Fig was in the middle of the river. And she wasn’t swimming toward the riverbank. She kept coming up, taking gulps of air, and then diving back down again.
“Fig!” Milton cried when she surfaced the next time. “Get out of there! That centopus is going to sucker punch you into an oblivion!”
Fig didn’t listen. She inhaled and went under again.
Meanwhile, the centopus seemed to be getting more and more furious by the second. Its water-engorged body was still underwater, but it was flinging its tentacles willy-nilly, banging into the now-empty canoes and spewing water to the high heavens.
When Fig resurfaced, she was even closer to the epicenter of the frothing madness. Too close—one of the tentacles smacked her in the head. She would have been all right (it was a hard hit but tentacles are quite squishy), but the sucker fastened onto her forehead. Then another sucker got her on the arm and another on the neck. She tried to twist away, but those suckers held tight.
Fig was stuck!
Before he even had time to wonder what Sea Hawk would do, Milton P. Greene was off.
He dove (belly first) into the river and began swimming as fast as his not-exactly-brawny limbs would take him toward Fig and the Push-Pull Centopus.
Fig was putting up a fierce fight. She was treading water with her legs while trying to pry the suckers from her skin with one hand and whack any nearby tentacles with the other. She wasn’t having much success though. The suckers weren’t unsucking, and the tentacles kept coming.
“What are you doing, you kook?” she yelled as Milton dog paddled up. “Go back, Sea Hawk!”
But he swam on, while fumbling one handedly with the snaps of his utility belt until he found what he was searching for.
His air horn.
Milton wasn’t sure what kind of noise a submerged air horn made, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t melodious.
Ducking beneath the waves, he aimed the horn at the centopus and pulled the trigger. Hundreds of bubbles came shooting out. At the same time, he did his best to belt out an underwater song. It was muffley and muted and gargley, but it was most definitely tone-deaf.
Instantly, the roiling river stilled. Suckers ceased their sucking, releasing Fig with a squelchy sigh. Tentacles retracted, waving so long as they drifted down, down. The creature’s water-filled body deflated and sank to the bottom of the river—to sleep, perchance to dream about whatever Push-Pull Centopuses dream about (a world where centopus-warbler love is possible?).
Milton, resurfacing into the sunshine, cawed in triumph. He had done it! He had saved Fig.
But now that he had, now that adrenaline and terror weren’t fueling him, he was suddenly acutely aware of how exhausted he was. He could only dog paddle for so long. His arms and legs weren’t working together anymore. They weren’t really working at all, in fact. The current was starting to drag him, but it wasn’t taking him to the shore this time.
Sea Hawk’s near-death cry came to him again: Shall Sea Hawk perish thus? When he was playing Isle of Wild, Milton always responded to this cry with increased button-pressing and joystick-jiggling. In the water now, he was trying to save himself, but there were no buttons and no joystick. There was only water and current and fear.
Then something grabbed him around the waist.
For a second, he thought the centopus had returned. Then he heard a voice, the voice he had come to love best of all that summer, a voice that meant business right now. “Come on, Sea Hawk! Just kick and we’ll get out of this river together.”
“Fig!” Milton sputtered. “I thought I was going to drown. We still might drown! I don’t have a lot of upper-body strength. I don’t have a lot of lower-body strength either. We should—”
“Seriously, Sea Hawk? Stop talking,” Fig ordered. “Just kick.”
Milton shut his mouth and kicked with as much umph as he could muster. Fig swam forward while keeping one arm around Milton, pulling him along. She didn’t let go or pause once.
Finally, they reached the shore.
Milton flopped down into the mud. “You saved me,” he told Fig as she collapsed next to him.
“You saved me, you kook,” Fig replied. She was covered in huge welts from the suckers, her hair buns had come unraveled, and her eyes were positively enormous. But she was smiling at him.
“We saved each other,” Milton said.
Fig nodded. “We did.”