Black Tide by Del Stone Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜OK Fred, let’s hear the post-event analysis. 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 –’
    â€˜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