I do not know where to begin this story.
I strike a match.
I know where it will end.
It begins with sunrise, I guess, on the first day. It was hot, and I didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t like Scotty, and that made everything wrong. The sun was only a distant blister of half-baked light swelling above the eastern horizon, melting the water into the sky so that our boat appeared to be nudging slowly forward into a vast and overwhelming heat, like an oven, or a furnace. Only a little closer was a thin line of sand pines, black against the torrid light, that reared above the narrow spine of dunes that made up Okaloosa Island.
Behind me was cool darkness. And giggles. When I heard the sound, my heart sank a little. I could feel it shrivelling and dying. Giggles.
‘Not much of an island, is she?’ the boatman said. His voice barely rose above the gurgling mutter of the Evinrude. He was a shape hunched over the wheel, his head bobbing in the gloom. But he handled the boat competently. The still waters of Santa Rosa Sound seemed to barely touch the Boston Whaler’s fibreglass skin.
It’s the heat, I remember thinking. I wanted to take off my shirt. The sun wasn’t up and already I was sweating. The conspiracy of temperature, humidity and perspiration had transformed my clothes – a cotton T-shirt and a pair of ridiculous clown shorts of a type that all the kids were wearing – into clinging, claustrophobic torture devices that rubbed my arms and increasingly ample stomach and the backs of my knees in all the wrong ways.
But you can’t take off your shirt, I reminded myself dejectedly, and it was true. There had been too many busy days when I’d skipped the gym or traded jogging for an extra hour’s sleep or lied to my workout group about not being able to escape the office, and many, many nights of beer-soaked conversation with grad students and faculty cocktail parties and occasional forays into seminar hospitality suites. When once I had been trim and lean and narrow-waisted, now my stomach hung over the waistband of these ridiculous shorts in jiggling folds, and my chest had begun to sag embarrassingly – somebody once jokingly suggested I look into wearing a sports bra.
How could I have let this happen? I glanced back at Heather, who was perched on a bench in front of the boatman. As I stared she became more than a shape in the dark, but I didn’t need to see her to know every detail of her appearance. I seemed to carry a permanent image in my brain. She was thin but not sinewy, like a long-jumper. More elegantly shapely – a gymnast without the muscle mass. Her hair was straight and blonde, framing angular cheekbones, a tiny bud of a nose, and dusty blue eyes that begged you to adore them. And she was bright somehow, as if she radiated energy. In all she possessed an intangible allure that defied ‘pretty’, or ‘beautiful’ or ‘sexy’. It was a natural quality of attraction, a gift that deserved respect. Scotty had his arms draped over her thin, blonde shoulders, and he wasn’t even looking at her. But Heather’s eyes flicked to mine for a moment, and a subtle shift in her expression seemed to acknowledge that yes, she could hear my thoughts, even the ones I wasn’t articulating. Which is why she’d brought Scotty along. I hastily turned away.
‘A good hurricane would put her under 15 feet of Gulf of Mexico,’ the boatman declared. For the life of me I couldn’t remember his name. I think it was DeVries. He was under contract to the University of Florida to provide water transportation services for visiting researchers. I’d gotten his name from the provost’s secretary, who had told me he was a reliable fellow, though I had my doubts. But DeVries, if that was his name, had shown up at the God-awful hour I’d asked and indeed, was driving us to the island.
I studied the fuzzy line of tree-ridged dunes. ‘No, Doc, you’re looking at the wrong island,’ DeVries chuckled. He pointed at the trees. ‘That’s Okaloosa Island. It’s a barrier island – million-dollar an acre Gulf-front, except what the US Air Force owns. Stretches all the way from Destin to Pensacola, a good 50 miles.’ He gargled and spat over the side, into the turgid water. ‘Your island is over here, to the right.’ He nodded into the azalea-coloured haze.
I stared hard but couldn’t see it. I heard Heather whisper, ‘Uh, yeah,’ and then her voice trailed into a disappointed ‘Ugh.’ I still couldn’t see it, but I could feel Heather’s pitying gaze on my back.
‘You call that an island?’ Scotty smirked. ‘What’s its name? Gilligan?’ He looked like Johnny Depp I decided, not realising I’d been working that problem in the first place. Johnny Depp, or at the risk of dating myself, one of the younger Flavour of the Month heartthrobs, or the endless parade of bachelors you see on televised reality shows. The pouting lips. The greasy black hair. The hint of stubble on his starved cheeks. The smirky insolence in his dull eyes.
I gazed frantically into the murk, feeling dumber by the minute, and wished I’d chosen the bifocals like the optometrist had advised. ‘You’re at that age where your eyes are transitioning,’ he’d told me, and I’d wondered, Dear God, I’m only 42 and I need bifocals? What will 50 bring? Diapers?
‘It’s a spoil island,’ DeVries explained. ‘It was dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the ’50s when they cut the channel down Santa Rosa Sound between Choctawhatchee Bay in Fort Walton Beach, which is just east of here, and Escambia Bay in Pensacola about 45 miles to the west. There’s not enough water movement through the sound to erode the island, especially after the grass took root and tied down the sand. So it’s been here ever since.’
Finally I saw it, barely rising above the water, a dark hump like the crusted back of a whale. A few scraggly clumps of Uniola paniculata, ‘sea oats’ as the locals called them, grew at the island’s interior, which rose only a little higher than the surrounding beach. The fringes were bearded with saltmeadow cordgrass.
‘She ain’t much of an island, and I guess after today she won’t be anything at all,’ DeVries went on. ‘They open that new pass and the water will fairly rip through here.’
Yes. The new pass. One of the reasons we were here.
A group of businessmen in a town called Navarre, about halfway between Fort Walton Beach and Pensacola, wanted to dig a channel across Okaloosa Island to the Gulf. They claimed such a channel would create a ‘flushing action’ in the sound, which had become badly polluted over the years with runoff and sewage spills. The real reason, of course, was that a channel would allow Navarre to develop a deepwater sport fishing industry, thereby bolstering the economy of that tiny Gulf-side town. Nobody in the Department of Environmental Protection would sign off on the project, but the governor’s office had intervened, prompting rumours of payoffs and favours owed. Whatever the reason, today was the day when barges tied up next to the pass would remove the last of the retaining rocks and allow unrestricted water flow through the channel. Once the flow was stabilised, boat traffic would be allowed to use the opening.
From the edge of my vision I saw Heather and Scotty exchange smug looks. He patted her on the shoulder, and I felt myself hurting suddenly – how utterly casual the gesture had been, a simple pat on the shoulder, and how desperately jealous I felt that Scotty was granted that kind of access when to my mind such an act deserved the status of … I couldn’t say. It was something I would lie in bed mornings during the muzzy period between sleep and consciousness and picture myself doing, and I’d feel a wash of contentedness slip over me. It was the stuff of dreams, if such a thing existed.
‘You think you could speed up, Skipper?’ Scotty hailed back over his shoulder. ‘This ain’t no three-hour cruise.’
DeVries, who seemed impervious to Scotty’s sarcasm, gave a healthy laugh. ‘Guess I could, but why stir up all that crap in the water?’
Crap in the water. The other reason we were here.
I asked him, ‘Is it bad?’ and he darkened and suddenly became serious. ‘“Bad” doesn’t begin to tell the story,’ he said. ‘You get the crap in your eyes or down your throat and you’ll be smarting the rest of the day. It’s worse than tear gas – not that I’ve been tear gassed. But it’s bad. I’ve lived here since 1964 and I’ve never seen anything like it – dead dolphins, dead birds, dead fish – hell, even the channel catfish are dying … and you’d need a hydrogen bomb to wipe out channel cats.’ He paused a moment, maybe for dramatic effect, or maybe to wonder if he should say anything at all. But finally he added, ‘I hear there’s something worse moving out of the bay.’
I asked him what he meant.
He leaned over and I could barely hear his voice over the motor’s throb and the water gurgling against the hull. ‘Some of the old fish heads up in Val-p and Niceville, along the northern edge of the bay. Shrimpers. Mullet fishermen. Oyster catchers. They say it’s out in the bay,’ he nearly whispered. ‘Some kind of crap in the water, like this red tide stuff,’ and he jerked his head at the sound. ‘But it’s worse. It kills everything – in the water, and above.’ He stared at me fiercely, his face hard. ‘Ev-ree-thing,’ he reiterated, emphasising each syllable. ‘I hope you folks know what you’re doing.’
I glanced at the vinyl bags of our gear lying in the bottom of the boat – tents, food and water, and all the equipment we’d need to assay the unprecedented bloom of the red tide organism that had occurred in these waters over the summer. I didn’t buy his story about a new, killer organism. Some of the fishermen were rustics who concocted tall tales. But it could be that an intensely concentrated bloom had taken place in the bay. The red tide dinoflagellate produces a brevetoxin that becomes an aerosol under certain conditions and is transported by the wind. It causes massive irritation to the eyes and respiratory passages. But in lethal quantities? Maybe to something that was allergic to the toxin. But typically only marine creatures were lethally affected.
‘We’ve got masks,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘And filters.’ And then I did a rotten thing, an act for which I still feel a small degree of shame. I turned back to Scotty and I said very clearly, ‘I just hope we brought enough filters. We would have had plenty for two –’
‘Don’t worry about me, Professor,’ Scotty mocked, his narrow Flavour of the Month eyes watching me without blinking. They glittered with an unidentifiable malevolence. ‘I’ll borrow one of Heather’s swimsuit tops and strap it over my mouth. You wouldn’t mind –’ and he turned solicitously to Heather, who looked down at the bottom of the boat and muttered, ‘You’re such a nut,’ and struggled to keep her expression neutral.
I turned away. I could feel my face burning, which was impossible because the blood had long ago drained to some hidden reservoir in my body where it weighed me down, pinning me to the lacquered bench there in the bow. I could not move, but my mind was frenziedly active. I saw myself stepping over the bench that separated me from the two of them and planting an unsteady Wet Shoe squarely in Scotty’s Abercrombie & Fitch chest and shoving him ass over tea kettle into the foul water of Santa Rosa Sound. Let him see how well he breathed with a sinus cavity full of Karenia breve.
But I merely shook my head and sighed wearily. This jealousy was pointless. And that’s exactly what it was. Jealousy. Without a word having been spoken I’d been exposed as a foolish old man, and as a result I was angry, and jealous, and hot. How ridiculous had it been to arrange a weekend alone with a graduate assistant – if such a thing as a romantic liaison were even possible. The university observed a strict prohibition of such relationships at the cost of tenure, and future employment, and reputation – all commodities I’d invested a lifetime trying to acquire. Besides, I don’t know that I was even in love with Heather. She interested me, yes. I found her attractive, and witty, and interesting in some indefinable way. But maybe it was something else. Maybe I just wanted her to be attracted to me. Maybe as I scrutinised the mirror and saw lines beginning to reach out from the crooks of my eyes and gnarly grey hair spreading beyond ‘distinguished’ into ‘old’ I’d begun to worry that such a beautiful and intelligent young woman – or any woman for that matter – would ever find me attractive. Particularly after my ex, whom I called Psycho Cecelia, had departed my life so unceremoniously. Whatever the reason, I now recognised that I’d been foolish and hopeful, like dozens of men my age, old men in our youth-oriented culture. By the same mechanism that had enlarged me earlier during my Scotty scenario I was now reduced, a small old man in their eyes, defeated and defeatable and worse, carrying the sullen face of a loser: Heather had brought her boyfriend on an assay of a red tide outbreak with her phytoplankton pathology instructor and now the old man was sulking. I didn’t like the sound of that. For a moment I hated myself, just as they must have hated what they thought I was.
It would be a long weekend.
The boat was gone. We were alone.
It was hotter now. The sun was high, just past zenith, and it cooked everything into a sluggish, gasping stupor. Even the air didn’t move. It held an odd stink, too, a cocktail of vapours baking off the mud flats, and bug repellent, and toxin breathing faintly from the still waters of the sound.
But at least I could now make sense of the local geography. Our island looked smaller by day. A single dune, if you could call it that, rose in the centre, then tapered at both ends, which trailed into shallows. The water itself was quite shallow until you entered the channel, which lay about 500 metres to our north. The mainland began about 500 metres to the north of that. It was lined with boat docks and seawalls, and above the treetops you could see the roofs of what looked to be fabulous houses. You could see people about their business on the shore. On the other side of the island, to the south, about 200 metres of sluggish water separated us from Okaloosa Island. And I supposed the geography would continue that way to Pensacola. Santa Rosa Sound was a narrow ribbon of water bounded by a barrier island to the south and the mainland to the north. It seemed hardly worth all the fuss.
The occasional tugboat chugged down the channel pushing a herd of barges, the pilot blowing long, mournful blasts from the tug’s horn, not that there were any pleasure craft to warn out of the way. We were also on the flight path of Hurlburt Field, a nearby military base. Overhead, four-engine C-130 gunships roared in low, their turboprops shrieking as the fat planes waddled down the landing approach toward a runway that lay just across the northern shoreline.
I’d soaked myself with insect repellent after nearly being eaten alive by whiteflies. They came at me viciously and would not stop – I suppose because my body was giving off more CO2 due to my lack of physical conditioning. This struck Scotty and Heather as funny – more so Scotty – although they both made a point of stressing that they weren’t bothered at all. I knew Heather understood the mechanics of insect predation but with Scotty I guessed he attributed his immunity to the intrinsic superiority of youth and good looks. That was consistent with the character model anyway. Scotty wasn’t a student at the University. At some point, I gathered from one of my late-night beer sessions with Heather, he’d enrolled at the school as an art major but had run out of money and signed on as bartender at one of the ubiquitous beer halls in Gainesville. The plan was to save his tips and re-enroll, but the danger of that happening didn’t seem very real or imminent. I’d seen his type. They inhabited the fringes of the campus demi-monde, living the student life – until even they became embarrassed about their lack of direction. Scotty probably had two more years of slinging drinks before he signed up at a community college much closer to Mom and Dad – assuming Heather didn’t figure into the equation. That thought caused my stomach to twitch uncomfortably.
Moments later Scotty had joined me in the Fraternity of Clowns by cutting his heel on an oyster shell. The mud flats surrounding the island were dotted with clumps of oysters whose shells jutted above the oozy muck like slime-covered machete blades. I pointed to my Wet Shoes and winked, feeling smug. Scotty glanced quizzically at Heather, who was also wearing soggy tennis shoes. He poked out his bottom lip and Heather made a fuss of washing and smearing ointment around the cut, which was not deep and presented no threat to life, damn the luck, apart from the risk of an infection. These waters were thick with faecal coliform bacteria. She tied a bandana around his heel and left it at that. I felt a little better as I smacked at tiny biting flies which buzzed around us.
Our gear was piled on that part of the beach where wet sand gave way to dry sand. I’d brought more than I needed, really, but I’d wanted to come prepared. Our inventory included a field compound microscope with 10X and 40X objective lenses, a Palmer chamber for counting our toxic little friends in the water, surface and subsurface niskin bottles, Pasteur pipettes and bulbs, a hydrometer and hydrothermometer, a salinity and conductivity meter, secchi disks, sample-collection bottles – many of the comforts of a proper lab but made portable and rugged for the field. Apart from the equipment we’d also brought the basics of camping – tents, waterproof matches, the insect repellent, sunblock, my cell phone, drinking water, and food, enough military meal packets to last three days, though I’d planned to be here only two.
And masks. The all-important masks.
They’d laughed back at the campus, but truth is I’d been exposed to brevetoxins before and I seemed especially sensitive to them. Not allergic, but sensitive. I hadn’t wanted to repeat the experience. So I’d brought two masks and a spare, which would now go to Scotty if a sustained wind came up and disturbed the water – that is unless he followed up on his offer to wear Heather’s bathing suit top.
But I was more interested in another kind of water disturbance and had kept busy through morning and into early afternoon setting up some of the measuring devices I’d brought, particularly the flow hydrometer and the conductivity meter. The new pass in Navarre was supposed to have been opened at noon and I wanted to measure the immediate effect, if any, of water transportation on this end of the sound. I imagined other measuring sites were running along the sound. The Florida Marine Institute had dispatched monitors, for instance. But our team was the only representation from the University of Florida and it was a matter of pride that I gather my own data. Nobody really knew what would happen when the pass was opened, but many folks like myself predicted a drastic change in the sound ecosystem, the way Choctawhatchee Bay had been converted from a freshwater to a saltwater body of water when the Destin East Pass was cut in the 1920s. Considering the present state of the sound, maybe a change wasn’t such a bad idea. Development had destroyed the watershed all across Northwest Florida, and Santa Rosa Sound was only the latest of several estuarine systems ruined by poor planning and overbuilding. Even without the massive outbreak of red tide taking place now, the sound was foul with stormwater runoff, point-source pollution, inefficient wastewater treatment and other water quality issues. Sadly, the sound’s ruination was typical of Florida, which would never grow fast enough for the developers or slow enough for the people who cared about the natural world. I’d never thought of myself as an ‘environmentalist’ but I increasingly found myself propelled into that role, not by morality but scientific necessity. The natural world had simply absorbed more punishment than it could take. And when that happens, nature usually figures out a way to solve its problem – usually the solution is something drastic, and horrible. In this case, we were the problem. But with luck, we could solve the problem before nature solved us.
