9 Tales Told in the Dark 15

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  The swarm didn't need to jump, and began cutting through calves and thighs. Those on the beach saw a middle aged, overweight woman staggering in frothing water and screaming. "Help! Help! My God, help me!"

  The sharp teeth severed tendons, and Mary toppled over backwards, water filling her mouth and stopping her screaming. One of the life guards ran down the beach and into the surf in front of Mary, then herself screamed and jumped back out of the water, bleeding from three bites.

  There were perhaps two hundred blues. Mary quit thrashing almost immediately and died from blood loss and asphyxia less than a minute later.

  "Dr. Charpentier?"

  "Yes."

  "Larry Westcott from the Connecticut DEEP. 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 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 after shave. 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 present 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- 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 lap top to the AV system in the room. When the trooper finished, sixteen pairs of eyes rolled over toward her.

  "Good afternoon. 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 blues attacking a human?" The tableful of heads swayed from side to side. "Not before this," the older cop said.

  She threw up 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 15-20 pounds and occasionally up to 40 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 sub-tropical 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 off shore.

  "We know that last month commercial trawlers took out over half of the Menhaden the blues usually eat, 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."

  "Thanks doc."

  Laura got back to her condo that evening, sitting at her kitchen table and eating 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 her, Pete Grosswald, also naked, was wading into the surf at Penfield Beach in Fairfield, He'd filled and drained his plastic beer cup several times before staggering down the beach slope and from the party.

  He stripped and shivered his way out until the 55 degree water was up to his nipples, then dove under water. He barely felt the first shearing bite on his cold-deadened skin, then screamed at the incision like chomps from his neck through his ankles. Pete sucked in air and screamed again. His belly was ripped open and his intestines began drifting out into the water to be ripped apart. 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, 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.

  "Bluefish?"

  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 about that of adult bluefish, and the bite edges are sharp, like a blue would cause. Is this 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 shin bone. "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 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's tone wasn't reassuring. She walked up one flight of stairs and into a teleconference room. Twenty seven people waited for her.

  "Are we on line 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 lock down, and we have no idea what's going on. Our shore front 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 wasn't aware this was a national concern."
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  "Miz 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 to now about bluefish, except maybe you, and we want you to take 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, then realized that the voice couldn't see her. Her ideas churned like chunks of fish in a 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 up for dinner. Laura used the break 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 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 phone call from the Rhode Island state police. If you don't do as I ask they 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, meat and organs."

  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 desk top 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, Laura thought with relief, and we can begin to figure this out. But her task group had forgotten something..

  Victor Sudvoy had been surf fishing Long Island Sound for over twenty years, moving out and back in the water with the tide. 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 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, teeth poking through the unappetizing wader skin deeply enough to draw blood. Once Vic's blood 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, blue fish tearing at his upper body. By the time he could stand up, sea water had filled his waders up to his thighs.

  He threw away his surf rod and began slogging toward the shallows, but the fifty pounds of water in his waders held him back, easy pickings for the churning fish. He dropped to his knees before gaining ten yards toward shore, then passed out and fell under the water. The blues bit him down from neck to waist, then burrowed into the waders to rip off flesh down to Vic's knees. The tidal rip pushed the remains into deeper water, where they were never found.

  "Talk to me, Frank."

  His voice crackled on the ship to shore phone. "It's weird. We're painting big schools of fish, blues and stripers. The stripers took both jigs and fish bait, but we couldn't get a blue hooked up. Not until we switched to Porky Pig. The blues hammered the meat baits. We've got forty of them at least, and need to get them back on shore before they go bad. Why pork?"

  "Because it's the closest to how we taste. Have you got a live well?"

  "Yes."

  "Before you come back, put one or two blues into the live well and try and keep them that way until I can get my hands on them."

  "It's your money, sure."

  Laura spent the next three days farming out data research, and dissecting and running tests on dead blue fish. Her live blues shunned bait fish, fasting rather than eating them, but bit each other trying to get at morsels of beef or pork. She scheduled a tele-conference for the fourth day. God help me, she thought, for what I'm about to recommend.

