Текст книги "Animorphs - 15 - The Escape"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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Let's just get out of here before they change their minds again."

"Amen," Tobias said.

But like an idiot I said, "We should go below. See what called them off." I guess I was starting to realize how it must have looked when I bolted before the others.

"l agree with Marco," Rachel said.

Naturally, Rachel agreeing with me convinced me I was obviously wrong.

But it was too late. We all sucked in a deep lungful of air and went down.

"Yahh! Look out!"

Not twenty feet below us was a submarine. But not a submarine any human ever built. It wasn't all that big, I guess, although it seemed like it when it was right below us. It was shaped like a stingray. It had downcurved water wings on either side. And at the back was a cluster of what looked like three engines, each a twenty-foot-long fattened cylinder, like a comical cigar.

But what was insane about the sub was that about three-quarters of it was perfectly clear. Except for the engines, and occasional tools, implements, and furniture inside, it was a glass submarine.

We could see directly into the sub. I saw three decks, all transparent.

It looked like the crew, a mix of human, Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, and Gedd, were all just calmly walking and sitting and standing in the water itself. Plus moving by at a good twenty miles an hour.

At the front of the sub was what had to be the command bridge. There were Hork-Bajir and Taxxons working at red-and-yellow computer terminals. And in the center of the room was a chair. It reminded me of Captain Kirk's chair on the original Star Trek.

Standing beside the chair was a bizarre creature. It had pebbly yellowish skin that seemed slimy, like it was coated with Vaseline. It sat like a frog on big hind legs with webbed feet. But instead of a frog's tiny front legs, this creature had four tentacles spaced evenly around its body.

It had a big head that just sat on its shoulders with no neck. The face was curved outward, with a hugely wide mouth that seemed frozen in a sort of idiot grin. There were two eyes, both brilliant green and large.

As the sub passed beneath us, this creature

seemed to shake, like he was having just a slight tremor. I saw him turn around to face us as we receded behind the sub. He gazed at us with his blazing green eyes.

The person sitting in the captain's chair must have said something.

Because the frog thing sort of looked troubled, then shrugged in a very humanlike gesture.

The person in the chair stood up. She stretched. She turned around and looked up. Right at us. Right at me.

And I swear I had to stop myself from saying, "Hi, Mom."

"Visser One!" Rachel said harshly. "So the main creep is here on Earth." The sub blew past without making a sound. The sharks fell in behind it.

And the sub, its occupants, and the sharks all disappeared into the hologram of a nice, normal seabed.

I had homework to do when I got home. Tons of it. I was supposed to do a book report, among other things, and I had to have it in by Monday. Five pages. And my English teacher doesn't respond well to five pages of babble and baloney.

I said hi to my dad. He asked what I wanted to eat for dinner. I said, "Anything but fish."

"Pizza?"

"No anchovies. That's all I'm saying."

I went upstairs and found the book I was supposed to read. It was under a dirty sweatshirt I'd thrown on my desk. I looked at the cover. Lord of the Rings. It was three books long and each of the three books was as long as three books. I only

had to report on the first book, but even that was impossible.

"What was I thinking, choosing a book this long?" I moaned.

Of course, I knew the answer. I was supposed to have started reading it like a month ago. I flopped down on my bed and placed my headphones over my ears. Then I pulled a pillow over my head. I fumbled blindly for my remote control and hit play.

Reggae. Some good old classic reggae. Bob Marley. I'd bought the CD at a point when I was considering growing dreadlocks. Never mind why. Okay, it had to do with this girl at school.

"Bob Marley, mon," I said. "Help me out, mon."

Bob didn't help. Bob was singing "No Woman, No Cry." And that translated way too easily in my head into "No Mother, No Cry."

"Great," I muttered. "Let's just wallow in self-pity."

I was not feeling good. No one had called me a coward. Maybe no one had even noticed the way I'd bolted. But I had.

