Mermaids

Chapter 4

At least half a dozen whales lay unmoving on the once pristine white shore. The sun bore down on their lumpy forms and even the strong smell of saltwater could not hide the cloying scent of blood and blubber.

Unbidden tears spilt hotly down Leena's cheeks as she stared at the tragic scene before her. A small scuffle and curse behind her alerted her to Sam's arrival.

Leena turned and read the equal expression of dismay in Sam's face. "Can you—" She had to swallow past the knot in her throat. "Can you go back and tell Ma, please? She'll know what to do."

A whale beaching, while uncommon, was not unheard of in this area. Leena could count with one hand the number of times she had gone down to this very cove with her mother and a group of others from the town to help rescue a stranded whale or dolphin. Half the time they had been successful; the other half, they had been too late.

It had never been as horrible in magnitude as this.

Sam only nodded and turned, heading back to the cottage, her recovered cheer from not an hour earlier once again evaporated.

Unable to just stand there and wait, Leena ran down to the whales. A desperate part of her prayed to find a survivor; but most of her knew its futility. She approached the nearest form and gently touched its skin. It was still damp, kept so by the cool breeze, but the body showed no signs of life, its side oddly flat. The organs had already collapsed in on themselves and a glance to the others nearby showed Leena the same thing.

Fighting back a fresh onslaught of tears, Leena forced herself look closer, trying to see if there was any sign of the cause of the beaching. While it was normal for whales to beach themselves every now and again, given the goings on of that morning, she would not dare to assume the crippling sound had affected only her family.

She found it within moments. A small trail of blood leaked steadily from the whale's ears, soaking the sand beneath it. Leena prodded gently at the raw skin, unhappily estimating the damage. Besides the minor gouges from clearly begotten from the rocks that littered the bay, most of the injury appeared to be coming from the inside. And she knew whales to only bleed so from the ears when suffering from severe trauma of some kind.

They had been right, Leena thought bitterly. The whales had definitely caught the brunt of the sonic weapon tested by the military. Her curious side—which she suddenly felt a brief moment of anger over, this was so not the time to be curious—wondered just how far the damage had spread, both in the animals and in the water; the rest of her upped its panic in how her grandmother's pod fared. Still, she made herself push the thoughts to one side. With a heavy heart, she kept moving, checking each whale, taking note of the damage—which, she was not surprised to note, showed to be the same symptoms for each—and the possible problems they might encounter when lifting the bodies out of the bay. Not all of the rocks were visible above the sand, and as Leena knew the area like the back of her hand, having practically grown up on its shores, she knew any input regarding how to safely remove the bodies would be valued.

It was as she was rounding a small gray whale when a slight movement in the corner of her eye had her turning, hope leaping up in her chest.

Was there a survivor after all?

Then Leena realised what she was looking at, and the hope died down, even as a lump grew in her throat.

A mermaid.

Smaller than any she had seen before, with a pale blue-grey underbelly and a dark fin—and apparently as badly wounded as the whales surrounding him. Blue-black blood wept thick and sluggish from a deep gash in his shoulder, while the opposite arm lay at an odd angle, clearly broken. His wide fleshy tail was bruised and scratched, the wounds harshly evident against his pale skin. Large black eyes stared at her menacingly even as his mouth stretched to bare sharp teeth in clear aggression, matched by the small spines raising along his back.