Black Tide

by Del Stone

  It was as if the world had gone to sleep.

  ‘Who cares what happened,’ Scotty announced. ‘Let’s just get the hell outta here!’

  Yes. For once, Scotty and I agreed. The phytoplankton pathologist within urged me to stay and puzzle through this disaster. But the human being had been screaming at me for the past hour to do exactly what Scotty demanded and get the hell out of here. The quiet alone was enough to give you permanent goosebumps. The thought of spending the night out here, after such a catastrophe – it wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate.

  ‘Call that guy,’ Scotty said breathlessly. ‘Call him and tell him to come get us.’

  His gaze had a wild, feral quality, as if the thinnest veneer of sanity kept him from jumping at me. But it compelled me to act. I fetched the dry bags and began rummaging through them, scattering what had earlier seemed a precious hoard of supplies haphazardly across the beach. After I had emptied both bags, I stood and ran my fingers through my hair, my anxiety giving way to new dread. Scotty came up beside me and looked. As he stared, he must have seen it on my face before I dared say it myself, because his expression collapsed into horrified dismay and he snarled, ‘Oh, don’t tell me! Don’t even say it!’

  At that moment I felt older and more foolish than I’d ever felt in my life.

  ‘You mean with all this crap you brought, you didn’t think to throw in a cell phone?’ Scotty roared, incredulous.

  I knew I had packed it. I just knew. But I shook my head lamely. ‘I didn’t think we’d be phoning out for pizza.’ But what couldn’t be denied was that I’d just forgotten it. In trying to collect all the equipment, and making the arrangements, and mooning over Heather … I must have walked off and left it.

  Scotty looked almost afraid for a moment. Heather reached up and cupped his shoulder with her hand, running her fingers around and around the joint, not just to comfort him but perhaps to hold him back? I glanced at her face, what I could see through the mask, and her eyes were narrowed, as if she’d seen the same thing in Scotty’s eyes that I had seen and was trying to defuse the situation.

  I saw Scotty’s body tense. His hands curled into fists. The veins in his arms stood out. I wondered, in that eons-long millisecond that always precedes a disaster, what it would feel like to have my nose broken, and whether the mask would give me any protection at all. Tears watered my eyes.

  ‘Stupid old bastard!’ he raged. ‘It’s just so fucking stupid …’

  Heather was no longer looking at us. I heard her say ‘Guys’ in a tentative voice and I interrupted her, blurting at Scotty, ‘Don’t you have a cell phone surgically implanted in that thick skull of yours?’

  He strode away, flapping his arms and fuming, ‘Stupid stupid stupid …’ and then Heather screamed, ‘Will you two shut up and look!’

  She was pointing to the farthest shore. I didn’t want to look. I could tell from her expression that it was something awful, and I’d seen enough horror for one day. But I looked anyway, and my instincts were right.

  I shouldn’t have looked.

  Across the sound, along the manicured yards hemmed by seawalls, and the marshy, grassy undeveloped tracts, an unbroken line of people was advancing on the water. It was like the Normandy invasion in reverse, and the towers of smoke rising from Fort Walton Beach contributed to the effect. Thousands of people, an uncountable horde of people, literally stampeded for the water. They were screaming as if in pain, and trampling one another, and colliding drunkenly with tree trunks and dock posts and moored boats. They seemed totally possessed by a mindless need to be in the water, and nothing, or no one, would stop them. They climbed over those who had fallen. They leapt from seawalls and docks. Some of them fell when they landed in shallow water, and they didn’t seem able to get up. Still, they dragged themselves toward deeper water.

  And something else – something I still can’t explain.

  The people were on fire.

