Becoming Mermaids Read online

  It’s like how if you became a vampire, you’d be yourself, but an evil version of yourself, he reasoned. Personality comes apart in bits and pieces. This realization— that he was made of parts, the conflicting notes of a discord— seemed to be the most pressing issue of his life. Everything was built on top of the assumption that he was who he thought he was. If he was a stranger to himself, how could anything else matter?

  Andrew’s parents let him stew for a few days, thinking it was remorse over whatever it was he’d gotten himself involved in, but when he wasn’t coming out of it, they worried. They worried especially because of all the hubbub the incident was gathering on the news. That first night in the police department, it had been a simple break-in. But after a few days, then weeks, it snowballed into something much bigger. Their phone was ringing off the hook— crank calls from morning radio show jockeys. They all wanted to talk to the fishman.

  The story had legs, so to speak. Everyone had seen the pictures, the graceful flow of the mermaid’s tail as she swam to kiss Andrew through the glass. Talk shows featured sloppily dressed cranks with detailed analyses of the tail’s dynamics, the impossibility of fitting human legs in a costume that way, which always seemed to get around to aliens in the end. The talk show hosts would let them go on, building up to a fever before knocking them down with the “what if she’s an amputee?” counterargument. Nevertheless, Animal Planet hosted a “told you so” documentary. Bill and Barbara saw so much of this on TV that they started asking their son the same questions: “What really happened that night?”

  Andrew had as little to say to them when he came upstairs for ramen noodles. “Mmmh.”

  Eventually, they tried cornering him, demanding a proper explanation. “What about that girl you were seeing— Samantha? Where is she?” The TV journalists had also picked up on Sam’s disappearance and were linking the two. It was widely believed that Sam had helped the mermaid escape, or that the two of them were together on the mothership. Bill and Barbara were also getting calls from Sam’s parents, who desperately wanted to know where she was.

  “I don’t know. The ocean, probably,” Andy said as he hunkered over the open refrigerator. It started to hum, the door being open for too long.

  “Honey—” Barbara’s voice went to a whisper, “is Atlantis real?”

  “Mmmh,” he responded and closed the door, deciding that he didn’t really want to eat, anyway.

  Andrew’s parents continued to pester him even after the mermaid story died down. Without new evidence, the talking heads ran out of fuel and moved on to new crises. But Bill and Barbara could see that something was eating away at their boy, and they wouldn’t let it go.

  They started doing his laundry and cooking for him again, and even let him lapse on his rent. They worried he was regressing into a teenager, but not in the out-all-night, hanging-out-with-friends kind of way. He was sitting on his bed, meditating. They even walked in on him doing yoga. Stacks of library books clued them into the transformation that was taking place, so much so that they weren’t surprised when he declared that he would be joining a monastery that summer. He framed it as a coming-out talk, in the living room with the TV behind him, while Bill and Barbara listened and swallowed hard.

  Barbara spoke first. “Of course, dear.” Bill was still breathing tensely, but eventually managed to settle enough to ask, “How long?”

  Andrew explained that monkhood was usually a lifelong vocation.

  * * *

  Major Brig had a problem. He paced around the windowless room, a makeshift field office commandeered from SeaWorld San Diego until a more permanent facility could be built, far from prying eyes. His mermaid was dying. Or just sick. Or depressed. But whatever it was, she wasn’t happy and he couldn’t lift the communication quarantine without being sure she wouldn’t affect any of his men. The fiasco with that ichthyologist— Dr. Hobbs— proved that she could be very dangerous indeed.

  The new facility would have an underwater touchscreen and a variable communications delay, so they could cut off attacks before they developed into full-blown mind control. But that was at least another month away, and any major development at the SeaWorld facility would draw more unwanted attention. Those cranks were already catching on. Too many unmarked vehicles hovering around the back lot and SeaWorld employees weren’t very good at keeping secrets.

  Major Brig folded his hands behind his back and clicked his heels as he paced.

