Feeder

by Patrick Weekes

  Tia Lake, whose shape had been running like a watercolor painting held up before it was dry, slid back into her hot-lady form. Hawk could kind of see the eels or snakes that made her, now.

  She was still smiling, however. “Nothing that matters to you.” She reached into a pocket— how did she still have pockets when she was made out of snakes?—and drew out her phone. “Karkinos,” she snapped, punching buttons on the screen. “The Nix are here. I am attending to the creature that freed them. Collect the Nix from the Deepwater Laboratory after I leave, please.”

  Then she turned on her heel and started to leave the room, the spotlight following her as she stalked away.

  Hawk wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that.

  “Hey!” he shouted, and ran after her. “We’re not done with you y—”

  He tripped in the darkness over one of the big eels on the floor, and it coiled around his foot. Others snapped around his arms, twisting and twining. He clenched his teeth just in case any of them tried to crawl into his mouth again.

  Tia Lake paused and looked back over her shoulder.

  “What do you intend to do?” she asked in a calm voice that was somehow worse than her yelling, like she had seen this show already and was just reading along with the script.

  “Fight you,” Hawk said, since he didn’t have a reason not to.

  “How?” Half her face was shadowed by the spotlight. The one eye he could see was disinterested.

  He pulled free from the eels coiling around him with brute force. It wasn’t pretty, and it left him stumbling a little, but he did it. “I don’t know.”

  “No, you don’t.” She smiled, a slow and sultry smile that made Hawk flush even as his skin crawled. “I am Tiamat. I am the Hydra. I am Jörmungandr. I have fought Anu and Heracles and Thor, and none of them could kill me, child. I grow back. I always grow back. And you are mine now.” As the eels twined around Hawk again, he tried to fight them off, but this time, they lifted him off the floor, and he found himself flailing against empty air, dangling by eels that held him like ropes twisting around all four limbs. “I will use you later. Perhaps you will be what makes the miracoral scream and summon the Leviathan. How do you feel about that?”

  “Fine,” Hawk said, and he did feel fine. It wasn’t going to happen, and worrying about it would just stress him out and cause him pain. Feeling fine was better than feeling pain.

  She smiled at that. “Interesting. Karkinos will see if you still feel that way when he gets here. But for now, I have other business.” She sniffed. “You made it down here, and that is impressive, because my form twists this part of your world apart, a little. If you try to flee, I will be there in that darkness, and I will be very unhappy with you.”

  “Leave him alone!” shouted Maya, rushing forward and then pausing as eels hissed out of the darkness toward her.

  “When I return,” Lake went on, ignoring Maya, “I will take pieces of you away until it makes the miracoral scream. I will keep taking as long as you have anything to give,” she went on, her voice rising, and now the one eye Hawk could see as she looked back over her shoulder glittered in the darkness with anger, “because all of you keep me here, trapping who I am with your eyes, and if the only way for me to escape is to erase every shred of life from this little world, I will do that. Do you understand me, child?”

  Hawk twisted in the eels. “No.”

  She shook her head. “Unsurprising.”

  She turned away again, and when she reached the doorway, the eels released Hawk. He fell to the ground, which would have hurt if he hadn’t been invulnerable, and as he shook his head and got back to his feet, he saw that all the eels in the room were slithering across the floor after Lake. They coiled around her, hundreds, thousands of them, and disappeared.

  Lake didn’t get any bigger or turn into a super-Tiamat or anything. She looked the same as she had before.

  She walked out without a backward glance, and the door shut behind her, leaving them in darkness.

  “Finally,” Iara said, scoffing in the darkness. “The snake woman talks far too much.”

  “You guys could have helped,” Hawk called back to the others. It wasn’t worth getting mad about, but it seemed like the kind of thing he should say.

  “I was there!” Maya protested.

  “Think, Pint-Size,” Tapper shot back. “We couldn’t hurt her. She said she was leaving. You’re the idiot who couldn’t let her go. The only one who did anything to her was Ipanema over here,” Tapper said. “Her scream messed with the eels.”

