The Deading

by Nicholas Belardes

Genres: Horror; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets The Last of Us in this harrowing dystopian novel about the downward spiral of a seaside town that becomes infected by a mysterious ocean-borne contagion.

If you want to stay, you have to die.

In a small fishing town known for its aging birding community and the local oyster farm, a hidden evil emerges from the depths of the ocean. It begins with sea snails washing ashore, attacking whatever they cling to. This mysterious infection starts transforming the wildlife, the seascapes, and finally, the people.

Once infected, residents of Baywood start “deading”: collapsing and dying, only to rise again, changed in ways both fanatical and physical. As the government cuts the town off from the rest of the world, the uninfected, including the introverted bird-loving Blas and his jaded older brother Chango, realize their town could be ground zero for a fundamental shift in all living things.

Soon, disturbing beliefs and autocratic rituals emerge, overseen by the death-worshiping Risers. People must choose how to survive, how to find home, and whether or not to betray those closest to them. Stoked by paranoia and isolation, tensions escalate until Blas, Chango, and the survivors of Baywood must make their escape or become subsumed by this terrifying new normal. 

At points claustrophobic and haunting, soulful and melancholic, The Deading lyrically explores the disintegration of society, the horror of survival and adaptation, and the unexpected solace found through connections in nature and between humans.

Release date: July 23, 2024

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

We hear about the old man rising at Sweet Springs lookout. We also learn of the magic cat in Coon Creek, and the police officer resurrection on Pasadena Drive. We gather to talk and laugh about them. We sneak booze. We suck down spliffs. We call our get-together the Dead of Night and have a real rager down in a hidden cove away from all the MDO park rangers. That’s Montaña de Oro, the state park where you can walk on beaches, trails, and hike to Valencia Peak and stare at the stars and ocean. Nothing about our party is serious. It’s just an excuse to be together soon after it all started.

Days go by. Weeks. Now, all kinds of adults are pretending to die. Deading. That’s what we call it, have been calling it, because, well, we’ve done it before, like more than a year before the adults ever thought to start their stupid version.

Thirteen months ago, to be exact, Mr. Nuño’s entire English class deaded two days after Kaylee Jones deaded in an elevator. Blas really likes her, we all know. Anyway, we acted like we’d been in some awful school shooting. No fake blood though. We weren’t about to get gross. Half of us sprawled on the floor. Some slumped over desks. Chewie Miller hung over the portable tablet cabinet.

We did it to make fun of ourselves. We did it because we die and it isn’t fair.

You see, we’d already held GUN CONTROL rallies, BLACK LIVES MATTER rallies, EARTH DAY rallies. Those always got us nowhere. Adults don’t listen. We know that.

Whatever.

Truth?

Already told you. We group deaded as a joke.

That, and because we knew Elisabeth Garcia’s social media accounts would blow up. We all wanted to be famous.

We deaded because we wanted to shake people up. We did it because deading is hilarious. We wanted to see our own expressions, our fake dead faces fresh out of the oven, and we did it before any of that fake deading while drinking Grimace shakes. We wanted to see the comments. We wanted to start a trend, okay? We’d all seen what Kaylee Jones had done two days before. We had to be a part of that.

What happened with her? She deaded on the campus elevator. Mr. Rocha was about to head to the second floor when he caught her lying there. Julie Moore was straddling Kaylee’s thin twisted frame, smart phone out, thumb snapping images.

“Best ever,” she said in her singsong way at Kaylee’s blank stare. “Everyone gonna wonder who took dead photos of you,” she sang. “Too bad we can’t make your face blue, maybe add some purple. I think that’s what dead really looks like.”

Julie kept on going, like her teacher hadn’t been standing there, listening, half horrified at Kaylee’s blank stare. She snapped another shot before acknowledging his presence. “Sorry, Mr. Rocha. For a post. You know.”

“No, I don’t know,” said Mr. Rocha.

Julie giggled like she didn’t care, like she didn’t want to explain, though she did. “She’s deading.”

“Oh.”

Kaylee’s eyes came back to life. She sat up.

“Your dead . . . thing is over,” said Mr. Rocha. “Get to class. I need the elevator.”

And that was the beginning, though what we did started sooner, somewhere else. Larry Lincoln said he read something on Bustle and told Kaylee that deading started somewhere in Russia. They were deading like crazy in Moscow. Freaking out friends and family over and over. Deading in schools. Deading in parks. Deading in parked cars. Deading while driving. Deading while crashing.

