Repo Shark

by Cody Goodfellow

  Finally, his head broke the surface. He gulped air and hacked up briny snot and knuckled his eyes, but there was nothing to see.

  There was no land. Before and behind him were rolling black swells and a bunch of unoccupied surfboards. When he looked in the direction the waves were headed, he saw a sight to make him cry. The black cliffs of Maui were maybe a quarter mile away. And the tide was pulling him out…

  Something brushed his leg hard enough to shred his track pants and break the skin. “Fok!”

  Surfboards.

  Zef flailed over to the nearest floating object, a longboard in a travel sack, and dragged himself halfway onto it. The wind was colder than the water, but it was a wet cold, and it didn’t feel good enough he could fall asleep and die. He shivered and spastically ate his own lips, but he willed himself to put his arms in the water and start paddling.

  Was he doing it? He couldn’t feel his arms. Maybe they were paddling right now. The board was moving, at least.

  It wasn’t just moving, it was jerking around.

  He dipped a hand in the water and something tugged on him. He kicked out and shouted, “Fok you!” but inside, he almost welcomed being eaten.

  But there were worse things than sharks in the ocean.

  “Hey bro,” Bagby gasped. He dog-paddled over. “Dude, how sick was that shit?”

  Zef’s head weighed a thousand pounds. His body was one big cramp. But he reached out for Bagby and took hold of his dreadlocks and held him under.

  The hands came clawing at him, but they were too weak, and with no leverage, they just batted at him. Bubbles kept coming. How could someone who smoked so much dagga have so much air in his lungs? They kept coming, and Zef kept fighting until something snatched Bagby out of his grip and the water got about ten degrees warmer, for a while.

  Peace at last. He curled up on the board just as the nose went under and water sloshed up his nose.

  Something was tugging on it, pulling it down. A wavelet slopped over the nose of the board into his face.

  He was on the neoprene surfboard bag with Isidro’s mangled corpse in it. Something was tearing the bag apart to get at Isidro, who was probably leaking a blood slick sharks could taste from here to Easter Island.

  The board tilted almost vertical and Zef rolled off. A sleek snout butted against his chest. He punched it, elbowed another, but they pushed right past him to get at Isidro.

  Another longboard came slicing down the next swell and Zef threw an arm over it, thinking, If you’re a shark, fine, just eat me, I don’t care—

  The board tugged Zef along after it and bore his weight graciously, dragged him until he flopped out of the water onto it.

  He’d surfaced between sets, mercifully, but now, the ocean drew itself up into a mountain to dwarf the coastal cliffs. Zef clung to the board and steered as best he could with his hands. As it gathered mass and force, the swell became a wall that Zef sledded down on a toothpick.

  He raced to the bottom and pivoted desperately out of the pit when the wall began to bow under its own weight to form a tube. He felt weightless. The board was as big as a battleship, the wave moved as fast as ice cream melting. Eyes closed, navigating entirely by his inner ear, he rose up onto his knees, and then his feet.

  The highest cliff was crowned with a broken guardrail. Maybe two hundred yards off and the distance was shrinking fast and there was a break in the cliffs, way off to the left. Maybe an inlet from one of the hundreds of fucking waterfalls, or maybe a nice, soft sandy beach…

  The tube was eating up the ocean like a jet turbine, collapsing at his back and gaining on him. He kept cutting back and down and away from the gnawing mouth of the wave and he was surfing, he was fucking surfing a winter wave on the north shore of Maui at a spot that made Pipeline look like a fucking kiddie pool, and where were the crowds?

  His legs buckled, muscles seizing up with cramps. Zef nearly went down on one knee but he would wipe out and get swept onto the rocks he could see now, black teeth as tall as the board was long, lava rock fangs that would rip him wide open for the fish to nibble.

  There was no getting around the point. The cliff face loomed up to block out the driving rain and it was the blackest black he’d ever seen. The cliff seemed to rise up like a mighty hand to clap the rushing slapping hand of the wave and he’d be crushed in between them, crushed and burst open and aerosolized in a burst of red spray.

