by Brian Hodge
Ralph started the outboard motor and the murky water sighed as the small boat cut its way through it. He shivered, not only from the unusual coldness out here, but from the fact that there’d been no reports of any tremors in the area. And no calls from the staff or guests of Heaven’s Cove. How could the water have rushed in so quickly so that they all had virtually no time to react?
He steered the boat past a row of rooftops whose peaks rose less than a foot above the rippling black surface. He frowned at the sight: at the leaves and branches clutching the eaves and gutters like castaways on preservers in the ocean. He never realized until now how much the valley dipped. It’d always looked flat, and he guessed it actually was once you made the ten-mile drive in from town. Gone now were the green grasses, the thickets, and most of the buildings. All that remained were ragged tree-tops and the upper levels of two-story cabins—just as Vinnie had said.
He passed by one of those cabins now. Here he saw the remnants of a pink suitcase, a week’s worth of clothing and panties washed up against the sills and broken panes of a second story window.
A little further on, in an area where the ground rose, Ralph could see the upper points of the white picket fence that had surrounded the heart-shaped swimming pool. He remembered last spring chatting with one of the maintenance workers about it; the man had told Ralph that it was painted it every year to help preserve its luster.
Now, along with everyone else, the groundskeepers were nowhere to be found. And as Ralph scanned the dead-calm surface, he figured there should’ve been some people walking around when the water hit, doing something other than lying in their beds with the doors locked. And if indeed there was no time to run, no chance for escape, then they would have drowned and their bodies would have floated to the surface, caught in the branches or against the windows like so many other items here. But there was no evidence of any bodies, as a whole or in parts. No pale bloated corpses with their eyes bulging and their lips picked away by insects. No torn limbs or even a wash of blood.
“Yeah,” Ralph said aloud, the cool humid air absorbing his words.
Across from the pool’s location a two-story cabin jutted from the water. The ground here was also higher, and only half the bottom floor was below the surface. A downstairs window had been left open. Water tided against the lower sill. Ralph motored up beside it, grabbed the sill, and peered inside.
The room, once occupied, was now empty. Eighteen inches of water drowned the carpet. The bed and tables looked like deserted islands. Whoever had stayed here had decided to leave their personal belongings behind, duffle bags, cosmetics, a book, a radio, all undisturbed upon the long counter running the length of the room. Ralph frowned, saddened at the depressing sight.
He noticed that the door to the room was open, an indication that the room’s occupants had fled.
As he labored over the thought, a woman appeared in the doorway.
Knee-deep in water, she slammed against the door jamb and clung there, face and body covered with mud and algae. She became one with the dark interior of the cabin, as if purposefully camouflaged, the whites of her shocked eyes and chattering teeth the only visible features to an equally stunned Ralph.
“Jesus Christ!” Ralph shouted, startled. He didn’t ask her if she was okay; clearly she’d seen better days.
“Help me…” she whimpered.
“Can you come to me?”
The woman, in her early twenties, shook her head slightly, eyes like pale glass marbles, floating in their sockets. “I-I don’t know…” A string of blood pendulated from her bottom lip. The woman sloshed through the knee-deep water, hands outstretched towards Ralph. When she reached the window, she shoved her arms out and grabbed him around the waist, nearly tipping him over. She started crying hysterically.
He grabbed her arms, hands slipping in the mud and slime coating her clothes, skin, and hair. “It’s gonna be all right now,” he said, doing his best to soothe her state of bewilderment.
Through her sobbing she said, “I heard the motor. I was too scared to come out. But then I saw you and…and…”
He patted her on the back, a weak but necessary gesture of support. “You’re safe now. Nothing can harm you as long as you’re with me.”
She pulled back and looked him in the face. “The water’s still rising…” She trailed off, her eyes tearing through the mask of filth on her face.
Ralph, trying hard not to show his anxiety, said, “Get in. We’ll find some higher ground and take you to safety.”
