Black Tide, page 10
“Oh, could it have?” I can’t give him too much grief for this one. I would have done the same thing in his position. Only I wouldn’t have missed. At least he had the presence of mind to grab the gun, not that it does us any good, now that it’s empty. Maybe one of us can use it as a club until our arms are bitten off.
“You said you only found part of the cop,” I say, steering the conversation away from my poor head, not that this new topic is a whole lot better. “What about the other guy?” I wish we’d gotten his name. Natalia’s dad.
Mike shakes his head. “There was a lot of blood in the grass. Could have come from either of them. But no body.”
“I think that’s his Jeep parked up the beach,” I say, glancing in that direction, which causes Mike to miss his target and jam his finger straight into the gouge and halfway through my head. That’s what it feels like, anyway. I push his hand away. “Stop. Enough.”
“Sorry.” He looks toward the Jeep.
It’s right on the verge of being swallowed by the fog. I can just see its shape out there. The last connection we have with a world that only yesterday still made some measure of sense. It was a violent, beautiful, heartbreaking, wondrous place, that world. It was a mess, but it was ours. Now the fog is pulled over it like a shroud to save me and Mike from having to look at the ugliness of its corpse.
“I’m sure you’re right. But I bet his keys are on him. Wherever he is.”
“That’s what I was going to ask—if you happened to find them.”
“Nope.”
“Too bad. Being on level ground, you might have had a harder time rolling that one.” I try to smile. I’m not sure what face I actually pull off, but Mike scoots a few inches back from me.
“I didn’t see him,” Mike repeats.
“Maybe he has a spare set hidden somewhere? Like you should have done?”
“Maybe. But that’s a long walk from here. And then we have to hope those things don’t catch wind of us while we’re looking. And if we don’t find a spare set, we have to make it back.”
“Thanks for the report, Admiral Optimist. You know, there was a positive outcome to that scenario too,” I say. But I don’t believe it either.
Then he says the words I’ve been dreading. That I knew he would say—but not so long as we were on some other topic. “I have to clean your leg.”
“You don’t. It’s really okay,” I lie. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”
“Take your pants off.”
“Wow, mister. I don’t know what kind of girl you think I am—”
“Beth,” he says solemnly, meeting my eyes. It’s the first time we’ve really looked at each other since the world became something different and unknowable. Since the air itself learned how to open up and bare its teeth. I force myself to hold the stare until he says: “Now.”
* * *
I can’t look at it. I don’t need to. And I don’t need to take my shorts off either, Mike. Instead, I gingerly roll the tattered hem back, adhered flaps of skin trying to peel away with it, and Mike’s expression is all that’s required to know it’s worse than a mosquito bite. The color has drained from his face, and that’s got nothing to do with his own loss of blood.
“It’s … it’s dirty,” he chokes. What does that mean? Sand? Dog hair? “I need to clean it out. Thoroughly.”
I can’t help it. With one eye closed and the other squinted like there’s something grim on TV and I haven’t fully committed to watching yet, I look. My leg is marred by two rows of deep, messy punctures just above my knee—one on the top of my lower thigh, one on the underside, where the jaws clamped down. The individual holes are clotted with sand and dry blood, yes, but there’s also a gross, black, oily substance all around the wound.
“I think this is saliva,” Mike says, making it all that much worse. “Or some kind of bile. It doesn’t seem to be corrosive or anything. Does it burn?”
“Actually, yes—now, can we please stop admiring it and get it the hell off me?” I’m trying not to hyperventilate, but I just can’t with this. Bile? No. Nopity nuh-uh. I’m done. Going back to sleep, and when I wake up, it’ll be this morning again and none of this will have happened. Why not? Last night I had a nightmare that killed the world. Why not a daydream that restores sanity and order?
I gag down a pulpy swig of mimosa. It reminds me of a time I crashed in some college guy’s crappy apartment. Woke up and grabbed the closest can of half-drunk soda to wash the taste of so many bad decisions out of my mouth. Only it wasn’t soda in the can—it was a mouthful of warm chewing tobacco spit. I left the contents of my stomach on his floor and stumbled out and somehow made my way home. Well, to my parents’ home. That was the last time my key worked.
