Sea of Secrets Anthology

by J E Feldman

  “Laura,” Simon gasped. “She’s behind us.”

  “I know. I don’t want to die,” Laura wept, on the verge of hysteria and barely able to raise her voice.

  “Laura,” he whispered, “we’re not far from the stairs. All you have to do is run fifty feet. You can make it. Get outside. If you can’t get to the bridge, just hide somewhere on the deck. Remember, she can only handle very low-level lighting, so you’ll be safe in there during daytime.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think this is where we part ways,” Simon replied quietly as, behind them, the creature let out a malevolent snarl.

  “No!”

  “I’m going to turn and blind her with the flashlight. When I do, Laura, you just run.”

  “You can’t do this. You can run too. I—”

  “On the count of three, Laura. One—”

  “No…”

  “Two—”

  “Simon!”

  “THREE!” Simon spun around, light slamming like a boxer’s punch into the animal’s face. “Go!” He roared at Laura one final time, physically shoving her down the hallway away from him. “Go!”

  She took off at top speed, even when she heard the thump of the creature slamming into Simon’s torso, knocking him down; even when she heard him screaming from the creature’s teeth sinking into his shoulder. And then, sudden quiet. Gripping the stairs, just seconds from escape, Laura turned back… Had it killed him already? She had to know!

  Simon lay on his back, still gripping the flashlight and convulsing with several bright stingers fully embedded inside the flesh of his abdomen. The creature raised its face slightly in Laura’s direction.

  “Betty!” Laura gasped. “It’s Betty; not Bea!”

  Betty let out a long, shrill cackle at her, almost as if she understood Laura’s puzzlement.

  God, how had she escaped too? Had Bea freed her? Blinking, knees buckling under her, Laura gawked at the scene before her. As Simon’s body tried to twist defensively away from the stingers, the creature clung fast to him, only sinking deeper inside his flesh. Still, its gaze stayed with Laura, as though it wanted her to understand she was being laughed at; to know that, to it, all of these deaths were wholeheartedly amusing.

  Bea’s autophagy had not been a stress relief, Laura understood now. No, it had been cold, hard war-time strategy. By God, she’d known the scientists would perform more experiments on her in a comatose state and she’d known her poison would kill them. With them dead, she was taking out anyone else that stood between her and a break for freedom. And her sister was damn-well coming with her.

  Swiftly, Laura weighed her options. How could she just leave Simon there? To Hell with his self-sacrificing b.s.! It wasn’t right to let him die like this!

  Then again, just a few seconds after that thought crossed her brain; she realized that, if the creature wanted to kill him, he’d be dead already. And yet there he was, writhing, kicking his feet futilely, and sucking in his breath as she gave every appearance of gutting him. But still he lived.

  Laura frowned, stunned. Why had the animals latched onto the submersible in the first place? Had they honestly thought they were strong enough to destroy its reinforced steel? Or could it be that these sea-born parasites had, had bigger plans all along? Maybe that animal currently shoving her spike-like appendages deep into Simon’s midsection, didn’t want to escape from the ship at all! Perhaps her intention after seeing her home invaded was to invade right back!

  The creature finally released Simon, tossing his amply bleeding and now impregnated body to the side like a rag doll. Moaning, whimpering, he clutched at his cracked-apart shell as though fearing his internal organs would spill out onto the floor beneath him. Then he turned his face to the wall.

  Laura’s terror gave way to rage. “I’m going to kill you, you glowstick from Hell,” she screamed.

  Cackling again in response, Betty pulled herself forward on the floor with the suction cups of her hands. Laura gripped the railing of the stairs. Hell no, she would not be ensnared by this approaching threat! “Simon was right. You just need to be waited out. And then, when you eventually come up on deck...it’ll be time for mermaid kebabs!”

  “Go, Laura….” Simon cried. “Please, get out of here….”

  “I’ll be back for you,” she cried, taking another few steps away. “I swear it.”

  Suddenly, she felt a sharp pain in her back. A cut? No. An insertion. A penetration. She blinked, stunned; and then slammed forward hard onto the floor. A soft glow alit behind her to match the one in front of her. The dread Bea. Worse for wear—a lot worse, but not at all dead.

  At first, as the stingers burrowed beneath her skin, Laura managed to just grit her teeth. But as they expanded, like air-filled tubes, yet another scream echoed down the corridor. This one, Laura realized soon enough, was her own. Pressure—awful, piercing, wrenching pressure embedded itself repeatedly in her flesh. Round chunks of...something…was suddenly being forcibly thrust inside of her. Again and again, each time prying a fresh scream out of her. Every time it ended, she was sure that it couldn’t be worse and then another chunk—no, God, another egg!—would be pushed in, until finally her stretched skin resembled a small wallet pocket whose owner had jammed in too much loose change. Groaning, sobbing, Laura lay as still as she could manage until the creature finished with her. When it finally left with Betty in search for more prey, Laura lifted her face a single inch off the floor to vomit.

