Deep Ark 6 Chapter 1 - This si a reading group activity

Authors note

In my hometown of Auckland, New Zealand, there's a fascinating place — an underwater world called Kelly Tarlton's where you can descend to the bottom of the sea and not get wet! A marvellous conveyor belt whisks you through undersea tunnels of thick perspex, and through them you can see schools of fish and sharks swimming centimetres from your face. You feel as though you can reach out and touch them. It was on one of my visits there that the idea for Deep Ark 6 was born. I wondered what it would it be like to live in a city kilometres under the ocean. What circumstances would drive people to the bottom, of the sea? How would they survive? How would they travel about?

These questions began to fill my notebook and I sketched the underwater world bit by bit. But what about the animals? If life was no longer possible on the surface, what would happen to them? So I created the Deep Arks — storage facilities for every animal species, spread out across the oceans of the world. And, because I've always , had a horrid fascination with creepy-crawlies, I created Deep Ark 6 to house the planet's most venomous snakes and spiders.

And what if they escaped? I had visions of being trapped in the perspex tunnels of Kelly Tarlton's with a thousand snakes and spiders after me. It would be a nightmare. But nightmares make great fodder for writing.

By the way, since writing this book, I haven't been back to Kelly Tarlton's. Maybe one day soon I will.

Stu Duval

Chapter 1

My name is Rom. I'm twelve years old, I live two thousand metres under the sea and I've never seen the sun.

The place where I live is called Basin City. More than twenty thousand people live here. Basin City is really a collection of enormous platforms, sort of like oil rigs, with massive steel legs anchored to the sea floor. My dad and I have an apartment in a part of town called the Outer Edge.
The apartments and buildings in Basin City are all made up of steel cubes bolted together under huge domes. Inside there are shopping malls, cinemas, schools, even swimming pools. Everything here is steel and rivets and pipes. The lights come on in the morning and dim •
Deep Ark ⁶during the night, though it's never totally dark. Even The air is piped in from somewhere. I guess it's like living in a giant submarine.
The fact is, I've never lived anywhere else.My dad has though. He came from the Surface, before the Great Meltdown. I've seen photos of him up on the.Surface. In one picture, he is sitting in an amazing thing called a "tree", which has huge, twisty arms covered with green stuff he calls "leaves".We don't have trees in Basin City. And there are none up on the Surface now either.
Not since the Meltdown.That's the time when the great polar caps melted. Dad said they melted because of something called Global Warming It caused the sea level to rise dangerously fast. Whole continents were flooded and people realised that the entire planet was about to sink. Pretty freaky. That's when they started building underwater cities.
Basin City was one of more than a hundred they built to escape the Floods. When the last piece of dry land had disappeared, millions of survivors were safe in these huge, underwater cities. They carried on living as best they could. Including my dad, Dr Buller.He's a herpetologist. That's just a fancy word for a guy who studies snakes. My dad loves them. I, on the other hand, can't stand them. They give me the creeps!My dad is in charge of a snake zoo. He hates me calling it that, but that's exactly what it is. The official term is Deep Ark Facility. When the Surface flooded and everyone escaped underwater, they had to figure out how to save the world's animals and birds. So they built enormous undersea zoos and called them Deep Arks. There are twenty of them, spread out across the ocean floors of the world. You get the picture.




Each ark contains a special type of animal. For instance, Deep Ark 1, off the coast of what used to be Madagascar, contains African wildlife, such as lions, elephants, rhinos and hippos. Deep Ark 5, off the coast of old South America, houses rainforest birds and mammals. Seals, polar bears and penguins are kept beneath the Arctic Circle in Deep Ark 18.

And my dad runs the snake zoo, at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean. Deep Ark 6. It's home to the most venomous creatures that ever crawled the Surface.

Deep Ark 6 is about ten kilometres from Basin City. There's only one way of getting there —by sub. I've been out there a handful of times, though my dad wishes I'd visit a lot more. Fat chance of that!

The Deep Ark Facility is inside a huge steel dome, kind of like an upturned goldfish bowl. The sub docks at an airlock on the northern side and a brightly lit tunnel takes you down to the main entrance. As you'd expect, security is tighter than an octopus's handshake.