I could come up with great excuses for being so scared. I was the only one who'd ever been chewed almost in half by a shark. And that was a pretty good reason to feel afraid.

But nothing changed the fact that I had run away.

And that feeling was crowded in my head with a whole ton of emotions about seeing my mother.

It was a terrible thing when my mom died. Or at least seemed to die. But as awful as death is, at least there's an end involved. You know what has happened. It makes sense. An awful kind of sense, but sense.

You meet other people who have lost mothers or fathers. You turn on TV and see stories about people who have lost parents or brothers or sisters. You read it in books. In newspapers. The counselors at school have a category for you, and they tell you things that are supposed to help.

You hate it, but you belong to a group of people like yourself.

But what group is there for people whose mother isn't dead but is a slave to an alien presence in her head? What group do I belong to when I realize that what looks like my mother is actually someone who would kill me without hesitation?

I guess it's what Jake feels every time he sits down to dinner with Tom.

I guess he feels the same way I do. Only Jake and 1 don't talk about that kind of stuff. Jake's my best friend. But he's my best friend because I'm me, you know? Because I'm funny and smart and I'd back him up anytime, any place.

I mean, what am I supposed to do? I'm me, Marco, not some touchy-feely, share-your-feelings-with-the-group kind of person. I don't share feelings, I make people laugh.

I have a picture of my mom next to my bed. I look at it every night before I go to bed. I can never decide what I want to see when I look at it. I don't know if I see the mother I lost, or the mother I want to rescue somehow. I don't know anymore.

I construct little fantasies in my head. Of how I'll get her away from the Yeerks. And I'll keep her locked up for three days until the Yeerk in her head dies from lack of Kandrona rays. And she'll be my mom again.

"And then what, Marco?" I ask myself. The Yeerks won't take it lying down. You can't just starve Visser One to death and take her host body and live happily ever after. We'd be hunted. We'd be hunted for as long as there was a Yeerk left alive on planet Earth.

And if the Yeerks ever did catch up with my mom and dad and me, they'd know I was an Animorph. And then they'd figure it all out and the others would be done for. Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Tobias, Ax ...

"I am way too young to have to deal with this kind of stuff," I yelled into my pillow. And then I pulled the pillow away from my face.

My dad was standing there, framed in the doorway of my room. He mouthed the words "I knocked." And he did a little pantomime of having knocked.

I yanked the headphones off. "Oh, hi. Urn, hi."

"Sorry. I just came to see if you wanted to watch the game with me."

"Oh, yeah. The game," I said. "Urn, I guess not. I have homework and stuff."

"Oh. Okay." He started to leave. Then he turned back and said, "You know, Marco, you can always talk to me."

"Oh. Sure, Dad."

"I mean, if there's anything going on that's bothering you."

It was a nice offer. My dad's a nice man. I'd like to grow up to be as good a man as my father. But you know what? Right then, dark suspicion was seeping into my mind. Why was he interested? What did he suspect?

Was my father one of them, too?

"Nothing's bothering me, Dad. I was just . . . urn, you know, singing along with the music. It was a song lyric."

"Ah. Okay. Well, I'll call up to you when the pizza gets here."

He left, shutting the door behind him.

"Nice world you live in, Marco," I said softly. I could trust my father and maybe end up dead. I could try to help my mother and maybe end up dead. And as a bonus I could get all my friends killed and doom the entire human race.

I looked at the book I was supposed to read. "That ain't happening. Not tonight."

And I thought about my father, sitting down in the living room and turning on the game. Who knew if he was my father any more than my mother was really my mother?

I couldn't really trust him. I couldn't go downstairs and spill all my problems out for him.

But you know what? I could sure go sit with the man and watch the game.

I could do that.

Those were not normal sharks," Cassie pointed out. "Somehow they were being directed. Controlled. They worked like a pack. Sharks don't cooperate."

We had met up in the woods beyond Cassie's farm.

