Marty, Rad thought frenziedly. Where was Marty? He and Dr. Montero should have been back long before now. There could be a myriad of reasons for their delay, some innocent (they lost track of the time), some more worrisome (they experienced an equipment malfunction), and some positively horrific (they were murdered by a bad-tempered mermaid).

The latter seemed all too possible. After all, the mermaid was here, and they weren’t. It would have likely passed them on its way. If they saw it, they would have followed it. They would be back here too.

But they weren’t.

“Jacks!” Rad shrieked. “For Christ’s sake, get away from the water!”

The hysteria in Rad’s voice finally cut through the dreamy spell that Jacky had been under. She looked at Rad, dazed, as if wondering where she was. Then she looked back at the mermaid just as it sprang out of the water, exposing its slug-white chest and the wooden spear clutched in its hand.

Jacky gasped, backed away.

It was too late.

With a powerful thrust of its sinewy arm, the mermaid skewered her on the spear, the tip punching through the back of her white singlet, spraying it red. In the next instant the tip disappeared with a sludgy slurp as the mermaid tugged the spear free.

Jacky tottered like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The momentum of the retracted spear would have pulled her forward into the water and the waiting arms of the mermaid had Rad not lunged forward and grabbed her arm, yanking her backward. She made it two steps before Jacky tumbled flat on her back, becoming a fifty-kilogram deadweight.

Fueled with adrenaline, Rad barely noticed and dragged her across the ground, two meters, four, six, before finally collapsing, breathless from fear and exertion.

Jacky’s eyes were closed, her singlet saturated with crimson blood.

She’s dead.

Rad glanced at the pool, expecting to see the mermaid slithering onto land to finish her off too.

It was gone.

Chapter 34

Chapter 34

ELSA

They had been trapped for two hours, and Elsa now knew that passing out and dying from carbon dioxide poisoning in two and a half days’ time wasn’t her most pressing concern.

It was trying not to go crazy before then.

Two hours and she already felt like she was losing her mind. She could deal with the perpetual darkness, as unnerving as it was. She could deal with being trapped beneath immovable tons of rock. What she couldn’t deal with was the fact there was a mythical monster that wanted her dead circling in the water below her…and knowing that eventually, inexorably, she was going to have to get in that water if she had any hope of escaping this nightmare.

So the new million-dollar question was, When?

The sooner, the better.

Before she lost her nerve.

Before she lost her mind.