A Boat Off The Coast

• Nikhil Kumar Puppala, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2008

30 elite French Daredevil Paratroopers thudded as they landed onto the storm lashed deck of an abandoned US aircraft-carrier, USS Revolver. The air was cold, the ship: deserted. Captain Andre and his troops watched while rain lashed onto them and the freezing cold chilled their bones. The two Super Puma Helicopters which dropped the troops off whizzed away, circling the carrier menacingly from above. The Daredevils acted: the men unclipped their chutes and as the GRX-3000 Nylon-Preachers swept off into the air, the daredevils spread out over the ship.

It wasn’t right, something was strange, and perhaps it was the fact that nothing was strange that made it strange. An American carrier had just landed mysteriously on France’s coast; his men were launched as a reconnaissance team onto this foreign Ship.

The Daredevils moved about in a systematic pattern all over the ship’s deck, they couldn’t find any entrance whatsoever into the ships under-deck, nor could they find any form of entrance to the tower, not even a door, locked or unlocked. André stared around, his heart pounding, it was quiet, too quiet, Andre looked up into the sky and realized that the two helicopters were gone; they simply disappeared. He searched the sky but couldn’t find anything, not even a bird.

The daredevils had found a door, a person wouldn’t have seen it if they weren’t searching for it. It was embedded underneath the shadows of an FA-18/A Hornet. André reached out for the door and pulled it up and opened it with ease. He stared down into darkness; a chill ran down the spine of André as he held the cold door handle in his hands and stared down into the darkness. Andre dropped down an ASX-Flare and watched as the light slowly descended down the dark shaft and lit up a massive cavern, before the paratrooper could get a glimpse of the cavern, the flare went out and the abrupt darkness was followed by a soft “plonk”. Water, the flare had landed in water, surprisingly there was water at the bottom of the dark cavern.

Andre tied a rope to the wheels of the closest Hornet and lowered himself down while the team continued searching the rest off the deck. André was inside the dark cavern now, this time he threw up an ASX-2000-hoveringflare. The flare hovered up at the ceiling of the cavern and revealed something beyond the imagination of mankind. André gasped at the walls of the cavern, but not with surprise, but with cold fear, the walls were not something made in this world.

Andre’s hands slipped and he fell into the water. Nothing happened,Andre’s heart was racing, thin filaments began wrapping around him, and André couldn’t help as something in the water started wrapping around him. The death scream of Captain Andre Massena echoed over the cavern, but it never left the cavern, instead it echoed around it infinitely, forever, along with the 700 other screams of the ships dead crew.