A Storm Followed Her

We used to visit the cozy beach town of Sunset Point when I was younger. That was before my dad lost his long war with alcoholism, dragging us down along with him. He lost his job, his marriage, and then finally his life when he drove into the wrong lane, colliding head on with a tanker that turned his rusty little car into a crumpled steel coffin. Times were hard after that, and even though I made it through alright I felt robbed of my childhood. I think that’s why it was first choice when I realized that my novels were going to make me enough money to go beyond a small apartment in the seedy part of Atlantic City.

         My house was situated a block from the tiny boardwalk where I worked part time at a pizza place called Vespucci’s. When I stepped out on my back porch I had a perfect view of the sunset. Every single night I walked down to the beach and sat in the sand, watching it disappear below the horizon. Some of my best ideas came during those solemn moments, with the soft ocean breeze blowing softly past me and the constant therapeutic sound of the waves rolling up the sand, desperately trying to claim just a little bit of the beach. Those moments were some of the most peaceful I ever experienced.

         On one such evening I sat with a bottle of coke in my hands and a towel draped around my bare chest watching the gigantic orange sphere as the ocean swallowed it. My hands were pressed deep into the sand the fine grains slipping between my fingers. My mind was in a space somewhere between reality and daydream, still entirely aware of my surroundings but ignorant of them nonetheless.

         I was dreaming up my next big story, or trying to at least. The process of writing worked a lot like ocean tides, waxing and waning depending on the day. I wanted to write science fiction having spent most of my time up to that point working exclusively in horror. Most of my novels involved serial killers and otherworldly forces and by the end of the story there were usually more dead characters than living ones. Though it would always be my favorite genre, the part of me which manufactured my greatest ideas was begging for a little change of pace.

         So far I knew that I wanted it to involve an alien invasion, but I didn’t want it to emulate other stories with a similar plot, especially the most famous one of all which featured the iconic tripod robots which pretty much every science fiction fan learned about at some point. My spin on things would be a more subtle invasion with a tone evocative of the X-Files, yet it wouldn’t take itself too seriously either. I wanted something thrilling and action-packed instead of the slow paced suspense filled works I was known for.

         My train of thoughts derailed and flew off of a cliff when I noticed something floating in the water. From a distance it looked like a gigantic clump of seaweed had formed into some sort of miniature aquatic colony. Curiosity got the better of me so I decided to go take in the peculiar sight hoping to God that it wasn’t a gigantic jellyfish. Ever since one had stung me as a child I was deathly afraid of them. Even seeing one in the aquarium with a wall of thick glass between myself and it had been unsettling.

         It was pretty close to shore when I got to the edge of the water, and the tide was readying itself to wash the strange mass of plant fibers just inches away from my feet. It seemed to lurch forward with the wave, cumbersome in some way or another. As the wave pulled back from it and left it lying on solid ground, my eyes widened. It wasn’t an object at all, it was a girl, barely conscious and murmuring under her breath. She looked pale and feverish.

         My cell phone was back in the house, so I decided to pick her up and carry her. As I began to move the seaweed off of her body, expecting to discover a bathing suit beneath, I found that she was actually completely naked underneath. Astoundingly, on closer inspection the seaweed was actually woven into a pattern. It was literally a complex dress made entirely from undersea plant life. The threading was so meticulous and seamless that it looked like the entire garment had been created from a single plant.

         I lifted her up in my arms gently, inspecting her for injuries along the way to make sure I wasn’t just doing more damage. She was a few years younger than me, probably in her early twenties. Her skin was a golden brown and her eyes which seemed to flicker in and out of focus were a beautiful sea green.         

         As we stepped into the house I laid my towel down on the sofa and laid it on top of her. She stirred a little bit, but didn’t seem to know what was going on. I dried my hands on a towel in the kitchen and began dialing emergency services, but as I glanced up at her something stopped me in my tracks.

