Wrenched from sleep by being violently slammed against her sleeping pod, Kristen screamed as she woke, tumbling to a halt as the metal of the underwater research facility she was inside of groaned and trembled from some unknown extremity. Alarms sounded and a calm, prerecorded female voice informed her that the hull had been breached. Panic surged through Kristen's slender body as she understood that miles of ocean were now filling part of the structure she inhabited on the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
The mechanical engineer scrambled to crawl out of her sleeping pod. The eight foot long, four foot wide cylinder was her private bunk inside the crew apartment she'd been assigned when she entered the station one month before. Emerging from her compartment, dressed only in black panties and a sports bra, fear driving modesty from her mind, she saw one other crew member also scramble from his pod in just boxer shorts, the wide eyes in his dark face full of terror, as she assumed hers were.
"What the fuck was that?" Rodrigo asked, his voice screeching over the sound of alarms and the calm voice telling them the hull was breached.
"We need to get to the escape pods!" Kristen replied, no more informed than he as to what had happened.
Disoriented, Kristen touched a sore spot on her head. Short, brown hair hid a lump at the back where she'd impacted the wall of of her pod. It was tender, but the skull felt solid beneath a swelling bruise. Checking the rest of her lithe body for injuries, she saw no wounds breaking her pale skin. Glancing at Rodrigo as he crossed the room the sleeping pods opened into, she assessed him for injury. The wiry black man moved awkwardly, groggy from sleep and not particularly athletic to begin with, but seemed uninjured. Kristen tried to recall Rodrigo's job. Biologist maybe?
When Rodrigo tried the door to their cabin it refused to open. The electronic door latch was blinking red, indicating it was locked. That door was never locked. Eight crew members shared this cabin, each with their own sleeping pod and footlocker which they had a right to access anytime. The others were all on duty just then, but Kristen and Rodrigo were part of the night shift. Day and night meant nothing that far below the ocean surface, but the shifts were each eight hours and conformed to surface time anyway.
Joining Rodrigo at the locked door, Kristen peered through the small window in the door and saw water filling the corridor beyond and stifled a scream as panic once more filled her body seeing water inside the deep ocean research facility.
"The hall is flooding" she told Rodrigo, her voice unsteady.
The thin man pushed her aside to see for himself. That door was the only way in or out of the cabin.
For several minutes they watched the water fill the hall as they paced, panicked, shouted and schemed for a way to get to the escape pods. The sprawling research facility spread across the ocean floor for hundreds of yards of, tight, twisting corridors and small rooms built to withstand the ocean's crushing weight, one couldn't simply smash through a wall to get out of a room.
The churning water stopped just as it reached the bottom of the window to their door. It took a moment for them to notice the level no longer rose every moment.
"I think it stopped" Rodrigo offered hesitantly.
They spent several long moments holding their breath staring at the lapping waters rippling against the glass pane.
"It's stopped" Kristen agreed and they looked at each other, shaking, sweating and wild eyed.
Panic gave way to joy and they laughed, shouting and jumped in a circle celebrating the reprieve from death they'd been given. Rodrigo reached for her and Kristen spun into his arms hugging and jumping up and down with hysterical joy.
Then, out of breath, they settled, still holding each other, squeezing the only other living soul near them after experiencing the existential dread of drowning miles beneath the ocean. Overwhelmed by the close call, Kristen clung to the wiry man in her arms, abruptly aware of how close to naked she was, and how desperately she needed him to keep holding her. The two of them stood in the centre of the cabin, clinging to each other. Slowly, both became aware of the skin of the other, the strangeness of being so intimate with a person they knew only casually, but who they had just shared a powerful moment with.
Rodrigo got an erection.
It pressed Kristen's belly, growing along her tummy as she pressed herself to him, needing contact, wanting it even more now that she understood his arousal. Examining herself, she too felt a powerful sexual appetite at that moment, a life affirming need to have another human as close as possible. Shocked by the intensity of her desire, Kristen leaned back, peering up at Rodrigo, maintaining the contact between her belly and his erection.
Looking into his dark brown eyes, she saw an expression that mirrored what she felt. The black man appeared bewildered by his body's reaction, but too frightened to mask his need. As they gazed at each other, neither knowing the other well, they abruptly began kissing, both intuiting that sex and the needs of the body were far more important than whatever mental restraints they might normally place on themselves.
They had very nearly died a moment before and now they needed to live.
