“Frank, you good?”
I hadn’t appreciated how different it would be under the water’s surface. With so much trash overhead, the sun was barely visible, and my eyes struggled to adjust after the blinding light of the Pacific sun. It was nearly pitch-black, and the water was cloudy from all the sediment and microplastics. It reduced visibility to a few metres, and Adam and Hanna looked like little more than blurry shapes in the dark even though they were no more than a few feet away.
“I’m okay.”
It was second nature to keep my mouth shut underwater and I knew it was going to be some time before I got used to talking in these new diving masks. Adam and Hanna nodded at each other, and both turned their lights on. To my relief, visibility improved enough that if I squinted, I could see who was who based on either a slim or muscular silhouette. Hanna gently glided over and tapped her helmet to remind me to turn my own light on. I fumbled for the switch, and it lit up revealing her blue eyes smiling at me as she floated a few feet away. I caught a glimpse of her smiling blue eyes and was reminded of why Discovery execs were scouting her as a potential tv presenter.
“Much better,” she laughed as she checked that I was securely attached to the dive line. “See it’s not so bad, is it?”
“Is he good?” Adam asked her, and she gave the ‘okay’ sign to let him know I was. Still, Adam looked me up and down and asked directly, “Frank, you good buddy?”
I managed a gentle nod.
“We need to be careful,” Adam said as he floated over and took hold of where my suit clipped onto the dive line “The masks will let us talk to each other and the ship while underwater, but it won’t give the sound any sense of distance or direction so it can be pretty disorientating. Now, listen to me carefully. Do not unclip yourself from the dive line. If you break the surface there’ll be a foot of trash, at least, blocking your view for 360 degrees. You won’t be able to see the ship, and you do not want to get lost out here.”
Only the last few words got through my mental fog. My heart was racing and even under the wet suit I could feel shivers crawling across my skin. We floated in a cloud of suffocating plastic snow lit only by the occasional slither of sun as the sea parted the trash overhead.
I could feel a confusing mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. We were trapped between the vast open void below and the ceiling of trash overhead. My movement was sluggish, and all around me the hazy abyss flickered with constant motion that I tried to track and make sense of. These were warm waters, I thought. There had to be life all around us and surely it couldn’t all be friendly? Jellyfish. Sharks. Parasites galore. The sea was filled with all sorts of nasty shit, and it had to be out there somewhere, aware of us.
As if it was summoned by my anxious thoughts, something strange caught my eye, floating far away at the very limits of my vision. A flicker of motion, shifting patterns of light my brain correlated with or without sufficient evidence. By the time I turned to look fully in its direction it had already gone. The only sense it left me with was one of great size.
“Frank?”
Adam poked me with a finger.
“Dude are you okay?”
I turned to see the two other divers staring at me.
“I’m good,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
-
It was with great relief I found my hand touching the side of the ship once more. It had been an hour since we left, and I’d made sure to point and shoot at every little thing Hanna told me too. Now it was over I couldn’t wait to get out of that damned water. My anxiety had caused me to babble on endlessly about random crap, and more than once Hanna had basically told me to shut up. But after a few minutes I’d start up again, yammering on about any old thing just to keep my mind off my fear. It didn’t help that I kept seeing something lingering at the very edge of my sight, circling at a distance while refusing to solidify into anything I might recognise.
Adam noticed that I was distracted, and he gave my arm a tap to get my attention.
“Frank you’re last because the equipment is so heavy. That way I can help the others bring you up.”
“Ah shit, really?” I groaned.
“You can take it off,” he replied. “We’ll take you up separately to the equipment.”
I clutched at my cameras protectively. They were how I made a living, and I wasn’t letting them go easily.
“No, I’ll be last,” I said.
“Right, well… don’t go wandering off,” he said and both he and Hanna laughed. I chuckled as well, but I grabbed the dive line and checked I was still attached to the ship just in case. By the time I looked back Adam was already being lifted out of the water by three pairs of eager hands. Hanna stayed beside me until Adam gave us the okay and just as quickly, she reached her arms into the air and left the water.
“Holy shit.”
