Sea of Secrets Anthology

by J E Feldman

  “It crapped ink on her,” Tom snickered.

  “A lot of people like to put octopus ink on their food,” Laura grumbled, looking down at the mess. “I doubt as many of them would do so if they realized what it is and where it comes from regarding the animal’s anatomy.”

  She began removing her surgical get-up.

  “What are you doing?” Simon asked.

  “This stuff could be very potent. I’ve got to get rid of it. Just let me put on a new smock and it’ll be fine.”

  But it wasn’t fine. As she donned the fresh medical garments, her previously-frazzled nerves were banging their heads against a wall, yelling at her to run; get away from this entire thing.

  She resumed her task of opening the creature’s stomach. But at the sight of its moonlight blue fluid so close to her fingers, Laura suddenly retched slightly in the back of her throat.

  “I can’t do this,” she choked suddenly, bristling with humiliation at the sight of her intensely shaking hands.

  “What?” Simon inquired, certain he had misheard her.

  She passed the scalpel to Heidi, so quickly that it almost jabbed her. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I just...I can’t.”

  “I catch it live, but you can’t even cut it up dead,” Tom chuckled. “But, yeah, you’re more qualified than me to work with these specimens, lady. Sure.”

  Laura’s cheeks flamed, but she said nothing. Heidi took the scalpel and patted her on the back for a second.

  “No worries,” she assured her. “I mean, hey, you may have done this sort of thing a lot more than me, but I have no problem going down in history as the first person to really get inside one of these girls. Let’s let the good times roll, I say!”

  Heidi turned and, moving away from the table, Laura held her fingertips, stained with the creature’s milky, Prussian blue fluid, close to her face. So this was the organic gold that was going to make them all rich and famous. Even in this meager splash lay such value… So why couldn’t she pull herself together?

  Still staring at the blood, Laura’s agitation began to increase and, with it, her heart rate. She began to shift on her feet, trying to shake it off. The shifting then dissolved into a flat-out stagger. Oh, Hell! Could this be any more embarrassing? She thought, crashing against the wall. Swooning at the sight of blood! God, she thought, I better get the heck out of here before I make any more of an ass of myself than I have already…

  As she moved toward the door, her knees buckled under her and she fell suddenly forward. She groaned, trying to rise, but found she could neither stand nor speak. Gradually, her mere trembling progressed to twitching and from there to convulsions. Tom burst out laughing as Simon knelt down, called her name, and, getting no response, hoisted her up in his arms.

  “She’s having a seizure! Get the door,” he barked at Tom.

  “It was a mistake bringing that twit on board, Simon,” Tom cackled. “Talk about out of her depth!”

  “Open the damn door for me!” Simon yelled. Tom acquiesced with the slowness of a too-pampered house cat. “Come on,” he growled. “We’re taking her to the infirmary.”

  “Like Hell we are!” Tom retorted, standing in the doorway. “You do whatever you want to, but I’m going to stay here and watch this.”

  “No, you’re going to help me take care of a medical emergency!” Simon hissed, walking down the hall. “And if you don’t, I’m going to relay that threat of yours that you’ll talk to the press to our boss. Now move your ass!”

  Snarling, Tom slammed the door to the autopsy room shut. As she drifted in and out of consciousness, Laura heard Tom’s footsteps hammering on the metal flooring like anvils.

  Tom wouldn’t be so unhappy to have been forced to leave that room—nor Simon neither, Laura ventured. Oh, certainly, for a few minutes they would no doubt be mammothly disappointed to miss out on such a huge event...until they realized the punch line to the story of their loss: Laura was not an epileptic; had never before this moment had a seizure in her life.

  En route, she tried to think straight, to go through the precise order of events; to analyze her symptoms. Was she going to die? Maybe… It was the ink jet, she thought, and there was something in that blood; something a lot more hardcore than LAL… Maybe it had managed to seep through her gloves and smock, like cyanide or perhaps she had inhaled it. Either way, she was thanking God now that her nerves had made her back out of finishing the procedure.

