Dean Carter - Blood Water

‘Are you serious?’ James pulled out of the car park and headed up the hill past the small woodland path where Sean sometimes walked with his friends.

‘Yeah, but I think I must have hallucinated it… I mean, it doesn’t make any sense, it’s mad. And I’ve been seeing some really strange stuff since the… you know.’

‘Yeah, but what if you did see it? We should probably tell the police.’

‘No, it’s OK, I met Mr Phoenix from school when I was walking back to the bridge. I told him what happened. He said he was going to check it out.’

‘Weird thing to hallucinate.’

‘It wouldn’t be a proper hallucination if it made sense though, would it?’

‘I dunno. Shit, is this storm ever going to end?’ The windscreen wipers were on full now, but the rain was so heavy that they were struggling to shift enough water to allow James to see the road ahead. ‘If the bridge is already flooded and the river’s coming up into the town, what’s going to happen if the weather doesn’t ease off soon?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sean replied. ‘But even if the rain did stop now, the shops and houses would still be flooded.’

They both shook their heads in bemusement.

‘Maybe it’s global warming,’ James said. ‘Or maybe it’s just a freak storm.’ He kept moving his head from side to side in order to see through the splashing of the wipers. ‘This guy you saw… did he say anything?’

‘Er, yeah… I think he said "The centre", or something. I don’t know what he meant though.’

‘The study centre maybe?’

It was only then that Sean made the connection between what the man had said and the Lake Byrne Study Centre, where his brother worked part time. It must have been the muddled state his brain had been in since the run.

‘I could check everything’s all right there when I go in to get my stuff,’ James said. ‘You never know, they might be missing someone. It might be the guy you saw.’

‘I really doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘This guy looked like he should have died days ago. He was like a zombie or something. His skin was all yellow and his eyes were red. He had sores all over his skin… and no one should puke black stuff like that.’

‘Jeez, I hope it really was an hallucination.’

‘Yeah. This thing came out of his mouth too. It was like a massive slug or a snake or something. Really gross. Made me turn and run.’

‘I’ll bet. Well, maybe we’ll find out whether what you saw was real when we get to the centre.’

Sean didn’t like the idea. He didn’t want to find it was real. He wanted to believe he’d imagined the whole terrible thing.

A universe of water. The sound was what shocked him most. Above the roar of the current and his own thrashing limbs, there were other sounds – sounds he couldn’t place – sounds that didn’t seem to make any sense. He didn’t know how much oxygen he had in his lungs but it was surely not enough to keep him alive for more than another minute or so. If he’d had more of a warning, he might have been able to take a bigger breath. He refused to believe it didn’t matter any more, that it was irrelevant now. If only he could reach the bank and haul himself out of the raging force that had engulfed him… But that wasn’t his only concern. The thing that was fastened to his face was now moving down over his top lip. He had no idea what it was, or what it wanted, but he wished it would go away.

His lungs were heaving, the pounding in his head was increasing, but he became aware of the bank to his left. As luck would have it, the current seemed to be pushing him towards it; as it came close, he reached out and grabbed a tree root, anchoring himself to it, then pulling himself upwards with every ounce of strength. Up and up, and all at once the dull roar was gone, air and sound exploded around him and he sucked in a huge lungful of air, then another and another; then the water rose up and he got a mouthful of it.

Suddenly the black slug-thing shot into his mouth, making him choke, then clutch his throat; he lost his grip on the root and was pulled back under the water. As he twisted and turned beneath the surface, trying simultaneously to swim to the side and reach into his mouth to find the slug, a strange feeling came over him: a fuzziness, a wave of confusion and something utterly foreign. There was an awful, alien sensation of something moving about in his head, as if someone had reached in a hand and was rummaging around. He was paralysed now, unable to struggle, unable to do anything but drift down towards the river bed, his eyes open, staring, disbelieving, muddy water gushing into his lungs. His head felt like it was expanding, ready to burst at any second from the pressure. Incredibly, however, he didn’t feel like he was dying. Quite the opposite in fact.

The rain let up a little, and James no longer felt he was going to crash at any moment. He slowed down, realizing the lane that led to the research centre would be coming up soon, and kept his eyes on the road ahead. Sean saw it before he did – a huge stretch of water that had collected across the road at the bottom of the hill; it looked deep enough to swallow them whole. James slowed the car further and stopped just short of it.

‘Great. Now what do we do?’

‘We’ve got to go through,’ Sean said.

‘We could get stuck though… Engine could get flooded.’

‘We can’t go back. This is the only way to get home.’

And then, to limit their choices even further, a van drove up behind them, blocking their retreat.

‘Oh well,’ James said, glancing in the rear-view mirror. ‘Here we go.’ He eased the accelerator down very gently and the car started to move forward. At first everything seemed fine: the water wasn’t particularly deep, but then the car seemed to dip down. Sean caught movement to his left, and saw a small grey creature, possibly a squirrel, dart up into a tree beside the road. His head throbbed, and as he looked ahead again he was horrified to see that the water was now rising over the top of the car. He cried out to James, who looked at him as though he’d gone mad.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘What do you mean "What’s wrong"? We’re under water! Look!’

James didn’t seem to understand why Sean was panicking. ‘It’s not that deep.’

‘Not that deep? Are you mad?’ Sean could see floating detritus in the water – leaves, bits of twig, even a crisp packet. Bizarrely, a large fish passed by, gazing through the windscreen at them before swimming on. And then, in an instant, the scene dissolved away and they were no longer submerged but driving through the flood as before.

Sean shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I imagined it… I’m sorry.’

‘Jesus, bro, the sooner we get you back home the better.’

James drove on slowly, still worried that the engine might become swamped and give up. Sean looked behind to see that the van was still there, the driver no doubt waiting to see if they made it through before committing himself. Suddenly the water dropped away, and the car was emerging from it. James accelerated carefully. Minutes later a sign for the Lake Byrne Field Study Centre appeared. They soon reached the small car park, and James swung into his usual space. There were quite a few vehicles parked nearby, though they could see no signs of life and no lights shone inside the building even though it was very gloomy.

‘So what exactly do they do here?’ Sean asked. ‘You never really said.’

‘Oh, you know, we do courses on wildlife and lake stuff,’ James replied.

‘Who are the courses for?’

‘Anyone. We do special weekends for members of the public, but we also do research on the fish in the lake too. That’s what I’ve been helping out with— Hey,’ James said, rushing on ahead of Sean. ‘The door’s open. That’s not right.’