  Their bodies gave off plumes of black smoke as they ran blindly for the beach. They held their arms away from their sides as if even casual contact with another surface produced agonising pain. A mental snapshot formed, of a photograph taken during the Vietnam War of a naked Vietnamese girl who had just been burned during a napalm strike on her village. She was running, and crying, and holding her arms away from her body to escape the pain. This was the same only repeated ten thousand times over, and I could neither explain nor understand how such a thing was possible. A contact toxin that produced a burning sensation, yes. Many chemical warfare agents were capable of producing that exact effect. But a toxin that created a biochemical response in the body so energetic that it literally combusted the tissue? No. Not in this world. It was the stuff of science fiction.

  When the people reached the water they hurled themselves beneath the surface and scrambled for the deeper parts, out in the channel. The water sizzled around them and gave off bubbling clouds of smoke. I could follow their paths by watching individual trails of smoke move toward us. They were still a good thousand metres north of our island when the smoke trails gradually dissipated. As if they had cooled. Or something.

  None of the people resurfaced.

  I heard Heather sobbing. No. It was Scotty who was crying. Heather was holding him as if he were a baby, and he had his face buried in her shoulder. I went over to them, and without any conscious declaration of intent I put my arm around the both of them, and it was OK. We stood there that way, for a very long time, and watched the people on the mainland drive themselves into the water and vanish.

  As the sun began to inch toward the western horizon, the afternoon cooled, and the world grew quieter still.

  We didn’t know what to do.

  In the evening

  It was a hot night.

  My clothes had never dried, and the shorts clung to my thighs, chafing the tender backs of my knees. I was constantly shaking them, trying to get the sand out. It was yet another form of madness in a day that had seen too much madness.

  My stomach hurt. I remember that. I didn’t want to eat anything. Heather had fished out one of the military meal packets for Scotty, who had picked at the chicken tetrazini. But neither Heather nor I would eat any of it. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to keep it down, and from Heather’s grimace it didn’t seem food was anything she cared about at the moment either.

  We all sat together, in front of the tents, in the dark. I’d swept a flashlight beam over the water for a few minutes after hearing strange sounds, a kind of stealthy sloshing, but decided it had been nothing but my imagination, fuelled by the day’s horrific events. Overhead, the stars were barely visible through a caul of smoke. We could see them because the lights were out on shore. Fires were burning, their ochre glow illuminating whole segments of the horizon. I’d say half of Fort Walton Beach must be going up in smoke. But no lights of traffic moved along the highway. Once, we saw the blinking telltales of an airplane, far overhead. Heather thought it was an airliner, but I guessed it was some kind of military reconnaissance craft. The people farther inland must have some inkling of what had happened. Perhaps rescue parties were on their way right now.

  Until then, I was very happy for Heather’s company for entirely different reasons. To be honest, I was more rattled now than I could remember, worse than when Psycho Cecelia informed me she wanted a divorce to take up with the high school boy she tutored in piano. Maybe that’s why Scotty irritated me to the point of distraction. Maybe I wasn’t experiencing the male mid-life crisis after all, but a weird Oedipal fixation. I should’ve gotten my degree in psychology instead of marine biology, but it was my observation that many psychologists were themselves insane. I didn’t need insanity added to my resumé of peccadilloes. But the thought of all those bodies, floating out in the sound, was enough to keep my wits on edge. Perhaps that’s what was making the sound.

  ‘OK Fred, let’s hear the post-event anal
ysis. What’re you thinking happened here?’ Heather asked me, shaking me from my thoughts. When my mind turned to that problem I was happy to feel something other than the slow simmer of fear.

  ‘I’ll say one thing,’ I began. ‘It’s too damn strange for words – at least any of the words I know.’

  Scotty had regained some of his smirking impudence, and he rolled his eyes. ‘That’s good, Professor. Very enlightening.’ But I decided to ignore him.

  ‘I examined some of the material that collected in the filters and the bottles I’d strung up in the shallows,’ I said. ‘Mostly what I saw was organic debris, so it was hard to get a fix on what exactly we were looking at here. I mean, did the debris belong to an offending organism, or was it residue from plankton or other marine life destroyed by whatever passed through the water?’

