Weekly Drabble #272: After the Storm (Patreon)

This week's prompt comes from EBB with 'storm surge' and with it, we check in on the aftermath of a small, idyllic coastal town and the storm that hit it. Enjoy!

~

After the Storm:

Cedrick hit the island harder than most. Normally, the island chain helped break up hurricanes before they hit Sandstone Bay itself, but Cedrick had been a particularly powerful storm and it had beaten and blustered its way across the Singing Islands before pounding Sandstone Bay ‘like a sailor on payday with a fresh hooker’, as one of the old fisherman had said. They’d lost a few people. Not that many, all things considered. Storms were an inevitable part of the autumn season here and the locals knew how to batten the hatches appropriately when one was coming in.

That didn’t always work, as the house wedged up on rocky shoals attested. It had been ripped from its foundations and beaten along the shoreline until it got stuck here when the water receded. Well, was what left of it. The main structure was still intact, but the doors and windows had been broken and several parts of the roof had collapsed. It was still recognizable as a house, but maybe one that had been... ‘reimagined’. By a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“All right,” Cooper said to the search and rescue team. “Why am I here?”

The leader of the group, a tall and wide man whose name the detective couldn’t immediately place, glanced over his shoulder, but before he could say anything, Doctor Damji pushed his way past a pair of young men in the bright red jackets of the SAR crew. “Because I requested it, detective.”

“Okay. Why are you here? Why’s the HSO interested in a wrecked house?”

Raed’s eyes darted around the group. There were a few onlookers watching the operation, and several SAR crew that looked particularly uncomfortable and confused. “Come with me,” the olive-skinned scientist said, leading the detective to a small tent, one of the SAR members posed outside like a sentry. “Search and rescue came into the house to check for survivors,” Raed continued as he zipped up the flaps behind him. Inside, there were a pair of chairs, and two small fold-out tables: on one was a radio set and a large red and white cooler had been placed on the second.  James looked at the other man, who gave him a grave nod.

The detective unlatched the cooler and opened it. He inhaled sharply. Packed atop a layer of ice was a man’s severed arm. “This is why you are here,” Damji explained. “You know Mr. Cullen, the head of the SAR department. When he encountered this, he felt it merited a certain level of... discrete analysis.”

James nodded, finally placing the big man’s name. A number of the local SAR personnel were in on Sandstone Bay’s bloody, centuries-long secret. They had to be, given what they might find. Body parts where you didn’t expect them always meant a discrete call to the SBHSO and the police department. “As a homicide detective and someone who understands the town’s history,” Raed continued. “I wanted your opinion.”

Cooper kept rubber gloves with him and pulled them on, lifting the arm up delicately. It belonged to an older man, well-tanned from the sun, leathery from the salt air, liver-spotted. There was an old ring on the finger, and a tattoo on the forearm that he recognized.  “This was Samuel Ruskin,” he noted.

“I suspected as much; that is his house on the bluffs, but you got along better with him that I did.”

The police officer snorted. Samuel Ruskin, born and raised in Sandstone Bay, was a salty old bastard. Which was a polite way of saying he was racist, sexist and, well, every kind of bigot you could think of. Cooper had run into the gruff, snarling man often enough to know that it wasn’t exactly prejudice – Ruskin had just hated everyone, but he had a better vocabulary for expressing that distaste towards people of different colours, creeds, ages and genders. He’d had problems with kids coming too close to his property, problems with tourists talking and eating too loudly, problems with women wearing shirts too low and skirts too high, problems with Cooper himself for being a ‘mainlander’. If you crossed the old man’s field of view, chances were he’d have a problem with you and an epithet-laden diatribe of what you – or someone like you, or people in general – had done wrong.

Looks like his last problem really was his last. “Damage around the shoulder is fairly clean,” he observed. “Not torn – sliced.” He probed the edges of the round. “Clean cuts, too. Looks like a knife.” He sighed. “This is from a jaguar knife, isn’t it?”

“That was my initial assumption,” Damji confirmed.

“Great.” Jaguar sharks were large near-shore hunters with a range up and down the mainland coast. They were big animals, getting their name from the patterning on their skin that helped them blend into their surroundings. They were one of the few sharks that could go from salt water to fresh water and would occasionally swim up past estuaries into canals and rivers and lakes to prey on wildlife. Cooper had once seen a pair of jaguar sharks take down a bull hippo. In the open ocean, they’d go after whales, seals, large fish and other sharks. They were a rarity here in the Singing Islands; aside from the angler seal colony to the north, there wasn’t a whole lot of prey big enough for the adults. Sometimes the females would come to the shallow seas to give birth, but that was it.

