The Dead Zone

Gibberish Writing Contest Round 1

Apr 11, 2024

Your Challenge This Week: Write us a story depicting a chase scene! In any genre, help your readers forget “fight” or “freeze”—make them feel the urge to flee! Or, if not flight, then to give chase! Either way, take your readers on a journey that puts them on the run.

GWC ‘24 Judges:

Scoot

and

Sara Dietz

.
GWC ‘24 Competitors:

, and

(click through to check out their responses to the challenge!)

Authors, today I’ve prepared for you a “fish out of water” story…but perhaps “fish in water” story might be more accurate.

You wrote: “Great fiction can take seemingly basic tropes and hide them, giving them the appearance of something new, yet still giving readers all the things they know and love” - and I took that thought to heart.

Please enjoy.

It’s funny how life works out, I guess.

The whole thing was supposed to be a kind of come-to-Jesus moment for us, the bright kids that Dr. Ross saw slipping out of his program’s grasp. It happens - ask me how I know, right? Freshmen sign up for Marine Bio because they’re not over their childhood dolphin or sea turtle obsession, then get cold feet at the thought of spending the next forty years counting spots on sturgeons. None of us had committed to the fall coursework yet, so he’d talked us into helping out with an informal survey of our neck of the dead zone. It was five of us out in the Gulf on his twenty-four-foot powerboat: Dr. Ross, Chelsi, Liz, Shawntel, and me, Paul. No grades. No pressure. Just the joys of everything the College of Business couldn’t give us.

We’d split the day between a couple of NOAA stations which were reporting hypoxic conditions, trolling without much success for whatever might still be down there. Things were particularly bad that year, with a fertilizer spill on the Mississippi and not much in the way of winds to churn it up; I could see drifting patches of sargassum just below the water’s brown-green surface. Chelsi had finally hauled in one and a half ill-looking grouper, and I’d helped Liz identify a tag on the one that was still flopping. Shawntel was in charge of the recording, and looked grateful for it.

“So, guys, any ideas what might be responsible for the depredation?” Dr. Ross asked as he held up the half-grouper for inspection. The top half, I mean - the half that had taken our bait before the rest of it became bait for something much larger.

Shawntel shrugged. We’d been out since five this morning, and the sun had barely given us a break. “Some kind of shark?”

“Almost certainly!” He ran a scarred finger along the gouges at the edge of its flesh. “A sizable one, too. Sharks have a slightly higher tolerance for low oxygen than other fish, so it’s no surprise to see continued signs of activity. Actually, some evidence suggests that sharks are using the hypoxic zones as hunting grounds for easy prey…”

“Good for them, I guess,” Chelsi said, shivering despite the heat. “As long as we stay in here and they stay down there.”

“I’d recommend it,” Dr. Ross said. “The prey will be getting quite thin on the ground, so to speak. If there’s more than one shark present, the competition between them will be fierce - even violent.” He turned and squinted into the reddening sun, as if he hadn’t even noticed the time. “Well, I think that’s enough for today. Paul, where did you put the keys?”

What did he mean, where did I put the keys? I’d given them back to him when we’d cut the motor to focus on our catch.

At least, I’d been pretty sure I had.

After a few minutes of fruitless searching, Liz stood up straight on the bow and yelped. “Out there!” Sure enough, there were the boat keys on their red plastic bobber, floating a couple hundred feet away from us.

I knew immediately there was no way we could reach them without somebody going in. Not the girls, obviously. Not Dr. Ross, who should have retired three years ago and went out of his way to avoid stairs. Maybe we could have radioed for help, but asking somebody else to fix my mistake was the last option I would ever have considered.

Tuning out the voices behind me, I pulled off my life vest and flip-flops, hopped onto the side, and jumped.

A sharp pain ripped down the side of my leg as I grazed the boat on the way into the water, but I doubled back up and kicked off the side. All sensation of a floor beneath my feet dropped away. There was a floor down there, of course - six hundred feet down. We’d done a lesson last semester comparing the layers of water on the continental shelf to the local skyline. As I began to swim, one arm over the other, I imagined myself flying past the top floor of the RSA Tower, the lower buildings lost to a poisonous fog. Post-apocalyptic vultures circled somewhere below, picking off the last of the ring-necked gulls before turning on each other. Up here, trapped on the surface, all I could see was the sky’s reflection in bright bands between the murky troughs.

The water was very warm and not too choppy; I was comfortable, despite the salt’s continued sting in my scrape, and I’ve always been a strong swimmer. It didn’t take me more than a couple of minutes to reach the keys and tread water while I clipped them onto the lanyard around my neck. When I turned around, though, the boat was further away than before, and a dark trail leading back towards it made my stomach clench. I leaned back and raised my leg toward the surface until I could see that it was open and bleeding.

For just a moment, a cloud dimmed the sun, revealing a shadow like a curved torpedo just to the right of my foot.

