It rained eight days and nine nights without stopping. It rained and rained, the tattoo on the metal roof reverberating along the cabin’s iron framework of poles with crusted joints. It rained and thrummed and spitted until April thought her ears would bleed. When it stopped, its sudden absence was deafening.

April lay in the black night, listening to a thumping she slowly recognized as her heartbeat. Scattered on the lodge floor like rotting logs, or lurking crocodiles adrift in a swamp, slept the others: her brother, her three younger cousins, and the redheaded twin Johnson neighbor girls who’d been sent up to higher ground with them when the bio-bombs turned the clouds green and the caustic rains first fell on the valley below. Their slight breathings in the absolute darkness could have been the sound of shushing snakes, or the scrabblings of blind mice.

Trying for silence, April stepped over sleeping bodies. Outside, beyond the steep overhang of corrugated tin keeping corrosive drippings from soft organic matter like the bodies of children, pale green threads of dawn streaked hazy grey skies. April tugged a pair of large heavy boots onto her feet. She lifted a rain cloak from a peg by the door, sliding it over her head with the pitted side out, mottled industrial rubber like molting bark.

Her boots squelched soft noises in the sucking muck as she stepped off the flagstone porch, the sluggish grey matter of liquefied ground eddying higher than her ankles as she slushed through it. Slimy overcooked vegetation, particulated minerals, and the dissolving bodies of small wild animals overcome by the rains all swirled in her wake as she slogged across the yard toward the treeline at the rim of the clearing.

Branches dripped overhead. April drew the rubber hood close around her face, glancing upward at brightening sky. Drip-drip-dripping echoed through the denuded forest with musical pit-pattering. Few trees had withstood the latest rains, fewer than ever before; fewer even than the time it rained four days and five nights. Then, at least a few trees had kept some leaves. Now the naked limbs prickled the dawn sky with skeletal branches.

April glanced down at the grey-green sludge. It deepened as she went, sucking halfway up her shins uncomfortably close to the tops of her boots. Inside, protected by enhanced rubber made heavy with industrial chemicals, her feet were cold; colder than night, colder than wet hair. Colder than dead people, of which April had ever seen only two up close.

Overhead, the bald pitted trunks of dead trees rose twenty, fifty, sixty feet into the air. Their bony twigs stretched toward each other like starving prisoners reaching through bars for food or comfort. Their exposed trunks, many stripped completely clean of bark, had bleached so pale in the most recent deluge they almost glowed in the filtered sunlight spilling over the crest of the ridge.

April had never seen the woods so naked. Sparkling beads of green-tinted rain dripped from high branches, bright as crystals from ballroom chandeliers, or emerald necklaces, or some other thing equally startling and beautiful. At the cliff’s edge with its shallow caves at her back, April shielded her eyes against the glare of morning light glancing off thick acid droplets, and gazed down into the valley.

Floods had turned what had once been the ridge of a single steep forested hill into an atoll-style island, surrounded by an ocean of sludge, with naked woods in the middle, a lagoon of dead trees. Little of the old farmsteads was still visible in the valley. The very top of the Johnson grain silo rose above the glittery mire. The roof of April’s house was just recognizable, and the leafless crown of the massive elm that had once shaded the whole house and half the yard. Farther off was the listing tip of the old church steeple, and just beyond that the ruined crumbling ramparts of the broken dam.

April’s bedroom had been on the side of the house nearest the elm. She imagined her window just beneath the surface of the lake. The bodies of her parents, too, and the dog Lancelot with the broken tail and the three-legged cat Mehitabel. She’d never tell her brother Mitch she pictured them all in the house still, as though they slept just under the slimy mineral surface of the swollen lake; or that she imagined the house just the same, except all quiet, maybe with the curtains swaying back and forth slowly in grey-green gloom.

She sometimes dreamt of her mother and father lying on their bed in the house under the corrosive waters, without their clothes or their skin or the meat of their muscles. Skeletons, lying side by side, bone arms crossed over bone chests. She didn’t need Mitch to tell her that was stupid; the rainwaters dissolved anything they touched for long, even rock and metal. When she’d told Mitch the week before that the metal under their lodge’s porch was dissolving, he’d threatened to smack her ears. He hadn’t wanted to hear, either, that for the past few nights the freshwater well under the eaves had glowed pale blue–so pale, you could see it only if you stared deep into it after darkfall. It wouldn’t glow if there was even a single candle lit.

But April almost never slept well, and on dark nights as quiet as if the others had all stopped breathing in their sleep, she’d crawl to the lip of the well, lift the plank cover, and stare down into the water until her eyes ached and bile swelled up into her mouth like slimy green floodwater swelling into the valley. Only then could she see the blue. During the day she tried not to roll her allotted cupfuls around in her mouth, tried not to taste the blue nighttime glow on her tongue mixed in with the good old-fashioned kind of water.