Adam’s voice in my ear. I swivelled expecting him right beside me, but he must have left his helmet on, and I could hear him talking to the others on deck.
“What the fuck is that?” someone cried in the background, but there was a clamour of voices and gasps that made my blood run cold. Helpless and paranoid that they were talking about something in the water, I turned sluggishly to catch sight of what might be behind me.
But there was only a wall of trash one foot high.
“…it’s… no way… not out this…. Here… doesn’t belong…”
I pushed myself closer to the ship and reached up, but no one was there to grab me. I started to slap the hull, desperate to get their attention, but no one was coming. Whatever they’d seen, I’d fallen to the bottom of the priority list. When I screamed into my radio, I was only one of a dozen people shouting for attention. Even worse, I caught a snippet of what Adam was saying.
Shark.
“Shark!?” I cried into my headset. “Guys did you just fucking say shark!?”
I pushed my back to the ship and ducked under water to see what might be nearby. There was only open water stretching off into a deep dark blue beneath my feet. For a second there I lost myself staring into those abyssal waters until a flicker of movement caught my attention and I scanned the water around me. That was when something strange emerged out of the murky distance. A torpedo shaped monstrosity far larger than anything else I had expected. Whatever this thing was, it was the size of a school bus with fins as large as my chest.
“Frank, it’s a whale shark!” Hanna cried joyfully into my headset. “Oh my god that’s incredible they never come out this far.”
“What the fuck is a whale shark?” I whispered, terrified of attracting this leviathan’s attention.
“It’s harmless,” Hanna replied. “Utterly harmless, I promise you Frank. It won’t hurt you. That’s incredible!”
She was giggling.
“It’s a filter feeder,” Adam interjected. “Curious, but friendly. Frank, it won’t hurt you. It might even play with you.”
Hanna was babbling on in the background. Whether she was right about the gentle giant or not didn’t matter to me. The whale shark disappeared into the filthy water and my skin crawled with the knowledge it might still be circling close by.
Having had enough, I threw my hands above the surface of the water and screamed,
“Get me the fuck out of this water now!”
Adam and someone else must have registered the sheer panic in my voice because I was suddenly being lifted up. I had my hand on the bottom lip of the deck when Adam’s eyes went wide, and the crewmember beside him shrieked, dropped my arm, and began to scrabble backwards. Panicking, I snatched at Adam with both arms and held on, forcing him to use all his strength just to stop the two of us pitching into the water.
Just as I thought we would lose the fight, I suddenly started to rise without effort. A current from below started to buoy me upwards, and I caught a glimpse of a mouth wider than a door lurching up towards me. I became so afraid that my whole body went numb and for a few brief seconds it felt as if I was watching the whole scene from outside my own body. I noted with detached horror that the shark’s rubbery mouth had already reached my waist, but to Adam’s credit he kept a grip on me and took advantage of the shark’s upward momentum to pull me the rest of the way before that grotesque yawning mouth could snap shut around me.
I hit the deck in a state of pure shock and looked down expecting my legs to be torn to shreds.
“Did it… did it bite me?” I stammered.
“They have no teeth,” Hanna explained. “They can’t… it couldn’t possibly have mistaken you for food. It must have been an accident.”
“It’s dead.”
Adam was leaning over the rails and shaking his head. I struggled to process what he said, so I dragged myself up and flopped over to the edge where the monster lay on its side. In daylight I could see it was bloated, broken skin running along its flanks. Colourless fat fell out of open wounds like clumps of sofa stuffing, and the eye facing us was burst and empty. In one or two places I could clearly make out bone.
“What the fuck?” I muttered.
As if it was tired of being watched, the whale-shark twitched, and its body fell lifelessly below the water. The suction of its descent pulled the floating trash back over like a blanket, and within seconds there was no sign there had even been anything there.
-
“Why aren’t there any gulls?”
Alec was the captain of the vessel and an otherwise taciturn man who rarely spoke to the documentary crew. It was plain as day he particularly disliked the scientists who filled the lower decks with endless equipment and chatty cliques. But I guess he must have found the filming crew a little easier to speak to since he’d asked me for a light once or twice and had now sought me out on deck to ask a question.
