Dead Bait 4

by Weston Ochse

  I will be next, they’ll open me from gullet to tail, they’ll peel off my fur in silver-grey strips to add to their own monstrous minglings of pelt, they’ll eat my liver while rimes of frost ring my dead eyes –

  With another shriek, and another agonizing wrenching of my body, and another even-more-agonizing deep-inside slashing of pain, I am suddenly loose.

  Loose and floundering on the ice, splashing in blood-slush. Clumsy and heavy, galumphing, awkward, as all around me the killers bellow and roar. Another claw-stick pierces my flipper. I heave myself forward and the grey webbing-skin shreds.

  The hole!

  I lunge for it. Headfirst, flippers scrabbling, hunching and flopping. They grab at me. But –

  In I go, down I go. The sea closes over me. My sleek grace returns, or as much as my bleeding wounds will allow. I try to dive.

  The cold numbs.

  The salt stings.

  I do not so much dive as sink, but I sink fast and deep. I cradle my hurt flipper to my chest and try to curl into a ball, as if it might meld my injured flesh together again with itself.

  Above me, there is commotion. One of the strange-furred killers has fallen in. A big male, a bull. What was my escape and return to grace is the opposite for him. He is not made for swimming. His own pelt hinders and entangles. His broad-set nostrils do not close.

  And Selah streaks out of the dark waters. Her jaws, made for nothing much larger than cod, clamp around one of the bull’s hindlimbs. She drags him far below any reach of the air-hole, whipping her torso savagely, like a shark rending prey. Enormous bubbles erupt from the bull’s gaping mouth.

  She is in a frenzy, my cousin, a maddened rage. Blood seethes in a cloud, half-obscuring her from my view. She is a dark shape in the red gloom, a death-shape, and she releases the land-creature’s hindlimb only so she can go for his underbelly and face.

  Just as abruptly, Selah halts her attack. She loops away from her still-struggling victim – his bubbles have nearly stopped, and his remaining eye bulges with terror – and comes to me. She nuzzles me, rubs her sleek side along mine, makes concerned and inquisitive clicks.

  The best I can manage is a mewling kind of cry. Selah, with a gentle care, burrows her head under my wounded flipper to help steady and support me.

  I don’t want to move, I don’t want to swim, it hurts, everything hurts. The next-nearest breathing-hole is still so far away … and even if we could reach it, what’s the use? Wherever we go, we’ll never be able to surface safely again! Not with them up there, waiting!

  But Selah is insistent. Even urgent. She will not leave me. She’ll push and tug and haul me through the water if she has to. Because she knows what I should have known, what I did know but forgot.

  All that blood.

  All that spreading bloodspill scent, hot and enticing.

  The first ominous outlines of fin and fluke have already begun to appear.

  And they do not wait.

  Out There Having Fun

  Andrew Wayne Adams

  The yellow Jeep Wrangler careened onto the beach with its canvas top down, tires churning up sibilant blades of sand as the vehicle swerved all wild and young, just slightly out of control on its eager way to where the water and the sun were perfect. It skidded to a stop and six teenagers jumped out. Laughing, smiling, they threw down beach blankets, stabbed a few big and brightly colored parasols into the sand, swung a cooler into place and popped it open to reveal sodas on ice, and pressed play on the radio that one of them had set up on the hood of the Jeep—and from the great round speakers of that bulky silver box came the opening drum shuffle of “California Sun” by the Rivieras, followed closely by the guitar twang of its famously groovy surf riff.

  The teens danced. They twisted, they shimmied: three guys and three girls, all six of them with superb physiques, a lot of skin showing. Their teeth perfect in their grins. The ocean sparkled blue and vast a bare ten yards from them, its immensity reduced to a backdrop for their swiveling hips and sculpted hair, their laughter somehow louder than its crashing. Their music overpowering the ocean, the rock song suffusing all...

  Especially this part: “Where they’re out there having fun... in the warm California sun...”

  And the teens looked more like they were in their twenties, but whatever. They acted like teens. Or at least like what people thought teens acted like. Twisting, shimmying. The guys and the girls really digging each other. Really digging the song, the sun, the sand, the space-time they took for granted as the arena of all being.

