“Avila Beach” by Z.D. Dochterman

It was a Saturday, about two weeks before I was set to graduate from high school. I went to Avila Beach to work on my last English paper, the only thing between me and graduation. As the dour tide pressed up against my feet, I could make out the five-appendaged shape smothered by sea foam. A starfish. It would make a good meal for my Betta fish, who were probably starving, since my parents hadn’t given me any money for fish food in weeks. 

But when I picked it up, instead of a coarse and mushy texture, the appendages felt hairy, warm, strong with bones. A hand. 

I looked around for any sign of cops. Nothing but the gray sand of Avila Beach and the foghorn of boats coming back from the decommissioned military base on Encuentro Island in the distance. I shoved it in my backpack and tried to focus on my paper.

But the body parts started rolling in by the score: fingers, ears, torsos. Soon the beach looked like an unearthed graveyard for the coyotes and crows to feed on. I decided to split before the cops blamed me for the mess.

Back in my room, I scrolled through the news videos on my phone. The mayor, the news, other adults said the typical things, don’t panic, this is just the work of some sicko, the cops are on it, someone from out of town, fentanyl, blah blah, social media, blah blah, this will all be over in no time. Greg Dorman, who did office work at the immigration office in San Luis, was gathering up a militia of anyone with a rifle, pistol, or knife to patrol the streets of Avila, taking out anyone who “didn’t belong.” Talk about feeling safer. When I texted Eva Dunlap she said her dad bought a small armored truck and they’d started sleeping in it to protect themselves from the alleged body-chopper. Super embarrassing.

At least I didn’t have to deal with parents, like her. Most of the time, my mom drank until two in the morning and then crashed at her friend Jackie’s house, or so she said, while my dad worked an overnight shift at the Correctional Facility in Soltero and wouldn’t get back until I left for school, so none of us had to be awake together for too long at the house. Things mostly stayed quiet that way, except for the ghosts of the people who died in prison on my dad’s watch. I never asked who or what did them in. They’d knock over the tea kettle or break an occasional window. But they mostly left me alone. It wasn’t me they were after.

That evening, I went to the beach again, but this time the area where I’d been working on my paper was roped off with yellow police tape as helicopters corkscrewed through the sky. I started writing.

She was clearly right to go against the authority of Creon, instead answering the higher calling of virtue. What crap. It was just the kinds of words I thought Mrs. Ellison wanted to hear. 

I looked up from the page and saw a crowd of kids approaching. In front was Adam, another twelfth grader–not the graduating type–who was popular because he had a weed hookup from his cousin up north. I’d bought from him once or twice and showed him the cicada tattoo I’d charged on my dad’s credit card behind his back. Beyond that, we hadn’t spoken much.

He pointed his index finger toward me. “Derrick Pa-der-dig-na.” The way he said it, I couldn’t tell if he felt disdain or slight affection or both. He was dragging an arm behind him in the sand, cut at the shoulder. Behind him was Yvette, the drummer for No Future, and Jayden, the guitarist. They had almost matching nose piercings and ripped jeans. Yvette was gonna be valedictorian, the kind who was so smart she didn’t even need to show up to class. Jayden wore a gray denim jacket which looked good with his teal undercut. Their band was the one decent thing about Avila, especially since their songs had literally blown through the walls of the Seance Club and ripped through the windows of Alistair’s. The lawsuits had just been filed. 

“Check out what we found,” Yvette said and held up a leg severed at the pelvis. “Practically a whole body.”

“Cool,” I said. “What you gonna do with it?”

“We’re gonna draw a pentagram in the sand and light them on fire to see what happens.” Jayden said. “Maybe summon a demon.”

 “Maybe he’ll solve the mystery of where the body parts come from,” I said.

“No mystery.” A girl’s voice, familiar. 

I saw her face, poking out from behind Jayden’s wide shoulders. Chloe. Chloe with her bob cut and that smile that only ever crossed one side of her lips. She used to ride the bus with me in the tenth grade, when we’d make fun of our Spanish teacher’s toupee and then hang out, drink, and do homework. Might’ve even been best friends for a month or two. Until she started dating Ethan Ialar who didn’t fancy her hanging out with other guys. 

“Tell us then, Chloe,” I said. I wouldn’t let my eyes break free from hers, not for all the fish food in the world.

“Encuentro Island,” she said and pointed off toward the crescent land mass behind her. 

Of course it was Encuentro. Anyone who stayed at Avila past nine at night could spot the unmarked helicopters, the boats making the two-mile trip to the Raythil factory in the San Luis Bay and back to the island’s sus research labs.  

