Sea Creature (22 page)

A shot rang through the air and then another and another. The white tip was hit in the dorsal fin and body and it darted into the depths in pain.

Patrick could see an outline near him and hear rumbling in the water. He felt vibrations in his back. He closed his eyes and rolled over, too weak to even hold his head up.

The boat came to a stop next to the carcass and Ignacio had the fisherman shoot one of the larger sharks that was feeding. The other sharks, confused and in a frenzy, began to lash out at each other and then disappeared into the depths.

One of the fishermen hopped onto the carcass and lifted Patrick up to Ignacio who pulled him onto the boat.

Patrick felt sensations against his skin and then motion. Someone reached down and lifted his head, their face near his.

“It is all right. You will live.”

*****

Patrick awoke, enveloped in the soft sheets of a hospital bed. There was an open window letting in the afternoon breeze and he could hear voices in the hall. A nurse was tending to a patient in the other bed and she noticed he was awake.

She began to speak to him in Spanish but his throat hurt so bad he couldn’t speak back. There was an IV connected to his arm and liquids dripped from three separate bags into the lines.

The nurse poured him some water from a cup and he drank it, the water stinging his throat on the way down.

He lay back and closed his eyes again, falling quickly to sleep.

Rodrigo Gonzalez packed the items in his cabin as he finished a cold beer. He had heard what had happened to his friend and he was disgusted that he hadn’t put a bullet into the old man’s head the day he found out.

But it was too late now and it would do nothing to bring Patrick back. He would go to shore and his boat and come out here and search for him. It had been three days since he had been dropped into the sea. Rodrigo had been informed by some of the other workers that he had taken a lifeboat and left on his own, so he left it alone. He knew Patrick well and it seemed like something he would do.

It was only recently that Christopher had told him what had actually happened. When he confronted Christopher about it, all he said was, “That’s life, Rodrigo. Friends come and go.”

But that was not life. Not the life Rodrigo knew. He had no family other than a drunken brother living on the streets of Mexico somewhere. Friends were all he knew.

He looked over his cabin to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. The last bottle of beer called to him and he popped it open and guzzled half of it, throwing the rest out of the porthole in the wall.

Rodrigo went out into the corridor and up two ladders. He stopped at the mess hall and gathered a few items out of the fridge there; bread and sliced meat and cheese with boxes of cereal and crackers and a case of bottled water.

He carried everything up the ladder to the main deck and went to the lifeboats. He opened one and placed the items inside before heading back down for another case of water.

After he had made three trips, he was satisfied he had enough for a month. It would take him two days to get back to shore, but why risk it?

He peered into the lifeboat and was impressed. It came with navigation equipment, a radio, a rifle mounted on one of the walls, and a GPS locater.

He stepped back and considered how one was to get it into the water, when he heard a scream from the other side of the ship.

Rodrigo quietly listened to make sure it wasn’t something he’d just heard in his head and there was another scream and a man’s voice crying for help. He sprinted in the direction of the voice. It was coming from the starboard side of the ship near the stern.

He got near to the voice, and froze in his tracks.

The man was in his boxers, halfway out of his porthole in a cabin. The porthole wasn’t large and the man was being pulled through by a copious red tentacle wrapped around his legs; the tentacle coming out of the sea, as thick as a horse.

The man was screaming as his flesh scraped off against the metal of the porthole. He came through, both arms seemingly broken, and plopped onto the deck, passed out from the pain.

Rodrigo saw a fire extinguisher and an axe hanging up nearby and broke the glass with his elbow and got the axe as the tentacle easily lifted the man into the air.

He ran to him, screaming, and slammed the axe down with all of his weight against the tentacle.

The flesh split open but was too thick to sever. Blood began to spit over the deck. There was a sound then unlike anything Rodrigo had ever heard in his life. It shook the very ship and the deck below his feet and deafened him. It was a roar.

The ocean foamed as something massive rose from beneath. Rodrigo didn’t wait to see what it was.

