Black Tide

by Del Stone

  ‘But I shouldn’t have asked him to come.’

  I let out a loud breath.

  ‘It was a big mistake,’ she continued, her voice clear now, like the Heather of old. ‘I mean, it was obvious you two didn’t get along. I don’t know what I was thinking … oh, what am I saying? Of course I know what I was thinking.’ She paused, and a curious expression appeared on what I could see of her face, a mixture of confusion and something darker. She said, ‘Why did you ask me to come?’

  I felt my insides go cold. Sweat speckled my palms. God, I didn’t want to get into this, especially under the current circumstances. I babbled the first, lame excuse that came to my mind: ‘You’re my graduate assistant. It’s customary for college professors to include their assistants on field studies.’

  Her head wobbled back and forth, and I could imagine her eyes rolling in the sockets. ‘I’m not exactly an expert on dinoflagellates. You could have asked a dozen other more qualified people to help, and you know I wouldn’t have been bothered. I don’t even know why I’m your assistant. I’d be much better suited to Dr. Purdy …’

  ‘I thought you wanted a diversified study base,’ I offered weakly.

  She sighed. ‘Let’s just be honest. We may not live through the night, so let’s be very, very honest …’

  ‘We’re not going to die tonight …’

  ‘Whatever,’ she answered dismissively. ‘I’d like to know the real reason.’

  I fought for breath. I had never spoken about this with her, not any of it, and now I wasn’t sure I even felt the same as before. Much had changed in the past two days. Too much for words.

  ‘Be honest,’ she reminded me.

  I didn’t want to be honest. I wanted to tell her another lie. Too much was at stake now, and when I began to enumerate to myself everything I would risk by telling the truth, the words just tumbled out.

  ‘I wanted to be with you. Alone.’

  She turned to me, her expression neutral. ‘You wanted to have sex with me?’

  The words stung. Spoken with such lack of decoration, such blunt certainty, they robbed the whole concept of its subtextual beauty. I felt my face growing hot, and I was hopeful she couldn’t see me.

  ‘It wasn’t just a sexual thing,’ I murmured, ashamed. ‘It was you. I wanted to be with you.’

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and the light had grown so dim I couldn’t make out her expression. But after that long pause she said, ‘I knew that.’

  The hole inside me deepened, if that were possible. It felt as though every molecule of my body were being drawn into it so that I heard her only dimly over the roar of my own heartbeat. A mad pulsing commenced in my temples, a heavy thud that sent shockwaves rippling across my body.

  ‘That’s why you shouldn’t turn on the light. That’s why I should be dragged off into the water.’

  I shook my head, more delirious than confused. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That’s why I asked Scotty to come.’

  I knew that already. I told her.

  ‘I don’t want you to think I hate you,’ she blurted, ignoring what I’d just told her. She had become a pale hobgoblin in the maroon twilight. ‘I just … I just didn’t feel the same way about you. And I wanted Scotty there.’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s not that I think you’re too old, or unattractive,’ she amplified. ‘I just … I was wrapped up in Scotty. I was taken. You see?’

  Neither one of us spoke for a long time. The night settled in around us. There were no bugs – my Karenia negre had apparently done them in too. We sat there in the cool dark.

  My feelings were … I don’t know. I felt hollow inside, and cold to the bone. A kind of revelation was settling in. Every person experiences a moment in his life when he finally understands in a way that the protective coating on the psyche cannot deflect that he is fallible, and mortal. It’s a condition that neither education nor intellect can deny. I had committed mistakes that for all my life I’d held other men in my circumstances accountable for, and now I didn’t want to admit the same for myself. I always seemed to disappoint myself.

  ‘Are we evil people, Fred?’ Heather asked, her voice perversely innocent. ‘All the manipulating and conniving – does that make us evil?’

  ‘You’re not evil,’ I told her.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I honestly didn’t.

  ‘We tried to talk him out of swimming to the other side, didn’t we? I mean, we really tried.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was that way,’ she continued, sounding angry. ‘You couldn’t tell him a damn thing. He was a stubborn asshole.’ A whiff of uncertainty crept into her voice. ‘Maybe that’s what I liked about him.’ I said nothing but I was listening. The conversation was jumping around, not quite linear, and in such moments unvarnished truth and fiction are mixed in equal parts.

  She shook her head. ‘But we tried. You even tried to stop him, and he hit you. And then you cried.’

  I made some kind of noise, I don’t know what. Some kind of animal distress sound. My shame burned ever hotter. She put a hand on my arm and through the murk, I thought I could see her smiling.

  ‘No, Fred,’ she said, ‘It’s OK. You guys are so hung up on crying. It’s a human thing. Entirely human.’

  And then she settled again into silence.

  I stood watch the first half of the night, switching on the dying flashlight and playing it around the empty beach.

  At some point, I fell asleep.

  Heather woke me up. She was cooing, ‘Oh Scotty, stop it,’ and at first I could not remember where we were or what we were doing. Then I saw pale fingers, fat as bleached sausages, sliding around her throat. The shape of a head bobbed in the gloom.

