by Howard, Bob
She felt the boat move as Paul managed to gather a little forward momentum in the tidal creek. The current wasn’t swift, but he was satisfied that they were drifting in the right direction. He was using a pole to reach into the marsh grass and push against the roots, and he had to be careful not to get the pole stuck in the mud. Pulling it free would have had the same effect as pulling them back in the other direction.
Paul let out a whoop of satisfaction when they made the last turn and had a straight line to the narrow dock, but then he moaned with dismay when he saw there was no ladder or even a rope he could climb to reach the platform above them. It was at least ten feet above the water, but he thought maybe he could jump up and grab the edge of a board.
He guided them into position then carefully got up on the seats. Once he had his balance, he jumped and grabbed. He had it for a moment, but he came down with a crash and a painful handful of splinters.
Several more attempts met with the same results, and Paul finally announced that they would have to reach the shore by wading through the water.
“I’m not getting in that water,” said Sarah Beth.
“What’s eating you?” he said. “We’ve swum in tidal creeks before.”
“That’s my point. Nothing is going to eat me. We haven’t gotten in tidal creeks after bodies have fallen in the water. I saw that head go off the dock into the water, and there were several people who fell in.”
“They’re long gone by now,” he argued.
“You don’t know that. I’m not getting in the water.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going.”
“You’re just going to leave me here?”
“No, you can go with me.”
Sarah Beth got up and walked to the bow. She sat down and crossed her arms as if to say the discussion was over.
Paul sat down and then swung his legs over the edge. He gave a push with his hands and launched himself over the side into the water. It wasn’t deep, so he bounced on the bottom with his tiptoes until he was facing toward shore then gave himself a push in that direction.
The cool water felt good after spending the day in the boat, and the stress of the things they had seen made the day seem that much hotter.
“You should go with me,” he shouted over his shoulder at Sarah Beth.
“You can come back for me after you get a ladder or something. As a matter of fact, I’ll stay here until you come back with help.”
Paul had just passed out of sight in the taller patches of marsh grass, and Sarah Beth heard some splashing, but she couldn’t see if it was him. Swells gently rolled across the surface of the water, and Sarah Beth leaned around one of the big poles that supported the dock.
“Paul?”
She could hear the water lapping against the banks, but otherwise it was quiet.
There were still some boats burning in the harbor, but it was like the aftermath of a war. She had stopped trying to tell where the random gunshots were coming from, but they were obviously not a danger to them. The big elephant gun wasn’t booming anymore. She watched as the smoke from the boat fires seemed to swirl and drift until it merged with the big fires in the city.
Sarah Beth took in the view as a spectator at a car wreck would. She felt detached and immune from what she was seeing, and when she got wherever she was going, she would tell everyone what she saw and then go on with her life. Everyone would say how awful it sounded and offer her sympathy as if it had happened to them.
Something had made her forget that Paul didn’t answer her when she called out to him. She used the piling of the dock to keep the boat steady and tried to see through the grass. There was another splash, but then it was quiet again.
“Paul?”
Sarah Beth heard the fear in her own voice, but she had no sooner called out the second time when the thrashing started. She heard Paul repeatedly yelling, “No, no, no…..”
He was half swimming and half crab walking on the marsh grass as he burst into the creek, but the whole time he kept yelling that one word. Sarah Beth got the impression that he was not so much yelling at someone as he was shouting a denial in answer to a question. Like he saw something that couldn’t have been there.
Paul didn’t even seem to see Sarah Beth. She saw his face above the water, and it was so pale he was bone white. His lips were even white, and his eyes were bulging so big she thought they would explode. It struck her that Paul resembled a guppy that was gulping as it tried to breathe out of water.
He grabbed the back of the boat and tried to pull himself over the stern, but Sarah Beth saw he was hurt. Watered down blood washed along the inside wall of the boat and puddled by the motor.
“Oh, no. Paul, let me help you.”
Sarah Beth somehow managed to get to the back of the boat despite the fact that Paul was making it rock as he tried to climb aboard. She grabbed his arms and pulled, but her grip was slippery because her hands were quickly covered in blood.
Paul screamed in pain, and she let go. As she did, she saw the big ragged tear in his arm and the white bone exposed from the wrist to the elbow.
She didn’t know what to do at first, but she knew she had to get him into the boat and get that wound bandaged. She grabbed him again, but this time she reached past his head and down to the middle of his back. She grabbed handfuls of his shirt and pulled, and this time he came up high enough and flopped over the railing into the boat.
There were plenty of towels in the boat that she could use as bandages, but Paul had never believed in wasting space with a first aid kit. She could wrap the wound, but she couldn’t clean it.
Paul began shrieking, and in between the screams of pain she caught words that could have been, “It can’t be.” She didn’t get the chance to figure out what he was trying to tell her before he passed out cold. Sarah Beth laid him back onto the seat cushions and went to work trying to stop the bleeding.
As the sun went down, Paul was breathing in raspy shudders. He had lost so much blood that Sarah Beth wondered how he could even be alive. She retreated to the bow and squeezed herself against it with her legs drawn up under her. For some reason she was afraid to be near Paul.
