by Weston Ochse
It was a man. At least it was man-shaped, but that was where the similarities ended. Huge lidless eyes reflected the light back at them. A round mouth gaped open, revealing three enormous, sharp teeth. Water, drool, or both ran from it down a chest covered in scales between two muscular arms. Some kind of mohawk or pointed hat stuck up from the thing’s otherwise bald head. Bits of blood-stained white fabric clung to its shoulders.
“I am king!” it hissed in an oddly flat voice, pointing a finger at the party goers.
A wave of writhing, squirming fish flung themselves up onto the beach. They were long, more like eels, with gaping three-toothed mouths like the creature that commanded them. Their scales shined in the firelight as they flopped ever closer.
“Shelly!” Rebecca cried, clutching the woman she loved so tightly she left bruises.
Makoa lunged forward, spearing one of the things with his sharpened stick. It shrieked a high-pitched cry as its brothers, shockingly, flopped toward its assailant. Makoa flung the thing into the fire just before one of them managed to latch onto his ankle. He cried out in pain and tried to rip the thing free, but the others were already on him, their mouths like suckers seeking blood. Rebecca looked away, but Shelly could only watch as more and more of those awful eel things crowded onto her great uncle’s body, biting and snapping and swarming like a school of ravenous piranhas.
Meanwhile, the thing that had been Clausen emerged from the waves and bowled something towards the women. It rolled and bounced before landing at their feet: Rose’s head.
Chris lunged forward and grabbed the end of a log from the fire, wielding it like a torch in front of him as he advanced on Makoa, using it to ward the eel things off, but he was too late. Makoa fell to his side, dead, bloody holes oozing on the sand.
The fish creature laughed and pointed again, sending his hideous lamprey minions after Chris, who swung his burning weapon for all he was worth. He managed to take out a few of them before he became overwhelmed, falling to his knees in the sand, his blood leaking from holes the size of highball glasses.
Rebecca was screaming “NO! NONONONONO!” in an ever-climbing pitch as Shelly surveyed the situation. There were at least a few dozen of those eel/fish things and one badass mutant creep who seemed to be their leader.
The man fish was fully out of the water now, stalking toward the remaining guests with murder in his cold, silver, dinner plate eyes. The smaller things flip flopped on the beach, advancing further and further with each movement. They didn’t seem to be suffering from lack of water, but given their leader, that was hardly the oddest thing about the evening.
Rebecca squealed once more and ran off in the opposite direction, not that there was much more to the island. Aside from a few palm trees and some scrub brush, it was basically a small flat beach with very little cover.
Shelly stood, watching as the things advanced like some kind of freakish army, led by a mutant general of unknown origin. There was no way in hell she was going to let that thing win. She couldn’t allow it to kill any more of their friends, or god forbid Rebecca.
Her training and muscle memory after years on the force kicked in. She watched as the eel things advanced on Tina, then seized her moment and shoved their leader into the flames.
He let loose a shocked, garbled cry as his skin blackened and burned. The fish things seemed to have lost their herd mentality and were easy enough to either step on or avoid.
Shelly looked over to where Rebecca was hiding (poorly) behind a palm tree. Rebecca looked up, a palm frond clasped to her head.
“Can we just get married in Vegas?” she asked meekly.
They Wait
Christine Morgan
Diving is the best.
No matter how awkward we might feel on land, how heavy and clumsy, the moment we’re in the water, we become sleek grace and weightlessness. Each supple turn, each rippling roll, pearly bubbles streaming up in long glimmering trails … such beauty, such freedom, such wonder and joy.
Leo bumps me. A friendly gesture, but there’s flirtation behind the playful affection, and I know it.
It isn’t that I mind Leo; Leo’s okay … he’s cute, a great swimmer … catches lots of fish when he puts in some effort …
He likes me, but Selah likes him, and Selah is my cousin.
Anyway, I like Pip better, though Pip is with Jaya now. They’ll probably be king and queen of the beach this year.
