“Why aren’t the satellites still working?”
Ross thought about Miller’s question.
“EMP?” Burkin said.
“I’m not sure what did it, but something wiped the whole goddamn slate clean,” Miller said, and pointed at the sky. “It took out the fucking sun.”
Rowtta walked up the first two steps to the bridge and turned around. “I’ll find a small port.”
Miller ran at him but Burkin blocked his path. “To what? Throw us at it?”
Rowtta stopped at the door. “At what, Miller?”
Miller walked back towards the galley. “I’m not going to stop you this time. I’ll let you drive us into the belly of beast.”
They broke through the fog line and hit choppy waves. Burkin and Ross walked in and looked surprised to see Miller sitting calmly behind Captain Rowtta. Rowtta ignored them, intent on directing the ship. Burkin was the first to gasp.
They had no idea which city it was. Some place along the shore of New Jersey, or Delaware. But for the first time they saw the source of the screams. Legs the size of buildings, and a body the shape of a giant spider. Its skin crawled with tentacles.
Rowtta slowed the ship as the horrible thing opened its mouth. It hadn’t been a horn that they were hearing; that booming sound was a howl. The earth shook and the ocean sloshed. Rowtta hung onto the helm. Miller stood up and smiled at it. Burkin’s sanity snapped like a rubber band.
Ross screamed. “Turn around!”
“He can’t!” Miller laughed.
The earth rumbled under the pressure as the creature walked, destroying the city in its way. The buildings collapsed under its feet. Rowtta cut the engine and ran around pushing buttons. The ship stopped and everyone was quiet. Burkin cried, prone on the floor, and Ross stepped out onto the deck. He didn’t want to believe his eyes.
Rowtta joined him. The air was colder than ever. Miller laughed hysterically, lying on the floor of the bridge. Beyond the enormous monster eating the skyline, something hung in the sky. At this distance it didn’t look bigger than a carousel. It was a void, spinning in the sky and growing larger by the second. Rowtta put his hands up and felt a great rush of air.
Miller walked up behind him.
“I don’t think we’re meant to understand.”
The creature howled, shaking the ground. Buildings crumbled and the whole city turned to dust under force of the creature. The ocean air pushed toward the spinning void, which sucked the wreckage of humanity up into its swirling vortex. The ocean chopped under the ship, pulling it slowly toward the shoreline.
Ross held onto the railing. “It can’t be!”
Rowtta fell to the deck and couldn’t bring himself to struggle. What would remaining upright do at this point? He thought about Erin. His ex-wife was the only person left in the world he had cared about. Even if she had hated him, he still loved her. Did she make it out of Boston? Did her new husband die with her? The air roared over them like a wind tunnel.
It was impossible, unimaginable, and a thousand other words that all meant insane. There was nothing left to do but scream. Rowtta opened his mouth, but nothing came into his lungs. He rolled onto his back. The night was silent and still. He had never heard such an empty quiet. He couldn’t hear his breath.
Scream!
Nothing. He heard nothing. His chest seethed in pain, and he felt pressure inside his skull. He felt like he might very well explode. He kicked and punched the deck, but heard nothing. Ross sat slumped on the deck of the ship, already dead. Miller sat up dead with a smile on his face. Rowtta felt his eyes get heavy. Slowly they closed.
Rowtta stood on the deck of his ship. A single blue-skinned cod lay on the deck, her body stretched in a U, her mouth and gills flapping, searching for water. Suddenly the cod’s eyes found him. Rowtta turned and flipped a switch. The net unfurled, dumping thousands of cod onto the deck.
David Agranoff is the author of four published novels, and two short-story collections. His novels include The Vegan Revolution...With Zombies, Hunting the Moon Tribe, Boot Boys of the Wolf Reich and Punk Rock Ghost Story. His first short story collection, Screams from a Dying World, was nominated for the Wonderland Book award. His short-stories have appeared in Dark Discoveries, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and his story “Punkupine Moshers of the Apocalypse” appeared in the Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade anthology.
