BENEATH - A Novel (29 page)
Authors: Jeremy Robinson
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The world was wet and thick. Willard had been thrown down the esophagus of the alien predator. He'd bounced off throat walls like a racquetball and had been repeatedly poked by sharp talons designed to shred prey as they slid to the creature's first stomach.
Only the impenetrable skin of his PMS suit kept him from being filleted. Upon awaking, he found himself afloat in a viscous white liquid that reminded him vanilla pudding.
Swimming through the digestive juices wasn't like dogpaddling in water. Moving was slow, tedious and muscle burning work. It took fifteen minutes of pumping away to reach the stomach wall, churned with motion, circulating the stomach fluids. The ribbed stomach wall, which he could see thanks to his still functional headlamp, was covered in splotches of pink and brown. He placed his hand against the stomach wall and felt the bumpy lines across his finger tips.
A surge of motion caused his hand to slide across the ribbed wall. He was being pushed along through the stomach like a piece of food, towards the stomach's exit and into the bowels beyond. Willard closed his eyes, ignoring the images conjured by his imagination. When the surge pulled him forward again, he didn't resist. He knew it would lead him to the exit, which he would never find on his own.
His theory proved correct five minutes later. With a quick surge he felt the floor beneath him open in a pulse. He was yanked down, sucked into another chamber of the beast's intestinal tract. Blinded by the quick movement and entrance into a tight tube, Willard became disoriented. He felt the thick ooze pulled away from his body as he slid, head first, through the conduit. The walls around him rolled with muscle, pushing him forward.
Then he slid into open air and dropped. He fell for several feet and saw a sloshing world of clear liquid below. Within the liquid rested an assortment of partially decayed alien corpses—previous meals that had yet to be fully digested.
Willard crashed into the liquid and thrashed about, panicking, searching for the surface even though all the air he needed to breath was provided by the PMS. He reached the surface and sucked air into his lungs. Twisting his body violently, he searched the chamber for any danger and found only the lonely dead eyes of alien sea creatures. Loose flesh hung from bones. Decaying muscles dripped into the liquid.
This must be where the real digestion takes place, Willard thought as he began to calm himself. Several deep breaths later, Willard became aware of something…a noise.
Splashing.
Beyond the fear of being eaten and digested inside the giant, he now had a sense that he wasn't alone, that the beast's digestion was aided by smaller creatures that lived within the bowels of the larger. Maybe parasitic.
Willard looked into the distance and saw only the dead and the distant grey walls of the grand organ. He ducked beneath the surface and scanned the depths. It was then that he saw his equipment, resting on the bottom. It had been stripped from his body when he was swallowed. The oxygen tanks, the personal propulsion system and the emergency medical supplies all sat on the floor of the stomach.
Forgetting the splashing sound, Willard dove down, knowing that if he had any hope of surviving and saving Robert and Connelly, he needed that equipment. He kicked his way down and clawed past the fragments of endless dead bodies.
As he moved closer to his goal, something nagged at his mind. Something fought for his attention. A sensation he hadn't realized was building began to scream and pound at his intellect.
He was hot.
He was
burning
.
Willard took another look around. The bodies that littered the bottom were awash with tiny bubbles. The liquid seemed to grow hotter…or more acidic the further down he swam. It had become hot enough outside his suit that the cooling system could no longer compensate. Willard wondered at what temperature the suit would reach its limit. If it got much hotter, the PMS would boil him like lobster meat in its shell.
Gritting his teeth, he pushed for the bottom. Every surge brought him closer to his equipment and nearer to death. As his arms and legs slid against the inside of the PMS, it felt as though a hot iron were being gently grazed across his skin. The sweat oozing from his pores stung his eyes and obscured his vision. His vision was all but obscured when he reached the bottom, but his aim had remained true. He felt the hard surface of the equipment strike his hand.
Moving as quickly as he could, feeling that the suit would soon fail him, Willard strapped the propulsion unit to his back, grasped the controls and set the throttle to full. Body parts were liquefied as the propulsion unit burst to life, dragging Willard up. After bashing through a few flimsy bodies, Willard broke the surface. He was exhausted and terrified, but alive and beginning to cool down. Laying on his back and hugging the rescued equipment to his chest, Willard caught his breath.
In the silence that followed his near broiling, he heard the same splashing. He scanned the area for the source of the noise. A ripple of liquid came from behind a large carcass that looked like a whale with a vertical mouth. Its skin was clear, but Willard wasn't sure if that was normal or caused by the digestive process. Willard eased himself toward the body.
As he closed in, the splashing grew louder, more desperate.
"Help me," a voice said.
Willard flinched. Had someone else been swallowed?
"Help me!" The voice was terrified.
As Willard prepared to aid whoever else had become victim to the beast, he realized that the voice was his own…inside his mind.
"Please," it said, "do not be afraid."
Willard felt strangely at ease as he moved around the whale-like creature. On the other side he found another body. It was built like a fish, but its skin was translucent and its internal organs glowed a dull blue. The fish flapped on top of the water, spinning in odd circles—twitching as death slowly claimed it. But what held Willard's attention was a small organism attached to the side of the animal. It had the same shape and size of a Europhid but was blue.
The blue Europhid was limp and motionless. With a final twitch, the dying creature passed away. Willard moved in closer.
