Zombie Pulp (15 page)

They were on the Ucayali River in central Peru, the main headstream of the Amazon formed by the junction of the
Apurímac
and
Urubamba
. A wild green world like something out of the Mesozoic: hot and steaming, clotted with palms and creepers and hanging vines, the jungles haunted by jaguars and poisonous snakes, black caimans and anacondas waiting in the stagnant river bottoms and flooded undergrowth.

They had come because Jack wanted to go piranha fishing.

And that was so like Jack, Elise thought. If he couldn’t catch it
with a hook or shoot it with a gun, he had no interest in it.

The jungle seemed endless as it pressed in from all sides. Rank, uniform, monotonous, licked by the foul-smelling serpentine river. Now and again they came upon clusters of palm huts belonging to families of Yorba Indians. But that was it. Rico moved the boat along, still telling stories, still making the men laugh. Elise sighed. He was exactly the kind of man Jack always seemed to find.

There was a sudden gagging stink of fleshy decomposition that put Elise’s belly in her throat. She smelled it right through the Vapo-Rub and the pungent brown river. And from the looks on the faces of the others, they smelled it, too. Rico steered them around a few stumps, navigated a turn in the river and there—in the center of a wide channel—was the bow of a large boat rising from the murk. A wood stork sunned itself atop it. All around the bow were hundreds of dead fish floating, belly-up. There were flies all over them.

“
What the hell is that about?” Jack asked.

Rico shrugged. “Some kind research boat…she sink. Hit something and sink. They suppose to come, tow her away. Ah, but the state…ha! Probably be year before they do!”

“
What killed the fish?” Cutler wanted to know.

Rico shrugged again. “Chemical or something. It were a biotech boat out research things. Everyone get off okay. So no worry…except for them sonofabitch fishies, eh?”

Elise was holding her nose. The stink of those rotting fish was hot, nauseating. It crawled up her nose and down her throat, tried to drag her stomach back up with it. She noticed that there was a funny purple sheen to the water around the sunken ship. Something about that she did not like at all.

But no one else seemed bothered.

Rico steered them away from the main channel and into the
igapo,
or flooded forest. The meltwaters of the Andes overflowed the rivers between January and June, creating a weird world of flooded jungle. He steered them around huge vine-covered trees and clotted stands of foliage, finding the channel where he knew the fishing would be good.

“
Yes,” he said, “this will do. Them sonofabitch
pirayas
travel in schools, hundreds of them, eh? They come to the
igapo
because they know game in the water and the eating she is good.”

Jack was excited. “All right, let’s do some fishing.”

*

As they made ready with the long bamboo poles, Rico told them that during flood season the
pirayas
were not truly dangerous. Their hunting range was expanded into the jungle and there was plenty to eat. They were only really a threat when there was no food. In fact, he said, during this time of year men wade into the river and spearfish, women wash clothes, and children swim in piranha waters without any harm.

Elise figured he was saying that for her benefit.

The jungle was primeval, silent, unbearably eerie. The channel they were in was maybe forty feet across, a stew of brown steaming water. Leaves and sticks floated on its surface. Trees grew from the water in
tangled, knotted masses to either side, rising up on snaking roots and filling out, growing thickly until their twisted limbs joined together overhead like woven canestraw. The result was like being in a tunnel…a hot, smelling, claustrophobic tunnel of stagnant water and warm decay.

Rico tried to give Elise a pole, but she refused. The bamboo poles were about four feet long, set with six-pound nylon lines and triple-barbed hooks that were baited with chunks of raw beef and chicken liver. To attract the piranhas, Rico tossed some bloody chum into the water.

“They smell this for miles,” he said.

The men tossed their lines into the water.

Rico rolled a cigarette, told a story about Isobel, his first wife, who was so crazy she’d once chased him down the muddy, winding streets of Cerro de Pasco with a baseball bat. She had been naked at the time. “And that, my friends, is no thing to be looking on first thing in morning.” He shivered.
“Yah!”

Then the waiting began. Elise sat there, beads of sweat rolling down her face. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes hovered over the water. Dragonflies buzzed about. Howler monkeys wailed in the treetops. Elise listened to the blue macaws screech and watched palm vipers thread through the spoking branches.

Basille suddenly stiffened, his bovine face beaded with perspiration. “I…ah…I think I have a nibble,” he said.

“Easy,” Rico told him. “The
piraya
is sneaky little devil. Don’t scare him off. Let him take good bite first…then he yours.”

Basille waited, looking very nervous. Suddenly his rod jerked, then bowed as something below tugged at the line. He pulled up his bamboo pole and there was an oval-shaped fish on the hook. It was silvery, its belly a dull orange. Jack and Cutler cheered. Elise was the only one that saw something was terribly wrong with the fish. But as Basille swung it on board they all saw it. On one side the fish looked like any other Red-Bellied Piranha, though maybe faded in color, but on the other: just bones. The head was intact, but it was just bones straight down to the tail.

“You hooked a dead one,” Cutler said.

Jack laughed.

“It wasn’t dead,” Basille said. “You saw how it attacked my bait.”

Rico swallowed. “Yes…but they are the cannibals, them
piraya.
They attack one another. You hook a live one, but its fellows…
ha!
…they strip it before you pull him in.”

And that seemed a perfectly logical explanation…but then the fish
moved.
Stripped to bone on one side or not, it began to flap its tail and writhe on the line, its hooked jaws snapping.

“That’s not possible,” Jack said.

Elise was getting a real bad feeling now. She didn’t believe for a moment that other piranhas had cannibalized this one, at least not recently. Because the fish stank…it was putrescent.

Basille, a look of horror on his face, just stared at the fish dangling over his lap. Then a slender green worm slid out of its side and dropped into his crotch. He tossed the pole, shrieking, brushing the corpse worm off him and smashing it beneath his shoe.

