"The idol isn't here," Pickles said.

"Look anyway. If you can detect it, why haven't we been able to find it all fucking year?"

Jessie immediately regretted the way she said it, and apologized.

"Sorry, didn't mean to be a dick."

"It's frustrating, I get it," Pickle replied.

Silencia began searching. So did Royalty. Pickles started with arranging the bodies to make it look like the men had killed one another. Police would be baffled, as the dead men came from all different walks of life. One was a homeless man, another a respected lawyer, two of them a couple of young men who worked at a fast food place together. Investigations would uncover that the men were acting strangely, there would be some drug testing at the autopsy, and like the deaths of all people, eventually forgotten.

Jessie wondered if this weirdness was striking in other parts of the world. Royalty spent a lot of time on the internet looking for common symptoms, but the problem was, on the outside, it looked like garden variety madness. All they had to go on was what Pickles could sense, and she said this bizarre energy was only within 100 miles of their town. They had traveled further, testing the theory, and it matched with what Jessie's father had said. That something sat in the ocean off the coast of their South Carolina town, something not of this Earth, and it would someties seep into people's minds. It had come and gone as far back as people lived here. Or before. The natives of the lands spoke of it, Jesise having been raised on the reservation. Sometimes there would be no sign of it for decades at a time. Maybe it was all over the world. Or maybe it was just here in South Carolina. Her father, and all the tribal shaman before him, said there was something in the ocean, a meteor or tomb or lost city off the coast, and it gave off a poison that made bad people worse. Someday, the legend said, whatever was laying on the ocean floor would rise, and control the minds of all the people. Nobody knew if that meant locally or the whole fucking world. Maybe it was bullshit. But the part about making bad people worse was real, so Jessie assumed the worst. She didn't necessarily give a shit about saving her town, most of the people were assholes, but on principle, she couldn't let a far worse evil turn everyone into mad killers. If she could stop it, well, she just might save the world.

Her tribe said the madness had come in waves over the centuries. Even when this madness would stop for a hundred years, it always came back, not on any cycle that could be tracked. Jessie's father had told her, not long before he died, that it was stronger than ever. Jessie wanted to know more, so she would know how to fight it, but her father didn't want her to get involved. He told her to move away from her hometown, to go see the world, or live somewhere else, to find a tribe of her own. Jessie had tried that, joining the Marines, because she was always looking for a fight, but ultimately she felt badly for the people she was fighting over there.

When Jessie returned from the middle-east, she spent some time with her dad, and then decided she would hop on her motorcycle, and cross the country. She had made friends in the Marines who lived across the United States, and wouldn't mind stopping in to see them. She could always find work as a mechanic. She had served in the USMC motor pool. Computers and apps might be replacing a lot of jobs, but they couldn't replace a transmission.

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Jessie had planned to leave one weekend, and stopped in to say goodbye to her father. He wasn't himself. He was rattled. Her father had been the most stoic man she had known, more so than the hardened Marine sargents she served under. But something had spooked her Dad.

"It's back," he said, only after she had spent twenty minutes badgering him. He didn't want to tell her, because he wanted her away from it. But he knew she wouldn't leave without an explanation.

"Last time, the madness rose, I was a boy. Nearly fifty years ago," Her father began to say, but Jessie wasn't that curious at the time. It had been a myth among her people, not something she took very seriously. But to see her father's native brown skin going pale also made her want to find this threat and kill it. Her father scoffed at that. Not at her. He had confidence in Jessie and always supported her, but he loved her too much to see her try and combat something that couldn't be fought. Did his best to reason with her.

"Most of our people are dead and gone. You should leave this reservation, leave South Carolina, go find yourself and what you're meant to do. But don't stay here to stop something like this. Like standing at the beach and trying to stop the waves from coming in."

She took his advice, half thinking that her father was getting old and going senile. Tough as he was, men grew old, they got tired, and sadly, dementia often set in. While she hated to admit it, part of Jessie wanted to leave because she couldn't stand to watch her father grow frail and feeble. He was pushing 70, and prostate cancer had thinned him. Whenever she offered to help him with something, she could tell it pained him. He was wise, and he knew she meant well, but he still had his pride.

"If you want to do anything for me, I only ask this. When I'm gone, come back and take this idol. It has to be kept away from them. Those who are driven mad by the thing in the sea."

That was what they called it in the legend of their people: The Thing In The Sea.

He showed her the idol, a crudely carved thing no larger than a jar of cookies. It was some sort of black stone infused with streaks of metal, like marble. Looked a bit like a seated man, though instead of a face, it seemed to have the head of a squid or octopus, with a beard of tentacles. The stone was strangely light. A rock this size should have weighed twenty pounds, but this felt no more than two.

"A rival tribe used to worship it. Captured its power for their own gain… Long before Europeans came. Our tribe killed them, and took this so that no others could use it."

Jessie thought the whole thing was a bit silly, and unlike her father to talk this way. Shaman or not, he was a practical man. Spiritual, but no fanatic. He respected nature and used herbs for various ailments because they worked.

"Sure," Jessie said to reassure him. She changed the subject, worried that Alzheimers was settling in. Unlike her to avoid conflict, but when it came to her father's mortality, she chose not to think about it.

A few days later the tribal police told her that her father was dead. Heart attack. Jessie delayed leaving for her road trip to sort out his things. While his death wasn't medically suspicious, there was an ugly coinicdence.

The idol was gone, and she would soon learn from a neighbor, people were seen at his house leaving in a hurry the night he died.