The dull sway of the waves lofts one side of the platform as high as the mooring lines allow, then brings it down gently again.  The night is dead quiet.

Third shift.  Diego took the position because it pays time-and-a-half.  Most people only last a couple years working the graveyard.  Old timers won’t touch it.  Too much time on the viewscreen at night makes people go mad, they say.

He’s taped a family photo above the monitor.  He misses Meena’s laugh and Carla’s scent—everything smells like fish here. He wants to provide a good life for them. Maybe even send Meena to college one day.

An eleven-pointed star spirals past one of the underwater cameras. The image is relayed across the screen in the control room, then disappears.

There’s a lot of life in the ocean, Diego has learned. More than people know, even scientists. His employers insisted he sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement that prohibits him from even discussing what he’s seen on that monitor. They’re terrified of getting shut down by the EPA or PETA or some other activist group.

It was good money, so Diego signed on the dotted line and kept his mouth shut.

Above all, the job took blind, shit-ass faith. And lots of it.

A thin creature with round eyes and long fangs on the outside of its mouth swims past. The eyes shift hue on the monotone screen, now merciless black pits, now reflecting one of the rig’s spotlights and glowing a luminous, soul-sucking white.

It disappears as quickly as it came.

He doesn’t see it. He’s already returned to the old western he was reading. Bramble Rose is about to take her vengeance on the Man in White Diego hears it—a sound like the gasping cry of some ancient metallic titan. He marks his page with a folded piece of mail.

They warned him things might get choppy, that the weather was different out here where there’s no cities or forests to slow the wind’s relentless procession.
 
“What do I do if there’s an evacuation?” he had asked the old timer on duty before him.

“Get to a life boat,” the old timer had said.  “Quick as you can.  Folks ain’t liable to wait around.” Then he headed for his bunk. 

Volatile weather is part of the job. That’s why it pays. And why Diego is willing to spend thirty days at a time in the middle of the gulf, away from his wife and newborn daughter, to do it.

The storm comes out of nowhere. Not like land storms, which have clear beginnings and ends. This is a sea storm—ripped from the dark womb of the Ocean herself. White-hot lightning cracks the sky in half.  The world goes blind. After-images of dancing photons dim from white, to purple, to green, to red. In the fading spectra, Diego glimpses massive walls of black froth that touch the sky, frozen in space but not in time. High above, the full moon oversees the dark works of the churning maw below.

The control room lurches. Diego nearly falls out of the flimsy rolling chair, but manages to catch himself on the control panel. The lights flicker off, but the viewscreen remains.

Something fleshy ribbons across the screen and disappears.

Diego sees this time. Though his mind is elsewhere—trying not to panic, to instead recall company protocol during power outages—he sees the lone eye embedded in the flesh’s side, watching him.

One of the backup generators kicks on. The lights return.

Diego grabs the walky-talky.

“This is Diego! Can you hear me? Over!”

“Copy Die—”  There’s so much static Diego can hardly hear the old timer.  “—Ove—!”

“What was that? Over!”

But the static is too thick.

Diego feels another lurch. 

He loses his balance and lands hard on the floor.  The western goes flying one way, the folded mail he uses as a bookmark another. His vision doubles.  

He’s been denied by seven different life insurance companies after starting this job. None of them gave a reason, but it was obvious. Too much liability.

He blinks the double image from his eyes, plants a palm on the controls, and hoists himself up.

The lights go off again. This time they don’t return. Emergency backups kick on and dye everything the color of blood. The slow wail of the evacuation siren warps in the air.

Diego tries to run shutdown procedures on his console, but the computer glitches, freezing a distorted half-image of green-and-magenta eyes on its black screen.  

Outside, co-workers sprint from below deck. The quickest head for the helicopter. It holds nineteen. Two dozen cram inside. A few cling to the skids. The helicopter struggles to take off.  It shakes the hangers on loose. One of them bounces off the rig before he plummets into the churn. It looks like the old timer who works the shift just before Diego.

The helicopter is just airborne when an obsidian pillar crashes down over the rig. When the water recedes, the helicopter and its inhabitants are gone.

Diego kisses his tiny gold cross and tucks it into his shirt. His thoughts are of Carla.

“We miss you,” she said. “We want you home.”

But the work was here. The work that paid for their house and their groceries and that big white SUV she loved to take Meena around in.  It would pay for Meena’s ballet lessons when she got old enough and, God willing, her wedding one day.

He’d taken the graveyard shift hoping that the extra pay would mean he wouldn’t have to spend quite so many years away from them.

A hundred more people run onto the deck.  Some of them slip on the wet steel desk. They crowd the lifeboats. One boat falls off its davit while people are still boarding. It’s swallowed by the water. Another is thrown against the side of the rig. Bodies fly in every direction. One of them hits the window of the control room with a thud.

Skyscrapers of swirling brine close in around Diego, each thick enough to envelope an oil tanker.

There’s nowhere to run.

Diego crawls under the control panel.

He holds his tiny cross between trembling fingers and prays as the watery ramparts converge on him.

Another lurch. A falling sensation.

Something wet. Water leaks into the cabin and spreads across the floor. It soaks Diego’s already-wet pants.

He opens his eyes for just an instant.

It’s long enough to see the horror staring back at him. One gargantuan eye, watery and black—so black he could fall into it. He feels his mind disintegrate, the electrons of his consciousness sucked into the vacuous void of the creature’s own mind. There’s no escape. His atoms are strung out in a line. Time, for a brief moment before he’s lost, becomes visible. 

He will be recycled, his quarks reused, rearranged into something new, something useful.

Then the creature will return to its sleepy domain beneath the material surface of our watery reality.

After the storm subsides, the rescue crews will arrive. Of the one-hundred-sixty-eight workers on duty that night, no survivors will be found.

Diego’s only remains will be a family photo, an old western novel, and a folded letter from his wife’s attorney.