At the entrance is a sealed door where a crabby security guard checks your pass. Then you enter a small chamber where you have to strip off and put on a special protective suit. It's a puke-yellow colour, with a laminated face

mask and hood. But, if it stops Dad's snakes from fanging me, I'll happily wear one.

All suited up, you climb into a camo-coloured jeep with another armed guard. This guy's got the same dead eyes as a shark, and a sense of humour to match. The jeep ride takes you along a dimly lit tunnel to yet another security gate. This one is made of razor mesh topped with barbed wire. Your passes are rechecked, torches are stuck in your face, keyboards are tapped and finally the jeep proceeds into the heart of Deep Ark 6.

DA6 is laid out like the spokes of a wheel. Dad's office is at the hub of the wheel. He and his team monitor a thousand cages from a wall of closed-circuit TV screens. It's like snake-o-rama.

The cages where the snakes are kept are on corridors that spread out from the hub like spokes. Each cage is about two metres square, with a thick perspex front. Crawling around inside them, you'll see everything from cobras and coral snakes to rattlers and deadly vipers. The larger ones, such as the Burmese python and the green anaconda, have a whole pen to

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themselves.  Some of these guys grow up to ten metres long!

It gets worse. On the southern side of DA6, there's a whole other group of creatures: spiders.

I hate these guys even more than the snakes. They're housed in the Arachnology Section. To get inside requires another security gate and pass check, because some of these hairy critters are really lethal. Dad showed me a tarantula once that was the size of his hand. One bite from that and you'd know all about it.

There's a lab just off the main office. That's where Dad extracts the venom from his snakes. Part of his job is coming up with antivenoms for deadly snake bites. He's been bitten a couple of times himself and it was only the antivenoms that saved his life.

My mum wasn't so lucky. The bite that killed her didn't have an antivenom.

She was a spider expert: an arachnologist. She and Dad met on the Surface, at the University of Auckland. Together, they helped create Deep Ark 6.

I was just a baby when the accident happened.

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A black mamba somehow got loose and concealed itself under the back seat of a DA6 jeep — my mum's jeep. Mum must've been reaching for her briefcase or something Whatever, the mamba struck her on her right arm, just below the elbow.

Dad tried everything to save her. But the mamba was a rare breed whose bite had no known cure. Nothing Dad did was any use at all. I know he still misses her a lot. I sure do, even though I didn't really know her.

Ever since the accident, Dad has been working around the clock to extract as much venom as he can. I sometimes don't get to see him for days on end. He says he's in a race against time to create antivenom for all known species of poisonous snakes and spiders.

If you ask me, he's in a race against time to bury his sorrow under a mountain of work.

The only guy who loves snakes and spiders more than my dad is Octo Serp. Octo is my dad's right-hand man and he's an expert on the mating habits of venomous snakes. Yuk! He's one creepy dude — with beady black eyes and a

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greasy grey ponytail as long as a snake's rear end. If you ask me, he's part snake himself. Always slithering-about in his dirty lab coat, whispering to the snakes as if they were his children.

Octo virtually lives out at DA6. He and Dad often have bitter fights over how the place should be run. I think he dreams of running the snake zoo himself one day.

Well, in my opinion, he's welcome to it.

I know my dad had always hoped I'd take over the place some day. Or even show an interest in his work. But there's as much chance of that happening as there is of me growing eight legs.

‘10°¹¹""4,₀01.

Like I said before, I've only been out to Deep Ark 6 a handful of times The whole place gives me the living creeps. So, because Dad spends more time with his snakes and creepy-crawlies than with me, I hang out mostly by myself. I don't mind I kind of like being alone.

My favourite place in Basin City is called Neptune's. It's a kind of mall and one of the

few places around here that has a viewing port: 

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Neptune's Window. Through this huge window, you can actually see the ocean floor. Normally, the sea around us is pitch black because we're so deep. So they've got these big spotlights outside to illuminate the sea in front of Neptune's Window. You get to watch sharks and stingrays and all kinds of things swimming by. It's pretty cool. There's always something to see.

