​What Lies Beneath

No one really remembers where it all started, or what the catalyst was. If you were to look hard enough, you may be able to find some videos from the earliest days of the event, most of which are vacation videos taken from the cell phones of proud parents watching their children. I was one of the lucky ones, if you can even call it that. I hadn’t bothered to go down to the shore in years. I was home alone, backing up some old home videos I had taken on my cell phone to my computer. Call me archaic, but even though I know that most things will store themselves virtually, I still like knowing that there are hard copies of the files within easy reach, should something ever happen. I had left the TV on in my living room, and I had been too lost in my own thoughts to notice when the sounds of the laugh track from whatever sitcom had been playing changed to the screams from the emergency news bulletin that had interrupted the regularly scheduled broadcast.

I had been watching the video of my last trip to the beach with my wife and daughter. I had taken the day off of work to drive them down to the boardwalk a few hours away, and we had spent most of the morning building sand castles and splashing around at the water’s edge. This was our first time taking our little girl to the beach that she would actively remember. Our previous trips had been when she was an infant, and she had spent all of those sitting in a plastic kiddie pool we had brought with us, splashing happily in the small amount of sand and sea water we had poured in beneath the shade of our umbrella. Once she was old enough to start school she would hear her friends talk about their annual beach trips, and once summer rolled around that’s all she would talk about. After a lot of careful planning, my wife and I finally decided we’d take her for her birthday. She had been so excited once she realized where we were going, and her mom had taken her out just a few days before to pick out a new swim suit for the occasion. She had gotten to the age where she was starting to develop her own style, which currently meant rejecting anything “girly”, as she put it. We had tried to raise her to understand that gender norms didn’t mean anything, but that didn’t stop her from recognizing that there were clear designations in the department store between “girl” and “boy” clothes, clearly separated by a wide dividing walkway. That day, she had fixated herself on a pair of swim trunks, which had a very distinctive multi-colored checker pattern not unlike a Rubik’s cube. I remember shooting my wife a glance when my daughter ran inside holding her prize to show me, dreading the thought of the fashion styles of the 80’s coming back into pop culture. She already had a rash guard that she wore when we visited the neighborhood pool, so all that really needed to be done was removing the netting from inside the trunks for a more comfortable fit. We had left early that morning, and I was fairly certain my daughter had slept in her swimsuit so that she would be able to get into the car that much faster when it was time to go. The day had been hotter than usual, and the beach was crowded. We had to set up a little further back on the sand than I would have liked, but we decided that we would keep an eye out for a spot closer to the water and move if something opened up. The opportunity had, indeed, presented itself as I was escorting my little princess down to play in the waves. I had sent my wife up onto the boardwalk to grab some lunch, and I knew that by the time she got back someone else would have taken it. For how close this new spot was, we would be able to let our daughter play in the water without the need for one of us to be standing over her the entire time, giving us both some much needed rest and relaxation. I told her to stay there and look for a present that she could give to her mom once she returned, and that I would take her further into the water once I got back from moving the chairs. She smiled up at me, in a way that I’m sure had to hurt her cheeks from how excited she was, and agreed. The last clear memory I have of her is the sight of her happily picking up the shells that were being exposed from the gently lapping waves, scampering back and forth excitedly as new ones caught her attention. By the time I finished gathering all of our belongings and turned around, I couldn’t see her anymore. I dropped everything, ran up and down the shoreline and asked everyone who was in the area if they had seen my little girl. It wasn’t long before the beach was cleared, and the coast guard was called in. I thought that I had instilled a sense of water safety into her from all of those visits to the pool when she was growing up, but children are unpredictable and curious creatures, and the ocean is not the same as a pool. In my mind, I can only hope that whatever it was that drew her further into the water, it must have been one hell of a beautiful shell. My wife never forgave me for leaving her alone, and I can’t say that I blame her. I was being irresponsible, and I should have waited for her to come back before attempting to move our belongings. I envy those of you who have never heard the anguished cries of a grieving mother, it’s the sort of sound that can’t be faked. It’s something raw and primal that you instinctively understand is the sound of an entire world being utterly destroyed. They never found any trace of her, and once they called off the search we were forced to bury an empty casket. Not long after, my wife decided that the grief was too much, so I was left alone with nothing but the ghosts of memories in the once happy