“THAT’S THEM!!!” Jerry screamed! His voice breaking as he clung onto me like a child. “Those two… Shoot them! Quick! They’ll damn us all to hell!”
“Jerry you little shit! Of course, you managed to weasel your way here!” The younger of the pair yelled back. “Lester you should have let me throw him overboard back when I said so!”
“YOU DID THROW ME OVERBOARD!”
“I MEANT SOONER DICKHEAD!”
“Look, if everyone can just stay calm for a moment… I’m sure we can talk this out… We’ve found ourselves in a very nasty situation, and panicking won’t-“ The older of the two began to say, before Jerry once again cut him off.
“DON’T LISTEN TO THEIR LIES!!!” He screamed. “THEY POISONED MY CAPTAIN’S MIND! THEY BROUGHT US INTO THIS MESS! IT WAS THEM! WE NEED TO ACT NOW!”
“How about you stop hiding behind captain greybeard then and fucking try it Jerry!” The young one shot back. “Come on! See how it goes for ya…”
“Sawyer! For the love of god SHUT UP!” The old one yelled at the young one.
“No God here Lester!” The one named Sawyer said. “Whaddo we need em for? Cannon fodder? I say we spare them all the wasted breath! …Especially Jerry…”
“We need to kill them Richard!” Jerry said, looking up at me with desperation in his eyes. “We need to kill them now!”
“No one needs to kill anyone!” The old one said with a nervous chuckle.
“QUIET YOU DEMON!” Jerry cried.
“JERRY IF YOU DON’T FUCKING SHUT THAT HOLE ON YOUR FACE I’M GOING TO BREAK IT!” Sawyer yelled.
Suddenly, the Titan ship let out a loud groan, causing everyone to fall silent.
Then the floor lurched down, so swiftly everyone in the room quickly lost balance and was sent hurdling into the opposing wall.
-
“Everyone off the main Deck!” I shouted into the loudspeaker. “Inside the ship! Now!”
Lighting flashed overhead, giving a brief but chilling picture of our pursuer. The titan’s haul was black as obsidian. Kelp, coral, and barnacles attached to its side like it was pulled from the seafloor. Though my glimps of its structure was brief, I saw on the surface of its haul, what looked like a million tiny pieces moving together, like the complex rotating gears of a clock.
More concerning though was the Jaws. The man we’d pulled from the water hadn’t lied. Its Bow stretched open, dawning a pair of jagged metal teeth that gleamed in the flash of light.
“CAN WE GO ANY FASTER!?” Jerry yelled from my side.
“ENGINES GOING AT FULL CAPACITY!” I yelled back. “THIS IS AS FAST AS SHE’LL GO!”
We were sailing blind. The fog we’d found ourselves in had not been kind enough to clear when the storm hit. Now the waves themselves towered over our ship, hindering our sight even further. Rain crashed down on the windows of the wheelhouse. The wind blew with such fury it had nearly sent two of my men flying off deck.
And all the while, behind us, what was almost certain to be our death, was getting closer.
We had just breached the top of a swell when we saw it. Behind the wave was hidden another doomed ship, directly in our path. No chance to avoid it, barely enough time for me to warn my crew to brace. We skidded down the swell, and smashed our bow right in the center of her haul.
The windows shattered. The men went flying. My body crashed into the main wheel, Jerrry smacking into me from behind. A few of the crew screamed as they went flying out the now broken windows. The neighboring ship snapped in half from the force of our blow. Leaving those still onboard with the shrill screeching of metal as our ship scraped through the wreck.
We had only a moment to gather ourselves after the collision. Before the pair of floodlights beaming on us from behind became blinding.
CRUNCH
Only seconds after the collision had shot us forward, we were sent flying backward, as the hell ship bit down on the rear end of our haul.
I remember my life flashing before my eyes as what remained of our ship turned vertical before sinking into the cold depths below. I grasped the main wheel like it was my lifeline. Those of my crew that hadn’t fallen to the deep clinging on to whatever they could for dear life as we all hung downwards. Then, those cruel floodlights blinded us once again. Before everything went dark.
