They were dark and fast and were too far away for me to identify, but their size and sheer voracity intensified my fear. I was witnessing a gruesome display of Mother Nature—it was pure animal instinct— and for a brief moment I felt relieved I'd be dead long before their voracious jaws ever tore into my flesh.

Craaaaack…

Death danced before me once more as the hairline fracture worked its way slowly, inch by crooked inch, across the acrylic bubble. The fear in my gut seemed to suck me in like a black hole.

Lacombe grabbed desperately for his radio. "Ace, where's that goddamn ROV?!"

"She just passed twenty-two hundred feet."

"Not good enough, Control, we're in serious trouble down here!"

I fell back in my chair again, then I was up on my feet, unable to sit, unable to keep still, the pressure building inside the cabin, building inside my skull, as the crack in the acrylic bubble continued spider- webbing outward, and the depth gauge crept below 4,230 feet.

I closed my eyes, my breathing shallow, insane last thoughts creeping into my mind. I imagined David Caldwell reading my eulogy at a grave site. "… sure, we'll miss him, but as the Beatles said, oh blah dee, oh blah da, life goes on… bra—"

Just when I thought things couldn't get worse, the Grim Reaper proved me wrong. With a sizzling hiss, the sub's batteries short-circuited, casting the three of us in a sudden, suffocating, claustrophobic darkness.

Panic seized me, sitting on my chest like an elephant. I gasped for air, I couldn't breathe!

Neon blue emergency lights flashed on as the blessed backup generator took over.

I wheezed an acidic-tasting breath, then another, as I watched the blue lights begin to dim.

"Just hang on, just hang on, we'll be all right." Lacombe was hyperventilating, clearly not believing his own lie.

The aft compartment's five-inch aluminum walls buckled in retort.

All of us were losing it, waiting our turn to die, but poor Hank couldn't take any more. Limbs shaking, his eyes insane with fear, he announced, "I gotta get out of here—" then lunged for the escape hatch.

Paralyzed, I could only watch the drama unfold as Donald Lacombe leaped into the rear compartment and tackled the cameraman, pinning him to the deck. "Kid, get back here and help me! Kid?"

But I was gone, my muscles frozen, my mind mesmerized, for staring at me from beyond the cockpit's cracking acrylic windshield was a pair of round, sinister, opaque eyes… cold and soulless, unthinking eyes of death… mythic and nightmarish, eyes that burn into a man's mind to haunt him the rest of his days… as final as a casket being lowered into the earth and as unfeeling as the maggots that reap upon the flesh.