"Are they Controllers? I mean, we discovered horses being made into Controllers," Rachel pointed out.

"No," Ax said. "Cassie has shown me pictures of the internal structure of a shark. There is no room in that brain for a Yeerk. The structures would never support a Yeerk."

"Could be implants," I suggested. "You know, electrodes or something."

Everyone just kind of shrugged at that. Who knew? All we knew was that we'd almost been slaughtered by a bunch of very unusual sharks.

"They were guarding that facility, that's clear," Tobias said.

"All the more reason for us to go in," I said.

Jake kind of raised his eyebrow at me. Rachel nodded agreement. I knew what Jake was thinking. He was thinking I had my own reasons. Reasons only he and I knew about.

I shook my head slightly, telling him no. No, I was not going to tell the others. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

He shrugged and let it go. But I could see he wasn't happy about it.

"I agree we have to go back there," Jake said. "These Leerans Erek talked about. We cannot have some psychic Controllers running around."

"You think that frog-looking thing on the sub was a Leeran?" Cassie asked Ax.

"Yes. Probably." He sounded uncomfortable. "l haven't exactly memorized the Encyclopedia of Galactic Life-forms."

"Where do you get that encyclopedia?" I asked. "Do they have it at the local library?"

"The question is, what do we do to get a look inside that complex?" Tobias asked.

"You aren't going to like the answer," I muttered.

That got a laugh from everyone.

"We have to think about going hammerhead," Cassie said. "Those guard sharks went after dolphins and Ax's tiger shark. My guess is they go after anything that isn't a hammerhead. And we don't have any hammerheads at The Gardens. However, they do have them at Ocean World.

They have a big shark tank. I called over there and found out they do have a big hammerhead. Fourteen feet long."

"Urn, excuse me," I said, "but has anyone considered the fact that we all have to be in our own bodies when we acquire one of these sharks?"

I regretted saying it the minute it came out of my mouth. It was like one minute I was all gung ho, and the next minute I was the one wea-seling. And after my performance the day before I couldn't afford to be sounding like a weasel.

So I said, "But hey, who's worked up by some little old sharks?"

"You are," Rachel said bluntly.

I felt like she'd kicked me. I mean, maybe she didn't even mean anything by it. But I found myself totally unable to think of a comeback. My cheeks burned. I turned away and pretended to care deeply about some bugs crawling up the trunk of a tree.

"We'd have to go at night," Cassie said.

"Tonight, I guess. And, of course, we have school tomorrow."

"Forget school," I said gruffly. "There's an assembly last period, anyway. We can bail out early and no one will care. Plenty of time to fly out to the island."

Jake nodded. "Okay. Ocean World tonight. The island tomorrow after school. We'll need some good excuses ready for parents in case we run late. I can't get grounded again."

And that was it. Until after sundown that night. I'd told my dad I was going to Jake's house to do homework. I said I might be home a little late. My dad had said to call him if I needed a ride.

We flew to Ocean World and landed in the dark, abandoned park. We demorphed, all of us back to human except Tobias and Ax.

It's funny, because I felt fine being in the dark, abandoned park in my seagull morph. But as a human I felt totally out of place. I felt like I'd get in trouble.

Ocean World is a very new facility. Basically, it's several big fish tanks. Big, as in apartment building size. There is a Plexiglas tunnel you walk through on a slow conveyor belt. The tunnel literally goes through the water. The fish are all around you and even above you.

But we weren't there to be tourists. We

couldn't just look at the hammerheads. We had to touch them.

"I wish I knew how we were going to do this," Cassie whispered as she led the way to the shark tank. "Sharks are not dolphins. I mean, these sharks are all well-fed, but they aren't exactly pets."

"Shark-petting. Add that to dolphin rodeo and we have a whole new ESPN show," I said. No one laughed. Jake smirked. But it wasn't a happy kind of smirk.

