Black Tide Read Online Free PDF

brightly in the sun.
    And then the windshields went dark. A shadow crept across my field of view. The temperature fell a cool 10 degrees.
    A sinister quiet settled into the island.
    From the right, it grew darker still. Then I could see the advancing wall of mist. It was rising from the water in fumarolic fits and spits, as if the entire sound had become a steaming volcanic mud pot. Through the sand I heard a white noise, like static on a television.
    â€˜Don’t move! Don’t expose your skin!’ I shouted, more to reassure myself than warn Heather and Scotty. My instincts were telling me to scramble out of what might very well become my own grave and run for my life, and I had to consciously force myself to lie still and trust that either the sand or the mask would keep me safe. I can’t really remember a similar emotional experience; maybe in the one or two seconds preceding my one and only car accident, where I skidded into the rear of the guy ahead of me. At that time I wished I could’ve been anywhere but where I was.
    I heard a rumbling behind me. I thought, Oh Lord, what now? and at that moment a dark grey C-130 roared low overhead, its flaps and gear down, its engines screaming as it prepared to land. I saw vortices of the mist get sucked up around it. It left horizontal tornadoes in its wake.
    And then.
    I can’t put out of my mind what happened next.
    The plane seemed to stagger in midair as it hurtled toward the runway, and its right wing dipped. But it was too low for such a manoeuvre, far too low, only a scant 50 metres above the ground, and although the pilot tried to recover the C-130 responded only sluggishly. The wing struck the ground and snapped off at the root, dissolving into a sickening cloud of flinders, and a ball of fire roared down the side of the fuselage as the entire plane rotated on its horizontal axis and disappeared beyond the lip of the runway, out of my sight. Moments later I felt a single, sharp thud jolt the island, and the water jumped up with a shock. Then I heard a boom whack the air. It was followed by a napalm-orange fireball that bloomed in the distance and boiled into the sky, merging languidly with the advancing front of mist.
    The island felt as though it were rolling with the motion of sea swells, and my stomach answered with corresponding waves of nausea. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to cry. I could hear Heather sobbing, and I wanted to crawl to her, and take her hand, and hold it against my cheek as I cried with her. I’d never seen anything so horrible, and to be forced to lie there buried in sand, unable to move, unable to even put my arm around another human being as this horrific drama played out was almost beyond human capacity.
    As the fire burned in the distance, the mist arrived. If such a thing were possible, my sense of terror deepened into something I can’t quite explain.
    The water began to change colour. I could see eddies of a black-coloured material drifting across the shallows in advance of a solid black mass swirling darkly from the east, just ahead of the mist. It looked like crude oil flowing under the water. I could not even begin to understand what was happening. A substance dissolved in the water, a fluid denser than water, or something with neutral or negative buoyancy being carried on the current, an organism of some kind. I just couldn’t say.
    The mist passed over us. It seemed to go all the way up the sky, into outer space.
    And then something happened to the water.
    It began to fry.
    At first I thought some kind of condensate was falling out of the mist. Where the mist began, the water was disturbed by … I don’t know … millions of tiny splashes, as if a pounding rainstorm were moving rapidly in our direction. And I could hear it plainly now. An urgent hissing that gained in volume until it nearly drowned the sound of my breath rasping inside the mask. Heather shrieked, and Scotty was murmuring