April jumped carefully from the top of the small rise to the rock ledge jutting from the cliff wall like the pouting outthrust lip of a stone giant. After eight days and nine nights, the scruffy vegetation habitually tufting from the limestone face in fist-sized clumps had completely disappeared. Here and there, slimy trails marked the recent dissolution of vegetable matter, and sometimes a naked woody root thrust at an awkward angle from the rock.

April reached the lower ledge at the rim of the valley, now a murky ocean of organic soup. From the waterline the church steeple and the Johnson’s submerged silo looked smaller rather than larger. She squatted at the lip of the cliff, once halfway up the face of the ridge, an impossibly high climb from her house.

She and Mitch had hiked all over those hills when they were small, back when the clouds over the valley were the old shades of white and grey instead of the heavy greenish purple of unhealed bruises. The air at the edge of the flooded lake smelled like turnips, or perhaps raw radishes–but greener and sharper, with an under-whiff of decay.

She reached into her pocket for the metal can pressing against her thigh, hard as a cylindrical rock. Mitch would box her ears if he knew she’d borrowed a can-opener. She opened the can of green beans, slowly so as not to spill anything. Green beans packed in water.

Each child chose two cans a day from the thousands in the stockpile their parents had dragged up the mountain two years earlier when the threat of ecowar had first become big in the news. Mitch usually chose some meaty thing from the damp wooden crates: tuna or sardines or liver paste. The Johnson girls always picked sweet stuff–peaches in heavy syrup, or maraschino cherries. April took cans none of the other kids wanted, anything as long as it was packed in water: green beans, beets, asparagus, corn; other things she’d never heard of before, like water chestnuts, just for the word water in the name. Water wasn’t the same as rain. Not since the ecowars.

April sipped metallic water from the can, floating green beans bumping against her top lip like the minnows that used to swim the lake. The old lake, not this one swollen monstrous and bitter.

Before long, the familiar bony fin crested the flat grey surface and sliced through grey-green fluid in April’s direction, wavelets rippling outward across the sludge as the fish neared. The lake fish was so large—soprehistoric looking, like a thing from an old science textbook—she’d first had difficulty thinking of it as anything other than a sea monster. Except there was no sea, of course—just the rippling caustic expanse stretching from the ledge she stood on all the way to the ruins of the dam across the valley.

On the other side of the dam was another small mountain, now another island densely prickled with dead trees. Electricity disappeared when the first bio-bombs fell, scattering spores engineered to corrupt the air, the water, the soil, the human bloodstream. Lights from homes dotting the far hillsides had flickered out all at once the night the dam broke. April never saw any smoke or other signs of life from the houses during the day, but at night, if she squinted really hard and concentrated, she could see small pinpricks of blue glow, and softer, larger glowing patches, like fungus on a rotten log.

There could be someone over there across the dank green mire, eking out a life and making do just as they did. There might not be; but also, there might. And between that shore and this one the big fish swam, the sea monster with no sea but a valley flooded with the muck of acidic water and the molecular soup of dissolving dead things.

April stood as it surfaced. Its rounded bulk rose high above the sludge, one enormous eye bluer than forgotten sky fixed on her with a steady inhuman stare. The viscous green-grey liquid of melted vegetation rolled from its mottled rubbery hide, dark and thick and pitted as April’s rubber raincoat. The fish rose with a strange muscular buoyancy to float on the muck: a treeless, mottled rubber island. If not for the fluttering gills, the fanning ray fins and wide, cavernous mouth–gaping and with a clownish downturn at the corners–she would’ve supposed it was about what a whale looked like. She’d never seen a whale in real life, and though the lake fish looked mostly like the groupers her father used to bring home for supper, its size made even larger aquatic beasts the more obvious comparisons: whale or sea monster, either and neither.

April drained the last water from her can around the edges of soggy beans, her mouth filled with a coppery tang even sharper than acid-laced air. She chewed one bean slowly, then flipped one to the sea monster, which caught the thing on its large protruding shelf of a jaw. Its movements were subtle, seemingly accidental, though the bean landed in the exact center of the creature’s mouth, which remained open. April could easily have convinced herself it hadn’t moved at all if she hadn’t seen it a dozen times before.

She stepped to the ledge and said, “Sorry I couldn’t make it for awhile. It was raining too hard. Maybe you can go out in that stuff, but I can’t. I’m glad you enjoy green beans.”