The darkness closed in on them despite the many small fires that still dotted the harbor. A few of them were larger, but they flared brightly and then sank below the surface. The cruise ship was long gone, and there had been a lot of shooting at Fort Sumter, but it all seemed so far away.
Paul opened his eyes, and even in the darkness she felt like he wasn’t really seeing her. It was like someone else was looking at her. He lifted the bloody arm and regarded it with a detached expression and said, “What happened?”
That surprised Sarah Beth beyond belief. She didn’t know what she expected to hear, but she didn’t think it would be a coherent question. She didn’t know if she should go to him or stay where she was.
“You went into the water so you could get to shore. I don’t know what happened after that. You came back hurt.”
She didn’t consider whether or not he could see her when she gestured toward Paul’s shredded arm.
“Something got you, but I didn’t see what it was.”
Paul was silent for a few moments like he was trying to remember something, but when it came back to him, there was that one word again.
“No, no, no….”
He pushed himself up on the seat and was trying to get to his feet. He made it to a standing position long enough to grab the piling under the dock and gave it a hard shove. He fell over in the boat, but they drifted away from where they had been sitting just far enough for them to see what was walking around above them on the dock. It was crowded.
There was a huge splash as a body landed in the water. Sarah Beth screamed, and there was a general increase in the amount of pushing and shoving followed by railing boards pulling free from their nails. The metal nails shrieked as they came out of the wood, and the moaning grew into a chorus as the bodies rained down faster.
Hands pulled at th
e boat, and the rocking back and forth increased. Somehow Paul got the pole into the water and pushed against the ugly, mangled bodies. Sarah Beth didn’t know what had happened to these people, but it looked like they had been too close to an explosion. All of them had injuries that made Paul’s arm look like a scratch.
Paul wrestled with something that was holding onto his pole, and when he eventually pulled free, he fell back onto his seat. In the pale light, Sarah Beth saw there was something still attached to the pole as Paul dropped it in the bottom of the boat. It was moving, and at first she thought it was a gigantic blue crab. It was biting into the pole and making a sound like a groan.
“What is that thing?”
Even as she screamed the question she knew the answer. Just like Paul, she just wanted to deny what she was seeing. The hair was matted down against the skin, and the ragged flesh where the head used to connect to shoulders was flapping against the boat making a wet sound that reminded Sarah Beth of a fish on a hook.
“Get it out of the boat,” she screamed.
The snapping teeth had clamped onto the pole, and Paul was trying to lift it upward using just his bad arm. He had one end of the pole under his armpit, and the other end was six feet away with the big, dark mass hanging from it. It seemed to start bouncing in the air as Paul tried to rotate it away from the boat, and when it fell off, Paul fell backward.
Paul screamed as the pain in his arm was replaced by the white hot pain on the back of his neck. He had fallen far enough for something to reach from the water and grab him, and when he sat upright he was reaching with his good hand to the new wound.
Sarah Beth felt helpless as Paul curled into a fetal position in the bottom of the boat. Both of them wailed in deep, wracking sobs for hours as hands rocked the boat. Her sobs were out of helpless fear. His were from pain.
Just before dawn, Sarah Beth realized Paul wasn’t sobbing anymore. She lifted her head and saw that he was trying to move. His face was turned away from her, but she doubted she would have been able to see it even if he had been facing her. It was a combination of low light and all that blood in his hair. She absently thought he must have been laying on his face because his hair was plastered forward.
She opened her mouth to ask him if he was okay, but something made her bite back the words. At first she thought it was the way he twitched and jerked as if he was stiff. Then she saw what it was. He was leaning with all of his weight on the shredded arm, and there was no sign of pain. He had also stopped bleeding, even though the wound was wide open.
Sarah Beth eased her feet under her so she could stand up. The boat rocked a little, but Paul didn’t appear to notice. He was lifting his head upward toward the sky, and for an insane moment she thought he was sniffing the air.
Paul pushed even harder on the arm that should have been too damaged to move. The exposed bones appeared to bend out of the arm from the pressure. Just as one of them snapped in half, he got his feet under him and stood to his full height. She felt something escape from her throat when she saw the bone break. She had her hand over her mouth, but he heard her anyway.
On legs that seemed like they weren’t used to walking, he rotated to his left as if taking in the sunrise in the east, but he continued to turn. There were gunshots somewhere by Fort Sumter, and that held his attention for a moment. Then he turned to face her.
There was just enough light for her to tell she wasn’t looking at Paul anymore. Whatever he was, he wasn’t Paul. On unsteady feet he tried to step toward her, but the boat rocked too much. Sara Beth scrambled forward on the bow as far as she could go, and the shaking of the boat made the creature sway and then fall. She didn’t know what he was, but right now her only defense against him was that he couldn’t stay upright when the boat shook, and that wasn’t going to stop him from eventually reaching her.
As if he knew she would rock the boat again, he started to crawl toward the bow. He would have to stand to climb up to where she was, but that wouldn’t stop him forever.
