Black Tide by Del Stone Page A

honestly didn’t.
    â€˜We tried to talk him out of swimming to the other side, didn’t we? I mean, we really tried.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜He was that way,’ she continued, sounding angry. ‘You couldn’t tell him a damn thing. He was a stubborn asshole.’ A whiff of uncertainty crept into her voice. ‘Maybe that’s what I liked about him.’ I said nothing but I was listening. The conversation was jumping around, not quite linear, and in such moments unvarnished truth and fiction are mixed in equal parts.
    She shook her head. ‘But we tried. You even tried to stop him, and he hit you. And then you cried.’
    I made some kind of noise, I don’t know what. Some kind of animal distress sound. My shame burned ever hotter. She put a hand on my arm and through the murk, I thought I could see her smiling.
    â€˜No, Fred,’ she said, ‘It’s OK. You guys are so hung up on crying. It’s a human thing. Entirely human.’
    And then she settled again into silence.
    Â 
    I stood watch the first half of the night, switching on the dying flashlight and playing it around the empty beach.
    At some point, I fell asleep.
    Heather woke me up. She was cooing, ‘Oh Scotty, stop it,’ and at first I could not remember where we were or what we were doing. Then I saw pale fingers, fat as bleached sausages, sliding around her throat. The shape of a head bobbed in the gloom.
    A bolt of fear nearly stopped my heart and I jerked the flashlight up.
    It wasn’t Scotty. I don’t know how I would have reacted if it had been Scotty. The weakened beam of the flashlight landed squarely in the thing’s bloodless face, and the eyes twitched up to reveal nothing but white balls rotating blindly in the sockets. The flesh puckered and the thing threw a protective arm across his face but it was too late – one eye kicked off like a flare and the top of our dune was illuminated in an otherworldly nimbus of blue light as it began to burn. Fingers had latched on to my shoulders and I could feel a mouth closing in on my throat – the breath was cold, as if somebody had opened the heavy steel door of a meat locker, and it was foul with a stench of both rotting flesh and muck. I aimed the flashlight at me and the fingers instantly let go and there was a menacing hiss of combustion. Whatever it was staggered back and howled wildly into the night.
    Heather’s eyes flew open and at that moment something snatched at her and grabbed the neck of her T-shirt from the back and began to drag her down the dune face. She screamed ‘Fred!’ and I aimed the flashlight at the thing, but at that distance the beam was so weak it produced no reaction beyond a tenuous bit of smoke. She was screaming, ‘Oh God, Fred, help me …’ and I snatched up one of the other lights, a big heavy duty lantern with a mushy, rubber-tipped push-button switch at the top. I mashed it savagely. A powerful beam of light stabbed into the dark and I aimed it directly at the monstrosity. Instantly his head went up in flames, but he refused to let go as he shambled toward the water, dragging Heather behind. It was an insane sight, and for a moment I felt the urge to titter. But her screaming drove me to my feet. I scrambled after them, the flashlight beam jiggling crazily, revealing in stroboscopic glimpses the crowd of things surrounding the island. I was able to reach her quickly and I ran in front, holding the flashlight like a gun. The beam scorched across the thing’s chest and it began to burn fiercely, as if I’d doused it in gasoline. It still wouldn’t let go of Heather.
    She wriggled out of her T-shirt and squirmed away from the creature just as its clothes began to burn. She crawled over to me, piping gasps of terror slipping past her lips. The thing went up with a great whoosh and we had to stagger back to escape the sudden wave of heat. All around us, the things