The moment Commander Ito climbed aboard the Nisshin Maru, he could smell the stench. It wasn’t just rotting fish—it was rotting flesh. He clenched his jaw and walked forward with purpose, showing his men his steel nerves. He marched briskly down the upper side-deck of the ship which overlooked the pit in the stern, his boots pounding the metal for dramatic effect. A fishing vessel was normally a loud, busy place. Instead, it was a silent, bloody mess of rotting fish, with a few seabirds feasting on the piles. The silence and lack of activity was eerie. There was no breeze at all, and the stale, foul air sat heavy on the ship. A seagull screeched and flapped away with something in its beak that didn’t look like a fish.

  Commander Ito walked briskly to the bridge and opened the door. The smell hit him first, almost knocking him backwards. He blinked several times and then looked around at the command center. It was as if a dozen humans had been put through a wood chipper and sprayed all over. There were remains and rotting human flesh splattered all over the walls, ceiling and deck. Ito’s stomach did a backflip and he stumbled backwards out of the bridge, taking a breath of better air. He turned and looked at the lieutenant next to him, horror and shock in his watering eyes.

  “Sir, the entire ship is like this,” said the officer quietly.

  “An explosion would leave evidence—shrapnel, fire, other damage,” said Ito as he tried to understand what he was looking at. “Pirates couldn’t do this.”

  Ito stared at the younger officer.

  The lieutenant remained silent.

  Commander Ito took off his cap and wiped his forehead. He had broken a sweat almost instantly. “What could do such a thing?” He asked no one in particular. They looked at each other and said nothing.

  The screaming from the stern, followed by automatic weapons fire broke their silence.

  FIFTEEN

  Endless Summer

  Wally tried the VHS radio first, hoping for a nearby vessel, with no luck. After a few minutes on channel thirteen, he switched to channel sixteen, the emergency channel. With a range of maybe fifteen miles, he’d have to get lucky and reach a nearby vessel. Wally tried his emergency request again.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Endless Summer, Endless Summer, Endless Summer. NZ3311. Mayday, Endless Summer, NZ3311. My position is seven degrees, twenty-one minutes, seventeen point thirty-six seconds north by one-hundred forty-three degrees, fifty-four minutes and fifty-four point eighty-two seconds east! Medical emergency! I have one dead and two injured passengers along with two children. Request immediate rescue! We are a sailboat anchored off Woleai. Deploying EPIRB. Mayday!”

  Guam, the largest island nearby, was almost one hundred and fifty miles away and too far for his VHF radio. With no response to his mayday signals, Wally hit the EPIRB. The Emergency Positioning Indicating Radio Beacon sent an emergency satellite signal to the coast guard and any agencies monitoring the emergency frequencies. The signal included his GPS location and would allow search and rescue to find them within fifty meters. Once the signal was launched, Wally returned to Maynard’s bedside. Abby was holding his hand with her good hand, her other hand already swollen and purple.

  “Manny, how you feeling buddy?” asked Wally, leaning over his bunk.

  Maynard’s complexion was so pale he was almost looking blue. His tongue was getting dark and swollen, and he was in the fetal position with severe cramps.

  “Can you tell me what hurts? Tell me what you feel?” asked Wally, trying to figure out his best course of action.

  Maynard just moaned softly.

  Travis, the ten year old, fought back tears. “What’s wrong with him, Wally? Is he going to be all right?”

  Abby faked a smile at Travis. “Of course he’ll be all right. It’s just a reaction to the sting.” She looked at her own hand and grimaced at the purple swelling. It looked like she had been bitten by a rattlesnake. She looked back at Wally. “Maybe some more antihistamines, huh, skipper?”

  Wally looked at her hand nervously. “Get that back in hot water. I’ll get you some more Benadryl.” He put his hand on Tanner’s shoulder and spoke quietly to him. “I need you to be a strong young man for me, okay? There are bed sheets in the cabinet by your room. Take some up top and wrap up Ellis, okay? I know it’s hard. He was our friend. But he’s gone now, Tanner, and we can’t leave him out there like that. Your mom and dad need me here, okay?”