Most folk in Basin City couldn't care less about the sea outside. "It's cold, dark and wet," they say and turn their backs to the window. Not me. I love it. I spend hours there, daydreaming.

Right beside the window is a greasy burger joint called Underwater Joe's. This is where I hang out after school most days. Only one light bulb works and the place reeks of stale cooking fat. Still, Old Joe makes a mean squid burger with crunchy French fries. He's not fussy about hygiene, which I guess is why the place is mostly empty. Suits me fine.

Old Joe's face is as wrinkled as a basket of laundry. He's got watery blue eyes and a tangle of snow-white whiskers.

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Hey, Rom! Good to see ya!" he calls from over his spitting grill. "The usual?"

I nod and take up a stained stool at the counter.

Joe plunges a basket of fries into the bubbling oil and the place fills with the sound of hissing and sizzling I watch him as he chucks a squid patty on the grill, flipping it expertly.

"Your dad workin' out at his snake zoo tonight?" he asks.

"Probably," I mutter as I drizzle ketchup over my fries.

"I got bitten by one of them oversized worms once."

I've heard the story a hundred times before, but I don't mind hearing it again. I say nothing, just eat my burger and listen. I'm in no hurry.

"Happened on the Surface, years ago," he begins, then pauses to stare out through Neptune's Window with faraway eyes. He always does this. "I was a cook in the merchant navy. Just a lad really. We was sailin' to New Zealand from the Pacific Islands with a cargo of coconut and bananas. It was stinkin' hot and the old sun was blazin' away in its blue sky ..." He pauses and looks up at the single bulb dangling above the counter. "I miss that darn sun sometimes."

He leans on the counter and continues. "Anyway, I was ordered to go below decks to the food store and get some flour. Below decks on a hot day is like hell's boiler room. So there I was, sweatin' like a pig; gropin' in the gloom for the flour sack, when out of the corner of my eye I spot a movement. Just the flicker of a shadow. I thought it was a rat. There are lots of them nasty beasties in a ship's hold.

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"I find the flour and I'm headin' back topside when I see the big bunches of bananas. I reckon I'll just help myself to one. I do love a ripe banana. But, as I'm reachin' out for one, somethin' rears up inside that bunch and grabs my fingers! I scream and pull my hand out. The pain is unbelievable. And there, still danglin' on the end of my hand, is a snake! Its fangs are sunk right through my fingers. I thrash about the hold, whippin' it from side to side against the crates, screamin' and shoutin."My mates come runnin' and one of 'em

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grabs a machete and lops the snake in half. Even then it wouldn't let go of me fingers! We had to pry open its mouth like a rat trap. I thought I was a goner. Dead for sure. But turns out it wasn't a poisonous one. Lost two fingers on my left hand from infection though. Never forgot the pain of that bite either ..."

Suddenly, a customer wanders in, and Joe moves down the counter to serve him, muttering, "Nasty thing, to be bit by a snake ..."

I sit there thinking about Mum. Joe doesn't know about her — about the snake that bit her. That's why I like coming here. He does all the talking and I do all the listening.

I don't want to think about snakes anyway, so my mind turns to bananas. I've seen pictures of them but, unlike Old Joe, I've never tasted one. They can't grow them down here in Basin City. They can't grow a lot of things under the sea.

The truth is, so much of what guys like Old Joe and my dad talk about sounds like stuff from an alien planet: trees, bananas, blue sky, green grass.

On the Surface.

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I stare out Neptune's Window, imagining what it must've been like up there on the Surface, before the Meltdown. This is what I do a lot. Dream about the Surface ...

Lying on green grass, eating bananas, staring up into the blue sky, with birds — real birds, not caged ones — flying oyerhead .. .

So I'm staring out the window, daydreaming as usual, while Joe flips his burgers. His voice drones pleasantly in the background as he tells a customer, "I got bitten by a snake once ..."

And that's when I notice it.

There's nothing outside the window. Nothing but empty water.I tell Joe. He wipes his greasy hands on his

apron and looks, squinching up his eyes."I don't see nothin'," he says, shrugging his

shoulders."Exactly," I say. "There is nothing!"

