Submerged, page 4
7
“Fire!” Theo screamed.
“No! Nobody move!” Charlie thrust both arms out to hold anyone else back from accessing the controls.
“Charlie this is not the time for your obstinance! FIRE!”
“Uncle, with all due respect, which is none! Shut the hell up!”
“Charlie what should we do?” Ria asked, her voice quaking with fear.
“We should listen to her and shut up!” Cal said.
“Hey man you don’t have to shout,” Jamal began he was cut off by—
bangbangbang
“Shit!” Theo shouted.
bangbangbang
“Settle people! Everyone, hold up your hands! Palms out towards the front window, now!” Charlie stood and held her hands up in the universal symbol for surrender, every fiber of her being hoping that whoever or whatever was outside the window could see them and understand.
The noise from outside the sub stopped, and Charlie breathed a sigh of relief but didn’t move. The creatures moved out of view on either side of the ship before converging back on the front hull. Several of them swam back a few feet, all but one that made direct eye contact with Charlie through the viewscreen. They reached out and beckoned forward with one hand and then swam out of the way of their craft.
“Okay, nobody else move,” she said as she sat down at the controls once again and eased them forward, as slow as possible. The rest of the welcoming party flitted away, but the leader remained in front of their sub, leading them through the cave structure.
Charlie followed their guide through a series of twists and turns, the crew of the sub relaxing once it became obvious that they weren’t about to be blown up or blasted apart. Fifteen minutes or so, by her estimate, and they began to steer up instead of just forward. Within moments, the sub breached the surface, far sooner than should have been possible given their depth.
Charlie peered through the viewscreen and watched as their guide, clearly now a person but not quite any type of person they had seen before, stepped onto a rock formation and gestured for them to park the sub to the side on a sandy bank.
She beached the sub as best she could—it wasn’t meant for this type of landing situation—and then pushed the button to open the hatch. As the outer door disengaged she heard the rest of her crew gasping and Jamal shouted, “Wait!”
Belatedly, she realized she hadn’t considered whether or not they could breathe even though there seemed to air down here. They held their collective breath and when the atmosphere didn’t go rushing out, they all exhaled a sigh of relief.
Bangbangbang
Their guide outside had clearly grown impatient waiting for them to disembark, and Charlie finished pushing the hatch open, reaching up to pull herself out.
“Wait!” Theo called from the cockpit, halfway out of the hole.
Charlie looked back at her uncle. “What?!”
“Are you sure you should go first? You’re just a pilot after all.”
“I’m going uncle.” Charlie rolled her eyes. “You’re welcome to come next, they’re going to meet all of us anyways.” She made her way out of the hatch and climbed down to the beach she had pulled the sub on to.
I’ll be damned if I let Charlie McIntyre take the credit for meeting an entire alien civilization living right here on our own planet! Theo thought as she hefted his ample frame out of the hatch opening and clambered down the side of the sub.
His niece was standing face-to-face with the oddest creature he had ever seen. They were average human height, but with skin so pale it was almost translucent and tinged ever so slightly green. Their hair hung dripping down their back, and also appeared to be some shade of greenish blue. Charlie was gesturing with her hands and repeating her name over and over. The creature seemed to be copying her, and that’s when Theo noticed the most jarring difference in their physiologies. Whoever, or whatever this was, they had webbed hands and feet.
He leaped the last foot or so down from the ladder on the outside of the sub, and as soon as his feet hit the wet sand Charlie whipped around and called to him.
“Uncle, come here!” She waved a frantic hand at him, beckoning him over to join them. He took his time crossing the beach to get to her. He certainly wasn’t going to go running at her call.
He joined the pair of them and opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by Charlie placing her hand on his chest.
“Theo,” she said with her hand over his heart. Then she repeated the gesture on herself. “Charlie.” Her dark eyes were wide and he realized that she was trying to convey their names to this underwater dweller. Several seconds passed, during which he could hear feet hitting the sand behind him and assumed the rest of their team was disembarking, as well as the quiet sound of the rest of the welcoming party they had seen in the cave coming to the surface nearby.
Eventually their guide held a hand to his own chest and spoke one word, “Kaerius.”
8
1 year earlier….
“Hello?” Ria pulled her mask off her face as she crossed the threshold into her family’s apartment. “Who’s home?” She dropped the mask in the decontamination bin next to the door. Later it would be scrubbed to remove all the pollutant particulate matter built up from her breathing the outside air. Mounted on the wall above the bin was a basket filled with freshly washed masks and new filters.
“Ria, is that you?” Her mom’s voice rang out from around the corner.
Likely in the kitchen, she thought. Her mom practically lived in the kitchen. Feeding six children was approaching impossible nowadays, and that reality was reflected in how thin and frail Ria and her siblings were. But her mom never stopped trying, and she never stopped adopting children who needed a home.
“Hey mom.” Ria made her way into the kitchen, stepping over a couple of old toys on the floor of the living room. On the way, a half finished sweater with knitting needles sticking out of it was discarded on the back of one decrepit chair.
