The Deep (15 page)

Yes
, said a cold voice inside his head.
Oh yessss, that’s it exactly. And it’s coming for you, Lucas. Coming for you this very moment . . .

YEARS AGO,
when his life was much better, Luke had been invited to a veterinary conference in Arizona. They had gone as a family, staying at a motel edging the desert. The first night, they settled their infant son into the Pack ’n Play, then once Zach was asleep, Luke and Abby made love stealthily. Luke slipped inside Abby and rocked gently. Afterward they slept, only to be awakened by Zach’s horrific screams.

Abby jackknifed up in bed. “Zach?” she said. “What is it, baby?”

Luke could just make out the shape of his son in the finger of moonlight
falling through the motel window. He was curled inside the Pack ’n Play. His face was pressed to the breathable mesh, which distorted his features.

Luke snapped on the bedside lamp. Zachary was
shrieking,
these lung-shredding sounds Luke had never heard before. He leapt out of bed. Zachary’s face was beet red and alarmingly puffed. Luke picked his son up and pressed the boy to his chest, a calming gesture.

Luke’s heartbeat skyrocketed when he felt something squirming against his own chest. Something
inside
Zachary’s sleeper, trapped against his son’s skin.

Zach’s piercing screams unlocked this dreadful hysteria in Luke; each one shot a jolt of scalding acid through his veins. The boy thrashed and squealed as Luke gripped him under the armpits, his little face a balloon ready to burst.

Jesus oh Jesus fuck what IS that?

Something was moving under Zach’s sleeper. Luke saw these terrifying whiplike motions in the left leg of Zach’s sleeper. It looked like a big fish caught in a net, trying to fling itself free. Luke made a dry gagging sound, the panic swelling in his throat like a sponge.

He tore the sleeper open. There, curling around his son’s ankle and all the way up his thigh, was the largest insect Luke had ever seen.

A long torsional tube. Its black body was segmented, sinuous, reflecting the room’s meager light. It looked the same at both ends, so Luke couldn’t tell where its head was. Luke saw inflamed divots all over Zach’s chest where the fucking thing must’ve bitten his boy.

It moved—
was
moving, even as Luke stared slack-jawed—with subtle undulations, powered by a dizzying multitude of legs. It released itself from Zach’s ankle, slipping up the back of his leg and around the frilled, absorbent ridge of his diaper. It was enormous, at least eight inches long; it kept coming and coming like a freight train steaming out of a tunnel, kinking and unwinding and flexing its revolting body.

Luke caught the final half inch of it—disgustingly warm, with a greasy sheen; it reminded him of grabbing the fireman’s pole at his old playground, the metal hot and slick from the hands of a hundred children.

He pinched his fingers with the desperate hope of snaring the bug, ripping the fucker in half, but it shimmied free and slithered under his son’s back.

Abby tore madly at Zach’s sleeve, trying to yank the sleeper off. The fear chewed into the sensitive wires in Luke’s brain, paralyzing his nerve centers. He pushed Abby away forcefully, too panicked to notice, flipped Zach onto his back, and pressed down on his sleeper, finding the bug—a millipede, he knew by then—and trapping it in the fabric. He freed Zachary’s arms, then leapt off the bed with the balled-up sleeper. The millipede whipped in his grip; Luke absorbed a series of bites as painful as the stings of a wasp.

Luke’s only thought:
This fucker’s been doing that to my son
.

He threw the sleeper down and stamped on it with his bare heel. A satisfying metallic crunch, like stepping on a beer can. He stomped again and again, fueled by a rage as primordial as any he’d ever experienced.

Die, you fucking brainless monster! Die, you awful thing!

He stepped away, panting. Abby cradled Zach; he was still bawling, but his cries had lost their death-struck pitch.

Luke’s gaze returned to the sleeper. Amazingly, it was moving.

The millipede crawled out of one sleeve. Skittering hesitantly, leaking viscid pus-yellow fluid, it curled into a cochlear coil on the carpet.

“Oh no,” Luke breathed. “Oh no-no-
no
.”

He retrieved his heavy-soled dress shoe and slammed it down. The bug actually
leapt
up, bouncing off the thick, nappy pile. With the same shoe, Luke flicked it through the open bathroom door and onto the tiles, muttering “
Fucking thing oh you fucking
thing,” and knelt on the tiles, slamming the shoe down furiously until the insect was nothing but a jamlike smear . . .