She listened to him and in a minute they were seated in the boat, facing each other. He idled the motor so they could talk without having to shout over the noise. Her body shivered and he gave her his jacket, which she clutched like a teddy bear. Ralph let a moment pass to see if she might regain her wits, but her face remained devoid of color and expression.
He reached for her hands. “It’s going to be all right,” he repeated. He looked back at the open window. “Is anyone else in there?”
“Oh God!” she shrieked, pulling her hands away from Ralph. She leaned back and slapped her cheeks. “They’re all gone! All gone!” She made an attempt to stand, legs wobbly and off-balance. The boat rocked back and forth. Ralph lunged forward and moved his hands to her elbows, steadying her. She slipped back down, grabbing his wrists tightly in an effort to hold on.
“Listen to me! If you want to get out of here you’re going to have to calm down. No one is going to hurt you. I’m the Sheriff from town. I have a gun.” He tapped his belt in a weak yet hopeful campaign to gain her reassurance, and for the first time her eyes made some attempt to refocus. “Okay?”
She nodded weakly. “I don’t feel like…me. I feel…crazy.”
“Well you just do your best to keep cool. I’m going to help you.”
Keeping an eye on her, he steered the skiff away from the cabin and looked for a safe place to drop her off. He noticed a chunk of land rising sharply out of the water about a hundred feet away. It formed a small island where a half-dozen picnic tables sat undisturbed. He deliberated bringing her back to the main entrance but decided against it for the moment. There might be others here, and he could fit three more people in the boat if he had to.
“I want to go home,” she sobbed.
“You’ll be home in no—”
A gunshot came out of the heavens, shredded the disturbing silence. The water three feet from the right of the boat shot up in a sludgy spray, dousing them both from head to toe. The girl screamed and cowered. Ralph pulled his gun and pointed it to the right.
What he saw blew his mind.
A large black man stood on the pitched roof of a building that rose six or seven feet above the flood, feet cradling the sides of the peak. Like the woman, he too was covered in silt and algae. He held a rifle in one arm, Winchester Ralph thought, pointing it high in the air like a bayonet. A double magazine of bullet cartridges crisscrossed his chest, making him look like something out of Desperado. He wore a uniform of some sort, a blue jumper with gold stitching that said ‘Noah’ on the pocket. Ralph figured Noah to be a Heaven’s Cove employee—a maintenance man whose gears were clearly in need of re-tinkering.
“Nothing like having the fear of God put into ya, eh Sheriff?” The man’s face twitched crazily, eyes unblinking and drilling holes deep into Ralph. He carried a look of pure conquest, pompous and absolute.
Ralph was certain he’d never met Noah before. Perhaps in the past they’d exchanged nods in passing, but damn if Ralph ever remembered seeing him before. “No need to shoot,” Ralph yelled, cutting the outboard. “I’m here to help.”
“I’m afraid…I’m afraid,” the girl sniveled.
The black man shook the rifle as if preparing to hurl it like a javelin. “Ain’t nothing you or anyone else can do to protect us. Just listen Sheriff. Listen real close. There’s a whole lotta silence goin’ on. You hear it? Sure ya do. No birds, no bugs, no nothin’. Know why? Cause it’s all covered. If you don’t beli
eve me then you just put your ears into the air and you’ll hear it. Yes you will. And then your mind will be weak and your body will fall like the rest of them poor bastards. But I ain’t goin’, no way Sheriff. You’ll thank me just the same ’cause I’m gonna spare you a trip to hell…”
He raised the rifle and pointed it at them.
Thankfully Noah hadn’t been much of a marksman before losing his mind, and the balance he needed to maintain his footing on the roof proved a worthy interference. He missed them by a long shot, the bullet taking out a chunk of wall in the cabin twenty feet behind them. The girl screamed and scrabbled to the wet floor in the boat. Ralph ripped his gun free and made the first shot count, hitting him squarely in the left bicep. Blood burst into red mist about the maintenance man as he tumbled down into the water.
The splash he made seemed to echo throughout the valley, even more so, Ralph thought, than the gunshots. It was a surreal moment: the rippling effect in the water, the immediate bob of Noah’s facedown body, sluggish in its motion. The air felt thick. The world muffled, as if in a vacuum.