home we had shared together. By the time I had pulled myself away from the video of my daughter splashing about happily in the waves, I was met by a very different picture. The same coastline, which had been filled with happy families in the video which I had been watching moments before, stood in stark contrast to what I was now witnessing. Vaguely humanoid forms were rising from the surface of the water, though what exactly they were wasn’t entirely clear. Their bodies were covered in bits of coral and barnacles, and a good number of them appeared to have entire parts of themselves missing. One of the ones that stood out to me the most was the upper torso of what I believe was a man at one point, pulling itself along the ground with fingers covered in algae and caked on sand. Everyone was panicking, trampling one another in an effort to escape the horror they were now faced with. I stood there, mouth agape, unable to process the horror of what I was seeing. Any belief I had in a loving higher power died the same day I lost my daughter, but bearing witness to what appeared to be the shambling corpses of the drowned rising from beneath the waves was enough for me to send a silent prayer to whatever may have been out there listening. That was about three years ago, and it wasn’t long before the mass panic gave way to the complete collapse of societal structure. Once it became clear that our local government was completely inept at dealing with the issues at hand, militia groups made up of whoever happened to have weapons handy at the time, banded together in order to try and keep their local areas safe. That only lasted for a few months once it became clear that bullets didn’t seem to do much against the thick rocks and remains of marine life that clung to their bones and skin like armor. The only sure way to stop one of them from moving was a clean shot to the head, but these things weren’t like the zombies we all saw in the movies growing up. They could reason, recognize patterns, and there were second-hand rumors that some of them could even talk. The vast majority of them seemed to hold memories of their previous lives; videos of people who appeared to be more recently deceased appearing to gesture vaguely as though asking to use cell phones surfaced alongside those who wore the uniforms of wars long since over attempting to break into coastal forts and occupy them once more. Exactly how much of that was genuine thought versus muscle memory was anyone’s guess, but it was clear that these things weren’t brainlessly shambling around. We were fighting a war, and it was going to take more than a few untrained civilians with handguns and hunting rifles to turn the tide. We eventually learned to avoid them, small settlements cropped up here and there full of people trying to bring back a sense of normalcy in this new and crazy world, but I didn’t trust them. I remembered how the people in those old TV shows would become complacent after living in a communal setting, which led to everyone being wiped out either by other humans or more zombies. Once that realization dawned on me, I realized I didn’t want to go out that way. I gathered up my belongings, and started making my way south. I knew that this trip would be longer than the one I had taken all those years ago, but if things went like I hoped it would be worth it. I didn’t see much of anyone in my travels, the coastal cities were all but abandoned in the early days due to their close proximity to the main source of the outbreaks, so I didn’t have to worry about anyone trying to interfere as I made my way along. It took a few days, but I had finally made it. I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the gallery until I found one of the many pictures I had taken that day, the one of my wife and daughter smiling and standing over the sand castle I had just helped her build. Despite the remains of broken umbrellas and discarded beach toys scattered about like makeshift tombstones for those who never made it off the sand on that first day, I knew I was in the right place. I walked a little further, seeing a solitary figure standing there at the water’s edge, the distinctive pattern of the swimming trunks still visible despite being covered over with a decades worth of grime and detritus from the bottom of the ocean, tears stinging my eyes. I walked up to her slowly, she was bent over picking away at the sand. “Princess?” I said quietly, not wanting to startle her. She looked up at me, her face marred by bits of coral and shell, and smiled. I fought the urge to flinch as what appeared to be a small crab scuttled out from her toothless maw. “Dad… Dee?” She said choppily, as though she were repeating a foreign phrase that she didn’t fully understand the meaning of. I nodded, now openly weeping, and dropped to my knees to be level with her. “You waited for me, just like I told you to.” She nodded jerkily, and I imagined her eyes lighting up with pride in place of the hollow sockets that looked blankly up at me. “Come on, sweetheart,” I said softly, taking her hand and walking slowly into the surf, “I promised I’d take you to play in the waves once I got back.” As we began to advance into the crashing waves, she tugged my arm with more strength than I would have expected given her tiny near-skeletal frame. “Dad… Dee…?” she said in a hoarse whisper that I barely heard over the crashing of waves, “Pres… Sent…” I looked down to see her free hand raised as high as she could manage, and held within was a clump of dead seaweed. With that, I dropped to my knees and hugged her as tightly as I could as a large wave broke overhead and pulled us both under.