Hell's Teeth: A Deep Sea Thriller

by Paul Mannering

  He worked her chest again and leaned over to give her another gust of oxygen. Aroha jerked and coughed. A sour mix of bile and phlegm splattered on her lips.

  “Aroha!” Casey yelled. Twisting her onto her side, he pounded her back while she coughed and gasped for air.

  “Fuck,” she moaned.

  “You’re okay. You’re okay.” Casey was laughing. He collapsed onto the steel grille floor.

  “Nari…?” Aroha whimpered from her fetal position on the floor. Her chest heaved in the confines of the dry-suit and her face had the same bleached pallor as her hair.

  Casey got to his feet and tried not to fall over at the sudden dizziness. “We have to get the other tanks. The hab isn’t going to last long.”

  “I need a minute.” Aroha waved him away.

  “Right. No problem.” Casey pulled the last of the Trimix tanks from the rack. There were slots for two respirator hoses to attach to the primary regulator. That meant they could both take air from the one source. He set to work, unscrewing the caps and setting the hoses in place. His numb hands made the job a thousand times harder than it should be.

  “Where is Nari?” Aroha asked.

  “She didn’t make it.” Casey didn’t look up. He couldn’t try to explain right now. He wasn’t sure he knew the truth himself yet.

  “Did the sharks get her?” Aroha shivered with cold and horror.

  They would eventually; it would do as the truth for now. “I guess,” Casey replied.

  Bubbles ruptured the surface of the dive portal. Nari sprang out of the water and slammed her knife, point first, into the steel grille, the blade cutting through the hard rubber of Aroha’s fin, pinning her foot to the floor. “Casey!” Aroha screamed.

  Casey lunged forward as Nari scrambled out of the water. “You were going to leave me to die!” Nari’s snarl was muffled through the heavy padding of her dive mask. “You were going to let us all die!”

  “No!” Casey raised his hands. “I was trying to get you both on the sub!”

  Nari pulled the knife out and slashed at Casey. The tight neoprene suit slowed the strike. Casey shoved the woman hard. Pushing her back against the door to the flooded habitat.

  “Nari, calm the fuck down!”

  Nari unclipped her helmet and let it fall to the floor. “You tried to kill me,” she insisted.

  The door behind her cracked open sending a surge of seawater gushing into the small chamber. The flood swept Nari off her feet, sending her rolling towards the portal and the cold ocean.

  Casey thrust out his hand and grabbed Aroha’s arm as she washed passed. Pulling her to safety, he helped her stand against the rising flood.

  Billy appeared in the open doorway. The water pouring out of the ruptured habitat sphere had already risen halfway up his thighs.

  The habitat creaked and groaned. A moment later, the pressure change became too much for the damaged structure and the main sphere ruptured. Water exploded through the open doorway. Billy clung to the frame with one hand and grabbed Nari by the wrist. She screamed and stabbed Billy in the thigh as he pulled her against him.

  Casey slung the last of the Trimix tanks onto his shoulders and slid the helmet over Aroha’s head. “Breathe!” he yelled over the roaring water. She inhaled as he secured his own dive helmet.

  Billy gripped Nari in a bear hug even as she struggled and stabbed at him. His calm stare caught Casey’s wild eyes and he nodded slowly.

  Casey hesitated for a moment then nodded back. With an arm wrapped around Aroha, he dropped through the dive portal. The space above them folded in on itself like origami.

  Around them, blood filled the water in an expanding cloud, dark and bitter as ink.

  “Nari!” Casey screamed.

  “She’s gone!” Casey staggered backwards, dragging Aroha with him out from under the crumpling habitat. Intact, it could have stood at this depth for a hundred years. Punctured and crushed, water tore through the interior spaces with an explosive force.

  Aroha swallowed her gasping tears. “Sharks,” she warned and twisted out of Casey’s numb grip. They both pulled dive knives from sheaths on their belts. They circled slowly, watching each other’s backs as the silver shapes slipped out of the darkness, drawn by the fresh blood filling the water.

