Through a mouthful of mush he turned to Wyatt and yelled, “I said shut up that fucking truck, you piece of shit!” spraying chunks of cinnamon-covered apple into Wyatt’s face. Then he threw his head back and laughed long and loud until he was coughing, choking on his oatmeal and spitting even more of it out into his lap.
He wheezed. His head drooped forward and his right eye closed. The left one stared at the wall, still half-open.
Wyatt held his breath. He listened to the television downstairs. It sounded like. Stu was watching, Wheel of Fortune. The old man’s breathing came in heavy, labored breaths, probably from the way he sat hunched over in the bed. Wyatt moved his leg and heard the joints creak. Finally, Dad slumped fully over and passed out.
* * *
Wyatt carried him under the arms while Stu held his ankles, and together they got him downstairs. The smell from the wound was enough to burn Wyatt’s eyes and he tried not to breathe, but Dad was heavy, Wyatt panted, and the stench was just rotten. His bloody hair pressed against Wyatt’s chest, and he had to force himself not to look down, because he would have been staring right into the hole in Pop’s head.
They hauled him through the kitchen, out to the porch, then out into the field.
“Are they out here yet?” Wyatt asked.
“I don’t know,” Stu answered.
“Let’s take him further in.”
They carried him to the edge of the pond, stood him up, and then let him fall naturally. Wyatt tossed a broken tree branch near Pop’s feet, hoping to give the illusion he had tripped. Then he stood over him for a second, trying to make himself turn around, but . . . this was still his father. This wasn’t his fault. It had been an accident. It never should have come to this. It still didn’t have to. It wasn’t too late to do the right thing for him.
No, he realized, it was too late, no matter what he was thinking.
“I’m sorry, Pop,” he said.
“Come on,” he said to Stu, and then they hurried back inside.
It was late, nearly two in the morning, before they managed to put themselves to bed, but both were lying awake, trying not to listen for the fish, hoping the old man didn’t scream. All they heard were the crickets and the ticking clock.
In the morning, the fish were in the fields, and the old man was gone.
* * *
The NYS D.E. C. showed up with someone from the Bureau of Fisheries and two New York State police officers.
“How many would you say you’ve seen in the area?” Jones asked.
Wyatt shrugged. “Hard to say, we didn’t know what they were, we just tossed ‘em back in the pond.”
“And you never questioned why every morning you kept finding fish everywhere?”
Wyatt shrugged, feeling a bit stupid. The truth was, he had wondered, but simply hadn’t known who to contact. Who would have guessed there even was something called the Bureau of Fisheries? If he had realized something was going on in the area, and that it was part of a bigger problem, sure. But as it was, well, with Pop and everything, he just had bigger things on his mind.
“What’s gonna happen?” he asked.
“We’re going to poison your pond,” Jones explained. “Then we drain it and process everything we find.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long,” Jones said, then turned away and joined his team.
Wyatt went back inside, and Stu asked, “What if they find him?”
“What if they do? They’re supposed to. Accident? Tripped, knocked himself out, got torn up by the fish? They’re supposed to find him.”
“But he’s not there!” Stu said. “He’s just gone. You know they didn’t eat all of him, they’re just little fish.”
“You didn’t get bitten,” Wyatt said, holding up his bandaged palm. “Those things can bite! But you’re right, there should be something left out there.”
They had searched the property all morning, trying to find any sign before the D.E.C. showed up, but there was nothing, not a bloody print, not a scrap of T-shirt. They hadn’t heard a thing in the night and their fear was that he had woken up and stumbled away, that he’d be found in town later in the day wandering down the street, bloody and rambling, and then they’d be in the shit.
It took a few hours, but eventually the fish were dead and then they began pumping the pond. Wyatt and Stu sat inside, waiting for the roar of the pump to die and someone to clomp up the porch steps, bang on the screen door, and tell them they’d found the old man in the pond. However, the pump went on and on until the pond was empty and a while later, the commotion died down. Jones came up to tell them thanks for their cooperation, and then, just like that, everyone was gone, and Wyatt and Stu were left to the dark silence of the farm.