  Heather shook her head. ‘Jesus. What could cause that level of destruction? An acid?’

  ‘I think it was a living thing,’ I told them. ‘In some cases I found intact, immature organisms. They bore a resemblance to Karenia breve, the red tide dinoflagellate, but there were striking differences.’

  They both looked my way, waiting.

  ‘Notably the pigmentation and some physical structures – physiologically they came in very close to Karenia breve, though I’d call this a new species of phytoplankton – Karenia negre –’

  ‘Black tide,’ Heather interrupted.

  I nodded. ‘Maybe it’s from the Sahara dust storms. Or those terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Centre and sent anthrax through the mail,’ Scotty said. ‘Maybe that – that – what’s that stuff they’re mining from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? Those methane ice chunks – maybe that’s where it came from.’

  We sat quietly a moment, and then I said, ‘Listen. All I know is I saw an awful lot of cellular debris in the slides. It looked like whatever was in the water had literally exploded.’

  ‘Like those people on fire,’ Scotty observed in a near whisper.

  ‘Yes!’ Heather declared, slapping her thigh with an open palm. ‘How do you explain that, Fred?’ She turned to me and I could see she was angry, but not at me. It was an intellectual frustration. She wanted answers and there weren’t any and it infuriated her. ‘Smoke pouring off those people’s bodies. You mean to tell me an aerosol caused their cells to burst into flames? Mass spontaneous combustion?’ The chin went back down on her knees. ‘This isn’t Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’

  I started to reach over and run my hand through her hair. Or pat her on the shoulder. Just extend some gesture of shared frustration. To be honest, I wasn’t strong on the chemistry component of my field, and human physiology bored me. Now I was wishing I’d paid attention in those classes or kept up with the latest papers, because I had no explanation for how any of this could have happened. On the face of it, some kind of marine organism had moved through Santa Rosa Sound, energetically reacting to some kind of stimulus and in the process releasing a compound that produced a similar reaction in terrestrial organisms, at least the higher vascular organisms. So far none of the grasses or trees had exploded. Maybe that was to come.

  At any rate, it sounded like something out of a science fiction novel, or worse, a George Romero movie, and I shuddered at that thought, here in the dark. A scene from the movie Night of the Living Dead sprang to mind, the one where the brother and sister are in the graveyard, and a zombie attacks the brother. I was only a kid when that movie arrived at the local drive-in. My big sister went to see it with her boyfriend, and she recounted the scene for me. Years later, when I saw the movie for myself, I felt a refrain of the shuddering terror that electrified my nerves as my sister described the zombie’s shambling stance, and the brother’s transformation from taunting jokester to dead man. An echo of that old dread reverberated through me now.

  ‘I think it was some kind of nerve gas spill,’ Heather said quietly. She still had her chin on her knees, and she was gazing blankly across the sound, at the fiery mainland. Debris had begun washing ashore on the island – timber from docks, old oil barrels, other flotsam and jetsam. It looked as though a barge had taken out a stretch of shoreline east of here, the results just now arriving at our beach.

  ‘There’s military bases around here,’ Scotty mused, his voice irritatingly sinister, as if that fact alone were enough to decide the issue. I couldn’t help but shake my head, and I could tell that irked Scotty. His expression soured into defensiveness. ‘Well, Professor, it’s a damn better theory than you and your nitro slime.’

  ‘These bases aren’t involved in that kind of work,’ I sighed, not even hiding the weary impatience.

  ‘How do YOU know?’ Scotty snarled back.

  ‘Hurlburt is a special operations base.’

  ‘Special operations!’ Scotty repeated stupidly.

  ‘Special operations,’ I mocked him, ‘as in commando operations. Not chemical warfare. And Eglin tests conventional munitions.’

  ‘Who’s to say what they do?’ Scotty hissed. ‘They’re the damn government, and the government lies all the time.’

  ‘Sure. And they’ve got a flying saucer hidden in one of their hangars.’

