by Steve Alten
“Shark!” he yelled back. What did that have to do with the game? Was it someone’s nickname? I couldn’t connect it with Philip frantically pulling on my rope, nor to the sound of tearing water like a big wave about to break behind me as a current pushed me forward and up.
A huge splash slammed into me like an explosion. I launched half out of the water but something clamped me like a vice from below. Boat? Jet ski? Oh God—shark—Philip had seen it. Droplets showered down like rain. Its mouth engulfed me— hips, thighs, everything down there—squeezing me like a pustule. I thrashed wildly and bounced off rock hard gritty flesh. I grunted as I felt it bite down, the pressure on my lower body immense and crushing. I couldn’t scream; I could only gasp and try not to burst. Then I was underwater.
My head submerged without a breath, all sounds cut off except bubbles and rushing water. Without thinking I sucked burning salt water into my mouth and nose. I had to get away, right now. I had to breathe. We seemed to be going down forever. I was drowning. I squirmed and tried to kick, but my legs and stomach felt pressed like a flower. Something pulled at me from above; the rope, growing tight. The shark slowed and shook me in a violent spasm. I didn’t feel any pain. It was just like a fish tugging on a line.
The shark lunged against the taut rope and suddenly I felt myself torn out of its mouth. I was free. Immediately I began to rise, swept upwards by the massive body passing beneath me. My lungs hitched; I wanted to inhale and take my chances, but the thought I might live kept me from doing so. I clawed at the water, desperate for the surface. How fast could the shark turn? Please don’t let it get me again. Not again. Please let it go away. Philip, get me...
I surfaced, raggedly wheezing warm brine from my mouth and nose. Philip pulled me backwards through the water, wailing my name in a frightening high voice I’d never known. I tried turning around, frantic to be back on the boat, but my numb legs wouldn’t kick. Instead I groped backward so Philip could grab me. He must be close; I could hear his breathing now, hyperventilating almost. I wanted to tell him I was OK, but it was tough to get my breath, and I couldn’t talk. I wriggled my fingers hi to him instead. Even holding my arms up was draining. But then he had me, his strong hands around my wrists, lifting me.
I came clear of the water, feeling the side of the boat scrape down my shoulders. Philip screamed, deafening, right in my ear almost. Was the shark back? He’d hesitated lifting me aboard and I tried to scream back at him, tell him to hurry, but I just couldn’t get enough breath. He shrieked again, words so loud and jagged that I couldn’t understand them. Then he was whimpering as he pulled me the rest of the way in and laid me down gently on the deck. He muttered a flurry of words between thick breaths.
“Oh-Katie-Katie-darling-oh-god-don't-move-you're-ok-don't-try-to—”
What was wrong with him? I felt faint, but that had to be normal. I was numb below the waist where the shark had cut off my circulation, which at least meant no pain yet where it had bitten me. Maybe there was a lot of blood down there where I couldn’t feel. Frightened, I reached a wavering hand down to touch my legs, but Philip grabbed it.
“Don’t do that honey, don’t… just lie still for me. You’ll be ok, I’ll get you…”
He didn’t want me to touch the bites. Whatever. He was sobbing. Sobbing? I wished I could comfort him. I really felt OK, just a bit weak and fuzzy. There was blood somewhere; I could smell it, thick and sour. That was OK, Philip knew first aid, though we’d probably have to go to the hospital. There was another smell too, heavier and grosser, like rotten meat. Probably the bait. I must be lying near where we kept it.
An alien noise startled me. A gull had swooped into the boat, I could hear it down near my legs, screaming and worrying at something. Phillip roared at it, thumping, his voice raw and crazy. He put a towel over my bottom half, kind of lifting me to wrap it underneath as well, and fiddling some more beyond where I could feel.
I was worried the shark would come back and attack the boat. They did that sometimes. My breath came in shallow gulps and warm salty water kept collecting in my mouth. With an effort I spat a bunch of it out and took the deepest breath I could, feeling pain in my chest for the first time.
“Is… is…” That was all I could whisper, but Philip heard me.
