Black Tide, page 8
He turns and looks at me. For a moment, I think he heard me, or heard Jake, and I wave for him to come back. Instead, he holds up an index finger and mouths: One minute.
“No!” I shout just as he turns away. “Not ‘one minute’! What’s wrong with you? Why? Why!”
Mike marches down the other side of the dune and disappears.
That’s when Jake starts to bark.
9
MIKE
She’s going to kill me when I get back.
Beyond the ridge, the dunes drop steeply before leveling off into a wide swath of beach grass and weeds. Past that, a scrubby coastal forest forms a natural buffer between the dunes and the various residential developments along the highway. Saddle Mountain rises prominently in the distance, but to the north, the hillsides of Astoria are hidden in a smoky brown haze. There’s a small military training base just to the northeast of here. Sometimes, on our sunset drives, Sarah and I would be stopped by soldiers on the beach because live-fire exercises were happening out there beyond the tree line. But if there’s a cavalry, they’ve already moved out.
Directly between me and the tree line is an impact crater as big across as my car, from headlights to tailpipe. I don’t see any sign of Natalia’s father, the cop, or a mountain lion attack, though. That brings me both a measure of comfort and deep unease. Seeing is believing. But the real horrors live in those places we can’t see.
As I descend the slope, I’m plunged into silence so heavy I can feel it perched on my shoulders, wrapping itself around me in a crushing embrace. The ridge of the dunes mutes the ocean entirely, until all I hear is the whisper of a breeze and the hushed rustle of beach grass and the soles of my shoes squeaking in the sand.
And then I see some of those blades of grass are stained red. Blood, still glistening and tacky. That brings me to a stop.
“Hello?”
My voice is so loud in this new quiet that it startles me. I get no response, human or otherwise. I don’t even hear any birds out here. No hum of traffic moving along the coast highway, no wail of sirens as emergency response vehicles rush about, tending to the disaster.
I’ve never seen so much blood outside of a movie set, splattered around following an act of violence. Roadkill, sure. But not real human blood. I don’t know how I know it’s human, but I do. Might have something to do with the cop’s shotgun, which is lying in the sand at my feet.
It’s been sheared in half, as if made of paper, the barrel separated from the rest just above the trigger guard.
That could explain the shrieking sound. Metal being sliced. But what could cut a shotgun in half like this? Not a mountain lion—that’s for sure. And I don’t imagine the cop stood idly by in the meantime. Whatever happened, it happened fast.
I step forward, my shoes feeling full of concrete, and kneel to pick up the two shotgun halves. There’s a sticky dark substance coating the barrel end. It looks like tar but has no odor. Having learned from my earlier mistake, I don’t dare touch it. Maybe it’s just oil from inside the barrel. I toss the shotgun aside and stand up.
“Hello? Officer…?” I don’t know his name. I’m sure it was there on his shirt, but I didn’t look. I don’t know the name of Natalia’s dad either. “If either of you can hear me, please say something. I’m here to help.” I’m sure they’re just overwhelmed with relief.
It feels as if I’m being watched. Like no matter which way I turn, something is creeping up behind me. I glance back at the ridge. The cop left his door open, but I haven’t heard any radio chatter. You’d think, with the state of things on the coast right now, there would be plenty of activity on the police band. And there’s nothing coming from his lapel radio either, wherever it might be. The strangeness keeps stacking up. Soon I’ll need a stepladder just to see over the top of it.
A trail of little brown blood splats in the sand leads right to the impact crater. The crater itself is about half as deep as it is wide, the grass around it flattened beneath soil ejected from the pit. As I near the rim of the crater, I finally see the meteorite itself, or at least a piece of it, half buried at the bottom. It’s smaller than the others, oddly enough, considering it actually produced an indentation in the earth. The exposed surface is black like lump charcoal, rough and angular and oblong, with streaks and flecks that glint in the sun. In short, it looks like a rock. It looks about as I’d expect a meteorite to look.
