Final Truth

Chapter 63: Save Yourself

Julia's point of view:

Back home, there is a large river hidden away in the woods.

Endlessly blue and beautiful, it's a popular place for those who know how to find it when the weather gets too hot to bear. However, the beauty of it hides danger: the river has a substantial current that can become dangerous if an inexperienced swimmer attempts to brave it. One wrong move, and you could be swept away.

I was volunteering at the hospital one day, working alongside Cassia and a few other people when we met one of those aforementioned rudimentary swimmers, a girl not much younger than myself who had nearly drowned.

Someone pulled her from the water right before she could die and brought her to the hospital; never before in my life had I seen CPR given so vigorously or take so long to finally work, but after a small eternity she began to cough and spew water from her mouth in massive quantities.

Later, as we worked to coax the rest of the water from her lungs, she explained to me what drowning felt like:

"It was peaceful," she had said. "Strange and terrible as it sounds, I wasn't afraid at the end. I didn't think anyone was going to pull me out, and I believed I was going to die as I couldn't make it to the surface. So I stopped kicking, stopped flailing, and opened my mouth to let the water in. It didn't hurt, didn't fill me with panic. I didn't have a reason to resist anymore. Only now do I see how horrifying the entire ordeal was. I'll never be able to go near that river again."

Now, her words echo in my head as I am pulled endlessly down into the depths of black water, blind and deaf to everything except my own gurgled screams.

How could this ever be peaceful?

I feel the instinct to breathe like knives digging into my chest but I refuse to let the water into my airways, refuse to be still and take it. My thoughts are quickly becoming a frantic mess but I hang onto one thought, one mantra to sustain me in the crux of terror:

Get to the surface. Get to the surface. Get to the surface.

I claw my hands through the water and force my body upwards, and I'm successful for a small moment before the pressure around my left ankle increases tenfold and drags me down even further.

The pressure quickly becomes pain, and I focus on it, use the agony to distract my brain from trying to force what little oxygen I have left out of my lungs in the form of screams.

In desperation I reach my hand down toward my ankle and feel for any sign of life, feel for a heartbeat or the sensation of blood pulsing through veins, something to tell me that whatever holds me hostage is a creature that can be killed.

And eventually, through the haze that has begun to befuddle my brain like an insufferable blanket, I can sense that the thing clamped around my ankle is in fact alive.

I can feel its brain, track its electric impulses along a vast nervous system, but the actual image of what holds me remains a mystery in the dark water.

All I know is that it's over three times the length of my body, and that it has teeth.

The frenzy of my brain has become nearly too much to bear at this point, the robbing of my most vital senses but the simultaneous overstimulation of pain and panic causing me to do the one thing I forced myself not to:

I unconsciously breathe in the water.

It's vile, like liquid fire licking a path down my esophagus to light my lungs on fire. Everything else, even the white hot pain around my ankle, dims in comparison to this.