By the time every marine animal they freed were given protection and sent away, all three of them barely had enough strength to gather themselves a couple of fish accompanied with some clams and a few seaweed stalks. But none of them felt like complaining, as Noel and Caleb were both satisfied with the progress they made so far with their abilities, as was the turtle.
Collapsing softly onto the sandy ground the moment they found another cave to take shelter in for the night, Caleb said to Noel with his bare chest heaving, “We sure had our work cut out for us, but it was all worth it… great job once again, Noel…”
“You too, Caleb…” Noel replied, panting just as heavily as him, “I can only see us getting better at what we do the more we do it, hopefully it won’t take us long to not get tired anymore from this…”
“As long as you keep up the good work, yes. Now rest well and eat up for tomorrow…”
Noel and Caleb rolled over to face the turtle lying between them with tonight’s food and took turns to pat it gently on the shell. Noel added, “You need it the most, you had to give protection to the animals AND make sure we were doing the same thing properly.”
“Come on, we all need it, no need to flatter someone for doing more work than the rest.”
The three of them shared some small chuckles over that and went right to eating, and before they knew it they had dozed off right after to awake next morning feeling especially refreshed.
“Nothing like a good night’s sleep after a hard day of working with your body, I can tell you that from the times I used to go to the gym.” Caleb said to Noel first thing in the morning.
Blinking to get the bright sunlight coming into the cave out of her eyes, Noel said, “I can see that.” And smiled to herself. The fresh feeling of a nice sleep fully recharging her for more action, added with the confidence she gained from yesterday’s hard work and payoff made her feel like she was ready more than ever to tackle another day. Not that she forgot about the dangers they still had to watch out for, but even those she didn’t feel as scared over as she did when this journey first began. She somehow felt stronger now that she was more prepared and capable than before. And from the way Caleb was enthusiastically stretching his limbs before making his way to the cave opening in search of breakfast, Noel could tell he felt the same way as her.
Even as they continued the travelling after their meal, it felt a bit more lighthearted than any of the previous days. In fact, when they weren’t concentrating to look out for any aliens that might be within their range of sense, they found themselves stirring up some chitchat over anything that just happened to cross their minds at the moment.
“What do you suppose we do if we come across a rift that leads us to a cave holding people like us?” Noel asked the turtle. “Same thing we do with the marine animals, or something different?”
“Once we free them and break them out of the mind control my kind put on them, we would have to explain the situation to them, no doubt. I can only assume then they wouldn’t want to stay anywhere in these dangerous waters even if we provide them with protection, considering they weren’t even prepared for any of this unlike you two.”
“It’s hard even WHEN you’re prepared, so yeah, that seems about right.” Said Caleb.
“But then again it may not be safe to return them back to land no matter how much they’d probably want to go there. Not only is there the glaring problem of the lesser ones of my kind still most likely investigating the lands, but it’ll take up way too much time to lead them all back where they belong and give them their legs back before we resume what we were doing.”
“Meaning we’ll just have to take them with us wherever we go?” Noel asked. “I thought you said it we must travel stealthily, and going around in big numbers will make it hard to do that.”
“I don’t know for sure what we can do, but for now let’s not count any eggs before they hatch. We’ll find a solution when it actually happens and we see for ourselves how things play out.”
The conversations continued throughout the rest of the journey to their third rift to destroy. At one point they began talking about what would become of the world if they did fully succeed and the aliens were no longer swimming in any of the earth’s waters.
“Do you think society will ever be able to recover?” Noel asked Caleb over a lunch of more fish and seaweed, to which he answered, “Society aside, I kinda fear we might have to go back to the stone age for some time because everything’s fallen apart so badly.”
“That sounds exaggerated.” Said Noel. “Don’t you think we’d be able to manage at least something with what we have left of the modern world? Like, if we know how to do it we can still get electricity running in cities and all that, and water if we’re lucky…”
“Fair enough…” Caleb muttered in a thoughtful voice. “That said,, I won’t be surprised if we resort to scavenging vegetation or hunting the animals we set free from the aliens to survive at one point.”
Noel shrugged. “Again, guess that’s just something we’ll have to see for ourselves when it happens.”
