Into the Drowning Deep

by Mira Grant

  The gunfire stopped. All sound stopped, except the sobbing of the injured guard. Jacques looked back. Three of the guards were apparently untouched. The fourth cradled his hand against his chest. The wound was concealed under his other hand, but the blood pumping forth made it clear that something catastrophic had happened.

  The women were dead. Michelle had been opened like a present, her intestines spread across the floor in a terrible pinkish swirl, and her throat was a gaping ruin. Andrea’s wounds were simultaneously more and less dramatic: pieces were missing from her arms, chest, and cheek, and everything was blood, but her internal organs were gone, not on display.

  The wounded guard continued sobbing, blood flowing from between his fingers.

  “Six so far,” said Jacques, turning his eyes back to the deck. Let them think him callous. Where there were six, there would be more. “It begins.”

  “We need to get Skip to medical,” said one of the guards. Jacques realized with distant surprise that none of these men had names to him; if he’d heard them, he’d forgotten them immediately. Their names didn’t matter. They took no orders from him, heeded no commands. A shout of “Run” needed no name attached.

  He mattered. Michi mattered. Every other body on this ship was simply bait, something to push in front of the sirens while he took a moment to reload.

  “Medical is two decks up,” he said. “Can your, ah, Skip, can he go unescorted?”

  “What? No, man!” The guard sounded appalled by the suggestion. A pity. Jacques had been starting to hope these people might show a measure of self-preservation. “We have to take him there. He’s bleeding bad.”

  “Yes, and this room smells of nothing but blood, ours and theirs,” said Jacques. “It’s chumming the waters. We need to continue patrolling this deck.”

  “You do that if you want, you heartless bastard,” said the guard, wrapping an arm around the stunned Skip’s waist, keeping him upright. “We’re going to the medical bay.”

  Jacques stepped to the side, letting the guards go past. Amateurs all, hired for looks rather than skill. He could go with them, he supposed—but ah, they smelled so strongly of blood now. They’d be leaving a trail behind them as they walked. If the sirens were anything like the predators he knew, they would follow the smell, and the guards would learn the wisdom of leaving their wounded to fend for themselves.

  He checked the chambers of his gun and started down the deck, moving away from the doomed men. There was much to do, and at last the hunt was on.

  On the top deck, the mechanism that controlled the shutters strained and whined, attempting to engage. Again, it failed.

  Daryl and Gregory exchanged a look.

  “I’ll call the captain,” said Gregory. “You get back to work.”

  They were running out of time.

  CHAPTER 28

  Western Pacific Ocean, above the Mariana Trench: September 3, 2022

  The Melusine had seven decks, with labs and living quarters on each one. Imagine had consolidated certain functions—one pool, one laundry room, one banquet hall—but had placed laundry chutes on each deck, recognizing that no one wanted to tote stained sheets down three flights of stairs. There were smaller café-style kitchens on decks one through three, and again on five and six, leaving only the top deck, with its open-air view and wide central space, without an eatery.

  Jacques prowled the lowest deck alone, watching the floor and rails for traces of mucus. Many of the rooms he passed were occupied, doors shut and the lights that signaled the locks were in use switched on. He smirked. The Melusine had been designed for the comfort of her passengers as much as for the functionality of her mission, and the doors were effective sound baffles. Add the shape of the ship, and the normal properties of screams, and half these people wouldn’t even have heard the slaughter. They were sitting ducks.

  He considered the wisdom of stopping at the closed doors, hammering on them until they opened, and sending the occupants to the next deck. It wasn’t safe there, of course, but it was a little farther from the water, and hence less likely to be the site of an all-out massacre. That wasn’t his job. The men from Imagine should have been conducting the evacuation, if the captain saw fit to order one. Instead, the guards who were meant to be watching his back had gone to take care of their own.

  Jacques kept walking.

