BENEATH - A Novel (39 page)

Peterson's mind convulsed. The others would share the same fate as Harris and Choi, and their deaths would be on his hands. Pushing his will with all the determination he could render, Peterson attempted to will control of his body back to himself. The attempt was fruitless.

The only response he received echoed through his mind.

It was the voice again.

Laughing
.

As anxiety welled within her, Connelly found herself reacting in a way she never had before. Her body fell limp. She was helpless as a rag doll in a laundry dryer. She could feel her body being pulled through a series of tunnels. The entire trip was masked in darkness as the creature that had taken her kept a firm grasp on her face plate.

The only hint that she was experiencing severe anxiety was her thought process. She recognized the rapid thought transitions, moving from one horrid topic to the next, seeing every gruesome detail of friends' deaths, imaginary dangers and painful memories exaggerated to the point of hysteria. But she felt no pain in her chest. Her throat never closed.

This anxiety attack was something new. Something she had never experienced or even heard of before. She wasn't sure if it was the extraordinary circumstances that had brought on the attack or the unusual stress of the last few days, but something was affecting her mind in a wildly different way.

Catatonic anxiety.

In many ways, what she experienced seemed a welcome change to the panic she normally felt. This was more subdued. A motionless lump would be hard pressed to make a fool of itself; like she had earlier, when she had turned into a sobbing, hysterical harpy in front of Robert and Willard.

For the first time since her attack began, she felt pain. It streaked across her chest like a razor's edge. And then it was gone.

As though waking from a dream, Connelly's world transformed. A brilliant blue light filled her eyes. After the long minutes of darkness it was like staring into a brilliant azure star. She clenched her eyes shut as her body hovered in mid air for a moment. Then she collapsed onto what felt like a thick rug.

Her first glimpse of the surreal new surroundings left Connelly feeling oddly far from home. True, she had never been further from home, but she couldn't find a single Earthly reference to describe what she was seeing. The floor, which she saw first, was thickly padded with sunflower yellow filaments that looked like billions of bright caterpillars standing on end. The growth covered every inch of the chamber's floor, like wall to wall carpeting.

It was the walls of the room that caught and held her attention next. Every inch of every wall, minus the three exits, was coated in gently undulating Europhids. But these Europhids were unlike any she had seen. They were immense, four foot long rods of gelatinous flesh. Their size alone wasn't what impressed Connelly the most, it was their color. Each Europhid radiated a cerulean glow. The blue coloration varied from organism to organism, giving the walls a varied and stunning texture. "Comfortable" was the only word Connelly could think of to describe the walls. She wanted to crawl into them and fall asleep.

As though a drain had been pulled on Connelly's anxiety reserves, she felt swirls of tension slide down her body and exit through her toes. She felt her muscles relax to the point of not being to hold her torso away from the floor.

The draining anxiety became dammed up instantly when Connelly caught a glimmer of shifting light in the glow of her head lamp. A subtle shift of color that appeared and then faded away again.

She was not alone.

The hunched creature that brought her here had lingered, remaining cloaked.

Connelly believed her thoughts must be an open book to the creatures as one by one, ten of the hulks shimmered into view. Their long appendages were folded down in a nonthreatening way and their eyes glowed with the same blue light as the Europhids coating the walls. They stood still and silent, like guardian statues. But Connelly knew better. They were brutishly strong and agile. She would be dead already if they desired. Her PMS may protect her from lacerations, but they could just as easily pummel her to death. She understood it would be effortless for the creatures. So why were they delaying? What did bringing her here accomplish?

Without thinking about communication problems that inherently existed between species that developed on different worlds, Connelly spoke rhetorically. "What do you want with me?"

The creatures remained motionless, silhouetted by the blue light emanating from the Europhid walls.

Connelly pushed herself onto her knees, waiting for some kind of attack. "Why am I here?" she asked.

Two of the creatures moved, causing Connelly to shirk away. They were going to pounce. This was it…

But they simply stood to either side, opening a path to a section of the Europhid wall. Then they were motionless again.

Connelly stood to her feet and looked around. The creatures stood all around her. It was clear they wanted her to move through the open space, to walk towards the wall, but why? Lacking options or the means to plead her case, Connelly moved slowly towards the wall. She stopped a foot away, looking into the glimmering blue flesh of the fragile Europhids.

A smile crept onto her face. She took another step forward, peering at the internal workings of the translucent Europhids.

Amazing.

Connelly didn't have a chance to scream or react as a barrage of blue tendrils snapped out of the wall, wrapped around her body and pulled her into the wall. Connelly sank deeper and deeper into the wall. A jolt, like an electric shock, paralyzed her. There was no pain, just immobility.

Like jellyfish tentacles
, she thought. Even humans weren't immune to the effects of jellyfish, whose tendrils caused severe burning and immense pain. The effect of the Europhid tentacles on Connelly's body was overwhelming, even with the PMS on.

As Connelly was swallowed up by the wall, the view through her facemask became stark blue…like she was floating in the sky. She felt her mind slipping away. Her thoughts became jumbled, tired, like sleep induced by a sedative. A blanket of total and complete peace had been laid over her. Her anxiety had been reduced to nothing. Here she was, about to face a death unlike any human had experienced before and she felt better than she had in all her life.

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The void that enveloped Connelly was all consuming. She attempted to look at her hands. They were gone. She tried to turn her head, hoping for a better view, but she lacked a neck. In fact, she had no body at all. For a brief moment she thought that maybe she had been killed and the Catholics were right all along, there was a purgatory and she was there. She'd always thought of purgatory as all white.