  “Momentarily,” Iara said. “I wish I could do more.”

  “What do we do now?” Maya asked. “We need to find out what happened to Lori.”

  “We need to get out of here, Blondie,” Tapper muttered.

  “Okay, yes, that too.”

  “Would’ve been nice to get more,” Hawk said, and shrugged. “Guess this trip was a bust.”

  “Not quite.” Iara made a little grunt, probably getting herself back on her feet with the crutches. “We know more than we knew, and we know what this Tia Lake wants.”

  “She wants everyone to forget her,” Maya said, her voice quiet in the darkness. “People remembering who she is, what she is, has her trapped. She thinks the Leviathan can take her out of people’s minds, so they all forget her, like they forgot about the water rising.”

  “And to summon the Leviathan,” Iara added, “she wants to experiment on us with the miracoral.”

  The miracoral, the only source of light in the room, was glowing with the same warm golden light it had held before. Hawk had thought his eyes were adjusting, but then he realized it was growing brighter.

  One of them was moving toward it.

  “I think,” Iara said, “as we have no other plan, we should see what happens.”

  Hawk saw her silhouette, black against the warm golden light, come between him and the miracoral.

  “Iara, wait!” He stumbled forward in the darkness. “You can’t—”

  “Joshua Bautista,” she said without looking back, “I am very tired of you telling me what I cannot do.”

  She reached into the aquarium and took the miracoral in her hands.

  LORI

  —Lori choked on salt water, splashed blindly in green emptiness frothing with white bubbles, spun with a rushing dizziness that had her fighting to find out which way was up, and then felt air on her face as she broke the surface.

  She coughed and sputtered, blinking stinging salt from her eyes, and saw the sidewalk just out of her reach. The canals, she was in the canals.

  She splashed over and grabbed hold of the side. Her hand was trembling. She coughed some more, trying to clear water that had gone up her nose.

  Everything hurt. Or more, it didn’t, but it felt like it should. Something was wrong, something inside her or about her or . . .

  She’d been down below with her friends. They’d been fighting Lake. And then . . .

  She was still hanging from the side. She pulled herself up onto the rough edge of the sidewalk, or tried to, anyway. Her arms gave out as she pulled, and she flopped into the water, swaying gently in the current.

  She’d gotten her wisdom teeth out a couple years ago. They’d knocked her out for the surgery, and then she’d been home for a few days, recovering. At first it had hurt, like the doctor had told her, and she’d had to rest a lot. (Who had taken care of Ben then? Was it her guess it was just one of those— no, don’t think about it.) After that the pain had been mostly gone, and she could forget about the whole thing most of the time. But every now and then, either by accident or curiosity, she’d twist her tongue to the back of her mouth and slide it over the strange, rough-edged holes where the teeth had once been. They didn’t hurt, but they didn’t feel like part of her. They felt like an absence.

  That was how all of Lori felt right now.

  She pulled again. This time she succeeded in getting her upper body up onto the sidewalk, thou
gh her arms trembled as though she’d been swimming for hours. She flopped onto the ground and rolled over, pulling her legs the rest of the way. The sky overhead seemed dazzlingly bright, bright enough that the sidewalk was a hot blinding white beneath her.

  “Handler.” She coughed it more than said it. Being on her back got more water down her throat. She rolled onto her side and coughed again. She had choked on the water. Could she not breathe underwater anymore? How was she going to get back to the others? “Handler.”

  She didn’t feel the buzz at her thigh. She’d had her phone in her hand when she’d grabbed Tia Lake. Maybe it had gotten lost. “Handler?”

  “Excuse me, are you all right?” came a voice from overhead. Lori looked up, squinting, and the silhouette resolved into a woman in a tank top and yoga pants, standing over her with earbuds in her ears and a concerned expression.

  “I . . .” Lori blinked. It wasn’t as bright as it had seemed, now that her eyes were getting used to the light again. She shaded her eyes, like she did when she came out of the movie theater on a sunny day. “Sorry, I think I fell in.”

