Cry of the Sea (4 page)

I stifled a smile and nodded thoughtfully. If
he was going to play this like nothing happened and get right to
business, I could go along with that. For now.

I drew in a deep breath as I considered what
he was asking. “The weather’s not too cold yet. There could be some
die-hard nature-lovers. You know, the retired folks and
beachcombers. No tents. Just mobile campers.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, too.”

All of the main beaches were part of public
parks with campgrounds, like Ocean City State Park.

“What about Grayland Beach?” I suggested.
“It’s south of town, away from the harbor and tourists. It’s the
one Haley and I usually hang out at because it’s less populated.
Odds are best that no one will be there.”

“Good idea,” he said, making a left turn at
the off-ramp.

A few minutes later my dad pulled the truck
into an empty public parking lot that led to the public beach at
the base of the cliff. We leapt out of the truck and grabbed our
equipment. The rain had stopped for the moment, leaving the air
crisp and smelling of salt and sulfur. It was now about four
o’clock in the morning, so the sky had brightened to a dull gray.
In another hour or so we would be able to use the cameras without
extra lighting equipment. By then, Affron’s
people
would
arrive, and it would be too late to get any pictures that truly
captured the devastation. Those guys moved fast when it came to
disguising their messes as “no considerable damage.”

I hiked the asphalt walkway down the hill,
carrying too much. With one heavy bag over my back, a tripod under
my arm and a flashlight in the other hand, I didn’t have a free
hand to catch myself when I slipped on the wet sand. My legs
skidded out in front of me. I skidded a half yard on my right thigh
and then landed squarely on my rump.

“June!” Dad snapped at me. “Be careful!”

Like my dad even cared about me getting hurt.
Even if I had, he’d just say, “Shake it off,” because I was not
allowed to cry. I hadn’t been allowed to cry over a bruise or bump
since I was six. He was only worried about the equipment. That’s
why he shouted. It stung a bit, to know that the equipment meant
more to him than my leg, but I also knew my dad’s reaction was the
correct one. Scratches from a fall meant nothing, but if the lamp
or bulbs in my bag broke, we wouldn’t get any good pictures. I
didn’t hear a crack or break come from the bag. I was pretty sure
it hadn’t touched the ground, so hopefully everything was still in
good condition.

Carefully, I stood up and continued down the
path. My thigh screamed at me, and I knew an hour from now, I’d be
looking at a heavy-duty scratch there.

When I caught up to my dad on the beach, he
was already wrapping the 35mm around his neck and pulling the
camcorder out of the bag.

“I’m going to need light, June,” he said.
“Can you hurry?”

“Sure.”

But even without the light, we could both see
that my mother’s worries had been founded. Already a number of sea
animals had beached themselves. Through the gray light of early
morning, the sand was dimpled with objects much larger than broken
seashells brought to shore by the high tide. Small creatures had
crawled out of the surf to escape the film on the top of the water:
clams, crabs, and a few turtles. I saw a lot of dead fish, a couple
of sea otters and already dozens of birds—all of them far blacker
than they should be for that kind of light. Some still struggled
against the oil coating their bodies. Most were dead.

It never got better, seeing this kind of
destruction. I could now bear the sight of it without breaking into
sobs like I used to when I was younger, but that didn’t mean I
didn’t want to fall on the ground and wail. I felt my throat close
up and my body tense in the way I’d trained it so that I could stay
cool despite the emotion rushing through me. My dad had taught me
how to overcome the sadness. He had to stay calm and in control,
and it didn’t help him to have a slobbery daughter at his side to
worry about.

Stiffly, I set up the lighting equipment that
I would carry behind my dad from spot to spot.

“Come on, June,” Dad called. “We’re losing
time.”

I followed him down to the waterline and
focused the lights on a porpoise. Its blowhole had been sealed shut
by the oil and its eyes permanently closed. My dad snapped a few
pictures and then switched to the camcorder. He held the camera,
while I spoke into a microphone about how the oil was killing the
porpoise.

