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out of the legs of my shorts. It was caked inside, and I desperately wanted to walk out into the water and rinse myself off. But whatever had passed by might still be there, admittedly in greatly diminished but maybe still lethal concentrations. Who knew? So I brushed and shook my clown shorts legs and did what I could to get the sand off me.
    Both Scotty and Heather were still wearing their masks, which was smart of Heather and damned miraculous for Scotty. We stood close together and stared out across the water, toward the mainland. Heather turned to me.
    â€˜Fred? Do you have any idea what just happened?’
    I was still fuming about Scotty and I didn’t want her to see my eyes. I looked back across the water, and what I saw deadened the anger and filled me with a kind of sick wonder.
    Acres of dead fish carpeted the surface. They drifted serenely westward with the current. I could imagine that by tomorrow, the smell would render the air unbreathable.
    On shore, the scene reminded me of photographs taken during the London Blitz of World War II. Fires were burning across the city. One big house across the sound and to the right of our island roared with combustion. Great tongues of flames licked from both the upstairs and downstairs windows, and twisted above the surrounding live oaks, threatening to set them aflame too. There was no answering wail of sirens. The smoke from these fires, combined with the dissipating shreds of mist, cast a depressing pall over the horizon, which had fallen eerily silent. It was the lack of traffic sounds, the rush of engines and the occasional horn. The cars across the way, on the highway, remained at a standstill. There were no boats on the water. No planes in the sky.
    It was as if the world had gone to sleep.
    â€˜Who cares what happened,’ Scotty announced. ‘Let’s just get the hell outta here!’
    Yes. For once, Scotty and I agreed. The phytoplankton pathologist within urged me to stay and puzzle through this disaster. But the human being had been screaming at me for the past hour to do exactly what Scotty demanded and get the hell out of here. The quiet alone was enough to give you permanent goosebumps. The thought of spending the night out here, after such a catastrophe – it wasn’t something I wanted to contemplate.
    â€˜Call that guy,’ Scotty said breathlessly. ‘Call him and tell him to come get us.’
    His gaze had a wild, feral quality, as if the thinnest veneer of sanity kept him from jumping at me. But it compelled me to act. I fetched the dry bags and began rummaging through them, scattering what had earlier seemed a precious hoard of supplies haphazardly across the beach. After I had emptied both bags, I stood and ran my fingers through my hair, my anxiety giving way to new dread. Scotty came up beside me and looked. As he stared, he must have seen it on my face before I dared say it myself, because his expression collapsed into horrified dismay and he snarled, ‘Oh, don’t tell me! Don’t even say it!’
    At that moment I felt older and more foolish than I’d ever felt in my life.
    â€˜You mean with all this crap you brought, you didn’t think to throw in a cell phone?’ Scotty roared, incredulous.
    I knew I had packed it. I just knew. But I shook my head lamely. ‘I didn’t think we’d be phoning out for pizza.’ But what couldn’t be denied was that I’d just forgotten it. In trying to collect all the equipment, and making the arrangements, and mooning over Heather … I must have walked off and left it.
    Scotty looked almost afraid for a moment. Heather reached up and cupped his shoulder with her hand, running her fingers around and around the joint, not just to comfort him but perhaps to hold him back? I glanced at her face, what I could see through the mask, and her eyes were narrowed, as if she’d seen the same thing in Scotty’s eyes that I had seen and was