Seawater

I ducked beneath whirring helicopter blades and shook my head at an advancing officer, indicating I couldn’t hear his shouts of welcome through the din. We hastened together from the helipad as I reached him, and I pulled the PPE out of my ears and stowed them in my pocket, adjusting my pack with a sharp shake of my shoulders.

The officer seemed just shy of seven feet tall, straight-backed despite the height and balding. His facial features were pinched, as though someone had taken his facial features, selected and shrunken them. He threw up a salute and cleared his throat gruffly. “Boffin Bell? Lieutenant Commander McGuaran. Am I glad to see you. Hell, we all are. Hopefully you can get to the nitty gritty of this and get us back shipshape.” He grinned.

I returned the salute. “Lieutenant Commander. I hope so too. The reports I received weren’t quite detailed.” My last words were on the dry side. Keeping information off comm channels was understandable, but for me to be walking – or rather, flying – into the unknown was never comfortable. McGuaran frowned. “The confidentiality was necessary. We don’t quite understand the situation ourselves.”

The messages transferred to my lab in Gibraltar had been cryptic. All I’d been asked to do was bring my equipment and have my scanners primed for use. “Well, I’m here now.”

“And you’re early. Good thing too, there’s a storm system settling in!” McGuaran shouted, raising his voice to be heard above the sounds of the helicopter taking off again. I watched the giant metal bird lift into a gray sky lined with the gold of retreating day. It flew off above a surging black sea spanning for miles outward.

“The winds pushed us to an earlier ETA, better than the alternative.” Slipping my pack off, I unzipped it to fumble for a bottle of water and uncapped it to take a deep swig and wipe my mouth with a sleeve.

The landing ship felt solid beneath my feet. After a few hours in flight, I was grateful for such an anchor. The air was my third least preferred place to be, with the second being out at sea. Though as the seconds passed and I steadied myself, I began to feel the slight list of the large ship from side to side and almost wished I were back in the air.

McGuaran led me along the side of the ship toward a set of stairs that presumably lowered into the belly of the beast. “Picked the asset up off the coastline past Almeria. Man overboard, or so it seemed. It was dark. We pulled up a dark mass that moaned and groaned like any man, covered head to foot with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam.” He lowered his voice. “A man, but… no man at all.” My eyes widened.

The Ogden was near four-hundred feet long, porpoise gray along her flanks and cut through the water like a knife through butter. She was staffed with two full crews to pull day and night, equipped with the highest level of advanced communications. Such a ship was commissioned and then employed to transport troops, landing craft, or in the case of the Ogden, cargo.

Its full-length flight deck broadcast her as more of an aircraft facility, but more ships nowadays were being commissioned with flight decks and landing pads included. It was what was within her that mattered. Both to the Navy, and today, to me.

Our boots thudded against the thick desk of the ship, and I felt the reverberations of our presence through it. Ships felt much like living leviathans, unlike aircraft swayed by the skies, for the strong liquid surge surrounding it and ushering it through the world’s tides. “And his appearance? The report didn’t say…”

“You’ll see soon enough,” came McGuaran’s answer.

I noticed an elevator nearby, lights off, with yellow tape crossed over its center. Shame. I would have preferred not to establish my sea legs while clambering down flights of stairs. I opened my mouth to comment on it as we passed and in the same moment, caught a glance of faded streaks leaving it against the floor. I swallowed. It could have been brown, could have been purple, could have been red. Either way, what looked like smeared splashes had been stripped off the floor with a harsh-smelling cleaner.

“Don’t ask,” said the Lieutenant Commander, noticing my wandering eye. A chill travelled down my spine. Biting my lip, I transferred my focus to the stairs descending into the dark, and on steadying my now trembling knees.

I was led down two decks, and we circled to the center of the third. The lights were dim, walkways lit only by flickering fluorescence along the floor. I saw rooms of flickering monitors, slipped past others empty or blocked off. Soon, the halls opened out into a wide room, full of crates and barrels, packaged goods or weapons stored for a time during which a shore landing would require support.

