Black Tide, page 9
I press the safety button, resisting the urge to squeeze the trigger just to be sure I’ve got it in the right position. I don’t dare take my eyes off the opening above me to check. I train the gun on the airbag. How will I even know when it’s coming in? Will there be a shimmer? A heat haze distortion in the clouds? Grains of sand raining down into my eyes and blinding me? Why not.
Before I can imagine even more fittingly absurd ways for this to end, something rips the curtain away and a face appears, staring down at me. Two eyes and a mouth, open not in a shriek of hungry rage but in a word I actually understand.
“Hey—!” Beth says.
The gun fires all on its own.
11
BETH
A bolt of lightning strikes me right in the face, with a clap of thunder so loud I’m pretty sure my head just burst like a melon dropped from a ninth-floor window. Everything—Mike’s surprised face, the rolled SUV, the beach—is swallowed by a blinding white flash. Which seems wrong. I always figured death would be a black screen. A void. Maybe it happened so fast I skipped the tunnel and the end credits and flew, howling, straight into the light.
Then the white fades to misty blue. When the spots clear, I’m lying flat on my back in the sand, staring up at long fingers of that dreadful fog as they begin to close around us. My lungs fill with heavy, warm air, my head with an eardrum-shredding shriek. It’s not me. I couldn’t scream right now if I wanted to. How could I, when my head just exploded?
He shot me. In the face. Why would he do that? How am I even thinking this right now when I’m dead? Am I not actually dead?
I blink. That’s good. My eyelids still work. I’ll just expand out from there, working one part at a time to determine what’s missing.
I roll my head to one side, and another flare of pain blurs my vision. When it clears, I see Mike scramble up through the window and out of the wreckage. What a dipshit. Seriously, what was he thinking? I swear, when I’m inevitably banned from pet-sitting anywhere in the immediate solar system and forced to turn to a life of crime, remind me never to hire him as a getaway driver.
Mike is blubbering and shouting something. It isn’t him doing the shrieking, though. No human can produce a sound like that. And it’s no mountain lion either. It’s the sound we heard earlier.
It’s the sound I heard last night.
In my dream.
I know, I know. But if the smell of the bowling balls could make its way into my subconscious, why not this? Which means whatever is making that noise, it appeared here at the same time as the bowling balls. It’s been creeping around Neacoxie Beach since midnight, and we’re the only two fools who didn’t know about it. Until now. When it is entirely too late.
I lift my throbbing head to look toward my feet. Something isn’t right. (Whatever that means anymore.) My vision is warped, the beach and dunes and distant contour of Tillamook Head appearing to bulge toward me, probably owing to my brains leaking out through the hole Mike made in my head. Even stranger, the wind has kicked up some sand, but rather than blowing it right into my face, the individual grains are suspended in midair, just past my feet. As if they blew up against and stuck to a pane of glass dampened by the mist.
“Beth!” Mike shouts. I barely hear him. Every ounce of my focus is on the beach beyond my feet. As that weird bulge begins to split open, I realize the sand was stuck not to a pane of glass but to a canvas, on which the beach is only painted. Something on the other side is pushing, tearing its way through, revealing the void behind the world.
The darkness is coming for me after all.
And it has teeth.
* * *
That dark maw widens, revealing rows of devilishly sharp points glistening in a black, oily sheen. It isn’t the shrieking void at the edge of existence that I’m staring into but a set of sinewy jaws stretching open to swallow me whole.
Not sure that’s an improvement.
I blink, expecting never to open my eyes again. And when I do, the thing shoots forward, and those dripping jaws clamp shut on my right thigh.
Now I’m the one screaming. An awful, guttural howl, my fingers digging trenches in the sand as this impossible horror drags me toward the dunes. As soon as those jaws closed, the thing disappeared again, except for those floating granules and a thin line where the jaws aren’t quite sealed, thanks to my leg.
