The Gasman shook his head like a wet dog. “You can not,” he said.
“I’ll prove it!” Angel dived back under the water.
By this time, Nudge and Igg
y were walking up.
“She talks to fish now?” Iggy asked.
Then, with no warning, a six-foot shark surfaced, mouth open, maybe two yards away from Gazzy. None of us made a sound—we were conditioned not to yell in a crisis. I’m sure we were all screaming in our heads. I sprang into the water, grabbed Gazzy’s arm, and hauled him toward shore. He was frozen with fright and seemed like dead weight. I kept expecting to feel the huge tug of the shark taking off my leg.
Angel popped back out of the chest-high water. I motioned her urgently to do an up-and-away. She laughed.
“He’s my friend!” she shouted. “He’s saying hi!” The shark had circled and was now moving right toward her. My heart was in my throat—what if she only thought she could talk to fish? “Go on, maybe you should wave,” Angel said to the shark, as I tensed to fly out over the water to snatch her up.
Before our eyes, the shark literally turned on its side, came a little bit out of the water, and waved a fin slightly.
“Holy cra—,” the Gasman began, but I said, “Gazzy!”
“Would someone please tell me what the heck is going on?” Iggy said.
“Angel just made a shark wave its fin at us,” Nudge told him breathlessly.
“Uh—wha . . . ?”
Then three more sharks appeared in the shallow water around Angel. Together, the four sharks turned on their sides and waved their fins.
Angel was laughing. “Isn’t that so great?”
Total trotted up next to me, his little feet kicking sand. “That’s awesome! Make them do it again!”
My knees felt weak. I needed to sit down. “That was neat, sweetie,” I said, trying to sound calm. “Now please ask the sharks to leave, okay?”
Angel shrugged and talked to the sharks again. Slowly they turned and headed back out to sea.
“That was so awesome,” Total said, as Angel splashed toward shore. He licked Angel’s leg, then spit. “Ugh! Salt.”
“So, Angel talks to fish, is that right?” Iggy said carefully. “And this is useful how?”
106
We had to keep on the move. It was going to be dark soon, and we needed shelter. Most kids my age would be bummed about their next math test or that their parents cut their phone calls short. I was more concerned with shelter, food, water. The little luxuries of life.
We were over northern Florida now. All along the coast we saw a million twinkling lights of homes and stores and cars moving in threads like blood cells in a vein. If blood cells had, you know, weensy little headlights.
But there was a huge unlit area below us. In general, dark = no people. I looked over at Fang, and he nodded. We started to descend.
A few minutes’ reconnaissance informed us that this was the Ocala National Forest. It looked like a good place, and we dropped down out of the twilight and aimed ourselves carefully through small gaps in the umbrella of treetops. And landed in water.
“Yuck!” I was calf-deep in muddy water, surrounded by cypress knees and towering pines. Looking around, I saw land a couple yards away and slogged over to it. “To the left!” I called, as Nudge and Iggy swooped in.
“This is good,” I said, looking around in what was rapidly becoming the pitch-darkness. “Easy to get out of, straight up through the trees, but almost impossible for anyone to track us overland.”
“Home, sweet swamp,” said the Gasman, and I smiled.
An hour later we had a small fire going and were roasting things on sticks. I was so used to eating this way that even if I were, like, a grown-up making breakfast for my 2.4 children, I would probably be impaling Pop-Tarts on the ends of sticks and holding them over a fire.
Now Fang pulled a smoking, meaty chunk off a stick and dropped it onto an empty Baggie, which was Nudge’s plate.