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by Norris, Gregory L.


  “Here,” said Brandon.

  With Aaron’s help, Cary made it back to midship and the door to the passenger cabin, now at an askew angle and looking more like the entrance to some dark wonderland.

  “You saved my life,” Aaron said, his voice close, his words washing comforting warmth against Cary’s ear. “You fucking saved me from that thing, man.”

  “We ain’t out of this yet,” Brandon countered.

  Even so, Cary noted the way Aaron’s hand held onto him, as though reluctant to let go, even as the panicking thirty or so passengers from the lower deck streamed up, and the crew hurried down from what remained of the top.

  12.

  6:30 p.m., Saturday the Thirteenth

  “Name?” she asked.

  “Brandon,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

  Erin—for a moment, he thought she said Aaron, but then Brandon made the connection—answered, “We need to get everybody into life vests. There are floatation devices, two of them, over there—” She pointed toward a locker.

  The Avello made another sudden dip. Cries issued from the crowd.

  “Did you see—?” Brandon started.

  Erin nodded. “I saw it,” she said, and handed life vests out, efficient in spite of the weeping cut above one eye, likely as a result of everything that had taken place.

  “Fuck, I’ll never forget it,” said Cary. He drew in a deep sip of saline air. “If we get out of this…”

  “When,” Aaron said. He moved beside Brandon and joined in handing out life vests, an impromptu hero. “Now help me, dude, before this tub goes under.”

  Several long seconds later, a shout rose up from the crowd gathered midship on the sinking ferry’s top deck.

  “Look, the monster—it’s coming back!”

  13.

  6:32 p.m., Saturday the Thirteenth

  Brandon, Erin, Cary, Aaron, and the captain glanced past the sobs and swears to see the flickers of neon blue glowing on the horizon beyond a curtain of rain and untold miles of choppy waves.

  But the lights were from the sirens of the flotilla of rescue craft dispatched from Hyannis.

  The End

  Read on for a free sample of The Lusca: A Deep Sea Thriller

  Prologue

  I’m not sure if things happen, the unexplainable things, the ones that alter you, shift your perspective, widen your mind and put wrinkles under your eyes…well, I don’t know if there’s a reason. Maybe aliens or government secret projects gone wrong or…living things. Living things so rare and instinctively intelligent, they actually own this earth. Maybe they live in hidden places, places nobody knows anything about. They are tough, yeah. Maybe the stars do align.

  They are tough and wicked.

  Some people are drawn to the sea. Some people aren’t. But there are those of us who, like me, have to see it at least once a year if we have no close access to it. Then there are those of us who need it so badly, we’ll give up our families, our habits, our life savings just to be with the great, wide and timeless sea. We can’t help it. The sea is the only thing that matters. There’s mystery, and those mysteries are our homes. We all know something deep down about her, though. We know we share this home. We don’t talk about it. There are stories when drink flows, yeah. Still, we don’t admit to the way we all know there is another world we simply are skimming the surface of, and it frightens us.

  Not enough to keep us away. We’re skeptics.

  Still, we’re terrified of it.

  Chapter 1

  I couldn’t make out what Shawn screamed. I could barely see the kid, with seawater flying up, down, everywhere. There had been nothing on the radar indicating a storm, and it hit so hard, so fast, that I had no idea if the captain even had a chance to call it in.

  “Drew—Drew!” It sounded like Shawn was yelling my name over and over, but I couldn’t make it out for sure above the eerie, low-humming sound coming from the darkness and water all around. I had no time to dwell on this oddity. Everything about this was weird. I couldn’t focus on any one thing, or I’d stop trying to figure out what to do, how to fix this disaster.

  Shawn waved his Bowie knife at me, then out at the sea. Another of the fishermen—I couldn’t make out which guy it was—rolled across the small fishing boat’s deck and into Shawn’s legs, puking black in the night as he went. As I called to them, lunged for them, they both went overboard into the valley of a deep Caribbean wave.

  I hung over the railing for a moment, my own impenetrable sea legs considering sharing seasickness with the others still aboard I heard retching.

  It was total and complete chaos in moments, when just before, the night sea had been as smooth as milk in the morning, and the sky so clear a child could navigate home to Mobile, Alabama.

  I held on, and stared down where Shawn and the other guy had gone in, but the wave now rose.

  I had to get out of there.

  Not sure what else to do, I ran to the wheelhouse to see what the hell Captain Johan, the old Cajun spitfire who always cursed in French, was doing in there. Once on the bridge, I wiped saltwater out of my eyes, and pushed my straggly curls back from my forehead. The wheel spun wildly, with no Captain Johan there to assist.

  Damn the man. Johan wasn’t the type to go down with his ship, but he should have been doing something.

  I was just a fisherman, and in the last three minutes after all hell instantly broke loose, I’d tried to find my buddies, the usual guys I came out with. I’d run all over deck, if you could call it running. It was more like sliding and falling and skidding in vomit.

  I’d seen a few guys, but the water poured over all of us so hard out there that once seen, a guy might not be seen again. I had wanted to find Jimmy, but it had been impossible.

  I dashed to the wheel, and jerked to steer us toward the top of the giant wave, trying to get into it. The ship didn’t want to comply; I put more of my shoulders and hips into hauling the wheel to the right. I might as well have already been drowning, I held my breath so hard.