This was it.

A cage sat in the middle, covered by a thick grey tarp. McGuaran gestured to it. “All yours, boffin.”

I placed my pack on a nearby crate, withdrawing what looked to be a second backpack from it. This was my scanning equipment, technology far beyond anything I could have imagined utilizing in my youth. Age, matter make-up, chemical component checks, temperature gauges, cameras, millions of dollars had been poured into the black box I now strapped onto my back, and into the glowing green scanners I now holstered at each hip. The lieutenant watched silently.

The memory of the stains by the broken elevator came to mind, along with words of caution from a report written in the hand of one Operative Peakes from overseas. I shuddered again. My heart began to beat loudly in my chest. If some part of me hadn’t known, some part of me had hoped. I could feel the sweat of anticipation gathering against my hairline.

I stepped close to the cage, my heart and stomach now both taking up space in my throat, and pushed the tarp aside.

The research in my Gibraltar lab had been fast-tracked by the reports of Operative Peakes. Project notes from the IBUC before a discontinued project in America had been fragmented and nearly lost after an explosion, but they’d all, by some miracle, found their way to my desk.

The deformed body of what had once been the child Mason Lofstrom flashed before my eyes, a warped photo from the IBUC. The being before me, however, was older, had been older when he’d turned. Into… whatever this creature was now.

His back was arched. Green and grey rotting scales had seemingly erupted all over its body in bursts, though dark patches of skin yet lingered. Grotesque, shedding and regenerating all at the same time, the creature rippled even as it sat still. Gills gaped down the sides of its neck. It lay prone on its side, barely a face to be found, and yet a mouth materialized and gaped dryly, showing a series of broken, serrated teeth.

Mesmerizing. I turned my scanners on with a whir, removing both from their holsters and began to hold them in the air, moving their green, glowing light over the form in the cage. “You said he moaned and groaned like any man. Did he make any other sounds?”

“When it came to,” McGuaran said, seeming reluctant to humanize the thing, “it grew crazed, thrashed about in our grasps. Had to subdue it, tranquilize it, sedate it before it would hurt someone. And I tell you, the scream that came from it was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. If it had clothes at one time, they’re long grown through now.”

“Yes,” I said abruptly, “but the scream. Tell me what it felt like, Lieutenant Commander? Did it sound like…” I cut myself off. Don’t confabulate, I warned myself. That’s not how you get the truth. But suddenly I was desperate for it.

“It felt…” McGuaran searched for words to appropriately describe the sensation it had left behind, and without him having to say anything, I already knew. The feeling such a scream left behind, as noted by Operative Peakes, was indescribable.

My left scanner beeped. I consulted a readout from the black box on my back. “Male, but we knew that much. Forties. The scales are blocking the genetic read, I can’t tell the ethnicity either.”

“Can’t believe that thing’s human, truly.” McGuaran shook his head.

“He’s not, really. Not anymore.” I ran the right scanner up over the cage and pressed my face a little closer toward the bars in my excitement. A real specimen, and alive. It was history in the making.

“How does something like this happen? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

I nodded. “One case. America. A kid.”

“Jesus, a kid? What happened?”

“It’s a long story. Where did you find him again?”

“Almeria. Off the coast. Do you think...?"

Suddenly, the light of both scanners dimmed. The green glow faded and returned nearly immediately, but not before another light entered the room. Cold, calculating, cunning and cruel. I swallowed and my gaze slowly lowered to the face of darkness.

Under the light of the room, hollow, filmed-over eyes emerged, grey, empty, glazed, and blinked once.

And then the creature screamed.

My blood began to sing in my ears. My body went rigid. Such control! I marveled at it despite myself, despite the pain raging through my veins.

A gunshot went off. Lieutenant McGuaran shouted. My muscles were tensed too hard for me to turn around, but out of the corner of my eye I saw one of his arms spasming and caught the figures of four or five others sprinting into the room, their weapons drawn, firing toward the cage. Neither of us had time to warn them before they too were caught in the range of the creature's cry.