Personally, I felt like my insides were morph-ing all on their own. Like my stomach was mor-phing to some burning liquid.

"I have an idea," Rachel said. "The shark doesn't have to be conscious for us to acquire it, right? So we morph to dolphin. We go into the tank. Six of us against one hammerhead." She shrugged, like we could figure out the rest.

Cassie was shocked. "Just go beat some poor shark half to death? When it's not attacking us?"

Rachel held out her hands, being reasonable. "It's a shark, Cassie. A shark. People eat sharks."

"And vice versa," I added.

"Beats just jumping in the pool with it," Jake said. "I mean, in human form how would we even catch a shark?" He looked at Ax. "Or in Andalite form."

Cassie started to say something. But instead she just clenched her jaw tightly, the way she does when she disapproves of something.

"Sharks can all die as far as I'm concerned," I said. I laughed like I'd made a joke. But it wasn't a joke.

"They are just predators being predators," Tobias said. "They aren't evil. Just hungry."

"So you're on Cassie's side?" I asked him.

"No. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. That's the predator's law. I know. I am a predator. I say we do what we have to do." Tobias has toughened up a bit since being trapped in hawk morph.

"Fine," Cassie said tersely. "Let's just get it over with."

We walked toward the fish tanks. They were three wide ovals. Like swimming pools almost. They were built up to make room for the Plexiglas passageways beneath.

There was no sound but our footsteps on concrete. And the sound of Ax's hooves. Nothing to see but deep shadows, made all the darker by the occasional pools of dim light. Nothing to feel but fear.

We were on the pathway to the tanks. Carefully tended bushes lined the walkway. Tobias fluttered along, then dove suddenly.

"Someone's coming!" he said.

We leaped over the bushes. I landed hard on my elbows and rolled under the camouflage of tiny leaves and stiff branches.

Ax leaped, too. But the bushes were only about two feet high. And Ax cannot roll.

A flashlight beam!

"Freeze! Don't move! What the . . ."

I heard the sound of a gun being cocked.

I peered through the bushes and saw a white circle of flashlight beam land squarely on Ax's upper body.

"What on Earth are you? Hey! Hey, Captain! Hey, over here!"

"Prince Jake, what should I do?" Ax asked.

More footsteps. Coming quickly.

"Captain! Look at this! Jeez, will you look at this?"

The first guard kept his beam on Ax. But the beam was shaking, wavering.

Not surprising. Ax is not what you'd expect to find on a dark night at a tourist destination aquarium.

The captain aimed a second beam. And I heard a second gun being drawn and cocked.

"What's that?" the captain asked calmly. "Why, that's an Andalite, son.

That is certainly an Andalite."

T what?"

"One move, Andalite, and I shoot you. These human weapons may be primitive, but you'd be surprised how effective a lead slug can be."

"Captain, you gotta tell me what's going on here," the first guard said plaintively.

Suddenly . . . WHAP! The captain swung his gun and hit the guard in the side of the head. The guard fell unconscious.

"A tiresome little man," the captain said. "But we'll have one of our people in his brain before he wakes up. Not that it will matter to me. I am off this tiresome detail! For capturing one of the Andalite bandits, I'll be Visser Three's new aide."

"Be careful what you wish for, Yeerk," Ax sneered. "l've seen the fools who work closely with Visser Three. I've seen their heads go rolling across the ground when the visser gets mad."

"What do we do?" I asked Jake in a voiceless whisper. His face was just two inches from mine.

"Ax needs a distraction."

It wasn't an order. Or even a suggestion for me to do something. But figured I was better at talking than any of the others. So I stood up on rattling knees.

"Hi. Is this the way to the souvenir stand?" I said cheerfully.

And at the same moment, something fell fast from the sky.

"Tseeeeer!" Tobias screamed. He raked the captain's face with his talons.

"Aarrgghhh!" the guard yelled as he clutched his torn face.