  Until suddenly “California Sun” shattered into sonic dust as a distorted bass drop intruded upon its shuffle and twang—and the cool 1960s rock song morphed into a jaggedly schizophrenic version of itself: rumbling, gravelly, spastic. Like the radio was broken. Except it wasn’t.

  The dancing stopped.

  “Goddammit, Ben,” groaned Lynda; “you downloaded the dubstep remix?”

  Ben gave an innocent grin. “Oops?”

  She kicked sand at him. Then the others kicked sand at him.

  Paul said, “There goes the authenticity of our experiment,” and he folded to the sand (which on closer inspection was not warm and pristine, but blisteringly hot and full of sharp rocks and debris) and dug inside the cooler for one of the beers beneath the sodas. “And this shoulda been an easy one. Those old ‘beach party’ films are so cookie-cutter, my little bro could pull one off, and he’s, like, twelve. And we’re grad students, we major in this shit.” Hiss of a beer can opening. “Ah, well, fuck it.”

  Annie, pinching the bridge of her nose as if her head hurt, said to no one in particular: “Do you have any idea how many times I watched Beach Blanket Bingo to prepare for this?”

  “Probably not as many times as I watched Bikini Beach and Muscle Beach Party,” said Bob. He got a beer, passed one to Lynda. “I even watched them simultaneously, once, one on the TV and one on my laptop, set up side by side. It was Professor Iceberg’s idea.”

  “Speaking of Professor Iceberg, just imagine his detached rage when he learns that we flubbed this assignment.”

  “We could start over,” said Lynda, taking her phone from her bikini top, “I’m sure I can find the original song online somewhere.”

  “Nope, too late, already started drinking,” said Paul. “Time to party for real, not for fake.”

  “Whatever,” Lynda said, looking up from her phone, “my data’s not working anyway.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, also on his phone, “I’m not getting any kind of signal at all. Weird.”

  “Honestly,” Paul went on, “what the hell kind of research is this, you know? Go out and pretend we’re in some dumb niche genre of 1960s film? What’re we supposed to learn from that?”

  “Paul,” said Annie, “do you ever pay attention in class?”

  “Look,” Paul said, “what got me into Media Studies freshman year was that I heard there was a class on professional wrestling. I got to write a term paper on ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage. Good class. Since then, though—I don’t know.”

  “Okay. But so why did you go on to grad school for it?”

  “You kidding? I didn’t wanna have to get a job.”

  “For the love of God,” said Laurie—silent till now, standing with arms crossed as she gazed out over the tremendous ocean; “won’t somebody turn off that damn music!?”

  The dubstep version of “California Sun” had continued to play in the background. Ben hopped over to the radio and reached for the volume knob as if to turn it down—but then cranked it up instead, giving Laurie a devilish look. He walked over to her, grabbing two beers on the way, and held one out to her. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t like dubstep,” he said, as the others all started to wobble their heads to the music, swigging their beers to the beat.

  Laurie took the beer. “It interests me academically, but that’s about it.”

  “Maybe you should try to, like, feel more,” and he made these eyes at her, sad and hopeful, w
ith a blossoming grin beneath—like there was something between them, him and her, or could be, and that thing was what she should be trying to feel. “Like, listen to your heart.”

  She was, actually. She’d been listening to it since the moment their project had failed and she’d glanced out over the ocean. And her heart’s message was simple.

  Fear.

  “Do you see that?” she asked Ben. “Out there. On the water.”

  He squinted. Some hundred yards from shore, a whitish mass floated on the mellow waves, hard to see through the shimmer of reflected sun. With focus Ben could just make out its composition: what looked like ropy tangles of slick pale tubing. Like a rug of udon noodles.

  “Just some trash,” he said.

  “But a minute ago I saw...”

  He waited. “You saw...?”

  “Part of it—moved.”

  They looked at each other. They sipped their beers.

