by Megan Hart
Once before, just out of college, when she hadn’t yet been used to the attention her new look earned, Kelsey had gone to a party with a couple other girls from work. She’d gone upstairs with a guy who seemed nice enough. His name was Richard and he wore glasses, and what on earth did she have to fear from a guy who wore a sweater vest? He’d pushed her down on the bed and tore her dress.
Richard had said the same thing to her. “Don’t act like you don’t want it.”
And that had been his mistake, because Kelsey not only didn’t want it, she wasn’t about to let someone give it to her anyway. Never again.
She’d kneed him in the nuts hard enough to send him weeping and gagging to the floor. She’d paused to send another kick or two to that tender region before she left the room. Nobody seemed to notice she’d left the party with him, and while word had it that he’d needed surgery to repair the damage to his balls, she’d never been linked to the incident.
She hadn’t let it happen to her then, and she surely wasn’t going to let it happen to her now. If only she wasn’t so tired, so sore, so thirsty, she’d have pushed him off her already, but now the effort was making the world sort of swirly and making her stomach sick. She pushed at his chest, but he bent over her and forced his mouth down on hers, and it was all she could do not to bite him.
No. Fuck that. She did bite him, catching his lip. Blood spattered onto her face, and Jeremy jerked back from her with an agonized shout.
“Bitch getcha? She gotcha, didn’t she?” Ty crowed. “Backstabbing cunt!”
Kelsey got unsteadily to her feet. She grabbed the cabin wall for balance and backed up a step, toward the front of the boat. Jeremy made no move to come after her, just sat with his hand clapped over his mouth and watched the blood drip through his fingers onto his still-distended crotch.
At the front of the boat, Duane sat, still holding Sheila. Kelsey didn’t want to look at her. At least all the way out here there weren’t any flies, she thought randomly as dizziness pushed her to stumble onto one of the benches. The body might’ve bloated and started to turn black, but at least there weren’t any maggots.
“Sheila, baby, wake up.” Duane had said this perhaps two hundred times in various degrees of earnest desperation, but now he sounded resigned and unconvinced his plea would ever be answered. “C’mon, honey. Wake up.”
And then…Sheila did.
With a gurgling rattle from deep in her chest, she flailed. Her feet kicked. Duane screamed hoarsely, his own arms flying apart as he tried and failed to scramble backwards.
Sheila heaved herself to a sitting position. Her mouth hung open, still making that sound, that grinding, ratcheting, terrible noise. Her milky eyes rolled.
Kelsey couldn’t move. She’d gotten used to the rolling side-to-side motion of the boat that had threatened her with seasickness at first, but now the deck felt like it was going to tip out from underneath her. She reached for something to hold onto and found the railing, but her fingertips slipped and she banged her arm.
The pain slapped away the dizziness, and that was good, but when she saw Sheila was indeed still a corpse and still getting to her feet, that as not good at all. For half a minute, Kelsey’d been able to convince herself that maybe she was dreaming, but not any longer.
Sheila gave a guttural grunt. Behind her, Duane had folded himself into a gibbering ball. Sheila’s dead gaze swiveled toward him, then toward Kelsey and finally past her toward Jeremy who muttered a curse of surprise. Kelsey didn’t move.
“What is this shit?” Jeremy said.
Sheila’s jaw worked. Her body shuddered. She took a lurching step forward, a horror movie made real. Her feet slipped on the deck. She went down onto her face with a full, bone-crunching thud. Something wet spattered against Kelsey’s calf, and she bit back a cry of disgust.
“Sheila? Honey?”
Duane bent over her, a hand on her shoulder. His fingers sank into the purpled flesh and may or may not have made a squelching sound. Kelsey clapped her hands over her ears a moment too late not to hear it. Duane pulled on Sheila’s shoulder, and her entire arm separated with a low purring sound.
It wasn’t enough. There was more. Too much more. Sheila rolled onto her back, mouth open, tongue lolling, her remaining arm slamming like a club into the side of Duane’s head hard enough to knock him down. She was on him in the next moment, straddling him, her teeth sunk deep into his throat. She tore it free like a dog thrown a hunk of meat, snapping and slobbering and gobbling.
