The Event

The Event: By Paul Lemoine

January 15th :2021 … NW Australia…

The moonlight is just peeking through a gap in the clouds over Tin Can Bay. The light makes a straight line across the water like a silver shimmering road. It’s early January and the hot weather has arrived, even the nights are warm now. Still, there is a calming quiet about the water now, but in twelve hours there will be swimming kids, small sail boats dashing across the waves, and tourist getting sunburns scattered on beach blankets like french-fries on a baking sheet. But right now it’s just Ryan and his golden lab Riley walking out on the dock and enjoying the quiet evening before tomorrow’s invasion. Riley has run ahead as dogs usually do and has started barking at something at the end of the dock. In itself this is not unusual, but this time he seemed to be overly excited about something at the end of the dock. Ryan decides to start running a bit as it dawned on him that Riley might just jump in the bay, and he would have to somehow get him out of the water. As he gets closer he begins to make out through an unusually sudden mist the bow of a small boat still tied to the dock. The back half of the boat was half full of water. He says out loud like Riley could understand, if this boat wasn’t tied to the dock it would be lying on the bottom of the bay right now. As he was looking around the small boat that the fishing gear was still in the boat, and a small cooler, and the live bait tank had bait in it. Ryan began to look around to see if anyone was close by, thinking the owner of the boat may have gotten into some trouble and went to get it help and would be returning soon. Meanwhile he continued scanning the boat to find out why the boat was half full of water and about to sink. After about thirty minutes he came to the conclusion that there was no apparent reason for the condition of the boat, and that no one was returning to the dock. Ryan decided to walk back to the beach area and check the to see if anyone was around that might need some help. Riley and him were about half way back to the beach when a loud kind of splashy boom noise happened. Ryan instinctively ducked his head and turned back to see what was happening, and he quickly realized that he was seeing the half sunk boat and all the gear flying about ten feet over his head and it landed about fifty feet past the dock and crashed down onto the beach. Then, as if that wasn't weird enough, the dock started to shake violently and begins to come apart. Riley had already took off running down the dock toward the beach and looking back and barking as if saying, what the heel are you waiting for, come on. The shaking was getting worse as Ryan took off running and he had just jumped off the end of the dock walkway onto the beach when the whole dock was torn to pieces behind him. His first thought was some kind of earthquake was happening, or something in the boat blew up, or maybe a tidal wave. But then as quickly as the whole strange event started, everything just stopped and became calm and quiet again, like nothing happened at all. Ryan looked up and down the beach and was confused about seeing that nothing else had been affected. No water up on the beach, no waves, the water was strangely calm with just a slight glow around where the pier had been. Riley came running back and sat beside him and just stared out at the bay, when Ryan saw a baseball cap floating at the edge of the water and started walking toward it, Riley suddenly started barking again like he was on the end of the dock earlier, so Ryan thought maybe staying away from the water might be a good idea. He was thinking to himself, it was like the water might be come after him if he got too close. So he decided to stay away from the water and turned around to walk back and take a look at the crashed boat on the beach to see if there was a registration or something that would identify who owned the boat. That seemed like the least dangerous thing to do. Maybe there was something in the pile of boat parts that would help him find out who owned the boat, and report what had happened to the local police in the morning.

