by Del Stone
Think, I told myself. Think. Quickly.
From the looks of it, the mist carried a toxin of some kind. Most toxins enter the body through respiration, injection or contact. How to address that?
We had the masks, yes, but if the mist were a contact toxin then exposed flesh would leave us vulnerable. I wondered if we could wrap ourselves in the tents – no, dammit, I could see the tent fronts were nothing more than mesh screens to keep out mosquitoes. Submerging our bodies in the water would do no good either if whatever produced the mist was already in the water.
And that’s when I remembered Scotty’s toy.
I began wading to shore. ‘Where’s that damn Frisbee?’ I shouted, not thinking at all about how Scotty would react to my tone. He grabbed up the plastic disc and held it out to me. ‘No! Start digging!’ I ordered. ‘A shallow hole, wide enough for you and Heather.’ It seemed only fair, since they’d planned to share a tent, that if this idea didn’t pan out they’d share a grave. I tromped ashore like Douglas MacArthur and made my way to the dry bags of gear. I began undoing fasteners and dumping stuff onto the beach. ‘Where’re the damn masks?’ I shouted. Heather scrambled over and hefted one of the bags and popped it open. She fished the masks out and held them up.
They were new from the shelves at the Army/Navy Surplus Store in Gainesville. The filters were good for a three-hour stint. I handed Heather a mask and told her to put it on. I shouted to Scotty, who’d already cleared out a sizeable groove in the sand, and tossed him a mask.
‘Now! The two of you lie down in that hole.’
Heather paused. ‘Who’s going to cover you?’ I sensed authentic worry in her voice, and for a moment I was touched. She might not be attracted to me, but at least in some capacity she cared. That was something, I told myself. I hurried her over to the hole Scotty was frantically widening and motioned for her to lie down in it.
‘Didn’t you ever bury yourself at the beach when you were a kid?’ I asked her, holding her shoulders as she lay back. She pulled the mask over her head and it instantly transformed her face into some kind of googly-eyed monster. I managed a small, hysterical giggle as I took in the incongruency of weird mask versus otherwise near-perfectly sculpted female figure. ‘I may be old,’ I went on, making sure she had the straps cinched up around her head, ‘but I’m not that old. I still retain some of my boyhood beach skills.’
I could see by her eyes that she was trying gamely to smile. But she was very frightened, and I took comfort that at least a dollop of her fear had been reserved for me. I began heaping sand on her feet and legs. Scotty lay down beside her. He’d gotten his mask on too, but I didn’t bother checking the strap – he was such a know-it-all. I’m sure the mask was on tight. Besides, it didn’t seem he’d appreciate the gesture.
As I scooped sand over the both of them, I stole a surreptitious glance over my shoulder. What I saw nearly caused my breath to freeze in my chest.
The mist was rolling down the sound in towering, striated lobes that seemed to rotate around one another as they lifted into the stifling afternoon sky. It reminded me of dust storms I’d seen in television documentaries about the Sahara, the cloud representing a line that separated quiet tranquillity from screaming turmoil – except in this case the screaming was not caused by the wind. It was no more than half a mile from the island and would smother us in minutes. The sight filled me with a kind of primeval horror, and the muscles around my windpipe tightened like constrictors. I redoubled my burying as the sound of damnation crept closer, then closer.
I packed in the last bit of dirt around Scotty’s forehead and, resisting the urge to cover his face entirely, began digging my own trench. The first two or three inches of sand were loosely packed and came up easily under the scraping lip of the Frisbee. More quickly than I would have thought possible I had a hole for myself carved out. I lay down and began pulling the sand back over me. I got my mask on and sucked in rubbery-scented gasps of superheated air as I covered my chest and packed sand around the sides of my head. I couldn’t see my arms but managed to wriggle them beneath loose heaps of sand to either side, so that they felt covered.
Then I lay still.
