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Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Three in the morning, and the stormy Indian Ocean raged around the oil tanker, Lapiz. The storm had been raging for three hours and its stubborn Captain refused to yield to safe harbor.

“Sir, this is one of the dumbest choices you’ve ever made,” his first mate said, holding on to a rail for his life. With each wave, it felt like the massive ship was just going to roll over. “Ford, every single time we hit a rough patch you say the same thing. How many times have I let you die?” Charlie asked him with a wicked smile.

“I’m not dead yet but couldn’t you just once not challenge the ocean, we can’t get lucky all the time,” First mate Ford replied to him and tried his best to peer out of the window but all he could see was darkness, waves and the wind-beaten rain.

“I’ve sailed in every ocean on this planet. This is just another storm. If we waited for the weather to clear we’d be late with the oil. Could you imagine the chaos if we were late?” Charlie asked and laughed about it. Ford just rolled his eyes as the sky flashed with a bolt of lightning and the ocean was struck in the distance.

“Did you see that, it’s not every day you see a strike so close,” Ford said, and was awestruck for a second. All of his years on the ocean, and he still found things to be impressed with. “Yeah, I saw it, but so what? It happens thousands of times a day all over the world who cares?” Charlie asked as he kept his cold eyes straight ahead. While he didn’t see the energy hit the ocean, the light did illuminate something in the distance - something he knew couldn’t be real.

It had to be just a trick of the storm and because of that he didn’t want to alarm William or anyone else.

Ford noticed the Captain was slowing down anyway and starting to tense up. “Hey, what’s going on. Are you alright?” Ford asked him and Charlie just smiled a bit. “Just fine, William,” he replied almost nervously. “No, seriously, what is it, you’re making me nervous,” Ford asked. Charlie had rarely ever called him by his first name, he was just a last name kind of guy towards everyone. It was a habit he picked up in the United States Navy a lifetime ago.

“Look out there in front of us - I thought I saw what I swore was an Umibozu,” he replied and swallowed. “A what?” Ford asked him, for he didn’t have any idea of what such a thing was, he’d never heard of it before. “It’s an old Japanese ghost story. Giant ghosts of shipwreck victims whose graves have never been tended. The version of the story that always scared me the most was the ship smashing spirits that would always be looking to drown people, to make more of its kind to do the same,” Charlie replied. He wasn’t sure how accurate that was but his time in the Japanese waters with the crews, stories would be told late at night - stories of horrible things.

“That’s a pretty scary story but ghosts aren’t real, I think we’re—” Ford never got to finish his sentence when the massive ocean tanker ran into something. The sudden jolt knocked both of them forward and brought the ship to a halt. “What did you hit?” Ford asked after getting his senses back.

“Nothing, there isn’t anything out here, this ocean is one of the deepest in the world,” he replied, trying to catch his breath.

Was it possible they were blown off course in the storm and didn’t realize it? According to the radar, that wasn’t the case. Charlie began to panic; a mistake like this would be the end of his ocean shipping days.

He picked up the radio. “I need eyes out there, I know the weather sucks so be careful. I have to know how bad the damage is. Brosco, Alders, you’re up,” he said into the radio.

“Got it sir, there’ll be a report soon,” a gruff voice responded to him. Now all they could do is make sure the rest of the crew was unharmed and wait to see how bad the situation really was. There might still be a chance to fix this after all, depending on how bad the impact was.

The two men put on their rain gear and entered the storm. “God damn it’s wicked out here,” Alders said to another. “Yeah, sure is. Let’s just get up to the front so we can tell him to call for help,” Brosco replied with a laugh, doing his best to ignore the fact that nothing should have been out here to hit. Looking to their left, all they could see was the ocean until it merged with the black just a few feet away.

The two men battled the wind and the rain, slowly making their way to the front of the ship. Brosco looked over the side and gasped. “Oil slick, one of the tanks must have ruptured,” he screamed to Alders as he saw something black and shiny reflecting off the surface of the ocean. Alders shook his head in disbelief, he heard the words but he didn’t believe that. They were too far forward to even come close to the tanks at all.

There was no possible way for them to rupture unless whatever they hit had actually run into them first. He’d heard stories of whales colliding with ships but he’d never experienced that before.

Alders had to see for himself and walked to the front of the ship and peered over it, and the blood ran from his face. He picked up his radio. “Uh, I don’t know what this is but it’s not like any kind of ground I’ve ever seen before, you’d better call this in,” Alders said into the radio as best as he could, forgetting all protocol, barely able to say the words to describe what he was seeing down there.