Was she…eating him? The bites of flesh went in and came back out, so Kelsey couldn’t be sure if Sheila was indeed trying to consume her boyfriend or just using her teeth as a weapon. And really, did it freaking matter? Kelsey pushed against the bench with her bad foot, ignoring the pain, and crawled as fast and as far as she could around the front of the boat while Duane’s screams edged off into gasping sobs and then…nothing.
There was no place to go except around, and this took her to within an arm’s length of Ty. If she hadn’t strapped his hands together behind him with duct tape, he’d have grabbed her, she saw that in his eyes, but Kelsey was beyond caring about his stupid jealousy or how much he hated her.
“The fuck’s going on?”
“Sheila,” she managed to say, and that was all before Jeremy’s voice rose in a scream that went higher and higher until it became ear-piercing and broke off abruptly.
The sounds of a struggle prompted Kelsey to creep past Ty, who snapped his teeth at her like a dog on a chain trying to threaten the postman. She peered around the edge of the cabin, but couldn’t get a good look at the front of the boat. She heard the wet slap of flesh, the crack of bone. The boat rocked. Something splashed into the water, and in the next moment she saw it was Sheila, floundering. She went under the water, came up, went under again. She didn’t break the surface that time.
Grunting. The squeak of something on the deck, more slapping, more breaking. Kelsey took a chance and inched forward to see around the edge of the cabin. Jeremy and Duane were locked together like sumo wrestlers, pushing and shoving. As she watched, Jeremy shoved Duane hard enough to knock him backwards. Duane hit his head on the bench and went still.
Jeremy turned.
“Kelsey.” It didn’t sound like him. His voice had gone thick and raw, like he had a throat full of blood or snot, like he spoke through a mouth full of meat. He took a step toward her, one hand reaching out. His mouth yawned wide.
Something jittered inside, behind his teeth and tongue, toward the back. Something black and writhing, also glimpsed in the caverns of his nostrils, and Kelsey had time to think that maybe she was wrong, maybe there were flies this far out, before Jeremy’s head erupted in a black cloud. He coughed and bent at the waist, his hands on his knees. Black goo shot out of him in thick ropy spurts. He spasmed, going upright and then further, bowing back so he faced the sky. A plume of something like…dandelion seeds, that’s all she could think of, spewed from his mouth and nose. They weren’t attached to fluffy white puffs and they didn’t float on the air. More like they hurtled, like minuscule bullets. Most hit the deck or went over the side into the water. A few hit her arm where they clung like hot tar, burning.
Revolted, Kelsey scraped at them with her fingernails. On the deck behind Jeremy, Duane stirred. He didn’t get to his feet, but his body convulsed furiously. His heels drummed the deck, and he let out a guttering, wretched cry.
Black spores jetted from him too, obscuring his face as he clawed at it. Jeremy had stopped spewing them but had fallen forward onto his hands and knees. Blood and goo dripped from him, she couldn’t see exactly from where, onto the deck. He smeared it with his fingers. He looked up at her, his teeth lined black, mouth painted red. His eyes were a bleeding horror, his nose torn and flapping from the force of whatever had ripped its way out of him. He grinned.
He got to his feet.
There was no place for her to go but back, around the cabin, toward Ty. She’d loved him once, a
nd even though things had gone spectacularly sour, Kelsey was willing to believe it had been a result of circumstances and not their inexorable eventuality. Even if he’d have found out about her kiss with his brother, even if it all would’ve gone that way eventually, she couldn’t leave him bound in duct-tape while everyone else on the boat turned into zombies or whatever the hell they were.
She rounded the corner. For the first time since the waterspout had broken the boat, Ty looked at her without suspicion or fury. He gave her one of those smiles that had melted her from across the room that first night.
“Baby, something bad’s happening,” he said.
She couldn’t form the words to describe what she’d seen. In minutes, less than that, Jeremy might lurch around the cabin from one direction. Duane the other. They had no place to go but into the sea, and Kelsey was ready to face sharks if she had to. They’d be less scary than whatever it was these people had become.