Heather had gone about making our camp and pitching the tents. Only two, I noticed. And the one she would share with Scotty was virtually next to mine. That raised the spectre of more giggling, or worse, and I wondered what I would do later that night if the two of them became noisy. The island was only a hundred metres long and had no significant vegetation short of the paniculata to absorb sound. I’d be stuck, immersed in their passion while my own frustrated interest simmered like the toxic waters surrounding this spit of sand. Was that also part of her plan? To punish me? Or was she merely trying to emphasise that she was taken? I felt bad, then, which was worse than feeling outmoded. I felt unattractive. Suddenly I wanted to be away from them both. I wanted DeVries to come back and take me to a different island, or let Heather collect the data and get me the hell out of here altogether. My shame redoubled, and this time I could feel my face burning. I was hammering a line of stakes into the water for anchoring collection bottles and I gave the stake such a whack with my ball-peen that the shaft quivered and nearly snapped.
‘C’mon, Heather. Bag it and let’s go do something.’
It was Scotty, cavorting on the beach with the only equipment he’d thought to bring, a neon fuschia-coloured Frisbee. If I’d known then that a damn Frisbee would probably save our lives I wouldn’t have provoked a confrontation with him. Heather was burying tent spikes in the soft sand and had the last one all but covered.
‘C’mon, girl!’
‘Do you see what I’m doing here?’ she answered, almost giggling again. ‘I’m building our homestead. Our house. Su casa y mi casa. Comprendes?’ She brushed a string of hair from her eyes and resumed moving sand.
But Scotty persisted, whining, ‘C’mon. You can do that later. Let’s relax a minute, OK? You’ve been at it since dawn. I think you’ve earned a break, and besides, I’m sooooo bored –’
‘If you need something to make yourself useful, Scott,’ I shouted at the water as I continued to pound the stake, ‘why don’t you collect some firewood?’
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he asked snidely, ‘Uh, Professor?’
‘It’s Miller, Scotty.’
‘Listen, um, I know you’re the college professor and all, and I’m just a stupid bartender …’ I glanced his way. He’d ambled to the water’s edge and was facing me. ‘… but where am I supposed to get firewood? There aren’t any trees on this island.’ He yanked his wifebeater down tight over his skinny chest and sneaked a quick peek back at Heather, who studied her tent stake-burying job with ferocious intensity. I felt my irritation heat up to real anger.
‘Well, Scott-eee, here’s the way it works,’ I began, laying as much sneer into my voice as I could put into it. ‘Now, that’s a very astute biological observation. There are no trees on this island.’
He began wading out toward me, his legs creating a swishing sound as they went through the water.
‘But there are trees on other islands. And there are trees on the mainland. And sometimes those trees fall into the water.’ I raised my forearm so that it was perpendicular to the sky, my fingers pointing straight up, then let my arm fall 90 degrees to the left. I whistled as it fell, the sound of a bomb dropping, and when my imaginary tree had struck my imaginary body of water I whispered ‘Splash!’ Scotty was nearly out to me and he was smiling the smile of somebody who was anything but happy. ‘When the tree hits the water, it floats! Why? Because trees are made of wood, and wood has positive buoyancy! So when the trees from those other islands, or from the mainland, fall into the water, they sometimes drift ashore on this island, thus becoming driftwood. And driftwood we can burn.’
He had reached me and was standing only a foot or two away. I could see cold rage in his eyes, and I could hear it in his voice when he said, ‘That’s why you make the big bucks, Professor. But explain something else. Why do we need a fire? Did you bring marshmallows too?’
Heather had stopped working on the tent. She was watching over her shoulder, her ass pointed toward us. Her body seemed taut with tension, ready to spring loose at a moment, like a wire looped and bound in the middle, and her expression was augured into real worry, almost a frown. Even when she was afraid she presented a rare, graceful beauty.
I looked back into Scotty’s smirking face. I said, ‘We need a fire to drive away all the blood-sucking pests.’
He stopped smiling. He raised a forefinger and used it to stab at me, and damn it all, I flinched, betraying how nervous I really was. He smiled at that. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to pay tuition for this science lesson ’cause I don’t have the bucks, but maybe we could work a deal. You don’t send me a bill, and I don’t kick your ass.’
For a moment, I felt a pounding inside me. It seemed to boom through my body, resonating with particular force in my temples. I could not believe what he’d said, or how he’d said it. But before I could react, he went on, ‘You’ve been a real shit to me all day. I don’t know what your problem is but you need to get over it …’
‘You’re interfering with the work I’m trying to do here,’ I blurted lamely.
‘What work is that, doc? Collecting slime from the water – or something else?’ He jerked his head back toward Heather.
Now I wanted to grab him by his skinny throat and squeeze until something snapped, but at the same time a layer of frost had formed around my heart. Was it that obvious how I felt about Heather?
‘I’ll tell you something. I don’t give a damn if you’re a college professor or King of the fucking Moon, you keep chapping my ass and we’re gonna have more than words, old man. I’m not one of your students, I don’t work for you, and I damn sure don’t take orders from you. So lighten up and we’ll get along fine.’
Human beings produce tears under a remarkably diverse set of circumstances. The eye continuously lubricates itself with what is called basal tears, while adverse stimulation, the proverbial ‘sharp poke in the eye’, produces reflex tears. Psychic tears occur in response to emotional stimulation such as grief or fear. And then some of us are afflicted with a rare disorder that produces tears at inappropriate moments. I share the disorder with other men, most notably author George Plimpton, who pointed out in an essay that this type of crying is not the indication of weakness most people take it to be. Yet as I felt the tears beginning to well, I knew I must do something. The bastard would accept anything less than a punch in the snoot as either an admission of guilt or a concession to fear. But I didn’t know what to do. The department looked even less favourably on professors who assaulted young people than those who tried to romance them. Luckily, or maybe unluckily, Heather came to my rescue.
‘What the hell is that?’ I heard her say.
I didn’t look up. I turned away and tried to surreptitiously wipe my eyes and look busy. I fished a couple of specimen bottles from my pocket. I’d brought two sizes – the smaller bottles labelled ‘Karenia breve’ for the red tide samples, and a slightly larger bottle for the copepods I knew would be grazing on the algae. It wasn’t until I heard Scotty answer, ‘I don’t know,’ and his voice sounded strange, almost afraid, and he began moving for shore, that I stopped and glanced Heather’s way.
She was standing and pointing to the east, toward Fort Walton Beach. I followed her finger. In the distance I saw … something. I’m not sure what it was. I was reminded of a moment I remember from my childhood. A local TV station would broadcast an afternoon movie called The Big Show – the movies were mostly science fiction films from the ’50s – big bugs, Godzilla, and Vincent Price horror films. I remember a scene from one of these movies in which people on a beach were fleeing a gigantic reptilian monster that had sprung from the ocean and was tromping shoreward, its giant steps raising huge splashes of seawater, and I remember feeling a shudder of sympathetic dread for those people. How awful it would be to have something huge and alien like that suddenly appear with no explanation and threaten your life. Now, for a moment, I felt a dim refrain of that horror as I looked to where Heather was pointing.
A kind of haze, or a mist, was hanging above the sound. It was a deep, tobacco-brown colour that reminded me very much of the dome of smog you see covering Los Angeles when you’re about 10 minutes out of John Wayne Airport. It started at the surface, but about 300 metres into the air, thin, cancerous plumes were dispersing northward overland. It was almost opaque; behind it I could barely make out the bridge that connected Okaloosa Island to Fort Walton Beach. I’d heard about similar optical phenomena before. The local sand, for instance, features high concentrations of quartz crystals that give it a brilliant whitish hue. You’d swear an inch of snow was covering the real sand which lay below, brown and reeking. Most afternoons, with a humid breeze blowing off the Gulf, sunlight would strike the sand and be reflected back into the sky, where some of it was reflected yet again by water vapour, creating an eerie white penumbra over the beach.
But the mist didn’t look like a trick of light. It had a soupy, unhealthy looking solidity to it. It might have been smoke. Maybe a boat was on fire, or one of the condominiums on the barrier island. I searched fruitlessly for a source but couldn’t find one.
The mist seemed to be rising from the water itself.
And whatever it was, it was coming toward us.
Which was impossible. The air was so still you could barely breathe it. And not a single cloud dotted the horizon.
Still, I could swear that between the moment I first looked and a few seconds later, the brown wall had moved a little closer. It seemed higher, and had gathered much of the ambient light into itself, which were both effects produced by a shift in perspective. My earlier impression, that the mist was rising from the water, reasserted itself and I moved over to the place in the shallows where I’d stationed the flow meter. I waded slowly, so as not to disturb the algae. When I checked the readout I thought there had been a mistake or that the meter had malfunctioned, because the numbers were unbelievable. Earlier, when I’d taken my first reading, the flow had come in at a reasonable one metre per 90 seconds to the west. Now, the water was fairly clicking along at an astounding six metres per minute. That was greater than any flow rate recorded here, ever, and it certainly exceeded tidal inflow/outflow or the littoral currents that paralleled the shore.
I knew then that what I was seeing was the new pass. The water must be roaring through the cut and out into the Gulf of Mexico. ‘Flushing action’ indeed.
Heather started to say something, but Scotty hushed her urgently. He was bent over, his head turned sideways, and he seemed to be listening intently. A comical vision sprang to mind, that Scotty was mimicking a hearing technique of Native Americans who claimed they could press an ear to the ground and sense the approach of cavalry. I started to find a spot in the sand clear of oyster shells and kick my heel hard, just to put Scotty’s melodramatic scouting talents to the test, when he asked, ‘Don’t you hear it?’
I knew I wouldn’t hear anything. I’d not seen the island earlier that morning, when Heather and Scotty could see it clearly. I didn’t expect my hearing would be in better shape than my vision. I knew this was one of Scotty’s nasty jokes, and I refused to bite.
But then I did hear something.
Bodies of water can produce odd acoustic effects, and at first I thought that’s what was happening. Maybe somebody on the mainland had tuned in a baseball game on the radio, or TV, and the audio feed was skipping across the water’s surface. Because what I could hear were crowd noises:
Shouting.
Cheering.
The clash of musical instruments.
Which … which …
Which is not what I heard. Not really.
What I refused to admit then, and what’s difficult for me to say now, is that I could hear something else.
People screaming.
As the brown wall moved resolutely down the sound, rising higher and higher, a sheer vertical cliff of mahogany mist, I could hear the sound more clearly. People on the mainland. Men and women – screaming. Not shouting, or cheering. People screaming in agony, the sound rising from the deepest recesses of the lungs and whistling from the back of the throat – the unrestrained screams of people who were in great pain, and people who were dying. Sometimes one scream would rise above the others, the notes fluttering skyward like ash from a bonfire, and then stop abruptly, leaving the imagination to fill in horrible details of the screamer’s fate. Suffused through this terrifying chorus were crashing sounds – horns hooting and then mysteriously going silent, tyres screeching, cars colliding with one another. An ambulance siren warbled to life and it did not move; there was no Doppler shift in the tone. I could see its driver in my mind’s eye, hunched over the wheel, writhing and dying, his eyes goggling like one of those squeeze doll toys and his tongue bulging, swollen and purpled, a blood-engorged sausage of tissue.
‘Professor?’
I could dimly hear Scotty and all the fire was gone from his voice. Now he was a frightened little boy calling for his daddy. I didn’t answer at first. I was remembering what DeVries had said on the trip out:
I hear there’s something worse moving out of the bay.
Something worse than red tide.
Something that passed unnoticed, diluted and dispersed in the bay. But drawn into the sound by movement of water through the new pass, it became concentrated …
I didn’t want to believe it. It didn’t make sense.
But the wall was bearing down on us, rising into the lemony afternoon sky like an approaching storm, and people were screaming, and dying. As I watched, the cloud overtook a dock lined with kids, fishing poles lodged between their pale legs. Suddenly they jumped up and ran, swatting at themselves as if swarms of hornets had descended and were attacking in a frenzy of stinging. One boy fell and rolled clumsily off the dock and into the water with a murky splash. I didn’t see him come up.
‘Fred?’ I turned this time. Heather was watching the mist roll toward us, her eyes nearly squeezed shut, her cheeks slick with tears. She had her mouth covered with her right hand, as if by physical force she were holding back the hysteria that had jittered into her voice. She could barely coax out the words. ‘What is it? What in God’s name is it?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Some kind of cloud …’
‘We can see that!’ Scotty blurted. ‘What kind of fucking cloud?’
‘I’m not sure. It seems to be rising from the water. Based on the reactions of those boys on the dock, I’d say it contains some kind of irritant, maybe a lethal …’
‘What do we DO?’ Scotty demanded. He too sounded on the verge of panic, though in him the terror came through as a bullish, indifferent rage. ‘You’re the brains here, Professor. Tell us what to do!’
I started to snap back at him that this wasn’t Star Trek, that I couldn’t just cobble together a solution by making a few adjustments on a gadget, but then I glanced at the cloud and saw that it was higher and darker, and the sounds of approaching catastrophe from the mainland were swelling and, I might as well say it, becoming more terrifying. I began to feel my thoughts swinging from rational, scientific curiosity to simple animal fear. A pit was forming in my gut, the nausea swirling round and round until I thought I’d have to vomit. The sudden, sharp cries, the explosions of glass breaking and metal being crushed, all of it induced a kind mind-numbing dread that sent long, cold fingers tickling the back of my neck and down my spine until at one point, I wanted to run. The mist was bad; I knew that. The mist was, dare I say it, evil. But running was out of the question, so I breathed deeply, shook my head, and tried to order my thoughts.
Think, I told myself. Think. Quickly.
From the looks of it, the mist carried a toxin of some kind. Most toxins enter the body through respiration, injection or contact. How to address that?
We had the masks, yes, but if the mist were a contact toxin then exposed flesh would leave us vulnerable. I wondered if we could wrap ourselves in the tents – no, dammit, I could see the tent fronts were nothing more than mesh screens to keep out mosquitoes. Submerging our bodies in the water would do no good either if whatever produced the mist was already in the water.
And that’s when I remembered Scotty’s toy.
I began wading to shore. ‘Where’s that damn Frisbee?’ I shouted, not thinking at all about how Scotty would react to my tone. He grabbed up the plastic disc and held it out to me. ‘No! Start digging!’ I ordered. ‘A shallow hole, wide enough for you and Heather.’ It seemed only fair, since they’d planned to share a tent, that if this idea didn’t pan out they’d share a grave. I tromped ashore like Douglas MacArthur and made my way to the dry bags of gear. I began undoing fasteners and dumping stuff onto the beach. ‘Where’re the damn masks?’ I shouted. Heather scrambled over and hefted one of the bags and popped it open. She fished the masks out and held them up.
They were new from the shelves at the Army/Navy Surplus Store in Gainesville. The filters were good for a three-hour stint. I handed Heather a mask and told her to put it on. I shouted to Scotty, who’d already cleared out a sizeable groove in the sand, and tossed him a mask.
‘Now! The two of you lie down in that hole.’
Heather paused. ‘Who’s going to cover you?’ I sensed authentic worry in her voice, and for a moment I was touched. She might not be attracted to me, but at least in some capacity she cared. That was something, I told myself. I hurried her over to the hole Scotty was frantically widening and motioned for her to lie down in it.
‘Didn’t you ever bury yourself at the beach when you were a kid?’ I asked her, holding her shoulders as she lay back. She pulled the mask over her head and it instantly transformed her face into some kind of googly-eyed monster. I managed a small, hysterical giggle as I took in the incongruency of weird mask versus otherwise near-perfectly sculpted female figure. ‘I may be old,’ I went on, making sure she had the straps cinched up around her head, ‘but I’m not that old. I still retain some of my boyhood beach skills.’
I could see by her eyes that she was trying gamely to smile. But she was very frightened, and I took comfort that at least a dollop of her fear had been reserved for me. I began heaping sand on her feet and legs. Scotty lay down beside her. He’d gotten his mask on too, but I didn’t bother checking the strap – he was such a know-it-all. I’m sure the mask was on tight. Besides, it didn’t seem he’d appreciate the gesture.
As I scooped sand over the both of them, I stole a surreptitious glance over my shoulder. What I saw nearly caused my breath to freeze in my chest.
The mist was rolling down the sound in towering, striated lobes that seemed to rotate around one another as they lifted into the stifling afternoon sky. It reminded me of dust storms I’d seen in television documentaries about the Sahara, the cloud representing a line that separated quiet tranquillity from screaming turmoil – except in this case the screaming was not caused by the wind. It was no more than half a mile from the island and would smother us in minutes. The sight filled me with a kind of primeval horror, and the muscles around my windpipe tightened like constrictors. I redoubled my burying as the sound of damnation crept closer, then closer.
I packed in the last bit of dirt around Scotty’s forehead and, resisting the urge to cover his face entirely, began digging my own trench. The first two or three inches of sand were loosely packed and came up easily under the scraping lip of the Frisbee. More quickly than I would have thought possible I had a hole for myself carved out. I lay down and began pulling the sand back over me. I got my mask on and sucked in rubbery-scented gasps of superheated air as I covered my chest and packed sand around the sides of my head. I couldn’t see my arms but managed to wriggle them beneath loose heaps of sand to either side, so that they felt covered.
Then I lay still.
The sand was cool at first. It trickled into my ears, where it itched. I peeked from the corner of the mask’s faceplate. I could see Scotty’s and Heather’s masks staring straight up, out of the sand, as though the three of us had become works of modern art. Heather was saying something to Scotty. I couldn’t hear with the damn sand in my ears. Her voice was made hollow and plastic by the mask. I heard him grunt an answer, and then I heard him say, ‘It’s coming. I see it.’
The sky straight ahead of us was still sunnily clear, the water perfectly calm. A flock of black skimmers rowed through the soupy air, heading west, not trolling for baitfish but flying resolutely down the sound. A traffic jam had formed on the tiny swatch of highway I could see through the trees on the opposite shore. Car windshields baked brightly in the sun.