  “You’ve got...to get up...Laura.” Over her cries, she could vaguely hear Simon still trying to maintain his grip at the end of the hall. “You’ve got...to crawl. Crawl with me… Come on. Get up!”

  “I can’t.”

  Simon pleaded. He begged. After long enough though, he yelled. “You liar! You said you were going to murder them and now you’re going to freaking back down? You coward!

  “Do you think you’re alone? They probably did this to everyone else too. But those people got up and moved. They got up and hid. They’ll survive because of it!”

  Laura picked her face up out of her retch. Never in her life had she been in more pain than this, but she wouldn’t take this crap from anyone.

  She reached her fingertips across the floor and, only by an inch, pulled herself forward. She understood the echoing explicatives they’d heard earlier all too well now, because a long string of them came flying like bullets out of her mouth as, for a horrendous eternity, she followed Simon—each of them slithering on their bellies like and at the pace of banana slugs. With each move they made, the sensation of being ripped in half was sent even deeper into their muscles, as if their motions only served to deeper implant the parasitic embryos.

  Hell! Where was he going? Laura cursed. They could’ve ducked inside a plethora of rooms, if hiding was on his mind, but doorway after doorway, Simon just passed. And then he finally turned, flashlight still in hand, back into the room where the autopsy attempt had been performed.

  “You want...to die...next to your team,” Laura hissed, when she finally rounded the doorway. “That’s it, huh?”

  “Oh, no,” he growled, surrounded by the corpses of his deceased comrades, as he tightly gripped an unused scalpel in one violently trembling hand. “I’m not going to die...because you’re going to cut those little bastards out of me.”

  Laura blinked. She’d just spent the last half-hour slithering over the leavings of his oozing abdomen and now he thought that she was going to do this?

  “It’ll kill you,” she gasped. “If I cut into—”

  “If you won’t do it for me, then I’ll do it to myself!” He snapped. “I’m not going to be a human Petrie dish for a damn fish!” He shone the light against his wound, illuminating not only the severity of the damage, but a cluster of bumps which the creature had just barely managed to fit under his skin. Placing the scalpel against one of the larger, more raised areas, he growled, “This is coming out—now!”

  “Wait!” She cried. �
�Your hands… You’re shaking too much! You’ll do more harm to yourself than good.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  Again, she cried, but she nodded as she did so. Pulling herself into the room, locking the door, she forced herself to ignore the dead around them. She focused on her patient, only her patient, lying now on his back on the floor.

  “Whatever happens to me now,” he choked, looking up at her with a mixture of relief and utter panic, “it will be better than what happened to Yoshi. If I’m going to die, so be it—but not like that!”

  She nodded, pressing the blade into him with one hand as, with the other, she tried to hold the flashlight steady. He twisted; she begged him to try not to move. His blood spread across her hands, her arms; her knees. But an egg, somewhat bigger than a quarter, with roughly the hue and consistency of a skinned lychee, finally dislodged from his muscle into the palm of Laura’s hand. She stared at it for a moment, just long enough to see the embryo’s tail inside give the slightest of wriggles, and then she slammed her parasitic handful down hard onto the floor, unceremoniously squashing it.

  “One down,” she scowled, wiping the muck off of her fingertips. “And nine more to go before I can stitch you up.”

  “We’re going to make it, Laura,” he just barely breathed.

  “We’re going to make it,” she repeated, when it was her own turn. Before he cut, she felt the lumps on her back, burrowing into her like candiru. She moved her fingertips away.

  “Do it,” she ordered.

  As she felt her flesh being scissored apart, once more she screamed, but this time it was a cry of rage.

  Afterwards, Simon and Laura lay on the ground, surrounded on all sides by death and gore, able to live perhaps by only sheer force of will.

  “I’m s-sorry,” Simon gasped. Laura mumbled vaguely that this whole turn of events wasn’t his fault. “You don’t understand,” he muttered. “It was classified.”

  “Even with the eggs removed, we still probably won’t survive. These conditions aren’t exactly sterile and there’s no telling if any residue fluids inside us from the creatures won’t prove lethal,” she mused, wiping at the blood-mixed beads of sweat dotting her forehead. “Might as well spill the beans.”

  “There were experiments going on down there...in the Trench. Nuclear experiments. I wasn’t involved with them before, but they called me in to help run tests on them after.”

  “Christ, are you serious? What the Hell was happening? It’s not bad enough that we’ve filled the oceans ear-to-ear with trash, choking off the marine ecosystem in every possible which way, but now we’ve got to bomb them too?”

  “I wasn’t involved, Laura. I was trying to help minimize the damage that had already been caused.”

  “Tom wasn’t wrong about the Geiger counter results?”

  “He has to have been. Laura, come on. You said it yourself. He’s just an entomologist. He’s out of his depth.”

