too fast, hyperventilating. She needed to get him out of there before he ran out of air. He grabbed Val’s arm and squeezed, pointing to the illumination from Sturman’s boat. He motioned for them to move toward it. She held her palm out to him, indicating that he should stay put, then slowly moved out of the dark recess in the boat for a better look. She flinched as a dull boom sounded, air under intense pressure erupting from somewhere below, inside the boat. A wave of bubbles rushed past Val as she leaned out of the cabin.

Suddenly Karl grabbed her shoulder and pushed past her, kicking her head with his fins as he surged out of the seiner toward the lights. Apparently they were going to make a rush for it now.
Fuck it, why not?

She began to follow Karl out of the wheelhouse, but he turned back toward her as abruptly as he had left. She raised her light to try and read his expression. In the beam of light, something pink appeared on his shoulder.

He turned his head toward it and tried to swat it away. As he tilted his body forward to kick back to the seiner, several more fast-moving shapes emerged from the blackness. Their color shifted from pink to red as they closed around him with astonishing speed.

She tried to frighten off the attacking squid with her light, but they hid behind their quarry. All she could do was shine her light on Karl from a body-length away and watch as more squid closed on him, some scattering when the light found them, sending them retreating into the darkness, but others taking their place. She felt anger suppressing her fear and finned out of the cabin toward her friend.

Something brushed her arm, then slowly curled itself around her elbow, testing. As she recoiled, she imagined small teeth from hundreds of tentacles cutting into her neoprene wet suit. She twisted her body and shined the light over her shoulder, and the feeling disappeared. She saw nothing behind her but minute particles swimming in the beam.

Then something wrapped itself around Val’s thigh, almost gently, and followed with a powerful squeeze. She reached down and felt the rounded firmness of a Humboldt squid’s muscular tentacle twisted around her leg. As she began to direct her dive light toward her attacker, another squid propelled itself against her shoulder, breaking the airtight seal on her mask. Water flooded inside, blinding her. Unable to clear her mask of water, she tried to shine the light where she thought the animal’s eyes might be.

Then they started to bite her.

She wasn’t sure how many there were, but they pulled her away from the structure, toward the open water, and she knew they were increasing their advantage as they overpowered her and she struggled clumsily to move back to where she could grab hold of the boat again. Val glanced at Karl one last time. He was too far away to make out his face anymore. She watched as the powerful arms of one of the massive squid clinging to Karl’s back—each of the arms thicker than her own—encircled him, its eyes shielded from her lights by his body. She could only watch helplessly as the beast took her struggling friend down into the blackness. His light was soon swallowed up by the abyss below her.

The soft bodies of the squid pressed eagerly against her, their hunger unmistakable.

S
turman tore open the wooden lid of a gear compartment mounted in the stern of his boat, against the rear of the cabin. Beneath the chipped white-painted lid were his wet suit, BC, mask, and other dive gear. He dropped each piece of equipment onto the deck at his feet, then flipped open another large compartment. Tossing out dirty towels, canvas tarps, and fishing gear, he finally found what he was looking for at the bottom of the bin. From beneath a box of fishing lures came the metallic gleam of small, shiny rings. Grunting, he heaved the oily, heavy garment out onto the deck and dropped it next to the other gear.

He took a deep breath. “Who do you think you are, Sturman? A knight in shining armor?”

Val and the other researcher had not surfaced. They had to know he had arrived, so if they were alive, the shoal, or something else, was preventing them. If Val couldn’t come to him, he would go to her instead.

With no time to don a wet suit under the shark suit, Sturman immediately began to slide on the heavy chain-mail garment. The two-piece protective suit, made up of thousands of tiny stainless-steel links of the sort found in butcher’s gloves, was designed for diving with smaller sharks. It wouldn’t protect a man from the crushing pressure of a great white’s maw, but it was adequate against blues, reef sharks, even small makos. Sturman had acquired it from Steve Black years ago as a means to pay off a large debt, and he’d used it a handful of times when diving in open water with schooling sharks. A blue shark had once taken a bite at his upper arm on a winter dive with Steve, and the suit had done its job. He had gotten a nasty bruise, but nothing more.

