Squid Jigger by Matthew Hurst

Squid Jigger by Matthew Hurst

The lights were on, but nobody was home, thought Liu.

He gripped the rail over the open helicopter hatch as it banked and circled above the floodlit squid ship, the pilot trying to gauge the best place to winch him down onto its deck.

The squid jigger ship, registered in Liberia as the LYT356, should have been catching Humboldt squid. They spent their days in deeper water, but spiralled up at night to find shoals of feeding fish. Individually they were two metres of vicious apex predator, and hunting as a team, they pinned clouds of fish against underwater cliffs and attacked en masse, plunging in and gorging. Like most cephalopods, they were intelligent, organised hunters, even if humans hadn’t quite worked out how they managed to do it — yet.

That was in the water. Out of it, gasping for oxygen on the deck of distant-water trawler, tentacles waving in the air, they looked less impressive. More to the point, they sold for a fortune on the restaurant tables of America and Europe, which was why Liu was there.

Twelve hours before, he’d been laying in bed in the hazey aftermath of a casino winning streak, saturated in expensive weed, champagne, and a woman who Liu knew was certainly going to expect payment despite being adamant she wasn’t a whore. His phone had pinged and annoyed him. What he read only increased his annoyance.

LYT356 non responsive to transshipment vessel. Please advise.

It was the captain of the transshipment vessel scheduled to rendezvous with LYT356, who turned out to be called Xiao. During the text exchange which followed, Liu established that LYT356 was now anchored east of the Galapagos Islands and showing no signs of life. No radio, no phones, no movement. Nothing apart from the floodlights.

In Liu’s experience, a non-responsive ship was likely to be down to pirates or mutiny. Either could be brutal, and either could be paid off, as long as the pay off was accompanied by the clear message that if the perpetrators came back for more, the response would be even more brutal. Liu knew he could convey that message – he was well paid to intimidate problems into disappearing. He made sure they never came anywhere near his boss, who owned a dozen squidships and who knew what other criminal schemes. The point of Liu’s existence was make his boss’s life run simply and smoothly. He avoided dwelling on what would happen if he failed.

The good news – if you could call it that – was that the ship was within helicopter range of the nearest land. Liu had spent the next two hours on the phone, charming and browbeating a succession of pilots and helicopter owners to get him out to the ships. Finally he found Min Rui, a young female helicopter pilot sufficiently naive and impoverished to agree.

When they landed, Xiao had been on the bridge watching the squid ship through binoculars. He held them  out to Liu.

“You want me take a skif and come alongside it?”. His voice was flat, but in the harsh lights from the control screens, Liu could see his face was clearly saying ‘please, fuck, no’.

Liu understood. Xiao just wanted to keep his head down and get his ship home safely. He was only there by chance, picked out by the logistics software as the closest vessel to take the trawler’s catch. Whatever was happening there, it was none of Xiao’s concern, and having to call out its owner’s thug of a fixer must have been bad enough. Now he just wanted his own ship as far away as possible from the thousands of tons of steel drifting out of control a couple of kilometres away.

Liu was well aware of his reputation. He was also well aware that Xiao would be a good person to keep on his side if the situation escalated. He said: “I’ll use the helicopter.” He had never seen a man try so hard to hide his relief.

Han, in the galley with a coffee and microwave meal, was not relieved. She knew what the training and regulations said about winching someone down to the deck of a unmanned ship at drifting sea at night: only in dire emergencies and with highly trained crew. And even then, basically, just don’t. She’d started to take a breath to say so, then remembered Liu’s reputation and who his boss was, and decided to find someone on the crew who knew how to operate a winching harness instead.

It wouldn’t be Liu’s first drop onto a ship at sea; an unannounced helicopter-hop had surprised sketchy captains and crews redhanded more than once. Liu enjoyed knowing his willingness to court danger built his intimidating reputation. More than that, he just liked doing it. He’d spent the first few years after school in the marine special forces, and still missed the excitement.

And now he was in the helicopter banking over the trawler. He turned to Rui  and pointed downwards, shouting ‘take me down’. Inaudible, he knew, but she’d get the point.

Rui  dropped the helicopter down to twenty metres above the sea, and the deckhand checked Liu’s harness, and the winch controls. Liu looked down through the open side of the helicopter as the pilot manoeuvred over the boat, keeping slightly off to the side,  out of the way of the superstructure. Visually, the trawler was an easy target, with the deck floodlit, and the lights on cables running each side the length of the ship. When the helicopter tilted, as if to tip him out into the sea, Liu took the hint and let gravity help ease himself into the night.

He lurched out into the darkness, freefalling for a moment that felt like an age. Then the winch whirred into life and he swung over the waves in the wind and downdraft, dangling over the LYT356’s foredeck.  The diamond-shaped spinner pulleys protruded from arms along the side of the hull, each over its own conveyor belt. The pulleys should have been winding in lines of hooked squid and dropping them onto conveyor belts for the crew on the deck.

But the decks were empty and the spinners and conveyor belts weren’t whirring.

