A Stranger Thing (The Ever-Expanding Universe) (26 page)

The whales reach the floe and again dive under. The wave is even bigger this time and washes over us with a chilling crash. I hold tight to the blade and Bok Choy, sliding around on the surface but holding fast.

The Devastator is not so lucky, and seeing as he was already at the far edge, he gets washed right over into the water. His shriek is eardrum-piercing as he flails and splashes, the icy cold water freezing his joints. He claws at the edge of the ice in a futile effort to pull himself back up, but the whales are already there, waiting, and a maelstrom of churning blood and foam erupts as the four whales make a meal of the screaming alien. In a matter of seconds the would-be conqueror from another world falls victim to the ocean’s deadliest predators.

There’s a slight lull as the water calms around the floe, but I’m not fooled. The floe has gotten considerably smaller since the whales started attacking it, I realize. They’re not going to quit now just ’cause they’ve had a snack. I huddle up tightly with Bok Choy, still holding on to the blade as an anchor.

Sure enough, within moments one of the whales fires out
of the water like a missile and lands almost the entire length of his body onto the ice, a fraction of a meter separating us. Bok Choy screams in fear as the massive mammal snaps its jaws at us. At this range I can see all the way down the animal’s gullet. Its tongue is burnt black, as if someone set it on fire with a match.

Or like maybe it just recently ate an electric heating pod.

The whale and I lock eyes. I know they are highly intelligent creatures, but I wonder if they are evolved enough to understand trash talk.

“Muaah,” I say, sticking my tongue out at the creature, wiggling it tauntingly.

The whale seems to get it and slaps the water angrily with its tail. The surface of the floe strains and cracks under the weight, and the blade comes loose in my hand. Without thinking, I lunge forward and gouge the Shamu wannabe right in the eye. It reels back, the blade still lodged in the side of its head, and slinks under the water. The other whales start circling the floe, closer and closer, nudging it, and I see tiny fragments of the ice break off and fall away. Pretty soon they’ll have us in the water, and it will be over. Aside from my cutting wit, I am officially out of weapons. The sound of something moving beneath the surface grows steadily louder, and I make out a dark shadowy form shooting up in our direction. Black Tongue is coming for us.

But when it crests, I have another in a series of the “shocks of my life.” What comes flying out of the water and passing over my head isn’t a killer whale—it’s the skiff. It lands with a crash on the surface and comes about, zipping toward us. The
plating in the front makes it impossible for me to see who’s inside. The whales scatter as the craft comes zooming in. As it pulls up beside us, we get a view of the passengers. Zee is driving, while Marsden and Cole sit in the rear. They’re all sopping wet, seeing as the skiff has no enclosed cockpit.

I do not see my father.

“Come on, let’s go!” Cole screams, holding out his hand to pull me in.

“Where’s Dad?” I shout.

“I’m right here, dearheart.” His voice comes weakly from the floor of the craft.

Thank God.

I pass Bok Choy across to Cole into the skiff. Bok Choy freaks out when Cole grabs him, and starts punching him in the face and neck.

“Ow! What the hell, kid, I’m saving you, dumbass!” Cole shouts. He looks at me, all bewildered. “
This
is the baby?”

Marsden pulls Bok Choy away from Cole and says something in Jin’Kai lingo that momentarily quiets the boy. Cole reaches back for me, and I take his hand. Just then the skiff is rocked to the side, and Black Tongue surfaces, locking his jaws on the bottom of the boat. He rips at one of the beam loaders attached at the rear. Cole finishes pulling me into the skiff.

“Marsden!” Cole shouts. Marsden stoops to pick up a small sack that looks like it’s filled with gelatin and hands it to Cole. Cole shoves me behind him.

“Go!” he shouts at Zee. She pushes down on one of the nylon tubes running along the floor, which, as Dad accurately deduced, serves as the “gas pedal.” As we rocket away, the
beam loader breaks off into Black Tongue’s mouth, still active. Cole leans out the side and brandishes the gelatin pack.

“Smile, you stupid bitch!” he screams, and tosses the pack right at the whale. Instinctively, the orca opens wide and snaps down on the projectile. The moment the pack is punctured, the gel spurts out. When it crosses the beam from the loader, it ignites in a giant blue fireball. There’s a loud pop, and suddenly whale bits begin raining down on us from above.

“Woo!”
Cole shouts, pumping his fist as he turns back around to me. “You see that! That’s the line from that shark flat pic you like so much, right? ‘Smile, you stupid bitch?’ ”

“Close enough,” I stammer.