I shouldn’t be jealous or disappointed. I’m sure I’ll find someone. It isn’t as if I’m going to end up with one of those scrawny losers who lurk around the edges of things, hoping for a lapse of judgment from the lonely or desperate.
Leo nudges me again. I look over, and he’s goofing around, doing twists, showing off. Selah’s below us. I see her watching him too. Watching him show off for me, anxiety dulling the dark shine of her eyes.
So, because I’m a good cousin, I splutter a rude string of bubbles to indicate the degree to which I am unimpressed, then arch my body and dive deeper. I skim over the rocky ledges – teeming with life, stars and spiny urchins, wavering fronds, crabs creeping sideways on skinny legs – toward the dropoff.
We know, of course, not to swim too far. We know the dangers, what’s down there, what’s out there. What waits, always hungry. Gaping maws. Gaping jaws. Rows of sharp teeth ready to rip and to rend.
We know, but we’re young, we’re confident, we’re having fun. We’re sure nothing bad will happen, not to us. To others, maybe. The careless or unlucky. Or, like Big Ro, the stupidly brave. Thinking he could take on a shark and win; was it any wonder he ended up shreds of gristle?
Shreds of gristle, adrift in dispersing blood.
A memory I could have done without.
A memory easy enough to shake from my head as I propel myself onward. The water parts around me and I am one with it. I’m not wallowing on the shore, trying to get comfortable, heaving my bulk around.
I am sleek, effortless, limber grace.
This is better.
Diving.
Diving is the best.
Selah paces me and Leo brings up the rear. We are well away from the beach now. Well into the bay, slipping through liquid indigo silence.
Silence, but for distant whalesong thrumming and warbling from the deep. The serenades of mating, of mothers calling to their calves, of bulls sounding challenges. It is their music, their melody. Oceanic arias in a cetacean opera.
Peacefulness. Serenity.
If only we could stay here forever.
But, sooner or later, we will have to surface. We are not fish to swim eternally while drawing with gills. We must breathe, and are limited to what air we can hold.
Our bubbles stream and trail and glimmer, rising from us, vanishing. I bump Selah and she bumps me back. We twirl around each other, play-fighting with slaps and swats. Leo joins in. We are a tussling tangle of flippers and slick wet fur, noses bristling with tickling whiskers.
I break from them first, disengage as they wrestle and roil. A small school of herring flit by. I dart and snap and catch one. It wriggles in my mouth. I bite. Fine scales and soft meat and a quick burst of juices. Gulp, gone. I want more, but the school whirls away and a constricting pressure in my ribs tells me it’s about time to ascend.
The sea-ice hangs thick overhead. Pale arctic silver, shades of pure glacial blue. Its underside forms inverted canyons, ridges and ravines. Sunlight beams down in shifting, wavering shafts from jagged cracks and smooth-edged holes.
Up and up, I swim toward the shining gleam. Toward the promise of air, of life-giving breath. I exhale more wobbling bubbles, a billowing cloud of them, seething around me in coursing undulations.
My muzzle splashes up into the bracing cold. I puff out a last pluming gust, my own little imitation of a mighty whale.
White, it is so white and so bright after the beautiful gloaming in the depths! The sides of the hole are sloped, ridged with marks made by others before me who’ve scraped and scoured an
d dug to keep it from closing over. I add my own contribution, the stubby claws at the ends of my flippers gouging at the ice even as my lungs swell with –
I see the sudden lunging shadow and twitch with shock, recoiling.
The twitch saves me.
Something deadly shears past my face, close enough to flick my whiskers. It crashes into the icy edge. There is a miniature blizzard of flying hail but I am already dropping, dropping straight down rump-first with my hind-flippers tucked and my front-flippers folded against my chest.
The shadow looms, menacing, furious, uttering some horrible noise. I curl in a somersault, I dive as fast as I can.
Leo and Selah …
… are not wrestling anymore, but rising themselves, rising side-by-side in tandem. They look good together. It is their moment. Like a dance. A thing of beauty.
Which I ruin by plowing right into them, but I don’t care. I don’t care that Selah actually snaps at me in irritation, or that Leo gawks at me as if I’ve been chewing on the kind of anemones that make bulge-heads swim in circles.
