The surface, p.7
The Surface, page 7
Inflatable ones had been available. But having a punctured kayak was the same as not having one at all. Maybe worse. Once she’d moved on to the idea of an inflatable—something she could store in a relatively small space—she’d also moved to the idea of being able to hold more than just herself inside the vessel.
What she had now were two eight-man, inflatable boats. They were made of extra thick rubber intended for ocean rescue and recommended for personal seafaring vessels. She breathed easier knowing they wouldn’t be punctured by sticks or rocks floating along on campus. Even if the water was shallow, she could trust they wouldn’t rip or puncture. She breathed easier and pulled the fabric of her oversized comforter down to cover the cardboard under her bed.
She’d spent hundreds of dollars on her new equipment. Then again, she’d decided that high-quality materials would be worth the cost.
Joule closed her eyes and felt her lips press together. She had not told Cage about the purchase yet, though she should have, long before now. For a moment, she entertained the idea of waiting out the thirty-day return window. But another thought followed immediately on the heels of that one: She would be angry if Cage had bought something this huge without telling her. So she hauled the now-empty delivery box down the stairs to the recycling bin and then headed to the other end of the hall.
Cage answered almost immediately when she knocked. His face showed obvious concern from misreading her expression. Wanting to get this over with and seeing Max lounging in the room, she pulled him into the hallway to tell him what she done.
She'd expected to defend her purchase, but all her brother did was look out the window at the end of the hall and say, “I'm glad you made me get the boots. And honestly, I think the rest was a good idea, too.”
Though she'd noticed when the rain started earlier, Joule hadn't looked out the window after that. Now she saw water pouring down in gray sheets so thick, she couldn't see the building next door.
15
Joule crossed campus more than a little bit irritated. The rain was merely a light mist today, the severe weather alert of three days ago never having quite panned out. Still, the air swirled wet and cold around her, making her jeans damp to the touch and the breath in her lungs a little icy.
That it was only mist was a good thing, she’d reminded herself as she’d grabbed her new, sturdier umbrella. She certainly would look like she'd fallen off her rocker, if she’d worn her full rain gear in this.
She and Cage and their friends had stayed inside during the hardest part of the rain. Luckily, it had passed in a few hours, and they hadn’t had to trudge across campus or leave to get food before it had let up.
Despite the light quality of today’s rain, her boots were still necessary. The already saturated ground was now splashing, rather than just squishing, under her feet. The land was doing its best to run off all the excess water, but it couldn't handle the volume.
Having grown tired of waiting for results, she’d emailed Kimura this morning, asking if he'd found out anything else about the eggs.
His quick reply of “Yes” had irritated her further. He’d added, “I don't have a full species identification, but I do have more information. And I've been incubating them. If you'd like to see, come on up to the lab. I'll be here today until six.”
If he had more information, why hadn't he reached out to her? She understood that she'd given him the samples for his research. But didn’t he understand that she had a stake in this, too?
She stepped from the grass onto the concrete patio surrounding the Bass Biological Sciences Building and noticed the patio was covered in an inch or two of standing water. The flat surface had created an ideal location for pooling. Picking her foot up and setting it back down, she noted how muddy the water was and wondered if it had been here long enough for anything small to be swimming around below the surface.
Then she wondered if Kimura would still be here. It was going on four in the afternoon. She headed into the building, leaving her wet footprints behind and arrived at the professor’s office, only to find it empty. Luckily, a sign hung on his door saying he was in the wet lab.
Great, she thought. If only I knew where the wet lab was. It took ten more minutes to find out that Dr. Kimura’s lab was in the basement. She headed downstairs, figuring she'd come this far and didn't really have anything to lose at this point.
As she cautiously pushed the door open, she was thinking of the glare she'd gotten entering Dr. Bang’s lab to look for Moonbeam. Joule was a little more cautious, but Kimura immediately popped his head up from behind a row of small aquariums and said, “Joule. I'm glad you came in!”
For a moment, her irritation at not being kept up-to-date fled.
“Did you come by to see the eggs?”
Maybe he just didn't have the social graces to know that he should have reported any results he’d gotten from her samples—not that she could have incubated anything in her dorm room. And not that she could trust Gin not to flush them down the toilet, or at least just glare at her every time she walked by. She decided to let it pass. “What did you find?”
“Well,” he said as he walked across the room, pointing to a few specific aquariums among at least a dozen. All looked sparkling clean, with filters and running water. “I carefully split up some of the strings of eggs.”
Kimura then motioned to the other side of the lab, where microscopes of various sizes and qualities stood. “I checked under the microscope to see if I could ID the species. But only of a few chosen eggs. I split the remaining eggs into three, roughly equal groups and incubated them in fresh, brackish, and salt water.” He motioned across the rows to each tank as he mentioned the water type.
There were possibly a hundred different twenty-gallon aquariums lined up side-by-side here, each labeled on the end with masking tape and poorly handwritten dates and notes. The water in each of the aquariums was a slightly different shade. Joule had brought him seven strings of eggs from five locations that she’d put into three containers. It had turned out she had five different kinds of eggs. Surely, even if he divided them all up, it didn't account for everything in the room. But she nodded along as he talked. “What am I looking for?”
