I looked wildly for Flynn, he'd been right there at the gate with me but now he was gone.
I didn't take the time to hunt him down.
Damn me, I fled. I let go of the gate and fled, kicking like goddamn dolphin but I didn't kick fast enough because the tips of my fins kicked the gelatinous bell. It took in my fins. I screamed. A silent scream that nearly burst my lungs and my heartbeat pulsed along with the bell and then I hissed out a long exhale, a torrent of bubbles.
And then I kicked free.
I jerked my head and found Flynn. He'd backed up against the front room wall, giving the things room.
The guilt at abandoning my friends, trapped in the fenced room, sickened me but only for a moment because they were now in a better place and Flynn and I were in a worse place.
The giants were flowing out through the gate.
The first giant pulsed its way through — the gate itself a good eight-by-eight feet and the creature filled it with little room to spare. It came head-first, bell-first, bulling its way ahead, and behind it trailed strings. Hundreds upon hundreds of thready strings, and they were caught up into bundles but the strings of each bundle entangled with the others to form one spreading undulating mass of thready stringy tentacles.
The stinging cells on the tentacles would be too small to see.
Easy to imagine.
Billions upon billions of nematocysts.
The thing bumped into me.
Holy freaking hell, it pushed me. And the bell where it bumped my shoulder gave to the touch, it was an ethereal gelatinous thing but it carried the weight of water — an iron ghost made of nothing but slime and water. Except for those tentacles, they were made of venom and I desperately kicked again to escape but as I kicked, a clump of tentacles caressed my legs.
It went on its drifting pulsing way and I went on my wildly propelled backwards way trying to escape to the corner of the cavern.
My legs tingled. I was stung. My breathing was out of control. Slow it down, fourscore and seven years ago.…
I wasn't stung.
I blessed the skin of my wetsuit.
When I managed to regain my breath and my senses I saw that the next giant had already flowed out of the gate into the front room.
And then I saw a crazy thing.
Oscar Flynn had left his wall and was swimming toward the giant.
I yanked my gaze to Walter and Tolliver and Lanny and I questioned their sanity as well, for the three of them had left the safety of their wall and were inching toward the gate, Tolliver and Walter flanking Lanny, arms linked, as if they thought their joined mass was a match for these huge beasts. But maybe they weren't crazy, maybe they had glimpsed more giants coming out of the depths, or maybe they just could not bear to remain in that jail of a room any longer.
And now I turned my focus back to the things in front of my nose and I saw that the first giant was drifting-pulsing to the mouth of the tunnel and the second giant was through the gate and following its leader and the third was halfway through the gate.
Oh sweet Jesus they were leaving.
The sweet little current was taking them out of the cavern and it was clearly going to take them out through the tunnel to the open sea.
I got it.
I'd already seen one out there. I'd seen it two days ago on our first dive to Target Red when I'd looked across the chasm and glimpsed the ghostly shape in the murk, the shape I had thought was a Humboldt squid or undulating kelp or a huge purple-stripe jellyfish.
Purple-stripe huge? That wasn't huge, not compared to this giant, this thing. Compared to this, the purple-stripe was a delicate little flower.
The ghost I had seen across the canyon was the same as the colossal bruiser I saw now.
And then I wondered if Joao Silva had met one of these beasts, instead of a purple-stripe, ending up nearly stung to death.
But no, the fence gate was shut when we entered.
Lanny had to open it.
Still, he'd come here to fix what he broke and what if that was the gate, some Lanny blooper had that acoustically opened the gate and let some of these beasts out. And then somehow the glitching signal closed the gate again? However it worked, was it you Lanny?
I stared at him and even now, sandwiched between Walter and Tolliver, he held his hands over his face mask. Couldn't bear to look at what he'd done?
The three men rode the current toward the gate, passing through the chimney-hole light shafts.
I stared at the sifting falling particulates and I got it.
That fenced-off room was an aquarium.
Growing monsters, feeding them on zooplankton falling through the chimney holes, on the nutrients from the upwelling currents that washed into the tunnel and through the mesh of the fence.
I yanked my gaze to Oscar Flynn.
Why?
Flynn was approaching the third beast.
I glanced toward the tunnel. The first two giants had already drifted and pulsed their way into the tunnel and all I saw now were trailing tentacles. Okay okay, they're leaving. The last one, the straggler, was passing by right in front of me.
I held my breath. It's okay. He's leaving too.
For a moment I thought that Flynn was going to leave as well, follow the last one, swim on out the tunnel.
But he wasn't leaving. He was treading water right beside the thing.
That made no sense.
And then I swear he looked across the cavern straight at me and I swear that he smiled although of course I could not make out any expression behind his mask.
Oscar Flynn reached out and patted the bell of the mammoth jellyfish.
Like it was a pet.
A pet with billions upon billions of stinging cells lining the hundreds upon hundreds of tentacles.
Maybe their venom was mild.
Maybe it wasn't.
It wasn't mild, for Joao Silva.
I realized that it didn't matter, to Flynn, because he had no inch of skin exposed. He wore a Neoporene mask. He wore a fucking protective mask to guard against stings. If that tentacle that had brushed my leg had instead brushed my face, the skin there exposed, I guessed I would have found out just how venomous were the stings of Oscar Flynn's pets. I wanted to swim over and rip the regulator out of his mouth and skin the protective mask off his face and shove that giant off its drifting course, right into the face of its master.
I wanted to do crazy things.
Instead I swam the short distance to meet my friends. Walter released Lanny and wrapped his arms around me. Tolliver still held onto Lanny, pulling him close, whether for comfort or even now to prevent Lanny from doing the job he had come to do.
But what more was to be done?
Lanny did not look like he was up to doing any sort of job. His eyes, behind the face mask, were large. I thought I saw fear there.
What I couldn't see — when I looked — was Oscar Flynn.
Flynn had disappeared.
I figured he had followed his pets into the tunnel, out to open sea — and all I could think was good riddance to the lot of you.
And then I turned to look back at the room where the giants had come from and I saw that I was wrong.
Oscar Flynn hadn't escaped into the tunnel.
He had entered the fenced-off room.
CHAPTER 44
I thought, he's crazy.
What if there are more giants back there in the depths?
Yeah, crazy maybe but not suicidal, not Oscar Flynn, not the man with an ego bigger than his colossal pets.
No, he's not worried, he's in there on a mission.
Flynn was swimming toward the control panel where Lanny had tried to do his job. Where the cables ran. And now Flynn was going to finish the job.
The keypad light glowed. All systems go.
For what?
Never mind. You go. Grab Walter and Tolliver and Lanny and go now.