  I really thought the wave that ate the kid was going to completely take us all out, but as the crest began to break, I cropped the wheel just strongly enough, and our boat went up and over, down, down.

  I heard screams. Staring up through the glass, I could see the whole deck.

  It looked like Little Jack and Samson starboard, and, from what I could make out, Little Jack was holding Samson back, like Samson wanted to jump over.

  That was nuts!

  I looked to the other side of the boat, where Samson’s eyes had locked as he wailed, pulling away from Little Jack, his mouth a dark gash.

  We were in a wave valley again, but the other side of the boat tilted and the water rose up to near-deck level. What looked like shiny black eels, or giant slugs, slithered aboard, moving in jerks and ripples. There were four of them, and they must have been about three feet long each. Maybe a foot in diameter. The fronts and backs of their snaky bodies tapered to points on both ends.

  Did they have heads? Faces? I couldn’t tell. The salty rainfall came on heavier than ever, with crashing waves so hard they cracked the wheelhouse glass. My view was gone.

  I hopped out as fast as I could, making a beeline for the lifeboat. Whatever those things were, they’d made me feel like the whole sea was full of them, and my gut knew they wanted to eat me. It’s one of those feelings that, once you’ve had it—and I’d been attacked by a mad Pitbull as a kid—you never forget it. I had to get off this boat right away.

  There were remnants of puke washing away on the deck where the lifeboat should have been.

  “Goddamn it!” I couldn’t see for longer than a second no matter how many times I wiped water from my face, and fear fueled my frustration.

  The balance of the wave valley was suddenly disrupted, and I felt the ship rise, rise high. I heard yells and screams of the men still aboard who I couldn’t see. It was simply too dark, the rain too heavy, and every unnatural light on the wildly tiltin
g fishing boat was long gone.

  What I did make out, just seconds before I dove overboard myself, was a long, thick…tentacle? Was that what it was? A tentacle with sharp-toothed mouths where suckers might have been…Those mouths, perfect circles when open. I saw some of them closing, it seemed, into small black dots in the silver flesh of the tentacle. It hovered over the ship, catching a moonbeam that happened through the storm, and the question of what rose the ship up to the level of the other high waves now burned in my brain. However, terror soon took any curiosity’s place as that long, monstrous thing came down, hard, across the deck, snapping the entire ship in two pieces like I could a toothpick in between my fingers.

  My end of the boat tipped up as I yelped and jumped into the dark water. It sucked me down in the undertow of the wave, so I pinched my nose shut with my fingers, closed my eyes, and went with it. I had to wait until the sea resurfaced me naturally. I was strong. I used to box heavyweights not too many years ago. I was not strong enough to swim in that wave. No way, nope.

  When I did open my eyes, everything was pure black liquid, so I mostly kept them closed. It made me feel like I just didn’t want to see instead of couldn’t…that I just didn’t want to breathe, not that I couldn’t.

  The wave current pushed me up higher. I could tell. My equilibrium was a little shaken, but that’s something a drowning man knows—up. I went completely limp, feeling weak as my hopes rose, and I finally broke the surface, gasping. I couldn’t see a damn thing.

  But I felt something in the cool waters.

  Against my ankle, my boot top and pant leg showed a little bit of flesh to something that could, indeed, see, and it slithered against my flesh. It felt like limp, cooked bacon, but cold, like the dead.

  I called out. “Help!”

  I felt it again, but this time it was against my thigh, wrapping around it. I yelled and jerked away, swimming from whatever the hell that had been. I thought of those eel things on the fishing boat and pumped my arms against the falling, flying stormy sea, to where, I didn’t care. Just had to get away from that rubbery, cold tendril of life that wanted me to warm it.

  Just ahead, in the water, I saw bioluminescence…the surface of the ocean had a spot of light in it, glowing and greenish. I swam for it, not thinking about it. It was light, and light was good.

  As I got closer, I heard yells and hollers here and there. I tried to call out again, but as I sucked in air to do it, one of the slithery things instantly wrapped around my ankle and yanked me under.

  I struggled violently, anxiety and terror wiping my thoughts of anything like a plan. It kept pulling me down, until I slipped out of my boot and swam as hard as I could to the surface. My hand broke free to the air just as the slithery thing wrapped around my socked foot and squeezed with the strength of ten hands. That’s when I realized I wasn’t going to make it to the surface, not ever again.

  I didn’t want to give up. I couldn’t.

  I bent over in the water and grabbed at the thing wrapped around my ankle. That cold bacon feel on my hands was much worse than it had been on my leg. I squeezed back with my fingernails, and through squinted lashes, saw the blackness in front of me fill with little dots of bioluminescent liquid, right where my fingernails had anchored.

  It writhed against my grip and squeezed my foot tightly. I couldn’t fight anymore…air was out, time was up. I didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to suffer. I closed my eyes to the sudden burst of light in the water now gushing up all around me, and sucked the sea into my lungs. I couldn’t describe what it was like, and I’d never try. But just then, I felt a hand pulling on my shirt, even as I convulsed and passed into my own private darkness.

  The Lusca is available from Amazon here

 

 

 


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