  Bob and Annie darted past, him chasing her, both laughing. Ben stopped them with a shout and spoke through a growing smile: “Guys, Laurie here has a great idea. We fucked up Bikini Beach—but we could still do Jaws. Look!” Acting like a bad actor acting terrified. “Out there! On the water!”

  And they all turned and squinted together.

  At nothing.

  “It’s gone,” Laurie said. Edging closer to the water, peering harder. “Where’d it go?”

  Bob was grinning like his face was broken. “Yeah, Jaws. Or Humanoids from the Deep. Horror from the ancient ocean. I like it.” He pointed at Laurie, whose gaze remained sutured to the spot out on the water where the strange thing had been. “And you’re the Girl Who Knows. We’ll not take heed of your premonitory waves of dread, and later pay for that heedlessness with our lives.”

  Paul and Lynda had walked up to listen, and now Lynda added, “After lots of promiscuous sex, of course,” and winked at Paul beside her, who answered with a wiggle of his eyebrows. He tilted back his head to drain his beer, threw the can behind him, and said, “Hey—who’s up for a swim?”

  “Great idea,” said Bob, looking right at Laurie.

  And Bob, Annie, Paul, and Lynda dashed off into the water, splashing and hollering as they ran, the white-flecked azure of the sea rising ever higher around them until finally they leaned forward into it and stretched out to swim—straight toward the place where Laurie had seen the blob of pale ropes, or whatever it had been... blubbery strands all splayed like fingers, heaped like spaghetti, and one of them had lifted and a wave went through it—like the wriggle of an eel, that nacreous length had lashed at the air for one grotesque second... its tip like the sickly tail of a rat, it had seemed to point at her...

  But it was gone now.

  “Maybe you were right,” she said to Ben, who stood next to her still, watching the others paddle out into the sparkling vastness. “Just some trash.”

  “Yeah. Hey, you ever seen Creepshow?”

  “Of course.”

  “This whole ‘creepy thing in the water’ thing kind of reminds me of that one story from it. You know, the one where there’s the creepy thing in the water.”

  “I think you’re thinking of Creepshow 2.”

  “No...”

  “Yes. The segment with that monster that’s like an oil slick or something? Anyway, I don’t want to talk about movies right now.”

  “Sorry. I can’t seem to help myself.” He took a dramatic gulp of beer. “You remember Professor Iceberg’s lecture about the viral nature of media images? He compared it to one of those freaky parasites you hear about with the unbelievable life cycles. Like the lancet fluke, that lives in cows, who poop out its eggs, which get eaten by a snail, who coughs out wads of the young, which get eaten by an ant, who has its nervous system taken over by the flukes, which causes the ant to climb a blade of grass at night and wait at the top to be eaten by a cow—who becomes the new host, and the cycle repeats. Or something like that. And that kind of bizarre parasitic life cycle, it’s the same thing with media images, only their cycle is this: they enter a human through the eyes and ears, gestate in the mind and heart, and then hatch and hijack the nervous system, causing their host to spew them back into the environment by a certain action of the vocal apparatus, or sometimes by the orchestrated discharge of hand movements. So I guess you could say I’m full of parasites. I really can’t help myself when I want to paint these one thousand and one references into every area of discourse. I’m infected by film and internet, the printing press. I’m a zombified vector of—”

  Laurie hurriedly drained her beer, tossed the can down, and ran forward into the great wet reach of the ocean. Her heart still murmured its chant of fear, hollering to her head that this was a bad idea—but she just had to get away from Ben and his affectatious regurgitation of Professor Iceberg’s lecture, all delivered at her with that same flirty look he’d been using earlier, that seemed this time to say how she ought to be seeing him in an amended light, based on how smart he unexpectedly was—brainy, just the way she liked ’em—when actually she recalled the lecture and knew that he had been repeating lines of it verbatim, obviously memorized from his notes without significant understanding... with only the calculated aim to impress...

  Between that and the ocean horror, well—she’d take her chances in the water.

  Maybe it really had been nothing, anyway. Her imagination. Too much stress lately. She’d been studying so hard.

