Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  “Rummy, get me another Long Island Iced Tea, will you?” came her languid request from the lounge chair. It was great to just lay around all day on the boat, soaking up the sun and getting loaded. She’d hired Rummy and Fishy as her crew—why not? They were shiftless alcoholic idiots but she figured they deserved a break. They waited on her hand and foot, cleaned the boat, cooked her meals, etc. June liked the idea of being waited on by men.

  “Comin’ right up!” Rummy replied after having just finished peeing over the side. Then he shuffled off to the galley where there was a fully stocked bar. Fishy was down below in the back, scraping barnacles off the prop, and June simply continued to lie there, in her Bill Blass bikini, her Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a three-hundred-dollar Tropicana sun hat, and she would be happy to spend the rest of her days just like this. Ah, the good life! she thought.

  But one question remained, did it not?

  Whatever happened to the sea-slop thing?

  Tempted as she was to keep it locked up for use as her personal sex minister, she knew that would be terribly cruel. It was a creature of the wild and an inhabitant of the deep blue sea—whatever the fuck it was—so in the deep blue sea it belonged.

  And into the deep blue sea, she released it.

  The best piece of male ass I ever had, she lamented, because she would’ve been perfectly content to let it fuck the stuffing out of her every day for the rest of her life. But how fair would that be to…to…it? To the sea thing, the sea monster, the…whatever the fuck it was?

  This she knew beyond all doubt: no human man would ever be good enough ever again. But there was also something else she knew with equal certainty:

  I was the best fuck of that thing’s life.

  She gazed out into the endless sea and smiled. See, that abstruse psychic connection she and it had shared never really severed with its departure.

  And June knew full well that that great big wonderful pile of sea slop would be stopping by very soon for a booty call.

  EVERY BEAST OF THE EARTH

  by Tim Waggoner

  Valerie’s heart pounded so hard she couldn’t distinguish it from the rolling crashes of thunder that shook her tiny Miata. Rain came down in what seemed like solid sheets of water, and she gripped the steering wheel so tight her hands and wrists burned. She leaned forward, squinting, trying to see the road ahead, but although she had the wipers working at their maximum speed, they only smeared the water around. There was simply too much of it for the wipers to clear.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no, no, no…”

  An icy coldness took hold of her, and she felt light-headed. Blackness nibbled at the edges of her vision, and she knew she was on the verge of passing out. She almost let the blackness take her, so desperate was she to escape. But she fought back.

  It was midafternoon, but the sky was dark as the inside of a cave, and the flashes of lightning, as blindingly bright as they were, only chased away the darkness for a split second, and then it rushed back in to fill the world. She risked a glance at the speedometer. She was doing five miles an hour, but it felt as if she were hurtling through the downpour at one hundred plus. She would’ve pulled over, wanted desperately to do so, but she was stuck in the middle lane of a three-lane highway, and there were vehicles on both sides of her, shadowy forms defined by headlights and taillights. The drivers weren’t going any faster than she was, but their presence made her nervous as hell. What if one of the vehicles drifted out of its lane, even if only a few inches? It could strike her car, knock her into the other vehicle, and then, and then…

  You’re going five fucking miles per hour, she told herself. The worst that could happen is you end up in a three-car fender bender.

  She knew this was true, but it did nothing to blunt her fear. If anything, the thought of a collision—no matter how minor—only served to sharpen it. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and concentrated on staying in her lane, doing her best to pretend the other two cars weren’t there.

  She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid. She never drove in the rain, wouldn’t get behind the wheel if there was even a hint of precipitation in the forecast, and she checked the weather obsessively during the course of each day. The weather app on her phone had said there was only a three percent chance of rain today, and even that much had worried her. But she’d been overdue for a dental checkup and cleaning. She’d cancelled her last two appointments because of rain, and she didn’t want to cancel again, not for a measly three percent chance. Now here she was, teeth clean, breath minty fresh, trapped in what for her was the very definition of Hell.

