Zombie Pulp (16 page)

He went under.

Then he surfaced once again, more skeleton than flesh, fish clinging to him by their jaws. His skull was trembling as if there was still life in it, one single eyeball staring from its hollow of bone with a deranged look of absolute shock.

Then he sank from view leaving only a slick of blood and tissue.

*

Elise was hysterical and it was Cutler who slid over towards her and slapped her across the face. And he didn’t just slap her once, but four times. Maybe he would have kept at it but Rico stopped him, shoved him away and almost into the drink.

“That enough, you crazy
punheteiro.”

Cutler didn’t like being handled like that, but he took it and kept his distance because, white-haired or not, he had no doubt that the old man would have given him the beating of his life with those rough, callused hands. They looked like they could split kindling.

Next to Cutler, Basille moaned.

“Easy now, lady,” Rico said, pulling Elise to him. “There, my lady, easy now.”

She was limp, face wet with tears, blood running from her mouth. Her shorts were stained red, her legs open in several places from the bites of the piranhas. He comforted her the best he could even though he himself was leagues beyond comfort.

She kept shuddering, shaking her head from side to side. All she could see was Jack, Jack, Jack—

The school of living dead piranha hitting him again and again, chewing and tearing, engulfing him in a primal bloodlust of cutting teeth, and that look in his eyes, that terrified, agonized, insane look in his eyes as they reduced him to a bleeding pulp.

She sat straight up and screamed.

Rico held her tighter. “Easy, you got to be easy now.”

“
You better shut her the fuck up,” Cutler said. “We got enough problems here.”

Rico gave him a look that burned right through him. It was easy to read. It said:
Just you and me alone, sonofabitch. That’s all I ask. You and me alone and, God above, how you gonna hurt when I put my hands on you.

He looked away. “I fish these waters sixty year,” he told them in a wounded voice. “Never…never I see a
merda
like this.”

Cutler offered him a sarcastic grin. “Zombie piranhas.” He shook his head. “That boat…that research ship. They must’ve spilled something in the water, set some bug loose, a virus or something…”

Rico shrugged. “I not know. And what does these things matter, eh? God help us.”

Basille had been badly ravaged and he kept moaning and groaning. He had lost consciousness now and was probably in shock. His white pants and shirt had nearly been ripped away. What remained were bloody rags. He was laid open in a dozen locations with deep, cutting wounds. Blood ran from him, pooled under him, and trickled down the boat into the water where it floated like a slick of grease.

Cutler stared at it, his face sunburned, blue-eyed, and stark with fear.

“
We gonna get out of this,” Rico said. “We gonna use shoes as paddles and get us to the riverbank. You see if we don’t.”

Cutler laughed with a dead, hopeless sound. “We ain’t fucking going nowhere and you know it.”

“
You shut that mouth,
punheteiro.”

Cutler turned away, staring at the blood seeping from Basille into the water. He started to make the connection. “His blood,” he said. “It’s in the water.” He looked over at Rico, his eyes wide and glassy like he was out of his mind. “You hear me, you goddamn idiot? His blood…
it’s in the fucking water…his blood is in the fucking water…”

Rico got it, all right.

Blood in the water. Those devil-fish. And them floating on the overturned skiff, its flat bottom a scarce four inches above the river.

Elise snapped out of her fugue. “Listen,” she said.
“Listen…”

Yes, they heard it, too. Beneath, in the water, the piranhas were hitting the boat again, one after the other. The sound of their gnawing teeth on the wood was almost like a muted sawing. They were trying to chew their way through it. It was insane but that’s what they were doing, driven by some malefic force to eat and kill. The water was filled with their darting bodies, slivery, scaly, discolored and putrefied…but alive, somehow alive.

“
We have to get out of here!” Cutler cried out, beside himself with fear.

More fish now.

The water began to roil. The piranha were swarming like locusts, pouring themselves at the boat in a steady stream of teeth. They chewed from below, from the sides, so many pressing in that hundreds were pushed flopping up out of the water and hundreds more were pulverized by the greedy appetites of the expanding shoal. And they were not just centered around the boat, it seemed, but the
entire
channel as if there was not a school of hundreds, but perhaps a school of thousands or
hundreds
of thousands. The frothing of the water made the boat roll in the water like it was caught in a good swell.

The carrion fish were whipped into a wild eating frenzy, driven mad by the taste of blood dripping into the water. Sawdust was floating to the surface as they chewed at the skiff. The flat hull Rico and the others sat on was greasy with water and blood. They gripped each other so they’d didn’t slide off.

All except Basille.

His unconscious form was sliding nearer and nearer the edge.

Nobody made to grab him for there just wasn’t time. The boat was rocking under the onslaught of the fish, the water a churning maelstrom of snapping jaws and bones, piranhas and parts of them. And maybe the motion of the boat would have carried them to the treeline, but something happened first: the fish started leaping on board. Driven by a relentless hunger, they leaped out of the water and started landing among the survivors, grotesquely bloated and decayed, some little better than living skeletons held together by leathery sinew and ligament.

But dead or
undead,
they were united in a single purpose.

Rico shouted as he ducked away from two or three that sailed at him, swatted two more out of the air, and was hit by three more that fastened their sawtoothed teeth right into his flesh. He yanked them free, tearing out flaps of skin as he did so.

They landed on the hull, flopping and chomping their jaws.

Cutler kicked them back in, slapped at them, smashed a dozen to a foul putrid paste with his fists. But for every one he destroyed, there were ten more vaulting at him. They bit into his arms, his shoulders, his hands, dozens affixed to his boots, their teeth sunk into the leather. One caught him by the chin, biting deep.

