Wrathbone and Other Stories

by Parent, Jason

  He had little time to consider it before electric pain jolted through his other leg. He hollered in agony. Instinctively, he jumped atop the lifesaver, his body commanding as much of itself as possible out of the water before his mind could piece together the cause of his duress. He balanced precariously on a tiny island, his buttocks sinking through the hole.

  His legs remained submerged up to his knees. He growled, half in anger and half in pain, as needle-like stabs poked junkie tracks across his skin. Something curled around his ankle, where flesh was thin and nerve endings shallow. Maurice squealed. Tears ran from his eyes. He ripped his foot free of the water, tottering backward and nearly plunking himself into the drink.

  Long, thin strands of what looked like vermicelli slid limply from his ankle and fell to rest atop the waves. More strands streaked across the surface, dozens of them, some dormant while others writhed like inchworms.

  Nearest to Maurice, the strands were spaced as wide apart as a foot. He traced their length twenty yards away, the distance between them narrowing like that of guitar strings up the frets until they began to overlap. A patchwork quilt formed close to a bulbous, off-white membrane that bobbed in the water like an upside-down buoy.

  The membrane was getting closer.

  “Shit.” Maurice turned onto his stomach. His legs sank deep into the water. The stinging was immediate and tormenting. Still, he kicked, the pain making him kick faster. When one adventurous tentacle caressed his thigh, he bit into his lip so hard that he drew blood. Maurice welcomed its copper taste, a reminder he yet lived. It took everything he had to fight the panicked urge to reach down and swipe the tentacles away.

  After a minute, new stings stopped coming, but the old stings ignited every nerve cell in his legs. The water simmered. His flesh was on fire. He kicked until his legs couldn’t kick anymore, then collapsed into the lifesaver. His teeth chattered, a deep cold icing his insides and causing him to shiver violently while his legs and forehead scalded. Where salt water didn’t soak him, sweat did.

  Tears in his eyes, he cursed Doc Asshole and the occupants of the Wakemaster , wondering how he could replicate and inflict all his pain and anguish upon them. A thousand wasps, stirred into a frenzy and set loose on those sons of bitches, seemed like a decent appetizer, but hardly par for the main course.

  If he’d only get the chance.

  He looked up at the sun, low in the sky, and sank into the preserver. He rested his ear against its curved surface and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  When Maurice woke, he gazed up at a sky full of stars. In his initial daze, he found it beautiful. Then he vomited out the sour-tasting contents of a stomach he’d thought empty.

  His head spun. A splitting headache pounded a heavy metal drumbeat through his skull. His skin radiated heat, while his insides were colder than a grave. Every muscle ached as if he had just completed back-to-back decathlons. His legs coasted weakly, the skin numb, the water strangely soothing.

  Content to float, thirst scratching at his throat, hunger gnawing at his belly, Maurice let fate do with him as it would. He had been foolish to think he’d had any choice in the matter. He cupped his hand in the water to wash the retch from his chin. His fingers tangled in a mass of stems and leaves, their color indistinguishable under the moonlight.

  Seaweed . He’d used it in a few dishes, but he had never cared enough to research what it looked like in its natural, non-dried state beyond the nasty shit that gathered on the shores of Staten Island. He lifted it out of the water, wondering if it was edible. As salted and saturated with seawater as it was, Maurice guessed that eating it would only make him thirstier, if not violently ill.

  Maybe it will speed along my death . The thought wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

  Another thought came to him, and he sprung up in excitement. An idea, a flash of information the truth of which he was certain—like sharks feeding … Oh, God, it’s night —blossomed like a flower at the forefront of his mind. He shook off his fear. A faint light of hope, a dying ember at best, needed fostering.

  Land! Kelp like this grows closest to land!

  Despite having no idea where he’d heard this fact, Maurice was so sure of its veracity that he paddled frantically forward into a mass of lush flora. It tangled his arms and legs, slowing his momentum. His efforts were at first like trying to sled down a snowless hill, then like trying to sled with no hill at all. Soon, he was swallowed by a living, underwater jungle.

  Immobile.