He lifted the man off the deck and put him on his powerful shoulders. He sprinted back toward the bow, looking for any way into the ship, shouting for help. He got all the way to the lifeboats before one of the creature’s legs whipped out in front of him. It bashed into the metal of the ship, narrowly missing him, and the metal groaned and bent inward.

Rodrigo ducked under the leg and kept running, the weight of the man beginning to make his legs burn.

Another leg shot out in front of him and one behind. They swept toward him together. He jumped over the one in front of him but the one behind him caught his calves and wrapped themselves around like a boa constrictor.

It flung him upside down and the man fell from his grasp onto the deck. There were other voices now and gunfire coming from the deck as Rodrigo was pulled over the ocean.

The moonlight illuminated a glowing red mass and it seemed to go on forever. There was another roar but this one sounded like a shrieking monkey, and as Rodrigo was lowered he saw the black pit of the mouth and the sharp edges of the beak.

Another leg wrapped around his upper torso and they twisted in opposite directions, splitting him in half, his organs spilling out into the sea before his corpse was lowered into the mouth and swallowed.

The men on the ship began firing shot after shot, yelling for the explosives as several legs blasted out of the deep and wrapped around sections of the ship. The antenna above the control center was crushed and one of the railings were ripped out of the deck and flung into the sea.

The ship tilted to the side as the creature pulled down and two of the men lost their balance and fell into the black water screaming.

The rest of the men scattered and ran to the entrance leading below deck, cowering as another roar shook the ship.

Patrick awoke from a deep sleep and found Ignacio sitting next to him reading a leather-bound edition of Moby Dick.

“Are you getting inspired?” he whispered, his voice metallic from a raw throat.

“It’s my favorite book when I was a boy. I would read it on the fishing boats I worked and dream of adventures away from the ghettos I lived in.”

“You saved my life.”

“That’s, how you say, three you owe me.”

“How did you even find me?”

“We received a distress call with your coordinates. At least the last coordinates where your ship saw you. It took us more than a day to find you.”

“Who sent the call?”

“I don’t know. It was a male voice. Someone on the ship was still your friend.”

Ignacio rose and lifted the sheet, looking at his belly. “It looks much better. They filled you with antibiotics for two days.”

“I’ve been here two days?”

Ignacio nodded. “You’re lucky, my friend. One of my favorite American expressions is: I hate to say I told you so. But I told you so.”

Patrick chuckled. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts too much.” A thought suddenly pounded in Patrick’s head.
Jane
.

“I need to get out of here.”

He tried to rise and Ignacio pushed him back down. “You’re not ready yet.”

“I need to get back on that ship.”

“Why? What happened there?”

He explained, but Ignacio didn’t react. He appeared passive, a slight smirk on his lips as if he was expecting exactly that.

“I will send the police,” Ignacio said. “We have a unit equivalent to your Coast Guard.”

“Do you know where they are?”

“No, but we will find them.”

Patrick shook his head. “I can’t just lay here while she’s on that ship because of me. I’m going too.”

He sat up, pain rocketing from his head to his feet. He swung his legs around the hospital bed and then remembered he didn’t have any clothes.

“I would appreciate if you could loan me some clothes.”

“You’re in no state to be searching the ocean by yourself. I will take you.”

The roar woke Mitch from his sleep, a sound from his nightmares. He jumped from his bed and looked out the porthole. He couldn’t see anything but he heard the footfalls down the corridors.

As if hit by a speeding truck, he felt his body fly through the air and slam into the wall as the ship was rocked to its side.

It hovered at an angle for a few seconds and then a deafening groan filled the air as the ship swung back into a horizontal position.

Another roar. It seemed to shake the metal beams and the walls and the floors.

Mitch got up and ran to the chest next to his bed. He got out his pistol and loaded it before grabbing the tranquilizer gun and loading a bottle of ketamine inside. He placed the strap around him and threw on his boots before running out of his cabin.