  Tanner nodded and wiped his tears away. He was just turning to ask Travis for help when Wally squeezed his shoulder. “Just you, Tanner, okay? I need a young man now.”

  Tanner tried his best to “man up” and went for the sheets. Wally moved over to Travis. “Travi, do you think you can monitor the radio for me? It’s very important. You have to sit in my chair and just listen for any kind of response. I sent out an emergency message. We should hear back from the coast guard or someone very soon. Do you think you can do that for me?”

  Travis nodded and looked at his father. “Shouldn’t I stay here with daddy?”

  “I’ll take care of mom and dad. I need you to be my radioman. It’s very important that we get some help for dad. When you get a response, you come get me right away.”

  Travis wiped his face and nodded, then walked up the steps to the captain’s chair where he turned up the radio volume and sat looking at the console, praying his daddy would be okay. Wally grabbed his first aid kit and looked at the various contents. It was basic, and although he had some first aid experience, he wasn’t a doctor and had no idea what to do for his very sick passenger.

  “He looks bad,” said Abby quietly. “My hand really hurts and it was just one of those things for a few seconds. If he had a few of them on him stinging him over and over, he must be in agony. You think he’s in shock?”

  “I don’t know, Abby. I’ve never seen anything like those things before. If it’s a toxin, we could be in real trouble. I hit the EBIRB. The US base on Guam will get that signal within a few minutes. So will any ship in the area. Help’s coming, Abby. We just have to hang in there.”

  Abby bent over and vomited. She dropped to her knees and vomited again, this time dark blood coming up.

  “Oh Jesus!” cried Wally. He was fighting off the panic in his chest. “It’s got to be poison. Oh God.” Wally rummaged through his first aid kit. It was a large kit and contained pouches labeled “bleeding, burns, fracture/sprain, CPR, suture and wound care”. He grabbed the one labeled wound care and opened it. It had antiseptic and swabs, but nothing marked anti-venom. Wally was trying not to panic, but Abby was convulsing and vomiting. Her legs were kicking and her eyes were rolling back showing white.

  Wally dropped to his knees and held her, trying to soothe her as she convulsed and vomited up what looked like a gallon of blood. “Abby! Please! Abby! Just hang on until help comes!”

  Wally looked at the bottle of Benadryl on the counter and felt hopeless. It would be like putting a Band-Aid on an amputated arm. These people needed a hospital immediately, and Wally felt a million miles away from anywhere.

  SIXTEEN

  Challenger Wreck, Three Miles Deep

  At first, Jack and Jessica just stared, squinting in disbelief. It looked human. This “thing” had its feet anchored into the long casings of the giant red tubeworms. It floated, hovering above the worms in the hot ocean current. With its arms outstretched, it looked like it was relaxing. Long fingers were covered with suction cups, and were spread wide open. The head of the beast was human to some extent, with large black eyes and a long dark tongue that extended out of its mouth, almost to its chin. The chest and stomach were definitely human-form.

  “Ian,” said Jessica quietly.

  “What?” asked Jack, his skin covered with goose-bumps. He blinked his eyes hard and stared in disbelief.

  “Oh my God. I think its Ian.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Jack, his voice cracking. The grisly veteran of many years at sea was coming unglued as he stared at something that seemed impossibly human, three miles below the surface.

  “Ian MacMullen. He was one of our crew.” Tears started to flow. Jessica was overwhelmed with memories of her friends, dead on that submarine. What she had seen could never be believed by anyone else, but here it was again—right in front of her.

  “We’re three miles down!” shouted Jack, trying to understand how he was looking at something that had a humanoid form, which Jessica was calling by name.

