While the frigid water chilled her to the bone, Natalia felt relief as she stepped from the scorching sand into the surf. Small waves crashed around her ankles, gulls cried out overhead, and the roar of the ocean competed with the sounds of fellow beachgoers; playing, surfing, and flirting. Natalia shivered and stood there for a few minutes, steeling herself to continue into the freezing water.
The young black woman had felt confident in her skin's natural protection from the sun's rays, but the intense heat bearing down on her made her second guess the decision to forego sunscreen. Making her way back to her picnic blanket, she pumped some into her hands and lathered it on, taking care to reach all the way around her hot pink one-piece. Coming to the beach alone made it difficult for Natalia to reach the spots on her back, but she was used to it -- she frequented this beach by herself for exercise and mindfulness.
'In fact,' she thought to herself, 'I don't particularly want to be around other people right now, getting splashed by kids or crashed into by body surfers.' She walked a fair way down the beach and reentered the surf, wading quickly in until it reached her neck, then finally submerging herself fully.
"Fucking hell!" Natalia swore aloud, treading water to warm up. She turned to face the shore, trying to gauge how far out she was. As she turned back around, a wave caught her off guard, slapping her in the face and filling her mouth with brine. Spluttering and rubbing her eyes, she struggled to stay afloat as wave after wave buffeted her, seemingly out of nowhere.
'Please don't wipe out, please don't wipe out,' she prayed, legs kicking hard to try to keep her above the assault.
Almost as suddenly as it had started, the strangely violent waves stopped. Natalia, suddenly finding herself able to stand, focused on coughing and blowing her nose, trying to recover from the onslaught. Seaweed brushed against her legs and hips, swirled up by the tide.
"What the fuck was that?" she wondered. Knowing that the current may have moved her while she was distracted, she looked back at the beach, only to find herself at an incredible distance from where she started out. While she wasn't far from shore, she could barely make out the figures in the distance. She breathed a sighed of relief; if she had wiped out here, she would have been totally alone.
The current had pushed her into a relatively calm part of the beach; waves crashed, white and foamy, around her, stirring up the sand and seaweed, but it never seemed to rise above her armpits. She suddenly felt uneasy, flinching at each brush of leafy or slimy seaweed against her legs or waist. While Natalia knew the remote beach well enough not to worry about the lack of a lifeguard, she'd never strayed so far from the main strip before, and she had no clue what could be in the cloudy waters beneath her. Images of blue-ringed octopuses, bluebottles, and jellyfish flashed through her mind, and while the rational part of her mind told her that this was just dead seaweed that she was feeling, her body told her to *get out of the water*.
Natalia made to turn, flinching as something brushed against both arms, and suddenly found that she couldn't turn at all. Something -- two somethings? -- had affixed itself to both of her wrists, holding them underwater. With the choppy water stirring up the sand, she couldn't see what had snagged her. She freaked out, pulling with all her might. She was a short and skinny woman, so that wasn't very much, but fear made her strong. Bracing her legs and using her hip and core strength to turn slightly, she snapped one of the bonds holding her, and pulled her arm up out of the water to see what it had been.
The slimy remains of something thick and dark green was looped several times around her wrist, still clinging on. The loose end came to a jagged halt from where she had snapped it, and looked as though it was made from the same material the entire way through -- rubbery but smooth, elastic but tough. Natalia reached back into the water, clasping her hands together with interlaced fingers to use her arms' combined strength to rip her other bond off, but a third rope-like tendril lashed its way around both wrists, tying them together and once more restraining both of Natalia's hands underwater.