Lineage(75)

“Andy!” Lance yelled. Nothing moved, nothing surfaced.

Lance dove and opened his eyes to the blistering cold, imagining his sight wouldn’t work due to his retinas freezing solid. Surprisingly, the world below stood out in fair detail. The moon overhead filtered farther than Lance would have guessed, and nothing prepared him for what he saw by its light.

John hadn’t lied. The lake’s bottom dropped steeply off from where he and Andy had been standing; the soft ground sloped from waist-deep to an abyss into which the moonlight didn’t even dare go. Several enormous boulders sat to each side like a gate unto the mouth of a watery hell, framing the horror that receded below him.

Andy slid silently down the steep decline, a submarine of flesh, his eyes open and pleading to the night sky. His arms were motionless at his sides, and Lance couldn’t discern any movement near his feet. It seemed as if the man were a stone sculpture, sinking to the bottom of the ocean from a wrecked ship above.

Lance swam after his friend, the lake’s temperature no longer a concern. He kicked and pulled at the water around him like an opponent in a death match, his hands striving to grasp Andy’s limp arm. To Lance’s horror, Andy’s feet began to disappear into the dark water below them, and he swam harder than ever, knowing somehow that if his friend slipped out of the faint light, he would be gone forever.

Lance lunged and reached, gliding a few feet, and finally grabbed Andy’s slim bicep. He pulled with everything he had and treaded for the surface, which looked like a rippling sky above them. Lance’s breath bubbled out of his nose in gray orbs that mockingly rose with ease, and the slight progress they had made halted. He looked down at Andy’s flaccid form and pulled again. The other man was caught on something near the edge of the drop-off. Lance swam down again, his breath turning to acid in his lungs. He grasped Andy around the waist and kicked for the surface, expecting both of them to shoot up like dual corks. They remained held in place, as if they were swimming in jelly instead of water. The moment of decision was almost upon Lance, and he could feel it sliding over his mind, nameless and cold like the liquid around him. If he couldn’t get Andy loose in a few more seconds, he would have to surface without him, and deep down in the recesses of his stomach, he knew that when he returned after a gulp of air, Andy would be gone.

With all of his faculties screaming for oxygen, Lance spun around behind Andy, his weaker arm around his friend’s chest, and pulled with all his strength while at the same time kicking off the silted bottom. Andy moved upward at last, and in that instant Lance gazed down at the depths below them where the light ended and the darkness truly began.

A decaying hand gripped Andy’s ankle.

It slid into the light with the force of Lance’s struggle, its mottled gray flesh missing chunks here and there, no doubt from the hungry mouths of the lake’s native fish. Its fingernails were black with decomposition, and as its hold on Andy’s ankle broke, Lance knew what had grazed his leg earlier.

A scream yearned to rip free of his mouth but he had no air left to fuel it. Moonlight shimmered on the top of the water, dreamlike in its movement and depth. As he kicked feebly, Lance wondered if it was a dream, if he was still asleep in the bed on the second floor, imagining all of this in a room of his mind that he had never visited before.

When the night air bit his face, he realized he wasn’t dreaming. Lance coughed and sucked in copious amounts of air. He felt hungry for it; each breath was sweeter than the last.

He paddled a few yards in open water until his feet touched the soft ground and he began to walk, dragging Andy’s still form behind him like a buoy. He imagined that at any moment he would feel rotting fingers close over his bare ankle. He could almost hear his scream echoing back to him across the lake.

Andy surprised him by vomiting an arc of water as thick as his wrist several feet into the air. It splashed down nearby, as Lance turned and examined his gasping friend. Andy’s eyes were blinking rapidly and Lance could hear the water gurgling in his throat.

“Almost there, buddy, almost there. Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Lance intoned, a mantra to keep the oxygen moving in and out of Andy’s saturated lungs.

The shore loomed ahead in the darkness. The grass beneath Lance’s feet became one of the most beautiful feelings he had ever experienced in his life. He laid Andy on his side on the lawn a few strides up from the rocky edge of the water, and stared at him in the milky light. Andy coughed and vomited even more lake water onto the lawn, and then collapsed onto his back.