Salt Water Tears

by Hopkins, Brian A

  “What was that thing?” he asked.

  She shrugged her freckled shoulders, breasts bobbing in the firelight. “A hunter from another world. Something that crawled from some abyss beneath the sea. A normal man-of-war mutated by some chemical spill. Take your pick, George. I certainly don’t know.”

  “I think you do. You were its keeper.”

  “I was its bait. It enslaved me one night. Right here on this very same beach. I swear to you, there was nothing I could do.” She held out imploring hands. “But you’ve freed me, George. I want to be with you.”

  He looked at her there, naked flesh all aglow in the firelight. More woman than he’d ever seen. More woman than he’d ever be this close to again.

  And he wanted her. Still.

  “You’re scaring me, George. Put the gun down. Please.”

  George lowered the muzzle, but he did not put the gun down.

  Somewhere distant, they heard another siren.

  “We need to be leaving, George.”

  “The cops,” he muttered, meaning those lying still and lifeless on the beach with them, “what happened to them?”

  “I don’t know!” Her voice was heavy with indignation. Too heavy perhaps. “When I got here, they were dead and you were lying there on the sand. George, we’ve got to go!” She was pleading now. She got brave enough to advance several steps. When he failed to raise the gun, she continued until she was kneeling beside him.

  George shook his head. “Why did it let me go that night?”

  She grinned down at him, and in that instant he saw what Earl Youngblood had seen back of her eyes. Serpentine fast, she batted the revolver from his hands. It skipped once like a stone across the surface of the water, such was the strength with which she’d hit it, then it sank beneath the waves. The same hand slapped him on its return stroke, no longer soft velvet, no longer the dainty hand he’d shaken in the Cavalier’s bar. Her skin had become that of a shark, coarser than a wood rasp, hard and cold. As it struck him, a blur of motion, it seemed more fin than hand.

  George’s head came up short against the ground. There was blood in his mouth, blood in his nose, blood in his right eye. He couldn’t see with his left eye. That was the side she had hit him on.

  She leaned close, her breath suddenly foul with fish, sea grass, and carrion. “You’re sick, George. Sick inside. We couldn’t eat you. One taste and we knew you were rotten meat. You don’t think we came all those light years just to eat rotten meat, do you?”

  “You should have killed me,” George told her.

  She laughed. “You’re no threat. Do you think you’ve accomplished something here tonight?” She waved a hand toward the carcass awash in the incoming tide. Her hand kept phasing on him, shape-shifting, one moment it was hers, the next it was something more fitting to an eel, the next it was claw-like, chitinous. “With the tide’s help, I’ll get him back in the water. We’ll go deep. He’ll heal. It’d take a lot more than your toys to kill him.”

  She might have been telling the truth, for George could still see movement in the wasted monstrosity. It was struggling to reach the ocean. Its movements were minute, little more than weak shiftings of body mass, but George could see them. He merely smiled, his hand sliding into the munitions bag.

  “We won’t make the mistake of leaving you alive a second time,” she whispered. Her face phased. For an instant, it was the orange face of a crab, eyes standing forth on wiper-like stalks. Then he was staring at the gleaming teeth and dead black eyes of a great white shark; then something that resembled a seahorse, but with glowing malevolent eyes; then a spiny urchin whose quills dripped a heavy green ooze; then a moray, a squid, a barracuda, a sea snake, and finally just Cheryl. Throughout the changes, her smile had seemed to remain the same.

  “Thank you for a wonderful evening, Cheryl. Shall I kiss you good night now?”

  ‘“You’re such a romantic, George.”

  “I can’t remember when I’ve had a date that was so much fun.”

  “You’ve definitely lost it, George.”

  “No. Cancer and I are doing quite all right, thank you. We’ve got to be leaving now, but I think we’ll be taking you with us.”

  Her hand became a great scythe of bone. She drew it back.

  “Ever heard of a PND, Cheryl?” The smile on his face was unwavering.

  She hesitated. “A what?”

  “Personal. Nuclear. Device.”

  From the pouch came a minute click, the last sound either of them ever heard.