I leaped forward and grabbed the gun. Or tried to.

BOOOM!

The gun erupted. It seemed to explode in my hand. My hand went numb. I lost my grip.

BOOOM!

He picked it up and fired blindly into the dark. Inches from hitting me.

You know how guns sound on TV? Kind of like

TEWW! TEWW!? Well, in real life, guns don't make cute little popping sounds. They sound like bombs going off.

Ax was still too far off to use his tail. And the Controller was in a panic now. He was firing wildly.

BOOOM!BOOOM!BOOOM!

"Run!" Jake yelled.

So we ran. But the gunfire had attracted other guards. Controllers or just normal human guards, it almost didn't matter. They all had guns.

We hauled, racing through the darkness, feeling betrayed by the noise our own feet made on the concrete walkways.

"This way!" Cassie whispered.

She led us to a door. She yanked on it but it was locked. And we were trapped. There was no turning back.

"Ax," Jake said.

"Yes, Prince Jake." Ax whipped his tail, faster than the human eye could see.

CHWANG! A neat slice appeared in the steel door, right at the lock mechanism. Cassie tried it again. It opened, and we piled inside. Into a Plexiglas tunnel surrounded by water.

"I always wanted to come see this place," I said. "And look – no crowds."

It was eerie and dark. But not totally dark.

There were red exit lights glowing. And moonlight came filtering down through the water in the tanks.

In some ways, that made it a hundred times worse. Without any light, we'd just have been in a dark hallway. But with the light, we could see exactly where we were.

We were in a plastic tunnel beneath millions of gallons of water.

Literally, there had to be millions of gallons. Fifty or a hundred swimming pools' worth of water.

And as we trotted down the tunnel, I could see ghostly pale gray shapes gliding by us on both sides and over our heads. Staring fish eyes appeared out of the gloom. Fish mouths gaped silently at us. And long, sleek, cutting shapes seemed to shadow our movements.

"Now, this is an interesting human concept," Ax said approvingly. "This hologram makes it almost appear that we are under the water."

"Ax? It's not a hologram," Rachel said.

"Then ... we are underwater? Protected only by badly made human plastic?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you humans do things like this?"

"Freeze, Andalite!"

It was a new guard. A Controller, too, obviously. He was standing twenty yards up the tunnel. He was in a firing stance, gun leveled at us.

We turned to run back the way we'd come. But the captain came panting around the corner in hot pursuit.

"Trapped!" Cassie said.

"You got 'im, Captain?" the guard called out nervously.

"Yeah!"

"There are some kids with him!"

"Forget the kids. We get kids breaking in here all the time. They're irrelevant. It's the Andalite we want."

"lf I go with them peacefully, they may let you all go," Ax said.

"Forget it," Rachel snapped. "We'll get out of this."

Brave words. But the guards had us trapped. And two very large guns were aimed straight at Ax.

"Jake," I whispered. "This is bad. We need something drastic."

"I'm open to suggestions," he muttered.

"Okay. I suggest you take a deep breath."

"Oh, no. Oh, man."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Everyone take a deep breath. Ax-man? Just how badly made is human plastic?"

It took Ax just a second to figure out what I was talking about.

In a flash, he swung his tail. He swung it in a

big arc. The blade sank into the Plexiglas. And it kept on cutting.

It cut a three-foot gash in the plastic, and that was all it took. The water pressure did the rest.

Crrrr-ACCCKK!

FWOOOOOOSSHH!

The water poured in like Niagara Falls.

"TWOOOOOSH!

A wave hit me and knocked my legs out from under me. The water picked me up and rocketed me down that Plexiglas tunnel. I went one way, everyone else was blown the other direction.

I saw the captain just ahead of me. I hit him with my feet, doing about fifty miles an hour. He went down and the water rushed over him.

"Jake! Rachel!" I yelled. But no one answered.

