Dead Bait 4

by Weston Ochse

  She recognized it instantly, of course, as a scene from Jackass: The Movie, which she had had to watch once as part of a class on reality television. In the film, some of the troupe learn an interesting fact about sea cucumbers: that they have a defense mechanism whereby they eject their internal organs to ward off predators. This discharge occurs as a spurt of white tubules. So, a gush of whitish substance from the tip of something phallic—naturally the Jackass cast had felt compelled to enact the scene that Laurie had just witnessed recreated...

  The motion slow underwater, she swung her open hand at the nearest of the grinning, imbecilic faces—Ben’s, it turned out—landing a soundless but solid blow that she hoped would hurt on multiple levels. Then, chest aching from the oxygen loss incurred through screaming, she kicked up desperately toward the surface. Shot gasping into the air. Blind for a moment as she batted the water from her eyes. Deaf as the stressed blood still thrummed in her ears.

  The first thing she heard, when she could again, was Bob, Paul, and Ben all cackling behind her as they surfaced. The first thing she saw was Annie and Lynda smiling as the guys related the little joke they’d pulled. The prank they’d plagiarized.

  A prank. Just a prank.

  No monster.

  She’d been crawling with fright, then crashing with it, at what ultimately was nothing. A natural phenomenon—obscure and somewhat gross, but natural nonetheless, and no harm to her.

  So why was she still terrified?

  ***

  Night fell. They set up tents on the beach and built a fire. Annie and Paul smoked pot from a bong. Bob found a used condom in the sand and snatched it up with a twig and flung it into the fire, and everyone ran back from the smoldering biohazard in jubilant disgust. The guys talked on and on about the stunt they’d performed with the sea cucumbers—“holothurians,” Bob kept calling them, impersonating some dweeby biologist—while Lynda berated them for emulating something as insipid as Jackass, to which Paul countered that their source had been the movie and not the show, and that film was an inherently more dignified format than television, such that Jackass: The Movie was art, even if Jackass, the series, was just embarrassing trash. Annie immediately disagreed about the distinction between movies and TV, citing it as a bourgeois notion.

  Laurie withdrew to her tent without a word and zipped herself inside.

  Five, ten minutes later, a hand knocked at the flap—stupidly, as if at a solid door—and Ben’s drunken voice whispered her name.

  Not unzipping the flap, “What do you want?” she intoned.

  He unzipped it himself, stuck his face in along the open side. “You seem upset. Do you wanna, like, talk about it? Or something? Maybe you should try to have some fun. You still could, if you tried. We could have some together—you know?”

  She sat up in the dark and said, “Listen to me very carefully, Ben: I’m not going to have sex with you.” She said, “This is not the kind of movie you think it is.”

  And she pushed past him out the flap of the tent and stalked off down the beach.

  She didn’t bother making sure she wasn’t followed. If he tried, he’d be sorry. She walked away far from the fire’s light and her friends’ guffawing. Sat on a huge length of driftwood, stared out over the terrible immensity of the sea. Glimmers of moonlight on its darkness. The incessant hiss of its deep churnings. Inconceivable events out there; life and death inexhaustible. Out there.

  She stood. Clear now what must be done if she wished for any peace that night. It was the fear at her core that was damming her up, thwarting the flows of rest, calm, insight, fun. And that fear, while maybe not coming from just one place, did have one place that epitomized it. One deep and thunderous place. And she could strike at it there.

  She took off what she had on and strode naked into the low waves. The water rose up her open body, tingling at her vulnerable matter, and she lay forward into it and took up a rhythm of determined strokes that carried her far from shore in little time. Stopping, she hung in place, treading the dark and alien water—an animal speck upon its nighttime profundity, bare beneath the implacable moon.

  “See?” she muttered to herself. “Nothing to be afraid of.”

  Turning slowly in the water, she chuckled and grinned at the trial of it all. The foolish dread in a system of no control. “You’re okay,” she said. And she was.

