Black Tide (8 page)

The authorities must be sending investigators and soldiers to find out what had taken place, to put out the fires and restore order. If we could signal to them – enough debris had washed ashore that we could easily lay out an SOS on the sand using boards and other flotsam. Or we could start a fire – not that one more fire would work effectively as a signal. To be honest, I had no other ideas.

As we stood there, pondering the awfulness of the world around us, DeVries' voice carried through the nylon weave of the tent at a near-shriek: ‘I'm thirsty!'

Heather sighed wearily and turned to go up the beach. ‘I don't know why he keeps saying that,' she mumbled, seemingly more to herself than anyone else. ‘I give him water but he won't drink it.'

‘That's 'cause it's not blood,' Scotty murmured and cast a furtive glance my way. I didn't respond, partly because I knew if I did it would only encourage him to further provocations, and partly because there was the chance he was right – in a way. If it were not fresh water the creatures craved, then some other component of human metabolism must be involved. At the moment I was simply too tired and frightened to think about it.

Heather had crawled halfway into the tent to check on DeVries when she called, ‘Guys. I think you'd better come look at this.' I didn't want to look at anything, to be honest, and I could tell Scotty felt the same way because for a moment, neither one of us moved. Then Heather shouted more urgently, ‘Guys!' and we both rotated and began tramping laboriously through the sand toward the pair of tents. Heather's ass jutted suggestively from the flap and I tried hard not to appear too interested. I didn't even glance Scotty's way to see if he were appraising my level of interest. Instead, I let my gaze droop to the sand.

Heather backed out of the tent, her face pinched into an expression of deep worry. She looked at me hesitantly and said, ‘Fred, something's … happening.'

I dropped to my knees and crawled forward, into the tent, which reeked of unnameable odours, some embarrassingly human and others unidentifiable. It was ferociously hot inside, yet DeVries' body vibrated spasmodically, as if a high-voltage current were arcing through his nerves. I recalled old black and white film reels about the Pacific campaign during World War II, and the men who'd been stricken with malaria. This looked remarkably similar. I laid the palm of my hand across DeVries' forehead, expecting it to be clammy, but instead felt an uncharacteristic chill. His head whipped back and forth and he whispered, ‘Thirsty – thirsty –' as saliva flecked with blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. I gingerly peeled away the sticky mat of T-shirt that covered his wound and reared back, revolted by what I saw. The bite was blackened as if cauterised. Tendrils the colour of road tar had begun spidering through the flesh, following the paths of blood vessels. It looked for all the world as if an alien infection were slowly consuming his body. Osmotic pressure within the vessels caused them to bulge obscenely.

‘I'm thirsty!' DeVries moaned, this time with greater vigour. In fact, the tone of his voice carried the hint of a demand.

‘Heather, can you get me a bottle of water? Let's see if I can get him to drink.'

She scrambled away as Scotty said something in a low voice about DeVries and how we should have cut him loose the night before. I felt a hot breath surge through me. How could he consider such a thing, much less advocate it as a course of action? ‘Infected' or not, DeVries was a human being who needed help. And he had come back for us at tremendous personal risk. He had earned our efforts to help him.

Heather was back, handing me the water through the tent flap. Though it had been sitting out in the sun, the bottle felt infinitely cooler than the sweat lodge of a tent. I unscrewed the cap and placed the lip of the bottle at DeVries mouth. ‘Try to drink some of this,' I told him gently, and reached around to hold up his head.

‘I'm thirsty!' he shouted. Spit flew. I felt squeamish disgust as a fleck landed on my cheek.

‘I'm thirsty!' he whispered as I tilted the bottle and poured the water between his lips. I began to feel a crawling sensation of tension, knowing that something was about to happen.

‘Thirsty thirsty thirsty –' he chanted, shaking his head and spraying the inside of the tent with blood-tainted water. I rocked back on my heels and the bottle slipped from my fingers, the water gurgling out in languid gulps to pool in the tent bottom.

‘Thirsty!' DeVries whispered again and sat up, bending at the waist, a ventriloquist's doll brought to sudden and horrible life. His eyes snapped open and they were as blank and blanched as boiled eggs. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

His head rotated ever so slightly as he seemed to sense me, and some horrid recognition of appetite crept into his features, and at this moment I could swear a smile formed on those chapped and scorched lips so that I scrabbled away toward the opening in the tent. His hand flew out lightning fast, faster than I would have believed anybody in his condition could have moved, and he whispered, ‘I am thirsty' and opened his mouth to reveal teeth that were coated with a kind of dark, clinging mucus that hung in snotty, glutinous strands as he grabbed my hair and began dragging me toward him.

I shoved my palm directly into his chest and blurted, ‘Shit – shit – shit, he's got me! Pull me out!' and heard Scotty swear and rip open the flap to grab my arm. DeVries snarled and leaned in close, his teeth snapping as they sought hold of my flesh. I pushed with all my strength, made stronger by the electric current of terror burning through me, and held him away as he gibbered and writhed and struggled to bring me into his embrace. Scotty was hauling me back and now Heather had grabbed me around the waist, and slowly I began to slide toward the tent opening. DeVries uttered puppy-like whining noises and redoubled his efforts, and I felt my body going back inside, toward what I knew would be a certain and grotesque death. I used my free hand to punch him in the testicles – one, two, three times in rapid succession – and his only reaction was to let loose with an animal cry of rage and yank on my head with superhuman strength.

‘Jesus Christ! Get him!' Scotty yelled and Heather grunted, ‘I'm trying.' I could smell the swampy, fetid stench of DeVries' breath, and his skin rippled beneath my touch as though I were grasping a plastic bag filled with live eels. I shifted my grip from his chest to his throat and I could feel him trying to bend at the neck to get his teeth into my wrist.