“Something smells amazing in here!” she said, rounding the corner into the kitchen, finding her mother exactly where she had expected to find her—elbow deep in soil, repotting small vegetable plants on their hydroponics shelves.
She smiled, remembering when her father had built those shelves with some reclaimed wood from demolished buildings no longer in use due to their small population. It allowed her mother to start growing some of her own indoor vegetables to add to the rations they received from the community hydroponics labs located in the university greenhouses.
“We got a veggie delivery today!” her mom exclaimed, her face lighting up with excitement. “I’m making stew.” She gestured to the stove in the corner where a large pot was bubbling away, the delicious smell she had detected wafted over to her on clouds of fragrant steam.
“Where are the kids?” she asked. Ria was the oldest of the six children her parents had adopted. Her own biological parents passed away when she was an infant. Her brother Orson and sister Harlee lived in a shared apartment in the same building a couple floors down, where Ria had lived until she joined the submarine crew and relocated to the university dorms to work full time on the project. Her younger three siblings—Nellie who was just eighteen, Dexter was fourteen and little Priya was nine—still lived at home, so she was surprised to find just her mom in the home.
“Oh Nellie took Dex and Pri out for a walk, the smog’s not as bad today eh?” her mother said, carefully brushing the excess soil off her hands and back into the plant pots. Not an ounce could be wasted.
Ria chewed her lip in response to her mothers relentless optimism. The reality was the smog wasn’t any better today than it had been in years. But the children needed to get outside once in a while, so she said nothing to deter her. Instead she allowed herself to be wrapped up in a dirt-smudged hug and breathed in the scent of her mother mixed with the stew bubbling on the stove. It smelled like home.
“How’s the project going dear?” her mother asked, releasing her and going to tend to the pot on the stove.
“It’s going well, Cal and Charlie and the engineers think they had solved the hull compression problems so we won’t all be crushed by pressure when we try to dive.” She let out a nervous laugh, so used to covering her fears around the others she forgot for a moment that here, in her mothers kitchen, was the safest space she could be in and it was okay to express the crippling terror she was feeling.
She wanted to do this for the good of the remaining population, but mostly for Priya—her baby sister deserved to grow up in a world where she wouldn’t be hungry all the time. That drive helped her overcome the claustrophobia she had when confronted with the reality of going to the depths of the ocean in a metal tube.
“Oh baby!” Her mom crossed the small space in a few steps and took Ria’s face in her hands. “The UGC won’t send you down there if it’s not safe, and you don’t have to go if you’re scared. No one will think any less of you.”
“I’ll think less of me mom, I do have to go. But I’m so scared,” she replied, tears welling up her eyes.
“I’m so proud of you sweetheart.”
Ria buried her face in her mothers shoulder and cried out all the feelings she was afraid to express around the rest of her team. They held each other tightly for a long time until the sound of the door opening and several pairs of feet broke them apart. Ria wiped her tears away quickly and turned just in time to be tackled by a short brown-haired girl throwing her skinny arms around her waist.
“Ri-ri!” Priya cried, squeezing her hard around the middle.
“Hey big sis,” Nellie said, ruffling Ria’s short red hair with one hand as she sneaked past to try and sneak a taste of the stew.
“What are you doing here?” Dexter asked. “Come for the delicious food? I bet you could smell moms cooking from all the way over there eh?”
She grinned at him over Priya’s head. “Most definitely, we better get some before Nel scarfs it all,” she replied, cocking her head towards Nellie who was delicately blowing on a spoon over the steaming pot.
“I am not! I just wanted to try it,” Nellie cried, her mock indignant tone betrayed by her smile.
“Children, out! Out of my kitchen now, there’s too many of you in here, go sit down and I’ll bring you all a bowl. Chop chop!” Their mothers’ commanding voice and clapping hands sent them all scattering to the table.
As Ria settled in with her siblings, laughing and joking and teasing each other like they always had, she knew coming to visit was the right choice. Fear be damned, nothing was going to stop her from going on this expedition and saving her family.
9
“Kaerius.”
Charlie let out a whoop of excitement, accidentally startling the person standing before her, who must’ve been called Kaerius given his response to her prompting. She ducked her head and took a step back to appear less threatening, tugging on Theo’s arm to get him to do the same. As usual, her uncle was about as movable as a tree stump and just as friendly.
“We come from the surface,” Charlie said. She gestured with her hands at the same time as she spoke, calling on her seldom-used ASL knowledge, her theory that maybe it would be easier to learn to communicate via sign language with these people rather than either side trying to learn a whole new verbal language. She punctuated the signs with gestures, pointing upward, trying to get the idea across.
After a moment or two, Kaerius raised his hands, held one in front of his chest parallel to the ground and wiggled the other beneath it. Then he pointed at Charlie and Theo, followed by repeating her own sign for “surface.”
“Yes!” She punched her fist in the air in triumph, then remembered to add a quick nod with both her head and hand, indicating an affirmative. For the first time since she had climbed out of the sub and seen his face, Kaerius smiled at her.
Very quickly however, his expression fell and he began to vehemently shake his head from side to side.
