It was a beautiful sunny day at Point Dume in Malibu. The COVID-19 bullshit was finally over and everyone was enjoying themselves at the beach. People were chatting, eating, flirting and enjoying their favorite beach activities with new vigor. There was beach volley ball and ice cream, beach umbrellas of the sturdy variety were out in their many-colored display. Most people were in the water and waves in general as it was a rather hot day and the ocean was fresh and cool. There were people surfing, boogy-boarding, snorkeling, and there was a fair sized group of people climbing the rock wall that was Point Dume.

Several miles south on the beach, Ph.D Jane Bumeshaka was working with her team of oceanic experts to handle a dead blue whale that had washed up on the high tide. It was a pretty fresh kill. Might have been about 24 to 48 hours old. She suspected it was hit by a large ocean freight carrier, swam some miles in agony and fear and slowly died close enough to the shore to be washed up. It was a large male. She had inspected and photographed where it had been hit by the bow of a ship moving at full speed and then where the propeller of the ship had clipped its spine just before its tail. Now they were working on the removal.

It really was a major problem. The animal is absolutely mammoth. That much rotting flesh would smell all the way up to Point Dume if they let it sit there. People would complain and then she would be called out to handle a rotten blue whale sitting on the beach. They could not drag it out to sea because it would simply be pushed back into the shore. No matter. She had the solution. While digging a hole under the whale and detonating a large pile of TNT had been attempted with less than satisfactory results before, she had seen the cause for the failure immediately. It was rather obvious really. They did not use the proper amount of explosives nor did they place it in the strategically correct spot.

Just now they had the whale’s mouth propped open wide with steel supports and her team was busy crawling deep into the whale and stacking thousands of pounds of TNT explosives into it. Elementary. She looked on in close supervision marking her clipboard, making notes, and squinting through her extremely thick glasses at her fellow scientists.

They had just been taking in the last three-hundred pounds of it when something very strange and inexplicable happened. There was a very small tremble in the ground and the sand under the whale began to sink! Jane watched the phenomena in scientist-like fasciation while the men inside were trapped in the whale as it went a bit sideways and the supports fell out of the mouth. It closed with a dead clunk. Several people around her were going into fast action to try and get the whale mouth open again but the tide rose rapidly on a very large wave and the whale was carried out to sea. It floated out a little ways and then did another remarkable thing. It sank!

“Well that was just fascinating!” She exclaimed. “It really should not have gone under like that. Sarah, do you think it went down because of the weight of the TNT?” She turned to her left but Sarah was running down next to the water screaming hysterically. Her boyfriend was one of the scientist that were in the whale when the mouth sealed shut.

An hour later back at Point Dume, Jimmy Dallymore, the two-hundred-pounds-of-muscle lifeguard, was at his post with his sun hat and aviators. He was leaned back, covered in tanning oil and enjoying the view of several curvaceous women prancing around the wet sand together squealing at the cold water touching their feet whenever a wave broke and rushed up. As he was sitting there watching and thinking about his pickup-line regarding no longer having to socially distance themselves from each other, a body in a black and white tuxedo washed up face down and still in front of the girls.

They all screamed and looked around for someone to help this poor man! This was Jimmy’s chance! He sprang into action! Making sure to look good while he was running, puffing out his chest so that they could see his massive pectorals as he ran, he sprinted over so fast that his hat blew off his head. He got to the man, trying to reassure the beautiful, almost naked women that he would help and that they did the right thing. He got beside the man and, in a way that best showed the women how large his biceps were, turned the body over onto his lap. Glassy, watery still eyes met his gaze and the body was limp. “No!” Jimmy said, flexing his arms and abs as he yelled. The girls all put hands to their mouths and arms around each other as tears filled their eyes for this poor soul lost at sea. Jimmy looked up, “It’s too late,” he said, while still flexing his arms. This was perfect, they would think he was brave and handsome and courageous but he didn’t have to do a thing to actually save anyone! This guy must have fallen overboard a party boat in the night and drowned hours ago. Still putting on his act, for he also wanted to seem kind of compassionate to the women, he tried to get a single tear squeezed out. He looked down again but as he did so Jake reached his dead hand up and punched his index and middle finger through Jimmy’s eyes. Jimmy opened his mouth to scream bloody murder, but he only had a chance to get air into his lungs before Jake also got his thumb hooked into Jimmy’s mouth to grip his face bone and his other hand on his forehead as a brace. Then two things happened: Jake pulled Jimmy’s face off with a sickening, bone-snapping, flesh-rending sound; and all hell broke loose. One of the women was stumbling away but couldn’t get out a scream because she was vomiting and having a wardrobe malfunction with her absolutely impractical “swimsuit”. The other two just dead fainted. But there were some people that saw what happened and panic was starting to spread at the same time that a horrible stench of rotting covered the beach. Birds were flocking in heavily. Very heavily. A man was trying to use a beach umbrella to beat a rotting seagull with plastic around its neck off his wife when a skeletal albatross with a ruptured stomach full of plastic bottle caps and empty lighters kamikaze dive bombed his eye and lodged itself six inches into his left prefrontal lobe. It was flapping around while lodged in his head and he was somehow still alive and screaming his head off simply running in blind agony. The climbers were being pummeled off the rock face. People were trying to run to their cars to get away but they were under such heavy assault they had to battle every step.