  He backed up on the board until the nose tipped up perilously, shimmying under him and he was going to wipe out, and before him the wave breaking on the rocks—

  It didn’t break. It flowed right into that black cliff face’s gaping maw like a tongue into a mouth, so black so dark he never saw what swallowed him.

  Falling down to hug the board, deafened by the booming artillery roar of the wave pounding up the narrowing tunnel, he put his head down and closed his eyes. It would happen any moment now…

  He lay in still shallows and felt the wave’s gentle tickling kiss as it rolled back down the smooth bore of the lava tube, leaving him facedown on sand like black kitty litter, crawling up to where it was dry and soft and melting and soaking into the sand.

  Down in the tube, in perfect blackness, he felt cut off from everything, even himself. His thoughts wouldn’t come in words. His emotions wouldn’t come at all. It was most disturbing, like how your radio goes dead when you go through a tunnel. Like his ideas and feelings, his essential personality, was coming from somewhere else, and his body only a radio playing a program that, he suddenly realized, was almost constantly an unbearable asshole of the lowest caliber.

  The TV doctor was right about him. He was a hole filled with bullshit. He’d wasted his whole life to become something he’d hoped would simultaneously disgrace and impress his father. And for what?

  He’d killed the fucker, hadn’t he? Donny Nanaue had to be fucking dead. Zef saw the minivan go into the ocean, and he never came up. Just like he’d seen the motherfucker take a bullet to the chest and wreck a truck and come back crooning. For him to still be alive now, the crazy bullshit Hodad and Auntie Kalei said would have to be true, which was funny as hell.

  So why wasn’t he laughing?

  He thought of that chicken the old witch had buried, and now he knew it wasn’t any kind of magic trick. They were just stupid, so dumb you could make them look at something and forget all else while you buried them alive. He knew exactly how it felt. He wondered if he went back, if the chicken was still alive down in the earth, still staring at that spot, waiting for a worm.

  Maybe if you dig up the chicken and eat it, you could get your soul back.

  That wasn’t funny.

  So why was he laughing?

  Was he laughing? He heard laughter… but it sounded like an old woman, far away…

  Too tired to move, too cold to sleep, he lay there until certainty that something was creeping up on him or would come out of the surf after him overpowered his fatigue.

  Hot. Dripping not seawater, but sweat. Was he dreaming, or was this a fever? He felt the cold sea leaving his clothes as steam. He sank into lava rock that softened into yielding, perfumed ladyflesh that sighed when it closed over his head.

  Crawling and moaning deliriously, he made his way up the lava tube. The dreamy softness trailed off and the floor became unyielding stone. The tunnel sloped more steeply, following the path that a vein of superheated magma had taken through the softer shale and sand to reach the coast. Too weak to stand yet, every few minutes he lay down to rest for a few hours, drifting in a semi-conscious fugue where Dr. Bill lectured him and Yeti cut chunks off his ass to bait fishhooks.

  Somehow, he found himself crawling again. He thought he could see light, though he’d forgotten what light looked like, what seeing felt like… And then he bumped into a wooden railing, scabbed with paint and wobbly in its concrete foundation, but definitely manmade.

  Something flew in his face. Hundreds of somethings. He choked back a scream, terrified they’d fly into h
is mouth. Did Hawaii have bats? Running for the light, he stumbled up a flight of stairs, pulling himself up into green undergrowth dripping with dew and rosy gray predawn light and fuck you, stupid world, yet again you have failed to kill me.

  Lying on his back in the grass, he watched a swirling cloud of butterflies or moths come streaming out of the lava tube. His hands and face were feathered with shredded sapphire wings speckled with flecks of silver so pure he could see his reflection in them. Fok, you couldn’t scratch your ass in Hawaii without killing something beautiful.

  The tube looked like a retired tourist trap, with a rusty sheet-metal hut, picnic area and chainlink fence collapsed under the weight of the jungle. Past the hut, he saw why it wasn’t still entertaining visitors.

  The trees partially hid a short field with about a hundred purple marijuana plants taller than Zef. Punani probably had patches like this all over the North Shore. It was way too much for local consumption. The fucker was killing casino moguls and eating Mexican gangsters to stop them exploiting his people, while grooming a massive cash crop of shit more potent than opium.

