by M M Buckner
“I thought you were gone.” He lifted her and squeezed her to his chest.
“The Watermind painted a rainbow,” she said.
“You’re raving mad.” He kissed her hair.
“Put me down.” She twisted and elbowed. “I want to see the lake.”
He dropped her and smiled. “Little brat. You’re not hurt.”
Roman noticed the boyfriend squatting in the stream, washing mud off his arms and legs. The bandage around his left hand was sodden and bloodstained. CJ had bleeding cuts and bruises. They needed medical attention. He glanced at his truck, calculating the distance to a clinic.
When CJ crabwalked over the matted rubbish toward the lake, he and Max followed. A rustling sizzle gusted on the breeze. Roman thought at first it was gnats or mosquitoes, but when they topped the rubbish mound, he knew it was coming from the colloid.
Fanning out from shore, the water crackled with heat, and a million tiny curls of steam fumed over the surface. Weak sparks flickered underwater, and patchy spumes of lather flocculated upward. In a matter of minutes, the lather clumped into glittery solids.
“Something’s crystallizing out of the water,” CJ said.
The small flecks glinted like mica, but soon, large glassy plates bobbed up. Square, hexagonal, the plates jostled and clinked like porcelain saucers in a vat.
“What’s happening?” CJ pushed her hair back. The steam reeked of burnt sugar. “This isn’t good.”
More solid plates rose to the surface. For a thousand yards out from shore, the lake glittered like a broken mirror. She checked for her Ranger Joe, but there was only a lash mark around her wrist where the magnetic field had ripped it away. She had a bad feeling. She jumped off the rubbish heap and bounded into the water.
“Estúpida!” Roman sprang in after her, but Max reached her first.
“What’s happening?” she said again. Knee deep, she scooped up handfuls of the broken plates that were rapidly flocculating out of the water. They fell apart in her hands. The water was growing hotter.
“Owh! Souplé!” Max grappled her waist with his good hand.
Roman helped them both back to shore, high-stepping out of the hot water.
Max made her sit in the mud so he could examine her legs. Her pale skin had gone bright red. She rolled up his jeans. His brown ankles swelled like ripe plums. They both had first-degree burns.
“I’m sorry.” Her hands hovered over his ankles, but she was afraid to touch the angry skin.
Max sighed. “Ceegie, you gotta stop this shit.”
Roman grunted. He sat alone on a log, sullenly examining his own livid shins and counting his grievances against Max Pottevents—until a whiff of burning salt drew his attention. The edge of the lake was boiling. He stood and shouted, “Another heat release! Run for the truck!”
Hot mist wafted to shore and scorched their faces.
“No, it’s something else. Something’s wrong.” CJ took a step toward the water.
Together, Max and Roman dragged her back behind the rubbish mound for protection. Grimly, they hunkered in the matted leaves and trash. Sweltering steam enveloped them, and they watched through chinks in the weir pins.
“Djab dile don’ like this lake,” Max said.
CJ squirmed. “I think he’s disintegrating.”
“We should move farther back,” Roman said, but no one moved.
Where the colloid’s plume fanned out from shore, the liquid bubbled and frothed, expelling gasses that smelled of methane, rotten fruit, and brimstone. Thick hot fog clouded the surface, and the glassy solids tossed in the sizzling foam. The water faded from muddy green-red-brown to gray, and dead microbial blooms floated in ridges, like pepper in a simmering sauce. Gradually, the dissolved compounds, held so long in colloidal suspension, precipitated to the surface and formed a thick scummy tar.
The sizzling stopped. The water lay dead calm under its solid black shroud. Along the shore, every surface dripped with hot condensation. While they waited for the steam to dissipate, Max held CJ behind the rubbish mound, and Roman lay apart, watching them.
Farther out on the lake, official vessels converged. The Coast Guard. Homeland Security. City police. The Corps of Engineers. Their sirens rose and fell like squeals from a distant playground.
“It’s dead,” she whispered.
“Impossible.” Roman got to his feet and counted the gathering boats.
Settle
Sunday, March 20
3:03 PM
When the heat dispersed to a bearable level, the three of them climbed over the wet, scalded rubbish toward the shore. Moisture still hung in the air, stinging their faces, and a dense cloud of steam blotted the sun. Roman gazed at his enemy, then glanced down the lakeshore, searching for a boat. He needed to talk to Lima and Ebbs. He needed transportation and a working cell phone.
“It’s dead. I know it.” CJ knelt in the mud and prodded the tar with her finger. Hard as rubber. She lifted her face to Roman with the look of a bereaved child. “Why?” she said.
Max kicked at the coagulated tar. Then he picked up a heavy rock and flung it down on the surface. The tar rang like an iron bell.
“It’s another trick,” said Roman.
“No.” CJ stroked the tar.
“Hey lamie, here’s something.” Max squatted and poked at a rippling white ridge of crystals that had collected around the lip of the tar. He pinched some up, rubbed the white grains between his fingers and held them to his nose. “It’s salt.”
CJ knelt beside him and sniffed the gritty brine. “Sea salt.”
