by Curran
Bitten, ravaged, bleeding, they came at him with hooked fingers and eyes glazed with madness. To them, sacrificing one of their own to those hideous little monsters had never been an option. So they came at him with murder in their eyes.
“Wait a minute!” he told them. “I saved us! Not just myself, but all of us!”
Elise just glared at him. “You sick bastard! It was murder! Murder! You fucking murdered that poor man!”
Cutler’s face was bitten, scratched, stained with blood. But now all the color ran from it because he knew, he knew, that they were no longer in their right minds. They were going to throw him overboard.
“Don’t even try it,” he warned them.
“Killer!” Rico said, “Dirty stinking killer!”
Cutler was right on one thing: they weren’t in their right minds. Had they been, they would never have considered throwing him to the fish. But they had been through too much, suffered through unimaginable horrors, been strained to the limit, and now they were thinking survival and nothing more.
Cutler edged as far as he could away from them on the flat hull, sliding his ass through the blood and water. “I swear to God! You try it! Either of you try it and I’ll flip us all in! I goddamn well fucking mean it!”
But they didn’t seem to believe it. They kept inching forward. In their minds, they already had Cutler pegged for the selfish, narcissistic piece of shit he was. He wouldn’t sacrifice what he loved best even to thwart his enemies. They knew it. And, sadly, he knew it.
Elise honestly didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe Rico did, but she was really just taking out her frustrations by putting a scare into him. And maybe that might have worked…had the situation not been so damned desperate. When she got within a foot of him, Cutler looked out at the slopping brown water, the dry islands rising up in the channel-maybe wondering if he could reach them in time-then turned back quick. And before Elise could react or even think of it, he hit her in the face with everything he had. Her head snapped back and she would have went right into the drink had Rico not grabbed her.
That was it for Rico.
He was Yagua Indian and where he came from, you did not hit women. But the men who struck them? Oh yes, you beat them silly. He came right at Cutler and Cutler threw a few sloppy jabs at him that seemed to bounce right off that old, seamed brown face.
And then Rico had him.
He bounced Cutler’s head off the hull two or three times, then hit him barefisted again and again. Cutler’s face was a mess now but still he fought. He shook and raged, trying to hit the old man, trying to deflect those huge callused hands. They grappled. The boat rocked uneasily. Grinning with pure wicked delight, Rico hit him again.
But he didn’t see Cutler fish the lockblade knife from his pocket, snap it open.
Elise did. She shouted: “Rico! Look out! He’s got a-”
Too late, Cutler brought the blade up and sank an easy three inches of it right into the side of Rico’s neck, severing the carotid artery. Rico, looking stunned and shocked, fell away grasping a hand to the wound. The artery was laid wide open, blood squirting between his fingers. He fell onto the hull face-first making a moaning, gurgling sound in his throat. His blood was everywhere, pools and rivers of it flooding their banks, vivid red and shining.
Elise launched herself at Cutler and he slashed her across the arm. “Next time it’s your throat,” he promised her.
Rico tried to pull himself to his knees and slid on the greasy spill of his own blood. He tried again and Cutler lashed out with his foot, caught the old man in the ass and propelled him forward.
Blood bubbling from his wound, Rico tried to stop himself and was only partially successful. His hands found purchase so he didn’t go all the way in, but his head and upper shoulders went under and the rest of him followed right to the waist. The piranha hit him like bullets. Their teeth punched right into him as he tried to pull himself up. But his blood in the water drove them to new heights of mania. His head was still underwater in the churning mass of feeding piranha, hands hooked into claws, splashing and flaying madly. Each time an arm came out of the thrashing water, there were more decaying piranhas on it. And each time there was less flesh.
Screaming, Elise took hold of one of his ankles, trying to pull him back on board. But he was a big man, under attack, and fighting with everything he had. Cutler would not help. He stayed as far away as he could. The more Elise pulled, the more Rico seemed to slide deeper into the seething pool of teeth. Blood and water splashed against her as the jaws of the living dead fish cut into him like buzzsaws, pulverizing his flesh, puncturing him.