Joule rubbed her hands down her jeans, only then remembering that they were still damp and slightly uncomfortable. In here, the science pulled her mind away from the physical sensations bothering her.
Kimura walked her through his process, excitedly showing off each of the different portions of his experiment with her samples. Joule couldn’t help but appreciate that he came off more as a teacher than a researcher.
“These are the gobies. There seemed to be two different species here, and I can't be positive they are both gobies. Still, that’s what I think. Given that the fish we pulled out of the puddle were red-tailed gobies, we know that’s the most likely possibility.”
He was talking a mile a minute, and Joule was just as excited to keep up. “What other kinds of gobies could there be?”
“Yellow. The yellow gobies in the Bay are relatively large and also carnivorous.” For a moment, his expression pulled to one side. Perhaps her question was slightly out of range. He turned back to another aquarium. “This is where I have them in freshwater, but even in just a few days, I can see they don’t seem to be developing as well as those in the brackish water.” He walked to a third aisle. “Here’s salt water, and these aren’t doing as well, either.”
Joule was noticing that the filtration systems in each tank were slightly different. She’d leaned down to examine them when he turned, still frowning. “Why did you ask about them being carnivorous?”
For a moment, she paused. Maybe she was crazy. Then again, maybe she was traumatized. She had found a student’s head in the bushes... and then later, an arm. But she thought if she didn't ask now, she’d never know. It wasn't as if she could look these things up on the internet. “The student that we found, Stephen—”
“We?” Kimura interrupted.
“Yes, I was out with a search party. A friend of mine is an SAR specialist—search and rescue. So she had a team and I was on it. We found Stephen… or we found his head.”
“Wow,” Kimura said, standing upright and tapping his fingers on the desk beside him. It seemed to create the sound of his thoughts. “I heard that they'd found parts of some of the students, but I didn’t really believe it. I thought it was just sensationalist rumor.”
“Oh no,” Joule said. “It was real. And I found it, so I looked up close.” She watched as he made a face. For all that he clearly loved science, maybe forensics wasn’t his thing. Still, she continued. “I noticed that the neck area looked like it had been chewed. So I wondered if the gobies could do that. Would they do that while the student was alive or only if he was already dead before they started eating him?” She didn’t really give him a chance to answer. “I know fish will eat soft tissue particularly quickly, and some fish will eventually eat everything but the bones if a body is found underwater.”
She was now reciting the things she had read online, when she'd been curious about what might possibly have happened to Steven and Ted and the others. Kimura was nodding along.
“All of that's correct. But the head was severed?”
“Yes. As were the lower leg and the arm we found later.” She watched as he grimaced again, but he’d asked.
“Where the bones broken or cut?” He kept digging, and she realized he was asking around something specific: Fish didn't bite through bone.
She thought about it. “No, I think just the connective tissue around them was gone, and that was enough to take the bones apart. All the bones I saw looked whole.” She shuddered that she could even say that.
He nodded. “But you asked about bites.”
“Yes. It looked like something had been chewing on him. Maybe.” She added the maybe at the end in case she remembered wrong. Maybe I’m just crazy.
He turned to her now, his attention completely removed from the bubbling aquariums beside him. “Gobies wouldn’t leave bite marks.”
16
Cage had mostly shaken himself off by the time he reached to the basement lab in the Biological Sciences Building. Joule had called him in a rush. Luckily, he hadn't been up to anything too important.
It was Joule who swung the door open wide and looked him up and down as he peeled off the rubber rain jacket that she'd gotten for him.
“This works wonders. Thank you.” It wasn't like they had a mother or a father to buy them these things anymore. But Joule’s eyes stared hard at him for a moment.
“You're very wet.”
It was a ridiculous statement, and it took Cage a moment to process it. “It's coming down harder now.” He watched as she absorbed that, and he realized she’d not worn her full rain gear over here. She was in a jacket and her jeans.
Still, she led him into the lab, draping his wet jacket over a nearby chair and introducing him to Dr. Kimura.
Cage held out his hand. “She told me you were helping with the eggs she’d found and that you helped her catch the fish the first day.”
Kimura nodded. “I’m hoping she’ll major in biological sciences. She has the head for it.” But he didn’t seem to make that statement as an ego piece for Joule, merely as a commentary on what he’d been thinking. He launched into an explanation of what he’d done with the eggs.
Joule occasionally added her own punctuation. “I found these over on the oval.” And later, “Those two were pulled from the same standing water, over between Campus Street and Galvez. By the visitor center and the stadium.”
Cage blinked a little at the information. He thought his sister had been picking up things as she passed them. Seeing odd occurrences and following through. It now sounded more as if she’d been conducting a carefully organized survey of the water on campus.
“These two are the ones Dr. Kimura is following most closely.”
Kimura chimed in, “I think they are likely elasmobranchii, but right now, their development isn’t far enough along to identify anything more than that.” He paused and sighed, “Honestly, that might even be wrong.”
