You deserve this, he reminded himself… forced himself to look once more at the faceless, disemboweled cop… but you don’t deserve that.
But what’re you gonna do? What would a ninja do? Your hands are tied and you have no weapons and you can’t move without getting your throat torn out. Well, you’d better figure out something…
What Kewalo said… Something about how they didn’t think he was going to show up… They were coming back, and they wouldn’t do this to him, because they had something worse in store for him.
He thought of that ritual at the construction site… the body roasted in the ground…
Think
Faster
Something…
The dog looked up at him like it could smell his idea. Its surgically bobbed ears twitched and drool overflowed its shitty, bloody muzzle.
The dog was probably the only audience in all the world who would not think any the less of him for what he started doing next.
Tucking his body into a tight ball, relaxing his back vertebra by dislocated vertebra he stretched his neck until his chin rested upon his terror-shriveled package. Tugging off his brine-crusty boxers with his teeth, he closed his eyes and focused on his breathing until he could feel his pelvis dislocate. Then he curled his pelvis up even tighter under his chin, straining and squeezing and oh fuck, something snapped like a rubber band in his lower back, but fuck it, he had no choice, did he?
Push and flex, pull and relax... He stuck his tongue out until he felt like it would tear free of the floor of his mouth, he tickled his own asshole.
He had tried everything else. He got it out once, but when he shoved it back in, it must’ve lodged in the elbow of his colon, or something. In spite of his relaxed attitude towards auto-fellation, he had definite reservations about bad-touching his own sphincter. That his dumper was one-way exit only (except for emergency personal storage) was dogma etched in stone, not because it would mean he was gay, but because it was shit.
He tasted it now, and holy crap, was there ever a good reason for some taboos. The black stuff he’d vomited up had been awful, but SHIT. While he could smell the brown funk of his own backdoor well enough and could taste it all too well, he could only go through with it because his ass was strangely oblivious to all the attention.
Tucking even tighter, until a miasma of fetid methane and toxic chocolate erupted in his face, he forced the tip of his tongue past the puckered ring of tough, scowling muscle and into the surprisingly soft tunnel beyond, so oddly unlike a cunt. The warm, velvety softness was poop, but he gagged and pushed on, tongue like a prodding finger wriggling all the way up against the anterior wall of his colon, desperately massaging his prostate and trying to make a miracle…
The dog came over. Its huge, flat tongue laved his buttcrack like there were Snausages in there. He would have stopped, would have collapsed in a dry-heaving pile of self-hatred or seized up and sent a cracked rib through his lungs, if he gave himself an orgasm, but it still felt like he was rimming the ribeye bone in a steak.
Suddenly, a rolling spasm passed through him, a grand mal convulsion that made him bite his tongue and shit all over the pit bull.
But, he saw through tear-rimmed eyes… it worked.
The plastic bag drugs he’d expelled—twice, now—lay in a lake of chocolate syrup, hanging out of his asshole by the sharp corners of the Zip-Loc mouth. The dog barked at it, crouching on its forelegs like a puppy at play. Zef wiggled his ass a little, causing the dog to pounce on the plastic bag and scarf it down.
Some animals never learn. They’re a lot like people, that way.
Its muzzle began to ooze foam almost immediately. It bounded around the shed, stopping only to frantically hump Detective Bongwater’s corpse. Then it started howling and chasing its own boner—trying to imitate Zef, maybe—and wheezing and coughing up foam, and then it dropped dead happier than anything that ever lived or died on earth.
That wasn’t an orgasm, Zef told himself. Just a muscle spasm. Zero percent homo. The dog did it…
So next, he had to hook a foot under the dead cop’s arm and pull him close enough to sit on and go through his pockets. His slacks were down around his knees. His keys were everything Zef could hope for, with a tiny pepper spray can and all kinds of keys and a little utility knife.
It cut right through the zip-ties. The blood rushing to his hands made him want to cut them off, too. Screaming into the dirt, he made himself get up and go for the door. He didn’t hear anyone outside. The light was watery gray, filtered through a canopy of jungle overgrowth. Through the cracked door, he saw another hut like this one, and red, bare dirt and then jungle and then sky.