He writes primarily horror but in summer 2017 is releasing his first science fiction novel, Flesh Trade, co-written with Edward R. Morris. He lives in San Diego with his wife and their brood of cute non-humans. He loves kung fu movies, Torrey Pines State Park, vintage sci-fi paperbacks, the Portland Trailblazers, IU basketball and vegan cookies. Follow him on Twitter @Dagranoffauthor
The Food Chain
by
Edward Ahern
Walter Peaked fished through the dawn without a hookup. At seven a.m. he set down his rod and picked up his paddle, his kayak’s bow spinning toward shore and sliding in a familiar surge-slow pattern toward the beach. At a hundred yards from shore he noticed silver glints in the water beneath him. Bait school, he thought. But just then a shiny ten-pound fish split the surface and arced over the bow.
It was a ranging shot. Bluefish leapt out of the water from both sides, snapping at anything their jaws encountered. As the blues slammed into him they sheared off apple-sized mouthfuls of skin and muscle. He screamed and began paddling as fast as he could get his muscles to coordinate. The relentless blues bit into his chest, back, and head. Two flopped into the kayak’s foot-well and began biting off calf and thigh muscle.
His screams went unheard by the few people on the shore. Muscle cramps and blood loss slowed his progress, and the feeding frenzy of open-jawed fish intensified. He felt a twinge in his left hand and glanced down to see that his pinky finger had been nipped off.
Walter lost consciousness fifteen yards from shore and the kayak slowly coasted onto the sand. Two orange-suited lifeguards ran down toward him.
The schooling blues veered off to run along the beach. Mary Perillo was the only person in the water, wading in water just over her hips. It took the fish four seconds to reach her.
The swarm cut through calves and thighs. People on the beach saw a middle-aged, overweight woman staggering in frothing water and screaming, “Help! Help! My God, help me!”
She toppled over backward, water filling her mouth and stopping her screaming. One of the lifeguards ran down the beach and into the surf in front of Mary, and then screamed and jumped back out of the water, blood gushing from three large bites.
There were perhaps two hundred blues. Mary died from blood loss and asphyxia less than a minute after they hit.
“Dr. Charpentier? Larry Westcott from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Thanks for getting here so quickly. Everyone else is already in the conference room.”
Westcott had the slender build and earnest, bifocaled stare that Laura Charpentier associated with environmentalists. She turned to him as they walked. “Have there been other attacks since yesterday?”
“Yes, three on the New York side of the sound, two more each in Connecticut and Rhode Island. You’ll get the details in the briefing.” Westcott raised his voice as they entered the conference room. “Everyone, this is Dr. Laura Charpentier, the marine biologist from Woods Hole. Please introduce yourselves.”
The room smelled of stale coffee and aftershave. Fifteen men of varying ages sat around the table. Don’t get academic on them, she thought.
Laura braced herself for the evaluating stares. At forty-three she was still attractively trim, but was confident that the men’s’ eroto-meters wouldn’t spike.
Two of the men were state troopers, and Laura’s mouth twitched when she imagined them trying to handcuff and interrogate a fish. The junior trooper presented capsule reports—the attacks had occurred at seven different locations at apparently random times, two women and one man dead, seventeen others wounded, three
dead fish available for dissection. While the trooper was speaking, Laura hooked up her laptop to the AV system in the room. When the trooper finished, sixteen pairs of eyes focused on her.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “I study our bluefish population, which is why I’m here. I know a lot about bluefish taxonomy and biology, but a commercial fisherman can probably tell you as much about bluefish behavior in Long Island Sound as I can.”
Laura fired up a picture of an open-jawed bluefish, its scalpel teeth glinting.
“How many of you are fishermen?” she asked. About eight hands went up. “And have any of you seen a bluefish act like this?”
Larry spoke up. “When they’re in a feeding frenzy they strike at anything, even a beer can. But the only people I know who got bit put their fingers too close to those teeth.”