“What are we gonna do?” Stu asked.
Wyatt looked outside and shook his head. “I can’t say. I just don’t know.”
They went outside, into a cooling breeze and their sweat dried on their skin. Stu shivered. Wyatt headed for the pond. It laid a ways back from the house, but it was not too far to walk. He approached and stared in awe at the giant muddy hole in his yard. He had fished it before, he had swum in it, but he never knew just how deep it was. Had to be ten feet at the deepest. And a good thirty feet across.
He sat on the edge in the damp grass, looking out over the emptiness. Stu came up behind him, sat to his left, sighed and said, “Look, Wyatt, I’m really sorry.”
“I know,” Wyatt said. “You didn’t know.”
“Yeah,” Stu said. “I didn’t know.”
The crickets had come to life hours ago. They had still never received a call from anyone. As far as they knew, no one had found him.
“I don’t get it,” Wyatt said, peering into the dark at the bottom of the empty pond. “Where is he?”
They heard something in the dark, a sucking sound, so loud and sudden, it startled them and they both flinched before they realized it was coming from the pond. Stu got up and leaned over the edge, trying to see and Wyatt asked, “What is it?”
“I can’t tell. Something in the mud. Maybe a dog wandered out there and got stuck after they left?”
“I’ll get a flashlight,” Wyatt said, heading for the house. “We should help it out.”
When he trotted back out to the empty pond, he found his brother on the edge of the mud, a look of horror on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Wyatt asked and Stu pointed.
Wyatt trained the light out onto the pond, where he thought the animal was stuck, but it wasn’t an animal he found. It was Pop. Dead, half-eaten with chunks of his face and arms missing. His dead eye was gone, but the other one stared at them, shining silver in the light. A chunk of torn fish hung between his teeth and he bared them, red and grisly. His T-shirt and shorts clung to him like a second skin, coated in mud and algae. Small pond twigs poked out from his hair.
“He just . . . rose up from the mud,” Stu said.
“Shit,” Wyatt said. Stu was still on the ground beside him, whining high in the back of his throat.
His first thought was, Pop’s all right, but a closer looked proved that wrong.
Wyatt grabbed Stu’s shirt collar, and hauled him up, and then dragged him away.
“Come on,” he said.
Stu stumbled back a few steps, then wrenched his shirt free of Wyatt’s grasp, turned, and hauled ass for the front porch. By the time, they got there and looked back, Pop had climbed over the lip of the pond and was heading for the house. They darted inside and slammed the door. Wyatt kept a Remington 700 in the closet. He went for it and when he came back, Stu stood staring out the window, cupping his hands to see.
Wyatt stooped beside him and tried to see too.
“What is this?” he asked. “What the hell is this?”
“I don’t know,” Stu said.
Wyatt felt the breath being sucked out of his lungs as if the house were being vacuum-sealed. Pop grabbed the porch rail and hauled himself up the few ste
ps, then beat at the door. The glass shattered, shards buried in his hands and forearms, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Pop,” Wyatt sighed.
His legs beat at the bottom half of the door, as if he were trying to walk through it. His arms flailed inside the hole left by the broken glass.
Wyatt grabbed Stu by the arm and hauled his brother behind him.
“Get back,” he said. “In the kitchen.”
“What are you gonna do?” Stu asked.
“I don’t know,” Wyatt replied. And he didn’t. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to shoot Pop, even like this. “I’m so sorry,” he said, staring at the thing pretending to be his father. Then he blew a hole in the wall an inch from Pop’s head.
“Shit.”
He cocked the rifle again and took aim, but now that he’d had that moment of fear and impulse, he didn’t know if he could bring himself to do it again. To fire on his father?
That’s not Pop, his mind said, and he knew he was right. But still. He just couldn’t do it again.
