We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Deading by Nicholas Belardes, a dystopian eco-horror novel available now from Erewhon Books.
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.
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.
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The Deading
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 thing trapped in darkness and seawater. He thinks how a lone sea lion might feel foraging in the protective harbor of the bay. No great white sharks here. No predatory whales.
Walking across the dock, he sees something—another ghostly form, this one standing amid oyster bags. He shudders before realizing who it is. Deb should be leaving about now. Doesn’t matter. If she wants to rake bags he’ll pay. He knows she’s desperate like Chango, trying to save money to rent an apartment in Baywood. Bernhard is sure most of his workers have roommates—probably five or more in a two-bedroom unit. No one can afford to live alone on Bernhard’s shit pay. You can’t really make it around here unless you’re a business owner, lawyer, supervisor, manager of some kind, administrator, doctor or nurse practitioner. A simple home in Morro Bay or Baywood can easily cost a million. He knows Chango lives with his mother and brother, and she owns a salon. She’s not rich and probably needs him to help pay the mortgage. But what man wants to live with his mother forever?
The rush of tidewater slips past the dim-lit dock. Salt tickles Bernhard’s nostrils. He waves to Deb’s dark form, calls out, “Any snails?” For a moment, he leans over the rail, admires the sound of his farm, the churn of oyster bags, seawater flushing them. He really does love the system he’s set up to take advantage of nature’s forces, the moon, and tidal movements. Ever since he was a boy he’s felt this way, that he needed to master nature’s forces. His father mastered waterways, built dams. Those obstructions destroyed diadromous spawning grounds until fish ladders were installed. Hell if Bernhard was ever going to help any bay fish. Let them gulp for air.
Oyster bags placed more than a year ago have been covered by the incoming tide. Each bag contains 120 oysters, once merely larval seeds, now mounted in areas around the dock. Each shellfish needs air, needs to squeeze its muscles, needs to be tossed and turned, agitated while the tide washes in and out. Buoys tied to their rise and fall hold them steady.
Fully grown oysters sell in bulk to seaside restaurants and markets in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Bakersfield, Fresno, even small towns like Delano, Arvin, and Hanford. He distributes quickly and efficiently. At harvest he has five hours to pull bags from the water and refrigerate them to prevent each oyster from sloughing into a warm mass of guts inside each shell.
What really makes him proud is the demand for his shellfish. His oysters have developed a unique flavor from the quality of estuary water, from stabilized temperatures, from phytoplankton that Morro Bay oysters feed upon. He knows this one-of-a-kind bay turns over faster than others, leading to more nutrients for each shellfish. The fresh water flow from Chorro and Los Osos creeks shifts the taste to a sweet underpalate, a green melon rind, he calls it. This year he increased his oyster farm size. When he did, some of the local fish stopped migrating into the bay. Didn’t bother him. His worry has always been growth-stunted oysters rather than snails. Only a few bags have turned out smaller shells. He blames that on seed oysters bought from a hatchery in Kona, Hawaii. That won’t happen again, he’s told himself. He goes with a different supplier these days.
He ignores whether Deb answers or not and slips into his office, wishing he hadn’t left that snail with Magaña. She’ll probably publish some related paper, make sure to blame his oyster farm for attracting the damn thing to the back bay. One snail. One stupid snail. He’ll deal with Magaña in his own way, in his own time. His profits will speak to that. Simple fact: He helps fuel tourism that pours money into oysters, not to mention all the taxes and permits. The entities that be? They need his money to pay their damn wages and pensions. The environmentalists can just deal with his oyster farm the way they deal with hunters shooting ducks and geese that flock to the bay every winter.
The light in his office, dim and yellow, stares downward. Always something wrong with that bulb in the dock shack. He has his tablet, a beacon now popped open to his financial notes, illuminating him like a sea-ghost, and starts writing about farm expansion. Pulls numbers from last year’s profits, from multiple bank accounts, adding the new stock he wants in organics and storage. Has to feed the needs of his high-end clients. These aren’t all hard numbers, just estimations, how he free-forms his dream to make more and more.
He realizes that in two years he can quadruple his oyster bed. Plenty of room in the bay to grow ten times larger. He can expand into that shoe size, sure he can. Slow growth, he tells himself. Play the long game. Speed it up if possible.
A half hour passes when the silence hits him. Closing his eyes, mind washed from thoughts of snails, he feels this moment. His heart wants to slow. The salt fog and mist now creeping in feel so fresh in his lungs. The calmness of the bay. Just the creak of wood, that lick of bay water against the boats, the dock. No seal splashes in the tidewater. No otter squeals, random gull or cormorant calls. No tern cries in the night. Everything slipping into sleep, a sleep that never usually comes because the bay never tires, never stops making noise. This rare silence feels like the kind of break he needs.
This peace lasts all of ten seconds because it finally hits him that Deb needs the floodlights or she might get stuck out on those bags. Hasn’t heard her singing to herself like she sometimes does. No rake sounds either. Wonders if he’s heard anything other than bags scraping against one another. He sure hasn’t heard her boat leave the dock.
