JENN KISSED THE soft top of Mason’s head, then Evie’s. Timmy sat up.
“I wish…my mom…” he whimpered. His sobs sputtered out. He wiped the tears from his cheeks. She knew how he felt. He had to stand up, to be strong. But strong was exhausting.
She stood up. She took Timmy’s hand and helped him to his feet. Evie clung to her arm. Mason anchored himself to her leg. She looked out at the sea, where the Tentageddon grew larger and closer. She saw in her mind a flash of Dax in his truck as he pulled into the flooded carnival, his eyes fixed on her, and the Ferris wheel behind. She heard a distant chink-groan, the sound of cracking metal. She glanced up the beach, toward the carnival, its colors all dull in the strained sunlight. Then, in a green flash, the Ferris wheel was gone.
The Mega Squidinox ballooned around the middle. Its elongated belly stretched and squelched. It split apart. The Ferris wheel rolled out. The squidinox grasped the wheel with its winglike part. It launched the Ferris wheel at the Tentageddon. The wheel hit the monster just above its tentacle crown. It caught one of the tentacles like a ring at the ring toss game. Then gravity pulled it down, ripping the tentacle off with it.
The monster howled. It ROARED. The sound of its cry made Jenn want to vomit. It made her want to run into the sea and drown. Hot tears leaked from her eyes. Her kids were red-faced and weeping. Dax clung to his grandma as she shook and cried. The cape-squidoodles pressed their wiggly limbs over their humans’ ears to buffer the sound, but the sound still leached through. Beach house windows shattered. The rowdy waves flattened, their momentum stymied by the awful sound. The Mega Squidinox shook and cowered. Squids toppled out as it struggled to stay intact.
The monster’s roar echoed upward. Shock waves of sound splintered cockpit windows and ripped apart propellers. Fighter jets plummeted into the sea. The planes that survived the howl changed course, conceding the battle.
When the last plane had crashed or flown away, the howling stopped, though the creature emitted intermittent yelps, horrendous and painful.
“Grandma,” Dax said, breathless from the trauma of the Tentageddon’s wail. “Grandma…you should go. You should—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” his grandma said. She had tears on her cheeks, and blood on her lip from where she had bit it. “I’m not leaving you alone.”
“He’s right,” Jenn said. “We should all go. We can’t—”
“No!” Timmy cried.
“We have to battle!” Mason said.
“If we don’t fight it,” Evie asked, “who will? We have to stay and fight!”
“But—” No, she wanted to say. The children were wrong. They could never win this battle. She had witnessed the Tentageddon’s reckless appetite, had seen it demolish ships and poison sharks and sprout sickening new pieces of itself. She had heard its voice and peered into its dark, soulless center. It would spread across the land and sea. It would pierce the molten center of their planet, coil around it, and break the earth apart.
The children were small and easily crushed. The children were unreasonably idealistic about the likelihood of victory, which was exactly zero percent. The children hailed from a fantasyland where a broken family donned squidoodle capes and saved the world.
The children were also right. They huddled together and brainstormed battle moves. They saw the same danger she saw, but they hadn’t given up hope, and it made her feel proud. Maybe no one else was coming to save them. No one else would fight. They wouldn’t win the battle, but at least they could fight.
She didn’t know what to tell them. She wanted to tell them it would all be okay. That they could survive. They could win. She wanted to say the things her own mother would have said to make it better. She wanted, in that moment, more than anything, her own mother. To take her in her arms. To comfort her. To make things right.
Then Jenn saw, in the water, a shimmery green light, like a single Christmas light. It drifted beneath the water’s surface. It merged with a small raft of squidinox, about ten or twelve of them shaken loose from the Mega Squidinox by the monster’s terrible roar. The mass wobbled toward the shore. When it reached knee-deep waters, a bubble formed atop its surface. The bubble expanded until it stood about six feet tall, pearlescent green, like the bubble that had expelled the surfer.