He lowered the gun, and that’s when Stu swooped in and took it from him.
“I’ll do it for you,” he said. Wyatt nodded, stepped away and pressed himself to the wall. His blood pounded in his ears, but mostly he heard the scratch of his own breath in and out of his throat. Then, somehow, he heard Stu’s mumbled words.
“Who’da thought I’d get to kill you twice, you hateful old fuck!”
Wyatt snapped out of his stupor.
“What did you say?”
“Huh?” Stu asked, looking to his brother who now stood at his shoulder.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Stu said.
The thing pretending it was their father still fought to get through the door, but the wood refused to give. His arms reached and flexed, the dead fingers grasping. Something churned in his throat, and then the rotting chunk of Northern snakehead in his mouth fell out, plunking to the floor.
“Why would you say something like that?” Wyatt asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wy,” Stu said, trying to shrug off his brother and do what needed done.
“You know what you said,” Wyatt insisted. “You get to kill him twice, why would you say something like that to our father?”
Stu didn’t answer. Instead, he raised the rifle again, took his aim. Then Wyatt asked, “Was it an accident?”
Stu lost his focus and looked over at his brother.
“Of course it was an accident. They happen all the time.”
“Not like that,” Wyatt said. “You look me in the eye and you swear it was an accident, Stu.”
The brothers glared at each other, neither blinking nor looking away. Stu never said a word.
“I can’t believe you,” Wyatt said. “He let you back into his house. He gave you everything you needed. And you did this to him, your own father?”
“What do you want me to do, Wy? He hated me. He was a fucking asshole to me, man, and you did shit to stand up for me.”
“No one told you to run off and disappear for ten years, either!”
“What else was I supposed to do, stay here and take his shit? I’m sorry you were trapped here all your life working his farm, but that’s not my life, Wy.”
“I’m gonna kill you,” Wyatt said, grabbing the Remington and twisting, trying to free it from his brother’s grasp. Stu’s hold was stronger and better placed. A quick flick of his arm and the gun was well out of Wyatt’s grasp. That’s when Wyatt attacked.
He flung his hands tight around Stu’s neck and choked him. The younger brother fell back into the wall, startled, and the gun fell to the floor with a clatter. He put his arms up trying to pry loose Wyatt’s hold, but it was no good.
He tried to fall and bring Wyatt with him, but Wyatt had a good thirty pounds on Stu and all of it was muscle built from working the farm. He was going nowhere.
The old man made a noise like a shriek, his dead vocal cords emitting a weird sound like knives against metal underwater, and Wyatt looked over and grinned maliciously at his father, because he knew now how to handle this.
He picked his brother off the floor and carried him by the neck to the door where Pop’s arms reached and grabbed him. The old man hauled Stu closer. Stu screamed and fought, but Wyatt’s strength combined with the old man’s, which came from who knew where, meant the younger brother stood no chance.
The old man opened his mouth, reached, and took a chunk from Stu’s cheek. He screamed again, this time like a toy winding down. He tried to look around at his brother, but the motion only pulled the wound open wider. Pop swallowed the chunk of bloody flesh, and then took another, this time from Stu’s neck.
The severed arteries sprayed blood everywhere, but Wyatt refused to let go until the deed was done. Only when Stu was too weak to fight, did he loosen his grip. The old man hauled him up through the broken pane, and then out to the porch, where he finished him off, while Wyatt stood inside and listened to the tearing sound of meat.
He stared out the broken pane and moved backwards until his back hit the opposite wall, then he fell to the floor, spent. He panted and cried. His muscles were sore from the sudden and extreme exertion. And the sound of his father eating his younger brother made his stomach churn.
After what seemed like forever, the noises stopped and something thumped against the porch floorboards, then scraped, and another thump, and a scrape. Wyatt peered out the broken pane. The sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. He saw Pop on his belly, crawling away from Stu’s corpse, down the porch steps. Then he tried hauling himself across the yard, struggling to turn his heavy deadweight toward the road. He got halfway there when his body shuddered, the legs jerked and his arms wobbled and fell and the old man’s stomach burst open against the ground and dozens of bloody Northern snakeheads fell from him, wriggling and twisting to be free. The fish wound their way across the ground, over to the road, and further on.