Why not blue
? she thought. It's not the most extravagant color…but it wasn't bad either…just somewhere in the middle. In limbo.

But the blue void began to change. Light filtered down from above, the beams reflecting off of a cloud of tiny bubbles. The light shimmered and shook. There was a surface above her. As the density of her surroundings increased, Connelly felt that she was underwater and that the illumination from above was sunlight glimmering through the surface.

The world around her became real. She was in a tropical lagoon. Snorkeling. She was seven years old.

A memory.

Her parents had taken her to
Hawaii
on her seventh birthday. Not really for her birthday, but she had always pretended the vacation was in honor of her birth. After a day seeing the smaller islands from the air on a helicopter tour, her mother, father and two brothers had retreated to a small beach, hidden inside a cove on the big island. Her father had bragged that discovering its location had only cost him fifty dollars. While her brothers built a sand castle out of the fine grey sand and mom and dad laid out to tan, she had taken to the ocean with snorkel in hand.

She was an avid and skilled swimmer, but she had never used a snorkel before. She'd seen it done, though, and needed no lessons on how to use the device. The feeling of freedom the snorkel had given her was like nothing she'd experienced in her seven years of life. For the next half hour, Connelly had swum in circles, circumventing the small cove, admiring the snails, crabs and multicolored fish, and never once had to come up for air.

Thirty-one minutes in the water marked the point where her experience changed drastically. Her insistent splashing had attracted the attention of a small tiger shark, a dwarf at only three and half feet long, but still more than a match for a seven-year-old girl in the water. Connelly had heard her father give warnings about sharks, about what attracted them: constant splashing, blood, and waving white skin on the palms and soles of feet. It was the first and last of the three that Connelly had been tempting the shark with for the past thirty minutes. It was the middle of the three which the shark would add to the mix.

Connelly saw a dim shadow swish past her off to the left, deeper in the lagoon. She'd already seen the light play tricks on her, though. Every time a cloud passed in front of the sun, the light would change, causing shapes to emerge and swirl through the water. The first few times caused her to catch her breath. But by now, she was so used to it, she didn't give the new shadow a second thought.

What happened next became a blur in her waking memory, something she had never fully recalled. But now, she was seeing it all as though the day were repeating itself in full detail. First came a horrible burning on her left calf. It was followed by an intense pressure that shot the air from Connelly's lungs as she screamed through her snorkel tube. She spun in the water as the pressure decreased and saw the black eyes of the small shark turn white as its protective eyelid snapped shut in preparation for a second attack.

Gripped by the pain lancing up her leg Connelly could only watch as the shark opened its jaws again and lunged at her face. The water above her head exploded as a fist broke through the surface of the water and connected solidly with the shark's snout, causing it to thrash and bolt away. The hand clasped onto Connelly's wrist and pulled her up out of the water. As she cleared the ocean waves, she looked up and saw the silhouette of her father standing above her like a statue of a Greek god. He was amazing. He was her hero.

Her father yanked her up out of the water, onto the backside of a boat.

Connelly became confused. Her father had been on the shore. He had pulled her onto the beach. They never even owned a boat!

She looked to her father again, expecting to see his scruffy face, dark eyes and tan skin, but instead she was met by an awkward smile, thick glasses and an explosion of hair. Robert…ten years ago. The day they first met.

Echo One, her first research ship, was little more than a decked-out pleasure boat. She and Robert both worked as consultants for Environ-O, an ocean conservation unit dedicated to studying the ocean and lobbying for a change in maritime laws that would protect Earth's endangered species. The job this time around had been laborious and time consuming: crab counting in the
Florida Keys
. Crabs were difficult to keep track of, most looked alike and there wasn't time to map out each individual's minute differences. More than that, crabs didn't always want to be found. It was the daunting scope of the task that caused Environ-O to hire both scientists at once. Connelly had always been glad they did. Robert saved them days of work by using a mathematical equation to estimate the number of crabs throughout the Keys by extrapolating the data from three separate islands, the closest to the mainland, one in the middle and the one furthest from shore.

The survey was completed in four days. It would have taken three weeks. They spent the following weeks vacationing together on board Orca One. It was the beginning of their bond…one that would eventually lead to more. Connelly felt slightly sad as she looked into the younger Robert's eyes. His attraction to her, even then had been obvious. But they had both been blind to it.

This was the second to last day of their vacation and Connelly had just been snorkeling for two hours. She'd been hooked on it, on the entire ocean and all its creatures, since that fateful day in the lagoon. She didn't fear or hate the shark for what it had done, she loved it for its perfection—
Galeacerdo cuvier
— the perfect eating machine. And she devoted her life to the study of all water dwelling creatures, even the microbial.

Connelly remembered the rest of this day in a flash. She and Robert drank a few beers, grilled a few fish, played a few rounds of chess and then sat on the deck, staring up at the stars until both fell asleep, side by side. She knew what Robert was about to say. She had been wearing a very skimpy bathing suit and one of her breasts was beginning to slide out as she was pulled from the water. Robert, seemingly unaffected by the view said, "You're slipping out up top." He had turned away as he hoisted Connelly onto the back of the boat and gave her ample time to adjust her suit.

She was shocked when events didn't play out as she remembered. "My God," Robert said. "You're just as stunning as I remember." And then he didn't turn around. His eyes lingered on her slipping bikini top, which was just beginning to reveal the top of her nipple. She stood on the deck and quickly adjusted her suit.