  “You weren’t swimming in there on purpose,” the woman said, or maybe asked. “The canal isn’t safe for swimming.” She looked disapproving now.

  Lori tried to get to her feet and found that she could. Looking down, she saw the swim shoes and the wetsuit. “No,” she said. “I was getting ready to go to swim class with my little brother. I got dizzy all of a sudden and fell in, I think.”

  “Do you need a doctor?” The woman looked concerned again. Lori watched her face change shape, the lines around the eyes soften and the neck relax. It was like she was watching someone talking to someone else. This is how people work. When they’re angry, they make this face.

  “No.” Lori realized she’d been waiting for too long. “I’m just going to sit for a moment. Thank you.”

  “Okay. Be careful.” The woman looked concerned still, but she nodded and jogged off.

  “Handler, what happened?” There was still no answer. Lori squinted, keeping her head down as her eyes adjusted. Bright sidewalk, no, just normal brightness, green grass on the other side of the sidewalk, growing up around a chain-link fence. Blinking, Lori looked up to see a swing set and jungle gym, with kids running around, laughing and shouting. Over to the left a brick building blurred into view.

  She was outside Ben’s day care.

  “Lori! Hey, Lori!” The voice caught her as she leaned against the fence, and she tracked it to her brother. He was running toward her, waving good-bye to one of his friends. “Hi, Lori, I missed you! I like your wetsuit!”

  She stepped around the edge of the chain-link fence and into his hug. “I missed you, too.” She felt ready to cry for reasons she still didn’t know, like she was on the edge of something, tongue flicking to the back of her mouth and looking for the gap where something was missing. “Let’s go home.” Ben was smiling and warm and real, and it felt like her vision was finally sliding back to normal after holding his little hand.

  “Miss Fisher.” Mister Barkin’s cold disapproval caught her from the side. “You need to come in and sign him out, please.”

  “Of course.” Lori nodded. Her ponytail, still wet, slapped the back of her neck, and the cold made her flinch. “I’m coming.” She turned to Ben. “Do you need anything inside?”

  He shook his head. “I have my Legos out here in my backpack. We were having a Lego Pokémon robot race, and I was winning, but then Josh used a set that had flick missiles—”

  “Okay, just go get your backpack.” Lori smiled as he jogged off, then turned to Mister Barkin and headed inside.

  Mister Barkin didn’t look very good. His eyes were sunken and a little bloodshot, and his hair was out of place. He gestured impatiently as she approached. “The sign-out sheet is there, inside.”

  It was dark in the main day care room. They must have turned out the lights because all the children were outside. She stepped past Mister Barkin to the table where the sign-out sheets were kept. He smelled rank too, she noticed as he got out of her way. Maybe he hadn’t showered last night.

  He would never come to work in that condition.

  She realized that having her back to him was making her uncomfortable, and she turned, ready to make up a question about Ben’s day, and that was when his hand clamped down over her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” he rasped in her ear. His other arm was around her neck, and she froze as he pulled her back against him. “I’m sorry. The eel won’t come back until I give you to them. I need the eel to come back, I’m sorry. I didn’t give them Ben. I could have, but I didn’t—” Blood pounded in her ears, drowning out whatever else he said.

  She slammed an elbow back blindly. It hit him somewhere, and his grip loosened. She tensed her fingers into claws and speared them back past her face and over her shoulder, and clipped his face. He gave a little cry, and Lori twisted out of his grip.

  “You have to,” he said plaintively, looking at her with bloodshot desperation. “They’ll just get you and I’ll get the eel back and nobody will take Ben, and I care about him, I do, I’m doing this to save him, and I need the eel!”

  He lunged and slammed Lori back into the sign-out table, and Lori gasped and jabbed a fist into his throat. He staggered, choking and sobbing, and she slammed the heel of her palm into his face. He stumbled back, tripped over a low shelf filled with children’s books, and sprawled across a play mat.

  “They’ll keep coming,” he said from the floor, and Lori leaped over the shelf, came down on top of him, and punched him once, twice, three times, until he stopped talking. Her arms trembled, and she was dizzy again, gasping as she stood over him.