The sand was cool at first. It trickled into my ears, where it itched. I peeked from the corner of the mask’s faceplate. I could see Scotty’s and Heather’s masks staring straight up, out of the sand, as though the three of us had become works of modern art. Heather was saying something to Scotty. I couldn’t hear with the damn sand in my ears. Her voice was made hollow and plastic by the mask. I heard him grunt an answer, and then I heard him say, ‘It’s coming. I see it.’
The sky straight ahead of us was still sunnily clear, the water perfectly calm. A flock of black skimmers rowed through the soupy air, heading west, not trolling for baitfish but flying resolutely down the sound. A traffic jam had formed on the tiny swatch of highway I could see through the trees on the opposite shore. Car windshields baked brightly in the sun.
And then the windshields went dark. A shadow crept across my field of view. The temperature fell a cool 10 degrees.
A sinister quiet settled into the island.
From the right, it grew darker still. Then I could see the advancing wall of mist. It was rising from the water in fumarolic fits and spits, as if the entire sound had become a steaming volcanic mud pot. Through the sand I heard a white noise, like static on a television.
‘Don’t move! Don’t expose your skin!’ I shouted, more to reassure myself than warn Heather and Scotty. My instincts were telling me to scramble out of what might very well become my own grave and run for my life, and I had to consciously force myself to lie still and trust that either the sand or the mask would keep me safe. I can’t really remember a similar emotional experience; maybe in the one or two seconds preceding my one and only car accident, where I skidded into the rear of the guy ahead of me. At that time I wished I could’ve been anywhere but where I was.
I heard a rumbling behind me. I thought, Oh Lord, what now? and at that moment a dark grey C-130 roared low overhead, its flaps and gear down, its engines screaming as it prepared to land. I saw vortices of the mist get sucked up around it. It left horizontal tornadoes in its wake.
And then.
I can’t put out of my mind what happened next.
The plane seemed to stagger in midair as it hurtled toward the runway, and its right wing dipped. But it was too low for such a manoeuvre, far too low, only a scant 50 metres above the ground, and although the pilot tried to recover the C-130 responded only sluggishly. The wing struck the ground and snapped off at the root, dissolving into a sickening cloud of flinders, and a ball of fire roared down the side of the fuselage as the entire plane rotated on its horizontal axis and disappeared beyond the lip of the runway, out of my sight. Moments later I felt a single, sharp thud jolt the island, and the water jumped up with a shock. Then I heard a boom whack the air. It was followed by a napalm-orange fireball that bloomed in the distance and boiled into the sky, merging languidly with the advancing front of mist.
The island felt as though it were rolling with the motion of sea swells, and my stomach answered with corresponding waves of nausea. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to cry. I could hear Heather sobbing, and I wanted to crawl to her, and take her hand, and hold it against my cheek as I cried with her. I’d never seen anything so horrible, and to be forced to lie there buried in sand, unable to move, unable to even put my arm around another human being as this horrific drama played out was almost beyond human capacity.
As the fire burned in the distance, the mist arrived. If such a thing were possible, my sense of terror deepened into something I can’t quite explain.
The water began to change colour. I could see eddies of a black-coloured material drifting across the shallows in advance of a solid black mass swirling darkly from the east, just ahead of the mist. It looked like crude oil flowing under the water. I could not
even begin to understand what was happening. A substance dissolved in the water, a fluid denser than water, or something with neutral or negative buoyancy being carried on the current, an organism of some kind. I just couldn’t say.
The mist passed over us. It seemed to go all the way up the sky, into outer space.
And then something happened to the water.
It began to fry.
At first I thought some kind of condensate was falling out of the mist. Where the mist began, the water was disturbed by … I don’t know … millions of tiny splashes, as if a pounding rainstorm were moving rapidly in our direction. And I could hear it plainly now. An urgent hissing that gained in volume until it nearly drowned the sound of my breath rasping inside the mask. Heather shrieked, and Scotty was murmuring something to her. I shouted, ‘Don’t move! Stay covered! Everything will be OK,’ but in reality I willed my body to sink deeper into the sand because as the mist passed us by, and the world went from the gauzy, suffocating yellow of a Florida afternoon to this ominous and claustrophobic twilight, I realised that absolutely nothing was falling out of the sky, except airplanes. Whatever had transformed the waters of Santa Rosa Sound into a hissing, churning cauldron was acting from beneath the surface, and I had no idea what that could be.
