Mute (41 page)

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.

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.”