The article wondered if Putin had been deading all along.

From there it spread across other parts of Europe, then Japan. For some reason the Japanese kids really loved to dead. We all wished we could join them at pachinko parlors and beautiful temples. And then it spread to China, people unhappy that they couldn’t get jobs. It was a kind of rebellion. We loved that.

Anyway. We began deading at Baywood High.

We teenagers anyway.

We started the deading here.

Deading. Deading. Deading.

And then we stopped. It got boring. It was over, for months and months.

But then this thing happened. It started with the adults. Something completely unrelated. Something similar. Everywhere in Baywood, people lying on sidewalks and streets. In living rooms, in restaurants. Next to cars and on the beach. In hotel lobbies. In school hallways. Around the administration building. In the gym. Really old people started doing it, then our little sisters and brothers.

People in their forties, thirties, twenties, teens . . .

We’d deaded long before the adults. That’s the thing. We’d DONE IT. We were already over it.

But that shit was a joke. We were just playing around.

Whatever started happening, whatever is really happening, is messing us all up. We knew this almost right away, can tell from that look in each others’ eyes, from the stories we started to share. No one is going to be a social media star this time, not the way this has been playing out. It’s beyond what we ever imagined, what we could comprehend. It doesn’t feel real and we’re all scared. We’re not even sure if anyone will make it out of Baywood alive.

Close to one in the afternoon the scare happens: a single snail found drilling into an oyster. By itself the snail isn’t a threat. A wash of yellow. An amber spiraled jewel. Ten thousand, on the other hand, could wipe Bernhard’s oyster farm from existence.

He pinches the shell, drops it in a baggie to take ashore.

Tidelands swell out here along the back bay where Bernhard’s floating dock and office rocks with the rush of water. Oysters feed off this sudden transformation between high and low tide, their beds buffered by a long harbor, by breakwater walls and sandspit dunes. The danger of what the open sea can bring can still slip through the narrow harbor mouth, Bernhard knows this.

Chango Enriquez and Deb Ochoa, both hired hands, peer at the zipped bag. “Got to be a one-off, yeah?” Chango says. Deb nods. Chango has always cried wolf about something. Strange algae colorations. Bizarre giant sea slugs. Slithering octopi found while raking grit, slime, and bony sealskin remains atop the rows of mesh bags. This one is no apparition. He’d spotted the glittering amber shell. Plucked it from an oyster, even flicked its little tentacle eye. “Can’t believe it let go the shell,” he says, eyes still roaming the beds, potential victims everywhere. “We’re searching for more, boss. We’ll get these little cabrones.”

Bernhard grunts, his stomach a knot of potential lost product.

The snail slithers in the baggie, tentacles outward, explores every edge of its new universe. Eyes like specks of stars against a thin wall of plastic. Bernhard wants to crush it right here. Instead, he leaves Chango and Deb to search the beds a second time, while he brings the specimen to the Center for Coastal Marine Sciences of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Best to confirm what it is or isn’t.

An hour later, Dr. Beth Magaña grins. Says she hasn’t seen an Atlantic driller in ten years. “This could be a one off,” she adds. “You never know. But the fear is real. Coastal ecosystems have reached a crisis point. More than your oysters will fall victim if there are others. And where there’s one, could be half a dozen, maybe more.”

Bernhard isn’t pleased with that stupid grin, or this kind of talk about ecosystems and timelines. The tidelands have always been tough, harsh, filled with nutrients that could pump life into massive numbers of shellfish, a lot more than his farm holds. At the same time he considers the strangeness of this snail, how nature’s ability to make spirals is a mesmerizing aspect of the sea. Maybe that’s what throws predators off, why this single snail hasn’t been eaten by something bigger than itself. Complex shell patterns and colors. Fibonacci sequences. He’s about to complain about its camouflage when Magaña goes on about some ocean blob, waves of seabirds washing ashore.

“A million starved murres, with little body fat, empty stomachs,” she says. “All white fluff beneath. Nothing in their guts.”

He feels what she’s saying, though he doesn’t believe this tale of swirling sea-tundra, feather and bone. His head fills with static. What does he care about bird die-offs?

Dr. Beth Magaña seems to enjoy this part of the conversation. “This is similar to all those birds dying in New Mexico a few years ago. Tens of thousands of passerines found in the sand, starved after fleeing forest fires, then a cold front. All that insect loss due to drought. Destroy one food source,” she says, “everything falls to pieces. Here, look . . .” She flips through her tablet, scrolls to a report from someone named Jotaro. “He studies ocean biomes south of us, in and around Channel Islands.”