William heard this and was still confused. Charlie looked at him; the thought of the thing he had seen before, or thought he saw, only chilled him further. “What do you see, exactly, I need to know what I’m calling in,” Charlie replied quickly. They clearly weren’t moving but nothing was showing up on the radar.

According to the instrument there was nothing but a hundred miles of ocean in all directions. Ford didn’t understand this in the least and was sure it was just a malfunction created by the storm. Charlie was ready to put the ship in reverse and hope for the best.

“I see, well, we’ve run into some kind of black sandbar. It looks like some kind of thick gel of some kind and it goes on as far as I can see, it looks like an oil spill,” Alders replied into the radio. He peered into the darkness and just past the lights of the ship, but he could see nothing else but the shining, unnatural black.

He looked towards the side and saw the black mass was leeching some kind of reflective shining covering over the water. “Alders, that’s not oil, it’s coming from whatever this is,” Brosco said and turned back towards his friend only to see that Alders was nowhere in sight.

Without thinking twice about it, he ran to where Alders was to see if he had fallen overboard. He expected to see someone there in the water, but there was no one there. “Alders, where are you man, talk to me,” Brosco screamed into the wind. He was starting to panic. Twelve years at sea and he’d never lost anyone, or even been on a ship that had. He hadn’t seen what happened to Alders, however, Charlie and Ford had done.

The Captain put the ship in reverse as fast as he could. “Brosco, get inside, right now,” Ford said to him with the radio as the ship’s engine began to pull against the slime that had trapped it. “I need to find Alders, he’s out there somewhere,” Brosco replied as a new voice started to cry out behind the wind. Something he hadn’t heard before.

“Alders is gone, you can’t save him. Run now if you value your life,” Ford screamed, watching in terror as the massive black tentacle struck out of the dark from behind and snatched Alders off the deck and crushed him as it pulled him off into the black.

Ford stared at Charlie, as if the all-knowing captain was going to have some answers, some kind of explanation of what was going on, but Captain Sull had none. In all of his years he’d never seen anything like this. The powerful ship’s engines were in reverse and slowly the bulk of the thing began to slide back and away from what was now clear was something from some unknown and horrible depth of the sea.

The Lapiz freed itself from the slimy mass risen from the sea, its weight shifted and the tanker rocked from side to side, threating to capsize at the sudden shock of being thrust back into the water combined with the rough seas. Charlie struggled, fought, and soon regained control of the thing. “We need to go, call in our position to the-” he said and was cut off. Before him he watched in the flashes in the night sky revealed the hulk of black slime slowly lifting itself from the ocean. In the storm, it looked like a heap of slime, a blob of black horror.

“Oh my God,” William cried and slammed his fist against the alarm button. The super tanker only had a crew of fifteen people on it. He had to try and save them or at least give them the chance to abandon the ship as useless as it would have been in the storm anyway. He figured it was better than being eaten alive.

The alarms blared as the monster waded through the stormy seas, it was screaming something in the wind. Its voice was artificial thunder that rattled the windows of the ship as it came closer. Then the ship’s windows shattered at the sound. The voice of the beast could finally be heard. “Lysis,” it sounded like it was screaming over and over again, as if it was trying to speak but was only capable of one nonsense word.

The screaming thing lurched up and over the deck of the ship, crushing the front end deep into the ocean. The two on the bridge held on for dear life as the whole back end of the tanker came out of the water. They were soon staring directly into the wall of black slime. A thick, black tentacle came from the left side and with one powerful strike, cut the tanker in half. A million gallons of oil exploded in all directions.

Charlie, in his last strands of sanity, flipped on the emergency distress beacon seconds before the torrent of oil flooded the cabin, crushing them both.

The strange screaming beast watched as it tore the vessel was torn in half. Satisfied with its work, the black shape simply disappeared into the storm as if it had never existed at all. The scene had no human witnesses. However, in the raging sea a short distance away, a figure stood on the waves, his long green beard unmoved by the storm and the rain beating against his green, scaled armor.

His aged eyes glazed in horror as he witnessed something that made little sense. The loss of life did not concern Poseidon, however, the thing that took the lives did.

“This isn’t possible,” he said to himself nervously. The old god of the sea now had a grim message to report to his family, and all of their kind who had long been forgotten. Something old had returned despite all the safeguards against it. The God’s body dissolved into ocean water as he quickly made his way to what remained of Olympus.