-
Forty-six of us climbed aboard when we first went out to sea. After the collision with the neighboring ship. The Metal Jaws of the monster ripping our boat to pieces… When the titan first shut its jaws around us, we only saw darkness at first, then fire. Fire and a thousand hooks and gears descended upon what remained of our haul and shredded through our steel like it were paper, dragging the torn chunks of our ship into the flames. It made no discern for whether it grabbed metal or flesh. Its metal appendages slicing through any man in its way like butter. We abandoned the ship, jumping for the floor of the beast’s mouth where we landed in a pool of seawater and blood.
Forty-six of us boarded when we went to sea. When the titan had finished disemboweling our vessel, and pulled the last chunks of broken steel into the hellfire of its gut, six of us, including myself and Jerry, remained to watch her voyage end.
We were deafened by the shrill sound of scraping metal, as the jaws opened again. Seawater hit us like a tidal wave, blasting us back like paper in the wind, as the bow of the ship we’d sailed into was washed into the monster’s mouth.
When the stranger ship was gone, the water began to drain away. Leaving us to see two new faces staring back at us.
-
“Our friend Jerry claims you two pulled something from the water…” I said to Lester.
The haul of our capture groaned, not the chilling animalist groans we’d heard before, but the creaking groan of metal adjusting itself to new pressure. I can only assume we were diving deep.
“He speaks the truth,” Lester replied. “Me and my associate were… Hunting something… For the sake of simplicity, we felt it best to conceal our intentions while on board his ship. Though… given the current situation we all find ourselves in. I believe that’s no longer necessary…”
The eight of us sat opposed to each other, licking our wounds from the drop. For the most part, we had only endured a few bruises. However, one of our deckhands, a pour boy named Ray, seemed to have broken a leg.
“He means to say he goofed!” Sawyer chimed in from Lester’s side. Lester let out a groan.
“What went wrong?” I asked. “And what exactly did you pull from the water?”
“It’s… hard to explain…” Lester replied. “You see… well…”
“Oh just let me tell him what happened!” Sawyer interrupted him. “We were trying to kill something out here. Call it a deity, entity, demon, whatever… Anyway, Lester here claims he knows how to find it. So we all wake up at four in the bloody morning, drag this thing up that looks like it came out of a Lovecraftian wet dream, shoot it! And then we find out we basically just shot its dog instead…”
Everyone stared at Sawyer in silence.
“That… is fairly accurate… yeah…” Lester chimed in. “We believe the entity we were originally searching for, is somewhere onboard controlling this ship.”
“Right now it’s going all fucking John Wick on everything,” Sawyer added.
“Sounds like it’s after you.” Jerry suddenly cut in. Everyone turned to look at him. “Sounds like you started this mess… brought the rest of us into this through your ignorance!” He growled.
Sawyer began to look annoyed again, while Lester’s expression changed to concern.
“We need to deal with them!” He pleaded to me again. “You heard them say it, where only in this mess because these two killed whatever is up there’s PET!”
“Try something, Jerry…” Sawyer taunted, his face twisting into a grin. “Go on, see how it goes!”
“HEY! No one needs to try anything!” Lester cut in. “We’re all in this together now! You think if it gets us you’re all just gonna get a nice ferry ride back to the shore?”
I looked to my remaining crew. Four terrified sailors stared back at me. I shared their fear, but now was not the time to show it. Whether or not we could trust the two men responsible for our situation was not something I knew, in fact, under most circumstances, I would have been much more inclined to agree with Jerry.
These were far from normal circumstances, however… Even though I didn’t the pair, I had even less faith in our odds where we to try and escape our predicament alone.
“So what’s your plan?” I asked the pair.
The two smiled. “Kill it before it kills us!” Sawyer replied.
-
The inside of the ship’s mouth was connected to the rest of the interior by one single air-tight door. Its wheel was rough to open but we managed. We stepped into one if its corridors. Thousands upon thousands of tiny little lights were scattered about the ceiling like the eyes of a spider. Giving the corridor a faint eerie glow. Portholes lined its outer wall, giving us an uncalming view into the darkness of the water around us. The walls themselves, like the ship’s outer hull, were comprised of millions upon millions of moving parts, seeming to descend in size infinitely when I stared down into them. Like its outer hull, they were black as obsidian.
We had but moments to admire our surroundings, before a noise down the hall made us freeze in place. Skittering. Metal tapping on metal. Something was coming our way…