"The Beast of Trash Island" is a horror/suspense novella by Steve Metcalf. This chapter provides a brief respite from the horrors the researchers have endured over the last few hours. The pause is short, however, as they hear a strange clicking sound coming from the bridge.
Chapter Eight, Organic
THE FOUR SURVIVORS SPLIT UP. James and Micah went back to the research room to see if their data had given them any clues as to how to beat whatever it was they were up against. Katya and Captain Scott went back to the main bridge to see if there was anything else worth scavenging.
Right now it was five o’clock in the morning and, unfortunately, everyone was simply running on adrenaline. All four survivors had been awake for the better part of the last 50 hours since leaving China Basin, and had been non-stop running scared for their lives for the last 12. Each of them, independently, thought that just a little nap might do the trick.
* *
It seemed like a storm might be blowing in. The air took on a musty quality and clouds started massing that simply blocked out the moon. The Aqua Tom had been running on emergency power for several hours, and James and Micah noticed a distinct drop in the brightness of the green emergency lights. The computers each had their own UPS battery supply and were set to save at regular intervals so there was little chance of losing the massive amount of data that had been recorded.
Likewise, all of the cameras had their own battery supplies. From a research perspective, they were still okay. But they would need to get the power plant back up and running sooner rather than later.
Micah, as was the focus of his portion of the project, went to check the various camera feeds and monitor the data that had been recorded. James, doing the work of both himself and Ai, started pouring through the different computer readouts. Some were measuring the makeup of Trash Island while others mapped the relative densities of the plastics in the swirling vortex. There was one computer specifically dedicated to recording the movement of the currents around the mass.
After a few minutes of reading through the data, James leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He sent his left hand on an exploratory mission to the back of his head. The bandage hung limply from the right side, held in place by medical tape that clung to a few strands of hair. As he gently probed the clotted mess of a gash, he recoiled in pain. James pulled the gauze off and tossed it in a trashcan.
Micah was going through the cameras one by one. They still had the hull camera, but there seemed to be too much disruption now that they were deeper into the mass of the micro plastic. All of the cameras that were attached to the gunwales were destroyed. They would have to dig through the recorded data to try and find some hints about how to fight whatever had been attacking them.
“Damn,” Micah said.
James looked up. “What is it?”
Micah shook his head. “There’s nothing coming in live right now,” he said. “I can reattach the two spares that I have. Maybe one at the fore and one aft. But I’ll have to start digging through the hard drive for anything useful.”
James nodded. “Okay,” he said. “We should start there. I’m getting nowhere.” He yawned and slapped his cheeks—left right left right—in rapid succession. “There’s miles of data here, but I can’t seem to make sense of any of it right now.”
James handed Micah a can of Mt. Dew from the cooler in the corner. He popped one for himself and chugged half of it at once. Micah went back to work and James leaned back in his chair. As he put his feet up on the desk, he knocked some paperwork off.
“Damn it,” he said, leaning forward to scoop the pile off the floor and put it back on the desk. Something about the stack of papers caught his eye. He started shuffling through the info and found what his unconscious mind had so quickly registered.
Avotech FSC.
The instruction manual for their full-spectrum camera.
Why? Why was this interesting to him?
“Okay,” Micah said. “I think I’m back to the moment we lost the cameras. I’m going to start moving backward. You want to watch?”
“Yeah,” James said, giving up on the pile of paperwork and rolling his desk chair over to Micah’s side.
“This is the bow camera,” he said. “I’m going to rock it back ten minutes at a time and see what we can see.”
“Sure,” James said, taking a sip from the slightly-cooler-than-room-temperature soda.
“Looks like this was a couple hours ago,” he said, nodding at the corner of the monitor with his chin.
“Thanks, Micah,” James said. “I can see that....” He trailed off. Something at the edge of his memory. Something he wanted to double-check. Something they could see and not see at the same time.
“What is it, dude?”
James had a blank look on his face, but his eyebrows were furrowed.
“Shit,” he said and then wheeled back over to his desk.
“Dude, what the fuck?” Micah asked, fully turning away from his own bank of monitors.
James came to a halt and started thumbing through the FSC manual. He found the page that he was looking for and grinned.