And then the windshields went dark. A shadow crept across my field of view. The temperature fell a cool 10 degrees.
A sinister quiet settled into the island.
From the right, it grew darker still. Then I could see the advancing wall of mist. It was rising from the water in fumarolic fits and spits, as if the entire sound had become a steaming volcanic mud pot. Through the sand I heard a white noise, like static on a television.
‘Don’t move! Don’t expose your skin!’ I shouted, more to reassure myself than warn Heather and Scotty. My instincts were telling me to scramble out of what might very well become my own grave and run for my life, and I had to consciously force myself to lie still and trust that either the sand or the mask would keep me safe. I can’t really remember a similar emotional experience; maybe in the one or two seconds preceding my one and only car accident, where I skidded into the rear of the guy ahead of me. At that time I wished I could’ve been anywhere but where I was.
I heard a rumbling behind me. I thought, Oh Lord, what now? and at that moment a dark grey C-130 roared low overhead, its flaps and gear down, its engines screaming as it prepared to land. I saw vortices of the mist get sucked up around it. It left horizontal tornadoes in its wake.
And then.
I can’t put out of my mind what happened next.
The plane seemed to stagger in midair as it hurtled toward the runway, and its right wing dipped. But it was too low for such a manoeuvre, far too low, only a scant 50 metres above the ground, and although the pilot tried to recover the C-130 responded only sluggishly. The wing struck the ground and snapped off at the root, dissolving into a sickening cloud of flinders, and a ball of fire roared down the side of the fuselage as the entire plane rotated on its horizontal axis and disappeared beyond the lip of the runway, out of my sight. Moments later I felt a single, sharp thud jolt the island, and the water jumped up with a shock. Then I heard a boom whack the air. It was followed by a napalm-orange fireball that bloomed in the distance and boiled into the sky, merging languidly with the advancing front of mist.
The island felt as though it were rolling with the motion of sea swells, and my stomach answered with corresponding waves of nausea. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to cry. I could hear Heather sobbing, and I wanted to crawl to her, and take her hand, and hold it against my cheek as I cried with her. I’d never seen anything so horrible, and to be forced to lie there buried in sand, unable to move, unable to even put my arm around another human being as this horrific drama played out was almost beyond human capacity.
As the fire burned in the distance, the mist arrived. If such a thing were possible, my sense of terror deepened into something I can’t quite explain.
The water began to change colour. I could see eddies of a black-coloured material drifting across the shallows in advance of a solid black mass swirling darkly from the east, just ahead of the mist. It looked like crude oil flowing under the water. I could not even begin to understand what was happening. A substance dissolved in the water, a fluid denser than water, or something with neutral or negative buoyancy being carried on the current, an organism of some kind. I just couldn’t say.
The mist passed over us. It seemed to go all the way up the sky, into outer space.
And then something happened to the water.
It began to fry.
At first I thought some kind of condensate was falling out of the mist. Where the mist began, the water was disturbed by … I don’t know … millions of tiny splashes, as if a pounding rainstorm were moving rapidly in our direction. And I could hear it plainly now. An urgent hissing that gained in volume until it nearly drowned the sound of my breath rasping inside the mask. Heather shrieked, and Scotty was murmuring something to her. I shouted, ‘Don’t move! Stay covered! Everything will be OK,’ but in reality I willed my body to sink deeper into the sand because as the mist passed us by, and the world went from the gauzy, suffocating yellow of a Florida afternoon to this ominous and claustrophobic twilight, I realised that absolutely nothing was falling out of the sky, except airplanes. Whatever had transformed the waters of Santa Rosa Sound into a hissing, churning cauldron was acting from beneath the surface, and I had no idea what that could be.
The frying water slid greasily around our island. It reached out into the sound as far as I could see, which was only about 30 metres. It really was like being trapped in a summer thunderstorm, amidst a driving, pounding rain that turned the world into twilight and assaulted the senses so violently that it kindled animal fear. The frying sound was quite loud now, and I could hear nothing of what was being said between Heather and Scotty. I struggled to see them from the edge of my mask and they were still lying in place, although I don’t know where either one of them got their nerve. Maybe being together helped them remain calmer. I envied Scott even more at that moment, because I felt my own panic growing, and I wondered if I might lunge from the beach and … and … do what? Run panic-stricken along the water’s edge until whatever was killing everybody else brought me down too? I struggled to calm myself. I tried to compose my thoughts. OK, Miller. Think. Concentrate on the problem. What could cause this? The disturbance of the water? The mist itself? The reaction to exposure?
I studied the roiling water as best as I could. It was nearly whitened by the froth of sizzling and spitting, and it seemed to give off a kind of gas – the source of the mist no doubt. It was moving quickly to the west, in the direction of the pass, but the emissions were being drawn north over land. From what I’d seen of the mist before it overtook us, it hadn’t reached a significant altitude. So the particulate material was fairly heavy, which meant it wouldn’t drift far inland before descending, maybe only a few miles. If the sounds of mayhem we’d heard from the mainland were in fact the sounds of people … well, then at least the disaster wouldn’t reach much farther than the Twin Cities about 15 miles to the north – small compensation to the thousands who’d probably been … affected.
Baitfish skipped across the water’s surface as if frantically trying to escape marauding bluefish. Whorls of smog-coloured gas danced dervishes across the sizzling white storm of water. I thought I could smell something, then, and at that moment I felt my bladder let go, and the sand packed in wetly around the crotch of my clown shorts as the idea settled into my brain with cold certainty: Your mask is leaking. The smell was of sea rot, the wet decay of old mud dredged up from deep, black waters. It came to me faintly at first, but after that initial whiff I was convinced I could smell whatever was in the sound, and I knew that at any second I might begin to itch, and scream, and die. I thought about everything I had done in my life, and how ironic it was that each of those events had in some way conspired to bring me to this place at this moment in time. I closed my eyes and felt tears squeeze between the lids. How awful it would be to die here on this beach, under these circumstances, not even knowing the name of the thing that had killed me. Maybe I was being punished for my indiscreet thoughts about Heather. If so, I offered a silent apology to whatever force was controlling events. Please, let me live. Let us all live. Even Scotty.
I took shallow breaths, an impossible thing in that the mask slowed my intake of breath already. The sand packed in suffocatingly and instead of cooling me it seemed to trap my body temperature so that I began to bake. At the same time I began to feel I was choking, that my lungs were filling – it was hysteria, pure and simple, and I suddenly realised that instead of taking shallow breaths I was hyperventilating. So I held my breath just as the world began to spin, and in a few moments the lightheadedness began to fade and I felt my equilibrium returning.
To my right, to the east, I began to see a lightening. At first I thought it was my imagination, some lingering after-effect of my hypercapnia. I began to see shapes emerge from the smoky whorls bubbling out of the water. Docks on the opposite side of the sound. A horizon of tree tops. Directly in front of me, I could see the highway. All cars were stopped. Beyond that, oily smoke still rose into the sky where the airplane no doubt lay in a smouldering scar of debris. Other smoke plumes, all across the city, joined with the mist blowing off the water to form a hazy caul that dispersed only slowly.
The water began to calm. Only short ribbons and hot spots continued to sizzle as they drifted serenely westward. It was if our storm, which had come in a rush of blackness and fury, pounding us violently for a time, was now dying out in grudging fizzles and spits. Eastward, straggles of mist swirled into faint, smoky vortices that were sucked into the gauzy sky. An astonishing mat of flotsam now lay on the water’s surface. I could see dead seabirds – terns, skimmers, laughing gulls – and terrestrial birds too, like bluejays and mourning doves. But mostly it was fish. Croakers, pinfish, speckled trout, mullet, channel catfish. They were floating belly up on the surface, their eyes goggling as if they too had slipped on masks but had failed to survive the exposure. A few swam in listless, inverted circles. Nothing came up to scavenge their carcasses.
I heard Scotty saying something. I saw him start to get up. I yelled, ‘No!’ and for a moment he did as I said. There were patches of water that still burped gas, and I still didn’t have a clue as to what was happening. The island itself might be poisonous now, covered in a film of the stuff. Contact with the sand could be as fatal as if we’d stood on the beach, unmasked and uncovered, as the mist swept over us.
Then I heard Scotty say, ‘To hell with it,’ and he crawled from the sand, shaking wet clods from his chest and his stomach, and stood up. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ he shouted through his mask. ‘If we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die.’ He shook his arms and the dirt flew. He started brushing it off his legs, which were nearly scarlet from having been buried. I watched him for signs of … oh, I don’t know. Signs of neurological dysfunction – signs of screaming and dying, I guess.
Nothing happened.
Then Heather rose from the sand. I wanted to shout at her to wait, but she was up before I could act. I nearly fainted with terror, and when my heart resumed beating my fear curdled into anger, then something darker. At that moment I hated Scotty with renewed fury. I hated him as much as I’d ever hated anyone in my life. Because if the toxin were still present, Heather would die with him, thanks to his adolescent fatalism – ‘If we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die,’ and not believing for a moment that he really would die – Flavour of the Month wasn’t old enough to die.
But nothing happened to Heather, either.
She walked over to me, sand sprinkling her smooth, white thighs like confectioner’s sugar on an éclair, and she said through her mask, ‘C’mon, Fred. I think it’s OK now.’
I sighed hotly. For all my caution, once again I’d come across looking overly cautious. Maybe I truly was. But I couldn’t remember ever having been as stupid as Scotty.
I got up.
Big clods of sand fell off me, taking away the heat. I was suddenly and deliciously cool, thank God. More sand poured out of the legs of my shorts. It was caked inside, and I desperately wanted to walk out into the water and rinse myself off. But whatever had passed by might still be there, admittedly in greatly diminished but maybe still lethal concentrations. Who knew? So I brushed and shook my clown shorts legs and did what I could to get the sand off me.
Both Scotty and Heather were still wearing their masks, which was smart of Heather and damned miraculous for Scotty. We stood close together and stared out across the water, toward the mainland. Heather turned to me.
‘Fred? Do you have any idea what just happened?’
I was still fuming about Scotty and I didn’t want her to see my eyes. I looked back across the water, and what I saw deadened the anger and filled me with a kind of sick wonder.
Acres of dead fish carpeted the surface. They drifted serenely westward with the current. I could imagine that by tomorrow, the smell would render the air unbreathable.
On shore, the scene reminded me of photographs taken during the London Blitz of World War II. Fires were burning across the city. One big house across the sound and to the right of our island roared with combustion. Great tongues of flames licked from both the upstairs and downstairs windows, and twisted above the surrounding live oaks, threatening to set them aflame too. There was no answering wail of sirens. The smoke from these fires, combined with the dissipating shreds of mist, cast a depressing pall over the horizon, which had fallen eerily silent. It was the lack of traffic sounds, the rush of engines and the occasional horn. The cars across the way, on the highway, remained at a standstill. There were no boats on the water. No planes in the sky.
It was as if the world had gone to sleep.
‘Who cares what happened,’ Scotty announced. ‘Let’s just get the hell outta here!’
Yes. For once, Scotty and I agreed. The phytoplankton pathologist within urged me to stay and puzzle through this disaster. But the human being had been screaming at me for the past hour to do exactly what Scotty demanded and get the hell out of here. The quiet alone was enough to give you permanent goosebumps. The thought of spending the night out here, after such a catastrophe – it wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate.
‘Call that guy,’ Scotty said breathlessly. ‘Call him and tell him to come get us.’
His gaze had a wild, feral quality, as if the thinnest veneer of sanity kept him from jumping at me. But it compelled me to act. I fetched the dry bags and began rummaging through them, scattering what had earlier seemed a precious hoard of supplies haphazardly across the beach. After I had emptied both bags, I stood and ran my fingers through my hair, my anxiety giving way to new dread. Scotty came up beside me and looked. As he stared, he must have seen it on my face before I dared say it myself, because his expression collapsed into horrified dismay and he snarled, ‘Oh, don’t tell me! Don’t even say it!’
At that moment I felt older and more foolish than I’d ever felt in my life.
‘You mean with all this crap you brought, you didn’t think to throw in a cell phone?’ Scotty roared, incredulous.
I knew I had packed it. I just knew. But I shook my head lamely. ‘I didn’t think we’d be phoning out for pizza.’ But what couldn’t be denied was that I’d just forgotten it. In trying to collect all the equipment, and making the arrangements, and mooning over Heather … I must have walked off and left it.
Scotty looked almost afraid for a moment. Heather reached up and cupped his shoulder with her hand, running her fingers around and around the joint, not just to comfort him but perhaps to hold him back? I glanced at her face, what I could see through the mask, and her eyes were narrowed, as if she’d seen the same thing in Scotty’s eyes that I had seen and was trying to defuse the situation.
I saw Scotty’s body tense. His hands curled into fists. The veins in his arms stood out. I wondered, in that eons-long millisecond that always precedes a disaster, what it would feel like to have my nose broken, and whether the mask would give me any protection at all. Tears watered my eyes.
‘Stupid old bastard!’ he raged. ‘It’s just so fucking stupid …’
Heather was no longer looking at us. I heard her say ‘Guys’ in a tentative voice and I interrupted her, blurting at Scotty, ‘Don’t you have a cell phone surgically implanted in that thick skull of yours?’
He strode away, flapping his arms and fuming, ‘Stupid stupid stupid …’ and then Heather screamed, ‘Will you two shut up and look!’
She was pointing to the farthest shore. I didn’t want to look. I could tell from her expression that it was something awful, and I’d seen enough horror for one day. But I looked anyway, and my instincts were right.
I shouldn’t have looked.
Across the sound, along the manicured yards hemmed by seawalls, and the marshy, grassy undeveloped tracts, an unbroken line of people was advancing on the water. It was like the Normandy invasion in reverse, and the towers of smoke rising from Fort Walton Beach contributed to the effect. Thousands of people, an uncountable horde of people, literally stampeded for the water. They were screaming as if in pain, and trampling one another, and colliding drunkenly with tree trunks and dock posts and moored boats. They seemed totally possessed by a mindless need to be in the water, and nothing, or no one, would stop them. They climbed over those who had fallen. They leapt from seawalls and docks. Some of them fell when they landed in shallow water, and they didn’t seem able to get up. Still, they dragged themselves toward deeper water.
And something else – something I still can’t explain.
The people were on fire.
Their bodies gave off plumes of black smoke as they ran blindly for the beach. They held their arms away from their sides as if even casual contact with another surface produced agonising pain. A mental snapshot formed, of a photograph taken during the Vietnam War of a naked Vietnamese girl who had just been burned during a napalm strike on her village. She was running, and crying, and holding her arms away from her body to escape the pain. This was the same only repeated ten thousand times over, and I could neither explain nor understand how such a thing was possible. A contact toxin that produced a burning sensation, yes. Many chemical warfare agents were capable of producing that exact effect. But a toxin that created a biochemical response in the body so energetic that it literally combusted the tissue? No. Not in this world. It was the stuff of science fiction.
When the people reached the water they hurled themselves beneath the surface and scrambled for the deeper parts, out in the channel. The water sizzled around them and gave off bubbling clouds of smoke. I could follow their paths by watching individual trails of smoke move toward us. They were still a good thousand metres north of our island when the smoke trails gradually dissipated. As if they had cooled. Or something.
None of the people resurfaced.
I heard Heather sobbing. No. It was Scotty who was crying. Heather was holding him as if he were a baby, and he had his face buried in her shoulder. I went over to them, and without any conscious declaration of intent I put my arm around the both of them, and it was OK. We stood there that way, for a very long time, and watched the people on the mainland drive themselves into the water and vanish.
As the sun began to inch toward the western horizon, the afternoon cooled, and the world grew quieter still.
We didn’t know what to do.
It was a hot night.
My clothes had never dried, and the shorts clung to my thighs, chafing the tender backs of my knees. I was constantly shaking them, trying to get the sand out. It was yet another form of madness in a day that had seen too much madness.
My stomach hurt. I remember that. I didn’t want to eat anything. Heather had fished out one of the military meal packets for Scotty, who had picked at the chicken tetrazini. But neither Heather nor I would eat any of it. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to keep it down, and from Heather’s grimace it didn’t seem food was anything she cared about at the moment either.
We all sat together, in front of the tents, in the dark. I’d swept a flashlight beam over the water for a few minutes after hearing strange sounds, a kind of stealthy sloshing, but decided it had been nothing but my imagination, fuelled by the day’s horrific events. Overhead, the stars were barely visible through a caul of smoke. We could see them because the lights were out on shore. Fires were burning, their ochre glow illuminating whole segments of the horizon. I’d say half of Fort Walton Beach must be going up in smoke. But no lights of traffic moved along the highway. Once, we saw the blinking telltales of an airplane, far overhead. Heather thought it was an airliner, but I guessed it was some kind of military reconnaissance craft. The people farther inland must have some inkling of what had happened. Perhaps rescue parties were on their way right now.
Until then, I was very happy for Heather’s company for entirely different reasons. To be honest, I was more rattled now than I could remember, worse than when Psycho Cecelia informed me she wanted a divorce to take up with the high school boy she tutored in piano. Maybe that’s why Scotty irritated me to the point of distraction. Maybe I wasn’t experiencing the male mid-life crisis after all, but a weird Oedipal fixation. I should’ve gotten my degree in psychology instead of marine biology, but it was my observation that many psychologists were themselves insane. I didn’t need insanity added to my resumé of peccadilloes. But the thought of all those bodies, floating out in the sound, was enough to keep my wits on edge. Perhaps that’s what was making the sound.
‘OK Fred, let’s hear the post-event analysis. What’re you thinking happened here?’ Heather asked me, shaking me from my thoughts. When my mind turned to that problem I was happy to feel something other than the slow simmer of fear.