Mike tears open a sanitizing wipe and goes to work, first cleaning away the black slime, then scooping grit from my leg. I force down another chunky, orangey gulp, then lie back across a flattened seat, leg resting on the center console, and clench my teeth to keep from screaming and drawing their attention.
Jake rests his head next to me, watching with unblinking concern. His wet nose issues little puffs of air, rustling the hairs entwined with the upholstery. He lifts his head now and again to look out into the fog. My heart loses its rhythm every time he does it. Can Jake see the invisible bastards? Or can he just pinpoint them with his super canine hearing?
Jake flops over onto his side and pants into my face. His eyes are wide and bright and pleading with me to fix things, to bring him some relief from this ridiculous heat. For real, it’s freaking October! Does the temperature have something to do with the new hell we’re living in?
“Soon, buddy. We’ll figure something out, just hang on a few more minutes.” He blinks, seemingly comforted by my reassurance. As if I actually have any sort of plan. As if anybody does. Go home and lock your doors, wait for further instructions. What a joke.
“This isn’t good enough,” Mike says. The disinfectant wipe looks like bloody sandpaper now. He spies the cooler with our lunch tucked behind the driver’s seat. He leans over me, pops it open, and finds the fifth of vodka I pulled from his freezer, a jug of tomato juice (who doesn’t like a good Bloody Mary with lunch—c’mon!), and the sandwiches I assembled from what little I could scavenge from his fridge. “Is this all you packed for lunch?” he asks, staring into the cooler incredulously, as if I’d filled it with cleaning supplies.
“Yes!” I snap. I know where this is going. I know I’ve Bethed up once again. “I wasn’t planning to be out here all day, okay? I thought we were going to have fun, not perform fucking triage.”
“You didn’t bring any water.” It’s just an observation, but it comes off like an accusation. As if I did it on purpose, out of some incredibly prescient malice. I’ve been accused of that my entire life, and his words make my insides twist up.
“There’s a whole ocean right there! You’re welcome to go get some.” I can taste the venom in my words, bitter and burning on the tip of my tongue. His tone, the look on his face. It’s all too familiar. Oh, Beth, I can hear Mom chiding. I didn’t think you could possibly make things any worse, but you continue to blow through my expectations like a semitruck through a guardrail.
“For us to drink, Beth.” Mike deflates. As if this is our last chance for survival. As if we had a chance to begin with.
“Tomatoes are mostly water,” I mumble.
I can’t even meet Jake’s eyes. His stare is the worst. There’s nothing accusatory in it. He still trusts me. He still believes I’m the smart human who was hired to take care of him and keep him happy and safe. That pink tongue of his is rolled out across the back of the seat like a worm dying in the sun, his breath hot against my skin, each exhalation a plea for me to give him a cool drink. How did I not even think to bring water for him? I should just open the door and get out. I don’t deserve to be in here, in the hot safety of the car. Maybe the shriekers will fill up on me and move along.
“I was hoping to use it to clean up your leg too,” Mike says. “But this will have to do.” He grabs the vodka.
“Will it, though? Maybe just Band-Aid that bitch and let them do the rest at the hospital, whenever we get there, preferably after they’ve knocked me right out.” The nearest hospital is in Seaside; I know that from the instructions left for me at the house. Seaside, where the cop directed anybody who didn’t have a home to go back to. I wonder what that situation looks like right now. These invisible creeps could get into the high school without anybody knowing until they opened their mouths. I think I’d rather be here.
Mike blots my leg with a paper napkin, then cracks the lid of the vodka bottle. For some reason, he sniffs at the cold liquid inside. As if confirming it’s of a sufficiently fine grade for medical use. I almost ask him for a sip. It seems only fair, given what he’s about to do, that I get a little anesthesia.
