Yeti came bounding at him with the stone knife in his teeth cutting a wide smile into his red, apoplectic face.
Zef went down on one knee and torpedoed himself at Yeti, a man with no arms grappling a man with no legs. They rolled and tumbled in the surf until Zef pinned Yeti’s powerful arms with his legs and sank his teeth into the shaman’s throat.
The Hawaiian’s pulse was strong, the heartbeat racing but steaddy between his teeth. He bit down until his teeth met and blood surged up in his face in a delectable red wave.
Yeti’s arms crushed him in a spastic bearhug, cracking several ribs, before he went limp. He rolled off the corpse and most of the grizzled old local’s neck came away in his teeth.
The retreating wave pulled Yeti into black shallows seething with gray fins. Sharks of every size, from fingerlings to ten-foot hammerheads and mako crawling half-exposed over the ribbed sandbar, converged on the mangled mancatcher in a frenzy so intense, the ocean itself seemed to eat him.
The rest of Yeti’s thug priests hung back in a demoralized mob at the on of the beach, but slowly, they gathered the resolve to come after him. Kalei knelt amid the spoiled offerings, pressing a tapa cloth to her mutilated breast. She looked older than the islands.
With nowhere else to go, Zef waded into the ocean, trying to climb onto the silver road the rising moon painted on the water.
Wavelets played about his knees. The rocky bottom tripped him and he fell in the shallows. He felt sleek shapes bumping against him, curiously, lovingly. Their teeth not eating, but undressing him.
He thought, This kind of shit only works if you believe in it…
After all the shit he’d been through, all the obstacles he’d destroyed, you’d think the universe would’ve just given up by now.
Just lie back and try to enjoy it, world. Dr. Bill ain’t finished with your fat ass by a damn sight.
Watching a big beautiful sunset and sipping a mai tai, he floated on a raft in the private lagoon at the center of his lowland estate on the Big Island. His erstwhile wife usually holed up here when she wasn’t required for social appearances like his upcoming Celebrity Marriage Retreat Special for sweeps. He’d come to talk to her about reconciliation, and thus he was on the phone with the admiral of his legal armada, Mort Blaustein.
“Morty, she’s fucking insane. I would certify her myself, if I was a real doctor. How many fucking honorary degrees equals one real one, anyway?”
“They don’t convert, Bill.” Morty had no fucking sense of humor. “She’s pretty dug in, this time, then.”
“You’ve never fucked her, have you? She’s always dug in. Her own worst enemy, I tell you what. Her clit’s as dead to pleasure as a tailor’s thumb. I am trying to find a suitable enticement to get some civility out of her just through the fuckin’ season…”
“Just let her go. Let our staff script the whole divorce. Sweeps in the spring, Bill. You play it right, it’ll get you another Daytime Emmy.”
“You don’t understand, man. It’s deeper than love, just take that at face value.”
“If I have to.” Morty’s breathing sounded like a machine purifying air. “If I may ask, why now?”
“I don’t know for sure, but she’s got some crazy ideas, as usual. Paranoid. She sees a thing about a tidal wave in the Philippines and blames me for killing a butterfly in the backyard.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Some sort of crimewave over here. The locals are all bugshit. Some big nutjob native supremacist fell off his boat or something in the middle of trying to ratfuck our deal on Zweibel’s holdings, and she thinks I’m to blame.”
“You should feel guilty once in a while, all the lucky breaks you get.”
“All the bad luck money can buy. I just wanted you to know what to expect.”
“If she comes at us with anything nasty, I’ll stiff-arm it until you can paper things over.”
“I appreciate it, Morty. And let me know if there’s any more problems with the mug thing. I want that shit off my plate. Bye now.”
He felt salty, so he skipped the phone across the water, almost got it to the shore. Droids were the shit, they’d skip six or seven times. The lagoon was almost more of a pool, the narrow outlet fenced and filtered, with movable barriers to stop intruders above or below the waves.
Mitsy was giving him way more than his quota of shit. After every other obstacle he’d put down, if she had any idea how wet his hands really were, she was out of her fucking mind to get his dander up now.
He resented it, but he needed her now more than he needed his useless children, his shitty show or anyone he’d ever genuinely loved. He planned to retire here, and soon. He’d given all he could to the cause of healing America’s septic, hypocritical soul. And he wouldn’t have gotten where he was if he didn’t always keep an eye on the big picture.
Though he invested heavily in oil and gas and backed Republicans and conservative social causes, he knew the world was fucked, and not by the Rapture. Dwindling oil, climate change havoc, famines, pestilence and human wave attacks of hungry, diseased beaner refugees were either here or coming soon. A zombie plague would be a fucking Club Med vacation compared to America’s imminent future, and Dr. Bill had gone all in on where he’d be when it happened.
Sure, the waters would rise, but Hawaii was large and mountainous enough to weather the changes, but small enough to pacify—or cleanse of natives, if it came to that. Kinky-haired, smelly America could eat itself with its bad teeth and die, for all he cared. When the lights went out all over the world, Dr. Bill would have all the prime real estate, the weaponry and the resources on these islands, and so long as Mitsy couldn’t retain a halfway competent lawyer, he had a fairly legitimate claim to the throne of the restored sovereign nation of Hawaii, should it ever come back.
He had no plans to assert it now, naturally. He’d look foolish, TMZ and People would have a field day with that kind of stupidity. Mitsy was only a quarter local, but it was all royal blood, and her white blood came from missionary stock that grabbed up plantations on three islands when the white traders deposed Queen Lilioukalani. He would quietly buy up Zweibel’s operation and turn the undeveloped Maui site into a Marriage Rescue Resort as a front for an arsenal to shame the National Guard. Come whatever the fuck may, he aimed to retire in high fucking style.
