Ex-Isle by Peter Clines (electronic reader TXT) 📕

Hitting it wasn’t as bad this time. He was going faster, but he was prepared, like a high-diver knifing into the water. Bubbles roared in his ears. Salt pricked at his eyes. The hull of the yacht rushed past him, and then there was the tanker a little farther off.

He spent his momentum arcing back beneath the ships, gliding into the dark. The glow sticks made a hazy ball of light around him. Barely ten feet. He could see the bottoms of the ships, but even those blurred into the nothingness.

He moved forward, crossing under the yacht, amazed at how far his momentum was taking him. Then he spun in the water, looking back at the dim shafts of light beyond the boats. He’d gone almost fifty feet down and another fifty under the island. He hadn’t taken a single stroke or kicked his legs once.

The water flowed across his clothes, and his clothes brushed his skin. But he still felt it. The tingle between his shoulder blades.

He was still flying.

He was flying underwater.

St. George managed a brief smile before moving forward.

The water shifted around him, and the whale loomed out of nowhere.

It headed straight for him, a huge black-green dome less than twenty feet away. He couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or he just happened to be in the way. It moved with the slow grace of something massive, forcing the ocean out of the way.

The rounded front of it was almost fifty feet across, and the body stretched out behind it into the darkness. There were no flippers. No eyes. The dark skin looked featureless in the weak light.

It drifted up and brushed against the bottom of one of the ships. He saw the sound quiver its way through the water and felt it on his ears. The clang was sharper here. He could hear the scrape, the grit of rust and barnacles and paint.

The not-whale passed him, and he saw twin rows of square panels the size of garage doors along its side. In the dim view the glow sticks gave him, he wasn’t sure if the squares were set into the skin or raised above it.

Another shape swelled out of the darkness, heading for him. A lump on the side of the cylinder, as wide as he was tall. Tubes and pipes jutted out from it, like massive pins skewering the lump onto the body.

St. George sailed up to pass over the deformity and saw the swaths of paint, bright green in the light of the glow sticks, and finally realized his mistake. The whole thing was tilted almost on its side. That’s why it had confused him. He needed to get back to the surface and warn the others. And tell Zzzap. And he needed air. Being prepared had extended his time, but his chest was getting tight.

He turned and saw teeth. A shark’s hungry grin. Nautilus slammed one of his boxing-glove fists into the side of St. George’s head.

He sprawled back, and a few bubbles of air spun from his mouth. One of the glow sticks spun away as his fingers shifted. He clutched the other one and surged forward.

St. George didn’t waste time with a punch. He launched himself at Nautilus and tackled the merman, driving him back through the water. Elbows landed on the hero’s shoulders. Knees slammed into his stomach. Clawed hands clapped against the sides of his head and his ears throbbed.

It was enough for Nautilus to twist loose and slip away through the water.

St. George shot after him, then reconsidered and headed for the surface.

The punch hit him in the back of the head. It was strong enough to spin him in the water a bit, but not to hurt him. He spun around, swept the hair from his eyes, and a pair of thick arms wrapped across his stomach. They jerked hard against his abdomen, squeezed, and then jerked hard. Half his remaining air formed a wobbly silver balloon and whirled away.

St. George grabbed Nautilus’s arms and focused on the spot between his shoulder blades. The ocean roared in his ears as the two of them shot up toward the surface. Nautilus tried to let go, but St. George shifted his hands and grabbed the other man’s thick wrists.

They broke through the surface and hurtled into the night sky. They went up fifty feet, a hundred, two hundred. St. George spun in the air three times and flung Nautilus away.

Toward the ships. He’d thrown him at one of the smaller ships. Dammit. St. George launched himself after the merman, but Nautilus crashed through the roof of one of the yachts before the hero had closed half the distance between them. Screams of alarm echoed up to him as he dropped feetfirst through the hole into the boat.

There was an empty bar at one end of the room, and couches lined the large windows. Small lamps gave off sputtering light and fishy smoke. A trio of people crouched, all looking back and forth between the cracked floorboards and the hole in the ceiling.

St. George looked at the trio. Two of the people had been working on the plants in the raised gardens. “Which way did he go?”

They said nothing for a moment. Then one of the women raised a hand and pointed to a doorway past the bar.

A few quick steps carried him across the room. The door led to a narrow hallway, but at the end he saw the light of an open hatch. Nautilus had run straight down the hall and up onto the front of the yacht.

One leap carried St. George to the end of the hallway. Another shot him up through the hatch without touching the tall steps. He heard a whoosh of air and ducked fast enough that something sailed past his head rather than striking him. It rushed away through the air.

Nautilus stood on the prow of the boat and growled through his