It looks nothing like the thing I hauled off the beach in the bucket. Nothing like the thing lying in the sand near my Subaru at this very moment. Near Beth and Jake. It doesn’t stink either. That might actually be the worst part. At least a hint of that knock-you-flat malodor would be enough to tell me this and the others came from the same place.
But if the other things aren’t meteorites, what are they? And more important, where did they come from?
My palms tingle, as if to remind me that I’d stupidly stuck my bare flesh on the thing Beth called a space bowling ball, a term that now feels far too cheerfully benign. I jam the tips of my fingers deep into my palm and dig around, chasing the itch. The thing hadn’t even felt like rock, now that I think about it. It was heavy, sure, as something composed of iron and nickel and whatever else is out there should be. But when I’d grabbed it, it felt meaty somehow. Like the shell of a coconut. I probably should have mentioned that part to Beth. She would have demanded we go straight inside until we figured out what was going on. We’d be safe indoors, together, not stranded out here in the middle of it.
There’s something else at the bottom of the crater, atop the violently disrupted soil. I make my way slowly toward it, rivers of sand rolling down to begin their slow task of burying the rock. With the nearly constant coastal breeze, it won’t be long before the hole is filled completely, its otherworldly contents swallowed up and forgotten for untold eons.
But the other thing down there isn’t otherworldly at all. It is very much a product of this planet.
It’s a human hand.
10
MIKE
That’s it. That’s all there is. Five fingers and a bit of wrist, cleaved from the rest of the arm as cleanly as the shotgun barrel and sitting in a thick, brown pool. It’s so coated in blood and sand I don’t even know which of the missing men it belongs to. My eyes trace a trail of muddy droplets up the curve of the crater, across the displaced sand, and into the grass. The rest of him is lying just a few feet away from me.
It’s the cop. That’s one mystery solved.
His head is missing from the nose down, his eyes still open wide in a mask of fear and surprise. Below the neck is just a mess of shredded uniform and bloody bits spilling into the dirt.
I fall flat on my ass in my hurry to put as much distance as possible between me and this horror, scrambling to my feet and managing a weak lurch before hitting the ground again. I repeat the strange boogie, retreating a few precious inches at a time, until the ground falls away beneath me and I tumble into the crater and smack my head against the meteorite. That gets me moving. I’m on my feet and out of the hole in a single flailing leap, as if I’d felt that severed hand reach up and tap me on the shoulder. Excuse me, I think I’m lost.
Black flowers bloom at the edges of my vision, and my head fills with helium. No! Not here! Not now! Keep it together!
I cannot seem to tear my eyes away from the man’s corpse. He wasn’t eaten. Just ripped apart and discarded, and in far cruder fashion than what happened to the shotgun and his hand. No mountain lion did this. I’m not hallucinating any of it either. I can no longer hide the unfathomable engine powering this nightmare behind a curtain. Something is out there, in the dunes. Something that arrived last night while we were all staring awestruck at the sky. It deposited strange, smelly orbs up and down the coast, it briefly blocked out the moon on an otherwise clear night, it has people so frightened they’re ready to set sail rather than risk waiting for it to find them.
Is this the thing that had been coming for me last night? When I’d dragged myself from the surf, the moon was bright overhead again. I’d looked for my visitor’s footprints as I staggered back toward my house, fighting off images of the bloated, wet feet that could have produced such a sound; of pallid, sandy lips curled into a terrible grin. But, as always, I found only signs of myself. By the time I had brought Jake over and was at my computer deleting that letter, I convinced myself my imagination had managed to fool me again, that the palpable strangeness in those lightless seconds between drowning and sitting bolt upright, gasping for air, had just made it more real than ever before.
Now I’m not so certain. I don’t exactly see any sign of whatever killed the cop, either, but I can hardly deny it happened. But if something really had been on the beach with me, why didn’t it attack? And where did it go?
The cop’s lapel radio is nowhere to be seen, or heard, but his pistol is still holstered to his hip. The thing that killed him can cut metal like soft cheese and reduce a man to gristly leftovers in a blink. If that thing’s still out here, my tire iron will prove fatally insufficient.
