by Tim Curran
Too bad Cushing wasn’t along, he’d probably know what Saks was trying to get at. The pictures in his mind he just didn’t have words for. Cushing knew a lot of damn useless, trivial nonsense like that.
Saks had dubbed them “boneheads” because their heads were more skull than flesh. All plated and angular with sharp bony ridges and hollows. First time one of them got real close to the boat, Saks had almost pissed himself. Like the little monster was wearing a skull mask… or was a living, swimming skeleton. They were as ugly as ugly got. Made sharks looked almost kind of sweet and inoffensive.
“They look…” Menhaus began, cocking his head to the side like maybe he was hoping something relevant would drop out “… I don’t know, just goddamn spooky, goddamn devilish, don’t you think? Them bony faces and black eyes sunk in those pits, jaws opening and closing like they only live to bite and tear…”
That got Saks smiling. That’s right, you idiot, he thought.
Sharks or boneheads, they were vicious streamlined things that could go through flesh and bone like living chainsaws. They came in a wide variety, that was for sure. Some were less than a foot in length, shaped roughly like eels; others were two or three feet in length with massive bullet-shaped bodies that were mostly head; still others – the really big ones – were eight and ten feet long with immense bony jaws that could have bitten through steel cable.
They were all predators. There was no doubt about that. And whether the men in the lifeboat could scientifically classify them and assign them a place in the natural order of things or not, it didn’t really matter. For they were here and it didn’t look like they were going to leave anytime soon.
Saks was getting a real kick out of them.
But mainly, he supposed, from the absolute fear they inspired in his little crew.
So he watched them, found them interesting.
They were brown or green and sometimes yellow. Speckled, banded, a few of the smaller ones the bright, electric red or shiny sunset orange of carnival glass. Almost artificial looking, you came right down to it.
Menhaus stared at his feet, rocking slowly back and forth, stroking his mustache, maybe thinking and maybe afraid to.
Fabrini cursed the fish, calling them everything but white men.
Cook studied them without emotion, his eyes as flat and dead as those of the predators circling them. But inside, he was coiled tighter than a fireman’s hose.
And Crycek? You just never knew what sort of happy shit was bouncing through the haunted ruins of his mind. He watched them, his lower lip quivering a bit.
Saks was the only one who seemed to be enjoying any of it.
In his mind, he viewed the boneheads and his shipmates in a similar vein. Enemies. That’s what they were. If he went into the water the boneheads would get him, would take his life quick as a knife across the throat. And it was no different here in the boat. Fabrini and Cook (maybe even Menhaus, too) wanted to take his life as well. Crycek was too withdrawn to do much more than scratch his balls and breathe, but the other three? Traitors and cutthroats. The only thing stopping the murdering bastards was the gun and the knife. They made Saks lord and master. And like any lord, he had his enemies.
Saks didn’t want to kill them.
But he would.
At the first sign of trouble.
But he’d only kill one of them. Toss them into that churning sea of teeth, let the others see what the boneheads did with fresh meat. If they’d tear apart a corpse, they’d gobble down a fresh bleeding body in seconds.
“Dammit, Saks,” Menhaus said, “why don’t you just shoot those goddamn things? They’re driving me buggy.”
Saks just laughed.
“It wouldn’t do any good,” Cook said hopelessly. “The blood in the water… it might drive them mad.”
“That’s right,” Saks said. “Haven’t you ever seen it on TV? They call it a feeding frenzy. Sharks go crazy, start biting everything, including each other. More blood flows, the crazier they get. And those are sharks we’re talking about, not… not these bastards.”
“How many more can there be?” Fabrini moaned. “I mean, shit, they just keep coming and coming.”
“Hundreds,” Cook said, cheerful as ever.
The lifeboat was made to handle rough seas with a dozen or more men aboard. The hull was rigid fiberglass. It would’ve taken a torpedo to breech it, but you just never knew. You just never knew anything in that place. The dead sea was a bottomless bag of dark tricks. You didn’t believe that, your death could get real ugly.