That section of the cliff had always been steep. It was easy to imagine the sharp drop-off immediately beneath the ledge; a drop-off steep enough to accommodate the bulk of a fish the size of a fat bus. April leaned out over the water and extended her hand, and the creature swiveled a blue eye as she stroked its thick hide. She ignored the pain of her burning skin where drops of lake sludge clung to her fingers, blistering them red as she watched.

She shared the rest of her beans with the animal, alternating one for her, one for it. It had no teeth to speak of. It was powerful enough, big enough, to be a creature that swallowed things whole rather than tearing off chunks. Twice, the fish closed its wide jaw like a drawbridge, taking in water and decaying flotsam, and when it opened again the cavern yawned empty. Inside arced ridges of cartilage, the arches of an organic cathedral. The sense of something powerful lingered just out of sight past the fish’s gaping mouth; something capable of crushing bones and pulverizing sinew and gristle.

April finished the beans, careful to eat with the hand she hadn’t used to pet the giant fish. When the food was gone the creature shimmied its tail. Its gills rippled half above, half below the water.

“Are you sure you want this can?” she said, looking at the peeling label. “You liked it last time, but it still doesn’t seem like a good thing to eat. Not to me, anyway, though I guess lake fish sea monster whales are different. Okay, then. Here.”

April patted the fish just beneath the globular blue eye, then stepped back and tossed the empty tin can along the same trajectory as the beans. The fish made no noise as its jaws closed like a sprung hinge.

The animal sank from view, mottled hide blending into murky grey-green sludge even before it submerged completely. Bubbles broke the surface where it had been, but April no longer felt the heavy presence, the thickened air pressure and weight on her inner ear that always accompanied the beast’s presence.

“See you next time the rains break,” she murmured to the expanse of brackish green, the surface calm and unbroken all the way to the listing church steeple.

It took longer to make her way back up the mountain than down. The earth soaked up the rains as the day warmed, making the ground more slippery than ever. All organic matter had melted from the chalky hillside, and the minerals of the soil itself were beginning to dissolve.

Mitch blocked her way as she stepped in off the covered porch.

“You can’t take the best cloak and boots,” he said. “What would we do if you wandered off and broke your leg? How would we get the stuff back then?”

He’d been angry even before the bio-bombs, unable to go to college last year before the ecowars hit so close to home. It wasn’t April’s fault their parents hadn’t let him leave the valley, though he’d always taken it out on her more than anyone else.

“I didn’t break my leg,” she said.

He snorted. He took a swig off the whiskey bottle from the crate only he was allowed to touch, since the rest of them were too young, he claimed, though April sometimes felt far older than he was. “You won’t find anything out there, so you might as well stop looking,” he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his wrist. “You, always dragging home lame one-eyed dogs and starving cats with broken tails. Well, there’s no animals in the valley to save anymore. No people neither, so you might just as well forget about it.”

“There might be people. And there’s the big fish in the lake,” she said. “It’s an animal and it’s living out there, so there could be more.”

“Shut up about your mutant fish. Those stupid stories make the littler kids stay up nights thinking something big’s going to come out of the floodwater and eat them.”

“It likes green beans just fine.” She lowered her eyes and finished removing the boots and cloak, placing them carefully on shelf and peg. She joined her cousin Sam and his sisters in the corner of the cabin, where they slapped cards one after the other onto a cleared spot on the floor like spiritless automatons. They played the same game all day every day, some game they’d devised between the three of them, with convoluted elastic rules producing no satisfying outcome April could ever see: a game that never ended, just dragged on and on like rain drumming on a metal roof.

Later that night, everyone but April and one of the redheaded twins vomited, cramps low in abdomens tight as drums. They’d all had their cupfuls of glowing blue water, except April, who hadn’t drunk from the well for days. One of the Johnson twins had always hated water, even the old-fashioned kind that fell from white clouds and tasted clean. Her skin was so pale and thin April could see her veins running blue beneath.

That twin sat next to the other one, holding the red hair from her sister’s face as she retched into an empty jar. The other kids groaned and rolled on their mats, and Mitch drank whiskey until he passed out even with cramps. April imagined she saw glowing blue water pulsing through their bodies, as clearly visible as the blue veins in the redheaded twin’s wrists.

They fell asleep one by one, crying. April spent the night going from each to the next, assuring herself they still breathed and wiping sweat from their cheeks with a dry cloth. In the morning they woke feeling better—all but Mitch, who had to be shaken groggily awake, and the sick Johnson twin, who didn’t wake at all.

Mitch was furious about the dead Johnson girl. He shouted wordless rage, and kicked over crates of canned food, ignoring the tin cylinders rolling beneath his feet with their colorful paper labels of mandarin oranges, of organic chickpeas, of condensed milk. He cried, and tugged his hair, and opened another bottle of whiskey and shook April’s hand off his arm.

