Free Empire Of Salt by Weston Ochse Page B

fish, beer cans, red plastic cups and all manner of trash floated in the tide.
    Gertie played her light back and forth, acutely aware of the sounds around her.
    Fear crept along her spine as she imagined things in the darkness, silent deadly things, watching her as she walked the tide line.
    It sounded like a fish surfacing, or something slapping the water with the palm of its hand.
    But her light found nothing but dead sea.
    She heard someone calling in the distance. Although she couldn't make out the words, she thought it sounded like Obediah , which meant they still hadn't found the boy. Gertie heard a great slurping sound and almost jumped out of her skin, even though she recognized it as Sump Pump #2.
    She chuckled and pushed her hair back, then stuck the baseball bat under her arm as she rearranged her pony tail. She decided that she'd give it a few more yards, then return to the restaurant. She'd already done more than was necessary, and out here alone, she didn't know what might happen.
    The beam of Gertie's flashlight swept past something white and filmy. She stopped and adjusted the light, circling until she saw what looked like the blind, cataracted eye of an immense dead fish.
    As she stepped closer flies erupted from the seaweed to buzz madly about the beam of the torch, making it almost impossible to see. She waived a hand to clear away the pests and stepped closer to examine her find. What she saw, however, wasn't the eye of a fish but a human.
    She inhaled sharply.
    Oh my God, she thought. Was this Obediah? Had the poor boy drowned?
    She turned and glanced behind her, wondering if she should call out. She returned her gaze to the head and tried to make out the features, plus see where the rest of the body lay. But everything was too obscured by the seaweed, the trash and the way the light played off the surface of the water.
    Then, for a moment, Gertie could have sworn that the eye blinked. Suddenly she wondered if Obediah might still be alive.
    The eye blinked again. This time she saw it.
    Or was it the waves pushing it open and closed?
    She stepped into the surf and was now close enough to see yellow ichors seeping from the thing's neck.
    What kind of person has yellow blood?
    Then she saw it in all its gory reality. The thing beneath the water couldn't possibly be Obediah. It was too old. It had the face of a middle-aged man. The neck was all but severed from the body. The head hung by only by a few pieces of skin. The spinal cord had been shattered and swayed like a broken rope in the water. The skin was a mottle of greens. The blood wasn't simply yellow but seemed to glow in the water.
    This must have been what she'd seen run across the street.
    Then it hit her. All the rumors were true , even those far-fetched things that Andy had been spouting to the other drunks in the restaurant when he thought she and Maude weren't paying attention. Gertie tried to step back but found she couldn't move her foot. Looking down, she saw why and screamed. A hand had wrapped around her ankle, green and gray tinged skin, yellowing nails that, even as she watched, pierced the flesh of her foot and slid against her ankle bone.
    She screamed again before she was jerked off her feet. She landed hard against the sand, the back of her head slamming the ground. Air left her in a whoosh . The flashlight and bat went flying.
    Another hand gripped her leg. First one tug, then another and another and Gertie was all the way in the water. She felt teeth slide against her skin and screamed hysterically and breathlessly. Teeth bit into her thigh and ripped away a huge chunk of flesh. They tore in again and again, each time ripping and shredding. When it hit her femoral artery, she screamed a final time, then was pulled beneath the tide. The red of her blood mingled with the yellow of the creature, resulting in a wide, orange slick that held together for a moment, before being washed under by the tide.

 

    A bigail wasn't sure how much