“If we start sinking,” Saks said ghoulishly, practically reading Cook’s mind, “we’ll just have to rid ourselves of some excess weight.”
No one wanted to comment on that.
The fish circled and circled, occasionally nipping at one other or breaking the surface with jaws snapping and tails slapping. There had to be about two or three dozen different species out there. Most were armored, but some were more like typical fish but with exaggerated jaws and teeth.
Saks started toying with them, making the others nervous. He was dipping an oar into the water, stirring up that briny soup. As soon as he did that, they came in numbers, thumping against the boat and trying to find something to bite which was very often each other.
“Stop that for chrissake,” Fabrini said. “You’re pissing ‘em off.”
But Saks wouldn’t stop; he was enjoying himself now. He giggled and dipped his oar back in and this time it was hit immediately. And hit with such force he almost lost it. And the gun. Whatever was on the other end was either real hungry or really pissed-off.
“Look what I caught, Menhaus!” Saks said, recovering himself quickly. Because he had been scared there for a moment or two. Was certain he was about to be pulled in.
He lifted his oar out of the water and they all saw his “catch”.
It was even uglier than the boneheads.
It was about two feet long, round as a basketball, shaped much like a pufferfish with a stubby tail. But its flesh was jet black and leathery, wrinkled and convoluted. Its mouth was huge. Big enough, it seemed, that it could have swallowed itself. It had tiny milky-blue eyes lacking pupils. Its jaws were yawned open, dozens of long needle-like fangs imbedded in the oar. They were about the thickness of sewing needles, but easily five or six inches in length.
“It’s… it’s glowing,” Menhaus said.
And it was. Deep in its mouth were a series of tiny luminous barbels that probably attracted prey fish into the mouth where the teeth took care of them.
It was flopping and thrashing and Saks could barely hold the oar up. Its sides were expanding with frantic, gulping breaths.
“Hurry up, Menhaus,” Saks said. “Grab the little pisser.”
Menhaus just stared with wide eyes.
But then the fish dropped back into the murk, disappeared. It left two of its teeth in the oar, though. Saks laughed and threw the oar at Menhaus who almost jumped out of the boat to avoid it.
Then the fun and games ended and they all just watched and waited, hoping and praying the fish would move on. But thirty minutes later, they still hadn’t.
“Shit,” Fabrini said in a panicked voice, “check that out.”
They did.
The fish passing by the boat was a monster. It was easily fifteen or twenty feet long with a spiny dorsal fin that jutted from that decayed sea like an inverted rudder, scathed with ancient scars and threaded with stray weeds. It was a dirty olive brown with a massive head that was plated in shields of ridged bone that looked sharp enough to slit open a belly. Its hinged jaws were gigantic, serrated not with teeth as such but jagged tooth plates, natural and lethal extensions of the armor covering its head and upper thorax.
It moved past the boat, those razored jaws opening and closing, opening and closing. Its eyes were the size of softballs, flat black and dead, remorseless. You could see death in those eyes. Evil, relentless death. Though its upper body was huge and armored, its tail was al
most snakelike ending in a huge asymmetrical caudal fin that pushed it through the water gradually.
“Jesus, look at the size of it,” Fabrini said.
The other fish, none of which exceeded ten feet and of which most were considerably smaller, gave the big fish room. It swam with a slow, even gait, almost lethargically. It seemed to be almost lazy in comparison with the others that darted around it and out of its way, moving with great heavy strokes of its scythe-like tail. That was until a smaller bonehead swam too close and the big one rocketed forward with a smooth flex of muscle and ingested it with slashing bites. The water became a boiling soup of blood as the others went crazy snapping and nipping at one another. Tails were thrashing, fins knifing, bony jaws slashing in and out of the water.
“They’d tear a man to bits,” Fabrini said sickly.
“Two bites!” Saks said. “Did you see that? That goddamn fish had to be five feet and it took it in two bites! Shit and shinola.”