But then the hideous real world returned as Noah propelled his head back above the swells, heaving loudly to catch his breath. The water glistened on his black face, eyes showing fierce anger…and then fear and confusion as a maroon-colored slick formed in the water beside him.
“Son of a bitch!” Noah yelled. “You shot me!”
“What did you expect me to—” Ralph’s words were cut off. What the hell…
There was something in the water behind the thrashing man.
Some…things.
From out of nowhere the girl started screaming. “What are they?”
Ralph turned to look at her. He saw a crazy black rapture in her eyes. She crawled to the side of the boat and dipped her hands in the water. The boat tipped slightly. He dropped his gun and wrestled her away from the edge.
At once he noticed her skin where it had come in contact with the water. It was balled with gooseflesh. The nails were blue and ragged. He pushed her to the floor of the boat, and her trance fell away just in time for her to share witness to the spectacle that was taking place in the water.
Noah had also taken notice of the swimming things: his sudden, whooping screams testified to that. At first Ralph assumed the creatures to be large fish, but they proved themselves otherwise as they ascended to the surface. No, these were no fish. What Ralph saw were…tadpoles. Big ones too. They were hoarding around Noah’s bulk, slapping the water’s surface in a writhing frenzy, like killies in a bait-trap. Noah began to scream. Loudly at first. Then his screams were muffled. Then they ceased entirely. Soon thereafter Noah stopped fighting back altogether. His body tilted sideways in the water and went into a back-float.
The creatures covered him from head to toe. Ralph could see them more clearly now, gripping Noah’s floating body with mouths that puckered and sucked, puckered and sucked. They were huge, some of them the size of footballs, tearing at his clothes to get at his skin. Jesus—what he was seeing made no sense…but there was also no possibility of this being a dream or a hallucination. No overwhelming feeling of him losing his mind.
The girl screamed hysterically. Tears sprang from her eyes. Ralph leaned over and gave her a quick but forceful slap in the face, silencing her for the moment. He then looked back at poor Noah.
The maintenance man’s struggles had turned to instinctual twitches. The creatures had begun to secrete a jelly-like substance on him, churning it with their wet bodies until it frothed up into piles of thick, white foam. At one point Ralph saw Noah’s fist attempt to punch a hole in it: knots and strings of goo covered his bleeding arm as it made an ineffective rise beneath the thickening surface. Soon Noah could no longer be distinguished as human, and the tadpoles slipped away into the depths of the flood, leaving the cocoon-like aftermath of their work floating on the rippling water, circles of blood spreading out from beneath the lumpy white casing like bruises.
Ralph slumped down. He probed blindlessly for the outboard motor, eyes still glued to the husk floating fifteen feet away. He felt weak, ill, scared. His mind searched for normalcy but found only the want to scream. He looked up at the blue sky and struggled to put away the vision of Noah being cocooned by those things.
The girl, silent but on the verge of pure panic, gazed blankly at the mound of foam that used to be Noah, and at the milky strings of goo tendriling away like jellyfish tentacles.
“What happened to him?” she asked in a pained whisper, breaking the ghastly silence. She grabbed Ralph and twisted his arm. “Did you see that? What the hell were those things?”
“The fuck do I know…” Ralph said, for lack of a better answer.
“Get us out of here! Please!”
Ralph wondered if he’d ever get his arm to unfreeze itself. He gripped the starter on the outboard and looked back towards the entrance of Heaven’s Cove. Safety lay a quarter mile away.
He pulled the cord. The engine coughed. His skin rippled with fear.
“Start the engine, please, before they eat us!”
He shot her a glance, was going to tell her to shut the fuck up when he noticed Noah’s cocoon going down. Feet first, maybe head-first. It was anyone’s guess. He looked like a ship finally plunging after filling with water, tip in the air and slipping beneath the surface in a splashless nose-dive. On the surface, only foamy white remnants remained as evidence of what the Heaven’s Cove maintenance man had become.