  Fuck that app, she thought, and a manic giggle escaped her mouth. It sounded like the sort of laugh a crazy woman would make, but that was okay. As bone-deep terrified as she was at that moment, she probably was crazy, or damn near.

  The sky had been clear when she’d walked into the building where her dentist’s office was, but when she came out, it had grown darker, just a little, just enough to make her queasy. She’d gotten in her Miata and roared out of the parking lot like she was training for the Indy 500. Her apartment was less than ten miles from the dentist’s, and she told herself that she would make it, that everything was going to be okay. She almost hadn’t gotten on the highway, but it was the most direct route, and it would give her the best chance to get home before the rain started. So she’d decided to risk it. She had been on the highway for little over a minute before the deluge erupted.

  Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!

  Though it hardly seemed possible, the downpour intensified, and she found herself almost completely blinded. She nearly screamed, but she didn’t, not even when she felt the Miata begin to hydroplane. But when her car struck the vehicle on the right, she screamed loud enough that she thought her vocal cords might tear themselves to shreds. And when her car began to spin on the rain-slick road, she screamed even louder.

  Valerie was four when her grandmother gave her a Children’s Illustrated Bible. Neither her father nor mother were religious, but her grandmother was, and she decided to tend to Valerie’s spiritual education, which her parents had neglected so badly. Valerie’s mother was angry about the Bible—or more accurately, about Grandmother’s interference—but Valerie’s father didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.

  “It’s just a storybook as far as she’s concerned,” he said.

  “It’s not just anything,” her mother countered, but she didn’t argue further and Valerie got to keep the book.

  Valerie was too young to read the text, but she liked the pictures. They weren’t cartoony or childish like the illustrations in her other books. These pictures were realistic, more like paintings, and she found them fascinating. Her favorite picture was the one that accompanied the story of Creation. It ran vertically down the side of the page next to the words, and it was a series of small scenes, one stacked on top of the other. It began with a formless void, followed by a scene of planets, stars, and the sun. Next was a vast ocean, and after that a verdant landscape filled with animals. Last came Adam and Eve, both naked but standing behind strategically placed bushes and tree branches to conceal their naughty parts. What Valerie especially liked about the picture was that there were a couple dinosaurs among the animals in the fourth scene. Animals were cool, but dinosaurs were awesome!

  The pictures of Jesus puzzled her. In them he had light skin and blond hair, but Grandma had shown her pictures of Jesus in her grown-up Bible, and in those his skin was darker and his hair was brown. She wondered if Jesus could change the way he looked, like the invading aliens she’d seen in a cartoon once.

  But there was one picture that fascinated her more than all the others—a two-page spread depicting the Flood. She’d seen pictures of animals walking onto the big boat two by two in other books. She even had a toy boat with cute plastic animals that went inside. Grandma had gotten it for her last Christmas, which for some reason she liked to pronounce Christ-Mass. But the picture in her kids’ Bible
was very different. Rain poured down from a dark sky, and the ark floated on the water in the background. In the foreground were groups of people clinging to rocky patches of land which hadn’t been covered by water yet. The people reached out toward the ark, as if imploring Noah to come help them. But the ark was too far away, and there was no one on deck. Valerie wondered if Noah did see the people and simply didn’t want to help them because he didn’t think them worthy of aid. Sometimes she imagined the men and women calling out in despair, sobbing as the water rose above their feet and continued rising.

  But that wasn’t the worst thing about the picture. Water rushed past the outcroppings the doomed people clung to, and animals were caught in the rapids. Cattle, antelope, even a mama elephant with a baby beside her, its trunk pressed to her body as it desperately tried to hold on. One animal—a deer, maybe, judging by its thin legs and split hooves—floated upside down in the water, obviously drowned. The other animals, who would soon join their companion in death, looked terrified. She would stare at that picture for long stretches of time, imagining the sound of the rain and the rushing water, the desperate pleas of the people on the rocks, the confused, mournful cries of the doomed animals.

