High Water Read online

  The emcee bellowed into the mic, “ARRRRRRRRRRRR!” - imitating a pirate - “… YOU READY TO GO AMIDSHIPS!” The crowd screamed their readiness in unison. The air was balmy and moist, everyone warmly anticipating the next song.

  The emcee hopped up and down, hyping the crowd, screaming, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I’M ASKING… ARE… YOU… READY?” The crowd screamed even louder.

  A dub offbeat with a sea-shanty melody started with the thumping bass slowly building up. Calvin didn’t bother to look for the eye-patched headliner. Instead he started grinding on butterfly girl. He was happy and, being honest with himself, somewhat surprised to feel her doing the same. Water sloshed between and around them. Sweat from the skin of his chest and her bare back mingled together as Calvin let the music guide him and the mystery girl in a sensuous dance. Butterfly girl turned around abruptly and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself close to him. Her sunglasses were framed by her incredibly sexy hair. He enthusiastically pulled her even closer and saw her drunkenly laugh in pleasure. The melody stopped, the music pausing for a beat, and then they both shook their heads to the wicked bass drop from Banter Amidships.

  A motion out of the corner of his eye made him pause. Calvin looked to his right and saw something that immediately killed his buzz.

  A guy about Calvin’s age with a short haircut and green swim trunks was looking straight down into the water and convulsing. It wasn’t the compulsive shaking of someone dancing to dubstep. It was unnatural and halting. The kid’s muscles looked like they were twisting under his skin. Green Trunk’s head reared back and Calvin had to double take because he couldn’t see any eyes. On second glance, Calvin saw they were encrusted with something the color of wet sand. Stepping back from butterfly girl, he stared, feeling alarmed. The beat dropped again, thundering loud enough to froth the water.

  Wanting confirmation for what he was seeing, Calvin turned back to his dance partner. Butterfly girl’s sunglasses had fallen off her right ear. An encrusted eye looked unblinkingly back at him, the iris weeping something rich and yellow.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  Calvin’s scream was nowhere near audible as his erstwhile dance partner shoved him violently off balance and into the water. Fully submerged, Calvin opened his eyes, seeing feet and discarded beer containers. The bass seemed even louder underwater, the higher frequency sound levels muffled. Before he could struggle out, a set of hands plunged through the rippling surface. The hand pinned him to the ground and knocked the rest of the breath out of him. Calvin took a deep breath in shock and his lungs filled with liquid.

  Nativity

  Bryan continued to hold Liz and Pete captive with his thoughts on a wide range of topics, from how bad management had turned out to be at Tahitian, to how Liz was “beautiful, and the only decent person at Tahitian.” Pete didn’t really disagree. Bryan finally ended on a treatise on the vagaries of his favorite local bands. Pete broke in when the latest screeching of the band in the water park ended.

  “Well, geez, Bryan, we don’t want to miss the headliner,” Pete said. He had no desire to be polite to a jackoff like Bryan, but Liz was strangely amused by his stories.

  “Oh shit, you’re right Peter! Hey, let me grab some beers and let’s go in there!” he said, running off.

  Pete whispered in Liz’s ear. “What are we doing?”

  Liz turned her mouth in a nervous smile, “We’ll lose him,” she said, trying to be reassuring. He didn’t believe it for a second. Bryan returned and led them out of the locker room and through an unmarked steel door that clicked behind them.

  After hours Tahitian Water Adventures was dismal and murky with the harsh overhead lights switched off for the night. But tonight was a special occasion. The throbbing of dance music and the clamor of crowds greeted Pete with a wall of flickering light and sound. The stage pool was on the other side of Slider Mountain and multicolored lights framed the central complex of slides from behind. For a moment Pete saw it as a mass of snakes piled on top of each other in orgiastic copulation. Humidity seeped into his lungs and coated his skin, making his button down shirt and jeans cling.

  His ears were already pounding as he walked into the gloom. Pete had to wonder whether it was safe to have large, open bodies of water for the intoxicated partygoers to stumble into and drown. Then again, he was here to investigate contaminants in the water that his girlfriend suspected caused some kind of insanity.