The helicopter jerked upwards and Liu swung wildly through the air. He tried to stay focussed and steer himself towards the deck, terrified and exhilarated by the thought of the harness being the only thing stopping him from plummeting into the kilometres of dark cold water, and whatever lived in it.

The helicopter pulled forward a little so he would hit the open deck in front of the bridge. The deck was cut away to reveal the next level down, where the squid were gutted and packed into open crates. Then the crew sent them into the bowels of the ship for processing and freezing. Months later, transhipment boats like Xiao’s picked them up so the trawlers could stay out for months at a time.

But this time nobody had been on the squid ship to meet them.

Liu realised he was hurtling down onto the steel deck. He dropped the highlight line down to hit the shiny wet metal, and the ship yawed up to meet him a moment before his boots made contact. The stench of piss hit the back of his throat. He retched. Technically, it wasn’t piss. It was sulphuric acid the squids emitted in self defence as they struggled and died, drowning in the air, unable to extract oxygen from it. One of those chemical reactions triggered as life faded from the animals.

Whatever it was, it made the whole ship smell like a filthy public toilet and he hated it.

He unclipped the line from his harness and watched the steel hook disappear back up to the helicopter. His hand burrowed inside the survival suit to find his walkie talkie. He pulled it out and told  Rui  to come back in an hour if she hadn’t heard from him on the ship to ship radio in the meantime. The helicopter tilted forward, the engine’s note rising as it scooped a curve into the sky, heading back to the Xiao’s ship. It sent a powerful downdraft to the deck as it went, leaving Liu grabbing a railing to stay upright as he watched it go.

He shoved the walkie talkie back inside the suit and took out his gun, transferring it into an outside pocket, velcro-ing the suit so it was sealed against the water. At least the gun was easier to reach now. He looked up at the bridge, half expecting to see a crew member emerging. There was no one.

He needed to find out what the ship’s officers were doing. Or since there had been no welcoming party, what had been done to them. Keeping out of line of sight from the bridge’s forward facing windows, he edged from bulkhead to bulkhead, moving from the deck up to the gangways that ran each side of the bridge, holding on to the rails where he could. By the time he got the tightly-closed bridge door, he’d caught no glimpse of movement from inside.

Liu risked a careful peek through the glass in the door. The bridge was empty, no sign of the officers who should have been at the controls. From his position, he could see nothing unusual on the monitor screens – just that the engines were powered down and the ship at anchor, to stop it drifting. He pulled the gun from his pocket, hearing the rip of the velcro flap on his survival suit.

He was pretty sure the bridge was safe and clear. The normal procedure when the crew was getting stirred towards violence was for the captain and officers to keep out of range in the cabins and bridge, in control of the ship and the weaponry. But if they’d been overpowered and someone was waiting for him in the bridge, they were better dealt with sooner rather than later. He might even be able to extract information from them.

He rammed his shoulder against the wet steel of the door, barging into the bridge, gun pointing ahead of him. Swinging from left to right and back again, back and forth, ready to dive to the floor or return fire, or start talking. Whatever was necessary.

But nothing was necessary. The bridge was just as empty as it had seemed. Gun held ahead of him, Liu checked the niches and cubby holes, the floor behind the benches of instruments for any hidden pirates and mutineers, but he was alone. He slammed the locks into place on the doors into the bridge to stop anyone bargeing in, and allowed himself a moment’s relaxation. He unzipped and unvelcro’d and unbuttoned the layers of his survival suit. The night wasn’t too cold and the tension had added to the heat. He was sweating already. Liu checked the data on the screens on the bridge in detail. It showed exactly what he’d expect for a ship drifting. No power engaged, position shifting slowly, but basically stable. Whatever had happened, the ship had been trimmed to keep reasonably steady. Which told him pretty much nothing about what had happened.

Liu leant against the front instrument bench looking out into the night sea, breathing slowing as he scanned the empty, silent foredeck. What the fuck had happened here?

He moved as silently as he could from the bridge down the passage behind it which led to the offices and canteen. The doors into the side cabins were swinging open and he peered inside each cautiously, one after the other, half expecting to see the ship’s captain hiding. Maybe he would be biding his time, waiting for the mutineers to calm down. Maybe he was scared. Or drunk. Or both. Liu reached the canteen and the chemical smell of cold microwave meat greeted him. Unwashed plates and mugs were scattered over the formica table top, cutlery sliding over the surface and laying wedged against the lip on the edge as the ship rocked. Waterproofs were crumpled on the floor, muddied with footprints. Odd that anyone would leave them there – they could be the difference between life and death, or at least comfort and misery, Liu thought. The threat must have been extreme to keep a crewman from grabbing his waterproofs as he ran.

He continued towards the stern, wrenching open a sealed door and stepping out on to the rear deck. Pools of water slopped across the green metal deck, the floodlights creating a triangle of bright green deck against the black sky. No signs of life at all. 

