Mermaids Don't Drown

Chapter 10

"What happened?" Kayla asked.

"Well one you guys left and I followed Pearl," Autumn says quickly. "She locked them up in one of those cage thingies, you know, the cages idiot divers go in so they can be 'up close and personal with the sharks?'" Autumn put quotation marks around her sentence. "And she locked them in there.

"She said the same thing to them, as they did to me the first time I met her. 'Your friends will be here soon enough, they care about you too much not to notice you're gone'" Autumn quotes Pearl.

"Take us there." Kayla demands. Autumn weaves her way through seaweed, until they got to a boulder in the water. They hid behind it.

Taking turns, the girls looked behind it to see Avrie and Avery in the cage Autumn described earlier.

Avery is against the back, looking bored, or like she wants coffee. While Avrie proceeds to cuss at Pearl. Pearl simply says, "Oh shut up. When your friends get here, I'll capture them and then you can be with your friends."

"Then what? What are you gonna do to us?" Avrie asks.

Pearl just smiles, and plays with some seaweed and the sand.

"We need a plan." Kayla points out the obvious, in a hushed whisper.

"What if one of us distracts her, and the others get the girls?" Autumn suggests quietly.

"She's faster then all of us combined. She'll get us." Kate shoots down.

"Fine, we'll throw a rock to distract her." Autumn says.

"She'll see where the rock is coming from, and come for us." Jenna says. A silence falls over the girls. Occasionally a, "maybe we could.." is thrown around, but the thought is never finished. They either trail off, or cut it off with a simple, "no that wouldn't work."

"So what do we do?" Kate asks.

Autumn sighs and runs her hand through her hair. "Well. We wing it." The girls look at her as if she's just asked them to swim into the cage right now. "Some people swim to Pearl and attack, some of us go to the cages to unlock them. Don't get caught. And if you do, put up a damn good fight. It'll buy us time. And if one of us are caught, then don't let the cage close when she throws you in. Jenna, you come with me to unlock the cage. Kate and Kayla, if all else fails, grab onto her hair and never let go."

The girls look around, hoping for somebody to come up with something better. "Let's go." Jenna finally says, swimming off. Autumn follows close behind, along with Kate and Kayla.

Kate and Kayla hurry over to Pearl, and latch onto her hair. Pearl screams at the girls, saying things nobody dares to repeat.

They throw punches and kicks at her, with Pearl landing a few hits on them. Never enough to get the girls to retreat though. Together they are stronger.

Autumn and Jenna hurry to the cage, and fiddle with the padlock. "Uhh Jenna. Get me a rock." Autumn says, remembering something she saw in a video. Jenna does so, and Autumn swings her arm back. She slams the rock down on the top of the padlock, and it clicks open.

Jenna opens the cage without questioning Autumn, and Avrie and Avery swims free.

Autumn is about to swim away, when she's caught by Pearl. The girls must have let go of her hair. Autumn sees the two girls bleeding, tending to each other at the sea floor.

Pearl swims up with  Autumn in her grasp, but the girls are close behind. Autumn is trying to free herself, but cannot. They follow Pearl to the surface of the ocean. She forces Autumns head above water, making her choke. Her body isn't use to the air like she was last week.

The girls try to stop Pearl, but it's no use. Autumn struggles to get free, as she tries to go back underwater. Pearl takes her underwater again, and as Autumn gasps for water, Pearl whispers in her ear, "That was the last time you ruin one of my plans." She holds Autumn back above water.

The girls pull on Pearls tail, trying to bring her down, but fail. They punch her, smack her, hurt her anyway they can, but Pearl doesn't care. She holds Autumn tightly in her grasp.

They now resort to trying to pull Autumn under. They painfully scrape Autumns tail as they pull on her. Autumns vision starts to go wonky, as the girls manage to pull her in the water again. Autumn swims as low as she can when she's out of Pearls grip, and coughs up air bubbles.

First they almost die of drowning in water, now suffocating in air. This has been a weird few weeks.

Pearl starts attacking them again, as Autumn recovers near a shipwreck. It's not the shipwreck they just sunk, this one was metal.

Avery gets an idea, and swims to the ocean floor, and grabs a small rock. When she comes back to the fight, she manages to lay a scratch on Pearl. Pearl thinks nothing of it, as blood from her tail seeps into the ocean.

Avery lands more cuts on Pearl, until she looked into the water, and saw a dark figure come swimming her way.

Quickly, yet secretly, Avery goes to all the girls and tells them what's about to happen. One by one, then go into the metal ship wreck, and lay down as flat as they can. Soon enough, it's only Avery and Pearl. Pearl haven't even noticed that the others are gone.

"Hey Pearl!" Avery says, landing one final cut of her.

"What?" She asks, wiping blood from her lip.

"Fish are friends. But you're food." She sorta quotes, swimming to the ship wreck.

Pearl looks to her left, and sees blood stained teeth, as they devour her. The girls heard screaming, but refuse to open their eyes, or even move, as their stomachs lay on the sand. They lay packed together like sardines, as they hold their breath.

Adrenaline pumps through their veins, but their body is too stiff to move.

A few minutes, (or hours) after the screaming ended, the girls start to gain the strength to sit up. They swim out of their safe house, and look around. No sign of Pearl. No sign of the shark. They simply look at each other, until Jenna breaks the silence.

"So can we go to the U.K. now?"

~Time skip, a few years.~
The girls happily walk along the beach. They had met one merman who let them change their form. If they touch water, except to drink, they will gain their tail back. But when they're dry, they have legs like normal people.

They have finally moved to the U.K., where the moving truck is unhappily waiting for their call. Their house was beautiful, and they filled it with animals. Little dogs and cats would run around, nipping on the ears of the bigger dogs. They have little gerbils, and even a few turtles they found in the middle of the road.

The girls stare out at the beautiful ocean, as the suns shines brightly. They have made their way to the dock, and the each smile at each other. They look around to see nobody watching. They climb over the railing and hold hands.

Autumn starts the countdown, "3, 2, 1!"