She started to cry again, but this time she was begging him to leave her alone. He couldn’t hear her because he was dead. Sarah Beth knew that, but she begged anyway. He pulled himself to his feet and leaned forward with his arms outstretched. All she could do was move her legs back and forth to stay out of his reach.
She felt his fingers catch one shoe, and out of reflex she jerked it back and kicked. The heel caught Paul in the middle of the nose and sent him sprawling backward. Without hesitation he climbed to his feet again. This time Sarah Beth didn’t wait. She threw her weight left and right, and the creature fell again. She had hoped he would fall overboard, but no such luck. She only slowed down his advance, and he was crawling again. Even though he fell over on his side, he kept coming. Somehow she managed to get her fingers wrapped around one of the poles she had seen people use to reach for ropes. She swung it at Paul, but it was much heavier than it looked, and it wasn’t keeping him away.
There was a whistling noise, or something like a whistle. Sarah Beth heard it long before she realized it was there because it started as a low rushing of wind and increased gradually until it filled the air. She had the vague feeling that there was a helicopter somewhere.
The sound seemed to pass by over her head, moved away, and then was coming back again. She saw it the first time when it passed behind Paul toward his left, but it didn’t make sense. It was square, but it was flying.
Sarah Beth almost forgot about Paul as the gray object got closer and closer. She could tell it was going to connect with Paul’s head if it stayed on the path it was following. There was a straight line that ran through the air from the gray square all the way back to the dock, and for the first time Sara Beth understood.
The man on the dock was short but very husky. Not many men could swing a cinderblock around in a circle on a rope even one time. This guy was not only swinging it in circles, but he was paying out more rope with each turn, and the block was closing in on Paul’s head. The man had a big smile on his face that erupted into a shout when the cinderblock found its target.
There was a sound like a ripe watermelon hitting the pavement after falling from a four story building, and Paul’s head disintegrated. The cinderblock was moving so fast that it almost stayed in the air, but the impact had caused the line to go slack, and it tumbled into the water.
A second man stood up next to the husky guy and put his hands on his hips. He stood like a supervisor or someone in charge. He had apparently been sitting on the dock to stay below the rope as it passed over his head. Once Paul had been removed from the picture, he was free to stand up.
The man launched into some kind of explanation without introducing himself.
“I asked Randal if he could hit that piece of ripe meat with that cinderblock from here, and he said he could. I was actually asking him if he could throw it that far. I didn’t know anybody could swing one like that on a rope. I gotta tell you lady. Even I’m impressed.”
He clapped the husky guy, presumably Randal, on the back. Randal look pleased with himself. He was busy pulling in the rope with the heavy cinderblock on the end, but he took the time to give Sarah Beth a little wave.
“I had to do it nice and slow, Ma’am. I didn’t want to overshoot and get you by mistake.”
Her throat was as dry as gravel, but she managed to croak out a weak thank you and something about being glad Randal didn’t overshoot, too.
Randal tossed the rope at one of the cleats near the stern and pulled the boat closer to the dock. He leaned as far as he could over the edge and extended a beefy hand to Sarah Beth. When she held her own out to him, she was surprised by how easily he lifted her up to the dock. She was also surprised when she saw the other end of the dock was crowded with injured people.
“What was that you called them?”
She gestured back toward Paul and then at the crowd that was slowing its own progress by bumping and shoving each other.
“Ripe meat?” asked the taller man.
“Yeah. Why do you call them that?”
The man couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. Then he understood and considered the possibility that she did not understand the full gravity of their predicament yet.
“Lady, have you been in that boat for a long time?”
She had to think about it for a minute, but she shook her head to clear her mind and said, “A day or two. I don’t know for sure.”
He held out his hand in a gesture that seemed oddly out of place considering where they were, and that she had just watched an old friend get his head crushed. Now this man was standing in front of her wanting to shake hands.
“My name is Stokes, and this here is Randal. We saw that you were about to become lunch for that ripe meat, so we figured we would lend a hand.”
“That ripe meat, as you called him, was an old friend of mine. Do you live near here?” asked Sarah Beth. She tried to keep her voice more calm than she felt inside.
“As a matter of fact, we just moved into that big place at the end of the dock.”
When he said it, Randal laughed like he thought something Stokes said was funny.
“You’re welcome to come home with us,” said Stokes.
He kept his hand out in front of her, waiting for her to accept his gesture.
“Sarah Beth,” she said. “I’m Sarah Beth.”
She shook his hand but only because something told her it would be dangerous to reject it.
“Well, hello Sarah Beth.”
Stokes made a sweeping gesture with his hand like he expected Sarah Beth to start walking down the dock, but she stayed where she was.
“Tell me what’s happening. Do you know?”
She directed her question to Stokes, but she glanced at Randal to see if he was going to answer.
“How long did you say you’ve been in that boat, Miss Sarah?”
Stokes used the formal way of addressing her that was common to the south, especially Charleston.
The thought of being in the boat rattled her a bit, and she couldn’t completely wipe out the tremor in her voice.