Liu stepped nervously over the coaming onto the slippery outside deck and crossed to the rear rail, land looked down to the floodlit sea slapping against the hull. If there was no life on the ship, there was plenty just under surface of the water: a teeming mass of squid tentacles and their cylindrical bodies jostling and pushing. It reminded Liu of a mosh pit at the front of the heavy rock band gigs he used to go to when he was younger, but made sinister by the eyes looking up at him, studying him, from just under the surface. As he watched, the eyes met his and the slithering slowed its writhing to a stop, and the eyes focussed up on him, becoming a single pulsing mass of wet flesh clear, floodlit water. Holding still. Waiting. Poised to pounce.

Were the squid just drawn instinctively to the lights, Liu wondered? Were they inquisitive? Was it just an unthinking reaction, not much more than a chemical process that pulled them towards the light? Or had they been conditioned, over the generations, to gather round the source of the light, just associating it mindlessy with food? Maybe more of them got fed from the bait than died? Maybe collectively, the squid ships were a plus for them. Maybe as a species, they’d worked out that massing round squid ships was a sound evolutionary strategy? Maybe they were even grateful to the predator humans? Or was it a threat?

Liu yanked his thoughts away from the creatures below. He had a job to do – find out what the hell was stopping the floating business from creating profit for his boss, and fix it. He retraced his steps inside, clanging the door behind him and heading back right through the bridge. Stepping on to the foredeck on the other side, the smell of piss hit him again and he retched. The sooner he could sort this out and get off the boat, the better.

The source of the stench was at his feet. A squid lay on the deck, its tentacles limp and glistening, the tubular body fading to grey and its eyes dead. He’d missed it in his haste to get to the bridge, but even dead, it was the big enough to be impressive. Liu prodded it with his foot and the slack body fell apart, sliced nearly in half down its length. A huge cleaver – the kind the crew used to gut the creatures on deck — still jammed into its exposed flesh.

Liu crouched down and pulled out the blade, using it to push back the squid’s eight tentacles. The first time he’d come on board a squid ship, one of the old hands had tried to scare him with a demonstration of the animal’s sheer weirdness.  He peered into the creature’s mouth, fascinated by the layers of killing equipment it had evolved. In the centre of the animal, where the tentacles met the body, there were the two hunting tentacles, lined with suckers, one each side of its mouth, each sucker studded with sharp serrated teeth. Humboldts hunted by using their normal tentacles to pull their prey towards them until they were close enough for the hunting tentacles to grab them. Then the razor sharp suckers could chew them into bite-size pieces to be swallowed. The pieces were pushed into its throat, which went through the centre of its brain – another way the cephalopod was extraordinary. 

Liu eased the hunting tentacles apart and jerked back in shock. A human hand was reaching out towards him from inside the animal, the hunting tentacles wrapped tight around it.

The bloodied wrist stump was torn and ragged where it had been ripped from its arm. The cleaver slice had been to stop it consuming the limb, Liu assumed. Maybe there was some truth in the old tales about how they could survive in the air. More likely, though, the old tales were just old tales, whatever the peasants the organisation used as deckhands thought. He’d bet on some version of: a half-arsed deckhand, probably an exhausted, undertrained peasant on his first trip, had fucked up and got his hand bitten off, and his neighbour had hacked the squid in half. Somehow the incident had spooked the crew and the whole thing had escalated to near-mutiny. Assuming the officers were halfway competent, they would have tried to bully and browbeat the crew back to work, but apparently the officers weren’t competent, it had all gone to shit and  now they were hiding somewhere below decks. In all probability, a pissed off crew had them trapped them in a cabin downstairs, until their demands to go home or for more money or food or whatever they’d fixated on were met.

Liu had seen mutinies before. You let the crew calm down, then you intimidated them with a show of force, lied about concessions, and got them back to work and finish the trip. Crewing up with uneducated bumpkins cut both ways: they could over react to superstitious nonsense, but were equally gullible when it came to bullshitting them back to work. He could handle this situation. He just needed to offer them something plausible sounding, in the moment at least, backed it with the implicit hint of overwhelming violence. Then he could get back on the helicopter and go home. The last thing he wanted was to be stranded on a ship where he’d just bollocked the officers and lied to the crew.

But first he had to find them. He yanked the cleaver out of the squid – the more weapons the better — and hefted its weight in his hand.

Time to go below decks and get his point across to the cowering lazy spineless crew.

He leaned over the rail round the edge of the main deck. Ladders led down to the next level, still open to the outside, where the crates of squid were taken for processing after they’d been hauled on board. They were checked for the kind of damage that made them unsaleable, then sorted by size, and gutted. Their ink sacs and mantles – the hard exteriors – were removed and thrown down chutes back to the sea. Only the soft edible parts were sent below for flash freezing, the first stage in keeping the squid edible till it reached restaurants and food factories on land. Like most mass caught seafood, squid was generally months old by the time it was eaten.

Getting to the officers and crew meant the lower decks, but Liu had no intention of clambering backwards down any ladder, offering an easy shot to a freaked-out mutinous deckhand swinging a blunt object.

He needed to check it out first, disgusting though it was.

Liu lowered himself down and lay on his front on the cold wet deck, the stench of squid piss making him retch, and slowly edged his head down over the lip of the deck, to see what was happening. It felt like paranoia but paranoia had kept him alive this long. Looking ridiculous and being on the edge of puking was no contest for staying alive. 