Selah pushes past me. I grapple at her, prod her with my nose. She spins, and this time it is no play-fighting slap. It’s slowed by the water; if we’d been ashore, she would have bowled me over.
Throat-grunting his amusement, Leo slings his muscular body upward. The silvery sheen of his belly-fur flashes. I squeal, but he must think I’m fooling. A strong flex of his hindquarters propels him into the wavering light.
Again, Selah pushes past me. Again, I grapple at her, and again she snaps and slaps at me. Her muzzle wrinkles, black lips peeling back to bare teeth in a snarl, nostrils sealed to shut slits.
I plead with pup-cries, like I haven’t done since we lolled on the ice-floes waiting for our mothers to bring sweet milk and half-chewed fish. Selah hesitates. Her head tilts. I see a grey face in her glossy eye, and realize it is my own.
Then she shakes me off, batting impatiently at my grasping flippers, and surges up after Leo.
He has nearly reached the breathing-hole.
My squeal is so loud and shrill the whales probably hear it in the deep. Selah flinches, glancing down at me.
But Leo pops his head up through the hole in the ice.
The shadow lunges. There is a sound, a terrible sound – a grisly, meaty kind of crunch – and a dark tide of blood floods the water. Leo thrashes, flippers flailing, all his sleek grace and strength gone in a writhing and desperate struggle to escape.
More blood gushes, a great spreading cloud of its hot thick red stink. Leo screams. No, Leo shrieks. His bladder and bowels add more hot floods of fluid. The space beneath the air-hole is a vile, churning turbulence.
There is a second terrible crunch. Leo’s shrieking becomes a gurgle. He convulses. His flippers beat madly at nothing, then go slack. The bulk of his body is yanked from above. It lodges in the hole, caught on the blood-rimmed edging of ice. The ice cracks and crackles.
Whatever’s up there gives another tremendous yank. Blubbery skin squeaks as the widest part of Leo is squeezed through. The rest follows. I have a final glimpse of his hind-flippers, a claw snagging briefly, and then he is gone.
Gone, but the shadow ...
Gone, but the sounds!
The grisly, meaty, crunching, rending sounds.
And the blood. More blood. So much blood. Running like spring meltoff, spring meltoff in steaming, stinking scarlet.
I turn to Selah. Now I see my face in both of her eyes, her eyes so wide they’re like round sea-polished stones. Her muzzle contorts. A thin, tiny whine issues from her throat. It is accompanied by a thin, tiny line of bubbles.
She needs to breathe.
She needs to go up.
Up there? Up there, where blood stains the ice? Where torn skin and gobbets of blubber plop into the sea as the thing that’s killed Leo – there can be no doubt! – is … what? Ripping him to pieces? Eating him?
But Selah needs to breathe.
We swivel, gazes searching the contoured, frozen underside for another opening, finding none. We’ve swum a long way, too far for her to swim back without a fresh lungful of air. She’d never make it.
I jerk my head at the hole above, encouraging her. If she goes now, while the deadly thing is busy with Leo, she can gulp a quick breath. Then we can flee far enough to find safety.
She shrinks from me, wrapping her flippers around herself. She’s trembling, quivering with fear and distress. I don’t blame her. The prospect of surfacing through the warm red salt-wash of Leo’s blood, the way it would feel coating whiskers and fur, the way it would taste … it’s too much. Too much even without risking a similar, violent end.
What is it? What can it be?
I know of sharks, of course. I know of the orca, those lethal black-and-white kindred of the gentler whalesong behemoths.
None of them could be on top of the ice.
Something else is.
A death-bear?
I know of them, have even seen them from a distance. They are big and shaggy, white as the snow. They are land-creatures, but they can swim – unlike us; we are sea-creatures who can go ashore. And they will gladly kill and eat us, if they can.
Death-bears are sly, too. They’ll charge us when we’re on rocks or pebbly beaches, when we’re at our slowest and most ungainly. They’ll slide into the sea and paddle with only their snouts and wet backs poking up, slinking alongside our ice-floes as we’re trying to bask, looking like ice-floes themselves.