Menhaus kept looking at his feet. He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. Cook studied it all with almost clinical detachment. He looked, if anything, like a Nazi sub commander watching a torpedo speed toward its target with cruel indifference. The effect was heightened by his sparse blond hair and sharp, predatory features.
The boat suddenly reeled as if struck by something big. Menhaus let out an involuntary scream. He hung onto his seat like a man on a roller coaster. The boat shuddered again, rocked with motion, then settled down.
“It’s that big one,” Saks said grimly. “He knows there’s something to eat in this boat and he wants it.”
“Break out them fucking oars,” Fabrini said. “Let’s try and pull away from these goddamn things.”
“You don’t give orders here, Fabrini,” Saks said.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Fuck me?” He had the gun on Fabrini. “You wanna rephrase that you little cockmite?”
Fabrini just glared. Oh, it was coming. One way or the other, it was coming.
Saks clenched his teeth, shook his head. “You see, Fabrini,” he said patiently, “what you don’t understand is that I am in charge here. Get it? And if I tell you to jump in and swim with the fishies, you better by Christ do it. Even if it’s that big one. And you don’t touch them fucking oars until I give the word.”
Fabrini gave him the finger. “You ain’t shit to me, Saks. You ain’t nothing or nobody. You ain’t a damn thing.”
Saks sighed dramatically. “Who brought you dipdunks together? Who hired you? Who was in charge?” Saks asked of him. He waited a moment for an answer. Two. Three. Then he shook his head and jabbed a thumb at his chest. “I was. Me. I organized all this and got the show on the road.”
“And it’s been some show,” Menhaus said in a rare moment of defiance.
“Yeah, it’s been a party right from the beginning,” Fabrini said with contempt. “Merry Fucking Christmas.”
Crycek was giggling, but nobody seemed to notice.
“What I’m saying, you goddamn shitrats,” Saks grumbled, “is that I’m in charge. Gun or no gun, I’m the one who should be in charge. I’m the only one here with enough goddamn smarts to run the show.”
Fabrini scowled and watched the fish. “Yeah, you’re a real fucking Mensa genius, Saks.”
“Keep it up, shit-for-brains. See what happens.”
Cook cleared his throat. “We don’t need a foreman out here, Saks. There’s no need.”
“You see, you’re wrong about that. You need one and I’m it. Who else is up to it? You? You can’t keep your hands out of your shorts long enough to crack the whip. And Fabrini? Shit. Fabrini can’t find his own asshole without Menhaus’ crank in his hand. And Crycek? Shit.”
Saks waited for more argument, but got none. And he knew why. Oh yes, he knew very well why. Because they were just putting up with him until he closed his eyes. Then they were going to kill him. Or so they thought.
But they were in for a big surprise.
A very big one.
Menhaus said, “Looks like the big one swam off.”
“But his friends haven’t,” Fabrini said.
Saks, unlike the others, was hoping it hadn’t gone too far. Come tonight or what passed for night, he might just need all the man-eating fish he could lay his hands on. Because tonight was going to be trouble. Tonight the shit was going to fly. And when the shit came down, there was no one better at dodging it than old Saks. Saks was just about to tell them he was onto their little bullshit plot and if they wanted a piece of him now was the time, baby, when something-something goddamned huge-bumped into the bottom of the boat. The boat seemed to be actually lifted out of the water. To heave up from the sea and crash back down again with an explosion of foam and sediment, tossing the men from their seats.
Somebody screamed.
Maybe Menhaus, maybe Fabrini, maybe even Saks himself for all he knew.
But not Crycek. His eyes were hazy-looking like steamed-up windows. He was just gone. Nothing was touching him.
Well, well, Saks thought, guess old Jaws didn’t abandon us after all.
“What the hell was that?” Fabrini stammered.
“I’ll give you one guess,” Cook said.
Saks pulled himself to his feet and leaned out over the gunwale, the Browning in hand. He saw something pass beneath the boat. A huge amorphous blur. Whatever it was, it was much bigger than the boat. Yeah, it was old Jaws again. Back for more and getting randy by the looks of things… except, no, it wasn’t Jaws, it was his bigger brother this time.
