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J
oe Montoya awoke feeling exhausted. He’d slept badly again—the nightmares of a police officer with a lot of years on the job. He rolled over, away from the light coming through the bedroom window. He kept his eyes shut as he listened to his wife moving around the room, getting ready for work. He could hear his teenage daughters arguing downstairs.

After a few minutes, he began to think about the day ahead. He knew he needed to get out of bed. He sat up with a moan and swung his legs over the side of the king bed.

“Nice of you to join us this morning, sleepyhead,” his wife said. “You still smell like a bar.” He knew she was just testing him—he’d only had a couple of beers. She was always worrying about his health.

Elena was dressed professionally in a beige silk blouse and gray skirt. She was a legal assistant at a local law office, and kept more regular hours than her husband. As a sergeant for the county sheriff, Joe often worked late and weekend hours. He wondered for a moment why she always looked her best when headed to work, instead of when spending time with him.

“I’m fine, baby. Will needed someone to talk to last night, that’s all.”

“Already in a bar after his accident yesterday? Is he all right?”

“Yeah, he’s okay. He’s really sore though.”

“Was he upset about Maria again? You can’t keep staying out late drinking with that man because he’s still upset about his ex-wife. He drinks too much, and you drink too much when you’re with him. Did you smoke last night?”

“Maria was never his ex-wife. She was his
wife
. And he’s my friend.”

“So you did smoke?”

“I didn’t stay out late, I didn’t drink too much, and I didn’t smoke. You done interrogating me?”

Joe shook his head and looked away from his wife. Elena walked over to her husband, pulled his head against her breasts, and hugged him. “I’m sorry. I know, baby. You’re a good friend to him. Just try not to get caught up in his lifestyle, okay?”

Joe became focused on the feel of his wife’s firm, slender waist under his hands and the smell of perfume in her long hair. He felt a tingling in his groin. At thirty-eight, she still turned heads, with her high cheekbones, smooth skin and dark, liquid eyes. Joe ran his hand through her silky black hair.

“How much time do you have before work, mama?”

“No, baby. Not today. I have an important meeting and I can’t be late. Besides, the girls are still here.”

Joe sighed. He knew better than to waste his time once his wife had made up her mind. As stubborn as her mother.

He dressed and went down to the kitchen. He said good morning to his girls and poured himself a mug of black coffee, then joined his daughters at the oak breakfast table.

“What are you two arguing about now?” he asked.

His youngest, a slightly plump girl with shoulder-length hair, spoke first. “Alicia won’t let me use the car, Dad.”

“She’s lying,” Alicia replied. “I said she could use it, but not tonight. I’m taking out Tiff and Stacy.” Alicia was eighteen, three years older than her sister, Gabriella, and the prettier of the two. She was taller and slimmer, and drew much more attention from boys.

“Gabby, you’re not old enough to drive alone anyway,” Joe said.

“But Dad, I thought you or Mom could ride with me and I could take Rachael to the mall!”

Joe shut his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Stop whining,
mija
. I’m not in the mood. We can go tomorrow, okay? Your mom will be off work. Let your sister use the car tonight.” He raised the mug to his lips and took a long pull of hot coffee.

“Alicia is having sex with Corey,” Gabriella blurted. Joe nearly sprayed the table with a mouthful. “Rachael’s sister said that . . .”

“Gabriella, that’s enough!” Joe glared at her. She looked away and crossed her arms. Just like her grandmother, Joe thought. At least she wouldn’t put up with shit from the boys like her sister. He turned from her to Alicia. Her lack of protest was enough, but when she broke eye contact and looked down at the floor, he felt his face flush. After an awkward silence, he decided to change the subject.

“You working today?” Alicia had taken a summer job at a teenage clothing store. The Rage, or something like that. She was headed off to USC in the fall, which wasn’t going to be cheap. He was paying for her school, but couldn’t afford to buy her the clothes and shoes she brought home every week.

“Duh, Dad. I work every Friday. You getting Alzheimer’s or something?” Like some of the guilty perps he questioned, now she was trying to play it cool.

