Night Swim

Raina walked towards the shore. Her feet were heavy, eyes groggy, toes and head felt numb. It was like her whole body was asleep. Her hair vibrated at the touch. Too many whiteclaws, cans scattered about the sand like wasted shells, illuminating in the moonlight like curdled cream. Z was walking about, in an intoxicated, half-hyped, half-asleep mood. “You feel the ocean, have you gone in yet guys?” Z proclaimed. His laissez faire attitude coupled with the drinks created recklessness. The campfire grown since their arrival at dusk was still alive and roaring.

Z pulled the blanket off of Lenny who lay down in the sand next to Annalise. She rolled back over, red hair collecting grains of the sand dunes. Annalise muttered “Leave us alone Z”. But Z had already ripped off the blanket from above their bodies and was making a beeline for the water. He dove in half-asleep, yelling with obnoxious jeers and taking a two minute break to wade around silently, panting and catching his breath.

Z flapped around, his arms propelled himself deeper into the murky dark blue. The crashing of the waves was more indistinct upon the shore. Annalise slept. Sunglasses over her eyes. Lenny was passed out, no other variable aside from the booze had caused him to fall asleep. It was a calm night too. With the exception of Z’s loud splashing, it was still, and the marks of the white waves rolled gently onto the shoreline.

Raina’s eyes bobbed around, pointing up at the sky. She felt her body unbalanced as she stumbled through the eroding shore, clumps of desert shifting beneath her feet. And she made out Z wading in the shallow end of the water. “What an idiot.” The four of them had come for a night of swimming, and ended up passed out under the stars. Beer in hands. Annalise and Lenny might as well have been at home in their beds, they looked comfortable, cozied up next to one another.

The quiet atmosphere was only penetrated by the distant noise of waves, and the illumination of stars. Raina rubbed her hands along the ground. Her glasses, as dark as it was, could not make out what lay up ahead. Sand, and more grains of sand. She looked up, and fog formed on the beach. A heavy dense thick fog, picking up along the shoreline. A darkness floated back to her. A memory perhaps, the dark fog rolled in were dreams of her father. More fog picking up in the distance. Like a bad dream, her childhood farm home, the darkness grew around her. Raina’s glasses fogged up. She dreamt of her father. A hard-drinking man, passed out in the sheep’s field, bleeding with a serrated shear through his chest. Blood poured on the haystacks. Her eyes darted back up from the inner darkness. The fog receded back into the dark horizon.

Raina’s eyes looked out. She saw someone walking towards her on the beach. Now the grogginess faded. Raina adjusted her spectacles. The figure continued to move forward. It stumbled and shifted forward in the sand. A silhouette emerging from the fog. “Z!” Raina called out to him, but he lay face down and passed out, with water lapping at his hair. “Z!”. The figure walked forward, ominously round headed, tall, thin, Raina could make out the outline of a shirt, a large shirt. She only called for Z louder no, but there was no answer. The figure, it must’ve been a man, started forward for Raina. Now she made a run for it.

She ran along the beach to avoid the figure as it stumbled after her, Raina’s eyes became a figure of flurry and movement. The darkness of the beach and sky, only illuminated by the tiniest stars rendered her nearly blind. The campfire faded, a small spark in the distance, as she ran away from it. The figure stumbled and fell, falling over by Analisse and Lenny. Her heart sank, “what if he got them?” “What if that man is killing them right now? “Or what If he’s doing something far more horrible?” The thoughts raced through her mind, she was unable to think. The only thoughts were carried from her mind to her legs and told her to run. A synergy of blood flow, panic.

The figure approached. It was starting to look like a man, an old, ugly looking man. As he got closer bits of detail like his face would reflect against the moonlight. Now he began to creep forward faster. “Please… come back…” The figure crawled forward. “Please.” “Please, I need to speak to you”. The man sounded scared. But he didn't sound like an old man, he sounded like a young man, a young man with an infection, or some kind of disease, his vocal chords sounded ripped to shreds, like he’d swallowed motor oil. Raina didn’t turn around. Paralyzed by fear. But she didn’t move forward.

Now this body stood behind her. She could hear his punctured breath. His words were choked, distorted, and disgruntled. “Please… I’m not going to hurt you… Are you a resident of this beach?”…“Do you live in Seahaven?”. In the sand Raina’s feet slowly turned. She closed her eyes trying to picture what this man would look like. “Your friends are in danger.” The fear consumed her and Raina opened her eyes. Before her was the half-melted man, a deformity of a young man. Raina could make it out, his eyelids and his skin all had the texture of a young man, his uniform was that of a young navy pilot. Like her father. But his hair, his eyes, they might have been beautiful eyes, were misshapen, warped, and peeling, melting off, like oils running down a canvas. Bits of skull visible through pink flesh.

