Authors: Jay Budgett
Sage immediately grabbed the vial and poured it into the mixture, which changed to a dark blue.
Miranda flared her nostrils. “You can’t just add it at the last second! Have I taught you nothing? The solution must be mixed in the proper order. What’s gotten into your head?”
Sage tucked her arms in close and started shaking. Miranda reminded herself to make sure the next one was less easily frightened.
Miranda smoothed her pants. It was important she maintained control—she must always have control. “It’s all right, sweetie,” she said. “You can come back tomorrow and mix a new one. The chancellor will survive another day without his antidote.”
At least Miranda hoped.
The wind thundered in my ears as I plummeted toward the ocean below. Behind me, strips of parachute fluttered, only slightly slowing my descent.
In ten seconds, I’d hit the surface. I pointed my toes, clenched my stomach, and plugged my nose. Years of cliff jumping in Moku Lani had prepared me well.
My body hit the water with a sharp sting. It felt like shards of glass buried themselves into the arches of my feet and dug deep into my veins. My legs burned as I plunged farther into the ocean’s depths, slowed only by the tattered remains of my parachute.
I cracked open my eyes, and the salt water offered its customary burn. In the distance, I made out a blurred figure.
Bertha?
I tore off my parachute and swam toward the shadow. It spun gracefully in the water like a sparrow in the sky. It froze as I approached, widening its mouth and showing the teeth embedded in its jaws. Small and rounded, they were unlike the shark teeth I knew so well.
They belonged to a dolphin.
A dolphin.
The creature before me was an actual, living dolphin. I opened my mouth in a silent scream. Bubbles flew from the corners of my lips.
In school, we were taught that dolphins were extinct, like most other large marine mammals. Killed by the nuclear fallout that settled in the ocean, and by the radioactive beasts that had emerged as a result.
The dolphin before me was, in short, a real miracle.
My parents had told me stories about them as a kid. Sailors would fall overboard during ocean storms, and dolphins would appear out of nowhere to save them. The angels of the sea.
As the dolphin teetered in the water, I realized why it had appeared: to save my life. It was going to be my angel.
I kicked softly in the water. There was no need to worry anymore—the dolphin would swim me to the surface like it had done for the sailors in the tales I’d heard growing up. I would wrap my arms around its neck, and it would kick its flippers hard against the salt water, launching us to the surface. I imagined the look on Phoenix’s face when the dolphin leapt from the water, my arms wrapped around its neck.
I reached for the dolphin, my fingers tingling. Already feeling the mystical bond between us that would surely form when it carried me to the surface.
It gave me one look with its big blue eyes and hurried away.
It will come back
, I told myself. The dolphins in the stories always came back.
Thirty seconds passed. It didn’t come back.
I swam toward the surface on my own. If I saw a mermaid, I’d keep swimming.
I sucked in a breath when I broke the surface. Two hundred feet away, a parachute drifted down to the water—Dove or Phoenix, I guessed.
Where was Bertha? She had to be nearby. I hadn’t been shot down long after she’d slipped from my arms. She’d fallen fast—too fast to land safely, even with perfect form.
Something plastic floated past my arm—one of Bertha’s guns.
Where was she? Had she survived the impact? Had she drowned? Was she hurt? I didn’t see any blood in the water. I had to keep searching. I stuck my face back underwater and started to paddle.
My head slammed into the side of something hard. “Oww,” a voice moaned.
I lifted my head from the water. It was a body—Bertha. Her eyes were closed. I shook her hard. “Bertha!” I said. “Bertha! Can you hear me? Please, wake up!”
She coughed but kept her eyes shut. “I think I hit a dolphin.”
“You hit a dolphin?”
She pursed her lips. “Landed on it—BAM!” She started laughing.
She was delirious. She must’ve hit her head. Her impact with the water had likely been tremendous.
“I was flapping my arms,” she said, moving her elbows. She held a waterlogged gun in each hand. “And then finally my parachute flew out of my pack, slowing me briefly ’til good ol’ Wet Willy saved me.”
“Wet Willy?”
She stuck a hand on her head like a fin. “Wet Willy.”
“You mean Free Willy? Like the whale in that really old movie?”
She moistened a finger in her mouth and reached for my ear. “Wet Willy’s comin’ for ya.” She moved her arm and winced. “Oww,” she said, holding her elbow in one hand. “I think I broke it. Or maybe my whole body.”