  He squinted to see through the thick black of night. If land was out there, which direction it lay was not a guess he was willing to make. The water and sky both shimmered with moonlight, but everything in between hid behind darkness. Shore, his salvation, could have been less than a half mile away for all the good it would do him. He couldn’t see a fraction of that distance.

  He frowned. Does kelp even grow in tropical waters? Is this even kelp? I wouldn’t know kelp from seaweed or any other fucking kind of ocean plant or algae or whatever the fuck it is . The growth around him was alive. That much seemed certain—that, and that there was a lot of it. His chin dropped. I am going to die out here . His heart thumped in his chest. He thought he might cry again, but before he could, he took several cleansing breaths and pulled himself together. Relax. Save your strength. You’ll see what’s what in the morning .

  Somehow, Maurice did begin to relax. He turned to his back and let his head dip into the water. The night was clear and beautiful. His mind began to drift, and he was back in his home, enjoying a cold beer and a fat, red burger, its juicy blood running down his chin. He licked his lips and closed his eyes. For one blessed moment, he allowed himself to forget his dire circumstances and simply exist in silence and in peace.

  Water splashed nearby, a light disturbance in the surface beyond the gentle sway of the ocean’s ebb and flow. Maurice froze. His eyes shot open, and he held his breath. A splash came again, and he caught sight of its maker. A small fish wiggled as it bit into the thick growth. A similar splash came from behind him, then another off to his right.

  Maurice let out his breath. The splashes came sporadically, but the fish that made them paid him no mind. He stared at the water as it rippled across the leafy tips of the underwater vegetation. It’s nothing. Just some little fish having a snack. These plants must be the feeding grounds for tons of them . He imagined all sorts of bright-colored fish, beautiful, harmless creatures like those he had hand-fed in Cancun.

  His reasoning seemed logical, but an uneasiness lingered at the back of his mind. He remembered the graduation card his parents had given him when he earned his Culinary Arts degree. Be a Big Fish in a Big Pond , it read. A picture of the food chain was drawn on its cover, that oft-used image of a tiny fish about to be eaten by a slightly larger fish, which in turn is about to be eaten by an even larger fish, and so on and so on. Except this card added a new component to the image. The pool in which all the fish swam was actually the inside of an Earth-sized fish’s mouth that took up most of the card’s cover. The mouth curled into a sinister grin.

  A shark’s grin, full of pointed teeth.

  “Why in fuck’s sake would you want to think of that?” Maurice asked himself aloud. Surely, he was being paranoid. He had enough to worry about without adding his irrational fears to the pile. He hadn’t seen a shark the first night, though he might have been too out of his mind to notice one tap dancing on the water directly in front of him, and he hadn’t seen one yet that night.

  Yet.

  Stop it.

  As soon as it was light enough to see, he would swim for shore. If there even is a shore. If there—

  “Ow!” Something bit him. He yelped again as another bite came.

  Whatever had bitten him wasn’t in the water. It was on his chest. He slapped his skin. Something squished.

  He raised his hand in front of his eyes. A sort of jelly with hard, greenish chunks in it spread across his palm. Tiny sticks jutted from one of the larger chu
nks. He brought his hand closer for a more critical inspection just as an inch-long bug skittered around his knuckle. It resembled a centipede, having too many legs to be an insect or spider, its smooth shell segmented like that of an armadillo.

  Its sharp pincers speared Maurice’s skin.

  He gasped and emitted a terrified squeal that might have called his manhood into question had anyone been around to witness it. He thrust his hand into the water and swished it as if it were on fire, trying to free himself of the dead bug and its very much alive friend.

  A chill ran down his spine as he glanced down at himself. His skin crawled. So did the swarm of isopods on it.

  He trembled. They were in his hair, under his clothes. He had to get them off. He needed them off that instant.

  In his panicked swatting, he tumbled into the water. Sinking beneath the surface, he tore off his shorts, clawed at his hair, and patted every inch of his body. When he calmed enough to take in his surroundings, as blind in those depths as he would have been lantern-less and several hundred feet below ground, he used his hands to see. They led him through a maze of shoots, which he grabbed to pull himself forward, his legs frog-kicking to assist.

