Gluttonous Bloom

 

Slime. It stuck to him. No matter how thoroughly Kareem washed his suit, no matter the type of bleach he used, no matter how clean it may have seemed, it still had that slime. It wasn't even the presence of it that stayed. It was its residue. It was the fact that it had been there, that it had stayed. The algae's stain wasn't on the fabric, it was in it. Every time he reached to put it on, Kareem braced for the cold slick of slime, even if it never came.  It stuck to his mind more than it ever did to the fabric

Kareem placed the suit to the side. Light pierced through his cabin window, gently caressing his skin. He needed to get more sleep. At least, he needed to finish this job. He'd  prepared for a short, easy salvage job, but this damn algae had thrown a wrench into things. Corporate megafarms had been dumping their waste and excess fertiliser into the bay for decades, but it just so happened that Kareem was one of the lucky ones to bear witness to the slimy consequences. Brought on by solar radiation, an algal bloom swept over the waters. Liquid blue turned to slick green. It wasn't just the algae, no, it was its results. The fish, suffocated and plunged into darkness, had virtually all died, meaning that not only was Kareem working in the pitch black, he was also surrounded by carcasses. He washed his hands one last time, then left for the water.

In the bloom's darkness, it was hard to fully see the HMS Terror. The darkness and water warped its signature to look more like 'Tarrar'. Its imposing name was more sarcastic than intimidating, clearly, given quite a small ship. Still, she made up for quantity with quality. While her exterior had seemingly rusted after just two weeks of sitting in the depths, she hid a special prize within her. The scientists who had crewed the ship, and who had promptly swam away from it when she sank, had key marine samples onboard. This wasn't inherently valuable to Kareem, but the large sum of money those desperate scientists were willing to throw into his hands was. It was certainly worth the chilling disgust he felt when he plunged into the depths. Swimming into the Terror's interior, the darkness around him only grew. Iron walls turned into warped mirrors. Furniture became swirling faces, grinning and gawping at him. Even with his light, the algae had only added green to the deep's already present blackness. His other senses intensified.

He couldn't smell any scent from the suit. Rubber, maybe, only if you really tried, but the way the mask pressed onto his nose made it hard to smell much of anything. Still, he could guess the smell, looking at the rot around him. Fish carcasses pressed against the roof, unable to rise to the surface yet still kissed by the lips of decomposition. Scales and flesh were almost entirely sloughed off, with just bones and some viscera remaining. Strings of seaweed and underwater vegetation had crumpled in on themselves, only slim stems of what they used to be. He mentally thanked those piece-of-shit farmers for being incapable of storing faeces properly. As he moved through the miasma of corpses, Kareem searched for the samples. They were apparently contained in a 'rectangular, metal box' but that's what most scientific equipment looks like when you're not a marine biologist. When he had asked for a better explanation, they'd just spouted some jargon-y whatever-the-hell, talking about how important the research was, how it'd make them rich, how this and that and this again. Kareem decided that he should stop working for people with too much time on their hands. Looking through cabinets he'd already searched before he found nothing new, yet just at that moment a glint of something rectangular, metal, and quite box-like appeared on his periphery.

Something touched Kareem.

It was just a moment. A second of slight pressure on his leg. As if something had poked him, prodded his suit with a long finger. He whipped around. The light showed nothing, but he knew it showed little to begin with. He tried to listen. The song of creaking metal echoed into his ears. Water moved with the tide above, making churning noises that sounded as if the abyss was speaking its own language. He could even faintly hear the muffled sounds of his own ship, if he really tried hard enough. But he could not hear anything that would have touched him. With a new sense of urgency he picked up the box. Scientists be damned, they'd take it, right container or not, and they'd like it.

Something touched Kareem again.

This time he yelped out. It was a longer sense of pressure, a larger one. For a moment longer he felt his right leg be squeezed. He instinctively tried to bash whatever was gripping his leg with the box, but he found nothing to be hit. Thankfully, he narrowly avoided hitting his own swimming fins. The abyss gave him no answers. The furniture swirled in unknown shapes, hungrily feasting upon him with their not-eyes eyes. He was breathing heavily into his mask. Sweat made the suit even slicker than it already was. Something was here. Surely, something was here. It touched him. Something touched him and he couldn't see it. He scrambled out of the Terror, pushing his body as fast as it could go towards the safety of the surface.

Something touched Kareem?

He felt his body being compressed. He still could see no one, nothing around him. Even as he flailed to fight back, he found no monster squeezing him. Not that he could see much, that damned algae overhead. Chunks of it clinged to his suit as he writhed in pain. The parts of him contained within the suit began to crunch and crack. The parts of him exposed to the water began to sizzle and burn. A cold burn. A burn like dry ice. It was eating him. It was eating his suit too, bit by bit. His eyes were not red from the barotrauma, but he could still see as the nothing started to feast upon him. He dropped the box, hoping it would provide some extra movement. It began to feast and break it down to. The force stuck to him with the algae, breaking him in its slick grasp. He felt like he was suffocating, and melting, and cracking all at the same time. The blood pouring from his torn flesh coated his vision even further. It mixed with the green and black to coat his vision even further. It didn't matter. There was no beast to see, no creature to run from. He screamed, but there was nothing to hear him. Nothing but the algae in its bloom.