“You’re freezing,” Cole says, moving back to me and wrapping me up in a big hug.

“You’re not much warmer,” I complain, but I let him hold me. “The ship sank,” I go on, stating the obvious.

“I know,” Cole says.

“What happened?”

Zee leans back as she drives. “
Someone
set off too many explosives.”

She’s looking at Cole, who manages even in this temperature to blush.

“Dearheart . . . ,” my Dad says weakly.

“Dad?” I pull away from Cole and look down to where Dad is lying flat on the floor. My heart stops in my chest.

My father is dying.

I always thought that I was particularly good at holding my shit together in stressful situations. After all, I have, in order, survived a murderous school faculty, a failing space cruiser, a batch of nasty aliens disguised as construction workers, the pretty aliens that had
protected
me from the construction workers, a gang of killer whales, a seriously complexion-challenged baddie from Planet Disgusto, and yet another round with the whales. And I’m still standing. But right now, watching my father struggle for breath as we speed along on the Devastator skiff, Zee at the helm—I am not doing a very good job at keeping calm and carrying on.

“Slow down!” I screech at my mother in the driver’s seat, tears pouring down my cheeks. “Slow
down
! The wind’s too much for him.” We’re racing across the ice so quickly that the wind is whistling around the sides of the skiff, blowing over us like a hair dryer set to “freeze dry.” It is clearly having
an effect on Dad’s already damaged skin. “It’s too cold. It’s too—” I choke on my words, shaking Dad’s arm as his eyes flutter closed again. His lips are ice blue, and his eyes are glassy.

“Wake
up
!” I holler.

“Elvie.” Cole grabs my arms, squeezing me into a hug that he won’t let me out of, no matter how hard I struggle. He’s also, I should mention, literally
sitting
on Bok Choy, since the kid has done absolutely nothing but try to hurl himself from the skiff since we set off, and Cole can’t seem to think of any other way to restrain him. “We’ve got to get him back to base as quickly as possible,” Cole says calmly. “We can’t slow down. It’s okay, Elvs. It’s okay.”

“It’s
not
okay!” I scream, struggling against Cole.

Since Cole is busy wrestling with me in his arms and Bok Choy under his butt, he can’t make a move when Dr. Marsden moves forward and, to my horror, starts unfastening Dad’s thermal suit.

“What are you
doing
? He
needs
that!” I bellow, trying to grab at him, despite Cole’s hold on me. “That’s the only thing that’s keeping him warm!”

Marsden doesn’t even attempt to explain himself. When he’s tugged the zipper down as far as it will go, he uses his Jin’Kai strength to rip the seam, tearing the suit all the way down the middle and pulling each half off my dad’s goose-pimpled body. He pulls off Dad’s gloves, boots, socks, everything, leaving him naked except for his underwear. And even though such a sight might be traumatizing on a typical day, I’m much more distressed by the bluish hue of his skin.
His veins are bright purple—I can actually
see
them in his arms, his legs, as though his blood has simply frozen up inside him into a hardened mass.

“Dad!”

Dr. Marsden takes something out of his pocket—a plastic pouch that seems to be filled with some sort of liquid. He certainly has a lot of those. He squeezes the pouch in its middle until I hear a small pop, then shakes it vigorously.

“What is that?” I ask. “What are you doing?”

After shaking it another few seconds, Marsden puts the edge of the pouch in his mouth and tears the end away. With practiced speed he squeezes the entire contents out on Dad’s chest. It’s a clear, thick gel, which Marsden begins smearing all across my father’s body. He spreads it to Dad’s arms—even working it up underneath the armpits—down to the hands, pausing to get every crevice between my dad’s fingers. Dad’s digits have all swollen to nearly three times their normal size, the pressure from the inside straining the dark purple skin so badly that I’m amazed the fingers haven’t burst right off his hands. Marsden works on my dad’s toes, his legs, his hips. I look away as the doc handles my dad’s more sensitive areas, tucking my face into the crook of Cole’s neck to weep. I don’t know what is going on, but I have a feeling I’m about to watch my own father die. And I’m not ready to see that.

“Elvs,” Cole coos softly into my ear. “It’s okay, Elvs. Look.” And he nudges my head up.

“Dearheart.”

It’s my dad, blinking up at me. And he’s smiling with his ice-blue lips.