“Remember when we first saw the sphere?” he asked, not looking up.
Micah nodded. “Sure,” he said. “We saw it on the full-spectrum. It was coming up as a yellow-orange color.”
“We had never seen that color on the FSC before, right?” James prodded him.
Micah shrugged. “It’s not like I use one every day,” he said. “But, yeah, that color stood out against all of the purples and blacks.”
James tapped the page of the manual. “I made a mental note to see if there was some sort of glossary or something. To see what the gold color was indicating.”
Micah waited while James paused dramatically.
“Well,” he finally said. “Come the fuck on.”
James looked down to read the text. “A yellow-gold hue,” he said, “might appear glowing against the stark background. This is something of a visual error message. The Avotech FSC is reading an object in the viewable field as dense organic: not otherwise specified.”
They paused, looking at each other.
“Organic,” Micah repeated.
James squinted his eyes.
“Yeah.” He trailed off.
Micah jumped up and ran out of the research room.
* *
Captain Scott and Katya were on the bridge. The captain was running through each of the electronic systems of the boat. They were all operating on minimal power provided by their respective battery backups. Katya was rummaging through the various storage cabinets collecting food and any other supplies that might come in handy for the survivors.
After a few moments, the captain yawned largely and sat down heavily in one of the four leather chairs that lined the walls of the room. They had originally been well-spaced around the bridge, but the violent motions of the ship in the last 12 hours had sent them rolling haphazardly.
Seeing the captain sit down, Katya also pulled up a chair and yawned.
“What’s your name, my dear?” the captain asked, taking a deep swig from a water bottle that she had just placed on the counter.
“My name is Katya, Sir,” she said, reaching up to remove the band from her hair, resetting her blonde ponytail and twisting the band anew. “I’m studying to be an architect.”
The captain nodded. “My name is Alexander Scott,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand.
She smiled and he smiled back.
He looked out through the windows of the bridge. The sun was making its way into the morning sky. It was nice to not have to rely on the emergency lighting system, but he would have to get the engines back on if they wanted any chance of surviving this chaos. In spite of the madness surrounding him, he smiled.
“What is it?” Katya asked. She, too, was smiling. She didn’t know why. Perhaps it was just because the captain was. Maybe she was just looking for something to be happy about.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. He pointed the half-drained bottle of water out the window at the rising sun. The light was bouncing off the swells of the Pacific Ocean like shards of gold. “Breathtaking.”
Katya nodded. “It is,” she said.
The captain finished his water, reached down, turned a trash can right-side up and tossed the empty bottle. He leaned back in his chair again, this time putting his feet on the console.
“Have you heard of the kraken, Katya?” the captain asked. She shook her head, so he continued. “It’s a legendary sea beast. Something like a giant, giant squid. Different myths describe it differently.” He paused for a moment. “And, Lord knows, trashy movies have certainly put their own spin on it.”
Katya rolled to the console and grabbed her own bottle of water, opened it, and took a long sip.
“There’s one legend that has always intrigued me,” Captain Scott continued. “Norwegian. There’s a kraken myth that claims that the beast would periodically rise to the surface of the ocean.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
The captain shrugged. “To rest, maybe. Maybe to feed. The legend says that he would stay there for a few months before re-submerging. The thing is, and this is the first thing that caught my attention. The thing is that sailors who saw it said he was as big as an island. A mile, maybe two miles across. Bumps across his back looked like mountains. Seaweed and kelp that stuck to him looked like trees and shrubs. A living island.”
Katya took another pull from her water. “Interesting story,” she said.
“I thought so, too. But after seeing the things I’ve seen over the last day, I’m not so sure. The size of the tentacles on that thing beneath us….” He trailed off. “Who knows what we’re dealing with?”
There was a moment of silence. A gentle breeze came in through the open door.
“You said there were a couple things that interested you about the legend?”
The captain nodded.
“It was the details, I think,” he said. “Part of the story spoke of the cyclical nature of the thing. The kraken would emerge to feed on fish. When he submerged, he would excrete his inky waste, that fish would be attracted to...and come and eat. The kraken, then, would surface and eat the new fish.”
“You think this trash vortex serves a similar purpose?” Katya asked. “To attract food for our very own kraken?”
