The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) by Anthony J Melchiorri Page B

where she’d try her luck at getting ahold of someone at Fort Detrick, one of the Army’s premier facilities in biodefense. She hoped someone there would listen to her.
    The car lumbered onto the highway and out of Great Falls. She flicked on the radio and scanned the channels.
    “Current weather trends point to—”
    “—Democrats don’t care what the Republic—”
    “—four eggs and a cup of milk. Then add—”
    “—alien spacecraft. I swear. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.”
    This ought to be good, Meredith thought, desperate for anything to take her mind off recent events.
    The low, crooning voice of the radio host came through the tinny speakers. “Thank you, Rhonda. Our next caller has something rather unusual to report. We’ve all seen the pictures of giant squids and whales washing to shore. But Roger? Well, Roger has something completely different.”
    She followed the highway west. The headlights illuminated swathes of dark, empty asphalt and trees lining the road. She tensed each time another set of headlights pierced the darkness and another car passed. But no one followed her, and no cops pulled her over.
    “That’s right,” the caller’s voice cracked with a Georgian drawl. “I live out here near Savannah.”
    “What exactly did you find, Roger?”
    “A body on a public beach. I was just out sweeping—you know, with my metal detector—before sunrise. Gotta beat the tourists and swimmers and stuff.”
    “Makes sense to me.”
    “Well, sure enough, I saw a person. Or at least what I thought was a person. But it wasn’t no person, I swear it.”
    “What was it, Roger? Tell the listeners what you saw.”
    “You see, I wanted to help the fellow, if by God’s good grace they were still alive. So I walked up, grabbed their shoulder to turn ’em over, and cut my hand on something.”
    “Cut your hand? I don’t understand, Roger? How’d you cut your hand?”
    “The body! The damn body was covered in these bony growths sharp as knives.”
    Meredith’s heart stopped for a moment, and she jerked the wheel out of surprise. Steadying the car and herself, she listened to the interviewee with a renewed sense of interest.
    “Bones? I’m not sure I follow, Roger.”
    “These things were just poking out. Kinda like their skeleton was trying to climb out from under their skin. Scared the living sh—”
    “We’re live, Roger. Careful with the language. But go on—it sounds gruesome. What’d you do next?” The radio host’s voice seemed measured and calm, but Meredith guessed he was skeptical.
    She was not. She’d seen Jay Perry’s last video stream featuring the monster that for all she knew had taken his life. The man on the radio was right to be afraid.
    “Nothing. Just got the hell out of there. I tell you, I tell you, I want to know what our government is up to. Crop circles, secret societies...now these weird bodies. Something’s going—”
    “Thank you, Roger.” The radio host cut him off. “Our next story is about a couple...”
    Meredith tuned him out as she tried to do the math in her head while the road wove on before her. Jay Perry’s team had just reached the rig only a short time ago before she called in Dom’s team, who’d been lying in wait. The body that had washed up on shore couldn’t have originated from Jay’s expedition. She doubted it would’ve been carried by the currents in such a short time. Then she recalled the report that triggered this wild goose chase. The cryptic message requesting program termination had been an early warning. Something aboard the IBSL facility had gone drastically wrong. If whatever was on the rig turned people into monsters, then maybe the workers and researchers had all been affected by this unidentified bioweapon.
    If the IBSL had been dark for weeks as the memo indicated, these creatures might have been floating around the ocean for quite some time. Their corpses might be driven up on land by waves all