Salt Storm: The Salted Series: Episodes #31-35 by Galvin, Aaron (read 50 shades of grey .TXT) 📕

dead sea-grass, revealing still more darkness within. Kellen hesitated upon the threshold.

The hiss of the Selkie dead broke their unified voice then, all shrieking at him before they raced to cross the distance between them.

Closing his eyes, Kellen barreled over the threshold with Roland and Tieran’s combined laughter to follow him on into the darkness.

When their voices turned mute, however, Kellen dared to reopen his eyes, expecting blindness for the surrounding dark he had witnessed beyond.

Instead, he found himself in yet another familiar setting from his life before.

A blue, swim locker with slatted gaps in the metal framing stood before him. Inside it, Kellen recognized a magnet featuring his high school logo and swim mascot – a Tiger Shark bearing the blue and crimson colors of Tiber High School. His backpack, swim goggles, and Speedo hung from the hooks too. Kellen’s brow furrowed as he backed away from the swim locker that he had been assigned in his Freshman year.

He nearly tripped over the wood bench behind him.

Catching his balance before falling, Kellen’s pulse quickened in wonderment of the continued dream. What is this? Why haven’t I woke up yet, like all the times before? He swallowed the lump in his throat, his gaze searching when he heard the echoed heavy slamming of the main doorway into the Tiber High boy’s locker room and the fast-moving footsteps to follow. Trapped inside the swim team’s personal area with only a single doorway in or out, Kellen immediately looked for and failed to find anything of note that he might use as a weapon.

Clenching his fists, Kellen put his back to the rear cinderblock wall, then stood as tall as he was able, awaiting whoever chose to come against him.

“Hey, Freshman! Where you at?”

The tenseness in him relaxed for a moment, but only just. Kellen swore that he recognized yet another voice from his past, but was unable to put a face to the memory.

“Winstel! You in here?”

The answer came to Kellen before his old teammate revealed himself. Campbell? Kellen wondered, the assessment proving true when the once senior captain of the swim team appeared just outside the doorway.

No. Kellen thought, the Campbell he remembered from his freshman year no longer the pimple-faced and gleeful bruiser, nor even wearing his swimsuit attire. The Campbell blocking the doorway now was as Kellen had last seen him at the Tiber County Jail before Lenny Dolan’s Selkie slave catcher crew had overtaken it and took Kellen away with them too.

Campbell wore his police officer uniform, the front of it caked with dried blood from the pool that Kellen had last seen his old teammate lying in. Then, as now, Campbell’s throat had been ripped apart by the savage teeth of Henry Boucher in his Leopard Seal form.

He was also not alone.

Where Kellen remembered the true-life high school memory differently – he choosing to confront Campbell and his other teammates to perform the swim team hazing they called ‘twelving’ – now, Kellen found himself on the opposite end of a different memory that he had witnessed involving another freshman. The time he had been changing out of his speedo and the seniors had come to trap and haze another of their youngest teammates instead.

Where Kellen could recall each of the senior’s faces in his mind, there were none of them standing with Campbell now. In their place, Kellen saw others even more familiar and friendlier to him in his life before when he had lived ashore.

There was his closest friend from childhood, Eddie Bennett, his neck broken and at an awkward angle. Bennett too looked on Kellen with the same accusing, milky eyes as all the other ghosts that hounded Kellen in his continued nightmare.

Bryce Tardiff stood with them also, his face bloated and blue from drowning when he and Kellen were taken down the Gasping Hole and into the Salted world by Tieran and his Selkie cronies. Kellen’s eyes stung at the sight of Tardiff’s clothes, skin, and hair all still sopping wet, just as he remembered them being when he held his drowned friend in the depths of Crayfish Cavern.

His father’s friend, Sheriff Hullinger, stood among the reanimated too, as did Kellen’s former cellmate and the town drunk, Boone Merchant, also.

All looked on Kellen with the same glee that he had witnessed from Tieran also.

Campbell stepped into the locker room. “You remember what comes next, Winstel?”

Kellen did, clenching his fists again. “I remember.”

Campbell nodded. “Well, what’ll it be this time? Will you go willingly again . . . or no?”

I went willing once, Kellen thought back on his life, the memory of confronting the seniors among his proudest of moments for the fear he saw that his choice instilled in them; that of one to challenge their authority and brave the hazing none before Kellen Winstel had willingly accepted. For all his memory of the confused and fearful look in the eyes of his teammates before, Kellen understood he would find nothing of confusion or fear in the ghostly faces of the reanimated dead that stood before him now. No mercy or pity either.

I’m a captain . . . Kellen told himself, even as he trembled. An alpha. He took his stance when Campbell’s phantom grin widened. And I’m not going down without a fight.

The dead came for him then, and Kellen rushing to meet them rather run from them in fear any longer. For every blow he landed, the dead felt nothing of his attack, nor tired from their combined efforts as Kellen suffered under theirs. Kellen fought and screamed and kicked as they bore him to the ground, their frozen fingers scratching and clawing at his skin for added purchase, all whilst he continued to fight.

Wake up, Winstel! Kellen shouted at himself when the dead subdued him in full, then lifted him from the floor and moved to bear him out of the locker room.

Still, Kellen fought on, bucking and writhing like a worm upon a hook as they carried through the