by Weston Ochse
My knees start shaking as I realize the skull is staring back at me. There are eyes in its sockets still. They’re pocked and shot with green veins. Its barbed mouth is wide and unmoving, a perfect circle. Its body, what I can see of it, does look log-like.
And it’s not just floating. It’s bobbing up and down. It disappears under the surface of the lake for a moment and when it comes up again it shoots another fish carcass out of its cavernous maw. The bass comes out with a spray of water and catches ever so slightly on the barbs that line the thing’s mouth. It’s enough to cause the fish to unravel as it flies through the air. When it gets here it’s nothing more than a thumping heart and a twist of white intestines that splatter against the boat’s hull.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say, even though Patrick is already splashing the oars in to row us to shore as quickly as possible.
I try to keep my eyes on the creature, but it bobs under again. At first, I assume to collect more ammo to launch at us. When it doesn’t re-emerge, I feel a tinge of hope in my heart that the thing has gone away, but there’s a tension in my bones that knows that would be too easy. I visor my hand to my forehead to block the sun so I can catch sight of it again. I desperately don’t want to catch sight of it, but it might be coming closer. I can’t let it surprise us.
Sure enough, I see a long shadow beneath the surface. It doesn’t move like a fish. It’s rigid, completely unbending. It comes at the boat, but dips at the last moment. I feel it scrape aluminum underfoot. “It’s chasing us,” I say.
Grunting, Patrick takes one of the oars from its lock and stands. Holding it like a baseball player stepping to home plate, he moves to the edge of the boat. He gazes into the murk. The long shadow – it must be ten feet – circles us. Patrick slaps at it. The attack does little more than get us wet. The cool drops mingle with my sweat and remind me how hot it is. We’re baking here. I suddenly want air conditioning. I want Minneapolis. I want off this lake and out of the woods.
“I’m so scared, baby,” I say.
He looks at me with furrowed brow and chastises. “It’s just a fish.”
But I know fish, and that thing is no fish.
Like a battering ram, the creature bursts out of the water. The monstrous skull hits Patrick square on the chest and propels him overboard. They both disappear into the lake, leaving nothing behind except a few air bubbles and a tint of crimson from where the barbs of the thing’s launch-hole bit into Patrick.
I stare into the water after them, freaking out, flapping my arms. They’re flapping out of fear, of course. At first. But they keep flapping as I dive in. And they keep flapping, in the cold water, harder and harder, pulling me down into the murk. As daylight disappears behind me, all I can think about is Patrick’s beard against my cheek and how I won’t let that feeling be taken away from me.
I can barely see in front of me, but I go deeper.
The blackness of the water gives way to white. Suddenly, I am eye-to-eye with this skull-faced creature. I react fast, but not fast enough to prevent it from striking me under the chin, slamming my jaw shut so hard my ears ring. My exclamation of pain comes out in bubbles, the last of my held breath, and my last hope for finding my man.
The creature disappears into the darkness.
I stop moving and begin to let myself float back to the surface. Am I going to let Patrick go? Just like that? Over a little bump on the chin?
I clench my abs and find a pocket of air tucked away in my lungs somewhere, enough to hold me over while I go a bit deeper. I’m not just flapping now. I’m sweeping the lake further behind me with each stroke of my arms. I can feel its cold weight on me as my empty lungs begin to spasm.
I keep going until I see a hand. I grab it. Even though I can’t see the rest of the body, I know it’s Patrick. I’ve held that hand so many times over the last four years, I know exactly what it feels like to have his weight-room calluses pressed into my lotioned palms. When I squeeze, I feel a squeeze back. It’s light, but it’s there.
I turn around and kick so hard I almost collide with the creature as it shoots past my head. Again and again, it crisscrosses the waters between me and a lungful of fresh Minnesota air, not making contact, just taunting. Nonetheless, I do not detour. I take the shortest path to the brightness above.