“Yes, sweetie, it’s OK. Don’t try to talk, just please lie still. We’ll…” He could never seem to finish. He moved away and I heard the zip zip zip of the anchor rope as he pulled it in, really fast. Any second now I’d hear the chain snarling across the bow and we could go. I yearned for hospital and a warm bed. Despite the sun on me, I was getting cold. I’d have to stay way past Sunday. Maybe I’d have scars. I could be like a celebrity, the blind teenager who survived a shark attack. I might go on A Current Affair.
Surely feeling should be returning to my legs by now, a tingling or something. What if I was paralysed? A calm voice reassured me. Not Philip, someone else. I struggled to focus on it, everything sounded strained through cotton wool. “Brett Lee. Bowls to Ganguly… wide outside off stump! Ganguly swings and misses, a big appeal! Not out.”
Weakly, I lifted an arm and reached towards the towel. My lifejacket ended just below my ribcage and I started there, tracing down my stomach. It was dry and cool to the touch, and I felt my finger dip briefly into my navel. So far, so good. Then I met the towel. I paused there for a while, gathering courage, a fold of it between my thumb and forefinger. The commentators droned on, always relaxed. “Definitely worth a shout there. I’m not sure there wasn’t some noise… Certainly Lee thought he had him…”
“Hang on, Katie darling, we’re getting you home. Hang on.” Philip’s shadow fell across my face briefly, his voice hoarse with the effort of calm. He didn’t seem to notice where my hand was. I slid a bit as he started the engine and slammed it straight into high gear, but I didn’t lose my grip on the towel. A bubble of salty fluid formed on my lips and popped. My hand trembled as it loosened the sodden cloth above my right hip, exposing flesh smooth and cold to the touch.
I probed further. Where was my suit bottom? No wonder Philip had—abruptly my fingers smeared through something crusty, and my skin ended mid-hip in a jagged flap. I gasped, hissing like a punctured blowfish. Frantic horror sent my whole hand burrowing under the towel but I couldn’t find my legs. The tear extended right across me. Below it was nothing but more towel, sticky and hideously limp.
Oh no-no-no, that couldn’t be me.
Sounds dulled and merged into a single ringing tone. The sun and the hard deck melted together, squeezing my head like I was drunk. The shark got the rest. It ate me. Gorged on my chewed up legs and lower body. They were inside it now, losing their shape, coming apart in pulpy chunks you could squirt through your fist like rotting jelly. My feet were just bones now, fanning open like mucus-webbed fins. Eyeless fish heads swam in a stringy soup of my flesh scrap slime.
Philip shouted into the VHF over the smothered bellow of the motor, hysterical for both of us, and everything was real again. I slowly curled my fingers over the middle of my torso where I ended. The skin was thicker than I thought, spongy and rubbery like a tyre. I wanted to pull it down like a skirt to cover my insides. I gripped it feebly, fingertips slipping slightly inside my body. My knuckles touched some stuff that had spilled out of me.
I tried to scream and salty fluid geysered weakly from my mouth. Blood, it was blood, of course it was. Everything in me was fucked up. I couldn’t be alive with stuff hanging out. Crying, I gripped the towel with my free hand and lifted it with a drawn out grunt. It came off me with a moist peeling squelch, scraps trying to cling, a faint pulling and shifting from inside me. The meaty smell I’d noticed before billowed out, raw and putrid. I convulsed with vomit but there wasn't enough left of me to arch properly. Instead I slid across the deck, slick with discharge, curling like a severed prawn. I banged into something and felt an ominous loose sucking from my lower torso.
Icy numbness crept up my belly. I shifted and gingerly worked m
y hand further into myself, trying to hold things in. Soft tubes and flaps of flesh squeezed and coiled together, as though I was a ruptured sack of fish. They jostled and squirmed, trying to get out of me, slipping through my senseless fingers. Sliding down the deck, drumming out their mutilated death throes in the stinking afterbirth. I had to stop them, put them back inside me. But there were so many.
I found I could move, chase them down the deck to where they were splashing overboard. Without waiting I dove into the chill water after them. As it enfolded me, the radio dulled and the stink of my open body faded. But I could clearly hear the chaotic vibrations of my quarries. I followed them downward in irregular thrusts, but they kept splitting into smaller and smaller schools, always leading me deeper. I pursued the largest group, following the flickering rhythm, but after some time I could count the number that were left.
