by C. McGee
• Solution #3: I could open the remaining tranquilizers, crack the hatch, drop them in, and hope that the stupid mongooses lap them up or pass out from the fumes.
— Critique of Solution #3: No, not a good option. It seems unlikely to succeed and very likely to result in me accidentally lacerating or sedating myself.
• Solution #4: I could paddle like hell.
— Critique of Solution #4: With the Kauai coast less than two miles away, I might be able to reach land before they scratch a hole in the bottom of the boat or through the foam bulkhead divider and into the cockpit. Not an ideal option, but less horrible than all the others. Plan.
Having decided upon a course of action, I immediately began paddling as hard and fast as possible. While urging myself onward, I attempted to concentrate on consoling thoughts. Only one came: The mongooses are just waking up from eighteen hours of anesthesia, I told myself. They’ll be groggy. They won’t be able to inflict much damage.
That thought turned out to be laughably incorrect.
The noise grew steadily as time ticked by. Within a quarter of an hour, there was a veritable symphony of scratching sounds coming from the compartment behind my seat. Doing my best to ignore the ominous racket, I paddled onward, forcing my exhausted muscles to continue. As I pushed through the deep, burning pain, my eyes remained singularly focused on the coastline, the shore gradually occupying more and more of my visual plane with each passing stroke. Around five hundred yards out I thought to myself, You know, I might actually make it. Then I felt the first claw poke through.
Responding to the breach, I grabbed some used food wrappers, a sunscreen bottle, my rain jacket, anything and everything within reach, and began stuffing it all behind my seat. It was an attempt to create a makeshift barrier between myself and the oncoming horde, and it failed miserably. Within a matter of seconds the first of the tiny carnivores made its way through the improvised barricade and into my cockpit. Without thinking, I reached down, grabbed the creature by its tail, slammed it against the side of my kayak, and then lobbed its limp and bloody body out into the ocean. The resulting splash was bittersweet. It meant that I was one mongoose closer to safety but also one further from victory over the chickens. Had there been time I would have paused to consider these conflicting sentiments, but there wasn’t, so I didn’t. Instead, I immediately turned back to the hole in the bulkhead from which a second mongoose was emerging. Attempting to employ the same technique that I had on the first, I reached down to grab the vermin by its tail. I missed. Instead of a handful of furry tail, I ended up with a handful of wiry torso. The inferiority of this grip quickly became apparent as the creature began biting and clawing at my fingers, a feat that his predecessor—which had been captured in a superior fashion—had found impossible. Looking to end the assault on my digits, I went to slam the mongoose against the side of the kayak but stopped at the last second when I realized that I couldn’t hit the mongoose against the boat without also hitting my hand. Feeling no desire to cause myself further bodily harm, I decided to throw the creature out into the ocean alive. It meant that the furry carnivore would likely drown, which was not the swift death that I wanted it to have, but it was bloodying my hand so I did it anyway. I wonder how far mongooses can swim? I mused to myself as the furry creature arced through the air.
The disposal of the second mongoose having taken longer than the disposal of the first, I was concerned that a number of others might have escaped in the time that had elapsed. Fortunately, when I returned my attention to the hole in the bulkhead I found that the third mongoose was still struggling to make its way out. A fat bastard, it was having a difficult time squeezing through the passage that had been carved out by its more slender peers. Relieved that I hadn’t been overrun, I waited patiently for the hefty creature to make its way through. As soon as it did, I immediately grabbed it by the tail, slammed it against the kayak, and tossed its hemorrhaging body into the ocean.
Imbibed with confidence from the successful removal of the third mongoose, I proceeded to dispose of the next seven in the same fashion, tossing corpse after corpse into the salty depths. Ka-splash, ka-splash, ka-splash. Every ten to fifteen seconds a mongoose would emerge from the hole and every ten to fifteen seconds I would help that mongoose meet its maker. By the time I polished off the sixth one I had the process down pat: grab it, smash it, toss it, splash it. It was like a fucked-up version of that Bop It toy that I had when I was a kid, a tad bloodier and grimmer than the original Hasbro edition.