The bars of the cage were vibrating, shaking, trembling, as the creature looked at me. It slid itself to a crouched position. The scales along its body suddenly darkened, and as it closed its mouth, the Lieutenant Commander and I fell to the ground. One of my scanners smashed against the floor and I swore, blearily trying to regain my faculties.

McGuaran was floundering to his feet. "Caution!" He bellowed, holding an arm to prevent his officers from firing again. "Don't provoke it! We can't take another-"

It was too late. His shouts had scared it. With another scream, the creature launched itself at the bars, swiped at it with elongated limbs hardened by the shining scales upon them, and shattered what had suddenly become very fragile protection between us and the beast.

It came for me first. Savage, how scientific curiosity can become such a crutch in the face of danger. I could have run, but the tiniest part of my mind whispered: Observe.

Stained teeth gripped my closest arm and the pain was so great I nearly slid into the void. We were surrounded by soldiers and blood was speckling the floor. Arms made to grab for me, bayonets were thrust at the creature and another scream sent us all to the floor, but broke off abruptly as the creature removed its teeth from me and it saw its way to freedom through the door across the room. Without looking back, it fled.

"Stop it!" I shouted, gasping aloud in pain as I wrenched my injured arm upward. "Take it alive or dead but do NOT let it back into the sea! I need to study it! I need to know how it's alive! I need to know!"

McGuaran and his men took off, and after struggling to my feet, I too fought my way up the stairs.

The deck of the ship was in complete disarray as I heaved myself out into the fresh air. The sea was choppy, and thunder boomed in the distance. Rain was dancing in the dark and I could barely breathe for the tension in the air.

I was no fighter. I sidled up against a wall and waited helplessly for a moment to catch my breath. The soldiers were still clanking around shouting, searching helplessly in the wet night. I'd assigned them an unthinkable task. McGuaran wouldn't soon forget this.

And then, I heard it. A low, keening sound, a sound born of an empty, unknowing heart.

The dark, writhing mass of man and scale stood looking over the edge of the ship, watching the thick, black seawater swell and foam against the keel. Under the strobing ship searchlights torching the shadows and a faint green glow from nearby, the darkness flinched and twitched. But it wasn’t until the LSD Ogden’s claxons began to blare that he took a single step ahead.

"No! Stay!" I held my dangling left arm to my chest with my right, ignoring the white-hot pain stabbing into the nerves, and limped forward into the blur. The alarms and flashing lights gave the mass away, lit it when it only desired more of itself. The dark. The hunger of gloom. I seethed in a breath and immediately choked it out, blood mingled with the air from my lungs and spattering against the deck.

It’s always raining in movies during climactic moments such as this. I always thought it intentional, to add to the drama, to tear your heart to pieces, but in reality, the universe is melodramatic. Karmic forces I will never truly comprehend have a sense of irony and of grandeur that born nature can only grasp at, like children, to parallel.

"McGuaran!" I screamed. "He's here!"

There is so much we do not understand.

The rain lashed out so hard that each drop was a cutting whip, soaking me to my core absolute.

I needed to prove he was real. I need to know how he lived.

Lightning forked high overhead, swept down through the clouds and struck the water ahead. The darkness stirred. “No!” I choked again. The ship seized against the waves, throwing me off my balance. I fell forward onto my injured arm, bracing as though it would have helped, and screamed.

The creature turned to the sound of my pain, and met mine with its own. Stretching its mouth wide open and baring sharp, stained teeth, it released its terrorizing screech.

My bones were rattled to the marrow. Every fibre of my being vibrated, billions of nerve endings firing off all at once, and the shriek seemed to last forever. The claxons continued to ring. Sounds of the crew screaming with me, screaming with the darkness, met the air.

My vision blurred again, and with the last flare of a searchlight, I watched the creature straighten its back, bend its knees, and….

jump.