Max

by James Patterson

  Then every thought went right out of my mind as I realized how totally completely beyond cold the water was at this depth. I gurgled out my best underwater shriek, realized I hadn't been crushed yet, and began to swim toward the light.

  I was hoping it was the sub's floodlights and not the lights of the afterlife, like I'd already just died and didn't realize it and now I was swimming toward, well, I guess not heaven, even on a good day, but someplace lighter than the other option at least. Then I realized that if I was already dead, I wouldn't feel like a bird-kid-cicle, so cold that every tiny movement was incredibly painful. So that cheered me up.

  At this depth, even though I hadn't been crushed, it was still shockingly hard to swim, to move, to get anywhere. It was like paddling through Jell-O or in slow motion, and there was a lot of weight pressing in on me on all sides. It didn't feel good, and I wondered how long my body would hold out.

  The water was cloudy, full of debris, and I blinked constantly, wishing I'd remembered to put on a mask before I went charging off on my white seahorse. Then I saw it: one of the creatures. There were several more, grouped around it, but it was the biggest one, easily as big as our sub. It fixed its red eye on me, turning slightly.

  The birds are working, said the Voice.

  Huh? I was so startled that I quit swimming for a second.

  The birds are working, the Voice repeated.

  I began swimming again. Voice, could we do this later? I'm kind of in the middle of something here.

  I was now about twenty feet away from the sea creature, and as before, I saw its skin was a mass of oozing sores, red-rimmed and raw. It wasn't symmetrical with a fin on each side—it looked like it had been put together by a two-year-old using a sea-monster Playmobil set. And he'd put it together wrong.

  The birds are working, the Voice repeated. They're working to help us.

  Just then the creature shifted, releasing… Angel.

  I surged forward as fast as I could, which was about the pace of a sea slug. Angel's eyes were closed, and she floated there without moving. My heart constricted, and I paddled harder.

  Then she blinked, smiled up at the sea monster, and turned to see me. Her face lit up, and she held out her arms, kicking off from the thing and rushing in slow motion toward me. I grabbed her and held her in a fierce hug, so relieved that she was still alive and that I could kick her butt later.

  "Max!" she said, her small arms looped around my neck. It was bubbly and indistinct but understandable. "I've been explaining everything to Gor, here." She gestured at the biggest creature.

  "Wha?" I managed.

  "It isn't their fault," bubbled Angel. "They're genetic freaks, just like us. And they're smart. They've been attacking fishing boats because the long nets have been damaging their eggs and babies."

  My mouth had dropped open, and now I quickly shut it as some tiny transparent shrimp tried to swim in.

  "All the radiation created them, but it's also making them sick," Angel explained as minuscule bubbles wafted away from her neck. "They're really mad at the Chu Corporation. I told them we are too. So now we're on the same team! Plus—" Angel paused, her blue eyes gleaming in the floodlights. "Plus, they know where Dr. Martinez is."

  73

  GOR SAYS it's not much farther," said Angel. She was wrapped in a towel, hair still wet, sipping a mug of hot tea. I was next to her, doing all the same things, except I wasn't communicating telepathically with a radiation-created, man-killing monster. I guess I do have limitations.

  We were moving slowly through the darkness, our lights turned off as we tried to sneak up on Mr. Chu's under-water lair in a six-hundred-ton sub.

  Angel's eyes unfocused, and she said, "It should be up here, on the left. Go really slow."

  The captain gave the command, then handed out night-vision goggles, which Gazzy had been begging for for years. If the captain was smart, he'd count them all before we got off the sub.

  "There it is," said Angel. "Gor and the others are going to wait here."

  In the distance, we saw something that looked like it was out of a James Bond movie: an enormous clear-topped dome, three thousand feet below the sea. It looked like someone had covered over a football stadium and dropped it into the ocean. It was designed to blend in with its surroundings, and without the night goggles, we could have swum within fifty feet of it and not necessarily seen it.