The pain is hot, like I’ve been set on fire, those teeth sawing back and forth through my muscle and grinding up next to bone as it pulls. There’s a sharp buzzing sensation rocketing up my spine and spinning around inside my skull like a blender gone mad, pureeing my brain. Blood pours from the spot where my leg vanishes into that mouth. It’s so red and bold it looks fake, splashing into the warm sand like paint.
A rapid succession of gunshots is followed by sudden and overwhelming relief as the monster skitters backward across the sand, leaving me—and my leg—behind. The world splits open again, giving me another look at all those teeth, now stained with my blood. Then it disappears, retreating up the dunes. I’m able to track it only by a trail of sandy depressions and the nauseating waver of its outline.
Should I keep screaming at this point or laugh? I’ve been pretty messed up on some seriously questionable products in my life, but this is beyond anything my poor body has ever been forced to endure. The pain is real. So is the blood. But nothing else that just happened is. Everything else is a nasty joke. Obviously, the bullet should have killed me immediately, but when I managed to hang on, the universe sent me a little something-something to push me over that final ledge.
Yet here I remain. Still breathing. Still bleeding. Still screaming.
An arm around my waist. Helping me to my feet. It’s Mike. He’s real too. He’s still here.
“What was that?” I wail, clutching at my leg. So much blood. Seeping through my fingers, vivid and viscous. The spots are back in front of my eyes, like somebody’s tossing rocks through the surface of my vision just to watch the ripples.
“I don’t know!” Mike cries. He’s bleeding too. What a circus. “We have to move.”
That sound rises from the dunes again. That shriek of twisting metal and gnashing teeth. It makes me want to stop, drop, curl into a ball, and get dead just so I won’t have to listen to it anymore.
Then it’s joined by others. One, two, maybe more. The chorus digs deep, like utensils scratching across a plate, burrowing into my head like something alive and hungry. There was more than one in my dream too. How could I forget that? And how the hell did Mike not hear them? He was the one actually outside.
“Come on, Beth!” Mike urges, shouting over them.
I try to pick up my pace while keeping pressure on my thigh as we limp pathetically toward the Subaru. Mike supports me as much as I support him, both of us leaking blood and gasping with every footfall, as if we’re barefoot and navigating a gauntlet of glowing coals and scattered nails. Jake yips and paws at the window, cheering us on.
The shrieks all stop at once. I risk a look back.
I still can’t see them, but I see the waves caused by their movement and the displaced sand as they tear out of the dunes toward us.
“Mike—”
“Don’t look!” he roars. “Just go! Faster!”
Faster, yes, sage advice in any scenario where the goal is to outrun death and dismemberment. We hobble and heave and grunt, the dry sand squeaking beneath our feet like tiny mocking laughs as it slows us down. How are we not gaining any ground? Why does the Subaru look just as far away as it was when we began? Jake spins in mad little circles. I hear the things behind us, gliding effortlessly across the sand, closing the gap in seconds.
“We’re not going to make it. We’re not—”
“Shut up, Beth!”
Mike pulls his arm away and I nearly fold to the ground. That would have been the end, for sure, but the adrenaline surging through my veins keeps me upright in an absurd, drunken stagger. He passes the pistol to his right hand, extends his arm behind him, and fires blind until the gun clicks empty. Great. Our only defense, and he wasted one bullet on me, while the rest he shot into … what? The dunes? The sky? Not them, that’s for sure. I hear no cries of pain, no thumps of lead sinking into flesh or whatever they’re made of. Do they even exist at all when those jaws aren’t open for business?
The soft sand becomes firm farther from the dunes, and we pick up speed. So do the shriekers, whatever it is they have for feet ripping up the beach like rototillers. It sounds like they’re in pouncing distance when Mike flings open the Subaru’s hatch and pushes me in on top of Jake. He slides in behind me, crushing us both into the back of the rear seats, and pulls the hatch door shut.