“It’s not fair!” he said. “I could be in the city doing something useful; not stuck here with a bunch of kids and a thousand cans of random tinned crap making me sick.”

“It’s not the food, Mitch.” April refilled and righted the last crate and shoved it back against the wall. “It’s the water. I told you, it’s blue at night. Maybe it’s another bio-weapon making its way to the valley from the rains, or soaking through the soil into the well.”

But Mitch threw his nearly full bottle at her, which narrowly missed her head to smash against the rough-hewn lodge post behind. She knelt to pick larger shards off the floor and put them in her cupped hand, sharp whiskey tang stinging the insides of her nose.

Her brother looked vaguely apologetic for a moment, smaller and younger, like when they were little. But then his mouth hardened around the edges. He stomped to the rain cloaks by the door and thrust his feet into oversized boots, muttering, “And now I have to go dig a grave in this muck, even though a body would melt faster above ground than below.”

They buried the Johnson girl just past the first line of naked trees. Back in the old days, when April and Mitch used to hike up to the lodge each summer to camp with their parents, the bushy undergrowth and low ferns made the cabin feel secluded. But now, with all the leaves and green stuff washed away, the remaining Johnson twin was clearly visible where she stood under the rippled tin awning, her arms crossed over her breasts. Her translucent skin glowed in the late afternoon light, making her a pale ghost-child with dark hollows for eyes.

That night nobody drank water from the well but Mitch, who fell clutching his stomach, flailing blindly and yelling threats at anyone trying to help him. After he drank himself to sleep, April eased the bottle from his slack fingers and measured out the remaining whiskey into tin cups for the rest of them, though the oldest of her cousins wasn’t even twelve. They spent the evening digging through the thousand cans by candlelight, pulling out whatever struck their fancy long into the blue-tinted night.

…Tell us again about the big fish in the lake of the valley, the smaller kids whispered around slurps of sour whiskey sweetened with the syrup of canned pears.

…Tell us again about the blue lights on the mountain on the other side of the dam.

So April told them again about the mammoth whale monster grouper fish with its mottled rubber hide, which rose to the surface of the murky floodwaters above their old homes to accept her touch on its wide clown-jaw and revel in the taste of green beans and tin cans. She told them for the dozenth time about her idea: about letting the great animal carry them to the mountain across the valley, where there might not be more people, but there might be.

The Johnson girl hadn’t spoken since her twin’s death. She stayed curled next to Mitch, staring at nothing as the camping lodge’s metal poles and foundations groaned the pained grating squeals of fatiguing metal.

The next morning April woke with her head tilted distinctly lower than her feet. The rain had stopped, but sometime in the night the corrosive sludge flowing beneath the freestanding cabin had finally softened the metal piers, and the floor listed crazily askew. April felt almost as off-kilter as she had the night before, after she’d finished her young cousins’ abandoned tin cups full of Mitch’s golden whiskey and peach slivers.

Mitch slept late into the morning. April and her cousins moved about the large room loading backpacks with blankets, with candles, with cans of things they liked to eat. April filled one for Mitch, though the muscles near her heart tightened against her ribs each time she silently rehearsed telling him they were leaving. When he finally woke, she and her three little cousins stood together, booted and fully dressed. April had given the younger ones the remaining rain cloaks and made do with just a heavy wool camping jacket for herself. It itched, and her nose tingled with unspent sneezes.

Mitch stood unsteadily. The Johnson girl had woken earlier, but when April told her they meant to leave and tried to take her hand, she’d shaken her head mutely and closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. She opened them now, but remained on the floor with her face to the ceiling and her arms straight down tight against her sides.

“Mitch, we’re leaving. All of us.” April held out the backpack she’d loaded for him and pointed to the best pair of boots.

He said nothing. For the first time in a long time he didn’t even look angry. April wanted to take this as a good sign, wanted his silence to mean acceptance. But something in the flatness of his eyes made her heart twitch again.

They departed the tilting cabin single file, April leading the way across the yard along the route with the surest footing. The young cousins followed closely behind, sploshing in muck, the smallest holding the tattered deck of cards close to her chest.

Mitch stumbled somewhat unsteadily behind them. He’d dumped all the food April had packed for him into a heap on the floor and refilled his backpack with golden bottles. His steps produced glass-on-glass tinkling, a strange musical accompaniment to the sucking splash under their boots. The Johnson girl followed, wearing no backpack but wrapped in the ragged quilt that had been her sister’s favorite. She clung close behind Mitch, a wraith, a pale shadow of a real girl.

