by Del Stone
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 d
amn 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.