She knelt in front of him, meaning to tear at the tape holding his wrists behind him. As she reached, Ty’s arms went around her. Held her tight. And, stupidly, relieved and scared and confused, she melted into his embrace for a second or two until she realized he’d somehow escaped his bonds. That didn’t even matter or scare her at first, it meant she wouldn’t have to try to tear him free, but then his hug got harder. He kept squeezing. His mouth found her ear, his teeth pressing.
“I will tear out your cheating heart and eat it,” Ty said, “you lying whore.”
No, and no, and no again. There was pain, but she’d had pain before. There was fear, but she’d lived with terror for the first twelve years of her life and learned not to be paralyzed by it. She’d escaped a woman who’d forced her to do the most heinous things.
She would not let this man get the best of her.
Kelsey twisted to get a hand between them as Ty laughed and grabbed at her. His humor vanished when she hit him in the nose with the heel of her hand. When she slapped him first on one side, then the other, hard enough to rock his against the wall. She took a handful of his hair, remembering but refusing to mourn how she’d run her fingers through it so many times after they’d made love. She got to her feet and used her knee to crunch upward, beneath his chin.
He grabbed at her legs, and she pinwheeled her arms as she fought to keep her balance but lost it, coming down hard onto her ass with her head narrowly missing the railing. Stars danced in her vision; she’d lost her breath. Her shoulders heaved as she tried to take in air, but all she could do was gape like a fish tossed out of the sea.
Ty bent over her, mouth twisted, blood pouring from his nose. He took her by the hair and slammed her head into the deck. His knee came down on her gut, forcing out more air. He opened his mouth. She thought he might speak.
Instead, he doused her full-on in the face with that same black junk that had come out of Duane and Jeremy. It burned her eyes, tiny black spots swimming amongst the fireworks of red and orange bursting in her vision as she fought to keep from passing out. Some squirmed into her nose. A mouthful of it choked her as she at last managed to catch a breath. Bitterness coated her tongue, and she wanted to spit but couldn’t. All she could do was writhe. Ty heaved again, body working in a set of spasms that had become horrifyingly familiar.
Get up, Kathy. This was Grandma’s voice, that old hag, that miserable bitch. Get yourself up, you filthy, useless girl, or else you will be dead.
And though Grandma had often told her lies, this was the truth, and Kelsey used everything she had to slam her head forward. Her forehead connected with Ty’s face in the places her hand and knee had already damaged. His face felt soft and rotten there, ruined by her blows or the spores that had torn out of him, she couldn’t be sure and didn’t care. All that mattered was that when her head hit him, she did not break, but Ty fell apart.
He slumped to the side far enough that she could get from beneath him. Nastiness ran down her face, and when she swiped it she could see it was blood and that black goop. Ty’s head was like a broken beehive full of honeycomb, except instead of dripping honey and wax there was splintered bones, gray matter, blood and spongy material, all infiltrated with that black mess.
He wasn’t dead.
Or maybe he was dead, he had to be dead, but he was still moving. Like Sheila, the human part of him had gone away but something remained. Ty had no face, nothing but a hollow where eyes, nose and mouth had been, and still he moved. Grabbed and clutched. His fingers barely missed her as she leaped out of they way.
She leaped over his outstretched legs. During the storm, the cabin had been wrecked, cabinets opened and the contents broken. She didn’t want to stay in there where she could be trapped, but she needed something.
Kelsey had no idea how to use a speargun, and when she pulled it from the wall there wasn’t time to read the instructions posted beneath it. She took it and pushed herself through the cabin door with it held in front of her. Ty had crawled around the side and swiped at her as she came out, but she easily dodged his grasp. The butt of the gun smashed the rest of his head into a pulp, and he didn’t move again.
There was no more waiting. She rounded the corner, gun held high. She aimed at Jeremy. She pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Shit. Safety? Batteries? Something was wrong. She didn’t know how to use it, how to shoot it. She pulled the trigger again and again, but nothing happened except that Jeremy and Duane both focused on her with their bloody, ruined eyes. Their ravaged mouths opened. They lurched at her, just like in every horror movie she’d ever seen where the monster fixates on the heroine, only she hadn’t gone into the basement carrying only a flashlight with dying batteries to investigate a suspicious noise. She’d fought back. She’d armed herself. She’d done everything she possibly could, and for what? The stupid gun wouldn’t go off, and she was stuck on a forty foot sailboat with a mashed-face corpse and two staggering, ravaged horrors.