“I have no medical training,” he informs me, as though he’s afraid I might sue him later. “I have no idea if this is adequate, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Wait—”
He doesn’t. He tips the bottle and pours cold vodka directly into the punctures. I jerk bolt upright like a vampire bursting from a coffin. My fist, acting of its own free will, swings into the side of Mike’s head. He topples back, nearly dropping the vodka and spilling it all over the floor. As if we needed even more tragedy today.
“Son of a bitch!” he hisses, blinking to clear the stars from his vision. “I don’t want it to get infected. You don’t know what that thing could be carrying.”
Why’d he have to say something like that? What an awful thought—I want to reach into my mind and grab it and rip it out and stomp it to death.
“Don’t care,” I say. “You’re done.”
I snatch the first aid kit, rip open a gauze patch, lay it across the worst of the punctures, and haphazardly tape it down. I can’t shake the thought of that thing’s awful teeth in my skin, that slimy black goo seeping into my bloodstream, the fact that last night the sky opened up and unleashed honest-to-God monsters upon our world. But at least I don’t have to keep staring at the evidence now.
I look at Mike. “It’s my turn to play doctor.”
He pulls up his shirt, as if to show me how unnecessary that is. He’s got a lot of scrapes and bruises, but the worst is a single, wide tear down his side, like somebody tried to shank him with a wooden spoon. It bled badly, but the bleeding has stopped. He doesn’t even have to worry about monster bile. What an asshole.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
“Not anymore.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix that.”
13
MIKE
The tide’s coming in. It’s been rising for a while, but I’ve only really noticed in the last hour. It seems every time I glance out the windshield, it’s crept a bit closer, inching toward us like a cat stalking a bird. Before we know it, it will be on us, and there will be no getting away.
Staring meaningfully into the tangle of wires behind the panel beneath the steering column isn’t helping either. Unsurprisingly, the owner’s manual doesn’t have a chapter on emergency hot-wiring. If only Beth’s phone could get a strong-enough signal for internet. You can find how-tos for just about anything on YouTube. I’ve read plenty of characters who steal cars, but always by force. Crimes of opportunity. Or they were appropriately equipped, courtesy of plot necessity. I should have rewritten them. Demanded higher stakes. Challenged them. That extra research would have paid dividends today.
Beth calls 911 again, and again gets a busy signal. At this rate, her phone will probably die just as she gets through to somebody. Now, that’s a good plot beat. Can’t let the characters off too easy—how will they ever grow? Sarah sure didn’t show me any mercy. But that’s where the parallels between our life and our fiction end. Protagonists are supposed to rise from heartache and ashes, not drown in them. Or maybe I’m not a protagonist. Maybe I’m just a side character, here to deliver some crucial piece of exposition before being killed in spectacular fashion. But if mine is just a supporting role, who’s the hero of this story? Maybe that’s another difference between reality and fantasy: In real life, sometimes there are no heroes. In life, sometimes everybody loses and darkness swallows the world.
Beth exchanges the phone for her camera and aims up the beach into the fog. She’s looking for the things she’s taken to calling shriekers. Tracks in the sand, swirling wisps of mist as they glide through the fog like wraiths. I’m honestly glad we can’t see them. If I saw what she described—that yawning maw of teeth—I might just snap. I also can’t shake the gnawing feeling that I’ve already snapped. That by skirting my fate last night, I slipped into this terribly broken limbo realm. That this is what awaits you if you miss your train: madness and monsters.
Beth sucks air through her teeth. “Mike. Look at this.” She passes me the camera and points out the window. “You can just barely see one of those bowling balls in the fog.”
It takes me a moment of fiddling with the focus ring, but I find what she’s talking about. Bowling ball. At this point, that’s a better word than meteorite, because it looks less like a space rock than ever. In fact, if the things had looked like this to begin with, I’d never have suggested coming down to the beach. I’d never have put one into a bucket and taken it back to my house. I’d have driven straight to the hospital to have myself committed.
A fleshy, creeping, purplish-brown vine protrudes from the object, stretching slowly toward the dunes. There’s something undeniably predatory about it, like it’s searching for something to grab hold of and squeeze the life from.
