Quiet waters

Quiet waters

Silent land

The wind became still. The darkness deepened, sounds became silence. The universe was holding its breath and all that was around waited. Life itself seemed to have been sucked out of the whole area. Death, like a dank and deep drain, dragged down everything that had life. After an hour a slight ripple disturbed the surface of the water, so very slowly, like a mountain growing, the ripple became a wave radiating out from a center of such darkness that light itself ceased to exist in it. That most ancient of all creatures, the Kraken, had surfaced to breath. Just one breath every million years it came to take the air, the joy, the life from all within its reach.

Only ten miles away a party was reaching its noisiest and most vibrant crescendo; the dancers became lost in the rhythms, the vodka and champagne were flowing, the cocaine was being shoveled into noses and all was movement noise and mindless activity. The music was from a greatly amplified machine, the dance floor was a stretch of compacted beach and the dancers were all young and beautiful, not a care in the world, or for that world. Further along the beach an isolated bungalow, its frontage jutting out over the sandy shore, was supported on weather beaten wooden posts. The veranda was unpainted, the roof low and made from hard wood shingles, it was small but practical, A jetty reached out into the water and kept the thirty foot fishing boat safe from the endless flow of the waves. The only occupant of the bungalow was a man of uncertain age and even less certain history. The bottle of whiskey was nearly empty and the level of interest in the party noise, lessened with each swallow of the amber liquid. It was the sudden silence that jolted soberness into the man.

The music and sounds of revelry did not just quieten down, they suddenly ceased to have ever existed. The silence of the grave was a disco party compared to this. Suddenly sober but strangely unable to move, unable to think or act, the guy crumpled onto the floor and just lay unable to care or even feel terror. The fringes of the Kraken's absorption of life had barely reached him and so he survived but for a time this was doubtful; the time passed and the effect gradually reduced. He dragged himself to a chair and sat, trying to will some thought into his mind. Dawn came with a brightness that so contrasted with the scenes it uncovered. The water was still and quiet again but a circle of stillness, not just death but total absence of life, was ten miles in radius from that original water disturbance. The guy in the bungalow and all plants, all creatures of land or sea, who where just beyond this circle gradually recovered their individual life force, speed of recovery dependent of species. Life more than twelve mils form the center was untouched, unchanged. Bungalow man gathered his strength, started up his boat and steered towards where the party had been. The horror of the scene was to stay with him the rest of his life. The sea was a graveyard, every fish and crustacean within the circle was dead even the seaweed floated in decayed clumps, the fish were not as seen on fish mongers slabs; these were decayed as if dead for years. The beach party was a collection of huddled clothes, each set held together by a rotting skeleton. There was no smell of decay, it was again as if everyone had been dead for years. Even the trees and grass were dead, decayed, skeletons of birds were found but not as many as expected, just as they do when a tsunami is gathering strength, somehow the creatures of flight had been warned and most escaped.

The forces of law and administration were called, photographs taken, bungalow man was interrogated, almost accused of being responsible for this twenty mile diameter of death. Comprehension of the scale of destruction slowly seeped into public awareness, the TV news channels started to understand the damage even to sea bed plant life and so slowly they changed perception from sensation to alarm. So many expert theories surfaced, the conspiracy theorists had a party. A nuclear submarine accident, a nuclear missile malfunction and a germ warfare experiment were the most popular of these, followed by genetic engineering run wild. Police kept sightseers away, the TV companies hired bungalow man and his boat to take film crews into the area banned to casual visitors.

Time passed, nothing on the surface, within the circle, grew but out of sight, deep under the ground, a non-life entity grew. The circle of death was a sphere not a circle and five miles under the shoreline a seed was growing. Time passed and the seed grew, it fed on the life force of anything and everything within its reach. This reach expanded year by year. Bungalow man had taken the TV money and drank himself to a state of near death: the horror of what he saw on the beach that day, coupled with a sudden influx of cash, drove him to try and wipe out his memories. He failed, when sober his mind was filled with terror so he drank and while this saved his mind it was killing his body. For the public who fed on TV output, life returned to celebrity and scandal; the unexplained was left to government experts to sort out. Five years later and all but bungalow man had moved on, public opinion as fickle as ever, wanted new and safer head lines. Artificial rebellion and orchestrated publicity for the latest book by the latest firebrand, drove thinking from minds and memories. The non life entity grew in strength and power, it started to move towards the surface in search of food. It's tentacles of power reached out, they brushed past bungalow man and decided not enough life force left even for a snack and so they passed him by. Humans became aware the trees and plants were dying without apparent reason, at first just in a small patch extending out from the area of the ill fated beach party but slowly and surely expanding. A persistent sea mist stayed obscuring the area with its damp silence. Nothing moved, even the wind had decayed to nothing. No sensible living creature ventured within reach of this anti-life force. Bungalow man staggered away from his home and camped out in his boat just out of reach of the mist. He had bottles and tins to sustain his needs and gradually came out of his fear and out of his mindless determination to drown all memories. From his vantage just off the beach, he saw all things die in an ever expanding arc that reached out into the land. Slowly but inexorably it grew towards a populated area. Day by day trees, grass and everything with life, was sucked dry rendered to nothing. The mist thinned as its reach expanded and through this barely transparent cloud it could be seen that even trees visibly shrunk as the clinging tendrils of mist reached them, the speed was accelerating as the non-life creature gained in strength. Now the arc of death was growing in radius at a yard a day. Bungalow man radioed to the nearest cost guard and warned them but his reputation as a drunken looser meant that his warning was ignored. He used his boat to patrol up and down the coast watching the death grow, oddly the sea life seemed unaffected this time, this was a creature of land. The arc expanded until its northern most reach along the beach reached a small freshwater estuary, just a brook a couple of yards wide but this seemed to stay the expansion. The south side of the brook died while the north side lived. Bungalow man radioed this and a note was made in a log but no one bothered to read it.