One at a time they peeled away until there was only one, darting around, evading me. I was so deep now. I couldn’t keep up. My freezing limbs stiffened and wanted to curl up for warmth. The only sound left was the tiny thrumming of my last fish, which became more and more distant. Fainter. Fainter. Eventually I doubted I could hear it at all.
“The Krang”
James Robert Smith
They claimed that there was a krang in Lake Dorr.
Because of this, Mangrove the City was holding its collective breath. In earlier times there would have been sacrifices made to appease the gods and to attract the monster itself. But Mangrove was ruled by less barbaric folk in these enlightened days. Now it was left to the work of the best men to rid the lake of the krang. Rewards were offered. Gold was to be paid—the highest of bounties.
Because everyone knew what would happen if the beast were not found and killed in all possible haste. It would first kill any unwary fishermen who plied the lake without proper care and without effective weaponry. And after that it would deplete the schools of fish that did so much to feed the burgeoning population of the expanding capital of Mangrove.
With speed the krang had to be located, captured, and killed.
If—Jove forbid—it actually spawned, then all would be lost. The lake would end up a dead and barren waste of sterile water. Merely that and nothing more.
The bars were packed because the town was filled with people having come from every city in the kingdom to try to earn the bounty for ridding the lake of the krang. Already several fishermen had vanished—and if anyone had doubted why, the wrecks of their crafts had washed ashore, one of them having the pearly white teeth of the awful creature embedded in the oaken planks left on the rocks. Someone who’d seen those teeth had held up his hand, indicating that just one of the ivory daggers was wider than his palm.
Hoggman liked that the bars were full. A full bar and crowded streets meant that he could beg enough spare change to put a roof over his head and food in his belly. If not that, then mead in his gut so that he could forget about his station in life. Hoggman was a beggar when you got right down to it. He wouldn’t have called himself by that base and common term, but it’s what he was. To hide from that label he liked to think that it was his yarns and glib tongue that earned him the odd silver piece that kept him from starving. In his darker moments, he would admit to himself that it was his crippled, withered left arm that made him an object of sympathy that put change in his purse.
And of course Hoggman made sure that one and all could see his deformed member. He wore his clothes just so, not hiding the weathered, stick-like ruin of a limb. No sleeves for that arm, no sir. More than once a sad-eyed sailor had been moved to tears and had emptied his coin-filled fist at Hoggman’s feet. Or sometimes a lady would do the same, seeing him and wondering who cared for this poor beggar plying the streets and unable to fend for himself.
Aye, Hoggman had a withered arm and thank the gods for it.
That afternoon he had been moving up and down the docks, looking a few times for honest work and failing in that had turned to his storytelling and joking to coax some money or some drink from the men and women who made the shores of Lake Dorr if not their homes, then at least their livelihoods. The street along that waterway smelled not so much of fish as normal. Many of the fishing boats were tied up tight to their moorings or even pulled up high on the rocky beaches in case the krang mistook them for mates and tried to hump them into splinters. It had been said such things had happened when a lone krang found itself isolated in a strange body of water, waiting to spawn.
But the docks and the businesses along it were filled with people whose faces were lined with concern and with no room for laughter or, sad to say for Hoggman, charity. Instead, he saw anger in the familiar souls he encountered and hard stoicism in the eyes of the strangers who were streaming into Mangrove to hunt the krang. They didn’t have time for beggars and they didn’t feel like hearing a joke or an amusing tale.
So by the time the sun was setting in the west Hoggman found himself in The Whore’s Bosom, one of the less inviting inns on the southern pier, but a place where he could sometimes depend on a free mug or three of beer from the owner, one Pearl, who had once been a comely prostitute who sold her body but who now—at the wise old age of thirty—owned the stinking inn and made her living selling drink and food and a warm place to bed down, generally without her as companion. Pearl sometimes felt sorry for Hoggman and would set him up with drinks, for he almost always repaid her in some way—either with coin when it came to him, or with some labor, for if he did have only one good arm, at least it was powerful, having to compensate for the worthlessness of the other limb.