No words needed to be said—only action was required. Ralph yanked on the starter and the engine fired to life. He quickly steered the skiff around.
The amphibians splashed after them. Like salmon challenging an upstream current, they rammed the boat from all sides, using their blind heads, their muscular tails, all with impossible force. The boat jimmied back and forth as if in the clutches of muscular men; it stayed afloat but was taking damage. Ralph could hear wood cracking somewhere. Carefully, he looked over the edge and saw greasy bubbles in the water, that heavy white discharge accumulating at the edges of the boat like pancake syrup, thickening by the second, looking as if it was climbing the sides of the boat, trying to get in.
A single tadpole appeared from the water, showing its mole-like face. What it lacked in eyes was made up for in its mouth, thick-lipped and voracious, sucking at the air in pursuit of anything that hazarded in its way.
“Jesus, what is it? What is it?” the girl screamed. “What’s all that stuff? It’s all over the boat!”
Although hampered by the creatures, the boat managed to slowly break through them. Some of the amphibians got caught up in the engine propellers, and it was at this time Ralph realized with horror that there were swarms of them in the water. The boat pitched and swayed and Ralph used all his strength to steer it away from the cabin towards the open area with the picnic tables.
And the girl kept screaming. “What are they?”
Ralph, terrified and frustrated, hollered, “I don’t know!”
“Well…why don’t you shoot them?”
“Shut up or I’ll toss you overboard.” Yep, Ralph was losing his cool.
Finally the boat reached the edge of the exposed hill, just as the engine cut out. He took a second to catch his breath. A warm trickle of blood went down his face.
He turned and reached for the woman.
His hand froze in mid air.
“Jesus Christ—” he uttered.
She appeared to be tranced again, eyes moving in contemplation of what was happening to her. Her face was lost beneath a fresh layering of silt—dark sediment that must’ve splashed up at her while the boat rocked and swayed its way toward the hill. Her right hand—the one Ralph had reached for—was covered in white foam. A thick rope of the stuff was bound to her wrist like a leash. From there it clotheslined over the edge of the boat into the water where the creatures fluttered and writhed in a five-foot churning lilypad of goo.
Ralph moved to help her. The boat slid back into the water. In an ins
tinctual do-or-die move, he backpedaled and managed to leap over the bow of the boat, onto dry ground.
The tadpoles attacked the boat with slippery speed. The boat rose and fell with the chaotic ripples they made, shaking the girl off-balance. She hit the wooden seat, hard enough so that her eyes rolled up into her head, momentarily matching the starkness of the stuff eating her hand. The disc of foam in the water went down below the surface, and with it went the tether attached to her wrist.
She screamed with amazing force, full wails pitching crazily into operatic levels as she braced her feet against the side of the boat, fighting a tug-o-war with the lily pad under the water.
Ralph watched helplessly from the water’s edge. He tried to come to his senses, and decided that all he had to do was find a way to cut the tether and take her to safety.
The tether whipped around to the back of the boat, out into deeper waters. The girl’s arm went that way too. Her body twisted around and around, making her look like a rat in a snake’s choke-hold. Her pelvis cracked against the floor of the boat before getting wedged beneath the seat.
And the things went right on yanking. Her arm whipped and jerked forward and back until her shoulder dislocated with a wishbone pop. She wailed, “My arm! My arm!”and Ralph shrieked too, looking at her arm, now horribly flaccid. It turned purple from the elbow to her fingers, the tether doing fine a job of cutting off her circulation. The bond on her wrist seemed only two inches wide now…but her arm still went through it. Blood gushed from her pores like rainwater. She made a yelping, gagging noise. Her eyes rolled out and looked at Ralph. They were glazed and skeptical. Unfocused.
Mercifully, her legs gave way, knees buckling like metal hinges. She slammed sideways against the outboard motor. Her arm fell across her chest; it had gained a few new joints. The tether loosened and tugged, her body lurching again and again. She managed a hell-bent scream that forced Ralph back up onto higher ground, holding his ears. Blood exploded from her bicep where the driving force had twisted it. It looked like a washcloth being wrung out.