  The plants grew everywhere, and though they parted easily enough for him to pass, Maurice feared them all the same. He imagined them belonging to something conscious and evil, like the tentacles of the jellyfish he’d already endured, except these were trying to drag him down to a watery grave: cold, empty depths where the souls of millions of others lost at sea waited with open arms and hollowed out eyes.

  Instead of swimming up, he tried to swim out. His breath grew short. Air bubbles escaped his lips. His lungs ran on empty. When they could operate without oxygen no longer, he swam for the surface.

  Only then did he realize how far he had sunk.

  He scissored his legs with all his might. His lungs burned, begged for air, but air seemed a mile away. Maurice couldn’t tell where water ended and night began. Something nudged him. Something solid and sleek. He screamed. Salt water seeped into his mouth, leaked down his throat. He tried to swallow it all, but liquid squeezed its way into his lungs. He coughed behind lips he couldn’t keep closed. His arms turned in maddening circles. He choked, gagged, panicked as life seemed forfeited.

  His grasping fingers found air.

  He wheezed as his mouth breached the surface, then fell into a coughing fit that depleted the oxygen he’d just inhaled and sprayed seawater spittle from his mouth. Even as he coughed for another minute, his eyes looked left, then right, then left again, scanning the surface for that horrid monster that had touched him, praying it would not touch him again. He saw nothing, heard nothing beyond the wind and the waves. Still, his heart pumped in rapid-fire staccato.

  A splash came from directly in front of him. He couldn’t see what had made it, just the white froth where the creature had once been. The ripples in the water, the sound the animal had made as it cut across the surface, led Maurice to believe it had been no minnow or goldfish. No, the creature was big, big and monstrous, probably with lots of teeth.

  He stared straight ahead. The danger revealed itself. A black fin, like the tail of an airplane, sliced through the water a mere thirty yards away.

  Twenty-five.

  Maybe it’s a dolphin . He wished to God that it was, but when it was only twenty yards away, he saw the second fin zigzagging gracefully about six feet behind. A dolphin’s tail fin is horizontal. Sharks’ are—

  Maurice didn’t need to finish his thought. He didn’t have to see the rest of the animal to know it. A shark headed his way, and if the distance between dorsal fin and tail fin was a trusted indicator, this particular shark was enormous.

  He pictured a giant mouth with pointed teeth curled into a sinister grin, the cover of the graduation card his parents had given him. His heart pounded so hard, he thought it might explode, hoped it might. His head spun. The world blurred.

  The shark closed in.

  * * *

  The sun was cooking the sky from purple to pink when Maurice woke, sputtering and floating on his back in water shallow enough to stand. He saw a beach and beyond it, a thick forest and the promise of an end to his nightmare. At first, he thought he was dreaming, or perhaps he’d found the afterlife. He slapped his cheeks and felt the sting.

  Is this real? I’m alive? How?

  A clicking sound, like that of an egg timer cranked slowly, emitted from the beak of a charcoal-skinned dolphin with smiling eyes. Another beside it bobbed its nose in and out of the water, splashing Maurice.

  Not two fins from the same animal. Two fins from different animals. Two dolphins! Had they saved him? He’d heard stories about shipwrecked sailors being rescued by dolphins, but he’d never believed them to be true. The playful creature splashed him again, and he splashed it back, laughing, slowly letting himself accept that the worst was over. Tears of joy ran rivers down his cheeks.

  “I wish I had something to offer you, you beautiful bastards.” He smiled at his saviors, their bright faces innocent like children. He’d never loved any person or thing as much as he loved them then. “Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  Naked and humiliated, his penis shrunken and wrinkled like a California raisin, Maurice waded to shore, part of him thankful it appeared deserted. When he reached it, he collapsed on the sand, embracing the beach and making promises to God to live a better life.

  After he had his revenge.

  Once his joy had tempered, he stood to gauge his surroundings. He had escaped the perils of the sea, but he had no idea where he was or how he was going to get back home. It wasn’t long before he spotted his answer.