“As long as we’re not alone, we’ll live…” Caleb mumbled, and cautiously gave a sideways glance at Noel with a small smile. Noel replied with a single laugh of agreement through her nose, but only because that was all she could manage, for when she met Caleb’s eyes out of the corner of hers she again felt that unexplainable jittery feeling in her, and couldn’t come up with a proper response.
“Oh come on, what’s wrong with me, it’s just him…” She said to herself, doing her best to make sure this wouldn’t translate into tangible thought inside her head. Likewise, Caleb was also praying Noel wouldn’t be able to read into his mind as he again felt like the water around them had risen in temperature, when really it was just his face growing hot. For some reason whenever he mentioned anything related to getting through something together, his mind kept involuntarily reminding him of how much they meant for each other, resulting in such reactions to his body.
“I already said it enough times to her, so why do I keep feeling this way whenever I-“ Caleb was thinking to himself, but then his train of thought – as well as Noel’s – was cut off when a familiar bright light was starting to come into sight and the turtle announced their arrival to their third rift.
“Weapons ready again, you two – you know the rest.”
Noel and Caleb got ahold of their heads and focused on the task ahead of them, harpoons in hand. Judging from the slight but tangible tension in the turtle’s tone of voice, they could tell this rift was probably being guarded by an alien, like the first one. And their suspicions were proven true when the turtle ordered them to hide behind a boulder and swam over to the rift to dig under the sand.
“It’ll be like last time, so don’t get scared now and do what you have to do.”
“We’re not scared.” Noel replied, though her grip on her harpoon instinctively grew tense, and Caleb added, “We did it the first time even with much less experience, we can sure do this again.”
The familiar moment of tense silence passed after the turtle disappeared into the sand, and as expected, it was broken in an explosive manner when the sand below the rift erupted in the equally familiar ivory-colored underwater mist. When the floating sand cleared however, Noel and Caleb had to come to terms with the fact that this time was going to turn out nothing like the first time.
The turtle was seen hanging tightly onto one of the eyes of a huge bright-red crab the size of a suburban house, with the other eye already having been punctured by its teeth. Even in the midst of the crab’s claws making loud whooshing noises as they blindly cut through the water, Noel and Caleb could make out the turtle calling at them to strike now. Without needing to be told twice, they swam behind the crab where the claws wouldn’t reach them and cautiously got close enough to its round scarlet backside to stab their harpoons as deeply as they could into the creature. But the problem was, the sharpened steel points wouldn’t go in at all.
“The shell’s too strong to pierce through!” Caleb called to the turtle upon their harpoons just simply getting deflected off the crab’s backside with dull thuds, even after half a dozen tries.
Feeling the disturbance happening on its backside, the crab turned around and began to blindly swing its claws in the direction of its other two attackers. The turtle finally let go of the crab’s eye to respond as one of its claws snapped at exactly where Noel’s tailfin had been just a second ago.
“There’s no way we’ll be able to so much as make a dent in the shell before it thinks of healing its eyes, so change of plan; we’re going straight through the rift, quickly!”
Even as it said this the turtle hurried over to the rift and concentrated firmly on it. It was only for a few seconds, but Noel and Caleb’s anxiety and fear went through the roof during that short moment as they watched the crab continuously swinging and snapping its claws everywhere, trying to grab at whoever blinded and stabbed at it. So when the turtle told them there was nothing on the other side they practically scrambled into the rift and crossed over before the turtle itself could.
Panting madly and holding one hand to her left breast from feeling like her heart would burst out of it, Noel said, “This was not what I had in mind!” to which Caleb agreed with a sigh and a nod.
“We’re on borrowed time, let’s hurry and get this over with so that we can all be safe!”
Noel, Caleb, and the turtle had all swam through the rift with such speed, the force of it had actually shot them out of the other side a good several feet before landing on the alien planet seabed. So they got back up and proceeded to swim back to the rift with their harpoons ready again, but then they found their path blocked all of a sudden by the crab from earlier as it popped out of the rift without warning. Had they not stopped themselves just in time, they wouldn’t have even been alive to see the crab had indeed healed its punctured eyes by means of self-shapeshifting on its injuries.
All of them ducked to avoid the crab’s first swing at them with one of its claws, before swimming away from it – and unfortunately the rift too – to dodge an attack from its other claw. Then they ran – or rather, swam – for their lives as the creature chased after them in a furious crawl of eight crustaceous legs.
