Dead killer whale, belly-up on top of a broken cottage—beautiful, perfect cover image, they'd win a Pulitzer for sure. Lara already had her pocket voice recorder switched on when the three of them met in front of the ruins, seawater up to their waists. Barely able to maneuver in the hip-waders, twenty-year-old Sam Hill stumbling around with her digital camera gripped firmly. Stormy with nothing in his hands, because he preferred to work from memory as Lara recalled from the newsroom. Two reporters and one photographer from the Word of the Weird Weekly, tasked with a very specific assignment: figure out why the hell a shit town like Carvelle now had a good chunk of ocean on top of it. Stormy stumbled, a sucker-rich tentacle dipping briefly above the water before sinking back down into the murk. "Watch it, twinkle-toes," Lara said, running a hand over what was left of the front gate. Barnacles. She hated the little calcified mouthes.
Stormy would have gone over in a strong gust, to be honest. He scratched at the freckle to the right of his right eye. "I don't see why Edna had to send you out here to help on this. I've been here for two days interviewing people, I don't need more bodies mucking things up." Two days of traipsing through a town half a mile wide, maybe, with grime in his hair and people holed up in the community center. They wanted help from the government, not strange reporters from some nobody magazine.
"You handle the human side." Lara ran a hand over a dead flipper. "Do we know whose house this is?"
"Beatrice Goode." Stormy took a few water-addled steps in the opposite direction, to roughly the front door. "She's still under there, apparently—they think this other guy, Roger Fiddle, was with her. The busybodies are already talking, you know what I mean? Gossip doesn't die."
"Well," said Sam, from five feet away. "The composition's going to be terrible, I can tell you that. I hate working with milky light." She scraped at the back of her shaved head and lined up another shot, clicking repeatedly from slightly shifted angles. "I would have brought a tripod, but this water's impossible." Junior photographer under Billsy, who knew what drew her to the Word in the first place. Edna was very careful about who had access to the personnel files, not that this usually stopped Lara when she really needed some information. They'd worked together once before, six months before, Sam taking pictures while Lara tracked a homicidal maniac with a playing card fetish and a habit for not dying. It was all a bit comic book, but Sam had been eminently trustworthy even if she did turn into a terrible drunk if you said the word "beer" to her. "But you'll get your dream cover, Lara, and I expect to be showered in awards and champagne for this." Better than salt crusting in one's toes and the constant smell of brine.
Lara cleared her throat and fussed pointlessly with the voice recorder. "I love that a possibly major act of God—I mean, have we figured out if anyone's randomly building an arc in these parts?—can't stop little old ladies from arguing over whether or not some old codgers were boinking behind people's backs." A dead eel floated past her, and she knew for certain that she'd never be able to go to a sushi restaurant again. "Have you got enough to put together some human interest sidebar crap for this, Stormy? What the survivors are doing to repair?" Edna expected half an issue's contents ready in three days' time, but she was like that. There'd be at least one drunken phone conversation in Lara's future, with screaming, cursing, and begging for deadline reprieve. Part of the process.
"I can throw something together. Do we know where all the water came from?"
"I talked to an old friend of mine, marine biologist, he happened to mention the Pacific Ocean's been—well—fluctuating lately, could be what caused it." At least nobody had said the A-word yet. Lara didn't really feel like doing a UFO exposé right now. "The science never makes sense anyway, and you know how much Edna hates big words—though if we can throw around teleportation she might get that glazed, nostalgic look. Easy to get a better Christmas bonus when she's like that."
© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.