He wrenched his eyes up to her face. She was watching him impassively, her head slightly cocked.
Enjoying the view? her expression seemed to say. There was no recrimination in it, just a vague sense of mirth.
“What did I say?” Luke asked. “When I was sleeping, I mean.”
“Get behind me.” She smiled as if to say it wasn’t anything he ought to be embarrassed about. “Get behind me where it’s safe or something like that.”
5.
THE CHALLENGER LEVELED OFF. They were presently over twenty thousand feet undersea. Luke heard sly pops and crackles, the sound of Rice Krispies doused in milk.
“Relax, that’s just the foam,” Al said. “It’s compressing to bear the strain.”
The view was disorienting. Profound, terrible darkness. What could possibly live down here? Luke pictured the water rolling away for miles in every direction, empty and pitiless. This stratum was cleansed of nearly all the fundamental assets that foster life—sunlight, warmth, air, food—so the only creatures that lived in it should be, by definition, less than whole. Their skin would be jellylike; Luke imagined bodies draped in a thin stretching of greased latex, like condom skin. He almost laughed at the idea of schools of condom fish flitting through the deeps—
Tink!
Something struck the porthole’s glass, then pelted away.
Tink! Tink!
“Do you hear that?” he whispered.
Al’s voice was tight. “Viperfish, I’m thinking.”
The water exploded with frenzied movement.
Tink! Tink! Ti-tin-ti-ti-tink! Tink! TINK!
Luke recoiled as quicksilver flashes smashed into the glass.
Ti-tin-t-t-t-ti-TI-ti-TIN-TINK!
It sounded as if they were being shelled with machine-gun fire.
“Al, hey, is this normal?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty unnerving,” she said. “We’ll be okay. Viperfish are the undersea version of wolverines. They’ll attack anything, even if it’s a hundred times their size.”
Just then, a viperfish got snagged before the glass. Its jaws—huge, sickle shaped, fearsomely toothy—were enmeshed in the foam. The creature was long and eelish, with fluted gills and oily black eyes socked in a polished-steel face. It was the most predatory thing Luke had ever seen.
“They’re mean as catshit,” Al said. “And I’d say we’ve hit a swarm of them.”
TINK! Ti-ti-ti-TINK!
“I’ve never seen so many of them. They’re fixing to tear that foam to shreds. We gotta boogie, Luke. Hold on.”
The Challenger plummeted. Luke caught a flash of the massing school of viperfish: a glowing sheet of bodies staggered into the water, tens of thousands of whiplike fish darting furiously about.
The sounds ceased as Al stabilized the vessel.
Tink!
“Fucking things,” said Al. “We must be in a cone of them—there’s no way they could drop that fast.”
Again, the Challenger plunged. The pressure built in Luke’s ears. That tickle returned to his bones, becoming quite painful now.
“Hold on,” Al said. “I’m feeling it, too.”
Luke’s gums tightened around his teeth until he was sure they’d shatter. The plates of his skull ground together.
Al stabilized the sub again. She shot a look down at Luke. A rill of blood, as thin as a pencil line, was trickling out of her nose.
“You’re bleeding,” Luke said.
She wiped it away. “Yeah, you, too.”
Luke wiped his nose. His fingers came away clean.
“Higher,” said Al.
Luke felt wetness leaking from his eye. He wiped away a single, bloody tear. “Am I bleeding from my eye?”
Al nodded. “You’ll be fine. Happens a lot down here. The blood comes out of you in funny, nontraditional places.”
Luke wiped the bloody tear on his overalls. “That will take some getting used to.”
They waited for those dreadful tinks! to resume. When they didn’t, Luke’s heartbeat settled into its normal rhythm. Al jimmied the controls and got the Challenger dropping again at a more leisurely rate. Water shushed against the hull, causing the foam to issue splintery popping sounds. Luke blinked and swiped a finger under his eye. A watery rill of blood tracked across his fingertip, warm and—
SWACK!
Luke jolted in his seat. Something entirely different was stuck to the glass now. A band of albino tissue, shockingly thick.
“What the—” Al said as the Challenger juddered. “Oh, are you shitting me?”
The band thinned out as it flexed across the glass. Eight inches across, with a vein running under its skin that was so black it could’ve been filled with ink. Studded all along it were disks—they reminded Luke of the plastic suction cups you’d use to stick sun-catchers to your kitchen windows.
“It’s a giant squid,” Al said, although Luke somehow knew that already. “I didn’t think we’d encounter one this far down.”
The Challenger rattled. An alarm shrilled.
“For the love of fuck!” said Al, the words exiting her mouth with a brittle snip. She flicked a switch and the vessel went dark.
Luke’s lungs locked up as an icy ball of terror crystallized in his chest. It was as if the sea itself had slid inside the Challenger, filling his eyes and throat and brain.
The squid’s tentacle sluuurped across the glass. A shape shot out—THACK!—snapping violently. It was the squid’s beak, which resembled that of an enormous parrot.
THACK!—harder this time.
Luke waited for the glass to crack and his life to end.
The lights flicked on.
“I thought it might leave us alone if we went dark,” Al said in a low voice. “Let’s try the opposite.”
She hit the spotlights. They didn’t illuminate much, despite their incredible intensity—a pall of sickly light picked up a patina of deep-sea sediment that swirled like dust in an enormous room.
The squid immediately detached and vanished with one convulsive flex. Luke got a split-second sense of its size: stunningly long, torsional and many limbed, whipping into the darkness like a bullet train speeding into a tunnel.
“Hold on,” Al said, and again they dropped.
They seemed to be falling even faster—the depth gauge near Luke’s head spun wildly, around and around like a cartoon clock. Al was busy with the readouts; thankfully, it appeared neither the squid nor viperfish had dealt the Challenger a terminal blow.
Shock-sweat had broken out all over Luke’s body. Tiny beads of moisture clung to the hull, too.
“The sub’s sweating,” he said.
“That’s normal,” Al said tersely. “Condensation. Our breath. Cold as a witch’s tit down here. Minus thirty or so.”
“Doesn’t the water freeze?”
“Never with saltwater. Not this deep.”
Al shut the spotlights off, plunging the sea into darkness again.
“Wow. That was the weirdest thing,” she said, exhaling heavily. “You have to understand—this is like the desert down here. It’s barren. Picture it this way: we’re a pin dropped into an Olympic swimming pool almost totally devoid of life. So why and how we’ve run across all these critters… it’s just weird. And that they’d attack us… The viperfish I get, but the squid? And back-to-back like that? No. Just no.”