“What do we do now?! That rift is our only way out and we’re swimming away from it!” Caleb screamed, knowing if they so much as used another rift to escape it would greatly complicate things for them. Not to mention there was no guaranteeing they’d even live long enough to find another rift with the crab hot on their heels, especially when the distance between them wasn’t getting any further. But even while focusing intently on their surroundings to check for more dangers, in the middle of a life-or-death situation no less, the turtle came up with a plan and explained it to them.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“At the speed it’s chasing us, the only way we’re going to lose it is if we hide somewhere! Now since there’s bound to be some caves or gaps within this rocky terrain around us, if we can find one that’s the right size then we can at least hide from it until it gives up on us!”
Noel and Caleb then took the time to look around them while they kept swimming for dear life. They were in such a panic, they hadn’t even bothered to make sense of their surroundings, which were indeed all rocky and looked like they could have a number of caves or gaps in them. It was also thanks to this rocky, bumpy terrain that enabled the crab to run faster still across the seabed, using its legs to cling onto the bumps and then clench onto them tightly to fling itself forward.
“But what if it doesn’t give up?!” Caleb asked, frantically looking for a hiding place in the rocks.
“Caleb, you think I wouldn’t know my own kind’s behavior towards their prey? Trust me on this!”
“Right away!” Noel replied and she too began searching for somewhere to hide, while Caleb, still only looking half-convinced, continued to do the same.
Just when it seemed like they would run out of breath from all their rapid swimming and the crab would snatch them into its big red claws soon, Noel finally found a crack in some rocks that looked wide enough for them to swim into somewhere ahead of them. She pointed this out to the other two, and the turtle confirmed that crack might just work for them. They sped up more with all the strength still left in their fins, to the point that their muscles felt like they were burning. But they all knew if they stopped now only doom awaited them, and that determination combined with the urgency of the situation kept pushing them forward. All while the crack in the rock sped closer and closer towards them like the light at the end of a dark tunnel.
“Come on, just a bit more, we’re almost there… please let us make it!” Noel pleaded to herself with every desperate and painful stroke of her tailfin. “We can’t die here… we mustn’t die here!”
Everything was suddenly engulfed in darkness. Then there came a massive crashing noise from behind. A second later, Noel could see Caleb and the turtle again as a ray of light shone down on them all. She looked behind her to see said light coming through the crack in the rocks they had been speeding towards and had now just swam through. They had made it.
Panting harder than ever, Caleb floated beside Noel to also look at the crack and said weakly, “I… I can’t believe we actually did it… I thought my tailfin would give way and the crab would get me…”
“Yet we’re still here, alive and breathing…” Noel uttered in between heavy gasps of water. She too couldn’t believe they were still alive after such intensity, but since they were, that was something to be relieved about. While Noel and Caleb rejoiced at their survival and caught their breaths, the turtle cautiously swam up to the crack they’d gone through to see what had become of their pursuer.
“Hey, you two? I think we more than don’t have to worry about the crab anymore…”
Noel and Caleb weakly swam up to where the turtle was using their arms as their tailfins were too worn out at the moment and saw what it had called them for. The crashing noise they had heard as they entered the crack had come from the crab slamming itself into the rocks from being unable to stop itself in time, due to the immense speed it was chasing them at.
“It crashed into the rocks so hard it knocked itself out?” Noel asked. “I think that’s more unbelievable than us actually making it here alive…”
“This thing ain’t knocked out, I can’t sense any signs of life from it… it’s safe to assume it’s dead.”
“That’s even more unbelievable!” Noel exclaimed, and Caleb huffed a flabbergasted breath from his mouth before saying, “I’ll be damned, who would’ve thought we’d be saved by re-enacting a scene straight out of the first Tremors movie?”
Noel couldn’t help but snicker at his words, in spite of what they just went through. “That’s seriously what comes to your mind from that?” and Caleb insisted, “You know, that one scene where Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward jump into a concrete ditch, and the Graboid…”
“Alright alright, now why don’t we all settle down and rest our fins before heading back to the rift?”