  Until she turned further and saw the thing on the water.

  A slam of adrenaline spiked through her, her heart stuttered off beat in a way that overrode all time-sense itself. Floating a short yard from her face, the throng of slender tubules, dull white in the gloom, seemed to stare at her. Several long green bodies bobbed among the mass, also seeming to stare. She stared back. She and the startling things bobbed together.

  Sea cucumbers.

  She took a breath. These had to be the sea cucumbers that the guys had molested earlier. Likely they’d been too rough with the delicate creatures, and the things had died soon after, floating up to the surface with their ejaculated viscera still hanging out.

  Killed for a joke. And not even an original one.

  “Assholes,” she said, and started to turn. Ready to swim back. She’d gotten what she needed. The dread hadn’t left her, really, but she’d collared it somehow, made it pliant to her higher mind. Good enough. She’d go get some sleep, and then it’d be even better than good enough.

  Just when she was almost turned away from it, the tangle of pale ropes moved.

  A quivery bouquet of them rose up off the water. The bundle of slick tubing stood poised for a second, framed against the huge black sky. A wriggle went through it, and it reared back like a cobra. It shook, making a sound like wet tongues writhing. Rising higher and higher...

  Laurie, who thought she had been afraid before, understood that she’d never known true fear till now. Understood, on a level underlying her obliterated mind, that true fear was as a god in its enormity next to her.

  It was the last thing she ever would understood.

  For in that next instant the mop of horrid tubules whipped forward and engulfed her face. The slippery tendrils coursed around her skull, wrapping about her head like a hundred fingers, or parodies of fingers, digits cartoonishly stretched into boneless noodles. Her body tried to scream but there was no air for the scream to ride out on as the tendrils closed in a solid sheet across her terror-gaped mouth. For a final second she could still peer out through the heap of attacking strands—saw the moon, space, ocean; saw the long green bodies of the sea cucumbers arching upright on the water, the tendrils around her head leading back to them—those ejected strands now rewinding into their points of origin, into the apertures that clapped obscenely open-shut-open as the sea cucumbers reeled their viscera in... pulling themselves along toward Laurie... flopping jerkily in their strange labor...

  Not dead. Not dead.

  Then the sight fell black as the tendrils invaded her eyes.

  The squirming threads punched through her corneas. They crowded in through her pupils, to the interior of each eyeball. They found the optic nerve.

  Climbed it to the brain.

  While the snaking fingers that entered each ear drilled their way there too.

  ***

  Ben lay drunk-spinning in his sleeping bag, his little tent dark around him, and listened to the sex from Paul and Lynda’s tent. Or was it Bob and Annie’s? Probably was happening in both. Could he try either tent with the idea of a threesome? Yeah, and get punched. He wished his phone would get a signal so he could use his data to watch porn. He kept trying to masturbate but the booze in him had his dick going soft. Porn would help. He didn’t know why none of their phones were working. It was this place. This beach was fucking weird.

  Speaking of weird—that bitch Laurie had something really wrong with her. They could’ve been getting it on right now. Bob was with Annie, Paul was with Lynda—that left just him and Laurie. Like, it was an obvious arrangement. They only had so much time on this earth.

/>   A hand knocked at the flap.

  He started to sit up, and the flap was already opening.

  She climbed in. He could see her face despite the dark, but the surprise of what was happening kept him from recognizing her at first. She was nude, flesh glistening from a swim and her soaked hair dripping. Her nipples stuck out like acorns, hard from the cool water drying on them.

  “Laurie...?”

  She didn’t answer. She crawled next to him, found the zipper on his sleeping bag, and opened it and slid in on top of him. His dick was already out from trying to masturbate, and before he knew it he was inside of her. His erection problems forgotten.

  “Like, wow... Laurie...”

  His mind tried to question this sudden turn, but he stopped it. Here was just proof that he’d been right all along. This was meant to happen.

