Splash

Splash

                "Aw piss!" I yelled, leaping back up the riverbank. Another speed-boat had just zoomed on past, spray water everywhere. For some reason, people loved to get right up to the bank in the few spots they could - where I was working was especially bad, since the depth of the river dropped way down a metre from where it usually met the bank.

                The spray was bad enough, but the real annoyance was the after-effect. Every speed-boat that went past had a wake; and that wake caused waves to lap against the bank for a good minute or so. The waves weren't big but they were enough - they were enough to disrupt my instruments, knocking the little floating balls about and out of formation. And there were so many speedboats going by.

                There was a reason for that. It was a three day weekend, and a horde of holidayers had come to the river to spend a few days swimming, fishing or - annoyingly - zooming up and down the river in speed-boats. I had no idea it was a long weekend when I came up there, but I certainly found like smacking someone upside the head when I found out. I could easily have done it a few days beforehand, or even earlier.

                Thankfully at that point I was almost done. I waited out the waves on a patch of grass nearby - the river bank was pretty flat in this area (one of the reasons I'd chosen it). The scenery was, honestly, beautiful. A mostly calm, if brown, river that stretched thirty or so metres across, with trees and other green vegetation scattered along both banks. The day was cool by the river and cloudless, further adding to the effect. It would have been nice if I'd been on holiday myself.

                I set aside my grumpiness and waded back into the water up to my ankles. The instrument I was working with resembled a bunch of ping-pong balls, tied together and floating in a net. The resemblance was deliberate - it looked like a toy or strange net rather than a complicated measuring device. Each ball had several sensors of varying types, and one ball wirelessly relayed data to any nearby device with the right decryption key. I was using my phone.

                With the balls inert once more, I wiped off my hands on my shirt and retrieved my phone. '90% complete' it read, the little bar slowly filling up as I watched. Ninety-one, ninety-two... My thoughts turned to my next job - driving halfway across the state to do the same stuff to a damn. If I was lucky I'd be able to get it done this evening and maybe even get all the way back home...

                A little beeping noise alerted me to the fact that data collection was finally complete. I hooked my hand into the measurement device and lifted it out of the water, keeping an eye on my phone as I went. 'Data analysis in progress...' it read. That sometimes took a while, but I could sit on the bank and wait for it to finish. My brain caught on to a faint noise I'd been hearing for a while; another speed-boat approaching. No, bigger - it was probably a house-boat. The data collection had finished just in time.

                I returned to my patch of grass and stared at my phone. The annoying thing about this step was that nothing changed - I'd never know if it had frozen during the analysis. In an earlier version it had done so a couple of times, costing me all the data. These days it saved the data first, so I'd at least be able to skip back to the analysis.

                The little 'Analysis complete!' message popped up, and the screen turned bright red. "Oh fuck," quite involuntarily escaped my lips. I had been expecting a green screen - that was the 'all good' colour. Orange meant that something had been detected, and red that something had been detected soon.

                The analysis program was never quite sure how soon, unfortunately, since it was (deliberately) missing data on exactly what it was detecting. The idea was to be able to reasonably claim it was a quack program for sensing earthquakes. Red meant it reckoned sometimes in the next few days, but it would also spit out a bunch of data in the form of various values for various things.

                One of the main reasons using the sensors is my job is because I can understand those numbers. I scrolled through them all, taking them in one by one, wondering precisely what kind of mess I'd just discovered. I certainly wouldn't be making it across the state today - I'd have to stay on site for those who'd come get ready for the mess. In the corner of my eye the house-boat came into site, rounding the nearby bend in the river.

                I knew what was coming at about half-way, and I was sure two-thirds of the way through, but I went all the way just in case. The numbers weren't for 'a couple of days' or even 'a couple of hours'. They practically screamed 'right fucking now'. I should probably have stopped when I knew that and warned the house-boat, because right after I read the last number I realised I could already feel the tell-tale rising rumble from the earth itself. I guess part of me had hoped that was the houseboat too.

                Rather than continuing to stand around looking stupid I bolted up the river bank, putting some distance between myself and the river as the rumbling got ever louder. The ground was visibly shaking now; I heard a tree crack and topple into the river with a splash, and screams came from nearby people who were getting scared out of their wits.

                When I was far enough that the rumbling wasn't too bad I turned back to the river just in time to see it happen. A giant clawed hand burst from the river, at least fifteen metres long and half of that being the claws, followed by a giant head that came up right beneath the house-boat and flung the doomed craft into the air. I watched in horror as it slammed upside down into the river, several bodies and objects flying off as it went.

                The creature's other hand rose from the river as well as it gasped for air. The waves from its emergence smashed into the shore, so large that they made the waves from the speed-boats a joke. As the creature quickly scrabbled towards the shore - thankfully the other shore - I made a call.

                It was picked up immediately. "Hi, you've reached K. D. Imports, Starla speaking," said the woman on the other end.

                "Hi, I'd like to say that my mum's come over for dinner," I replied.

                The sound of a book flipping came through the phone - they were looking up the code I'd just used. After a while, the woman said, "Oh, holy fuck."

                I ahemed loudly in reply, prompting her to add, "Sorry sir. We'll be right there."