Dark Meridian

Evangeline Cross did not want to die.

There was too much left to do. Too many questions without answers. But the ocean had its own agenda and right now it was doing its damnedest to drag her down into the inky blackness below. No time to think. Just beat at the waves. Keep the head up. Don't swallow the ocean. There was so much water.

The rain wasn't helping. It had come out of nowhere. There was no build, no warning, just suddenly there. The heavy drops hammering her head and arms like rocks. The darkness had hit the same way. One moment dusk, the next nothing, as if the sun had decided not to exist anymore.

Swim, Evie. Swim!

She had no idea how long she'd been in the water. The ship had gone down fast. No stars above to gauge anything by, no lights anywhere, just the black water and the black sky and the rain trying to drive her under.

Her arms were burning. Legs too. Stop and drown or keep going and drown slower. There wasn’t many choices to be had.

The wave was strong and came from behind and her head went under. Her lungs burned as she hadn’t had a chance to suck in air and the panic was burning through what little oxygen she had left.

Her eyes were drawn downwards in her frantic kicking to reach back to the surface. Below her, in the black something moved. Large. Impossibly large but moved in a way her mind could not process. Air!

She kicked back to the surface and didn't look down again. She couldn’t look down it again. If it was coming from her, she didn’t want to see it get her. Drowning started to seem like the better option.

***

Sand in her mouth. Coarse. Gritty.

Her fingers were moving before her brain caught up, dragging, clawing, pulling herself forward through something solid. The beach. She was on the beach! She didn't know how. Didn't matter. She had to keep moving!

The black sand scratched at every inch of exposed skin. Rain still coming down hard, each drop slamming into the back of her head, trying to push her face back into it. The sand was wet and thick and it moved against her like it was trying to suck her in. It gripped her knees, pulling at the weight of her soaked clothes. The ocean hadn't taken her. Now the beach was having a go.

Her fingers hit something hard.

Not rock. The edge too clean. Too flat.

Concrete.

She pressed her palm against it and felt the seams. Deliberate. Manufactured. It meant someone had been here. It meant someone had built something.

Evie started to laugh. It came out wrong. Too high. Too close to the other thing. It didn’t matter. The ocean and the beach failed to take her.

She pressed her forehead against the concrete, breathed, and passed out.

***

You’re not dead, Evie.

She came back to herself in pieces.

It was the sound first. The rain still fell but it had become lighter. The kind that settled into a gentle patter that one would read or write news articles to. Underneath that sound, water moving over rock somewhere nearby. And under that, at the edge of hearing, something she couldn't name. Not a sound exactly. More like the space where a sound should have been and wasn't.

Then cold. God, she hated the cold. It was that specific cold of wet clothes that had been wet long enough to stop feeling wet and start feeling like skin. Her hair was matted against her face as the bun she had put it up in had failed. There was nothing left to do but open her eyes and pray nothing was going to eat her.

Grey light was what first assailed her eyes. Maybe it was pre-dawn or a sky that didn't intend to get much brighter than this. The rain came down soft and steady through it, dimpling the black sand around her face. She watched it for a moment, the small craters each drop made, the way the sand filled them back in slowly, the dark color of it that didn't match any beach she'd been on.

Black sand. She filed that away.

Her body ran its own inventory while her mind caught up. Hands, present, scraped, the right palm flattened against something hard.

Concrete. She had found concrete before passing out.

Legs were still intact. They were there heavy and she had lost one shoe. Her head was a particular ache taken a wave badly. She breathed deep again to check her lungs. They worked. She was alive.

Alright, Evie. You can’t just lay here. You gotta find shelter or something.

How long had it been since she took any sort of survivalist training? None. Camping was about it and that trip was a cabin. She pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked at where she was.

The beach stretched in both directions, the black sand dark and wet, the rain stippling it in shifting patterns. Behind her, there was vegetation that was dense, dark, the kind that didn't leave gaps. In front, the ocean, flat and black in the grey light. The horizon was nearly invisible do the color of the fog and the sky. It was like the word just didn’t exist that far out.