‘I’ll say one thing,’ I began. ‘It’s too damn strange for words – at least any of the words I know.’
Scotty had regained some of his smirking impudence, and he rolled his eyes. ‘That’s good, Professor. Very enlightening.’ But I decided to ignore him.
‘I examined some of the material that collected in the filters and the bottles I’d strung up in the shallows,’ I said. ‘Mostly what I saw was organic debris, so it was hard to get a fix on what exactly we were looking at here. I mean, did the debris belong to an offending organism, or was it residue from plankton or other marine life destroyed by whatever passed through the water?’
Heather shook her head. ‘Jesus. What could cause that level of destruction? An acid?’
‘I think it was a living thing,’ I told them. ‘In some cases I found intact, immature organisms. They bore a resemblance to Karenia breve, the red tide dinoflagellate, but there were striking differences.’
They both looked my way, waiting.
‘Notably the pigmentation and some physical structures – physiologically they came in very close to Karenia breve, though I’d call this a new species of phytoplankton – Karenia negre –’
‘Black tide,’ Heather interrupted.
I nodded. ‘Maybe it’s from the Sahara dust storms. Or those terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Centre and sent anthrax through the mail,’ Scotty said. ‘Maybe that – that – what’s that stuff they’re mining from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? Those methane ice chunks – maybe that’s where it came from.’
We sat quietly a moment, and then I said, ‘Listen. All I know is I saw an awful lot of cellular debris in the slides. It looked like whatever was in the water had literally exploded.’
‘Like those people on fire,’ Scotty observed in a near whisper.
‘Yes!’ Heather declared, slapping her thigh with an open palm. ‘How do you explain that, Fred?’ She turned to me and I could see she was angry, but not at me. It was an intellectual frustration. She wanted answers and there weren’t any and it infuriated her. ‘Smoke pouring off those people’s bodies. You mean to tell me an aerosol caused their cells to burst into flames? Mass spontaneous combustion?’ The chin went back down on her knees. ‘This isn’t Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’
I started to reach over and run my hand through her hair. Or pat her on the shoulder. Just extend some gesture of shared frustration. To be honest, I wasn’t strong on the chemistry component of my field, and human physiology bored me. Now I was wishing I’d paid attention in those classes or kept up with the latest papers, because I had no explanation for how any of this could have happened. On the face of it, some kind of marine organism had moved through Santa Rosa Sound, energetically reacting to some kind of stimulus and in the process releasing a compound that produced a similar reaction in terrestrial organisms, at least the higher vascular organisms. So far none of the grasses or trees had exploded. Maybe that was to come.
At any rate, it sounded like something out of a science fiction novel, or worse, a George Romero movie, and I shuddered at that thought, here in the dark. A scene from the movie Night of the Living Dead sprang to mind, the one where the brother and sister are in the graveyard, and a zombie attacks the brother. I was only a kid when that movie arrived at the local drive-in. My big sister went to see it with her boyfriend, and she recounted the scene for me. Years later, when I saw the movie for myself, I felt a refrain of the shuddering terror that electrified my nerves as my sister described the zombie’s shambling stance, and the brother’s transformation from taunting jokester to dead man. An echo of that old dread reverberated through me now.
‘I think it was some kind of nerve gas spill,’ Heather said quietly. She still had her chin on her knees, and she was gazing blankly across the sound, at the fiery mainland. Debris had begun washing ashore on the island – timber from docks, old oil barrels, other flotsam and jetsam. It looked as though a barge had taken out a stretch of shoreline east of here, the results just now arriving at our beach.
‘There’s military bases around here,’ Scotty mused, his voice irritatingly sinister, as if that fact alone were enough to decide the issue. I couldn’t help but shake my head, and I could tell that irked Scotty. His expression soured into defensiveness. ‘Well, Professor, it’s a damn better theory than you and your nitro slime.’
‘These bases aren’t involved in that kind of work,’ I sighed, not even hiding the weary impatience.
‘How do YOU know?’ Scotty snarled back.
‘Hurlburt is a special operations base.’
‘Special operations!’ Scotty repeated stupidly.
‘Special operations,’ I mocked him, ‘as in commando operations. Not chemical warfare. And Eglin tests conventional munitions.’
‘Who’s to say what they do?’ Scotty hissed. ‘They’re the damn government, and the government lies all the time.’
‘Sure. And they’ve got a flying saucer hidden in one of their hangars.’
Scotty stiffened and he started to get up. I had the feeling he was defending Heather’s point of view more than simply arguing for a solution, but either way he was angry again, angry like he’d been the moment Heather had seen the mist. He was halfway out of his crouch when he froze and cocked an ear. Heather looked down-sound. Then I heard it too.
A boat motor.
The sound was strangely incongruous in the deafening silence, but it was the first human sound we’d heard all afternoon, apart from the screaming and our own squabbling. We all stood up. I flipped on the flashlight and began waving it frantically. Heather scrambled back to the tents to fetch her flashlight. Scotty jumped up and down, waving his hands idiotically and shouting, ‘HERE! HERE!’ as if the person on the boat could see him in the inky darkness, or hear his voice over the sound of the motor.
Heather rejoined us and aimed her flashlight beam into the sound. Suddenly, I could see it. The red and green running lights of a boat. The operator had a small spotlight swinging to and fro across the water. The beam stood out like the ray from a Martian war machine, peeling back the dark. Suddenly, it blinded us.
‘HERE!’ Scotty shrieked, cavorting maniacally. ‘YEAH, MAN! RIGHT HERE!’
The boat turned in our direction. Relief gushed out of me. Heather latched on to my arm and laid her head against my shoulder and sighed. I wanted to put my arm around her shoulder and gather her in, but I couldn’t; she wouldn’t let go. Scotty turned around, glimpsed us, started to turn back, then slowly turned around again. Heather let go.
‘I’d better start packing our stuff.’
I watched her head back to the tents, and when I turned back, Scotty was still staring, his eyes slitted now and measuring me. I think for a moment he actually felt threatened. But then he turned and resumed waving to the approaching boat.
As the boat came closer it assumed the familiar shape of DeVries’ Boston Whaler. I felt a surge of gratitude for the man – that he’d remembered us out here and had thought to come rescue us in the wake of whatever disaster had befallen Fort Walton Beach. I wanted off this island. I wanted to be back in my classroom, among my colleagues, and mired within the mundane concerns of school and life. I wanted no part of this ecological catastrophe – and that’s what I’d come to believe happened here. It wasn’t a nerve gas spill or a chemical discharge. It was an emission by an unknown phytoplankton that caused a violent reaction in vascular organisms. I was convinced of that. When I returned to Gainesville, someone among us would sit down and analyse the samples I’d collected and come to a reasonable conclusion in the blessed light of rationality. But right now, out here in the superheated dark, with a carpet of death floating by, I only wanted to be home.
I went to help Heather pack. She was neatly unpegging the tents and brushing sand from the nylon.
‘No,’ I told her. ‘Leave ’em. Just get the equipment and the samples.’
‘Fred?’ she frowned at me. ‘This stuff is expensive.’
‘I don’t care. The sooner we’re on that boat and heading back to civilisation the better I’ll feel.’
She offered me a sly smile. ‘I thought you were looking forward to a long weekend of obsessing over red tide.’
‘That was before this – and Scotty.’
She stopped and frowned hard this time, turning to look up sternly. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. ‘What does Scotty have to do with anything …’
‘He’s a jerk,’ I whispered back. ‘He contradicts everything I say …’
‘I think you’re just jealous,’ she cut in with what I knew was feigned petulance.
‘He makes me feel old.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not exactly a candidate for the rocking chair,’ she said, and I felt a little better. Then she continued, ‘Maybe for one of those three-toed canes, but definitely not a rocker.’ She snickered and winked at me.
In the distance, over the burble of the Evinrude, I heard DeVries call out, ‘DOCTOR MILLERRRRR! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?’
I stood up and got a shot of his searchlight, right in the eyes, which momentarily blinded me. That’s why I wasn’t able to see what happened next. I heard it first, but only after the spots cleared and my sight returned was I able to make out what was going on. I might have chosen to remain blind the rest of my life had I known what I would see.
I heard a loud knocking sound, as if a piece of timber had been dropped inside the boat. It was a loud thunk against the fibreglass bottom. I heard DeVries shout, ‘Hey –’ and his voice cut off abruptly. Then I could hear him shouting, ‘No! No! No!’ and at the same time Scotty exclaiming, ‘What the hell!’ and then DeVries began to scream. It was a high, ululating wail of panic and pain, the scream of somebody whose life was about to end. The Evinrude suddenly howled and there was a loud splashing, and another thunk. The spotlight spun away from me, out of my sight, and for a moment I couldn’t see anything – just purplish, flickering blotches as my eyes readjusted to the dark. Scotty came scrambling back to us and snatched the flashlight from Heather. He whispered hoarsely, ‘Something’s got him!’ and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if lightning were about to strike.
Something. Not someone. Something.
I stumbled down the beach. Scotty had gone ahead of me at a dead run. The boat was spinning in a tight circle, its engine screaming, the throttle wide open. A plume of spray fanned out behind it, glowing a sickish tobacco brown in the gyrating light of the searchlight. Off to the side I could see two figures struggling.
It was DeVries, and what looked like a man. Why had Scotty used the word something? an inner voice questioned. It was clearly a man. Perhaps he was a fellow survivor, like us, clinging to some of the flotsam drifting down to the sound. He’d heard the boat and had swum to the sound. Scotty was in the water, up to his calves, when I caught up to him. I yelled, ‘You get DeVries! I’ll see if I can get the boat!’
I had no idea how I’d accomplish that – the boat was spinning at a maddening speed. Behind us I could hear Heather screaming, ‘Watch the prop! Don’t get near the prop!’ She didn’t have to tell me that. I’d seen what a prop could do to a man’s leg and had no intention of being chopped to bits. Maybe if I could get inside the circle and chop the throttle on one of the boat’s passes …
Scotty was wading out to DeVries, who was screaming, ‘GET OFF! GET OFF!’ A sweep of the searchlight revealed a hideous indigo stain in the water around the two as they struggled – what was the maniac doing to him? He appeared to be clinging to DeVries, his face buried in the crook between DeVries’ shoulder and neck; I could see only that. The froth they were throwing up concealed everything else.
The boat’s arc began to widen, and it headed for DeVries and his attacker. Scotty hesitated. Heather was at the beach now, and she screamed, ‘Scotteee! Get out of the way!’ just as the boat struck the two men. You could hear the awful, meaty burr of the prop as it ripped into flesh. The boat jerked to the right with a loud BRRRWAP, straightened, and charged toward the middle of the sound, out into the night. Scotty shouted, ‘Son of a bitch!’ and began jumping in the water after the boat, then saw the futility of the chase and stopped.
The man struggling with DeVries had stood up. His back was arched, and his mouth was open. No sound came out. He took a single, whooping gasp, then battened on DeVries again. I heard myself snarl, ‘Goddammit’ and I went splashing to them. Scotty came in from the side. We reached them simultaneously.
‘What are you fucking doing!’ Scotty screamed and looped his arm around the man, pulling him off DeVries. He wouldn’t let go. Scotty jerked once, twice, and I grabbed DeVries and hauled in the opposite direction. I heard an awful sucking sound – and then the tearing of flesh.
I caught DeVries as he started to go under, hooking my arm around his neck and hauling up. I still had the flashlight. I aimed it into his face.
His eyes were rolled back in the sockets. They looked yellowish in the light, yellow as hundred-year-old ivory. They circled in the sockets and settled on me for a moment, and you could see the insane fear. I moved the light lower, and when I did the damage that had been inflicted on DeVries came into terrible focus. A semi-circular chunk of flesh had been torn from his throat, and blood was oozing in a sickening flow that pulsed in syncopation with his heartbeat. I could see the torn flesh, the glistening muscle, the ragged tissue – I had only a brief glimpse of these things and my stomach heaved. For the third time that day I thought I might vomit. But then something even more incredible began to happen. The flesh began to bubble, then fry, and smoke poured from the wound.
I heard someone shouting something. I couldn’t think. My brain was numb, as if Novocaine had been injected directly into my cerebellum. The words soaked through this gauzy layer of incomprehension only slowly – ‘… me –’ and then with greater clarity, ‘Help me!’ and I turned the light on Scotty.
He was struggling with the man. I aimed the flashlight directly in the man’s face.
It was beyond description.
The face was a ruin of melted skin. From the forehead to his blood-soaked T-shirt there was nothing but wrinkled, scalded flesh, a bloodless white, the colour of undersea creatures that had never seen the light. And his eyes – utterly devoid of colour, no iris, no pupil, nothing but slick, pearly balls. As abruptly as I took this in the man’s flesh began to smoke, and then his eyes literally exploded, like old-fashioned flashbulbs, and the sockets emitted ferocious jets of blue-tinted flames. Everywhere the light travelled across the man, its skin erupted in swaths of blackened ruin that burst into flame. It arched its back again, its eyes burning like two flares, and cut loose with a sound that had never been uttered by a human being. It fell howling into the water.
Scotty staggered back, gulping. The man … no, the thing, scuttled along the sandy bottom like a Callinectes sapidus – forgive me – a blue crab, leaving a trail of swirling sediment in its wake.
We both stood there a moment, breathing hard, neither of us believing what we had just seen. Heather was shrieking from the shore, ‘What’s happening? What’s happening?’ and the piercing hysteria of her voice seemed to galvanise us. I knelt down and got DeVries into my arms. Scotty staggered over, lifted an arm over his shoulder, and between the two of us we were able to get him up and headed for shore.
Behind us, we heard more furtive splashing.
‘For God’s sake shine the light!’ Scotty yelled at Heather, his voice a couple of octaves higher than I’d heard so far. She aimed it directly at us, and I shouted, ‘No! Out there!’ and pointed at the sound. She swept the beam across the water and a tumult of splashing arose. The sound reminded me of alligators that had been lurking at the surface suddenly diving below.
We got DeVries to the shore. His feet were dragging behind him. He moaned softly as we laid him on the sand, and when Heather saw his wound she sucked in a shocked breath and muttered, ‘Oh dear God,’ and ran back to the tents. A moment later she returned with one of her T-shirts and the first aid kit. We had to hold his head up as she folded the T-shirt and pressed it into the wound. It was instantly soaked with blood.
DeVries took a ragged breath and tried to say something, but choked. He gargled and blood leaked from the side of his mouth. Finally, in a coarse whisper he said, ‘Sorry. Sorry. The boat.’ In the distance we could still hear the Evinrude whining as it crossed the sound in an all-out dash.
‘I wanted to come sooner but they’re not letting anyone in.’
I could barely hear him and leaned in close. ‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Some – some kind of poison gas,’ he gurgled. His lips were becoming thin and pale, like a hypothermia victim’s. ‘For 30 miles inland between here and Navarre, everybody’s … everybody’s …’
‘Oh Christ, they’re all dead,’ Scotty muttered darkly and turned away.
‘Not dead!’ DeVries gasped. His body began to tremble. We needed a fire.
‘Not dead, not dead, not dead – different.’
‘Like that man back there?’ I prompted.
‘They’re everywhere. When the sun went down, they came out.’
Scotty gazed nervously out over the sound.
‘What in God’s name is he talking about?’ Heather said, pressing the T-shirt into the wound.
I hunkered down closer to DeVries. ‘Does anybody know what’s happened?’ I asked gently. ‘What kind of poison it was? The changes in the people? Does anybody know what’s going on?’
DeVries shook his head. His skin was losing its colour, becoming livid and hard, almost statue-like. The irises were shrinking. The T-shirt was sopping with blood and it was pooling in the sand around his neck.
He said, ‘I’m very thirsty. Do you have some water?’
Heather went to fetch a bottle. Scotty was sweeping his flashlight across the water’s surface. He turned it to DeVries and the man’s face began to smoulder. ‘Get that off him!’ I snarled and Scotty whipped the beam away as DeVries cried out weakly. Scotty hissed, ‘Jesus! It’s happening to him, too.’ DeVries began thrashing his head from side to side and moaned loudly, ‘Oh God. So thirsty! Please!’
At that moment, Heather screamed. It was a sound I never want to hear again.
Scotty leapt to his feet and aimed the flashlight at her.
I saw people.
Some were merely standing in place, staring dumbly, their blind eyes somehow seeing. Others were shambling across the lone dune, crashing through the paniculata in a noisy advance. Others were creeping stealthily out of the water, crouched like stalking creatures about to scramble and pounce. My first impression was that this resembled a scene from one of the old Revell monster models I used to build as a boy, of zombies staggering through a graveyard to set upon a hapless mourner. There was a peculiar, indescribably horrible quality to it all – the creatures seemed at once thoughtless and driven by single-minded purpose, if such a thing was possible. My mind averted from the idea of what that purpose could be.
Scotty swept his flashlight across the horde and their bodies burst into flame. You could hear the flesh sizzling, and a barely audible wail arose, as if they were shrieking in the supersonics. A man at the very top of the dune went up like a torch and nearly galloped down the opposite dune face and hurled himself into the water. The others scattered and began to do likewise. They stumbled over each other as they scrambled into the water, to vanish beneath the surface in a roiling of bubbles and smoke.
Heather was sobbing, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ and all I could think of was to get up and go comfort her. It was all I could think to do. I dropped to my knees beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
‘C’mon. It’s all right,’ I said lamely. We both knew it wasn’t, but again, I couldn’t think of anything else to say or do. She tittered, but it was the nervous sound of a person whose wits were tripping on the edge of an abyss.
