The Ocean Dark

86

Voss saw daylight.

“Lieutenant!” Crowley called from up ahead.

“I see it!” Stone shouted. “Go!”

The tunnel had widened but the ceiling had dropped by several feet, so even Voss — the shortest of them — had to crouch to run. Crowley hustled, moving ahead so fast that Voss could barely keep up.

“It’s got to be a vent or something,” David Boudreau said behind her.

“I’ll take it, whatever it is,” Voss replied, ducking quickly to avoid bashing her temple against an outcropping. “Watch your head.”

Gabe Rio and Lieutenant Stone came last, with Stone flashing his Maglite over his shoulder every few steps. Their faces spoke of desperation, and Voss found herself unable to draw a distinction between them. A criminal and an officer, they were both men trying to stay alive, and willing to fight to keep others alive as well. A part of her — a little voice in the back of her mind — tried to remind her that hunting Gabe Rio had led her to this place, but she ignored it. Who they were up in the sunlight didn’t mean a damn thing down here in the dark.

The song pursued them as well — the insidious banshee wail of the sirens — but instead of a scream it seemed a whisper, and came only in small snatches of melody. The things were back there, following them in the tunnel, but they scuttled along, keeping out of the reach of flashlights and bullets, and Voss felt sure they were waiting for an opening.

“Here!” Crowley called. “Be careful!”

Voss blinked as she emerged into sunlight. Crowley grabbed her arm and pulled her aside and as her eyes adjusted she saw why. The rest of them followed, spilling out onto a wide ledge, and Voss felt her heart sink.

They were in an open volcanic vent, not unlike what the grotto might have been before time had worn one of its walls away. Half a dozen tunnels opened into the chamber — a thirty-foot-wide shaft that went up at an eighty-five-degree angle to the surface. The sight of the sky should have lifted her spirits — the daylight shone down into the shaft all the way to the ledge where they stood, and the creatures could not follow them out without burning — but the sky had darkened and the angle of the dimming light revealed just how close they were to dusk, and how long they had been down there, under the ground.

The ledge that ran around the shaft alternated in width, as much as four feet in some places but barely an inch in others. The water had risen to just three feet below the ledge.

“Get away from the tunnel!” Stone snapped.

Voss moved, skirting the shaft on the ledge, and turned just in time to glimpse something pale and white dart back into the deeper shadows of the tunnel from which they had just emerged.

The sirens had been following closer than they’d thought.

“Beautiful,” Gabe said, looking around at the various fissures and caves that formed tunnels leading away from the shaft. “Which way do we go?”

Voss twisted around to stare at him. “Are you kidding?” She pointed to the water, where in addition to the tide rising, the reach of the daylight streaming down from above moved toward them with every passing moment. “The sun’s going down. We’ll be in the dark again, and then nothing will stop them.”

As if in punctuation, Stone fired a couple of rounds back into the tunnel they had just escaped.

“We go up!” Voss snapped, shuffling along the ledge toward the front of the shaft, where the wall canted slightly, so the climb would be less sheer. Her throat tightened and her mouth had gone completely dry. Her heart thudded in her chest as she realized this was their only possible exit, their last chance.

The siren song grew louder, echoing off the walls of the shaft in an eerie, ghostly cry. Something splashed, and when she glanced over she saw two of the sirens slithering from the water in the places the sun had already abandoned. Something white breached the water, rolled, then submerged again.

“Look at that fissure in the back,” Crowley said, right behind her.

“Son of a bitch,” Gabe whispered.

In the fissure opposite their position, where there was no ledge at all, several of the things lay motionless, black eyes watching, unblinking, waiting. One of them uncoiled its lower body as lazily as a snake in the desert sun.

“Climb,” David said, nearly drowned out by the maddening, growing song. “Just climb.”

Gunshots echoed up through the shaft.

Voss spun and saw a flash of white emerging from yet another tunnel, but this one was still washed in sunlight. She blinked in amazement as she saw it was not white, but silver — Alena Boudreau’s hair. Lieutenant Commander Sykes followed her out onto the ledge, both of them looking around in a panic only to come up short, expressions stunned, when they saw Voss and David and the others.

Then Tori Austin emerged.

Voss held her breath, not daring to hope, until Tori reached back into the tunnel and helped a staggering figure out onto the ledge. He looked pale and weak, but her partner was alive.

“Josh!” she shouted.

He looked up. Their eyes met. Without another word, they nodded to each other across the sun-splashed water, with the night and the tide and the devils moving in, and both started moving.

Two sailors practically spilled out onto the ledge, firing into the tunnel behind them. One of the sirens lunged out after them and it began to smoke and then burn. Screaming, it kept going, rolled off the ledge and into the cooling water with a hiss of steam that rose as it plunged into the dark.

“Climb!” Voss shouted.

And they were all in motion, reaching for handholds, racing the encroaching dark.