Chapter 4: The Gallery of the Damned

The maintenance deck offered no sanctuary. As the two swarms of fleas converged from above and below, Leo and Jefferson found themselves pressed against a bulkhead, trapped between waves of chittering death. The air itself seemed alive with malevolent intent, thick with the drone of millions of wings and the musty, sweet smell of decay that clung to the creatures like perfume.

"There!" Jefferson pointed his flashlight toward a narrow passage that branched off from the main corridor—barely wide enough for a man to squeeze through sideways. "Service tunnel. Might lead to another section."

They dove for the opening just as the swarms met in the space they'd occupied seconds before. The sound that followed was like nothing Leo had ever heard—a wet, organic collision as millions of insects merged into a single, writhing mass. But there was something else beneath the buzzing, a sound that made his blood freeze: laughter. Low, human laughter that seemed to echo from somewhere deeper in the submarine's bowels.

The service tunnel was a claustrophobic nightmare of pipes and cables, forcing them to crawl on hands and knees through ankle-deep water that reeked of diesel and decay. Leo's phantom sensations had intensified—every surface his skin touched felt alive with crawling things, every breath seemed to carry the taste of corruption. Behind them, the unified swarm pressed against the tunnel entrance, probing for a way to follow.

"How much further?" Leo gasped, his deputy's uniform soaked through and clinging to his skin like a burial shroud.

"Can't be much," Jefferson replied, though his voice carried the hollow ring of false hope. "These service tunnels connect the compartments. Has to open up somewhere."

The tunnel curved sharply to the right, then opened into another corridor—this one mercifully dry but filled with a stench so overwhelming that both men immediately began retching. The smell was death concentrated, multiplied, and fermented in the submarine's sealed environment until it became almost a living thing itself.

Jefferson's flashlight beam revealed their new surroundings, and Leo's mind recoiled from what it showed. They had entered what appeared to be the crew's main berthing area—a long, narrow compartment lined with triple-stacked bunks that stretched away into darkness. But every single bunk was occupied.

The corpses here were in various stages of decomposition, some relatively fresh, others reduced to little more than skeletons wrapped in rotting cloth. But all bore the same telltale signs they'd seen before—the countless tiny puncture wounds, the waxy, translucent skin, the expressions of absolute agony frozen on what remained of their faces.

"Sweet Jesus," Jefferson whispered, crossing himself. "It's like a... a gallery of the damned."

Leo forced himself to look closer at the nearest body, fighting down the bile that rose in his throat. The corpse wore the remains of a petty officer's uniform, and his death had clearly been neither quick nor merciful. The flea bites covered every inch of exposed skin, so numerous they overlapped like scales. But it was the man's eyes that haunted Leo most—wide open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, filled with a terror so profound it seemed to radiate from the sockets even in death.

"They didn't die from drowning," Leo said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Look at their positions, their expressions. They were alive when... when those things got to them."

Jefferson nodded grimly, playing his light down the rows of bunks. "Trapped in here with millions of those creatures, probably for days. Maybe weeks." He paused at one bunk where a sailor's hand still clutched a rosary, the beads green with corrosion. "Poor bastards probably tried everything—sealed themselves in, burned what they could for smoke, prayed to whatever gods they knew."

As they moved deeper into the compartment, the scale of the horror became increasingly clear. Sixty, perhaps seventy men, all dead, all bearing the marks of prolonged torment. Some bunks held multiple bodies—sailors who had tried to huddle together for protection, only to die in each other's arms as the relentless swarm drained them drop by drop.

Leo found himself scratching compulsively at his arms, his neck, his scalp. The phantom sensation of crawling insects had grown so intense he could barely concentrate on anything else. Every shadow seemed to move with predatory purpose, every sound carried the echo of tiny legs skittering across metal.

"You feel them too," Jefferson observed, noticing Leo's frantic scratching. "The phantom bites. Read about it once in a medical journal—happens to people who've been exposed to massive insect infestations. Mind keeps expecting the sensation even when there's nothing there."

But Leo wasn't entirely convinced there was nothing there. In the periphery of his vision, he kept catching glimpses of movement—dark shapes that vanished when he turned to look directly. The air itself seemed to shimmer occasionally, as if filled with nearly invisible forms dancing just beyond perception.

They pressed on through the charnel house, each bunk revealing new horrors. Some sailors had tried to fashion protective clothing from blankets and canvas, wrapping themselves like mummies. Others had attempted to dig into the ship's structure itself, their fingernails torn and bloody from clawing at steel bulkheads. One man had tied himself into his bunk with rope, perhaps hoping to avoid thrashing that might attract more attention. All efforts had proved futile.