  Ducking under a charging fish, Aroha noted the flaps under its smooth, grey belly. Male, she thought automatically. The appendages, called claspers, allowed the male to grip the female during mating. Mating behavior in great whites was still one of the great mysteries of the world’s oceans. The only thing that Aroha was certain of, females could be much larger than males.

  The fish they had seen around the wreck of the Waitangirua and the habitat were males, ten to fourteen feet long, which made them average sharks. The organized and cooperative pack-hunting tactics they had shown were not unheard of, but suggested an intelligence far beyond that normally taken for granted.

  The sharks came from the left and right. Arching their backs, they threw their heads back in the last moment as they bared their teeth to bite. Aroha ducked under the torpedo shaped body. She didn’t want to add to the blood in the water by cutting or stabbing any of the charging sharks. A good smack on the nose would usually send a shark away, the equivalent of kicking a man in the balls, her biology professor had once said.

  Casey jabbed a twelve-footer in the face with his knife. The shark convulsed, twisting away with a trickle of blood streaming from the cold flesh of its nose. “Keep moving!” Casey shouted over the comms.

  Aroha danced over the hard-packed silt as the sharks swam over them, the cold patience of their movement chilling her more than the dark waters.

  “Look out!” Casey lunged and stabbed a shark dropping like a hunting bird towards Aroha from above. Now, at least a dozen silent predators slipped in and out of their view as more sharks emerged from the darkness.

  “Keep moving,” Aroha said. Her chest ached from the CPR and her throat burned from the bile she had vomited up.

  Casey strode along the ocean floor, turning constantly, scanning the perimeter marked by the beam from his helmet lights. Aroha hurried with him, bound close by the shared Trimix air supply. The sooner they got to the wrecked ship, the better chance they had of finding cover and maybe, just maybe, getting to the safety of the tiny sub.

  Casey’s helmet lights dimmed. Aroha pushed herself to move faster, afraid that he was getting ahead. Then the light dimmed further and he was within arm’s reach. Casey raised a gloved hand and slapped the side of his helmet. The light flickered and went out. The darkness rushed in and the water felt even colder.

  “Can you hear me?” Aroha asked over the comms. Casey turned and tapped his helmet and then made a shaking gesture with one fist.

  No.

  “Shit,” Aroha whispered. The batteries on Casey’s suit had run out or malfunctioned. He had no heating, except the thin layer of air between the thick neoprene suit and his skin. He had no lights and no radio. The air supply was entirely regulated by the pressure in the tanks, so they would not run out of air just yet. Aroha swallowed hard against the barbed wire in her throat. The terror of her suffocation would haunt her forever.

  Casey took her arm and they marched on. The debris field around the wrecked ship told them they were getting closer. They picked their way over magazines and scraps of cloth that waved in the gentle breeze of the currents.

  Pieces of metal and broken machines slowed them down. They worked their way carefully over the largest chunks and either walked around or stepped over anything smaller.

  In her head, Aroha heard the old Police song, Walking On The Moon. The bottom of the sea felt just as alien and deadly. Neil Armstrong was just as far from help, but at least he didn’t have to worry about sharks trying to kill him as he took his small step.

  Focus, she reminded herself. The constant watch for incoming sharks and the treacherous ground underfoot were more than enough to keep her attention from wavering. Some kind of shock, Aroha
decided. Or hypoxia. The shortage of oxygen for several minutes had no doubt fried her brain.

  Casey tackled Aroha a moment before a large great white swam past. The beast’s gaping maw passed within inches of her face. She tried to scream as the shark twisted its sinuous body and renewed the attack. Aroha pressed herself against Casey, until were both lying with their backs to the cold sand. Now, they had nowhere to go and no way to avoid the savage assault.

  The shark jerked under a jarring impact and then rolled away. The head of the twelve-foot male shark spun slowly through the water, trailing a thick cloud of blood and flecks of tissue. The jaws that had bitten the shark completely in half were at the business end of the biggest shark Aroha had ever seen.