He heard nothing outside but crazy bird noises. He opened the door and walked into the barrel of a gun.
It fit in his mouth like he was born to suck guns.
His hands should’ve gone up and he should’ve surrendered, but he spat out the gun and had his hands on the person behind it before they could react. Hugging them close with the gun hand trapped under his arm, he slammed them into the wall.
“Twenty thousand,” said a little brown man with a shaven head and no ears.
“Holy fok, Earwi… Maja, right?”
“My rate go up. Need new partner. You still pay…?”
“Yeah, shit, I pay. And don’t make it look like no fokking accident.”
Maja tossed her head down the slope, towards the village and the sea. “Follow.”
Down a trail that was little more than a rain-cut channel in the spongy red soil. The sun was somewhere in the west.
“Hurry,” Maja said over her shoulder. Running, bare feet slapping earth, muffled gusts of desperate breath. Zef struggled to keep up. His left leg was sore from getting hit by the Jeep, this morning. “Sunset will be too late,” she said.
What the fuck did that mean?
The trail cut across a road flanked by KAPU—KEEP OUT signs. Zef glanced up the road when he passed, saw the lights of a general store, a town. Their town, their store.
I don’t want to kill anyone.
I just want to go home.
There is no home.
The world wants you dead.
The trail went through broken lava rock with tortured hala trees under canopy so dense the fading, failing light was deep, deep green. Maja disappeared into the curtain of leaves hanging down from the trees and Zef followed and when he came through the curtain, he stood on a black beach lit up by clusters of torches.
Girls in grass skirts danced to a languorous rhythm that echoed the waves crashing on the beach. It looked like a luau, except no tourists, no bar and nobody smiling.
A grandmotherly woman stepped forward and hung a lei round Zef’s neck. She wore a grass skirt and no top to cover her drooping breasts. She leaned in to give him a big toothless kiss. Zef recoiled into the arms of another old crone who trapped one of his wrists in a pair of handcuffs. Zef jerked away from her. The first old woman zapped him with a taser so her friend could catch his other wrist.
“Twenty thousand,” Maja said again, but not to Zef. Clad in a canary yellow robe, Yeti came out of the dark between the torches.
“You get it, Maja,” Yeti said. “Mahalo.”
You know that movie, everyone’s seen it, where the guy goes to the island and he tries to save an innocent girl from being sacrificed by a bunch of pagan maniacs, only to find out that the girl’s in on it, and the sacrificial victim on the block is him?
Zef DeGroot never saw that movie.
Kewalo came up behind him and shoved him to the ground. The bare hand slashed his back, flensing off his sweatshirt and laying bare his spine almost exactly where he’d done it before, ripping out Auntie Kalei’s stitches.
Kalei—
They brought her out next, covered in flowers. She walked willingly with them and stood proud and naked on the sand, but the look on her face was sad. She searched the crowd until she saw him, and then she looked even sadder.
She looked yo
unger than Zef now, and more beautiful than the volcano-bitch-goddess who raped him in his dream.
A procession of men in red and yellow robes came out of the dark to surround her. Kewalo made her kneel without quite touching her.
Yeti came up to him, smiling like he was doing Zef a huge favor. “This isn’t exactly tradition, but I think we muddle through, I promise.”
“I was trying to do what you wanted me to. What the fok are you doing?”
“What the hell does it look like? We’re trying to call the gods back.”
Baskets and trays of offerings were laid out around Auntie Kalei. It was a trick, it had to be…
“She’s an old woman. Donny’s mother and nobody knows who the father was, but my father did rituals around her and brought Ka-Moho-Alii into her body to awaken a ghost-god in her womb.
“We got a man, instead. But we’ve worked on the man.If he eats his last tie to his human face, he’ll change and never go back.”
“So he turns into a shark, so what?”
“Not a shark. The king of sharks. The kanaka maoli will know the gods are awake, and return to the old ways. The white man will never know peace in our ocean. The waves that fall on Waikiki will be red with his blood. This place will devour them and drive them out, and the kingdom of Hawai’i will be restored!”