There were men running down both ends of the corridor. Some were ducking into rooms and a couple ran into a storage room. A few jumped down the ladder leading farther below in the ship.

“What’s going on? Lo que está pasando?”

None of the men replied. He ran toward the ladder and went up to the mid deck. It was empty. As he reached the top step something pounded the ship as if it had hit a mountain and he had to grip the ladder with both hands as he nearly flew off. His feet were dangling as the ship tilted to the side and then fell back.

He ran down the corridor and to the top deck. His mind was racing but he figured that they must’ve hit coral or land, the second falling asleep at the wheel as he had done before.

When he got to the top deck and into the night air, he saw a ship that looked like it had gone through a war.

The control center was torn in half, jagged hunks of metal strewn over the deck. The lifeboats had been smashed and the railing ripped away from half the ship.

He turned, and saw a vision that made his heart stop.

Its legs and tentacles were wrapped around the metal frame as if it were crushing life from it and even in the night Mitch could see the lone circular eye, glowing yellow in the moonlight.

It was nearly a quarter the size of the ship, with legs as long as soccer-fields. It reached out with one and grabbed a fishing station, crushing the chair to bits and ripping out the bolts as it lifted it in the air. It placed the metal into its mouth and pulverized it to nothing.

The tranquilizer would be no use. He needed to get to the armory. He sprinted for the entrance below deck and the creature spotted the movement and turned toward it. It lashed out with a tentacle and Mitch dived into the entrance as the tentacle crashed into the door, knocking it off its hinges. He got to his feet and dashed for the ladder and jumped in headfirst, narrowly missing the tentacle as it went overhead.

He ran for the armory and saw Christopher coming out of Hamilton’s room. He looked ashen white, and as frightened as a little boy. Jane pushed her way past him into the corridor.

“What the fuck is going on?” Christopher said.

Mitch froze and stood silently.

“Mitch what the fuck is going on?”

Mitch’s eyes were wide and his mouth opened, but no words came. The tentacle had come between his legs and he looked down and didn’t move.

It went past him, searching the corridor, and Christopher jumped back into the cabin as Jane screamed and he grabbed her and pulled her in.

Mitch held his breath.

The tentacle searched the grates of the corridors and ran along the walls. It was glistening and would leave a trail of clear slime as it slithered around and finally it began to retract.

It was nearly through his legs when Mitch felt a single drop of sweat roll down his forehead and to the tip of his nose. He reached for it but it was too late; it rolled off his nose and through the air.

He saw it silently drip onto the edge of the tentacle, and it stopped moving.

Mitch decided he had to run. He looked down the corridor and he lifted one foot into the air to begin a sprint but the tentacle rose in between his legs. He screamed as he was lifted into the air and in a motion almost too fast to see, the tentacle retracted through the opening and was gone, the screaming fading into the distance before being abruptly cut off.

Patrick sat in a deckchair, sipping soup at Ignacio’s insistence. The wind was in his face and the sea air was both comforting and revolting at once. He was taken back to the darkness spent on a lump of flesh in the sea, the ocean’s ancient predators around him feasting, their black eyes spying him suspiciously as they gorged themselves on flesh.

“We’ve gotten word,” Ignacio said as he came and sat next to him. “There was a distress call sent two hours ago. The ship is three-miles to the northwest. We should be there shortly.”

“What was the distress call about?”

“They don’t know. It was ended before they could investigate.”

Patrick glanced up to the man steering the ship. “Did you call the police?”

“Yes, they are meeting us there.”

They sat in silence a long time and after an hour or so Patrick fell asleep. He dreamed of violence and pain, sounds in the dark around him. Movement, splashing, feeding and grunts.

*****

Patrick awoke with a start. He pulled away and reached back. Something was grabbing him at the shoulder.

He felt the softness of Ignacio’s hand and looked up at him, confused as to where he was and what he was doing. It was the pain that brought it all back. Pain had the ability to remind one that reality is actually real.