  When she finally regained her complete consciousness, she blinked to find herself lying on a medical cot with Simon sitting beside her. Tom scowled at both of them from the corner of the room with hateful, I’ll-never-forgive-you eyes. No doubt about it, he’d decided to take the seizure as an assault on his personal ambitions.

  “There,” he spat in Simon’s direction. “She’s awake. Can I freaking go now? I need to see the surgery firsthand to get the best description for my book. Readers aren’t going to be impressed with a description of this seizure crap.”

  Laura swallowed difficultly. “Don’t,” she whispered. Simon leaned in closer to her face, trying to feign a smile for her. “Don’t go without a gas mask.”

  “Gas mask?” Simon blinked.

  “There may be tetrodotoxin in the room.”

  “Tetrodotoxin?”

  “The territory of the blue-ringed octopus isn’t all that far from here. It kills its prey via tetrodotoxin. Just one bite is enough to bring down nearly a dozen men… Sometimes though, instead of being received through a bite, the poison is inhaled.”

  “What are you saying?” Tom snapped. “The creature we are autopsying isn’t a dang octopus.”

  “No…” Laura difficultly shoved herself up on her elbows. “But breathing a small amount of tetrodotoxin can cause a seizure.” She looked from Tom to Simon and then back again. “You all got so excited about the LAL in the creature’s blood, but did you ever do any kind of assessment of the creature regarding whether or not its blood or tissue were toxic? It’s not just the blue-ringed octopus that’s poisonous. All octopuses are! And that creature shares enough in common with cephalopods that we should’ve all considered poison as a possibility.

  “Do you hear what I’m telling you? I don’t have seizures, damn it! Something in that room made this happen to me! If you go back in there and I’m right, that tetrodotoxin might somehow be inside the animal, if you breathe it, you could seize too...or you could die!”

  “My team,” Simon murmured. “My team!”

  “Oh, come on,” Tom huffed. “Simon, you aren’t actually considering this craziness might be true, are you?”

  “Bea died from autophagy, but it might not have been from her wounds,” Laura mumbled, slumping back into the bed. “She repeatedly ate those parts of herself that were most likely to be venomous. Perhaps her body had a natural immunity to a certain amount of her own poison...but everything has its limit. That’s probably why she vomited up her own tissue…”

  “Bullcrap!” Tom spat.

  “Go to the end of the hallway and call out to our people,” Laura urged. “Tom, I swear to God, I hope I am wrong. But whatever you do, do not go inside that room. If the team responds, you tell them what I said. You tell them what the dangers could be there, but you don’t approach that room!”

  Tom stormed across the tiny infirmary, gripped the door knob to the outside, and then knit his eyebrows. “You’re supposed to know this stuff, aren’t you, Laura? I guess that means it was your job from the get-go to warn everyone. And if they all really have come to harm...well...I guess that means it’s your fault, doesn’t it?”

  Simon leaned back in his chair, his face turning pale and his eyes widening with shock. “My team,” he muttered again and again. “I personally selected every one of them… I contacted them all… I brought them here…”

  “I’m so sorry,” Laura choked. She reached out to squeeze his hand. “I could be wrong,” she offered hopefully.

  “I would’ve stayed in that room, if it wa
sn’t for you. Tom would’ve stayed too. Then we….”

  “You probably saved my life.”

  “If they… If they’re...gone,” he swallowed. “Laura, that’s not on you. That’s on me.”

  Exhausted by the post-ichtal state, Laura squeezed her eyes shut. “How long was I unconscious before?”

  “A half an hour or so. Maybe more.”

  That long? Well, it was certainly long enough that, if it was tetrodotoxin, the team would definitely be dead.

  “I want to go home,” Laura whispered.

  Silently, Simon leaned forward, bracing his elbows against his knees and hanging his head. Minutes passed. Many, many minutes.

  And then a cry, long and guttural, echoed down the ship’s corridors. Within seconds, it was overlapped by another voice, shrieking, “Oh my God,” and a string of explicatives.