“Definitely.” Noel and Caleb replied in unison, and followed the turtle deeper into the crack to find a place to sit down. However, if they had stayed where they were a couple of seconds longer, they would have been able to notice the front of the crab’s shell cracking open by just a few inches from the crash’s impact, where the crab’s yellowish inner fluids began to seep out of in a thin stream.
Now that they weren’t under a life-threatening situation, the three of them could see the crack they had swam through lead right into a vast cavern, similar to the ones they’d seen twice before when destroying those rifts but with some differences. For one, the walls didn’t have any bioluminescent substances, but they did have several paths branching out in many directions. Most noticeably, this cavern didn’t have any marine animals held captive in biological protective layer bubbles. This one had only one bubble right in the center which was full of what looked like faint smoke.
Sitting on the cavern floor and stretching out her tailfin for comfort while Caleb did the same next to her, Noel wondered, “What do you suppose that is? It had better not be something dangerous…”
“No need to worry, it’s nothing dangerous. It is, however, something I feel like I should talk about.”
Helping the turtle rest itself between him and Noel, Caleb asked, “Is it something we ought to be concerned about?”
“Partly. Looks like they’ve already started working on a new rift in advance, one that’ll take them straight to the land portions of your planet. Man, do they love planning ahead…”
“You could sense that just by concentrating on it?” Noel asked.
“Of course; again, biologically generated rifts. How else do you think I’m able to see if there’s any life on the other sides of rifts? If I can figure out where it leads, then I can sense the presence of life forms that may or may not be there. Anyway, what you’re seeing up there is what a rift looks like if it’s nowhere near finished. My senses tell this was made the same day they sent the smaller ones onto land after shapeshifting them. They have no idea how long it’ll take for them to come back with the exploration results, but they sure want to get there as fast as they can when they do.”
“That was like a little less than a week ago.” Said Caleb, counting the days on his fingers. “So if they really take this slow to create a new rift, you’re right when you said we’d be able to destroy a hell lot of rifts in the time it takes for them to replace one they lost.”
“We’re at three rifts down in the span of approximately three days, if we get back to the one we came through and destroy it too.” Noel said, and she couldn’t stop herself from grinning again at this thought. “Despite not knowing exactly how many rifts are out there, that progress and the knowledge of how long it takes to make a rift sure gives me a boost in confidence, somehow.”
“Like I said, they didn’t have the strength and time to completely fill the oceans with rifts. And from what I can tell, between that theory of mine and our progress, the ocean rifts only exist in places just many miles away from coastlines. That way when my kind first came to this world, they’d already be close enough to the lands to spread the effects of their powers all over them.”
“The more you know.” Said Caleb, humorously tapping a finger on the side of his head. Noel could tell he too was starting to feel more confident than ever now that they had some idea of how well their progress was going and/or expected to go. Where all of this would exactly lead them to still remained about as clear as the water after an alien hiding under the sand violently burst out of it, but at least they were no longer full of anxiety over whether they could pull through. They both now fully believed they could do it, and what with them already having succeeded twice – soon to be thrice – there was no reason for them to believe otherwise. These thoughts greatly improved their mood, something much needed considering the current circumstances, and the soothing sensation of their hard-worked tailfin muscles being put to some well-deserved rest also helped.
Around the time they began to feel like they had enough rest and were ready to go, Caleb suddenly said something very odd even for him, “Did someone fart? I think I can smell it even in water.”
Noel looked at him like he had just pulled an extremely lame April Fools’ prank on her. “Can you even smell farts underwater?” She said, unable to believe she was actually asking such a thing. But at that moment, her nose also picked up something strange, making her brow furrow in confusion.
“I smell it too, it’s a weird scent that I don’t recall smelling in here before.”
“So I’m not alone.” Said Caleb. “I had to ask because I thought it smelled kinda stinky like a fart, but now that I smell it again, it’s more… salty? And that’s saying something, considering we’re in salt water.” He then paused to ask the turtle, “Does your planet’s oceans also consist of salt water?”
“Yes – and now that you mention it, the scent is indeed salty… and it seems to be coming from…”
Seemingly following the mysterious scent, the turtle swam upwards to where the crack they came in through was. Noel and Caleb followed close behind, and right away they were able to find the smell’s source, which was the dead crab’s cracked shell seeping out its fluids from the inside.