The expansion grew and its speed increased, then it reached the outskirts of a small town. Then, as gardens and livestock started to die, humans panicked in their usual way. Someone do something screamed the web posts, conspiracy theories blamed every human agency and demanded they stop what ever they were doing. The problem was that no human agency was doing anything. People were evacuated from their homes, farmers drove their cattle further inland, the army set up road blocks both to keep sightseers away and in a futile attempt to stop the progress of the death zone. Ridiculously they tried poisoning the land with chemicals to kill all vegetation, apparently with an idea that, like a fire, it could not jump an area that was already dead. It could. The army retreated after if lost six people who bravely thought their body armor would give them protection. It did not. A news helicopter flew over the area coming in from the sea, their last message was that they noticed bungalow man in his boat then they flew over the tide edge. The crew died in an instant and the aircraft crashed in to the desolated land.

The news choppers base received the call about a guy in a boat and they did not know he was a drunken nobody and so they sent out an other vessel to talk to him. That way the population learned that the death area did not jump running water but could “eat” the life force out of anything and everything else. The fact that this arc of death expanded over only land finally got the attention of the military engineers. They commandeered all the land ahead of the dead arc and blasted and bulldozed a huge ditch in an arc of their own; joined both ends to the sea and flooded it. It worked, in so much as it curtailed the growth of the dead area. What was the cause still remained to be found. Brave military scientists ventured over the ditch in bio-hazard suits and then died. They sent unmanned drones to photograph the area, these returned safe but all the photos showed the same, just lifeless clumps of decayed trees and vegetation. Every sort of radiation tracking, every sort of ultra sound, radar even x ray units all were sent over in the drones and all came back showing nothing. As usual with human military governance, a section of the ruling powers wanted to blast the area with high explosives. A bombing raid was ordered, fortunately for the air crew it was decided to use a cruise missile launched while the aircraft was still over the sea. A big crater was caused but nothing was gained.

The history of the locality was examined and the story of the beach party that ended in tragedy, became a focus of attention. Bungalow man was brought in, sobered up and actually listened to, as he told all about what he had seen and experienced. War ships were stationed off shore with constant visual and electronic surveillance in place. The great fear was obviously that what ever was contained behind the ditch would break out or would start again further down the coast. Meanwhile deep under the earth surface, the non life creature stopped growing, with no life to feed on it went dormant, sustaining itself with all the life energy it had absorbed over the last few months. At a depth of 5 miles it was, just like its parent Kraken, existing out of reach and out of the knowledge available to humanity, but it still existed. Bungalow man had gained some respect and this helped him control his drinking and regain his actual name, Alex Mann; he started to bath regularly, keep is hair and beard trimmed and have some self respect. It helped that he became the regular “go to” person for all the TV channels when they wanted another five minutes on the death zone, as it had become to be called by everyone, from news readers to military scientist. Even the military scientists enlisted Alex's help and this furthered his standing with the TV people and so his bank account. No longer overdrawn and desperate, his standing all through the community grew.

The state governor was facing an election and his PR team decide the death zone was as good a distraction form his personality problems as they could get. Amid great fanfare of news bulletins he announced a committee was being set up with Alex as its chairperson, the only responsibility of this committee was to solve the mystery of Death Zone and render it harmless. What Alex thought about “only responsibility” was never recorded. Away from the publicity hand outs Alex got cooperation from the military and access to their research. They were as anxious as anyone to solve the problem and Alex with his committee, took the heat out of expectation that they, the military, were responsible for not finding a solution to the problem. They now knew that only robotic equipment could operate in the zone and that the zone was strictly contained within an area with no water. They had set up all sorts of automatic recording and transmission devices that metered everything from atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, radiation levels, magnetic flux abnormalities and even static electricity. At Alex's suggestion they started to drill a series of six inch diameter holes and put meters down at various depths. It soon became evident that both pressure and magnetic flux started to give abnormal readings the deeper they went. They focused on these and kept drilling deeper and deeper using remove controlled equipment borrowed from the oil research people. None of this became public knowledge, the expectation of headlines about releasing what ever was buried, would panic the governor, so they kept their work secret. At a depth of four and a half miles the gauges suddenly showed readings off the scale, way over what they were designed to record. Late one night they brought up a fire service boat, one designed to fight fires at sea. They pumped sea water down a hole just under five miles deep. No one knew what to expect and tension filled every one who watched from the semi circle of ships gathered off the shore line. The air itself seem to be waiting, tense with a mixture of fear and hope. The eruption was silent, which made it even more weird. A jet of super darkness, so dark it showed up even in the night; streamed up like an oil “gusher” in a old time movie. Then just as abruptly it dropped and a crater one hundred feet diameter slowly formed, the earth sinking down and down. The stench of corruption flowed up and out of this crater, everyone who smelt the slights whiff, became physically sick. It was so bad they backed the ships further out and relied on remote operated cameras. By dawn the foul smell had evaporated, seagulls flew from the sea and over the beach without dropping dead. It was over. For now.