‘C’mon. Let’s see if we can get DeVries to drink something.’ She had a plastic bottle of water clutched in her right hand. I thought it might burst, she was squeezing it so tightly. But she got up and we made our way back to Scotty and DeVries. Scotty was standing quietly, staring down at the man.
He lay on the sand, barely moving.
‘We should get rid of him,’ Scotty finally said. I couldn’t see his face, but his voice was low and evenly modulated, the sound of a man in complete and deadly control of his faculties. The cold-bloodedness of that statement produced an instant flash of anger in me, and I snarled back at him. ‘This is the man who came to save our butts, and you just want to ‘get rid of him’? Are you out of your mind?’
‘We should throw him in the water. Get rid of him.’
‘You mean kill him?’
‘He’s as good as dead,’ Scotty sighed heavily. ‘We should get rid of him.’
‘He’s not dead. He’s hurt and he needs our help.’
‘Before he becomes one of them,’ Scotty said quietly. ‘We should get rid of him.’
I let go of Heather’s shoulder and jumped up. I smacked Scotty in his skinny chest with an open palm, knocking him back a step. ‘This man is injured and he needs our help!’ I screamed at him. He just stood there, staring. ‘We don’t have any idea how this poison works – it – it could be that only the tissue around the bite is affected.’
‘I’m going to get rid of him,’ Scotty said flatly.
‘The hell you are,’ I answered. ‘I’m in charge here and you’ll do what I damn well tell you.’
‘Get out of my way,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t give a damn what you want. You try to hurt that man and I’ll …’
‘Just stop!’ Heather screamed, her voice warbling up the scale. ‘I can’t stand it – just stop –’ and then the issue was settled for us.
Something grabbed my ankle.
I could feel a cold, unearthly circlet of pressure as fingers slithered around the bone. The skin felt slimy and cool, and my mind instantly composed an image of something old and pale and horribly desperate that had crawled from the deepest parts of the ocean and would take me back there with it unless I resisted. I yanked my leg once, twice, and freed myself from its grip. Scotty stepped in with the flashlight and aimed it downward.
I had only a second to take in what lay before us: A little girl, her bloodless skin made all the whiter by the black plaster of hair that framed her thin, vulpine face, had scuttled through the shallows unseen and was about to bite me. She jerked her head up at us and centred those blank yet seeing eyes on me, and then she smiled, an act suggestive of an insidious animal cunning, as if she were being driven by equal parts need and pleasure. Her face instantly folded in on itself in a black ruin, like newsprint put to a flame, and the eyes ruptured fire. A cloud of acrid smoke boiled into the night sky and the girl – what had once been a girl – began to grunt and writhe on the beach as her body immolated. Scotty played the beam over and across the body, and everywhere the light struck, the flesh burned. The hands began to beat rapidly against the sand, and the feet kicked out, throwing up clods of sand. Then it began to convulse.
Scotty kept at it with the light.
The clothes caught fire then, and the flames went from a barely visible blue to bright yellow and orange, and a perimeter of light went up around us. From about the island you could hear splashing and other sounds of turmoil beneath the water’s surface, and to my shame I admit I shifted a little closer to the burning body to protect myself from what I knew was lurking out there, in the dark.
Heather had moved over to stand with Scotty. He had his arm around her, but there was no challenge in the gesture.
We stood there, as the body burned.
Later, we huddled at the top of the dune.
Each of us had a flashlight, but we had decided to use only one at a time. Scotty was sweeping his beam in a circle, aiming at the water just off the shore. A few times the light had found one of the people, or things, whatever they could be called, attempting to creep ashore. But mostly what we saw were their eyes, staring just above the surface. The light caught them for only a moment before they jerked back below the surface. But it was enough to make your flesh want to crawl off the bone. More times than I can count I had been driving back from some field study like this, tired and sunburned and ready for a shower and something more civilised than military meal packets to eat, and had spotted animals crossing the road at night, opossums, raccoons, deer, and other wild creatures. They would stop and stare into the headlights, and their eyes would throw back a particular wavelength so that they seemed to be glowing with an internal radiance, strange greens and shades of magenta. But these creatures reflected only blue, a cold, dead blue. Odd. And frightening.
DeVries moaned once, then lay quietly. The bleeding had all but stopped. For some reason I did not take that as a hopeful sign.
After a lengthy silence, we began to talk. If you could call it that.
‘So, Fred, any theories since the last time I asked,’ Heather started.
‘Jesus. I don’t know.’
‘What’s happened to these people?’ Scotty asked.
‘Don’t know. It’s … it’s unprecedented. I can’t think of a rational explanation. But the man who figures it out will win the Nobel for biology – biology, chemistry, voodoo – you name it.’
‘Well, what do you think?’ Heather asked, her tone almost accusing. I was the college professor, the scientist. I suppose I should have had a working thesis by now.
So I speculated. ‘In many ways the reaction resembles an allergy …’
‘An allergic reaction that’s contagious?’
I threw up my hands helplessly. ‘I don’t think it’s a pathogen, like a virus or a bacteria. Maybe a prion. Or a chemical reaction of some kind.’
‘A communicable chemical reaction.’
‘Something – I don’t know what – but something is causing the body to metabolise …’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
We sat quietly for a moment.
‘What do they want?’ Heather asked.
I sighed. I didn’t want to say the words ‘I don’t know’ again, but it seemed inescapable.
‘They’re vampires,’ Scotty said, swinging the flashlight beam around us.
I snorted. Tired and frightened as I was, I still could not escape the irritating grate of his nonsensical ideas. ‘I think it’s safe to say they won’t turn into bats and suck our blood.’
‘OK, Professor. What are they? Zombies?’
‘I’m not up on my contemporary horror lore but I wouldn’t call them that, either.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ he sneered. ‘How can they live under the water? How come they want to eat us?’
‘I don’t know anything about what motivates movie zombies to seek out human flesh …’
‘Brains,’ Scotty said.
‘In that case you’ve got nothing to worry about.’
‘You’ve been saving up all night for that one, haven’t you, Professor?’
‘Well what do they want?’ Heather cut in.
I shrugged. ‘I really can’t hazard a guess. It could be anything. Some component of our blood …’
‘Vampires,’ Scotty repeated.
‘… iodine, proteins, amino acids, a product of the endocrine system, or even something as basic as fresh water. The human body is comprised of 75 percent water. And now that I think about it, that’s something DeVries said before he lost consciousness. Remember? He said he was thirsty, very thirsty.’
‘Zombies.’
‘It could be the reaction taking place within their bodies has dehydrated the tissue, or their exposure to saltwater has plasmolysed the tissue. Who knows? It may take years of study to figure it all out.’
‘Why are they in the water?’ Heather asked.
‘To escape light. Apparently, light ratchets up the chemical reaction a hundred fold, like photosynthesis gone wild. Only the chemistry is different.’
‘Oh, Lord God,’ Heather sighed wearily. ‘That sounds just as far-fetched as any vampire myth I’ve ever heard.’
I nodded. Then Scotty said something that shut us all up.
‘Whatever the cause, we’d better figure out a way to get off this island. Look.’
He aimed the flashlight beam at our feet. The light was weak, and yellowish.
‘We have two more flashlights. And then it’s lights out.’
From out in the sound, we heard water being disturbed. We felt eyes, watching.
We slept until late in the morning, almost 11. We’d been awake all night, none of us daring to nod off, none of us able to relax to the point that sleep could overtake us. The island was surrounded by stealthy noises – surreptitious splashing, the plod of wet feet on sand, the occasional animal cry of pain. Scotty had kept a frantic vigil with the flashlight until about 5:30 or so, when the sun had warmed the eastern horizon with a suffocating pinkish hue. The sounds of disturbance had faded, then, as the things presumably moved to deeper water. Scotty and Heather took the opportunity to drag DeVries, who had begun to moan and squirm sluggishly, into one of the tents. If the flashlight were capable of causing his flesh to combust, the full light of the sun would surely produce a more … energetic reaction. The tent would afford at least some measure of protection.
All of us, then, had collapsed into what for me was fugue-like sleep.
I awakened to find Scotty and Heather standing on the beach, taking in a very different and unfriendly world in the light of day.
Across the water, fires still burned out of control. From the bridge to the east to as far as I could see west, individual plumes of oily black smoke merged into a single pall that drifted sluggishly northward. I uttered a silent prayer of thanks for that – all we needed was a stinking smoke cloud to add another layer of misery to our already miserable situation. In some areas, forestland had been ignited and was burning in a solid wall of flames. I couldn’t imagine what the damage from this catastrophe would be.
Closer, Santa Rosa Sound presented an equally unsettling sight. The surface was layered with dead fish, dead birds, dead animals – and in some cases the bodies of people floating amidst the carnage. Why these animals and people had not been transformed into the things that had attacked us at night, I couldn’t be sure. Presumably their exposure to the toxin had been sufficiently great to cause death, but who could say? Specimens would have to be collected, necropsies conducted – it might be years before anybody nailed down the pathogen and its killing method. In a former life I would have been intrigued by the challenge of researching what had happened here. But given our circumstances, I merely wanted to get off this island.
The authorities must be sending investigators and soldiers to find out what had taken place, to put out the fires and restore order. If we could signal to them – enough debris had washed ashore that we could easily lay out an SOS on the sand using boards and other flotsam. Or we could start a fire – not that one more fire would work effectively as a signal. To be honest, I had no other ideas.
As we stood there, pondering the awfulness of the world around us, DeVries’ voice carried through the nylon weave of the tent at a near-shriek: ‘I’m thirsty!’
Heather sighed wearily and turned to go up the beach. ‘I don’t know why he keeps saying that,’ she mumbled, seemingly more to herself than anyone else. ‘I give him water but he won’t drink it.’
‘That’s ’cause it’s not blood,’ Scotty murmured and cast a furtive glance my way. I didn’t respond, partly because I knew if I did it would only encourage him to further provocations, and partly because there was the chance he was right – in a way. If it were not fresh water the creatures craved, then some other component of human metabolism must be involved. At the moment I was simply too tired and frightened to think about it.
Heather had crawled halfway into the tent to check on DeVries when she called, ‘Guys. I think you’d better come look at this.’ I didn’t want to look at anything, to be honest, and I could tell Scotty felt the same way because for a moment, neither one of us moved. Then Heather shouted more urgently, ‘Guys!’ and we both rotated and began tramping laboriously through the sand toward the pair of tents. Heather’s ass jutted suggestively from the flap and I tried hard not to appear too interested. I didn’t even glance Scotty’s way to see if he were appraising my level of interest. Instead, I let my gaze droop to the sand.
Heather backed out of the tent, her face pinched into an expression of deep worry. She looked at me hesitantly and said, ‘Fred, something’s … happening.’
I dropped to my knees and crawled forward, into the tent, which reeked of unnameable odours, some embarrassingly human and others unidentifiable. It was ferociously hot inside, yet DeVries’ body vibrated spasmodically, as if a high-voltage current were arcing through his nerves. I recalled old black and white film reels about the Pacific campaign during World War II, and the men who’d been stricken with malaria. This looked remarkably similar. I laid the palm of my hand across DeVries’ forehead, expecting it to be clammy, but instead felt an uncharacteristic chill. His head whipped back and forth and he whispered, ‘Thirsty – thirsty –’ as saliva flecked with blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. I gingerly peeled away the sticky mat of T-shirt that covered his wound and reared back, revolted by what I saw. The bite was blackened as if cauterised. Tendrils the colour of road tar had begun spidering through the flesh, following the paths of blood vessels. It looked for all the world as if an alien infection were slowly consuming his body. Osmotic pressure within the vessels caused them to bulge obscenely.
‘I’m thirsty!’ DeVries moaned, this time with greater vigour. In fact, the tone of his voice carried the hint of a demand.
‘Heather, can you get me a bottle of water? Let’s see if I can get him to drink.’
She scrambled away as Scotty said something in a low voice about DeVries and how we should have cut him loose the night before. I felt a hot breath surge through me. How could he consider such a thing, much less advocate it as a course of action? ‘Infected’ or not, DeVries was a human being who needed help. And he had come back for us at tremendous personal risk. He had earned our efforts to help him.
Heather was back, handing me the water through the tent flap. Though it had been sitting out in the sun, the bottle felt infinitely cooler than the sweat lodge of a tent. I unscrewed the cap and placed the lip of the bottle at DeVries mouth. ‘Try to drink some of this,’ I told him gently, and reached around to hold up his head.
‘I’m thirsty!’ he shouted. Spit flew. I felt squeamish disgust as a fleck landed on my cheek.
‘I’m thirsty!’ he whispered as I tilted the bottle and poured the water between his lips. I began to feel a crawling sensation of tension, knowing that something was about to happen.
‘Thirsty thirsty thirsty –’ he chanted, shaking his head and spraying the inside of the tent with blood-tainted water. I rocked back on my heels and the bottle slipped from my fingers, the water gurgling out in languid gulps to pool in the tent bottom.
‘Thirsty!’ DeVries whispered again and sat up, bending at the waist, a ventriloquist’s doll brought to sudden and horrible life. His eyes snapped open and they were as blank and blanched as boiled eggs. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
His head rotated ever so slightly as he seemed to sense me, and some horrid recognition of appetite crept into his features, and at this moment I could swear a smile formed on those chapped and scorched lips so that I scrabbled away toward the opening in the tent. His hand flew out lightning fast, faster than I would have believed anybody in his condition could have moved, and he whispered, ‘I am thirsty’ and opened his mouth to reveal teeth that were coated with a kind of dark, clinging mucus that hung in snotty, glutinous strands as he grabbed my hair and began dragging me toward him.
I shoved my palm directly into his chest and blurted, ‘Shit – shit – shit, he’s got me! Pull me out!’ and heard Scotty swear and rip open the flap to grab my arm. DeVries snarled and leaned in close, his teeth snapping as they sought hold of my flesh. I pushed with all my strength, made stronger by the electric current of terror burning through me, and held him away as he gibbered and writhed and struggled to bring me into his embrace. Scotty was hauling me back and now Heather had grabbed me around the waist, and slowly I began to slide toward the tent opening. DeVries uttered puppy-like whining noises and redoubled his efforts, and I felt my body going back inside, toward what I knew would be a certain and grotesque death. I used my free hand to punch him in the testicles – one, two, three times in rapid succession – and his only reaction was to let loose with an animal cry of rage and yank on my head with superhuman strength.
‘Jesus Christ! Get him!’ Scotty yelled and Heather grunted, ‘I’m trying.’ I could smell the swampy, fetid stench of DeVries’ breath, and his skin rippled beneath my touch as though I were grasping a plastic bag filled with live eels. I shifted my grip from his chest to his throat and I could feel him trying to bend at the neck to get his teeth into my wrist.
Scotty wrapped his arms around my chest and heaved a mighty heave and I heard a tearing sound, like a Velcro fastener being undone, and a swath of my hair ripped loose as the three of us tumbled out the opening. We stared at each other wildly – I’m not sure we understood what exactly had happened – when DeVries abruptly growled and launched himself from the tent.
I threw myself out of his path and simultaneously jumped to my feet as he came at me. His arms were outstretched and his fingers hooked into claws, and as he sprinted toward me his flesh began to wrinkle and burn.
I ran.
He began screaming as he chased me down the beach, his voice gone beyond anything that sounded remotely human. I snatched a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that he was consumed by fire, a trail of greasy smoke unfurling behind him. His eyes had begun to smoulder and as I watched, they popped into blowtorches of flame.
Still, he came after me.
Mindlessly. Impervious to the fire, he came after me. I felt my chest heaving and my lungs burning, my lack of conditioning now a possibly fatal flaw. I moved out of the soft sand and into the hardpack area between the island proper and the water to improve my footing, and when I looked back he not only was still there but was gaining on me, an escapee from a charnel pit gone irrevocably mad. My thighs began to ache. A knot was forming in my side. I did not know what was worse – the physical pain I was feeling or the horror of seeing this … this thing chasing me.
Finally, I could run no more. The pain was too great. I could not take another step.
The shoreline was littered with debris. I snatched up a board and whirled around, holding it before me like a knight prepared for a joust. DeVries slammed into the end of the board, nearly knocking it from my grasp, and reached out with flaming arms to grab me.
His reach was short. Thank God.
And I held him that way, as the fire cooked his flesh into sizzling black chunks and his screams of hunger and rage diminished to an inhuman croaking. I held him at board-point and felt myself crying as his tendons snapped and his muscles gave way to the flames and he dropped woodenly to his knees.
I was still standing there as he burned to a crisp in front of me.
It was Heather who came and got me.
She led me unresisting back up the beach. The smell of rotting fish had become cloying. By tomorrow the air would be unbreathable, unless the current continued to flush the kill toward the new pass. Scotty was gazing appraisingly across the water.
He glanced at me as I joined them, then looked back at the shore. He said, ‘We have to do something.’
I scratched my head. ‘I was thinking. The authorities should be moving into the area today …’
‘We have enough food for two days,’ he interrupted me. ‘Enough water for a week. But it’s the light we’re hurting for.’
‘We lay out a signal on the beach. An SOS, using some of the lumber that’s been washed ashore …’
‘We have two flashlights left. That may give us another night or two. And there’s enough wood for a single fire.’
He wasn’t even listening to me. I might as well have been talking to the smoke-dimmed sky. Clearly he had already made up his mind to do something, and it sounded as though he were trying to justify the decision to himself.
‘I’m going to swim across to the mainland.’