“What do you make of that?” Beth asks.
“I don’t. I can’t.” I no longer possess the emotional energy to be even adequately mystified. I feel the way I used to after weeklong development marathons, losing track of days, stumbling home drained and gibbering, Sarah guiding me to the couch and shoving a glass of wine into my hand before losing herself in a tumbler of icy vodka.
The memory sticks me like a needle. That woman was too good for me. Never on any of those nights did I ask about her. What was she seeking comfort from in that frosty glass? I took her for granted. I’d earned her love and assumed that was the mountaintop. She never stopped working for us, for our marriage, so why did I think I could? Why did I assume that if things were okay at the beginning, they would just stay that way until the end?
“I mean, it’s … like … sprouting, right?” Beth asks. “Am I just making that up?”
“You’re not making it up. That’s what it looks like to me too.” I can’t think about it further than that. That’s the problem when your whole life—when the entirety of your species’ existence—is restricted to a single speck adrift in an insignificant corner of infinity. When something slams down from beyond the known borders of reality, how are you supposed to approach it? Stories explained the unknowable before the advent of science. What happens when science is left shrugging its shoulders?
I guess it comes back around to us, right? The storytellers. But I’m certainly not up to the task. I’ve gotten away with being successful in this business largely by virtue of being male, lucky, and just skilled enough to fool everybody into believing I know what I’m doing. I fish my ideas from the crowded shallows, all of us splashing about and bumping into one another and getting our nets tangled. Our catches are familiar, derivative, but satisfying enough when drowned in spice and sauce.
Sarah, though. Man. Sarah was brilliant. She sailed beyond the horizon and cast her line into the deep and reeled in things inexplicable and mesmerizing and terrifying. I used to envy her talent. I don’t anymore. I have no interest in pondering what else might be out there. Because I know what happens now when you hook something that’s more than you can handle. It eats you alive.
“It’s almost like the bowling balls … are seeds. Or spores,” Beth says, waving a hand in the general direction of the thing. “Yuck.”
“Let’s stick with bowling ball,” I say, kicking the words seed and spore into a closet and locking the door. “The tide’s coming in,” I add, to change the subject to something only slightly less awful.
“How high will it get?”
“Where we’re parked? Pretty high.” Silence fills the car. Much the way the seawater will in a few more hours. Right around sunset, probably. I wonder if Beth will still find it so provocative, the sunset, as we’re choking down our last, briny breaths. Or will she finally see it my way?
“You didn’t see anything else out there, did you?” she asks. “On the other side of the dunes?”
“No.” But we’ve reached a point where anything is possible. I almost tell her about what I thought I saw on the beach last night, but that’s a can of worms I’m just not ready to open. We have enough problems without bringing my own sanity into the mix. Unless … could she have seen that thing too? Or heard it, outside the house, before it staggered after me? Strangely, I almost want her to have witnessed it. I would be somewhat relieved to know the shambling presence came into the world from the same place as the shriekers and bowling balls. “Why?”
She bites absently at her lip, staring through me.
“Beth. Why?”
“I was just wondering. If there was anything else we need to be worried about.”
I can’t tell if that’s the whole truth or not. But if she didn’t offer it up willingly, she definitely won’t if I press the issue. “I still think, for the time being, if we stay in the car, we’ll be all right.”
Beth quietly digests that, looking like I just diagnosed her with a terminal illness. She pulls up her parents’ number and calls them again. It rings to voice mail. She sucks in her bottom lip and bites on it once more.
“Beth—”
“Stop, Mike. Just … shh. Don’t talk for a minute.”
I don’t. I look back at Jake, who’s sprawled across the folded-down seats. His panting has slowed to long, heavy sighs, his eyes dull and languid. He needs water, of which we have none. He needs cool, fresh air, but I don’t dare open the door. He’s our best shrieker alert, able to home in on their movement like a finely tuned tactical instrument, but he’s on backup power now, his batteries running out of juice.
