“What the hell?” Atticus moved his hand away from the activation keypad and gazed at Kronos as the creature backed away, its eyes locked onto his. Reaching a distance of twenty feet, it resumed its circular course around Ray. It was waiting for something, but what?
Atticus knew this behavior was completely unheard of in the animal kingdom. Its life had been threatened. It had been under attack, yet it didn’t fight or flee. It had defended itself, to be sure, but then it showed restraint. Perhaps even mercy.
Atticus shook his head at the last thought. He remembered Giona and the way she’d been so quickly eaten. If this creature was intelligent, it had eaten her on purpose, and toyed with him now. He reached over for the activation keypad, but froze before reaching the halfway point. The creature’s body, or something inside the creature, caught his attention.
Atticus focused on the anomaly.
A flashing from inside its body. Perhaps it was building up its own electric charge, like an electric eel? If that were true, the herring wouldn’t have been able to flee, and he and Giona would have been shocked. Then what the hell was it?
As though in answer to his unspoken question, Kronos brought his body closer, a mere ten feet from Ray. Its body filled the view. Moving out of instinct more than anything else, Atticus switched off the exterior lights, turning Kronos’s side into a dark canvas.
Then he saw it-a flash from inside the creature, emanating from a precise source. Then with a sudden brilliance, the flash repeated like a strobe light, and an image coalesced at the center of the light.
A silhouette of something at its source.
A form.
A body.
A shape that Atticus immediately recognized.
“Oh, God no…” Atticus leaned so far forward that he hit his head on the lexan glass bubble of Ray ’s eye socket viewing port, which separated him from the ocean. He didn’t even register the impact.
He knew the shape, however impossible. Sadness, then rage, took hold of him, shaking his body. The beast tormented him!
Before Atticus could act and destroy them both with a small thermonuclear device, the impossible happened. The silhouette moved amid the continuing flashes. He could see her arms. He watched her knees rise up to her chest.
Still alive.
Giona was alive-inside Kronos.
Hot tears came with a torrent of emotion. Atticus pushed against the glass bubble, willing himself to burst forth into the ocean, tear Kronos apart, and extract his still-living daughter from its gullet.
“Oh, baby, I’m here.” Atticus filled his lungs and screamed. “Giona! I’m here! I’m going to get you out! I won’t leave you! Giona!”
He was pounding on the glass now, beating his fists as his heart broke for the second time in five days. Then the flashing stopped, and she disappeared, hidden behind Kronos’s black skin. Kronos slowly backed away, his body sliding backwards as his massive face turned toward Ray. Atticus felt the intelligence behind the massive beast’s eyes once again, yet more clearly. It was conveying a message with its eyes-a look of consternation, of disapproval.
Atticus slumped in his chair. How was this possible? It wasn’t! His mind kept shouting it at him.
She’s dead!
Giona is dead!
No, damn it, she’s alive!
Atticus could sense the message coming from the beast. Its eyes, once frightening, now tranquil. It bore him no ill will. And then it let out a cry, a sound so peaceful that Atticus, despite the dire situation, felt comforted. In that moment, he realized that the creature had no intention of truly devouring Giona. She lay inside the creature, yet even after days inside, was still alive and undigested.
A single thought burrowed into Atticus’s mind. What kind of creature is this?
ASCENT
35
Kronos-Gulf of Maine
The flesh supporting her body felt like a waterbed, comfortable and cozy, yet visions of monsters played behind Giona’s eyes as she slept. Her hair lay damp and matted to her face and the slick tissue beneath her body. Her wetsuit, still secure, kept the majority of her body free from moisture, but her face, long exposed to the humid air, had paled and wrinkled.
Her breaths, previously even with deep sleep, came ragged and quick. When her eyes finally opened, it seemed that the nightmare she’d just been having continued on into reality.
An all-consuming blackness surrounded her. Light did not exist. Her body didn’t exist. As Giona tried to comprehend the absolute darkness, a violation of her senses assailed her nose. The smell of rotting fish, fat, and bloated, thickened the air. She gagged and dry heaved, her stomach lacking substance to issue forth. She breathed through her mouth, which turned out to be a mistake; she could taste the odor. As her body built toward a second dry heave, she became aware of a noise, deep and repeating. It pulled her attention away from the smells.
A deep whump-whump came again and again, double beating like a distant machine, working without tire. A momentary hope tugged at her thoughts as she imagined she’d somehow been transported to a fish factory. That would account for the smell and the sound, but…
Giona rested her hands on her bed. It rolled beneath her like the massaging chairs she was fond of trying out at the mall. The surface beneath her suddenly shifted. She tumbled and fell against a wall. It, too, felt soft and smooth, like silk. She stood for a moment, bumping her head on the low ceiling. But the ceiling flexed as her head connected. She’d been trapped inside a giant balloon, or some kind of cocoon.
Panic rising, Giona shuffled around her enclosure, probing the soft walls with her hands. Since she found no method of egress, sobs wracked her body.
Trapped.
“Daddy?” Giona said between vaults of emotion. “Daddy!”
But the darkness around her absorbed her voice. No echo returned. No sound escaped. The fleshy walls held in everything.
Fleshy…
Giona’s thoughts lost focus on reality as a flood of memories washed through her mind, overloading her synapses and quickening her breath. She no longer noticed the smell. A single image emerged from the deep, consumed her mind, opening its dagger-filled mouth and sucking her down. Giona opened her mouth to scream as the full realization of her situation struck her, but before the sound could escape, her body left the floor and smashed into the ceiling above.
Then she hit the floor again. Each wall greeted her in rapid succession, pummeling her body. As consciousness slipped away, Giona found breathing nearly impossible. Her body, while being twisted and jounced violently, was ultimately protected by the soft walls that formed her meaty prison. A searing pain turned the darkness all white as something solid struck her head. She blinked back to consciousness seconds later, not knowing how long she’d been out because the murk of unconsciousness was no darker than that of her current waking world. But the pain in her skull told her the impact had been real.
All that mattered was that it had stopped. She held a hand to her throbbing head and felt a warm, sticky wetness beneath her hair. A cut caused by the projectile that had struck her head had swollen and gushed, but the blood had clumped and coagulated in her hair. She imagined the sight of it would send most kids running in fear, but at least the bleeding had stopped. Then she remembered her watch. Her father had given it to her on her last birthday-a Luminox Navy SEAL dive watch, the same as her father’s. She pressed a button on the watch and its yellow face glowed to life. The little light seemed like a spotlight in her eyes, and she squinted against it as her eyes adjusted.