Chapter 1

Ocean.

The ocean is a great and terrible thing sometimes. It controls everything on the planet as it heats up, cools down and does all kinds of weird things. The oceans of the planet are powerful thing indeed. But my story is not about the ocean itself, but rather what dwells inside of the ocean. Remember that movie, Cloverfield? Yeah. That one. The viral marketing campaign for this movie was pretty impressive but it is the only thing that I can compare to this story. The slusho stuff had the slogan "You can't drink just six." Yep. That's the one you might have known about, or maybe not. I'm not sure exactly. But the ocean came through in real life, similar but not quite. The company came from nowhere actually. Well, I suppose its not nowhere but you get the idea. Zalron Tech it was called. I don't know much about it besides two things. One, it created one hell of an energy drink that came in a red can. Two, this drink was addictive. The company claimed it wasn't, but the results were plainly obvious.

Zalron's drink was called "The claw" Yeah I didn't make much sense of it either but it caught on like wildfire. Everyone was drinking it at the time and it actually worked, it tasted good too, but the energy it gave you was impressive enough to last for hours. The crash was annoying though but the stuff was cheap so another shot picked you right back up again to accomplish anything, or just to stay awake. I tried it once, it was pretty good, but I felt sick after I had my first shot and didn't have anymore. Apparently the chemicals didn't agree with my makeup, but it wasn't the common side effect of the drink. It wasn't reported often enough to get it pulled from the shelves. There was no reason to stop selling the Claw.

Times were tough back then. People only seemed to have money for what was important. Anything that wasn't seemed to go by the way side, and as time melted away, more and more traditions were being replaced with easy and cheap things that could be replaced without thinking. It was just the way of the world back then, you know? But there was so many choices to pick from it was enough to drive you insane. But one choice everyone seemed to be making was "The claw" It was the thing to drink, the thing to have.

It came from the ocean they said. Special bacteria that created massive amount of energy it was. but the can called it Vitamin "Z" It didn't make sense though. When ever I thought of the letter z the only thing that came to mind was sleeping, I was the minority though I guess. The ocean is a very bad place for people who like the land, for people who lived near it, people who sailed on it. The ocean is a very bad place, what lies beneath though tends to be much worse and new things were discovered daily. I was discovering things too. I am reporter you see, or was I guess now. It was my job to expose the dirt on everything that might have been too good to be true and I never bought the company lines on anything. So I went digging like any good reporter should. I wanted the messy job. Not the desk job, not the bottle counter job. I wanted to harvest this new Vitamin Z, and for that. I had to go out into the ocean.

With in three days time I found myself on what the company called with affection the Flesh Runner. A small enough boat that carried six of us out to the rig in the sea, a refitted oil rig designed to get water from the sea and extract the chemicals, then to ship it out. It was a process that never, ever stopped due to demand. But as far as I know this was the only rig for the whole company, that didn't make sense to me. Soon enough we were on board the place, it was obvious all the action happened inside the place and the foreman seemed to make it clear that it wasn't a very happy place to be. Not in so many words but more in the body language I picked up on, I was good at such things.