As I’m reaching for the surface with one hand, my other holding tight to Patrick, the creature jolts past my ribcage, ripping me open with its mouth barbs. I’m in a cloud of red and the lake suddenly gets a lot colder. But the pain seems far away, farther than the air above, so I ignore it and keep kicking.
When I finally splash through, I suck in a deep breath and feel like I’ve overdosed on oxygen. Lightning bolts go off behind my eyes, and when they’re gone they’re replaced with storm clouds. Black clouds. I’m going to pass out. I can’t though. I don’t have that luxury. I have to take care of my man.
I get his head up into the air. His eyes are rolled back. He’s leaving me.
I spin around. Shore is far. At least a hundred feet. And the creature is circling us. The top of its skull cuts the surface like a shark’s fin. It’s not going to let me get to dry land, but I need to get air into Patrick’s lungs now.
I don’t know shit about CPR, but I have to try. I kick as hard as I can to keep both of our heads above water. I latch one hand to the waist of Patrick’s jeans and pinch his nose with the other as I lock my lips around his and blow. I turn him around quick and give him a series of squeezes. Then I blow into him again. I don’t know how many times I repeat, but I don’t stop until he coughs up water and I can hear him breathing. He doesn’t really regain consciousness, just kind of lolls around, but he’s alive, and that is everything.
I notice how scraped up he is. A piece of his cheek is missing. I can see bone. I need to get him ashore. Fuck a monster. I’m going to save my man.
I let the creature take another couple of laps around me. Let it play. Let it think I’ve given up. Then, when it thinks it has me and its circles go too wide, I kick so hard my thighs burn immediately. I kick so hard I’m soaring above the water, even with Patrick in tow. My heart beats against every one of my ribs.
I don’t make it fifteen feet. The creature is in front of me, coming straight at me, readying another battering ram maneuver. I splash and shift and almost dodge it. Almost. It digs its barbs into that same spot along my side, opening me up more. I don’t touch it, but I can feel the cold water getting into it. There’s a hole in me.
But I also have a window, and I don’t miss it. I adjust my grip on Patrick and start kicking toward shore again. I get another five feet. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. My head’s filled with competing cheer squadrons. One screams, “You’re gonna make it!” The other yells, “You’re gonna die!” I ignore both and just swim.
Out of the side of my eye, I see the creature skimming the surface beside me. My gasp causes me to suck in a lungful of water. I choke and cough, but I keep going, even as the creature jumps completely out of the water and then dives in skull-first, piercing the lake like an arrow. It’s going deep.
I try not to think about what it intends to do next. What will that help? What good will it do me to know it’s going to shoot up from the bottom of the lake and punch me right in the stomach, destroying me? All I can do is swim until it feels like my one shoulder is going to tear from its socket and my legs are rubber.
To my surprise, the creature doesn’t hit me from beneath. I hear it break the surface of the water behind me. Why is it taunting me like this? What is it doing? I don’t have time to look back. I’m so close.
Now there is splashing all around me. Little explosions of water shoot up from the lake. I stop and tread water. It takes me a moment to figure out that the creature is launching fish again. Its aim is worthless though. Dozens of them plop down in front of me, disappearing into the murk.
“Do you think I’m scared of fish? I came here for the fucking fish!”
Then one of the fish bobs
to the surface, blue and bloated. It’s not a fish at all. It has toes. A foot. A human foot. The skin is ragged and one of the nails has been ripped out of place and is impaled like a shard of glass in the tender spot between little toes. Suddenly I can’t breath again. It’s like I’m under the lake, with no air in my lungs. The creature is eating my man right out of my arms and I didn’t even notice.
More parts appear. Feet. Hands. Indecipherable chunks of meat in various states of decay. A face stares at me with empty sockets full of seaweed and a nose that has peeled away in so many layers it looks like a flower that forgot how to blossom. I’m almost relieved. These are not parts of Patrick.
Whose parts are these?