  As we got closer I could tell that the whole dome wasn't clear—it was metal on top, with a wide band of windows around the middle. Three different air-lock entries would admit submarines, which meant Mr. Chu had access to extradeep-diving subs. Maybe he had connections with some military organization? Maybe he was so stinking rich that he had bought his own private fleet of submarines?

  "I can barely hear Gor," Angel said in frustration. She stood up and dropped her towel. "I have to go out again."

  I had forty-thousand tons of reasons why I didn't want her to go back out, but we were actually relying on the recon abilities of the sea monsters (who called themselves the Krelp, by the way).

  Instead I accepted the inevitable, including the even more gross inevitability that I should go out with her.

  "Yeah, okay," I said, reluctantly unwrapping my towel. "I'll go with you."

  "Oh, thanks, Max!" Angel took my hand and skipped alongside me as we headed for the air-lock chamber. It was like old times, except we were at the bottom of the ocean, talking to sea monsters, and about to rescue my kidnapped mother. Other than that, it was all old hat.

  No one protested or tried to stop us this time. Fang looked at me, hope in his eyes, and I smirked at him. I save the huge emotional kissy-face for imminent death scenes. This probably didn't qualify.

  I hoped. I really, really hoped.

  74

  SADLY, THE temperature of the ocean water had not mysteriously risen by, say, fifty degrees while we were back on the sub. It was still horribly, teeth-chatteringly cold, and I went ahead and indulged myself in a searing tirade about cold water as we slowly swam toward the huge dome.

  A hundred yards in back of us, the sub was still dark, blending in with the black water. I knew they were watching us with night-vision goggles, so I tried to look more heroic and less weeniefied about the cold.

  The dome was lit and divided into rooms. Whatever glass-type stuff they had used was a couple of feet thick, and the interior was dim and distorted. Cautiously, Angel and I began to swim around the whole dome, seeing a room full of computers and equipment, another room full of sleeping dumb-bots, some rooms that looked like an apartment.

  Finally, when we had swum almost the whole way around, I grabbed Angel's arm and pointed. There were several small, grayish compartments, set off from the others. In one of them, a slight figure lay curled on its side on the floor. It had long, dark, curly hair. It was my mom. Was she still alive?

  Angel's eyes were big as we hovered there.

  The glass is way too thick to break, I thought, and Angel nodded.

  If we use a torpedo, it would probably kill my mom. Angel nodded again.

  Maybe I could borrow some kind of big drill from the sub? Maybe we could storm in through an air lock? Angel frowned, unsure.

  Then I noticed something weird. Okay, I mean, something weirder. There were no fish anywhere close to the dome. No nothing. This deep, it isn't exactly teeming with the circle of sea life anyway, but there were still plenty of freakish, scary things swimming around, not necessarily related to the oozing radiation. But none would come close to the dome, and no barnacles, sea stars, or tube worms attached themselves to it either.

  Almost as soon as I realized that, the mystery was solved for us: an eel-like thing swam close and passed us. Then, zap! Some sort of invisible force field suddenly electrified it, killing it instantly. It sparked, twitched, then sank silently down into the depths to the ocean bottom.

  Angel and I backed up several yards.

  So much for attacking through the sub's air locks, I thought. My mom
was right there! But I couldn't get to her. She was lying there so limp, unmoving—surely she was still alive. They couldn't have killed her yet, could they?

  Angel looked perplexed, then turned her head and peered out into the darkness. Way off, using raptor vision, I could just barely make out the looming dark pickle shapes of the Krelp. Angel stared at them, cocking her head, as if she were listening. After a minute, she nodded.

  The Krelp say they want to help, she thought at me.

  But how? I asked.

  I don't know, she answered.

  I felt a swell of icy water push against me, and then the largest Krelp, the one Angel called Gor, surged past us, almost tumbling us head over heels. It neared the dome, got zapped over and over again, but steamrollered right through the force field.

  Follow it! Angel commanded. It's shorted out the electric net!

  We rushed after it, trying to trace its exact path. I braced myself for a horrible electrocution, but nothing happened. I swam as fast as I could to the window leading into my mom's cell. I rapped on it hard, but she didn't move.