  A massive body swam past, and kept going as Casey counted the passing seconds. He estimated the beast was at least forty feet long. Forty feet? That wasn’t a shark. That was something out of a horror film.

  Aroha barely breathed as she stared in wonder. Alpha shark, she thought. A massive great white, big enough to swallow other sharks whole. The new arrival had to be female; the males of the species didn’t get that big. There had been stories, a tagged great white had vanished, and when her tag washed up on a beach a few months later, the data suggested she had been swallowed whole by something of unimaginable size. The theories ranged from giant squid to Cthulhu, the pulp-horror monstrosity created in the 1930’s by H.P. Lovecraft.

  Most shark researchers agreed that the best candidate for the loss of the tagged shark was a truly massive shark. Aroha saw now that it could be true. Here, in the cold waters off the coast of New Zealand, where sharks were believed to come and breed, a monster of Biblical proportions now swept through the teeming swarm of sharks. The colossal female took a fleeing male in two quick bites. The first bite severed him behind the dorsal fin; the second snap swallowed what remained.

  CHAPTER 15

  Chatham Rise South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W. 400 meters below the surface.

  Casey scrambled to his feet, dragging Aroha upright. She saw his eyes were wide and terrified in the white glare of her helmet lights. A strange calmness had fallen over the researcher. She knew where she wanted to direct her energies next. She had seen living proof of an alpha shark. Perhaps a freak of nature inflicted with gigantism, or perhaps a super predator that had survived to reach this size by sheer luck and savagery.

  Casey pulled Aroha against the high steel cliff of the ship’s hull. He indicated upwards and she nodded before looking back at the dark water where the alpha might still be terrorizing her smaller brethren. Aroha silently vowed that she would see the creature again, study it and learn if there could be others, perhaps even larger, somewhere in the almost endless darkness of the world’s seas.

  With a whoosh of gas, the two divers’ BCDs filled and lifted them off the floor of the ocean. They rose steadily, managing their ascent like hot-air ballooners, letting the air out until they slipped over the ship’s rail and began their descent down the torn deck.

  By now, neither of them could feel their fingers and toes. Aroha wondered how Casey could cope with the cold that was creeping through her heated suit. When she saw his face, it was pale to the point of being grey. She couldn’t see his lips, but guessed they were blue by now.

  Arm in arm, they touched down next to the mini-sub. Casey made a complicated series of gestures and hand signals. Aroha replied with an exaggerated shrug, his message completely meaningless to her.

  Casey tried to think through the shivering twitches that wracked him. He was so cold he had lost feeling in his hands and feet. With the failure of his suit battery, he worried he would freeze to death before they got to safety.

  Motioning her to stay put, he stumbled around the submersible and gathered in the floating tarpaulin. Coming back, he spread the dense plastic sheet over the top.

  Aroha watched curiously as Casey cut slits in the corners and then as he struggled to tie the pieces securely around the struts at the bottom of the sub.

  Realization dawned and Aroha crouched down, taking the tarpaulin and securing it around the steel legs.

  It took her a minute to secure the two remaining corners. Now, the center of the tarpaulin pressed against the top of the sub and the sides were stretched tight down the machine’s flanks.

  Casey gestured at Aroha again, trying to communicate that he needed her to remove her BCD. The vest was the same as a life jacket, with bladders in it to hold air pumped in via the regulator hose.

  Without creating a pocket of pressurized air, the interior of the submersible would flood. Casey hoped putting air into the cabin would keep the water pumped out. He also fervently hoped that the electronics inside were still secure behind their waterproof seals. Otherwise, they would die.

  Aroha didn’t understand his request, so he reached out and unclipped her BCD, then fumbled at the zipper. She helped slipping out of the device with a supple twist of her shoulders.

  Using more of their precious air reserve, Casey filled the vest with gas until it swelled and strained to fly like a helium-filled balloon. Stay, he motioned and Aroha nodded.