  Scotty stiffened and he started to get up. I had the feeling he was defending Heather’s point of view more than simply arguing for a solution, but either way he was angry again, angry like he’d been the moment Heather had seen the mist. He was halfway out of his crouch when he froze and cocked an ear. Heather looked down-sound. Then I heard it too.

  A boat motor.

  The sound was strangely incongruous in the deafening silence, but it was the first human sound we’d heard all afternoon, apart from the screaming and our own squabbling. We all stood up. I flipped on the flashlight and began waving it frantically. Heather scrambled back to the tents to fetch her flashlight. Scotty jumped up and down, waving his hands idiotically and shouting, ‘HERE! HERE!’ as if the person on the boat could see him in the inky darkness, or hear his voice over the sound of the motor.

  Heather rejoined us and aimed her flashlight beam into the sound. Suddenly, I could see it. The red and green running lights of a boat. The operator had a small spotlight swinging to and fro across the water. The beam stood out like the ray from a Martian war machine, peeling back the dark. Suddenly, it blinded us.

  ‘HERE!’ Scotty shrieked, cavorting maniacally. ‘YEAH, MAN! RIGHT HERE!’

  The boat turned in our direction. Relief gushed out of me. Heather latched on to my arm and laid her head against my shoulder and sighed. I wanted to put my arm around her shoulder and gather her in, but I couldn’t; she wouldn’t let go. Scotty turned around, glimpsed us, started to turn back, then slowly turned around again. Heather let go.

  ‘I’d better start packing our stuff.’

  I watched her head back to the tents, and when I turned back, Scotty was still staring, his eyes slitted now and measuring me. I think for a moment he actually felt threatened. But then he turned and resumed waving to the approaching boat.

  As the boat came closer it assumed the familiar shape of DeVries’ Boston Whaler. I felt a surge of gratitude for the man – that he’d remembered us out here and had thought to come rescue us in the wake of whatever disaster had befallen Fort Walton Beach. I wanted off this island. I wanted to be back in my classroom, among my colleagues, and mired within the mundane concerns of school and life. I wanted no part of this ecological catastrophe – and that’s what I’d come to believe happened here. It wasn’t a nerve gas spill or a chemical discharge. It was an emission by an unknown phytoplankton that caused a violent reaction in vascular organisms. I was convinced of that. When I returned to Gainesville, someone among us would sit down and analyse the samples I’d collected and come to a reasonable conclusion in the blessed light of rationality. But right now, out here in the superheated dark, with a carpet of death floating by, I only wanted to be home.

  I went to hel
p Heather pack. She was neatly unpegging the tents and brushing sand from the nylon.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘Leave ’em. Just get the equipment and the samples.’

  ‘Fred?’ she frowned at me. ‘This stuff is expensive.’

  ‘I don’t care. The sooner we’re on that boat and heading back to civilisation the better I’ll feel.’

  She offered me a sly smile. ‘I thought you were looking forward to a long weekend of obsessing over red tide.’

  ‘That was before this – and Scotty.’

  She stopped and frowned hard this time, turning to look up sternly. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. ‘What does Scotty have to do with anything …’

  ‘He’s a jerk,’ I whispered back. ‘He contradicts everything I say …’

  ‘I think you’re just jealous,’ she cut in with what I knew was feigned petulance.

  ‘He makes me feel old.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not exactly a candidate for the rocking chair,’ she said, and I felt a little better. Then she continued, ‘Maybe for one of those three-toed canes, but definitely not a rocker.’ She snickered and winked at me.

  In the distance, over the burble of the Evinrude, I heard DeVries call out, ‘DOCTOR MILLERRRRR! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?’

  I stood up and got a shot of his searchlight, right in the eyes, which momentarily blinded me. That’s why I wasn’t able to see what happened next. I heard it first, but only after the spots cleared and my sight returned was I able to make out what was going on. I might have chosen to remain blind the rest of my life had I known what I would see.