  Gor pressed itself against the glass, and I could only imagine what it looked like from the inside. Someone inside the dome noticed it and started screaming. I saw people starting to race around, saw someone outside the room that housed all the sleeping 'bots. Still, my mom lay motionless.

  My stomach got a cold, clenched feeling. Maybe, after all this, we were too late.

  People were still staring up at the enormous creature pressed against the glass, and now I noticed a thick slime seeping out from under its body. This thing was the size of a 747. I mean, the word eew doesn't even come close.

  "Watch," Angel said out loud.

  Where the slime was touching the glass, wisps of smoke were twisting away into the water.

  "Oh, my God," I said. "It's melting the glass with its… uh, body snot."

  "Gazzy will be so jealous," Angel bubbled. "He'd give anything to be able to do that."

  "Please do not tell him about it."

  The glass continued to melt, and then something clicked in my brain, and I realized what would happen once the glass failed: water would seep in, then it would flood in, then it would crush the dome, and everything inside with its unimaginable weight.

  If my mom wasn't dead now, she would be, really soon.

  75

  ANGEL!" I yelled. Her head whipped around, floating gold curls wreathing her face. "We need the sub here, now! With its air lock open!"

  Looking scared, Angel nodded. Her eyes unfocused as she compelled the crew back on the sub to come get us. I could almost feel its superquiet engines as they powered up.

  Angel pressed her fingers to her temples as if she had a headache. Just as the first small trickle of ocean water began to seep into the dome, I was suddenly surrounded by Krelp.

  Inside the dome, people were running and screaming. They didn't exactly have the navy's precise protocols of emergency preparedness. I looked for Mr. Chu, wanting to personally take him apart, but didn't see him anywhere.

  The Krelp, ranging in sizes from baby whale to semitrailer to jet plane, pressed closer to me. I hoped they had a plan. I hoped they could see me. I hoped they liked me as much as they liked Angel.

  The dome cracked. The freezing ocean water rushed in in torrents, quickly filling one room after another. Just as someone activated the M-Geeks, readying them for battle, their quarters were flooded, water smashing them against the ceiling and sweeping them down hallways.

  The section of dome over my mom's room started to split. I tensed, not really having a plan beyond "Get Mom, dead or alive." Water splashed in, dousing my mom's body. She moved.

  She was alive!

  The next moment, the ceiling above her broke open, and her room was instantly flooded. She got swept up against what was left of the ceiling, smashing against it hard. I heard her cry out with pain as I rushed in with the water, grabbing her shoulders and pulling her free. She was unconscious.

  The Krelp hovered over us, and I realized they were creating a really big… snot bubble, sort of attached to several of them. Almost as if several kids were blowing bubbles, and the bubbles touched and poofed into a bigger, combined bubble. But with snot. Angel grabbed on to me, and before I had time to think, Oh, man, I'm gonna barf, the Krelp had dropped down beside the three of us. The bubble oozed around us, encasing us. There was air inside, and it kept the crushing ocean at bay.

  Yes. I owed my life, Angel's life, and my mother's life to a mutant's ability to create industrial-strength snot.

  The Krelp floated upward to where our sub was waiting, its air-lock doors open, and gently pushed us in. Immediately alarms sounded, the hatch doors started to close, and I felt pressurized air being pumped into the room.

  Thirty seconds later, the air popped the bubble, the hatches were shut, and the inner doors swooshed open.

  "Help my mom!" I cried to the medic who was already rushing in.

  Fang ran in and knelt next to me, and then I was surrounded by the flock.

  A few more seconds, and my mom started coughing and gagging, spitting salt water out. I patted her hand, praying that she would be all right. She looked thin, pale, weak, and beaten up, and a wildfire of rage swept through me as I thought of what they had put her through.

  "Mom! It's me!" I said. "You're safe now. You're on a sub, and we're headed back to Hawaii." I couldn't believe we were together again at last, that she was alive, that we had reached her before it was too late.

