Undertow by Michael Buckley Read Free Book Online

drastic.

    i’m pregnant and i’m keeping it.

    After ten minutes without a peep, I just couldn’t hold back the tears.

    both of u r grounded.

    I pulled myself together and decided the best thing I could do was go home after all. Maybe Mom would show up. When she did, she could tell me this was all a big nothing. We’d have a good laugh. It would be a story they’d tell when I was an adult:
The time Lyric thought her father was going to kill me. Ha, ha, ha!
I was all set to go when I noticed a group of people on the beach. I counted nineteen of them, all walking hand in hand toward the surf. When they got to the water’s edge, they knelt down to pray. At first I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t unusual to see congregations on the beach back then. People got married there, baptized themselves and their squalling babies, and even launched little canoes full of flowers and candles, meant to sail to the dearly departed in the afterworld. But this group was different because my mother was with them.
    I hopped the tiny fence that lined the beach and ran to her side. When I reached her, I bent down and saw the same wor­ried gaze from the night before. She was transfixed on the ocean, and it took me several seconds to pull her out of her trance.
    â€œLyric, go home,” she begged, suddenly frantic. Her eyes were wild, her pupils dilated. She took my hands in her own and I could feel she was trembling.
    â€œWhy? What is this? Who are these people?”
    â€œDon’t question me. Just go!”
    I took a step back. My mother had never raised her voice to me before, even when I deserved it. I had no frame of reference for her fury. It confused me, froze me where I stood. We caught the attention of a woman kneeling beside her, a tall beauty with platinum hair. She turned toward us and shot us a wrathful glare, then barked threateningly—yes, barked, like a dog, or rather like the deep-throated sea lions at the aquarium. It was loud and ridiculous and shocking, so I laughed, because that’s what you do when a crazy person does something crazy and you’re feeling a little crazy yourself. It only made the woman howl at me louder.
    â€œLyric, please,” my mother pleaded. “Just go!”
    â€œBut—”
    We were interrupted by the loud vibrating sound that I’d heard the night before. In response, a man in the group cried out in excitement. He leaped to his feet and pointed toward the waves, but I couldn’t look. I was too astonished. The man was Mr. Lir, a guy who had babysat me, had put bandages on my bloody knees, and had taken me and his son, Samuel, to the Bronx Zoo every summer until I was ten.
    â€œLyric, go, now!” my mother said as she and her friends got to their feet. They linked their hands together and raised them over their heads, facing out at the horizon.
    â€œThey are here!” Mr. Lir shouted.
    I turned my eyes to the water, and my throat was seized by dread. There were people rising out of the surf, about fifty of them. Yet they were not people. They were something else. Each was easily over six feet tall and heavily muscled, with skin like a copper penny and dressed in bizarre armor made from bones and shells. They all held weapons—tridents or spears or huge, heavy hammers—and they waved them around aggressively. Behind them was a second wave of people who were not as hulking as the first group but just as intimidating. They held no weapons, because theirs were in their bodies: vicious blades that came right out of their arms. Two men from this group were at the center and stood out among the rest. One had a shaved head and wore a goatee sculpted into a point beneath his chin. The other had long, golden hair like a lion and wore sea glass around his neck and hands. With them was a woman whose breathtaking beauty seemed to multiply with every steps she took toward me, yet there was something unsettling about her as