Van of Valor

Fictional story By Dr. Kevin P. Wallace 
Van of Valor

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – The first time I heard a lionfish growl, I wasn’t a scientist. I was a 47-year-old combat veteran, sixty feet underwater, breathing compressed air that tasted like a second chance. 

A year of my life had been stolen by sarcoidosis, a microscopic civil war in my lungs. The treatment was a crucible that rewired my emotions, but it brought me back from the brink. 

On a sun-drenched Sunday, my wife, Lauren, and I processed together to become PADI Open Water Scuba Instructors. My number, 529301. Hers, 529302. 

It was a sequence, a pair, a testament to a recovery story written in water and will. I had traded the gravity of a Bronze Star with Valor and a Purple Heart for the earnestness of a dive instructor. The war zones I now navigated were made of currents and the occasional panic behind a novice’s mask. It was a perfect peace.

That peace was shattered by a vibration that thrummed up through my scuba tank and resonated in the chest where the sarcoidosis had once laid siege. 

It wasn’t a sound at first; it was a low-frequency pressure wave, a stark, biological alarm bell that yanked me back to the hyper-vigilance of combat. 

Twenty feet away, a magnificent lionfish held court, its venomous spines fanned out. But its eyes, usually vacant, were fixed on me. Its gill covers were fluttering with a muscular tension that produced a hum. A growl of pure, territorial malice.

Back on the boat, a local dive master dismissed it. 

“El pez león does not growl, Doc Wallace,” he said. “Maybe it was the ghost of your old sickness.” 

But I knew what my body had felt. 

Other divers on the boat, a pair of eco-activists from Portland, were too busy celebrating their “guilt-free” kills to notice. Their eyes held the same adrenalized, righteous glow I had seen in soldiers after a successful mission. 

For them, the lionfish was the perfect enemy: an invasive monster that couldn’t shoot back, allowing them to sanctify violence as healing. They were surgeons, not hunters—or so they told themselves. 

It made me sick. 

I’d documented the worst of humanity, and I knew that the most dangerous words in any language are “they deserve it.”

While others saw a target, Lauren, an ethnomusicologist, saw a pattern. My growl was not just a noise; it was a communication. 

For years, I had been the documentarian, the storyteller. 

But it was Lauren who recognized that the lionfish’s hollow, venomous spines were not just weapons. They were instruments, tuned like the bone flutes she had studied her entire life. 

The lionfish weren’t just adapting biologically to our culling; they were talking to each other, using a pentatonic scale as the foundation of their language. 

Our global, relentless campaign of extermination hadn’t erased an invasive species. We had administered a boot camp for a super-predator. We had taught them to build an army.

The consequences of our violence came home in the autumn of 2041, not on a beachhead, but in the plumbing of New Orleans. 

The lionfish, now evolved into amphibious “mudfish,” studied Hurricane Katrina the way a general studies a siege. They attacked the pumping stations and floodwalls of the canals, using a corrosive biofilm and tactical formations I recognized immediately. 

It was a SEAL Team structure, right there in the water: centralized command, decentralized execution. They didn’t conquer the city; they broke its circulatory system and left the rising water to do the rest. In a single night, we lost New Orleans because we never imagined a fish could understand civil engineering.

In the end, our salvation didn’t come from a spear, but from listening. 

The first growl was a warning. 

To be continued…

Disclosure: The Wallaces have been occasionally working on a wide array of fictional work, to decompress from the seriousness of Van of Valor work. If you enjoyed this fictional piece, and would like to see more like it, please drop a comment below.