  A bolt of fear nearly stopped my heart and I jerked the flashlight up.

  It wasn’t Scotty. I don’t know how I would have reacted if it had been Scotty. The weakened beam of the flashlight landed squarely in the thing’s bloodless face, and the eyes twitched up to reveal nothing but white balls rotating blindly in the sockets. The flesh puckered and the thing threw a protective arm across his face but it was too late – one eye kicked off like a flare and the top of our dune was illuminated in an otherworldly nimbus of blue light as it began to burn. Fingers had latched on to my shoulders and I could feel a mouth closing in on my throat – the breath was cold, as if somebody had opened the heavy steel door of a meat locker, and it was foul with a stench of both rotting flesh and muck. I aimed the flashlight at me and the fingers instantly let go and there was a menacing hiss of combustion. Whatever it was staggered back and howled wildly into the night.

  Heather’s eyes flew open and at that moment something snatched at her and grabbed the neck of her T-shirt from the back and began to drag her down the dune face. She screamed ‘Fred!’ and I aimed the flashlight at the thing, but at that distance the beam was so weak it produced no reaction beyond a tenuous bit of smoke. She was screaming, ‘Oh God, Fred, help me …’ and I snatched up one of the other lights, a big heavy duty lantern with a mushy, rubber-tipped push-button switch at the top. I mashed it savagely. A powerful beam of light stabbed into the dark and I aimed it directly at the monstrosity. Instantly his head went up in flames, but he refused to let go as he shambled toward the water, dragging Heather behind. It was an insane sight, and for a moment I felt the urge to titter. But her screaming drove me to my feet. I scrambled after them, the flashlight beam jiggling crazily, revealing in stroboscopic glimpses the crowd of things surrounding the island. I was able to reach her quickly and I ran in front, holding the flashlight like a gun. The beam scorched across the thing’s chest and it began to burn fiercely, as if I’d doused it in gasoline. It still wouldn’t let go of Heather.

  She wriggled out
of her T-shirt and squirmed away from the creature just as its clothes began to burn. She crawled over to me, piping gasps of terror slipping past her lips. The thing went up with a great whoosh and we had to stagger back to escape the sudden wave of heat. All around us, the things staggered toward the water, burning until they hit the shallows and dived in amid clouds of steam and hissing. You could see their forms, scuttling along the bottom as they headed for deeper water.

  ‘It touched me!’ Heather screamed hysterically, squeezing my arm until it hurt. ‘The filthy thing touched me and it was cold and slimy –’ and a huge, shuddering shiver ran through her body.

  The thing stood and burned. It still clenched Heather’s T-shirt, which had begun to smoke.

  She jerked me around and looked me straight in the eye. Hysteria had pinched her face into a weird mask of terror, the eyes wide and glassy, the cheekbones raised, the mouth a twisting shape as she struggled to breathe.

  ‘They’re not going to come, Fred – nobody’s going to come!’ she whispered hoarsely and I knew it was true. They would come, all right. In three or four days’ time. By then we would be slumbering on the bottom of Santa Rosa Sound, waiting for the sun to go down. ‘We can’t do this again tomorrow night. We can’t.’

  I waggled the flashlight beam around, seeing white eyes sink beneath the water’s surface hundreds of yards out. They were everywhere.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  We didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  About 4:30 in the morning, the lantern battery began to die.

  In the morning

  It was ugly.

  I had awakened around 10 after a fitful few hours of intermittently dozing and jerking awake, afraid that the things in the water might suddenly develop an immunity to daylight. It was during one of those half-lucid transition periods between sleep and wakefulness that the idea came to me. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before.

  Heather was still asleep when I got to work. By the time she woke up I was nearly finished. She trudged down the sand dune and stood on the beach, watching me.

  ‘What’s that?’

  I stood up. ‘That is a raft.’

  She frowned. ‘Will it float?’

  I nodded. ‘Everything I made it out of floated here. Sure it’ll float.’

  ‘But will it carry our weight?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ I answered, instantly regretting the flippant tone of my voice. She began to shake her head, and I could see the dread in her eyes.

  ‘We’ll end up like Scotty,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ I pointed to the clear stretch of land, on the landing approach to the runway at Hurlburt Field on the north shore. ‘All we have to do is cross the channel. It’s about 500 yards, the same distance Scotty swam yesterday. Once we’re across the channel we hit shallow water – you can see it.’ Indeed, the turbidity of the water had diminished overnight so that the natural colouring of the bottom was returning. Fewer dead fish drifted westward. Another few days and you’d be hard pressed to tell that anything out of the ordinary had happened here at all. ‘That water is only about waist deep almost a thousand yards to shore. We walk to that clear spot, avoiding the trees to either side, and go on up to the highway. We can find a car and drive out of here.’

  I thought it was a good plan, a sensible plan. If I’d thought of it yesterday all three of us might be back at Gainesville, Scotty and Heather celebrating their brush with death over a pitcher of Löwenbräu and a pizza, and me … well, I wasn’t sure. Doing something other than how I’d spent the time since Psycho Cecelia walked out of my life. That was my new pact with myself. If we survived this, I would change my life. For the good.