"Save me," the voice said. "Save me and I will give you a gift in return."
"Are you…are you the fish?" Willard said.
Silence followed.
"Show me who you are."
The Europhid glowed a gentle blue and then faded.
Willard set his confusion aside. Something…or someone had asked for his aid. As his instincts took over, he responded the only way he knew how. "What do I need to do?"
"Touch me."
Willard felt a stab of distrust. He squinted and said, "And what will you give me in return?"
"Hope," the voice said. "Life."
The last word was weak, fading. Willard reached out with his hand before he could weigh his options. He could sense the creature fading. His finger brushed up against the Europhid and a shock, like electricity ripped through his body. He shook as though claimed by an epileptic seizure and felt his mind, his very thoughts, merge with another's.
When the shaking subsided and his mind cleared, Willard looked back to the blue Europhid. It was withered and colorless—dead. With a hard heart, Willard knew he had failed. But then a new emotion filled his body.
Hope.
"Are you there?" he asked.
No response came. Other than the bubbling of rising digestive gases, not a sound could be heard. Willard wondered if he had had a hallucination brought on by stress.
It felt so real
, he thought. But the voice was inside his head, which only supported the idea that his experience had been a delusion. The blue Europhid, which shimmered lightly with life only moments ago now looked decomposed and long dead.
Willard concluded without a doubt that the Europhid had not communicated with him.
It was just a damn plant anyway!
Willard focused his thought on the task at hand, escaping from the gargantuan bowels. The feeling Willard couldn't shake, even after determining he'd hallucinated the talking Europhid, was the nagging sense of hope—the knowledge that he knew what to do. Without questioning why, Willard turned to the far wall and gunned the propulsion unit forward. He sped through the digestive fluid, not being able to see any exit, but believing,
knowing
, it lay ahead.
A polar chill shook through Connelly's body. It had been a half hour since Willard had entered the water, and by her estimations, if nothing went wrong, he should have arrived at their location five minutes ago. She knew that under normal circumstances a five minute delay would be nothing to fret over. But in this strange new world with unknown luminous behemoths and savage predators, five minutes might signify that the worst case scenario for Willard had occurred…and that the worst case scenario for she and Robert would soon arrive.
She looked at the air gauge. They had twenty minutes remaining, but that was only because they had thinned the air by half, making every breath laborious and deficient. A perpetual feeling of lightheadedness permeated Connelly. She and Robert had given up on conserving air by not talking. With the end near, neither wanted to die in silence. They focused on recalling memories from the past.
But the stories soon faded, replaced by an unrelenting sense of doom. Five more minutes passed before either of them spoke again.
"Are we officially giving up on him?"
"Robert." The tone in Connelly's voice forbade him from saying it again.
"What?" Robert said. "He's never this late. Not during an emergency."
"Remember that time in the
"It was a white out," Robert said, indignant. "How was he supposed to find me faster?"
"You had a GPS tracking device sewn into your gear. He knew where you were."
Robert stared straight ahead working hard to hide his surprise. "Why would he make me wait?"
Connelly smiled. "He was teaching you a lesson."
"What could Willard teach me?"
"A few things…"
Robert raised his eyebrows. He wanted examples.
"Every time Willard's given a storm warning since that day, you hauled ass back to base. He never had to chase after you again." Connelly stretched and took a deep breath, which did little to ease the burning in her chest. "While you were shaking in your boots, we were sipping on hot chocolate and playing checkers."
"That little—I could have frozen to death." Robert locked his gaze onto Connelly.
"Wait. You knew?"
"Calm down before you use up all our air," Connelly said.
"I could have died."
"Willard had faith in your equipment. I had faith in Willard." Connelly looked through the sphere's window and took in the view of the barren cave. "I still do."
Robert stood and leaned against the wall of the sphere. "Think this is another lesson?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Unlike your time in the storm," Connelly said, "Willard doesn't have faith in our equipment."
"What? What do you mean?"
Connelly sighed. "He ran a safety check on TES and the sphere back in the Antarctic. Everything checked out…except for the submersible mode. The GEC made attempts to correct most of what he found, but he was still unconvinced. I think the submersible is fine, but given our current predicament…" Connelly saw that Robert's face had fallen flat and pale. "What?"
He turned to her, his eyes filled with fire. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't want you to stop the dive."
"I would have."
"I know…I'm sorry."
"Why didn't Willard tell me?"
"He thought you knew."
Robert lowered his head and then glanced at the air gauge. "We have ten minutes of air left, Kathy." Robert's voice was low and gravely. He stood over Connelly and looked down at her like an angry father.
She couldn't bear to look into his eyes. She knew her betrayal by omission would be the cause of their deaths. It was a pain beyond description, worse than any heartbreak she had felt before. Robert's hand took her under the chin and lifted her tear wet face up, so they were looking eye to eye.
Then Robert did the last thing she expected, he smiled. "Seeing what we have seen is a gift beyond my most vivid dreams. I'm glad you didn't tell me about the submersible flaws. I'm glad we're here. And if we die…there is no one else I would rather have by my side."
Staring up into Robert's glossy eyes, Connelly became overwhelmed by the strongest emotion she had ever experienced. She'd known Robert for as long as she could remember. They were the closest of friends, but now she wondered if they were more than that.