Hell, no.
Kelsey didn’t wait for them to get to her. She lifted the speargun. She ran at them. She stabbed Jeremy first, in his open mouth. The spear popped out the back of his head in a spray of black and red. She yanked it free, and it brought his tongue and some other dangling bits of tissue with it. Without waiting, she shook off the flesh and stabbed him again. He went to his knees. She stabbed him again. He teetered, arms flailing, but in silence.
She stabbed him again.
By the time Duane reached her, she’d effectively made a mush of Jeremy’s head as nicely as she’d done with his brother. Duane’s scrabbling fingers tore down her arm, but Kelsey didn’t take the time to scream or even flinch. She tore the speargun free of Jeremy’s face and used it to stab Duane in the guts. It was enough to send him back a step, but not put him down. To do that, she had to stab him in the eye. This time when she yanked the speargun free, it came with his eyeball and the trailing bundle of nerves, and possibly some brain matter, it was hard to tell amongst all the gore.
She stabbed Duane thirteen times before he stayed down.
Breathing hard, she stared down at the corpses. Neither of them moved. Kelsey stabbed each of them another fifteen times between them.
“You’ll like it with the Smiths. You’ll meet new friends, get a fresh start. New school.” The social worker pauses, flipping through the files. She looks over her glasses. She has a sympathetic face, but she wouldn’t look like that if she knew the truth about what happened.
But if anyone knew the truth about what really happened, they’d lock her up forever, put her away in jail or worse, the crazy house. Probably the loony bin, because they’d have to ask her if she meant to do it, if she meant to mix the chemicals and poison all of them, and though she could lie, she was sure she wouldn’t want to. The truth, all of it, would come tumbling out of her because she wasn’t ashamed. She was in fact gleeful of what she’d done and how she’d managed it, because she knew enough to back away fast enough and get out before the gas could hit her, and that even though she passed
out in the doorway there was just enough fresh air to keep her breathing even though it killed Grandma and Grandpa. If anyone knew that, she would never be allowed to go to school, make friends, grow up. She’d never be free.
“So, Kathy, are you ready to meet your foster family?”
“My name,” the girl says as she stands, “is Kelsey.”
“My name is Kelsey. My name is Kelsey.”
She became aware of someone shaking her gently by the shoulder, and Kelsey came awake, startled. It was a man with a kind, concerned face. He backed up a step when she flailed.
“Miss? Are you okay?”
She scrubbed at her face. Mouth gummy, eyes crusty. So thirsty. She’d fallen asleep in the shade of the cabin, but how long ago?
“I’m thirsty.”
“We have water. Food. How long have you been out here?” The kind-faced man looked around the boat, the spotless white deck, the cushions that hadn’t been lost put back in their place, everything in the cabin returned to where it belonged. He looked back at Kelsey.
“I don’t know. A few days. We were staying at The Blockade Runner. My boyfriend rented this boat. It was supposed to be a weekend trip. There was a storm,” she said. “It broke the mast.”
He nodded, of course having seen the splintered mast already. “We can get you back there, but…well. There’s been some problems.”
“At the resort?” Forming the words was hard; forming the thoughts even more so. She was so tired, every muscle ached, she wanted a drink of water, a hot shower and a soft bed. In that order or maybe all at once. She wanted to get off this Godforsaken boat and never go sailing ever again.
He looked strained. Uncomfortable, which was weird, since hello, she was totally the one who’d been stranded here for days on end. He shook his head, just a little. Gave a half shrug. “Yeah. And on the mainland too.”
“What kind of trouble?” Kelsey asked, though she thought she knew.
“I’m not sure I can really say. Tell you what, you come aboard with me,” he gestured at the small yacht that had pulled up alongside the sailboat, “and we’ll get you all fixed up. Get you back on dry land. You can…figure out what’s going on then.”