His skull rattled, as if the jet engine of a 747 roared a foot from his head and his teeth trembled. Even though he didn’t feel any change in the water, Aaron thrashed his arms and legs and frantically backed away from the edge of the channel. Quickly regaining his senses, he remembered that struggling would use up his oxygen faster. He steadied himself. Aaron let his heart and breathing rates ease. The racket in his head faded into silence. He stared at the hazy channel and treaded water.
Aaron remembered his father’s words when he made him try out for little league. He had earned a starting spot with solid play in practice, but he had struck out in all three at bats in his first game and quit. His father had told him, “Sure, you stick with it when it’s going your way, but you always give up when things get hard. If you don’t suck it up, and go back out there, you’ll never learn how to pick yourself up.”
Aaron realized that he never did learn. When school got tough for him-usually socially more than academically-he bailed and hit the beach. Even with how much he impressed his friends surfing, he never entered the competitions. Now a real risk awaited him, and he had the most meaningful relationship of his life on the line.
Everything in Moni’s life rested on this investigation. There in front of him, awaited the answer. Hovering a foot off the bottom of the lagoon, Aaron floated halfway above the revelation and halfway to surfacing with his life. He could leave. He could trek across the beachside with his surfboard under his arm, and ignore the nightmare unfolding in the lagoon. But he couldn’t forget Moni. If he didn’t uncover this, he might lose her to the cyborgs inside Mariella, or worse.
That made it worth stepping into the batter’s box-even if he struck out or got beaned in the head by a pitch.
Aaron paddled down the slope into the channel. By the time the bottom flatted out, he recognized something gigantic in front of him. Its bulky gray hide spanned six feet high. It was so long that he couldn’t see its end in either direction. It reminded him of a giant worm resting in the middle of the channel, but this worm was anything but round.
When he aimed his camera’s light and snapped a photo, Aaron saw an outboard motor embedded halfway into the mound of flesh. Its propeller still turned, even though he couldn’t spot a fuel source. Along the bottom, where the thing’s fatty rolls swelled over the exposed sand, he saw more than a dozen exhaust pipes. Few of them matched. He figured that they had been swiped from various cars and trucks.
Swimming around the expansive collection of biomass and spare parts, Aaron captured photos of wires, transmission lines and even a shovel all trapped in its flesh like flies in ointment. It didn’t merely collect metal and tools. Aaron found several sets of gills, but they weren’t breathing the water. They were sealed closed as if the thing were holding its breath.
Aaron understood how the Lagoon Watcher had seen this from above and thought of it as a colony. It reminded him of a Portuguese Man O' War, where four separate organisms work together, and function as one animal. Except, this giant worm stayed true to the nature of its tiny cyborgs masters, and invited metal and machinery into the mix.
Before he finished contemplating why it would do this, Aaron spotted something up ahead. It protruded from the flesh wall like an oversized door knob. He didn’t dare touch it. Aaron shined the camera’s light ahead, and froze… He immediately recognized that face. He had seen it in the photo during the search mission the day before. That was Robin Mint-Mariella’s teacher.
Even seeing her eyes shut, he recognized those puffy cheeks, and her perm of brown hair swaying in the water. She didn’t breathe, which made sense because she didn’t have a neck. Her skin shone as pale as a corpse’s. Her lips were more than closed. They were curled inward and cinched between her teeth. It reminded him of a gargoyle head affixed to a gothic castle.
Mariella had been the last person with Mrs. Mint. No, he could no longer call Mariella a person. The microscopic cyborgs wanted the teacher for their colony and Mariella must have delivered her to them. Aaron searched for another explanation. Maybe the infected creatures caught the teacher while Mariella escaped. But that didn’t make sense. If Mariella hadn’t been infected, then she must have been their top target judging by how many times they had come after her. There’s no way she could have escaped all those times. Yet, with Mariella playing on the lagoon’s team, that means all those times it appeared the gators and snakes wanted her, they were really after the people around her.
Aaron recalled how close that snake in Moni’s house had come to biting him. He thought he had pushed Mariella out of the way, and saved her. It turns out, she had baited him. He wondered how many other people she had lured in so their heads and organs could get stuffed into her microscopic masters’ giant stocking.
With a photo of this as evidence, Sneed and Colon would finally see the real source of the bloodshed. The detective would find all the missing heads here. Aaron had no doubt that the general’s bombs had been deposited into the colony as well. He supposed he could swim until he found the explosives wired into the fleshy warehouse, but Aaron would rather take his chances with the heads.
Aaron focused the camera on Mrs. Mint’s captive head and snapped her final photo. He doubted that this one would make the school yearbook. A moment after the flash faded, another light beamed through the water. The purple glow shined from the sockets of the teacher’s eyes. Even without pupils, they gazed upon Aaron. He paddled in reverse. He wasn’t fast enough. A ghostly pale hand pierced through the wormy flesh and seized hold of Aaron’s ankle.
Chapter 40
When the pale hand burst from the fleshy wall and caught his ankle, Aaron nearly spit out his mouthpiece. He was damn lucky that he didn’t, because the dolphin head that followed it out of the colony opened its beak and, from in between its unnaturally sharp teeth, it spewed purple mist.
Aaron sucked his mouthpiece tight against his face as the tiny beads of purple splattered across his scuba mask. The droplets that struck his mask less than an inch from his eyes didn’t look more threatening than grape juice, but he had a hunch that if he could get them under a microscope, he’d see something similar to the little beasties he saw last night inside the possessed rat.
My suit is air tight. One-hundred-percent waterproof. It better fucking be.
The suit wouldn’t stave off the microscopic army for much longer with the mutated dolphin tugging at his ankle. Despite his strongest paddling toward the surface, it yanked him down and chomped on him with its jaws. He braced for a bone-shattering impact that would leave an open wound for the microscopic predators’ invasion. The dolphin shredded his flipper. His suit and skin stayed intact. But it didn’t let him go. Through the purple light cast by the eyes of Mrs. Mint’s mounted head, Aaron saw the mutated dolphin squeeze completely free of the sticky colony wall. It trapped his leg against its belly. Two elongated jaws filled with knife-edge teeth and a purple tongue snapped up to devour his face. He met it with a speargun shot that blasted through the roof of the creature’s jaw. Its head recoiled and left Aaron in one piece. Yet, the grubby bastard wouldn’t let his ankle go. He smacked its arm with the butt of his speargun. The water slowed his swings and let the creature regain its grip after each strike.
Aaron had another eight minutes of air. It didn’t feel like that long. He felt as if he were already drowning with a boulder weighing down on his chest.
Then more purple mist sprayed across him. The great worm’s gills had opened up. Instead of sucking water in, they flushed purple toxins out. When they washed over the dolphin, its eyes blazed purple like light bulbs plugged into a nuclear reactor. Aaron reared his speargun back like a club and aimed his swing for the light.