Sub zero, p.23
SUB-ZERO, page 23
Trip stepped up and in the most simplified way, gave Kirk a rundown of everything that occurred on board the Endeavor over the last few hours.
“Aliens. Meteor. Infection. Monsters. Blood. Pregnant. Death. Disgusting. Tired. Cold.”
“Wait,” Kirk said, remembering something from his past—something he himself saw splashdown in these very waters, “did you say ‘meteor?’”
* * *
After a thorough, three-month-long investigation, Captain House and the surviving crewmembers of the Endeavor were finally cleared of any wrongdoing. While the concept of an alien invasion via parasitic octopus wasn’t listed as the direct cause, the incident was officially blamed on an “unknown contagion.” The ship was then quarantined and towed to an undisclosed location for “cleaning.”
“It needs to be destroyed,” House said, speaking to Damon Becker’s replacement, a man he had no interest in getting to know.
House was done with the military for good—and so was Trip. Including Gianna, the three planned on moving into House’s current home just south of Savannah, Georgia with the plans of raising Baby Boy Triplett together. Hearing of the career seaman’s retirement, House was immediately given a job as Senior Director of the Port of Savannah, a leg of the Georgia Ports Authority.
Gianna and Trip would be working closely with the port’s IT team to help increase productivity, while also introducing new, technical jobs to the GPA.
Sitting in his office, House read up on an article detailing the incident in the Southern Ocean. Because of the deaths, and the following lawsuit, the government was forced to release as much information as necessary to satiate the wolves of the media market.
But, like most disasters, not everything was included in the writeup. The identities of those on board were deemed classified, and House’s record remained impeccable.
A knock at his door announced the arrival of his daughter, and she was starting to show. Her belly was protruding slightly, and she looked even more beautiful than usual. House’s smile was apparent.
“What?” Gianna asked.
“What, what?” House asked back. “Why can’t I smile at my little girl?”
She rubbed her belly and snorted. “Well, don’t get used to it, cuz I’m not gonna be ‘little’ for much longer.”
House laughed and looked out his window, out to the sea of shipping containers. Just past them was the Savannah River and further down it, the open ocean. His ocean. He missed it, but it wouldn’t come between him and his family—not again. He missed too many of Gianna’s birthdays and his share of anniversaries and Christmases. His goal was to be there for the rest of them until his time on this planet was over.
“Oh,” Gianna said excitedly, “guess what?”
House blinked away a memory of him, Karen, and Gianna, and raised an eyebrow.
“We picked out a name!”
House sat up, excited to hear what she and Trip had picked out.
Her face softened. “His name will be Sebastian Marcus Triplett.” Her eyes watered. “But,” she sniffed, “he’ll go by Buddy.”
* * *
Slashing through the water like a thirteen-foot-long, eight-thousand-pound torpedo, the enormous bull southern elephant seal searched for its next meal. Typically, it would gladly snag a squid or fish, but today the seal wanted something bigger.
Being able to hold its breath for twenty minutes at a time gave the marine mammal a broad range to hunt, diving to depths exceeding three-thousand-feet. The southern elephant seal was the deepest diving, air-breathing, non-cetacean ever recorded and was a sight to see in the open water. Unfortunately, the seals’ thick, clumsy build made them easy prey.
Nearly out of air, the bull turned to head for the surface but stopped, seeing something off to the south. Curious, it headed off, using its keen eyesight and sensitive facial whiskers to locate the potential snack. After three pumps of its muscular tail, it propelled forward with an intense burst of locomotion.
Just feet from its inert, floating prey, the seal opened its jaws and tore at the creature’s neck. Thrashing back and forth, it ripped a chunk of flesh away and woofed it down, greedily going back for seconds until it had its fill. Admittedly, the meal tasted different than the others he’d had in his life.
It tasted better.
Slowly, the seal began its return trek to the surface, and to its colony of forty females. There, it would mate and slumber, digesting its latest catch until it was time to return to the ocean.
The bull blinked hard, feeling odd. Shaking it off, the seal continued onward, unknowingly digesting a small piece of a creature not of this world. As the chunk of tubular, hypothermic meat thawed within the warm-blooded mammal, it started on its next conquest. Slowly, it released a small amount of a strange, pulsating plasma before shriveling up and crumbling into a grey, ashen state.
But as quickly as the original piece decayed, a new one began to form. The microscopic organisms continued to spread, latching onto one another, merging into a single, stronger worm-like creature. They “assimilated” with one another, growing exponentially, quietly transmitting a message the seal would easily understand.
We are better together.