“What do you mean?”
“Every time we pass this way the sky is filled with the fucking things,” he replied as he scanned the horizon. “It’s a floating garbage dump,” he added. “But now… Where are the gulls? It’s never like this. Never quiet.”
I took a moment to listen to the gentle susurration of whispering plastic caught in the tropical waves.
“We must be due to leave soon?” I asked and he nodded. “Thank fuck for that,” I added.
A few seconds of silence as he smoked his cigarette.
“I took a look at the footage you brought up,” he said. “Still not sure what that shark was doing.”
“Hanna says the animal must have been confused,” I replied. “Blind. Didn’t even know I was in the water.”
“Right.” I could tell by Alec’s vacant gaze he didn’t think much of that. “Only thing is I stayed up last night going over that footage. Not just the stuff you shot deliberately, but the GoPro footage from the cameras you’d strapped to your back.”
“And?”
“That thing had been following you since you got in the water.”
“What do you think that means?”
“I think it means it was hunting you,” he replied.
I thought back to the endless glimpses of a strange shape passing forever in the distance.
“Hanna says they’re not predators.”
“They aren’t,” he confirmed. “Even if it got you, couldn’ta done shit with you. It’s a filter feeder. Eats plankton. Best it coulda done was drown you outta spite”
I took a deep breath and appreciated the feeling of being alive and dry on the ship. Alec looked ready to say something when we were both distracted by the sound of flapping wings as a gull descended onto the floating island. I chuckled and began to say,
“Signs of life at—” when a quiet splash interrupted and the gull was sucked below the surface. It didn’t even have time to struggle.
Alec and I remained silent, rooted to the spot until the ship’s engine started and the island began to recede slowly but surely into the distance.
-
“How far did we travel?” I asked.
“80 to a 100 miles depending on the tides,” Adam replied, looking at me like he hoped I might have some kind of explanation. I didn’t, and we both turned to Alec and Hanna as they emerged from the cabin and began to address the crowd on deck. Everyone had gathered that morning after some of the crew had rung the alarm. Since then every check you could imagine had been run. Engines. GPS. Radio. Some people suggested we simply hadn’t moved. Others were adamant they knew the feel of a ship underway. But what explanation was there?
The garbage patch had followed us.
“It has to be the currents,” Adam muttered quietly as Hanna cupped her hands around her mouth and called for attention.
“Everyone,” she cried. “As you know we appear to not have moved. This has… raised some understandable concerns. But I’ve spoken to the coastguard and, after checking multiple sources, I can confirm we really have travelled closer to shore. We’re on our way home.”
There was an audible sense of relief that carried through the crowd.
“Unfortunately,” Alec added, “the tides have caused the patch to follow us and, as is clear, it has even overtaken us. We don’t have an easy route in or out of the island. We can still stick to our current heading, but with so much debris, nets especially, I’ve made the decision to travel at quarter speed. If something gets caught in the propellor I want to limit the damage.”
“We’re looking at least a week before we get home,” Hanna said, clarifying the captain’s words.
As one, the crowd began to cry out in anger and frustration.
-
“Thinking of taking a dip?”
Alec sidled up to me as I smoked a cigarette on deck. It was quiet out with most people having slunk away to their cabins so they could mope in private. But I found it uncomfortable down there. My cabin was below the waterline and the sounds I’d been hearing kept me up. Strange scratches, little taps… they were probably nothing but that didn’t stop the nightmares.
“I’d rather run a marathon with my ass cheeks sewn shut,” I replied.
Alec burst out laughing.
“I don’t blame you,” he said once the laughter died down. “I haven’t seen anything like that in my life. Not just the footage, but the shark afterwards. Half its guts were ripped out. How could it even swim? It’s like it was—”
Whatever point Alec was going to make was interrupted by the sound of something heavy and wet hitting the deck. When we turned we saw a sea gull, mutilated and bloody, feathers strewn around the point of impact.
Together, we both looked up into the cloudless night sky.
“Where the fuck did that come from?” I snapped. There hadn’t been a sound. Not the cawing of gulls or the flapping of wings.
