It seemed to be coming from the stream of creatures.
Denne walked down the highway, passed the parked cars, and headed toward the mass of people. Zeke stopped beside Gabriel.
“What the hell is this?” Zeke asked.
“Yet another challenge in a job full of them,” Gabriel said dryly, and followed Denne toward the crowd.
The stream seemed to be going on forever. There didn’t seem to be a break in it at all. As Gabriel reached Azalea Road, he saw that the creatures had made their way into the school parking lot.
No wonder people from the school had called the sheriff’s department. The creatures weren’t going around the parked cars. They were going over them and under them, covering them as completely as a stream of mud would. The only difference was that, so far, the creatures hadn’t moved the cars out of their parked positions.
The sound was eerie. In addition to the usual surf banging against the shore, there was the thudding of a million feet—if feet was what to label the appendages on the creatures that were passing him.
None of the creatures looked at the humans. Instead, the creatures appeared to be running, almost as if they were evacuating the ocean.
Gabriel turned to Zeke. “Call Athena. Tell her to put Suzette on dispatch and get down here.”
“Okay.” Zeke gave the stream one more look, then headed back to the squads.
No one else spoke. Everyone just watched the exodus. One teenage boy had a camcorder out and was filming the entire thing. Gabriel made a mental note to seize the disc when the time came. He might need the information.
Even if he didn’t, the news departments and the so-called reality shows didn’t need it.
Gabriel moved as close as he could to the stream without touching it. The creatures were all shapes, but not all sizes. None of them stretched higher than his knees. Unlike the water sprite that Zeke had found the night before, none of them had wings. But he would wager all were amphibious.
Denne was crouching beside the stream, not touching, but clearly studying. He was too close for Gabriel’s comfort, but Gabriel knew that he couldn’t do anything about Denne. Denne had always done what he wanted. If someone told him to behave otherwise, he would nod, agree, and continue with what he was doing.
Gabriel didn’t recognize any other faces. Most of these people seemed to be traveling through. Some locals had come out of the nearby shops, however, and stood in the doorways, arms crossed. It was a tribute to them and their entrepreneurial spirit that they didn’t move too far away from their cash registers, in case one of the tourists decided to leave the stream and shop.
The hot dog vendor who had called them stood outside his illegal stand as well. No one was supposed to build on the beach, but that little shack had gone up overnight.
Gabriel hadn’t cited him—hoping the village council would do so—but they hadn’t so far. And now, after the guy had shown that he cared enough to do his civic duty, Gabriel wasn’t sure he should cite him either.
The stream was getting wider, and the creatures that struggled across the road seemed to be moving slower. Were these the old, the handicapped, the impossibly young? Was this exodus just like all the human exoduses of years past, dragging whatever they could to get out ahead of some disaster?
He had no way of knowing and no way to find out.
Gabriel sighed and backed away from the stream just as Zeke reached his side.
“Athena’s coming, although I don’t think she wanted to.” Zeke glanced at the stream, then looked away quickly, as if the sight burned his eyes. “What’s wrong with her today anyway? It’s like she’s upset or something.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said, and he truly didn’t. He had his suspicions, but sometime during the day, he realized that even though he had known Athena most of his life, he really didn’t know her at all. She had seemed the same, an immutable force, always there, always wise, and always strong.
Maybe it was just a shock to realize how mortal she was.
Zeke nodded toward the stream. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know that either.” Gabriel shoved his hands in his pockets. “Stay here.”
He didn’t wait for Zeke’s answer. Gabriel walked toward the line of parked cars. As he approached, he heard the chatter of soft rock from one radio station, and the brassy sound of a big band from another. On a third, Dr. Dean Edell talked about gallbladder surgery, and on a fourth, one of the Whale Rock DJs was reading an ad for Mo’s Restaurant.
Gabriel listened until the ad was done, knowing that the DJ would comment on the events in Anchor Bay if he knew about them. But after the ad, the DJ went into a discussion of the weather in his cheery voice, the one reserved for good days, when there weren’t life-threatening storms or accidental drownings by the sea.
Which meant that no one had reported this strange event to Whale Rock yet. Gabriel nodded to himself and pushed between the cars.
The heat from the exhausts rose around him, and the smell of gas overpowered the stench of dead fish, at least for a moment.
Then he left the lane and walked up the curb toward the Anchor Harbor Wayside.
Oddly enough, no one had pulled out of traffic and parked in the Wayside lot. Everyone seemed to think that the exodus would end soon—or soon enough that their cars wouldn’t run out of gas. When Gabriel got back to his own car, he’d get the megaphone out and make an announcement, telling everyone to shut off their engines as this might take a while.
Several gulls stood in the parking lot, their wings tucked against their sides. They all faced the stream as if it were an entertainment for their benefit. But they didn’t approach it, as they would if they thought they could get food. Instead they watched, the way they watched a storm blow in, and seemed to be waiting.
Gabriel had to walk right into their midst if he was going to avoid the stream altogether. The stream covered the entire south side of the Wayside, that part of the parking lot being hidden under hundreds of bodies, moving forward.