The first shrieker slams into it hard enough to dent the door. The thing screams in rage, and its buddies join in. I clamp my hands over my ears before the discord splits my damaged skull right down the middle. Jake can’t decide if he wants to bark or howl or melt into a quivering blob.
Mike pulls the cargo cover over us and secures it in place.
We lie there, the three of us packed together in the dark like oily little fish in a tin. Only it’s not oil slicking me and Mike but sweat and blood. Mike wraps himself around me, and I let him, despite the heat. The contact feels safe, and I need that right now more than I ever have before.
“Don’t move,” he whispers, as if I need convincing.
I never want to move again. I squeeze Jake as he tries to squirm away. He’s my buoy and Mike is my life jacket and if I lose either, I’ll be pulled into the roiling, bottomless depths of this madness.
One of the shriekers jumps onto the roof, tapping curiously at the metal while another pounds on the doors. Did I close the driver’s door when I got out? The ocean is a muted grumble, and there’s no airflow, so I must have. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
“We’ll be okay,” Mike breathes into my ear. “If we just keep quiet and don’t move, we’ll be okay.”
He can’t know that, and I don’t care. It’s something. And for the moment, it’s the best we have.
12
BETH
I don’t know how long we’ve been under the cargo cover. Time has no meaning in the sweltering dark. Long enough for somebody to come looking for that cop. Long enough for somebody, anybody, to find us. But nobody does. Or maybe they drove down the access road, took one look up the beach at two seemingly abandoned vehicles and a wrecked police car, turned right around, and noped outta there. I don’t blame them.
My head stayed in one piece—that’s a plus. Once the adrenaline of outrunning giant invisible mouths full of very sharp teeth waned, it was pain’s turn to show its true face. And pain’s an ugly bastard. My eyes are pulsating and my teeth ache and there’s a terrible ringing in my head.
The bullet just grazed my scalp; when I pull the sticky clumps of hair aside, I can feel the shallow groove it carved. My skin there is on fire and my skull feels like it’s about to crumble apart like graham cracker pie crust. I’ve managed not to poke the spot for almost thirty full seconds now, but I’m going to need some kind of medical attention soon. So will Mike. His bleeding stopped, but he jerks every time he takes too deep a breath, like somebody’s sticking a fork in his side, which is bruised from his hip to the bottom of his ribs.
And poor Jake is panting so hard I’m afraid he’s going to suck his tongue into his lungs and asphyxiate himself. I finally got him to stop growling at the things outside, but then he started farting. And when I say farting, I mean if we were any closer to an international border, it might be taken for an open act of aggression.
“I have to get out of here,” I announce, rolling back the cargo cover. I’m not sure whether it’s the light that blinds me or the fresh surge of pain. This is worse than any hangover.
“Beth, no—” Mike tries, but I’m already sitting up. The fog has come to rest on the beach like a cloud that got tired of hanging out in the sky (cloud why does that word make me anxious what happened with clouds recently). Visibility is less than a hundred yards. Even if somebody came down the access road now, I’m not sure they’d be able to see us. I don’t see the shriekers, not that that means much. They could have retreated to the dunes, moved farther down the coast, or they might be sitting five feet out the window. I don’t see any wavy distortions, no grains of sand suspended in midair or freshly laid tracks. That’s good.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I whisper. I barely even want to breathe, and not because of Jake’s farts. We have no idea how good the shriekers’ hearing is, or if they even can hear. Mike did his best to debrief me on what happened beyond the ridge, but the whole story stopped making sense once he got into that SUV and something he couldn’t see jumped onto the hood. “How can something be … invisible?”
It looks for a moment as if he’s going to attempt an answer, but then he wisely keeps his mouth shut. I don’t want science. I want to know how something that, as far as I’m aware, doesn’t exist—and admittedly, I zoned out during high school biology for a few months—just chased us across the beach.
I examine my leg. It looks almost as bad as it feels. Like somebody tried to lop it off using a pair of rip saws. There’s a lot of blood on the floor. That can’t all be mine. How much blood can we lose before we hit the point of no return, anyway? And how fast do we replace it?
