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As the tile reached his chest he slammed his arms down to block himself falling farther, but his arms plowed through the tile and the concrete beneath and the dirt beneath that, and all of it swirled around his head in a cloud of murk and mud.
The pool water was now rushing down around him, pushing into his mouth and nose. He was a loose plug caught in a drain.
Duck Zhang’s world swirled, crazy flashes of feet kicking above him, sparkling sunlight, then his vision tunneled, narrowed, and darkness crowded out the light.
It had been funny for the first minute or so. Zil Sperry had enjoyed sneaking up on Dork Zhang: he and Hank and Antoine creeping around the side of the house, shoving one another playfully, suppressing giggles.
It was Hank who’d found out about Duck’s secret swimming pool. Hank was a born spy. But it was Zil’s idea to wait until Duck had it all cleaned up, until he adjusted the chlorine and got the filter working.
“Let him do the work first,” Zil had argued. “Then we take it from him.”
Antoine and Hank were cool, Zil realized, but if there was serious thinking or planning to be done, it was up to him.
They had achieved total surprise. Duck had probably wet himself. Stupid dork. Big, whiny baby.
But then things had gone wrong. Duck had sunk like a rock. And kept sinking. And suddenly the sun-dappled water had turned into a whirlpool of shocking power. Hank had been standing on the steps and managed to leap up and out of the pool. But Antoine was with Zil in the deep end when Duck pulled the plug.
Zil had managed, just barely, to grab on to the end of the diving board. The water sucked at him, practically pulled his bathing suit off. He barely held on, fingertips scrabbling at the sandpapery surface of the board.
Antoine had been swept away, drawn into the circular motion. The force of the water had rammed him into the chrome ladder, and Antoine had managed to wedge one fat leg between the ladder, and the side of the pool. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his ankle.
Hank hauled Zil to safety. The two of them together helped Antoine clamber awkwardly up where he collapsed like a beached whale on the deck.
“Dude, we almost drowned,” Antoine gasped weakly.
“What happened?” Hank asked. “I couldn’t see.”
“Duck, man,” Zil said, his voice shaky. “He, like, sank through the water and just kept going.”
“I almost got sucked down,” Antoine said, practically in tears.
“More like you almost got flushed,” Hank said. “You looked like a big pink turd going down the bowl.”
Zil didn’t feel like laughing at the joke. He had been humiliated. He’d been made a fool of. He’d been hanging on for dear life, scared to death. He turned his hands palm-up and looked at his scraped, ragged fingertips. They burned.
He could imagine what he must have looked like, dangling from the end of the board, his swimsuit halfway down his butt as the water tugged at him.
There was nothing funny about it.
Zil would not allow there to be anything funny about it.
“What are you two laughing at?” Zil demanded.
“It was kind of—” Antoine began.
Zil cut him off. “He’s a freak. Duck Zhang is a mutant freak. Who tried to kill us.”
Hank looked sharply at him, hesitating, but only for a moment before he picked up Zil’s line. “Yeah. Freak tried to kill us.”
“This stuff isn’t right, man,” Antoine agreed. He sat up and wrapped his hands around his bruised ankle. “How were we supposed to know he was a mutant freak? We were just playing around. It’s like anything we do now we have to be worried about whether someone is normal or some kind of freak.”
Zil stood and looked down into the empty pool. The hole was ragged with broken tile teeth. A mouth that had opened and swallowed Duck and almost gotten Zil as well. Alive or dead, Duck had made a fool of Zil. And someone was going to have to pay for that.
FIVE
104 HOURS, 5 MINUTES
“BULLETS ARE FAST. That’s why they work,” Computer Jack said condescendingly. “If they moved slowly, they wouldn’t be worth much.”
