them all, and for a moment they seemed to observe a spontaneous moment of silence for those who weren’t coming back with them.
“Jacob ripped his suit through sheer, dumb, stupid carelessness after I repeatedly warned him to wait for the right tool for the right job,” David began. “Maybe if Lou had been with us, Jacob would’ve likely heeded Lou, but as you all know, for reasons none of us understood, Lou switched us around like a deck of cards last minute. I assume now that was something put into his head, along with this night dive, by Kelly Irvin—or rather the thing controlling her.”
“Whoa, hold up, there David. What thing are you talking about?” Bowman wanted to know.
“I’ll get back to that. As for Jacob, he went nuts on me when he saw those Bentleys and Renaults in the hold. Ironically, one of the cars killed him.”
Fiske and Jens wanted the details of how a hundred year old car could kill a man in the deep. David told the story, finishing with, “It’ll all replay on the video from my cam.”
“You saw the cars, really? How’d they look?” asked Bowman, sounding a bit insensitive.
“Fine! Damn it, so fine they got Mendenhall killed. He was mesmerized by them.”
“Imploded, damn… .gotta be a bloody, nasty way to go,” said Fiske.
“Poor sonofabitch!” agreed Jens but not a word out of Lena.
“Bad luck,” added Will, trying to redeem himself.
“Jacob didn’t suffer—didn’t know what hit him. As for Dr. Irvin, I killed her with my laser knife beam, but only after she tried to kill Lou and me.”
This caused a wave of gasps to bounce around the cabin, and David, watching Lena for fear Bowman and Entebbe were right—that she might have a full blown medical condition building, made no response to this revelation whatsoever. He decided she was doing as Entebbe instructed, attempting meditation therapy, keeping her eyes averted from others yet examining her surroundings as if new to the place. David watched her closely in his overhead mirror.
At the same time, David continued his tale. “She was the killer, all along—or rather since Alandale.”
“Since we discovered Alandale’s body, you mean?” asked Bowman.
“Alandale was infected, and she spent time with him, and he infected her, but only after Alandale had been infected by Houston Ford. It fits the timeline; it was just after Alandale’s body was discovered that Kelly targeted Lou, influencing him, getting him to go along with her wild plans. Before that, she was enlisting my help to destroy the thing.”
“You’re not making a whole helluva lot of sense, Ingles,” Bowman assured him.
“Damn it, Will, she was the carrier—the disease that killed Alandale, Ford transferred to him. She didn’t bring it aboard, but it somehow learned that she was a serious threat to it.”
“But you said she attempted to kill Lou, and after that, she tried to kill you,” countered Bowman with the others closely listening to both men.
David realized the others hadn’t enough facts; they knew nothing of the journal or how ancient this threat was. “My cam-recorded video! When you see it topside, it’ll tell the whole story—as will the sound feed from my helmet.”
“She was killed—not by the depths,” began Bowman, “not by
“Damnit, Bowman, she… she wasn’t a she; she was an it…”
“An it?”
“A thing, a creature, a killing machine.”
“Ingles, you’re sounding like a psycho nutcase!” Bowman snarled at him. “Are you sure Mendenhall died the way you say? God, and we’ve got you at the controls here… damn!”
“Bowman, the pressure reduced them to dead flesh the size of… the size of a newborn mouse but hard as granite.”
“She had me convinced that Ingles was some sort of monster,” moaned Swigart, doing his level best to corroborate David’s story. “When we got below deck level out of your and Mendenhall’s sight, she had some device, a remote that took us offline. And she had a spear gun, which when she raised it at me, I knocked out of her hands. That’s when she shoved my head so hard into an iron wall, that I literally passed out from the backlash to my head. She thought she’d finished me off by snatching down some heavy debris over my body. She had enormous strength.”
David realized only now that Forbes had done a piss poor job of explaining things to the second dive team, and that they’d come aboard knowing nothing of what had gone on during the black out of communications.
“How do we know that David wasn’t the one who set us all up to die down here, huh?” It was Lena, suddenly shouting at the top of her voice, out of control, pointing a shaking finger at David.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” shouted David. “Will, you saw me reading that journal in my quarters, the one I kept from you.”
“What journal are you talking about?”
“I stuffed it behind a wall panel in our berth aboard
“No… no I didn’t.”
“Well maybe if you hadn’t been playing house with Lena, you might’ve!” Ingles shouted, his temper unleashed. “Damn it, Will, you know I’m no killer.”
“Tell that to Terry Wilcox,” muttered Lena, her eyes now like those of a snake.
“If I could reach you, Lena, I’d slap your face raw for that! Damn you!”
“Take it easy! Easy!” shouted Jens. “We’ll sort everything out topside.”
Lena glared at David, a look that could kill.
“Lena, listen to me,” he implored, trying to reason with her. “Dr. Kelly Irvin placed that journal in my hands in order to earn my trust, to put me at ease around her while she… while she killed Alandale for sustenance, followed by Ford, and she—or rather it—it came for hundreds if not thousands of egg-sacs down here lost on
Forbes shouted from above, “Ingles, get control of yourself—your vitals are going wild, and you’ve got Max pushed to the limit. If you hit the surface at your present speed, you’ll all go flying over my bow!”
David realized that Forbes was right, of course, but just as he started to slow Max, he saw movement out the corner of his eye. Something wobbling, squirming. “Jesus, tell me you picked up a sturgeon out there in your net, Lena! Will! What the hell’ve you two done?”
“We discovered some sort of new life form!” shouted Bowman. “It’s our discovery. Found it together, didn’t we, babe? Found in a frozen state in the aft freezers.”
“Oh dear God!” David went white, realizing only now that the stewards, pursers, junior officers, and some senior officers would most certainly have taken victim bodies to the closest refrigerated compartment as they would be nine city blocks apart from one another.
“The airlock, now! Jettison those bloody things outta the airlock! Now before it’s too laaa—”
Too late.
Already the most evolved of the eggs exploded outward, splatting onto every surface like a black, oily eruption, including on Will’s suit, moving at eye-blinking speed, searching for a way into a host organism— squirming, crawling, and going for the unprotected face and orifices.
Will raised his laser cutter, but he could not risk hitting Lena or anyone else with it. Everyone in the sub was screaming, their masks off now and breathing in the fresh oxygen.
“Cover your head!” Ingles shouted at Lena. “Put your helmets back on!”
But it was too late for Fiske as the a globule the size of a pancake leapt from Will’s hazmat suit to strike Fiske full in the face and disappear in rivulet-fashion through his ear, which he desperately tried to prevent without success as there was no getting hold of this thing.
Amid the screams from everyone in the cabin a second and a third egg hatched and began flying about the small space, David grabbed hold of Lou’s headgear and placed it on him.
At the same time, Forbes warned from above that David must slow the ascent. “You’ll all die of the