         It could have been a trick of the eyes but I thought I could see slits on her neck. I walked over to her to inspect more closely, and sure enough there were two sets of three on each side. I looked down at her in awe as I realized that they were in actually gills. People didn’t have gills though, and probably hadn’t for a billion years before crawling out of the ocean for the first time, if evolution was to be believed at least, and by the look of things it wasn’t. On further inspection both her hands and feet were webbed, and her teeth were slightly sharper than those of the average human being.

         I sat the phone down on the coffee table and went to get a wet towel to put on her forehead. All’s I’d be doing by calling an ambulance was ensuring that her face would be plastered all over the news before the government or some scientist locked her away in some cramped cell where they’d experiment on her for the rest of her life. I’d try to save her myself, I decided, and then help her get home… wherever that was.

         I stayed up the entire night, sitting in a chair by the couch hoping that her condition would improve somehow. She had managed to fall asleep at least, and had a content look on her face which was at least a good sign. She stirred a little bit once in a while repositioning herself to be more comfortable. Going into my closet I got a blanket and a pillow, sliding the latter under her head as gently as I could trying my hardest not to wake her. I draped the blanket over her, and she almost immediately nuzzled into it.

         When morning came around I was groggy, so I went into the kitchen and began making a pot of coffee. There was a startled gasp from the living room and the sound of my strange new guest sitting up. I walked slowly through the doorway holding my hands up, cautious not to make any sudden suspicious moves.

         There was a deep intelligence in her eyes as she looked me over. Despite the initial shock of waking up in a strange new place, she was completely calm and seemed to be analyzing me in the same way that a hunter analyzes an animal. She began to speak in a guttural language which I had never heard before. Her voice was both harsh and melodic at the same time, and the words she spoke were long and beautiful. I could tell by the tone in her voice that she was asking me something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

         “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I told her aloud. She looked at me for a second, and then suddenly her eyes lit up.

         “You speak English then?” she said with a thick accent. Her words were fluent and she didn’t stumble on them at all.

         “Yeah, I do. I’m kind of surprised that you do though. Somehow I don’t think you’re from around here.”

         “Where is here?” she asked, looking around the room in wonder.

         “You’re in my home, I found you floating in the water, barely conscious. If any of my people found out about you I think you’d be in some trouble so I didn’t take you to the hospital. Where are you from?”

         “I come from a city beneath the waves. We call it Roanoke,” she said.

         “You mean like a city under the sea?” I asked in disbelief.

         “Yes a city more ancient that anyone can imagine,” she explained. She stretched her limbs out slowly, revealing a beautiful form. Her brown hair fell about wildly like it had been swept by the wind and as she turned to look out the window I could see a long complex tattoo running down her back.

         “What’s your name?” I asked her.

         “Kadja. What’s yours?

         “I’m Jesse. Are you hungry?” I offered.

         “I feel like I could eat a whale,” she replied. I laughed at that, though part of me didn’t know if she was completely joking.

         As we sat at the lunch table silently, it was apparent that she had never had pizza before. She looked down at the reheated leftover slice like it was some sort of mysterious puzzle. Then she watched me eat, trying to unlock the secrets of a food that was pretty much second nature to me. It was actually kind of strange to see someone have trouble with pizza, even if that someone was apparently a fish person. As she cautiously took a bite of it I watched a look of utter disgust cross her face and then the subsequent struggle to force it down.

         “You don’t like it?” I asked.

         “It’s certainly… unique. Do you have any fish?” she asked.

         “Yeah I think I have something in the fridge,” I told her. She seemed to struggle with the last word so I pointed to it. She nodded in understanding. As I pulled the tuna off of the bottom rack and moved to turn on the stove she quickly stopped me.

         “Yeah I’ll have it like that,” she said. She obviously wouldn’t have a problem with sushi, it seemed. I handed her the packaging and she tore it open ravenously, devouring the contents in mere seconds.

         “So what’s it like back where you’re from?” I asked. It was an inevitable question, considering that I’d probably never get a chance to ask anyone else that again.