Inside the bubble, a human shape appeared. It looked adult-sized, and luminous inside the swirl of squidinox greens. The human pressed one hand to the balloon, then the other. Her hands pushed through. Her body followed, out of the bubble, to the edge of the raft. She dropped down and submerged herself beneath the water, rinsing away the squidinox slime.
She swam back up, to the surface. She stood. She had long hair, down to her waist. She wore cutoff jean shorts and a PI Surf Shop T-shirt. She looked around, uncertain how she had gotten to this place. Her legs trembled. Her face betrayed her fear and bewilderment, but her eyes were bright and dewy. She was so young. So much younger than Jenn remembered.
“Jenni! Hey! Jenni!” Timmy yelled. “Look who it is!”
Jenn’s mother stood there, dripping wet, hands shaking, as her mind tried to process the wild trip she had just taken, and the girl on the beach in front of her, who wasn’t a girl anymore.
Timmy ran into the water to meet her. “Mrs. Farrow! Hey, it’s me, remember? Timmy!”
Jenn’s mother looked at the boy, and then past him, at Jenn, then over her shoulder, at the monster-scape behind.
“No, don’t look at it,” Timmy said.
“What…Where…where is this?” she stammered.
“It’s Pearl Island,” Timmy said. “It’s the future. I know it looks too lame to be the future, but it is. And that lady on the beach, that’s—”
Jenn stared at her mother. Her mom, younger than Jenn was now. A single mom to a ten-year-old girl; a mom whose husband had left her; a mom who worked too much, who missed the hours she wanted to cherish and made up for it with ice cream; a mom who did what she could, but it never felt like enough. A mom who looked afraid and confused, who didn’t have all the answers. A mom Jenn had thought was gone forever.
Jenn wanted to run out into the water, to embrace her, to beg her please.
Don’t leave. Don’t ever leave me.
But her body wouldn’t move. She was stuck in herself, on the shore, tears rolling down her cheeks.
Jenn’s mother stared back.
“Please, no,” she murmured. “Don’t tell me I missed all those years. That I missed her childhood. I couldn’t—” She choked back a sob.
“You didn’t,” Timmy said. “You won’t. You were there the whole time. Jenni told me so.”
“I…I was…. Good.”
“But for just right now, you need to be here. Because—because this Jenni needed to see you. She needed her mom. I know it’s discombobulating, riding in the squidinox like that. Believe me. But you gotta go be her mom, okay?”
Jenn’s mom nodded. She took a deep breath. She walked up onto the beach. She placed her hands on Jenn’s shoulders. She looked at her daughter. Her eyes shone with love, pride, awe.
“Oh, Jenni…it really is you….”
“Mom…” Jenn cried. “It’s…I can’t…”
“You can,” her mother said. “You can. I believe in you.”
“But I…It’s too hard. And I’m not…”
“You are amazing, Jenni. I’m so proud of you. I know it’s hard. The world is a brutal place. And I know how lonely you’ve felt, and I wasn’t always there when I wanted to be. But I always wanted to be there. And now…you’re not alone. Just look.”
Jenn blinked, and through her teary eyes she saw the faces of her children beaming back, and Timmy, and Dax, his arm still wrapped around his grandma’s shoulder. And her mom.
“What…what do I do?” Jenn asked.
“I…I don’t know. I wish I had the answers. I wish I knew the right thing to do, and I’ve tried, but I’ve always just had to make it up as I went along. But what I do know, Jenni, is that if anyone can figure it out, if there’s anyone strong enough, smart enough, creative enough, it’s you.”
Her mother hugged her. Then she let go. She looked down at Evie and Mason. She smiled. She brushed away a tear.
“You be good now,” she told them. “For your mom. And your grandma.”
She bit her lip. Her body shuddered, as she turned away, from the flood of tears that she held inside where her daughter couldn’t see them.
“Wait!” Jenn called. “Mom! Wait! You can’t go! You can’t!”
