Dead Bait

by Romana Baotic (ed. )

  I see the tiny stand of kelp in shallower water and give it a wide berth, even though only a couple of the strands actually touch the surface. No point in tempting fate.

  When I can put my feet on the bottom, I start wading, skipping my little ritual. Arrogance; thinking I might have any real idea what it’s like to live in the ocean. Waist deep, I turn and look out over the waves, finally spitting the mouthpiece out to take a deep, unobstructed breath. The ocean seems less friendly, more alien than it did this morning. Knowing what lurks under that surface isn’t at all reassuring. My ancestors left something of themselves in the water and the Swarm picked it up to scuttle on.

  A shiver runs up my spine and I push through the water back up onto the beach, out of the water, waves lapping at my feet. I feel a bit of movement on my right thigh and look down to see three sand crabs poking at the neoprene. Given time and enough claws, they might cut through. I brush them away and run hands all over my body, knocking at least a dozen more hitchhikers free to run for shelter.

  One of them turns back after a few scuttling steps and reaches out with its one large claw to grab for my left flipper. My lips curl in a snarl and I lift the foot to grind it into the sand, but my mind hauls up images: tiny crustacean bodies skipped like stones across the waves, smashed against rocks for fun, skewered on hooks to use as bait, left to dry out forgotten in a corner somewhere, or a bucket, or a pocket. No less of an impact second hand.

  Maybe it’s time to teach the Swarm something different. I try not to think about the cliché.

  I lower my foot, carefully distant from the crab, and reach down to scoop it up in one gloved hand, using the other to pull off my mask. Bringing it up to eye level, I stare at it, this minute fragment of an immense mind. Tiny black eyes wave back and forth on olive-colored stalks, scanning my entire face, I think. Is the whole Swarm watching through those eyes? Expecting an evil laugh as I crush it in my hand?

  I can’t project my thoughts and I guess it can’t hear them. It definitely can’t understand my words, but maybe language doesn’t matter, only what we do. The Swarm knows people by our actions, so I’ve only got one way to give it a message.

  Putting one knee in the sand to steady myself, I lower my hand until it’s flat against the beach. The eye stalks keep waving back and forth, but otherwise it stays rock still in my palm. Then, so suddenly that I almost jump, it moves off toward the surf, not stopping to look back and I don’t know why part of me expects that human reaction.

  I stand up to watch the crab run for the waves and wonder what it will make of my action. We can be cruel, but we don’t have to be, and I’m not. That’s the message I want the Swarm to have, but what message came through?

  I’ve found the secret of this stretch of coast. I know why people disappear and die here. I’ve seen the heart of the Swarm and lived to walk on the beach again. What comes next?

  My stomach growls. The sun is lower in the sky than it should be, and I’ve had a good workout this afternoon. Next is dinner. I turn my back on the waves and trudge up to my jeep.

  LOBSTER STEW

  by

  Gregory L. Norris

  There were two Bruce Marionvilles.

  The first smiled in the face of most kitchen disasters and could usually be counted upon to right the day’s wrongs.

  The second had a significantly darker side. That Bruce routinely cut the liquor with water, sometimes recycled uneaten portions of baked vegetables, slaw and even seafood from one plate to another to cut down on overhead, and for the past ten years had skimmed from the Claw & Slaw’s profits to cover his secret identity. Gambling was the worst of his vices, though after turning the big Four-O there’d been women at a motel fifty miles down the coast, usually two of them at a time, one for each of the Bruces, and they carried a hefty price tag for the acrobatic services rendered.

  There were two Bruces, both of them kind, one kind to all the wrong people. Marnie-Rae fell in love with the first, but married the second and was none the wiser. Eleven years later, the color was leeching out of her blonde hair in great gray strokes. The flawless skin of her face sagged off her cheekbones. Her ass had gone doughy, forcing her to renounce the tight prisons of denim that had once contained it so beautifully. Now, she wore stretch pants – appropriately named, he often thought to himself with a humorless chuckle, because of the many marks they hid. She was no longer the woman he’d exchanged I-Do’s with, on the same pier where the Claw & Slaw bought its catch of the day, freshest in all of Pelican Cove – unless, known only to the Bruces, the person who ordered fried shrimp before you didn’t clean their plate completely.