As far as Cooper knew, there were only three things that would prey on a jaguar shark. Orcas, packs of lantern squid... and mermaids. The latter used spears and poison to bring down the great predators. The massive, rich liver was the primary goal, but they used all the parts. A jaguar shark’s serrated teeth, each as long as a steak knife, could slice through a layers of surge whale’s blubber like butter. It was no wonder that the mermaids would use their teeth as weapons and cutting implements.

Cooper glanced back at Raed. There was something in the other man’s expression... “What aren’t you telling me?” he asked. “We could have done this in the coroner’s office. You wouldn’t bring me out here just for this.”

“You are correct,” Damji agreed. “I wouldn’t. You may have noticed all the rescue personnel standing around. That is key, my friend. Standing around and not checking the house to see if Mr. Ruskin was somehow still alive, or to retrieve his body.” He picked up a cup of cold coffee that was sitting by the radio and took a sip before he met the detective’s eyes again. “They will not go into the house.”

“What?” Cooper blinked. SAR had dealt with these kinds of scenes before. “Why would...” he trailed off, glancing at the closed doors, the fabric shaking in the wind. “No. You’re not telling me...”

“After they recovered this arm, the first team reported... noises,” the doctor replied. “They were not able to get any recordings, but Mr. Cullen chose to pull his people out. I can’t tell you what is in that house, because they would not go farther. And I could not blame them for their caution. The bulding is already precariously positioned and one stiff gale from collapsing entirely. Who could muster their courage enough to press deeper when there might be something else within? Who but a madman or a fool?”

James pursed his lips, nervously touching the gun holstered on his hip. “You want me to sweep the place.” Sandstone Bay didn’t have a SWAT unit; it had a detective from the mainland. He had deputies, but none of them had his experience. That’ll teach me to talk up my credentials.

“Not alone, of course. Mr. Cullen and I will accompanying you. He has the experience and I, to hear my staff tell it, am quite mad.”

“Well, then I guess we know what that makes me, don’t we?”

Raed smiled apologetically. “I suppose so.”

~

Samuel Ruskin’s house was wedged against a rock formation well above the high tide mark, stuck there after it had been sucked off its foundations and tossed back and forth in the storm-churned waters. Its proprietor, refusing to evacuate with the rest of the coastal homeowners, had presumably gone with it.

Cooper wondered if the old man had drowned as the house had flooded, or maybe died some other, relatively peaceful, way. Maybe the house coming off the foundations gave him a heart attack.He hadn’t many kind words to offer Ruskin; the man was responsible for a sizable number of nuisance complaints to the local PD all by himself and whenever someone wanted to show James a story that some tourist was sharing about the town, half the time Ruskin was involved. Okay, that was a little bit of an exaggeration. There were only three incidents, but they’d all been spread across social media.

Despite all that and the many times he’d had to hear Ruskin’s nasally whine complaining about this group, that person or something else, he still hoped the old man had died quickly and peacefully. In Cooper’s estimation, there weren’t a lot of people that deserved a protracted end. Even accounting for all his vitriol, a bigoted old man who was all mouth wasn’t one of them.

James would have gladly locked someone the likes of Medinacci in a room with a mermaid – and not a hungry one, either. A very full one that wanted to show her children how to hunt, giving them lots of practice. Ruskin, though? No, he wasn’t the worst human being the detective had ever met. He didn’t deserve to be eaten alive.

As it turned it, that hadn’t been his fate, either.

They found his body – what was left of it – floating in a corner. Oddly, most of his clothes were still on. Mermaids weren’t animals; they knew enough to strip their meals rather than eating denim and polyester. In fact, the old man’s body was mostly intact with no sign of feeding. From the way he was positioned, it looked like Ruskin had lost a fight and managed to slosh through the water to this room before collapsing. The reason for that became apparent very soon.

“Shit on a biscuit and call it cinnamon,” Cooper breathed. That was a very old curse from his great aunt, but it was the first thing that came to mind for an occasion like this. Ordinary epithets just weren’t good enough.

“I don’t know what that means,” Doctor Damji said with a soft, awestruck whisper. “But I concur.”

The house had truly taken a beating as it had been slammed back and forth; walls had collapsed, furniture had been thrown around and there, tangled in a mess of wiring that had fallen out of the ceiling, was a mermaid. Her eyes were closed, cables and wiring digging into her limbs as her struggles to get free herself had only gotten her more and more entangled. It looked like there were several large bruises on her arms and head; maybe from being thrown about?

At first Cooper thought she was dead, perhaps strangled by the cords around her neck, but then he saw her chest move ever-so-slightly.

“God,” he whispered as the full reality of what this was came crashing down on him. “This one’s alive.”