March 21: 2021 …..New Zealand

After six days at sea the Russel family and three other families anchored their sail boats a few hundred years off Coopers Beach. It was a calm night and their last leg to Sidney was ahead of them, so a few days rest and some shore time was going to be a welcome diversion from the San Diego to Australia sailing adventure they had planed for several years was down to their final leg from New Zealand to Sidney. After a few hours of securing the boats and fixing some dinner, it was time to settle in for a nights sleep. Although tired, Carrie Russel was restless and left her husband below deck sleeping and decided to go up on deck and enjoy the night sky while looking forward to some shopping and relaxing in town tomorrow. Her quiet time was interrupted by Linda, her friend who’s boat was anchored about twenty feet away as the dusk was now turning into a very dark night. Only the few running lights dotted the darkness. Linda had come up on deck to tie off some rigging that was loose and making noise. Carrie called to her and a soft conversation started between them about how much fun the trip has been and how sad they were going to be when it was over. All three families were neighbors in California, and after reaching Sidney, they were all flying home after a weeklong lay over in Hawaii. Mark, Linda’s husband had a friend that had moved to Coopers Beach several years earlier, and was going to come out with his power boat in the morning and take them to shore. As they were talking about tomorrow Carrie noticed a little bit of mist on the water between their boats was starting to get lighter, like there was something kind of light under their boats in water all around their boats, an eerie kind of illuminating misty glow changing from white to greenish blue. Linda mentioned how pretty it looked and Carrie noticed that it was getting warmer and the water was starting to bubble and steam a little. That’s when Mark, Linda's husband, came up from below deck looking flushed and sweaty and said that it was really hot below and wanted to get some fresh air. He quickly noticed the mist and the color of the water around their boats and that that it was hot up on deck as well. Carrie said that it just started heating up a few minutes ago. Mark noticed that Joe and Sally’s boat, about fifty feet away from them, was outside the illuminated area and he called to them. A light came on in Joe’s forward cabin and as he reached the top of the steps and opened the deck cover he heard cries for help coming from his friends boats. As he stepped on deck he saw both of his friends boats being pulled under water in a matter of seconds. He stood there in shock as the water that was churning and misting up all around his friends boats just stopped bubbling and the mist faded away and the sea went back to a normal dark color. But, there was nothing left of his friends boats or his friends. Joe ran below and called the local harbor police and told them what he saw, and within twenty minutes there were several police boats on the scene with search lights and radar scanners, but there was no evidence that any boats had been there at all, no debris, no trace of anything, including people. The search went on until daybreak. At dawn they launched an ROV and two divers when down to look around, but after several attempts to find anything, they found nothing, so they decided to take Joe and Linda back to shore for safety reasons, and try to figure out what was going on from there, and come back out at daybreak to look again. When asked what he saw, Joe replied that the sea just seemed to swallow them up. Marks friend said he’d never heard of anything like this and the police said they would continue to search and let Joe and Linda know if they found anything, and suggested that they spend the night in town and go out with them in the morning to see what they could find out. They also suggested that it might be best if they flew to Sidney instead of sailing there, and they would arrange for someone to sail the boat on to Sidney. They could take a plane home to America from there, and anything the local police find out would be sent on to them.