Her mother turned back. She smiled. “I…I think I have to.”
“You can’t leave me!”
“I don’t want to leave you. I wish I could stay here. I want to know everything about your life. But I can’t stay here. You know that. This isn’t where I belong. I need to go home. I need to be there when you get there. My little Jenni. She needs me.”
“Oh Mom…”
“There’s no one I love more than you. Not in all the universe.” Her mom hugged her, one last time. “Goodbye, Jenni.”
Jenn’s mom turned. She walked out into the water. Into the green mass of squidinox. And then she was gone.
The squidinox portal disbanded. Jenn stood on the beach, tears streaming down her cheeks. Her team gathered around her. She didn’t know what to do. Her mom didn’t know what to do. None of them did. They were all just insignificant humans clinging to life on their big hunk of space rock, making it up as they went along, trying to play the role of Good Mom, trying to find love, to find themselves, to nourish their Power Nucleus, pretending they could make a difference, somehow, in the vast and fickle universe.
Pretending they could guide the Mega Squidinox to certain victory.
But then—in an instant—the battle was over.
The winglike bundles on the Mega Squidinox’s sides fell off. Hundreds of loose squidinox toppled into the sea.
“No!” Timmy yelled. “Nooooo! Stay together!”
The head part disbanded next. Squidinox dove from the top or rolled down the exterior sides or plunged through the slime-skin, expelling themselves from the collective.
“They can’t,” Mason cried. “They have to stay together!”
“We need more candy!” Timmy yelled.
Jenn could hear the children in her mind, their pleas volleyed to her brain by the squidoodle. But the creatures did not respond. They continued to disperse. They swam out and away. They disappeared beneath the waves. The rounded lower lump sank down in the water. The Mega Squidinox shrank from its massive cruise-ship size to the size of a yacht, then a fishing boat, then a green raft adrift on the surface of the ocean.
Then nothing. A few stray squidinox scattered across the water. A lone squidoodle washed up on the shore.
“We need to go,” Jenn said.
“No!” Timmy shook his head. “No! We have to stay and fight!”
Out in the water, surrounded by debris from wrecked bombers and the corpses of sharks and pterodactyl and the massive Ferris wheel that had severed its pernicious limb, the Tentageddon rumbled. It began, again, to heal itself.
“Fight how?” Jenn said. “No. We’ve stayed too long already.”
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen!”
“I don’t know how it’s supposed to happen,” Jenn said. She loosened the squidoodle-cape from around her shoulders. She tossed it into the water. “But I know we can’t be here when that thing does whatever it’s going to do next.”
“But—”
“We tried our best.” She peeled off the squidoodle that hung from Mason’s shoulders. She picked Mason up in her arms. “We tried. And it didn’t work. And now we need to get as far away from the Tentageddon as we can.”
“But—”
“No buts. We need to go.”
The squidoodles that had clung to Dax and his grandma let go. They plopped onto the sand and wriggled toward the shore. Evie removed her own squidoodle and dropped it in the water.
“But…no!” Timmy cried. “You can’t make me! You’re not my mom!”
“I’m your best friend. And you’re right, I can’t make you. But I can tell you: You need to come with us. We tried our best. But the battle is over.”
“But…” Timmy looked out at the sea, where the flocks of squidinox had scattered and fled, where the Tentageddon loomed, where there was nothing and no one to fight it. He blinked back tears from his eyes. His lips trembled. His head shook, instinctively, relaying his rejection of this no-win scenario, the upheaval of his conviction that he had come on a mission to save the world, the repudiation of this stupid future where the world couldn’t be saved.
“You want me to carry him?” Dax offered. “Because I—”
“No,” Timmy said, dejected. “No, I’ll walk.”
His squidoodle-cape slipped from his shoulders. He turned and ran, down the beach, over the dunes, up to the beach house, Sea La Vista.
Farewell, battle. Farewell, beach.
