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.
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.”
The last sentence sounded like an afterthought. Swartzman didn’t concentrate on solving the murders in his lab, probably because he feared that would lead him to implicate his friend. He worked so feverishly on this case because he got a rush from making bold discoveries. He must get a hard-on when he fantasizes about his articles on the cover of scientific journals, Aaron thought. What did the professor care if a flunky student got roasted along the way? The professor could thank him posthumously in his liner notes.
“If I go down there, I’m not coming back up,” Aaron said. “The Lagoon Watcher told you how smart these things are. They won’t let me approach them a second time. You know how they feel about eliminating witnesses.”
The professor nodded in reluctant acceptance of the student’s conclusion. “Or possessing them, apparently,” Swartzman said.
Aaron couldn’t argue. After seeing this bio machine and how it conquered the human mind, he couldn’t imagine how Mariella could have avoided it during a night along the water. The moment he got ashore, he’d call Moni and warn her. The girl hadn’t harmed her as far as he knew, but if her microscopic buddies tell her about Aaron’s little escapade, Mariella might show a darker side of herself, Aaron thought.
Swartzman fired up the motor and steered the skiff south toward their home base in Fort Pierce. A few seconds later, his cell phone rang to the tune of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.”
“The detective is responding to your e-mail pretty quick,” Aaron said. “Good. Maybe he can send a chopper and get us out of here.”
“That’s not Sneed.” Swartzman checked his phone with one hand as he steered with the other. “It’s my tracking alert for the sea turtle we tagged. You know; the one with the purple tumor. It’s come within a thousand feet of us.”
“The infected sea turtle? Dude, that’s not good.”
“I wouldn’t worry. It’s coming down from the north at 30 miles per hour. That’s blazing fast for a turtle, but it doesn’t have a propeller like we do.”
As Swartzman revved the skiff up to 55 miles per hour, Aaron wondered how long their propeller would last in the increasingly acidic water. He heard the acid chewing away all around the boat, especially on its metal.
“Maybe we should just find a dock somewhere around here,” Aaron said from his seat in the rear, just in front of the engine. He clung to the railings so the choppy water didn’t toss him. “How about someone’s backyard?”
“The acid releases have been confined to small areas,” Swartzman said from behind the console. “I doubt this one goes past the causeway up ahead.”
“But they’re stronger this…”
Aaron forgot his point when the professor’s phone sang that Beatles tune again. Swartzman checked it. His jaw dropped.
“What?”
“That’s a healthy sea turtle all right,” Swartzman said. “Too damn healthy if you ask me.”
He swerved the boat to the right so hard that Aaron nearly catapulted over the rail. Glancing behind them, he saw a dark green shell cross their wake. It headed off their turn. The professor pulled the skiff the other way, but the sea turtle didn’t react like a lumbering armored car like it should have. It burst from the water as if it were a missile with its flippers extended in flight. The purple tumors formed a grisly mask over its face and neck. They smothered its eyes, but no physical vision guided this creature. It honed in on Swartzman. Screaming, he turned and hunched over. The reptile smashed his hip with its infected snout. Aaron reached across the skiff. By the time his hand made it far enough, Swartzman had careened into the acidic water under the weight of a near 400-pound sea turtle that carried a thirst for the iron in his blood and the brain in his skull.
“Hold on!” Aaron screamed as he scrambled to the console and steered the boat around. They had landed 40 feet from the point of impact. He spotted it by the fumes rising from the lagoon as if a fresh batch of frozen fries had been dropped into a fryer.
Professor Swartzman had been the only teacher who showed any faith in Aaron. Sure, he had his selfish reasons, but he had recognized his talent and given him a shot. Aaron realized that most of his scientific knowledge, and the most fun he’s had on missions, came from the man with the infectious enthusiasm for marine biology. His father didn’t care how he did in his life’s passion, but Swartzman did. Aaron thought he could please his professor. He thought he’d be grateful that they reached the spotlight together by cracking this case. Instead, it’s come to this…
Aaron slowed the skiff so it came to a drift along the site where Swartzman had landed. He didn’t see the turtle. He didn’t see the professor either. He spotted one of his shoes bobbing in the water. It looked like it had been taken for a stroll over burning coals.
He should have looked away then. He should have given up. Soon, he would wish that he had.
Aaron peered into the depths of the lagoon as it grew clearer from the acidic concentration. He recognized his professor’s brown eyes gazing back at him through the blurry water. They weren’t surrounded by eyelids. Swartzman’s face had been stripped to its bare muscle and bone. Aaron saw the muscles and tendons of his jaw framing his teeth and gums. When he opened his mouth to scream, his tongue melted. His hair had whittled away, along with the skin on his scalp. Aaron saw his professor’s breastbone and the cartilage between his ribs. His intestines fanned out like tentacles and then burst open, splattering their gooey contents into the lagoon. Swartzman’s arms dangled through the water as the acid boiled their lean meat alive. Finally, his microscopic tormentors decided that he had suffered enough. Swartzman’s head tumbled off his shoulders and plunged to the bottom of the lagoon. His blood was consumed before a drop could reach the surface.