Hungry Darkness: A Deep Sea Thriller Read Online Free Page A

children, Carlitos, Eva, and Elias, were perfectly fine, but everyone kept telling them there was something wrong with Sarita, something they couldn’t spot while looking at her beautiful face and disarming smile. Finally, they’d taken her to see a doctor in Belize City. The man, who wore a lab coat so white it didn’t look like any color Emilio had ever seen before, told them Sarita needed to see a speech-language pathologist in order to overcome her delayed speech. Not talking as a baby was fine, but not talking as a toddler was seen as an impediment. That was only the beginning of what had turned into a nightmare.
    Emilio had always been able to put food on the table, but with four kids and no health insurance, every time he had to visit a doctor and buy an antibiotic his finances took a hit that had him scrambling for months. Now that Sarita had to see her new doctor regularly for therapy, the first thing that had gone out the window was regular trips to the grocery store. Whatever they ate came from their garden, from a neighbor who traded them meat for fish, or straight from Emilio’s fishing line.
    And there he was, sitting on a gently rocking boat above one of his favorite channels in the reef waiting for a big tarpon to swallow the crab at the end of his line.
    While tarpon were usually fish only targeted by tourists because they put up a hell of a fight, Emilio was there simply for the meals he’d get out of his catch. An adult tarpon can measure 8 feet or longer and weigh anywhere between 200 and 300 pounds, and he could get a lot of filets from an average-sized fish—poach it, pick the meat off the fish’s huge bones, and use it to make fish cakes. Everyone in the house loved his fish cakes, and he could also box a few and use them to trade Reynaldo, his next-door neighbor, for a few eggs and some rabbit or chicken meat.
    The water was calm and the current not too strong. Emilio knew the tarpon would be coming and going through that channel during the night, so it wouldn’t be too long before one spotted his bait. Then the fight would be on. Before, he usually tried to avoid fishing for tarpon because it was a lot of energy spent for a fish that wouldn’t bring in any money, but with every penny going to help his daughter, he was willing to jump in the water and beat any 200-pound beast to death with his bare hands if that’s what it took to put food on the table.
    Emilio closed his eyes for a second and lifted his face to the breeze while throwing up a silent prayer to whatever gods flew around the top of the ocean at night. He was lowering his head again when something bumped against the underside of the boat. Emilio instinctively looked around before grabbing an oar from the boat’s floor and plunging it into the dark water to test the depth. The chance of his anchor coming lose and letting him drift into the shallow spot of the reef was slim but not impossible.
    The wooden oar sank. The fisherman’s hand followed it into the warm, moving, impenetrable darkness. He hadn’t hit the reef. That meant something had struck the boat.
    Emilio reached down again to grab his waterproof flashlight from between his legs. He felt something hit the boat again, this time with enough power to knock him forward. He fell to his knees, his hands forgetting the flashlight and flying forward to stop him from falling.
    Suddenly, on all fours inside his boat with the star-sprinkled dark sky above him, a sea made of black ink underneath him, and something smacking his vessel around, Emilio wished he had a bigger boat. He wished he had stayed home that night instead of trying to turn his stress-induced insomnia into a few extra hours of fishing, and hopefully, a few meals. He wished he had someone else in the boat with him. But more than anything, he wished he was home and in his bed, his wife sleeping soundly next to him, and his four little angels snoring in the next room.
    The third hit came while Emilio was trying to