  “Christ, what’s that?” Laura choked.

  Simon jumped to his feet, intent to aid in whatever new grizzly problem had arisen, but suddenly the bright lights which had shone throughout the ship switched off and only the rays of moonlight drifting in through the infirmary windows provided any visibility. As the distant, agonized moaning continued, Laura and Simon both became very keenly aware of the restless lapping of the Mariana Trench’s waves against the side of the ship. If there was something wrong on board, if the power had somehow been cut, was abandoning the ship an option? Would the lifeboats still work? Or was the only escape an eventual sinking to seven miles below the surface?

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Simon gasped. “Can you walk?”

  “I… I think so.” She pushed herself up and then fumbled through the darkness with her hands. Simon gripped her wrist, pulling her to her feet.

  “My cabin’s a few rooms down. I’ve got a flashlight there.”

  “What about Tom?”

  Simon was silent for a moment. He opened his mouth to try to give a halfway intelligent response; something evasive, but comforting. Another scream, this time from a different throat, cut him off.

  “This vessel has fifty-four people on board. Twelve scientists; forty-two crew,” he whispered to himself, trying to calculate the chances that the screams belonged to Tom.

  “I don’t think it does anymore,” Laura shuddered, memories of Hector flashing through her brain like a war veteran’s personal traumas. “I think we better watch our fingers…”

  “Laura,” Simon insisted resolutely, “I don’t know whose cries those are. I don’t know what is happening. But I do know that whatever is wrong, it’s not because the animals got loose. However smart they are, those creatures don’t understand modern technology. And they can’t shut it down. The ship’s engineers are probably on top of the problem right now. Just give it a few minutes and—”

  Once again, they heard a new person begin to scream. Simon covered his mouth with the palm of his hand, shaking slightly and glad she couldn’t see it.

  “We’ve got to go, Laura,” he whispered, pulling her forward, out of the infirmary, and toward his cabin.

  Leaning against the wall inside, with the sounds of Simon searching through pitch black for the necessary equipment, Laura dreamed of her apartment, her blessedly non-aquatic, 100% mammalian cat, and her view of the city through her kitchen window. How often she had resented that view, with its multi-storied apartment buildings, noisy streets, overflowing trash cans, and general lack of nature. Well, if this moment here was nature, screw it! She’d take the polluted, overpopulated city.

  “What you said earlier...you were wrong,” she murmured, realization that she actually might never see any of it again beginning to hit her. “This has most definitely not been my lucky day.”

  The flashlight clicked on within Simon’s hand. After her eyes adjusted to its sudden glare, she scanned the room quickly. She noticed her book on a small desk beside his bed and chuckled.

  “Write a book, they said. It’s going to advance your career, they said… Ha!”

  “Things are going to be okay, Laura.”

  “Oh, you think so? Because right now I feel like a crustacean en route for a picnic at the Red Lobster.”

  “I was going to ask you to autograph my copy. That’s the favor I was asking for at dinner,” Simon commented dryly, patting the book’s jacket in an attempt to distract her from the horrors outside. “I told you: I’m a huge fan.”

  “Really? Well, pal, get me back on dry land and we’ll see. Right now, I’m thinking an autograph would be a rather short-lived momento.”

  Short-lived? He knit his eyebrows in her direction as though she were making a bad pun.

  Just then, they heard yet another scream—loud, on-going, and high-pitched—echoing down the ship’s corridors. Laura jumped, holding her hands against her mouth. As the screaming continued for several minutes, tears streamed down her face, but neither she nor Simon said anything.

  When the cries were finally followed by a terrible silence, Simon Akimitsu fought to retain his focus and self-control.

  “Laura, we need to send out a distress signal.”

  “Mayday?”

  “Yes, but there’s only one way to get to the bridge from here. We have to go past the room where the autopsy was being performed.”

  “No, no, no—”

  “Laura, there’s no other option,” Simon informed her thickly. He gripped her shoulder reassuringly. “Hey, we’re getting out of here. Believe that. If you don’t believe, if you give up, you won’t make it. No one in survival situations ever does. I’m going to live to see tomorrow morning. So will you. And then I’m going to get that signature from you. Got it?”