He swept his gaze around the deck, seeing it upside down.

The dozens of blue plastic trays which should be full of dead squid were empty and scattered randomly, leaning against each other, upended on their sides, flipped over upside down.

Directly beneath him was a dead crewman. At least, there were body parts that you could probably put together to make yourself a deckhand, if you only wanted one for spares and repairs. The arms, legs, hands, feet, and pieces of torso lay ripped and torn on the deck with the viscera sliding out as the shipped rocked. Head, torso, half a leg separated, and half the face torn away. Blood drooled from it, pooling on the deck diluted to pink by the dead squid liquid.

Liu had seen factory accidents before, where flesh had encountered relentless, unstoppable machinery. They were brutal, but they were rational. One mechanical force pulled one part of a human body in one direction and another mechanical force pulled the same human body in another direction. When the force pulling apart became stronger than skin and flesh and bone’s ability to stay attached, the body came apart. The body had been subject to too much force and one part of it failed, that was all. It was a simple matter of competing mechanical forces. The machine had no thoughts.

This was different. After the body parts had been ripped from each other, they’d been hacked at, pulled at, torn at, even more. It had been frenzied. Whoever had done this, Liu realised, was driven by murderous vengeance.

But whatever it was, it had moved on.

Liu moved slowly down the ladder, step by step, sliding one hand down the side, the other round the cleaver, trying to minimise the clanging of his boots on the metal. As he reached the deck, Liu spotted a heap of squid hacked into pieces, their eyes staring blankly up to the sky.

He crossed to crouch down next to them. The slicing into the bodies wasn’t the usual rough but functional butchery of the crew, prepping the squid for processing on the lower deck. These animals had been slashed and torn at, attacked in a red mist of rage and panic. It was like the aftermath of battlefields he’d seen in the army, dead and dying left where they’d been beaten down.

Bloody peasants had really lost their shit, Liu thought, taking it out on everything around them.

A door slammed hard, somewhere down below, jolting Liu. He paused, stock still, listening for any shouting or running footsteps through the metal passageways below. But there was nothing. Was it a sign of life? Could’ve been anything, a random movement caused by the rocking of the ship. The welded metal sheets echoed and clanged whenever anything hit moved. If nothing else, it was a reminder to stay alert. He had to keep moving and took a steady pace towards the stern, heading to the covered part of the deck.

He ducked through a door heading aft, into the cabin which housed the processing machinery. The floor was made of removable grills, the slots letting the blood and liquids drain away. They rattled under Liu’s feet as he took his first couple of steps into the cabin. Intricate sequences of conveyor belt took the squid to be flash frozen between cold metal plates. At the end of the conveyor they were packed and labelled and tipped into more of the blue trays, ready for the freezer in the bottom hold. 

Peering down the narrow gaps between the machinery, Liu saw white hygiene suits scattered on the floor by the far door.  The suits were watertight, to stop the crew’s sweat and saliva contaminating the squid as they were processed.

He assumed the suits had been left laying casually around; hygiene rules were mostly ignored. But they bulged. They were thick, smooth tubes swollen with dark liquid, like human shaped blisters. One of the suits was wedged under the conveyor belt legs, another was bent double at the top of an ascending lift. Further down the machinery, another was ripped open. Liu slowly took in that it contained a human, now sprawled on his back, limbs splayed, faced gored into a pulpy red mass, eyeballs ripped open. Liu pushed at the body on the floor with his foot, tilting it up. Blood poured out of holes ripped in the suit and seeped away through the grilled tiles in the floor.

 He realised the other suits were the same thing: blister-packed human corpses. Whatever had been frenzied on the open deck had kept up its frenzy down here.

The level of violence was beginning to unsettle even him. He edged round the side of the machinery, treading carefully down the narrow gangway, to have a look at the faceless corpse.

He felt his heel go first, the edge of his sole aquaplaning on something wet and pushing forward so his knee locked. His centre of gravity was flung backwards and took him down. He twisted his body to keep his head out of the way of a metal corner and felt his ankle turning painfully. He smacked down on to his back and grabbed at metal of the machinery leg to stop himself sliding down the length of deck. The cleaver clanged on the metal floor and spun away from him.

Suddenly disorientated, Liu flailed for a second and was abruptly on his front, facedown in the viscera, struggling not to inhale liquidised squid extremities. He pushed himself up onto all fours and slumped back to lean against the side of a brushed steel cabinet. He look back to see what he’d slid on.

Another hacked up squid. “Fucker,” he growled at it. He could feel the water swilling round his survival suit and scrambled to his feet, heart slamming fast in his chest. He instinctively patted the suit to check he could still feel the gun inside it and resisted the temptation to let off a couple of rounds in the squid he slipped on. This wasn’t the time for emotion. Regaining control had to come before anything else. He scrambled to his feet and lurched from handhold to handhold, one step at a time, heel and then toe, to avoid another slip. He picked up his cleaver as he ricocheted down the rest of the gangway between processing machinery, towards the ladder down to the freezing deck below.