That was why, when the sun was gone and the moon was riding the clear skies, Hoggman was screaming drunk, sitting in the midst of the bar, regaling one and all with stories of his days as a sailor and a fisherman. That was why he came under the sharp, clear eye of the outlander who was sitting still and alone in the shadows, his back to the stout walls, hanging on every damned lie coming out of Hoggman’s drunken mouth.
“I have sailed Lake Dorr from end to end,” he bragged. “I have seen the north of it where it comes to our borders with the barbarian nations in those cold regions.” He’d scanned the faces looking up at him and down at him. “Yes, I have. Once I took a sailboat and the winds of summer led me far to the south where the lake spills down the Cane River until I came to the Dragon’s Ladder where the rocks will tear a boat to bits.” Smiling, he’d added, “And then I turned my boat round and sailed it all the way back. Aye!”
“What about a krang? Have you ever laid eyes on such?” Someone asked him. It was a young kid, fresh from the City of Mangrove, the capital, come down to the shores of Lake Dorr to do battle with the beast and earn the bounty that would make him wealthy.
In fact, few men had ever seen a krang. The monsters were not of the land of Mangrove and how this one had ended up in the lake was merely guesswork. Some said Jove himself had placed it there. Others that Gault, that nation of evil, had sent it to their Lake Dorr by way of some overland barge, depositing it in the waters where it would ruin the economy that supported this part of the country. There were pictures of the krang in books, but those books were in temples where only the monks and priests could see them. It was said that the sight of such a creature could drive a weak person mad.
Knowing all of this, Hoggman said the first thing that came to him. “Yes, I have seen the krang.”
“Where?” It was as if every throat in the inn rose at once. The roar of it startled even a practiced liar like Hoggman.
“Not this krang,” he admitted. “It was one in the Mungpo River, in Rama.” He doubted any man there had ever seen Rama—one had, after all, to cross six borders to find it. “In my youth,” he continued. “I was on a fishing ship, the Globe, it was—the hold could take on two tons of fish. The captain had been hired to find the krang that was ravaging the stocks along that shore of Rama and we did it. We landed the beast.” Everyone was silent.
Hoggman looked to his left, eyeing the dark, useless bit of bone
and skin that hung down to his waist. “It was how I came to lose the use of my arm,” he muttered.
Looking up, he saw two-dozen heads nodding at him, believing. They were, after all, drunk to the last one of them. After that, the drinks came to him one after the other, strangers buying him round after round, clapping him on his good shoulder and bragging of their own exploits on the vast waters of Lake Dorr or the Eastern Sea where Mangrove the City loomed over it on pale, marble cliffs and walls. His belly filled time and again with beer and he had to keep walking out the back door to empty his bladder in the alleyway that itself seemed to be flowing with a river of urine.
It was while there, standing in that dark, awful-smelling way, his pants down around his thighs, his dick in his good hand, that the blow fell. The club—wood padded with leather strips—thumped solidly against his skull and the next thing Hoggman knew was… well, nothing.
“Ugh,” he heard himself say.
Hoggman’s eyes hurt. They hurt terribly. He lifted his hand to ward off the glare that was burning down on his face and slowly, carefully, he peeled his sleep-glued eyes open until he could see.
“Oh,” he said, drawing the lone syllable out until he figured that he should stop or end it by puking out the contents of his guts. So he just lay there for a while, covering his eyes with his hand. At least the gentle rocking made him feel better, as if he might not puke. At least just now.
And it was then that he realized that he was on the water. In a panic, he forced himself to sit up. Then, quickly grasping the situation, he leaned over the side of the boat and finally did vomit.
“Yer awake at last,” said the voice. “I was beginning to worry I’d landed far too hard a blow on that hard noggin of yours. Took two whacks, it did.”
Opening his eyes, bracing himself, Hoggman took stock of the situation. He was on a small fishing boat. Nothing fancy; oars for two men, a single mast, a tiny cabin and a hold that could contain maybe five hundred pounds of fish or other cargo. And he looked up to see the man at the oars, pulling hard to take them out ever farther into the vastness of Lake Dorr. “I don’t know you,” Hoggman said.