  The beach erupted in a maelstrom of intense heat, incinerating sand, cars, trees, aliens and humans alike. The blast rose, a hundred meter mushroom of broiling inferno sweeping towards the heavens, then fell back.

  • • •

  Navy officials from Norfolk beat their Army counterparts to the scene. First to arrive were two Navy Tomcats which took up a sweeping flight pattern just off shore. Navy officers and engineers arrived just minutes after that. They took readings with a variety of test equipment, presumably identifying the source of the explosion, for they were the ones to call Fort Monmouth. Navy MPs kept spectators back.

  Army Intelligence arrived a mere twenty minutes after the initial explosion, sweeping in from the north in three helicopters, one landing, the other two circling ominously overhead the whole time.

  But before any of them had cordoned off the area, Sergeant Willis had gotten in to see firsthand the blackened crater, like some vast burnt-out eye socket in the sand. It wasn’t until he’d stood on the edge of the hole and kicked at the black glass there, that he thought about radiation dangers. He’d quickly retreated to the gravel road where he’d had only minutes to wait for the arrival of the Navy.

  He got the story in bits and pieces as he waited beneath a hazier than usual dawn, some from the Navy engineers who knew from their readings that a nuclear device had been detonated, some from the Army’s team when they arrived on the scene. It was he that first linked George Cooper to the affair, by running the license plates radioed in earlier by the first officers on the scene. DMV identified one of the vehicles as a Nissan Maxima registered to Cooper. Once Cooper was identified, the rest came out fairly quickly.

  “Willis!”

  He turned. It was Precinct Captain Burke, come to see firsthand what had blown out thirty miles worth of windows up and down the Virginia coastline.

  “Morning, Captain.”

  “Casualties?” Burke asked, with his usual lack of greeting or amenities.

  Willis restrained himself from asking where Burke had been while the entire precinct was mourning the loss of two fellow officers. Willis had radioed that information back more than thirty minutes ago. “Two of our own and one, possibly two, civilians.”

  “Do we know—”

  “Engineer for the Army,” Willis cut in. There was little love lost between the two men. Willis seldom, if ever, let Burke finish a complete sentence. “Guy had terminal cancer. Less than six months to live.”

  Burke frowned. “Hell of a way to go out. What’d he—”

  “Cooper was his name. Like I said, an engineer. He worked at some top secret Army lab—Army boys aren’t saying much about that yet. Cooper had access to advanced weapons, including nuclear devices.”

  Burke’s face blanched. “Radiation?”

  “There’ll definitely be some fallout. Army brass is checking it out now. They’ve told me they’ll make a statement before eight.”

  Burke looked as if he was going to faint. “I’d better start making some phone calls.”

  “Easy, boss. The Army assures me this is not Chernobyl. These PNDs, Personal Nuclear Devices, are designed to deliver maximum concentrated destruction with a minimal amount of residual radiation.” Willis smiled, proud of himself for getting that out as he’d been told it. “Just the thing for wasting an area you plan to occupy immediately afterward.”

  “I’ve still got to call the Governor. I’ve—Wait! Who the hell is that down there in the surf?”r />
  “There’s nobody on the beach, Sir. The Navy’s got armed men patrolling—” Willis turned to see what Burke was talking about. The rising sun was orange off the surface of the Atlantic, a rippling cockle shell broken by a man wading out just beyond the foam.

  “Shit!” Willis spit. “He tried to get through earlier and I turned him back. Must’ve come up the beach.”

  “Who?”

  “Some damn marine biologist from the university. Claims to have discovered some new jellyfish.”

  “Jellyfish?”

  “Yeah. The beach is covered with the little beggars, Captain. Millions of them. I thought at first they were all dead, but then I saw some of them working their way out beyond the surf...”

  Sand King

  * * *

  The last of the sand castle engineers and their admirers left the beach just before ten, heading for Fort Lauderdale bars and more than one wet T-shirt contest. The moon bathed the beach and the sculptures in opal iridescence, scintillating off the white-crested waves, striking diamonds in the sand. With the moon came the tide, strewing froth, sea grass, trash, and marine life within a dozen feet of the sculptures. Many of the contest entrees were electrically lit, powered by a spider web of extension cords strung from beach houses a few hundred feet up the dunes. One of these lighted sculptures stood out from the others.

