I pursed my lips, unmoved, and Jonny shrugged.
“Okay, so you don’t need it to breathe, fine. But can you do me a favor and bring it with you? That way the tanks will all be at the caves. Otherwise, I’ll have to leave it here.”
Okay, that made sense. I could do him a favor. I lifted the backpack with its heavy, dinged-up tank. The straps weren’t going to fit over my oh-so-disgraceful, draggy wings, so I wore it backward, with the single tank in front of my chest.
Nudge, also carrying an oxygen tank in front, went in right before me. I plopped in last, splashing with my awkward tank, and as I swam after them toward the mouth of the tunnel that would take us to our sanctuary, I tried to work on a little thing called humility.
30
WE SWAM. I kept my wings tightly folded against my back. I’m not a bad swimmer, but the Aquatics had obviously been designed for this: Though clumsy and awkward on land, in the water they became graceful, fluid, powerful swimmers.
The ocean, which only three months ago had been crystalline, a clear, clean aqua, was now a murky, opaque sludge with almost zero visibility. I followed Jonny mostly by the swirling eddies of ash particles, while trying to keep an eye on Nudge. The stupid oxygen tank made it hard to swim, weighing me down, and I considered just ditching it.
“Aiiieeeeee!!!!”
The panicked scream was garbled and muffled, but unmistakable. My head whipped around but I saw nothing but churned-up sludge. More screams echoed through the water around me, and I glimpsed a couple of the Aquatics speeding past me with terrified expressions. What’s happening? Where is Nudge?
Was it a… party? The murky water seemed alive with streamers whipping and writhing in the currents. Could this be some sort of welcoming ceremony? Someone had been surprised and had screamed?
Oh, God, oh, God. My brain had no time to think except to register: These streamers are alive.
They were eels or water snakes, and they were freakishly large. Slick ropes of muscle fifteen feet long and as thick as my waist, they made looping Ss through the water, disappearing and reappearing confusingly so that I lost all sense of direction.
But the most horrible part was their mouths. Their whole heads, really, were circular vacuums of death, with rows and rows of teeth spiraling inward toward a gaping hole. The kind of thing you don’t want to see on a movie screen, let alone near your leg.
Uh-huh. My leg.
There it was, slimy and quick, with its razor-sharp teeth moving closer and closer to my flesh. Once it attached, I felt a powerful leechy sucking sensation and then the first jolt of pain. I kicked at it, but my splashing just seemed to attract more of them, and I could only hold them off so much longer.
Desperate, I did the only thing I could think of: I slipped off the straps of the oxygen tank and quickly turned its valve. Immediately, pressurized bubbles burst out of it with the power of a fire hose, sending the eels wheeling away from me. I grinned victoriously but then blanched when I realized why the eels weren’t returning.
A flash of color in the olive-green water caught my eye. It was striped, like Jonny Diamond’s shirt. They’d found a new target: Jonny. I kicked with my legs, aiming my tank, but stopped in horror as I took in the scene:
One had suctioned onto him, and the snakelike body streamed out from his chest. For a second it just seemed like a small inconvenience, an odd extra limb, and Jonny tugged at the tail determinedly.
For a second.
And then Jonny’s expression changed.
His mouth opened in a silent scream, a flurry of bloody bubbles escaping from it, and the muscles in his neck tightened into cords of agony. His eyes bulged in disbelief as his legs flailed and his hands scratched and tugged at the creature desperately.
The sucking mouth was burrowing into him.
Aiming my tank, I opened the valve, but only a tiny stream of bubbles came out: I’d used up the last of the oxygen. My mouth pressed tight in shock, I saw Jonny’s head go limp, his whole body becoming boneless, like a rag doll’s. Instinctively I moved away from him. When I looked back a final time, more toothy mouths had latched on to Jonny’s body, burrowing into his chest, thighs, and stomach until he looked like some sort of mutant octopus. Two brilliant red ribbons of blood floated up out of his nostrils.
Something brushed against my arm, and I kicked wildly, a rush of adrenaline making my ears sing. But it was only Nudge, as stricken as I was.
I was freaking out, but I grabbed Nudge’s hand and swam hard in what I thought was the direction of the tunnels. All I wanted was to breathe real air, scream, and then cry. When a few inches of space opened above the water, we surfaced, gasping. Behind me, a bloom of crimson stained the turquoise sea.
The splashing had stopped.
31
IN TODAY’S WORLD, heaven pretty much boiled down to actual beds, reliable shelter, and a consistent food source. The caves were something else altogether.
“Look how beautiful it is.” Nudge’s voice was tired; her face was pale with shock and the effort of swimming through the death tunnel. I tried to quickly count heads, but I could only estimate that we’d lost about six of the Aquatics. More than half of the number that had started with us.
And the weird thing was, not a single person seemed bothered by Jonny’s gruesome death or the loss of several of their friends. No one had mentioned it, no one seemed surprised, and no one was crying. Which told me that it was a common occurrence. That they had known about the horrific eel/snake/leech things and had gone anyway. Had made us go in anyway.