Chapter 2 – Don't listen to the music

The following is a compilation and analysis of highly sensitive files provided by an anonymous source from within the US Navy, which were in turn sourced from fishermen in the West Pacific. Names, dates, and locations have been altered to protect the identity of those involved.

Video footage shows the waters clearing. The Enigma’s rate of sinkage appears to slow to a standstill.

The floodlights illuminate an isolated plateau on top of a pillar in the endless dark abyss.

A swarming mass of rotting corpses writhe on top of a rusted, barnacled city.

It’s the light, they see it. They’re coming.

The date counter begins malfunctioning at this point

Unknown Timeline Day 1

“It’s the lights, Lana! Turn them off!”

Simon’s yelling pulled me out of my stupor just before the first of them reached us. They threw themselves against the cold steel hull loud enough to ring the entire place like a gong. It was a crescendo of thundering and crashing to the point of pain as what could only be thousands of bodies slammed into the sides.

The structure of the ship started to groan and tremble under the pressure, and I saw some of the steel plating bend, cracking the five inch thick glass of the portholes. Human bodies shouldn’t be able to do that.

I stumbled my way to the cockpit, where the bulbous transparent window was already webbed with fine fractures, and pulled the master kill switch for all the electronics in the submarine.

We were immediately plunged into darkness. Out of pure instinct, I dove onto the floor and lay still, heart pounding traitorously against my chest. For all I knew, the front canopy was only a few hits away from completely shattering and allowing the full crushing depth of the deep to pulverize everyone who was still alive.

Thankfully, our hunch about the lights was correct. The pounding of bodies against the hull quickly dwindled, then faded to silence. I strained my ears for signs of movement, and when I found none, slowly crawled my way back into the opaque metal confines of the sub’s living quarters.

CRASH

An ear-splitting sound, one of metal on metal, broke my concentration. In the next moment, all hell broke loose.

Out of the darkness came the sounds of dozens of fast footsteps. At the same time, I stood up in panic and hit my head on a metal beam, sending waves of sharp, hot pain down my scalp. The footsteps gave way to a grating, hysterical screaming unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It was like a thousand nails on a chalkboard, amplified and humanized through a thousand voices that made my spine tense up and hair stand on end.

I panicked, which I knew I shouldn’t have done, and I’m sorry for the people I hurt as a result. I decided to start running, feeling my way to the medical bay where we set up a safe area for most of our healthy crew. The footsteps behind me became rapid and heavy, their screaming more urgent. I rounded a corner and felt a hand grab me by the elbow. It felt like slime and grit and mold. Thankfully, I knew the insides of this submarine like the back of my hand, and so I also knew there was a fire extinguisher right on the edge of the wall. Without even pausing to think, I threw my shoulder into the glass with all my weight, shattering it into dozens of large, sharp shards. Perfect. I grabbed a shard with two hands, clamping the blade-like piece on each side and drove it into the neck of my captor. The body jerked away from me, moaning in pain, and I felt warm, thick blood pour out into my hands. I’m sorry.

I grabbed the fire extinguisher for safekeeping and kept running while spraying foam behind me to try and slow them down. On the way, I ran into some of my crewmates. Some were quick to join me, others weren’t so lucky. If our chasers didn’t stop to brutally disassemble our stragglers, a fact that presented itself to me in the sounds of violent ripping of flesh and crushing of bones, then I probably would not have made it.

It typically takes less than a minute to get anywhere within the sub to anywhere else, but it felt like an eternity before I finally reached the heavy bulkhead door signifying that I’d reached the medbay back near the cockpit. A few of the crew made it in with me. Others didn’t make it in time before I had to seal the bulkhead. I’m so, so sorry.

I’m writing this entry right now in the med bay, along with four other people who had the idea to come here and also managed to make it. Simon… he’s not here. I really hope he managed to seal himself off somewhere until we can figure this out.

The only two people out of my close acquaintances who I know for sure survived are Alex and Anton. Yes, the same Anton who was coughing up his lungs a few days ago. He’s just here now, and he assures me he’s perfectly fine. Alex, especially, is shocked about this development and has been running tests on him for the past hour. They’ve been sectioned off in a corner of the bay to try and prevent any spreading of the disease, but Alex tells me there’s no longer any trace of symptoms or the illness on him anymore. He talks the same as he always has, makes the same terrible dad jokes, and he suddenly just seems surprisingly healthy.

