Catch up!

Once he’d caught his breath, Adam felt ready to get to the floater, what he guessed was a sunken ship. He surprised himself by not being panicked (for once) that he was alone. It helped him to know where he needed to go and that friends would be waiting there for him. He stretched his legs inside his suit and headed out in the direction he’d seen Ramata and Spot swim toward.

Adam took his time, swimming at a decent speed and taking care to not wear himself out again. Ramata had been worried about swimming through the ruins, but for what? Adam hadn’t seen anything besides them swimming around here, much less anything else to worry about. Ramata’s just paranoid from a life lived in that prison of a city. Always thinking that someone’s out to get them. Adam reached out to touch a nearby steel beam. He looked up the beam and tried to see it as the large building it used to be. Remembering city stuff made him smile.

Adam ran his hand up and down the beam and cried aloud as a piece of splintered steel caught his finger and sliced a deep gash into it. By the time he pulled the wound toward his mouth a small pool of blood had spilled and slowly mixed with Ocean. Ouch. Adam sucked his finger. I’d better get going. He swam off at a brisk pace. Every now and again he’d put his hurt finger into his mouth to stop the thin trail of blood that leaked out behind him.

The first shadow passed over Adam so quickly that he barely registered it. He looked up to miss seeing what it was that cast it. He kept swimming. Two more shadows, larger this time, circled around Adam’s shadow on the ocean floor.

Adam didn’t miss this new shadows and stopped dead in the water. Three more shadows joined the circle, which was now less a circle and more like crisscrossing mayhem on the ocean floor. Adam looked up. Five large sharks swam above him, slowly making their way down in a spiral – just as Adam had when he rode the manta down to Tiskaloo.

The shark circle widened as it descended around Adam. He rotated himself along with the sharks, trying to keep his eyes on all of them at once. One of the sharks, who had a huge tooth jutting out from its bottom lip, spoke in a slithering whisper, “So swims the sad, sorry bleeder.”