  ***

  Ben had followed her into the water, of course, but the task of staying afloat kept him from blathering too much, and once they reached the others it was easier to shield herself from his attentions. Whenever he swam near her, she’d find something to say to Annie; and Bob and Paul occupied him the other half of the time with their tomfoolery. Everyone had fun for a while pretending they were in some horrible movie about the aquatic menace that Laurie had seen—everyone but Laurie, that is, who still couldn’t shake the buzz of dread from her brain, and who found herself scanning the water every fifteen seconds for any trace of something wrong. She barely heard Lynda addressing her and Ben with, “Did you guys, like, see it? The sunken car? For real, on the swim out, an actual convertible, in the water. Its top down and everything, not even that old looking. About forty feet back that way,” and she barely heard herself answering, “No,” she hadn’t—hadn’t what?—already losing track of the topic, too distracted, because she’d finally detected her trace of something wrong...

  The boys were gone.

  A second ago they’d been behind her, splashing and shouting. Then: silence.

  She spun, checking all around. They weren’t anywhere. No bubbles or choppiness on the blue’s undulating skin to indicate where they might have just dove under. No dark blots where they might’ve been lurking close to the surface. Three grown men, erased sharply from the scene.

  Annie and Lynda noticed now too. Made confused, dubious faces. Annie opened her mouth to say something, probably call the guys assholes for trying to scare them, since it was clear that that was what was going on, only it wasn’t working...

  ...but Laurie didn’t get to hear what she actually said: because to Laurie it wasn’t clear that that was what was going on; and she was scared; and her body leapt ahead of her mind in deciding what to do, which was to plunge down into the water—driving in deep, with eyes open and searching, frantic to locate her friends... if it wasn’t already too late...

  She had never seen such clear water—like mountain air made liquid—yet the panic flooding her brain seeped even into her vision, so that the clarity twisted into murk. Several yards from her, a cluster of shapes hung swaying near the sandy bottom, some twenty feet down. She clawed her way toward the sunken shapes, their features—arms, legs, hair—resolving as she focused on them and closed the space between them and her.

  It was Bob, Paul, and Ben. Grappling with something on the bottom, their backs were to her, only Ben’s head turned slightly, so that she saw one wide, staring eye. She tried to make out what they w
ere fighting with—something on the seafloor they were groping at: what looked like smooth white rocks, big and round... almost like the domes of skulls half buried in the sand...

  She thrashed on through the water toward her friends, unable to think of how she could actually help them, but driven by the sense that she had to.

  Ben’s one eye locked on her.

  He spun.

  Bob and Paul spun too.

  She’d gotten to within five feet of them, and now, as they whirled around to face her, her view of the horror was clear and close. Each had some elongated blob, green and coarse, emerging from the groin area. Wrapped around these green terrors, their hands jerked urgently, as if trying to yank the long blobs in two. Laurie could only stare on, shocked brain scrabbling to decode the situation.

  A small dark hole opened at the end of one of the green shafts.

  And from the hole came spewing a mass of slick pale ropes—blubbery strands unspooling into the water... like an eruption of udon noodles...

  Laurie screamed, bubbles exploding from her wrenched mouth.

  The ropey horror gushing toward her—it was the stuff she’d seen on the water earlier; the weird thing she’d been afraid of instantly, and hadn’t stopped being afraid of, even after she’d started to pretend that she knew better—that it had been nothing, really.

  Just some trash.

  Holes opened on the other two green stalks, and the same eruption of white tubes came spitting out of them—whipping through the water toward Laurie’s face, from which the bubble-blowing scream seemed interminable...

  ...until she saw the guys’ faces.

  They were laughing. Grinning so huge it had to hurt.

  Her scream continued on a second, then snapped off as she suddenly understood. The elongated green things were sea cucumbers. The guys were holding them at their crotches like simulated penises, pretending to masturbate with them, with the erupting white ropes meant to imitate semen spurted forth at the cusp of orgasm. What they’d been doing with their backs to her was grappling with the creatures, pulling them up from where they clung to the skull-like rocks. Waiting for her to get close before they sprang their lewd prank.