Undoing my hard work, I inch forward and reach toward the holster with one hand, forcing myself not to look at anything but my own intact fingers. With a rubbery tug, his handgun is mine. Not that I have any clue how to use it. I’ve been on plenty of productions with prop guns, but that’s the business of the weapons wranglers and talent. How hard can it be? Point and shoot, just like an autofocus lens. There’s probably already a clip loaded and a round chambered.
I sprint for the ridge, vaguely aware that if I trip, I’ll likely blow my own brains out. Honestly, that would be a better fate than what befell the cop. Faster, for sure.
The grass grabs at my ankles, slowing me down. The sand is slippery as ice. Everything has developed a malevolent will. I can hear all the noises around me now, as if somebody cranked up the volume, the silence itself becoming a deafening static in my ears. Chirps and chitters and rustles and thumps, the world suddenly full of menace and teeth. Why did I have to come out here? Why didn’t I just get in the SUV the moment I saw blood? I could still pretend there was an aggressive mountain lion on the loose, had I done that.
As I huff my way up the ridge, I’m greeted by the rumble of waves—and the insistent bleating of a car horn. Beth. She’s seen something. Or she’s just trying to light a fire under my ass. It works.
Without stopping to look around, I dive into the SUV and pull the door shut and try to catch my breath. It’s quiet again. A better kind of quiet. Safe. Whatever is out there, it can’t get me in here. Beth lets off the horn, and in the side mirror, I see her lift her camera and aim it toward me. I give her a wave and she returns a middle finger. That’s fine. I deserve that.
The engine is still humming; all the gadgets appear to be properly working, including the radio, despite an unnerving absence of chatter among police units. Now would be a good time for me to get on the air and make a distress call, but I can do that once I’m off this cursed dune. Away from all that grass, and whatever’s hiding in it, watching me.
I shift into reverse, but before I can lift my foot from the brake pedal, the front end of the SUV dips forward, sinking into the sand, the shocks creaking beneath added weight. Except nothing’s there. Nothing but granules of sand scattered across the hood, and a smear of blood right where the thin metal covering the engine has gone slightly concave. Was that dent there all along? Did he hit a deer or something?
The SUV is positioned at just enough of an angle that I can’t see the grass over the hood, but I can see the tops of the trees beyond the meteorite crater. There’s something off about the view. A slight bend of the light, a warping of the treetops and the mountains. A flaw in the glass, must be.
The distortion moves ever so slightly, the bend in the skyline shifting position. The movement is accompanied by the unmistakable pop of metal under stress, and the indentation deepens. There’s a sound, all but masked by the hum of the engine. A constant, high-pitched chitter, like a cricket trying to sing harmony with an old iron gate swinging in the breeze. It’s an alien noise (please, find a different word, Mike), somehow both mechanical and organic.
Just like that shriek.
Beth, impatient as ever, lays on the horn again. The unexpected bleat causes me to jump—and blink. In that sliver of a second that my eyes are closed, something happens. I’m glad I can’t see it. That I can only hear the screech of sharp points peeling back the top layer of hood, the heavy thump of impact that turns the windshield into a webwork of splintered glass.
I slam the gas pedal to the floor. The tires spew a geyser of sand out over the grass. My hands, operating independently of my other systems, crank the wheel in a desperate bid to get me facing the opposite direction of whatever just smashed into the windshield and toward my goal as fast as possible. While I appreciate their initiative, it backfires spectacularly.
The tires find traction, rocketing me backward just as the front end swings parallel with the steep dunes, which proves too much for the top-heavy vehicle. My stomach does a slow somersault as the passenger-side tires lift up off the sand. Before I can even think of correcting, the SUV—the whole point of this ridiculous odyssey, our only hope of escaping this haunted goddamn beach—tips.
And rolls.
* * *
It happens in slow motion, briefly transporting me to those loud carnival rides I masochistically enjoyed as a stupid child. The deafening roar of steel and gears and motors, people screaming in joyous terror as their guts were turned inside out and brains smashed against the insides of their skulls.
This time, the ride goes off the rails, and the only one screaming is me.