The others followed. At the house, the contractor and his grandma both said goodbye. Maybe forever goodbye. They could hear the Tentageddon howling in the distance.
“But I’ll come right back,” Dax said. His grandma started down the stairs, but Dax lingered in the doorway. “As soon as we get Grandma’s dog. I’ll be back, and we’ll see if we can find a way off the island.”
“If there is a way off the island.”
“If there is, we’ll find it,” he said.
“You don’t have to come back. We’ll probably just slow you down. If you can find a way off on your own, you should take it.”
“But I—I want to come back.”
He gazed down at her, his dark eyes ardent. His shirt had gotten torn, somehow, in the battle, revealing the bronzed brawny chest beneath.
“I—” want that, too, she thought, but then his lips were pressed against hers. His arms encircled her waist. He lifted her up. He kissed her, deeply, the way she’d always wanted to be kissed, as if it was the last kiss ever on planet Earth.
It lasted an eternity, because time didn’t work the way they thought.
It was over in an instant.
He set her down.
He left, and she was left trembling from the intensity of his kiss, but she needed to leave, too. Now. She commended past-Jenn for having the foresight to assemble all the backpacks and suitcases. Though they should probably jettison the toys and most of the clothes to make room for essentials, like food and water. She opened a kid suitcase and dumped out all the Pokémon action figures crammed inside.
“No, Mom! What are you doing? Put those back!” Evie cried.
“Go put your shoes on,” Jenn said.
She removed the Snorlax float from another kid suitcase.
“But Mom—”
“Go. Now. Mason, you too! And then go grab those water bottles from the kitchen, and whatever snacks you can find, anything that we don’t need to cook, and pack it up in this suitcase while I carry everything else down to the car. Now!”
The kids mobilized. They put on shoes while Jenn carried bags down to the car. She ran back upstairs. In the kitchen, Mason and Evie filled a suitcase with snack foods.
“Hey, where’s Timmy?” Evie asked her.
Timmy.
“Timmy!”
Timmy didn’t answer.
“Timmy!”
She hated this disappearing act.
“Oh, there,” Mason said. “On the porch.”
He stood perilously close to the broken deck rail, his back to the house. His eyes gazed out at the monster-occupied sea.
Jenn flung open the back door.
“Timmy! Shoes! Now!”
“But come and look,” Timmy said.
“No. There’s no time for that. We need to go.”
“But look! Something’s happening!”
There was no time for something happening, but then Timmy leapt up, clapped his hands, and yelled hurrah! and Jenn saw a splotch of swirling green in the water, just offshore, about a hundred feet in diameter. And then the green splotch expanded, fast, stretching another hundred feet in a matter of seconds.
“They’re back!” Timmy said. Across the water’s surface, more green splotches appeared. The sea became a patchwork quilt of gray-blue waves and bright green squidinox. Clusters popped up all along the coast, as far as they could see in either direction. Larger clusters gathered farther out, past where the Mega Squidinox had stood, and beyond, all the way to the horizon.
A green patch appeared in the sludge water around the Tentageddon, and then another, and another. The squidinox didn’t merge the way they had before, but they multiplied. And as their numbers grew, the choppy waves slackened. The dark shapes beneath receded. More squidinox surfaced or materialized. They swam up from the ocean depths or transported from some other place or time. It wasn’t apparent which. But more and more arrived. The dim sky turned brighter, less hazy. The wind lost its cold bite. Gangs of squidinox surrounded the Tentageddon in a ring of luminous green. The water, once dull beneath the monster’s shadow, turned blue, with crests of silver sunlight.
The other two children ran out onto the deck.
“What’s happening?” Evie asked.
“They came back!” Timmy said. “So now we can still fight it! Come on!” Timmy bolted for the deck stairs.
“No, stop!” Jenn called. “Stop! Timmy! Please!”
She expected him to ignore her and sprint away, the way he had when he plunged into the mass of squidinox. But this time he stopped.
