Natural Enemy 1-5B

His vision went white, the sky blinding his open eyes with a camera flash jagged enough to blot out everything. He barely had time to wipe his eyes before the thunder caught up and tried to shake his teeth out of his gums.

Kai’s mouth hung open, hair standing up on his arms with the air as wet as it was charged. Rain battered him as much as the wind, but it didn’t stop him from walking out onto the beach behind the village. His eyes were almost as wide as his jaw as he took it all in, the sight of the world ending in the most insane way. 

There was no more ‘postcard’, all the ‘chill island vibes’ ripped apart and fed to the sharks as the wind and water howled and roared with the lightning flashing bright enough to light up the darkness.

Violent waves churned the water in jagged ugly mountains of frothy gray-green, slamming into the shore with a sound like cannonfire. Thick spray misted and fogged the air with every splash of surf on sand. He could taste it in the air, almost enough to drink from here; the air ninety percent salt and ten percent fear. Whatever it was, it hung heavy on his tongue and sat in the back of his throat; strong and metallic like biting down on a battery.

None of that really mattered to him right now, though, not as Kai stood on the sand. Wind whipped against his bare chest and water beat at his legs, both hard enough to actually sting his skin.

Part of him knew he should feel scared, or worried, or something bad, but looking at it all, Kai couldn’t even try to lie to himself. He felt… good.

Better than good, even. He felt awake.

Any little laziness left in him was gone, sucked out by the screaming storm winds as the blood in his body pounded in his ears with every clap of thunder. This was real. The pork, the hut, the smiles; all that was like a dream in front of the noise, the danger and the power right in front of him. 

The stormy water called to the rush in his veins, the “curse” or whatever the Elder called it. The hum under his skin spiked loud and proud as the ocean raged, turning into a roar the longer he stood there. 

It wanted to be out there more than anything else. 

It wanted to play in traffic.

Board under his arm, Kai trudged his way toward the surf with no hesitation, the sensible voice in his head choked out until it stopped bothering him with craziness about ‘drowning’ or ‘rocks’ or anything else. Let’s do this.

Kicking off his sandals into the last bit of dry sand behind, Kai sprinted with bare feet into the surf.

The water was a wild animal and as much as it made him feel alive, it didn’t welcome him.

Not one bit.

Cold. The shock of it punched the air out of his lungs, water temperature almost freezing as the storm welled up. Angry, too. 

Wave after wave after wave bashed at his bare chest, almost knocking the wind out of him as he scrambled onto the board. Strong hands paddled hard as he took himself further out into the water, fingers pushing aside water that was no longer his friend. “Screw you.”

He took a mouthful of spray — salty, gritty with stirred-up sand — and spat it out with the two hissed words..

Calm waters worked with him but this ocean, charged and riled up by the storm, tried to buck him off; wave after wave grabbing at his arms and ankles till his muscles screamed with every push through the whitewater. 

Kai shoved a wall of water aside with a hard thrust, both palms snapping up and out fast and hard. The water obeyed, backing up just enough to let him slice through. Cheat. Cheat. Cheat.

He didn’t care. Not a competition.

He didn’t have to play fair against the open ocean. A grin on his face, wild and eager, Kai fought his way past the break, pushing harder against the water as his heart hammered against his ribs like the village drummer; Topo.

The horizon stared back at him, nothing but a mess of heaving gray hills as Kai sat up on his board, straddling it as he bobbed like a cork. Almost here.

He felt it before he saw it coming, the charge under his skin spiking hard in time with his heart a few seconds before the shadow fell over him. Blue eyes widened as he looked up and kept looking up; a moving wall staring back at him as the hair on the back of his neck stood up straight.

A dark, roaring beast that blotted out the bruised and flashing sky; too big and too fast. It should have sent him scrambling for the shore, maybe even screaming for help. No holding back.

Kai grinned with all teeth as he turned the board, power singing loud to be used. “Come on then!” The wind tore the words away as he paddled forward, digging even deeper to use what he had inside him. 

It felt like being hit by a truck; a rear-end from a full Mack, the type he’d seen roaring down the highway carrying a whole trailer at speeds that looked dangerous. The wave met him and the surge lifted him, higher, higher, until the world tilted upside down.

Screaming in silence as the storm took his hearing, Kai stood up on the face of a wave that was as much a cliff of churning glass as it was water.

He fell as the wind roared even louder in his ears, a high-pitched wail that outdid any siren from back home. His board carved a bottom turn, the fins of the board groaning as he flew over the surface of the water. 

Spray blasted him like a shotgun from all around inside the wave, the gray churning wall towering high in the curl and threatening to crush him as he danced with the hurricane. Another laugh tore its way free, a raw ugly sound that felt like freedom. This is it. This was what the power was for. 

Just this. Being the storm.

He felt infinite. He felt unbreakable. He felt—

The wave shifted as the ocean remembered it wasn’t his friend.

The lip curled tighter and a thousand tons of water decided to fall.

Oh. Kai felt the board fly out from under him and vanished into the wave, nothing between him and the open ocean but the soles of his bare feet. Oh no.

The impact knocked the breath out of him, nothing graceful about his fall and nothing clean about the landing. Like a giant’s hand swatting a fly, the wind took him before anything else as he skipped like a stone across the surface. The world went white, flashing with lightning, then black, then a chaotic, churning gray as he tumbled, ragdolled and spun across and under the water without any way to know up from down. Wai-w-wait!

Limbs yanked in all four directions at once, Kai pushed past the pain as he kicked toward what he hoped was the way out. Seconds felt like minutes but he pushed and pushed and- F-finally!

He broke the surface with a heavy gasp, the teenager sucking down air and seafoam both. He coughed and spluttered, eyes stinging as he treaded water as best he could, strong arms and legs pumping under the surface to keep him above the chop.