The captain shrugged. “Not sure, but it’s an interesting idea.”
They were silent for several seconds.
“Hah,” Katya finally said. “There was a tale of Sinbad the Sailor where he landed his ship on an island that suddenly started moving and drowned most of his crew who went ashore to explore. I had always thought it was a giant whale, but what if it was a kraken who was feeding on the surface?”
The captain nodded and smiled. “Henceforth, you shall be known as,” Captain Scott started as if he was quoting from something oft-read, and then was interrupted.
It was a clicking and scratching sound.
They were both up in a shot, turned toward the storage cabinet in the corner.
“That door was open early in the day,” the captain said. It was the locker that originally held the weaponry. “One of those little beasts must have gone exploring in there and the movement of the boat swung the door closed.”
Katya held her ground at the other end of the bridge. She was hefting the aluminum bat that James had found during the earlier battle. The captain took the three steps necessary to get him right to the door of the storage cabinet.
He held the gun at the ready in his right hand and reached forward with his left. Katya backed up a few steps. The captain grasped the handle. No sooner had he tripped the latch than the last remaining water strider on the Aqua Tom burst out of the confined space and leaped directly at the captain’s face. He fired once, but was completely caught off guard by the speed with which the giant insect moved.
He spun to his right with the force of the collision.
“No,” Katya shouted.
The captain fired again as the water strider emptied his toxic chemicals directly into the senior man’s mouth and eyes. Shouting in agony, Captain Scott fell to the floor.
He was soon joined by Katya, who was shot in the chest by the captain’s second errant bullet.
Now free, the water strider ran through the open door and crawled over the side of the boat to join his brethren.
* *
James was five steps behind Micah as they were running along the deck way toward the aft of the yacht. He heard a scream and then a muffled shot ringing out, followed by another. Micah didn’t stop and neither did James.
“Micah,” James yelled. “Hang on. Wait.”
They both rounded the corner. The sun had just started coming up and the sphere cast a long shadow that reached the complete opposite side of the Aqua Tom. Micah reached the center of the rear deck and slid to a halt right in front of the black sphere.
“Organic,” Micah said. “What the hell is this thing? Has it been causing all of this crap?”
Micah reached out to touch the sphere.
“Hey, whoa,” James said. “Dude. You need to stop.”
He turned to look at James, his fingers splayed out, but paused. “What is it, man?”
“Look,” James said. “I need you to think back.” He paused, letting the ship roll in the waves. “The people who touched the sphere. Ai. Edmund. Sarah. The first three people to die.”
Micah’s eyes narrowed. He was playing back the events of the last 24 hours.
“Ai,” he said and then trailed off. His eyes snapped open and he stood up. “Ai,” he said again, taking a step back from the sphere.
There was a roar underwater, directly beneath the yacht. The water around them seemed to start boiling.
“Edmund,” Micah said.
“It’s like,” James started. “It’s like if you touch it, you die.”
“Ai,” Micah said, and took another step backward. He looked from James to the sphere, and back to James. “Jesus Christ. This thing’s been killing us since yesterday.”
“We were able to get it onboard,” James said. “And then nobody could move it. It’s like once it was here, it didn’t want to leave.”
“You say that like this thing can think or something. Like it can make a decision.” Micah started pacing. His hands shook. He wheeled from James to the sphere. “Fuck you—you big, black piece of shit. You ate my friends and....”
An eruption of water, and then a giant, black tentacle leapt out of the Pacific Ocean and smashed down directly on Micah.
“Jesus Christ,” James yelled, and jumped backward.
There was a huge blood stain on the aft deck as if someone stepped on a human-sized grape. The tentacle paused for a moment and then slowly retreated back into the water. Micah was a broken and bloody mess. He was completely unrecognizable. James, for the first time since this madness began, threw up on the deck.
Slowly, Micah’s mangled corpse started to get sucked into the black sphere like all of the other Aqua Tom passengers before him.
* *
James sat on the flying bridge, holding one of Ai’s brown flip-flops and watching the sun rise.
He watched the bodies of Katya and Captain Scott slide along the deck from the bridge to the aft deck. The two huge tentacles swirled around the yacht for a few moments and then disappeared back under water.
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