  About a week ago, the creature started jumping like a dolphin. The jumps were, at first, timid, experimental. But eventually she managed to clear the water gap and flopped around on the upper deck. Fortunately, there was no one on feeding duty at that time and they made it abundantly clear that the door would remain locked while she was up there. Just to be sure, though, the Major ordered an automated feeding tube to be installed that would pipe in sardines with no human contact at whatsoever, placing no one in unnecessary risk.

  The mermaid’s explorations didn’t seem to be aggressive, though. She just went up there to sunbathe under the florescent lights. Now and then, she poked around the three-foot space between the ledge and the door. She could spend all day up there sometimes, curled up like a sleeping cat, her tail around her head. Out of the water, she seemed to be cold. Definitely hungry. Why wouldn’t she get back in the water?

  Could it be some sort of a cycle? A month at sea, a month on land, by some amphibian necessity? The scientists couldn’t be sure. They kept insisting that she’s unique in the animal kingdom: neither mammal nor fish, but whatever she was, they had no idea what she needed. They pestered him for more tests, but as long as she had the ability to hypnotize, that was out of the question.

  Perhaps her sojourns on land were intended as aggressive. She hoped to trick them into getting too close.

  The most disturbing indication was the fact that, after all this time, Dr. Hobbs was still compromised. The effect on his mind seemed to be permanent. Not a day went by that he didn’t lobby for her release— into the wild of all places! One exposure was enough to turn him from a willing investigator into bleeding Greenpeace. He got more annoying by the day.

  Now, Major Brig was not an indecisive man. He was famous for turning problems into advantages, and by God there was a way to do it here if he just put his mind to it. Had he been too cautious, keeping all personnel away from the mermaid? It was a stalemate: neither side could advance from this position. And if Dr. Hobbs was already permanently contaminated, well, what harm would it be to put him in there again?

  The Major didn’t fancy putting anyone in danger, and the mermaid’s capability for physical violence was still an unknown. There would, of course, be a backup team.

  On the other hand, an incident might accelerate the schedule for the new facility, which was woefully late. They’d take her to the desert and she’d be off his hands for good. Major Brig liked the sound of that. Clapping and rubbing his hands, he smiled and said to himself, “Three birds with one stone.”

  Again, problems could always be turned into advantages.

  Chapter 15: Roman Wilderness of Pain

  Sam lay on the cold tile with her tail covering her face. The hard surface was sucking heat out of her body, but it was so nice to have something solid to touch. She was tired of floating effortlessly in the water, listlessly doing laps. Her body shook. She had long since lost the ability to cry.

  She was still changing— or at least, she believed that she was. It seemed to her that her scales were creeping higher up the sides of her torso, and she thought she could feel the beginnings of a dorsal fin on her back. The hip bones under her skin were either gone or buried so deeply she couldn’t find them with her thumbs. The tail was now pliant up to her bellybutton, and the webbing between her fingers seemed a bit longer, down to the first knuckle.

  If I don’t stay out of the water, she thought, I’ll turn into a fish. She imagined her arms melding into her sides and her hands becoming
flippers. Her neck would thicken and her cheeks would spread out to her shoulders. The scales would ride up over the smooth skin of her breasts and her back, and finally close in over her flapping mouth.

  She missed being human. She missed work— chatting with Stacy and Donny, and even Jamie, her teenage boss. She missed wearing clothes, having even the thinnest layer of cloth between her private, sensual body and the public persona she wanted to portray. She missed gravity, and desperately wanted to comb her tangled hair.

  In short, she was tired of lounging in bed and wanted to get back to the real world.

  And eat food. Real food— cooked, not living. How could these assholes believe she really wanted to eat live fish? She always winced when she felt their still-beating hearts on her tongue. Why didn’t they ask? Why did she always have to be alone?

  Hungry as she was, she couldn’t bear the thought of eating any more sardines. She might starve to death, she knew that. But the prospect of being trapped in a fish’s body and spending her days swimming back and forth was far worse.

