Infestation

- 4 -

Svetlanova paused in her dictation; she’d heard the noise again and this time she recognized it for what it was: gunfire. It sounded too far away to be on board, too far away to be of any help to her and certainly not enough to shift her from her safe, for now, cubbyhole.

She knew she couldn’t stay here forever. But just a little bit longer. Please?

The overhead bulb had dimmed considerably now and she had to peer to see the stack of food and drink around her. Once the light had gone, she might be forced into having a look at what was outside the door. Then again, maybe she wouldn’t, for her nerves were shot to pieces already; she wasn’t sure how much excitement she’d be able to take before retreating into herself, to a quiet, safe place where things didn’t skitter and tear in the dark. The cold bit at her but that she could handle; it had nothing on a Moscow winter.

She took the opportunity to arrange boxes and bottles so she would be able to identify them by touch should the bulb finally give out on her and plunge her into darkness.

More gunfire sounded, the rat-a-tat still too distant to be of help but she felt something stir in her that hadn’t been there for a while. It felt like hope. But the feeling was short lived. As if in reply to the far-off sound, she heard something much closer; a scraping and scuttling outside the door of the pantry. She stood stock still, scarcely even breathing. She knew the isopods had no sense of smell as such but they had shown an almost preternatural ability to seek out food, especially fresh, or nearly fresh, meat. The light overhead was now so dim she saw blue flickering under the metal door.

It’s right outside.

The scraping got louder and her panic rose, threatening to engulf her, but when another burst of fresh gunfire roared in the distance, the scratching and scuttling moved off quickly.

Yes, go and investigate. Go, far away. There’s nothing for you here.

She knew the truth of that as soon as she thought it. There was indeed little of any value to the isopods left on board, apart from the cold meat on her bones; she’d seen it for herself, in the headlong flight for safety that led her to this small patch of relative calm.

And I need to finish the tale; in case I don’t make it.

She waited until she was sure the corridor outside was empty again, then returned to her dictation.

“The beginning of the end arrived four days and a few hours later, near midnight, on a moonless night and at first we scarcely noticed it. If it hadn’t been for a slight tremor in the shaft, I might have ignored the initial signs completely.

“I’d gone to bed early but hadn’t been able to sleep more than a few hours, couldn’t bring myself to stay away from the drill rig for any great length of time. Drilling was proceeding smoothly and I only noticed the tremor as I was lighting a smoke. Despite a flat calm night, the match head trembled as I introduced it to the end of the cigarette. Then I felt it, the faintest of shakes underfoot but noticeably different from the normal slight sway brought about by the ocean swell. I thought the drill had maybe reached a different substrate and was struggling on a denser rock. I was even glad of the chance to get my hands dirty and do some work. I headed for the rig.

“One of the crew was up on the rig walkway above me and he let out a yelp of surprise as the whole thing shook, hard, and he almost lost his footing. At the same time, the drill shaft let out a loud creak as if it had come under some greater pressure from below. The drill revved, like a motorcycle being started, then leapt faster, still going down, yards at a time as if there was nothing beneath it to hold it back.

“My hands shook as I finally lit the smoke, this time it wasn’t the tremor from below but sheer excitement and anticipation. We’d hit an unexpected void, or at least an area of viscosity that wasn’t supposed to be there. Whatever was down there would already be on its way back up the drill shaft; and I was about to be the first to see what it was. I was only minutes away from seeing some results from all the hanging around in the cold. The shaking continued, less violently now than the first impact and the drill kept going, several meters a minute, an order of magnitude faster than before.

“The captain arrived having been roused from bed, still buttoning up his shirt and tucking it into his pants. He took a smoke when I offered.

“‘Any minute now,’ I said. ‘We’ll get to see whether it was all worth it.’

“By the time we had finished our smokes, the slurry was clearing from mud and rock to something much more liquid. An oily, rainbow sheen hung around the rig and the air tasted thick, almost greasy. I heard a rasp and a clatter, then the shaft coughed up a lump of something heavy, something the crewman had to drag out of the slurry channel with a tire iron. It fell to the rig’s decking with a moist thud as the captain and I went in for a closer look. The oily sheen was much more pronounced now and it hung, shimmering in the air all around us.

“I don’t quite know what I was expecting to see, mud and oil maybe, or sandy conglomerate. What I really didn’t expect was to see a lump of tissue, and one most certainly alive, or at least had been until sometime recently and very recently – the beast from which it had come had obviously been right beneath the drill bit and been chewed up.

“What remained was all in one piece, about a foot across, the top part made of thicker, armored shell black in the gloom, with an underlying layer of what might have been muscular tissue, gray, almost white. The captain took the tire iron from Jose and prodded at the paler tissue. As the iron touched it, it gave off the blue, luminescent glow I remembered only too well. This was part of an isopod but one at least ten times the size of those we had previously encountered.

“‘Captain,’ I said softly. ‘I think we might be in trouble again here.’

“The blue light shimmered in the captain’s face, lending his aspect an almost evil glow, lit as it was from underneath, an old stage magicians trick, eerily effective here in the cold dark.

“The crewman on the rig shouted something, an incoherent yell I took for surprise. When I turned toward him, it was to see his face too was lit, blue and shimmering. But he was too far from the lump of tissue on the deck; something else was lighting him up, lighting him up from below his feet.

“I looked down through the grille of the iron deck of the rig. It was too dark to see the sea itself but not so dark I couldn’t see the blue shimmering light, rising up from the depths, getting brighter, fast.

“I tugged at the captain’s shoulder.

“‘We need to get out of here,’ I said.

“The captain looked down through the grille.

“‘Is it those bloody isopods again?’

“I looked at the lump of tissue at our feet. The blue glow it gave off matched the hue and shimmer of whatever was coming up the side of the drill shaft.

“‘Yes, it’s them. But I think this might be something larger,’ I replied.

“The blue rushed upward at a dizzying speed, the water at the surface roiled and boiled and an isopod the size of a small car came out of the deep and scuttled up the outside of the drill shaft.

“It came straight for us. We had little time to react but the captain made the most of it. Using the tire iron, he hacked, twice, at one of the kerosene drums until it split. The shimmer in the air of spilled fuel as a stream ran down through the grille and over the approaching beast. Even as we backed off, the captain was lighting a whole box of matches and as the scuttling isopod seemed certain to reach up toward us, he dropped the flaming box down the gap between the handrail and the deck. We leapt off the rig and down onto the deck as the kerosene went up with a whoosh, singeing my eyebrows and tightening the skin at my cheeks.

“But it did the job. We ran to the side in time to see the creature, already burning, fall away from the drilling shaft. It hit the sea, the splash rocking the rig and the ship moored alongside it. The kerosene-fuelled flames hissed violently then it sank, the blue luminescence fading, slowly, into the distant dark.

“The captain turned toward me, a wide grin on his ash-blackened face. I was about to congratulate him when I saw the faintest hint of blue light again, lighting his cheeks and chin. I looked down over the gunwales.

“A large patch of the sea beneath the rig glowed, blue and silver and green, a pulsating shimmer like an aurora under the surface, rising fast. And this time, it was bigger still; it wasn’t just beneath the rig. It was beneath the whole length of the boat, as if the whole bed of the bay where we had anchored was coming up to meet us.

“The blue came out of the water faster than I could make sense of what I was watching.

“The swarm came up and over the gunwales like a giant wave.”