Waterfalls of Blood Where the Fork Goes In

2007

A local man was striding into the river that ran as red as blood. Waist deep, chest deep.

The bright white cake of soap on his head told me he came to bathe. At neck deep, he stopped and grabbed the soap.

You would only bathe here if the river was blood farther than you could walk. He was downstream of the bridge, so I pretended to look upstream. There's no use seeing things you can't change.

The bridge was too narrow to allow us to pull over. Claude had parked at the halfway point, not caring if the Land Cruiser blocked the road. We hadn't seen another vehicle in two hours. We didn't expect to see one for another sixty kilometers.

The bridge gave us a wide view on this sunny day. Blue sky, not a cloud.

The red water was a shock under such pretty skies. Heaven and earth out of harmony.

“Chemicals from the Chinese mine,” Claude said.

Or the French mine, which had been there longer. I left this thought unvoiced. After all, my company intended to stake a claim too.

“Take a picture,” he said.

The glint in his eye said it was a joke, but I didn't get the joke until I tried. The picture wouldn't take. Oh, the button went click, but the smeared image in the viewfinder was hardly representative of the scene in front of us.

I swore under my breath.

“It is not your camera,” he said in his careful English. “You will see later.”

“It is the camera. The lens is dirty.” My picture looked like a fingerpainting smeared around by a giant with a dirty thumbprint.

He waited while I cleaned the lens. Took more pictures. Got more smears.

The river, the bridge, the rocks, the sky... Every bright thing had photographed as a smear in the process of being wiped away.

“Now you see," he said. "The spirit of the river does not allow pictures.”

“Oh, for...” But there was no use swearing at Claude. A look at his face told me he half-believed it.

“The camera will work again when we get away from the river.”

He was right. Once we were off the bridge and around the next turn, the Nikon worked as well as ever.

It continued to work for several more years until I was clumsy enough to drop it in Lupata Gorge.

2017

My company never got the mine. I had not even filed my initial report before a talk radio broadcaster triggered a successful coup d'état. The American government responded by banning humanitarian aid to the country. Investment in a mine was out of the question. I went on to other jobs.

I didn't hear from Claude again for years. I had no idea he'd emigrated to Canada until his Québécois employer brought me in.

“Your French is as bad as ever,” Claude said in that language.

“Worse,” I assured him.

Switching to English, he said, “You might appreciate this.” He waved in the direction of the blood-red waterfall, a redundant gesture since I was already staring at it.

“Acid from a mine up the mountain,” I said after a moment.

He tilted his head up to the green hills. “What mine?”

“An illegal one,” I suggested. “Hidden under a suitable veil of fast-growing summer vegetation.”

He laughed. “Come. We have had three independent studies done. No one can explain it.”

The water smelled of salt and copper. My nostrils pinched themselves closed. The sky above was blue and cloudless, but the air was anything but clean.

“You have been involved in some very interesting projects since your return to North America,” he said. “You must tell me if you know something.”

“The spirit of the river is now inhabiting the waterfalls,” I said in a dry tone. “As good an explanation as any.”

“I hear this is now happening in many places. Three occurrences in your Pennsylvania alone.”

Claude shouldn't be hearing anything from the States. A national security seal had been slapped on the places where water had turned to blood. And it was blood, not just iron-rich minerals. Literal blood. We'd done eighteen months of tests and always got the same result.

The water was a 99.99845% match to human blood.

Effectively identical.

“Of course, we have tested the DNA,” he said. “It is human.” Neither of us bothered to remark on the fact that water shouldn't have DNA.

“I must be careful about what I share,” I said. “There must be no leaks. Our government is concerned about creating a panic.”

He sighed heavily. “There is no exact match to any human we have on record residing in Canada. Of course, we are not at liberty to test everyone. But it is common now that the wealthy test for paternity.” His nostrils flared. You learned to block out any scent, even blood scent, but I could tell he was smelling the bloody waterfall afresh. “One might suppose it would require some amount of cash to create this... spectacle.”

“DNA tests are part of a person's confidential medical history,” I observed in a bland tone.

He snorted. As if, in a crisis, any government would trouble itself to respect that confidentiality.

“We've found no matches in the US databases,” I said, for I owed him that much. “None in any other nation's files to which we have access either.”

“Perhaps it does not matter. It might have been cloned long ago from someone no longer living.”

“Or it might not be a cloned product. It might be artificial blood.”

“Even more costly. And yet here it is pouring out freely on the Earth.”

I had no answers for him. As far as I knew, nobody had any answers. Only questions. There were places on this Earth where the water had been transformed into blood. And no one knew why.

Neither of us really supposed that a human agent-- however wealthy-- was creating this spectacle. We would have figured out how they were doing it by now.

But governments like to work from theories that sound sane. Wild-eyed speculation must be kept behind the scenes and away from bosses.

Had our red river been the first? Is that why Claude called me? He wasn't demanding an answer I didn't have-- an answer no one had. He was sounding out a colleague who'd shared an odd experience.

We were quiet for a time as we poked around the red waterfall to take more samples that would lead us to more inconclusions. He seemed almost cheerful about the mystery. I saw he had a theory too mad to share with people he worked with every day.