She’d lost it. The impact had given her a concussion.
“Take me home,” she shouted. “TO NEW TEXAS, BABY!”
I grabbed her feet and pulled her in the direction of the fallen parachuter. We had to find the others. And soon, or the Feds would be on us.
Fifty feet away a green flare shot into the sky. Phoenix was sending us a signal. I swam hard in its direction, dragging Bertha behind me.
“Whee!” she cried as I dragged her by her feet.
But the water was empty when we reached the flare’s source.
“Phoenix!” I called.
My legs shook, and my breaths came in short spurts. I was tired. Pulling Bertha hadn’t helped. I wouldn’t last much longer in open water.
“Phoenix!” I called again.
Something yanked my ankle, pulling me under. It was too late to scream. Phoenix hadn’t set the flare off at all—it’d been one of the Feds. The green should’ve given it away.
The soldier pulled me deeper and deeper. His grip tightened around my ankle as we sank. I tried to kick, but he held on that much harder. My lungs screamed—they needed air, and fast. I hadn’t had time to breathe before he’d pulled me under.
A shadow swam behind us, followed by a flurry of bubbles. Suddenly the soldier softened his grip on my leg and a cloud of bubbles shot from his mouth. His corpse fell slowly into the ocean’s blue depths. A shiver ran down my spine.
He is not your enemy
, I reminded myself.
The Feds are not your enemies.
It was hard not to think so when they fought so desperately to kill me.
The shadow swam toward me. Did it have a similar plan in store?
Before I could decide whether or not to flee, the shadow grabbed me by the hand and pulled me toward the surface—Phoenix. He’d saved me again. Air flooded my lungs when my head broke the surface at last. I squeezed my eyes shut and laughed.
Bertha floated next to me, spinning and giggling in the water as waves passed. “I think I’d like some breakfast,” she announced.
Phoenix was silent. He stared up at the sky above and clenched his jaw. A hundred parachutes filled the sky—armed men with weapons slung across their chests. Feds.
“Their bullets won’t work in the water,” I said, “and moisture will ruin the guns.”
“BANG! BANG!” Bertha pretended to fire her waterlogged weapons.
“They don’t have bullets,” said Phoenix. “They know those won’t work underwater. They’ve got Dummy Darts—a lot of them, by the looks of it.”
“What if,” giggled Bertha, “they weren’t Dummy Darts, but Gummy Darts? And they just fired Gummy Bears at us and we collected ’em and ate ’em and then had a picnic.”
Phoenix turned to me. “What happened to
her
?”
“Concussion.”
“PERCUSSION!” shouted Bertha. “Somebody get me some drums!”
A hum sounded over the crashing waves. On the horizon, a boat sped in our direction. The Feds were coming at us from all directions. They might not have been my real enemy, but they’d try to kill me nonetheless.
Phoenix jumped in the water and waved his hands at the boat to signal to it. “Yell,” he told me, before screaming as loud as he could.
The boat swerved in our direction.
I yanked his arm. “
What are you doing
?”
“OVER HERE,” he yelled, ignoring my question. “HEY, OVER HERE!”
The waves broke faster as the boat sped toward us. I kicked hard to stay afloat and saw Phoenix do the same; his muscle mass made him heavy in the water. Bertha, however, floated along on her back with ease.
The parachutes were only a few hundred feet above us now, decorating the sky like polka dots swaying in the breeze.
As the boat came closer, a figure leaned over the boat’s deck and pulled something up from the water. I recognized the red writing printed along the boat’s starboard side:
The Retired Lobster.
It was Churchill Wingnut.
“CHURCHILL!” I yelled. Phoenix looked confused. “He helped me when the Wet Pocket broke,” I explained. “He was the one with the hook and the blood and the shark and… yeah.”
Phoenix nodded, as if it were the most reasonable thing he’d ever heard.
“OWW!” Bertha cried out in pain. A thin yellow dart was protruding from her stomach. “What the—?” She looked around, startled. “How the hell did I get in the middle of the ocean?” She threw both arms back, then cried out in pain when she moved the injured one.
“Dummy Darts,” said Phoenix.
Waves crashed on either side of us as the
Retired Lobster
finally reached us and slowed to a stop. Just in time—the Feds were only twenty feet from the surface now. They began to cut their parachute cords and drop into the ocean like swollen raindrops. One Fed cut his chute directly over the boat and landed on its deck with a splat. Churchill quickly chucked the man’s limp body overboard.
