FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 34

NERO

Saturday, March 31, 2018

Tentacools.

Like it made a difference: there were so many of them, floating on the surface in a gelatinous blue mat, that they seemed to take up the same amount of space as only a few of their evolved counterparts. I was about twenty meters underwater, and yet as I stared at them all, bobbing listlessly on the slight current, I felt my mouth go dry, and my body locked up. All the while, my heart played inside my chest like a war drum, drowning out any other sound. A thought came to me:

Jude. Where is Jude?

He was out there, of course, down along the side of the ship, directly beneath the Tentacools, swamped in their great, collective shadow. Sleepy as they were, they hadn't noticed him yet, but he had certainly noticed them, and treated them to a stare of fascinated horror  –  the same kind of stare you might give a corpse, or a car crash. I prayed that he would screech in surprise and run back towards me... But he didn't. Like me, he was frozen in place, bobbing in the current, just like the Tentacools.

One of the Tentacools woke up, blinking blearily. It spotted Jude floating down near the seabed and peered down at him.

That war drum in my chest beat louder, a resounding boom, -oom, -oom that I could feel in the roots of my teeth. Don't panic. Stillness... Yes, stillness, that's what I needed. The muscles in my tail were aching to bolt for Jude and snatch him away, but that wasn't possible: these things were like sedentary balls of antennae, and they reacted to the slightest push and pull of the current. Maybe not quickly, but underneath a forest of them, it was easy to get surrounded.

For a moment, I felt like I was surrounded, that it had happened before and was already happening again. It was just a second, a mere crack in my psyche through which déjà vu flowed in hard and strong, but my resolve withered all the same: I began to shake badly, and the heat seemed to leave my body in a tide, whereas a flood of flashbacks flowed in the opposite direction, pouring through that crack somewhere between my eyes. I felt something on my flesh and jolted, but nothing was there — the tentacle had been of my own imagining, a ghost from the past. The ocean was empty.

For now.

Jude. I struggled to focus, to even take a breath — my chest was on fire, and the water seemed to go over my gills wrong. Weird lights throbbed across my vision, and behind them — within them — I continued to  see other things that weren't there. I even heard them, heard me: Go over and get caught. Under, and we might survive.

Under. They wouldn't follow, would they?

No, not under. Under led to catastrophe. Don't go under. Over. Risk getting caught. It isn't worth it. It isn't—

"Nero?"

A shaky hand came down on my shoulder, and like a fishing hook, I was yanked back to the present. Cora — she was behind me, and she sounded scared, but the very real physical contact sent all the phantoms running to the corners, and I could see again.

"What's he doin'?" Neko asked from behind. He hovered at Cora's side, and the rest of the merkids arrayed behind him. "Is he daft? Them Tentacools be dangerous!"

Cora was watching me, her dark eyes gleaming in the underwater sunlight. She knew. "Aye," she agreed. "Let's get 'im 'afore he finds 'imself in a twist." She squeezed my shoulder. "Be back in a bit."

"No, I can..." But I couldn't — the phantoms were gone, but I was still shaking too badly, and by the time I started moving, Cora was already gone, swimming calmly over to where Jude floated thunderstruck beneath the Tentacool forest. I watched her, helpless, and suddenly began to feel sick — just like last time, just like last time, some of the Tentacools awakened at her passing — my passing — with their eyes following her with a dull curiosity. Their tentacles, held in tight knots and bunches beneath them, twitched, began to unfurl.