“Spit it out,” I said.

He pointed an index finger directly at the blue zenith of the cloudless sky. “Do you believe that civilizations live on other worlds?”

“I suppose. Who doesn't? Space is big. There almost has to be...”

“Space is big but never big enough. That is why we would go into far places to build our mines, yes? What we have is never big enough.”

“You think these other civilizations have an eye on Earth. I doubt it, Claude. There's no reason to sit back and watch. A space-faring civilization could come on down and take this primitive planet anytime.”

“If you assume there are only a few. But perhaps there are many. Perhaps there is even a federation, as we see in the movies and on television. There are laws and treaties.”

“The prime directive. They can't interfere with primitive planets that are currently inhabited by intelligent life."

“Indeed.” He made a steeple of his hands, as if about to pray, then caught himself and undid the steeple. “This federation's laws may say they are not allowed to take our planet until we are...” He smiled a small, wry smile.

“Until we are..?”

“Cooked. Until we are fully cooked.”

I stared at him. Had he chosen the right word?

“Yes, my friend.” His smile remained. “It is madness, and yet this is what I have come to believe.”

Refusing to understand, I shook my head.

He pushed a finger almost but not quite into the bloody spray. “There are places on this Earth where they stick the fork in to see if we are done. Like a chicken, do you see? Yes, I think you do. As long as the blood flows, we are not yet fully cooked. But they grow impatient. They poke at us more often.”

A few weeks after my visit to the red waterfall, the Canadian government slapped its own national security seal on those places where water was no longer water. I didn't hear from Claude again for another wide gap of years.

2027

Claude had reached an age where he was noticeably older than the people around him. Perhaps I'd done the same, but I was careful to avoid mirrors. He'd flown from New York while I'd flown from Atlanta to meet in the business class line from Johannesburg.

We were not yet in the jetway, much less settled onto the plane. There was still time to back out. “Are you sure you'll be OK going back?” I asked.

“Oh, do not be concerned. So many years... So many governments.” He handwaved off the last two decades. “I will not be detained. There will be no trouble on that score.”

We boarded without incident. Breezed through Customs without anyone lifting an eyebrow. Three days later, we were standing on a bridge where a river red as arterial blood once flowed.

The sky was blue and cloudless. The interiors of multiple continents were on fire, but you couldn't tell from here.

Downstream, a man waded into the water. Waist deep, chest deep. Same bar of soap on his head.

But it wasn't the same man or even the same river.

I stared.

As far as I could see, the water was clear and fresh. Mica-flecked pebbles reflected sunlight even from their resting places at the very bottom. “I didn't know they'd closed the mines,” I said.

“They are not closed.” Claude shot me a significant glance. “They are not producing so much anymore, of course, who is, but they still remain.”

Failing mines are seldom clean mines. This is what he brought me to see.

“Amazing cleanup,” I said carefully.

He snorted. “No one cleans up mines this far away from the eyes of those who enforce the laws.”

I looked at a river running as clear and pure as the first day of Eden. Instead of hope, I felt an icy finger tapping at the base of my neck. “You aren't going to tell me that just... happened.”

Claude shrugged. “Then I will not tell you.”

There was no smoke here. It was a perfect day. I could use my phone to take a photo, but I didn't want to know.

Was it better if the invisible giant with the greasy thumbprint was still here? Or was it better if the spirit had departed?

“The end comes soon, my friend,” Claude said.

I looked into the water. It was pure, and yet I saw no fish.

He kept looking up. As if he expected something to appear over the wide blue sky.

“This is ludicrous,” I said. “Plenty of places on Earth remain habitable. We're not fully cooked.”

“Medium rare.” He smiled that same old small, wry smile. “The juices have only now begun to run clear. Perhaps, in the eyes of some, we are cooked to perfection, and longer roasting would only serve to spoil the sauce.”

There was an odd shadow in the brightness overhead. Not a cloud. My skin tingled as it does in those moments before a solar eclipse. Birds began to twitter their twilight songs.

Not many birds. With the insects mostly gone, the birds were going too. But enough to tell me I wasn't imagining that shadow.

Eclipses never came unpredicted. It wouldn't be the Moon blotting out our Sun. But perhaps it would be only the one ship. All the peoples of the Earth could surely fend off one ship, no matter how advanced.

A childish hope, of course.

Once a single vessel breaks their pact against invasion, they all do.

.

Photo Credits

Feature Photo: "The Red Waterfall" by daveynin is licensed under CC BY 2.0. The color is thought to be caused by acid mine drainage from a coal mine dug around 1900 by the Ocean Coal Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Photo slightly modified by the author.

Red River: Digital painting by the author based on a series of photographs I took in Madagascar, November 2007. The odd atmospheric effects over a river turned red by mine tailings-- invisible to the human eye but easily picked up by the camera-- provided the seed of inspiration for this story.

Bloody Shore: Digital painting by the author based on a photograph I took in Canada, June 2010.

Author's Postscript

If you enjoyed this story, please gently tap the <3 button to let me know. I gratefully accept tips. In this story, the world ends by water, but if you think it will end by fire, perhaps you'd enjoy one of these: