His bladder and bowels released while he ate. They went at the same time to make more room—and his blue jeans, already caked to his skin, filled with gore. He felt all this, tasted all this. He knelt over the morbidly obese woman they’d caught running through the streets, screaming her fool head off, and he made her fat his fat.
And as Lewis Lippman wallowed in the woman’s meat, slurping her golden goodness, he thought about how he’d always hated fat people. And now, how he couldn’t get enough.
It was a matter of will, he’d always thought. He hated them for that, for being weak. Why couldn’t they just stop?
Lewis remembered giving them dirty looks in the marina. He would fire up a cigarette and glare at the waddling tourists who tottered down a finger pier into one of the whale-spotting boats. The docks would groan and shift on the Styrofoam floats as they went.
He even said something once in the Chinese restaurant where he and the boys often went for the lunch buffet. He watched as a man well over three hundred pounds grabbed his dirty plate, squeezed out of the booth, and went to attack his seconds or thirds.
“Don’tcha think you’ve had enough?” he grumbled, just loud enough for the man and his fat family to hear. Kyle and the others laughed, even though Kyle was lugging around a few extra pounds himself. But nothing gross, not like this.
Flashing back to the gruesome present, Lewis watched himself as he dug sideways under the woman’s skin. Here was that feller from the buffet that day. No telling them apart from their insides like this. He scooped the fat with his hands, tearing it away from the skin and the meat below, like cleaning a fish.
Lewis used to shock the tourists he took out in his boat by cutting off a piece of a fresh catch and popping it in his mouth. He’d offer them a chunk on the end of his fillet knife and take pleasure in the way they recoiled from him. Once they were out on the sea with him and Kyle, they were stuck. Hauling in the fish they’d dreamed of catching—that they’d paid good money to catch—Lewis would watch them as the seas picked up and they turned a hundred shades of green. He’d delight in their sickness, watch them turn up their noses to the smell when the belly of a nice big jack was opened like a purse, his knife the zipper, the ripe contents sliding toward feet picked off the deck in a hurry.
It was fun, that, having them trapped out there, the sea roiling the lunches in their landlubbing guts, the smell of fish innards that Lewis had become inured to crowding their noses with a ripe stench. He and the others would turn and smile as their fares lost it over the gunwale. Crowds of little fish would come to the surface and chew the lost breakfasts of strangers from Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.
And now Lewis was the passenger, the one shitting himself at sea, this concrete sea. A world he’d dreamed of seeing, that he’d fantasized about from a distance, Times Square with all those crowds as the ball dropped, as the date changed for the East Coast well ahead of the great big nothing that happened in Coal Bay.
He was the tourist, now. He was trapped in this skull of his, watching the guts spill, smelling the horror, feeling sick and being unable to vomit. He was the man growing bloated like a fish dragged on the end of a line, the man with his plate, bending over seconds and thirds. No willpower. No willpower in the world was enough.
Lewis tried to remember days on the docks, smoking cigarettes, watching fat tourists from the Dakotas bend the finger piers as they crowded onto whale-spotting boats. He tried to remember it again without him glaring, without the sneers and jokes to Kyle and the others. In his mind, he took another glorious drag from that smoke before flicking it into the sea with a sputtering hiss. He tried to travel back there, to pretend the little globules of yellow fat sucked out of his palms were caviar and that the rats burrowing in among his knees to feed alongside him were little fish, nosing up to the surface, eating the chum from the guts of strangers, and that this time he wouldn’t turn and smile and judge anymore.
40 • Darnell Lippman
Darnell had hoped and prayed from the moment she was attacked that someone would come for her. But not like this. This wasn’t a rescue. It was the hand of some angry god reaching down from the clouds and plucking her off the ground. She was discarded fruit, all of them were. Nasty fruit fallen from a tree and riddled with worms, and now they have come to choose the rotten among the rotten.
They lured them into their trap with blood. Blood and something else. Darnell thought of her husband chumming for sharks off Spit Point. She knew what these people were doing, and still it worked. It was like that cartoon she’d clipped for Lewis, the one with a fish commenting on a hook before going for the bait. It knew, and still it went. It had no choice. There was only the hunger.
This wasn’t the first trap they’d set. She’d seen them try before, the helicopters swooping in among the same low buildings, the same alleys. Whatever they’d used the first time didn’t work. The smell wasn’t right. Darnell wondered if it was animal blood at first, or human blood with the life melted out of it, maybe with the soul evaporated. That first time, she could smell the copper in the air, but it didn’t move her feet. It wasn’t the same.
They came back the next day with something different; her group could smell it. Their shuffling went from aimless to concerted action as they spilled into the baited alley, the thwump-thwump-thwump of the fishermen hovering in helicopters overhead, a rotor like an outboard, the hook both visible and irresistible.
Darnell and the others bit. The alley tightened between a set of rusty green dumpsters. She was near the front, crowding against the pawing others, the groans and grunts filling the narrow space between the buildings with an eerie roar. One of the dumpsters squealed as the crush of undead pressed hard enough to jar its wheels. Those alongside her kicked through trash, waving their arms after the fetid odor, a long rope like a line with a sinker and bobber dangling down between the brick walls.
They could see it. Darnell knew everyone else could see the lure as well. And still, they went after.
The alley forked where it met the crumbling wall of the building along its back. The sun was low, the shadows deep, and the smell was everywhere. It trailed off in both directions, further dividing the narrow stream of disfigured and disgusting animals.
Darnell was being culled from the herd. She felt the panic of a hook sinking into her lip, the lonely fear of being left to drown. Where was Lewis? She wept silently and tearlessly, powerfully alone, wishing he were there, but she hadn’t seen his hat for days.
She hurried at the front of the group that veered left, following the smell of blood and the smell of something else as well. It was a heady odor she’d nosed from a man with a split skull, a feed from a week ago. The smell of brains.
Onward, deeper into the alley, thwump-thwump-thwump from the propeller above her. Darnell imagined it was Lewis. He was here to catch her, to lift her out of her misery and into his reeking boat, to wrap her in a blanket and tell her that he loved her, to make her feel safe.
She and three others were standing on the net when it rose up from the camouflage of newspapers and soggy cardboard. The man beside her with the broken leg was caught on the edge. As the net cinched tight, he tumbled out, his foot catching in one of the square holes, grunts from the rest of them as they were pressed together and lifted skyward.
The man with the broken leg wiggled free and tumbled with a sick crunch to the pavement. Darnell and the other two were packed gill to gill in the tight net. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach as they rose higher. The man beside her made a gurgling sound. He was chewing the rope, the air so laden with the scent of blood and brains that Darnell feared one of the monsters would begin to chew on her. Or that she might turn on them.