Black Tide (3 page)

‘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.

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.