  But Heather looked doubtful. ‘How’d you put it together?’

  Now that was a question I could answer and I launched enthusiastically into my explanation. I showed her how I’d used the tent lines to secure a segment of dock to the empty oil drum that had washed ashore, and after I’d run out of rope how I’d cut strips of nylon from the tents themselves and braided them to make more rope for the outriggers that would keep the raft from tipping over. I felt an inordinate sense of pride over the raft. I was not the fixer-upper type and for me, this was not only an engineering marvel but a – dare I use the word – proactive solution to our problem. I had even tracked down a couple of thin boards we could conceivably use as paddles once we were out in the deep water.

  Still, Heather didn’t look convinced. She had said she couldn’t swim and was afraid of the water and I could understand that, being a bit acrophobic myself. So I chose that moment to show her the ‘life preserver’ I’d made for her. I’d taken one of the nylon tent bags and stuffed it with as much Styrofoam as I could find – the beaches around here were always thick with the stuff, what with boaters losing their coolers over the side. The current disaster had produced a bumper crop, which I was able to break into small pieces and fill the bag. I tied the ends of the drawstring together to form a loop, which she could wrap around one shoulder and under the other. I wasn’t sure it would hold her up, but it would certainly add to her buoyancy. More importantly, it might give her the confidence to get on the raft in the first place.

  ‘Is there no other way?’ she asked. She looked small and frightened, and I felt an intense sorrow for her. It was bad enough that anybody had to deal with circumstances like these, but for somebody who had suffered the way she had, and was about to, it was nearly intolerable.

  But she answered the question herself. Her gaze swept across the island and landed on the charred body of DeVries standing at the lip of the dune. It had never fallen over. It stood there alone, a blackened scarecrow that frightened nobody but us. She turned back to me and I could see she had made her decision.

  We ate first.

  I forced the both of us to choke down a military meal packet. We would need our strength. Three of the food packets remained. If some other poor bastard ended up on this island, he wouldn’t die of starvation for at least a couple of days. If he lived that long.

  Shortly after noon the sky began to darken. A few fires continued to burn on the mainland, and a thin layer of dusty smoke hung over everything. But puffy cumulus clouds had begun to gather inland, collecting into larger build-ups. I saw the first hint of a cloud base. In the distance, a thin murmur of thunder echoed down the empty corridor of Santa Rosa Sound.

  We didn’t pack, and we didn’t clean up. We took the flashlights. I stuffed the waterproof matches into my breast pocket. The environmentalist in me hated to leave the island such a mess, but considering the situation, a bit of litter didn’t matter. I’d used some of the lumber from my distress sign to make the raft. I’d considered spelling out the world ‘HELL,’ but that didn’t seem a useful expenditure of energy either.

  As Heather clambered aboard the raft I looked back one more time at the island. The dead thing stared westward. The sign on the beach said ‘HEI.’

  I was too frightened to be happy we were leaving.

  I got behind the raft and pushed.

  In the afternoon

  It took the better part of an hour to get us out into the deeper part of the sound. The raft was not exactly hydrodynamic, and the exertion of pushing it through the water left me exhausted. Worse, a north wind had sprung up. Thankfully there was no more Karenia in the water – there was nothing alive in the water at all! – so the question of airborne toxins was moot. But the air movement disturbed the water, creating small waves. They slapped against the blunt nose of the oil drum with a hollow thunking sound that didn’t give me a lot of confidence about its seaworthiness.

  Heather was crouched in the middle of the dock grid, her life preserver clutched to her chest in a death grip. The raft was constantly tilting to port or starboard and the outriggers tended to submerge momentarily before stopping the tilt, creating even more drag. Part of the problem was Heather – sh
e didn’t have the sea legs of an experienced boater, who would have shifted his weight to counterbalance the motion of the raft. Instead, she remained stiff, which only exacerbated the tipping motion. I knew she was afraid. Her face was as pallid as some of our nocturnal visitors. If she could see me aboard a jetliner I would look the same as the plane drops its gear and descends toward the runway. Still, it wasn’t helping, and I actually looked forward to the moment when I could climb aboard and take up one of the paddles.

  I had asked her to keep an eye out – for what, I hadn’t elaborated. But I think she knew what I meant. Pushing the raft like this, I couldn’t see what was ahead – or underneath. Scotty’s haunting image re-formed in my mind’s eye, and then another thought, even more disturbing, came to me: What if he were out here, waiting for us to pass overhead? It was too much to contemplate and I forced my thoughts to return to what I was doing.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Heather declared.

  My heart jumped into my throat. ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘A storm,’ she said.

  I glanced at the northern horizon. The sky was the colour of blue steel, fringed with a menacing outflow boundary that gave the cloud base an even darker and more ominous appearance. Here in Florida such afternoon thunderstorms were practically a daily occurrence. The storms could be violent, with lashing winds and rain. But that wasn’t something Heather needed to know. So I lied to her.

  ‘No problem. We’ll get wet. But the rain will put out the fires.’

  She nodded, but I didn’t get the impression she was reassured.