“Right. So will you be home for dinner?”

“But I just told you I’m taking out my friends. Are you okay, Dad?”

“Yeah,
mija
. I was just hoping you might eat with us before you head out.”

The room got quiet again. When Gabby retreated to the downstairs couch to watch MTV, Joe took the opportunity to get up from the table. He heard Alicia leave the kitchen behind him.

Joe stood at the kitchen window, staring out at the warm, overcast morning. His thoughts shifted from his daughter’s romantic life to the immigrants who had died at sea. He had dreamed a lot about them. He pictured them all being killed by a school of sharks, like those sailors who died when their battleship went down in World War II.

And he kept thinking of the dead man’s torn body. He still had a lot of questions for that kid about what had happened.

T
hey sensed the ocean floor somewhere beneath them and the surface not far above, and instinctively pressed away from both into the bustle of hundreds of their kind moving through the dark water.

The water here was not deep enough for the entire shoal. Like giant undersea wasps swarming within a congested hive, the immense assemblage of organisms had become densely packed as each member of the shoal sought to avoid the sloping bottom, while also seeking deeper water away from the bright light filtering down from above. Although the murky North Pacific hundreds of feet down would be absolutely black to most creatures, to their kind these shallower near-shore depths were brightly lit.

Most in the shoal rarely brushed or bumped against any of the largest females in the group. They were avoided out of self-preservation, since they were much more powerful and aggressive. Several were three times the weight and nearly twice the length of the others, despite the shoal being a fairly uniform group of mature adults. Their size served as a warning to the others not to aggravate them.

The members of the shoal did not consider their location as they hovered in the dark water. If they had, they would know they were not supposed to be here, that these waters for millennia had been too cold, too full of predators and competitors to allow their presence. Although they had never been able to survive here before, they were here now simply because nothing was preventing their intrusion.

While their migration, the expansion of their species, was new to them, they had continued to follow the same daily cycle their kind had followed for thousands of years. During the daytime, they retreated a thousand or more feet beneath the surface to suppress each member’s metabolism, hidden from the sunlight, the heat, the activity of the surface.

At night, they rose to feed.

The higher oxygen levels and warmth of shallower waters enabled them to increase their metabolisms, intensifying speed and strength and reaction time. Their enhanced abilities allowed them to overtake prey easily in the dark water using their powerful eyes and deadly appendages.

But the water here was too shallow. The shoal had been unable to retreat to a comfortable depth, and most of the massive horde had grown agitated. They were accustomed to the nearly bottomless depths of the deep ocean. Yet the shoal had ventured into shallower and shallower water in recent weeks, following its collective instincts.

And its hunger.

For days, those assembled in the shoal had found little to satiate their unmatched desire to feed. They had happened upon some of the smaller deepwater prey on which they normally fed—anchovies nearer the surface and lanternfishes farther down—but the schools had been small and many in the group needed much more sustenance to survive.

Always the water temperature had remained relatively constant and the directional currents had facilitated the shoal’s migration. Each evening, the shoal had risen with the upwelling of cool waters to feed closer to shore. Each morning, the shoal had retreated to the depths farther offshore, following a sinking eddy current of cold water making its way back toward the abyss. Always the shoal pushed itself in the same direction. As it searched for food, rising and descending in its never-ending cycle, still it continued purposefully in a single lateral direction, drawn away from the place where it had originated.

The members of the shoal gradually calmed when the day began to wane and the bright sunlight from above faded toward black, as another daily cycle progressed into night. The twilit water above was becoming much darker and more familiar, and no longer pained their eyes. They began slowly rising along the steep slope of the bottom, toward shore, to feed.

The largest females moved near the head of the fleet. They would be the first to feed when prey was discovered.

These females had lived longer than most in the shoal. They had attained their great body size by managing to stay alive longer than the others around them, and by being more aggressive than the others at taking prey. This fearless aggression had yielded them more food, which had turned into greater body mass. But it had come at a cost.

The largest of these females had only one eye. A scar of wrinkled flesh covered the place where the other had once been, between the smooth length of her body and her set of appendages. Evidence of past battles for survival blemished her otherwise smooth skin.