  Pushing the BCD under the tarpaulin, he pressed down on the valve and the tarpaulin vibrated under the sudden rush of trapped air.

  The makeshift airlock barely inflated against the water pressure. Casey pumped more air into it, inflating the tarpaulin sack until it swelled enough to allow him to gesture at Aroha to go underneath it. He followed her a moment later they stood with their heads above water. Casey pushed Aroha.

  Taking one last breath, Casey opened the valve on the Trimix tank and let the remaining air flow out in a hissing roar. The tarpaulin swelled, straining against the upward push of the air and pushing the water level down until the narrow access hatch was almost above the water line.

  Casey unclipped his dive helmet and yanked it off.

  “Open the hatch! Get inside!”

  Aroha didn’t hesitate. She removed her own helmet and handed it to Casey.

  With trembling hands, she unfastened her weight belt and twisted the handle on the sub’s access hatch. It opened and water started to pour inside.

  Squirming through the hatch, she gave Casey an OK signal from the cramped cockpit. With numb hands, Casey disconnected his own BCD. Dropping the gear at his feet, he crawled inside the submarine and froze.

  The orange plastic box, which looked strong enough to resist him trying to open it, waited on the floor of the cockpit. Swallowing hard, Casey picked it up with the same nut-crawling fear he would have if it were a live snake.

  With a rising waterfall of freezing seawater pouring over the lip of the hatch as the air leaked out from the tarpaulin, Casey pushed the orange box out through the open door and heaved the hatch shut; spinning the locking handle until it sealed tight.

  Water sloshed around their feet and the only sound they could hear was the chattering of their teeth.

  Casey wriggled into the pilot seat as the half-inflated air sack quivered. The view through the Perspex hull of the cockpit erupted in an explosion of bubbles and tearing plastic. A shark ripped the covering away and snapped at the water, looking for the prey it could sense.

  “We are safe in here, yeah?” Aroha had squeezed herself into the corner to give Casey room to maneuver.

  “Yeah, should be.” Casey tried to ignore the frenzied attack going on a few feet away. With a silent prayer to whichever gods may be watching, he activated the submarine’s power systems. The control panel lit up and the whirr of the internal heating systems breathed warm air over them.

  The sub’s small bilge pump started and the water drained out of the cramped cabin.

  “Get in this seat.” Casey motioned for Aroha to sit beside him. She squirmed into position. “Hold on.”

  The submarine’s propellers hummed into life, stirring up the silt around them. Slowly, they lifted off the bottom of the ocean. Aroha suppressed a whoop of delight. The shark tearing the tarpaulin to shreds swam away
into the darkness as the strange metal beast rose up and turned to scan the wrecked ship.

  The array of halogen lights illuminated the darkness, reflecting off the torn steel and grey silt. “We made it,” Casey breathed.

  Aroha started to reply, when her eyes went wide. The sub rocked under the force of a massive impact.

  Casey wrestled with the controls, helpless under the sudden onslaught. Through the Perspex window, he could see a massive white shape.

  “It’s the alpha shark!” Aroha yelled. She struggled into the co-pilot’s seat and snapped the 8-point harness into place.

  “The what?”

  “Alpha shark. Rare, giant, female great white,” Aroha explained in as few words as possible.

  “It’s trying to eat us?” Casey couldn’t quite believe it as the massive creature’s teeth scraped over the steel hull.

  “Probably. I mean, she can bite a regular fourteen footer in half. We’re just another meal.”

  “Get off there, you bitch!” Casey shouted through the window.

  The submersible swung around as the shark let go. A moment later, a gaping maw lined with triangular teeth bigger than Casey’s hand opened and the front of the sub had a clear view into the darkness of the shark’s gullet.

  “She’s gonna fucking swallow us?” Casey felt the sub’s propellers whining as they strained against the obstruction.

  “No, she’s trying to bite us into smaller chunks. Shark’s will bite anything to find out if it is edible. She’ll give up—”

  The shark bit down again, tearing one of the halogen lamps from its mounting. The light went out and the alpha tossed it down her throat.