  Dirt road outside passed by little cabins cut into the mountainside. He crept past these, then crawled around flooded fields where they grew that purple shit Auntie Kalei cooked. He saw cars up on blocks, chickens and pigs roaming free, but no people.

  He made it to the foot of the mountain without encountering anyone. The dirt road came out of a stand of banana trees that he raided, and he found himself on a paved road.

  He had to figure anyone and everyone he encountered for an enemy. He was wearing a hoodie and boxer shorts and nothing else. Also, he was a fugitive from a crime scene with at least six dead bodies, and a drowned VW microbus with maybe three more.

  He’d lost the gun and the phone. He had no idea where Donny was holed up and no way to do the job. He had to get the fuck out of here, get off this island, let Dr. Bill do his worst. There had to be a way to hang this around his neck, but right now, he wanted only to get out.

  The road took him around a rocky bend and into the murky red-gray glow of a rising sun buried under storm clouds. A little shrine of neatly mortared lava bricks had a cross on it, but under its peaked roof, he found plates of fish, Spam, candy and coconut cups of inflammable booze set up in front of a row of tiki fetishes.

  The biggest one was a black humanoid figurine with a mouth for a head, studded with shark teeth. Thinking, fuck you, Hodad, Zef drained the booze and took the shark tiki, hefting it like a club.

  Something like a village, with a baseball field and a general store and a little chapel of rough-hewn blocks of rosy coral, but all the signs in Hawaiian and no people at all. After the church, the road just gave up, with thorny trees and spears of lava rock pointed at the waves like some kind of barrier.

  He saw a white car coming and he dropped on his belly behind a rock, but then he jumped up and came running.

  The postal Jeep was covered in bumper stickers and he could see flowers piled up in the back. He ran out in front of it and waved his arms and ran for the driver’s side, remembering that there was no passenger door.

  She didn’t stop. He turned to jump out of the way when she hit him and threw him across the road. The tiki flew from his hands into the undergrowth.

  He landed rolling. He couldn’t see her, but he heard sandals slapping wet pavement, felt someone turn him over.

  “Yo, Auntie Kalei, wotthfok… you gotta…”

  “What do I gotta?” Kewalo asked.

  “Fok! Help—”

  Kewalo’s hand covered his mouth. He felt thousands of tiny teeth bristle against his skin, ready to take his face off. “Tried to tell you, haole boy,” the shark-man said. “We love trouble.”

  He woke up to kisses. Earnest, passionate kisses.

  Dog kisses.

  Tongue like a big man’s hand slathered up the side of his face and forced in between his lips. He spit, cursed, tried to bite the tongue. Growl he could feel in his bowels.

  His hands were tied behind his back with plastic zip-ties, and something tied his bonds to a wooden post in some kind of sheetmetal shed.

  “I fucking knew it,” someone said. “I knew I’d find you here. I knew your fucking wigger ass would be jungled up with these fucking savages.”

  Zef shook his head and strained to see past his crooked nose. Silver-blue pit bull with a head like a claw hammer sat at attention in front of him.

  The livid, sunburned face hanging beside him in the dark sneered and spat in his eye.

  Detective Bongwater.

  “What the fok you doing here, Five-Oh?”

  Bongwater shrugged. “I heard what happened to Yolo. I knew you and your party pals were fucking shit up out here. So I came over off the clock…”

  Zef choked on a high, unbearable giggle. “Yeah,” he said, looking at the chains the Honolulu cop was hanging from, “you one hell of a clever detective.”

  “I figured your shit out pretty quick.”

  “If you weren’t the dirtiest cop in these islands, you could’a done something about it, too.”

  “You and your fucking pineapple-head friends cut off the whole pipeline. There’s nothing coming in, and the fucking Mexicans and the Chinks are killing each other, because your fucking friends opened a new front in the drug war.”

  “I tried to fokking tell you before, I’m not with them. I just came out here for the fokking bike…”

  Bongwater wasn’t hearing him. Tossing his head and snapping his chains taut, he tried to rip down the wall. “Locals all hang together, even fucking Doris. These fucking native sovereignty nuts are just another gang. Think they’re gonna take over and push us out of our own fucking country.”

