Weekly Drabble #247: Most Shark Attacks Happen in Less Than Six Feet of Water (Patreon)

It's true, you know.

This week's prompts are 'leaving the shallows' and 'poisonous shallows' from Framing Device and Pyro Hawk, with a tale of a quaint seaside community and what can happen in the shallow waters. Enjoy!

~

Most Shark Attacks Happen in Less than Six Feet of Water:

Watch out for the shallows.

That was sage advice, and the populace of Sandstone Bay had followed it for well over two centuries. Tourists were told the same. Sandstone Bay was a picturesque place, with a large stretch of beaches and idyllic scenery that made it a hidden gem within the Singing Islands, a little further off the beaten path than most, but well worth the trip. It had a perennial boom of visitors from the larger cities and islands in the chain, along with frequent tourists from the nearby mainland.

Kept afloat by a year-round fishing industry, with strong stocks fed from nearby upwelling off the continental shelf, Sandstone Bay was a lovely small town. But you still watched out for the shallows. Not all the shallows, of course. And deep water could be troublesome itself, but it was the shallows where the problems really lay.

Detective James Cooper blew on his hands as he rubbed them over each other in the cold morning air. Seagulls squawked angrily at the visitors to this small strip of beach, a tiny inlet a ways off the main beaches. The rising sun glinted off the back of the warning signs that the town council had staked on the approaches to the bay.

WARNING

HAZARDOUS AREA

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

DO NOT SWIM, SUNBATHE OR VISIT AT ANY TIME

FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL SANDSTONE BAY POLICE DEPARTMENT OR SANDSTONE BAY HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES OFFICE

That last bit had been Cooper’s predecessor’s idea. A few decades back, a cargo ship carrying chemical fertilizers had torn open on the reefs and gone down. Ever since, the scientists at the Sandstone Aquatic Sciences facility worked hand in hand with the ‘hazardous substances office’, doing sampling and environmental health analyses year round. Every so often, one of the leftover containers of chemical waste would start leaking and whatever section of Sandstone the currents ended up carrying the deadly contents would be closed down until it was deemed safe for humans again.

Over the years, it had become a consistent and efficient process. It had even gotten Sandstone Bay some minor national attention for its dedication and thoroughness to balancing the town’s economic needs with the environmental and health concerns. There was only one problem with all of that. Every word of it was a lie. There’d been no wide-scale contamination from the sunken transport. Only the hull had been breached; very little of the cargo had actually leaked out and the mess had been cleaned up years ago. It did, however,make for a perfect cover story. Even the semi-famous pictures of rusted, leaking barrels on the bottom of the sea floor were staged, placed there by local divers and filled with harmless, but foul-looking effluvia that could be strategically broken for a visual representation of the ‘deadly chemicals’.

Sandstone Bay’s town council (and a handful of other trusted residents) had been running a con on the rest of their population and the world at large for a long time. Not without good reason. They’d tried the truth long before and those stories still swirled around the small town. So the only way forward for the last couple centuries had been a lie in the hopes of keeping people safe. It worked. At least most of the time. If it was perfect, Cooper wouldn’t have been called out here in the damn early morning.

“So,” he said in the half-silence of the early morning, the seagulls still chattering at each other amid the hushed voices of the handful of on-scene officers and trusted SBHSO personnel. “What do we have?”

Doctor Raed Damji looked up. The man was a newcomer to Sandstone Bay, same as Cooper – at least, relatively speaking. The former had been here twenty years and the locals still called him ‘that new scientist’, just as James had been here for eleven years and he was still ‘the new cop’. “What I expected,” he said, his voice still heavy with anaccent that two decades of life in the Singing Islands had only barely softened. “A few idiots who cannot read.” One of his assistants came up with something on a tablet. He nodded, and clapped the girl on the shoulder. She looked ill. This was her first time directly studying deaths cause by ‘chemical waste’.

The crabs and gulls had been shooed away, but there was still a tangle of limbs and body parts left on the sand. James studied the gorey spectacle. “Two?”

“Two,” Raed confirmed. “There were three.” He gestured offhandedly towards a nearby ambulance. “She’ll lose her right leg at the knee, but the medics say she’s likely to survive.”

“Aside from the illiteracy, can you tell me what happened?” He’d been rumbled out of a sound sleep by the alert. It was no surprise that Damji was here before him. Cooper didn’t think the scientist ever slept.

“The usual story, I think,” Damji told the detective as Cooper began his survey of the scene. “Alcohol and hormones. The girl and two boys snuck off to an isolated section of the beach to drink and fornicate, believing warning signs don’t apply to them. The girl is in hysterics, so your deputies could not get much from her, but it sounds as if they went swimming. She was attacked and the boys came to her defence. Which, I would say, was the point.”

“Why take one when you can get all three?” James murmured as he knelt by one torso. The crabs and gulls had been at it, but there was more damage than just claws and beaks could have caused. The lower body had been hollowed out, the ribs cracked open and the limbs had been pulled off. Most of the flesh was missing from them, and there was clear evidence of toothmarks on the bones.

“Exactly,” Raed confirmed. “The boys must have put up more of a fight than expected, because the girl managed to get to shore. She used a belt as a tourniquet and called 933. And now, we are here.” The ambulance started up and took off, lights flashing and sirens wailing as it barrelled towards the hospital. Cooper took its urgency as a hopeful sign. If shock or blood loss had gotten the girl, there’d be no need to hurry.

“Here we are indeed,” Cooper said with a sigh. Every year there were some morons who thought the copious warnings about deadly toxic chemicals were just there for laughs. Usually they got caught before anything happened, fined, lectured and sent on their way. Sometimes, though... sometimes things like this happened. “Any suspects?”

Dr. Damji was picking through the other boy’s ribcage, carefully examining the broken ribs and deep wounds. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Cecily likes night-time ambushes,” James said, running through a list of names and modus operandi in his head. “But she’s skittish. She doesn’t like coming this close to the town. This bay’s too sandy for Aliya. She likes the deeper waters around the kelp forests. Lucy... Lucy’s pretty damn bold. This is probably her and Cecily.” With Lucy around, Cecily probably felt safe enough to come in this far and Lucy could use Cecily’s tactical thinking. That one was as subtle as an orca slamming up on the beach after a seal pup.

“That was my guess, too,” the biologist said. “We’ll know for certain once we do full forensics on the bodies. There’s bound to be DNA traces, fingerprints – you know the drill.”

“I do,” the detective said heavily. “You’re ready with the cover story?”

“Always,” the scientist assured Cooper. “Exposure to the chemicals causes hallucinations, both auditory and visual. The girl was attacked by something-”

“-angler seals have been spotted on the northern end of the island,” Raed’s assistant pointed out, the young woman very studiously not looking at the remains of two young men her age. “They get aggressive during the rut. A lone bull could have done this.”

Raed nodded. “Better than another boat propeller.” He turned back to Cooper. “How does that sound?”

“Sounds better than the truth, doctor.”

“God is funny that way, is He not?”

“Yeah,” James sighed. “He’s a real laugh riot.” He looked across the beach. The water was calm and blue, speckled by waves and the shifting floats of seaweed that bobbed back and forth. It wasn’t very deep, perhaps no more than six feet until you got out to the mouth of the bay. Deep enough, though. Deep enough.

He pulled his jacket tighter as he stared out at the shallow, inviting ocean. He’d have to send one of his deputies out here now just to make sure no other dipshits decided to ignore the warnings Sandstone Bay posted all over whenever the sea turned dangerous and there were things in the water that shouldn’t be. “Fucking mermaids,” he said to himself, the words creating a puff of steam in the warming summer air.

Fucking mermaids.