“This porpoise was swimming in the ocean,
eating fish this morning. It came up for air and couldn’t get any.
The oil spread across its blowhole so that it couldn’t take a
breath. Imagine trying to breathe through cellophane taped over
your nose and mouth. In a panic, the porpoise swam to shore and
beached itself, probably thinking that it could rub the oil away in
the sand. Unfortunately, it can’t get back into the water. It
wouldn’t matter anyway. The fish it ate were coated with oil too,
and that oil is slowly poisoning his system through his kidneys.
This animal will die in minutes, not hours.”

Learning to talk through the knot in my
throat had taken years of training, too. Usually I could keep it
together if I could just stand and watch, but the second I had to
say something and blam! Out the tears flowed. Just like a baby. But
Dad preferred me to do the voice-over work, so he could focus on
taking pictures, so I did the best I could.

Granted my vocal tones weren’t smooth that
morning. My words quavered and edged on losing it, but I knew we
didn’t have time for retakes, so I pulled out some inner strength
and mastered it.

“As you can see, there are already a growing
number of creatures here on the beach dying or dead because of the
Affron Oil leak. The oil will begin to sink deeper into the ocean
and will coat the scales of fish. The killer whales, sea lions,
sharks, and dolphins will eat those fish and die. The oil will seep
into the ocean floor and kill the coral, sea plants, and the
creatures that live and feed on them. Thousands of creatures will
be dead by nightfall.”

We moved around the beach, getting shots of
different kinds of animals and birds. I made sure to note on video
which animals were endangered species. Dad complimented me on my
growing expertise at making clear expository for the video clips
and advised me about what to add as we walked away from yet another
victim of the oil.

“I told you that I’ve learned a lot from you
and Mom.”

He smiled. Not in a whole-hearted happy way,
but in that I-hear-you-and-appreciate-what-you’re-saying way.
“Yeah, I guess we’ve inundated you with this stuff. But look how
good you are at it. You could really make a statement, if you’d
just...”

“Follow in Mom’s footsteps?” I finished for
him. “I could, but I could also do a great deal of good with the
animals themselves. Just think, I could know how to clean up these
animals, get them healthy, and get them re-acclimated to the ocean.
Wouldn’t that be just as worthwhile?”

My dad put the camera down and rubbed his
shoulder. “It’s worthwhile, but...”

“But what?” I came back quickly. “How can you
argue that animal research and rehabilitation would be bad?”

“I’m not saying it is. I’m saying that you
wouldn’t have to rescue any animals if people weren’t hurting them
in the first place. Your mother and I try to
prevent
things
like this oil spill from happening. We need someone young and
intelligent like you to keep our work going.”

“You say that like you’re going somewhere,” I
said. “You’re not dying and you’re not quitting, so why do you need
me so much?”

“You’re the voice of your generation, June.
That’s why.”

I looked away from him back toward the water.
The sky had lightened quite a bit, and now I could see two-thirds
of the way down the beach. We had been there about an hour and
already more pelicans and sea gulls had flopped onto the shore,
their wings coated with oil so that they couldn’t fly, their beaks
stuck together so that they couldn’t eat.

“Do we have enough?” I asked my dad.

“I think we’ve covered at least one of each
type,” he said. “We might as well keep shooting, though. The Coast
Guard will be here soon enough, and we can stop then.”

I scanned the beach for a particularly sad
case that we could stick on the evening news when I saw something
horrible down toward the far end of the beach. No, it couldn’t
be!

The sun was up just enough for me to be able
to make out the silhouette of what looked to be a human being
covered in oil. I took a couple steps to my left to see more
clearly. No, I was wrong. It wasn’t
a
human.

There were
three
humans struggling
against the oil.

“Dad!” I screamed. “There are some people
over there! We’ve got to help them!”

Chapter
Three

They must be surfers
, was all I could
think as I ran toward the three squirming bodies. Who else would be
in the water this early in the morning? But even for surfers, this
was pretty early. They’d have to have been surfing in the dark.
That didn’t make any sense. Were they crazy? I knew some surfers at
school, and they were definitely nuts sometimes, but surfing before
the sun rose seemed extreme even for them.