  Jack fumbled with the joystick, his hands shaking. He adjusted the video camera and focused on the hideous creature that seemed to bask in the five hundred degree water closer to the vent. When he moved, the lights and aimed them at the creature in the tubeworms, it turned its head and seemed to stare right at them. Lit up by the powerful LED flood lights, the creature’s face was much easier to see. It opened its mouth and seemed to roar at them, enraged to be disturbed from its dark resting place. When it pushed off the side of the smoker and hurled through the water straight at them, neither Jack nor Jessica could stop their screaming.

  Jessica’s hands instinctively flew up to protect herself. The creature slammed into the thick acrylic glass and hugged the small submarine with its arms outstretched. Its face was flat against the glass, right in front of Jessica, who was still screaming. The sound of the razor sharp hooks inside each tentacle scratching across the steel was unnerving.

  “Get us out of here!” She screamed. “Get us up!”

  Jack was every bit as terrified as Jessica. He pressed the controls to ascend, but the weight of the creature hanging on the outside of the submarine was making them sink, not surface.

  The face outside the glass was unmistakably Ian MacMullen, or what was left of him. The face was hideous, but there was no doubt what it had been. His tongue was covered in rasping hooks like his fingers. He opened his mouth wider than any human could, his jaws unhinging like a snake’s, and sealed his lips against the acrylic. He tried to burrow through the window the way a plecostomus cleans the algae off of the glass of a fish tank. The acrylic was showing white scratches on the clear surface from the sharp hooks of his tongue.

  Jack pulled on the joystick that controlled the sub’s direction and angle, but the sub continued to descend, rolling slightly forward under the weight of Ian MacMullen. The small sub groaned as the pressure continued to increase in the rising temperature.

  Jack pulled back on the stick as far as it would go, but it didn’t respond. Jessica stared in disgust and horror as Ian’s tongue continued to work the acrylic in front of her face. The pane was slowly frosting over with scratches. A few seconds later, a dark liquid squirted up out of Ian’s throat against the pane, and the tongue scratched up and down even faster. The surface of the acrylic seemed to get wavy.

  “Oh my God. Jack! He’s going to melt the fucking glass!”

  Jack’s eyes went wide as he saw the digestive enzymes spread out against the thing’s tongue. “Jessica, the controls won’t respond! These panes are acrylic, not glass. They’re a few inches thick, but I don’t know if they can hold up against a chemical attack. They’re synthetic—they’re not designed to withstand acid!”

  Jessica put her hands against her chest and controlled her breathing as best she could. The hideous thing in front of her was trying to bore its way in. The only good news was that the sub would implode in a split second and they’d both be dead long before the thing could eat her.

  She closed her eyes and began praying…

  SEVENTEEN

  Nisshin Maru

  The commander raced after his men outside the bridge, towards the stern of the ship. They were up on the catwalk overlooking the stern pit where the fish lay rotting in the hot sun.

  “Who’s shooting?” screamed the commander.

  One of his sailors below ran back towards the officers and looked up at them from his location in the pit. He shouted up at them.

  “Sir! I saw something at the stern ramp! A kappa! It was a kappa!”

  The commander was livid at the spreading panic he could see in the men below, but was also wary of whatever could have massacred the crew with such ferocity. He stormed down the catwalk steps to the pit below and approached the terrified sailor.

  “Kappa? You idiot! Tell me exactly what you saw!”

  The sailor pointed to the stern ramp, which was in the down position, open to the sea behind them. The nets were still lying on the deck, full of decomposing fish and a few seabirds.

  “Something was at the ramp. It looked human, but it wasn’t. It was standing on two legs, but, but…” He couldn’t form words.

  “What?” screamed the commander.

  “It was kappa, sir! It was a sea monster. It grabbed a large fish and started eating it. I fired at it.”

  “Did you hit it?” asked Commander Ito.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It dropped the fish and ran over the side.”

  The commander stared at the sailor. He knew him by name, and knew him to be a responsible sailor. Ito walked towards the ramp and looked around, slowing as he got closer. Then Ito spotted the wet footprints near the edge. He drew his sidearm and walked closer. Something had climbed up the ramp.

