“Forget that,” Eric said. “We need to celebrate.” He touched her stomach again, third time since she’d told him she was pregnant. “The three of us deserve an afternoon to just goof off. Maybe open a bottle of wine—oops! None for Mommy, of course.” She kissed him. “I love you, Eric.”
“You can show me how much in an hour or so.” He grinned and made his eyebrows bounce a time or two. “Right now, though, find me a place to anchor at Utopia.”
“Utupua,” she corrected him.
“Just wait, babe. It’s going to seem like Utopia in about an hour.” He patted her bottom as she bent back over the chart.
She laughed. “I didn’t realize becoming a daddy was going to make you horny!”
Utupua was nearly split in two by a deep bay, the mouth of which faced to the west. They couldn’t have asked for a more sheltered anchorage. Approaching the mouth of the bay, Eric fired up the diesel, while B.J. furled the genoa and dropped the main. She stood on the bow to call out directions, one hand braced on the forestay.
“Come left. There’s a large outcropping of coral directly ahead. Back to the right now. A little more.”
As they entered the bay, an easy anchorage didn’t look promising. There were coral reefs everywhere. Not only would their anchor damage the marine life when it dragged, but it would likely get caught, meaning Eric would have to dive for it when it was time to leave. They pressed deeper into the bay, hoping for a sandy bottom. On the beach to the south, there was a small village of grass huts and a tin shed or two, more than likely made from materials left decades ago by U.S. Marines. Melanesian children played in the surf. They shouted and waved when they saw the boat. There was an old woman hanging out laundry. A couple dark men played cards on an overturned canoe.
Eric shook his head when she turned to ask if he wanted to anchor there. “Privacy,” he said. “Our celebration requires privacy.” They’d anchored near South Pacific villages before. The children rarely gave you a moment’s peace.
So they pressed deeper into the bay, Eric’s eyes on the depth finder and B.J. at the bow calling out the coral heads. The island closed in on them, heavy jungle vegetation leaning out over the water, painting the surface with mottled shadows and bright splashes of light. Colorful birds watched them from the foliage. A monkey commenced to gibbering somewhere in the jungle. The banks were choked with mangroves, their roots like some bizarre fish traps from an Escher painting. The water became a thick green soup, too murky for B.J. to spot coral or see the bottom.
“Twelve feet,” Eric reported. Grace required just over five for her keel.
Finally, they ran out of bay. Eric swung Grace around and killed the engine. The sounds of the island, previously subdued by the growling Yanmar engine, swept out of the jungle and enveloped them. The boat came to a standstill in the stagnant water.
“It might be sand, but I can’t see,” B.J. said. She was down on the deck, peering over the side at the water.
“Looks flat on the depth finder, but I’ll take a look,” Eric told her, coming forward.
“I don’t know, Eric. This looks like some sort of swamp.” She swatted at a mosquito. “Maybe we should try back near the mouth of the bay.”
Eric slipped off his shorts and underwear and stood there naked, sucking in his gut. With an idiot grin on his face, he pounded on his chest with his fists and did his best impression of Tarzan’s famous yell. B.J. couldn’t help but laugh at him.
“Okay, Tarzan, you check it out.” She really didn’t feel like making the thirty minute trip back to the mouth of the bay anyway. She knelt by the chain locker and made ready with the anchor. “Just don’t let any passing fish take a fancy to that little worm of yours.”
“Ouch! You really know how to hurt a guy.” Then he turned and jumped into the murky water.
B.J. waited for him to surface. He was only down for a few seconds. When he came up, he had a handful of black, sandy muck in his hand. “Heres your bottom,” he hollered.
Laughing, she slipped off her own shorts, turned her back to him, and said, “No, darling, here’s my bottom. You’d better get back up here if you expect to see any more of it.”
Eric laughed. “You’re so naughty. Drop that anchor and come for a swim.”
“In that swampy mess?” she asked as the anchor splashed into the water. When the chain quit running, she hand fed another twenty or thirty feet into the water, then set the lock.
“Feels great. Come on!”