Well, crazy or not, they didn’t deserve to be
caught in an oil slick. I crashed down to my knees beside the
bodies and dropped my gear. I started to reach out my hand to tap
them and see if they were all right without even stopping to get a
good look at them. But before I touched any of them, my arm
recoiled back to my side.

“Dad!” I screamed. “Oh my God! Dad!”

My dad rushed up behind me. “Are they alive?”
he asked, trying to catch his breath.

“I... I...”

Words didn’t come. I couldn’t formulate a
thought. I was too startled. These three figures lying in the sand
in front of me weren’t surfers at all.

They weren’t even people.

From their facial features and upper torsos,
they looked kind of like women, but all three of them had
silver-colored skin. They were bald, with strange ridges marking
their skulls. None of them seemed to have ears, only holes in the
sides of their heads. No nose was visible, not even a bone or
nostrils filled that space between their eyes and mouths. Although
their mouths seemed to be moving, they were actually breathing
through what looked like gills in their necks.

And if that wasn’t weird enough, instead of
legs, their upper torsos stretched out into long, scale-covered,
silver fishtails. If I had to say what these things stranded in
front of me, splattered with oil, appeared to be, I’d say mermaids.
And no, they didn’t look like they’d start singing songs or
granting me wishes. They looked a little bit scary—but fragile too.
Most of all, they looked like they were going to die, and no
handsome prince was there to kiss them and keep them from turning
into sea foam.

“June,” my dad whispered. “Do you think
they’re real?”

“Yes,” I whispered back. “Strange but very
real.”

“You don’t think they’re costumes?” he
suggested. “Maybe some costume party on a yacht last night—they
fell off.”

Sometimes my dad’s brain worked even more
off-kilter than mine. I shook my head. “Those are not costumes,
Dad.”

Those beings lying there in the sand were not
wearing anything that was cut or stitched together. What I saw
wasn’t material. It wasn’t a lycra suit like on
Catwoman
,
nor was it some kind of make-up like that chick from
X-Men
.
Make-up would’ve been washed away.

What I saw was real skin. Or some kind of
skin, if skin could be silver. And those were real scales, not some
kind of pointy sequins. I’d been around enough fish to know the
difference. Besides, if these were a couple drunk, rich women in
costumes, they’d be dead already. I knew these creatures weren’t
dead, because the one closest to me suddenly opened its eyes and
focused them right at me.

They were huge and midnight blue, almost like
eyes from a Japanese Anime character but more oval in shape. The
color was so deep, lacking any light, probably like the world the
creature knew. In those eyes I saw such intense pain and
desperation. The creature implored me with those eyes to do
something to help. The mermaid raised its webbed hands to its
throat. The other mermaids started doing the same action.

“I don’t think they can breathe,” I said.
“They’re suffocating.”

My dad and I had been kneeling there in the
sand, mesmerized by the creatures for far too long. I forced myself
to my feet and sprang into action. Reaching into my pack, I pulled
out a box of alcohol wipes. I used them to wipe the oil away from
the mermaids’ gills and faces. The mermaids cringed at the sting of
the alcohol. While I attended to the mermaids, my dad got on the
cell phone.

“Yeah,” he said to someone on the other end.
“It’s Peter Sawfeather. We’ve got an emergency... Oil spill... How
fast can you get the center ready? We’ve got a number of animals
here, but we need to bring in three, um, fish, right away... We
can’t wait... Dolphin size... Saltwater... Give us twenty minutes.
Maybe less.” He closed his phone and came back to me.

By now the sun was fully above the horizon.
The Coast Guard and Affron specialists should be arriving any
moment to take over.

“We’ve got to get them out of here before
Affron gets here,” Dad told me as if I didn’t know that already.
“They won’t be safe.”

I chose not to take a moment to say, “Duh,”
even though I was thinking it. Instead, I slipped my arms under the
cold, slimy body of the first mermaid. He didn’t lean over and grab
the tail. Instead, he was rummaging through his pack. “Dad,” I said
impatiently, “help me carry them.”