Scotty wrapped his arms around my chest and heaved a mighty heave and I heard a tearing sound, like a Velcro fastener being undone, and a swath of my hair ripped loose as the three of us tumbled out the opening. We stared at each other wildly – I'm not sure we understood what exactly had happened – when DeVries abruptly growled and launched himself from the tent.

I threw myself out of his path and simultaneously jumped to my feet as he came at me. His arms were outstretched and his fingers hooked into claws, and as he sprinted toward me his flesh began to wrinkle and burn.

I ran.

He began screaming as he chased me down the beach, his voice gone beyond anything that sounded remotely human. I snatched a quick glance over my shoulder and saw that he was consumed by fire, a trail of greasy smoke unfurling behind him. His eyes had begun to smoulder and as I watched, they popped into blowtorches of flame.

Still, he came after me.

Mindlessly. Impervious to the fire, he came after me. I felt my chest heaving and my lungs burning, my lack of conditioning now a possibly fatal flaw. I moved out of the soft sand and into the hardpack area between the island proper and the water to improve my footing, and when I looked back he not only was still there but was gaining on me, an escapee from a charnel pit gone irrevocably mad. My thighs began to ache. A knot was forming in my side. I did not know what was worse – the physical pain I was feeling or the horror of seeing this … this
thing
chasing me.

Finally, I could run no more. The pain was too great. I could not take another step.

The shoreline was littered with debris. I snatched up a board and whirled around, holding it before me like a knight prepared for a joust. DeVries slammed into the end of the board, nearly knocking it from my grasp, and reached out with flaming arms to grab me.

His reach was short. Thank God.

And I held him that way, as the fire cooked his flesh into sizzling black chunks and his screams of hunger and rage diminished to an inhuman croaking. I held him at board-point and felt myself crying as his tendons snapped and his muscles gave way to the flames and he dropped woodenly to his knees.

I was still standing there as he burned to a crisp in front of me.

 

It was Heather who came and got me.

She led me unresisting back up the beach. The smell of rotting fish had become cloying. By tomorrow the air would be unbreathable, unless the current continued to flush the kill toward the new pass. Scotty was gazing appraisingly across the water.

He glanced at me as I joined them, then looked back at the shore. He said, ‘We have to do something.'

I scratched my head. ‘I was thinking. The authorities should be moving into the area today …'

‘We have enough food for two days,' he interrupted me. ‘Enough water for a week. But it's the light we're hurting for.'

‘We lay out a signal on the beach. An SOS, using some of the lumber that's been washed ashore …'

‘We have two flashlights left. That may give us another night or two. And there's enough wood for a single fire.'

He wasn't even listening to me. I might as well have been talking to the smoke-dimmed sky. Clearly he had already made up his mind to do something, and it sounded as though he were trying to justify the decision to himself.

‘I'm going to swim across to the mainland.'

I felt a moment of shock, and then I found myself shaking my head and muttering, ‘No.' Even now, in looking back on that moment, I can't say exactly why I opposed the idea, only that I did. I felt an instant apprehension, and I can't say if it stemmed from some hidden concern for Scotty's welfare, or for our own, or what. Maybe I saw it as a usurpation of my authority. Maybe I was secretly jealous he'd thought of the idea and not me. But I found myself formulating objections, the first being, ‘You can't swim that far. It's almost a mile.'

He pointed to the nearer shore. ‘That's only about a quarter of a mile.'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘a quarter mile of dead fish and bloated animal carcasses carrying God alone knows what kind of pathogenic organisms …'

‘I've had enough of your pathogenic organisms,' he answered. ‘Look around you. All of Northwest Florida is a pathogenic organism.'

‘What if one of the creatures in the water attacks you?'

He shook his head, tendrils of his slicked hair swaying with the movement. ‘It's daylight. You saw what happened to DeVries.'

‘And once you get ashore,' I countered. ‘Look at the shoreline over there.' I yanked a finger southward. ‘It's a solid mass of sand live oak and
Spartina patens
– er, saltmeadow cordgrass. Very dark. They could be hiding in there.'

‘I'll stick to the open areas. Once I get ashore I'll find a telephone and call for help …'

‘Who?'

He stared at me, exasperated. ‘Somebody. Anybody. Or I'll get a boat. I'll play it by ear. For Christ's sake, it's better than sitting around here waiting for one of those things to come up …'

‘I don't want you to go,' Heather cut in. ‘I don't think it's a good idea. Fred is right. The police, the National Guard, whoever, will be moving in today, and we should stay here and wait to be rescued. We should stick together.'

Stick together. Yes, I thought. That's why I didn't like the idea.

I was afraid.

Scotty stared at her with an expression that was equal parts bafflement and anger. His eyes got big. ‘Heather! Please! I'm trying to get us off this island …'

‘You won't accomplish anything if you get yourself killed,' she said, gazing sullenly at the beach.

‘I don't plan on getting killed,' he insisted, his voice lower and tinged with what sounded like gratitude. ‘It's a short swim across the sound. I find a clear spot on the beach and go ashore. I stick to the open areas – hell, I'll find a car and drive to the nearest marina, get a boat and come get you and the Professor,' and with that he glanced back at me sneeringly.

My thoughts were hopping frantically from one scenario to the next. Finally, an idea occurred to me. ‘We'll all swim across.'

Scotty turned to me and laughed, a totally spontaneous gesture. He said, ‘You gotta be kidding! You couldn't make it halfway across. We'd drown trying to save your ass.'

I knew he was right. You'd think a marine biologist would be more at home in water than dry land, but I had never been a strong swimmer. And with my current flabby lack of conditioning a quarter mile might well as be the entire breadth of the Gulf of Mexico. But before I could offer another alternative Heather spoke up.