Chapter 2: The Stagnant Deep

The ladder rungs were slick with condensation and something else—a film that felt organic under Leo's gloves. Each step down carried him deeper into the submarine's throat, away from the storm's fury and into a different kind of hell. The air grew thicker with every foot of descent, heavy with the stench of decay, diesel fuel, and stagnant water that had been festering in darkness for God knew how long.

"Jefferson?" Leo's voice echoed strangely in the confined space, seeming to stretch and distort before fading into the black depths below.

"Down here." The sheriff's reply came from somewhere in the bowels of the vessel, his flashlight beam creating a weak pool of yellow light that only made the surrounding darkness more oppressive. "Jesus, the smell..."

Leo's boots splashed into ankle-deep water as he reached the bottom of the ladder. The liquid was warm and oily, with a consistency that made his skin crawl. In the beam of his flashlight, he could see it wasn't just water—ribbons of oil created rainbow patterns on the surface, and darker things floated just beneath: pieces of fabric, unidentifiable debris, and shapes that his mind refused to process.

The corridor stretched away in both directions, a tunnel of corroded metal and shadow. Water dripped constantly from overhead pipes, each drop echoing like a funeral bell in the oppressive silence. The walls wept with condensation, and in some places, Leo could swear he saw something growing—dark patches that looked almost like mold but moved with a life of their own.

"This way," Jefferson called, his voice tight with something Leo had never heard before: fear. The sheriff was twenty feet ahead, wading through the contaminated water with his shotgun held high and dry. "Corridor leads to the crew quarters. If there's anybody left alive in this floating coffin, that's where we'll find them."

Leo followed, trying not to think about what he was walking through. The water lapped at his boots with each step, making obscene sucking sounds that seemed to follow them through the darkness. Overhead, the ceiling was a maze of pipes and cables, some hanging loose like dead snakes. The metal groaned and settled around them, as if the submarine were a living thing adjusting to their presence.

"How long you think she's been down there?" Leo asked, more to break the suffocating silence than because he really wanted to know.

"Hard to say. Could be days, could be weeks." Jefferson paused at a junction in the corridor, playing his light down each passage. "But look at this corrosion, this decay. This ain't normal saltwater damage, boy. This is something else entirely."

Leo saw what he meant. The metal walls weren't just rusted—they were eaten away in patterns that looked almost deliberate, like something had been feeding on the steel itself. In some places, the decay had eaten completely through the hull plates, revealing glimpses of other compartments beyond, all flooded and dark.

They chose the left passage, following what Jefferson claimed was the standard layout for Japanese submarines. The water grew deeper as they progressed, rising to their knees and forcing them to move more slowly. With each step, Leo felt the phantom sensation of things brushing against his legs beneath the murky surface—probably just debris, he told himself, probably just his imagination.

But when something long and rope-like wrapped briefly around his ankle before sliding away, he had to bite back a scream.

"There," Jefferson whispered, stopping so suddenly that Leo nearly collided with him. "You see that?"

Ahead, the corridor opened into a larger compartment. Leo could make out the shapes of bunks built into the walls, tier upon tier of sleeping spaces that had once housed the submarine's crew. But now...

Now they held something else entirely.

The first body was in the lowest bunk on their right, and Leo's mind struggled to process what his eyes were seeing. The corpse was dressed in the remains of a Japanese naval uniform, but the fabric was so rotted and stained it looked more like grave shrouds than military issue. The man's skin—what remained of it—was a mottled gray-green, covered in dark patches that looked like enormous bruises or fungal growths.

But it was the man's face that made Leo's stomach lurch. The features were still recognizable as human, but wrong in ways that defied description. The flesh had a waxy, translucent quality, and dark veins were visible beneath the surface, spreading out from what looked like hundreds of tiny puncture wounds. The man's mouth hung open in a silent scream, revealing teeth that had turned black and begun to crumble.

"Mother Mary," Jefferson breathed, crossing himself with his free hand. "What happened to him?"

Leo forced himself to look closer, fighting down the bile that rose in his throat. The puncture wounds covered the corpse's neck, arms, and what he could see of the torso—tiny holes, each no bigger than a pinprick, but there were so many of them that the skin looked like it had been used for target practice with the world's smallest needles.