  “But if there’s nuclear stuff going on down there, then the sea life would have nuclear results.”

  “Normally, I would agree with you, but there’s no way they could be exposed to what the government did and just...bounce back from it.”

  “Not in the Trench, they couldn’t,” Laura whispered. “But if they brought their offspring into a different environment, then the species has a shot at survival. Simon, don’t you understand? They were never the test subjects… We were.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re going to be disappointed with the test run!” He snapped. “This was a pretty good trick they played, but it won’t work twice.”

  Laura swallowed, staring over into Heidi’s dull, lifeless gaze. She moved her fingertips forward, brushing the dead woman’s eyelids shut with a shudder. Was this all that Betty and Bea were capable of? Was this the true extent of their powers?

  Morning came. Simon and Laura clutched each other’s hands without a word as they stared hopefully at the daylight shimmering onto them through the window. Did they dare to go outside; to make that five minute run again, especially now both of them were in too much pain to even walk? Or was it just better to stare at the door, awaiting rescue?

  The knob suddenly jiggled. Wide-eyed, they looked at each other, but didn’t make a sound.

  “Guys,” Tom called out on the other side of the door. “Hey! I know you’re in there! Come on. You don’t have to be scared anymore. The worst part’s over. You can come out now.”

  Simon swallowed, moving a few inches forward, as if to stand and let his friend inside, but Laura caught Simon by the wrist, wild-eyed, and shaking her head. Tom sounded calm—too damn calm.

  Again, the knob jiggled—this time more insistently. “Hey, I know it hurts. That’s why we’ve got to take care of you now. You’re very important; more important than I think you appreciate.”

  Once more, he tried to get inside; then he slammed his palm hard against the door. “Come on!” He shouted, and then there was a long silence. “You wanted to know who their caterpillar in the Trench is, right, Simon? That’s how you phrased it, right? Well, now you know: it doesn’t matter. So long as the host is strong and large enough, this species can survive in almost any setting. We—people—have put them through an awful lot. We backed them into a corner...and so this was the only way out for them. Can’t you understand that?”

  “You’re the one who cut the power to the ship, aren’t you?” Simon yelled.

  “I did what they needed me to,” Tom replied defensively. “And I’m going to keep on doing it. All of us are.”

  “All of us?”

  Laura and Simon looked at each other, swallowed, and then crawled to the door. Peering through the keyhole, they saw a blood-soaked mass of bodies pressed together, standing shoulder to shoulder, awaiting them. Bruised and broken flesh swelled outward from its normal position upon the peoples’ frames, with several torn-open chunks of man meat completely exposed, dripping pus, and exuding the stench of internal necrosis.

  As if he knew they were being watched, Tom dropped down, looking through the keyhole right back at them. “I’ve been taking care of the babies from the day they were born. Did you really think they would want me to serve you, you who intended them harm? No, Simon. They chose me—me—to protect them! And now, they have decided to allow me to truly prove my loyalty…” He leaned far back and pulled up his hoodie, revealing several eggs embedded inside him. “They’re going to come out any day now. Dr. Lowensohn, I think I’m going to need your help with that. We all will. Dr. Akimitsu, you were right that we can breed these things en mass, sir. But you were wrong about how it’s going to happen—and why. You don’t need to be afraid. It won’t be like it was with Yoshi. We can do this...again and again and again. It’s a wonderful feeling...knowing just what we’re doing for these creatures; seeing how much we’re helping them get back on their feet, possibly from the brink of extinction. If you don’t understand yet, you will when your own roe hatch…”

  Laura and Simon looked down at their pulverized mer-caviar on the floor, swallowing hard.

  There was one aspect of the Glyptapanteles wasp that no one had considered, when making a note of the mermaids’ tendency towards traumatic insemination. To the wasp’s whim, the caterpillar became utterly domesticated; made docile. Even as the parasitic baby wasps ate through the host caterpillar’s flesh, to its last breath, that partially-devoured caterpillar nurtured them, protected them; even killed in order to defend them.

  “Come on out of there!” Tom demanded, banging on the door again.

  Soon the other human hosts joined in, their group hostility growing by the second as they became increasingly suspicious of Simon and Laura’s noteworthy lack of love for the creatures which had, to Tom’s mind as well as the others’, honored them with their seed.

  Simon and Laura moved back against the opposite wall, leaning against each other, and knowing all too well that the door would not hold forever. Swallowing, Laura picked up the scalpel from off of the floor and cut
into her finger with it. Carefully, with her blood, she wrote her name out on the corner of her shirt, tore it away, and handed it to Simon. Their fingers interlocked tightly, but they did not speak.

  They knew more people would come later, after they’d both been killed by this mob. Yes, there would be fresh faces—investigators, scientists, crew; people from the government. Would any of them survive, they wondered? Or would they be inseminated as well? Just how long would it be before one of these human beings carrying mermaid young was transported via helicopter back to the mainland?

  And what then?

  What then?

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