Wyatt watched from the front door, remembering what Jones had said, that these things could live up to three or four days out of water, almost envying their freedom.
He looked at his father, and then made himself look down at Stu as well.
He would bury them in the field. Hopefully the crops would cover them well enough. He had better get started soon, he realized. The sun would be high before he knew it, and there was work to do. He stripped his shirt, headed to the barn for the shovel, dragged the two half-eaten corpses to the field, and got to work.
END
THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA OF THE DEAD
By
Tim Curran
He was an old man who fished alone in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and he had not seen a living fish in three months. There were reasons for that and he knew what they were, but he no longer thought about such things. The time for that had past. The only thing he thought about now was the sea itself. The blue-green waters, the vast gray emptiness of it. How sometimes that emptiness seemed to live inside him. He was at one with the emptiness and it was at one with him. Again, he did not think about it, for the world had changed, and he had changed with it.
Though he had not seen a living fish in some ninety days, the old man believed in his heart that there was such a fish out there. One last fish. That it was waiting for him to catch it. It was a game and he must play it, because the fish expected it. Why would the fish, the last living fish, give its life easily without spectacle and sport? It would not. Because, if it did, its life would have no meaning. The last living fish in the sea of the dead.
Each morning, the old man would open his eyes and walk outside, where he liked to stand beneath the green of the palms. His eyes would look out to the vastness of the sea and he would say, “Today, fish, we will meet. Today, battle will be joined.” Then, like every day, the old man would go back to his shack and get his wooden box that contained the coiled, braided lines, gaff and harpoon. The very things he would need to find and hold the fish
when he found it. He would unfurl the sail on the skiff and push out into the surf, the sea moving around him, neither happy nor sad for his intrusion, but perhaps, curious as to what it was he thought he would do today in the graveyard sea.
The white ribbon of sand at his back and the immensity of the Gulf before him, the old man would spend his day in search of the fish. His bait box was filled with crawling things, but it was the best he could do since the world died. Everything was carrion now. Carrion that moved and the old man wished for the old days when things dead stayed dead and did not move, did not bite. He no longer smelled the stink of the carrion. However, it was on his brown, weathered hands and enveloped him in a tarp. He was used to it and it no longer existed in his mind. All day, he would bait his hooks and cast his lines, catching one living dead fish after the other. He would throw them all back, because he did not want them. The living dead fish were neither sly nor crafty as they had been in life: they would bite anything. Even a bare hook was enough to tantalize them. There was no sport in them. They were dead.
When the sun turned the waters orange and the horizon red, the old man would return with no fish. Not defeated or frustrated, but only patient. The sea was a strange girl and sometimes she smiled at you, but mostly she did not. He would pack away his lines, gaffs, and harpoon in the wooden box and wash out his bait box, then go back to his shack. There was no point in putting anything away. There was no one left to steal from him. Those that still walked did not care about fishing, boats or stealing.
In the shack, he would think about the boy.
He was old and his memories were no longer clear, but before the world died, the boy had spent much time with him. The boy understood him in ways that he did not understand himself. The boy looked up to him and thought he was the greatest fisherman in the world, even though, very often, the old man caught no fish at all. There was a time when the boy fished with him, until his father forbade it. Still…the boy would come. He would bring the old man bottles of beer, sometimes plates of yellow rice and black beans. Then the old man would tell him stories of great fishermen he knew, of greater fish, and strange things that he had seen once but would never see again. The boy liked to hear about Africa, so the old man would tell him how, aboard a tuna clipper, he had first seen the walking dead men on the shore. How they had waited. How they had stared. How they had wanted the tuna boat to ground herself in the shallows, so they could feed upon the men that tried to escape her.
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