They kissed, they groped one another and Rodrigo pulled her bra up over her breasts exposing the hardness of her nipples. Suckling her breasts, he sent jolts of desire along frazzled nerves while she groped the hard, lean muscles of his back and arms. A bestial hunger for sex she knew from another time in her life awakened once again as her breasts were manhandled. Needing him inside her suddenly burning sex, Kristen lay on the cool plastic floor and pulled her panties aside for him, opening her glistening slit for him to enter.
"Please" was all she said, but Rodrigo was already pulling his erection from his boxers and kneeling between her wide spread thighs. Positioned over her, he made sustained eye contact with her, wordlessly entreating her for permission.
"Please!" she begged him and the biologist thrust himself into her.
Both frantic, terrifyingly fragile humans hissed with need, lust and pleasure as they joined. Fucking furiously, animalistically, with no hesitancy and no mercy they sought to affirm that they had survived a disaster that terrified them to the very core.
Humping up to meet his downward thrusts, Kristen grunted and moaned from the extremity of their coupling. It had been some time since she'd been with a lover, but the woman writhing on the floor in depraved abandon was a familiar to her, a part of herself Kristen had thought buried deep. As deep as the bottom of the ocean.
They rutted like beasts, clawing each other, kissing and gazing at the other as they clung to life, defying the universe the chance to utterly snuff them out. As if the harder they fucked, the greater the chance they would live, the two beings stranded in the deep, dark of the most dangerous place on the planet ground themselves against one another until Rodrigo erupted deep inside Kristen's clenching sex. The spill of hot cum igniting a denotation of primal euphoria within her as she accepted his seed deep in her body, proving life still continued.
Gasping and relaxing after their efforts, they remained entwined, shivering with the aftershock of both the horrific flooding accident and the violent sexual reaction they'd both had to it. Laying half underneath Rodrigo, Kristen felt his sperm inside her and shivered at the idea of having a baby. Knowing she'd been careful with her birth control, she was still uneasy having the sperm of a man she hardly knew soaking inside her.
Then she felt water tickle her feet.
Pushing Rodrigo out from her sex and off her body, she looked and saw water seeping under the door.
"It's leaking in!" she cried.
While they had fucked with panicked abandon, the hall beyond had filled, the window covered in water and the ocean leaking around the edges of the sealed door.
Jumping up, Kristen pulled her bra back over her breasts and her panties back over her vulva, all thoughts and feeling about the sex they'd just had dismissed by the abrupt, animal need to get out of that trap. Scanning her mind for a way out, the frantic mechanical engineer tried to picture the schematics of the facility in her mind. According to what she recalled there should be what the crew jokingly called a Jefferies Tube behind one of the walls. The name came from the old T.V. show Star Trek as a name for a service crawl-way in their space ship.
Opening the long drawer recessed beneath her sleep pod, Kristen rummaged through her haphazardly organized belongings until she found a screwdriver.
"What are you doing?" Rodrigo said, the hope in his voice indicating he needed her to have found a solution.
"There should be a way out behind one of these pods. If my memory is right, it will be this one."
The pod belonged to a woman Kristen had spoken to a few times. The kind lady scientist had been at work when the water started coming in and Kristen hoped she was safe wherever she'd been when the disaster had stuck. Using the screwdriver to pull the keypad apart, Kristen disabled the lock and opened the pod door.
Crawling inside she headed to the far end and began undoing the plastic panel sealing the pod. As she worked Rodrigo gave her far too regular updates about the water level. The water was coming into the pod by the time Kristen had the rear panel off and was crawling into the Jefferies tube beyond.
"Come on!" she encouraged Rodrigo as she did her best to recall which direction the escape pods were from there. When Rodrigo emerged from the sleeping pod into the crawl-way with her, he looked terrified again.
"This is too small. The water will fill this in a few minutes."
The thin man's shoulders nearly filled the width of the tube. The biologist's small size one of the major reason he had been hired for this project, same as Kristen's. Both their skills and small stature were perfect for working in the limited space of the underwater research facility.
"No, this tunnel is really long, it runs all around the facility. It will take a while to fill up. Not like the cabin."
Feeling a new fondness for the man she'd just shared such an intimacy with, she was gentle with his fear in spite of her own.
"Come on. The escape pods are this way."
Painfully, on hands and knees atop the metal grating of the crawl-way, she moved forward, embarrassingly aware that her scantily clad butt was thrust right into his face as Rodrigo moved close behind. Red emergency lights illuminated the way as she scrambled as fast as possible in the tight confines of the Jefferies Tube.