Zef nodded along. It made sense. “Yo, you wanna do that shark-shit, go ahead. What the fok you need me for?”
Yeti balanced on one hand while the other took Zef’s head in it like a softball, and squeezed. “When a chief passed away, a sacrifice was required by the gods. The mu ai kanaka was charged with finding that sacrifice, so whenever a ritual was called for, every able-bodied man in the village took to the mountains.
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to find sacrifices? Tabus of every kind were invented, just to feed the gods. All the tabus meant death by sacrifice, so the mu policed the people, but once you weed out the stupid and the arrogant and the unlucky, you have to start letting foreigners in.”
A cold hand stroked his guts. If he had anything left in it, it would’ve come out now. “Yo, you can’t just, fok, man you can’t let him eat me…”
“Don’t worry,” Yeti said, “you’re not for him, you’re for us.” Resting on his tailbone, he held up a massive obsidian knife. “We cook you, but I promise we won’t eat you.”
“He’s not coming,” Kewalo said.
“Give him a taste,” Yeti said.
Kewalo came over to Zef and admired his the ink on his back. “That’s a nice tattoo, brah. Can I have it?” His finger traced around the crown on Zef’s shoulder, clipping it out like a coupon.
Zef bowed his head, but said nothing.
“I always wanted to get one, but I not like needles. Did it hurt?” Kewalo dragged his hand over the shoulder. Curls of skin backed with a thin sheen of fat sloughed off like sliced cheese.
Kewalo licked his hand, but his eyes were hooded, blank. “Scream, you fucker!”
Zef was aware of the damage and saw the blood arcing out from his bare muscles, but he felt nothing.
“Leave him alone!” Kalei screamed. Her voice sounded hard and haggard. She slashed at her young girl’s nubile body with her nails, making runnels of red down her gently rounded belly.
“I thought you were butt-buddies with Donny,” Zef said.
“Fuck you, brah.” Kewalo peeled Zef’s skin down to the waistband of his boxers.
“He can’t fok girls without eating them, right? So I thought you and him must be like…”
The phrase bit his ear off gets thrown around so much these days, ever since Tyson bit Holyfield, but almost without exception it’s a gross exaggeration. Tyson barely nipped a notch out of Holyfield’s indigestible cauliflower ear.
Kewalo took off Zef’s right ear and a good chunk of his scalp, and he didn’t spit it out. He didn’t gag. He just swallowed it.
It didn’t hurt a bit.
It wasn’t shock, and he wasn’t one of them. He was definitely dying from blood loss, light-headed as his precious fluids gushed out of him. But it didn’t hurt, and that clearly freaked them out.
It should’ve freaked him out, but the answer, right now, was almost a gift.
The fokking hippie…
Fokking leper…
The way he’d traded with that woodcutter in Lahaina… The shit he’d talked in the bus, right before he vanished.
He’d traded him for leprosy? That was a shitty deal. What did he give up?
No, it was bullshit. Relax, dude, Hodad said in his head. This kind of shit only works if you believe in it…
Just then, a massive shadow came out of the trees and into the channel of darkness that lay across the beach.
“Fuckin’ cut it out,” said Donny Nanaue.
The priests encircled Donny, pouring flowers onto the ground at his feet. He suffered them, but his eyes never left the lady on the sand.
“What’s he going to do to her?”
Kewalo laughed. “He gotta do the big change, and he gonna eat her up.”
As Zef talked to Kewalo, he finally succeeded in trapping Maja’s eye. “So like, that’s why you selling him out? Because you’re like mad queer for him, and he’s not into you?” To Maja, he mouthed, thirty thousand.
Kewalo raised a hand and hissed. His teeth had grown so long and thick that he could no longer speak. A spray of saliva was all the response he could muster.
Maja’s eyes brimmed with tears, but she made no response.
Yeti dragged the knife across Kalei’s breasts, sendng rivulets of blood cascading down her chest. Donny pounded his fists into the sand and came charging.
Staring into Maja’s eye, Zef rolled his eyes to indicate the man standing over him, and said, “Isidro.”