“All of that out there … it definitely happened?” I ask. “That wasn’t a hallucination?”
“As far as I can tell.” Mike doesn’t look like he’s ready to believe it, though. “But I have no idea what they are or where they came from,” he adds.
“The meteor shower. I mean, did one of them hit some kind of … I don’t know, laboratory or something? Punch a hole through the ‘Top Secret: Don’t Even Think of Opening This’ door and let these things out?”
“Maybe,” he says super helpfully. I don’t know what I expected. What sort of answer could he possibly give? “Let’s just hope there’s some sort of system in place to clean up the mess.”
“How? We can’t see them!” My head is pounding hard enough to blur my vision. “People were trying to escape out to sea! The cop was telling everybody to get home and lock their doors!”
“He also said to ‘wait for further instructions.’ Which suggests to me there’s some sort of plan in motion. We just need to wait.” He looks up and down the beach. “And honestly, I think we’re in a good position to do that. Those things already seem to have forgotten about us. I wonder if they can’t see through the windows. Or maybe they just lost track of us in the fog?”
“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t get on the radio and tell somebody we were out here.” I know it doesn’t do any good to make him feel shitty. But it helps to redirect my anger. After all, we wouldn’t be sitting here if I hadn’t dropped the stupid car key to begin with. Quit it. Don’t let Mom get into your head. You’re supposed to be done letting her do that.
My parents. Dad hasn’t tried calling back. How is he handling this? Two years ago, I wouldn’t have worried. He was always so levelheaded, even under her tyranny. He would have developed a plan, followed instructions, made it all seem like Mom’s idea. But now? On his best days, the slightest deviation from routine can send him into a rage. On the worst, he doesn’t even know where he is. Will Mom even bother with him, if some kind of rescue effort comes knocking? Will she just leave him behind to putter around the house, to continually ask the walls if Beth is coming over for dinner? It won’t surprise me at all if she uses all this chaos as a way to escape him.
When Dad’s memory started to slip, it was me—the daughter who always ruined everything—who ended up being his constant, lingering in Mom’s environment like poisoned air after a nuclear disaster. It’s been a special kind of hell for her. Sometimes I wonder if Mom wishes her mind had been the one to go, the atrophy of old age wiping me from existence.
“I’m sorry, Beth,” Mike says. “It all happened so fast.” He lowers the back seats and rear console and scoots forward, squeezes into the front passenger seat and opens the glove box with a clunk that shakes the car and can probably be heard for miles. We both freeze, waiting for the shrieks, for the pounding on the windows that will undoubtedly break them this time. A whine forms in Jake’s throat, and I snap my fingers. He flattens his ears, sniffs at the stain of my blood on the carpet, then gives me the same indignant look usually reserved for when I tell him the elk don’t want to play.
When nothing emerges from the fog to attack, Mike digs through the glove box and finds a little travel-sized first aid kit. Extracting it from the compartment seems to cause him physical pain, like he’s pulling a nasty splinter out of his palm. Or his heart. I bet his wife put that first aid kit there. What’s her name? Sarah? I still don’t know what happened between them, but I silently thank her for her foresight. There’s no first aid kit in my Toyota. Maybe a used Band-Aid beneath one of the seats, some emergency panty liners in the console, a half-melted tube of ChapStick in the glove box.
“Come up here,” Mike whispers.
I slide closer to him. Every movement I make rocks the car, announcing to whatever is within earshot that we’re still here, nice and marinated, slabs of meat in a barbecue.
Mike gently pulls my bloody hair aside. When a small strip of my scalp peels off with it, I bite my lip to hold back a scream. Mike drops the clump like something he just fished from a clogged drain. Sweat stings my eyes. He dabs at the graze with a damp antiseptic wipe, and it’s all I can do not to throw him out of the car. “I am so sorry,” he says again. “That could have been really bad.”