“O-okay.” His voice came out a wheezing rasp, too much salt down his throat and too close to his lungs to work right. “B-bad one. Head in, gotta head in.” Kai turned towards what he felt was the shore. Hell, he could see it even; the beach way off in the distance.

A thin line of white sand the dark sky and gray of the ocean couldn’t hide from him.

Kai started to swim, only to feel his stomach drop; the bottom falling out of his gut.

The water was different now, the chaos of the surface gone and replaced by something even worse. 

Kai’s eyes went wide, blue the size of dinner plates as his legs felt the sudden pull. The hand of the sea; cold, relentless, and solid dragging him back out into open water. Riptide. 

He could already feel the funnel under the water, a vacuum cleaner sucking everything back into the deep. A current would have been bad enough, a wave he could roll with even, but this was a conveyor belt. A river within the ocean, moving fast, moving deep, and moving out. Further away from the shore, away from the island, away from what he knew as home.

No big deal. Don’t fight. A year’s worth of practice on a board and in the water tried to take the wheel, ingrained instincts doing their best to calm him before he panicked and made everything worse than it already was. Swim parallel. Relax.

Kai tried. He really did; kicking, stroking, and swimming as carefully as he could. 

But the current didn’t care for his plan, the liquid wall dragging him backwards even as he tried to swim sideways rather than directly against its reverse rushing force. 

Backwards.

And down.

The light from the angry sky vanished to nothing as air went with it, lungs filling up with brine again; the gray-green deepening to a murky, suffocating black. No more roar from the waves above in the churning stormy sea, just a deep humming pressure that pushed in on his ears and pushed him further down no matter how hard he stroked and kicked. 

Kicking did nothing but he didn’t stop; each push from his legs a hard and frantic bicycle motion that felt more and more useless the more he did it. Fingers clawed at water, powers screaming to be used, but the water refused his pull, still charged by the storm and thicker than even Gatorade, sticky against his command.

Viscous, almost. 

Black spots danced as his eyes bulged out in the green-black darkness, his chest getting tighter and tighter as the pressure pushed in there too; a world of force crushing the air out and leaving nothing.

Nothing but panic.

His heart beat slower even as his brain rushed faster, nerves firing off a hundred times a second as his lungs and eyes and brain burned with panic that screamed for release against the terrifying pressure and darkness. 

It felt like it was holding him, cradling him almost. Blessed and damned…

A dry, rasping whisper echoed in the drowning-dark of his skull, the Elder’s voice suddenly louder than everything else. He takes your swim.

He could feel it seeping into his pores, the vast ocean feeling like it was eating him from the outside in; dissolving at the boundaries of his skin. The static under his skin turned into a purr, a happy, eager thrum from power that sang with the feeling of water. 

It wanted to join. It wanted to dissolve. Where did Kai end and the ocean begin?

The pull was there, not like his hold on the water, but something in the water wanting to take him back; to give him all the power he ever wanted and could ever need if he just… let it happen.

Just close his eyes and… let… it…

Mom.

The image flashed in the blackness behind his eyes. Grainy. distorted. A doorway in the rain.

Dad.

Standing in front of him. Arms out. Shadowy figures blocking the light.

Run, Kai!

They hadn’t let go.

They hadn’t dissolved.

They had stood there when he couldn’t. Both mom and dad had taken the bullets and fought the ocean of bad luck and bad men and bad odds he’d brought down on their heads. They had fought until they couldn’t stand, just to give him a chance to run.

And what? Now he was going to drown? Just lie here and water take him out?

The surge in his chest charged, heart beating harder and faster past the burn of no air in his lungs. Hotter, uglier and tasting like copper and old pennies, Kai let the taste of rage burn through him hot as it could get. 

No.

The word was loud in his mind, loud enough to scream out with air he didn’t have.

NO.

There was no technique he had to use. Not a single shape to make her; no marble or bullet, or a turtle or a wave. Kai  just reached inside, grabbed that purring, happy static, and strangled it. He grabbed the curse with both hands and turned it into a weapon.

GET OFF ME!

He shoved.

He didn’t aim. He didn’t care about the physics. 

He detonated.

There was no sound underwater. Sound needed air. This was just raw force and a path; a concussive blast erupting from the bubble of vacuum around his body and moving at a speed he couldn’t calculate if he even tried.

…

The riptide shattered, ocean water vaporized as the massive weight of the deep was blown apart by raw rejection. 

Kai was a bullet as he broke the surface, a missile launched skyward by his own bomb as he flew up, up and out.

He hung in the rain, free from the depths as nothing more than a flailing, coughing projectile surrounded by a mist of pulverized seawater. Blue eyes red from seawater saw the beach, saw the coconut trees; all of it under a still-gray sky.

Before he could even smile, gravity caught him.

Kai fell; all of his momentum gone as he dropped to the ground by natural law.

His body hit the sand. Hard.

Like on the water, he bounced, rolled and skipped, but he didn’t go under.

Sand scraped the skin off his elbows, rocks dug into his body, and everything felt like one big bruise as he tumbled like a thrown toy. Finally, he came to a stop in a heap of tangled limbs and misery barely a good fifty feet from the tide line.

Blood trailed down his forehead as it rushed through his ears, pumping hard enough to blank out every other sound as he lay face down in the white sand, chest heaving.

Then, he retched.

His stomach convulsed, violent and sudden, as he coughed up what felt like a gallon of saltwater. Hot stinging bile and brine poured free out of his nose and mouth, soaking into the sand.

Kai finally gasped, sucking in air. Sweet, beautiful air even if it tasted like wet sand and a little like blood. “Jesus…” A bubble of snot and salt popped on his lips as he rolled onto his back.

That was so stupid.