  After five minutes of electronic glitches she was able to begin. " I gather from the data that the beach closures have almost eliminated incidents to swimmers, but that we've had two dozen cases of shore fishermen who've been attacked or gone missing. These fishermen are now also prohibited from entering the water.

  "We've examined the stomach contents from 135 blues and found flesh from seals, humans and in two instances each dog and sea gull. But no fish. The blues have apparently changed their feeding habits, something corroborated by the fifty percent decline in the observed seal population, and the discovery of seal remains washed up at over twenty sites.

  "In short, we've become a prey species for the blues, a danger that needs to be, if not eliminated, reduced to a manageable risk.

  "We've already agreed to use Long Island Sound as the initial focus because of its contained nature. What I'm going to propose is related to the sound and not the open waters along the Atlantic coast.

  "I-I'm reluctant to recommend these emergency first steps, but the alternatives would all leave the blues in control of the Sound. In order to reopen the beaches we need to greatly reduce the number of bluefish. This could be done in two steps, first sustained commercial fishing targeting bluefish, using trot lines with thousands of hooks baited with mammalian byproducts. That would largely spare the striped bass.

  "Secondly, shallow water commercial netting of immature bluefish, the snappers. The immature fish seem to still be targeting smaller bait fish, which would realistically have to be removed with the snappers. This should greatly reduce the number of adult blue fish next year.

  "The health of marine life in the sound would be changed greatly for the worse, and changed in ways we can't foresee yet, but we would hopefully have regained the sound for recreational use. The costs would be borne by the federal government and the contiguous states of New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island in some equitable way, perhaps calculated on shoreline miles.

  "While this is going on we can make plans to attack the bluefish menace along open sea fronts. It's mid-June, if we begin immediately we may be able to get back into the sound in late August." Laura had barely stopped when verbal bedlam erupted, replaced ten seconds later with an eerie silence.

  "This is Fred Malone. I've temporarily shut down your outgoing sound. The one thing we can't do is nothing. We can argue deficiencies and consequences while we proceed. If you have better first steps than what Dr. Charpentier has proposed send me an e mail right now. We'll take a day to winnow through them and if there's nothing better we're going to proceed with her plan. I will now accept your oral comments on why her proposals are impossible to implement."

  The eerie silence resumed. What Laura had proposed was expensive but relatively easy to perform. The tele-conference concluded an hour later. Taiwanese and Chinese commercial fishing ships already illegally netting in the Atlantic were granted permission to immediately operate in the sound and target bluefish. Over the next few weeks thirty seven tons of fish were taken out of the
sound.

  On July 19th fishing operations were expanded to include the entire Atlantic seaboard, and on August 13th Long Island Sound was declared open for swimming and water sports.

  Larry Westcott was one of the first to call and congratulate Laura. "I still think what we did was ecologically dangerous, Laura, but I can't argue with its results. Incidentally, you did a great job selling the gutting of the bluefish population on Good Morning Americans."

  "It was a bad choice, Larry, but we didn't have any better ones. Are your Connecticut beach goers getting back into the water?"

  "Slowly. We've got a week of hot weather forecast and I expect to see many more in up to their necks."

  Laura hesitated. "I wonder if God knew what he was doing when he gave us dominion over the animals."

  The third day of hot weather brought thousands to the beaches and into the water. And something else as well. From the deeper pockets and trenches of the sound tens of thousands of snake like, four foot shapes rose up, schooled and swam toward the shallows. The spiny dogfish, deprived of their usual food, were on the move.

  Helen McDonald was the first victim. The raspy snouts bumped into her thighs, sniffing out that the fourteen year old girl was mammalian. The teeth, more widely spaced than a bluefishes, sank into her legs, the jaws then spun and twisted until chunks were torn off her body. She dragged herself by her arms halfway onto the shore but died there as the dogfish slithered through inches of water to continue eating her legs. Four hundred attacks followed hers.

  Laura was frozen out of the task force, not being a shark expert, and being held somehow responsible for the new attacks. As she watched the news she worried that the sharks, having released themselves from bottom feeding on dark nights, wouldn't easily relinquish their place in the sun. And what will follow them?

  THE END.