“This is it, folks. Imagine the amazement of the two guys who discovered this place. Now let’s go make some discoveries of our own. If all goes well, your eyes will be looking at things no human being has seen before.”
The four men started making their way across the vast expanse of the chamber. Dave and James took opposite sides of the cave and focused on getting footage of the massive formations that surrounded them. After about ten minutes of that, they agreed to shut down the cameras and focus on moving forward at a good pace. Twenty minutes of movement followed, and Dave and James only started rolling again once Nick told them they were approaching the 3,000-foot mark. While the two-tank setup had struck the two cameramen as excessive, they now understood the need for it.
Nick was paying attention to the walls around him, and he quickly realized the two divers he had sent down here had done a great job. What had once been a passageway too narrow for a skinny human adult without a scuba tank to squeeze through was now an opening the size of a garage. Nick went through, a chill running down his spine, and then turned to watch the other three men make their way through without a hitch. Nick also noticed no one mentioned anything about the rock around them being slightly clearer in tone than the rest of the surrounding walls.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have officially reached an area of Giant Cave no human has reached before. Now, we push forward. I just checked the depth gage, and we’re doing great. Check your air gage, and make sure you have enough battery left in your cameras for the next half hour or so. Clear?”
Both cameramen agreed. Sebastian’s voice came through for the first time since they’d gone underwater. He warned Dave and James against drifting away solo and reminded them that they should stay within sight of each other at all times. Sebastian’s rough voice made it seems like he was already reprimanding them for drifting away, but no one said anything. The anxiety Nick had perceived on the surface had dissipated. Both cameramen now seemed eager to move forward and explore further, to catch with their lenses things no camera lens had ever caught before. For the second time since they entered the cave, Nick smiled to himself because he knew they were finally feeling the same excitement he’d been feeling since National Geographic had called to tell him they had approved his proposal and would give him the grant. With the smile still plastered on his face, he moved forward into the darkness in front of him, already pondering the narrative that he’d write to be voiced over the footage the two guys behind him were shooting.
Chapter Four
Dave was taking his time shooting. He wanted to get an interesting cave-dwelling creature on tape. Anything strange would do, but he was hoping for something strange, blind, and transparent, which was how he always imagined the creatures that lived in perpetual darkness. He knew videos of strange underwater animals, or any bizarre animal for that matter, had a tendency to go viral, and his YouTube channel could use the boost. Maybe a viral video would finally help him start getting a few dollars from advertising.
Thirty feet away or so, James was doing the same thing as Dave minus the YouTube revenue daydreaming, and he found something.
James was moving his camera down a stalactite in hopes of spotting a small crustacean or an interesting anemone. He loved when an uninteresting shot suddenly turned into something amazing thanks to a living organism entering the shot. He had framed the rock column in the center of his shot and had left enough space on either side to provide a second, natural frame. Despite the fact that he was focusing on the rock right in front of him, his peripheral vision registered the moment a huge figure darted from left to right behind the pillar-like structure. His heart skipped a bit. James moved back slowly and circled the stalactite. Jerky camerawork just wouldn’t cut it with him.
On the other side, a huge spherical thing was almost imperceptibly bobbing in the water behind a protruding rock formation that reminded the cameraman of a rough-looking balcony. James couldn’t see the thing clearly. The darkness of the cave was still playing tricks with his eyes. To make matters worse, someone’s light was causing the stalactite he’d just circled to throw a shaky shadow over a large portion of cave. All of these things were doing a good job of keeping what James was looking at hidden, but it was obviously not part of the rock itself.
Then there was movement to James’ left. The first time there’d been movement, he’d been able to see it because it happened right in front of him. This second time, however, the movement happened too close to where the mask impaired his peripheral vision, so it forced him to turn his head to get a better look. While his head jerked violently to the left, his hands held somewhat steady. He was both scared and excited, but he wasn’t about to let that strange mix of emotions affect his hands. Even with his accelerated heartbeat pounding his ears, he reminded himself not to pan the camera too abruptly and maybe ruin a great shot of whatever creature he was about to film.
