3-20-15 Foolish Friday
Artwork © M. S. Corely, All Rights Reserved - http://mscorley.blogspot.com/
Story and Characters © Ken Naga, All Rights Reserved
Brought to you by Four Fools Press: “Crazy Good Stories”
It's #FoolishFriday and you asked for it; so here it is! A sample from Chapter 3 of Ken Naga's Something Under The Sea Is Drooling... On sale now at Amazon!
***
Orcinus orca. Also known as an Orca Whale, or in the more common parlance, Killer Whale.
And here I was, all alone and looking like a big can of opened tuna.
My arms started pinwheeling, churning towards the surface in as narrow an angle as I could manage. I wanted—needed—to get to the surface as quickly as possible. I had no earthly idea what good it would do me, but something small, scared and primitive was screaming at me to get away from the GIANT MAW FILLED WITH ROWS OF PEG TEETH. My head smashed through the ocean’s surface about the same time as the Orca hit my calves. There was no immediate crunching and crushing, nor was there any inexorable pull towards the interminable blackness below, so hope flashed in my mind.
Hope that was dashed a moment later when the giant mammal’s momentum vaulted me up out of the water and into the freezing air. I cartwheeled from the tremendous force and as I went heels-over-head, I caught a glimpse of the whale waiting for me below; his pink hungry mouth open wide.
This was not going to be good.
I was done for.
All of the things I’d faced and fought and this—a whale—was going to end me. Not that I dislike whales or anything, but com’on; a guy who’d taken out city-sized robots, acid-spewing creatures from the Nether Realms, and star-snacking aliens getting chomped to bits by the only other air-breathing mammal within a thousand miles? Talk about irony.
It’s weird how your mind works when you think you’re about to die. Here I was, falling down into a waiting whale’s mouth and all I could think of was dinner and being forced to eat Mom’s infamous Chicken Asparagus Casserole. That was the vilest substance I’d ever encountered. It seemed to defy the very laws of physics: slimy yet sticky and it had the uncanny ability to grow exponentially in size and fill any space into which it was thrust.
Suddenly, the whale’s mouth was filled with a glop of foul, stringy nastiness: Mom’s Casserole!
I can honestly say that before today, I’d never seen a whale gag.
I bounded off the back of the tremendous mammal’s back as it was desperately trying to dislodge the plug of rancid goo from its mouth and throat.
A whale ralph is a very, very odd sound, let me tell you.
Right before I hit the water I realized that somehow I’d flown (or been flung) out of the range of the lodestones’ influence and my imagos had fired back up. So it seemed that the things had a definite range, and that range seemed to extend only in a horizontal direction, but not straight up.
I wondered about straight down.
I grinned.
“Hold on Cobbs, I’m comin’.”
T-minus 3 hrs, 09 mins
I sucked in a deep breath and dove beneath the surface of the water. The icy wall of shivering pain that awaited me nearly blasted the air from my lungs. I swam into the darkness after Cobbs, but the creature that nabbed him was gone. Out of the frigid blackness, one came up for me. Initially, I only caught a flash of it and it looked like a living torpedo with odd black and white markings. Now, bearing down on me full bore, I knew it for what it was.
Let’s just say that wasn’t really comforting—at all.
Orcinus orca. Also known as an Orca Whale, or in the more common parlance, Killer Whale.
And here I was, all alone and looking like a big can of opened tuna.
My arms started pinwheeling, churning towards the surface in as narrow an angle as I could manage. I wanted—needed—to get to the surface as quickly as possible. I had no earthly idea what good it would do me, but something small, scared and primitive was screaming at me to get away from the GIANT MAW FILLED WITH ROWS OF PEG TEETH. My head smashed through the ocean’s surface about the same time as the Orca hit my calves. There was no immediate crunching and crushing, nor was there any inexorable pull towards the interminable blackness below, so hope flashed in my mind.
Hope that was dashed a moment later when the giant mammal’s momentum vaulted me up out of the water and into the freezing air. I cartwheeled from the tremendous force and as I went heels-over-head, I caught a glimpse of the whale waiting for me below; his pink hungry mouth open wide.
This was not going to be good.
I was done for.
All of the things I’d faced and fought and this—a whale—was going to end me. Not that I dislike whales or anything, but com’on; a guy who’d taken out city-sized robots, acid-spewing creatures from the Nether Realms, and star-snacking aliens getting chomped to bits by the only other air-breathing mammal within a thousand miles? Talk about irony.
It’s weird how your mind works when you think you’re about to die. Here I was, falling down into a waiting whale’s mouth and all I could think of was dinner and being forced to eat Mom’s infamous Chicken Asparagus Casserole. That was the vilest substance I’d ever encountered. It seemed to defy the very laws of physics: slimy yet sticky and it had the uncanny ability to grow exponentially in size and fill any space into which it was thrust.
Suddenly, the whale’s mouth was filled with a glop of foul, stringy nastiness: Mom’s Casserole!
I can honestly say that before today, I’d never seen a whale gag.
I bounded off the back of the tremendous mammal’s back as it was desperately trying to dislodge the plug of rancid goo from its mouth and throat.
A whale ralph is a very, very odd sound, let me tell you.
Right before I hit the water I realized that somehow I’d flown (or been flung) out of the range of the lodestones’ influence and my imagos had fired back up. So it seemed that the things had a definite range, and that range seemed to extend only in a horizontal direction, but not straight up.
I wondered about straight down.
I grinned.
“Hold on Cobbs, I’m comin’.”
***
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