I do not even push them out of my way. I swim through them, toward the shore. They rub against me. Their icy touch is all the motivation I need to ignore the fatigue creeping into me, the fear waiting to take me over.
Patrick is coughing now and breathing hard. He’s coming to, just as I’m able to touch my feet against the bottom. I get him upright in front of me and guide him in. The water might as well be cement. It does not want to let us go, but I push forward until it is only up to my waist. When it is ankle-deep, I shove Patrick as hard and as far as I can. He stumbles out and falls face-first onto a patch of grass.
I hear the skull-faced creature rushing through the lake behind me.
One. Two. Three. Four. I count Patrick’s limbs as I feel barbs sink deep into my lower back. The impact pushes me forward. Something snaps in my spine before I abruptly change directions. There’s so much blood. I’m being pulled back into the cold darkness of the lake. I’m moving fast and I have no air.
But it’s okay. My man is safe.
The Blackest Eyes
Adam Cesare
The shark was a loaner.
Loaner with an “a”.
Come to think of it, the shark was a loner, too.
Phil had read the shark’s Wikipedia page. Multiple pages actually, because first he'd looked up hammerhead sharks, in general, but it turned out that there were many different species of hammerhead.
Most of those other species, like the scalloped hammerhead, traveled in schools. Those were the kind you most commonly saw in aquariums, but the shark living in VCX FX’s warehouse was a lone wolf.
Their shark was a great hammerhead.
No. She didn’t do tricks or anything—she wasn’t Some Shark, Charlotte’s Web style—she was a member of the species sphyrna mokarran, a great hammerhead. Like how the ‘great’ in ‘great white shark’ wasn’t an indicator of quality, just a name.
Phil Court had been resistant to housing the creature in his workshop, but the artists who worked under him had been strongly in favor of the animal’s proposed three week residency.
“We’ll be able to watch it for reference any time we want,” they’d claimed.
Phil hadn’t poured a mold or soldered any circuitry in ten years, these days he was more of a figurehead for the company. He was the liaison between VCX and the studios, he offered his input on their various projects but it was the staff who did the work.
But even with his hands-off approach, he recognized that their argument was sound. You can watch YouTube videos all you want, but to capture the soul of the shark and transmute it into foam latex and animatronic puppetry: it would be better to work with a live subject.
Yes, the argument was sound, but in the time it had taken for the aquarium to drop off the temporary tank, treat the water, and introduce the shark most of the work on VCX's shark models had been completed.
After they were finished with their initial work, all Phil's employees wanted was to get up close to the damn thing’s tank and take selfies with it.
This was a big budget picture and if the studio was willing to partner with the Anaheim Oceanic Conservancy (itself a public relations outcropping of the Ocean Planet theme park chain) and they wanted the sharks in Deep Hammer to be photo realistic animatronics. Who was Phil to stop them from spending their money?
VCX did a lot of television work, way more than enough to keep the warehouse lights on. These days the only time they were hired for creature fx for feature films was lower-budgeted gigs where the director was trying to capture a “throwback” vibe. Phil found it refreshing to be working on a hundred million dollar picture again, and oh so rare that a hundred million dollar picture would want to use some of that money on practical FX.
And that was not to say that there weren’t going to be computer animated sharks in Deep Hammer, there would probably be CGI in great abundance, but for inserts and close-ups their puppets would be needed. And their puppets would be fucking great.
“Right, Rosie?” Phil asked, extending a finger to tap on the Plexiglas of the tank. The shark's temporary home was a combination of tarp and lightweight synthetic glass that could be collapsed for transport on a flatbed.
The shark didn’t react to his tapping, she just kept swimming. The rectangle of the tank was maybe ten by twelve, the depth another seven feet. It was not much room for a shark that was nearly as tall as Phil if you stood her up on her fins.
Rosie had settled into a lightly psychotic pattern of swimming clockwise for a few minutes or so before switching to counterclockwise for a similar round.