"Bites," he whispered. "Those look like bite marks."

"From what? Rats?"

Leo shook his head. The wounds were too small, too numerous, too uniformly distributed. And there was something else—a faint movement in the shadows around the corpse, like dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. But dust didn't move with such purpose, didn't seem to flow and swirl with predatory intent.

They moved deeper into the compartment, and the true scope of the horror revealed itself. Every bunk held a body. Every single one. The crew quarters had become a catacomb, a gallery of death that stretched away into the darkness. Some of the corpses were in worse condition than others—some had been reduced to little more than bones and rotted cloth—but all showed the same pattern of tiny wounds, the same waxy, diseased flesh.

"Sixty, maybe seventy men," Jefferson said, his voice hollow with shock. "The entire crew, all dead. All... marked."

Leo felt something crawling on his neck and slapped at it instinctively. His hand came away empty, but the sensation persisted—a phantom itching that seemed to spread across his skin like wildfire. He scratched at his arms, his chest, his legs, but the feeling only grew stronger.

"You feel that?" he asked Jefferson, but the sheriff was staring at something else, his face pale as moonlight.

In the far corner of the compartment, the water was deeper, almost waist-high. And floating in that stagnant pool, partially submerged and badly decomposed, was what looked like an officer—gold braid still visible on his rotted uniform, a cap floating nearby with the rising sun insignia of the Imperial Navy.

But as they watched, the corpse moved.

Not with any semblance of life—Leo could see that the man was as dead as the others, his flesh in the same state of advanced decay. But something underneath the water was disturbing the body, causing it to bob and sway in patterns that had nothing to do with the submarine's gentle rocking.

Jefferson raised his shotgun, though what good it would do against a corpse, Leo couldn't imagine. They waded closer, the contaminated water rising around their waists, the stench growing so strong it was almost visible.

That's when Leo saw them—dark shapes moving beneath the surface, swirling around the floating corpse like a living shadow. For a moment, his mind tried to rationalize what he was seeing. Fish, maybe. Small fish that had somehow gotten trapped in the submarine when it flooded.

But fish didn't move in coordinated swarms. Fish didn't seem to pulse and flow like liquid darkness given form. And fish definitely didn't make the sound that was now rising from the water around them—a barely audible humming, like the drone of a million tiny wings.

"Back up," Jefferson said quietly, his voice steady despite the fear Leo could see in his eyes. "Back up real slow, boy. Don't make any sudden movements."

But Leo was frozen, staring down into the dark water as understanding crashed over him like a cold wave. The tiny bite marks on the corpses. The coordinated movement beneath the surface. The humming that was growing louder with each passing second.

Not fish.

Insects.

The water around them erupted in a cloud of tiny, dark forms. Leo caught a glimpse of segmented bodies, gossamer wings, and countless pairs of compound eyes before instinct took over and he stumbled backward, Jefferson grabbing his arm and hauling him toward the corridor.

But they were everywhere now—pouring out of the flooded compartments, rising from the contaminated water like smoke given substance. Leo felt them landing on his uniform, his face, his hands. He could hear Jefferson cursing and slapping at his own skin, but the sound seemed to come from very far away.

The phantom itching Leo had felt earlier wasn't phantom at all. It was memory—his body recognizing a threat that his mind couldn't yet process. Because somewhere in the deepest, most primal part of his brain, he understood what they were facing.

Fleas.

Millions upon millions of fleas, somehow surviving in this aquatic tomb, feeding on the dead and waiting in the dark water for fresh blood to arrive.

And they were hungry.

"Run!" Jefferson's voice cut through the humming cloud. "RUN!"

Leo ran, crashing through the knee-deep water with Jefferson beside him, both men slapping frantically at their skin as the swarm pursued them through the submarine's corridors. Behind them, the humming grew to a roar, and Leo realized with mounting horror that this was only the beginning.

Whatever had happened to the crew of this submarine, whatever had reduced them to waxy corpses covered in bite marks, it was still here. Still alive. Still feeding.

And now it had found them.