One of her sisters, nearly her own size, moved through the water alongside her. Bearing even more scars than the one-eyed female, she had lost the tip of one of her two broad fins when a shark or swordfish had nipped it off when she had been younger and smaller. She bore countless scars along her body, and when she grasped at her prey, she did so without one of her limbs. It was a useless stump of flesh, far shorter than the others since one of her own kind had torn it off.

As the dominant females coursed through the mass of their peers, moving slowly toward the front, their wide, unblinking eyes caught a flash of silver in the darkness above them. Then another.

Prey.

In an instant they changed their body shapes and colors, no longer smooth, pale torpedoes meant for travel but instead fierce red blossoms that opened to expose not petals, but tools meant for violence. They uncoiled their weapons and thrust their bodies upward toward the prey, single-minded of focus.

They intended to kill.

A member near the front emitted an excited series of brief flashes of light, which appeared green in the nutrient-rich water. The light blinded its silvery prey as it lashed out and ensnared the fish before the others could reach it. The one-eyed female arrived at the stricken prey an instant later, thrusting her own weapons through the water and digging their small teeth into the fish as it thrashed in the dark water. Dim light from the distant surface glinted off silver scales as it desperately attempted to free itself.

The fish struggled as the large female drew it toward her powerful maw and violently gnashed into its side, removing a tremendous hunk of flesh. The thin bones in the fish easily snapped inside the great beak, and blood poured from the gaping wound as the fish’s life slipped away.

Around the members of the shoal, thick, silvery fishes with vivid yellow tails and white underbellies were clearly visible to their large eyes. The pulses of light generated by the shoal confused the school of fast, powerful prey as they overtook it.

The aggressors rapidly changed colors as they attacked, their skin turning bright reds and purples instead of their usual pale white. Frequently, they emitted the green-cast bursts of bioluminescent light when they were most excited, for the fish they attacked now were not the smaller fish they had been feeding upon for days, but instead a larger, more dangerous prey that could sustain the shoal with the nourishment it needed to survive and grow. But to attack these fish was to do battle.

Larger than the quarry and greatly outnumbering it, the shoal quickly began to overtake the prey. The shoal attacked in squads, surrounding the school of broad, silvery fish and engulfing its terrified members. Soon all that remained in the black water were the drifting, inedible remains of the fish.

Yet there was not enough food.

The largest females had eaten much of the meaty fish, but had lost some of the flesh to other ravenous members of the shoal. Their hunger remained. As they propelled themselves slowly through the bloodied water, they searched for something larger than the floating bits of tissue around them. The shoal parted in front of them momentarily, and ahead they saw something else. Something that excited them, caused them to again become aggressive and single-minded of purpose.

Ahead of them was a small, glowing object.

This was like the bioluminescent light of the lanternfishes on which they had always preyed. The one-eyed female moved toward the glowing green object, and saw as she approached that there was not just one, but several glowing objects near her in the water. All were moving erratically, as if wounded. She began to pivot in the water to direct her weaponry toward the prey. The small glowing lights had immediately attracted the attention of most of the shoal and now, as she spun her great bulk to overtake the prey, a smaller, faster member of the shoal hurtled past her toward one of the glowing objects. In an instant, the prey began rising rapidly toward the surface, meaning to escape her smaller sister’s grasp. It could not. Her sister lashed out and seized the glowing object, drawing it in.

Then her sister began to struggle.

The smaller object was somehow drawing her up with it, toward the surface, and she was now desperately emitting powerful jets of water, struggling to free herself.

The larger, one-eyed female no longer focused on the glowing object. She now began to focus on her struggling sister.

The large female sensed that her sister was incapable of escaping the object she had seized. She was defenseless, with the dangerous parts of her body still wrapped tightly around her prize, and the soft, unprotected flesh covering the rest of her body exposed.

Focusing on her sister’s flanks with her one remaining dark eye, the enormous female rushed forward and clasped her vulnerable sister in a tight embrace.

And bit into her.