“Just how hard did it run into the rocks to not only die, but crack its shell?” Caleb asked the turtle. Noel turned to the turtle to ask the same thing, then felt her blood turn to ice as she noticed the turtle’s eyes wide open with panic and heard what it had to say.
“If the inner fluids were leaking into the water this whole time, there’s no doubt something could’ve smelled it from a distance away and got attracted by it… we got to move fast!”
Noel and Caleb’s hearts missed a beat upon hearing that, even as the turtle hurriedly ushered them out of the crack. The crab’s corpse had pretty much acted as a sign saying “all predators welcome to come eat us” and yet it had completely slipped their radar until they too could smell its fluids, how could they have been this oblivious?
“Don’t blame yourselves for this, nobody would’ve expected the shell to crack like that, especially while our backs were turned. Now if we can all swim away from here just fine and- LOOK OUT!!!”
Instinctively Noel and Caleb ducked down at the sudden yell from the turtle, and just in the nick of time too, as they felt something speed past them which could only belong to the thing that had been mere inches away from slicing them up – or rather, THINGS. They only had a second or so to look at what they were up against to realize it was a whole horde of crabs, ones four times smaller the one they had killed before. Needless to say, Noel and Caleb didn’t need to be told to frantically flip their fins away to escape their aggressively snapping claws.
Even though these crabs were smaller, they couldn’t even compare to the crab from earlier because there were so many of them. While Noel and Caleb did manage to thwart some of them by tricking them into running straight into some rocky walls, there were still too many of them by the time the rift they had come through began to come into sight. It was no use trying to fight them off with their harpoons either, as their shells were just as tough as that of the bigger one.
“Now what?!” Noel screamed in terror. “They’re gaining on us and we can’t get away!”
“Don’t remind me!” Caleb screamed back, looking behind his shoulder only to scream some more as the crab at the front of the horde almost sliced off the tip of his tailfin.
“I’ll try to hold them off the best I can, you two go and destroy the rift! Don’t worry about me, I’ll be with you again anyway once the rift fully implodes!”
Neither Noel nor Caleb liked the sound of that very much, but it was the only option left for them. They had no choice but to simply look at the turtle as it bravely launched itself into the eyes of the crab at the very front. Upon having its eyes bitten and punctured, the crab tripped and fell over its own eight limbs. This caused most of the crabs following close behind to also trip and fall over in what could only be described as one huge crustacean pileup, obscuring the turtle from sight under all the round fat bodies and long wriggling legs.
This did buy Noel and Caleb a good twenty to thirty seconds, which was enough time for them to safely reach the rift and rip through its protective layer with their harpoons, eventually piercing the rift itself. Once again this resulted in them getting transported back on earth to where they were before, and they wasted no time taking care of the rest of the rift.
Like the previous two times this happened, Noel and Caleb hid behind a rock to watch the rift implode in a giant whirlpool that sucked in a whole bunch of aliens for a full minute. Though this time, the whirlpool only shot out something like five dozen marine animals or so instead of the immense amount they saw before, which kind of made sense as this rift didn’t lead them to any caverns keeping these animals to be eaten later.
When the minute passed and it was all over, Noel and Caleb swam out from their hiding place and looked frantically amongst the several marine animals in search of the turtle. But no matter how hard they looked, the turtle was nowhere in sight. They tried calling out to it to receive no reply.
“I don’t understand, it should be here after the rift imploded, shouldn’t it?” Noel asked Caleb with confused uncertainty. “It crossed over from here to there using this rift, the implosion should have brought it back here like us!”
“Yeah, it should have!” Caleb agreed. “But then…”
He stopped himself mid-sentence, and Noel knew why the second he did. There was no reason for the turtle to not return even after the rift implosion, unless it was…
Noel and Caleb’s minds then jumped to when the turtle disappeared from their sight as the crabs tripped over one another. Then the haunting possibility of what might have happened during the twenty to thirty seconds it took them to reach the rift and destroy one side of it struck them harder than a punch to the face. Not all the crabs had fallen over, and even the ones that did could have picked themselves back up during the brief time Noel and Caleb were occupied with the rift. And assuming that was truly the case, then…
“NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” Noel and Caleb could only scream in despair at the revelation they were forced to reach from this.