  The door squeaked and she propped her head up. They never opened the door while she was on deck. Maybe something’s happening! Maybe they’re finally going to let her go! She’ll tell them about the magic gemstone and they’ll get somebody else to wear the tail and she can go back to her normal life and— oh. It was Dr. Hobbs.

  Somebody behind Dr. Hobbs shoved him through the door, and he nearly fell off the ledge, into the water.

  Sam watched him with unblinking eyes, which drooped from hunger. Dr. Hobbs’s own eyes were filled with pity. He crept along the treacherous ledge so that he could sit down beside her. Sam coiled in her tail like a cobra.

  “Christ,” he said, not looking at her, but down at his feet dangling over the water. “What have they done to you?” He ventured a glance at her face and saw the scar joined by a hundred little marks of abuse. Her once full cheeks were now almost hanging like jowls. Then, uncertainly, he took a lock of her matted hair in his fingers, twisting the thick felt. Sam leaned into his hand to feel the warmth and pressure on her face. She wanted to speak, to talk the way people do, but she was having trouble forming the words.

  It didn’t escape her that this was the man who had captured her, bound her, handed her over to the ones who’d brought on all this misery: the arguably unethical scientist. But by that point, she didn’t care. Any human contact was better than none.

  She found, to her enormous relief, that she was able to cry again.

  The effect of the siren song had long since worn off on Dr. Frederick Hobbs. The feelings it evoked were more of a wake-up call than a compulsion, with consequences that long outlasted the spell itself. Far from forgetting his wife and family to want to join the mermaid in the sea, it made him see traces of Sam in his daughters. He was especially appalled at himself, not just for capturing her, but for realizing that it took magic for him to see the face of suffering. He considered himself an inadequate human being for needing such nudges.

  But then he met the military officers.

  In his cooler moments, he recognized that they, too, had redeeming qualities— fiercely protective of their comrades and their homeland. But when it came to an external threat, a woman who didn’t look human, with powers they didn’t understand, they had no mercy at all. They couldn’t even see her for what she was. Perhaps they had never heard her speak. After all, Frederick hadn’t proven any better, when it was his turn to act.

  But now he could fix that. He didn’t have a plan, exactly— Major Brig had given him less than an hour’s warning before he would “infiltrate” the enemy’s territory, bring back “intel”— but he was going to use the chance to break her out. Somehow. There was only one door, and a half-dozen armed soldiers on the other side. He just had to think. Think!

  A buzzer blasted on an overhead speaker. He had been petting her forehead as she sobbed in his lap— the hard, sudden sound made them both almost lose their footing. A one-way intercom crackled and demanded, “ASK HER WHY SHE’S NOT EATING.”

  Sam was stunned. She didn’t even know they had an intercom.

  “Those bastards can go to hell,” Fred muttered.

  Sam strained to use her own voice. “G— get me out of here.”

  It shook him to hear her be so blunt. “I wish I could.”

  After another minute, the intercom blared, “ASK HER WHAT SHE WANTS.”

  Fred made a rude gesture at the camera and Sam laughed, choking on her own tears.

  A moment later, the speaker announced, “Okay, time’s up. Get out.”

  The door opened a crack and the barrel of a gun peeked out. Fred hesitated as long as he felt he could, then said, “I have to go.”

  Sam shook her head, clutching his shirt with her talon-like fingers.

  “We’ll find a way,” he promised, but it was an empty promise. He was lying to himself as well.

  She did not and would not let him go. When he struggled to stand, she dragged herself, grabbing at his legs, anything to keep him from going away. Guns meant very little to her now.

  She so tangled his legs that he tripped and might have caught himself if the tiles hadn’t been wet. Slipping, struggling, his knee went out from under him and he tumbled over the ledge. His elbows, then his wrists, then his fingertips couldn’t hold his weight and he fell ten feet into the water. Before she even heard the splash, someone on the other side of the door said, “Get her!”

  Six men in heavy riot gear trained their guns on her, blocking the door. Sam pushed herself off the edge, following Fred. For all the grace they have at swimming, mermaids have no particular skill for diving— she fell like a barbell and splashed twice when she hit the water, practically knocking Fred out in the process.