Then I couldn't yell anything anymore. The water swept over me, filling the tunnel completely. I fought my way to the top of the tunnel and tried to suck up a big, squirmy, silver air bubble I saw. I got a mouthful of saltwater instead.

Morph, you idiot! I told myself. I needed to go dolphin. No! Not dolphin. Dolphin needed to be able to reach the surface to breathe. I needed a fish. Long ago we had morphed trout. Could I still retrieve that morph?

All this time I was still shooting along, carried by the rushing water.

And then I realized I wasn't alone. There were fish with me. Big fish, little fish. All swimming around me.

Air! I needed air!

Bump! Something hit me. It brushed by me, spinning me around in the water. A body? One of the others? I spun around in the water. And, seeing me move, the shark came back toward me.

I yelped in fear and gave up bubbles of precious air from my lungs. I shot my arms out and kicked my legs hard and backpedaled through the water.

Morph a fish? The shark could eat either one of us!

I began swimming. I had to get back to the break in the tunnel. The hole Ax had made. If I could get through that, I could reach the surface.

Air! Air! My lungs were on fire! I could feel my throat spazzing as my lungs fought to fill themselves.

I swam down that tunnel with the shark following lazily behind.

Is it possible to sweat underwater? I felt like it was. My guts were jelly. My limbs were weak with fear, cramping up from lack of oxygen.

No time to morph. Only time to flee.

There! Was that the hole? Yes! It was a hole. A hole in the tunnel. No, wait. This hole was too round. Too perfectly round.

No time to worry. I kicked hard and started up through the vertical hole. Suddenly my head broke the surface. Air! I sucked it down and spewed it out and sucked it down again, making gasping, sobbing sounds.

Where was I? I was in a sort of vertical tunnel. It was no more than three feet wide. It extended above me for another five or six feet. And at the top there was a metal grill.

"The air-conditioning," I gasped. My voice rang flat and hollow. I was in an air-conditioning vent. This was how they ventilated the tunnel.

But I couldn't reach the grill overhead. And I was still treading water.

The shark! I stuck my face back in the water and opened my eyes to look.

I swear I nearly levitated. The shark was rising toward me like some kind of submarine-launched missile. I didn't think, I just reacted. I slammed my feet against one side of the shaft, my hands against the other, and I pressure-walked my way up and out of the water.

My butt was still in the water when I saw that hideous face poke up to take a look at me. That hideous, hammerhead face, with its dead eyes at the end of each side.

That got me up another foot. But the plastic was slippery. And I was too weak to keep it up for long.

"Go kill something else, you monster!" I yelled at the shark.

The head disappeared beneath the water. But I knew in my heart it was still there. Still waiting.

"Ahhh! Ahhh!" My left hand slipped and almost lost it. There was no way this could last. I'd fall. Sooner, not later.

Only one thing to do. I had to acquire that shark.

Animals go limp when you acquire them, I told myself. Except when they don't. Like Tobias's dolphin.

This was insane! I couldn't hold on. And if I dropped, my only hope was in actually grabbing hold of a hammerhead shark.

The shark poked his snout above the water again. It was now or never.

"If it turns out you eat me," I told the shark, "make it quick."

I released my pressure. And I dropped. Directly onto the shark.

It turns out, as tough as sharks are, they still aren't used to having screaming, flailing, panic-stricken human beings dropped on them from the sky.

Pah-LOOOSH!

I hit the shark and knocked him downward through the water. The two of us sank together, back into the main tunnel.

Before the shark could recover its wits, I shot out my hand and I grabbed him by the dorsal fin, and I thought, Please, please, I'm begging you, be like a normal animal and go limp!

I focused my mind. And to my infinite, profound, world-embracing relief, the hammerhead became peaceful and sluggish.

I wrapped my arms around the big monster, happy I'd worn long sleeves, and we floated up through the gash Ax had made. Up toward air and the stars and freedom.