The hit was unexpected and brutal. James felt as if the weight of the world had come crashing down on his upper back and shoulders. He felt his entire body push against the water below him with incredible force, travelling about five feet in a second. The hit pushed all the air out of his lungs, made him drop the camera, and knocked his mask, which included his regulator, off his face. He wanted to scream, but his empty lungs wouldn’t let him.
For a second, James thought a rock had come loose from the cave’s ceiling and smacked against him, but then he realized whatever had hit him had wrapped itself around his torso and was dragging him sideways instead of down. He’d been scared, especially when he realized his mask and regulator were gone, but now that something had a hold of him, panic set it.
James moved his hands down and touched something as thick as a tree trunk and even slimier than the rainbow trout he used to fish for with his father as a kid.
Then the thing under James’ hands tensed and squeezed his chest. His ribcage collapsed under the monstrous pressure, his scuba tanks groaning as the steel bent, and his ribs cracking loudly half a second before they perforated his empty lungs. James was dead before he felt any pain.
Sebastian was bringing up the rear, ensuring the two distracted cameramen wouldn’t move away from the group on their own and get lost or injured. He watched Dave slowly maneuver his camera between two rock formations and then looked at James, who was closer to him. The second cameraman was trying to get around a stalactite, but he never made it all the way around. A tentacle as wide as a man shot out of the darkness behind the rocks with the speed of a much smaller creature and hit James like a car, knocking his mask off his face and the camera out of his hands.
The tentacle quickly wrapped itself around the stunned man and squeezed. James’ mouth opened and a dark cloud of blood blossomed out. The two tanks screeched as they bent, and the sound made Sebastian’s blood run cold. He blinked and realized the thing wrapped around James and the expanding cloud of blood coming from his mouth were not a hallucination. The thing that had grabbed James was pulling him around the stalactite, back into the darkness, and the fear of seeing the diver disappear into that blackness made Sebastian snap out of the paralysis the shocking scene had locked him into. He reached for the large knife strapped to his right calf, trying to ignore the voices in his head that were screaming at him to flee.
Nick had heard a sound behind him that reminded him of someone complaining. If sound underwater was tricky, sound underwater in a cave was even worse, but the sound was loud enough to make him turn around. His headlight first passed over Dave, who was in the process of turning himself and his camera around, no doubt because he had hear the same thing.
Nick’s light then illuminated what looked like deep nothingness, and then hanging in the water with his arms out and brandishing a huge knife that reflected his light, was Sebastian.
The sight of the knife immediately made Nick’s internal alarm sound off. Sebastian was not the kind of man to pull out a knife as a joke. Then Nick realized he hadn’t seen James. Then Sebastian’s scream exploded in hi
s ears for a second before being replaced by a crushing sound and then silence.
Nick watched as an enormous shadow moved out of the darkness and engulfed Sebastian. Every instinct in Nick’s body was telling him to get away from whatever had covered his friend, but there was no way he was going to move forward with two divers in danger and a third one near whatever had overwhelmed Sebastian, so he moved forward.
The mass that now filled the space where Sebastian had been looked rough. Nick thought of a greenish rock, but it was obvious by the way it moved in the yellowish light that whatever was there was not solid, and he had seen it move like a living thing. Then the green color flashed a bit of red, like a wave of color passing through it. Nick had seen the same thing many times, and that suddenly made the bumpy surface painfully obvious to him: he was looking at part of an octopus, but the size was just…wrong.
“What the fuck, man?”
Dave’s shaky, nasal voice came through loud and clear, the fear in it forcing it up a few notches and injecting it with too many decibels.
“That thing just ate Sebastian! Nick! Nick, we need to get outta here!”
Dave dropped his camera and started frantically moving toward Nick. He was past the point of panicking. His screams had been replaced by fast breathing, the kind that consumes too much oxygen.