The frying water slid greasily around our island. It reached out into the sound as far as I could see, which was only about 30 metres. It really was like being trapped in a summer thunderstorm, amidst a driving, pounding rain that turned the world into twilight and assaulted the senses so violently that it kindled animal fear. The frying sound was quite loud now, and I could hear nothing of what was being said between Heather and Scotty. I struggled to see them from the edge of my mask and they were still lying in place, although I don’t know where either one of them got their nerve. Maybe being together helped them remain calmer. I envied Scott even more at that moment, because I felt my own panic growing, and I wondered if I might lunge from the beach and … and … do what? Run panic-stricken along the water’s edge until whatever was killing everybody else brought me down too? I struggled to calm myself. I tried to compose my thoughts. OK, Miller. Think. Concentrate on the problem. What could cause this? The disturbance of the water? The mist itself? The reaction to exposure?
I studied the roiling water as best as I could. It was nearly whitened by the froth of sizzling and spitting, and it seemed to give off a kind of gas – the source of the mist no doubt. It was moving quickly to the west, in the direction of the pass, but the emissions were being drawn north over land. From what I’d seen of the mist before it overtook us, it hadn’t reached a significant altitude. So the particulate material was fairly heavy, which meant it wouldn’t drift far inland before descending, maybe only a few miles. If the sounds of mayhem we’d heard from the mainland were in fact the sounds of people … well, then at least the disaster wouldn’t reach much farther than the Twin Cities about 15 miles to the north – small compensation to the thousands who’d probably been … affected.
Baitfish skipped across the water’s surface as if frantically trying to escape marauding bluefish. Whorls of smog-coloured gas danced dervishes across the sizzling white storm of water. I thought I could smell something, then, and at that moment I felt my bladder let go, and the sand packed in wetly around the crotch of my clown shorts as the idea settled into my brain with cold certainty: Your mask is leaking. The smell was of sea rot, the wet decay of old mud dredged up from deep, black waters. It came to me faintly at first, but after that initial whiff I was convinced I could smell whatever was in the sound, and I knew that at any second I might begin to itch, and scream, and die. I thought about everything I had done in my life, and how ironic it was that each of those events had in some way conspired to bring me to this place at this moment in time. I closed my eyes and felt tears squeeze between the lids. How awful it would be to die here on this beach, under these circumstances, not even knowing the name of the thing that had killed me. Maybe I was being punished for my indiscreet thoughts about Heather. If so, I offered a silent apology to whatever force was controlling events. Please, let me live. Let us all live. Even Scotty.
I took shallow breaths, an impossible thing in that the mask slowed my intake of breath already. The sand packed in suffocatingly and instead of cooling me it seemed to trap my body temperature so that I began to bake. At the same time I began to feel I was choking, that my lungs were filling – it was hysteria, pure and simple, and I suddenly realised that instead of taking shallow breaths I was hyperventilating. So I held my breath just as the world began to spin, and in a few moments the lightheadedness began to fade and I felt my equilibrium returning.
To my right, to the east, I began to see a lightening. At first I thought it was my imagination, some lingering after-effect of my hypercapnia. I began to see shapes emerge from the smoky whorls bubbling out of the water. Docks on the opposite side of the sound. A horizon of tree tops. Directly in front of me, I could see the highway. All cars were stopped. Beyond that, oily smoke still rose into the sky where the airplane no doubt lay in a smouldering scar of debris. Other smoke plumes, all across the city, joined with the mist blowing off the water to form a hazy caul that dispersed only slowly.