April 8th : 2021…. Alsea river bay, Walport Oregon

Tracy and Dylan were driving down the coast from Newport at the request of the local Coast Guard station to investigate some odd happenings in the coastal town of Walport about sixteen miles south on highway 101. Tracy was looking over the report that was sent to them from the coast guard and a CDC official named Jake Scott. The letter read like a late April fool’s joke. It seems that all the fish had left the bay and the backwaters of the harbor. Including all the Crabs and all the sea birds. The town had been blanketed with a strange smelling misty fog, and reports from local first responders said many people getting sick from a yet unknown illness. They also said that they have not heard anything from the town in the last several hours. The National guard and State police had already blocked the Pacific Coast Highway 101 and detoured traffic inland on both the north and south sides of the town. The CDC had just sent a team of people into the town trying to find out what was happening. Tracy and Dylan are both Marine Biologist and Ocean research scientists from Oregon State University’s Marine Science Center about 16 miles north of town in Newport. When they arrive at the Alsea Bay bridge they are stopped by the National Guard who have barricaded the road. They are told that no one is permitted to go into town without authorization from the Command officer and CDC officials. Tracy noticed that the mist has covered most of the town and is starting to engulf the bridge, and a van is speeding toward them on the bridge just ahead of the fog. The van is speeding and flashing their lights and about fifty yards from the north end of the bridge when the van starts too slow and veers right into the bridge railing and to a stop into the side of the bridge. Some of the guardsmen start to run toward the van when a man opens the van door and yells at them to stay back as he falls to his knees, then collapses to the pavement. Dylan notices that the misty fog seemed to stop advancing as soon as it got to the van. Just then the CDC official came out of the command trailer and ordered everyone back off the bridge. He sees the Oregon State letters on the truck Tracy and Dylan were driving and asks them to come with him into the command trailer. Once inside the trailer, CDC scientist Jake Scott shuts the door behind them. He introduces himself and asks them to look at some video’s that people in town had sent before everything went silent. He told them the mist had now moved past the town and went several miles up the backwater, and everyone who has been in contact with the mist is either dead or dying. He isn’t even sure if the CDC and Guard people that were in town and suited in full hazard gear are alive or not. The last video that they got was about three hours ago from a fishing resort about six miles inland on the Alsea river. They showed the mist moving up river and suddenly it just dissipated and the air cleared in about five minutes. There were a few cars that had been trying to outrun the cloud that had stopped and said everyone close by to get in their cars and take off inland before the cloud gets there because people were just dropping dead if they got caught in it. We flew a drone that had a video cameras on it and shot these pictures of the mist just fading back toward the bay. At the rate it is moving it will reach the bay in about fifteen minutes. Jake said he had one of his drones equipped with air sample tubes and video cameras and he would like them to view the videos and see what they think of the images. he said they were going to try and fly it into the cloud and gather some samples before it is gone. I’m hoping you two have some equipment at the science center or the NOAA boats that can analyze the samples so we can get some idea what we’re dealing with. We have an airtight container sitting on the road at this side of the bridge that the drone will land inside of, and we can remote close the top and seal it. Tracy and Dylan looked at each other and Jake could tell they really had no clue what was happening. Dylan said the best thing now was to stay away from the infected area and get the samples back to Newport so they can use the labs there to examine them, and maybe come up with some answers. Jake asked them to see the videos from town before they lost contact, and warned them that what they were about to see would be hard to look at. Jake was right, as soon as the videos started it was clear that something awful had happened. The only audio was one of the CDC team said that it looked like something just ate away peoples nose, mouth, throats and lungs. Like the air they had breathed in was like acid, and just dropped them in their tracks. The images also showed that everything, the buildings, the roads, wires, anything that was touched by the fog had started to erode as well. Then it seems that the teams protective suits started to fail and we lost contact with them. Jake asked them to head back to Newport and get the labs ready, and call in anyone they needed to help them examine the samples. He would secure the sample box and bring it to them as soon as possible. Tracy and Dylan raced back to Newport making some calls as they drove getting people started on setting up the labs to receive the toxic air samples. The box arrived about two hours after Tracy and Dylan got back to the Science Center. They had a rooms ready and a team setting up the equipment they needed to run the testing of the samples. There were six containers, each put in different sealed contagious materials lab tanks. They couldn’t risk any mishaps. There were no test animals at the Center. so Dylan told them to go outside and catch some flies they were easy to catch by using some fish from a local packing plant on the Newport Bayfront. His logic was that the mist was killing everything, so flies were as good as anything else to test the samples with. Dylan was in charge of the containment and extraction of the samples and Tracy was in control of getting the samples into the analyzing chambers. It would take several hours to get the results back once Tracy had the samples exposed to the equipment. She got three containers and Dylan kept three to do their testing with. They needed to find out how lethal the air in the containers was. It had been about six hours sense the samples were gathered, and the fog in Walport was now completely gone from the Alsea bay and the town. Dylan decided to see if the air was still lethal by releasing some of the flies in the isolation gate chamber, then opened the door so the flies could go in the sample chamber. It was only seconds and all the flies were dead. He tried the next container and when the flies went in this time they flew around for about a minute and about half of them died. When the last container was tested, none of the flies died. To double check he put more flies back into the first container, they did not die. It seemed the air was no longer dangerous. Dylan called down to Walport to ask Jake if there was any changes there and Jake told him that birds were flying all around the bay again, and he just sent some men into town and it was a gruesome scene and so far it didn’t look like anyone survived. Dylan told him it looks like the mist has lost its ability to infect anything, and every container they have was safe now. It looks like whatever this event was, it’s over now. Jake told them to keep working the problem because something had to trigger this event, and answers were needed before it happened again.