I felt a moment of shock, and then I found myself shaking my head and muttering, ‘No.’ Even now, in looking back on that moment, I can’t say exactly why I opposed the idea, only that I did. I felt an instant apprehension, and I can’t say if it stemmed from some hidden concern for Scotty’s welfare, or for our own, or what. Maybe I saw it as a usurpation of my authority. Maybe I was secretly jealous he’d thought of the idea and not me. But I found myself formulating objections, the first being, ‘You can’t swim that far. It’s almost a mile.’
He pointed to the nearer shore. ‘That’s only about a quarter of a mile.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a quarter mile of dead fish and bloated animal carcasses carrying God alone knows what kind of pathogenic organisms …’
‘I’ve had enough of your pathogenic organisms,’ he answered. ‘Look around you. All of Northwest Florida is a pathogenic organism.’
‘What if one of the creatures in the water attacks you?’
He shook his head, tendrils of his slicked hair swaying with the movement. ‘It’s daylight. You saw what happened to DeVries.’
‘And once you get ashore,’ I countered. ‘Look at the shoreline over there.’ I yanked a finger southward. ‘It’s a solid mass of sand live oak and Spartina patens – er, saltmeadow cordgrass. Very dark. They could be hiding in there.’
‘I’ll stick to the open areas. Once I get ashore I’ll find a telephone and call for help …’
‘Who?’
He stared at me, exasperated. ‘Somebody. Anybody. Or I’ll get a boat. I’ll play it by ear. For Christ’s sake, it’s better than sitting around here waiting for one of those things to come up …’
‘I don’t want you to go,’ Heather cut in. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea. Fred is right. The police, the National Guard, whoever, will be moving in today, and we should stay here and wait to be rescued. We should stick together.’
Stick together. Yes, I thought. That’s why I didn’t like the idea.
I was afraid.
Scotty stared at her with an expression that was equal parts bafflement and anger. His eyes got big. ‘Heather! Please! I’m trying to get us off this island …’
‘You won’t accomplish anything if you get yourself killed,’ she said, gazing sullenly at the beach.
‘I don’t plan on getting killed,’ he insisted, his voice lower and tinged with what sounded like gratitude. ‘It’s a short swim across the sound. I find a clear spot on the beach and go ashore. I stick to the open areas – hell, I’ll find a car and drive to the nearest marina, get a boat and come get you and the Professor,’ and with that he glanced back at me sneeringly.
My thoughts were hopping frantically from one scenario to the next. Finally, an idea occurred to me. ‘We’ll all swim across.’
Scotty turned to me and laughed, a totally spontaneous gesture. He said, ‘You gotta be kidding! You couldn’t make it halfway across. We’d drown trying to save your ass.’
I knew he was right. You’d think a marine biologist would be more at home in water than dry land, but I had never been a strong swimmer. And with my current flabby lack of conditioning a quarter mile might well as be the entire breadth of the Gulf of Mexico. But before I could offer another alternative Heather spoke up.
‘I can’t swim.’
We both stared at her. She dropped her head apologetically.
‘I never learned. In fact, it’s almost a phobia with me.’
‘You’re getting a master’s in marine biology and you can’t swim?’ Scotty asked incredulously. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Look, it’s the subject material and the labs I like, OK,’ she shot back defensively. ‘I usually don’t go out on these field studies. But I’d planned to learn. I’d even signed up for lessons at the Y.’
Scotty threw up his hands. ‘Well, that settles it. The two of you stay. I’ll swim across.’
But I still wasn’t having it. ‘Look, that’s stupid. Just like Heather said, it’s better if we stick together. They’re sure to have recovery teams in the area soon – maybe they’re here right now. We signal to one of them and get off the island. And besides,’ I added ominously, ‘if we have to spend another night on this island, it’ll better if there are three of us instead of two.’
‘I am not spending another night on this island,’ Scotty said through gritted teeth.
‘The Coast Guard always tells people who are in boating accidents to stay with the boat,’ I answered, trying to sound reasonable. ‘Think of this island as a boat that’s overturned. We stay with the boat until help arrives.’
‘I’ll tell you what I think of this island,’ he raged back at me. ‘I think of it as the buffet at Barnhill’s. She’s the dessert,’ and he pointed at Heather. ‘I’m the prime rib and you’re the greasy, overfried chicken. And we’re ALL on the menu once the sun goes down!’
God, how I hated him. At that moment I hated him more than I hated my own jealousy and pettiness. No matter how badly I wanted him to stay. I could’ve wrapped my fingers around that scrawny throat and squeezed until his eyes bulged and his lips swelled, like the rotting fish drifting by. His youth, his good looks, his relationship with Heather – none of that seemed to matter anymore. He opposed me. He opposed my knowledge, my experience, my authority – everything I was. I understood that all young people undergo a process of revision and discovery that distances them from their elders. It’s all part of the separation of psyches that allows kids to become independent adults. But this was more than a stage in the process of becoming an individual. Scotty was trying to dominate me. If we were to live, I couldn’t let that happen. The battle with DeVries had changed me somehow.
So I did the forbidden thing. I asserted.
‘I won’t let you go,’ I told him. ‘I can’t stop you from being stupid, but I can stop you from doing harm to yourself, and to us too.’
His eyes narrowed and I could see a hardening there. It was the same brute anger I’d seen in him yesterday, just before we’d spotted the mist. I could feel my eyes starting to water, and I cursed my weakness.
‘You’re not in charge of me,’ he answered quietly. ‘If I decide to swim ashore, you can’t stop me.’
‘I’m in charge of this field study, and you’re a part of it.’
‘I’m a gate crasher, a party pooper. Remember?’ and he winked slyly.
‘What the devil are you talking about?’
‘Yeah,’ Heather chimed in. ‘What are you talking about?’
He snorted petulantly. ‘You think this was a damn expedition to study plankton?’ He stabbed a finger at me. ‘That’s bull. He wanted to have a secret weekend here alone with you, sweetheart.’
My stomach seemed to drop entirely from my body. I blustered, ‘Excuse me …’
‘You stupid old man. You’re so transparent.’ He paused for effect, and a look of pure malice crept into his expression. ‘As if any woman would give a paunchy old gasbag like you a second look. Hope you brought your stash of Viagra with all your test tubes and microscopes, buddy. Maybe you and Rosy will get lucky – Rosy Palm, that is.’
He started up the beach, toward the opposite side of the island. My face was scalding with rage, and I didn’t dare look at Heather. I stood there, clenching and unclenching my fists, my breath coming in superheated, sawed-off gasps. Far away, I heard Heather mumble something to me, something about not overreacting, and I guess my expression must have revealed to her what I was thinking. I didn’t want to stop him from swimming across to the other side.
I wanted to kill him.
‘Fred. Take it easy,’ she said. All I heard was a dull ringing.
‘Fred.’
I scrambled after him, stumbling in the loose sand. I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.
He struck me across the nose. It was not a punch – more of a slap – but it stopped me cold. I felt the impact surge through my body, down to my stomach, where a knot of nausea quickly unravelled and threatened to drop me to my knees in a fit of vomiting. Tears sprang to my eyes and blinded me for a moment. I wiped my face with my forearm and saw a bright streak of blood, almost black against my tanned flesh. I caught my breath and without thinking, lunged at him again.
This time he gathered his hand into a fist and punched me hard in the stomach. The air gushed out of my lungs in a sickening exhalation and I fell to the sand, clutching my middle. Dimly I heard Heather let fly with a small gasp of horror. Then she screamed, ‘Stop it! You’re killing him!’ Again, I thought I’d throw up, but I couldn’t breathe and knew that if I began to retch I might suffocate on my own vomit. Spasms shook me, and the pain was indescribable – not the sharp, dazzling flare of a cut but a low, heavy, throbbing ache that seemed to radiate from my stomach and spread to all corners of my body. It paralysed me momentarily, and only after I was able to take several deep breaths did it let up so that I could open my eyes.
Scotty was hovering over me, his fist poised to strike again. Heather was holding his arm back. I wondered how such a scrawny little fellow could hit so hard, and decided it was not that he was so strong, but that I was so weak. I hadn’t physically fought another person since junior high school, and my pain tolerance seemed to have diminished since. I didn’t think I could take another blow. The realisation settled in with a heaviness that amplified the agony in my gut.
He roughly shook himself from Heather’s grasp. He was breathing heavily, actually snorting, and his eyes were burning with an adrenalin-stoked fire. He muttered some guttural, incomprehensible epithet, then resumed his path across the island, kicking sand in his wake. This time, Heather didn’t go after him. She remained by my side.
‘I’m so sorry, Fred,’ she sobbed. She had a bandana, one of those cheap paisley print scarves you can buy at any convenience store, and she began wiping the blood from my face. My nose throbbed and I wondered if it might be broken. ‘I’m sorry I asked him to come. I’m sorry for all this,’ and she took in the island with a broad sweep of her arm.
‘I’m sorry for being such an ass,’ I told her. It seemed a noble confession for a middle-aged guy to make after having his ass kicked by a man half his age. ‘When we get back to Gainesville you can switch advisers – if you want.’
She shook her head, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned to watch Scotty tramp into the water, a mass of dead fish swirling behind him. I got to my knees and strained to see into the sun-spackled water. It was just after noon.
We watched.
Scotty was halfway across. At first he had swum hard, his arms taking in huge bites of the turgid water, his feet kicking a frothy wake the colour of root beer. But after a few minutes he’d tired and was simply propelling himself through the kill, holding his head as high above the water as was possible. I couldn’t imagine how awful the smell must be, or the sensation of the slick, bloated carcasses brushing against his skin. I had to admit to a certain admiration for him. Despite the fact he’d insulted me and defied me and then physically attacked me, he was showing an endearing courage. Maybe stupid. But admirable.
I was beginning to think he might make it when the unexpected happened. You could tell from his movements that something was wrong. He stopped in the water, his head whipping back and forth, and then he peered down into the water. What he saw there must have frightened him because he began to swim madly for the opposite shore. Around him we could see whorls and disturbances in the calm water.
Something was after him. We knew what it was.
Heather screamed, ‘Swim, Scotty! Swim!’ and I don’t think he needed to be told that because he was swimming with the frantic resolution of somebody who had glimpsed death’s stalking shadow. I could tell from the colour of the water he was nearing the shallows on the opposite side. If he could make it there the light might protect him. I wasn’t sure what degree of tolerance the creatures had for sunlight, but if a flashlight beam was enough to set them ablaze surely the noon sun, dimmed though it was by three feet of water, would produce similar results.
Scotty’s head had disappeared beneath the surface. A roiling tumult bubbled around the spot we had last seen him. I couldn’t see him but my mind’s eye filled in the horrible details of what must be happening – the things lurking in the dark, deep waters had grasped an ankle and were pulling him under to extract whatever it was they needed from his body. His body would pop to the surface and ignite, and then Heather and I would be here, the two of us, to stand against the night. I’d told him it was a dumb idea, dammit. I had tried to keep him here. I’m ashamed to admit this but a secret part of me was satisfied I’d been proven right. The same stubborn certainty of youth I’d admired only a moment ago would probably lead to his death.
But then he did pop to the surface. He let out a great, sucking gasp of breath and began swimming again. Heather shouted, ‘Are you all right?’ and he answered with a distant, breathless ‘OK’ and continued swimming at a frantic pace. Within a minute he was in the shallows and stood, bending at the waist and taking in great draughts of air.
He shouted, ‘I’m OK; I’m OK,’ and unbent, breathing heavily. Heather sighed loudly and dropped to her knees next to me. She muttered, ‘Oh God, if he lives through this I’m gonna kill him.’ Her voice was touched with relief, and something else, something that sounded like … I don’t know. Love, maybe. I felt an involuntary chill of disappointment. Was there no bottom to my selfishness?
‘Told you,’ Scotty shouted back at us. He had waded into the extreme shallows, almost to the beach, and had turned to wave – and taunt. Heather giggled mirthlessly and shook her head.
‘I’ll be back in a few … with a boat,’ he yelled. ‘Get your shit packed, Professor. You’re going home.’ Despite my anger with him, the thought of going home sounded awfully good. I got to my feet slowly, afraid the sudden change in position would set my nose to bleeding again. Heather helped me. Her grip was a lot stronger than I’d expected.
We watched him wade to shore. There were no spots along the beach that were free of trees and underbrush, but he seemed oblivious. Heather tugged at my arm and whispered, ‘C’mon, Fred, let’s get our stuff ready to go.’ But I wanted to stay and see what happened. I wouldn’t really believe he’d made it until I saw him atop the crest of dunes that topped Okaloosa Island.
He plunged into the fringe of trees. Heather tugged again. ‘Come on, Fred! What are you waiting for? He’s there.’
‘Not yet,’ I answered, my voice betraying my uncertainty. My tone must have frightened her, because she merely grabbed my arm and held on and stood next to me, watching.
We never really saw what happened. But we heard it.
Scotty vanished within the trees. A preternatural silence descended over the island, coupled with a smothering tension that defied rational explanation. I kept scanning the dune horizon, hoping to see Scotty waving from atop the horizon. But that did not happen.
We saw a cloud of smoke waft from the trees. We heard the sound of underbrush being crushed.
And then we heard screaming.
It was the sound of a man who was dying. We heard, ‘Stop it! Stop, dammit …’ and then more crashing. Then, an animal shriek of pain. More wispy tendrils of smoke slipped from the canopy. And the screaming began in earnest. It didn’t stop. I couldn’t imagine human lungs capable of holding the air necessary to produce such an unending cry of pain. Heather dropped my arm and ran madly for the water. I got to my feet and nearly fell over with dizziness, but managed to keep my balance and run after her. She splashed into the water and I thought she meant to swim the breach between our island and the shore. I caught her and held on. She was shouting, ‘Scotty! Scotty! Come back!’ and the screaming assumed a new, more urgent pitch. The underbrush began to gyrate madly, and then Scotty burst into view. Three of the creatures had fastened to him, one with its mouth at his throat, another biting his arm, and the third trying to reach the other side of his throat. Scotty was dragging them with him, and when the sunlight touched their skin all three began to smoke furiously and then burst into flame. They instantly let go and hurled themselves into the water. You could see the turbulence on the surface as they slithered, eel-like, toward the darker, deeper reaches of the sound.
Heather was sobbing, her chest heaving against my encircling arms. Her breath made a short, asthmatic whistling sound as she sucked air. Her gaze was locked on Scotty.
He stood there on the shore staring at us, his arms hanging at his side beseechingly. He was covered in blood. I didn’t know what to think – that he was pleading for help, that he was finally admitting I’d been right about something, that he was damning me for bringing us to this place. At once I felt an awful cascade of emotions – shame for all my evil thoughts about him, my less than honourable motivation for arranging this trip to begin with, possibly my ineptitude in dealing with the situation. Maybe he wanted me to see there was a kind of tragic honour in trying to beat death. I don’t know. My fevered imagination was treading equally through shock and guilt.
Scotty stood that way a moment longer. And then gravity took hold. He simply fell over, into the water, and vanished.
Heather moaned, ‘Nooo,’ and went weak in my arms. I nearly dropped her. She collapsed against my chest and began to sob, and it was a pitiful sound, full of defeat and misery, the kind that tears your heart apart. If I could have reached into her and taken that pain and brought it into myself, I would have done so because at that moment I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a human being who was so utterly, completely sad in all my life. And it had all been my doing. I couldn’t have foreseen these events, but it was because of me that we were here, and it was because of me that Scotty and I had fought. My shame gave way to a freezing sense of terror. Now it was only the two of us. And as old-fashioned as it sounds, I knew it was my responsibility to get us off this island alive. My feelings of infatuation for Heather had given over to a kind of paternal protectiveness. Yet the doubt remained.
Would I be able to do it?
Heather pulled herself from me and staggered away a few short steps. She began to vomit.
I should have gone to her. I should have helped her. I should have spoken the magic words that would have eased her pain.
Instead, I simply knelt there staring blankly at the spot where Scotty had vanished. The torrid afternoon seemed to weigh as much as the world.
We sat atop the dune, numb.
I had worked all afternoon collecting lumber from the beach. Fortunately a great deal of wood had washed ashore, practically all of it dock timbers. This reinforced my suspicion that a barge had ploughed along the mainland side of the sound, tearing out a number of docks. Too bad none of the boats tied up to those docks had come our way. I’d worked almost to dusk, collecting the boards into a huge pile. Then I’d begun spelling out the world ‘HELP’ in 20-foot tall characters on the sandy tailing of the island, careful to avoid DeVries’ carbonised body which was still standing upright where he had burnt. The spot was slightly elevated with a shallow slope, so there was a chance somebody from shore would see it. But I was counting on an airplane or a helicopter pilot. That seemed the logical approach to reconnoitring the coast. If the authorities had begun to probe this far south, they’d do so by air first. Then by surface.
I had worked with a great deal of energy, partly to banish my thoughts, which kept returning to the sight of Scotty standing on the far shore, and partly to satisfy the newly found sense of urgency I felt in getting us off this island. Heather had remained on the beach for most of the afternoon, and I didn’t bother her. I expected she needed the time alone. I didn’t want to add to her misery. Later, she’d joined me, working silently yet with determination, and I’d said nothing.
As the sun slipped below the horizon and the air cooled, we gathered a few things – most importantly the flashlights and waterproof matches – and set up camp at the top of the dune. Neither one of us spoke of what we would face during the night. The day had already surpassed our quota of horror.
I checked the flashlight that Scotty had used the night before. The beam was jaundiced and barely illuminated the foot of the dune, much less the beach. I turned it off again. I wanted to get as much use from it as possible before the batteries died. No telling how much juice was in the other two flashlights.
We sat quietly in the gathering dark until the sun dropped completely below the horizon. And then Heather began to talk.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she began, her voice jagged. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it through this.’