He wrenched open the door to the corridor, his shoulder aching from his fall, and stood still for a moment, listening. He stood over the ladder hatch, his gun pointing ahead of him in one hand, the other hand steadying himself on the wall, as the boat rocked.  Controlling his breathing. Surely he should be able to hear the crew in the hold by now? Allowing for the corpses he’d found, there were still ten or fifteen men somewhere. Where the fuck were they? They couldn’t be sitting entirely quietly in an echoing metal box for long even if they were still alive. So far, he’d seen no signs of human life at all. Just death.

He barely caught a glimpse of the squid before it cannoned into his upper chest, just the flash of tentacles and a tubular body, hurling itself up through the hatch into his ribs.

 The tentacles wrapped round him tightly. He was fighting for breath.

He managed to bring up his right hand, hacking at it with the cleaver, feeling the ammonia spurting over him and hearing its death hiss next to his ears. He tried to ram the cleaver down between its tentacles to stop the serrated suckers getting a grip on him. The squid squeezed tighter, pulling the cleaver, trying to take it from him, and gripping his chest so tight that Liu began to black out. He locked his hand round the cleaver handle but felt his legs start to go. He slumped back against the wall of the corridor. Holding on for what seemed like forever. Finally, the squid’s tentacles loosened, hacked and cut to pieces by Liu’s panicked cleaver blows. Liu sucked in lungfuls of air, panting with life, and felt the squid’s blood and liquids flood over him as it slowly died. After a few moments, he gripped at the creature wrapped round him and pulled it off his chest.

It hadn’t been large, probably a young one. It hissed and writhed in its death throes and finally slumped, the last vestiges of life leaving it.

It shouldn’t have been alive in the first place. Squid, like almost all sea creatures, drowned in the air as quickly as land creatures drowned in water. By the time it had been brought this far into the ship, it should have been long gone. Liu had heard the stories of squid clinging on to life long after they should scientifically be dead, but people at sea for months on end came up with wild tales. If you believed them you’d end up expecting mermaids and bearded men with tridents and lost civilisations. He’d never seen a live squid survive more than a couple of minutes out of water, let alone attack anyone.

But what if the superstitious peasants had been right? Is that what had panicked the crew?

He lay down on the floor to peer down into the freezer deck, more used to the revolting liquid swilling around him now. The entire lowest level of the ship was a giant freezer, separated by a partition about halfway down its length and keeping the squid frozen to at least -20c for months till ships like Xiao’s came to unload them. By now, the hold would be pretty much full – that was the whole point of Xiao coming to pick up its catch. If the crew had been hiding down there, they’d be freezing to death. Xiu cursed himself for failing to check the temperature on the screens upstairs

He wrenched open the hatch and recoiled instinctively as freezing vapour hit his face. Leaning forward again, he looked down through the hatch and saw blue trays, stacked nearly to the ceiling, a couple of metres high. They were pushed together in stacks of three by three, with narrow gaps between each stack, making a grid of nine stacks.  Some of them were full of frozen squid, piled neatly to make the most of the limited space.

But closest to him, the trays didn’t contain hacked up squid, laying flat. These were filled with bulkier, lumpy objects, crusted in ice. Not squid, for sure. What had the ship being catching? Why had they decided to go for another cargo and what was the poi–

Liu’s brain slammed to a halt.

It had recognised the icy objects in the blue trays. They weren’t catch. They were human arms, legs, torsos, heads. The crew had been harvested, ready to be delivered to the restaurants they served. 

But who had done it? Whoever had gone on the rampage must still be around, and on the ship with him. Liu had either passed him – or worse, them – on the way down, or the killer – killers – were lurking in the freezing hold in front of him. Did Liu go forward or back? Either could have him heading straight towards his death.

He could flee and arrange for the ship to disappear mysteriously, and make the best of the situation with an insurance claim. It would still be messy though, and he’d have to finish off whoever had done this to stop any of it getting out.

He had to end it now.

He descended step by step down the ladder to the lowest deck, trying to keep the clatter of his boots on the metal rungs as quiet as possible. When he felt his feet on the floor at bottom he stood stock still, taking another slow look round, trying to swallow the vomit he felt rising in his throat at the smell of ammonia and rotting flesh, which managed to push through even the ice.

As silently as he could, he extracted his gun from his survival suit and chambered a round.

He approached the maze of blue trays.

One pace at a time.

Pace.

Pause.

Pace.

Pause.

Wait. Listen.

Tried to steady his breath. Tried not to retch and cough at the smell.

Concentrated on the corner in front of him, gun held out in front, ready to squeeze the trigger. However many crew it had taken to do this, however many had lost their minds, he wasn’t going down without a fight when they came rocketing at him.

Liu moved steadily aft in the ship. The tactic compressed the killers’ room for manoeuvre and expanded his area of control. Did the killers have guns? Or was it just cleavers? If they’d been able to shoot Liu, they would’ve done it when he came aboard, so almost certainly just a cleaver.

That was Liu’s advantage. Distance. He could kill before the lunatics got close enough to hack away with his cleaver. The only question was reaction time, and Liu’s was the product of training, experience and hyper alertness. The killers would be cold and tired and panicking. And insane. Liu rated his chances.

