I planned on going back to see James the next day. Cat offered to make me dinner since I was so kind as to let her stay with me. Once dinner was made and we sat at the kitchen table, I began a conversation. “So, what’s the big deal with the die off?”

“We can’t confirm it’s a mass die off yet, but we’ve seen some fairly large algae blooms. They’re a good indicator that terrible things are coming in terms of the sea. Soon we’ll see red tides and swaths of marine life washing up on shore in waves, literally,” she explained to me as she stirred her noodles in with her tomato sauce.

“Red tides?” I asked.

“You may not want to ask that with the sauce,” she said.

I looked down at my plate. “Try me,” I responded.

“Alright,” she said, “Poisonous algae will blossom in such numbers that the ocean literally turns red like something out of the Bible. It will looked like the water is made of blood. The local water sources will become undrinkable, as it’ll probably wash into the freshwater systems and kill pets and give people nasty bacterial infections. Most of Florida will get the full Flint, Michigan experience.”

“So major pollutants on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?” I asked.

“Probably worse. If the readings of algae content we got back at Eckerd keep up, we’re looking at an environmental catastrophe that will definitely destroy the coastlines all over the Gulf of Mexico. It’s quite terrifying how suddenly this blew up; we only started getting these readings around the time the Malibu sank.”

My heart dropped. “What?”

“Yeah, about two days after the Malibu sank, we got word that there were some problems in the food chain off the Florida coast. A bunch of the sea creatures were just dying because of starvation. Then the algae blooms started popping up, and quickly. There were coastlines around Cape Coral that looked like football fields, and you never want to see that along a coastline. The local government is already putting out advisories on tap water.”

I felt sick, and it definitely wasn’t from the red tide story. “Oh . . . oh my God,” I managed to stutter.

“I told you you’d feel sick,” she remarked.

“No, no it’s not that,” I replied. I suddenly felt the knot in my stomach pulse towards a full on explosion, and I knew what was coming. The chair almost crashed to the floor as I raced down the hall towards the toilet. Once I was over the bowl, I let loose the hot, violent mess that came from my digestive system. After the initial spewing of my stomach’s contents, another round came bursting out of my mouth.

Cat walked into the bathroom and her face scrunched at the horror that had befallen my toilet bowl. “What the Hell is wrong with you? Is it the stomach flu? That season’s coming up, you know,” she said.

“I . . . I just-”

Another eruption was imminent, this one on par with the explosion of Mount St. Helens. I lurched over the toilet before more contents spilled into the bowl. The stench of partially digested fast food filled the tiny bathroom.

“Oh God, I’ll leave you be. When your done hacking up McDonald’s, I’ll buy you a ginger ale or . . . six from the convenience store.”

She left.

I thought I was done, but my stomach evidently wanted one final round before there was nothing left to throw up.

So much for meeting James tomorrow.

I washed up after flushing the vomit and stumbled out of the bathroom towards the stairs. Cat tried to assist me, but I knew she’d be too much of a germaphobe to help me out. I got to my bed alright and she gave me a ginger ale and set me up with some Netflix. I told her that if she even thought about playing Contagion or The Walking Dead that I’d kick her out. She laughed, I guess she couldn’t tell that I was being serious.

Even though it was only around six o’clock, I was out like a light. I didn’t awake until around six in the morning, a full twelve hours later. The last time I slept like that had to have been when I was in high school. I went downstairs to see the trademark Florida sunrise when I noticed another manilla folder on the table.

On the outside of it there was a note: SEE JAMES!

Inside of it, there was another picture of a crew of naval men. This one had a timestamp on it, it was from 1997. I knew this was the crew of the USS Vanderbilt. Once again, all of the faces were covered in red “X” marks except for one, which was circled. This time, the gentleman circled was at the other end of the line as compared to the picture of the Malibu’s crew.

The thought finally came to me, what if the circled men were the only survivors of the sinking?

Next Chapter: Shoreline: Section 5