Her fingers highlight a section:

The Blob is a result of unseen explosions like the atom bombing of Hiroshima, transforming the seas with 228 sextillion joules of heat. No doubt ocean food chains are affected. Fish numbers in Pacific coastline estuaries are already down. Salinity is up (I’ve attached a chart). What you can do: Harvest shellfish and plant crops early. Monitor for predators. Consider other methods of growing over the next few years. Consider more protection from tides. Consider what might happen if the worst comes. No one can predict how bad this will be.

A muscle twitches below Bernhard’s left eye. Why hadn’t he already received this report? Should he even believe it? Aren’t all those El Niño numbers a lie too? Someone surely messes with those buoy sensors. He’s seen those warming trends. Little orange heat blobs all over the map. It’s cyclical. So what? Big deal about those hundred-degree ocean surface temps off Florida too. Probably happens all the time.

He reads more:

I know it seems like an obsession with water temperature, but this is pretty unusual and perhaps to the land-based, it needs the context. We do get warm water offshore around this time in an average year. What is different this time is that the warm water has entirely displaced the colder inshore water. Our charts usually show yellow and orange offshore (warm) and blue/green inshore (cool). But now it is beyond orange into the brown (68°F) in some areas, and no cool water at all inshore. This is unusual in two respects: 1) the warm water has lapped up right to shore; and 2) the warm water is several degrees F higher than what we usually consider warm around here. This is very warm for us. Note that an unexpected Least Storm-Petrel was netted on Southeast Farallon Island last week. That suggests a marine heat wave, rather than El Niño, but as the latter strengthens and warm water shows up from the south, the entire situation will unite. The current sea surface temperature anomaly map shows a cold region to the south of us, separating us from the El Niño. Interesting if at the same time troubling. I guess as we fry on this earth, we will be happy enough seeing all the bird vagrants brought in by the doomsday scenario. Fascinating but terrible. This will mean gigantic red tides and demonic acid outbreaks. Say goodbye to crab season and expect more mass bird die-offs.

He admits what could happen if there was a danger. A decrease in micronutrients means less meat per shellfish. A decrease in customer satisfaction. He can’t expand his oyster farm if meat quality heads to the toilet. Some of his fishing friends predicted this would happen. Thank god these marine heatwaves go underreported. He bites his tongue. Magaña. She has it out for him, he thinks, for oyster farmers in general, has for a while now. He doesn’t believe he’s destroying habitats, no way, not for a minute. It can’t be what she thinks. Plenty of tidewater nutrients to go around.

“I’ll email this to you,” she says. “Mind if I keep this specimen? I don’t come across this species every day.”

Bernhard sits across from his wife Katherine at Bayside Café, a harbor restaurant just off the back bay. He’s already been to the oyster farm and back. No report of any snails so he sent Chango home. Deb promised to work until dusk, said she could use a few extra hours on top of her twelve-hour shift. That’s good because Bernhard doesn’t feel satisfied. A weight sits in his gut about snails in the silt and slime, how Magaña has it out for him. He doesn’t like when things come at him from multiple directions.

Katherine picks at her dinner, starts to say something about the fish being too dry. “You know, we really should have gone to the Quarterdeck in Arroyo Grande,” she says. “You proposed to me there.”

He talks over her, complains how Magaña is helpful one minute then spies on him the next. “She lurks in the marina with her binoculars,” he says. “I’ve seen her mingling with Harbor Patrol when she’s on a kayak. They whisper things. She’s not looking at birds or waterlines when she’s out there. She’s spying on me, on the goddam oysters.”

The sun has melted its orange eye into the darkness of Morro Bay’s tidelands, spreading a dust haze into lavender blood. A heater next to the table glows and flickers. Katherine’s face has become a haunt of propane light. Reminds Bernhard of her great-grandmother Mary staring ghostlike from Katherine’s library photo shrine. That flowing drift of white cotton, that narrow, starved face. Gone for decades, Mary’s judging eyes continue to examine anyone who sits and reads.

Almost always alone in the photos, as if she never knew a soul, Mary sits on a couch, on steps, bent and thin in a kitchen, eyes sideways to the lens. You forget the camera eye, that she only seems alone—that great-grandfather Katherine never mentions with his finger on the shutter—or maybe her rumored Dunite impressionist lover from a seaside cult. A dune vortex worshipper, he illustrated shadowy hellscapes, underworlds filled with heaps of burning sand that melted into disturbing forms.