He kept his focus and kept moving forward.

The maze of trays blocked his route to the back of the hold. Three stacks of trays, separate by two narrow alleys between them. Each of those alleys would have two junctions with alleyways crossing them at right angles. Don’t overthink, he told himself. He didn’t have the information for it to be more than random. Pick one.

He went for the right.

Pace.

Pause.

Pace.

Pause.

First junction.

Liu slowed his breathing again, hoping the warm cloud of air wouldn’t drift and give him away. He slowly extracted a lump of ice from one of the trays – a hand? A foot? – and slid it along the deck into the gap. Pause again.

No sound. No reaction. Nobody got freaked out by it and took any potshots.

Liu hurled himself across the gap to the safety of the alley of trays again. Still alive.

He moved forward to the next junction, and repeated his ice trick.

This time there was a scrabbling sound. Briefly. Liu held his breath, to listen, and to suppress the warm air cloud. Still nothing. He plunged across the gap, into the safety of the final canyon of blue trays.

Quietly to the edge of the stacks. Ahead of him, the gap in the partition led to the back of the ship.

Where whatever was doing the killing must be.

The second Liu stepped through that gap, he’d be in the open freezer hold, with no cover. He paused, breathing fast, considering his options. He edged as far forward as he dared, trying to narrow the angle of view out of the gap, to catch a glimpse of anyone waiting for him. Nothing. Whoever was waiting for him was keeping well out of sight.

Making his decision, he lifted his gun and spun into the gap, facing the open freezer compartment, letting off a couple of suppressing shots to keep his opponent – whoever it was – down. He swept the gun back and forth, left to right, ready to take down anyone coming at him.

But there was no one.

Just a human body wrenched apart. Two arms, two legs, head, torso. All separated.

And a squid lifting picking them up, and laying them neatly into a blue tray.

It was watched by a mass of other squid, laying on the floor of the compartment behind it. Each of them a metre or two of tubular body, and a nest of tentacles shifting, twitching. Their eyes shifted to meet his own, glaring back at him. Clear and lucid. Blinking. And, it seemed to Liu, comprehending exactly what was going on.

Nobody had gone murderously insane, Liu suddenly understood. The crew members hadn’t been torn apart by any human being.

They had been attacked and dismembered by the squid, just as the humans had been catching and gutting the squid for centuries. Maybe the squid had tolerated the mass attack on them for most of that time, respected it even, as fellow apex predators. It had been like two armies of gods fighting in the heavens. But in the last few years, with the industrial levels of harvesting from the squid ships, it had become too much. There were more than the spoils of interspecies war at stake now. They were threatened and they had begun to fight back. 

Liu knew that the squid hunted in co-ordinated groups, like wolves, trapping their prey against rocks and in caves, pinning them as they feasted. They used the temperatures changes in the depths of the oceans to locate their prey. There was an intelligence to these animals. And the squid spent most their time in the far depths of the ocean, where oxygen was harder to come by. Who knew what they’d evolved over the hundreds of thousands of years they’d been down there?

Whatever it was, it was enough to give their eyes a fierce, furious intelligence as they looked back at him. Assessing. Planning. Just as he had been. And now there were hundreds of them on the ship, and only one of him.

He had no chance of winning this battle. He would be their victim.

Or he could flee.

There was no question now of winning any battle. His only chance was to flee, or be the final victim of the vengeful squid.

Not taking his eyes off them, he slid his hand inside his survival suit and found the radio. Holding it to his mouth, he squeezed the ‘talk’ button and said “Hi Han. This is Liu. Come in please.” He released the button and listened for her reply.

Just white noise.

Nothing moved except the cloud of his breath.

Squid eyes stayed steady.

Liu hit the ‘talk’ button again. “Han. Han. Come in. I need to leave the ship right now. Right fucking now.”

White noise. Liu felt his heart pounding.

“Han. Now. Come now. I will be waiting for you on deck.”

He’d expected the squid to pounce, or leap, or whatever the fuck it was they did, and that right now he’d be on the floor, being ripped apart. But they just lay there. Looking. Staring. Considering him. They must be able to move, he thought, and move fast, because of their mass killing of the rest of the crew. So why weren’t they coming for him?

It didn’t matter. The main thing was to leave. Why wasn’t Rui  replying? The metal hull of the boat and being below the waterline must be stopping the signal getting through. He’d need to get out of the steel blocking the radiowaves , up on the deck. What would happen when he tried to leave the squid down here? There was something calculating and conscious about the way they were looking at him. But he had no choice.

Still holding the gun pointing at them, he had to back into the blue tray maze again. It felt almost protective.

Would they be waiting for him at the other side? He’d back straight into them. The group he’d seen on the floor would pin him from the front, as they all set on him. He could imagine their tentacles gripping, and the sharp teethed suckers shooting out to tear at his flesh. He was sure that if he fell to the floor, they’d be on him. Step by step, he retraced his way through the maze until he came to the gap where he’d entered. He tried to keep his eyes away from the body parts freezing in the trays all around him.