The water began to calm. Only short ribbons and hot spots continued to sizzle as they drifted serenely westward. It was if our storm, which had come in a rush of blackness and fury, pounding us violently for a time, was now dying out in grudging fizzles and spits. Eastward, straggles of mist swirled into faint, smoky vortices that were sucked into the gauzy sky. An astonishing mat of flotsam now lay on the water’s surface. I could see dead seabirds – terns, skimmers, laughing gulls – and terrestrial birds too, like bluejays and mourning doves. But mostly it was fish. Croakers, pinfish, speckled trout, mullet, channel catfish. They were floating belly up on the surface, their eyes goggling as if they too had slipped on masks but had failed to survive the exposure. A few swam in listless, inverted circles. Nothing came up to scavenge their carcasses.
I heard Scotty saying something. I saw him start to get up. I yelled, ‘No!’ and for a moment he did as I said. There were patches of water that still burped gas, and I still didn’t have a clue as to what was happening. The island itself might be poisonous now, covered in a film of the stuff. Contact with the sand could be as fatal as if we’d stood on the beach, unmasked and uncovered, as the mist swept over us.
Then I heard Scotty say, ‘To hell with it,’ and he crawled from the sand, shaking wet clods from his chest and his stomach, and stood up. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ he shouted through his mask. ‘If we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die.’ He shook his arms and the dirt flew. He started brushing it off his legs, which were nearly scarlet from having been buried. I watched him for signs of … oh, I don’t know. Signs of neurological dysfunction – signs of screaming and dying, I guess.
Nothing happened.
Then Heather rose from the sand. I wanted to shout at her to wait, but she was up before I could act. I nearly fainted with terror, and when my heart resumed beating my fear curdled into anger, then something darker. At that moment I hated Scotty with renewed fury. I hated him as much as I’d ever hated anyone in my life. Because if the toxin were still present, Heather would die with him, thanks to his adolescent fatalism – ‘If we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die,’ and not believing for a moment that he really would die – Flavour of the Month wasn’t old enough to die.
But nothing happened to Heather, either.
She walked over to me, sand sprinkling her smooth, white thighs like confectioner’s sugar on an éclair, and she said through her mask, ‘C’mon, Fred. I think it’s OK now.’
I sighed hotly. For all my caution, once again I’d come across looking overly cautious. Maybe I truly was. But I couldn’t remember ever having been as stupid as Scotty.
I got up.
Big clods of sand fell off me, taking away the heat. I was suddenly and delic
iously cool, thank God. More sand poured out of the legs of my shorts. It was caked inside, and I desperately wanted to walk out into the water and rinse myself off. But whatever had passed by might still be there, admittedly in greatly diminished but maybe still lethal concentrations. Who knew? So I brushed and shook my clown shorts legs and did what I could to get the sand off me.
Both Scotty and Heather were still wearing their masks, which was smart of Heather and damned miraculous for Scotty. We stood close together and stared out across the water, toward the mainland. Heather turned to me.
‘Fred? Do you have any idea what just happened?’
I was still fuming about Scotty and I didn’t want her to see my eyes. I looked back across the water, and what I saw deadened the anger and filled me with a kind of sick wonder.
Acres of dead fish carpeted the surface. They drifted serenely westward with the current. I could imagine that by tomorrow, the smell would render the air unbreathable.
On shore, the scene reminded me of photographs taken during the London Blitz of World War II. Fires were burning across the city. One big house across the sound and to the right of our island roared with combustion. Great tongues of flames licked from both the upstairs and downstairs windows, and twisted above the surrounding live oaks, threatening to set them aflame too. There was no answering wail of sirens. The smoke from these fires, combined with the dissipating shreds of mist, cast a depressing pall over the horizon, which had fallen eerily silent. It was the lack of traffic sounds, the rush of engines and the occasional horn. The cars across the way, on the highway, remained at a standstill. There were no boats on the water. No planes in the sky.