The air was filled with fish, a steaming brew of blood and corpse gas.

They hit Elise, too. They fastened on her legs, her arms, one sank its triangular teeth right into her breast. She pulled them off, screaming, hitting and crushing them under her fists. She was completely out of her mind, ripping them free, kicking and slapping. She smashed them in her hands into a black gushing slime of drainage and tiny bones. She tore one off her left arm and the whole body came away in a pulping flap, but the small chambered skull remained, those serrated jaws holding tight, teeth punctured deep. She beat at it until it shattered to fragments.

And when one clamped its interlocking jaws on the knuckle of her pinkie, she attacked it without thinking: clamping its foul, festering body in her own jaws and biting down until it exploded in a gushing spray of putrescence in her mouth. More hit her, but she craned her head and vomited putrid flesh, scales, and tiny bones along with a few squirming, severed worms.

More and more were coming out of the water and there was simply no defense.

Cutler fought through the rain of fish, shouting,
“It’s him they want…don’t you see?”
He ripped piranhas free, tearing one from the end of his nose and leaving several teeth sunk into the cartilage. “THEY WANT HIM! THEY WANT BASILLE! NOT US! THEY DON’T WANT US—”

And with a sideward kick, he knocked Basille’s body into the foaming water.

It was the sort of deranged diversion only a psychotic mind could come up with, but there is no sanity in survival. The water instantly went red in a swirling eruption. It frothed and boiled like a cauldron. Basille’s body was covered in a living, biting tarp of the monsters…and somewhere during the process, he came awake, thrashing and screaming, gulping in water, his own blood, and piranhas. His body rolled over and over in the churning wake, voracious jaws shredding him as the others watched. He was like a shank of bloody meat tossed into a shark tank.

But it worked.

The diversion worked.

The school enveloped him and no more fish dove at the skiff. In fact, the very act of the piranhas abandoning the boat left the water roiling and this pushed it out of harm’s way, precious feet from the devouring shoal.

Out there, you could not even see Basille any longer. He was buried in thousands of fish, their teeth in constant industrious motion in that simmering sea of blood. And when they finally fell away, glutted, there was nothing but a freshly-picked skeleton that bobbed to the surface for a moment or two, then sank from view.

*

Maybe Cutler expected some gratitude. Maybe in his crowded, twisted little mind what he had done to Basille was seen as an act of selfless heroism. But once the remainders of the biting fish were disposed of, gratitude is not what he got from Rico and Elise.

Bitten, ravaged, bleeding, they came at him with hooked fingers and eyes glazed with madness. To them, sacrificing one of their own to those hideous little monsters had never been an option. So they came at him with murder in their eyes.

“Wait a minute!” he told them. “I saved us! Not just myself, but all of us!”

Elise just glared at him. “You sick bastard! It was murder! Murder! You fucking murdered that poor man!”

Cutler’s face was bitten, scratched, stained with blood. But now all the color ran from it because he knew, he
knew,
that they were no longer in their right minds. They were going to throw
him
overboard.

“Don’t even try it,” he warned them.

“Killer!” Rico said, “Dirty stinking killer!”

Cutler was right on one thing: they
weren’t
in their right minds. Had they been, they would never have considered throwing him to the fish. But they had been through too much, suffered through unimaginable horrors, been strained to the limit, and now they were thinking survival and nothing more.

Cutler edged as far as he could away from them on the flat hull, sliding his ass through the blood and water. “I swear to God! You try it! Either of you try it and I’ll flip us all in!
I goddamn well fucking mean it!”

But they didn’t seem to believe it. They kept inching forward. In their minds, they already had Cutler pegged for the selfish, narcissistic piece of shit he was. He wouldn’t sacrifice what he loved best even to thwart his enemies. They knew it. And, sadly, he knew it.

Elise honestly didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe Rico did, but she was really just taking out her frustrations by putting a scare into him. And maybe that might have worked…had the situation not been so damned desperate. When she got within a foot of him, Cutler looked out at the slopping brown water, the dry islands rising up in the channel—maybe wondering if he could reach them in time—then turned back quick. And before Elise could react or even think of it, he hit her in the face with everything he had. Her head snapped back and she would have went right into the drink had Rico not grabbed her.

That was it for Rico.

He was Yagua Indian and where he came from, you did not hit women. But the men who struck them? Oh yes, you beat them silly. He came right at Cutler and Cutler threw a few sloppy jabs at him that seemed to bounce right off that old, seamed brown face.

And then Rico had him.

He bounced Cutler’s head off the hull two or three times, then hit him barefisted again and again. Cutler’s face was a mess now but still he fought. He shook and raged, trying to hit the old man, trying to deflect those huge callused hands. They grappled. The boat rocked uneasily. Grinning with pure wicked delight, Rico hit him again.

But he didn’t see Cutler fish the lockblade knife from his pocket, snap it open.

Elise did. She shouted: “Rico! Look out! He’s got a—”

Too late, Cutler brought the blade up and sank an easy three inches of it right into the side of Rico’s neck, severing the carotid artery. Rico, looking stunned and shocked, fell away grasping a hand to the wound. The artery was laid wide open, blood squirting between his fingers. He fell onto the hull face-first making a moaning, gurgling sound in his throat. His blood was everywhere, pools and rivers of it flooding their banks, vivid red and shining.

Elise launched herself at Cutler and he slashed her across the arm. “Next time it’s your throat,” he promised her.

Rico tried to pull himself to his knees and slid on the greasy spill of his own blood. He tried again and Cutler lashed out with his foot, caught the old man in the ass and propelled him forward.