  He found what he’d been looking for midway around the ship’s curve: a fresh slime trail, thick and gray and glistening in the starlight. “There you are, my pretty thing,” he murmured, crouching. The smell was fishy and sharp, more acrid than he expected from something that lived at the bottom of the sea. It must have possessed some helpful properties, to make it a viable use of limited biological resources. Perhaps the scientists could take it apart, after the ship had been rendered safe again.

  His walkie-talkie crackled. He plucked the clever little box from his belt as Michi’s voice, distant and echoing, said, “Jacques, are you there?”

  “Still patrolling, my love,” he said, depressing the SEND button. “The men assigned to do it with me have gone away, but never let it be said that I would shirk my duties.”

  “I know,” she said. “They came by heading for the nurse. They were getting blood everywhere. I don’t like this.”

  “Have you made a kill yet?”

  “Two of the damned things, by the prow. They’re coming up the sides. They can scale sheer metal surfaces. Bit of a stunner, that.”

  He laughed, delighted. “You’re always so droll when you’re excited. What are you thinking? Shall I come up and you come down, and we meet in the middle? There’s plenty to be done, and these people from Imagine, peh. They don’t know how to hunt.”

  “They’re listening, you know.” Michi made no effort to hide her amusement. “My team didn’t get hurt. That’s a point in my favor.”

  “Ah, but I’ve killed more than you have, so the score is tied.” He straightened. “I have a fresh trail here to follow. Will you be coming down?”

  “No, and you won’t be coming up. Not until a new team comes to join you. There are civilians on that level. They need to be protected.”

  “We’re all civilians when there is no war,” he said, and clipped the walkie-talkie back to his belt. Michi had long since grown accustomed to his need to have the last word, even found it endearing, in her way. She wouldn’t call back unless it was to start a new discussion, to report a kill or ask about his status.

  Following the trail of mucus, Jacques stalked farther down the deck.

  “We can’t just stay locked in here,” said Tory, standing fast enough to knock her chair to the side. It rolled across the floor, coming to rest against the wall. “If they’re coming, if they’re actively attacking, we need to tell someone.”

  “So pick up the phone,” said Olivia. “We’re not going out there.”

  “Olivia—”

  “You didn’t see them.” Olivia’s voice was low, tight, and fast; she was obviously struggling not to scream. “They’re … they’re so fast. You don’t understand how fast they are. They shouldn’t be able to be so fast when they’re not in the water, but they are. The one that took Ray moved like it was flying. It wanted him, and so it took him. I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t stand there while it takes you too. I can’t.”

  “It won’t,” said Tory. “But Liv, I have to. I have to see them. They took my sister. I can’t hide.”

  “So you’ll die?” asked Luis, sounding surprised. Both women turned to face him. “Sorry, Tory, but that’s not rational. I can’t let you charge out there unarmed and unprepared just because you want to see the deep-sea killing machine before it chews your face off. I’m with Olivia on this.”

  “What if they take the ship? This isn’t a defensible location. This is a lab.” She spread her arms. “No food, no water, no bathroom. We can’t stay here forever.”

  “I have a bottle of Mountain Dew and some granola bars. That should get us through the night.”

&
nbsp; “Not good enough.”

  “Come up with a plan that does something beyond getting us all slaughtered, and I’ll think about it.” Luis folded his arms. “We’re not going out there without a plan.”

  “I’ll call the bridge,” said Olivia. “Tell the captain they’re coming. He can send some guards to pick us up. We can go where there are more people. People with guns.”

  “Because being locked in a room with Jacques Abney would make me feel better about the situation,” said Tory sourly. “He shot a Crimean tiger. He bribed seventeen government officials, and he shot a Crimean tiger. They’re critically endangered. He did it because he wanted to.”

  “Well, I want to live,” said Luis. “I don’t care if the captain thinks we’re safer in our labs. The captain also thinks a few security fire drills mean the same thing as being ready for a disaster, and look how far that’s gotten us. Make the call.”