A photograph of the sandy communal home of Moy Mell hangs amid the shrine. Some say the painter had a bedroom next to hers after she left her husband, that they visited each other in the middle of the night. Her pale form next to a white porch surrounded by tents and clotheslines repeats itself along the wall. Bernhard can imagine them all, the house shifting in angles and shadows, sometimes thin and tall, other times white and tilted, sinking into sand.

Some photos haunt Bernhard more than others. A reflection or shadow in one window feels like a slice of darkness that crept from the sea, that lodged itself in a plane of glass, come from beyond piles of distant dunes and shrubs. In the same image Mary smiles at something inward, distant.

Images play through Bernhard’s mind, a stillness in them springs to life, cracks open amid faded black and white. The great-grandmother, a dark line next to an oak or cypress. Sometimes a blur on a sand dune, ocean in the distance, her body dwarfed against a black band of seascape. She stares from a wraithlike portrait like she knows something about how this will all end for Bernhard. Wallpaper patterns resemble a crypt. Walls close in. The sea closes in. Death closes in. Shadows and shapes where the old woman’s eyes should be. Their blackness pulls him into a void where he imagines a starless drift. He can only escape along an edge that releases him into a swamp of roots and mulch. Katherine has stepped from a similar monochrome nightmare. He thinks maybe she was born of some tree of blood, squeezed amid tangles of roots within some dark hollow.

Bernhard wonders when this happened to Katherine, when this transformation took place. Some nights he doesn’t even think it’s her in his bed, but Mary, resurrected, a leather-skinned thing pulled from the soil, skin coarse against his, bony skin to skin, breathing curses against his back, whispered from tangles of deadfall.

Her hand creeps to her glass, edges lit by a tiny flame, the candle-dusk having slipped to midnight blue. Bernhard slurps down his entire martini to rid himself of how sunken Katherine’s cheeks have become. Desperate to pull himself away, he continues talking, avoids eye contact. “These local marine biologists are always accusing me of operating poorly within the tideland ecosystem. Any minute they’re going to say I’m harming the birds, the water. And if I harm the birds, they’ll think I hurt the fish, snail, and crustacean populations. I just know they’re going to say that every goddam thing in the tidelands is at risk because of my oysters. And now this Blob? A warning to make me paranoid. A way to get me to reduce size. Saw a report from this guy, Jotaro. Then she sent me a letter. Listen to this.”

He starts reading from his phone screen. “Higher water temps from the Blob mean forage fish are replaced by warm-water varieties. That means lower nutritional value. The fish they feed on go deeper where the murres and auklets can’t catch them. Not only that, predator fish are eating the good stuff. Cod, flounder, and walleye come in because they’re hungrier too. The entire ecosystem has shifted. Murres starving mostly. Warmer waters affect more than seabirds and fisheries. They bring invaders up and down the West Coast like that Atlantic oyster driller your worker found. This means your harvest runs the risk of predation, or at the very least, a decrease in intertidal micronutrients. The overall quality of your oysters are at stake over the next few seasons.”

Katherine isn’t listening, he can tell. She starts talking about their son Michael who studies law at Pepperdine. Her voice drones through the salt air. “Michael’s new girlfriend is from Newport Beach. I think she has a disorder of some kind. She’s all bones. I never see her eat.”

Bernhard doesn’t want to talk about this. He doesn’t want to point out the irony. He’s got a one-track mind to enlighten her, to pound some sense about what’s eating at him into that cold stare. “Four years straight of quality oyster meat, Katherine. This isn’t the end of the world. I see dollar signs. Exceptional oysters with each harvest. We have to expand. We’ve got the perfect tumble method. It’s all peaches and cream. These scientists and biologists—they operate on fear. It’s Blob paranoia. They want me to think I’m harming the environment or that we can’t withstand the Blob.” Then he lies: “I’ve seen other reports. Fish numbers have been holding steady in the estuary. Salinity levels too.”

“Can we step away from the oyster farm for an hour?” Katherine says. “I drove down here to be with you.” She pops open a mirror, stares at her shadow in the heater glow. She’s always staring at those cheeks, her thinning lips, her eyes and eye makeup.

“Takes five minutes to get here,” Bernhard points out.

She changes the subject again: “I don’t like having two homes so close to each other. I can’t maintain them.” She takes a gulp of wine. “Michael says you haven’t called all week.”

