The force of the blow made the dolphin wince and lose its grip on his ankle with the hand it never should have had. Aaron kicked off and swam for the surface. Then he stopped. Neither the speargun nor the camera had clunked against his legs when he started ascending. Glancing at his belt, he realized that the tethers for his equipment had snapped. No, they had burned.
Without the photos in that camera, his death-defying dive would be like catching the perfect wave without anybody on the beach as a witness. Aaron knew the acidic spike in the water would ruin his camera if he gave it enough time. His wetsuit wouldn’t last too long in sulfuric acid either. He stood a decent chance of surviving if he surfaced now and hit the boat. That would leave him as the only man who believed that a mutant colony lived in the lagoon-the only man not in jail, anyway. Unless he showed them proof, the military and cops wouldn’t help him combat the creatures until they grow too powerful, Aaron thought. They might even ask Mariella for more heads, especially the head of a certain woman who always stuck around her.
Pressing his scuba mask firmly against his face just in case it came loose, Aaron dove back down. He saw the glow of Mrs. Mint’s eyes-plus a few other pairs-watching him from further down the worm. This time, Aaron didn’t feel all that curious about uncovering the source of those lights. He spotted his speargun and camera on the sandy bottom. For some reason, the water appeared clearer down there than before. It might have been because the sulfuric acid chewed up the heavy sediments. All of a sudden, he clamored for murky water again. He scooped up his camera and left his weapon behind so it wouldn’t weigh him down as he kicked towards the surface. Against the wishes of his pounding heart as he neared the ceiling of air and sunshine, Aaron glanced below him. He saw two glimmering purple eyes framing a beak with his old spear jutting though it.
His head broke the surface. The comfort of seeing Professor Swartzman about twenty feet away in his boat didn’t erase his anxiety about what followed on his heels. By the way those possessed animals had boosted their abilities, a “dolphin” like that could rip him in half as easily as a great white shark. Aaron made like a seal and rolled forward. He felt the onrushing water as the creature barreled by him. He poked his head through the surface just in time to see the dolphin finish cart wheeling through the air and splash into the water.
He had time, but not much. When he faced the boat, it might as well have been in the Bahamas. Aaron saw the colorful logo on his wetsuit cracking as the acidic water ate away at it. His neoprene wetsuit should last at least an hour unless it tore, but he didn’t know how long his scuba equipment would hold up. A shot of sulfuric acid mixed with microscopic invaders wouldn’t go down the hatch easy.
With the professor cheering him on, Aaron narrowed the gap to the boat with desperate arm strokes. Swartzman asked him whether he found anything. He declined to set aside his mouth piece and roast his face so he could answer him, but that didn’t stop the professor from repeating the question again and again. Swartzman finally shut up. He didn’t look like a man who had recognized his silly mistake. His eyes grew wide as he let out a terrified gasp.
Realizing that the professor was reacting to something behind him, Aaron glanced over his shoulder. The tricked-out dolphin had returned. And it had invited its evil twin to share an appetizer of a young man wrapped in a crispy neoprene coating like a seaweed wrap around a morsel of spicy tuna. Aaron turned toward the skiff and swam faster. He couldn’t reach it in time.
With his facemask splashing in the foamy water, Aaron couldn’t make out his professor’s expression. But he could recognize the long black piece he held across his body as a rifle. A gunshot rang out and sliced into the water behind him. Aaron didn’t turn and see whether the professor had hit his mark. Either way, one bullet couldn’t take out two dolphins, if it could even stop one. The professor couldn’t reload the rifle fast enough. Aaron’s fingers clasped the side of the skiff. He started pulling himself up. The sound of sloshing water from behind him grew closer. Aaron winced and covered the back of his head, as if his hand could block razor-sharp teeth slicing into him at 40 miles per hour. He heard another bang. Something gray smacked against the side of the skiff. Aaron lost his grip and fell back into the water. He bumped into the dolphin’s head. He saw the bullet hole between its eyes.
“I’d offer you a hand, but I’m afraid I’ll get wet,” Swartzman said as he placed the revolver back on the deck. His professor was more badass than he thought. “Here. Take this.”
He lowered the edge of a life preserver to Aaron. The moment he grabbed it, the fabric began fuming from the acid coating his wetsuit.
“Holy shit,” Swartzman said. He retreated to the other side of the skiff as Aaron climbed aboard.
Aaron toweled off before he spit out his mouthpiece and sealed the tank. The towel looked as if it had been roasted in a deep fryer. “You don’t wanna know what’s down there.”
“Please tell me you took photos!” he exclaimed, as if Aaron would flake out on the whole point of the mission.
“You can see for yourself after we get the hell out of here. They know we’re here and they’re pissed.”
“Let me see.” The professor snatched the camera, dried off the acidic water, and pulled up the photos. “What! That woman… she’s…”
“I know. I know. You should have seen the way her eyes lit up after that.”
“And you didn’t get that on here?”
“That’s when all hell broke loose. Which is all the more reason to leave-like, now.”
The professor’s frenzy over his latest breakthrough pushed his recognition of this new deadly reality aside. He plugged the camera into his cell phone and downloaded the pictures.
“I’m sending these to the lab computer and to Sneed right now,” Swartzman said. “Now they’ll see we’re not crazy, and neither is Trainer.”
Aaron hadn’t been swayed on that last part, but when he spied the fumes wafting from the skiff’s hull and heard that frying sound, he realized that they would qualify as more insane than the Lagoon Watcher if they sat there for another second.
He remembered the boats the police had dragged out of the lagoon. They had been doused with acid and stripped of metal-both under the hull and topside. Now he understood how that could happen. The colony must contain enough mutants to capsize a boat, or something much larger. Even if they could avoid them, the acidic water would eventually drag the boat to the bottom of the lagoon. Aaron didn’t feel like making a swim for it, especially with precious little oxygen left in his tank. Swartzman and his shorts wouldn’t last ten seconds in the toxic water.
“These are astonishing.” The professor gawked over the photos. “Could you pop back down and get a DNA sample? I bet the genomes in the colony are even more exotic than the possessed animals we’ve sampled.”
“Back down? Did you see what just happened?” Aaron felt like a flimsy fishing rod the professor decided he’d try out on a mako shark. He wouldn’t have asked any self-respecting human being to plunge back into that death trap. Aaron wondered whether his professor had saved him from the mutants only because he carried the camera with his precious evidence.
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Heck, it’s more than that,” Swartzman said. “This is a whole new classification of life form that survives in a drastically different environment.”
“Yeah, and it wants us the hell out of its environment.”
“I’m sure you’d rather hit the beach with your surfing buddies than take on a challenge like this, but this isn’t just about you, Aaron. It’s my career too. It’s about all of the people in this county who are under attack by that thing down there.”