My heart leaps in my chest. “Dad!” I cry. “You’re okay, oh God, you’re okay!”

I practically pounce on top of my father to give him a big bear hug, but Marsden stops me.

“Don’t touch him,” he says all doctor-like. “Give the gel time to work. He’s still very weak.”

Indeed, Dad’s skin is still a ghastly shade, but the veins, already, are less noticeable. He bends his fingers, as though testing their strength. That gel, whatever it was, did
something
good.

“You’re a very brave man, Harry,” Dr. Marsden says. Then he turns to me. “He’s fine for now. Let him rest. He’s had a rough day.”

I just blink at him. Talk about hard to read. Does this guy want us dead, or doesn’t he?

I decide, for the moment, not to think about it too much. For the moment, my dad is okay. And really, that’s all that matters.

•  •  •

“I’m not sure this is a better plan,” I tell Cole as I examine the “child safety harness” he’s whipped up for Bok Choy. Using strips from Dad’s shredded thermal suit, Cole has decided to tie the kid to the backseat of the skiff, his hands bound tightly behind him. It’s more effective than sitting on him, granted, but . . . “Child Protective Services would have your head on a spike right now,” I say.

Cole just shrugs. His bruises from the beating Bok Choy’s doled out to him are already healing, but I have a feeling he’s well exhausted from trying to rein in the world’s most savage (and most
enormous) month-old infant. “Seems fine to me,” he replies.

“Cole,” I say with a sigh. But I don’t really have anything to follow it up with. Bok Choy is making a lot of ruckus and thrashing about, just generally being an überhuman pain in the ass—but can you blame him when he has the strength of a He-man but the intellectual and emotional maturity of a U.S. Congressperson? Still, if anyone tied my darling Olivia to a car seat, I would go all caveman on his ass. I glance at Dad, sleeping as well as he can in the seat beside me. Zee and Marsden are at the front of the skiff, doing their best
Flight of the Navigator
to get us back to base, chatting all buddy-buddy. I can’t hear them over the engine and the wind, but when Marsden turns and sees me looking at them, he gives me a smile. It’s not his usual “charming snake” smile but rather one that seems warm, and honest—perhaps a reference to our harrowing escape, and the confusion we probably both feel about finding ourselves as allies. At least, that’s how I read it.

I nod back.

And then, suddenly, I have an unsettling thought. “Hey, Cole?” I say—loud enough to be heard over the rushing wind but not nearly loud enough for the doc to hear me. Cole looks up. “You don’t think that . . . Britta . . . ?” I point to Bok Choy. Britta had her fetus swapped too, just like Other Cheerleader. And what if
her
kid was sprinkled with Miracle-Gro too?

But Cole has other things on his mind.

“Ow!” he yelps. Bok Choy has gotten a hand free from his restraint and is bonking Cole repeatedly amidst a stream of
“Bok choy!”
s.

I scooch up right next to Bok Choy and take his hand,
stroking it soothingly. The kid stops flailing and looks at me, his chest heaving. I think back to when I was little, when I’d fall off the swing set or trip on the stairs and start bawling. My father would pick me up, put me on his knee, and start singing a song I thought I’d long forgotten. But as I start in on the melody, the words flow out like they’ve been inside me all along.

“I love you, yes I do, I love you.

It’s a sin . . . to tell . . . a lie . . .”

Immediately the kid begins to calm down.

“It’s working,” Cole whispers, incredulous. “He likes it.”

I smile and continue singing into Bok Choy’s ear. I’m glad that I’m able to project my “inner peace” to the kid, but it’s all an act. I’m not feeling calm in the slightest. And it’s not just the day’s deeds of derring-do, or the evil-alien-army-that-could-mean-the-death-of-us-all fiasco. Oh, those are big concerns. But right at this second I’m more anxious about the doting dreamboat smiling down at me. And if I’m being totally honest with myself, I’ve been kind of anxious about that for a while.

Cole, magnanimous doofus that he is, would do anything I asked him to, without blinking. And that should send me over the moon with happiness. It would send a
normal
girl over the moon with happiness. But that’s the thing, isn’t it—I’m not a normal girl. In the last year I’ve gone from typical suburban teenager whose most passionate love affair was with her lap-pad, to (oops!) mommy-to-be, to Rambo-lina-style survivalist, to
half-alien hybrid fugitive. Not to mention that the bump in my belly has actually turned into a real-life
person
—a person who’s going to depend on me for just about everything that I’ve always depended on others for.