It took me a lot longer to hike up the dune than it does to come back down. The sandy hill doesn’t unfurl gently down to the beach as it does from my backyard, to that signpost and all its warnings. Here the dunes are tall and abrupt, as if a particularly strong tide had rudely pushed them up into a pile. It might not have been so bad had I followed the trajectory of the tire tracks. Instead, the vehicle rolls straight down and right over a ledge, where the hillside has been sheared away by the elements. The free fall is brief, and concludes with a coda of cracking glass and metal groaning in protest. Pain lights up on every quadrant of my body, each impact accompanied by a blaring alarm in my head. I can’t keep track of what’s being broken and bruised as I rattle around inside the SUV like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker. At least I’d remembered to put on the seat belt, breaking my streak of supremely idiotic decisions, though I think that was muscle memory more than anything. Amazingly, the gun doesn’t go off and put a bullet or three right through me.
The SUV comes to a stop just beyond the base of the hill, lying on its side, the tires still spinning as if there’s yet a chance of pulling off this getaway. I’m crumpled between the steering wheel and door like a greasy hamburger wrapper, staring up at the passenger-side curtain airbag, which billows gently in the breeze passing over the smashed-out window. I can feel pieces of glass in my shirt, my hair. The roof panel is between me and the Subaru. I can’t see Jake, but I hear him howling in despair. He’s still in the car.
But Beth isn’t. “Mike! Ohmygod! Mike?” Coming this way.
“I’m okay!” I shout. Each word is a knife plunging through my ribs. The worst pain is on my left side, just above my hip. Prodding the area, I find the cop’s small laptop came free of its mount during all the excitement and ended up between me and the door, where one of its corners dug into my flank with enough force to tear open the skin. Blood seeps through my shirt, thick and dark, almost black. I suck air through my teeth and hold it in, my lungs igniting, and delicately place my hand on the laceration. Boy, that’s a lot of blood. I should look. I don’t want to look. As long as I don’t look, how bad can it really be? “Beth, stop! Stay away!”
I hear her feet come to an abrupt halt. “What’s the matter?”
How do I even begin to answer that? I’m not even sure what just happened myself. Except that there was something on the hood. Something I couldn’t see, but that could apparently see me. I unlatch the seat belt and rotate until I’m kneeling on the driver’s-side window through the airbag, feeling things deep inside me grind and pop in ways I don’t think they’re meant to, not even at my age.
“Just listen to me! Get back in the car!”
There’s a thick security-glass partition between the front and back seats, and a metal mesh screen between the passenger and the cargo area. Not getting out that way. I could probably punch through the windshield, but I’d likely lose a lot more blood and the use of my hand in the process. There’s no other way but up.
That’s when I hear it. Outside, scraping along the exposed undercarriage, poking curiously at the pipes and frame, still chirping and shrill. Above me, I can just see the side mirror through a corner of the window opening that’s no longer covered by the deflating airbag. The mirror is cracked, and now angled in such a way that I have a partial view of the ground, but I still can’t see whatever is making that noise.
And Beth won’t be able to either. Even were it to materialize, the SUV is between it and her. What is she doing, anyway? I haven’t heard the Subaru door shut, but I also don’t hear her approaching.
“Beth! Do not come over here!”
She doesn’t respond. She must think that keeping quiet and still is the best course of action at the moment, and I cannot find the words to convey to her how wrong she is.
The singing, unseen thing keeps prodding. Searching for a way into the SUV. Soon it’s going to move around to the other side. It’s going to see Beth standing there. Then she won’t have time to make it back. Jake seems to sense this too. He’s going on about it just as he did last night, during the meteor shower. As if he knew this was all coming. And once again, here we are, ignoring his warnings. We truly don’t deserve dogs.
I reach to sweep away a pebble of glass digging into my knee, and my hand brushes against cold metal. The pistol. I grab it just as the SUV trembles from the thing leaping up onto the sky-facing side with the grace of a cat, having heard the mournful wail of the breeze passing over the opening. In a moment, it’s going to find that opening. It’s going to pull aside the airbag curtain and come in.
