Night Swimming

Jason Amano is seventeen, sells weed out of the back room at Qball's Pool Hall, and knows every exit in every room he walks into. On Christmas Eve the lights die, a shadow peels itself off the wall and stands up, and the only thing that keeps his crew alive is a handful of flashlights. The trail leads to Silver Springs, where Katie, the girl who swims in December and lives in a motel room, goes under the water and comes back up with a message from something that has been sitting in Florida's limestone for longer than there's been a Florida.

It wants the people, not the planet, and it's picked the stroke of Y2K to take them. So Jason does the only thing he's good at. He works his network: a chemist with a broken heart, a swimmer who hears the wrong frequencies at warehouse raves, a girl looking after her little sister while their mother works nights, a burned-out veteran in a swamp cabin who's been watching the shadows for twenty-five years. Six days, a lot of batteries, and a question none of them can answer yet: is a crew of kids nobody wanted enough to hold back the dark?