‘You’re doing fine,’ I told her.
‘I’m trying …’ and it seemed she would start crying, as if the sound of grief alone would open the dam holding back her emotions. ‘I’m trying not to be one of those hysterical females you see in the movies, the ones who scream and faint and fall into the arms of a man. But I’m not sure …’
‘You’re not hysterical.’
‘I can’t believe what’s happened. I can’t believe what’s happened to Scotty. Two days ago we were a happy couple and now …’
‘I know. It’s horrible,’ I tried to console her. ‘Everything that’s happened since we came to this island is horrible – the mind can’t take it all in.’
‘But Scotty …’ and then she did begin to cry, very softly. She laid her head on my shoulder and just as quickly jerked it away. ‘Scotty was real. The rest of it …’ she waved her hand as if to take in the entire world, ‘just doesn’t seem that way.’ She looked up and in a warbling voice said, ‘What am I going to tell his mom?’ and began crying again.
‘Tell her he died trying to help us get off this island,’ I said.
‘He was attacked …’
‘Don’t tell her that,’ I said, waving the flashlight around. ‘Tell her what I told you.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t bother turning that thing on,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if she were speaking to me or merely thinking aloud. But I said, ‘Of course you’re not serious.’
She stared into the approaching dark. Finally, she shook her head. ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I guess not. I don’t think that’s how I want to die. But maybe I deserve it.’
I put my arm around her, more firmly than what would have been implied by a seductive gesture. ‘Look, Heather, don’t start, OK? You couldn’t have known and nobody expected this …’ I swept my arm across the dim vista of the sound. ‘This … insanity. Nobody could have foreseen any of this. I could be punishing myself about asking you to come, but I’m not. To question my motives based on hindsight – it’s pointless. I’m not going to do it, and you shouldn’t either.’
‘But I shouldn’t have asked him to come.’
I let out a loud breath.
‘It was a big mistake,’ she continued, her voice clear now, like the Heather of old. ‘I mean, it was obvious you two didn’t get along. I don’t know what I was thinking … oh, what am I saying? Of course I know what I was thinking.’ She paused, and a curious expression appeared on what I could see of her face, a mixture of confusion and something darker. She said, ‘Why did you ask me to come?’
I felt my insides go cold. Sweat speckled my palms. God, I didn’t want to get into this, especially under the current circumstances. I babbled the first, lame excuse that came to my mind: ‘You’re my graduate assistant. It’s customary for college professors to include their assistants on field studies.’
Her head wobbled back and forth, and I could imagine her eyes rolling in the sockets. ‘I’m not exactly an expert on dinoflagellates. You could have asked a dozen other more qualified people to help, and you know I wouldn’t have been bothered. I don’t even know why I’m your assistant. I’d be much better suited to Dr. Purdy …’
‘I thought you wanted a diversified study base,’ I offered weakly.
She sighed. ‘Let’s just be honest. We may not live through the night, so let’s be very, very honest …’
‘We’re not going to die tonight …’
‘Whatever,’ she answered dismissively. ‘I’d like to know the real reason.’
I fought for breath. I had never spoken about this with her, not any of it, and now I wasn’t sure I even felt the same as before. Much had changed in the past two days. Too much for words.
‘Be honest,’ she reminded me.
I didn’t want to be honest. I wanted to tell her another lie. Too much was at stake now, and when I began to enumerate to myself everything I would risk by telling the truth, the words just tumbled out.
‘I wanted to be with you. Alone.’
She turned to me, her expression neutral. ‘You wanted to have sex with me?’
The words stung. Spoken with such lack of decoration, such blunt certainty, they robbed the whole concept of its subtextual beauty. I felt my face growing hot, and I was hopeful she couldn’t see me.
‘It wasn’t just a sexual thing,’ I murmured, ashamed. ‘It was you. I wanted to be with you.’
She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and the light had grown so dim I couldn’t make out her expression. But after that long pause she said, ‘I knew that.’
The hole inside me deepened, if that were possible. It felt as though every molecule of my body were being drawn into it so that I heard her only dimly over the roar of my own heartbeat. A mad pulsing commenced in my temples, a heavy thud that sent shockwaves rippling across my body.
‘That’s why you shouldn’t turn on the light. That’s why I should be dragged off into the water.’
I shook my head, more delirious than confused. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s why I asked Scotty to come.’
I knew that already. I told her.
‘I don’t want you to think I hate you,’ she blurted, ignoring what I’d just told her. She had become a pale hobgoblin in the maroon twilight. ‘I just … I just didn’t feel the same way about you. And I wanted Scotty there.’
I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not that I think you’re too old, or unattractive,’ she amplified. ‘I just … I was wrapped up in Scotty. I was taken. You see?’
Neither one of us spoke for a long time. The night settled in around us. There were no bugs – my Karenia negre had apparently done them in too. We sat there in the cool dark.
My feelings were … I don’t know. I felt hollow inside, and cold to the bone. A kind of revelation was settling in. Every person experiences a moment in his life when he finally understands in a way that the protective coating on the psyche cannot deflect that he is fallible, and mortal. It’s a condition that neither education nor intellect can deny. I had committed mistakes that for all my life I’d held other men in my circumstances accountable for, and now I didn’t want to admit the same for myself. I always seemed to disappoint myself.
‘Are we evil people, Fred?’ Heather asked, her voice perversely innocent. ‘All the manipulating and conniving – does that make us evil?’
‘You’re not evil,’ I told her.
‘And you?’
‘I don’t know.’ I honestly didn’t.
‘We tried to talk him out of swimming to the other side, didn’t we? I mean, we really tried.’
‘Yes.’
‘He was that way,’ she continued, sounding angry. ‘You couldn’t tell him a damn thing. He was a stubborn asshole.’ A whiff of uncertainty crept into her voice. ‘Maybe that’s what I liked about him.’ I said nothing but I was listening. The conversation was jumping around, not quite linear, and in such moments unvarnished truth and fiction are mixed in equal parts.
She shook her head. ‘But we tried. You even tried to stop him, and he hit you. And then you cried.’
I made some kind of noise, I don’t know what. Some kind of animal distress sound. My shame burned ever hotter. She put a hand on my arm and through the murk, I thought I could see her smiling.
‘No, Fred,’ she said, ‘It’s OK. You guys are so hung up on crying. It’s a human thing. Entirely human.’
And then she settled again into silence.
I stood watch the first half of the night, switching on the dying flashlight and playing it around the empty beach.
At some point, I fell asleep.
Heather woke me up. She was cooing, ‘Oh Scotty, stop it,’ and at first I could not remember where we were or what we were doing. Then I saw pale fingers, fat as bleached sausages, sliding around her throat. The shape of a head bobbed in the gloom.
A bolt of fear nearly stopped my heart and I jerked the flashlight up.
It wasn’t Scotty. I don’t know how I would have reacted if it had been Scotty. The weakened beam of the flashlight landed squarely in the thing’s bloodless face, and the eyes twitched up to reveal nothing but white balls rotating blindly in the sockets. The flesh puckered and the thing threw a protective arm across his face but it was too late – one eye kicked off like a flare and the top of our dune was illuminated in an otherworldly nimbus of blue light as it began to burn. Fingers had latched on to my shoulders and I could feel a mouth closing in on my throat – the breath was cold, as if somebody had opened the heavy steel door of a meat locker, and it was foul with a stench of both rotting flesh and muck. I aimed the flashlight at me and the fingers instantly let go and there was a menacing hiss of combustion. Whatever it was staggered back and howled wildly into the night.
Heather’s eyes flew open and at that moment something snatched at her and grabbed the neck of her T-shirt from the back and began to drag her down the dune face. She screamed ‘Fred!’ and I aimed the flashlight at the thing, but at that distance the beam was so weak it produced no reaction beyond a tenuous bit of smoke. She was screaming, ‘Oh God, Fred, help me …’ and I snatched up one of the other lights, a big heavy duty lantern with a mushy, rubber-tipped push-button switch at the top. I mashed it savagely. A powerful beam of light stabbed into the dark and I aimed it directly at the monstrosity. Instantly his head went up in flames, but he refused to let go as he shambled toward the water, dragging Heather behind. It was an insane sight, and for a moment I felt the urge to titter. But her screaming drove me to my feet. I scrambled after them, the flashlight beam jiggling crazily, revealing in stroboscopic glimpses the crowd of things surrounding the island. I was able to reach her quickly and I ran in front, holding the flashlight like a gun. The beam scorched across the thing’s chest and it began to burn fiercely, as if I’d doused it in gasoline. It still wouldn’t let go of Heather.
She wriggled out of her T-shirt and squirmed away from the creature just as its clothes began to burn. She crawled over to me, piping gasps of terror slipping past her lips. The thing went up with a great whoosh and we had to stagger back to escape the sudden wave of heat. All around us, the things staggered toward the water, burning until they hit the shallows and dived in amid clouds of steam and hissing. You could see their forms, scuttling along the bottom as they headed for deeper water.
‘It touched me!’ Heather screamed hysterically, squeezing my arm until it hurt. ‘The filthy thing touched me and it was cold and slimy –’ and a huge, shuddering shiver ran through her body.
The thing stood and burned. It still clenched Heather’s T-shirt, which had begun to smoke.
She jerked me around and looked me straight in the eye. Hysteria had pinched her face into a weird mask of terror, the eyes wide and glassy, the cheekbones raised, the mouth a twisting shape as she struggled to breathe.
‘They’re not going to come, Fred – nobody’s going to come!’ she whispered hoarsely and I knew it was true. They would come, all right. In three or four days’ time. By then we would be slumbering on the bottom of Santa Rosa Sound, waiting for the sun to go down. ‘We can’t do this again tomorrow night. We can’t.’
I waggled the flashlight beam around, seeing white eyes sink beneath the water’s surface hundreds of yards out. They were everywhere.
I didn’t know what to do.
We didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
About 4:30 in the morning, the lantern battery began to die.
It was ugly.
I had awakened around 10 after a fitful few hours of intermittently dozing and jerking awake, afraid that the things in the water might suddenly develop an immunity to daylight. It was during one of those half-lucid transition periods between sleep and wakefulness that the idea came to me. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.
Heather was still asleep when I got to work. By the time she woke up I was nearly finished. She trudged down the sand dune and stood on the beach, watching me.
‘What’s that?’
I stood up. ‘That is a raft.’
She frowned. ‘Will it float?’
I nodded. ‘Everything I made it out of floated here. Sure it’ll float.’
‘But will it carry our weight?’
‘Only one way to find out,’ I answered, instantly regretting the flippant tone of my voice. She began to shake her head, and I could see the dread in her eyes.
‘We’ll end up like Scotty,’ she said.
‘No.’ I pointed to the clear stretch of land, on the landing approach to the runway at Hurlburt Field on the north shore. ‘All we have to do is cross the channel. It’s about 500 yards, the same distance Scotty swam yesterday. Once we’re across the channel we hit shallow water – you can see it.’ Indeed, the turbidity of the water had diminished overnight so that the natural colouring of the bottom was returning. Fewer dead fish drifted westward. Another few days and you’d be hard pressed to tell that anything out of the ordinary had happened here at all. ‘That water is only about waist deep almost a thousand yards to shore. We walk to that clear spot, avoiding the trees to either side, and go on up to the highway. We can find a car and drive out of here.’
I thought it was a good plan, a sensible plan. If I’d thought of it yesterday all three of us might be back at Gainesville, Scotty and Heather celebrating their brush with death over a pitcher of Löwenbräu and a pizza, and me … well, I wasn’t sure. Doing something other than how I’d spent the time since Psycho Cecelia walked out of my life. That was my new pact with myself. If we survived this, I would change my life. For the good.
But Heather looked doubtful. ‘How’d you put it together?’
Now that was a question I could answer and I launched enthusiastically into my explanation. I showed her how I’d used the tent lines to secure a segment of dock to the empty oil drum that had washed ashore, and after I’d run out of rope how I’d cut strips of nylon from the tents themselves and braided them to make more rope for the outriggers that would keep the raft from tipping over. I felt an inordinate sense of pride over the raft. I was not the fixer-upper type and for me, this was not only an engineering marvel but a – dare I use the word – proactive solution to our problem. I had even tracked down a couple of thin boards we could conceivably use as paddles once we were out in the deep water.
Still, Heather didn’t look convinced. She had said she couldn’t swim and was afraid of the water and I could understand that, being a bit acrophobic myself. So I chose that moment to show her the ‘life preserver’ I’d made for her. I’d taken one of the nylon tent bags and stuffed it with as much Styrofoam as I could find – the beaches around here were always thick with the stuff, what with boaters losing their coolers over the side. The current disaster had produced a bumper crop, which I was able to break into small pieces and fill the bag. I tied the ends of the drawstring together to form a loop, which she could wrap around one shoulder and under the other. I wasn’t sure it would hold her up, but it would certainly add to her buoyancy. More importantly, it might give her the confidence to get on the raft in the first place.
‘Is there no other way?’ she asked. She looked small and frightened, and I felt an intense sorrow for her. It was bad enough that anybody had to deal with circumstances like these, but for somebody who had suffered the way she had, and was about to, it was nearly intolerable.
But she answered the question herself. Her gaze swept across the island and landed on the charred body of DeVries standing at the lip of the dune. It had never fallen over. It stood there alone, a blackened scarecrow that frightened nobody but us. She turned back to me and I could see she had made her decision.
We ate first.
I forced the both of us to choke down a military meal packet. We would need our strength. Three of the food packets remained. If some other poor bastard ended up on this island, he wouldn’t die of starvation for at least a couple of days. If he lived that long.
Shortly after noon the sky began to darken. A few fires continued to burn on the mainland, and a thin layer of dusty smoke hung over everything. But puffy cumulus clouds had begun to gather inland, collecting into larger build-ups. I saw the first hint of a cloud base. In the distance, a thin murmur of thunder echoed down the empty corridor of Santa Rosa Sound.
We didn’t pack, and we didn’t clean up. We took the flashlights. I stuffed the waterproof matches into my breast pocket. The environmentalist in me hated to leave the island such a mess, but considering the situation, a bit of litter didn’t matter. I’d used some of the lumber from my distress sign to make the raft. I’d considered spelling out the world ‘HELL,’ but that didn’t seem a useful expenditure of energy either.
As Heather clambered aboard the raft I looked back one more time at the island. The dead thing stared westward. The sign on the beach said ‘HEI.’
I was too frightened to be happy we were leaving.
I got behind the raft and pushed.
It took the better part of an hour to get us out into the deeper part of the sound. The raft was not exactly hydrodynamic, and the exertion of pushing it through the water left me exhausted. Worse, a north wind had sprung up. Thankfully there was no more Karenia in the water – there was nothing alive in the water at all! – so the question of airborne toxins was moot. But the air movement disturbed the water, creating small waves. They slapped against the blunt nose of the oil drum with a hollow thunking sound that didn’t give me a lot of confidence about its seaworthiness.
Heather was crouched in the middle of the dock grid, her life preserver clutched to her chest in a death grip. The raft was constantly tilting to port or starboard and the outriggers tended to submerge momentarily before stopping the tilt, creating even more drag. Part of the problem was Heather – she didn’t have the sea legs of an experienced boater, who would have shifted his weight to counterbalance the motion of the raft. Instead, she remained stiff, which only exacerbated the tipping motion. I knew she was afraid. Her face was as pallid as some of our nocturnal visitors. If she could see me aboard a jetliner I would look the same as the plane drops its gear and descends toward the runway. Still, it wasn’t helping, and I actually looked forward to the moment when I could climb aboard and take up one of the paddles.
I had asked her to keep an eye out – for what, I hadn’t elaborated. But I think she knew what I meant. Pushing the raft like this, I couldn’t see what was ahead – or underneath. Scotty’s haunting image re-formed in my mind’s eye, and then another thought, even more disturbing, came to me: What if he were out here, waiting for us to pass overhead? It was too much to contemplate and I forced my thoughts to return to what I was doing.
‘Oh, great,’ Heather declared.
My heart jumped into my throat. ‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘A storm,’ she said.
I glanced at the northern horizon. The sky was the colour of blue steel, fringed with a menacing outflow boundary that gave the cloud base an even darker and more ominous appearance. Here in Florida such afternoon thunderstorms were practically a daily occurrence. The storms could be violent, with lashing winds and rain. But that wasn’t something Heather needed to know. So I lied to her.
‘No problem. We’ll get wet. But the rain will put out the fires.’
She nodded, but I didn’t get the impression she was reassured.
When the water was as deep as my chest, I told her to hang on and I hoisted myself onto the raft. It wobbled precariously and Heather clung rigidly to the deck spars. For a moment I thought it might go over altogether and I stopped moving until its motion settled. Heather was sucking in great, whistling gasps of air.
‘It’s OK,’ I whispered, hauling my feet onto the sloping deck. It was canted at about a 20-degree angle – I couldn’t figure out how to raise the back end of the raft without using another oil drum, which we didn’t have – but the slope wasn’t unmanageable. I hefted one of the ‘paddles’ and began to pole us out into the deeper water.
A shadow fell across the sound. The leading edge of the thundercloud had swept across the sun. The wind picked up and the temperature began to fall. I began to see the occasional whitecap. We were in the storm’s outflow. It would be raining in a few minutes.
‘Ah, don’t you just love this Florida weather?’ I quipped, trying to inject as much levity into my voice without it sounding phoney. ‘If not, just stick around a few minutes. It’ll change.’ Heather glanced back and smiled nervously.