“They chop up humans and make kibble out of them,” Jayden said. “Boats go straight to the Dogville Factory in Atascadero.”

“No way,” Yvette said. “It’s the prisoners from Soltero. Cheaper than keeping them in cells. Encuentro throws their bodies out to sea but wasn’t expecting the tide to bring them to shore.”

“It’s a black site,” Adam said. “I hear they do drug experiments and genetic testing on homeless people. And then when the test subjects get aggressive, they just send them through the blender.”

“What about you Chloe?” I said. “What’s your theory?”

“Just a big black hole devouring anyone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” she said. “Avila doesn’t give you much time to figure things out.” 

The four of them lit a bonfire and tossed the limbs on top. The legs and arms dissolved in the flames, leaving behind six baseball-sized seeds. We planted them in a circle around us. Although we didn’t get a demon, after about fifteen minutes, six human-sized Venus flytraps sprung out of the sand. They’d occasionally nip at us and we’d have to beat them back with slaps and fists.

I forget who was the first to talk about jobs.

Jayden was thinking of working down at the gas station, or maybe the old video store in Cyanth. Yvette was deciding between OnlyFans and college, since she had the grades but not the money. Adam obviously was making a killing from selling pot, so he was set.

I spent almost the whole night talking to Chloe about quantum computers and octopuses, comparing the cicada tattoo on my forearm with the datura tattoo she’d got on her ankle. I asked her for ideas for the English paper I needed to finish.

“How about this,” she said. “Our heroine rallies the people to storm the palace?”

“That’s not an interpretation,” I said. “That’s a different ending.”

“Sometimes that’s what stories need,” she said with that half-smile.

The stars made drunken rounds in the sky and the air filled with police choppers and drones zooming off to the island. 

“You know I still have your DVD of Zéro de conduite from two years ago?”

She almost squealed. “The little kids who take over a boarding school! Haven’t seen it in ages.” 

We made plans to watch it together Tuesday night.

***

The next day, I got up for school around seven and was just about to go looking for my mom’s Adderall bottle when I got a text from Chloe. 

“Meet me at Creto Square Park. It’s urgent.”

The drugs would have to wait. I downed a cup of coffee from the machine and grabbed a block of cheese and some ketchup from the fridge. My dad’s car keys lay on the sofa, where he was passed out with a handle of bourbon next to him. I told the ghosts to do their worst and slammed the door behind me. 

I pulled into the parking lot. The morning fog and low pink streetlamp haze mingled above the grassy expanse. In the middle of the park, near the tiled fountain, dozens of bodies huddled together, murmured a static of sentences. The park was never like this, not on a weekday at least; it was just pigeons and a couple people trying to sleep in their tents while the kids that ditched school did graffiti or played mobile games.  

I spotted Chloe walking toward the crowd and called out to her. She came over and hugged me as tight as she ever had.

“You haven’t heard, the rumor, have you?” she said.

“What’s this all about?”

“Follow me,” she said. “I hope it’s not true.”

We neared the fountain and wove through the crowd. I spied a two-foot-wide sign stuck into the earth, a handwritten message written in large, black marker. Still too far to make out the words. On the ground, shapes. Knocked over trash cans? Dogs? 

“What’s going on Chloe?” I said.

Then they came into focus. There was a loose shoe, then a sneaker. A sneaker attached to a leg. Severed just above the knee. Next to it, two arms, a torso–a woman’s torso–and another leg. Draped over her was another body, cut down the middle, ribs, loins, intestines spilled out.

Then I saw the handwritten message:

Here lie Yvette Contreras, Adam Oliver, and Jayden Woole 

Guilty of the recent wave of murder and dismemberment.

In Avila Beach, the punishment fits the crime.

Do not touch on pain of death. -Avila Police

Chloe’s lower lip was trembling, her hands covered her ears. “No–no–no.”

My body was shaking. Acid sped up my esophagus. Burned my tongue and tonsils. I covered my mouth, held back the urge to release it. Swallowed. 

“They’d never do this,” I managed to say. Chloe rushed into my arms, and I held her like some thorn briar. My neck became wet with her tears.

Then we saw the creature.

It strode toward the crowd, with gargantuan steps that sounded like foghorns. Nine feet tall, horns, body of a rabid bull. Its veins bulged like rivers in his reddened flesh, and it smelled of manure left out in a heat wave. Everyone took five steps backward. A minotaur, except for the snakelike tail, the six-inch claws on its hands, and the dozen eyes on its forehead.

The creature arrived at the pile of corpses. It planted the butt of its axe into the ground and grunted, low and coarse. People whispered about how impressive it was that the police had hired something like that to guard the dead. Budgets must have gone up.