The End
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT JAMES is the international bestselling author of over twenty action-packed titles (published in multiple languages).
He’s responsible for such thrillers as the intense DEAD MOON series, SUB-ZERO, DARK ISLAND, and THE DRAGON. Matt has also partnered with USA Today bestselling author, David Wood. Together, they’ve released three stories within David’s incredibly popular, globe-trotting Dane Maddock Adventures (BERSERK, SKIN AND BONES, and VENOM).
Matt lives in Wellington, Florida with his wife and daughters, enjoying the work of novelists Jeremy Robinson, James Rollins, Greig Beck, Matthew Reilly, Andy McDermott, Ernest Dempsey, and Nicholas Sansbury Smith.
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PRAISE FOR MATT JAMES
"Matt James is my go-to guy for heart-stopping adventure and bone-chilling suspense!"
—Greig Beck, international bestselling author of
BENEATH THE DARK ICE
“If you like thrills, chills, and nonstop action, then Matt James may just be your next favorite author!"
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PRAISE FOR “DEAD MOON”
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"A rip-roaring action-adventure that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go!"
—Richard Bard, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of BRAINRUSH
Chapter 1
Gianna Madera knew she’d never get out of this alive.
The cramped aft compartment of the ship stank of ancient sweat and stale seawater. If she hadn’t disabled the enormous diesel engine beside her, the noise and heat would have degraded the atmosphere from miserable to unlivable. She knelt and clamped a small silver tube to one of the trawler’s propeller shafts. A green light at one end of the sonic charge glowed.
Someone pulled at the bulkhead door from the other side. The rope she’d tied around the handle stretched tight, but held.
“She’s in here!” a woman shouted.
Footsteps pounded against the deck. Whispers conspired in the passageway.
“Gianna!” the captain called. “It’s a little late in the game to cause all this trouble. The work is done.”
“But I can make sure it never gets ashore,” Gianna said.
“No you can’t. Listen.”
She did. Rotor blades whined from somewhere above the upper deck.
“That’s a helicopter I radioed to come pick up the emitters. They’re already gone, off to do good work.”
“I doubt that. If they were going to do good work, you wouldn’t have kidnapped me and forced me to make them.”
“That was about expediency,” the captain said. “Sometimes timelines get compressed, and we have to cut corners. But as I’ve always said, you’ll be well compensated. Since we’re finished, we’ll forget about this little incident, and you’re free to go home on this chopper if you want. And we’ve explained your absence to your employer. You’ll have no problems.”
Gianna worked in a black ops section of Silenius Imports. The people on this boat had the combination of magnificent minds and missing morals that made them prime candidates to have connections there. But if this crew had legitimate government sponsorship, they wouldn’t have had to resort to kidnapping, and would have been forthcoming about the ultimate plan for the sonic emitters she’d been forced to perfect.
Everything the captain spouted had to be a pack of lies.
“Forget it!” Giana shouted.
“Then you’ll never get off this boat alive.”
“Neither will any of you,” she said to herself. “And neither will the emitters.”
With a small screwdriver, she flipped a microswitch on the sonic charge attached to the propeller shaft. A green light turned red. The cylinder began to hum. Gianna scrambled to the other side of the big engine and ducked.
The charge spooled up and emitted an escalating, high-pitched scream. The driveshaft began to flex back and forth, as if the steel had turned to rubber. It clanged against the mounts at either end. The people in the passageway shouted in confusion.
The charge frequency peaked at a painful shriek. Giana covered her ears, but the noise seemed to penetrate straight through her skull.
The mounts sheared. The driveshaft ripped clear of the hull and tore a gaping hole in the transom. Water rushed in and swept the sonic charge into the sea before it could do more damage. The stern angled down. On the other side of the door, the passageway filled with the sounds of people scrambling away for the upper decks.
Gianna splashed through the rising water to the bulkhead door. She tried to untie the rope, but the others yanking at the door had cinched the knot tight. Water pooled around her calves. Her wet fingers slipped against the hard, nylon line.
“Damn it.” She gave the rope a frustrated pull. The nobility of sacrificing herself to stop this unknown evil suddenly did not outweigh self-preservation.
A brainstorm struck. She pulled the tiny screwdriver from her pocket and wedged the tip into the heart of the knot. She wiggled and wiggled until the knot began to work free. Cold sea water lapped at her knees and her pulse throbbed so hard it made her hands shake. The boat angled further down.
The knot broke loose. She whipped the rope free of the door and tried to push the door open. With the boat angled back, the door seemed to weigh a ton. Her feet slipped on the submerged steel deck.