Eventually, after the tenth ka-splash things settled down. No more scratching sounds, no more scurrying sounds, no more animal sounds at all, nothing but the kayak and the water slapping against it. In spite of the calm, I remained alert. I had captured eleven mongooses but had only dealt with ten. The job wasn’t complete, and I was determined to remain vigilant until it was. So I continued to sit, poised, ready to strike, prepared to grab one last tail, smash one last body, toss one last corpse, but the moment never came. I waited but the eleventh chicken assassin didn’t emerge, and after a while I decided that it wouldn’t. The final mongoose had expired in the rear bulkhead, I concluded, the victim of either the sedatives or the melee or some combination of the two. And with that reassuring thought in mind I finally relaxed.
After a few calming breaths and a fit of laughter induced by the absurdity of the events that had just transpired, I got back to paddling. Around the same time, the final mongoose got around to waking up.
Goddamn that sleepy fucker. She took me completely by surprise. I had fallen back into the routine of paddling when she emerged from the tunnel all claws and teeth, scratching and biting like a maniac. You’d have thought I murdered her daughter (which I might have done but having been under anesthesia there is no way she knew that).
In response to the mongoose’s sudden presence, I abandoned my paddle and reached down into the cockpit in pursuit of her. Not fond of being chased, the little asshole answered my efforts by delivering a barrage of snaps and scratches, bloodying my arm from every direction. The pain was immense, but I refused to pull back. Determined to get both my kayak and myself safely to shore, I knew that I had to rid the boat of the mongoose as quickly as possible, and if that meant getting scratched to hell than that meant getting scratched to hell.
Finally, on the fourth or fifth attempt, my doggedness paid off. I successfully grabbed a hold of the creature’s sinewy body. Responding to the presence of my fingers wrapped around her torso, the mongoose lashed out, deploying all of her spiky body parts against me: teeth, claws, everything that she could use to inflict physical harm, which she did use to inflict physical harm. The pain that I experienced as a result of this full-fledged attack easily surpassed the sum total of all the pain that I had experienced up until that point. It was agony, but I did not relent, and with gritted teeth I managed to extricate my hand from the interior of the cockpit with the mongoose still in its grasp.
An end to the violent struggle now in sight, I immediately attempted to toss my assailant out into the depths of the moonlit ocean. The attempt failed. My arm accelerated forward and my fingers released, but the inflictor of my wounds did not leave my hand. The teeth that she dug into the webbing between my thumb and forefinger prevented her from doing so. Rather than flying out into the water, her orange-spotted body briefly accelerated away from me and then whipped back around toward my arm, her clinched teeth serving as an anchor, fixing her to my hand.
Understanding that my attacker would not allow herself to be tossed quietly into the night, I acquiesced to the reality of the situation. She would have to be disposed of in an infinitely less desirable way.
“Drowning it is,” I said, as I leaned over to the side and plunged my fist, and the mongoose that it held, into the ocean.
An involuntary yelp of pain escaped my throat as the salt water hit the open wounds running up and down my arm; tears I refused to acknowledge welled up in my eyes; tendrils of dark, blood-tainted water spiraled
out from my arm; the submerged mongoose lashed out wildly; and through it all I stared out toward the horizon, focused on the distant calm, ignoring the pain and panic, resolute on finishing the job.
And after forty or fifty seconds it appeared that my resolve was going to pay off. The job was almost done. The mongoose was nearly dead. Its writhing and thrashing coming to an end. The mild protestations that it had left were merely obligatory, lackadaisical swipes at my hand and nothing more. As the threat slowly faded, so too did the tension that had been saturating my body. My shoulders lowered, my neck relaxed, my ass cheeks unclenched.
Then I saw the shark fin and everything tightened right back up.