Bernhard grabs a broom, pokes the office light. The bulb buzzes, pops as if sound and light can mix, brightens the room. About to hit the switch for the floodlights, he sees something tiny and yellowish latched to the doorframe.
It’s round. It slithers.
Just like that, all of his insides reverse course, fire into a frenzy.
“Goddam it, Deb.” He plucks the spiral onto his hand, its mucous foot pools a slithery mess. Even as he rages, he feels something. Pinpricks on his palm. Not too strong. Almost an electricity, a warmth. A strange sense of connection to the creature. Palm against foot. Mucus against skin. Hunger against hunger.
He lowers his hand to the dock, rolls the shell off his palm. The snail hides its slithery eyes, seems to know what’s coming.
Bernhard lowers his boot, smashes the snail into a paste.
He turns on floodlights now, exposing the topmost layer of oysters in a bright glow. He’s ready to yell, to curse at Deb, at Magaña, at Jorato as if they’re the Blob, the 228 sextillion joules of heat bursting from an ocean trench. He feels the burn in his insides, this tremble, this fear of what might happen, this anger that this snail he’s crushed should have been found sooner, that Magaña’s report should have got to him at a more convenient time.
That’s when he sees her. Deb stiff in her orange bibs, covered in sea muck and gastropods, an ungodly terror in her eyes.
Creatures slither across Deb’s face, into her open mouth, on her exposed hands and arms. “Move,” Bernhard wills her to stop just standing there. “Get over here.”
He can hear the desperation in his voice, but somehow knows she can’t move, somehow knows that fear, or something else, has plastered her feet to this unknown, frozen her to the bay.
She needs to be rescued from the bags, from the snails. He’s instantly aware of this. He just doesn’t know if he’s the one to do it.
Then he realizes it’s not just her. Every exposed bag wriggles with snails. Thousands of yellow stars have crashed onto the oyster farm. If only he could have seen them creeping in their knobby, coiled shells, slipping into the bay, the result of a distant swelling, a mass proliferation beyond explanation that in its inevitable wake expanded toward the coastline, pulled to the scent of his oyster farm as if by the moon, and something else driving the snails, something in them that they’re carrying, that they need to pass on.
The ochre gastropods have slithered on tiny singular yellow feet, crawling, siphons pulsing, drawing water into their gills, searching through interconnecting sea currents, and like their own ravenous tide of hunger, have found their way to the same estuary as their brethren’s remains.
Thirty years into the great ocean warming, they’ve finally arrived to feast.
Bernhard is in disbelief that so many gastropods can take over so quickly. Something has seriously gone wrong for this kind of plague to consume so much so fast. If he’d only had that damn warning, he might have pulled every bag from the bay. An early harvest means smaller oysters, but something could have been done. Theoretically, he could have moved them all. The snail discovered earlier should have been warning enough to try something, anything.
A wash of guilt smashes Bernhard. He’s failed Deb. But he’s failed his oysters too. His eyes meet hers with a kind of helplessness and terror while a snail crawls out of her mouth. He doesn’t know what to do. Snails shouldn’t be able to do this to her. He can’t even say her name. Just knows he’s faced with two choices, one that means entering this area swarming with gastropods, or something else, something that can maybe save his farm.
The horror in her eyes locks on his, begs him to leap onto the bags and kick his way through that slithering mess. Adrenaline screams through his body. He knows he’s her boss. He’d be happy to rescue her from a burning boat. But this.
She’s not your friend, he tells himself. She’s not going anywhere, wouldn’t have done anything special with her life. She can be consumed.
Even then, he twitches, pauses.
Then it really hits him. You don’t have to do anything. She’s not your responsibility. Not now. Not when this happens. He feels a throbbing deep in his gut, a kind of pain mixed with anger and fear.
“Goddam,” he says. “Think, think.”
Another option smashes him like a lead weight. Molluscicide. He could try saving the oysters with chemicals. Right now that alternative is waiting for him like some kind of shadow at the end of the dock. A promise. Yes, a promise to himself, his clients, his family for godsakes. Something in him doesn’t want to quit them, doesn’t want to give up on all of this.
In the end, Bernhard knows everything always boils down to two choices: fight one fire or fight another. His eyes peel away from Deb.
He runs into his office, opens a closet, pries open a sealed container. Packed inside, several jugs and a barrel labeled HAWLEY’S MOLLUSCICIDE B that he experimented with more than a year ago. Fish started popping to the surface that day, choking to death. He scooped them up, said nothing. Made Deb and Chango swear to secrecy. They’ve been really good to him keeping that one. He gave each a big Christmas bonus. Neither said a word to Magaña.
Bernhard hooks the barrel to a sprayer that dilutes the chemical with seawater and sprays the bags closest to him. He looks to Deb again. She’s gone. Nothing but dark waves. No floating body. No seals or otters. No night birds. Nothing. She’s slipped off the oyster bags into the tide. He feels sick but doesn’t have time to worry, not about her. He’s made his decision and is sticking with it, he’s made the right call.