  “She’s trying to drown him!” cried a voice from above. “Shoot!”

  Sam dove quickly enough to escape the ringing bullets, which buzzed like angry hornets underwater. Fred was not so lucky and blood ballooned around him. “Shit!” she gasped, losing all the air from her lungs with one word.

  When it comes to stopping bullets, water is as effective as a human body. After all, a body is mostly water, anyway. Near the surface, a gunshot wound would be fatal, but down at the bottom of the pool was like hiding under a pile of bodies fifty feet deep: bullets whined, deafeningly echoing off the concrete walls, but they had lost all power to pierce her skin.

  The surface continued to thicken with a thick, red cloud. Sam inched upward and winced at the sound of each new bullet. Fred slid downward, lungs empty and perforated.

  They met in the middle. His eyes were alive, but not much else. She wailed soundlessly and pressed her forehead to his chest. The smell of rust was overpowering. Tendrils of blood danced around them like gauzy fabric. She couldn’t even find where or how many times he’d been hit— the fog cocooned them in a fetal haze.

  Or could she? There was a dimple on his arm that closed up under her fingers. His skin gurgled and shimmied the way her legs did when they became a tail, turning to clay, molding into a clean form. His skin belched up a spent bullet. His wounds were closing under her touch.

  The look in his eyes— he seemed to know it— watched in serene expectation that all would be well. The universe was fundamentally friendly. Sam checked her fingers, which radiated with the magic touch. Is this how Ariel saved Eric? How long would there still be surprises? Coquette hadn’t told her any of this.

  But she had no time to ponder this newfound ability: scuba divers splashed into the pool. They had spearguns.

  Spears could shoot much farther underwater than bullets, but took longer to reload. Also, the divers swam at such a slow pace that Sam was like a queen on a chessboard full of pawns. She could dart from one end of the pool to the other in the time that it took them to kick themselves a few inches forward. She also had the cloud of blood for cover.

  As soon as a gap presented itself, Sam grabbed Fred around the waist and pumped hard to the top of the pool, on the side near the deck. The
medics above had lowered a rope ladder. She made sure to loop his arm through a rung before zipping away, to the far, bottom end of the tank, hoping that the soldiers would be brave enough to left Dr. Hobbs to safety.

  The divers weren’t content to follow her around the aquarium in an exhausting stalemate. They tossed a huge net over the surface and each carried a corner to the far ends of the pool. Then they dove to the bottom, spreading it across the entire tank to methodically scoop Sam out, like a fish at a pet store.

  It was only a matter of time before they got her. She had nowhere to hide. Still, as the mesh of rope approached, she shot out of reach, into the gradually shrinking volume that remained. If she got too close to the edge in an effort to slip around, a diver would shake his speargun in her direction.

  The operation took at least an hour, and dread overwhelmed her as she watched it happen. They tied up the corners of the net with her in it, and then ratcheted it on a crane. The space in her bubble shrank as the net rose, dripping, and then her full weight took her when she came out of the water. It folded her in half and pinched the soft parts of her skin.

  They left her in the netting as they carted her through the door, into the hallway, and into the back of an armored car, with its engine running in the parking lot. The brief handover through the double doors was the first time in a month she had seen the sky.

  Sam kept looking out for Dr. Hobbs, but never saw him. The soldiers still had earplugs, communicating efficiently in sign language, unaware that the water in Sam’s lungs prevented her from saying a word. She only fully spit it up once she was laying on the metal floor of the armored car, draped in a tangled mass of netting, and the doors slammed shut.

  The net was so tight it effectively bound Sam’s arms to her hips and her attempts to worm her way out only made her flop on the floor, splashing in her own puddle. She felt a pang of hopelessness, to think they could do this. She was a commodity, a thing to be transported from one aquarium to the next, helpless on land, trapped in water. She bent at the waist, curling her tail upward in a mass of tangled nets, only to lay it down, uselessly, on the floor. The car lurched into a start, rolling her over backward.