‘We’re almost to the channel,’ I wheezed. ‘See that buoy over there?’ I pointed to our left. ‘That marks the left-hand side of the channel. There’s a corresponding buoy on the other side – see it?’ She nodded yes, and then pointed quickly to a wooden latticework structure rising above the water a ways past the other buoy. ‘What’s that?’
‘That’s a channel marker,’ I said. ‘It’s got a permanent light mounted on top. That helps the barge captains navigate at night, when the buoys are difficult to spot.’
The sky darkened and the wind ratcheted up another notch. I sneaked a furtive glance at the north shore and saw our clear spot beginning to slide by to the right. I had forgotten about the damn current drawing toward the new pass in Navarre. But I didn’t think it would be a problem – if we entered the shallows west of where we wanted to go ashore we could simply walk back.
‘The channel is about a hundred yards wide – that’s about a football field in length. We paddle across that and we’re in the shallows. Then we get out and hoof it. No problem.’
I was talking to her partly to keep her mind busy and away from this frightening thing we were doing, and partly to bolster my own confidence. The approaching storm appeared to be growing in ferocity. A dense skirt of heavy rain hung from its middle and as I looked, a snake’s tongue of lightning flicked at the distant ground, producing a boom of thunder that shook the raft.
‘Gonna get wet,’ she said, repeating my earlier statement.
‘That’s OK. This ship can take it.’
‘This ship – hey! What’s its name? You never gave it a name!’
I started to answer the SS Minnow, borrowing from Scotty’s constant patter of Gilligan’s Island remarks. But I didn’t want to remind her of him; nor did I want to name our raft after a shipwreck. Titanic was out too. So I shouted over the wind, ‘It’s the Kon Tiki, set out on a voyage to prove that Western civilisation’s ancestors sailed to the new world from spoil islands in Santa Rosa Sound!’ The Kon Tiki was a successful expedition despite the prognostications of critics, and I felt the example would inspire Heather with confidence. I needed the confidence myself.
‘Ah, a reasonable hypothesis, Thor,’ she answered. ‘But how did our ancestors get to the spoil islands in the first place?’
‘Obviously they sailed from Egypt in papyrus rafts,’ I deadpanned.
The first shot pellets of rain began to spack the water around us. My pole was no longer touching bottom, and I drew it up to begin paddling. I lay back on the dock and planted the board between my outstretched ankles, then began a sideways rowing motion. The raft began to turn to the left, its nose pointed west.
‘Shit. This isn’t working,’ I muttered. I pulled in the board and began easing my way to the front of the raft, trying to manoeuvre around Heather, who still rigidly clung to the planks. She looked at me uncertainly, and I composed a smile for her. I needed to pull us forward and keep the raft’s snout aimed at the opposite shore. I could only do that from the front.
The current was stronger here, and waves were sloshing against the top of the barrel. The raft wallowed. I got to my knees and lifted the board over my head, then reached out into the water with it. I couldn’t get much of a pull because the backstroke of the oar was blocked by the outriggers. But it was enough to orient the raft toward the north again. For every metre shoreward, we seemed to drift 10 metres westward. That would put us into the shallows a good distance from the runway clearing. I pulled more strongly on the board but didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep this up. My back was already aching, and I was beginning to feel dizzy. You don’t get this kind of a workout standing in front of a classroom, or staring at slides of rodophyta.
‘Here comes the rain,’ Heather said quietly.
You could see it advancing southward across the water, a vertical white sheet that turned the water to froth. Then I could hear it, that sickeningly familiar frying pan sound. For a horrible moment my mind recomposed the arrival of the mist, and I felt a sickening sense of déjà vu. What an awful thing it would be for us – worse than it already was – if this rain were contaminated with the negre toxin. I forced that thought from my mind.
The rain suddenly sluiced over us in a freezing downpour. I think we both gasped simultaneously. The drops struck with the force of icy needles that drove through the skin to impale themselves in the bone. The horizon disappeared, the buoys disappeared, everything around us was swallowed by a maelstrom of hammering rain and wind and dark. My skin scrunched up into gooseflesh and that was not by temperature alone – waves had begun to wash over the front of the raft and I had no idea where we were going. I could only try to keep the raft pointed into the waves and hang on. Heather was crouched next to me and she said nothing. I was thankful for that. I could sense the terror in her, about to uncoil, and I think it would have been contagious.
Suddenly the force of the rain redoubled and I literally could not see 10 feet ahead of me. People who don’t live in the South can’t grasp the violence of such cloudbursts. The rain becomes a solid object almost, a waterfall from the sky, the kind of rain that forces drivers to pull off the road and hope some daredevil doesn’t roar up from behind and rear-end them. The world had gone from muggy afternoon to freezing twilight in an instant. The raft was wobbling precariously and the waves were driving it to port, and I began to fear we would get turned around so that the whole thing might tip over. I bashed at the water with the board, wishing I had something lighter and wider that would create more drag. My shoulders had gone beyond aching to a kind of dull fire in the joints, and I could not breathe fast enough to feed my burning muscles. Lightning and thunder cracked across the sky and I could feel the force of the air booming against my skin. I can’t begin to imagine what Heather was feeling but she held on silently, enduring the onslaught, and seeing her inspired me to try harder. The storm will pass by in a few minutes, I told myself. The water will calm. We’ll make it across the channel. Then you can rest.
The raft hit something.
I couldn’t see what, but it was a solid jolt, not at all like the feel of waves against the oil drum. It staggered me for a moment and I nearly dropped the board. The water was still cluttered with debris though much of it had either washed ashore or drifted to the west. The raft turned grudgingly to starboard, back into the waves.
I strained to see what was ahead of us.
Then Heather moaned.
A pallid hand was rising from the water, groping for the right outrigger.
A shock of cold pulsed through me and for a moment I could not move. I could see the vague, amorphous outline of a shape in the water. Then others, ahead of the raft, to the left, then behind us. It was like gazing into a koi pond dark with algae and seeing a hint of luminous bodies squirming in the foul depths. I did not want to know what might rise to the surface.
I still could not move.
Heather was first to act. I’d brought two boards to use as paddles with the expectation that she might help in moving the raft, and she snatched hers up now and raised it clumsily over her head like a club. ‘No, no, no!’ she shouted angrily into the din and smashed a hand that was clawing at the deck. The hand disappeared in a sudden roil of dirty foam. I hefted my board as a head bobbed to the surface in front of the raft – it had been a man and was still comically dressed in a business suit, a pair of black-framed glasses perched jauntily on its nose, its lidless eyes staring blankly through the lenses. I swung the board and it connected solidly, knocking the thing’s head sideways, the glasses flying into the murky water. The thing began to spasm and sank.
Heather called ‘Fred!’ and I turned to see one of the things scuttling up the back of the raft. I jabbed at it with my board and knocked it back into the water. Heather smacked at hands trying to grasp the deck, the spars, the outriggers – they were all around us. I could see their pale shapes beneath the surface, coming into focus as waves refracted the tiny bit of light that penetrated the downpour.
‘Keep fighting them!’ I screamed at Heather as I clubbed at flailing hands. ‘The storm’ll let up and they’ll be forced to go back down!’ but I was beginning to think that might not happen at all and it filled me with a rising sense of desperation. In the diminished sphere of visibility around the raft I could see scores of the things moving toward us and I did not see how anyone could hold them off before the light increased. If we could reach shallow water it’s possible we could jump off the raft and outrun them, but I simply couldn’t see how far across the channel we’d drifted.
For the first time in my life as a scientist, I felt the urge to pray.
Fingers wiggled up through the slats in the decking and I stomped them. A sepulchral face loomed in the froth to my right and I drove my board into it. My muscles roared and I began to feel my grip weakening. Heather screamed and I saw hands grabbing at her legs; she kicked and they let go.
The raft shuddered again and I dropped to my knees. One of the things was trying to climb over the oil drum, its pale, lamprey-like fingers reaching and slipping on the metal. I smashed at it and the metal drum gonged loudly, and the thing dropped back into the water with a shriek.
I could not breathe. My arms and my shoulders throbbed.
I didn’t think I could go on.
Ahead of us, a dark shape rose from the water, a darker blotch in the thundering rain. A light strobed through the gloom.
The channel marker.
Maybe 40 metres to the north and east of us. It marked the northern edge of the channel, beyond which the water became too shallow for most boats.
Forty metres. That’s all we needed – another 40 metres.
As Heather smashed at the things I began to row frantically, summoning every bit of energy I could from my aching muscles. I could feel my arms quivering. A cramp seized up my left shoulder, sending a bolt of pain down my spine. The board began to slip from my grasp. I experienced a momentary, desperate vision of our raft lurching down the main part of the channel as we battered at the things with diminishing strength until they swarmed over the sides and set upon us and pulled us down into the dark, deep water, and in that black moment I did the most foolish thing I have ever done in my life.
‘Keep them off me for a minute! I’m going to try something!’ I screamed at Heather. Her eyes bulged in terror.
‘No! Fred! Don’t …’
I scuttled to the back of the raft and slipped into the water. I held on to that last dock timber and began to kick viciously. My legs were still strong and if I could propel us into the shallow water we might survive.
At least Heather might.
The raft swung satisfyingly to starboard and I could feel us moving. I could also feel hands grasping at my legs – I kicked at them as much as I kicked the water. Their touch was cold beyond description, not a human sensation at all but something more grotesquely primordial that reawakened ancient horrors of reptiles and multi-legged arthropods. I punched at them and kicked and Heather smashed the water around me as the creatures gathered en masse and rose to the surface. I glanced up to see how close we were to the channel marker and one of things had hoisted itself up the front of the raft. I shouted to Heather and she swung the board, catching the thing in the neck and knocking it onto the outrigger spar and then back into the sound. Icy fingers pulled at the waistband of my shorts and I slithered out of them as I continued to fight. I felt a face beneath my chest and I viciously jabbed my fingers into its eyes. They gave way with a sickening mushiness and the thing thrashed violently as it was swept in our wake.
The foul sound water sloshed into my mouth and the rain pounded at me. I felt my legs beginning to weaken. A cold hand encircled my ankle and I kicked. Other hands clutched at my arms, or pulled at my briefs. I felt an instant of stark terror as something brushed at my privates, and I screamed to Heather to help me. She smacked the water around me. I could see no hint of terror in her expression; her jaw was set, her eyes narrowed, and she was working with a grim determination that struck me as oddly beautiful. In fact, I could not remember a moment, at any time, when she seemed more beautiful than as she struggled to save me. It was a beauty that transcended mere physical appearance, or love, or any of the human qualities we associate with beauty. It was a spiritual thing, and it gave me strength.
The rain was beginning to slacken as I knew it would. I could see the channel marker. It was much closer now. I knew in that moment we would make it. I knew it.
A strong hand gripped my arm and began to haul me down. I tried to punch but couldn’t connect. I tried to draw it up so I could kick at its body but it was stronger. I felt its teeth brushing against the flesh of my forearm and yanked as hard as I could. It bobbed to the surface next to me, to my left. A young man, so much like Scotty that for a heart-stopping moment I thought it was Scotty. But in a splinter of a second my frantic mind tabulated the differences: a fuller face and higher forehead; a ragged beard trimmed into what must have been a neat goatee; lank strands of hair hanging lower than the eyebrows; and a single diamond stud shining from a fat earlobe.
Heather saw this and raised the board. She brought it down with a tremendous whack, and the board skated across its slick head and connected with my right shoulder.
The pain dazzled me. I think I lost consciousness for a moment. My vision swam with bright spangles that dissolved into black splotches, and a pulse of nausea boiled out of my stomach as waves of pain crashed over me. Dimly I saw Heather bash at the thing with the board one more time and it let go.
Then I let go.
I simply could not hold on.
Heather screamed, ‘Oh God!’ and I felt myself being carried away from the raft by a mob of cold touches and grasping fingers, pulling me beneath the surface into the warmer water below. The hissing of rain and waves became a watery echo and the wan light all but disappeared. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation, and I think that was the moment I finally gave up, consigning myself to the fact I had truly failed and would suffer the consequences. I was too tired, and in too much pain, to resist any longer. I did not welcome what was about to happen but I accepted it, the way all living things must accept death when there is no other choice. My skin was bathed with a peculiar tingling as I awaited that first horrific bite.
A blinding flash of light exploded through the murky depths.
Simultaneously, a tremendous thud of sound shook the water.
All around me the creatures began to burn. The water became a sizzling froth as the things combusted and writhed and shrieked in the airless void beneath the waves. Instantly I was free. I shot to the surface and drew in a huge gasp of air, then dropped below the surface and forced myself up again. It took me several breaths to get myself oriented. I couldn’t see the raft, which had disappeared in the rain, but the channel marker was only a few metres ahead. One of the creosote-soaked posts was smoking.
Lightning. It had been struck by lightning.
I managed a feeble, one-armed breast stroke, which is all the energy I had remaining, and crossed the distance to the structure. A wooden ladder hung down into the water. A sign warned, ‘Property of the US Coast Guard. No trespassing!’ and never was a rebuke more welcoming. I hung there a moment, simply gathering my wits. Then, with my good arm wrapped around the rung, I hauled myself out of the stinking water.
I did not know where to begin this story.
I strike a match.
I know where it will end.
The storm moved out a few minutes after I reached the top of the channel marker. There, a light blinked somnolently, warning non-existent barges and boaters of the shallow water only a few metres north. The light and its batteries were housed in a nonconductive plastic manifold that protected it from the lightning. But its light was cold and vague, and I knew it would not be enough.
The storm played itself out in a spreading veil of cirrus that began to unravel as the late afternoon sun burned through. Angled bars of light swept across the horizon. It was the stuff of church frescoes.
By that time the pain in my shoulder had subsided to a dull throb. I don’t think any permanent damage was done – maybe some disturbance to the connective tissue, but no broken bones.
When the rain let up I began searching for the raft. Finally I spotted it far off down the sound. It lay firmly in the westward current’s grasp. But I could not see Heather. My initial thought was the raft had swept into the shallow water north of the channel and she had jumped off to walk ashore – maybe not so much of a thought as a hope. Perhaps when I slipped from the raft the creatures followed me, abandoning her. Maybe they’d been destroyed by the lightning. I couldn’t know. But my hope was she’d made it to shore and was searching for help.
But of course, another explanation was possible.
I didn’t want to think about it.
At the time I believed I could stay here. It couldn’t be long until somebody came through here to see what had happened. If DeVries were able to drive his boat from Niceville, only a few miles north and east of here, the Coast Guard or Marine Patrol would surely follow. Tonight or tomorrow. I could survive until then.
But that’s not the way it worked out.
Which brings me to this moment.
It seems years have passed since we stepped off the boat and onto the island. Much has changed in the last three days.
I once believed I knew what was important, but now I am not sure. I know that I am a man, and I am alive. But that is not enough. It is the struggle that defines the life, not the life itself. And I have struggled – we have struggled – and the waging of that struggle rises above the common qualities of love, and hate, and maybe even death itself. I saw it in DeVries as he grappled with the thing that brought him down. I saw it in Scotty as he stood dying on the beach. I saw it in Heather as she fought to protect me. Maybe I will see it in myself.
That night on the dune, after Scotty was killed, Heather asked if we were evil. Had we brought ourselves to ruin with our manipulations and schemes?
As I gaze into the water below me, I see them. They are down deep, away from the fading sunlight. I see their pale bodies as far as the depths reveal them to me. Each one is curled into a foetal position and is drifting with the current. Do they think, I wonder? Do they dream? One cold winter morning my father and I snuggled into our warmest clothes and launched our tiny aluminium boat from a nearby ramp and went sputtering across a bay very much like the one that adjoins this sound. We had a baitwell full of live shrimp and our quarry was the elusive speckled trout. As we crossed the water, the tiny Golden Jet motor struggling to push us through the waves, I idly glanced over the side. Below I saw something that caused me to take in my breath and hold it – an infinite layer of jellyfish. They were large, each about the size of a cantaloupe, and they were the colour of long-dead flesh, a bluish white that struck me as unearthly and inexplicably terrifying. They swam in schools of tens of thousands, moving through the water with the slow, languid pulsing of things that exist for no other reason than to frighten little boys. Moon jellies, I would come to learn later, although at some point I began calling them ‘moonstars.’ A galaxy of moonstars below us. And how awful it would be, I mused as I watched them, a shuddery creepiness slithering up my spine, to fall overboard and be sucked into those depths and drown in that sea of translucent alien flesh. It would be worse than dying. It would be a fate reserved for somebody who was bad – a very bad person indeed. It would be a fate reserved for somebody who was evil.
The moonstars are below me now, slumbering in their abyss. Every so often one of them turns and gazes up at me. Then it moves in the slow, languid pulsing of a thing meant to frighten little boys, toward the surface. It scrabbles up the ladder, dripping water as it climbs higher, and as it draws near I strike a match so that my visitor shudders and drops like a dead weight into the fetid depths. Right now only a few dare this effort. By deepest night it will be many.
And among them, dear God. Among that sea of pallid flesh.
I see her.
She is watching me. I see the lust in her eyes, and I feel the horrible certainty I have earned that hungry, adoring gaze.
In half an hour dusk will give way to dark. I know I cannot make it to the shallows. Too many of them lurk in the rancid depths that separate me from escape. So when darkness falls I will remain here, hoarding my matches, until they are gone.
We are not evil beings, I tell myself. Selfish, perhaps. Short-sighted. And sometimes afraid. Which makes us nothing more than alive.
But not evil.
I hope that is true. I am about to find out. Another is scaling the ladder, grinning up at me with a bloodless leer and whited eyes.
Heather has yet to stir from her staring slumber.
The struggle is unfinished.
I strike a match.