  Mostly, it was the way she smiled that burned him. Her ass had gone to hell in a bottomless all-you-can-eat sized hand basket. Her face was varicose with tiny red veins, and her hair, he sometimes swore, was whitening before his very eyes. But that friggin’ smile of hers was as glowing and welcoming these days as it had been at the beginning, when one Bruce fell in love with her and the other her small trust fund, enough money to buy a lobster shack, right on the water.

  Good old Marnie-Rae, grinning ear to ear, whether slaving behind the grill, waiting on their summer tourist customers, or cleaning up after the slobs, who’d apparently learned their table manners in a pig pen. As the close of the summer season loomed, she still had no clue that the Claw & Slaw had done its worst season yet, the profits down almost twenty grand on the previous year’s earnings, a drop in take that would matter significantly once the very-long winter descended on Pelican Cove. She didn’t know because there were two Bruces, and that one of them had lost five hundred bucks betting on a baseball game and another grand on the first week of college football.

  But the first Bruce would make things right, the way he always did.

  Both Bruce Marionvilles were on the pier smoking a rare cigarette, standing with their mutual back and one foot planted flat against the shack, the other on the ancient planks, when the opportunity came to save their lives from economic ruin.

  The Atlantic beyond churned through the dregs of a hurricane that had taken a spin up the coast, stirring a soupy fog the likes of which Bruce couldn’t remember in his ten years in Pelican Cove. Through it, he heard the chug of Gordon Hewitt’s lobster boat. Heard it, but didn’t actually see it until the weathered old sea beast was nearly on top of the pier.

  The Josie McGhee materialized out of the fog, a ghostly silhouette riding the swollen waves. Bruce flicked his half-smoked butt over the pier and righted. The Josie McGhee, named long before Gordie Hewitt became her skipper, and likely after some Pelican Cove piece of ass planted under the daisies long ago in Pine Grove Cemetery, coasted up to the mooring along the pier. The old boat never fully coalesced out of the fog, any more than the surrounding seascape had following two days of driving rain.

  Captain Crustacean – the first Bruce’s nickname for Hewitt – sauntered out of the boat’s wheelhouse, looking more phantom than man.

  “What’s the good news today, Gordie?”

  At first, Hewitt didn’t answer. He, like his boat, lingered out of focus in the fog.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Bruce said.

  Hewitt’s large hands, which had shelled infinite muscles and danced around the pincers and claws of Homarus Americanus, the mightily-priced lobster, glowed white in the morning’s overcast, adding to the illusion that the other man was one of the deceased. His long face, with its bristle of chin stubble looked pallid and shaken.

  “It’s the goddamndest thing,” the other man eventually said. “That bitch of a storm’s really stirred things up out there. I lost half my traps.”

  Bruce ambled closer to the dock and tipped his eyes from the back of the wheelhouse to the deck. The big plastic bins, usually crawling with angry lobsters, their claws neutralized by rubber bands, sat empty. “Shit man, I’m so sorry,” he said. Then he saw the tarp stretched across the deck. “What’s…?”

  “That?” Hewitt said. “I think I caught the
Old Chief.”

  Bruce and Marnie-Rae Marionville had spent an eternity sweating out a living during the tourist season and spending it to the last cent over the off. To most of Pelican Cove however, the owners of the Claw & Slaw were relative newcomers, awarded a single notch of community acceptance above that given to the visitors who spent their vacation money around the sheltered seaside town. Still, it was long enough to have learned about the Old Chief. Every town that makes its living off the water has a big fish story, and the legend of a giant lobster was Pelican Cove’s.

  Old, because the tall tale had enjoyed plenty of spin over the years. Sightings in the late ‘70s spiked on the heels of the shark scare delivered by Steven Spielberg’s don’t-swim-in-the-ocean big screen bloodbath. A similar panic occurred during the 1950s, when Pacific atolls were routinely being fried by American mushroom clouds – a spate of black and white theatrical junk about giant ants, praying mantises, and fifty foot-tall chicks in torn animal print, circus tent bikinis had polarized people away from the sugary stretch of Little White Beach, all the way up to the rocky headlands.