  A large, white craft lazed in the water off in the distance. Maurice threw a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “No fucking way!” He must have died. Either that or the jellyfish stings were making him hallucinate. He knew that vessel.

  The Wakemaster.

  It can’t be. I must be losing it . Maurice rubbed his eyes, blinked the blur away. The ship was no illusion. He squealed with glee like a toddler. He knew that she-bitch, Olivia, forced the captain to stop at every good sunbathing beach and that her husband forced the boat to stop whenever the notion to explore fancied him. But right there? Right then?

  Maurice rubbed his hands together. His luck had done a complete one-eighty. Or perhaps it was that other she-bitch, Karma, come to bite those motherfuckers in the ass. The dolphins hadn’t just saved Maurice’s life. They had towed him to other people.

  And a chance for revenge.

  How he wanted to kiss those slippery sons of bitches. He didn’t know why the boat was docked there and didn’t care. Maurice had one mission: get to the ship before it left him stranded a second time.

  A mosquito bit his forearm, and he smacked it. The small splatter of blood its flattened form left behind caused him to chuckle. Anything else want to take a bite out of me?

  Maurice thought back to those nasty kelp critters and examined the welts on his skin. He recalled that moment of sheer horror when he thought a shark would make him into sushi. He wanted those on the Wakemaster to know that feeling, the fear of being eaten alive by something sinister and predatory. He wondered if that sort of terror was something he could cook up.

  The pipedream spurred him into motion. At first his legs protested—they had forgotten the feel of solid earth—but soon they were sturdy beneath him as he sprinted the winding beach, keeping out of sight close to the tree line.

  The scalding sun had risen high by the time he approached the yacht. Sweat glistened on his red-brown shoulders, dripped from his hair. All that separated him from the boat was half a football field of wide-open beach, followed by a five-minute swim. Despite nearly two full days in the ocean, Maurice coveted that swim, his body already like dry brush ready to ignite.

  He steadied his mind, forced himself to examine the boat, watch for signs of life. But the ship sat silent. Is everyone sleeping? He smiled, then tip-t
oed across the beach. To his right, he spotted what he first mistook for felled trees until he saw that they had been hollowed out.

  Some sort of canoe? He crouched and rolled forward, which probably would have drawn more attention to himself if someone had been watching. Feeling exposed, he wondered if the beach was as deserted as he’d thought. Keeping low, he held his breath and waded quietly into the water.

  He swam much of the distance underwater, only coming up for air when he absolutely needed it. The ladder started a foot above the water. He pulled himself up and made his way to the top, where he peeked over the lip. No one stirred. Maurice climbed aboard.

  Where the hell is everybody? He scanned the deck, half-expecting a trap. But no one jumped out at him. Master and crew had simply … vanished?

  He made his way from bow to stern, his wet feet slapping the deck, announcing his presence with every step. He loitered at the stairwell down to the living quarters, listening for chatter, snoring, anything, but heard nothing.

  As he slunk below deck, every creaky stair made him cringe and stop to listen. He searched room after room. Still, he found no one. When he reached the galley, he ran to the refrigerator and yanked it open. He cracked open a bottle of water and let it spill down his throat and seep from the corners of his mouth. The cold water felt like heaven. When the bottle was empty, he placed it on the counter and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then, he grabbed another bottle and a plump, red apple.

  The loud crunch as he bit into the apple made him freeze. He chewed slowly and put the apple down, then grabbed a large butcher knife from the chopping block and a bottle of vinegar from the cabinet. After finishing his sweep of the cabin, satisfied he was alone, he rummaged through his bedroom, happy to find his stuff had not been thrown overboard. He grabbed a clean shirt and shorts and headed for the shower.

  Cool water cascaded over his damaged skin and rehydrated his pruned lips. He scrubbed clumps of seaweed from crevices and wiped dead things from his skin. Red and purple welts tracked across his legs like bubble wrap filled with blood. Some of the bubbles had burst, leaving open sores that looked like rare roast beef. He laughed. He’d heard once that certain jellyfish could kill a man in less than five minutes. Apparently, he’d been exposed to the pussy kind, even though his legs throbbed worse than anything he’d ever experienced.