Was this tank that much bigger than the one she had at Ocean Planet? Phil didn't know, Mary and him had never had kids so he'd never had a reason to go.
It was easy to look at Rosie, lonely and swimming in circles, and get ready to sign up for PETA and start protesting Ocean Planet. While Phil had been searching for info about hammerheads, he’d stumbled upon some videos of shark fin fisherman, huge nets filled with sharks who then had their fins sliced off and their finless bodies tossed back into the ocean to die, providing chum for even more sharks to be caught up in the nets.
Maybe a depressing life in captivity was a better fate than that.
Phil tried to imagine Rosie, no fins and releasing clouds of blood as she sank to the bottom of the tank. He was probably part of the problem, helping a multi-national corporation make a movie about killer hammerhead sharks wasn’t going to endear the creatures to anyone.
“I’m sorry,” he said, walking away from the tank and shutting the lights out on the warehouse.
***
“Well, what we’re doing now is testing the salinity. There’s pumps and a filtration system, but that doesn’t monitor everything. Salt water tanks are very temperamental, there's a lot of material in the air in your workshop, and we want Rosie to be safe,” the girl said.
She was standing atop a ladder and leaning over the tank.
Rosie didn't seem to care that there was a nubile young woman practically dunking herself into the tank. The shark was more concerned with lazily scooping up the frozen fish that were beginning to sink to the bottom of the enclosure.
Less than half of the artists looking up from their workstations seemed like they were listening to what Gloria had to say. Most were admiring how her ass looked in her Ocean Planet-issued cargo shorts.
“And we appreciate it, Gloria,” Phil said. “In only a few days Rosie’s become a regular mascot for the guys, we’re quite fond of her…" he said, not catching himself say "guys" before it was too late. VCX was a progressive employer, these days, and Phil kept two female artists on staff.
"But," he began.
Gloria dismounted the ladder and turned to him. With one hand she shook out the litmus strip she’d dipped in Rosie’s water, the way people used to shake out Polaroid pictures. Was Gloria even old enough to remember Polaroids?
“But wouldn’t it be easier to train one of our people to do this?" he continued. "The four-oh-five must be murder on you driving up every day.”
Phil certainly enjoyed watching Gloria, a caretaker at Ocean Planet, stop by to check on Rosie, but it seemed like overkill for them to pay an employee to drive, daily, from Anaheim to Burbank to feed and check the water.
"I don't mind, really," Gloria said. Phil noti
ced she dropped her voice down to a more conversational tone and volume. "What I'd be doing at work isn't much more interesting than sitting in traffic. There's a whole team of us dedicated to working the touch-tank. Starfish, nurse sharks, stuff that it's safe to pet. Any day I don't have to explain what a stingray is to six hundred children, individually, is a good day. "
Behind her, Rosie had made quick work of the frozen fish and squid chunks she'd been fed. With no more to the show, Phil's employees focused back to their work tables, heads down.
The novelty of working in a place where every surface was covered with disemboweled corpses, severed werewolf heads, and mechanical spiders had worn off years ago. For Phil this was just another day in the office.
Phil and Gloria's conversation had moved from public to intimate in a matter of seconds.
"I kind of assumed that you spent your days helping walruses brush their teeth or riding on the backs of killer whales. You know, the exciting stuff," Phil said. He felt his face redden and wished they weren't having this conversation where his staff could so easily overhear their boss trying his best to flirt.
It had been three months since Mary had moved out and she only last week finalized the divorce. But no one at VCX knew that. For all they knew the boss was perving on the new fish. Pun intended.
"No. I wish I was anywhere near an orca. That's what they don't tell all those little girls who try and follow through on their childhood dreams of majoring in marine biology: at my level, I'm one stop removed from selling churros. And the pay grade is the same. Having to take care of Rosie," she said, turning to watch the animal. "Gives me a purpose."
"That's," Phil didn't know what to say."That's saying a lot."
"Well, that and I'm getting paid to drive the van up here and that gives me time to listen to my podcasts."