Laura nodded. “And that’s what we know about them too. Bluefish eat fish, not people. And it’s a good thing they do eat other fish, because they forage along the same beaches that we wade and swim in. But the only suspected bluefish attack on a human was in Spain, on a seven-year-old girl. Have any of you heard of other blues attacking a human?”
The heads swayed from side to side. “Not before this,” the older cop said.
Laura offered more projections. “Bluefish teeth are extremely sharp, and they’ll frequently bite off the tail of another fish so they can turn around and chop up the cripple. That often includes their own young. They’re quite aggressive, and travel in loose schools.
“Their formal name is Pomatomus saltatrix. Streamlined, high-speed predators, often reaching fifteen to twenty pounds and occasionally up to forty pounds. The only surviving species of the family Pomatomidae, so not closely related to any other fish. They feed in huge numbers in most temperate and subtropical waters, but almost nothing is known about how and where they reproduce.
“While in a feeding frenzy, blues will snap at anything shiny or quickly moving. In short bursts they can outrun a boat, and are as common as clams everywhere from Maine down through Florida. Some people even eat them.”
That comment got Laura the expected laugh. Most people who fished for bluefish just threw them back because they didn’t like their oily taste. She put up her final picture, a photo of beachgoers lined up along the water’s edge looking at frothing water a few yards offshore.
“This is a frenzy of bluefish feeding on menhaden. We know that by last month commercial trawlers had taken out over half of the menhaden in the sound, forcing the blues to feed opportunistically on any other fish they could find. A predator population like the bluefish declines one breeding cycle after the decline in the prey population, but that’s a year away. My best immediate advice is what you’re already doing. Keep instructing the lifeguards to quickly get the people out of the water if they see a feeding frenzy close to shore. I believe that this is a one-time aberration, but I’m giving you all my contact information in case anything else happens.”
Laura got back to her condo that evening, sat at her kitchen table, and ate take-out Chinese. She’d lived with three men over the last fifteen years, but had eventually cut them all loose. At 10:30 she stripped down for a shower.
As the warm water flushed over Laura, a man named Pete Grosswald, also naked, was wading into the surf at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, Connecticut. He’d filled and drained his plastic beer cup several times before staggering down the beach slope away from the party.
He stripped and shivered his way out until the water was up to his nipples, and then dove under. He barely felt the first shearing bite on his cold-deadened skin, but then he screamed as jaws attacked him from neck to ankle. He sucked in air and screamed again when he saw his intestines spill out into the water. The rock music from the party blared in tempo with his screams, swallowing them up.
By the time Laura stepped out of the shower, Pete’s body had settled onto the sand in six feet of water, left to be further shredded by crabs. The jumbled pile of clothes and shoes was found the next morning, a half hour before low tide revealed his head and bones.
Pete’s body was laid out on a metal examining table. “Bluefish?” the trooper asked.
Laura’s stomach churn held below the level at which she’d vomit. She’d been helicoptered back down to view what was left of Pete’s body after the fish and crabs had dined.
“Hard to tell, but I’m guessing yes. The crabs have also been nibbling, but the bite radii are that of adult bluefish, and the bite edges are sharp, like a blue would cause. Is he the only fatality like this?”
The trooper shrugged. “So far. But not many people go swimming in the sound after dark. We’re scanning the missing-persons reports to see if we have other possible victims.”
She used a magnifying glass to examine the remains more closely. Getting within inches of the dead flesh and bone was somehow more clinical and less repulsive. “Ah,” she muttered.
“Something?”
She used tweezers to extract a broken tooth from Pete’s shinbone. “I won’t know for sure until tests are done, but this looks like a fragment of a bluefish tooth. It’s weird, though—bluefish are sight feeders, usually a lot less active at night. Do we know who this man is?”
“The ID in the pants on the beach was for a Fairfield U. student, Pete Grosswald.” The trooper’s voice had risen an octave. “Bluefish don’t do this, doc.”
“Not in my experience, no.”
Laura knew her tone wasn’t reassuring. She walked up one flight of stairs and into a teleconference room. Twenty-seven state police and government officials waited for her.
