It was the sort of deranged diversion only a psychotic mind could come up with, but there is no sanity in survival. The water instantly went red in a swirling eruption. It frothed and boiled like a cauldron. Basille’s body was covered in a living, biting tarp of the monsters…and somewhere during the process, he came awake, thrashing and screaming, gulping in water, his own blood, and piranhas. His body rolled over and over in the churning wake, voracious jaws shredding him as the others watched. He was like a shank of bloody meat tossed into a shark tank.
But it worked.
The diversion worked.
The school enveloped him and no more fish dove at the skiff. In fact, the very act of the piranhas abandoning the boat left the water roiling and this pushed it out of harm’s way, precious feet from the devouring shoal.
Out there, you could not even see Basille any longer. He was buried in thousands of fish, their teeth in constant industrious motion in that simmering sea of blood. And when they finally fell away, glutted, there was nothing but a freshly-picked skeleton that bobbed to the surface for a moment or two, then sank from view.
*
Maybe Cutler expected some gratitude. Maybe in his crowded, twisted little mind what he had done to Basille was seen as an act of selfless heroism. But once the remainders of the biting fish were disposed of, gratitude is not what he got from Rico and Elise.
Bitten, ravaged, bleeding, they came at him with hooked fingers and eyes glazed with madness. To them, sacrificing one of their own to those hideous little monsters had never been an option. So they came at him with murder in their eyes.
“Wait a minute!” he told them. “I saved us! Not just myself, but all of us!”
Elise just glared at him. “You sick bastard! It was murder! Murder! You fucking murdered that poor man!”
Cutler’s face was bitten, scratched, stained with blood. But now all the color ran from it because he knew, he knew, that they were no longer in their right minds. They were going to throw him overboard.
“Don’t even try it,” he warned them.
“Killer!” Rico said, “Dirty stinking killer!”
Cutler was right on one thing: they weren’t in their right minds. Had they been, they would never have considered throwing him to the fish. But they had been through too much, suffered through unimaginable horrors, been strained to the limit, and now they were thinking survival and nothing more.
Cutler edged as far as he could away from them on the flat hull, sliding his ass through the blood and water. “I swear to God! You try it! Either of you try it and I’ll flip us all in! I goddamn well fucking mean it!”
But they didn’t seem to believe it. They kept inching forward. In their minds, they already had Cutler pegged for the selfish, narcissistic piece of shit he was. He wouldn’t sacrifice what he loved best even to thwart his enemies. They knew it. And, sadly, he knew it.
Elise honestly didn’t want to hurt him. Maybe Rico did, but she was really just taking out her frustrations by putting a scare into him. And maybe that might have worked…had the situation not been so damned desperate. When she got within a foot of him, Cutler looked out at the slopping brown water, the dry islands rising up in the channel-maybe wondering if he could reach them in time-then turned back quick. And before Elise could react or even think of it, he hit her in the face with everything he had. Her head snapped back and she would have went right into the drink had Rico not grabbed her.
That was it for Rico.
He was Yagua Indian and where he came from, you did not hit women. But the men who struck them? Oh yes, you beat them silly. He came right at Cutler and Cutler threw a few sloppy jabs at him that seemed to bounce right off that old, seamed brown face.
And then Rico had him.
He bounced Cutler’s head off the hull two or three times, then hit him barefisted again and again. Cutler’s face was a mess now but still he fought. He shook and raged, trying to hit the old man, trying to deflect those huge callused hands. They grappled. The boat rocked uneasily. Grinning with pure wicked delight, Rico hit him again.
But he didn’t see Cutler fish the lockblade knife from his pocket, snap it open.
Elise did. She shouted: “Rico! Look out! He’s got a-”
Too late, Cutler brought the blade up and sank an easy three inches of it right into the side of Rico’s neck, severing the carotid artery. Rico, looking stunned and shocked, fell away grasping a hand to the wound. The artery was laid wide open, blood squirting between his fingers. He fell onto the hull face-first making a moaning, gurgling sound in his throat. His blood was everywhere, pools and rivers of it flooding their banks, vivid red and shining.
Elise launched herself at Cutler and he slashed her across the arm. “Next time it’s your throat,” he promised her.
Rico tried to pull himself to his knees and slid on the greasy spill of his own blood. He tried again and Cutler lashed out with his foot, caught the old man in the ass and propelled him forward.
Blood bubbling from his wound, Rico tried to stop himself and was only partially successful. His hands found purchase so he didn’t go all the way in, but his head and upper shoulders went under and the rest of him followed right to the waist. The piranha hit him like bullets. Their teeth punched right into him as he tried to pull himself up. But his blood in the water drove them to new heights of mania. His head was still underwater in the churning mass of feeding piranha, hands hooked into claws, splashing and flaying madly. Each time an arm came out of the thrashing water, there were more decaying piranhas on it. And each time there was less flesh.
Screaming, Elise took hold of one of his ankles, trying to pull him back on board. But he was a big man, under attack, and fighting with everything he had. Cutler would not help. He stayed as far away as he could. The more Elise pulled, the more Rico seemed to slide deeper into the seething pool of teeth. Blood and water splashed against her as the jaws of the living dead fish cut into him like buzzsaws, pulverizing his flesh, puncturing him.
And it was bad for her…but those scarce seconds underwater were an absolute horror for Rico.
From the moment his face and upper body submerged, they were at him. Their slimy, putrefying bodies, teeth slicing into him like knives. They hit his face, his arms, his shoulders, but especially his throat. Dozens of them fighting their way in, chewing and sucking at the hot flow of blood, drilling into him, gnawing through muscle and tissue. But what was worse, was that as he fought, his mouth open screaming and gargling in the water, they swam right in. Right into his mouth, chewing his tongue away and biting their way into his throat, deeper, deeper, filling him, making him gag Rico came out of the water with a fierce backward lunge, knocking Elise aside. He came out fountaining water and blood. From the waist on up, he was bitten, mangled, simply laid raw. There were dozens and dozens of piranha in every state of decomposition hanging off him, jaws shearing, tails flapping. His face looked like the surface of the moon, cratered down to shining white bone from hundreds of bites. His eyes were gone, his nose chewed down to a hollow, his lips gnawed down to the bleeding gums.
He thrashed about like some obscene zombie, spraying blood and drainage and fish in every direction, a horrible gagging sound coming from his pitted throat. And then his abdomen, so bitten and torn, seemed to dissolve before Elise’s eyes. It exploded outward as the fish that tunneled down his throat ate their way back out, macerating organ and muscle and membrane, scissoring jaws rupturing through like drill bits. A slopping, slimy tide of blood and carrion fish and half-eaten tissue came flooding out and he flipped back into the water where the real devouring began.
Elise reached out, managed to grab a hand as he was caught in the surging maelstrom. He nearly dragged her in, but she pulled back with everything she had left and, to her surprise-and horror-he came up. Or his hand did. It was clutched in her own, the wrist gnawed to a bloody stump.