  The three skirted around a few pools and made their way under Slider Mountain. Bryan put himself between Pete and Liz as they walked three abreast. The constant power games were grating. Pete wondered, with some guilt, what Liz was staying in Jersey for. They’d had a great afternoon together, so why did he feel insecure? Pete shook his head doing his best to ignore jealous sentiments. It was probably nothing.

  As they walked past a rack of inner tubes, Pete looked up at the bottom of Slider Mountain and the nest of pipes and couplings that ran the contraption. Here was the belly of the beast. From underneath the concourse of slides, their view of the walls of the building was obscured. Dropping in from the left and ending in front of them was an enormous slide, bright red and probably able to carry several people at a time. Judging from the lights beaming from beyond the slide, the concert stage was just on the other side.

  “… the hell is with the music?” Liz shouted, and it didn’t take long for Pete to realize what she meant. Dubstep was incomprehensible to Pete, especially pirate-themed dubstep. Even he could tell that the booming bass skipped awkwardly as though the DJ had passed out on the turntable.

  The three were about to skirt the bend of the red slide when a shrieking girl in a ludicrous pink one-piece bathing suit rounded the corner. Her momentum carried her astray and the three could only watch as her bare feet went out from under her. She fell forward to the concrete with a fleshy slap.

  Pete, Liz, and Bryan were so thoroughly shocked they didn’t have time to react to what was behind her.

  Hot on her heels was a man who was momentarily silhouetted by the pulsing lights, an animated shadow of aggression and violence. Pete could just make out that he was wearing green shorts before he aggressively tackled the girl’s fallen body. The skimpy bathing suit did nothing to protect her and bare skin scraped against the hard floor. The man in the green swimsuit began to pull at her hair while pummeling her head and shoulders. He leveraged himself by pressing his knees into her lower back. The girl’s shrieks intensified as she was battered by the man. “ME!” the man shouted, “SAY you’re SORRY to ME!” Pete watched as the crazed man raised a fist high, preparing to brutally hammer his victim’s head.

  Pete wasn’t a black belt but had been in a few scuffles with plenty of sparring practice. Years of training at Wushu Shaolin Studios had prepared Pete for a fight, but for him, martial arts were learned for the purpose of not using it. He made a decision as the man’s fist crashed into the back of the young woman’s neck, eliciting another pained cry. He didn’t get involved in domestic disputes but watching the girl get brutalized was too much to bear.

  Adrenaline surged. Pete’s brain rocketed to a heightened state of pugnacious alacrity and he threw himself into action. Closing the distance and squaring his feet, he pulled his knee up. Kung fu pulled power from the ground, and he crunched his torso into the kick in perfect form. Bringing his foot down to smash into the man’s shoulder and neck with a kick he’d practiced thousands of times until it was quicker than the eye. The assault paused as the man crumpled under the blow. Pete squared for another kick, but hesitated momentarily at what he saw.

  An eyeball, encrusted with something that looked like half-baked cake batter, had been forced out of the man’s face by Pete’s kick. The eye and its nerve bundle twitched as the organ seemed to try and swivel to look at him. Pete saw muscles tense and could tell the man was going to spring. The attacker’s movements were all unfocused energy and allowed Pete to anticipate the man launching from a crouched position towards Pete’s midriff.
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  When it came to martial arts, weed has always been a performance enhancing drug. Rather than slowing his reaction time, it made the movements feel sublimely fluid. Striking down with one hand and pulling up with the other, a move that Sifu had said came from Aikido, he put the man into a spin. The momentum threw him to the hard concrete behind Pete. A hearty snap was the sound of a forearm breaking. The forward motion of Pete’s move caused the man’s face to grind into the pavement, leaving a moist smear of skin and blood. Tattered remains of the hanging eyeball stared back at Pete accusingly. Checking and seeing Liz safe and fumbling with her purse, he craned his neck to see Bryan standing over the sobbing girl, gawking.

  “Bryan,” Pete said sternly, pointing. “Help the girl out.”

  In the heat of the moment, he remembered Kyle saying that the key to the stressful, rapidly unfolding situation was not to freeze. It was critical that you do something. Giving Bryan a job to do would get him working with Pete in common purpose.