But I knew where it came from. Where all of our problems came from. 

Encuentro.

 Chloe and I headed back to the car and sat on the hood. She offered me a cigarette, which I took, not ever having really smoked one. When I grabbed it like a joint, she chuckled. I laughed at myself and then copied her fingerwork. It was all we could do to stop ourselves from losing it completely.

“What about their parents,” I said. “They’re just gonna let them stay out there for the rats and the street dogs?”

Chloe began scrolling through the news, until she found a clip. “All three families, joint statement, all three families. Check it out.”

There it was: “Now that we know our children are guilty, we commend the police for doing the right thing. We hope their deaths will serve as a warning to anyone who would hurt the great city of Avila Beach.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Chloe said. “Everyone knew that Jayden’s parents worked at the Island. Yvette’s dad too. How they roped in Adam’s parents is anyone’s guess.”

“But they must know they’re innocent,” I said. “Jayden, Yvette, they’d never–”  

I could see Chloe shaking. Everything about her, from her eyelids to the shoelaces, shaking. Of course she knew. I didn’t even need to say it. That meant they’d do this to any of us if they needed a scapegoat. Innocent or not.

“Text you later Derrick,” she said and jogged off. I could hear the whimpers echoing her footsteps. 

***

For some reason or other I decided to go to school. 

Maybe it was just the impulse to see what the other kids were doing about this–what they were planning on doing. But first I stopped for pancakes and coffee at Dolores Cafe, got major side eye for being out during school hours. Or maybe because I looked like one of the kids from Avila High, like Adam, like Yvette, like Jayden. When the server brought me the tab, I took out a pen and wrote that I was flat broke but promised to come back and pay as soon as I had the cash. I went to the bathroom and slid out the back door.

I smelled the smoke about ten blocks from school, even with the car windows rolled up. Brambly, black plumes poked out over the tops of the Monterey Pines. A police car sped past me with its sirens flaring, then another. A helicopter circled in the distance. I rolled through a few more stop signs and sped closer to the blaze.

The school was on fire.

As I pulled up opposite the parking lot, just a block and a half down on Seco Street the whole scene came into focus. A line of cops had begun to move in toward the quad. Other kids were hopping the fence, running, frantically looking over their shoulders. I made out the auditorium and the science building turned ashen in the inferno.  

Among the kids rushing down the street, I spotted Melanie and Jaime from my English class. Some of the few kids I knew whose parents didn’t work for Soltero or for the city or the Island. In fact, both of them kept near full-time jobs, Melanie at the grocery store and Jaime down at the bike shop. 

I waved them down. They stopped and we perched on the trunk of my car as they panted to catch their breath, hunched down, hands on their knees.

“What is this?” I asked. Another two police vehicles and a big paddy wagon rolled up about two hundred feet from us.

“Principal Minas had a big fucking assembly,” Melanie said. “Said that Yvette and Jayden and Adam were the killers. Told us where their bodies were. Creto Park.”

“It’s bullshit,” I said. “They needed someone to blame, that’s all.”  

“Khalid,” Melanie said. “You know him, right, Derrick? Drummer from the band, Jayden’s best friend?”

I nodded.

“Well, he wasn’t having it either.”  

“So a dozen, maybe two dozen kids got up,” Jaime said. “Started yelling. Then Khalid set that shit on fire. Passed out legit Molotovs. I even threw one.” 

“They said Hebe Alacron conjured some purple ivy to strangle the adults,” Melanie said. “Dean, counselors, Minas. All those fucks.” 

“Now Khalid and them are occupying the admin building,” Jaime said.

Be safe you crazy fools. I didn’t know if it was a joke or a prayer. Be safe. 

We watched the threadlike tendrils of Hebe’s ivy as they bloomed across the math building, then over to the lunch area. It snapped the windows, made the bricks crackle. The violet leaves luxuriated as they stretched toward the sunlight.

Then we heard the shots. 

Glass from the admin building spilled onto the floor. Another seven, eight rapid-fire booms. A pine-green haze suffused the air near the windows. Tear gas. Even as far away as we were, we heard them screaming, coughing. Students bolted out, covering their mouths and noses with their shirts. 

A few were grabbed and arrested. The lucky ones ran past the phalanx, hopped the fence to freedom. When Khalid finally emerged, there’s no way he could’ve seen the first bullet to the cheek or the second one to the chest.  

***

Word came in around 5 p.m. Twenty-seven arrests. Six hospitalizations. Khalid, the leader of the riot, confirmed dead. School would be canceled for the next three days. The national news came down later that night to Avila to report on what happened. The body parts washing up, the riot. I could see the headlines now: Mass Panic Grips Small Town as Teenagers Dismember Residents.

