Black Flag

short horror

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

Josie’s ears filled with the crackling background sound of the ocean, and as the heavy water rolled over her head she felt free for a moment, light and loose-limbed. She let her neck wobble under the pressure from the wave. And then she kicked something.

She knew immediately that it was Something. Not a rock or a clump of seaweed, but something that wasn’t meant to be there.

She doubled over and opened her eyes into the solid green water. Grains of sand like static blurred anything more than a few inches away. She swept her hands through the murk, her fingers blanched in watery sunlight, trying to grab whatever it was before the waves sucked it away. Her neck prickled. She didn’t know what she hoped to find.

She bumped it, then finally wrapped her fingers around it. Hard rubber, pillowy fabric: a sneaker. When she pulled her hand back through the silt she saw a bony ankle sticking out of the top. A skinny leg leading off into the gloom. Her heart beat hard. Julio.

She pulled the leg and it suddenly kicked out, jerking against her grip. He was alive! She grabbed his calf with both hands, dragging him towards her, dragging them both toward the surface. Her lungs burned.

Julio’s face swam into view. His skin was bloated, hazel eyes bulging, hands windmilling wildly. He clawed her collarbones and pushed her down into the depths, climbing her body like a ladder in a desperate dash for air.

Even though he was half her size, he had the immeasurable strength of a drowning person. Josie’s chest began to spasm as the last air left her lungs in a sheet of bubbles. The impulse to inhale was overpowering. She reached for his head, her training taking over. She needed to immobilize him, or he would kill them both.

Her fingers found a lock of his hair, slick with ocean slime. She wrapped it around her hand and yanked him back, turning his body away from her. Looping her arms underneath his, she interlaced her fingers behind his head, locking him in a hold, and kicked for the surface.

They broke through. Josie coughed, fresh air stinging her lungs. She blinked against the salt and began to swim for shore.

But Julio, locked in her arms, disintegrated, his limbs coming undone from the whole, one by one. She tried to catch an arm as it floated across the waves, but as she did Julio’s head rocked forward off his neck, landing face down with a splash. Inside the stump of his neck Josie saw a nest of scuttling crabs, dozens of legs and claws picking away at his flesh from the inside.

She woke up with a searing pain in her chest, the feel of that sneaker on her fingertips.

---

Thigh-deep in the surf, Josie linked arms with Seth on one side and Hendricks on the other. The water was as warm as it would be all year, but her muscles felt cold and stiff, her bones heavy as lead. The Atlantic hissed and growled, spitting salty mist and hurling sloppy breaks at the trio.

The lifeguards fanned out perpendicular to the shore, and began trudging through shifting wet sand and relentless waves, their bodies the teeth in a giant human rake. Hendricks, at just under six feet tall, was submerged to his waist. Beneath the cloudy surface they dragged their feet, sweeping for a sign. Any sign would do, but finding a whole body would mean they could go home.

Julio Acevedo had disappeared from Watson Beach two days ago. He was ten years old, with skinny arms, skin the color of a wet sandcastle, and hazel eyes that burned out of his school photo— the one his mom had given to the cops and they had flashed to the lifeguards in turn.

As if lifeguards needed to know what his face looked like.

The September rip tide pulled at Josie’s legs— a steady, swirling pressure as insidious as it was insistent. It was as if the ocean knew that Labor Day had come and gone, as if the Atlantic itself had struck a bargain with the naked apes. After lapping sleepily all summer, welcoming swimmers with pats on the back, September was when the sea reclaimed itself, clawing at the sand with white-peaked waves, thirsting to suck late-season swimmers into the void.

“Let’s find this crab food so we can go home,” Hendricks barked at them.

Rod Hendricks was too old to be a summer lifeguard. Muscular, with a square head, his bronze chest and arms were speckled with black stubble. He was an ex-marine or something— the younger lifeguards all speculated about him— and a surprisingly inelegant swimmer, heavy and flailing during water tests. But his lanyard was stacked with the black beads they were awarded for rescuing people, and he had a way of barking orders they all listened to.

Josie felt his sandpaper skin against her arm and suppressed a snarl. Two days ago she had opened her eyes to his hard angled pecs in her bed, plastic and shiny in the dawn. He had shaved his arms in her shower, a scene she found so revolting she left him to lock up her apartment himself. She swallowed it like bile, closing her eyes behind her sunglasses to block the whole thing out.

The summer was supposed to be over; she shouldn’t have had to see Hendricks again.

“Dude, you’ve got it all wrong,” Seth shouted over the waves. His broad swimmer’s chest rose and fell with the effort of staying upright in the break. He was a hair taller than Josie, but also lazier, so he took the shallowest spot in the line.

“We’re getting time-and-a-half for this shit! We should be going as slow as possible. Maybe a couple more kids’ll drown while we’re out here.” He laughed his high-pitched laugh.

“Seth, please shut the fuck up,” Josie said through clenched teeth. She considered kicking his leg out from under him. “I’ve had to listen to your bullshit for —”

“Roller!” Hendricks yelled, interrupting her tirade and ducking his head under a big swell.

Josie ducked too, dropping both their arms, glad for the respite. The summer had been punishing, hot and hard, and it should have been over days ago, but they’d agreed to stay on to help find Julio. Other teams of lifeguards were combing the beach between jetties, methodically sweeping the surf for Julio’s little body. Divers searched a grid farther out.