Yet there’s something… off about him. He just reeks of wrongness.

Are we all going crazy?

Unknown Timeline Day 2

I woke up today with a splitting headache and a sharp pain in my shoulder. It turns out that hastily handling broken glass in the dark lead to some pretty nasty lacerations in my shoulder as well as my hands. Alex managed to patch me up pretty nicely, but we’re both worried about possible blood-to-blood wound contact with the mob that was trying to kill me.

Speaking of the mob, Alex and I talked and he thinks that they were our own crewmates, not outsiders who managed to break in like I thought.

He was treating the sick in the back of the sub (in full safety equipment, he assures me) when the creatures outside started banging on the submarine. The patients had been complaining about the singing getting louder for a while now, but when they heard the banging… they lost their minds. Alex recalled suddenly seeing his patients clawing at their ears, foaming at the mouths, and violently tearing at their own skin, begging for the singing to stop. It was all he could do to escape with his own life. He remarked that the only people who are still themselves are people who haven’t reported hearing the singing. A shiver ran down my spine.

In the distance, if I strain my ears, I can hear a faint tune:

I had strings, but now I’m free…

Unknown Timeline Day 3

We’re in quite a predicament here, and I’m not sure I can think of a way out. We’re God knows how deep in the ocean at this point (the untrustworthy bathymeter says 4000 miles, which would place us near the center of the Earth), and if we tried to escape or resurface, we’d either get sucked into the downward current that brought us down here in the first place, or we’d be completely swarmed and destroyed by a hoard of dead seamen just outside the submarine. And that’s assuming we could somehow get out of this med bay and into the cockpit to do anything.

Once again I found myself talking to Alex about some kind of diversion, which we could maybe use to buy me enough time to bolt myself back inside the cockpit. Alex kindly reminded me that he’s a medic and not a combat strategist. If we were going to take back the submarine, he’d leave me to figure it out for myself. Thanks a lot, man.

Anton overheard the conversation and sat up in his bed, beckoning me to come over to him. Alex had cleared him of all ailments and infectious agents, but I was still cautious about getting anywhere near him. Plus, there was that whole issue of him coming back from being practically dead. He beckoned again, and I found myself drifting over to him anyway, trying not to think about the strange, almost chemical smell he gave off.

“If you’re looking for a way to take back the sub, a diversion isn’t going to be enough. You’re going to have to kill them. They’re already looking for a way into the med bay, and they’re going to make it in eventually”

The sight of the bolted down, bloody air vents interspersed throughout the room and the occasional metallic thud of a body slamming itself against the metal bulkhead door was enough to convince me that Anton was right.

“How do you propose we do that?”

“Listen, the sickness was caused by that song. When we got down here, that song got so twisted and deafening that it caused most of the crewmates to go absolutely crazy”

Alex had never told Anton the story about his patients.

“And I know you hear it too, Lana”.

“H-how do you-”

“So what we do is, we deafen them. I don’t care if they were our crewmates, but they aren’t anymore. We take the industrial SOS flares stored in most major rooms of this sub, use them to blow out their eardrums and melt their retinas at close range. If they can’t hear the song, they’ll collapse like vacant puppets”

Anton’s coarse dismissal of our crewmates’ lives was jarring. I knew him as such a warm, empathetic guy. But I knew what he said was true. Those people were gone. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but I’m pretty sure most of them were missing vital body parts when they were chasing me down. I nodded.

“But how do you plan on flaring all of them at once? It’s a cramped labyrinth of a submarine, you’re going to have to get them all in the same place.”

Anton made a face I’d never seen him make before. It was like he was an excited little boy, eager to show his mommy what amazing thing he’d discovered in his backyard. He grinned at me proudly, savoring the ingenious plan he was about to share with me. He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper and leaned in:

“Fresh meat. We can use some of the more expendable people in here with us as bait, since the corrupted seem to love killing healthy people. They’ll put up a good fight, long enough for as many to gather around as possible before using the flares. Since they don’t have much experience, we’ll just tell them that they’re igniting special sparklers to fend off the light-fearing corrupted. We’ll make them think they’re securing the room when they’re literally lighting their own grave.”

My face must have given away the sick feeling I suddenly had at the pit of my stomach.

“Why the grave face?” He flashed me his classic joker face and laughed.

“It’s foolproof. We just need a few eager volunteers”

As he continued to chuckle to himself, I realized an ammonia-like smell was coming from his lungs.