We walked over to the bird and were struck by the God awful smell and the harrowing sight of bone and glistening muscle. Pale yellow fluid oozed out of every open wound, and the bird’s anatomy had been ruined by the impact to the point where I wasn’t sure what was meant to be a wing, or head, or tail, or torso.
“I’ve seen roadkill in better shape,” I said.
“I don’t understand what happened to it,” Alec replied as he leaned in, one hand clamped over his mouth and nose. “Looks like it encountered something corrosive. A toxic chemic—”
The bird stood up. With what must have been a lot of effort, it tried to flap its way towards Alec who cried out and stumbled backwards. Both of us swore, and I even burst into a nervous laughter which I often do when I’m scared.
“How is it still alive?” Alec asked.
I squinted at the bird as it continued the torturous journey towards us.
“It isn’t,” I said.
“I mean it clearly—”
“That’s its brainstem,” I said while pointing towards what looked like a pale white centipede dangling loosely to one side. “And where is the beak? The damn thing doesn’t have a head. No brain. No life.”
The bird hopped another step closer.
“It has to be alive,” Alec cried while pointing to the bustling pile of flesh and feathers. “It’s coming towards us for fuck’s sake!”
Both of us took a step to the right and the bird turned to keep us in its path.
“Nope,” I said with a quick shake of the head. “Nope. Not doing this.”
I stepped forward and kicked the bird as hard as I could, sending it whistling through the air like a shuttlecock before it plunked into the water.
Alec and I stared at each other and, after a moment’s tension, began to laugh. It felt like the only sane reaction to such a nightmarish encounter, especially since no real danger had been involved. I assumed there had to be a sensible explanation. Like Alec said, a toxic spill perhaps, or some exotic disease. But in the moment, it felt damn good to just laugh after so much time spent afraid.
We were still laughing when the ship’s engine cut out and the lights failed.
-
It was clear in the morning light that the garbage around the ship was getting thicker. I stared at it through the windows and tried to suppress the strange notion that it didn’t want to let us go.
“Engine’s room a fucking mess,” Alec hissed as he stepped into the bridge where Hanna, Adam, and I waited. “I’ve got some good guys on it but the propellor didn’t just stop. It was like something yanked the damn thing half-way out the ship. Ruined everything down there. Best we can do is patch the leaks.”
“Any chance of repairing it and getting going again?” Hanna asked.
“Not in the water,” he replied. “I’ve asked the coastguard to send for a tow.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“A day, at the most.”
-
Three days later and people were getting anxious. Radio calls between Alec and the coastguard were getting terse. I had passed the bridge late one night and heard Alec crying into the headset,
“What do you mean you can’t see us!? We’re right here! We’re in the water! We’ve sent up flares, given you coordinates, read the stars. Everything! We’ve done everything you’ve asked. This isn’t some life raft in the middle of nowhere. It’s a ship with thirty people on it! It’s bigger than most houses for crying out loud. A day’s journey and we’d be able to see the coast how can you not find us!”
In the end it was Hanna’s idea to try the dinghy and head for shore that way. It couldn’t hold more than two people, but it’d let someone get helpd and lead the coastguard back.
“Will this thing be able to push through all the garbage?” I asked as Hanna climbed the ladder and stepped onto the rubber floor below.
“It’s not far to shore,” she replied. “And we have poles to help us manoeuvre around the worst of it.”
“And you got plenty of food?”
She chuckled.
“Frank we won’t be gone long enough to need food.”
“None of this is normal,” I said while looking at the rolling hills of rubbish. “You should be prepared for the worst.”
“You know some of this stuff is thick enough to walk on,” she replied. “Maybe we’ll be able to hike part of the way?”
She said it as a joke, to keep me from harping on about how bad an idea this all was, but it only made me feel worse.
“Just don’t get in the water,” I replied. “It’s… I don’t know. Just don’t.”
“I won’t.” She smiled just as her companion turned up and began to climb down. I didn’t know the woman well, but from what I understood she was basically Hanna’s makeup woman and closest friend. Jen, I think her name was. She saw the look on my face and reached over and squeezed Hanna’s hand.
“Don’t worry,” Jen told me. “I’ll take good care of her.”