Dove stood on the deck’s other end. He raced to my side and pulled from me the water. My legs shook when they hit solid ground, unfamiliar with the feeling after having treaded water for so long.
Dove and I then helped Bertha into the boat, and she shook her head as she yanked the Dart from her chest. “Some serious shit going on around here,” she muttered, still looking confused.
Together, Dove, Bertha, and I pulled Phoenix from the water. Churchill continued to toss overboard any Feds who suffered the horrible misfortune of slicing their chutes directly over his ship. As if having your body crushed against the ship’s hard wooden deck wasn’t enough.
One soldier managed to grab the railing as Churchill pushed him overboard. Churchill promptly brought “Old Jimmy” down on his hand. The man cried out in agony as the hook’s sharp edge pierced his skin. Blood swelled and rolled down his arm before he fell into the ocean’s basin of churning salt water.
Churchill held his rusty hook high in the air and roared. “OLD JIMMY!”
Bertha’s eyes widened. “And I thought
I
was intense.”
A massive fin broke the water. Federal soldiers screamed as the incoming megalodon tore them apart with ease.
Phoenix grabbed Churchill’s arm and shook him. “You got blood in the water!” he said. “You should’ve known better. You should’ve known the nets would be turned off.”
He turned to Dove. “You know how to drive a boat, right?”
Dove nodded.
“Think you can manage this one?”
Dove ran to the ship’s helm while Churchill stood silent.
The soldiers in the water screamed as the megalodon shredded them into bits like paper. The water grew redder by the second. Soon the whole ocean looked like it was ablaze.
But more blood meant more megalodons. And sure enough, in the distance, several fins broke the surface. As the megalodons swarmed, the remaining soldiers clawed at the ship’s side, crying for help.
I felt sick to my stomach. This wasn’t right. The men in the water weren’t villains—they were just men doing their jobs. They weren’t the Lost Boys. They weren’t terrorists. They weren’t real villains. They weren’t real trouble.
I watched Phoenix stare at the bloody water with a blank expression. And it was at that moment that I realized: I was one of them. A Lost Boy. One of the people responsible for the deaths of all these men.
A particularly desperate moan erupted from the water. I ran to the ship’s side, and threw my hand to a man not much older than myself. His bright blue eyes burned into my soul—a lovely blue, the color of water when the sun breaks on it just right. The same color as Charlie’s eyes. Not one of the typical shades of Indigo blue, but something brighter: Charlie blue, I’d always called it. His fingers were inches from mine. I stretched my arm a little farther, knowing his hand would soon fall into mine.
There was a kick and a splash. Salt water stung my eyes. His fingers slipped past mine and he fell back into the water.
Bright green eyes replaced his—Mila. She’d tossed the man back into the water, and now she put her hand into mine.
Before I could pull her on board, the ship’s engine revved, and I squeezed her hand in my own. The boat shot forward, pushing past screaming corpses. My body lurched against its railing as Mila’s was dragged through the water, my grip the only thing keeping her from becoming a megalodon snack. A massive fin shot up beside the boat. Following Mila—food.
Phoenix sprinted to my side, and grabbed Mila’s other hand. Water poured onto the deck as the megalodon launched its face from the water, its teeth glistening in the scattered sunlight. Mila’s bright green eyes were filled to the brim with frozen fear.
The megalodon gnashed its teeth, its jaws heading straight for Mila’s legs, still dangling limp in the water like worms.
The megalodon’s teeth dripped blood, and a pair of black and green pants were lodged between two of its teeth—undoubtedly all that was left of a Federal soldier it had consumed only seconds before. I silently gave thanks that it was only a pair of pants. It could’ve just as easily been a bloody arm or leg.
Despite having jaws large enough to swallow their victims whole, researchers had found that megalodons were particularly fond of tearing their prey to shreds. The scent of torn flesh seemed to satisfy their insatiable blood lust, however briefly.
The
Retired Lobster
groaned as it raced forward, its rusted engine no match for the megalodon who easily kept pace. Having already left the soldiers to its mates, it wasn’t about to give up on us, its last chance at a meal. Its wide jaws were easily large enough to tear apart not only Mila, but the tiny boat itself. My heart beat hard in my chest, and my knees felt weak—if it killed Mila, the blood frenzy would sure lead it to kill and eat us, too.