“You just want to see me naked.”
“Always!”
She unbuttoned her blouse and dropped it with the pile of clothing on the deck. She stood there naked a minute, one hand on her belly, wondering if she was showing yet, wondering if her breasts really felt heavier or if that was just her imagination. The sun felt good on her skin. There was a light breeze teasing her hair. She was glad she’d let it grow out over the last couple of years. She’d once thought she was getting too old for long hair, that anything more than shoulder length was a girlish affectation best put away, like short shorts and halter tops and false eyelashes. But that was the old Barbara, the Barbara who’d spent all that time making the hobby shop a success, the Barbara who’d nearly lost Eric. That was the Barbara who would have never sailed halfway around the world, never eaten fresh snapper grilled on the hibachi at Grace’s stern, never... never gotten pregnant.
With a warhoop, she leaped into the water.
She came to the surface looking for Eric, but he wasn’t around. Laughing, she braced herself. He’d probably gone under and was even now groping around in the dark water, trying to find her ankle or something. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of squealing. A second later, he did emerge, but his face was anything but playful. He looked shocked. Confused. He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, his body rose from the water as if lifted from below.
Then she saw the crocodile that had hold of him.
B.J. screamed. Hearing her, Eric screamed, too, as if he only understood what was happening when he saw it mirrored in her eyes. He pounded the head of the crocodile, but his fists glanced harmlessly off its thick hide.
“Help me!” Eric pleaded, reaching out to her.
The croc rolled, taking Eric with it. Blood sprayed, several droplets splattering across the hand B.J. had extended to her husband. The crocodile was massive. Its scaley hide matched the jungle-green water, but as it rolled B.J. saw the gray of its underbelly. Eric thrashed in its mouth, firmly clamped in place, the jaws encompassing him from stomach to about mid-thigh. Eric’s flesh around the crocodile’s jaws was ravaged and torn. As he rolled, screaming, B.J. saw pale pink meat, yellow fatty deposits, and gruesome-hued loops of intestines glistening in the shredded flesh. From Eric’s right thigh, blood sprayed as if from a fire hose.
The croc shook Eric, whipping him from side to side like a rag doll, his screams abruptly starting and stopping each time his face slapped with a great smack!against the surface of the water. Eric would scream. The croc would whip him across to the other side with a great churning of water. Then smack!, his scream would momentarily end. Then the scream. Then the whipping action. Then...
All the while, the crocodile growling like an idling chain saw. A deep bass rumble. The sound of distant thunder. Of angry demons. Of hunger.
B.J. nearly caught Eric’s hand as he whipped past, their fingers briefly connecting. This contact seemed to snap Eric back from the edge of stark-raving terror. He suddenly seemed to realize just how close she was.
“Run,” he whimpered. Then, louder, a blood-curdling scream as the croc worked its monstrous jaws on his midsection, grinding and crunching like a dog with a bone, so that B.J. could have sworn she heard his pelvis crack: “Run, goddammit, Runnnnnnnnnnn!”
It was then that she noticed something stirring along the bank behind the thrashing croc and her husband. Something long and dark slipped effortlessly into the water. From the corner of her eye, there was more movement. When she whipp
ed her head around to look in that direction, there was nothing but a ripple on the surface of the water... and then a trail of bubbles.
Eric vanished beneath the water, leaving an oily slick of red to mark where he had been.
B.J. turned to swim to Grace. The bow of the yacht was too high to board from here. She’d have to swim for the transom at the stern. But as she started in that direction, she saw a snout and two knob-like eyes centered in a vee in the water that was pointed straight for her. In the wake of the vee, the languid, snake-like, side-to-side motion of the croc’s tail propelling it through the water. She was cut off. She floundered, uncertain, waiting for the crushing vise of jaws around one of her legs.
She felt a sudden terror then, a fear so sharp and new that it rose above the horror of the last sixty seconds, clawed its way with razored talons to the top of all her other fears and shrieked so loud as to silence them all. Her baby. Her unborn child. She had to save the baby!