Nick looked at the approaching man as his body, now bypassing his brain and almost acting on its own, began moving backwards. In his light which was following the visible chunk of greenish beast as it submerged further and moved toward a pair of fallen rock formations, Nick could see Dave advancing, desperately trying to put distance between himself and the monstrous octopus.
“Nick? Nick, come in. What’s all the commotion about? Over.”
Gary’s voice seemed alien to both men, like something coming from another planet a few light years away. Dave started screaming again.
“Help! We need to get the fuck outta he…!”
Nick didn’t see the tentacle dart out, but he did see Dave’s eyes become even wider as the octopus wrapped one of his arms somewhere on his lower body and pulled him down and out of his light with unbelievable speed.
The sound of Gary screaming was not enough to mute out the pounding of Nick’s heart in his own ears. He had to escape, to hide somewhere until this beast was gone, but fear had paralyzed him, his brain telling him to move away while also trying to make sense of the situation and trying to digest what he had just seen.
The pressure was brutal and immediate. Something was crushing Nick’s left leg right below his knee. While he was busy watching and trying to get his thoughts in order, the huge octopus had grabbed him. That it had covered the distance between the place where he saw Dave disappear and where he was so quickly seemed impossible. Everything that was happening seemed impossible, something out of a child’s nightmare after seeing a bad creature feature.
Nick felt his flesh crunch under the pressure, meat, muscle, and bone giving in as if they were all made of plasticine. The pain reached his brain a fraction of a second later. That’s when the scream that had been building in his chest finally erupted, reaching the surface as a loud electronic squeal not unlike a microphone’s feedback.
Nick felt an irresistible force pull him through the water as if he weighted nothing. He moved his arms in an attempt to counteract the movement, a last second attempt at escaping, but his movements had the same effect a mosquito has on the speed of a truck barreling down the highway. He ran out of air, and the lack of it killed his scream. He gulped oxygen as he felt a second arm wrap itself around his waist, shattering his pelvis and silencing his second scream before it was it was out of his mouth.
The last thing Nick Ayres saw on the dive that was supposed to change his life was the yellowish light of his headlamp reflecting against the black curve of a massive, gaping beak.
Chapter Five
Emilio looked down at the moon shining over the water and inhaled deeply. Being out here, with the breeze caressing his face and the moon above him looking like a piece of magical low-hanging fruit, was almost enough to make him forget about the trouble at home.
Sarita, Emilio’s daughter, was almost three years old before she began to babble her first words. Their other three children, Carlitos, Eva, and Elias, were perfectly fine, but everyone kept telling them there was something wrong with Sarita, something they couldn’t spot while looking at her beautiful face and disarming smile. Finally, they’d taken her to see a doctor in Belize City. The man, who wore a lab coat so white it didn’t look like any color Emilio had ever seen before, told them Sarita needed to see a speech-language pathologist in order to overcome her delayed speech. Not talking as a baby was fine, but not talking as a toddler was seen as an impediment. That was only the beginning of what had turned into a nightmare.
Emilio had always been able to put food on the table, but with four kids and no health insurance, every time he had to visit a doctor and buy an antibiotic his finances took a hit that had him scrambling for months. Now that Sarita had to see her new doctor regularly for therapy, the first thing that had gone out the window was regular trips to the grocery store. Whatever they ate came from their garden, from a neighbor who traded them meat for fish, or straight from Emilio’s fishing line.
And there he was, sitting on a gently rocking boat above one of his favorite channels in the reef waiting for a big tarpon to swallow the crab at the end of his line.
While tarpon were usually fish only targeted by tourists because they put up a hell of a fight, Emilio was there simply for the meals he’d get out of his catch. An adult tarpon can measure 8 feet or longer and weigh anywhere between 200 and 300 pounds, and he could get a lot of filets from an average-sized fish—poach it, pick the meat off the fish’s huge bones, and use it to make fish cakes. Everyone in the house loved his fish cakes, and he could also box a few and use them to trade Reynaldo, his next-door neighbor, for a few eggs and some rabbit or chicken meat.