April halted at the top of the rise to gaze out over the flooded valley. The church steeple poked out, a stork-white needle stuck upright in the brackish green-grey. The topmost branches of the elm prickled upward from the lake in twiggy quills. But the Johnson’s silo was gone, and there was no longer any sign of the shingled roof of the house where April and Mitch had been born.

They descended the ridge to the cliff’s edge, lake lapping over the rim after the most recent rains. Heavy clouds receded across the horizon, hazy sky reflecting in sludge sea with a dark oily hue. April squatted and unzipped her pack to rummage for the nearest can. Her cousin Sam offered her a can-opener from his pocket, and she smiled thanks at him. He smiled back, tentative, and she realized with a stab in her side how long it had been since he’d laughed.

She opened the can–stewed tomatoes this time, whole and soft like small detached hearts. She dug out one slippery red glob and held it over the water. “Sea monster whale lake fish, where are you?” she called, her voice rolling away across the grey-green lake in muted echo.

The surface swelled near the cliff edge, and the fish’s familiar rounded bulk broke the water in a shower of acidic green fluid. April ignored the prickle and burn on her cheeks where liquid spattered her face. The fish’s sides quivered with the sucking of its air-exposed gills, and its jutting unhinged jaw yawned. April tossed the tomato into its maw, then another, then the whole can all at once. The jaw lowered and the fish’s side-fins fanned sludge.

April extended her hand out over the muck and the fish came so close to the edge, lakewater sloshed across the toes of her boots. She stroked the mottled hide, noticing for the first time that it was more scales than skin, though fused together to make a smooth undersurface for acid-etched pitting. Maybe it was just a gargantuan mutant fish like Mitch said, and not something more whalesque or monsterish.

It leaned into her touch like an enormous cold humpbacked cat with no fur. She stroked it, running her hand up its side as it sank low enough in liquid to cover its gills, just eyes and the ridge of its top fin rising above. Holding her breath, April leaned onto the creature’s back, inching forward until she lay splayed across it sideways. There was nothing to grasp, no handholds of any kind, but if she moved slowly, she could shimmy toward the animal’s head and sit upright. She ignored her stinging skin where moisture from the fish’s hide coated her legs. The animal was cold as ice, but the acidic damp burned hot as melted lead.

Gripping tight with her knees, she extended her hand to her nearest cousin. The girl visibly shook, but Sam guided first her, then his other sister to April’s outstretched arm. The creature beneath shuddered as each child climbed onto its humped back and scrabbled with small numb fingers at its hide; but April patted it, leaning low over its head to speak soothing nonsensical syllables close to the mottled rubbery surface.

April reached for the Johnson girl but the redhead stepped behind Mitch, her eyes unblinking beneath the cowl of her quilt shroud, wide and dark in a face white as a snow owl’s.

April held her hand to Mitch but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He looked at the cliff-edge and the rising mottled bulk of the lake creature and shook his head.

“No goddamn way,” he said. He turned to trudge up the mountainside in the direction of the dissolving camping cabin in the skeletal leafless woods.

“Mitch!” April called after his departing back, her voice thin and more watery than the liquid splashing beneath the soles of her dangling boots. “Mitch!”

But he continued climbing the ridge and didn’t look back. The cousin gripping April’s waist shifted and sucked her breath, and April again felt the burning on her thighs and the insides of her knees where corrosive damp soaked her clothes. She imagined the blisters they’d have when they reached the other side of the valley.

. . . If we reach the other side of the valley.

She bit her tongue hard and tasted blood, metallic like the water of canned vegetables. When, she told herself, gripping the creature’s back even tighter as it buoyed higher in the lake and glided forward with its smooth slow motion, air pushing past them heavy and silent. …When we reach the other side.

As they neared the tilting steeple—reflected in the oily surface of the lake refracted at an angle so it looked like one long spire broken in half—April twisted, craning her neck around to see over her cousins’ heads. Two figures stood silhouetted sharply against the greenish clouds at the top of the cliff, and April imagined she felt their gazes long after she’d turned forward again to squint into thickening acid-misted air. She ignored the blisters rising on her cheeks stung by her tears, thinking tears must be quite like the good old-fashioned kind of water anyway, and hardly corrosive at all.

About the Author

When not on ten wooded acres near Austin, Texas, Camille Alexa lives in Portland, Oregon in an Edwardian house with very crooked windows. Her work appears in ChiZine, Fantasy Magazine, and Escape Pod. Her short fiction collection, Push of the Sky (Hadley Rille Books, 2009), received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. More information and an updated bibliography can be found at http://camillealexa.wordpress.com/.