“No?” Charlie asked both verbally and via sign. She was confused, he seemed to be expressing disagreement, did he not believe her?
Kaerius peered curiously at her and then looked around at his companions who were still treading water nearby. A stream of sound poured from his mouth, totally foreign but oddly beautiful to Charlie’s ears. Beside her Theo jumped back in surprise.
“Relax uncle, he’s talking to the others,” she explained.
“I know that,” he snapped back.
“Uh huh.” She rolled her eyes at him and turned back to Kaerius. Splashing in the water caught her attention and she just saw two of the others out of the corner of her eye diving below the water. They’ve gone to tell the rest of them about us. So far they had done nothing outwardly aggressive aside from the initial banging on their submarine, and she fervently hoped that things would continue to progress peacefully.
Kaerius dropped to the sand and sat cross legged, and Charlie tried not to stare at his curiously webbed feet as she joined him. He drew between the figure of a person in the sand, then pointed up above their heads before crossing out the figure.
“There’s no people above the water?” she asked. Oh my god, they don’t know. Charlie quickly drew many little stick figures in the sand and repeated his upward gesture, trying to get her point across.
“There were many many people,” she explained, hoping he was following her. She crossed out most of the stick figures leaving just a few. “Now there are only a few left.”
Kaerius pointed around at the crew of the sub, Theo still stood very nearby, always wanting to be in the middle of things but seldom contributing. Cal was inspecting the sub for damage and Jamal and Ria had moved over to some plant life growing on the edge of the sand, whispering excitedly to each other.
“Us?” Charlie asked, before catching his meaning. “No, no we’re not the only ones, there’s more.”
Kaerius made an expansive gesture with his hands, she assumed he was indicating a lot or many more.
“Yes, quite a few more,” she began. How on earth do I explain the near extinction of our species to someone who’s language I don’t speak?
Kaerius shook his head again and looked alarmed, he pointed to the sub and made the same expansive hand gesture then fixed his imploring gaze on hers.
“More subs? Oh, no no we don’t have any more of those.” Charlie suddenly understood he was concerned about his home being overrun. She was intensely glad they had talked Theo out of sending up that beacon yet—even without more vessels available right now if this news got out there was no telling what lengths the governing council would go to get here. Deep down, Charlie already knew that would be a terrible idea, a gut wrenching feeling of worry for these inhabitants she had only just met bubbled up inside her.
Jamal followed Ria down the ladder on the side of the submarine. Callum was already inspecting it for damage to the hull, and Charlie and Theo seemed to be attempting to converse with one of the creatures that had led them here. But none of those things held his attention for long. He followed Ria’s bright-eyed stare to the edge of the damp sand bar they were standing on to find a lush thicket of tall green plants.
“Holy shit,” he whispered. Ria slipped her pale hand into his darker one and pulled him along behind her with surprising strength given her size. She slid to a stop at the edge of a wall of flora such as none of them had ever seen outside of picture books.
Ria released his hand and reached out towards the plant life with a slow almost reverent hand. She brushed her fingers across the tops of the four and half foot tall ferns and yanked them back as if she’d been burned.
“Are you alright?” Jamal asked.
“I can’t believe they’re real,” she whispered, her green eyes wide with wonder and sparkling with excitement. “My notebook, I need my notebook,” she said, suddenly breathless as she turned on her heel and ran through the sand back to the sub and clambered up the side.
Once he saw her safely inside, Jamal turned his attention back to their surroundings. There was much more than just one type of large fern growing in this cave, what he assumed must be kelp or seaweed lapped at the edges of the sand bar, smaller crabgrass-like plants sprouted in shallow tufts along the edge of the fern patch. But most interestingly, along the cave wall nearby were vines creeping along in intricate patterns that looked too deliberate to be natural, glowing a bright green from inside the stalks.
With a start, he realized that must be where all the lighting was coming from. A quick glance back at Charlie and the others confirmed there were no torches or electrical lights that he could see so he followed the path of the vines with his eyes and sucked in a breath. All along the walls of the cave, over the water where they had surfaced, and twisting away around a corner too sharp to see beyond, the vines shone a bright white-green light.
Gingerly he reached for an artful swirl of vine that was lower on the cave wall, and was pleasantly surprised to find it wasn’t hot or even overly warm.
A shout from behind startled him back, he whipped around to find the being that Charlie had been attempting to communicate with running toward him shouting something he didn’t understand and waving his arms. The meaning was clear, and Jamal stepped a full pace back from the wall with his arms raised.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything,” he cried, trying to be heard over the sudden chaos. Charlie was right behind her companion, reaching out to try and gain his attention back while Theo had started barging up the sandbar at the same time. Callum came out from behind the sub looking bewildered but immediately descending on the quickly assembling group.
“Whoa whoa whoa, what’s wrong?” Charlie managed to skid to a stop between Jamal and the underwater dweller she had been conversing with. She gestured emphatically with her hands at the same time, after a moment Jamal realized she was combining her spoken language with sign language. Genius, leave it to Charlie to think of that, he thought.