“Pontchartrain’s a tidal basin,” Roman reminded them. “It’s open to the sea.”
She shot him a look. “Saline solution? What are you thinking?”
He wasn’t thinking anything. He watched her scrape up more salt and smear it across her palm. Its pungent smell reminded him of sand and surf, breaking blue waves, a yellow house with a wide cool veranda.
“Saline’s a stronger electrical conductor than fresh water,” she said. “Do you think . . . a power surge?”
Roman hadn’t made that connection. Reilly’s mind took faster leaps than his. Crazy leaps. Could saline have overloaded the colloid’s wet circuits? How ironic if the exotic network survived his gigavolt EM shock only to succumb to saltwater.
“We’ll need tests,” he said.
The dingy white grains glinted in her palm. “He was born in fresh water. He wasn’t prepared for this.” She stuck out her tongue to taste the salt, then stopped herself and glanced shyly at Max, who was shaking his head.
Max dug in his breast pocket and pulled out a pink plastic jewel box. Tenderly, he dumped the fragile necklace into his bandaged hand, then offered her the box. “Collect you a sample for your microscope.”
She bit her lip. Then she accepted the box like a treasure.
Roman snorted and stared across the lake. Salt? The answer couldn’t be that easy. He didn’t believe it. The official vessels had reached the far edge of the slick, and they were hailing him. One man brandished a megaphone. He could hear Rick Jarmond’s voice whine like a violin. He knelt and prodded the tar with a stick.
Hardened and black, the coagulant seemed as inert and harmless as he had always assured the media it would be. He scowled at its mottled surface. He would test it, yes, but he already knew what had clotted together in this tar—all the tons of expensive cargo stolen from the river barges.
He shaded his eyes and made another count of the boats converging around the tar. The Mississippi River Commission, the EPA, the Louisiana State Militia. An oil skimmer much like the Refuerzo was already deploying a containment collar. As things stood, this would be a routine cleanup. He wondered if the materials in the tar could be reclaimed. Tomorrow was Monday. He would find another banker and float another loan. The Anglos might try to bankrupt him, but he would recover.
Reilly walked out onto the solidified tar, and Max followed a few steps behind her. It sank under their weight
like a floating mat. When Roman saw them, he wanted to throw CJ Reilly over his knees and spank her. Max lent her his pocketknife, and Roman watched her scrape a few black crumbs into the pink box.
“It’s not dead,” Roman repeated, though all his senses told him the enormous black slick was a carcass. A leftover. Vestigial remains. “Reilly, take some decent samples this time. Get Vaarveen to help. I want the full complement of tests.”
She nodded.
“You’re team leader now,” he said.
She shrugged.
He watched her sway on the rocking surface. Mud matted her red hair. A bump on her forehead was turning shadowy green, lavender bruises dotted her thighs, and her calves glowed bright blistery pink. She looked pathetic. He half expected her to fall through the tar, but what was the point of telling her to be careful? Max Pottevents was with her.
Roman stood to his full height and squinted across the matte-black shroud. In one graceful leap, he landed on its surface. Far from solid, it bounced under his feet like a trampoline, but he kept his balance. He tossed his truck keys to Max, and without another word, he marched off across the lake to meet the Anglo bureaucrats.
Sink
Sunday, March 20
3:55 PM
Almost imperceptibly, the slick drifted away from shore, leaving a three-foot margin of open lake water. Where the stream trickled in from the marsh, brown river bouillon merged with estuarial consommé from the Gulf. A confluence of muck, CJ thought. She sat near the edge of the drifting tar and crossed her legs. She could almost taste the chemicals fermenting in the lake. They gave off the same smell as Devil’s Swamp.
At that very moment, under the hot Louisiana sun, she felt sure the colloid’s active ingredients were incubating again. In fertile bogs and fecund sloughs up and down the southern Mississippi, ancient algaes were secreting thick misshapen blooms of proplastid, and fructified waters were stirring with signals and ring tones. High spring floods were bringing new microelectronics. Nanomachines, gengineered bacteria, quantum memory dots. Cheap disposable technology—thousands of tons every day. Who could imagine there would be no issue?
“You’ll come again,” she whispered.
Max bent low and skipped a flat pebble across the open lake water. His expert aim made the rock bounce six times before it sank. Then he stood erect and straightened the bandage on his hand.
She watched him in silhouette, strong and dark against the blue sky. There was much she needed to tell him. This conversation might be difficult, or it might be very easy. She felt embarrassed by her garbled thoughts. Should she begin with confession, apology, gratitude? So much depended on choosing the right words, or perhaps that didn’t matter at all.
A few fat raindrops pelted them, and CJ glimpsed a fleeting rainbow in the fog. On impulse, she sprang to her feet and slipped her arms around Max’s waist.
“Amou,” he whispered, clasping her to his chest. Slowly they rocked back and forth, dimpling the slick with their gentle zydeco waltz.
Photons warmed the black tar. Insects began to whine again. A Cerulean Warbler twittered in a tupelo branch, and blades of grass sprang free of the mud. High above in the hazy glare, unseen by any human, a white cloud streamed toward the sea.