There was only one direction to try. The bank. She struck out frantically for the bank opposite where she’d seen the other crocodiles enter the water. Were crocodiles like sharks? Did they target splashing in the water? She dove beneath the surface, swimming like a frog, expecting to be seized from behind. Her progress seemed so very, very slow, and she couldn’t see a thing. Just when she knew she’d have to surface for air, her face rammed against a mass of submerged roots. She followed the roots to the surface, gasping for air. Something splashed behind her. Without thinking, she shoved her body in among the roots, working her way deep into the darkness there.
• • •
B.J. awoke with a start, nearly tumbling from the junction of mangrove limbs where she’d wedged herself. She’d fallen asleep for a few minutes, beyond exhaustion, tired as only a person who’s known real terror and unimaginable grief can be. Subjected to the right stimuli, the mind eventually just shuts down. Catatonia or sleep are the result. Before falling asleep, she’d spent some time crying, then screaming, partly out of sheer hysteria, but also in the hopes that someone—a villager perhaps—might hear her. She’d even called out for Eric in the vain hope that he might have somehow broken free of the crocodile. If he was on the bank somewhere, hurt and bleeding, he would need her help.
But no one had answered her calls.
The moon had risen. It was huge and cold and silver. Its features were all wrong. Part of her knew that this was because she was in the southern hemisphere, but it seemed like this wasn’t even the same moon as the one she’d left behind in San Diego. This place was some alien world where crocodile gods stalked the tourists, where...
B.J. glanced over the side. The crocodile, which had been patiently waiting at the base of the tree, was gone.
The croc was gone.
She looked again to be certain. Swung around and looked from the opposite side of the tree. There was no sign of the crocodile.
Cautiously, she climbed down, looking from side to side, scanning the foliage, expecting the crocodile to erupt from the brush at any moment. Nothing moved. The moon-silver leaves and palm fronds shivered in a gentle breeze, but nothing else moved. The jungle continued its incessant song of insects and monkeys and animals dying and rutting in the night, but of the crocodile... there was no sign.
She could swim for Grace. From here, though, it was a good fifty yards. If there were crocs in the water, she knew she couldn’t outswim them—certainly not for fifty yards. She thought she’d have a better chance of following the bank around to the north side. The breeze had pushed Grace in that direction, running out that extra length of anchor chain until the boat lay in the water about twenty feet from the bank. There might be crocs along the bank, but there were plenty of trees. Surely if she saw one on land, she’d have time to scramble up into a another tree. The water was their element... right? The least amount of time she spent in the water, the better. It made sense.
She limped through the underbrush, trying to be as quiet as possible, her ankle burning with pain where the croc had snagged her. Every shadow seemed shaped like the triangular head of a crocodile. Every swaying branch was the swish of some massive reptilian tail. Somewhere something growled, a feline perhaps, or an angry monkey, but she was certain it was a crocodile slinking up behind her. She spent several long and terrifying minutes agonizing over a fallen log before she was certain it really hadn’t moved. She looked behind her. She looked to each side, trying in vain to penetrate the moon-cast, monochrome shadows. The jungle mocked her.
Nearest the water on the north side, the ground was a soft, dark muck that sucked at her feet. It slowed her down. It was noisy. But as she approached that area where the boat would never be closer, she was forced down to the edge of the lagoon. The water was a black mirror, reflective with moonlight, an impenetrable sheen. There could be anything waiting just beneath the surface.
As she paused on the bank, she was struck by an awful stench. It was overpowering. Death and rot. The stench of maggot-ridden meat decomposing in the jungle heat, leeching glistening trails of putrescence into the sand. She gagged, covering her mouth, doubling over. It was then she saw the dark opening in the foliage and the slick wet slide where the crocs crawled up from the water.
She’d found their lair.
Of all the places she could have gone, fate had brought her here to this stretch of water where the crocodile gods crawled forth and feasted in some dank, muddy warren. It reeked of blood and death and a throat-clogging stench that could only be the crocodiles themselves. She retched again, bending at the waist, dry-heaving, Some trick of the light, some errant beam of moonlight cast perhaps from her pale flesh, penetrated the den and revealed a long grey limb.