This entire sight unnerved him more than he could say. He had truly never seen anything like it, and it did unnerve him.
He walked to the edge of the Wayside where the metal rails separated the tourists from the beach and peered over.
The stream continued along the beach, although oddly enough, the stream narrowed as it reached the Wayside. The stream seemed to be coming from a block-long section of the ocean, and the creatures, without obvious direction, slimmed down so that they could walk by the Wayside.
Gabriel knew that was important somehow, but he wasn’t sure how. He’d learned long ago that when he ran into important things that he didn’t understand, he should let his subconscious work on them while his conscious worked on something else.
And what his conscious was working on was the extent of this stream. He had no idea how long this exodus had been going on, but he knew it had to be some time for people to notice it and call it in to him, and for him to arrive.
He shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the ocean. The stream looked like a blackness that went beneath the surface—and the blackness seemed even wider underwater than it did on the beach.
His squint became a frown. If there were that many more creatures—enough that they covered the bottom of the bay as they approached the shore—then this could go on for days.
Somehow, he was going to have to change that. Somehow he was going to have to get Anchor Bay back.
Gabriel leaned against the cold railing for a moment and tried to envision the map of Anchor Bay in his mind. If these creatures were determined to go east, there was no way to reroute them around Highway 101.
Anchor Bay didn’t have bridges over rivers, as Whale Rock and Lincoln City did, and no one had ever thought of building anything that covered the bay, like the famous bridge in Newport.
The highway was the main road here, and he couldn’t do anything about it. The creatures would have to go across it. He couldn’t even make a
makeshift bridge, not one strong enough to handle cars for a couple of days.
Gabriel leaned toward his left. Leland Hill rose, blocking the rest of 101 from his sight. Then he tilted his head toward the hill.
At the base, years ago, the city engineers had built a concrete block that kept the hill’s sand base from eroding too badly in storms. For that block to work, they had had to route drainage systems through it.
Gabriel didn’t think much of the system through the summer months—during the dryness it became little more than a series of pipes—but in the winter months, the pipes poured a steady stream of water onto the beach, so steady that it had carved a tiny canal into the sand.
If he could get the creatures routed toward Leland Hill, he might be able to get them to use the drainage pipes instead of the highway.
Of course, he had no idea how to do that, since this group didn’t seem to want to go around anything. They just went over.
He turned and found himself face-to-face with a broad-shouldered, red-haired man he’d never seen before. The man had pale, freckled skin and light green eyes that looked like someone had taken tucks in the corners to eliminate bags. His cheeks had a smoothness that didn’t suit the rest of his skin.
“I understand you’re the person in charge here,” the man said, with that kind of clipped authority people had when they were used to getting what they wanted.
Gabriel leaned against the railing. The metal was ice-cold and rough against his back. “I don’t think anyone is in charge here today.”
“Look,” the man said. “I’ve already spent too much damn time in this godforsaken place. I have a flight out of Portland at eight o’clock tonight, and I need to be on it.”
“Matter of life and death?” Gabriel asked, trying not to sound as sarcastic as he felt.
“For me. I have a meeting in Los Angeles that I don’t dare miss. I built in two days for weather problems, but it seems that’s what this state is all about.”
This time, Gabriel looked pointedly at the stream of creatures. “This has nothing to do with the weather.”
The man rolled his eyes. “You can believe whatever you want. I’ve been speaking to some of my people and they insist that there is some kind of weather-related problem from last night’s storm that’s causing this. They believe that if you just park a car in the center of that mess, you’ll divert the mindless mass, and it’ll go back to the sea.”
For the first time, Gabriel noticed that the man was clutching a small, black cell phone in his right hand. He had a beeper on his hip, and another electronic device in his shirt pocket, next to a pair of sunglasses, which he was pointedly not wearing.
That made Gabriel wonder if the man expected Gabriel to recognize him. Even if Gabriel had, he wouldn’t have given the man the satisfaction of knowing it.
“Your people aren’t here,” Gabriel said with as much patience as he could muster. “They probably haven’t seen the school parking lot. These creatures aren’t going around anything. They’re going over and under, but not around. I doubt I can change that.”
At the word creatures, the man glanced toward the exodus. For a moment, he seemed to understand that this was no ordinary event. Then his jaw tightened and he turned back to Gabriel.
“Look, it’s imperative that I get out of here. Do you have an airstrip?”
“In Whale Rock,” Gabriel said. “That’s about twenty minutes south—”
“I know where it is, and that does me no good.” The man shook his phone at Gabriel. “I stayed in that second-rate hotel until almost noon, when I finally got assurance that the highway south was open. I just got off the phone with my people, who have been in touch with the highway workers, and they tell me the roads north and east are still closed. You have to get these things off the highway. I have to get out of here.”
“I would change my flight if I were you,” Gabriel said.
The man’s cheeks flooded a dark shade of red, but the skin near his lower eyelids did not, confirming Gabriel’s notion that this man had had a lot of plastic surgery.
“I don’t have that luxury,” the man said.