He was still in an acquisition trance by the time my head broke the surface. We were in one of the tanks. The walls around were higher than they should have been, since the water had drained out to flood the tunnels. But up around the lip of the tank I saw anxious faces staring down.

"Hey. What are you guys up to?" I asked.

"Marco! You're alive!" Cassie said.

"Yeah. And I brought someone for each of you to meet. Dive on in. It's hammerhead time."

the next day there was a huge headline in the newspaper. A terrible accident at the Ocean World Aquarium. Two guards were missing. Also several fish.

The one guard who did remain told a bizarre tale of a half-deer, half-human creature. The aquarium spokesman sort of implied that the guards must have gotten drunk and shot up the place, causing the tunnel to shatter.

It was on the TV news and everything. CNN even sent a camera crew.

On Monday I handed in five pages of pure, total babble as a book report.

I wrote it on the bus. On Thursday I got it back. D-minus. The teacher wrote, "Nice try, Marco. Do it over, and this time try reading the book."

What can I say? Some teachers buy it. Some don't.

We had decided we couldn't go back to the Royal Island facility until the weekend. Sneaking out at night was risky. If one of us got caught and grounded, we'd be out of business for a while.

I had stopped worrying what the others thought about my running from the sharks. I felt like my actions at the aquarium balanced that out. And I kind of felt like I'd gotten past my fear of sharks. More or less. I mean it's never a good idea to get casual about sharks.

Instead of obsessing over being scared of sharks, I found I was obsessing about the shark DNA inside me. I wanted to morph that shark. I wanted to be it. I wanted to know what it felt like to be so relentless, so unafraid. So totally without emotion.

Twice I dreamed about it. Both times in the dream I was a shark, only I still had my own face. And both times someone was doing something terrible. I can't remember what, I just remember thinking, Oh, man, that's awful. But in my dream I was a shark, and so whatever the terrible thing was, I was safe.

I wish I could remember what the terrible

thing was. I think maybe it was someone being killed. A woman's voice kept saying, "Help me, help me." I remember that much. But it was confusing because sometimes the voice would start yelling, "Help him, help him."

After school Thursday, I hung around for a while. I went to the gym. I went to the pool. To my surprise, it was empty. The swim team was somewhere else, I guess. Maybe off shaving their legs and heads. I don't know.

The pool is indoors. It smells of chlorine and mildew. It's one of those places that makes you think about athlete's foot, you know? It's white tile around the sides and dark blue on the bottom. There's a high board and a springboard. There are windows high up on one wall of the room, but mostly the light is fluorescent. There are lights like car high beams in the water itself. But still, it all manages to be gloomy, no matter how many lights are on.

I knew what I was going to do. And I knew it was stupid. But I knew if I didn't do it here, I'd do it in some even stupider place. Like my bathtub at home.

I went to my gym locker and changed into my gym shorts. Then I went back and checked the pool once more. No one. No one in the bleachers. No one in the water. Not a ripple.

I jumped in, feet first, around the eight-foot marker. I bobbed back up to the surface and said, "This is insane, Marco."

To which I answered, "So I'll be careful."

To which I countered, "You're talking to yourself, do you know that?"

"Oh, shut up," I said.

I began to do what I had been wanting to do since Sunday. I began to focus my mind on the shark. I saw it in my memory. Saw it chasing me down that plastic tunnel.

I pictured the moment when I touched the shark's sandpaper skin and brought it under the acquiring spell. And then, slowly, I felt the changes begin.

It started with the squishy sound of my own bones dissolving. See, sharks don't have bones. Just cartilage.

I could hear my bones. The bones in my arms. The bones in my legs. My hip bones, and even my spine, were all starting to dissolve.

I could see down through the water, down to my feet. They shimmered against the deep blue background. They began to elongate. The toes stretched out and out, till each toe was a foot long. My calves followed them, stretching like Gumby. It was a total shock when I realized I was touching the bottom of the pool.