Oh, God... it was Eric.
She dropped to her knees, sobbing. Eric. It was Eric. It was her husband. Stashed like some snack in a larder. Gnawed and ravaged and... Oh, God. Just waiting there to be consumed.
She wanted to vomit. Wanted to scream. Instead she reached out a tentative hand. The darkness swallowed it. The mouth of the lair seemed to surge forth, sucking her in. Trembling, she withdrew her hand. She looked at the placid surface of the water. Looked at the moon reflected there, so cold and indifferent. The mud sucked up around her knees and her hands, threatening to hold her in place.
The crocodiles, she knew, would come back. Perhaps at any second. They would come back and they would feast on her husband. Even now, they might be moving through the dark water, approaching. B.J. had a sudden terrifying thought then: perhaps one of them was even now lying in the back of the lair, dark eyes appraising her, waiting to see what she would do.
But she couldn’t let them eat Eric.
She reached out again, laid a trembling hand on his cold, dead ankle. Wrapped her fingers around it. Pulled it toward her. Her worst fear—that all that would emerge from the dark would be his leg, ending in a shredded pink stump complete with protruding, gnawed-upon bone—wasn’t realized.
He was heavy, but she set her knees in the mud and pulled with all her strength, and what was left of him slipped from the den, trailing entrails and gore where he’d been nearly separated at the middle.
“Oh, God, Eric...” she cried, swallowing bile. “Look what—”
Something stirred in the back of the den. There came a guttural growl and a shifting of the darkness in its depths.
She gathered the stiffening corpse of her husband against her breasts and scrambled for the water. His legs tangled in her own, and she tripped, sprawling in the mud. His head lolled lifelessly, his glassy eyes unmoving, his tongue a swollen black thing clenched in his teeth. She crawled with him tucked under one arm... into the water, where his weight became manageable. Behind her, something heavy slipped up from the lair, its mass making a great sucking sound in the mud.
She didn’t look back. Grace was just twenty feet away. She hooked her arm around her husband’s neck, as if she were saving him from drowning. She side-stroked as hard and as fast as she could toward the stern of the yacht. There was a spla
sh as something entered the water behind her.
Ten feet.
Then five.
She was reaching for the transom when Eric was suddenly seized and jerked back toward the bank. She nearly lost her grip on him, but she held fast, his head tucked up against her neck. She was dragged through the water, away from the boat.
“No!” she screamed, refusing to let go. She kicked out with her legs, felt her feet glance off a scaley snout. There was a moment of release as the croc worked its jaws to get a better grip, and she used that instant to wrench Eric free of its mouth. She scissor-kicked for the transom, watching the roiling water behind her.
The croc surfaced, opening its mouth to strike, dark water sluicing back from that gargantuan vice of moon-yellow teeth. She yanked Eric aside and shoved him toward the transom as the jaws snapped closed. Then she was scrambling up onto the transom herself, dragging her husband’s lifeless body. For the first time, she noticed one of his legs was completely missing, that he was held together at the waist by little more than his spine. There were ribs standing out from his chest like broken tree limbs, stripped of their bark and gleaming white. There were leeches on his back. His skin was a striated gray marble. All of this she noticed as she pushed his shredded corpse over the transom and into the cockpit.
“You bastard!” she screamed at the crocodile, thinking herself safe now that she was out of the water, but the croc surged up out of the water, hauling its mass up on the rear of the yacht. Grace rocked with its weight, nearly throwing B.J. back into the water. She scrambled into the cockpit as the crocodile roared at her.
There was a shotgun below. She went for it, slipping and sliding across the wet deck. It took a minute to find the shells. Eric had always insisted that they not be kept with the gun. Then it took her another few precious seconds to remember how to load the gun. As she climbed the gangway back to the deck, she feared the croc might have managed to reach Eric’s body, feared that the struggle to reclaim him had been in vain. But when she came back out in the moonlight, she saw that the croc was gone and what remained of her husband was still heaped on the deck.
Salt Water Tears Page 8