But the look on her face spoke volumes about the fear she was trying to hide.
“Everything ready?” Alec asked as he appeared beside me. “We only have one more of these,” he told Hanna as he pointed to the dinghy. “So please look after it. And please come back.”
One by one the others came by and waved goodbye to the pair of women who all our hopes were resting on. Once the final farewells were said, Alec helped launch the dinghy with a barge pole as Hanna started the onboard motor and Jen began to paddle. Slowly, the distance between us and them grew and the little canal they’d carved in the garbage patch was filled by the currents. They were about a hundred yards away from us when they both turned, smiled, and waved and we all returned the gesture.
And then the dinghy was pulled below.
Screams.
Cries.
A loud splash.
And before any of us could even begin to react, the garbage had floated back into cover the space where they had once floated.
-
“You can’t seriously be thinking of this!” I cried as Adam jumped into the spare dinghy and prepped the motor.
“It’s not far,” he said climbing back aboard to grab spare jackets and a lifesaver. “We need to check.”
“There’s something in the water,” I told him. “It’s just gonna do the same thing to you it did to them!”
“We don’t know that,” he replied.
“Adam,” Alec said, and something the captain’s voice stopped both our bickering. “This isn’t a good situation to be stuck in, and I don’t think this kind of impulsive response is wise. Maybe there is something in the water.”
“W-w-what?” he stuttered. “Because of the shark? You were wrong. It wasn’t hunting us! That’s like saying you’re being stalked by a fucking cow! It’s a filter feeder. And Hanna’s dinghy must have been broken, punctured maybe, or they hit something just below the water. A rock. I don’t know. But they need help and I can’t seriously believe the two of you are suggesting we just sit here and let our friends drown!”
“Adam…” I began to say.
“No, if you won’t come with that’s fine but my decision is made.”
He turned and threw the lifesaver into the dinghy where it landed with a loud thud. Not a second after it had stopped moving, the entire little boat was torn down into the water with such astonishing force that it sent a spray of water ten, twenty feet high. Once the water settled, all three of us were left staring into the open space in the trash that had been left by the dinghy and I caught a glimpse of something pale and reddish sweeping past, a long and thin limb covered in fleshy barbs.
A, just as swift, also flashed by. The sense of looking at an alien lifeform was unmistakeable, it’s skin a rugose pattern of wrinkled flesh, a single black orb of an eye glaring back at us from a torpedo shaped head and opposite it, an empty socket where another eye should be.
Slowly, the trash bobbed back into place and our view of what lay below as hidden.
“Was that a fucking squid?” Adam stuttered, his skin paper-white.
-
Both Adam and Alec had spent the best part of eight hours on the radio with the coast guard, but we had no luck. The best estimate anyone had was that we were trapped in the garbage patch and it was being carried away by the currents so that our position and heading were almost impossible to discern. You’d think the GPS would solve that problem, but for the life of us no set of coordinates we gave ever seemed to help. The coastguard were often adamant they were flying overhead, but whenever we looked there was nothing to see or hear.
People were starting to get hungry. We had a decent supply of food, but we’d had to start rationing. Slowly, layer by layer, it felt as if the journey was descending into a life or death struggle. And yet I found it hard to take seriously. The ship was huge, luxurious. Many crew whittled the day away in the gym, or watching satellite TV.
But time was limited.
We all knew that.
Still, I stood on deck and watched the garbage, unable to shake the feeling something was just out of sight and watching me back.
From behind I heard someone approach. I figured it was Alec come out once again to steal a cigarette. I kept my eyes on the water and called out,
“I wouldn’t bother. I’m out.”
There was no reply. My smile faded and the hair on my neck raised as I registered a wet, fetid stench, and heavy laboured breathing completely unlike Alec’s. Or anyone’s, really. This was the wet gurgle of someone whose lungs were filled with fluid, and I turned not sure what to expect, but already terrified beyond measure.
It was Hanna.
-
“Don’t…”
Alec reached out with his arm to stop Adam touching her. The gesture worked. Adam withdrew his hand. It wasn’t hard to see why.
