A dove preceded the catastrophe. A white, Middle-Eastern rock dove that flew into Marin County from the Pacific and, after resting a few hours, flew back out to sea with an olive leaf in its beak.

Days later, a great ship emerged from a dismal fog near the mouth of Willapa Bay, curiously up-current from where the dove had made landfall. It drifted into the shallows, the tide pushing it down the Bay and finally leaving it stranded six miles south of Bay Center.

No proper shipwright would have claimed authorship of its haphazard appearance. At the center was a boxy barge-like section, more a canal boat than an ocean ship. A child’s idea of a ship, or that of someone totally unfamiliar with the sea.

Nowhere had such a vessel been seen for at least five thousand years.

Around this original vessel thronged a series of accretions: rafts of great driftwood logs, lashed with sharkskin cables; scows of worked driftwood; and bits of wrecks incorporated into the whole. Here the prow of some Scandinavian dragon ship cobbled to the towering stern of a galleass. There a Chinese rice junk battered by storms.

Singularly, all the decks were roofed over.

Not a single element of seamanship could be seen anywhere in use: no lines, sails, exhaust stacks, tillers or steering tackle; as though a collection of accommodation hulks had somehow put back to sea and now clung together despondently, unprepared to face the forgotten rigors of sailing.

An observer would have been hard put, without close examination, to determine if this were a single vessel or a tightly packed fleet - or to estimate an age for the thing.

Though venerable and weathered there was also an air of Flying Dutchman about her - suspended in Time rather than profoundly affected by it, as though her great apparent age belied an even greater antiquity.

The ship, or fleet, stank. Reeked the horrid fetor of an unkept decaying barn; of dry rot and of the wet rot of urine-soaked beams; of stalls mucked out but never hosed down or disinfected; of a circus menagerie in winter quarters after the inspectors have been bribed to stay away; of matted fur and running sores from chafing wounds that just never heal, day after day after day.

So ferocious was the odor that seagulls and carrion birds, normally attracted by foul smells, instinctively kept away.

A similar effect must have worked in the sea, for as the tide receded not a single barnacle or wrack of seaweed clung to the hull.

After a time three small hatches creaked open, as though unfamiliar with such usage. Birds hopped onto the sills, then perched there, stupid and dazzled by the light. Hands appeared and tried to shoo them out into the open, succeeding only against considerable resistance. The birds quickly found the nearest shadows and hid there.

A clatter of mauls and spikes sounded inside a wooden hull, until a cargo hatch in the hull’s side, in the upper bulwark just below the added roof, yielded and was put aside. Hidden hands guided a loading ramp out. The moment the landward end of the ramp touched the sand the whole thing collapsed in a flurry of dust and the dead husks of generations of powder post beetles.

Voices murmured, argued. Then mauls and spikes began again, battering away at the hull itself, tearing an opening right at the level of the soggy beach. Crabs scuttled away. Shellfish dug deeper into the sand.

At another point on the periphery of the odd vessel, metal squealed. A rusted, stained but functioning steel debarkation ramp, of Liberty Ship design, lowered slowly with a great clanking of neglected chains.

Even before it touched the ground several bold ship rats ran along its length, leaped to the ground, and scurried quickly off the beach and into the woods. Not Norway rats, typical since the Roman Age, but a variety zoologists had long thought extinct, known only through desiccated corpses found in tombs and caves of Turkey and Syria.

Eventually more animals appeared, adjusted their eyes or other senses, and made their way unsteadily to shore. A mastodon trying to get its land-legs clung to the ramp chain for support until its desire for a bath overcame its nausea and fear. Trumpeting, it staggered into the water. Hordes of insects swarmed from its shaggy coat to escape drowning and headed out to look for newer homes.

Spraying a trunkful of water onto his back the mastodon suddenly sneezed, hugely and wetly; lost his battle for balance and splashed mightily onto his side. Years of accumulated body oils began forming a noticeable slick on the surface of the bay.

Long-horned cattle of a kind not seen on land for forty centuries at least stumbled into view. These had been tended more carefully, their coats combed out, their horn tips wrapped in leather. Two of them had purplish patches, an inch or so across, along their undersides and in the crevices behind their ears and under their tails…a lesion no modern cattleman would recognize.

The cattle inspected the oat grass with considerable suspicion before attempting to tear off mouthfuls.

It would be hours before an oysterman, sailing up the coast to check his beds, would see a short-maned European lion staring at him from the shore and raise the alarm. Hours before modern civilization confronted this anomaly from who knew what time or place.

Already, though, it was too late.

Far south, in Marin County, at each spot where the dove had touched down, big brown spots of withering vegetation, already yards across, expanded hourly. The olive tree from which the dove had plucked a twig was dead, its neighbors wilted.

The birds, perched on telephone lines, piers, rocks and trees seemed stupid and dazzled by the weak light of morning. They made no effort to fly or feed. Crusty scales formed in the corners of their eyes. Small pustules marked the roots of their feathers.

Each breath was a struggle.

The End

Bio

Timons Esaias has been publishing steadily since 1989; first as a newspaper satirist and then primarily in speculative fiction and poetry. His first professional SF sale, to the British magazine Interzone, was the second most popular story of its year. He has been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, and had five Rhysling nominations. Translations of his work have appeared in twelve languages. He lives in Pittsburgh, and is a member of the Worldwrights and The Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. He is one of the many writers who have wisely married physicians.

Tim reads far more than is really healthy, though he is occasionally distracted by chess, baseball, historical war games, aikido, learning Hittite or square-foot gardening. You may discover a bit more about him at timonsesaias.com