He reached the other side, and there they were, blocking his way.

He would take none of this shit, even if it took a couple more bullets to intimidate his way through. But before he could turn his gun on them, the mass of squid parted, allowing him a pathway through to the ladder. Almost like an honour guard. What the fuck, Liu thought. Would they wait till he was pinned between them in the pathway then launch themselves at him? They hunted in co-ordinated packs, after all. But what choice did he have? He took a step forward, looking at the wide blinking eyes looking up at him. They didn’t move. He took another step. Still no movement. Taking a decision, Liu moved faster across to the ladder and scrambled up the first few steps. He looked back. The squid had gathered back into their group and were moving towards the bottom of the ladder, tentacles pulling them over the wet slippery floor. A couple of metres then pausing, echoing his stop-start progress. They gathered at the bottom of the ladder.

There was some kind of power shift going on: he had come onto the boat as the alpha human, ready to bully the other humans into doing his will. And now, he was being driven away by creatures who’d evolved millions of years ago.

The closest squid reached out with a tentacle, edging it up towards Liu’s ankle. Suddenly realising he could still be pulled down into the hold, Liu scrambled up the rest of ladder onto the processing deck level. And kept going. Whatever the weird animals had in their heads, he wasn’t going to to stick around and risk his own life. The crew might be torn into frozen lumps, but he still had a good chance. He skidded and slid through the narrow passages by the processing machinery and onto the open deck where the he’d found the first dismembered crewman. It was still there rolling back and forth with the movement of the boat. He must be able to get reception for the radio here. He could still save himself.

Behind him, squid tentacles emerged up the ladder, hauling their bodies onto the deck, closing in on him.

Wedging himself against the rails on the deck, Liu yanked out the handheld radio and started to hammer the ‘talk’ button, blipping it to try to get attention from Xiao and Han. He thought the flight over had taken about five minutes. Add preflight checks and takeoff? Even if Rui  rushed them, he had to hang on for the best part of ten minutes.

“Han, Han. Xiao. This is Liu, come in.”

More white noise.

 He recognised the adrenalin rush of panic through his brain, despite his self image as the perpetually calm professional. But who wouldn’t be panicking now, with the crew dismembered and hundreds of vicious predators heading for him?

He tried again. “Come in Xiao. I need to be rescued. This is a shitshow like you wouldn’t believe.”

He paused. Listened. Nothing human came back to him. He felt very alone. Liu looked back the squid. Why were they moving so slowly? He didn’t understand what they were doing. Shouldn’t they be trapping him, hurling themselves at him, pulling him apart like they’d pulled apart all the humans on the ship.

But they were keeping their distance.

Then a crackle. “Liu, this Xiao. Reading you. What’s the problem?”

“Just fucking come and get me. Now.”

“Roger. I’ll get Rui  now. She can drop a winch and a harness, okay?”

“Yes, yes whatever the fuck. Just do it.”

“ETA about 8 minutes, okay?”

“Quicker. Now.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Eight minutes. He had to last out eight minutes.

Maybe the squid weren’t all that smart after all. Maybe they were just smart enough to understand what a gun was and that was holding them back. Maybe he would come out of this unscathed.

One of them broke from the group and shunted towards him. Liu lifted his gun towards it, knowing it understood the threat. He backed towards the ladder to the top deck. The squid kept coming at him, tentacles slapping on the wet deck, an angry hissing seeping from its mouth.

Liu stood his ground, gun raised. Intimidation always worked best.

The squid moved in, closing the gap between them.

Liu loosed a shot into it, hearing it scream horribly, the impact of the bullet flipping it onto its back, limp. Liu crouched over it, to finish it off, stifling the urge to cough as the ammonia hit his throat. An old school double tap. He pushed the muzzle between the tentacles, grinding it deeper, as he gasped, harder. The gun needed to be as far inside the creature as he could penetrate, to make sure he finished it off. He pulled the trigger, hoping the bullet would slam through the squid’s hunting tentacle, into its throat and through its brain. He felt it rip out the back of its body and heard the bullet clang against the deck.

The squid were gathered in a horsehoe a few metres away. Hissing. But not moving. There was something calculated in this new tactic.

Liu took a couple of deliberate, deep breaths, pointing his gun at the mass of squid in front. Maybe he’d given them too much credit. They were just primitive deep sea animals after all, and couldn’t compete with humans’ ability to execute a plan. They might be trying to harass and manoeuvre him like pack hunters.

He backed towards the ladder, not taking his eyes off them.

Another squid hurled itself at him, the impact on his chest pushing him back. Liu pressed the barrel into the soft body and fired again, praying the bullet didn’t end up in his body too. The squid’s grip slackened and he used the barrel to push it off him, hearing it slap onto the deck. The rest of the animals held back – for now at least – and Liu made the most of their hesitation to pull himself up the ladder as fast he could.

Safely on the main, open deck of the trawler, close to where he’d landed on the winch only a few minutes before, he looked out into the night, desperate for any sign of the helicopter. Were they lights on the deck of Xiao’s ship? How long did it take these people to get a helicopter up?

