The card-shuffling noise reaches them first and Brittany soon sees why: the stairs are folding flat, like totally forming a slippery slide instead. Plus the waterfall sound is exactly what it sounds like: a roaring wave threatening to drown them.
"Water slide!" is her only warning from Artie before she's bitchslapped in the face by ice cold water that rushes everywhere, like under her bra and into her panties and probably getting rid of the poop that she couldn't get to earlier, which she is pretty grateful for. But the water is also trying to get into her lungs and she chokes because she's not a fish and it hurts so she tries to push herself up, except she's somersaulting through the water without even trying and it's sort of fun until she remembers that she can't breathe like the fishies can. The edges of her vision are going black and it's not a happy feeling, not at all; then she remembers she's a lot like Sugar—not the Lord Tubbington likeness—but in the fact that she doesn't know how to swim, though she's pretty good at throwing her arms and legs in all directions, but Artie has told her that that isn't swimming, that's drowning.
Oh. She's drowning.
Though, as Artie said earlier, at least it's not in shit.
Arms wrap themselves around her torso and pull her down—up—she's lost all sense of direction, but she suddenly has access to oxygen and she takes needy gulps of it and it's so good being in this guy's arms, "Pull me out the water, cold and blue/ I open my eyes and I see that it's you!"
By the way, "you" means Ryder.
Most of the initial bitchslapping water has washed right over them. continuing to race downwards like a crashing wave. Tina resurfaces ahead of them, pulling a spluttering Sam up along with her.
"I can't swim," Sam chokes, coughing up some brown drizzle; if there's one good thing about zipping down a water slide at an uncontrollable speed, unsure of where they're going or if the trap's just going to end in a brick wall or a pit full of acid or hungry sharks or zombies, then it's that all the cold water is washing the poop out of their clothes. Yay!
"Where's Kitty?" Ryder asks, glancing around.
It's just the four of them; Sugar ran ahead of them earlier, though Brittany thinks that she can maybe hear the cat's miserable screams echoing from further down the water slide. Tina picked Sam up first, even though she doesn't like him at all. So where is her fellow blondie? She yells, "And time goes quicker/ Between the two of us/ Oh, my love, don't forsake me."
Tina lies down and disappears under the surface of the water, and then she's suddenly shooting forward, her long black hair streaming behind her like a comet at midnight as she flies away from them, and even though Brittany wants to race her because going down the water slide that fast looks fun, she's also afraid of drowning, so she stays right next to Ryder and Sam and Artie. But then Ryder does the same thing too except he goes like twice as fast, and Artie disappears too and Brittany is just left with Sam, who looks really scared, so she reaches over and holds his hand and they wait.
It only feels like seconds—or maybe hours—later when Ryder pops to the surface, a limp body cradled in his lap, and he's doing something really weird to her, like humping her, except it looks a lot more like he's using both fists to punch her in the stomach. And that makes Brittany really angry, because she thought that Ryder was a really great guy for saving her from drowning, but now he looks like he's hurting Kitty on purpose, and Kitty really doesn't like sex. At all.
Sam must see her angriness though, because his hand squeezes hers. "Calm down, Brit. He's trying to save her life. It's called the Heimlich Maneuver. He's using his fists to force the water out of her lungs."
"Really?"
Sam smiles as Kitty jerks back to life. "Yeah."
Brittany would like to say that was their happy ending, only happy endings don't really exist, or else this is just a really, really long story, because there is a fork in the slides up ahead. The round tunnel that swerves off to the left looks like it twists and turns and does backflips, and though it looks as nauseating as a roller coaster, the slide that continues straight ahead just ends in darkness in thirty feet.
Artie can't seem to make up his mind, so he puts his right leg down the slide to the right and his left leg down the slide to the left, but he forgot that his crotch is still there, which makes him stop suddenly in the middle.
Ouch.