And, it would all be just perfect, once he made sure that little shitbird from Vegas was well and truly—
The raft seemed to jerk a foot or two out of the water. Like someone stood up under him and tossed him.
Dr. Bill was not a small man—first-string offensive line in high school and college—but he got flipped out of his seat as if by a rogue wave.
Toes touched the soft imported sand on the bottom and pushed him to the surface. He gripped the raft, but it was already flat. What the hell? He flipped it over. The underside was shredded.
Jesus, something was in here with him. What did they say about sharks? They didn’t like to eat people; they did it by mistake because they looked like seals or just spazzed out in the water. Don’t panic, big guy. Don’t give him an excuse.
Slowly, deliberately, Dr. Bill tip-toed towards the beach, where two big sides of beef who used to guard dignitaries in Iraq for Blackwater would be sitting and tanning, if he hadn’t given them the afternoon off so he could have it out with Mitsy in private, and because one of them was a Jesus freak and the other one was maybe queer for him, so he was working on replacing them.
The water was up to his chin, and shit, if he had one of those headset deals he would look and feel like a fucking call-center operator for Time-Life Books or a suicide crisis center, but he could call for help.
Fuck help. A fucking blacktip reef shark or something must’ve blundered into the lagoon, and when he got out, he would have something more substantial to try the new autoloading crossbow on than his wife’s surplus housecats.
Sport fishermen had pretty much wiped out all the big sharks anyway, and the fu
cking chinks were wasting the rest to make their shitty shark’s fin soup. Shit didn’t even taste like anything, but try and tell a chink that his #1 status symbol was a nasty, cruel, meaningless waste. You might as well try to talk them out of gambling.
Chinks. Jesus, but they had fucked him good, this time. For the thousandth episode of his show, he had the producers get these fancy coffee mugs for all the crew and staff—much nicer, apparently, than they could buy on their fat fucking union paychecks, because they all used them and lo and behold, the mugs had lead paint AND mercury...?
Somebody up there doesn’t like me, Dr. Bill thought. They gotta know one day, I’m gonna take over…
He’d almost forgotten about the shark. The water was only up to his thighs when it bit him.
On the Shark Week shows, they always say the shark comes up and bites impulsively, and they often spit up what they bit, because we apparently taste like shit.
The whole back of his left calf was on fire and he got a head rush from blood loss and when he lifted his leg out of the water, he almost had a fucking heart attack.
The skin had rolled off like a sock and the bulging, fibrous pot roast of his calf was sheared raggedly off about five inches above his heel. His Achilles tendon, all the things that made his foot more than just a perishable kickstand, were torn out like so many uprooted weeds.
He tottered in a woozy circle on his remaining leg, wobbling and weeping and squeezing just above the knee, but he was still losing too much fucking blood and hopping like a fucking idiot and he saw someone on the balcony of the house…watching.
“MITSY!” He waved and hopped and screamed.
She waved and sat down, picked up something. A phone? No… a tall cool drink with a straw and an umbrella in it.
“HELP ME, goddam you… fucking… traitor…”
Even the most vicious sharks always took a bite and then hung back to wait to decide whether it was worth going back. With humans, they almost never came back. His Summer Safety episode told you to stay still and not to panic.
He didn’t panic. He hopped for shore.
It came back for his other leg.
Howling, he fell onto a sleek steel-gray torpedo body that frictionlessly slid out from under him. He grabbed it the wrong way and his palms were torn wide open and the salt water in his wounds pushed him down into
shock
and he tried to cling to the shark. It couldn’t eat him so long as he could hold onto it. His face pressed against the flank of a young male twelve-foot great white with weird black scars all over it. Almost like… Jesus, Dr. Bill thought in disgust, who would do such a thing, putting gang tattoos on a shark?
The great white shook off Dr. Bill and plowed him underwater.
REPO NINJA, said the tattoo between its gills.
It was impossible. So unacceptable, he flung himself away from the shark and crossed his arms and shut it all out. No, this isn’t, no, not real
NO
This was a night terror like the ones he had when his parents split up, or when the rumors got around campus in high school and college that he was queer, or when his first book got savaged by the APA…
In all his books, lectures, videos, TV shows and retreat camps, he always and endlessly said it was will that separated the victors from the victims. The will to change, the will to prosper and conquer, the will to shape reality to meet your needs.
And now, at last, he had to admit something. It didn’t work. It was all bullshit.
The shark didn’t care.
Its mouth yawned wide enough for Dr. Bill to sit down in it. The upper set of teeth dropped down into view and the triangular daggers in rows were not what held Dr. Bill’s fascinated, repulsed stare right up until they bit him in half, but the writing on its gums…
It said WISEBLOOD.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Mahalo, Hawaii
Special aloha thanks to Mason Ian Bundschuh for his invaluable insights into island life and language; to Tori, Madeline, Joni, Ryan, Tina, Laura, Jenna and Daniel for all their tireless location scouting and research assistance; to Hailey for braving the road to Hana twice; to Cameron Pierce for convincing me to change the title; to Jeremy Robert Johnson for writing his own fucking books; and to J. David Osborne for publishing this one.
Photo by Hailey Goodfellow
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
A part-time writer and full-time parking enforcement officer in Tarzana, California, CODY GOODFELLOW has never actually been to Hawaii, but he aggressively issues tickets to even legally parked motorists to save up enough bonus money to someday realize his dream of retiring to Maui to issue parking tickets in paradise on his own recognizance.
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