         “It is a paradise in many ways. The streets are paved with gold and the buildings are carved from ivory. A gigantic library holds books and scrolls as old as time itself, and there are ancient technologies far beyond your wildest dreams,” she said.

         “Sounds like a nice place,” I remarked. She hesitated for a second and then nodded. I thought for a second I could see a bitter look in her eyes.

         Over the next few hours I introduced her to many of the things that she never experienced living deep in her sea paradise. To her credit, many of the things we had up on the surface existed in some form down there such as television, which was only used to broadcast emergency alerts. Though they had telephones down there, no cell phones existed, and she found the concept extremely interesting, remarking that whoever invented them must be quite rich. I assured her that she was.

         I noticed though, that any time I tried to delve deeper into her culture, she seemed to shy away from it. There was a degree of apprehension that accompanied each response, almost as if talking about it was taboo. What she did tell me was incredible. She said that her ancestors had in fact been humans, and that they had been guided to the deep sea city by the Ancient One, who guarded over the city eternally. She stated that her people had been chosen to live there, and before them the ancient Greeks.

         She decided that she would stay with me until she got her strength back up. I moved her into my bedroom opting to sleep on the couch instead. That night I dreamed of the city that she spoke of, an ancient utopia deep within the sea. Yet there was a shadow looming overhead, the same one that had loomed over the Kadja when I tried to ask her of her home. There was a riddle to it all for sure, but I couldn’t figure it out.

         I awoke the next morning to find her performing stretching exercises in the back yard. I ushered her back inside, warning her that if the neighbors got too close and saw her that she’d become a modern myth for crackpot theorists to debate for years to come. She continued her exercises in the living room, assuring me that the path to spiritual awareness was to have mind and body working at full capacity. I politely offered that the closest to spiritual awareness I’d really get was a few cups of coffee and a doughnut.

         “So I’m sure you’re excited to go home,” I said, as I watched her contort her slender body with the litheness of a gymnast.

         She hesitated for a moment keeping her eyes cast down towards the floor. Finally she looked up at me and nodded, but there was no conviction in her eyes. She was doing her best to cover up whatever it was she really felt but I could still see through it. It wasn’t my place to go digging through her personal life even if it was a life unlike anything in recorded history.

         “How did you get here anyway? What caused you to wash up here of all places?” I asked.

         “I was out gathering undersea plants for my mother’s dress shop. The kind that she wanted were far outside the domesticated zones. Lanterns light much of our territory since the sunlight doesn’t reach the depths the city sits at. So I took a lantern and swam off into the dark. It’s dangerous there, and I think I got stung by something. The rest I can’t remember,” she explained. I looked out the window and saw that it was beginning to drizzle. Just twenty minutes prior there hadn’t been a cloud in the sky, but now the sun was almost completely blotted out, little more than a faint ring in the sky.

         “That’s too bad,” I told her. Kadja needed more fresh fish, so I decided to head out to the fisher’s market down by the docks. Originally I considered bringing her along but it was too risky. She expressed disdain but accepted that it was for her own good.

         When I arrived there was a strong wind blowing, whipping against the tarps that the various sellers had erected over their stands. A wind chime that one salesman had set up to grab people’s attention was becoming a tangled mess, and the drizzle had intensified. I pulled my hood up over my head and zipped up the pocket which held my cell phone. Walking between stalls it was apparent that the storm wouldn’t be stopping the salesmen for putting on their most exuberant pitches. They’d call out to me, offering and counteroffering prices like some kind of reverse auction. I waved all off. It was impossible to live in a beach town without meeting some of the local fishermen, and one in particular, an old man called One-eyed Dave gave me a pretty good discount.

         His stall had the smallest selection of the entire market. This was mostly due to the fact that his age was slowly catching up with him, and that he refused to use any of the newer tech which many of the younger fishers used. What he did have though was usually very good, and he made sure to clean them thoroughly so that by the time the fish was on the dinner table there were no sea pollutants to muck up the taste.