  Olivia nodded and lifted the receiver off the wall. The Melusine’s phone technology was outdated, necessarily so: cellphones didn’t like to work in the middle of the ocean, miles away from any terrestrial relay towers. The satellite relays on the ship were dedicated to the wireless network. They could be used for Skype and other internet calling services, but they weren’t as convenient as an ordinary phone, run off a limited network that only covered the ship itself.

  Tory and Luis glared at each other, Olivia briefly forgotten.

  “You knew we were coming out here so I could face them,” she said.

  “Face them, yes; fight them, no,” he said. “They’ll kill you. They won’t even spit out your bones when they’re done. You think I can let you do that to your parents? You think I can let you do that to me? I’m not going home without you, and I’m not getting eaten by a fucking fish. That means we’re getting through this alive, and if I have to keep you locked in this lab to do it, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “We don’t even know that there’s anything out there,” snapped Tory.

  “Yes we do,” said Olivia in a small voice. They turned. She was placing the phone back into the receiver, slowly, moving with a deliberateness that looked like reverence, until they realized how hard her hand was shaking.

  Taking a deep breath, Olivia steadied herself and said, “There have been mer—I mean, sirens seen on three of the decks. There have been at least three deaths. They’re getting the shutters ready to deploy, but it’s going to take time. The captain said to stay put, and that they’ll send guards to pick us up. That we’ll be fine as long as we stay put.”

  “Why don’t they close the shutters now?” asked Luis. “Bring those down and nothing can get in here. We can be safe.”

  “The sirens are already on board,” said Olivia. “I guess maybe … maybe they don’t want to trap them in here with us? Or maybe there’s something mechanically wrong. I don’t know.”

  “That’s insane,” said Luis. “Lowering the shutters should be the first response to danger. See a bird you don’t like, lower the shutters. Big wave, lower the shutters. They should have kept them so highly attuned that they kept slamming down and cutting birds in half. Are you telling me we have killer mermaids murdering people, and that’s not a good-enough reason to hurry up and finish their repairs? What do we even have the shutters for?”

  “It probably keeps insurance rates low.” Tory walked back to her desk, opening the bottom drawer and rummaging through it. She withdrew a tranquilizer pistol. Turning to her companions, she smiled. “They’re not going to save us fast enough for my tastes. Who feels like taking a walk?”

  “Tory, no,” said Olivia.

  “We have to do this,” said Tory. “We can’t cower here and wait for them to come. Do you understand that? They tore down doors on the Atargatis. I’ve seen the footage, and the damage. I’ve studied the damage. When they get hungry enough, they’ll find a way inside. At least this way we stand a chance.”

  “A chance at what?” asked Luis. “Dying outside instead of dying inside?”

  “If we can get to the kitchen, we can bar ourselves inside there,” said Tory. “It’s a bigger space, there’s food and water and the staff bathroom. We can make it if we stay there. If we stay here, it’s not a question of whether we die, just how.”

  “This is not good,” said Luis. “This is a not-good idea. Let’s not do this.”

  “I think we have to,” said Olivia, stepping up next to Tory.

  Luis made no attempt to hide his betrayal as he looked at her. “I thought you were on my side.”

  “I’m on the side where we live,” said Olivia. “She has a gun—”

  “It’s a tranquilizer gun! It can’t kill anything!”

  “—and she’s going to go out without us if she doesn’t go out with us. There’s safety in numbers.” Olivia paused, wincing as she remembered Ray hitting her as he knocked her aside. “They can’t kill us all that fast. The cafeteria is on this level. It isn’t like it’s far.”

  “This is a bad plan,” said Luis.

  “Maybe. But it’s the best plan we have.”

  “Oh my God.” He shook his head. “Can we at least have a few minutes to pack our laptops? Tory, you know we need to be able to keep an eye on things. You’ll go crazy if you don’t have your computer.”

  “Fine,” said Tory. “Five minutes, and then we move. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he said, and moved toward his desk.

