Kronos

ASCENT
35

Kronos-Gulf of Maine

The flesh supporting her body felt like a waterbed, comfortable and cozy, yet visions of monsters played behind Giona’s eyes as she slept. Her hair lay damp and matted to her face and the slick tissue beneath her body. Her wetsuit, still secure, kept the majority of her body free from moisture, but her face, long exposed to the humid air, had paled and wrinkled.

Her breaths, previously even with deep sleep, came ragged and quick. When her eyes finally opened, it seemed that the nightmare she’d just been having continued on into reality.

An all-consuming blackness surrounded her. Light did not exist. Her body didn’t exist. As Giona tried to comprehend the absolute darkness, a violation of her senses assailed her nose. The smell of rotting fish, fat, and bloated, thickened the air. She gagged and dry heaved, her stomach lacking substance to issue forth. She breathed through her mouth, which turned out to be a mistake; she could taste the odor. As her body built toward a second dry heave, she became aware of a noise, deep and repeating. It pulled her attention away from the smells.

A deep whump-whump came again and again, double beating like a distant machine, working without tire. A momentary hope tugged at her thoughts as she imagined she’d somehow been transported to a fish factory. That would account for the smell and the sound, but…

Giona rested her hands on her bed. It rolled beneath her like the massaging chairs she was fond of trying out at the mall. The surface beneath her suddenly shifted. She tumbled and fell against a wall. It, too, felt soft and smooth, like silk. She stood for a moment, bumping her head on the low ceiling. But the ceiling flexed as her head connected. She’d been trapped inside a giant balloon, or some kind of cocoon.

Panic rising, Giona shuffled around her enclosure, probing the soft walls with her hands. Since she found no method of egress, sobs wracked her body.

Trapped.

“Daddy?” Giona said between vaults of emotion. “Daddy!”

But the darkness around her absorbed her voice. No echo returned. No sound escaped. The fleshy walls held in everything.

Fleshy…

Giona’s thoughts lost focus on reality as a flood of memories washed through her mind, overloading her synapses and quickening her breath. She no longer noticed the smell. A single image emerged from the deep, consumed her mind, opening its dagger-filled mouth and sucking her down. Giona opened her mouth to scream as the full realization of her situation struck her, but before the sound could escape, her body left the floor and smashed into the ceiling above.

Then she hit the floor again. Each wall greeted her in rapid succession, pummeling her body. As consciousness slipped away, Giona found breathing nearly impossible. Her body, while being twisted and jounced violently, was ultimately protected by the soft walls that formed her meaty prison. A searing pain turned the darkness all white as something solid struck her head. She blinked back to consciousness seconds later, not knowing how long she’d been out because the murk of unconsciousness was no darker than that of her current waking world. But the pain in her skull told her the impact had been real.

All that mattered was that it had stopped. She held a hand to her throbbing head and felt a warm, sticky wetness beneath her hair. A cut caused by the projectile that had struck her head had swollen and gushed, but the blood had clumped and coagulated in her hair. She imagined the sight of it would send most kids running in fear, but at least the bleeding had stopped. Then she remembered her watch. Her father had given it to her on her last birthday-a Luminox Navy SEAL dive watch, the same as her father’s. She pressed a button on the watch and its yellow face glowed to life. The little light seemed like a spotlight in her eyes, and she squinted against it as her eyes adjusted.

While the watch did the job of illuminating the time, it did little to reveal her surroundings. She checked the time-9:30 a.m. Then she saw the date and gasped. It’d been four days…four days since her dive with her father! As her eyes began to water again, she noted a slight glint of light reflecting from the floor. She reached her glowing watch out toward it and saw her camera, now freed from its waterproof casing.

Her dank cubby had stopped moving almost completely, just rising and falling gently. She slid over to the camera and snatched it up. After finding the power button, she turned it on. The view screen blazed to life, causing her to squint again; but while the screen glowed brighter than the pitch-darkness surrounding her; it could only project the light it took in through its lens, which, at the time, was none.

Giona pushed the button on her watch again and held it down, moving the watch face in front of the camera’s lens. The light of the watch magnified through the camera and bloomed from the view screen. For the first time, Giona saw her own body. Then the watch was extinguished, and the light disappeared. She needed more light. Feeling the camera’s solid frame in the dark, Giona realized she held a bright light source in her hands. Snapping a few pictures would reveal everything.

Not bothering to aim, Giona held up the camera and took a photo. The flash exploded into the small dark chamber like an atom bomb. The brightness shot stabs of pain through Giona’s fully dilated eyes. She groaned, and in the resuming dark, now colored by shades of purple dancing in her vision, she lowered the brightness and set the camera to take multiple photos. She hoped the lower light level but would allow her eyes to adjust.

With three quick bursts, she held the button down, unleashing a strobe of light on the small chamber. With each successive barrage, her eyes adjusted. Then she held the button down. The flash burst brilliantly, twice a second for thirty seconds.

Giona took in the space around her. Blue veins pulsed just beneath the pink flesh above, below, and all around her. At one end of the cavity, a large swirl of taut flesh, like a giant, muscled sphincter, emerged from the darkness. She realized that was how she’d entered the chamber.

The full weight of her situation fell on her as she saw the small chamber for the first time, realizing she was trapped in some godforsaken portion of s sea monster’s gullet. She’d either die of starvation or be digested alive. A chill enveloped her body. She pulled her knees to her chest while leaning against one of the soft walls. Having seen enough of her situation, she dropped the camera and longed for the blessed escape of unconsciousness to return.

She didn’t want to be awake when the beast began to digest her.