  Chief, the Bruces remembered, due to the politically awkward belief that, if you ever found a stewpot big enough to drop the fucker into once you caught him, he’d come out of that boiling soup redder than the reddest Injun.

  “You caught…” Bruce stammered.

  Ghost-faced Gordie Hewitt nodded and aimed a pale, chewed-up hand toward the tarp. Then the boat shook with a muffled ka-thump as whatever was beneath the tarp kicked.

  And the thing was big.

  That stink.

  Bruce had smelled it hundreds of times over the past decade, but never in such high concentration. The putrid fetor of spoiled seafood. It permeated the space around the dumpster on stagnant summer days. Sometimes, it oozed out of one of the refrigerators. Here, it was many times worse, because it was right in his face, on his clothes, his hands. While carrying it into the restaurant he thought, who needs nukes? Lob this sunna-bitch into the heart of a battlefield and the troops will drop faster than if they were sucking on a cocktail of mustard gas and Sarin.

  “Hooked itself in one of the lines after smashing the trap. Took me most of the morning to haul it in. I thought I had me a killer whale thrashing about ‘til I seen it.”

  The line was still coiled around one of its plate-sized claws, only now it was wound tightly and tied off in a sailor’s knot. Somehow, Hewitt had gotten duct tape around the other. Bruce saw that the other man had taken several gouges to his hand from its scurrying legs. It – the Old Chief, if that’s what it really was – was the size of a coffee table and the weight of a medium-sized dog. Its tail snapped like an alligator’s. Bruce hugged the horror’s ass-end against his gut, happy to leave the claws and whipping antennae for Gordie to corral.

  Up the pier, past the barnacle-encrusted rocks, over a stretch of sand, they finally reached the restaurant’s back exit. They entered unseen, which was just the way Bruce wanted it. This was his big fish now. It would save his ass. Luckily, Hewitt wanted to dump the thing just as fast as he could and return to the clamming bed on the far side of Little White Beach.

  Five hundred bucks to own the biggest fish in Pelican Cove; hell, perhaps in terms of the species, across the entire planet. He’d pegged the giant lobster at somewhere between fifty and sixty pounds; a big old puke who’d weathered plenty of storms, perhaps hundreds of hurricanes, but Hurricane Bruce would be his last. The Old Chief would be spending his final storm simmering in a sea of bubbles and drawn butter, and this king of all crustaceans was going to make the Marionvilles rich. At least Bruce Marionville and his alter ego.

  A contest. No, an auction! Certainly, nature freaks from across the globe were bound to pay outlandish sums to save the Old Chief from the lobster pot. Take him away to some ocean sanctuary to be studied, or tag him and toss him back in the drink. The publicity alone…the Claw & Slaw would be overwhelmed during the big off-season, perhaps into the next tourist season. Hell, all seasons! A book deal – sure, why not? Especially in a tabloid society where every celebrity with a sex tape or mother with more than triplets can become a media sensation. Bruce Marionville had debunked a local legend by proving it real. Book deals and TV documentaries and world records and who knew what else awaited him. All of it was quickly adding up to a small fortune in his mind. He owned the equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot or el Chupacabra.

  The Old Chief was his.

  They got it into the lobster tank, a hundred-gallon nightmare Bruce had griped about from the moment Marnie-Rae insisted it be installed three springs earlier. The oblong wall, comprised of a glorified fish tank and a base of decorative glass bricks, didn’t match the rest of the shack’s rustic décor: picnic table seating, walls covered in netting, an old Styrofoam marker, a brass compass and a wooden figurehead that had scandalously flashed her left boob, complete with erect nipple, for decades.

  The lobster tank, separating the register from the dining area and customers, had never contained more than twenty lobsters at the most during the height of the season, because Marnie-Rae had insisted whatever was in there at any given time have enough room to move around, to stretch its legs.