Unknown Timeline Day 4

I was so disturbed by Anton’s behavior yesterday that as per my request, Alex had him strapped securely in his medical bed so that he wouldn’t be able to murder anyone in their sleep should he suddenly feel the urge to do so.

Meanwhile, the situation with the corrupted crewmates has gotten worse. They no longer seem to be trying to get in the med bay, having found it practically impossible to force their way in here. Instead, they’re pursuing the unfortunate survivors stranded in other parts of the submarine. The frequent, faint sounds of moaning and banging in the distance suggests that most of them had left our end of the sub alone. If we were to make our move, now is the chance.

But what even is the point? The chances of survival are so slim, and returning to the surface is such a distant impossibility that it didn’t even register on my list of priorities. We’d just be prolonging our deaths.

Well, a spark of hope was just reignited in me by Alex. He managed to coax the display console typically used for communicating with the cockpit into accessing the Enigma’s suite of sensors. A quick sonar ping showed that we’d drifted a good distance away from the strange pillar city from which the corpses originated, and importantly, that the valley floor seems to have miraculously reappeared a good distance out from the sub.

The picture before me was rough, but chilling. A single thin, tall pillar in the center where the city of corpses resides, a sheer vertical circle of endless deep around it where we’re currently adrift (Dotted with a few large floating island-size like objects. Strange but irrelevant), and finally the reappearance of the ocean floor in a ring of cliffs approximately five miles out.

I don’t know how I knew, but the reappearance of the valley floor gave me confidence that whatever forced Enigma down into this hellhole was gone, and we would finally be able to resurface once we reached the edge of that circle. But we didn’t have much time.

In the distance, I heard the sharp, crisp sound of fracturing glass. Our corrupted crew are trying to break themselves out into the ocean.

Infrared external camera footage shows some of the deepwater corpses swimming close to the Enigma. One places its hand on a thinly-cracked pothole and looks in, almost longingly. A bloody hand appears on the other side.

Unknown Timeline Day 5

We didn’t have much time to act. At this depth and pressure, every bit of damage done to the windows is toying with death.

There was no choice other than to follow Anton’s plan with a few modifications to protect the volunteers. It was decided that a team of five people would be needed to attract the corrupted, consisting of four crewmates who survived with us in the medbay as well as Anton (we thought it would be fair for him to take part of the group of “fresh meat” whose life he so blatantly disregarded). Alex and I fashioned makeshift blindfolds out of spare thick clothing and passed out standard submarine sleeper earplugs to hopefully limit any damage the flares would do to the crew. Meanwhile, I would take Alex to the cockpit and secure the controls.

With the plan in place and everyone armed to the teeth with sharp medical equipment, Alex slowly cranked open the bulkhead door. At the same time, I kicked the heavy wall-mounted iron vents located on the wall with a loud metallic clang and slipped inside the ventilation shaft, gesturing for Alex to follow.

The sound of heavy, frantic footsteps and panicked piercing screams filled my ears as the corrupted began running toward the med bay. I took one last look at Anton’s crew. They looked almost like kamikaze pilots, with thick red and black bands of cloth wrapped around their forehead, ready to drop down to the eyes at a moment’s notice. They were armed with needles, scalpels, hammers, anything with a point or a hard surface. Anton carried a portable defibrillator, cackling to himself in anticipation for the fight to come. I waited till the last second to look away, making sure they were crouched securely behind their fortress of iron operating tables and a stack of industrial emergency flares before Alex scrambled into the vent, blocking off the view and shutting the entrance.

The vent was so narrow that I could barely squeeze my arms back and forth to crawl up the gentle slope toward the cockpit. Grime coated my hands and knees, threatening to slide both of us back down toward the scene of an undoubtedly obscene fight. Over the din, I thought I heard the painfully human cries of my friends. It could be the last time I’d ever hear them.

The passage became so narrow that I found myself sliding up with my stomach and back contacting the walls with hardly any room even to breathe. The thundering beating of my heart and the violent shivering brought about by the cold steel vents threatened to give us away. It doesn’t matter anymore, I thought. If we don’t succeed, we’ll be dead anyway.

I grabbed a hammer from my belt and punched the exit vent out from in front of me, jumping up from the ground with my hands in front – ready to fight for my life. I saw a tattered body turn the corner toward the med bay. The cockpit was empty.

And then there was only pain.