He looks at me funny, then at the half-finished squid burger on my plate. He's probably thinking he's poisoned me or something."There's nothing out there;" I repeat, pointing to the window.

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He looks again and this time his eyes widen. "Hey! You're right, lad. There is no thin' out there."

"How many times has that happened?" I ask.

"Never. Not as far as I can remember?' He scratches his chin. "There's always somethin' swimming by."

Together, we stare out the big, empty window. Normally the sea outside is teeming with underwater life. Dad told me they used to have aquariums on the Surface, with lots of fish and sea life in them for people to go and see, and I guess it's like that, except, instead of us looking in at the fish, they're looking in at us.

But not today. Today, the window looks like an empty picture frame.

"Where'd they all go?" I ask.

"Beats me," says Joe, turning back to his grill. "They'll be back. Probably just scared off by somethin. You want another burger or shake?"

Suddenly, the single bulb flickers and goes out.
All around the mall, the same thing is

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happening. I hear shouts and cries of alarm. Old Joe fumbles in a drawer under the counter and flicks on a torch.

"Not another power cut," he grumbles.

Basin City does have its share of power cuts. The power station splutters and coughs along like an old granny. In fact, Dad gave up depending on Basin City power ages ago. DA6 is completely self-powered by diesel generators, which is just as well because, if the power fails out there, you've got a tonne of deadly snakes and spiders on the loose!

Joe swings his torch over the grill and fryer. They are turning stone cold. "As if business wasn't bad enough?' he mumbles.

The window is black now. The outside lights have gone out with the power failure.

But there is something out there — a dull glow, away in the distance on the ocean floor. I move towards the window until my fingers are pressed up against the cold glass.

There it is again. A throbbing red glow in the darkness.

"What is that?" I ask Old Joe without turning

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He's busy rummaging around for new batteries.

"Maybe a sub-liner light?"

Sub-liners are huge undersea transports that can carry up to three thousand passengers at a time. They cruise under the oceans from city to city, mostly full of tourist types.

But this is no sub-liner light. It's too big and it kind of glows, like it's on fire.

Suddenly, to my amazement, the light explodes! Even through the soundproof window I can hear the sound — a deep, terrifying roar.

Then, before I have a chance to cry out in shock, the whole of Basin City shakes so violently that I'm smashed face first into the window.

Old Joe is sent sprawling under his counter. Oil from his fryers sloshes across the floor. Everywhere there are screams and cries for help.

I stagger to my feet and wipe away the blood that's pouring from my nose.

"You okay?" Old Joe asks, shining the torch in my face.

"What was that?" I ask, still wobbly on my feet, blood dripping onto my sneakers. "Earthquake, for sure!"

"Earthquake? So that's why the fish disappeared! They must've sensed something:

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Before he can answer, another shockwave hits Basin City.

This time, I'm tossed like a dead fish across the mall. I smash into a phone booth and feel my ribs crunch. Shattered glass rains down on my head.

By the time I stumble to my feet, I can't see Old Joe anywhere. His burger joint has collapsed. Across the shattered mall, fires have broken out and people are screaming for help.

My ribs ache, but nothing seems broken. I shake broken glass out of my hair and stagger through the chaos towards Joe's.

"Joe! Can you hear me?"

I see a hand under the wreckage of the counter. I grab it and pull with all my strength. A body emerges. It isn't Old Joe. It's the customer he'd served just before the quake hit. He is dead, his eyes blank as a frozen fish's.

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I shout for help, but my cries are lost in the roar of another tremor. The ground shakes so badly I'm afraid the window might implode. I know I have to get out of the mall before the next quake shatters the thick glass.

Outside, the mysterious light has gone from a dull red to a violent, glowing white. Enormous cracks have appeared in it, like a giant eggshell cracking open. I still don't know what it is and I don't want to hang around to find out.

But where to go?

My mind is racing. Outer Edge and home? No. It would've been hit by the quake, same as here.

I think of Dad. That's where I need to go.

I have to leave Basin City and somehow get to Deep Ark 6.