James Patterson: Max

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.

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.

“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.