  Against what, though?

  Pete squared himself with the assailant, who was trying to lift himself up with a broken arm. Instead of leveraging his weight, the arm twisted the wrong way and the crazed man collapsed in a scream of pain.

  “Hey!” Pete shouted, “Don’t get up!”

  What in the world was the guy doing? He decided Liz was really on to something. Blood spurted from the compound fracture, where a sharp, red sliver of fractured bone had jammed itself through the skin. Giving a final shudder, the man laid still and unconsciousness. Heart pounding and mind racing at the severity of the violence he’d just inflicted, Pete walked over slowly, still on guard. He stopped short when he heard a deep, wordless bellow and Liz cry out, “Crap!”

  The unholy noise came from a huge man with dark hair and a dark complexion. He was at least six and a half feet tall, well over two hundred and fifty pounds, his t-shirt proclaiming, “FUCK THE POLICE”. The swelling of his eyes was even worse, engorging one side of his face. Sweat dripped from his chin while neck and shoulder muscles twitched and convulsed.

  To Pete’s horror, the huge man started toward Liz, but grunted as Bryan threw himself in between. Pete sprang toward the melee as Bryan struggled against an opponent with at least thirty pounds on him. Large hands clutched at the lifeguard’s throat, grasping for purchase to choke. The look in the man’s eyes was frenetic, crazed, and focused on crushing the life from Bryan.

  Pete closed the distance and aimed a sweeping kick at the big man’s knee. Sifu had said that it only takes three pounds of force to severely injure or cripple the leg joint. His training meant more than a few pounds were behind a roundhouse kick, he’d practiced for years. The shin was the weapon, a bone close to the surface, hard and unyielding.

  With savage force his kick bent the man’s knee inward, ligaments twisting and snapping under the skin. A groan of pain interrupted the grunts and strange curses of the massive man, who pushed Bryan away and flailed toward Pete. Bryan’s falling body tangled up Pete’s legs and Pete felt himself go off balance, momentarily unable to respond to the huge meaty hands that were trying to push him to the ground. A smell, slightly floral like rotten cantaloupe, overpowered the smell of chlorine. If he wasn’t about to be thrown to the ground, Pete would have gagged.

  A knife flashed once, twice, three times, glinting silver, and then red. The last stab ended with a twist and a pull that tore a substantial hole into the man’s back. Dark blood gushed onto Bryan. His terrified face was now covered in gore and his red beard soaked with blood. The knife attack from Liz caused the grip on Pete’s shoulder to relax. He wrapped the man’s arm in his own, and with a quick pull across his chest, snapped the humerus. The man barely made a noise but shuddered in pain. Using the broken arm as leverage, he bent the man over and brought his knee up at the same time.

  The kneecap met the man’s face with a meaty crunch and threw him backwards. Pete helped him to the ground with a palm strike to the face. Nose and mouth in ruin, holes in his lungs, the man’s vocalizations were mere gargling. His stand against law enforcement was completely stained by blood. He bled out in seconds, writhing and shivering into stillness at Pete’s feet.

  A strange calm spread over Pete. The bass became a sensation in the soles of his feet rather than his ears. He thought so anyway. Sifu would have told him he did the just thing, right? What had just happened was in the defense of loved ones, Liz, and innocents, Bryan and a crying girl.

  “Are you okay?” Liz asked, putting a blood-soaked hand on his arm. Her eyes were haltingly calm despite her clothes being speckled with red.

  Studying malaria had given Pete a casual familiarity with the cardiovascular systems of the human body. He knew blood intimately when it was magnified and, most importantly, controllable. If a certain sample of blood didn’t serve its immediate purpose in the lab, the slide was tossed and another slid in for Pete to squint into the microscope again. Much of the time blood was a liquid only in the abstract sense. It was more of a painters’ medium, a two dimensional rendering. Far from uniform, it was instead an organized chaos of various cells. Some native and others foreign, the cells undulate and squirm past one another, carried about by currents caused not by lunar tides, but by muscular action.