Chloe texted around 9 p.m. Said she was safe, wandering the streets because she couldn’t go back home. Her dad was one of the cops that answered the call from our school.  

“Now they take Khalid.” she wrote. “So, this is war. A real war.”

“And what are we gonna do against people with guns and tear gas?” 

“Creto Park, that’s what. Tonight. Midnight. Let’s work your English paper–maybe change the ending.”

I knew exactly what she meant. The bodies of our friends. The minotaur. Chloe wasn’t the kind to back down. “You have something to do it with?”

“My mom. I know where she hides one. Six chances to end it.”

I watched the screen. 

Waited. 

Took a depth breath. 

“I’m in,” I typed. Hit ‘send’ before I could backtrack. “I’ll call it research for my final essay.”

“Great. I’ll have the car. You come on foot. Be sure to bring something for the job.”

I didn’t know what I was doing anymore, didn’t know what was right. I guess war is a tide that carries you to strange destinations.  

***

We met across from the liquor store on Hyacinth. She was wearing a dark hoodie, gloves, had a bandana tied around her neck that she could pull up over her mouth. I felt stupid just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. But I’d managed to find an old aluminum bat from my days playing Little League. It would have to be enough. We headed toward the park and about three hundred feet from it, climbed up one of the nearby sycamores to get a vantage on the grassy expanse where the bodies lay. We took our positions on opposite branches. My pulse boomed in my wrist as we spotted the creature.

“Not even holding its axe,” Chloe said and pointed. The minotaur was sitting down next to the pile of our friends. “It’s flipping through its cell phone.”

“We’ve got it distracted,” I whispered back. “If we’re careful.”

“We sneak up, you give one quick hit to the back of the head. That’ll stun it.”

My heart pounded louder, and my palms dripped wet and cold. “I don’t know Chloe, what if we just–”

“And then I go in.” She reached into her hoodie and pulled something out from her jeans. I recognized it instantly. Glock 22. The kind my dad carried. The kind he’d used to shoot more than one prisoner trying to start something in the yard, that’d killed half of those ghosts at home. Chloe must’ve heard me panting, almost asphyxiated, there in the tree’s shadows. Her cerulean eyes caught mine. “You can still leave, Derrick. I can do this by myself.”

“Just give me a second. Never done anything like this.”

“That makes two of us.” She put her hand on my back. I managed a quick smile. And nodded.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. 

We descended from our perch and crept around to the far side of the park where we could hide behind the barred-up community center. I gripped the tape on the aluminum bat. The soft pink lights spread across the grass of Creto Park, blanketing the dew drops and the unburied bodies. 

We snuck closer. Inch by inch.

The two of us hid behind a pillar about sixty feet from the beast. Even from that distance the stench of the rotting bodies made me wretch. I clenched my stomach with my free hand. We drew closer, could see that flies were buzzing all around the open wounds in Yvette’s torso. A few pigeons picked at the last bits of skin on her toes. I could see the bones in Jayden’s arms. 

The minotaur chuckled. Scrolled through more videos with its giant claws. We were twenty, fifteen feet away.

“Now!” Chloe said. She had pointed the gun at the creature’s head. I thought we’d have time to talk. Plan it out. But no. She looked at me and grunted through her teeth. “Now!”

  Before I could think I was running as fast as I could. Ten, eight feet. Closing in. The beast turned its head. Eyes bulged wide. Six, four. It began to mouth something. I jumped in the air and swung.

That’s when the crack rang out. 

Metal on skull bone. The sound was lower than I thought it’d be. Like a car backfiring. The minotaur put its hands on its temples, and the axe fell, clanked on the concrete. Blood poured out of its ear and onto its cheek. 

I saw Chloe holding the gun with both hands.

Then, six shots. It was all-or-nothing now that the gun was empty.

The beast stumbled and swirled. It clutched its throat. Dropped to its knees. And fell headfirst to the grass.

It gave a few final twitches and then the night fell silent.. Chloe and I flipped the creature over. Two shots right through its eyes. One in the esophagus. Three in the heart. Nothing less would’ve killed the beast. 

We had no time to lose.

Chloe ran back to the car. Thirty seconds later it skidded onto the grassy area. She slammed the brakes, stopping just a few feet from the corpses of our friends. We picked them up: legs, arms, feet. They would get their burial tonight. Torso, head. Our clothes grew sticky-wet from all the fleshy matter that’d spilled onto us. Chloe took out a knife and drove it into the minotaur’s neck. After five minutes of sawing back and forth, she’d severed the head.