  Her brown eyes blinked groggily several times, and she winced as the medic started an IV in her arm. "Max?" she croaked.

  "I'm right here," I said, holding her hand. My eyes felt hot, and I blinked several times.

  Blearily, she looked up at me, tried to focus. "I knew… you'd come," she said.

  My throat threatened to close, but I managed to say, "I'll always, always come, Mom. You can count on it."

  My mom smiled faintly, then closed her eyes again.

  Fang put his arm around me. "You did it. You saved her."

  That was when I should have jumped up and done a victory dance, whooping my way down the corridor to the bathroom, where I could change into dry clothes.

  Instead, I burst into unexpected tears, covering my eyes and gulping in breaths like a big baby. Fang put his arms around me.

  Sometimes I just don't understand myself.

  76

  AS YOU MIGHT IMAGINE, I was thrilled to get off that submarine once and for all. We docked, the top hatch opened, and after the medics took my mom out on a stretcher, I was the next one off. I rushed up the ladder, over the gangplank to the dock, and then—

  On the dock I wobbled, couldn't walk straight, and ended up falling over, feeling like I was going to hurl. I watched the medics hurrying away with my mom, and I would have to crawl to follow them.

  Captain Perry knelt next to me. "You'll get your land legs back in no time," he said kindly.

  Irony sort of reaches up and slaps you in the face sometimes, doesn't it?

  Anyway, let's just resume our scene with me already sitting at a table, sucking down Fanta.

  My mom was in the infirmary, where they had found she was way dehydrated, really banged up, and needed IV fluids and rest. Every time I realized she was back and alive, a new rush of warmth went through me.

  And here I was with my flock, Fang's hand in mine beneath the table. Dejected because of his many failed attempts to create huge snot bubbles, Gazzy slumped in his seat. Nudge, Iggy, and Angel were on their fourth round of ice cream.

  "Max!" Total raced up and jumped on a chair next to me. He enthusiastically licked my face, which, after being encased in a snot bubble, frankly didn't seem so bad. "Dude, I missed you guys so much! I'm so glad your mom is okay, Max. God knows the loss of a veterinarian would be a terrible thing. Ooh, Fanta!"

  We got him his own Fanta and stuck a straw in it. He slurped it up delicately. "So much has happened," he said, wagging his short tail. "There's s
o much to tell you!"

  I blinked. Total thought a lot had happened on his end? I felt like catching him up on our shenanigans would take about three weeks!

  Akila ran up, leading John and Brigid to our table. She gave several short, happy barks, and Total turned to grin at me.

  "Gotta go. Timmy's in the well. If you know what I mean." He winked and trotted off with Akila while we all tried very hard not to think too much about his last statement.

  "Max! Max Max Max Max Max!!"

  "Ella!" I got up and managed to run to my half sister without disgracing myself. We hugged each other, doing the weird rocking and patting motion that people do when they hug.

  "Hello, Max."

  I stopped rocking and patting. I would know that voice anywhere. I separated myself from Ella. "Jeb."

  "Where's Mom?" Ella pleaded.

  "Come on. I'll take you to her." Ignoring Jeb, I led Ella down the hallway toward the infirmary. I stopped outside her door, unable to resist looking through the glass to make sure she was still there and still all right. Ella and Jeb hurried in, and I hung back. Ella, at least, deserved some time alone with Mom. Already they were crying.

  Smiling, feeling warm, dry, happy, and relatively safe, I headed back to the cafeteria. A dark, quick movement caught my eye, and I saw Brigid hurrying around a corner, her face tense.

  I know spying on people is wrong and an invasion of their privacy, but fortunately I've never had a problem with that. I walked silently down the hall until I was close enough to the corner to peer around it at my nemesis.

  Brigid was talking to some suits, gesturing earnestly with her hands. I pulled back. Suits always make me nervous.

  I couldn't hear what they were saying, so I started to leave—but then someone else walked up to them and shook everyone's hands. Brigid greeted him, and the suits smiled and nodded.

  It was Mr. Chu.