Come on, try harder. Gritting her teeth, she threw herself into her struggles and as she reached over her head to pull herself through the water, the tips of her fingers touched something, got wound in something fibrous, like thread. She tried to pull her hand away, but whatever it was came with it.

There in the dark, nose to nose with her, was a severed head. Tara Atwater’s eyes were open and blank in her bluish face, and from her neck a thick stream of blood invaded the water.

Kristi screamed and tried to disentangle her fingers. Panic constricted her heart. Fear propelled her to swim, dragging the damned head only to bump into something that rose from the bottom of the murky depth.

Another head! Even in the weak light she saw the blond hair as the head bobbed and turned, facing her, Rylee’s wide eyes open and staring. Damning.

Kristi shrieked, stroking away, with Tara’s head still caught in her fingers. But as she shot ahead her crown crashed into something hard. She turned to see Dionne’s face staring at her, blood flowing from her neck, her eyes wide and dead.

No!

Dionne’s eyes blinked and she looked down as if in warning. Then Kristi knew, though she couldn’t see the bottom, that evil lurked in the murky depths.

Swim! Get away! Her mind screamed.

She turned again and saw another disembodied head. Not Monique’s as she’d expected. The ashen face that floated on the surface was Ariel’s.

God, oh, God, get me out of here!

Panicked, she started flailing, trying to scream, trying to get away. But the harder she struggled to reach the gleaming tile, the further away it appeared.

Her lungs burned, her body was heavy. She knew she was about to drown. In this pool of bloody severed heads, she would die.

Before she had a chance to tell Jay that she loved him, before she saw her father one last time.

She tried to scream, but her throat was thick and she was being pulled down, deeper and deeper, the water becoming dark.

Oh, God, help me.

Panic gripped her.

She flailed, trying to surface.

She gasped.

And then she noticed the water was turning red, a deep scarlet color….

“Kristi!” a deep male voice said, and she felt his hand upon her ankle, pulling her further down. Into the bloody depths!

“Kris! Hey!”

Her eyes flew open and she found Jay, dressed only in boxer shorts, leaning over her. She was on her daybed, in her nearly dark apartment, and he was shaking her out of sleep.

“Jay,” she whispered tremulously, the effects of the dream so real she was certain her skin was damp. She threw her arms around him.