It was a spooky story, and Phil would nod his head as if to suggest he had witnessed the horror first-hand. His grandfather had told him about it, claiming he’d heard all about it from an uncle who’d rode down from Bell County to assist in the recovery effort. As a child, it was like some black-and-white movie in his mind. A fiction. After Phil had been living there awhile and got to know the pieces of the island that still harkened back to that era as well as the descendants of survivors, it became much more of a real thing to him.
When Katrina came and went and the news stories began talking about residents of New Orleans “getting past it,” Phil knew these were just words. People weren’t going to be over that for a very long time.
After making a quick run through driving rain to the gas station for cigarettes (evoking “islander privilege” long after the proprietor had placed an “outta smokes!” sign in the window), Phil wandered down to the beach to look at the receding ocean. Having stood in a similar spot for a couple of other big storms, he knew that the surge on this one would really be something. Fifteen feet? Twenty? He figured his house would be fine, as it was up on eighteen-foot pylons. If the surge reached twenty-two or twenty-three feet, he might get flooded out, but the house wouldn’t be carried away.
When he got to the waterline, the sight was like something out of an alien invasion flick. Rather than blue, the sky was a bruise, all purple, yellow, and a sick gray-green. This was almost blocked out by a broad wall of swirling white clouds that ran the length of the entire horizon. The clouds were uniform in height, low on the water, and had was looked like a black-gray brush riding under them. indicating just how much rain was pouring down out of the them.
“Hell’s bells,” Phil muttered.
He wandered back up to his shack, climbed the steps, and stripped off his wet shirt and shoes before considering a nap. There’d be no fishing today or tomorrow, though by tomorrow night he imagined the beach would be littered with the soon-to-be rotting carcasses of thousands of unfortunate fish. A waste.
He went to pour himself a glass of water from the front dispenser on the refrigerator, ignoring the glowing “replace filter” indicator for the three-hundredth time. A dollop of water spit itself into his waiting glass followed by an oily black discharge that sluiced down in a sticky trail.
“Gross,” he murmured, turning the glass over in his sink.
As he watched it slither down the drain, he got annoyed. Oil coming up through the water lines meant there was already a pipe broken somewhere and it had already leaked into the Galveston Reservoir. This would be a priority for the city repairmen, but would be a bitch to repair. In fact, that could about be the last glass of water he’d draw out of a tap for a week.
He felt an odd burning sensation and looked down at his finger. He saw that when he’d dumped the glass, a drop of the oil had stayed on his skin. He hadn’t cut himself, so he wasn’t sure why it was burning, but he turned on the kitchen faucet to wash it off regardless. Unfortunately, it only spit out more of the oil-and-water mixture, which had the effect of scalding his finger even worse.
“Shit!”
He shut off the tap, went back out his front door, and hopped down to the sand below, dragging his fingers through the wet sand to get it off. As the rain came down around him, he tried to scrub the oil off his fingers but found it near-impossible. The burning sensation only got worse and seemed to spread.
Cursing the whole way, he climbed back up into his shack to find a rag to wipe it off. He went straight to a kitchen drawer, dug around for a clean dish towel, and settled on a potholder. Using it like a scouring pad, he tore at his irritated fingers and finally managed to transfer the smear of now-sandy oil from skin to cloth.
“Jesus,” he exclaimed, relieved.
He was looking around for his cigarettes when he was raised three feet off the ground and thrown into the living room. He would’ve made a clean landing, too, as his trajectory was taking him directly to the sofa, except that his television was rolled out a little from the place where it normally stood. His face smacked into it, sending him smashing through a cheap wicker coffee table.
“Gnnnnh,” Phil groaned, looking up at his ceiling.
For a moment, he thought he’d tripped or slipped on something. Anything that would explain how he got from one side of the shack to the other in so short an amount of time. But then he was lifted up again, as if unwittingly battling an invisible wrestler in a decidedly one-sided bout. He was thrown a second time, this time bashing into his closed bathroom door, cracking it down the middle.
As Phil sank to the floor, he realized that the throbbing in his ankle was because it was broken. He tried to focus his eyes well enough to see who was attacking him.
That’s when he was attacked a third and final time. Rather than being thrown, his unseen assailant drove itself towards Phil’s throat with such force that it first cut off his air and then broke his neck.
Winded, incredulous and dying, Phil found himself looking back towards the sink. The tap was off, but oily liquid was descending out of the faucet. It rapidly filled the sink and began washing onto the floor. Phil’s eyes went wide as the liquid glided across the floor, reached his left foot, and began to eat.
• • •
Alan sat at a table in a small conference