Blood and other matter from Jimmy had exploded all over Jake and turned his once salt washed white shirt red. Blood soaked deep into the wet sand as Jake sat up and then got to his feet. He lifted Jimmy’s two-hundred pound bulk by the ankle and held him aloft, blood gushing from his face cavity over the sand. A wave crashed and hissed out over the sand. Mother Nature’s salt water tongue licked at the blood soaked sand. It was like someone licking a delicious fine wine from the edge of a glass right after they had gently tasted it. Just before taking a deep swig like an alcoholic.

Jake tossed the limp body into the sea and turned around to face the two women that had fainted just a few yards away. The the waves and water around Jimmy’s body began to take on a different hue. There were screams from people in the water. There was a huge school of dolphins that showed up. It was hundreds strong, but something was wrong. People that were swimming farther out were dipping under water and not coming back up. It was all happening so fast. The waves were full of dolphins! The water was turning a strange color. It was getting darker. Several surfers that were sitting on their boards a little higher over the swimmers, and at first had thought the dolphins were an amazing spectacle. They changed their minds when they started seeing them up close, but then it was much too late.

These creatures’ eyes were the wrong color. They were scarred and rotting. The air was stifling and putrid. The surfers were trying to swim back to shore but they were being knocked off their boards and not coming back up out of the water. The water was becoming darker and darker.

One of the people that had seen Jake rip Jimmy’s face off was a thirty year old ex-military all around bad-ass named Tom Booker. As soon as he saw the action take place he sprinted for his car. He knew what it would take to rip someone’s face off. As impossible and mythic as that was, he knew the kind of strength. He was strong but he did not want to tangle with someone like that. Still in shock, he was mostly acting out of training. This kind of armed response was what he had spent years training for in the military. On top of that he was a Prepper. Always ready for anything, he had a high powered (and strictly speaking illegal) AR in his trunk with multiple types of ammunition. He whipped open his trunk and ripped away the false bottom to expose a precisely packed AR and preloaded clips, color coded for fast recognition of ammunition types. He pulled out the gun, flipped the strap around his head, pushed a double clip of hollow-tips into place, and cocked a round into the chamber. He turned to find the killer and was shocked to see all the pandemonium. He was ready for people panicking, but he had been so laser focused on his task that when he turned around and saw people battling hoards of birds and death being dealt in all directions he froze for a moment. Then he rallied. His attention re-focused. Stay on target. He looked for the killer. There he was! He was dragging two of those beautiful women Tom had seen around the body when the lifeguard had been murdered! They were limp. Their necks had been opened and they were bleeding out on the wet sand as the murderer dragged them to the waves!

“YOU SICK FUCK!” Tom screamed. A new wave of fury rose from deep within his heart. But he couldn’t get a clean shot off. Too many obstacles. Tom was in action. He surveyed the battle field. A full grown, nine foot thresher shark with it’s nose mangled by a boat propeller launched from the waves as full speed and chomped into a woman who running from dead birds that were assaulting her from above. Its teeth sunk into her torso and it thrashed around while she screamed and blood sprayed everywhere. A wave of all kinds of sea creatures washed ashore covered in black oil and began a new wave of attack on people forced back from their cars. Tom took the remaining clips and stuffed them into his belt and cargo shorts pockets, the last of which was a red double clip of explosive, incendiary rounds. Then he locked in battle with undead forces on his way to the murderer.

Tom was oddly not hindered much. Perhaps it was because he dropped every bird, seal or other living-dead animal that opposed him. Perhaps it was something else. Either way he finally got twenty-five yards from the murderer and raised his rifle. He breathed in and looked through his sights. He flipped the little switch he had added to his modified rifle that turned it to full-auto. The murderer was up to his waist in the waves, walking straight out to sea. Everything went still for Tom. He exhaled, aimed, and squeezed the trigger. The AR ripped the air and the clip was emptied in two seconds, but the bullets bit into an oil slick, puffy, rotten, walrus that had jumped in front of the target. Black chunks of blubber and skin flew in all directions and Tom cursed and reloaded. He tried to take aim again and his target was gone. He swore again. He might have tried some sort of pursuit but found himself assailed by a wave of dead albatross. He grabbed a thick plastic cooler lid off the ground and used that as a shield as he battled them off, and bent to the task of trying to save other people if he could.

Two minutes later a massive wave formed in the water and a sweating, bewildered, and battle crazed Tom looked to the ocean and saw it come in. It was forty feet tall. It came up, crested and thundered into the beach. In the wave was a massive blue whale. The wave and whale came down on one of the last lines of defense. A small band of courageous humans had piled together coolers, towels, and umbrellas into a circular barricade and fought the undead, viciously, clinging to the life force they so zealously coveted.

Tom swore again. Looked down at his last double clip of explosive incendiary rounds, released his empty clip and jammed them into his gun. He lifted he AR, flipped to full-auto again, and sighted on the whale’s face. Right between its eyes. At the same time, the whale’s mouth opened and five dead men in chemical suits stumbled out and assaulted what people were left near the whale. Tom squeezed the trigger. Explosive rounds ripped a line through the air deep into the whales throat. Tom didn’t get a chance to go through the entire clip. The resulting explosion from thousands of pounds of TNT blew a two-hundred foot crater in the ground and a four-hundred foot cloud of sand, water vapor, fire, rock, and whale into the air.

Immediately following the cataclysm there was silence. All except for the red tide of blood that filled the crater as the sea continued, completely un-phased, with its rhythmic pounding of the sand. The sun shown through the waves. They were red. Bits and pieces and body parts of human and whale could be seen, if there had still been a living soul to see anything, tossing and tumbling in the waves as they crashed to shore.

Mother Nature drank the red deeply into her sand until she was quite delirious with intoxication.