         One-eyed Dave himself was the definition of a character. He was a mixture of the Hollywood pirate and the stereotypical Vietnam War veteran. He used terminology that had gone out of style a hundred years beforehand, and many of his younger, more ignorant competitors saw him as a joke. There was a great deal of respect for him though among the more seasoned sea dogs, some of whom he had actually trained.

         “Great day for a stroll on the beach, eh?” he said gruffly as he noticed me walking up. He was wearing a blue raincoat, the collar of his red and blue floral Hawaiian shirt protruding through like a plant growing up through the ground.

         “I guess I picked the wrong day for a broil huh?” I grinned.

         “Lad, there never be a bad day for a broil,” he replied sagely.

         “I guess not. So what have you got for me today?”

         “The usual, so I’m almost certain that you’ll want the Tuna. I got a big ol’ girl this morning before this storm showed up. She almost broke my damn hands too,” he said, pointing to one of the largest I had ever seen.

         “I’ll take it,” I told him. He nodded and wrapped it up as I pulled out my wallet. Suddenly someone yelled urgently from a few stalls down.

         “Looks like it’s starting to flood. You’ll be my first and last sale of the day it seems,” he told me. When I pulled out my money, I realized that I was short about five dollars.

         “Shit, I guess I’ll have to take one of the smaller ones,” I said sheepishly.

         “There’ll be none of that. Here, if you help me pack up I’ll give you a single day’s employee discount,” he said with a grin.

         By the time we had gotten all of his fish into the coolers and hoisted them into the back of his truck, the tide was coming dangerously close to the boardwalk. It had only flooded three times since I had lived there, but I learned early on that if the boards were flooding, than my house was probably in danger too. Though I had homeowners insurance I had no intention of replacing carpets and furniture again. I shook One-Eyed Dave’s hand and promised to be back the next time I needed seafood.

         “You be careful now. Davey Jones’ locker is a shitty resort,” he called. I waved in understanding and he sped away.

         On the drive home I could see that the streets were in bad shape. There were a few accidents slowing down traffic, no doubt caused by people rushing home to batten down the hatches in the same way that I was. I wondered what it was like for Kadja to see rain, having never been above the surface of the ocean before. I flipped through the channels on my radio looking for a weather report but there was simply static except for one AM station where the DJ was speaking swiftly in Spanish, a language I was hardly fluent in.

         A few brave souls were walking down the road. Some people in town would go about their business as usual even in the event of a hurricane. In one famous case a man had actually rowed a raft to work actually fighting against the flowing water. He never made it to work though and actually ended up floating out to see before being rescued by the coast guard. After two weeks in the hospital with pneumonia the man returned to work, allegedly receiving the employee of the month award for his efforts.

         When I finally reached my house, the back yard was already forming huge puddles and the driveway was nearly nonexistent. Kadja was staring out the window when I walked in the front door, and barely seemed to notice me.

         “I brought you one hell of a Tuna,” I told her, setting the tightly wrapped bundle on the coffee table in front of her. She tore the wrapper apart hungrily, and bit into the raw flesh without reservation. She tore through the scales easily with her sharpened teeth, exposing the guts beneath which she ate hungrily.

         With a mixture of fascination and disgust I watched her devour it. She didn’t even to stop to take a breath in between bites, and you’d have thought that she hadn’t eaten in months. A she picked the bone clean I walked out onto the back porch and began assessing the damage. There was no doubt that the flooding would reach the door within the hour. I had tried many of the strategies which others in the neighborhood used to keep the water out but none of them seemed to work for me. Having really no other practical options, I placed a towel on the floor in front of the sliding glass doors, hoping that the flooding wouldn’t spread too far beyond that.

         “This storm is insane,” I told Kadja as I walked back into the living room.

         “Yeah it’s bad,” she said, the slightest hint of worry in her voice. I looked out at the street and saw my neighbor had forgotten to roll up the windows on his car. It was already partly filled with water.

         “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get through this storm. This must be one of the first times you’ve ever seen rain before huh?” I asked.