“The big one again? That monster?” Menhaus asked carefully.
But Saks shook his head and kept watching. Fabrini and Cook did the same. Menhaus stayed on the bottom of the boat where the impact had thrown him. He’d gone a nasty shade of pale. His face was pinched, withdrawn. He was, in effect, a man who did not want to know.
“It looked bigger this time,” Saks said.
Nobody said anything to that.
“It couldn’t have been bigger,” Cook said. “No way.”
“Yeah, and what the fuck do you know?” Fabrini snapped. “You think there couldn’t be one bigger than that other one?”
“It just seems unlikely.”
Saks grunted. “Yeah, you tell the sea monster that when it’s biting you in fucking half.”
Cook seemed to be looking at something, following it beneath the fouled water with his eyes. “There,” he said. “Right there. Look! Can you see it? Can you see it?”
They did. It was a very big fish. Sort of a dirty, almost green-brown in color. Looked to be the same species as Jaws, only far larger.
“Gotta be twenty feet at least,” Fabrini said with awe. “Maybe thirty.”
“Fucking monster.”
“Shoot it,” Menhaus raved. “Just shoot it. You gotta shoot the goddamn thing, Saks. You hear me? You gotta shoot it!”
“I bet that baby could just about swallow a man whole,” Saks said, enjoying Menhaus’ discomfort. It was the little things in life, he knew, that gave you the most pleasure.
“He may have just bumped into us,” Cook said optimistically. “It may have not been on purpose. It’s possible.”
Saks laughed. “And it’s possible your mother might have raised some children that lived, but I doubt it.”
Cook gave him an acid look that could’ve peeled paint from a door. But as quick as it had appeared, it was gone. His face became lifeless clay again. “What I’m saying, Saks, is that there’s no reason to start shooting the thing. No reason to provoke it. It might just swim off.”
“Yeah, I’ll just bet,” Fabrini said.
“It won’t swim off,” Menhaus moaned. “Oh no. Not yet. Not just yet. Not until its belly is full.”
Fabrini made like he was going to slap him. “Knock it off with that shit, you goddamn pussy.”
“He’s stressed,” Cook said, defending him.
“Fuck you, too,” Fabrini told him. “I’m sick of the lot of you.”
Saks sat back with his arms folded over his barrel chest. He was enjoying this immensely. Cracks were beginning to form in their ranks. Sooner or later, if this kept up, they’d be at each other’s throats. Saks couldn’t help but smile.
“Now, now, boys, all for one and one for all. Remember?” Saks chortled.
“Piss off.” Fabrini looked very much like he wanted to hurt someone.
“Five men in a boat, “ Saks said. “Five men in a boat and not a broad amongst us. Life’s a beach and then you die.”
“Life,” Fabrini said. “Shit.”
For once, Saks had to agree with him. Life was shit no matter how you sliced it or how sharp your knife was. He’d had his share of hardship. Of pain. Of deprivation. He knew about life. Life was your old man getting killed in an industrial accident when you were twelve. Life was your old lady drinking herself to death and spreading her legs for every shitbag sailor with a bottle of vodka. Life was quitting school when you were sixteen and going to work in a hellhole foundry. Life was when your kid brother got knifed for his lunch money when he was ten fucking years old. Life was joining the Navy when you were eighteen to be a Seabee because you loved that old John Wayne flick and getting your ass sent to Vietnam as a joke. Life was pushing back the jungle with dozers for a Marine compound while gooks with Russian rifles sniped at you. Life was getting killed because you were digging latrine pits or drainage ditches or laying a runway. And life was payback, too. It was opening up on a gook patrol with heavy machine guns and watching those gutless slant-eyed shits dance like marionettes with clipped strings. Yeah, that was life, baby. And life was also years later in another goddamn jungle watching the only friend you ever had get dragged downriver by a crocodile the size of a Buick. Yeah, that was life. And life was being in a boat in the middle of a godforsaken, monster-infested ocean just this side of Hell with three guys who wanted you dead and a fourth who was too crazy to care either way.