And it was bad for her…but those scarce seconds underwater were an absolute horror for Rico.
From the moment his face and upper body submerged, they were at him. Their slimy, putrefying bodies, teeth slicing into him like knives. They hit his face, his arms, his shoulders, but especially his throat. Dozens of them fighting their way in, chewing and sucking at the hot flow of blood, drilling into him, gnawing through muscle and tissue. But what was worse, was that as he fought, his mouth open screaming and gargling in the water, they swam right in. Right into his mouth, chewing his tongue away and biting their way into his throat, deeper, deeper, filling him, making him gag Rico came out of the water with a fierce backward lunge, knocking Elise aside. He came out fountaining water and blood. From the waist on up, he was bitten, mangled, simply laid raw. There were dozens and dozens of piranha in every state of decomposition hanging off him, jaws shearing, tails flapping. His face looked like the surface of the moon, cratered down to shining white bone from hundreds of bites. His eyes were gone, his nose chewed down to a hollow, his lips gnawed down to the bleeding gums.
He thrashed about like some obscene zombie, spraying blood and drainage and fish in every direction, a horrible gagging sound coming from his pitted throat. And then his abdomen, so bitten and torn, seemed to dissolve before Elise’s eyes. It exploded outward as the fish that tunneled down his throat ate their way back out, macerating organ and muscle and membrane, scissoring jaws rupturing through like drill bits. A slopping, slimy tide of blood and carrion fish and half-eaten tissue came flooding out and he flipped back into the water where the real devouring began.
Elise reached out, managed to grab a hand as he was caught in the surging maelstrom. He nearly dragged her in, but she pulled back with everything she had left and, to her surprise-and horror-he came up. Or his hand did. It was clutched in her own, the wrist gnawed to a bloody stump.
She screamed and threw it, hysterical and shaking.
The rest of Rico sank away in the foaming scarlet water.
*
On her hands and knees on the blood-covered hull, Elise called out his name again and again and again.
But he was gone.
She was alone with Cutler and even being eaten by the living dead fish seemed preferable to that. When she turned back, Cutler had the knife in his hand and he was making his way toward her. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. His face was an absolute atrocity: a gouged and chewed waxen mask, streaked red and lit by two blazing hungry eyes and a grinning mouth of pink-stained teeth.
Elise could see it in on him.
There was no mistaking it.
He had been watching her ever since they got on the boat like a child molester watches a schoolyard. He knew what he wanted and even the misery they’d all been through had not vanquished the flame of lust burning in him, it had not dulled the perverse edge to his soul. He had a knife. They were alone. There were no witnesses. She had a choice: she could either give him what he wanted or he’d take it.
But he’d have it. There was no doubt of that.
She sneered at him. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! YOU FUCKING SLIMY DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT!”
The words meant nothing to him.
As he came forward, the knife edge catching the sun, his eyes were wild, filled with a shocking animal delight.
“You can either enjoy it, Elise, or I can make it worse th
an anything you can imagine,” he told her.
“Get away from me!”
He laughed. “You know better.”
He reached out to touch her and she slapped his hand away. He sliced at her with the knife, again and again, pushing her closer to the edge and the waiting jaws. She had no choice now. There was nothing left but to allow it…as vile and repellent as that would be.
She shoved him away.
“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” she said, tearing her blouse open, exposing the cones of her breasts. “IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? IS THIS WHAT YOU FUCKING WANT?”
It was. It was obvious that he had been thinking of nothing else. With Jack alive or Rico he would never have dared to do what he was now going to do. But now all bets were off. He was practically drooling. He unzipped his pants and he was already hard. Not letting go of the knife, he squirmed his way out of them until they were down past his knees.