“Are we online for this meeting?”
“Yes, doctor. There’s about forty people listening in. You’ll have the list later. I’ll mike you up now. What’ve you discovered?”
“Initial examination indicates that Mr. Grosswald was also attacked by bluefish—”
An overbearing voice interrupted her. “What the hell is going on here, doc? Our beaches are on lockdown, and we have no idea what’s up. Our shorefront residents are screaming about the danger and the damage to property values—”
Another voice overrode the first. “Another time, a different meeting, Arthur. Dr. Charpentier, I’m Fred Malone. I head up the U.S. Office of Emergency Management. That was Arthur Lillard, who handles the dirtier jobs for Connecticut governor Malloy.”
“I thought this was a regional concern. wasn’t aware this was a national concern.”
“Dr. Charpentier, we’re missing a bunch of people up and down the Atlantic coast, and while the reports we’ve gotten aren’t as precise as yours, it looks like they were attacked by bluefish.”
“I haven’t heard anything about these other attacks.”
“You weren’t meant to. Nobody seems to have given much of a damn up till now about bluefish, except maybe you, and we want you to take a point position on this. Dragoon whoever you like out of Woods Hole, or wherever else you need them from. But we need answers quickly. We seem to have already lost more people than this year’s murders in Chicago.”
Laura nodded, and then realized that he couldn’t see her. Her ideas churned like chunks of fish in boiling chowder. “Okay, sure. I assume I can use a contact at your organization to clear away obstacles?”
“Of course, but we’ll try and clear a path for you ahead of time. Right, Arthur?”
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
Laura continued. “A lot of the talent I’ll need is right here in this room, and I’d like to focus the meeting on identifying alternatives and deciding on emergency first steps. For now, we need to keep people and bluefish apart. And I’m going to need data. As much as you all can gather, no matter how insignificant it seems.”
Five hours later the meeting broke for dinner. Laura used the time to make a call.
“Frank?”
“Yeah, who’s this? Laura? I thought you’d consigned me to the lowest level of hell.”
“I did. I do. But now I need to use the devil I know. You’re going out on
a charter for me tomorrow.”
“Laura, I’ve already got a charter. In fact, I’m booked for the week. Tuna and shark.”
“You can keep the sports on board, but you’re going bluefishing tomorrow.”
“I may be a devil, but you’re sure as hell not God. Go play with yourself, little lady.”
“Frank, I don’t have time to piss back and forth through the phone line. In ten or fifteen minutes you’re going to get a call from the Rhode Island State Police. If you don’t do as I ask they’re going to shut your ass down. Hard. You’ll get paid, and your sports will get to fish for free. But you’re going to fish for bluefish for the rest of the week in several locations I’ll provide, keeping the fish intact and on ice.”
“I’ll believe it when I see their uniforms.”
“Just call me back when you get the confirmation. And Frank . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to bait half the hooks with raw pork.”
Two mornings later, Laura pushed herself out of bed at five a.m., microwaved a cup of yesterday’s coffee and sat down at her desktop computer. The in-boxes were bloated with reports, frequently conflicting, but only one fatal attack was logged in. The regional beaches had been closed to swimmers and waders.
A week, maybe, and we can begin to figure this out. She hoped her task force hadn’t forgotten anything.
Victor Sudvoy had been surf fishing Long Island Sound for over twenty years. He moved out and back in the water with the tide, in an isolated spot where he wouldn’t have to deal with lifeguards or security. His waders had been patched with sealant so often that they glittered in the morning sun. He was fishing the ebb, working his way out to Penfield Reef as the water level dropped.
The blues swam against the rip until they found the source of the smell. The first few bites were tentative, but soon the teeth were poking through the unappetizing wader skin deeply enough to draw blood. Once it swirled into the water the feeding frenzy began. He screamed, but was a quarter mile from shore, just a knobby bump on the reef to anyone watching from land. He stumbled and fell, bluefish tearing at his upper body. By the time he could stand up, seawater had filled his waders up to his thighs.
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