  Once, when Grandma came over to watch her while Mommy and Daddy were at the hospital to get her new baby sister, she showed Grandma the picture of the Flood.

  “Why did God do this?” she asked.

  “Because the people were wicked. They had to be destroyed so everything could start over again…so the people would be better.”

  Valerie frowned as she tried to absorb this. She then pointed to the drowned deer bobbing upside down in the current.

  “What about all the other animals? The ones not on the ark? Were they wicked, too?”

  Grandma opened her mouth, then frowned. After a moment of silence, she took the Bible from Valerie’s hands, closed it, and set it on the couch next to them.

  “How about we make some cookies?” Grandma asked.

  Even at four, Valerie understood Grandma was trying to distract her, make her forget her question about the drowning animals. But because she was four, and Grandma had said the magic word—cookies—it worked. Mostly.

  Valerie never opened her Bible after that, and she hid it in her closet so when her new sister was old enough, she would never see the picture and hear the screams of the animals.

  The Miata missed hitting either of the other vehicles that flanked her, although she had a sense that she hadn’t missed them by much. She fought to get her car back under control, and she thought she’d succeeded when she bumped into a metal guardrail. As slow as she was going, the impact was minimal, but it was enough to make her cry out, especially when an intense burst of lightning flashed, turning the world a blinding bright white, followed an instant later by a thunderclap so loud she felt the vibrations shiver through her body. Too terrified to pull back onto the highway, she rode the guardrail, metal scraping metal, and she might’ve continued like this all the way home if she hadn’t reached an underpass. Suddenly the rain was gone, and her headlights showed her that others had stopped here to wait out the storm. A motorcyclist standing next to his bike, looking out at the rain. An SUV with its hazard lights on, driver and passengers still inside.

  Now that is a damn fine idea, she thought.

  She pulled over, put the Miata in park, hit the hazards, and turned off the engine. With an effort, she pulled her hands off the steering wheel and then sat there for several moments, doing her best to breathe evenly and waited for her pulse to return to some approximation of normal. Outside the underpass, the storm continued to rage unabated. The rain and thunder were still loud as hell, but they sounded more distant now, and that helped take the edge off her anxiety. Her panic loosened its grip—only a little, but even that much was a relief. Even so, she was shaking and her stomach roiled with nausea. The Miata’s interior felt hot and stifling, and she wanted nothing more right then than to get out of her car. Leaving the keys in the ignition, she switched off the headlights, unlocked the door, opened it, and stumbled outside, almost losing her balance and falling. She sucked in cool, moist air, felt a breeze caress her skin, and her body relaxed. She still felt weak and light-headed, but her trembling lessened, and her nausea subsided, although it didn’t go away entirely. But she was out of the rain. She was safe.

  She looked around. She didn’t know what had happened to the two cars that she’d been so worried about hitting. She assumed they’d passed her and kept on going, driving through the underpass and back out into the storm. She couldn’t imagine anyone—even someone who didn’t have her issues with driving in rain—continuing on in this hellish storm.

  Suicidal dumbasses, she thought.

  She made sure to stand on the shoulder, in case any other vehicles might pass through. How ironic would it be if she’d managed to get out of the storm alive only to be struck by another driver?

  She walked behind the Miata and leaned over to check the damage on the vehicle’s right side. As dim as the light was in the underpass, it was hard to tell, but it looked like it wasn’t bad. Some minor dents and scrapes. Ugly, but nothing serious.

  She’d pulled over less than thirty feet from the southern edge of the underpass, and she now turned to look out at the water pouring off the highway above like a waterfall. She felt a sudden claustrophobia, a sensation that she was trapped in a bubble of air deep beneath an ocean, tons of water pressing in from all sides, the bubble so fragile it might pop any second, allowing the water to rush in and engulf her.

  Stop it, she told herself. Stop it, stop it, stop it!