“I thought you liked sleeping apart sometimes.” Bernhard wants to call her ungrateful but doesn’t. He knows he uses that word too much. It causes them to hate each other for days on end. But he can’t manage to stop thinking how unappreciative she’s been the past year. He tries to focus on their son though he can only think about her rudeness, those cheeks, that damn snail again. He glances into the darkness as if he can see his floating dock consumed by gastropods.

“Can’t Michael see I’m busy?” he says. “I mean, with this snail issue and everything? What does he want?” Bernhard has spent most of the week driving up and down the coast for TV interviews, promoting his upcoming harvest by promoting safe oysters. He has nothing but pride in his farm though by the look on Katherine’s face it’s about to cost him his marriage. What does he care? He gets hit on all the time these days, which is why that second home comes in handy. Wealthy man of the bay. “Mister Shellfish” they call him on KSBY and in the papers. He’s got more respectability than any oyster farmer on the coast. Photos and videos of his weathered face in front of piles of oysters pop up anytime anyone googles California oysters. Narrow glasses over pinpoints of eyes. Tousles of grey hair. Big forehead. Teeth white as whalebone. He wishes they had snails on the menu. He’d eat every goddam one.

Katherine’s green eyes have melted to grey pits in this light. They meet his. “He’s dropping out of the law program.”

This hits Bernhard out of the blue. More ungrateful family shit is what this is. He bites his lip. Swallows. Now he’s craving bourbon. Lots of bourbon. He tries to lower his voice with some measure. “Our son can’t do that.”

Katherine’s face seems to have grown thinner. She drones in a steady line of disappointment. “He wants an MBA. He wants to be like you. Sad as that sounds.” Her mirror still open, she glances at herself again. “God, I hate all of this.”

“You should like having multiple homes, cars, vacations,” he says. “Maybe our son would benefit from being more like me. God knows I could use some support from this family.”

Katherine peeks at herself. Maybe she wants to disappear into the mirror. He wants to throw the damn thing and her into the bay. She sinks into her drink, drains her glass. “Feels like we live in lighthouses,” she says. “I’m just home to stare at the sea, to wait for something, never for you anymore.”

Katherine asks if Bernhard will be in their bed tonight. When he doesn’t answer, she slams the car door, starts the engine. Seconds later she makes a sharp turn onto Main Street, her haunting form a blur, taillights dwindling to pink dots.

Bernhard watches her pass Windy Cove alongside Great Blue Heron silhouettes in a eucalyptus rookery, branches fingerlike over the bay. In them, giant shaggy birds, their plumage lined with ritual markings, long bills sharp and deadly. They’re haggard witches casting spells on the cars beneath them.

He walks over to the marina, tries to forget his wife’s image, her voice, but sees nightmare images. Glimpses of her great-grandmother standing atop the night sea, slowly sinking, asking him to join her.

He still sees the apparition while slipping into a dinghy and piloting toward the oyster farm’s floating dock. He ignores the ghost, really a tidal marker that he soon passes, tells himself he can sit in his office and crunch numbers. He’ll smell the sea, let the lull of the bay cradle him, and that will be that.

The moonless boat ride makes him feel blind while he cuts across windless waters. Images of Mary fade, though his anxiety is replaced with a new reality. Magaña. Jotaro. The Goldilocks Zone. Poisoned streams. Large die-offs from estuarine organisms, microalgae, tainted plants, chemicals. He knows deep down there really may be a connection. Won’t stop him from growing shellfish. He’ll never cease production. He’ll keep those oysters right where they are, let them tumble and churn in muddy bay water. He doesn’t care. His oysters act like both filter and sponge. They’ll steal the bay’s nutrients until nothing is left. Other organisms can just leave the tidelands if they can’t find anything to eat, if they can’t handle the silt. Let them die if they must.

A few dim lights on the floating dock guide him. Above those, the Milky Way shoots its arm along the bowl of night, looms like an open wound revealing the scintillating white-and-blue blood of starlight. Behind the boat, Morro Bay glitters, as does Baywood across to the south. Car lights east of the estuary move in a distant line along San Luis Bay Boulevard.

Frigid air seeps into the bay while he moors the boat and climbs to the dock. Something about the cold feels comforting. He likes the slight breeze, the cold moisture settling on him, in his lungs. And right now he likes the chill and isolation. This aloneness reminds how he can be a forgotten th. . .