The water was calm and the current not too strong. Emilio knew the tarpon would be coming and going through that channel during the night, so it wouldn’t be too long before one spotted his bait. Then the fight would be on. Before, he usually tried to avoid fishing for tarpon because it was a lot of energy spent for a fish that wouldn’t bring in any money, but with every penny going to help his daughter, he was willing to jump in the water and beat any 200-pound beast to death with his bare hands if that’s what it took to put food on the table.
Emilio closed his eyes for a second and lifted his face to the breeze while throwing up a silent prayer to whatever gods flew around the top of the ocean at night. He was lowering his head again when something bumped against the underside of the boat. Emilio instinctively looked around before grabbing an oar from the boat’s floor and plunging it into the dark water to test the depth. The chance of his anchor coming lose and letting him drift into the shallow spot of the reef was slim but not impossible.
The wooden oar sank. The fisherman’s hand followed it into the warm, moving, impenetrable darkness. He hadn’t hit the reef. That meant something had struck the boat.
Emilio reached down again to grab his waterproof flashlight from between his legs. He felt something hit the boat again, this time with enough power to knock him forward. He fell to his knees, his hands forgetting the flashlight and flying forward to stop him from falling.
Suddenly, on all fours inside his boat with the star-sprinkled dark sky above him, a sea made of black ink underneath him, and something smacking his vessel around, Emilio wished he had a bigger boat. He wished he had stayed home that night instead of trying to turn his stress-induced insomnia into a few extra hours of fishing, and hopefully, a few meals. He wished he had someone else in the boat with him. But more than anything, he wished he was home and in his bed, his wife sleeping soundly next to him, and his four little angels snoring in the next room.
The third hit came while Emilio was trying to get up. He had moved back into a kneeling position and p
icked up the flashlight. He wanted to shine it around, try to see into the water around him instead of only being able to see blackness with occasional slivers of shaking moonlight. The blow rocked the boat again, but instead of the usual back-and-forth that usually followed, the boat developed and increasing list to starboard. Then Emilio spotted something hanging onto the side of the boat.
His hands started shaking, but Emilio was able to turn on the flashlight and aim it at starboard. In the round light, what looked like a giant pink snake with splotches of white and green was clinging to the side of the boat and apparently trying to flip it. Emilio panicked. He reached back and used his right foot to kick at the thing. It was much harder than he expected. He kicked again. The thing moved, half of it rising up and reaching toward him. That’s when Emilio saw the two rows of enormous suckers. He wasn’t looking at a weird snake, he was looking at a gigantic octopus’ arm.
His mind reeled. There was a fileting knife somewhere. No. No time to look for it.
The motor!
He could turn it on and beeline it straight to shore.
Something pulled on his left leg. Emilio went down hard, his right shoulder cracking against the wooden seat near the bow. He screamed, but the hit had taken a lot out of him, and what came out was more like a grunt than a scream.
The arm around his leg slithered up a few inches and then tightened. The bones snapped. The sound filled Emilio’s head for a second. Then the arm yanked his body and pulled his lower half out of the boat. Then it began pulling again, slower this time.
Emilio tried to grab on to the boat, but the thing pulling him under was too strong. A second arm slithered up his back, its suckers becoming attached to his skin. Emilio could feel them pulling off chunks of flesh in a few places. The huge arm reached Emilio’s arm and pulled it away from the boat with the same ease with which he pulled bait fish out of the ocean with a flick of his wrist. With half his body already underwater, the fisherman bent his right arm and used it as a hook by sticking it under the seat in the middle of the boat, praying the wood wouldn’t crack from the pressure after so many years of sun and saltwater. His right hand and forearm became the only things keeping him out of the warm water.
Hungry Darkness: A Deep Sea Thriller Page 2