  “Lieutenant!” barked Commander Ito. “Tell the XO to send a crew over in our inflatable. I want them to look around over here.”

  The lieutenant glanced around nervously at the other crewmen, but called back to the ship and delivered the orders. The men remained where they were until a four man team in a small orange raft buzzed around the back of the trawler.

  Ito walked back to the edge of the ramp and yelled over at the men in the raft. “Make a quick run up and down the hull and look for anything odd. Something was on this ship that went back into the water. Don’t get too close if you see anything, just report back to me immediately if you find anything unusual.”

  “What are we looking for?” asked the sailor in charge of the boat.

  “I’m not sure.” Ito made a face and thought, but you’ll know it when you see it.

  The thing that had, in another lifetime, been Jim Lewis clung upside down to the barnacles below the water line. He stared with black soulless eyes as a small orange craft buzzed in the water over his head.

  EIGHTEEN

  USS Chosin

  Theresa and Tony sat at a long table in the captain’s briefing room. They were surrounded by officers from the Chosin, the medical staff director, and a live video feed with Admiral Antus back in Washington, DC. Antus was flanked by several other officials, none of whom were familiar to Tony or Theresa.

  The ship’s medical director, a lieutenant commander named Gail Reilly, had been taking copious notes as Theresa explained everything she could remember from the Challenger catastrophe. Tony interjected occasionally, but most of what Theresa was explaining were the scientific aspects of the infection, so for the most part, he just listened. Theresa ended at the point when the DSRV surfaced and Ethan died from the infection.

  Lieutenant Commander Reilly jumped in as soon as Theresa finished her briefing. “This deinococcus radiodurans that infected the crew and killed Ethan, has it ever infected humans before?”

  “Not that we know of, no. It exists only in the deepest parts of the ocean, in the gut of certain inhabitants of the thermal vents. It has the distinction of being in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the toughest bacteria on the planet—impervious to cold, dehydration, acids, radiation—it can even survive in a vacuum. In the labs, they call it ‘Conan the Bacterium.’ The bacteria does more than just infect its host, though, commander. It changes the host’s anatomy. D. radiodurans can actually repair and alter DNA strands. Whatever happened to our crew was more than just a simple infection.”

  “Earlier in your briefing, you said there were other smaller creatures attacking you up on the bridge right before your escape. These weren’t altered forms of Ian MacMullen or Jim Lewis—so what were they?”

  “I’m not sure, which is just as terrifying as what we saw happen to our friends. My theory is that they were pieces of infected tissue from either other members of our crew…” Theresa dabbed at her eyes, thinking of Mike, “…or they were pieces of tissue from Ian or Jim. We believe that infected tissue regenerates the way a crab can regrow a leg or a starfish can regrow a whole body from a couple of connected legs. It presents a huge danger in terms of spreading. There’s also the colony theory.”

  “Explain—what do you mean ‘colony theory’?”

  “If you ever study coral, you’ll see that it’s a colony of polyps. Most people look at coral as a plant, because it can have branches or can have tree or flower-like forms. But coral is a colony of microscopic polyps—individual animals that share food and energy and maybe even some primitive type of intelligence the way a beehive or ant colony does. They’re stronger as a colony than as individuals. I believe that these pieces of tissue seek each other out and collaborate in some way.”

  Dr. Reilly made a face. “Based on what?”

  Theresa rubbed her tired face. “Based on the crazy shit I saw three miles down.”

  The officers in the room sat stone faced and waited for her to continue.

  “Look, I don’t have any hard evidence of anything, okay? All I can tell you is what I saw, and what I think. That’s it. You weren’t there. None of you! I can’t explain an unexplainable horror show! Our friends are dead, the Challenger is lost, and our conduct is being questioned. If we had died down there with the rest of the crew, you wouldn’t even know any of this.”

  “Perhaps the video from the DSRV will provide additional information,” said Admiral Antus quietly from the monitor.

  “Speaking of which, when will they surface?” asked Tony.

  “At least another three hours,” answered one of the officers.

 

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