April 9th :2021 …….. Newport, Oregon…Marine Science Center….

After Tracy was finished with her testing of the samples she thought about contacting the NOAA research boats and talk to anyone who might have had some experience with this kind of event. While she was waiting on a return call, she typed into her computer ‘Reports or stories on unexplained ocean phenomenon’ hoping to come across some kind of clue that could help shed some light on what happened. What she found was a news story from Coopers Beach , New Zealand, that told of two sailboats that sank in their bay under very strange conditions. She read the papers account of had happened to the two boats and called the paper and got the names of the two people who saw what happened and decoded to call them and get their story first hand. After talking to them she got a call from one of the NOAA boat crew members about a second odd story. According to first hand newspaper report from another small town on Australia’s north west coast called Tin Can Bay, a missing person report from a local City employee about a small fishing boat that the ocean tossed over his head from the end of a dock onto a beach and then the dock was destroyed right out from under his feet. His last remark was “it was like the Ocean came after me”. Taken separately these stories don’t add up too much, but now this thing in Oregon, she began to wonder if it could be true, what if the ocean water itself was the source of these events, and was targeting people. Just then Dylan came into her lab to see what she had learned from the sample testing. Her train of though turned sharply to the lab results. She told him the air analysis was normal except for a small amount of a complex molecule she has never seen before. The particle appears to carry a very fast growing virus that would explode in any animal that would breath it into their lungs, including humans. It reacted with some body chemistry and the combination turned very acidic and it would be one hundred percent fatal if you come into contact with it. But the good news, if there is any good news, is that it has a short twenty-four hour mortality rate. So it will start to dissipate after about eighteen hours and loose potency over the next six hours and be harmless by the twenty-fourth hour. The big question is, why is this going on, what is making it happen, and how long will it keep going on. If these events are somehow connected, how did it move across the Pacific Ocean so fast, is it random, and finally, who should we tell. Just then Dylan’s phone began to ring and it was a call from the NOAA lab team, he put the phone on speaker so Tracy could hear, and the news was bad. They say they had informed the CDC and Jake already. But it seems that another event has started inland about sixty miles from Walport. Reports starting coming in about three hours ago. The cities of Philomath, Corvallis, and Albany had been sending out requests for emergency assistance. They are reporting thousands of people are coming down sick, and their hospitals can’t keep up with the people flooding the emergency rooms. Reports from National Guard there is that there was no fog or mist they had been warned to be on the look out for by the CDC. and the CDC had released a warning to the Oregon Governors office that something was going on in the Willamette Valley in the Corvallis area and that the National Guard was to lock down the towns and wait for the CDC to get there. Jake was still in Walport when he was informed of the inland incident and sent the city officials everything he had on what happened on the coast. But somehow this was different. There was no indication that it was being transmitted through the air. Tracy had already started to call Jake, when her call was interrupted and she was informed by a CDC assistant that Jake was on his way by helicopter to Samaritan Medical Center in Corvallis, and asked you to send him all your data, He also requested you and Dylan go to the Coast Guard base in Newport where a chopper was waiting to take both you and Dylan to Corvallis. It took about two hours for them to reach Corvallis, and when they arrived they could not believe what they were seeing. Bodies laying everywhere, medical people doing whatever they could., but they were helpless against the flood of infected people. The National Guard had already barricaded and quarantined off the cities of Albany, Corvallis, and Philomath, no one in and one out from any direction until further notice.