Move girl. You gotta move. She sat up the rest of the way and pushed her wet hair back from her face only noticing in passing that the dirty blond strands mixed with red. A part of her groused that she didn’t re-dye it like she had planned and then chuckled at the extremely bizarre thought.

What had she grabbed a hold of? Turning and ignoring the groan of her back, she found what it was. It was a wall. Part of one at least. It was maybe four feet of and appeared to be holding back the rest of the place. Retaining wall maybe?

She put her hand flat against it again and pulled herself up and so many of her joints cracked and popped at the effort. She almost past out from exhaustion from the movement. Her limbs were so tired.

It wasn’t just a retaining wall. It was a small road, the asphalt old with grass forcing it’s way through the cracks. Looking left and right, it appeared to run the length of the shore an those dark trees and foliage. Not maintained. Access roads?

There were not yellow lines on it that she would have expect so maybe it was just there to allow beach goers an easy way to access this, strange, black beach.

Why the hell would anyone go here?

That was a problem for another time. She made a mental note that if she found any of her items, she was going to come back to make sketches and notes for an article.

Hefting herself over the retaining wall on to the road was much more of a feet than she wanted to admit. The exercising she had done daily was probably the reason the ocean hadn’t drug her down.

Standing on that road with hands on her hips, she looked both direction, confused trying to decide which direction she should go. The rain hadn’t stopped and she had a concern it would get heavy again.

Don’t want to go through that.

The direction really wasn’t that important. The key was finding civilization. That’s what her dad always said. Beginning to walk, she made her way down the broken asphalt, the crunch of the pieces crackling under her one shoe mixed with the sound of the rain splashing down. Thank god she was starting to feel more human again. It was going to take forever to get her clothes dried.

It was probably about thirty minutes until she was able to see structures in the distance, like the start of low buildings leading into a town.

You can jog the last bit of distance, Evie, she lied to herself. Her legs were still weak and had stated to grow stiff. She only took a few short trots before slowing down again. Was that a lump in the middle of the road? She squinted. Yeah, there was definitely something up ahead but the rain and the hazy gray of the air only made showed it’s dark outline.

Cautiously walking closer, her gut twisted as recognition kicked in. It was a body sitting but slumped forward, arms hanging loosely by their side. She had seen those clothes before. Who was it again?

Richard something or other.

He was some sort of archeologist as part of the scientific cruise. She remembered wondering what could even interest an archeologist as the voyage was about the ocean. She went to call out but a cold stab of fear kicked her gut. The body moved. It looked like he was scooting backwards without moving.

It took way to long before her brain processed that something was pulling him in short, slow bursts towards the forest edge. Instinct told her to run up and help but what she saw rooted her in her track.

Tendrils.

Black, long, and glistening were wrapped around the man’s body and was tugging him along. She could hear the scuff of his clothes against the asphalt.

Breath. You gotta remember to breath! she told herself. Her mind refused to even comprehend what she was seeing. There was no creature on the planet she had ever encountered that had tendrils like that.

Turning around was the only choice at this moment but when she did, she saw something hulking. It was low and wide and it moved like something that had learned to walk from a description rather than from practice.

Oh, god! What was going on here? What were these things? Her mind raced half wanting to learn more for an article but the other out of sheer terror she hadn’t felt since Afghanistan.

Every bit of her screamed to run as the sound of it dragging itself along the pavement finally reached her ears.

Don’t run. Walk. You’re faster than it right now, Evie. she told herself.

Turning back to where the body was, she had found it was gone. Sucking in a breath and holding it, she moved and walked as quickly as she could without making a sound. As she past that spot, the grotesque wet crunching reached her ears from somewhere in the woods. It took everything not to wretch right there.

As soon as she passed the first building and the forest was no longer on her right.

She ran.

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