  Poseidon, God of the Sea.

  His eyes were lit from within so that they cast a baleful glare out over the encroaching waves. His hair spilled out from beneath a crenelated crown, cascading down over his powerful shoulders to spread out and merge with the sand dunes. Behind him, a scalloped bivalve, five feet tall and standing like a great sea fan as backdrop. Rising over the scallop, a series of phallic towers whose parapets were a delicate filigree of sand-sculpted windows and bastions. Poseidon’s brow was furrowed. His eyes glowed malevolently. His hands, clasped before him, were gnarled and empty. Apparently, the sculptors had forgotten his trident.

  Before the Greek protector of waters, carried ashore by the rhythmic waves, lay a gelid tableau of jelly fish, neon-lit in the moonlight. Picking their way among the quivering polyps, there came an effusion of Crustacea and sea life. Blue crabs and fairy shrimp. Soft shells and horseshoes. King crabs and lobsters and squirming blue blennies whose struggles might have appeared comical if there had been anyone to watch. Silver eels. Croakers. Hermits with their homes strapped to their backs and awkwardly-jointed arthropods whose chitinous sounds echoed eerily back and forth between the sand sculptures, cloaking the beach with the insidious whisper of approaching locusts. The beach became crowded with their bumptious, scrabbling bodies, their eager claws and their multiple legs snicketing and clack-eting together. The ineffable cachinnation from their crusty mandibles was a sound to raise the dead.

  And so it did...

  They bore him on their backs, this naked, bloodless caricature of a man, fish-gnawed and gas-bloated, with his vandalized eye sockets and earless head, his impotent, shriveled penis and reef-scoured buttocks. His inanimate gestures were feeble. The convulsing of a leg as they drew him from the surf. The nervous, twitching protest of the muscles in his back to the thousands of insect-like movements beneath him. A moan of escaping gas. His nails beseeching the sand. The salt water draining from his lungs.

  They’d had him for quite some time.

  It was rare that they gave one up. Such discarded treasures had always been their property. The flotsam and jetsam of ocean liners. The drowned cache from sunken vessels. The unwanted ones they gathered from the beach with each cycle of the tides. They did not easily surrender such prizes. But the warming of the water signified great change, as everywhere beneath the ocean’s surface, prophecies unfolded. A coelacanth here. A seven gilled shark there. New life forms clustered about sulfur vents in the deepest trenches. New species emerging every day. And if any more evidence were needed, there sat Poseidon, glaring down on their beach with those sinister eyes, demanding... something.

  So they pulled this offering, this corpse, from the surf and dragged it across the beach, dropped it in the ring of bright light before the god. The eyeless man moaned and farted and bled sea water into the sand, while crabs and sand lice scurried about, into his mouth and rectum, through the hollow pockets in his skull where once blue eyes held court, between his wrinkled fingers and toes, back and forth over the stippled surface of his cold dead flesh.

  Poseidon scowled upon their offering, spoke with a rumble of thunder that shook the sand beneath their many feet. He wanted more, but exactly what he wanted was beyond the aggregate marine intelligence. Waves rose in the moonlight and pummeled the beach, crushing millions of the god’s audience, threatening to suck the others out to sea. The horde that remained clung to the sand with claw and tentacle and fin as the god of the sea raged.

  The masses burrowed into their offering, wrapping themselves about the tendons and gears of his emaciated limbs, taking up residence in his water-logged skull, bloating his organs with their slug-presence. Jellyfish and man-o-war flowed into the space left by the shriveled brain, working their electric tendrils into decaying gray matter, searching for nerves still intact and usable. Anemones wrapped about his brain stem and twitched along his spine. Urchins sought out the decaying soup of his joints, their long, barbed splines capturing tendons and ligaments. A puffer fish swelled within the ventricles of his collapsed heart. Together these creatures brought the cadaver to its feet. Bones creaking in protest, the sentient fusion of sea life wondered at the inefficiency of human locomotion. First one wobbly step. Then another. A few more steps... and a semblance of balance was attained. Lifting one arm and then the other, the creature tested its dexterity, not completely dissatisfied with the results.