Hanna was missing the back of her skull, along with the bottom half of her jaw.
But she stood on deck, clothes torn and dripping, her skin a pallid greenish blue. A standing corpse. A walking nightmare. Her eyes were cloudy but they often fixed the nearest person to talk, which I found to be most frightening thing of all. She was in there, somewhere. Or at least something was. She looked like she’d been taken apart and put back together again and somehow, she still moved, heard, saw… her nervous system was still firing away, sending signals to a body that should not have been able to respond.
Minutes passed and Adam swallowed his fear. He took off his jacket, ignored Alec’s weak plea to be careful, and stepped close enough to drape it over Hanna’s shoulders.
“Hanna, are you okay? Where’s Jen?”
Those cloudy eyes turned to him, but her head and body didn’t move.
“I don’t think we can expect much of an answer,” I said.
“Hanna?” Adam asked, but she only stared and I became slowly convinced that there was nothing of Hanna left inside that body. Those eyes watched us, sure, but I don’t think the images were being relayed back to the woman we once knew. Instead I felt another intelligence behind them, something malignant, curious, dangerous… I don’t know. For now it felt content to watch us, and that more than anything worried me.
“She won’t move,” Adam said as he tried to turn her shoulders away and lead her indoors. She merely shrugged his hands off and continued to flick her gaze from each of us to the other.
I pointed to the blood on the deck. It was already coagulated, the texture of rice pudding.
“No doctor’s going to fix that,” I said. “Just leave her there. Maybe tie her to the gunwale first with a length of rope. I don’t think we need her roaming around the place.”
-
Hanna was gone in the morning. The rope we’d tied to her was overboard and when we pulled it up we found it soaked in a foul-smelling liquid. Even worse, despite briefing everyone and making it clear to stay away, we were down a person on the headcount. I wasn’t sure how, but I figured the two events were related and the thought made me shudder. God help the poor soul she’d taken down there with her…
By now the atmosphere had taken a dark turn. One by one everyone had come along, usually in groups of two or three and in bright daylight, to gawk at Hanna during the time she’d been aboard. The effect was haunting, not just the sight of a walking corpse. No. It was the intelligence behind her eyes that was really unsettling. I got the distinct sense she was watching us, counting our number and gathering a sense of who and what we were.
I don’t think I was the only one to feel that way. After discovering someone was missing the next day, everyone pretty much locked themselves in their cabins and stayed out of sight and I couldn’t blame them. Only Adam, Alec, and I stuck around on deck and even that was only to try and find a way out of this mess. Not that the others were idle. At least one group of crew had bandied together and were trying to make a raft out of spare material in the hold below. Another were working on their computers to try and get the coastguard to us. Meanwhile the actual sailing crew had fallen in line under one of the engineers and were working furiously to get the engine back online.
My plan was a little simpler.
“This isn’t safe,” Adam said as I threw another lump of wood onto the pile of timber that floated below.
“Nope,” I replied. “It isn’t.” But that didn’t stop him handing me another piece we’d torn from the ship’s interior. Alec soon appeared hauling another table from the canteen.
“I’ll break this up,” he said. “Adam, you get the fuel?”
“Wasn’t easy,” he replied. “The guys down below didn’t want to let it go. They’re convinced they’ll have us up and running in no time.”
“We don’t need all of our supply to get to shore,” Alec said. “If they succeed, great. But I’d like to give this plan a go anyway.”
“Coastguard know what to look for?” I asked, and he nodded.
“Big plume of smoke.”
“Does it look big enough?” I asked after we’d finished throwing the table, one leg at a time, onto the pile below.
“If the plastic catches then we should be good, right?” Adam said. “And it doesn’t have to be big. Just smoky.”
Alec surveyed the wood and shrugged. I’d managed to hook a bundle of floating tyres and nets and was using that as the base of the bonfire.
“There’s a serious risk we could set this whole fucking patch alight,” Adam said. “Us included.”
“Or the smoke could suffocate us all, like being trapped in a wildfire,” I added, and both Adam and Alec looked at me with frustration.
“It was your plan,” Adam grumbled.