  Laura swallowed, nodding.

  “Come on now. From my cabin, it’s a straight route to the stairs that lead up on deck. From there, we’ll go to the bridge. We do it carefully, no talking, and we’ll be out of the ship’s interior in five minutes. Easy, peasy.”

  “We should stay here. We should lock the door and just stay put.”

  “What if no one else gets to the bridge, Laura? What if no one else manages to call for help? Do we wait in here until dehydration hits us? Hunkering down isn’t really an option.”

  Laura wiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand, stiffening her lower lip. A five minute run, he promised. Just five little minutes…

  Slowly, Simon turned the handle of his door. He peered out into the horribly quiet hallway, almost as if he expected to be able to see something. He raised the flashlight and waited for a moment. Nothing emerging, he waved at her to come forward. She crept after him, both of them all too cognizant of the sound and vibrations of their footsteps against the metal beneath them.

  Two minutes of hesitant snail-pace later, Simon motioned at Laura to cover her nose. She followed his lead, not breathing in as his hand pushed against the autopsy room door. As it creaked open, inch by inch, the collapsed bodies of their fellow academics, littering the floor like heaps of trash, became poignantly visible. Laura turned away from the corpses like a spinning top, facing the wall and doing her damndest to hold back her sniffling.

  Simon’s eyes widened, but he did not break his lack of breathing. Crouching down beside the first body, he felt in vain for a pulse. He moved to another body. And another. And another. His head swimming and body panicking from the lack of oxygen, he had no choice but to retreat.

  As he stood, his flashlight fell across the slab where Bea had once lain, so subdued; so apparently fragile.

  She was not there now!

  His flashlight followed a blue bloody trail off of the table onto the floor, where it slimed down the hallway opposite the direction from which they’d come; disappearing toward the screams of the ship’s remaining inhabitants.

  He returned into the hallway, once again motioning Laura after him. They followed the blood trail. There was no choice.

  And then the blood trail diversified into separate colors. Human fluid, red and still uncoagulated, sprayed the walls and appeared in large, almo
st random pools. And yet, for all the evidence that they belonged there, there were no bodies in sight. As awful as the sight of the dead scientists had been, at least Laura and Simon had the then-unappreciated comfort of mind in knowing they hadn’t been moved. These bodies though...they had to have been taken!

  A sticky sound seemed to cry out to both of them when the plastic sole of Laura’s sneaker accidentally stuck inside of one expansive splash of liquid. With each new step that she took, she saw her own shoeprints spring back up at her like a scarlet accusation. “You did not belong here!”

  Hector had been a warning; a lesson from the universe regarding animal cruelty and karma. She had thought that, albeit the hard way, she’d learned it. But apparently it hadn’t been hard enough because, when faced with temptation, she had agreed to be on board for another scientific study whose animals, at best, could look forward to perhaps just a little less pain than their captors had already inflicted on them.

  The humans weren’t the ones in charge now. That was for damn sure. And, though the ship was a lot larger than Bea’s tank had been, it had nonetheless and very quickly transformed into one giant, floating, steel cage.

  As Simon and Laura progressed, they found a mass of red covering one particular door; as if someone had been pressed up against it as their jugular had been sliced. Beads of sweat dotting Simon’s forehead, he gripped the knob.

  “No!” She choked.

  “Our people could be in there,” he whispered back. “They could need our help.” He tried to enter, but the room was locked from the inside. Swallowing, he jiggled the knob. Breath caught inside his throat, he squeezed his eyes shut for a miserable moment.

  “Hello?” No one inside responded. “Is someone there?”

  And they heard a sound. Wet, slick, slippery; and large. Something moving. Something close. Laura froze in her tracks, too terrified to move. Simon clicked off the flashlight, waiting to see what direction the sound was coming from; praying it would go away. That dreadfully familiar bioluminescent glow cast their shadows against the walkway before them.