He looked around for the best place to stand so that Rui  could get a decent position with the winch and harness. There was an empty patch of deck further forward – he could get to it down the gangway by the side of the coaming, and be ready to be lifted off this sinister hell of a boat the moment the helicopter was close enough. What the fuck was he going to tell the boss when he got back to civilisation? He had no idea. Don’t think about it yet, he told himself. Focus on getting out of this first.

The sound of an engine drifted across the water, and he looked over to see helicopter lights lifting off, its body and rotors tipping forward as it started across the black water towards the trawler.

He checked his watch – just another five minutes to hold on. He took a pace towards the open deck.

But now it was blocked. The squid had massed there, stopping him. There was no way past.

Then they started moving towards him. A slow, remorseless mass.

Instinctively, Liu backed away from them, edging aft down the side of the board. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the row of floodlights on cables down the side of the ship, the ones that attracted the squid, and the conveyor belts and spinners protruding over the side where they were pulled on board, ready to be gutted. The animals closing in on him recognise where they’d been hauled in.

The squid edged closer. Liu stepped back again, trying to increase distance from them. They’d held back so far. He could keep them back for just another few minutes. He could hear the helicopter getting closer now. Just another, what, three or four minutes. He kept moving down the side of the boat. Harder for Rui  to pick him up, but he had no choice. Hang in there. Maybe he could get to the deck at the stern and be lifted from there.

He spun round, ready to run and scramble up ladders to get to that open deck.

Another mass of squid faced him. They’d moved in behind him. Now he was pinned between the two groups.

He could still make it out of this, as long as he could hold them off.

He grabbed for his radio, feeling the hard square corners in his hand. “Han, get here now. Fucking NOW.”

A tentacle circled the radio, closing tight on it, and yanked it out of his hand. Then it hurled the handset over the side of the ship into the sea.

Liu looked into the wide eyes of a squid. He saw more than anger.  He saw murderous calculation.

Without breaking its gaze, the squid wrapped its tentacles round his ankle, and he felt the serrated suckers of its killing tentacle sink into his flesh, cutting through the survival suit. He screamed involuntarily, trying to pull back, pressing himself against the side of the ship, the only protection left between himself and the sea. The other squid circled him more tightly. Trapped, Liu tried to scramble up the side, to lift his feet away from the vicious teeth. He grabbed at one of the conveyor belts leaning over the side and pulled himself up onto it, putting himself out of range, at least for the moment.

The squid surrounded the deck end of the conveyor, and he shifted back, sitting on the belt itself.

They had all gathered on the steel wall at the edge of the deck now, lined up. Eyes glaring at him. Liu clung on tight to the line as the ship rose up and down in the water, his leg throbbing and blood pumping out into his survival suit. Tentacles reached out towards him.

Looking down into the floodlit sea, his gaze was met by hundreds more squid, looking up at him.

Hang on, he thought. Hang on.

Then the squid who had taken his radio reached up for the lever at the end of the conveyor, and pulled it downwards. The belt under Liu whined into life. They’re going to pull me back in, he realised. Then he registered the conveyor belt direction had been reversed. He was being carried away from the ship. In a few seconds he would be pitched off the end into the sea.

There was a road of helicopter engine, and the sea flattened from the rotors’ downdraft. Thank fuck, thought Liu. I’m rescued.

Liu risked a glance back the squid. They were watching, hundreds of eyes observing him. But not moving, at least.

He was moved relentlessly away from the ship, over the sea.  The helicopter came down lower, and he spotted a crew member on the end of a winch, being lowered towards him. He hadn’t thought Rui had it in her.

He realised he’d be off the end of the conveyor before the rescuer reached him.

Ahead of him, the fishing line dangled at the end of the conveyor belt. He had no idea if it would take his weight, and his timing would have to be perfect. He tried to use his adrenalin to focus his brain.

The end of the conveyor got closer and closer. He had one desperate chance. As he got to an arm’s length, he grabbed at the line and twisted it round his wrist, pulling himself up so he could turn it round his body, under his arms. How long could he hang like that?

He looked down.

The squid he’d seen behind the ship were massed underneath him in the floodlit sea. Hundreds more eyes looking up at him.

Then Liu realised. Squid worked together to manoeuvre their prey in a pincer action. That’s what they’d been doing with him from the start. He’d been forced exactly where they wanted him.

Except – they hadn’t, had they? Human technology had beaten them. Machinery was going to save him. The squid jigger, the catch line, the helicopter, his own intellect, had beaten the inchoate irrational animalistic rage.   

He looked up, exhilarated to see the helicopter hovering into place above him, and the winch operator dropping down on the line that would save his life.

He felt the rotors’ downdraft shift and strengthen.

He tried to hang on. The fishing line swung wildly in the tornado made by the helicopter, and Liu twisted and spun on the end, slamming up into the steel of the conveyor belt.

The jolt of the impact and the force of gravity on Liu’s body was too much for the fishing line. Maths and physics did their work. The line snapped.

And Liu fell into the seething, vengeful mass of squid.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Matthew Hurst 2025

Image Source: Dey from Fictom.com