I ran over to the trash can and threw up.

***

That night, there on Avila Beach, as we buried our friends, that was the last time I saw Chloe. 

We popped the trunk and brought Yvette, with her No Future tattoo on her shoulder, and Jayden, with his sabretooth tiger tattoo on his wrist, over to the circle of Venus flytraps we’d grown a few days before. Without the tattoos, the body parts all looked the same in their decomposed state. These limbs, we wouldn’t burn. Chloe and I dug a giant hole and laid them down softly. Covered them over. Patted down the sand.

Neither one of us knew what to say to the other once their bodies were buried. We sat there listening to the ululation of the waves. Moonlight skipped across the wet mirror of the shoreline. Occasionally one of us would start to tear up. An hour, maybe more, passed that way. Just in the silence of a lightless universe.

“They’ll know it was me, Derrick,” she said. “That I buried them. Since I was best friends with them. And then they’ll come for me.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe they’ll–”

“Stop,” Chloe said and touched me on the arm, right where my cicada tattoo lay. “It’s not safe for me anymore.” I fumbled with some driftwood, made shapes in the sand. Even though my eyes were downcast to the sand, I could tell Chloe was looking at me. “I’ve got to leave town. Got a cousin up near Ukiah. Stay with them.”

When I did look up, I could see she was smiling. I bit my upper lip. My fingers shook. “How about I meet you up there after school ends? No point in me staying in Avila.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be around me. Maybe someday. But not for a while.”

I wanted to tell her we’d move to Oregon or Montana. That we could try to get jobs at one of the big box stores or figure out some untraceable credit card scheme or maybe open a place to take care of dogs. Make a few bucks. See where things could go from there. But those were just dumb dreams, the kind you don’t get to have in Avila Beach. 

“Then we’ll just say you owe me a movie night, Chloe,” was what I managed to say. 

She rolled up her pant leg and pointed to her Datura tattoo. “You’ll know they got me if you see this. Just promise you’ll bury me too.”

“But they won’t get you,” I said.

“Promise you’ll bury me.”

I looked in her eyes and nodded. “Deal.”

She kissed me on the cheek, and we went back to watching the stars together one last time.

After she left, I saw what looked like three cyan-colored spirits rise out of the sand and hover above the waves for a moment, before they floated off in the direction of Encuentro Island.

***

The next three days, there was no school, so I had time to work on my essay. During that time, the news ran stories about the “Body Thief.” The news had put two and two together: the person who’d killed the minotaur was the one who’d taken the three corpses. Arlan Jones, an eleventh grader ratted on Chloe, said she was always hanging around Yvette and Jayden. Then the other kids who didn’t want to get in trouble after the riot followed suit. Her picture showed up in the San Luis Times and on posters on telephone poles all around Avila. 

She knew how Avila worked. She was right to go on the run.

 During that week, no more body parts rolled up on the beach. The town relaxed. Jayden, Adam, Yvette–it seemed they’d found the killers.

But I knew better.

Encuentro had been on fire. From the old military installation to the research lab to the housing for scientists. Helicopters dumped endless gallons of water on the blue flames that rose from the wooden structures, but nothing put them out. For the next week, from the shores of Avila Beach, you could see the island, crowned in fire, burning all through the night. That’s why nothing had turned up on the beach. Whatever spinning blade machines they had whirring through the night had been crippled.

Two days before school ended, I turned in my English paper on Antigone. I’d managed a C-.

Your idea that Antigone should have led the townsfolk against Creon for refusing the burial of her brother is not an analysis of the text as it is. Instead, you are proposing an alternative ending–one that is far from realistic in those, or any times. But I will pass you since you show you’ve read the book, even if you haven’t learned its lessons. 

So, I’d be graduating after all.

My classmates and I all made a pact. We’d get tattoos of our names on our legs and arms. Wild boar and fennel bulbs and scythes and dark rainbows and magic eight balls. Anything to give us an identity. We knew it was just a matter of time before Encuentro began churning through the prisoners and fentanyl users and homeless people, and the kids who drifted through the streets, lost to the world, like us. At least this way, if someone found our body parts, recognized our tattoos, we’d be buried and remembered. 

Maybe a few of us would even rise up and set fire to Encuentro, like the spirits of Yvette and Adam and Jayden did.

That’s why I’ll go check the shores every night. For Hebe or Melanie or Jaime or the dozens of others that might turn up there before me. An undertaker to a whole community of young people with no future. 

I just hope I’ll never see her ankle. The one with the Datura tattoo. Of the girl who slayed the minotaur and whose film I promised myself I’d give back one day.

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