He sprays and sprays without a glance to where Deb stood. He’ll douse them, he thinks, get the other jugs, douse some more, then get the hell out. That’s what he’ll do, he tells himself. Get the hell out, come back in the morning, report Deb missing. He’ll tell the authorities she must have had an epic battle trying to save his oysters. He owes her that much. He owes her family. That’s what he’ll do. He owes them.
Then he realizes a sensation, a feeling of numbness where the snail mucous touched his palm. A stiffness extends into his fingers. The other snail didn’t do this, he thinks, why this one? His breathing grows rapid though he figures he may be having a panic attack. He sets down the hose, lets the mixture shoot over the dock, then grabs a jug, dumps it straight into the tidewaters. He does this with two other jugs—pours chemicals straight into the bay. No dilution. Nothing. He knows it’s pure insanity to dump any toxin, let alone this much, but doesn’t have a choice.
He starts to feel dizzy by the time he has one jug left, the sprayer still shooting It’s time to get away, he tells himself. He’ll leave this dock, get some help. Maybe he’ll change his plan, tell the authorities he tried to save Deb, that she was helping fight the oysters.
His hand now feels like a lump of flesh. A dull pain shoots up his arm. He struggles to remove the last lid then moves down the dock, pours chemicals along the dinghy. Snails dislodge, fall into the sea. A sickness enters his stomach followed by a lightheadedness from inhaling chemicals. Climbing down now, he tries to grab a rung with his numb hand and falls into the boat with the jug. Toxins splash and pour. He wipes at his face and burning lips. Blisters form, parts of him turn to slick paper. At the same time he splashes more poison along the boat, killing snails. Makes his way to the motor feeling like he’s on fire.
He pumps the primer bulb. When he does, a snail latches to his good hand. “Goddam it,” he cries, knocking it off. He turns the throttle to the right then presses the electric start. The engine fires up. He realizes in the dim light and panic that he hasn’t unmoored, grabs the jug, dumps chemicals along the rubber hull, tries to kill snails already slithering up the sides. While he fumbles to untie the boat, the shaking of its high idle kicks the engine into gear. He hasn’t checked if it’s completely in neutral.
The dinghy lurches forward.
When it does, Bernhard finds himself midair, boat slipping away. For the slightest second he reaches for an invisible hand along the Milky Way’s spiral arm. But nothing, not even begging the universe just then, can stop his momentum.
His ass hits the side of the boat first, then his legs. He tries to grab hold, but the boat squirts from under him. He falls into the toxic, snail-filled sea.
When he comes up for air he roars and cries an empty wailing, one he knows no one will hear, one that seabirds and seals will ignore, just as their deaths have always been ignored by humans.
A slithering mass comes for Bernhard, countless snails fill the tideland waters around his arms, legs, mouth, and nose. He swims through them, mostly with one arm, reaches toward the dock ladder.
He doesn’t get far. Snails have latched to his burning skin with their sticky primordial glue. He feels his body going numb, can smell chemicals in the water, on his neck, face, and hands. Though many of the creatures float dead or dying, there are too many. The dock becomes a blur by the time he reaches the ladder. He can’t grab it. His good hand has gone stiff while the other hangs as if broken. Managing an elbow over a rung, he can’t hold on, feels himself going, and lets out a cry, slipping back into the waves.
He loses sight while he treads water, and in this moment time slows. His thoughts jump to the creatures themselves, wonders how they propel themselves through seawater, how they could arrive in such numbers, why they didn’t attack some other farm up or down the coast. Tens of thousands, possibly more, swimming, tumbling through currents, undetected. He imagines the ocean Blob, all the snails caught in its heat, his hatred for them burns.
He sees Katherine’s pale cheeks in his mind, her watching from the dock, her feet lifting from boards. She hovers out over the water, above him in a white dress, eyes black as space.
She bores into him, watches him start to sink. Slowly she transforms into someone else, her ghostly grandmother who watches from hallway photos, and sometimes from atop the sea. A cold terror rises in his spine and stomach.
Snails enter Bernhard’s mouth, slip down his throat. He can no longer swallow. He can only slip beneath these waves, where pain of another consciousness burns and tears into his mind. Somehow he doesn’t die though he gulps water into his lungs.
Drifting near the bottom, he feels himself transforming. Images break and fail. Two women in the deep, heads tilted near his, mouths open, gulping, eyes black pits, hair flowing in deathly spirals. He breathes the muck in and out. He sees darkness until even the women fade away. He feels alone. So alone. So cold. Until a new terror comes. Something in him. Around him. It’s here in the murk.
Bernhard feels set adrift in his own skull. Facing nothing, surrounded by darkness, eyes open, seeing nothing, no light, no shape. Only the numb feeling of this murk. The cold.
In a way, this helps him. It reveals the truth. Finally. He is alone. No one to help. All his life he has run from this thing he’s been born to do, to help the sea. Why didn’t he listen? Is something with him now? What’s that? What’s here?
He’s always wondered what would happen if he stopped fighting, if he just let go. He’s been afraid of how far he might fall.
This is the place he’s always feared. The bottom. The depths. The bay. This presence. The sea.
Excerpted from The Deading, copyright © 2024 by Nicholas Belardes.