She took a deep breath, dug in, and heaved. The door slowly rose, then past the halfway point, then slammed down on the other side as gravity started to work for instead of against her. Water surged out of the engine room and into the empty corridor.
From the deck overhead came the splash of a launching lifeboat and the shouts of the panicked crew.
For the first time since she’d entered the engine room with the sonic charge, Gianna dared to think she might not die today.
She shouldered the red bag that contained her tools and sprinted up the corridor.
Chapter 2
“Jared, you baby. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Tiffany tugged at Jared’s arm. In the moonlight, her long blonde hair seemed to shimmer, and the playful smile he’d fallen in love with practically glowed. In a bikini top and denim shorts, she was more irresistible than ever.
“I’m not afraid,” Jared said. “Just exhausted.”
He had every right to be. The two of them had been dropped off by a friend’s ski boat at Fort Jefferson National Park, a pre-Civil War fortress on an isolated island key in the Dry Tortugas. The fort took up most of the key, leaving a beach and a campground outside the walls. They’d spent the day snorkeling and sunbathing. With midnight approaching, Jared’s personal battery was about depleted. He didn’t want to run it down to zero before he and Tiffany crashed in their tent. He’d spent the day eyeing Tiffany’s bikini body, and he didn’t want to fall asleep and let that go to waste.
“Ugh, seriously,” Tiffany said. “Since graduation you’ve lost your spirit of adventure. Senior summer, baby. Maximize it. Let’s go out to the point and watch the moon over the water.”
The entire key was little more than a glorified sandbar. The eastern point was as far away as they could get from the campground without swimming.
“But I’m so beat,” Jared said.
“Now you can stay here with the Shannons…” Tiffany pointed at the enormous tent the family of five had erected at the other end of the campground. “…or you could join your girlfriend for some fun.”
She slipped a baggie of joints out of her pocket, pinched the sealed end between her fingers, and waved it before Jared. She laughed, and then took off running toward the point.
“Damn.” A hot, stoned girl on a secluded beach in the dark wasn’t anything he was going to pass up. He took off after her.
It took about two minutes to run out of island. Tiffany skidded to a stop in the sugary sand at the water’s edge. The moon lit the beach and wave tips in a soft glow. Jared caught up, wrapped his arms around her waist, and reached into her pocket for the weed. She slapped his hand.
“No head start.” She looked out to sea. “Look, is that a manatee?”
Offshore, something barely broke the surface and then submerged.
Jared squinted at the water. “Looks more like a log, maybe.”
Something splashed in the water, closer, just a dozen yards out.
“It is. It’s a manatee!”
Jared couldn’t see much in the gloom. “Tiff, it could be anything. Even a shark.”
“No way. A shark would have a big fin. It’s a manatee, out by itself in the dark. It’s probably scared, maybe trapped in fishing line or something.”
Tiffany waded into the water. Thoughts of sea urchins, jellyfish and a dozen other painful animals came immediately to Jared’s mind.
“Tiff, get out of there. It’s dangerous.”
“You’re going to let a helpless animal suffer? You have really gone lame.”
Any hope of beach tent sex began to evaporate. He couldn’t very well stay back now that Tiffany had plunged forward. He followed her in.
“Here, little boy,” Tiffany called out to sea.
She waded in waist-deep, and then swam out a few yards. Jared stopped as water rose to his chest and sent a shiver up his spine.
A giant claw burst out of the water beside Tiffany. It had to be six feet long and nearly as wide. In the moonlight, it seemed almost transparent.
Tiffany screamed.
The claw snapped open and lunged. It clamped around her waist and jerked her under the water. The sea swallowed her bubbling cry for help, and then she went silent.
Terror ripped through Jared like a bolt of lightning. He panicked, turned, and ran. Or tried to. In the deeper water, every step felt like wading through molasses. His feet sank into the sand. He struggled to go faster but it felt as if the entire ocean wanted to hold him back, to make him a meal for whatever giant crustacean had just taken his girlfriend.
A thunderous splash sounded behind him. His foot crashed against coral and ripped the skin from his toes. He stumbled and went underwater.
A rock-hard claw clamped across his back and chest. He screamed and sucked in sea water. The claw wrenched him up and into the air. He coughed and shook the water from his eyes.
He hung face to face with a giant crab. It reeked like a rancid fish. Black eyes on short stalks stared into his. Its mandibles opened to expose a dark, hungry mouth.
The crab swallowed Jared whole.
CLAWS is available from Amazon here!
Matt James, SUB-ZERO