If they’ve figured out our system of air-holes …
We have to surface, we have to breathe.
All they’ll have to do is wait.
Selah warbles a small, pitiful sound.
Urgently, almost frantic, I jerk my head. I swat and nudge at her, trying to force her upward, but she resists. She’s too scared. She knows something’s up there. Waiting, just waiting for the next silly seal to stick its nose up.
I find a place where the ice forms an inverted basin, a kind of hollow. I exhale some of my own breath into it and it catches there, held, suspended, a jiggling air-puddle. I push Selah at this instead, working my head and torso under her to boost her the way our mothers did when we were pups having trouble resurfacing on our own.
She finds the pocket of air. It may not be the freshest, but I feel her gasping. Her flipper pat-strokes at me, desperate gratitude.
Desperate, possibly doomed gratitude, because now neither of us have enough breath to last long.
We explore the underside, claws ticking and scraping, hoping to find a spot we might be able to gouge through. But the ice is too thick.
There’s no other choice. If we’re going to make it, if we’re going to live …
I squint up into the hole’s murky brightness. I don’t see any looming shadows. I don’t hear any more menacing growls or awful feeding-noises.
Maybe it’s satisfied and has already gone?
Maybe it took its … kill … with it. Dragging Leo’s mangled corpse away, leaving only a long gory smear. To its lair. To its mate, or its hungry young.
Maybe it’s all right now. Maybe it’s safe.
Maybe just the briefest of bob-up-bob-down peeks, to check. To make sure nothing’s up there … poised and patient … waiting.
Selah won’t do it. I don’t want to, but what else can we do?
A lot of the blood has diffused, so, there’s that.
Of course, sharks and orcas may have scented the bloodspill and be coming already, strong tails whipping sinuous side-to-side or flexing powerfully up and down.
Their jaws. Their teeth. Coming at us out of the blackest depths.
Sharks and orcas won’t wait.
Danger below. Danger above.
Dead either way.
I gather myself. My heart pounds, my muscles tense. Selah watches me, so much fear in her eyes … Leo is dead, and I’ve already given her my breath, and if I die too, she’ll be all alone.
Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound.
No shadow. No noise.
Up!
The water thins, the light brightens, the red-stained ice sparkles and shines. The cold air hits me like a rogue wave. My nostrils flare and my mouth gawps; I suck in as much as my lungs will hold.
The sight almost knocks the breath right back out.
Leo. His belly split open from gullet to tail, layers of blubbery skin folded back to reveal sodden crimson meat and purplish innards. His head hangs back, upside-down, his frost-glazed black eyes staring dead and blank into mine.
The things around him –
They are not death-bears.
They are big, yes, and shaggy, but their pelts are of many mingled kinds and colors. Luxurious ruffs encircle their round, mud-brown, flat faces. They have curved claws like sharp stones, slicing dripping dark hunks of liver-meat to gnash at with short white-ivory nubs.
One of them sees me. A female, I think; it seems to have a pup or youngling clinging to its furs. It thrusts a claw toward me and garbles a loud call. The others whirl. Meat in their teeth, blood on their chins, they rear up on hindlimbs and waggle weird forelimbs.
Then there is a stick, a stick with a claw or a tooth of its own, jabbing at me. I flinch like before. And, like before, the fierce shearing strike passes close enough to tweak my whiskers.
Unlike before, there is another claw-tooth-stick and there is pain!
A vicious, brutal, biting pain!
I squeal.
No, I scream. I shriek like Leo did.
I try to drop but am snagged, snagged on the claw-tooth, and it digs and it grinds and I feel it shudder against bone and my blood pours down into the water as I thrash my body every wild which-way.
A pull.
A pull, and the claw-tooth catches firm, it is barbed, it is hooked, it has me. My flesh tears, my flippers smack rapid panic on the sloped, wet, bloodied ice. I am sliding, sliding upward, out of the sea, out of the hole, I am being dragged up to where Leo is a cold, gutted carcass.