And Elise, her belly flooded with a warm rush of nausea, stripped the rest of the way and stood up so he could get a good look at her. Although bitten and bloodied, it was easy to see that the only place she wasn’t tanned was where her bikini had been.
“Get over here,” Cutler said.
She went back down on her knees, knowing that what she must now do was the only way. She sucked down everything inside herself, forgot about such trifling things as self-respect, dignity, and honor. She replaced it all with something that was dark and grim. Maybe Cutler saw it in her eyes for just a second, for he cringed.
“Now,” he said.
“On your back,” she told him. “You want this, we do it my way.”
He was so excited he didn’t question it. Not for a moment. Elise went right over to him and felt his grubby, scaly hands roughly fondle everything she had. Then with a crooked, salacious grin she took him by the shoulders and forced him down on the hull. She squatted over him, gripping his hard little penis and then forcing herself down upon it. She gasped. He trembled. He had forgotten his knife now. Forgotten everything but what he was getting which was all he’d ever dreamed about. Elise rode him until he came, making a good show of it, the whole time thrusting down hard on him and sliding his body across the greasy hull ever closer to the water.
“Oh God,” he said. “Oh God that was good…”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Elise said and then sprang on him, shoving him with her weight and every ounce of muscle she had. Her strength was irresistible and especially to a man who was as spent as Cutler.
She forced him over the edge of the hull and he immediately started shouting, swinging, trying to throw her off. But she pinned him down with her legs and, grasping his throat, forced his head into the water…then beneath it.
The piranhas struck right away in wave after wave of shearing jaws.
Cutler thrashed, gyrated, but Elise clung to him, straddling him and locking him into place. She barely felt his fists as they bounced off her head or his nails that laid her face open.
She was only aware of the churning water and the swarming fish, how Cutler jerked with each attack.
Even submerged she could hear them feeding: the tearing of flesh and soft tissues, the chomping of muscle and connective tissue, the dull crunching of bone that sounded oddly like someone chewing on ice cubes. They bit at her fingers, too, which were just under the surface, but their main interest was the head.
Cutler died horribly.
It did not even occur to him that the cunning bitch had led him into a carefully baited trap until she shoved his head underwater, into that murky brown water, and the searing, unbelievable agony began. He could not see them, just a darkening mass of seething bodies that covered his face and head as the water boiled red. Their jaws snapped, tore, cut, ripped, and ultimately rendered him to bone. But he fought, oh how he fought, striking at the evil bitch and tearing at the biting fish that went to corpse jelly under his fingers. But it was futile, of course. A school of living piranha can deliver 1200 bites in less than a minute and who could say about these monsters? Their jaws punctured his face, sawed and bit and stabbed. His eyes went fast as did his tongue and lips. His nose and ears took a little longer. All in all, his head was devoured to a ball of fleshy mucilage in thirty seconds.
After maybe fifteen seconds, Elise fell away, gasping, sobbing, studying the ruin of her once long attractive fingers. Just bloody stumps now, worried right to the bone.
Cutler’s head finally came up out of the water and it was really little more than an eyeless, earless, scalpless skull covered in pink, rutted, well-gnawed tissue. He rose for a second, his head bobbing like some gruesome Halloween prop and then he fell backwards and splashed into the drink. The school finished the job they had started.
Elise watched until there was nothing but a bubbling scum of blood and fragments on the surface. Then lying down on the hull, she closed her eyes.
*
The moon came up over the Amazon River basin.
Elise woke, raw and hurting, aware of nothing but the agony that pulsed through her body in punishing waves. Botflies had laid their eggs in her wounds. Clouds of mosquitoes had drank their fill. Gnats and chiggers had feasted on her throat.
Out in the rainforest, night birds cried out and snakes slid through the wet leafy loam. Spiders spun webs larger than men in the branches and huge Amazonian leeches clung to the thick cable roots just under the water. Moths fluttered over the clotted surface of the channel and crab-eating raccoons chattered in the jungle.
All was well in the hot, misty night world.
