Below the Wake
Some things in the deep don't need to surface to drown you.
The ship was called MS Odyssey Voyager, a name that sounded like it came with a Netflix deal. But there was nothing fresh about her. She was a rustbucket in denial, a floating contradiction of patched steel and tired engines hauling Chinese-made solar panels to the Port of New Orleans. A month behind schedule. Standard fare for a modern-day cargo hauler, more bureaucratic band-aid than ship.
I was aboard as a maintenance tech, which really meant I was there to babysit the onboard systems when the automated controls decided to throw a tantrum. Which happened more than you’d think. I wasn’t a sailor. Not really. I was a former electrician who drank too much and said the wrong things at the wrong jobs until the only gig I could find that didn’t care about my mouth was two hundred nautical miles from land and four beers from giving a damn.
I signed on in Singapore. They said the voyage would take twenty-six days. Said it’d be “easy water” this time of year.
They lied.
We hit the storm on Day 28. And that alone should tell you something.
It started how these things always start. Some twitchy low-pressure blip on the radar that should have spun itself into rain and gotten bored. But this one didn’t. It got hungry. Big angry sea type of hungry. The kind of storm that feels personal, like the ocean finally got tired of our ships, our oil slicks, and our constant arrogance.
The captain, a guy named Morello, was old school. Ex-Navy. Still shaved every day and called coffee “joe.” He insisted we push through. “She’ll hold,” he said, tapping the metal of the control panel like it was the hull of a battleship instead of a glorified floating warehouse.
By the time we realized she wouldn’t, we were too far in. The nearest port was a dot. The storm wasn’t.
That night, the wind screamed like it had lungs. Real ones. Full of spite and something older than weather. Waves hit us like fists. The whole boat groaned and tilted and shuddered with each slap. Containers crashed on deck like drunken dominoes, their locks snapping like brittle bones.
My cabin was on the starboard side, lower midship. Cheap little porthole, good for watching the sea if you liked watching nothingness. But when the wind came, and the ship pitched, that porthole stopped looking like scenery and started feeling like an eye.
Around 2:17 a.m., I woke up to the sound of metal screaming. Not the ship. Not the containers. Something under it. Like the sea was chewing on the hull.
I pulled on my boots, half-drunk from the sleep and panic, and tried to stand. Gravity had a new opinion about where down was.
I staggered toward the door but paused at the window. The ship dipped hard. The window slid under the surface.
And I saw it.
A shape. Not the suggestion of a shape. Not the flicker of something big that could be a whale if you were high enough. No. This was deliberate. This was awake.
It was green-black, mottled like wet stone, longer than the ship. Coiled. Not swimming. Not rising. Lurking. Creating the chaos. I could see the tail twist through the water like a whip being drawn back.
And then it turned.
And its eye met mine.
Not animal. Not human. Ancient. And aware.
The thing saw me.
And I saw myself.
And for a long, breathless second, I didn’t think about the ship, or the crew, or the storm. I thought about everything I’d never finished. Every bitter phone call. Every apology I never gave. Every woman who walked away because I didn’t know how to stay. I thought about my dad’s eyes in the casket and how I never said goodbye because I was too pissed off at how he raised me.
Then the wave hit.
The porthole blew out in a sharp crack of pressure, and freezing salt water punched into the room like it was trying to drown the sin right out of me. I stumbled backward, gasping, grabbing for something to hold, but everything was slick and cold and tilting.
I heard the metal twist again.
This time it wasn’t the ship.
It was the dragon.
It surfaced.
Not fully. Not grand like a fantasy novel cover. Just enough. Just enough to prove it wasn’t a trick of light or sea madness.
A head the size of a pickup truck. Slick, plated. Gilled and horned like something that came from a part of the ocean we weren’t meant to find. It breached off the port bow, rose like it was sniffing the air.
I ran.
Down the corridor, barefoot and soaked, I slipped past emergency lights flickering like they were scared too. Alarms blared, but not for flooding or fire. The systems were confused. We’d trained for breach, fire, man overboard, mutiny. Not this.
I found Morello in the bridge. He was cursing the radar, yelling at a dead mic.
“It knocked out comms,” he said, not looking at me. “This thing is—” He stopped. Looked at me. “You saw it too.”
I nodded. That was all I could do.
“It’s in the water,” he said. “Moving under us. Fast.”
Another wave. Another jolt.
Then something worse.
Silence.
No wind. No waves. Like the storm had hit pause.
And then a low, groaning hum that vibrated the metal under our feet. Not the engine. Not the sea. A sound from something that existed beneath.
Morello turned to the window. “Get below. Find the others.”
I ran.
Only there were no others.
Corridors were empty. Doors swung open. Lights flickered off one by one.
I found one crewman. Delgado. The cook. He was shaking in the galley, muttering prayers in Spanish. I grabbed him. He looked at me like I was already dead.
“It called me,” he whispered.
“What?”
He touched his head. “Not words. Just… knowing.”
And that’s when I understood.
The dragon wasn’t just a beast. It was something older than belief. A presence. A mind in the deep. Something we stirred up by dragging our arrogant machinery across the floor of the world.
It didn’t need to break the ship. It was already breaking us.
The rest of the night blurred. We tried to steer. Tried to stabilize. But it was like trying to swim with a hand on your soul. It watched. It chose.
By morning, the storm passed.
But so had the crew.
I found Morello’s body in the bridge, eyes wide, mouth open like he’d tried to scream a name he hadn’t used in decades.
Delgado was gone. Just gone.
No lifeboats missing. No struggle.
I was alone.
The ship floated quiet. Half-dead.
I sent out a beacon. Took two days for a response.
They found me on the deck. Still staring at the sea. Still wondering if it was coming back.
Because that thing didn’t surface just to scare me.
It marked me.
And I know one day, when the sky goes still again and the wind dies and the waves stop pretending to be random, I’ll look out and see it again.
Waiting.
Watching.
Chilling! Loved it.