         “I’ve actually been to the surface of the ocean before, just never on land. We have a very powerful radar that tells us when ships are above us, and if they don’t move for a long period of time for whatever reason we go up to see if it’s abandoned. If it is we scavenge things,” she explained. The rain was slapping against the window then, almost falling horizontally. Her voice was indifferent as she explained her previous life, like she couldn’t wait to move on to the next topic. It reminded me of a girl I used to date who was abused by her father as a kid. Any questions I asked her about her past were responded to with short, vague answers.

         “So are you going to tell me why you don’t want to go home, or should I just guess?” I asked her. She looked up wearing a look of surprise.

         “How did you know?” she asked.

         “I can read your body language from a mile away. You’re running away from something, even if I don’t know what it is yet,” I explained. She nodded slowly.

         “There are many things about my home that are great. We have cures to otherwise terminal illnesses, the ability to cultivate enough food so that no one starves, and an academy where our minds are filled to the brim with knowledge both ancient and futuristic. We even learn languages from the surface world, thanks to the books we find among the wreckage of your ships,” she began. She started off smiling but it slowly devolved into a frown, “the problem is, I’m not allowed to go to school, or become a doctor or professor. Women are wives and mothers in Roanoke, nothing more and nothing less.”

         “You live in a male dominant society,” I said.

         “They follow the teachings that whoever came before left in the temples of the city. Books in ancient languages that only a select few ever learn to read. Those books make us women look like little more than servants. I don’t just want to be someone’s wife, I want to become a scholar,” she explained.

“So you ran away,” I replied in understanding.

         “Yes. You see women aren’t supposed to leave the city, and I almost got by them without me noticing, but at the last second a guard caught me and chased me. That’s when I got stung by some sort of poisonous eel,” she told me. I looked over to the back door and saw that the water had reached the porch. Kadja’s gills were flaring, reflecting how upset she was and she looked as if she were on the verge of tears.

         “Well you’re certainly not the first girl I’ve met who’s run away from home. You’re definitely the first to come from an underwater city, but otherwise there’s nothing wrong with needing to get away,” I told her. She smiled weakly.

         I could hear the winds whipping against the window, and the chair on the porch fall over with a loud crash. The world outside my door had turned a hellish color, like the sea was going to swallow the Jersey Shore whole. I knew that it wasn’t likely considering how we survived the massive storm the previous summer, but there was always a fear in the back of my mind that a single gigantic wave would come and destroy everything I had worked for, and everything the town had worked for.

         Then there was a peculiar, loud noise that sounded like a deep bellow which rattled the windows violently. It sounded like a distorted fog horn mixed with a gurgling noise like a ship was drowning out in the ocean, but there was another part too, a malevolence of sorts that made it sound like the voice of some terrible creature. Looking out my back door down towards the beach I could see nothing but the tumultuous sea, barely visible against the blackened sky. A bolt of lightning struck a tree a few doors down splintering it and sending it crashing down through some patio furniture. The balding owner ran out into the backyard and started yelling unintelligibly as if admonishing the storm for its behavior would cause it to back off.

         “What the hell was that?” I wondered aloud. As if answering me, the bellowing noise came once more like a gigantic drawn on groan. I stepped onto the back porch, allowing the slightest trickle of water to break through into the house. I squinted, and saw a large lump protruding from the water.

         It looked as if the storm was going to beach a whale. Unfortunately that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, though I had never heard one moan so loudly before. I wondered if it was a different species than what I was used to seeing. Another lightning bolt struck down, this time in my neighbor’s yard. I could almost smell the burning from where it had scorched the Earth, a small trail of smoke rising from the ground.

         A deafening crack of thunder was followed by another long, drawn out groan. It was even louder outside, and I had to cover my ears for fear of my eardrums shattering. I ducked back inside and closed the door, a headache forming and my ears ringing. I walked into the bathroom and shook two aspirin out of the bottle I kept in the cupboard. Previously it had been for helping with hangovers, but I had a morbid fear of becoming an alcoholic like my father, so it hadn’t needed to be touched in a long time. I usually only got drunk the night one of my novels hit the shelves, as it helped me cope with the anxiety of wondering whether or not it would be a critical and commercial success. As I gulped them now I heard glass shatter in the living room. As I sprinted out into the living room I saw that the back door had completely shattered.

