Night on the River

The water was dark. Everything was. The dark ripples from the boat flowing through the water were hardly noticeable. There was no moon that night. The businesses were closed. The only lights form the shore were street lights that turned from green to yellow to red for the traffic that wasn’t there. Even in a city as big as

Miami, there was not a soul awake at two in the morning.

Mosley stopped the boat dead in the middle of the river. He listened to the night air. There was not a sound. The only thing there was to break the silence were the crickets chirping their nightly song.

He turned and looked to the back of the boat. There sat John and Maggie. They wore dark clothes like Mosley did. None of them wanted to be caught doing this. It would only lead to more problems. More problems than what they already had.

“Now or never John,” Mosley said.

“Okay. Let’s do this,” John said.

John stood up and moved to the center of the boat. There he removed a black sheet of plastic. It revealed a corpse. It was a child that could be no older than ten years. But he was not entirely human. He was gone for a week and then shown up as a monster. His hands were claws. Sharp teeth lined his mouth. His waist formed into what seemed to be a fish tail. He was not the same boy when he came back. They all witnessed that a few hours ago and had to kill him.

Yet it seemed at that moment, the three of them stopped what they were doing and looked into his large milky white eyes. They remembered who the boy was and felt a moment of heart ache because they had to do this.

“He’s tied to the anchor John,” Maggie said breaking the silence.

Without word, they all knew what they had to do. Maggie grabbed the child as the two men grabbed a side of the heavy anchor.  The men threw than anchor over board. The child was tied to it was pulled out of Maggie’s hands. The three of them watched over the edge of the boat as the child sank into darkness.

“Better make sure it will hold,” Mosley said.

“Will do,” Maggie said diving into the water.

She swam to the river floor where she saw the anchor had sunk into the dirt. The child was tightly intertwined in the chains. He had no chance of floating to the surface. She then went back up to the surface. She climbed back into the boat.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Maggie said.

“Good. Let’s head home,” Mosley said. “This whole thing is creeping the hell out of me.”

Maggie couldn’t agree any more. John was silent in his own thoughts. Mosley turned the boat around without another word.

“John,” Maggie finally said.  “Don’t you think we can tell some one about all this?”

“No,” John said. “Tell one person, and then everyone comes in. My son will be taken away. The CDC will pull us into some sort of damn quarantine. They’ll tear everything apart.”

“I was just suggesting-”

“I’ll stop it all tomorrow.”

The two of them only looked at John. They felt that he didn’t have a clue of what to do with all of this. He was just as lost as they were.

“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” John said simply.

Find out what really happened in the book Palm’s Inn by Samie Foster. Available on Amazon or at the author’s website Lelue’s Realm. Google it or go directly to http://www.lelue.webs.com/