  Now splattered all over his girlfriend’s shirt, it had a third dimension. His body’s visceral reaction to the sight gave it yet another, more cerebral aspect.

  Her touch yanked him out of his reverie. “Yeah, thanks, he almost had me there,” Pete replied.

  “Same. I’m just glad I carry this,” she said, acknowledging the bloodied knife in her hand. Pete nodded, not sure how to reply.

  Bryan, who had slid a few feet away from the carnage, was resting on his knees. Liz’s coworker tried to croak out a word but violent coughs erupted through his damaged throat. Liz herself had walked over to the girl victimized by the earlier attack, still sobbing where she lay on the wet concrete floor. Cool as a cucumber, his girlfriend put a hand on the shoulder of the crying girl, whispering something in a comforting tone. He noted that Liz’s other hand still held the bloody knife tight.

  Pete lifted Bryan to his feet. The bigger man wheezed with the effort. “Come on you did good, but we need to stay alert. I don’t know what’s going on,” Pete said. Bryan nodded, still unable to speak. Pete glanced over at the guy in green swim trunks, who remained face down on the floor. Something foul was happening in the water park and he knew that Liz’s instinct was dead on once again.

  Liz and Pete’s gaze’s met, and they exchanged a knowing look. He nodded, understanding what had to happen next. Stepping around the crying girl and the waterslide, he went for a look at the concert stage.

  Above the churning pool, the stage was empty. The DJ’s setup was now a mess of broken records and equipment. Bright stage lights flitted over floating corpses, illuminating an eerie scene made terrifying by those who were still alive to view it. From a distance, Pete couldn’t make out who was infected and who wasn’t, but he wasn’t about to wait around and find out. The closest fight to him was already decided, where a woman in a bikini angrily held someone under water even though there was no sign of resistance. Other battles raged on. People were slipping and falling, throwing punches and drowning one another. The water itself became a weapon. What remained of the music, remnants of the full electronic arrangement the DJ was paid to perform, gave the scene a vulgar, grating soundtrack. The sounds were so loud and jarring, overpowering all the ambient noise, that the scene resembled a silent picture. Not in black and white, but in brilliant, dazzling colors with the stage lights moving to their own beat.

  Backtracking slowly, Pete tried to avoid drawing any attention. The water was the vector that much was certain. Liz had said the water park was cutting corners. Ambient heat and the moisture contained in the building created a perfect breeding ground for all manner of contagion. And that was with chemical treatments, let alone without. Orifices had been inundated with the toxic water. The filthy pool facilitated the sprea
d of the disease.

  Heart pounding with alarm at the escalating situation, Pete tried to consider what was going on here. Years in the lab had taught him the importance of an investigative methodology, a series of steps to take before coming to a conclusion. In some ways, it wasn’t dissimilar from kung fu training, where technique was drilled over and over again in order to fix a certain outcome. Both mental processes, martial and scientific, synthesized after years of coexistence. Symptoms were feral rage combined with the discharge of the eyes. Some kind of swelling of the brain could cause that, perhaps encephalitis?

  The infection could very well be protozoan: however a parasite that spread this quickly was unusual and in a word supernatural. Scientific method, normally a passive tool, now barged its way into in Pete’s thought process, demanding he interrogate that word. The concept that anything could be beyond natural was nearly indecent, offensive to the method that guided his mode of inquiry. But there was no time to investigate his thoughts. He had come here for a purpose.

  Taking the empty plastic container from his pocket, Pete carefully leaned down to dip it in the water. He watched the figures in the pool warily. Hurriedly, he capped the bottle while making as little contact with the water as possible. Managing to get the cap on without getting his hands wet, he dried a few drips off the side of the container with his pant leg. It would have to do.

  Out of sight of the watery slaughter, the area behind the bend in the slide was enjoying a moment of sanity. Liz had gotten the crying girl up and talking. Her black hair was matted with blood and she was shaky on her legs, but Liz had her moving slowly back under Slider Mountain.

  “Come on, sweetie, you got this,” Liz said to the girl quietly. “We’re just going to move one step at a time, okay?” The girl whimpered, but moved a little faster. Bryan stood in a daze, rubbing his neck absently.