This effort, though it weighed heavily on her, made her feel like part of something important. Watson Beach Search and Rescue. She would return to classes a couple days late, humbled by the burden of her Very Important job, maybe with a story to tell about the moment they found him. While she knew somewhere in the back of her mind they would not be rescuing Julio after two days, she hoped the recovery would fall to someone else.

And then, in the two seconds she was submerged under the swell, she kicked it. Something in the waves, inorganic, hard and soft. Just as it had been in her dream.

She swept her arms back and forth, hoping she had imagined it. But as soon as her fingers grazed it she knew, the tactile sensation was so exact. She grabbed on, despite herself, then found her feet and stood. She sputtered then shouted “spot!” — code to alert the line that they’d found something without raising the curiosity of stragglers on the beach.

She looked down at her shaking hands and saw she was holding a black Nike, half full of sand. Her skin rippled with goosebumps.

Josie turned the shoe over and seawater poured out, followed by a river of sludge. The boys stopped where they were standing, as if she was holding a severed limb. She stood in the whitewater alone, the little shoe not a dream but something so real in her hands.

Its black lace was knotted twice, a double bow impervious even to sand and sea, and Josie saw Julio tying it tight, his little legs running out on the slick jetty after dusk, his rubber soles wobbling on uneven stones. She saw a seagull taking flight just out of his reach, heard its teasing caw. She saw the boy squatting down to inspect a ripped fishing net tangled in the rocks, dark hair ruffling in the wind, one little finger tracing a mussel shell.

Then a September wave, full of all the hunger and swirling madness the ocean could hold, grabbed his knobby ankle and pulled him under. Brine filled his nose and mouth, smothering the cry before he could muster it. Josie coughed and spit up a stream of cloudy sea. She looked to Hendricks, panic in her eyes.

But Rod’s eyes were Julio’s, hazel and shrieking. In her mind, she saw the rip tide curl like a constrictor around Julio’s ribs, little bones striped across his narrow back. It dragged him out, deep into the belly of the ocean, where his thrashing only tightened the grip. A cool, wet mist zipped up behind him, like he was never even there.

“Check the jetty,” Josie croaked, her voice hoarse and scratchy with salt. Hendricks high-kneed through the surf toward her.

“Did you see something? Is it him?”

Josie felt Julio’s panic and her heart surged as he clawed for the surface, white water blocking his view of the sun. His mind in her mind reeled with cartoon images of great white sharks, but it was only the ocean he should have feared, it’s unending hunger for things on land.

She tasted the iron tang of his fear, watched his little sneaker snag on the rocks and his socked foot slip out.

She thought of his mother, pressing a thumb onto the toe of the Nike, checking there was room to grow.

Stay off the jetty, Julio, she begged him. But it was much too late.

Hendricks dived into a wave and swam toward the jetty, his strange loping stroke like he was tackling the surf on a football field. Josie stumbled onto the sand, waving the shoe over her head in the direction of the lifeguard station.

“Call the divers! Tell them to sweep the jetty,” she panted, before falling onto her hands and knees, overwhelmed by the new signals in her brain. Seth stood frozen, mouth open, tan skin gone ash.

She sat on the sand, the shoe in her hands like a relic, as a couple uniformed police officers jogged out to her. She watched the big white police boat cutting wake back to the jetty.

Then the police were with her, their black boots kicking up sand. They pulled the shoe out of her grip and dropped it into a paper evidence bag, where it landed with a dry crackle. Evidence of what, she wondered. The Atlantic Ocean kidnapped a child? The September tides committed a murder?

After a few minutes, Josie saw a diver’s hooded head pop out of the water, his hand raised. A body bag was passed over the side of the boat, and Josie watched them drag it through the waves and disappear below. Over the radio, she heard a crackle, then a gravelly voice.

“Pretty sure this is the kid, L.T. We got him.” The divers passed the bag, now heavy, over the side of the boat. It was hauled in like a fishing net, water draining from the feet.

One cop clapped the other on the back. She answered on the radio.

“I imagine he looks pretty bad Cap. You sure it’s him?”

“Diver says right size, hair color, skin color. Eyelids and lips pretty much gone. Crabs like the peely parts, you know how it is.”

Josie tasted acid. She looked out at the boat but a black dot in the waves caught her eye. She watched as it was carried in on a pillow of white foam and deposited neatly ashore.

A black Nike.

Then another one washed up next to it. She pointed, but couldn’t find words.

“L.T., you seeing this?” The gravelly voice came back over the radio. Josie heard the cop say “what the,” and she got to her feet, sand clinging to her wet skin like fur.

The cop fumbled with her radio and dropped it in the sand.

A dozen black sneakers dotted the beach, more arriving with every crash. Seconds later, there were a hundred, the waves throwing up black Nikes like a person spitting watermelon seeds. Soon the tide line was fringed with them.

Josie stumbled into the surf, arms out to her sides, and waded through the black current. The ocean spray tasted mineral and ancient, but it seethed with the sharp smell of rubber and nylon, a sloppy, immiscible brew of element and ersatz. The rip nudged her calves.

She grabbed a shoe as it floated by on a current of shoes, black laces double knotted on each. She saw Julio tying those knots, over and over and over again.