"Look at this," Jefferson called from halfway down the compartment. He was standing beside a bunk where someone had used what looked like blood to scrawl Japanese characters on the wall. "Writing. Might be important."

Leo joined him, studying the crude symbols. The characters were shaky, obviously written by someone in extreme distress, but their meaning was unmistakable even to someone who didn't read Japanese—they were repeated over and over, getting larger and more desperate with each iteration.

"Kuroi Yami," Leo said, sounding out the phonetics. "What do you think it means?"

"Don't know, but look at this." Jefferson had found more writing, this time on a piece of paper clutched in a dead sailor's hand. The writing was in English, shakier but readable: "The Guardian protects the darkness. The darkness feeds. We are blessed to serve. We are blessed to—"

The sentence ended in an illegible scrawl where the writer's hand had apparently cramped or lost strength.

As they moved through the gallery of corpses, a pattern began to emerge. The deaths weren't random—they had progressed through the crew in a specific order. The bodies near the entrance were in the worst condition, decomposed almost beyond recognition. But as they moved deeper into the compartment, the corpses became more recent, some appearing to have died only days or weeks ago.

"They were trapped in here," Jefferson said, voicing what Leo was beginning to understand. "The ones in front died first, probably when the ship was flooded or damaged. But the ones in back... they lived longer. Watched their shipmates die one by one."

The implication was horrifying. The submarine hadn't been destroyed in battle or sunk by enemy action. Something had happened aboard the vessel itself, something that had turned it into a floating tomb where the crew died slowly, in sequence, consumed by the very weapons they were meant to deliver.

Near the far end of the compartment, they found evidence of the crew's final, desperate attempts at survival. Bunks had been overturned and stacked to create barriers. Makeshift weapons—knives lashed to broken pipes, clubs fashioned from furniture—lay scattered across the deck. Some of the bodies showed signs of violence that had nothing to do with insect bites—skull fractures, stab wounds, evidence that the men had turned on each other in their final hours.

"Madness," Jefferson observed, studying a crude barricade made from overturned lockers. "Fear and desperation turned them against each other. Probably blamed each other when the... the cargo got loose."

But it was the last bunk in the row that held the greatest horror. Here lay what appeared to be an officer, his uniform still bearing traces of gold braid. Unlike the others, this man showed fewer flea bites, as if he had been somehow protected or spared the worst of the infestation. But his death had been no less agonizing—his face was twisted in an expression of absolute terror, and his hands were pressed against his ears as if trying to block out some unbearable sound.

Pinned to his uniform jacket was a note, written in English in the same shaky hand they'd seen before:

"Day 12. The Guardian comes. He speaks to us in dreams, tells us we are chosen. The others cannot hear him, but I understand now. The Kuroi Yami is not just a weapon—it is a sacrament. We are priests in the temple of darkness, and our deaths will feed something greater than war, greater than victory. I have seen what waits in the captain's cabin. God forgive us all."

Leo felt ice form in his stomach as he read the words. This wasn't just biological warfare—it was something far more sinister. The note spoke of intention, of purpose beyond military strategy. Someone or something aboard this submarine had wanted the crew to die, had orchestrated their deaths as part of some larger design.

The scratching sensation on his skin intensified, becoming almost unbearable. When he looked down at his hands, he could swear he saw tiny dark shapes moving beneath the surface of his skin, burrowing deeper with each passing moment. He knew it was hallucination, knew his mind was playing tricks on him, but the knowledge didn't make the sensation any less real.

"We need to find the captain's cabin," he said, his voice strained with the effort of maintaining control. "That note—something's waiting there. Something we need to understand."

Jefferson nodded, though Leo could see the older man was fighting his own battle against phantom sensations. The sheriff's hands moved constantly, brushing at his neck, his arms, his face, as if trying to dislodge invisible parasites.

Behind them, the gallery of the damned stretched into darkness, sixty-odd corpses bearing silent witness to humanity's capacity for horror. But ahead lay something worse—the source of the submarine's corruption, waiting in the captain's private domain like a spider in the center of its web.

As they prepared to leave the berthing compartment, Leo caught one final glimpse of movement in his peripheral vision. For just an instant, he could have sworn he saw a figure standing among the bunks—tall, wearing what looked like a gas mask and heavy protective suit, watching them with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.

When he turned to look directly, there was nothing there but shadows and death.

But the phantom crawling on his skin intensified, as if millions of tiny legs were preparing for their next meal.