“I’m just pointing out this isn’t a safe plan. It’s just a plan. And I don’t think we are at a huge risk. The wood will burn but everything below, it might char and bubble, might go up a little, but it’s also soaked in water. I don’t think this whole thing is gonna go up in flame. I mean, it’s been here for years. If it could burn, wouldn’t someone have just done that already? Just torched the whole patch, if not to get rid of it then just for fun?”
Alec sighed.
“He’s right,” he replied. “I don’t think we… need… what?”
I stopped what I was doing—pouring gasoline haphazardly over the side of the ship—and turned to look in the direction of Alec and Adam’s gaze. They were staring at the strangest damn thing I’d ever seen. It looked like a blimp, almost, but floating in the water. A large round object with a ribbed striated surface. Its skin was pale blue but the space between each striation blood red. It made me think of some jellyfish, maybe. Like a man of war. Only this thing was the size of a small house.
“It’s definitely coming towards us, right?” Adam asked, and Alec nodded.
I think I sensed the danger early on. In fact, the others probably did too. But we were baffled by this strange shape. It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before, and as it came closer it carried with it the most God awful sound you could ever imagine. It was like metal struggling to hold up some impossible weight, a long drawn out keening wail that was so loud it drew everyone out of the hold and onto the deck where all of us, a crowd of thirty, stared in disbelief.
By the time it was close enough to bump against the ship’s hull, the sound it emitted was deafening. Alec asked me a question, but I couldn’t hear him, so he nudged my arm and pointed at the water below. There I saw that the floating object took on a slightly more recognisable shape.
A wrinkled eye blinked. A fin gently stroked through the water.
It was a whale, and I suddenly remembered tales of how their floating carcasses could inflate to impossible sizes and posed serious risks to passing ships. All that pressure, and rancid meat… a pressure cooker of disease that could send lumps of meat as big as a man hurling for hundreds of metres.
I ran and hit the floor just as it went off.
-
I lifted my head to pure carange. A crowd of thirty people were screaming, tveryone soaked top-to-bottom in blood and rotten fat. White irises glared back at me from faces painted crimson, and dozens were on their knees coughing and retching. But it wasn’t just disgust. Something else was going on. Adam crawled towards me, screaming in pain.
“Get it off!” he shrieked as he tried to pull his top off. “Get it the fuck off me!”
I rushed over and helped him pull the t shirt off only to reveal… something crawling over his skin. It too was soaked in blood and hard to see, with frighteningly long legs with a small disk shaped body. It skittered out of sight at lightning speed. But it wasn’t alone. Dozens of them covered Adam’s skin, and they were biting and latching onto his flesh, wrapping legs around his torso like harvestman against tree bark. I dug my fingers under one set of spidery legs and tore them away, but it wasn’t enough. I saw at least three of them burrow into his flesh and disappear.
I looked around and slowly appreciated the scale of what had just happened. The deck was covered in hundreds of these monstrous sea spiders, and they were making short work of everyone left alive after the explosion. Already there were at least ten people convulsing on the floor as these plate-sized arachnids tore through their insides.
This wasn’t my proudest moment, but even as Adam screamed and begged for help I knew there was nothing I could do except run. So I turned, ready to flee, and saw Alec stood before me soaked in gore. He held a can of gasoline over his head, its contents already dripping through his hair and trickling across the deck.
“It’s inside me,” he whimpered as his thumb rubbed the flint of a lighter over and over, trying desperately to get it to ignite. I looked down and saw gasoline spreading amongst my feet.
“Alec,” I said. “Alec what…”
The lighter caught. For a flash there was only a tiny flame hovering over his thumb, then it finally found the fuel and all hell was let loose.
-
The fire was virulent. People, already soaked in blubber, became living candles that thrashed and ran across the ship, fleeing deeper into the decks below and spreading the flames faster than I thought possible. I was forced to flee to the stern of the ship where the air was clearer. Once there I gripped the railing and turned to face the fire. People still screamed, but as the seconds ticked on the agonised cries of those still alive began to thin out as one by one they died out of my sight.