. . . AND RIGHT THEN,
alone in the
Trieste
’s tunnel, this was the memory Luke’s mind conjured:

That slippery
whush-whush
in the cavernous dark was the
whush
of a
millipede stalking toward him, chitter-clattering on its million-skillion legs.

This wasn’t your garden-variety one, either. Oh, no. The darkness nursed it into something new entirely. A millipede the size of a fourth-generation Aleppo pine, thick around as a trash can. Something primeval, hailing from the Permian age, where the scale of life was all out of whack. Its mandibles, sharp as hedge shears, clashed silkily: the sound of a razor drawn down a leather strop.

Whush-whush . . .
pause . . .
whush-whush.

Chitta-chit-skriiitch-chizzt-chit-chit
.

It advanced slowly, in no rush. Where was there to go? It had all the time in the world.

Impossible
, the rational center of Luke’s mind insisted.
Even if it did exist anywhere on earth, which it absolutely fucking does not, how would something like that get down here? It’s nothing. Nothing at all, for fuck’s sake
,
nothing at ALL
.

His mind took a sickening lurch. That reasonable (if increasingly shrill) voice in his head held no sway down here. Maybe his brain had conjured this nightmare bug out of nothingness. But it was still
here
—if only in this moment.

Either he’d created it . . .

—
or the
Trieste
had
—

. . . or he was coming down with a case of the sea-sillies already.

Your seabag’s leaky, sailor.
Isn’t that what they said in the Navy when a guy went batshit?
Your seabag’s leaking its guts all over the friggin’ place, swabbie. You’ve gone Section 8, ya fookin’ loonybird
—

Whush-whush . . . WHUSH-whush . . .

You think
that’s
nothing, Luke?
his mother said mockingly, with that throaty chuckle of hers.
Ohh, I think we both know it’s something. After all, the dog can feel it, too, wouldn’t you say? Can’t you feel her shivering against you? Oh yes, it’s something all right, and whatever it is, Luke, it’s coming for you.

Luke pushed the dog behind him and butt-bumped toward the
locked hatch. The tunnel narrowed. His breath came in hot, nauseous gusts.

Whush-WHUSH
 . . .

Luke swore he could see the segmented shape of the millipede’s gargantuan and somehow gothic body, the plating of its exoskeleton exuding its own sick glow. It was approaching with a mincing sidewinder movement.

Jesus, no, this is not happening . . . there’s nothing—NOTHING—!

He flattened his back against the hatch. The dog was tucked and trembling behind his knees. Luke leaned forward slightly, terror buzzing in his skull like angry yellow jackets . . .

Whush-whush-WHUSH-WHU
—

The airlock hissed behind him. The hatch fell open. Luke’s heels stuttered back and hit the metal lip. He squawked, toppling backward as he scrambled away from the chattering noises in the hallway.

Light flooded his eyes. A familiar face stared impassively down at him.

“Hello, brother.”

10.

CLAYTON NELSON’S FACE
wore a particular expression a good deal of the time. It had begun to grace his features as a child, and although his face had changed over the years, the expression had not. There was a noticeable thinning of the lips and a flaring of the nostrils; the flesh drew tight at the top of his nose where it met the edges of his eyes, while his eyebrows tented in an inverted V. It was the look of a man who’d sniffed something foul, but could not determine the source of the odor.

Clayton Nelson’s face could hold this expression for hours. It was the very expression it held now, in fact, as he looked at Luke sprawled on the tunnel floor.

“Thanks for rolling out the welcome wagon,” said Luke, feeling stupid, which is how he frequently felt in his older brother’s presence.

Clayton was narrow-shouldered and thin-hipped, dressed in gray coveralls. A custodian’s uniform. His face was austerely handsome in a way particular to polar icecaps—flinty and remote. As he’d aged, Clayton had come to look more and more like a member of some fallen Eastern European aristocracy.

The only feature working against that perception was his hair, which hung down his neck in a ragged fringe—the beginnings of a mullet. It gave him the look of a Double-A middle-relief pitcher; an aging player who’d had a cup of coffee in the majors and was now playing out the string with the Tuscaloosa Mud Hens or Richmond Flying Squirrels.