  On the third deck, Michi and her guards—her boys, as she kept pseudo-affectionately calling them, subtly shifting their ideas of loyalty from the corporation onto her, where all loyalty belonged—walked, looking for traces of blood or slime. The nasty things were doing them a favor, leaving trails; if someone was paying attention, they’d never be taken by surprise. It was like fighting an invasion of giant slugs.

  “How are the damn things making it all the way up here?” asked one of the guards, a nervous, broad-shouldered specimen named Carl.

  Michi wasn’t sure how Carl had been able to get a job like this one. It was proof that people didn’t have standards anymore, really. In the two encounters they’d had so far, he’d only been able to draw his weapon once, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to fire. He’d just stood there, gaping, while the rest of them cut down the sirens and left them bleeding on the deck.

  (It was a waste of trophies, the way they kept abandoning perfectly serviceable bodies. All of them had unsightly bullet holes, but the creatures were virtually identical; Michi had absolute confidence in her ability to take pieces from one creature and use them to patch the holes in a second. She could make a functional specimen from what she had available, if she was allowed to claim her fair share of the kill.)

  “They can climb,” she said, as calmly as she could. Losing her temper would do her no good, and might do her considerable harm. Jacques could rant and rave and people would view him as roguishly dangerous, possibly unbalanced, possibly just unpredictable. If she did the same things she’d be labeled as a crazy bitch and lose any respect she’d gained among these men. “Goannas do it, in Australia. Metal is no challenge for something with big enough claws if they’re only looking to pull themselves up. Be more concerned about what those claws can do to flesh, and look alive.”

  Carl grimaced and nodded. At the start, they had been a team of seven; now they were a team of five. One of their men had been hauled over the rail by a siren that appeared from nowhere and knocked him off balance. Michi still wasn’t sure where the thing had been lurking. That made her nervous. If the creatures had camouflage capabilities—which were not unheard-of in the ocean—they were in serious trouble.

  Another guard had turned tail and run after they came across the first human body, a scientist, still in the white coat that some of them wore even in the middle of the ocean, his belly sliced open and his guts spilling out onto the ground. The guard had been overcome with horror and fled.

  The screams had come shortly thereafter. His body had been nowhere to be seen when the rest of the
team followed the sound to the place where he’d died, but there had been two more of the creatures there. Both had died in a hail of bullets.

  The absence of bodies was beginning to make Michi nervous. The creatures killed, that much was certain; she had seen with her own eyes. She had watched the footage from the Atargatis. It was unclear, jumpy, but it was still evident that for every person the creatures consumed, three more were being taken over the rail. It was an unusual hunting pattern. It was not a unique one.

  It spoke to something being fed somewhere beneath the surface. Unless the creatures spawned like salmon, feeding hundreds and thousands of young with the bodies they hauled over the side, whatever they were feeding was large, to have such a healthy appetite. Lionesses hunted like this, dragging prey back to their mates and cubs.

  Just going by the number of creatures she’d seen, this was a swarm larger than any pride of lions she had ever seen, and all of them seemed bent on taking something with them when they went back into the water. It was unnerving. It was dangerous. She adjusted her grip on her rifle, trying not to let her anxiety show.

  Michi Abney was aware that most people thought she and her husband were unbalanced, and more, that she was regarded as the saner of the pair; that people who would have screamed the heavens down if they’d felt judged were judging them and their choices every minute of the day. They were killers. They were monsters. They were throwbacks to a less enlightened era, and if they were tolerated in places like this one, it was because even throwbacks can be necessary; without them, the monsters at the door would become the monsters inside the house, and the fairy tale of conservation and tolerance would end, swallowed alive by something older and redder and wetter.

  Knowing what people thought of her meant she could work to combat it, or at least leaven it. Jacques played to type, and she played against it. It kept the world guessing, and a world that was busy guessing wasn’t running them out of town on a rail for the crime of doing as their natures bid them.