My heart sank. It was clear there was no saving the ship. We had life rafts, but they were at the bow and already lost. The last thing I wanted to do was jump into the water, but it was starting to look like it was that or burning alive. I was genuinely contemplating which of the two deaths I’d rather when I heard a noise I’d spent days hoping to hear. For a moment I thought it might be a cruel trick of the mind, but it grew with each passing second until I was finally sure of what it was.
A helicopter.
It circled the ship at some distance, unable to come closer because of the smoke. I could already feel the heat at my back as the fire caught up with me, and I looked down below convinced that swimming was not an option. But what if no one saw me? I thought. The smoke was growing thicker with every second, what if they left thinking they couldn’t help anyone?
Hanna had joked that, in places, the island was thick enough to support a person’s weight. I looked at the floating garbage below and decided I had to at least try. Especially with help so close by. I also needed a way to get noticed, and thankfully a first aid box on the nearby wall contained a flare that I grabbed and stuffed into my pocket.
I climbed the rail and awkwardly lowered myself down as far as I could until I finally had to let go and drop the rest of the way. My feet hit something solid enough to stop myself instantly being submerged, but it quickly began to sink into the water. Before it got further than my knees I jumped onto another clump of floating plastic and that too began to sink. I quickly realised that if I stayed in one place for even a second, my weight would overcome the island’s buoyancy. I couldn’t risk the water, not with what I knew.
So I ran. I picked footholds at random, and sometimes not very well. At one point my heel struck the edge of some bundled up net filled with buckets only for the whole thing to rotate and nearly pitch me into the water. But I had enough forward momentum to be sent hurtling onto what might have once been the fibreglass prow of an old speedboat.
I don’t know how far I got before I struck the flare and began to scream. I couldn’t turn or stop, not even for an instant. If I did I would sink and drown, or maybe worse. All I could do was keep going one foot at a time and just pray that the helicopter saw me as I held the glowing fireball over my head at arm’s length.
Eventually my luck had to run out though. The floating island was a piecemeal jumble of old trawling nets and dumped plastic, and I stepped onto what looked like a fairly buoyant clump of bottles and nylon rope expecting it to hold me up only for it to give in instantly.
I hit the water face first.
The flare went out.
I tried to kick, to free my leg and keep going, but it was useless. All hope drained. I hadn’t had time to hold my breath and already my lungs were burning. Unable to help myself, I looked down…
I saw shapes floating in the water. Vertical. At rest. People. Whales. Sharks. Squid. Turtles. Lifeless things that lay in wait, part of something larger, I’m sure. Below them a single shadow too dark to simply be the abyss. Overhead the water churned, the trash parted, and a ray of light flashed past me. It was weak, but it landed on whatever was below.
It was big. Too big to make sense of. Too big to give a shape. In the end I think I saw only a part of it…
It saw me. I know because one of the floating animals, a squid, broke out of its trance and began to glide towards me. It too was a broken mutilated thing kept alive, an undead monstrosity enslaved by whatever lay below.
I suddenly began to regret not burning to death.
The squid was a hundred yards out when something plopped into the water below me. I looked up into the blinding sun and saw a ladder within arm’s reach. I grabbed it and with a mind that no longer felt whole, I quickly climbed out of the water.
-
“I wouldn’t bother,” the man said as he sat down beside me on the park bench. I snatched my phone into my pocket, irritated that someone had clearly been reading over my shoulder. “They won’t publish anything in the news. They didn’t when I tried. Email them all you want. CNN. Fox. Whoever. The only luck I had was on Reddit, and I think that’s because most people assumed my story was fiction.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I grumbled, and whether I believed him or not, I found myself hastily deleting the email I was writing. It had been a month since my rescue, and I’d already sent dozens to the big news sites. No one responded, and there was no reason to believe the twelfth email would magically work.
“Anyway,” he said. “I’m Stephen. I’m a scientist who specia… used to specialise in robotics.”
“What do you specialise in now?” I asked.
“I think,” he said, firmly planting the emphasis on the last word, “I specialise in whatever it was you saw down in the water. I hope I’m wrong, of course. Because what I specialise in… what I saw, last time I saw it, it was trapped. But if you saw it too, out in the open water, well…
“I don’t even want to think about what that means.”