Twisting instinctively as he fell, Adam hit the water with his heels, opening a splash big enough to let him break through the river’s tension membrane without smashing the life out of himself when he hit the hard surface. Still, the smack hurt. The water was stunningly cold. Adam flailed to slow his descent into the dark depths and kicked through the bubbles of his entry to push himself back up to the air. His brain was screaming from the shock of the impact and freezing water.
Adrenaline shot through his body as events fragmented and sped up in his panic to survive. He could see the wavering outline of the glowing bridge lights high above as he swam upward. Liv was somewhere up there, perhaps still on the bridge, watching him drown. He might never see her again. He kicked harder. Adam broke through the surface, gasping and shivering.
The acid in the water stung at first, then burned his frozen skin, blistering in red pustules along his arms. His face and neck howled with the agonizing torture of bitter iciness and chemical fire. Bobbing in the poison water, kicking his legs to stay afloat, Adam spotted the foamy dark rocks of the shore on the closer Brooklyn side, and frog-swam in that direction. He coughed and moaned as he stroked his arms through the toxic current.
Each splash on his face brought a new wave of pain. He could feel his skin crisping under his heavy wet clothes. As he swam closer to the rocky riverbank, Adam felt a bizarre prickling sensation all over his body, a freaky tingle under the searing chemical burns. His Lucid focused in tightly on the fold of his inner right elbow, frozen in mid-stroke. He concentrated on a closer zoom, to the pores of his skin, then even closer to the cellular level.