As Sturman yanked the suit on, he watched the angled hull of the seiner on the water next to him, the tip of the bow now barely above the surface. It was going to sink before he could even get in the water. The lights on his vessel might help ward off the shoal, but unless Val appeared at the surface very soon, she and whoever was with her were about to ride the dying vessel down to Davy Jones’s locker. He needed more time. If only he could stop the boat from sinking, even slow it, he’d—

Sturman looked at the seining skiff he had towed over, drifting a few yards away, and at the heaps of drifting net in the water and its mass of cables and ropes tangled on the surface, all kept from sinking by the yellow floats through which the ropes were threaded. How strong were those cables? Would they hold? No, it didn’t matter. They were too lengthy and unworkable. He glanced at the last few visible points of the submerged seiner. Part of the boom protruded from the surface. It had to be strong enough. But how could he fasten it to his vessel?

The anchor chain
.
It just might hold long enough for him to find her. But would it even work? And his own boat—

He ran his hand along the worn wood of
Maria
’s cabin door, knowing it would be for the last time.

 

 

Val had remained relatively calm, focused mostly on the blackness where Karl had disappeared, until she felt the first sharp teeth tearing through her wet suit. Instincts took over, and she panicked.

Kicking, reaching, squirming, willing herself toward the dark cabin doorway behind her, she continued to lose ground as the animals clung ever tighter against her body. Even in the relative weightlessness underwater, she could feel their bulk pressing into her, pulling her down. Ten feet from the doorway, she somehow reached the vertical side of the sinking boat and clawed at its surface, dimly aware that one of her nails broke off as she managed to grip a groove in the rusty metal. She turned her back toward the boat and forced her attackers against the rough metal, and felt them release her. She turned and finned along the vessel until she saw some sort of hatchway, maybe the opening to the hold. She bumped and clanged through, into the black water inside the
Centaur
.

For a moment, she would risk drowning inside the boat. She needed another plan.

In the cast of the lights, she studied the hundreds of silhouettes in the water above her, each the size of a blue shark, moving past as they were disturbed by the stimulus. She looked at her depth gauge. She was fifty feet below the surface. Her air wouldn’t last long here. She began to feel pain on her left leg and with her hand found a gaping tear in the neoprene on the back of her thigh. Warm blood seeped past her fingers into the cold water. It felt like a lot of blood. Her time was running out.

She would have to leave the safety of the sinking seiner. But how?

The groans of the dying vessel rose in volume and frequency, and Val saw a cloud of bubbles rise past her face in the shifting beam of her dive light. She felt the
Centaur
begin to push down into the top of her head. If she didn’t leave it soon, it would drag her to her death when it gasped the final pocket of air trapped in its steel lungs and began its long journey into the abyss.

But how to get out of the sinking ship? With Sturman’s boat now above her somewhere, she needed to find it and get on board as fast as possible. If she swam upward against the hull it might provide cover long enough for her to locate the bright lights beaming down from
Maria.
Once she was close to the lights, the lit water itself might provide some measure of protection.

It was time to decide now. Karl was gone. She could try for the surface, knowing it was probably hopeless. Or she could give up and die inside the doomed vessel.

She was gathering herself to move again out of the darkened hatchway when she felt dull vibrations run through the hull. It had come into contact with something on the surface. Then the seiner slowly began to change its position in the water. From its vertical orientation in the water, prow at the surface, it somehow started to slowly right itself in the depths. The lights on the surface grew brighter—or closer? As though pivoting around something up above, the vessel continued a slow-motion swivel for a few minutes until it was nearly upright.

Impossibly, the boat protecting her had somehow stopped sinking.

S
turman rolled off his boat and into the cold water, sinking like a stone as his armor sought the bottom. With no air in his BC and lacking the buoyancy of a wet suit, the heavy shark suit dragged his body under faster than he had ever descended. He wasn’t worried about going too deep, because around his waist was a tether that secured him to the skiff.

He plummeted down toward the seiner, which hung from its boom below him. In the bright glow cast by the lights on board
Maria
, he could see the boat’s raised cabin and part of the deck through the tangled threat of netting near the surface, but everything faded into black around the sides of the vessel. In the fringes of the light he could also see other things. Moving things, living things, close to his size and clearly at bay only because of the brightness.