  She kissed him. Felt odd, like her mouth was a bit puffed, tongue coarse and swollen. Whatever. Making out wasn’t his primary concern. But there was something else weird, too, that he couldn’t quite identify. Then it came to him: she’d had her eyes closed this entire time. They were closed now, in what he assumed must be ecstasy, as she rode on top of him—but so had they been shut when first she crept into his tent, and at every moment since.

  “Hey,” he said. “Look at me.”

  Her lids snapped open.

  And where her eyes should have been, there yawned two ragged cavities of red-black ruin.

  Her hands gripped his head on both sides, pinning it. She opened her mouth and her tongue slid out, and he saw why it had felt so funny.

  It was a sea cucumber. Rooted in her mouth, in place of a tongue. Dangling out through her lips, it wagged like a bloated tail.

  He kept thinking that he should be screaming. But he couldn’t seem to do it. A puckered orifice twitched open at the end of Laurie’s replacement tongue; he stared into it; it stared back; and a burst of white cords bloomed from it at pyrotechnic speed—filling his vision in a hideous flash, then blotting it out completely as the cords enveloped his face.

  Laurie’s fingers, buried in Ben’s hair, split along their tips, and more sea cucumbers thrust their way out from inside her digits. Smaller ones, like babies. They spat forth networks of thread that roiled over Ben’s temples... groping toward his ears...

  Their entry was like that of burning millipedes. His eardrums ruptured with a bludgeoning pop, and the feel of the tendrils burrowing in through the bony coils beyond was like broken glass rolling on ulcerous gums. Some part of him realized he was finally screaming, and felt surprised at the way it had simply kicked in without him, after all that failure to will it. None of his shrieks could escape, though, from behind the mask of repulsive tubules. He lay there beneath Laurie, the two of them still seemingly locked in erotic congress, and shrieked only to himself, trapped in this last and most intimate kiss as his eyes and ears poured thick rivulets of blood against the intruding organs of that ultimate inhumanity; he lay there bequeathing his brain to the outer thing claiming it.

  By the time he was no longer him, the whole thing just felt good.

  ***

  Lynda moaned under Paul, then said, “What the...?” as a motion at the tent’s flap drew her gaze: a slow opening of the zipper, with a man’s silhouette cast on the flap by the embers of their bonfire outside. At her sudden change Paul whipped his head around to see what she was looking at—just in time to watch Ben’s upper body poke through the flap.

  The idiot was wearing sunglasses. “Threesome?” he said.

  Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable.

  Paul was going to punch the creep.

  In his anger he didn’t notice the strangeness of Ben’s voice... the muffled, waterlogged vibrato of it... didn’t notice the wormy things erupting from Ben’s fingertips... too focused on the urge to knock that jackass flat...

  It was a blow he never got to deliver.

  Ben stuck out his tongue. Splayed his fingers.

  And then all Paul knew was the swarming white fibers, and the screaming: his own, and Lynda’s, and that from the tent next to theirs, where Bob and Annie lay entangled with Laurie—whose advances they had on the contrary accepted, adventurously... the three of them atremble in a shrieking, bleeding embrace: an adventure even greater than imagined.

  No need to muzzle the screams now. No one who might hear and get away.

  Besides, it was quiet again soon enough.

  ***

  The yellow Jeep Wrangler shot down the beach toward the water’s silvered edge. The six teenagers sat grinning in their seats as the vehicle hurtled into the waves, which crashed up over it but did not stop it. On the radio, “California Sun” was playing—the original, not a remix, though no one had done a thing to the file. As if the song had done it itself. It accompanied them as they drove on, the water rising over their Jeep, which somehow continued to operate, even under five, ten, fifteen feet of water. They sped along the sandy bottom, passing the other submerged vehicles, of which the convertible they’d seen on their swim that day was but one example. They stopped and got out and screwed their bodies down through the silt until only their heads were showing—their heads, which with time’s decay would come to resemble smooth white rocks. Within their brains the larvae droned, growing—even now pushing at the stitch-points of their skulls, working at sprouting free... to wait anchored and patient again, swaying in the current... twisting, shimmying... under a cold California moon.