The fingertips of his left hand were bandaged.

“Let me help you up,” Clayton said mechanically, offering Luke his unbandaged hand.

Luke glanced down the storage tunnel. Empty. No giant millipede.
Of course not. He rubbed his head. A fresh goose egg parted the short hairs on the back of his skull. LB hunched behind him, her tail tucked between her hind legs.

“Ah. You located the specimen,” Clayton said.

Anger flared in Luke. It was partly the adrenaline burn-off, and the shame at his crazed imaginings, but primarily the familiar rage he’d too often felt toward his brilliant, careless brother.

“Why was she in there?” he said. “It’s freezing. It’s dark. She was alone.”

“I wasn’t aware. Hugo took it.”

Luke bristled at the pronoun.
It
. As if Dr. Toy had stolen office supplies instead of a living creature.

“He must’ve abandoned it in there,” Clayton said.

“Why would he do that?”

Clayton’s eyebrow arched. “Have you seen Hugo?”

When Luke nodded, Clayton said, “Then I don’t need to tell you why he might act irrationally. I don’t know why he locked the specimen—”

“
She
, Clay.
She’s
not a specimen,” Luke said.

“Technically, yes, it is,” Clayton placidly replied.

“You named her Little Bee.”

“And? It’s just a name.”

“A stupid one.”

“Well, I’m sure the specimen appreciates your concern.”

Luke willed himself to calm down. What profit was there in arguing as they had as children? He wished Al would get her ass back. He needed a buffer.

“Clay . . . what the hell is happening down here?” he asked. “The monitors are out, you haven’t communicated for days. I get a phone call at three o’clock in the morning telling me to hightail my ass to Guam. They play me a recording where you’re telling me to come down—come
home
. After that, they took me into a chilly room, rolled out a slab, and showed me Dr. Westlake.”

“Hold on.” Clayton held up his unbandaged hand. “What’s this about a recording?”

Luke nodded. “The last transmission they received from you. You were saying
come home, Lucas; we need you, Lucas
. Stuff like that.”

Clayton scoffed. “Asking for
you
? Why in God’s name would I do that?”

“Clay, I
heard
you. Clear as day.
Come home, Lucas
.”

Clayton’s features were fixed in that
just-sniffed-shit
expression, and again, Luke was left feeling that
he
was the dog shit on Clayton’s shoe, the foul muck that his brother was just now realizing he’d stepped in.

“Whatever you heard, it wasn’t me. I have no need of you here.” He gave Luke an
are-you-serious?
look. “What would you possibly add?”

Clayton was telling the truth; Luke knew him well enough to see that. Who the hell could have sent that transmission, then, and how? Had someone taped Clayton covertly and spliced a sound file together? Why would Westlake or Toy—the only possible culprits—do that?

“You said something about Westlake,” Clayton prodded.

Luke eyed his brother evenly. “Are you saying you don’t know what happened to him?”

“We’ve had no recent contact with the surface. Disturbances in the water have muddied our transmissions. I know Westlake took the sub. I have no idea how he managed it. None of us were taught how to . . .” He exhaled through his nostrils. “I hadn’t seen him in some time. He locked himself in his lab. He left in . . . I was about to say the dead of night, but it always feels like that down here. He certainly left without telling me.”

“He’s dead, Clay.” Luke paused to let it sink in. “I mean . . . not
just
dead.” The word failed to express what Luke had seen. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I never want to again.”

Clayton accepted the news stoically. Perhaps his upper lip twitched, but if so, it was barely noticeable.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Luke resisted the urge to punctuate each word with a poke to his brother’s chest—anything to pierce that Teflon exterior. “You’ve got Dr. Felz and everyone else in a flap, and that was before Westlake surfaced.”

“Our research. The tests are ongoing,” Clayton said. He had already accepted both Westlake’s death and Luke’s untimely arrival
;
his mind had processed both phenomena, catalogued and dismissed them with typical Claytonian swiftness. “It’s remarkable. What we’ve discovered beggars description. There have been setbacks. Some expected, others less so. Dr. Toy isolated himself . . .” He glanced at his watch with a hint of perplexity. “I can’t say how long ago. Time has a funny way of behaving down here.”