Donny roared and ripped off his clothes. He approached Kalei, panting, but then, pawing at his face like he’d drunk poison, he turned from the offerings and charged toward Zef.
A gun went off, then twice more before anyone hit the sand. Maja stood over Kewalo, straining to lift the big smoking automatic in both hands, then emptied the clip into his head as he tried to get up.
Yeti got in the way, chanting and holding a torch of smoking leaves, but Donny swept him aside, spoiling his canary robe with a splash of scarlet.
Three of Yeti’s robed goons overwhelmed Maja. Zef got up and tried to save her, but his right arm wouldn’t do what it was told. It dangled and flopped against his hip like a purse.
Donny waded into them, snapping limbs and biting throats until he freed the assassin. Lifting Maja up over his gaping mouth, he roared until his voice ripped. Blood gushed from his mute mouth.
Zef sat down hard on his left hand, dislocating his thumb. His left hand slid free of the cuffs and popped painlessly back into place. With his one working arm, he frantically searched the sand where he’d seen Maja drop the gun.
Yeti pranced around Kalei on his hands, leading a guttural chant that seemed to egg Donny on.
Donny twisted an arm and a leg out of their sockets, eliciting only a sigh of agony from the assassin. Jaws working like he was singing to himself, he flung Maja into the jungle and turned to look for someone else. His eyes were black, empty but for the reflected torchlight.
Yeti advanced on Donny and held up a cutlet of breast flesh at him. Donny turned, aroused by the familiar scent even in his blood-glutted state. He caught the gobbet of flesh and wolfed it down. His mouth seemed to eat his face until he was all snout and teeth. He looked round and saw Zef just as he found Maja’s purse.
Donny came lurching at him, jaws snapping, but his legs stopped working all at once. He fell on his belly and thrashed in a frenzy to get at Zef. His hands pawed the black sand as if he’d forgotten how to use them. His forearms blackened and split open to slough off at the elbow, leaving his upper arm flat blades of muscle.
Zef turned the purse inside out, dumping ruined cosmetics and notebooks and bits of trash, and then finally a loaded clip for the Berett
a.
A piglike grunting came from his twitching gill slits as Donny scooped up one of his discarded arms and then the other, gobbling them up as he came closer, crawling on fins and half-fused feet.
Zef stared into his abyssal eyes as he tried to work the unfamiliar automatic one-handed and he thought, thank God for leprosy!
But he wasn’t just infected with it. He suddenly had it, but he hadn’t given up anything that he knew of for the dubious gift.
He remembered what Hodad said when he asked him how he got the disease.
Traded a guy for it.
He wouldn’t say what he got in return.
In the black, flat eyes on the mottled gray monstrosity humping towards him, he saw nothing like humanity, but he could see agony and rage and something else no one else could understand.
Donny Punani didn’t want pain without the release of death, immortality as a ravening beast. He didn’t want to be a ghost-god. The King of Sharks. He’d rather be nothing.
You’re no fokking ninja, but what is a ninja, anyway? A killer, skillful, silent, utterly in control. To be all those things, you can’t be full of yourself. To be so full of all that good shit, there’s no room for a self, at all. So, to be a ninja was like trying to be a shark.
Zef reached out with his working hand to stall Donny for just a moment, long enough to meet his eye and say, “Wanna trade?”
Donny kept coming, his mouth wide enough to bite Zef in half.
Zef stuck his gun in Donny’s face. Donny’s massive jaws surged out of his gaping mouth and closed over Zef’s left arm up to the elbow, then bit it off.
Zef fell on his ass, screaming and sobbing and hugging his stump, but once the shock of seeing it happen wore off, it was no more painful than a lost phone or a parking ticket.
Inside Donny, Zef’s severed arm spasmodically twitched, pulling the Beretta’s trigger until the clip was empty. A string of muffled pops, and Donny belched cordite fumes and vomited blood. Then another bang, and the flat gray top of his head bulged and split open. One of his eyes popped out.
He sighed and slumped to the sand and died less than a foot from the high tide line.
Repo Shark Page 21