  Perhaps Poseidon wanted a sacrifice of a different kind...?

  • • •

  Mary Aponte had lost everything... everything, but her love for clay.

  The loss of her sight had merely intensified her passion for the moist shifting of creation between her palms. The loss of mobility meant that she suffered no guilt for spending all her time seated before the potter’s wheel; she had no other pressing engagements. The loss of her parents and her brother had gifted her with the independence to spin her clay into new and unique forms, an art that defied the gravity of things like responsibility and obligation, cooperation and compromise and coercion. The loss of her husband had left her with no distractions, no earthly desires, no outlet for tactile passion save her art. The loss of her child—

  No, she couldn’t go there. The wheel spun and the clay slicked her fingers and her mind went where it always did: somewhere quiet and empty and dark, a vast echoing chasm where nothing waited and nothing wanted. There was only the squeak of the wheel and her art. The clay climbed and defied physics at the bidding of her clever fingers. Things were born there: containers and vases and pottery whose symmetry was elegant perfection. From her wheel to a kiln to the shelves that lined her simple beachfront shop, where they were admired and collected by her customers, the only people with whom she’d had contact since her daughter—

  But she couldn’t go there.

  It was late, but she was accustomed to working such hours when sleep wouldn’t come, as was so often the case. The beach was still alive with music and voices—this was, after all, Spring Break. She paid little mind to the noise, pouring herself into the clay. When the bell on the door of her shop tinkled, she realized she’d never locked up. This was common as well. She wasn’t afraid.

  “I’m here,” she called to the front of the shop. “Behind the counter. At the wheel.”

  There was no response.

  This didn’t bother her, not even when she heard the dragging footsteps and sounds like the wet workings of a joint on a freshly thawed chicken. A moment later, she caught the smell. If Death Incarnate had an odor, this was it. The clay shifted and threatened to spin out of round, but she deftly sculpted it back, her hands quick and sure. What reason had she to fear Death? What
could he possibly take now?

  “Pull up a stool and watch, if you like,” she said.

  Nothing.

  “I wonder,” she said, careful to breath only through her mouth, filling the empty air of the shop for her visitor’s sake alone (for she actually preferred the silence), “what my customers place inside the things they buy from me. Flowers surely... in the vases. Cookies? It’d be nice to think of some of my pieces ending up as cookie jars for someone’s...” She faltered, shrugging off the memory that tried to surface. “Coins? When I was young, my Daddy had a huge jar of pennies.”

  Her visitor shifted. She could sense him leaning close, leaning over the wheel and the turning pot. She could taste the dead fish smell and briny rot of him in her mouth as she breathed. Something dripped onto her wrist, cold and clammy. She felt it slide down over her hand and merge with the spinning clay. It was followed by a large plop! of congealing goo that filled the bottom of the jar. She was forced to slip one hand into the piece and work the jelly uniformly over the inside of the jar. What had already been a large piece was getting even larger, its insides as moist and spongy as a... a mother’s womb. She shuddered. But not with fear. What passed through her mind was... anticipation.

  “Do they put the ashes of their loved ones in my clay jars?” asked Mary Aponte softly. “Do they lie with them at night, hearts like scorched walnuts sealed in my clay, pressed against their lips? Do they curse... you?”

  She felt the cold tips of fingers on her face. Her dark glasses were removed.

  “Blind,” she said. “But you know that.”

  She thought she felt his hand on her thigh, more a shifting of her clothing than anything else, for he could have crushed the wasted limb that lay beneath her work apron, crushed it until the thigh bone was powder, and she’d have felt no pain.

  “Crippled, too,” she said, with something approximating a laugh. It was too bitter to be a true laugh, though. And it was short-lived as her visitor drew her thighs apart and pulled her apron aside—these sensations, too, she knew only from the shifting of clothing at her waist. She’d felt nothing from that part of her body since—