April 10th : 2021…. Samaritan Medical Center.. Corvallis, Oregon

Jake saw Dylan and Tracy arrive and came over to tell them that Oregon State University had labs that were testing the air samples they had gathered already, and they had people checking the Willamette River and Mary’s River to check for mist or fog areas. But so far nothing has been reported. It was obvious that a solution was needed quickly or everyone in these cities would suffer the same fate as those in Walport. Dylan asked if the national weather service had shown any winds that could have brought the virus from the coast into the valley. But Jake said they had checked that and the winds were off shore so nothing was moving inland. Tracy was asking the medical people where the cases in town started showing up first, maybe to pin point where they could start looking for answers, but it seems that the break out was all over the cities at the same time. Tracy asked if there was any blood samples from the infected people being looked at in the medical center, and where the lab was located. The nurse she was talking to said she could take them to the lab. When they got there it was a chaotic scene and about half the staff were sick on the floor. One of the lab staff a young girl told Tracy that there were blood test results on the computer, but she has been trying to help the sick lab staff and had not had time to look at any of the data yet. Tracy took one look at the data and called Jakes phone right away and told him and Dylan she was in the lab and to come there as soon as he could because some of the data from the blood samples were showing some very strange results. When they arrived in the lab, Tracy had already isolated some of the data from about a hundred samples of infected people and all of them had toxic levels of prescription and over the counter drugs. Fatal levels of Opioids, Steroids, Tylenol, Blood Pressure Meds, name it and it was on the list she said, and the list is huge. It’s like a toxic mix of every drug we use was shot into peoples blood streams. But how is it getting there. The young lab assistant starts crying as one of her lab staff that she was helping died right in her arms. She covered the persons head with a sheet and went to a lab sink and started washing her hands. When she is done she grabbed a paper cup and runs some water in it to have a drink. Just as she starts to drink it Tracy runs over and slaps the glass out of her hands. A Surprised Dylan barked out “why did you do that”. Tracy grabs another cup and fills it with water and tells them, what if it’s the water that has the toxins in it. Everyone just goes quiet as the idea of that statement sinks in. It would make sense she said. Everyone drinks the city water. They shower and wash their hands with it. They cook with it. It’s the perfect delivery system. And it would break out everywhere and effect them instantly. Jake asked the young lab tech if this lab was capable of testing the water to see if it is contaminated. She said that this lab was not equipped to do that, but the maintenance shop had the testing equipment they used to monitor the main water supply to the hospital. Dylan said what if it is the water, what do we do then. Jake told Tracy and the lab tech to go to the maintenance shop and run the tests they needed to confirm if there is contamination in the water while Dylan and him would start telling everyone to stop using the town water supplies just in case that is the source of the event. It took only a few minutes to confirm Tracy’s suspicions. The city water supplies were killing anyone who drank it. They called Jake and told him what they had found, and Jake ordered the National Guard and Police to start running trucks and cars with loud speakers on them telling everyone to only drink bottled water, and not to use the city water at all, even to shower with, and that included their pets and livestock. They got onto all the emergency stations and got the word out everywhere. But again, not before thousands of people had died, and again, as soon as the reasons behind the deaths was discovered, the contamination disappeared within several hours. So, what now was the big question, and Tracy, Dylan and Jake had no good answer for that question. Maybe it's over for a while, maybe not. But the why was becoming clearer. The water was sending us a message.

On April 11th… State, Local, and National representatives had a meeting. A world-wide media broadcast was set up by the CDC to inform everyone what had been taking place in the Pacific rim . Although there was no resolution to the event, there was no way of knowing if there is going to be more of these events, but it seemed that the waters of our world have somehow grown capable of causing these events to happen. The reason behind these events is a warning to all of us that we’d better stop polluting our planets oceans and rivers and lakes because there will be consequences if we don't. It’s start cleaning up our act or else. Of course arguments began, some people did nor believe the Oceans could cause such things too happened. They said that the cost of clean-up and removal of all contaminants from the waters of the world and our sewage water would be financially prohibitive. Besides, there hasn't been another event for months so most likely it won't happen again. The usual verbal garbage that comes from people trying to protect their profit margins at the cost of our environment were flying wildly, and, while we debate and postpone action, a slow mist starts to form in the rivers of New Orleans and London. July 4th, 2021....

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