“We can still fight it,” he said, solemnly.
“No,” Jenn said. “Nothing we throw at the Tentageddon will defeat it. You saw it heal itself. The only thing to do now is get away. As far away as we can.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Timmy said. “I can stay. I can fight it.”
“I can’t lose you again,” Jenn said. “We’re…we’re a team. Team Wave Blast.”
“Team Wave Blast,” Mason repeated.
Timmy looked at her, then Mason and Evie, then back to her. He looked, in that moment, older, almost teenaged. His face bore an expression that belonged to the man he would become. If any of them survived the Tentageddon.
He nodded. “Okay.”
“So we’ll go. Together.”
“Okay. But…can’t we at least see what happens next? Because maybe—”
It happened before Timmy could finish his sentence. Drifts of squidinox encircled the Tentageddon in a thick ring of lustrous green. The green ring swelled inward, until its edges pressed against the monster. It puffed up from beneath, buoyed by an onslaught of squidinox reinforcements. Then, in an instant, the parts of the Tentageddon that loomed above the ocean’s surface dropped down fifty feet. A momentous SQUELCH echoed across the sea. The Tentageddon dropped again, fifty feet, and then again, as if sections of its sickening torso had gotten chopped out and beamed away.
It kept dropping, shrinking, until only its obelisk peak remained. Then that part disappeared, too, and the only creatures still visible in the sea were the squidinox.
This time Timmy ran, and Jenn didn’t stop him. She followed after him, with Mason and Evie, down to the beach.
The Tentageddon, as far as they could see, was gone. The menacing undersea tentacles had vanished. Sea and sky were clear and bright. The sense of impending devastation Jenn had felt in the monster’s presence had faded, so swiftly that she could almost not recall the terror she had felt. Everything seemed so fine.
Timmy waded into the shallow surf, amid a gaggle of small squidoodles.
“What happened to it?” Evie asked.
“The squidinox,” Timmy said. “They moved it somewhere else. Just like when they transported me.”
“But will it come back?” Mason asked. “What then?”
Then was a problem for then.
Jenn kicked off her shoes. She walked into the water where Timmy stood. Squidoodles swarmed around her ankles and brushed her toes with their slimy limbs. She allowed herself to recall The Kiss, and to imagine the then when it might resume.
“What if it’s not really gone?” Evie said. “What if it’s still out there? Or here, in the storm drains?”
Jenn didn’t have answers for these questions. They should probably still follow through with their evacuation plans. But the sea was a stunning carpet of squidinox greens and glittering waves, and she felt giddy, almost delirious with relief from the Tentageddon’s palpable absence (and from The Kiss), and she wanted to linger there in the shallow water, just a moment longer.
For now, they were safe.
But the water had an odd brownish tint. And a smell: sweet, effervescent, with notes of orange and lime and lemon.
She bent down and dipped her fingers in the water. They came back sticky. She held them up to her nose.
“It smells like cola,” she said. “Or…maybe orange soda.” She sniffed again. “Or Dr. Fizz.”
Timmy scooped a handful of ocean water. He slurped.
“Ha! I knew it!”
“What?”
“Fizz Wizard! Right before we left the beach I was thinking about the Fizz Wizard factory and how I’d never seen so much pop in my whole life and how much it would suck if I never got to go back there again because, well…But I was still touching the squidoodle when I thought all that. And it must have read my mind!”
Timmy reached into the water, amid the swirl of squidoodles. He fished out a six-pack of Fizz Wizard Cherry Cola bottles. Two squidoodles clung to the bottles, their appendages twisted around the caps. One cap popped off. A squidoodle limb plunged inside.
“They must have brought the whole factory right here,” Timmy deduced.
There weren’t factory remnants in the water, but emptied cans and bottles floated among the patches of green that now speckled the whole surface of the visible sea.
“I think,” Jenn said, “they brought a lot more than just the factory.”