Chapter 23
Thank God for Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the best website of all time. I honestly believe that. It’s the great equalizer, boundless information that can be accessed by all. And don’t give me that shit about it being riddled with mistakes. Numerous studies in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that the website is just as accurate as its more prestigious and less accessible peers. Plus, it’s really fun. I’ll spend hours on there clicking one random thing after another. You never know where you’re going to end up. One time I went on in order to figure out the parent company of a specific carpet cleaner and ended up spending three hours reading about the coldest cities in the world. (Yakutsk? What the fuck, Russia?)
When I moved to Hawaii, I spent the bulk of the plane flight browsing Wikipedia looking up stuff about my new home. “Sharks” was my favorite tangential search that stemmed from my investigation into the Aloha State. I must have spent four hours reading about those boneless motherfuckers. As a result, I have a basic understanding of the creatures that exceeds that of your average person. No, I’m not saying that I’m an expert, but I am saying that I’m four hours more knowledgeable than most. That’s how I know which type of shark it was that attacked me in my kayak that night. It was a tiger shark—a big-ass tiger shark. Of course, that knowledge wasn’t very consoling at the time. If a shark kills you, you’re dead, regardless of what type it is. And that dark-striped, white-bellied bastard definitely wanted to kill me. Fortunately, I also read the Wiki entry on how to survive a shark attack.
The shark was fifteen yards away when I spotted it; it’s dorsal fin peeking ominously out of the water. Reacting, I immediately pulled my arm out of the ocean and into the boat. As I did so the extent of my injuries was revealed.
Cuticles to elbow, my entire lower arm was a mangled mess. Scratch marks of varying severity crisscrossed my forearm, broken mongoose claws protruded out of my wounds, tufts of brown fur clung stubbornly to my skin, and blood flowed over it all. So much blood, bucketfuls of blood, mongoose blood, my blood, all of it red, all of it fresh, and all of it alluring to predators. The shark’s presence was practically mandatory.
The entirety of my body had been back within the perimeter of the kayak for no more than a second when the shark’s head jutted out of the water, its mouth open unconscionably wide, its vicious teeth exposed. Terrified and awed, I instinctively leaned away as the creature chomped down on my boat, ripped its head to the side, and then dove back into the depths, a piece of my kayak’s fiberglass hull still clutched in its mouth. As the last of the shark’s tail dipped below the ocean’s surface, I turned my attention toward the mess it had just created. It was a serious fucking mess, more of a catastrophe really. The hole that had been brought about by the beast’s zealous jaws was far too big for my little sixteen-foot vessel to handle. I was going down, and it was happening quickly.
My presence in the ocean an inevitability, I decided to get on with it. I voluntarily exited the sinking ship and entered the blood-soaked water, doing my best to hold my pee in the process. (I really had to go and the sheer terror of the situation was encouraging me to do so, but I was determined not to. The last thing I needed was more alluring body fluids around me.) Upon entering the water, I immediately started heading for shore, away from the wreck and the blood and the small-mammal corpses and the urine (I couldn’t hold it). Looking to minimize my splash and conserve my energy, I decided to employ the elementary backstroke. It would not get me to shore swiftly, but it seemed more likely to get me there alive.
Feet to butt, hands to armpits, then out, then down, then glide. I repeated the stroke five or six times without incident before I realized that the last mongoose was still in my hand. Implausible, yes, but also true. The shark had attacked, the kayak had sunk, I had pissed myself, and, through it all, my fingers had held on. I’m not sure why they had held on, but they had, and they probably would have continued to do so had the creature not started writhing around. Somehow it was still alive.
No fucking way, I thought as I looked down at my hand and the battered mammal it grasped. I was legitimately astonished. The fact that I was still clutching the mongoose was amazing. The fact that the creature was still amongst the living was borderline miraculous. As it turned out, it was also quite fortunate.
My brain was still processing the mongoose’s uncanny resilience when my eyes caught sight of an approaching dorsal fin. For the second time in five minutes a shark was closing in on me. Based off the looks of the triangular appendage, it was the same one as before.
