Black Tide (11 page)

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.

 

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.

 

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
thunk
ing 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 – she 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.

When the water was as deep as my chest, I told her to hang on and I hoisted myself onto the raft. It wobbled precariously and Heather clung rigidly to the deck spars. For a moment I thought it might go over altogether and I stopped moving until its motion settled. Heather was sucking in great, whistling gasps of air.

‘It's OK,' I whispered, hauling my feet onto the sloping deck. It was canted at about a 20-degree angle – I couldn't figure out how to raise the back end of the raft without using another oil drum, which we didn't have – but the slope wasn't unmanageable. I hefted one of the ‘paddles' and began to pole us out into the deeper water.

A shadow fell across the sound. The leading edge of the thundercloud had swept across the sun. The wind picked up and the temperature began to fall. I began to see the occasional whitecap. We were in the storm's outflow. It would be raining in a few minutes.

‘Ah, don't you just love this Florida weather?' I quipped, trying to inject as much levity into my voice without it sounding phoney. ‘If not, just stick around a few minutes. It'll change.' Heather glanced back and smiled nervously.

‘We're almost to the channel,' I wheezed. ‘See that buoy over there?' I pointed to our left. ‘That marks the left-hand side of the channel. There's a corresponding buoy on the other side – see it?' She nodded yes, and then pointed quickly to a wooden latticework structure rising above the water a ways past the other buoy. ‘What's that?'

‘That's a channel marker,' I said. ‘It's got a permanent light mounted on top. That helps the barge captains navigate at night, when the buoys are difficult to spot.'

The sky darkened and the wind ratcheted up another notch. I sneaked a furtive glance at the north shore and saw our clear spot beginning to slide by to the right. I had forgotten about the damn current drawing toward the new pass in Navarre. But I didn't think it would be a problem – if we entered the shallows west of where we wanted to go ashore we could simply walk back.

‘The channel is about a hundred yards wide – that's about a football field in length. We paddle across that and we're in the shallows. Then we get out and hoof it. No problem.'

I was talking to her partly to keep her mind busy and away from this frightening thing we were doing, and partly to bolster my own confidence. The approaching storm appeared to be growing in ferocity. A dense skirt of heavy rain hung from its middle and as I looked, a snake's tongue of lightning flicked at the distant ground, producing a boom of thunder that shook the raft.