  A Prayer for the Surfer Boys

  David James Keaton

  I thought it would be funny to walk the beach with a door under my arm. I’d wait for a surfer to harass me, maybe record it all on my phone or something, and this would out these punks for what they really were, a bunch of entitled trust-fund babies that should be way too old for this kinda shit. Way too old to claim a section of beach as their own and needle any and all comers to make outsiders never want to surf or swim there again. Way too old to be posting pictures of themselves on Facebook messing with the wildlife. Certainly too old to be dressed like sharks while doing all this.

  “We’ll burn you every single wave,” the first shark muttered, ten minutes after I hit the beach, shuffling past but aiming his surfboard at my face like a weapon.

  “Nice day, isn’t it!” I shouted, stabbing the base of my door into the sand and leaning on it to catch my breath. It wasn’t the heaviest door in the world but it wasn’t easy to trudge up and down the seashore with it. But the door was essential for my joke. My brother gave it to me, scrap from his side job building houses for Habitat for Humanity, where they were tearing down an old apartment building so they could hammer it right back up again. This beautiful door didn’t match the newer, cheaper doors they were installing, so it wouldn’t be missed. It was old-school, too. Rich mahogany, speakeasy style, with a knocker, and a big, gold doorknob like a brass hamburger. The previous owner disfigured it a bit by drilling a peephole, but the rest was cherry.

  “The day will be a lot nicer when you’re gone!” another shark said without looking over. The shark trailing him spit at my feet. Now, when I say “shark,” I mean the online rumors were true, and these were grown-ass men in black wetsuits with big dorsal fins jutting out of the middle of their backs. I’m not sure if wetsuits came like that, if it was some next-level San Jose Sharks hockey gear, or if their long-suffering mothers sewed them on before packing their lunches. But I hoped to get close enough to touch one before the day was out. Everything was going as planned so far. The sharks were fucking with me right on schedule. But I was a little confused by the sense of rivalry. They were scoffing at me like I was going to surf with them. Even though I was carrying a goddamn door.

  Another surfer stomped past, flipping a foot full of sand my way, followed by a half-hearted raspberry. They seemed to be losing interest, so I tried another tactic.

  “Hey! Here’s a joke for you,” I said, and he whirled around, almost catching me in the chest with the skeg off his board. “What’s the difference betwee
n a pizza and a surfer?”

  He just blinked.

  “A surfer can’t feed a family of five.” No reaction.

  “Unless they’re sharks!” I added. Still nada, but there were plenty more walking fish hybrids shadowing him, so, inspired, I stepped back behind my excellent door and rested my ear on the wood.

  “Okay, I got one! Knock knock,” I said, rapping the gold ring as I worked to keep it balanced in the sand. “Who’s there!” I answered for myself. “To…” I said.

  “To who?” came a voice on the other side of my door. A shark had taken the bait.

  “To whom,” I corrected, and the shark yanked the door open and rightfully punched me in the face.

  ***

  Like most people, I’d first heard the claims of “localism” after the internet-famous incident involving my brother. The term referred to the escalating turf wars where locals vandalized your vehicle, whipped sand dollars at your head, or simply threatened to kick your ass for even setting foot on their precious beaches. At the time, my brother was down here in Palos Verdes working environmental cleanup for the city. He was a good guy, but a sucker for seedy beach-front life, fascinated by the Biblical nature of the homeless near the ocean, all those sandals mixed with surf, a plight I accused him of never acknowledging in the cities. Even though the surfers fought so hard for the area, they didn’t think twice about leaving bottles and half-smoked roaches everywhere. My brother told me that in surfer slang, “pollution” referred to interlopers trying to drop in on their waves. Always ready to give people the benefit of the doubt, he wondered if they just didn’t understand the concept of pollution after they hijacked the word.