  A half dozen stragglers from Captain Crustacean’s last visit huddled in one corner of the tank. Marnie-Rae had threatened to release them back into the Atlantic if at least six customers didn’t order whole lobsters over the next few days. Just march out to the pier and drop them right into the drink, even knowing they’d paid well for them.

  The Old Chief went over the edge of the tank and into the water. The act of maneuvering it into place had been nothing short of Herculean and left both men soaked, along with the floor after the new addition to the tank raised the water level to overflowing. One of the beast’s legs ripped the plastic edging off the top of the tank as it went in.

  Bruce glanced down to see his shirt in tatters. He was scratched and bleeding and there was lobster tank spill-off all over his floor, but he had no idea how long the Old Chief could live outside water and couldn’t risk letting it die. Not now.

  Its belly flop into the tank sent the other lobsters out of their huddle and scurrying. Bleeding and panting for breaths that wouldn’t come fully or easily, Bruce watched the much-smaller creatures, a mix of one-and-a-quarter chicken lobsters and two-pound and up selects, dart away from the monstrosity. They flew ass-over-end, some crashing their carapaces into the tank’s farthest wall. But there was no escaping the Old Chief; as it tumbled and stretched out, landed onto its back and scrabbled off it and righting itself. It filled most of the hundred-gallon space, reminding Bruce of those hideous animal rights photos of veal cows in tiny pens.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. No, that came when the Old Chief’s twitching alien eyes darted toward him, and for a split-second he couldn’t shake the thought that it wasn’t a lobster at all, but some sinister demon that had been stirred out of the deep ocean muck by the hurricane’s surge.

  The black, quarter-sized eyes lacking irises and the bumps across the creature’s exoskeleton briefly froze Bruce where he stood. Icy water soaked through his moccasins. In contrast, his abdomen, forty-years old now and just beginning to droop over his belt, burned hotly from his welts. And the legendary thing he hoped would make him rich, peered at him with what could only be described as hatred, in its eyes.

  *

  He paid Gordie by check. The second Bruce wanted everything clean and legit, and a check would prove ownership of the cryptozoologist’s dream sloshing angrily about in his lobster tank. Even so, he threw an extra fifty in cash at Captain Crustacean and hurried him toward the exit. Before long, Bruce figured, he’d have a hell of a cushion to cover so generous a donation to his local lobsterman.

  The Claw & Slaw’s kitchen door banged shut behind Gordie, and Bruce was grateful for the privacy though not the terrible silence that followed. He shot a look toward the wall clock to see he had about two hours before Marnie-Rae was due to arrive for her shift
. She would come in bubbly. He imagined her smiling as she set tables, turned on burners, stirred chowder in the stewpot, set soft bakery rolls and butter in little wooden baskets, made salads, served plates to their few walk-in customers. Would she still be smiling, he wondered, when she saw the puddle of water an inch deep around the lobster tank, or when she locked eyes on what brooded inside.

  Bruce dragged the mop and bucket out of its alcove. A few seconds after he started swabbing up the mess, he stopped and pondered.

  The second Bruce Marionville, the one who drained the ketchup bottles to the last possible glop, who urinated on hookers in the shower of that seedy hotel room, who routinely considered arson as a viable approach to escaping both his marriage to Marnie-Rae and his indentured status to the restaurant, that Bruce did a happy little dance in his waterlogged shoes. Once the money rolled in, he’d leave her. Leave the Claw & Slaw and Pelican Cove and start a new life, likely kicking it off with two more shady ladies and a super-sized bet. College football, most-definitely.

  A clatter of breaking glass shocked Bruce out of his reverie. He spun in the direction of the restaurant’s dining area, sure the Old Chief had forced its way through the lobster tank’s walls. Still holding the mop by its handle, he spun around, only to see the tank intact and its hideous occupant leering at him with its black eyes.

  A breeze of salty air teased Bruce’s face. He followed it to its source. The ghost was an ocean mist, creeping in through a sizeable break in the front door’s glass, from the height of a man’s knee on down. Chunks of broken glass littered the floor, and the rest of the pane had a decent spider web running through it. Replacing that pane would cost a small fortune. Bruce leaned down and scanned the floor. No rock, no dive bombing bird, no obvious reason why the glass was broken.