Cutler jumped away from the dropped pole and what flopped on the end.

Rico, looking dead serious now, grabbed it and threw the line overboard. He slashed out with his knife and cut the piranha free. The fish hit the water and swam away like it was perfectly healthy. Nobody said anything for a time. They listened to the jungle. The silence was deadly, ominous.

Then Jack’s line was hit. Cutler’s, too. Both men looked at each other, for the first time in their lives almost afraid to see what was on the end of their hooks.

“This not right,” Rico said.

And then, from below, something hit the boat. In fact, several things hit the bottom of the boat in rapid succession. One after the other, like hammers. Then it stopped. Everyone just sat there, wide-eyed, the boat moving in a slow counterclockwise rotation from the impact. Then it started again and this time there was no stopping it. From below it was hit again and again and again, maybe hundreds of times. The boat shook. It canted this way and that. Bamboo poles were yanked from hands and dragged beneath the surface.

“This is crazy!” Basille cried out.
“We’re being attacked!”

Jack held Elise to him, either for her protection or his own. He looked frantically at Rico. “Croc? Is that what it is? A croc? A big fucking croc?”

The boat was hit so hard from beneath that it jumped an inch out of the channel and came back down with a cascading splash of murky brown water. Basille lost his nerve. He screamed, elbowed Cutler out of his way in a frenzied attempt to get out of the bow. Cutler took hold of him. They wrestled, they swore. Rico shouted for them to
stop it, stop it, stop it—

But it was too late.

Tangled together, they fell over against the lip of the boat and it flipped up out of the water from the sudden shift in weight. For one frightening second it hung there, its side parallel to the river, while everyone tried to hang onto the seats for dear life.

Then it flipped right over and all five of them went into the drink.

*

Elise surfaced, her legs bicycling and arms thrashing. She spat out a mouthful of water that was brown, slimy, and warm like some primordial ooze. Rico was only maybe five feet away, pulling himself up onto the overturned boat. Crying out, she swam towards it as it drifted away from her. She could see several fish attached to Rico’s legs as he dragged himself out of the river. They had bitten right through his pants and blood was blossoming from the wounds.

Somebody shoved her forward and she was never sure if it was Cutler or Basille. She heard Jack shouting out in a high, almost girlish voice: “Swim! Elise, swim for the boat! Swim! Swim!
Swim!”
His voice broke into a note of absolute terror.

Elise pounded through the water to the boat. She felt something bite into her knee. Her ankle. Her hip. Then she was at the boat and Rico hauled her aboard by grabbing her hair and yanking her up out of the water with considerable strength. She flopped onto the bottom of the overturned boat, glad to feel the hot sun upon her. She spit out more water, coughing and gagging. Cutler pulled himself aboard and so did Basille, both men tearing biting fish off their legs. Rico grabbed the one chewing on her knee. It was bloated green, eyeless, its triangular teeth red with her blood. It was so rotten it went to a soft, oozing pulp in his fingers. He tossed it away.

“Jack!” Cutler cried.
“Jack!”

Elise, shocked and trembling, looked for him. In her panic she had forgotten about everything but survival, everything but getting out of the water and getting away from those flesh-shearing jaws.

Jack was still in the water.

For whatever reason, he had been thrown out farther from the others. The drift of the overturned boat had put him even farther away. He was closer to the trees so he swam for them. They saw him grip the solid spiraling anchor roots rising from the water. He got his hand on one and pulled himself to it, then up out of the water and it seemed like he was going to make it, he was really going to make it—

And then, as he pulled his upper body out of the slop, the water around him began boiling like a pot, seething in a great fountain of thrashing silver bodies. Jack screamed. Screamed with a wild, almost animal sound of agony and horror that echoed off into the jungle and sent a flock of birds winging into the sky.
“Help me! Help me! Somebody fucking help me—”

His cry turned into a moist gurgling sound as he swallowed water, fighting to pull himself away from all those razored, chomping jaws. But the limbs of the trees were damp, green with fungus and he couldn’t quite get a grip. He’d pull himself up an inch or two, then slide back down. His body was shuddering as he was hit by hundreds of piranhas and the thrashing water around him gushed a brilliant red.

The agony.

Oh Jesus, the agony. When they first started hitting him, Jack felt the impacts, boom-boom-boom, and the nipping pinpricks of their teeth. And within seconds, not a nipping, but a biting, a ripping, a feeding frenzy. It felt like a thousand razors were slicing into him, carving him, slitting him open. The water was churning with red bubbles, foaming with blood and tissue and thousands of fish, gutting him to the marrow—

Elise was screaming.

Jack was making a gobbling, clotted sound in his throat as his own blood filled his mouth. The fish kept hitting him and with one last valiant effort he pulled himself up out of the water. Beneath the hips, he was nothing but bleeding red muscle, yellow ligament, and knobs of white bone. There were hundreds of fish hanging from him, biting and tearing. They were bloated green, looping with worms, many nothing but fleshy skeletons. They could not possibly be alive, yet the inborn instinct to feed was driving them on. Blood burst from Jack’s mouth in a red mist, his eyes bulging, his face twisted in a silent scream.

Elise was hysterical.

Rico tried to hold onto her but she was hot and greasy in his hands, squirming wildly.

Jack was pulled down into the water, still trying to yank himself up, but the fight was gone and he slid into the boiling mass, his body thrown from side to side, jerking and jumping like some grisly marionette. He broke out of the water, a bleeding husk that had been shredded down to basal anatomy. A fleshless hand groped over the surface. He let out one last cry and everyone saw that the left side of his neck and face were eaten right down to muscle-covered bone. He looked like a living, bleeding shank of raw beef.