Do you remember when the sea was calm and quiet?
“Mother,” Adele said. She wandered the part of the ocean she hadn’t explored yet. A complete wasteland. This part of the ocean was dark and foggy, and there was trash and grime everywhere. It was easy to guess that they were in the spot where the humans’ waste washed up. “Mother, where are you?”
“Here.” Gloria’s voice came from the other direction, further in the dark fog. There was a cave. A very dark cave.
Adele gulped, not wanting to smell the rotting trash, and swam to the entrance of the caverns.
“What the—” Adele started.
A dead human laid in the sand buried within its grasp. His skin was pale. So pale it was like the water washed away all its color.
Bile rose in Adele’s throat. “A— Another one?” She said, trying not to gag.
“Yep,” Gloria, Adele’s mother said.
Adele could smell the flesh rot. The stink wasn’t trash. It was the scent of copper. Rotting blood. How long was the body there for? They were lucky they found it before the sharks did. It looked like a boy. He had dark black hair that tangled with sand. He bled from a wound on his forehead, the blood sank into the watery ocean air as the he laid there. Eyes wide open.
“How did he die?” Adele asked. Why did she just ask that? She didn’t want to know!
“Blunt force trauma to the head,” Gloria stated.
That didn’t sound terrible like all the other bodies scattered across the ocean. Then Adele swallowed cold air as she thought of the reason why that body laid there. “Do you think it was the raiders?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, sweetheart,” Gloria said.
It was the raiders, they killed again, and they would do it until they get what they want. Whatever that was. Adele had to figure it out. And with the help of Kai, she would. And every last raider would be dead.
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