  “This ain’t your fucking country.” Kewalo walked into the shed. A big, dull-witted guy followed him—Peapea’s understudy. The pit bull cowered.

  Kewalo came over to the cop and smiled at him.

  Even hobbled and bound on his knees, the cop came up to his shoulder. He threw himself at Kewalo like a junkyard dog on a short leash. “You pigfucking sonofabitch—”

  Kewalo grinned and shrugged. “We didn’t think repo ninja boy’d show up, but now we got him, we don’t need you, no more.”

  “Cut me loose, you half-nigger island trash, and I’ll snap your fucking neck like a twig.”

  “I not one fighter,” Kewalo murmured, leaning in close. His skin rippled and broke out in goosebumps like tiny catclaw teeth. His bare, almost childish hand reached out to touch the cop on the crown of his skull.

  Bongwater whipped his head around, trying to headbutt or bite. Under Kewalo’s feather-light touch, his skin came unzipped and sloughed away bananapeel easy from his skull to fall over his eyes in a shiny pink blindfold.

  The cop’s screams went up so high only the pit bull could hear them. The dog whined and lunged, but the big guy caught his collar.

  You had to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

  “Look how he bunched up his cheeks,” Zef said. “I bet he’s smuggling drugs.”

  “We better find out,” Kewalo said. “If he holding, it go bad when he get where he wen go.”

  The big guy untied the cop from the wall and dropped a knee like a telephone pole on his back to pin him to the dirt floor. Kewalo went up behind him.

  “I’ll talk, I’ll tell you anything, you motherfucker, but please don’t...”

  “I don’t want to know anything, but what you got up there,” Kewalo said, patting himself down. “Shit, I ain’t got no gloves. You ain’t got no diseases or needles or other sharp objects up in there, right, Five-Oh?”

  “Please, God, stop them, make them stop…”

  “You must be crazy.” Kewalo wiggled his fingers in the cop’s face. His fingernails seemed to grow into claws like teeth. “Gods love this kind of shit.”

  Without preamble or benefit of lube, Kewalo fisted the cop, whose screams became so unreal, the pit bull latched itself onto his shoulder and shook him to shut him up.
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  “You lied to me,” Kewalo said, pulling his fist out. A few feet gnarled gray intestine popped out of the ruined sphincter. “Ain’t nothing up there nobody wants.”

  Zef stared in horror, relief and guilt, and he still wanted to laugh.

  The big guy pulled the pit off Bongwater’s arm. Kewalo came around to kneel in the cop’s face. Weeping, mewling like a crushed kitten, Bongwater whined, “Please…”

  The big guy made worried Hawaiian noises. Kewalo snapped at him, turned and sank his teeth into the cop’s cheek. A long, gray tongue rasped up the cheek, flaying meat off bone like steel wool on whipped cream.

  Still blinded, the cop struggled, but it was pathetic, like leaning into it, wanting only to end it. He tried to make words, but Kewalo licked his lips off. Biting away the flap of scalp covering his eyes, Kewalo sucked one and then the other out of its socket, popping them in his mouth with inhuman relish.

  Kewalo stood up. His mouth split his whole face to his ears, but still couldn’t contain all his teeth. “We gotta check you next,” Kewalo said as he turned to leave, “but I be gentle this time, I promise.”

  The pit bull barked at the cop’s ravaged rectum, then clamped onto the dangling length of bowel and entertained itself with a game of tug of war.

  And the cop kept crying.

  You deserve this.

  None of this would have happened without you thinking you were the shit, trying to play fokking Scarface. Look what it got you. Look what it got a whole bunch of people who otherwise might have been alive.

  Some nice Japanese lady came all the way over here to get married and fok only knows how much it costs over there, where a watermelon is like a hundred fucking dollars… And in the middle of getting her pictures taken, a bullet falls out of the sky and knocks her brains out in the groom’s face.

  Would the world be a better place without me?

  The pit bull was throwing up its dinner of raw, unwashed human intestines. But getting sick only seemed to make it friskier, and now that Detective Bongwater had finally passed away, it was interested in him.