At this point, I would like to say that the relentless misfortune of the events that had already transpired curbed my reaction to the shark sighting, that the day’s tribulations numbed me into nonchalance, that I responded to the encroaching predator with the confident demeanor of an athlete that knew she was going to win, or a rock star that didn’t give a shit about what others thought. Unfortunately, I can’t say that because I didn’t do that. What I did do was piss myself. Again. Evidently, my bladder has a reserve tank for emergencies.
Encompassed by my own urine, I attempted to steel my nerves and gather my thoughts as the shark closed in. Nose, gills, eyes, I thought, recalling the “How to Survive” Wiki that I had read on the plane. Nose. Gills. Eyes. The three words repeated in my head at a rapid staccato as the menacing fin drew nearer. With the shark roughly twenty-five yards away, I made a last second scan of my immediate surroundings. Locating a sizable piece of debris a couple feet to my left, I reached over and grabbed what turned out to be a piece of my kayak. Now armed with a chunk of fiberglass hull in one hand and a durable mongoose in the other, I turned back toward my attacker. It was mere feet away.
Acting without hesitation, I jammed the kayak wreckage into the beast’s jaws the moment that they opened. Caught off guard by the attack, the shark lashed its head in an attempt to rid its mouth of the unwanted contents. Recognizing an opportunity, I responded to the predator’s distress by attempting to harm it further. Aiming for the eyes and the gills, I slammed my empty hand down onto the creature’s head while simultaneously plunging my mongoose hand toward the slits in its side. My empty fist missed, my mongoose fist did not.
It was almost as if the shark wanted its gills to be messed with. They opened wide at the exact moment my knuckles made contact and didn’t close until my fist and the mongoose that it held were wrist deep inside. It was an oddly pornographic scene that seems funny now but definitely wasn’t at the time. At the time, my fisting of the shark’s slit was serious business.
The moment that I felt the shark’s gill close around my wrist, I let go of the mongoose and extracted my hand. Having finally released the small furry predator, I dug my heels into the large cartilaginous one, kicked off, and swam away. As I paddled toward shore, my eyes remained fixed on the shark. It didn’t seem to have noticed my departure. Rather than pursuing me the beast stayed where it was, thrashing angrily near the water’s surface. I didn’t have to look far to identify the reason for its protestations. The rear legs of the mongoose were hanging out of one of the slits in the shark’s side, scratching wildly at the skin of its captor, tearing into its gills, endangering its ability to breath. The shark was bleeding profusely, and its efforts to get rid of the nuisance that was inflicting the damage were failing. The s
hark simply couldn’t turn its head back sharply enough. The mongoose was out of reach. The resilient little mammal was outweighed and out of its element, but it was winning anyway, destroying the creature that nearly destroyed me.
Eventually the scene died down. As to whether or not the mongoose actually came out on top I cannot say. The splashing didn’t cease until I was too far away to identify the victor. I hope that the mongoose won, after all it did save my life. Had it not destroyed the shark’s gills that big ass fish would have hunted me down and eaten me no questions asked … Then again, the shark wouldn’t have even been in the area had the mongoose not torn my arm to shreds, so maybe that furry son of a bitch actually does deserve the blame … On the other hand, the mongoose wouldn’t have even been there to attack me had I not brought it on board, so maybe I deserve the blame … Confusing … Whatever. I’ll just blame the shark—stupid boneless motherfucker.
Chapter 24
A Hostile Exchange with a Shit-Cherry
Having defeated the tiger shark with a mongoose-punch to the gills the rest of the trip back seemed rather blah. The open-ocean swim through moonlit water didn’t even register on my excitement meter. But at that point I’m not sure what would have—gladiatorial combat with a yeti? Pool sex with Michael Phelps? A late admittance letter from Hogwarts? Probably nothing.
After crawling out of the surf and onto the beach, I collapsed on the sand. I was wet and salty and wounded, but I didn’t care. I was too tired to care. I was too tired to do anything but sleep, so that’s what I did.
An indeterminate amount of time later I woke up, struggled to my feet, and stumbled back in the direction of my car. It wasn’t far away, and I wasn’t carrying anything, but it still took me a while to get there. Exhaustion and failure tend to slow one’s pace.