The ‘water’ fought me with every stroke every kick. Trying just to get back to the surface was a struggle. I could feel my lungs begin to burn as I fought my way out of the lake, but the lake fought back. I could see things start to go black when I felt my body begin to shake. Next thing I knew I was speeding upward to the surface and I realized the shaking wasn’t coming from me but my leg!
My prosthetic leg was saving me again! Though if there was anything this leg was made for by the fish people, it was to get around in water. And even though this water was more like jello than regular water, it was still water and this leg was showing me that it indeed knew how to get around in it.
I finally broke the surface and sucked in all the air I could get. I looked around me as I let the leg take me toward the beach. Where was I? And more importantly how was I going to be able to find Tam again? At this point we had to be miles away from each other. Even to get onto the beach I needed help from my new artificial leg. I would’ve thought climbing out of the water would have been the easy part, but this ‘water’ just did not want to let go. With a bit of struggling, I was finally able to get myself free, but the ‘water’ continued to linger on me. I tried to dry off, but I seemed unable to slick away the layer of this goop. Surprisingly, when I gave up trying, the ‘water’ began to just slip off of me.
As I stood there letting the ‘water’ ooze off me, I looked out into the beach and the rocky cliffs behind it. I wasn’t going to find a payphone out here or a taxi stand. Finding a way back up was going to be tricky, but I could do it. I knew I could. I wasn’t…OW! Something bit my foot!
I looked down at the ground and saw little crab-like creatures streaming out of the sand, swarming all over my feet. One of my legs may have been made out of metal, but the other one was pure meat. As the tiny crabs tried to tear into my flesh, I shook my fleshy leg with desperate terror. I tried to hop further up the shore as more and more tiny crabs emerged from the sand. It was like the entire beach was made up of them and the sand was just a screen for them to go hunting. I feared that was exactly what this was like and, at the moment, that I was the prey.
It was then that red bird-like creatures began to divebomb down at me. I tried to dodge as they swooped past. Just because I was trying to escape these vicious tiny crabs didn’t mean I was going to let some opportunistic birds be the end of me. As I did my best to dodge, duck, dive, dip, and dodge, I realized that the birds weren’t coming after me at all. They were only after the crabs, scooping up bill-fulls of them with every swoop. So it seemed like something was finally on my side in this crazy, mixed up world.
Not that those crazy birds were doing much to the crabs that were already biting me. All those birds were doing were terrorizing the other crabs, keeping me from being completely swarmed. That was good, I consented, but not great. I still needed to get these crabs that were on me off of me and to get as far away from this feeding frenzy as I could.
So I bounced up the beach, trying to shake the crabs off me, trying to not get hit by the divebombing birds, trying to survive in one piece, but then the whole ground began to shake. I went tumbling backwards to the ground, but as soon as my body hit the beach I had to move to keep the crabs from swarming all over me. The shaking beeneath was violent enough that I began to worry that the whole little floating island was going to shake apart, but then the shaking became something else.
Something beneath me was rising, coming out from beneath the sand! And it wasn’t just rising up from beneath me, but it was emerging from most of the beach! Whatever this behemoth was, it had to be thirty, forty feet wide! The sand began to slide off of it in sheets. I did my best to stay on top of it so I didn’t fall back into the viscous lake. It wasn’t easy staying on, but fortunately most of the little crabs had fallen off of me by then so I only had the occasional bite to distract me from trying to maintain my balance. But I did have the monstrous thing emerging beneath to draw my attention. What was this thing?
And then a giant claw emerged from the sand to snap down on one of the swooping birds. It was then they I realized what the creature I was standing on was. It was a giant crab! It was the mother of all crabs!
to be continued…
The Quantum Unstable Man 