Picking up dead birds wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I figured someone had to do it. Sabba had kept his promise and sent his private plane to pick up Brenda, Daniel, and Tank. Until they arrived, I had nothing to do but play Mah-Jongg with Safta and her friends, watch the professor read, or venture out to the beach.
So I got up early, pulled a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from my old dresser, and slipped into a battered pair of sneakers I found in the closet. I smeared sunblock on my nose (redheads tend to burn easily, even in October) and pulled one of Safta’s battered straw hats from a hook in the laundry room. I grabbed a couple of trash bags from a cabinet, then strode out across the deck and went down to the beach.
I wasn’t alone. The beach was spotted with curious onlookers and social do-gooders. I smiled a “me too” smile at a girl dressed a lot like I was, then took a pair of rubber gloves from a table and read the sheet of instructions someone had posted:
1. Don’t touch dead birds or fish with bare hands.
No kidding.
2. Don’t throw dead birds or fish back into the water.
Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?
3. Place all dead birds and fish in a trash bag, then close securely. Leave bags by the lifeguard stand; someone from the Pinellas Fish and Game Department will pick them up later.
Simple enough. I powered on my iPhone, put the earbuds in my ears, then slipped my hands into the flimsy gloves and set out for a section of beach still littered with dead animals. The music carried my thoughts away as I knelt to clear the area around me. The fish’s empty eye sockets seemed to accuse me—of what? If I’d known what killed them, I would have done something to help. Anyone would. Anyone who loved animals, that is.
After a while I stopped picking up fish one by one and began to gather them by handfuls. How many yards, I wondered, did this carpet of dead fish extend? And the birds—the tide had pushed most of them farther up the beach, but their little bodies littered the dunes several yards beyond the water’s edge. If disease or climate conditions had caused their deaths, why had they fallen only here? Why hadn’t they landed in my grandparents’ front yard, or on the roadways? What had caused them to fall in this particular spot?
And most important, what had happened to their eyes?
The odor of decaying flesh was strong enough to overpower the tang of sea air, but after a while I grew numb to it. Numb enough that I was able to pick up a single bird, hold it in my gloved left palm, and bring it close to my face, using my right hand to probe its feathery little body. Like the fish, the bird had holes where his eyes should have been. In addition, this bird’s little beak appeared cracked and some sort of brown liquid dribbled from its nostrils. The little body felt like a feathery bag of air in my hand.
When I heard the unexpected sound of a vehicle on the beach, I turned and looked behind me. A white van had pulled up near the lifeguard stand, and two men in hazmat uniforms had stepped onto the beach. Hazmats? Did these guys know something we didn’t?
I dropped the little bird’s body into my bag and went over to check out the new arrivals.
The van had no markings or identification on it, so for a while I simply watched the men dressed in white from head to toe. They walked over the sand as I had, but they used a long-handled tool to pick up the dead animals, then they put certain specimens into individual bags. After sealing each bag, they wrote something on it—probably date and time—and placed the sealed specimens in a cooler.
I gave them space to pick up a few corpses, then pulled out my earbuds and walked up to the closest guy. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “Who are you and where are you from?”
He blinked at me as if I were a Martian who’d suddenly come up and introduced myself. For a moment he seemed taken aback, then he fumbled with his hazmat helmet and pulled it off. “Steve Laughlin,” he said, his cheeks brightening as if he had suddenly realized how silly he looked in all that protective gear. “We’re from the University of Tampa.”
“Oh.” I laughed. “I thought you were from the government.”
He laughed, too. “Not by a long shot. The government’s probably been here and gone already, leaving us to clean up the mess. This thing has made our biology department curious, and since it happened in our own backyard—”
“I get it. I’m curious, too.” I felt the corner of my mouth rise in a half-smile. Steve Laughlin looked like a professional geek—my kind of guy. “Don’t you feel a little overdressed? I mean, no one has even hinted that these animals died from contagion.”
“No one has said they didn’t.” Steve smiled back at me, apparently recognizing a kindred spirit. “I’ve always found it better to err on the side of caution.”
I nodded. “Listen, Steve—you got a pen?”
He pulled one from his pocket, and I took it. “I’m visiting the area with my boss, Professor James McKinney. We’re keen to know more about this event, and if you learn anything, we’d appreciate it if you’d give us a call.” I grabbed his gloved hand and pulled it toward me, then wrote on the back of his white glove. “This is my cell number. Will you call me?”
His eyes glinted with interest—more than a purely scientific interest, it seemed to me. “I’ll call if you’ll tell me your name.”
“Andi.” I released his hand and held out his pen. “Don’t forget—I have friends who will be truly intrigued by whatever you learn.”
His mouth curved in a slow smile. “Andi. Got a last name to go with that?”
“Maybe.” I picked up my trash bag and waved. “Maybe you’ll find out when you call.”