Black Tide (7 page)

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.