  Ben was outside.

  She dashed outside, saw him coming toward her with his backpack. “Come on,” she called over. “We have to go.”

  He looked confused, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the yard. She didn’t look back into the building. They were all out playing. In a few minutes they’d go back inside and find him. What would Barkin say when he woke up?

  “Are you wearing your wetsuit because we are going swimming?” Ben asked. “I don’t have mine.”

  “I don’t know.” Barkin would either call the police or call Lake. He had Lori’s phone number.

  He had her home address.

  “We might be going out for the night, okay?” she said, and forced a smile as she looked down at Ben. “Like a camping trip, but at a hotel?”

  “Why?” Ben asked.

  “We just have to, for a day or two.” She kept the smile going. “We’ll have lots of pizza.”

  “I don’t have my pajamas,” Ben said thoughtfully, “or my toothbrush.”

  The day care teachers began yelling for kids to come inside. Lori walked a little faster, pulling Ben along to keep up. “That’s what will make it fun, kiddo. It’ll be an adventure.”

  “Lori, we missed the ferry stop.” Ben pointed with his free hand.

  “I think we’re going to get a taxi.” Behind her, kids were starting to head inside. “I just have to get someplace I can call for one.”

  “Why not just use your phone?” Ben asked, and Lori blinked away sudden tears that could have been from exhaustion or the fight with Barkin or the sudden feeling of her tongue finding the hole where something was missing.

  “I don’t have my phone,” she said. “I lost it.”

  “No you didn’t.” Ben tapped her waist. “It’s in your pocket.”

  Lori looked down and saw the familiar bulge in her wetsuit’s zippered hip pocket. She unzipped it and fished the phone out. Maybe she’d missed the buzzes or maybe the fight had knocked it from vibrate to noise.

  Her phone had a long crack running the length of the screen, splitting into a little spiderweb down at the bottom. It turned on at her touch, and she flipped over to Messages and selected Handler.

  Handler: KEEP HER TALKING WE NEED INTEL

  Handler: Wait no nonono. You’re not l
ike her. You’re not a monster.

  Handler: Lori, I’m so sorry.

  That was all.

  Lori: Handler?

 

  THURSDAY

  10

  HAWK

  Come on, come on, come on, Hawk thought, and said absolutely nothing out loud, treading water in the cold darkness. It would succeed this time. It had to.

  Tapper worked at a door that was a dull gray in the darkness, his hands blurring and making little bubbles. There was some kind of lock, and he was trying to break it while Maya hovered over him, looking worriedly back over her shoulder into the darkness where it slept.

  Hawk didn’t look back. He didn’t have special eyes or ears. All he could do was worry.

  Then he remembered that worry was pain, and he didn’t need pain, and he let it go away, and he was fine again.

  Behind him Iara’s voice rang out through the water. “Get inside!”

  He looked off into the darkness, and far in the distance overhead, he saw a tiny golden star. It grew steadily as he watched, and then he could make out Iara’s body swimming, silhouetted against the light from the miracoral she held. A moment later she was darting past them, eyes wide with panic. “Get inside, get inside! She is coming!”

  The water was growing warm around Hawk, and as he turned back to look down into that horrible darkness, he saw sickly green bubbles billowing up toward them.

  Close enough, he decided, and moved past Tapper. With a quick jerk, he snapped the lock holding the door closed and wrenched the door open.

  Everyone swam inside, just as a great rushing mass of bubbles lit Tiamat, her true form, as she rose from the darkness and sent frothing water surging all around them. The impact rattled the door in Hawk’s grasp, and he slammed it shut.

  Had she seen them? She was too big, and he didn’t see any eyes, didn’t see any of her, really, just the enormous mass and the impression that she was like the eels.

  With a slow bubbling flushing noise, the water began to drain out of the room. Watching it always made Hawk realize that it had been almost half an hour since he had breathed air, and he always started to panic, as though the water wouldn’t drain out fast enough. He was fine, though, same as always. The fear whisked away, leaving calm behind.