Cage was opening his mouth to ask what that word meant, but Kimura and Joule were both already talking. He held up a hand as they were verbally tumbling over each other, well past his ability to follow. “I thought there were five species she brought you. One amphibian, two possible gobies, and the remaining two were unidentified.”
He watched as Kimura slowly nodded along, thankfully not offended by the pointed questioning. “Yes, they are. Would you like to see each of them?”
Cage was surprised at Kimura’s candid openness, but he followed the man over to an aquarium and peered in, unsure what he was looking at. Joule seemed to already know what was happening, but wasn’t that the way this whole season had gone? Joule seem to be slightly ahead of him on everything. Now, looking into the aquarium, Cage took a moment to locate the small section of eggs in the twenty-gallon space.
The glass was only half full and had a yellowish brown assortment of relatively natural looking rock on the bottom. The small, squarish eggs were not what he was expecting. Joule had shown him pictures of what she’d found, but the first ones hadn’t looked like this, and he must not have paid enough attention as she’d flipped through all of them for him.
He’d been expecting clear, gooey balls with dark centers, strung together almost like pearls. They’d had a pond in the back yard at one house and he and Joule had caught the fingertip-sized frogs when they hatched in the spring. He’d seen those eggs, and he’d seen caviar. So the two clusters of small, whitish eggs, one with black dots inside, had seemed normal to him. But these were strange.
On a string that looked almost like seaweed, they were neither a chain nor a cluster. More like the way a fisherman strung up fish in a bunch. And they weren’t round. These were flat and had a stringy, almost dry-looking texture. “I feel like I've seen this on the Discovery Channel or something.”
Kimura smiled. “Exactly. The entire class of elasmobranch fishes uses an egg case like this. They vary a good bit and I’m trying to look up this particular color and size, and what’s local to the area. No luck so far, though.”
Cage was nodding along. At least he could follow this. “So, there’s nothing particularly alarming about these eggs?” He gestured at the whole room, still not sure which aquariums were housing his sister’s samples.
“Exactly.” However reassuring the word was, Kimura’s expression was still grim. “It’s not the eggs themselves that are alarming—”
It was Joule who burst into the conversation then. She, too, motioned to the aquariums as though the whole room, bubbling behind them, was part of her evidence. “What the five kinds of eggs mean is that there's a link from the Bay to the campus—just like I thought. And that it’s more than just one or two enterprising red-tailed gobies that made it here. Wherever the tunnel or sewer or valley is, it’s channeling bay sea life all the way here. Anything that can handle brackish or fresh water has been invited onto campus with the rainwater!”
Her words hit him the way the cold water had the week before. A feeling of dread took hold as he realized the ramifications of what she was saying. She wouldn’t like what he added, but he looked to Dr. Kimura. “It’s not just the campus.”
Joule’s expression changed as he said the words. Had she forgotten? Pushed it out of her memory? They hadn’t talked about it, but was it possible she hadn’t seen what he saw?
Cage decided to tread carefully. “We were out—off campus—when the levee broke. We got hit by a crash current. We were over by Evergreen Park, trying to walk home, when the rush of water almost pulled us under. It could have killed us.” He looked to Joule, still not sure if she’d seen what he saw when they were out. He’d not mentioned it again, just glad that they’d gotten through okay. “There were fish in that water, too.”
Joule nodded, not surprised by what he said. “I think they were decent-sized.”
“What’s decent?” Kimura asked and waited while Joule held her hands up to indicate. Clearly, Cage was not the only one who’d seen the dark bodies writhing in the water as it rushed past. He hadn’t been certain enough to count it until now. He should have been talking to his sister more.
“Well then.” Kimura crossed his arms as his eyes glazed and stared into the distance. “We have a problem.” When he looked back at the twins, he seemed to have made a decision. “Joule has presented several options, and I think she's right. Either the students who went missing were washed away and died before the fish got to them or they were still alive when it happened. Were there any wounds on the arm that might have looked like the student fought something?”
Joule shrugged. “I don’t know how we would know. All the parts were pretty bashed up, but they’d been in strong current on campus and down the street. There were cars, curbs, and who knows what else the water might have crashed them into.”
“You’re right,” Kimura conceded, his eyes glazing a little again as he thought. “So, we won’t know about that, but we do know that the fish got to them, and your sister says she saw bite marks on the body parts that were found.”
Cage hadn't really thought about it. She’d told him the gobies were carnivorous, and he knew fish often ate bodies left in the water. But then Kimura told them something that didn't seem to faze Joule at all.
“When we think of carnivorous animals, we think of teeth. But many carnivorous fish are scavengers or eat their prey whole, and teeth aren’t part of the equation. Gobies wouldn’t leave the kinds of marks your sister saw. They're relatively small, and a human body left in the water is free food for most anything that comes by. Hell, even goldfish will eat a dead body.”
Though it was silly, the comment about the goldfish let Cage slow his heart rate a bit. Anything could have eaten the bodies. Even goldfish. He didn’t like that image, but it did make him breathe a little easier.