“You don’t have a choice.” Gabriel skirted around him and headed back to the highway. He could hear the man scurrying after him, demanding that he do something.
Gabriel would do something if the man wasn’t careful. He’d have Zeke lock him up for threatening an officer of the law.
As Gabriel reached the mouth of the parking lot, Zeke was waiting for him. The man caught Gabriel’s arm, and Gabriel looked down at the man’s thick, manicured fingers.
Then Gabriel looked up at the man’s face, slowly enough to intimidate anyone.
“I’d rethink that gesture if I were you,” Gabriel said.
The man glared at him. “You need to do something.”
“I am trying, but you’re interfering. And the longer you bother me, the less time we have to get anything done.”
“Look,” the man said. “I’ll pay you. I’ll give you ten grand to cover any problems I cause, and then I’ll just drive through this mess. If I run over a few of the critters, so what. That’ll probably convince the others to go around. What do you think?”
Gabriel was actually tempted. It was an interesting plan, and if he didn’t know how magical these creatures were, and how important they were to Anchor Bay, he would have taken the man up on his offer.
“What do I think?” Gabriel asked. “I think you have more money than sense.”
He shook his arm out of the man’s grasp and threaded through the parked cars to Denne. Gabriel looked out of the corner of his eye and saw Zeke blocking the man from following. Zeke was gesturing as he did so, probably threatening the man with arrest.
The nice thing about Zeke was that he would follow through if he had to.
Denne was still in the same position that Gabriel had left him in. Denne was older than Gabriel by nearly a decade, but Gabriel didn’t think his knees could handle a crouch for this long.
Denne didn’t even seem to notice.
Gabriel crouched beside him and heard his own knees crack. The sound, which seemed like a gunshot to him, got the attention of a few of the bystanders, but not the creatures, and not Denne.
“What do you think this is?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s not a natural migration,” Denne said. “We’d have records. And we’ve been keeping records of this area for more than a hundred years, so this isn’t a twenty-year locust cycle either. I can’t tell you much more than that. I don’t know what these creatures are. I’ve never seen them before. I don’t even think I’ve seen pictures of them or drawings or read accounts of them.”
Gabriel frowned. “I thought all of the things that lived offshore have shown up in one myth or another.”
“I would have thought so too, but I don’t pretend to know all of the world’s folktales.”
Gabriel looked at the stream. The creatures seemed lined up by height and speed. At the northern edge were black beings not much bigger than his thumb. They didn’t have obvious heads, but they did have legs and feet, and they were moving forward with great determination.
The size progression moved up, sometimes with isolated creatures, and sometimes with an entire platoon of them. Some were frog-green, and others a deep ruby red, and still others seemed to emit some sort of camouflaging gray goo.
But they were all different. It disturbed Gabriel that Denne didn’t recognize any of them.
“I will say this. Judging from their smell, they don’t come up from the depths very often.”
“Things farther down smell worse?”
Denne shook his head. “It’s just that someone would have commented if they saw things this tiny and this stinky. That’s all. And if no one’s mentioning them, and if they haven’t shown up in fishing nets to be tossed over, then they probably come from somewhere deep.”
“What does that mean to us?” Gabriel asked.
Denne shook his head. “Maybe noth
ing. Except that I’m pretty sure some of them don’t have eyes—at least not as we know them. This sunlight has to be hard on all of them.”
Gabriel sighed. “None of this is helping me, Hamilton. I have to get them off my road.”
“You might just have to wait.”
“I’ve got some rich asshole from California who wants to drive over these things because he has to catch a plane. I’ll wager that he’s not the only stranded driver who’s thought of that solution. I don’t have the manpower to guard this spot.”
Denne nodded. Gabriel wasn’t sure Denne even heard him.
“To make matters worse, we have kids in that school, and some of them have to go north to get home. Parents aren’t going to like being separated from them.” Gabriel looked across the stream.
More cars were stopped on the other side. There, no one had bothered to get out. They were watching from inside their vehicles, patiently waiting as if some ODOT employee was going to use a Stop/Slow sign to tell them when to drive forward.
“That’s not your problem,” Denne said.
“Like hell it isn’t. I’ve got a situation here that could easily get out of hand. I need your historical and folklore-filled brain to figure out what I can do to reroute these things.”
“Where would you reroute them?” Denne asked. “You can’t avoid 101.”
“The storm drains.”
“And keep them going east? Who knows what’ll happen to them in the mountains or even on cross streets farther up.”
“I can’t worry about that at the moment. One problem at a time, Hamilton.”
“I can’t tell you how to control creatures I’ve never encountered before.”
“Then get on the phone, call your friends in South County who’ve dealt with this stuff. Figure it out for me.”
“What phone?” Denne asked.
Gabriel smiled and pointed at the guy with the red hair. “Borrow his. I’m sure he can afford the minutes.”
Denne gave Gabriel a dirty look, then stood. Getting out of the crouch appeared to be difficult, which somehow pleased Gabriel.
Then Denne threaded his way through the idling cars toward the troublemaker still arguing with Zeke.
Fantasy Life Page 28