As he pushed aside a mass of netting, he realized it offered some degree of protection. The squid moved closer now as he fell farther from the light, drifting shapes several yards away in the water, but they seemed hesitant to approach the netting. Black spots marking their watchful eyes were visible near the midpoints of their tapered bodies, which appeared darkish grey as the dim water absorbed their true reddish color.

Dense water rushed past his face for another few seconds as he avoided the net, the seawater becoming noticeably colder as he moved deeper through a thermocline. The vessel loomed closer, a few large squid darting along its surface, and then he was there.

He slammed into the surface of the seiner with a rasp as the hard chain-mail links at his knees and elbows scraped against the rough metal hull. He released air into his BC vest to achieve some measure of buoyancy as he pulled himself over the deck of the vessel. He had no idea how long
Maria
could keep the enormous boat from sinking, or whether the anchor chain might give.

He kicked along the tilted deck of the vessel toward the raised wheelhouse at the fore end. As he passed a hole in the deck, a blinding beam of light caught a cloud of bubbles as they whooshed past his face. The beam was redirected and he squinted at the dim outline of a diver holding the light. He shined his own dive light toward the diver’s face.

Val.

Sturman’s heart swelled. Her dark hair flowed around her head, and her eyes met his. She squinted against the brightness of his beam and raised a hand to shield her eyes, and he turned the light away as he grabbed her hand. After nobody else appeared, he understood that she was alone.

The tether at his waist began to tighten. He had allowed nearly all seventy-five feet of the tether to trail him down, wanting to make sure there was enough line to reach Val, and it had been just enough. Until now. He was literally at the end of his rope.

He gestured with his thumb toward the surface. She nodded, but didn’t move. She was looking past him, hesitating. Sturman had spent enough time in the mute diving world to recognize what people were thinking based on their expressions. She didn’t want to leave the seiner, even though it was sinking. A loud crack resounded from above, and the vessel shuddered.

He jerked another “thumbs-up” in front of her mask. She nodded and slowly emerged from the safety of the hatchway. Sturman squeezed her hand tighter and looked around. He could see the shoal huddled in the darker water, hundreds of squid still darting past at the fringes of the bright light. He added air to his BC and began to kick upward along the length of the boom, dragging Val with him at first until she committed to their ascent and began to rise faster than him, unburdened by the shark suit. He paused, hearing the rumble of a motor—another vessel had to be approaching.

Then the first one attacked.

The squid slammed into Sturman’s side. He managed to keep hold of Val’s hand, but dropped his dive light with the impact. He pulled her down in front of him and wrapped his armored body around her as more squid joined in the assault. Then they were sinking, as their attackers maneuvered them toward the deep, away from the bright lights above. He forced himself to ignore the squeezing and pulling as the lights faded in intensity and other squid moved in.

A fast-moving one appeared in front of them, filling Sturman’s field of view, and hurled its body into Val. He grabbed the mantle of the animal and pushed his thumb into one of its large eyes. The badly scarred creature maintained its grip for several seconds as he crushed the black orb deep into its socket. It finally relented and shot away in a cloud of ink. He could hear the eerie sound of their beaks scratching across the steel armor encasing his sides and legs. There was another booming crack from above.
Maria
would go under soon. The lights would short out, and without them . . .

His heavy armor would not allow him to make an emergency ascent. But Val had a chance to escape before the shoal fully closed on them.

Sturman pulled her body against him in the increasing darkness and reached for her waist. In the fading glow of
Maria
’s lights, he looked into her eyes for an instant and wondered if she knew what he felt for her as he searched her belly for the clip on her weight belt. The plastic clip popped open under his fingers.

As the heavy belt slithered off her body and sank past her fins, he pushed her outstretched hands away as she reached for him, terror in her eyes. She accelerated away from him, unable to fight the powerful lift created by the air in her vest and lungs and wet suit. She was still looking down at him when her silhouette shrank into the bright lights above, and then Sturman was alone in the gloom. He reached for his dive knife.
Let them come, then.

He felt the press of the closing shoal and swung the blade at his attackers, the tether around his waist tightening as the squid enveloped his body and dragged him deeper.