CLP and Saltwater

The sun dipped low, snuggling the horizon, playing coy with the day’s end. It’d succumb as it always did, with the twilight splashing the surf in brilliant tangerine. After an hour, the night would wash over the sea turning it blue-black. Serenity would wash over into a furtive somnolence. Darkness amongst the islands came with a dreaded implication. Local folks were known to avoid the waters at night, but most assuredly no one camped there.
On the beach of Gunnison’s Keep, Leo meticulously piled logs into a teepee. He shoved handfuls of kindling inside and lined the firepit with stones. Overtop he spread a spit draped with thin cuts of salted flank steak. He toed at his workmanship and backed away from the crude trap, satisfied in the moment, ugliness aside.
“And, this’ll work?” asked Kurt, ten or so paces toward the water.
“Has to.”
“What are you gunning for?”
“Whatever I see.”
Kurt and Leo worked at the boat, pressing on the hull with sandy, workworn hands. Their elbows corkscrewed and strained until they felt the lofting pull of the ocean suck the boat away. In its weightlessness they turned it longways and tugged it back into the sand so that it ran parallel to the tree line.
“So, what’s the plan?”
Leo didn’t respond. He drove stakes into the sand, hammered them home and tied the boat off. Every movement was deliberate. Mentally rehearsed a hundred times the previous night. His plan, however, was shoddy, cooked up in less time than it took to say it aloud. When he laid it out for Kurt, garnishing it with a seething sense of loss and anger, Kurt accepted. Familial responsibility blinded Kurt in the moment, let him believe this wasn’t nonsense. But red-eyed Leo, sundried and spent from grief, was flooded with equal parts confidence and malice.
In the trip to Gunnison’s, the brunt of what they sought gathered in Kurt’s mind. The potential violence of it. He’d started pelting Leo with questions that had obviously started to wear his brother’s nerves, distracting him, and now irritating him.
“You don’t even know what happened.”
“Does it matter?”
“It ought to. Ever since we were kids, we avoided this place like plague. Max knew that too. Him and his friends. The whole parish knows. But they still thought it wise to post up here. For what? A dare? A ghost story to prove wrong? This place earned its reputation for good reason. What would you find? What would you do if you did? This is ridiculous.” Kurt paused. “I loved him too, y’know.” He tapped his own chest.
“Right.” Leo rummaged through a bag aboard the deck.
“What’s that supposed to mean? I was his uncle.”
“’Was.’” Leo scoffed and tossed a hefty, worn, army green duffel bag over the edge and onto the sand. The racket minced the quiet air. The broken zipper sagged open on impact and coughed magazines and ammunition boxes onto the beach. The waning sun was kissing them goodbye, shining a golden hue off the brass jackets that tumbled into the sand.
“Load.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“And you’ve not nearly enough. Load.”
While Kurt half-heartedly clicked rounds into steel magazines, Leo approached the edge of the bush and stared off between the trees. He raise his hands to his sides and caught the breeze. He blinked his crusty eyes. The wind carried from behind him, up the small incline, past the tiny pseudo-encampment and towards the islands center, slithering between palms and shrubbery. Leo watched the tops of the trees dance. He began to cry. From his pocket he pulled a matchbook.
Kurt’s clicking slowed as he finished and finally, he tossed the sack back up onto the deck, full of loaded munitions. His thumbs throbbed from the effort. Leo lit a cigarette with a match and dragged half the life out of it with a pull. He crushed the matchbook in his hand, laid it out flat in his palm, and rolled the crumpled bundle around the cigarette’s filtered end. He secured the makeshift firestarter with a zip tie and set it between the logs. The cigarette smoldered, slowly shrinking towards its terminus. Kurt watched him and pretended not to see the tears.
Leo turned, paused, and marched across the sand, his cheeks wet and his chin toward the sky. Darkness was falling.
“What if nothing happens?”
“It’ll happen.”
“But what if?”
“Then we’ll set here till it does.”
The two boarded the boat. Leo picked up a scabbard and pulled two rifles from inside, one to a man, and handed Kurt his. They pressed their magazines into the wells, pulled their charging handles and set their selectors to “safe.” As Leo took his position in the belly of the fishing boat, Kurt beside him, he watched as the matchbook ignited, followed by the kindling. On one knee, Leo, through foggy eyes, observed as the logs caught. He couldn’t smell the smoking meat but could hear the sizzle. He knew the scent was still being blow inland. He turned and looked down the beach at Max’s discarded, derelict campsite. It showed like a grim tiding, over a week old.
In the pitch blackness of the evening, restlessness crept in the men. They set their handguards atop sandbags lining the deck. Desperate, stone-solid, they laid prone atop a bunkie board Leo repurposed. The waters were steady and soft, and the small aluminum boat bobbed ever-so-slightly. The men scanned, hunched behind buttstocks. The only reprieve from the dark was the fire, an island of light in a sea of quiet cold. The only smells: CLP and saltwater.
“Leo, I don’t-“
“Shush.”
Leo pointed.
The palms shimmied; the shrubbery teetered. From the cut slid huge, impossible shadows. Furry and ragged. Swaths of orange flickered in their mirrored eyes. Claws raked the sands as they circled the encampment. Maliciously, hungrily they slunk in.
The men swallowed screams, rotated their selectors, winked their left eyes, and squeezed.

***

Damien Moore is a Florida native, occasional flash fiction writer, veteran, future medical professional, and recent addition to the PNW. He can be found walking his tiny dog, watching horror movies with his partner Kayla, getting tattooed or deadlifting. (Extremely) Recent addition to twitter: @somebogmonster.