         The bellowing came once more revitalizing the ringing which had just begun to taper off. I went through one of my drawers and pulled out two pairs of earplugs, offering one to Kadja who simply shook her head and sat on the couch with her hands wrapped tightly around her knees. I plugged my ears just seconds before the next otherworldly wail. It was still incredibly loud, but I didn’t feel like I’d lose my hearing after the storm was over at least. Panicking and trying to figure out what to do, I began to pace around. I had never dealt with a broken window during a storm before much less a broken door.

         “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. The water was seeping through the carpet and slowly crawling towards the couch. It had snaked its way around the porch chair, which as it turned out had been the culprit of the smashed door. I hoped that my insurance would cover that. The gale force winds were whipping through the house now too, negating the effects of the heater and knocking several books down off the shelf of my personal library.

         A huge crash of thunder made the ground shake, and almost caused me to lose balance. The waves outside were growing even more violent.

         I decided that the best course of action was to get all of the electronics away from the flood waters. There was no way of stopping it at that point, so all I could do now was damage control. I picked up my television with an exasperated groan and slowly maneuvered it into my bedroom. I did the same with my laptop which had pretty much all of my work on it. If it got wet I’d lose many hours of work. Just as I got my iPod out of the danger zone there was another crack of thunder, and once again I felt the ground shake. It was followed two seconds later by another even louder one.

         “Hey Kadja, I think you’d better get in here. We’ll have to stay the night in the bathroom or else we’re just putting ourselves in danger,” I called. By that point the water had already begun to flow into my room and I heard wet footsteps as she trotted through the water towards me. Another loud bellow, sounding even closer than before, rose above the sounds of the storm and as Kadja entered the room I could see tears streaming down her face.

         “This is all my fault,” she said in a small voice. There was another loud crack of thunder followed swiftly by another. The gap between the thunder crashes was almost impossibly fast, with one following the other.

         “You don’t control the weather,” I told her, listening to the sounds of my house being ripped to shreds. Kadja mumbled something under her breath as more thunder drowned out her voice. The shaking of the ground was steadily becoming more violent, and the whipping winds outside seemed to be screaming bloody murder. It felt like the end of the world had finally come, like the biblical flood repeating itself.

         “What did you say?” I asked her.

         “This isn’t just weather,” she said. Before I could ask her what she meant the loudest bellow yet came and there was a huge sudden crash as my room caved in. along with part of the bathroom wall.

         My eyes widened as I looked out through the hole in the ceiling. Towering above us with a creature unlike anything I had ever seen before. It had legs like that of a crab, but they were as thick as tree trunks and jagged. Its three, beady black eyes stared down at us menacingly, and as the thunder cracked I could briefly see at least four rows of teeth that looked like gigantic blades that belonged in a lumber mill. Taking a step back and sliding down against the sink I stared up at it. Tentacles erupted from its back as it let out a deafening bellow. It took a step forward and I realized that the thunder I had been hearing was actually the footfalls of a monster. I looked over at Kadja who was shaking violently.

         “I’m so sorry,” she said, as a tentacle reached through a hole in the wall and grabbed her. She looked at me sadly as she was lifted away to the monsters face. He inspected her for a split second before apparently decided he found what he was looking for. With large, lumbering steps the huge aquatic monster backed away, and slowly turned around. I stood up and walked through the ruins of my house, watching through the broken sliding glass back door as it disappeared into the ocean, the speck its tentacle wrapped around along with it.

         Three hours later the most violent storm in the history of New Jersey suddenly subsided. I spent the next morning watching the sun rise up into the clear sky. Never again did I see Kadja, or the monster that had followed her. Once more the ocean swallowed her; a girl like no other, with a dream the same as many.