I had to fight myself to lower my leg back into the depths and tread slowly while the adrenaline fizzed through me from the chest up, making the world spin. All the reassuring shark-attack statistics in the world lose their meaning when you put yourself in the water with a megapredator that you’ve predisposed to assume that you’re food. It had probably been following me since I hit the water, just waiting for confirmation.

Specific strategies, unpracticed, failed me. All I knew was that my amygdala was screaming at me to get out.

I let myself begin to slowly move sideways, hoping that by edging around it I could convince the thing that I didn’t plan to attack it. That’s crazy, I know. This was one of the planet’s great eating machines, and I was a toothless, clawless, unarmored monkey who was in way over his head. Moving in an agonizingly wide arc, I paddled backwards through the dark surface waters, my brain reminding me with every long kick of just how rapidly the temperatures dropped off into the depths. I had my back to the boat now so that I could keep an eye on the creature, which was coming back into view as it rose towards the surface to continue stalking me. There was no way to tell how close I was or what new obstacle might lie in my way, but I told myself forcefully that I was doing just fine.

Then its dorsal fin broke the water’s surface within arm’s reach, and I panicked. I swung my feet out hard, slamming my toes into something rough, cold, and bubbling, and took off swimming as fast as I could.

I must have lost my mind. No human being can outswim a tiger shark - you don’t keep the same basic design since the Early Jurassic if there’s room for improvement - but I was going to try. My hands slapped and scrabbled at the water, seeking purchase and only creating chaos. I looked up through the spray, and the infinite sky frowned down on me. No, I had to focus…I had gone from trying to reassure myself that it might not attack me to trying to reassure myself that it might not kill me – at least, not on purpose. Still, if I ended up bleeding out and sinking six hundred feet to the bottom of the dead zone, those keys were going with me now. I had to keep going.

I threw my head back down as I corrected my course. I was still so far from the boat. I could barely see through the salt in my eyes, but the vague awareness of which direction to turn was enough to keep me going. I pushed away the pain in my leg and a creeping soreness in my muscles and kicked forward again. My feet hit shark skin, and it spurred me on faster, heart pounding.

Then something bumped into my side, hard enough to knock the breath out of me. I foundered, rolled, resurfaced gasping. My eyes were burning, but my hands found a piece of driftwood, and I managed to at least pull the top half of my body out of the water. I had to be closer now, because I could hear more than one voice shouting. I saw the boat, maybe thirty yards away. Definitely closer than I had been.

But now, instead of one fin in the water, I saw two.

By some miracle, the two fish were still circling and not yet closing in, but I knew that the shark coming in to investigate like that meant a bite was coming from one of them. I hadn’t even attempted a thirty-yard pass in years, or I would have thought more seriously about trying to throw the keys onto the boat. True, even if they landed in the water they’d be closer to the others than when we’d started, but that would have felt like giving up.

Anyway, what was I going to do after that – sit there and let the sharks take turns finding out I taste like garbage? I could tell now that they were definitely tiger sharks, and that might not even matter. Those guys aren’t picky.

I took a deep breath and slipped back into the water, then grabbed onto the edge of the driftwood and shoved it forward towards the shapes I could only just see. It connected with one unexpectedly, knocking me back in reaction. Sargassum wrapped around my ankles and I kicked it free, raising my head yet again to look for the boat, then flattened myself into the water’s surface and took off.

I was flying again, still trapped on my single plane while the sharks pursued me in three dimensions. Below me, the water cleared just enough to show the outline of one of them - no, a third - swooping in under me as I swam. I flew faster, not knowing how.

My shoulder hit something hard and flat, and I bounced off in something of a daze. The boat’s hull loomed before me, bobbing gently in the waves. But was it the side? The stern? Where was the ladder? I was reaching out to feel for which direction to go in, nearly blind, when a rope ladder landed hard across my back. I grabbed one of the rungs and hauled myself from the water just as the boat rocked under a hit from one of the sharks, looking for me.

I rolled over the side and onto the deck and laid there, limbs prickling and suddenly cold, my eyes seeping hot tears to try to wash the sea out of them. I could barely even process everyone asking if I was all right. Someone tugged at the lanyard and then I felt the motor start.

When I finally felt able to look around again, Dr. Ross was at the helm, looking like he’d had enough excitement to last him the rest of his life. Shawntel had retreated to the cockpit beside him with her phone in hand, talking about how she needed to get the video edited. Most of me looked all right, but bloody water was still running down my leg and eddying on the white foam decking. Liz and Chelsi had pulled out the first-aid kit and were trying to get it bandaged up.

“I bet you won’t be going in there again anytime soon, huh?” Liz said, smiling at me weakly.

But, you know, life’s funny like that.

Oh, you said you grew up out in Yella Pine, right? So you’ve seen what happens when you hold a chicken upside down? That’s called tonic immobility, and it works with sharks, too. Here, let me grab Lucy and I’ll show you…

Wordcount: 2,009