  She looked away from the wall of water that blocked the south entrance of the underpass and checked on her fellow shelter-seekers. The motorcyclist—a man wearing a sodden T-shirt and jeans—watched the rain, arms folded, and although she couldn’t see his face, his body language indicated he was pissed, almost as if he saw the storm as a personal affront. No one had exited the SUV yet, but now Valerie could hear young children—loud young children—and an equally loud woman, presumably their mother, warning them to be quiet or else.

  Valerie remembered how her mother used to say that kids and pets always went nuts when it stormed, full of wild, nervous energy. It’s like you have little storms inside you to match the big one outside, she’d say.

  Valerie considered getting back in her car to wait out the storm, rolling the windows down so it wouldn’t feel too oppressive inside, but instead she turned back to the underpass’s southern entrance. She felt pain at the base of her skull as she watched the water fall, the beginnings of what she feared would be a truly horrendous stress headache. But despite this, despite the cold nausea quivering in her gut, she found the downpour mesmerizing. The rain was falling so hard and fast, it looked like a solid wall. No, more like a shimmering curtain, the rhythmic rippling of its surface almost hypnotic. She wanted to look away, but she couldn’t, and the longer she watched the rain, the more she became convinced she could see shapes within it. Large, indistinct, shadowy forms that drifted in and out of sight, as if she were gazing through a glass wall at the waters of some wild, turbulent ocean, watching sea creatures swim in close to take a look at her before moving off. It was a ludicrous thought of course, but one she couldn’t escape, and it only served to heighten her anxiety. And still she couldn’t look away.

  One of the shapes seemed to draw closer to the curtain of water, and there was something about it that intrigued Valerie, despite how on edge she felt. She knew what she was seeing was only an illusion, a combination of falling water, dim light, and her own imagination. But the shape’s outline seemed familiar somehow, and without realizing it, she started walking toward it to get a better look. It wasn’t large, this shape. She estimated it was five feet high, maybe five and a half, and about two feet wide. It remained more or less stationary as she approached, although it bobbed slightly—up, down, left, right—almost as if it really were something floating in water.

  A voice in the bac
k of her mind shouted for her attention.

  Stop! it warned. Turn around and go back to the car, get inside, shut the door, and lock it! Then close your eyes and keep them closed until this damn storm stops!

  She heard the voice, but it was faint, more a nagging feeling than full-throated alarm. She’d been gripped by panic—accented by the occasional sharp spike of terror—ever since setting off on her desperate race for home. Her emotions were so jumbled at this point that she didn’t recognize the voice of her own survival instinct attempting to warn her. Instead, she acknowledged the feeling and then immediately dismissed it. She had to know what that shape was, illusion or not. So she kept walking.

  Only once did she glance over her shoulder to see what her fellow stranded travelers were doing. Had they also seen shapes in the rain that compelled them to investigate? But the mother and kids remained in the SUV, still shouting at one another, and the biker still stood with his arms crossed, pissed at the storm for inconveniencing him. If they saw any shapes—and Valerie doubted they did—they had likely decided they were simply tricks of the eye.

  She faced forward and continued walking.

  When she drew near the southern edge of the underpass, the boundary between safe and, well, not safe, she realized the shape was the silhouette of a person. She couldn’t make out any features, but the overall form was unmistakable: torso, head, arms, legs…Not a very large person, either. Someone just over five feet tall and slender. She stopped a foot away from the wall of water, because now that she was close she could see that’s what it was. Not thousands of separate drops plummeting from the sky but rather a solid mass of dark grayish water, as if she were standing in front of some kind of invisible barrier, like the clearest, most undetectable glass ever fashioned. And on the other side of this barrier floated what appeared to be the silhouette of a small person. But that wasn’t the only shape Valerie saw. A dozen others moved in the background some distance away. Some small, no larger than house pets, while others were bigger. Just how big was impossible to tell through so much water, but she had the impression that some of them were huge.