Elise went to the edge of the hull and peered into the water. What the moonlight showed her should have been shocking, but she was well beyond things like shock or fear. She was bruised, bitten, slit, peppered with dozens upon dozens of swelling insect bites. Botfly larva were already wiggling in her wounds. She knew only agony and misery and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Only nature at its fiercest and a channel filled with unnatural things. This is what the moonlight showed her in the water: the piranhas.
Hundreds and hundreds of them surrounding the overturned skiff. Just waiting. Row upon row of them breaking the surface, their jutting jaws wide open. Greening things, bloated things, wormy things, glaring evil skulls. They were not alive and had not been in some time so they did not need to swim to force oxygenated water through their gills. The leaking chemicals from the biotech ship that poisoned the school also resurrected them. Once they had been alive, filled with a rapacious vitality. Social creatures that lived to defend the school. Not truly dangerous to man except in the dry season when food was scarce. But now they no longer mated and swam for the glory of the school. Now all they had left was an insatiable appetite.
And this is what they offered Elise: their appetite. Serrated rows of triangular teeth activated by powerful jaws. The sort of jaws that could bite through fishing nets and steel hooks. It was all they had and they offered it to her now.
Elise looked down at them surrounding her little island. Like loyal subjects surrounding their queen. And they were loyal. She did not doubt this.
They waited.
They knew she would come to them.
Finally, staring out across those yawning, tooth-studded jaws gleaming in the moonlight, all open in her honor, she said, “Please, I hurt so bad, so terribly bad…let it be fast.”
Somehow, she knew they would make it so.
She thought then of Peruvian cattle herders. Jack had told her how they would sacrifice a cow downstream in the dry season to the hungry piranhas so that the rest of the herd could cross safely upstream. Elise knew then that she would be such a sacrifice.
Sucking in a breath, she slid into the water and submerged amongst them and they accepted her. And true to their promise, as the water gushed red with her blood, it was mercifully quick.
The skiff drifted on upstream.
A giant otter splashed in the distance.
And in the treetops, a pygmy owl screeched.
THEY WALK BY NIGHT
1
When the phone rang I was sleeping like a body in a freezer, cool, dead, and easy. When it finally jarred me awake, I bolted upright, my heart pounding, my head full of spun cobwebs. How long it had been ringing I didn’t know. I seemed to remember dreaming about phones. Maybe for hours.
My hand fumbled it off its cradle. “Steel here,” I said into the receiver, my voice full of sand. “Make it good.”
“Vince? Where the hell you been? I been calling you all goddamn day.”
I knew the voice. Knew it well. It was everyone’s favorite homicide detective, Tommy Albert. Tommy and me went way back. Years ago, before I picked up my private cop’s license, I’d been on the force with him. He didn’t call me unless it was important.
“I’ve been sleeping, I guess. I like to do that sometimes.”
I looked at the clock. Christ. I’d been out for almost fourteen hours straight. Not surprising, really, when you took into account that for the past three weeks I’d been chasing an errant husband and his twenty-year old mistress throughout the tri-state area. And for those three weeks I bet I hadn’t slept more than three or fours hours a night. The entire case was a comedy of errors, a comedy with me as the lead clown. Not exactly duck soup but I’d brought the duo in and it had paid off in heavy green. Good or bad, it was how guys like me made our meat.
I cleared my throat. “What the hell’s so important? You know I gotta get all the beauty rest I can.”
“And then some,” he said. “I was about to send a couple uniforms over there, have them kick in the door and drag you over here.”
“I don’t think I’d like that.”
Tommy went on to tell me he’d been calling me just about every half-hour all day long. “It happened this morning,” he went on. “Our boy…surely you remember the one that decided his wrists would look better laid open with a razor? Yeah, well, guess what? Guess what happened this morning?”
“You remembered you were engaged to him?”
“Ha. No, and let’s keep that between us, shall we? No, I’m afraid our boy disappeared from the morgue.”