“I’ve come to warn you.” Raina stared. The young soldier, his head mutated, his clothing disheveled, but still precise. Still diligent and focused. He shook in place in fear. Raina saw that fear. “What happened to you?” She asked under her breath. “I got out.” “I got out.” That’s all he kept repeating. Raina walked closer to the man, his face she now noticed had a deep hole down the side of it, she turned away. But still was consistent in her question. “Can you tell me what’s happened to you? Are you a soldier?” The soldier’s eyes darted at her in fear. Bloodshot, the pupils ran red, with veins forming at the bottom, blood, tears, salivation ran from them. He cried. Blood coughing out of his mouth. Raina backed away. “Dear lord.”

The soldier’s eyes became black holes, shriveling away, craters in his face. He resigned to rest on the sand, the shore lapping behind him. He leaned back and reached into his jacket pocket. “Take this”. He garbled. His hand shook as he reached in and removed something, something that Raina thought might be a photograph or a government identification. She couldn't make it out, but it was definitely the uniform of a local army unit of infantrymen. The man’s fist was crumpled, gloved, but blood and sweat ran through it. He grabbed Raina’s hand from the ground, and opened his palm. He dropped a heart shaped locket into the sand.

“This was Diana’s.” The soldier rested his head in the sand, choking, and still breathing. Raina held up the heart-shaped locket. “Who does this belong to, your wife?” The man coughed up more blood, tears forming. They slowly began to bubble, he closed his eyes, burning from the pain. “She was with me when it happened.” He cried. “When it got out.” Now the waves behind them were lapping calmer. Almost as if they had slowed down. The soldier lay there, his distorted face collecting with tears. “I had a boy too.” It grew darker, and the lights in the sky seemed to shut off, the stars burning out. “They shouldn't have been there, but I wanted to get them out before it was too late.” “I wanted to get them somewhere safe, like the bunker across the ridge”

Raina looked at him deeply. “And what happened to them.” The soldier cried, despite his many wounds which she thought would physically render him from crying or making her hear it. “They got killed first by it.” The soldier lay bleeding on the beach. A mortally wounded man. A cold blood rain through Raina. She dreamt of her father, drunk and fallen over on an eleven inch blade he used to sweep sugarcane. She remembered his cold blood shot eyes as he looked into hers. The eyes of a dying man. Raina stared down at the dying soldier. And remembered her life.

Looking up at her bright moon Raina ran back to her camp. She didn’t look back once at the twitching soldier who was dying under the moon. She ran back through the darkness, her bare feet scraping on rocks and shells, sloshing through the dark cold water. She guided herself along the curves of the shoreline, her eyes glancing up at the moonlight. She ran forward, hoping to get towards the camp with everyone.

“Z, where are you?” The water had been lapping more quietly now. She darted forward, sprinting to the shore. “Annalise?” There was just silence up ahead. Until, Raina flipped forward. She fell, her foot bending over something, She could feel it on her legs and she crashed into the wading mud. The water ran over her torso, but her legs were lifted above something large. She got an odd cold feeling in her gut. Raina flipped over and kicked her feet in the air. She brought them down to her side and splashed up in the water. Shaking her hair away from her face. She couldn't find her glasses. They were somewhere in the darkness in the water.

She felt around for what she had tripped over. And she felt a body. She moved backwards in fright, nearly tripping over again. But she looked over, and felt the shirt, she felt the hair. It was Z. His body sweltered and bloated in the sea. She screamed and dropped him back into the ocean. She ran up to the beach, the dying campfire illuminating her way. The two bodies were blurry masses half covered by a blanket. She bent down, swept the blanket off.

There was a foul odor and two bodies marred with blood and the stench of disease and death. She could see their blackened cratered eyes. Annalie’s glasses had melted into her eyes. “Oh god help us”. Raina cried. She backed away. And she ran down towards the shore, helplessly. All she thought of was her feet dashing through the shoreline to keep her mind off the faces.

“What did that man do to them?” She sloshed her feet forwards in the water, her adrenaline spiking. She would keep running until there was no end in sight. But she heard the faint coughing of the dying soldier. She walked up towards him. The soldier’s eyes were blank, and stared up at the sky. “My friends are all gone.”

“They’re gone,” he said. He repeated it. “They’re gone”. Raina protested angrily. “What are you talking about? Make some sense. My friends are dead”.

“And they’re coming.”

He looked at Raina with dead intent. The man with no eyes spoke.

“They are coming.”

The soldier looked up.

“They are coming from another world”. Raina’s eyes filled with tears. “A world we didn’t have the right to barge into. There’s many doors you can break down, cover back up, this isn’t one of them”

The soldier pointed towards the far end of the beach, over the ridge. “Go now.”

Raina looked at the soldier who was covered in shadow. He commanded. “Go!”

She took off. Not looking back. The stars were illuminated above her, but she ran through darkness, using the shoreline to guide her, along the desolate beach.