She screamed and threw it, hysterical and shaking.
The rest of Rico sank away in the foaming scarlet water.
*
On her hands and knees on the blood-covered hull, Elise called out his name again and again and again.
But he was gone.
She was alone with Cutler and even being eaten by the living dead fish seemed preferable to that. When she turned back, Cutler had the knife in his hand and he was making his way toward her. “Now it’s your turn,” he said. His face was an absolute atrocity: a gouged and chewed waxen mask, streaked red and lit by two blazing hungry eyes and a grinning mouth of pink-stained teeth.
Elise could see it in on him.
There was no mistaking it.
He had been watching her ever since they got on the boat like a child molester watches a schoolyard. He knew what he wanted and even the misery they’d all been through had not vanquished the flame of lust burning in him, it had not dulled the perverse edge to his soul. He had a knife. They were alone. There were no witnesses. She had a choice: she could either give him what he wanted or he’d take it.
But he’d have it. There was no doubt of that.
She sneered at him. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! YOU FUCKING SLIMY DISGUSTING PIECE OF SHIT!”
The words meant nothing to him.
As he came forward, the knife edge catching the sun, his eyes were wild, filled with a shocking animal delight.
“You can either enjoy it, Elise, or I can make it worse than anything you can imagine,” he told her.
“Get away from me!”
He laughed. “You know better.”
He reached out to touch her and she slapped his hand away. He sliced at her with the knife, again and again, pushing her closer to the edge and the waiting jaws. She had no choice now. There was nothing left but to allow it…as vile and repellent as that would be.
She shoved him away.
“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” she said, tearing her blouse open, exposing the cones of her breasts. “IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT? IS THIS WHAT YOU FUCKING WANT?”
It was. It was obvious that he had been thinking of nothing else. With Jack alive or Rico he would never have dared to do what he was now going to do. But now all bets were off. He was practically drooling. He unzipped his pants and he was already hard. Not letting go of the knife, he squirmed his way out of them until they were down past his knees.
And Elise, her belly flooded with a warm rush of nausea, stripped the rest of the way and stood up so he could get a good look at her. Although bitten and bloodied, it was easy to see that the only place she wasn’t tanned was where her bikini had been.
“Get over here,” Cutler said.
She went back down on her knees, knowing that what she must now do was the only way. She sucked down everything inside herself, forgot about such trifling things as self-respect, dignity, and honor. She replaced it all with something that was dark and grim. Maybe Cutler saw it in her eyes for just a second, for he cringed.
“Now,” he said.
“On your back,” she told him. “You want this, we do it my way.”
He was so excited he didn’t question it. Not for a moment. Elise went right over to him and felt his grubby, scaly hands roughly fondle everything she had. Then with a crooked, salacious grin she took him by the shoulders and forced him down on the hull. She squatted over him, gripping his hard little penis and then forcing herself down upon it. She gasped. He trembled. He had forgotten his knife now. Forgotten everything but what he was getting which was all he’d ever dreamed about. Elise rode him until he came, making a good show of it, the whole time thrusting down hard on him and sliding his body across the greasy hull ever closer to the water.
“Oh God,” he said. “Oh God that was good…”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Elise said and then sprang on him, shoving him with her weight and every ounce of muscle she had. Her strength was irresistible and especially to a man who was as spent as Cutler.
She forced him over the edge of the hull and he immediately started shouting, swinging, trying to throw her off. But she pinned him down with her legs and, grasping his throat, forced his head into the water…then beneath it.
The piranhas struck right away in wave after wave of shearing jaws.
Cutler thrashed, gyrated, but Elise clung to him, straddling him and locking him into place. She barely felt his fists as they bounced off her head or his nails that laid her face open.
She was only aware of the churning water and the swarming fish, how Cutler jerked with each attack.
Even submerged she could hear them feeding: the tearing of flesh and soft tissues, the chomping of muscle and connective tissue, the dull crunching of bone that sounded oddly like someone chewing on ice cubes. They bit at her fingers, too, which were just under the surface, but their main interest was the head.
Cutler died horribly.
It did not even occur to him that the cunning bitch had led him into a carefully baited trap until she shoved his head underwater, into that murky brown water, and the searing, unbelievable agony began. He could not see them, just a darkening mass of seething bodies that covered his face and head as the water boiled red. Their jaws snapped, tore, cut, ripped, and ultimately rendered him to bone. But he fought, oh how he fought, striking at the evil bitch and tearing at the biting fish that went to corpse jelly under his fingers. But it was futile, of course. A school of living piranha can deliver 1200 bites in less than a minute and who could say about these monsters? Their jaws punctured his face, sawed and bit and stabbed. His eyes went fast as did his tongue and lips. His nose and ears took a little longer. All in all, his head was devoured to a ball of fleshy mucilage in thirty seconds.
After maybe fifteen seconds, Elise fell away, gasping, sobbing, studying the ruin of her once long attractive fingers. Just bloody stumps now, worried right to the bone.
Cutler’s head finally came up out of the water and it was really little more than an eyeless, earless, scalpless skull covered in pink, rutted, well-gnawed tissue. He rose for a second, his head bobbing like some gruesome Halloween prop and then he fell backwards and splashed into the drink. The school finished the job they had started.
Elise watched until there was nothing but a bubbling scum of blood and fragments on the surface. Then lying down on the hull, she closed her eyes.
*
The moon came up over the Amazon River basin.
Elise woke, raw and hurting, aware of nothing but the agony that pulsed through her body in punishing waves. Botflies had laid their eggs in her wounds. Clouds of mosquitoes had drank their fill. Gnats and chiggers had feasted on her throat.
Out in the rainforest, night birds cried out and snakes slid through the wet leafy loam. Spiders spun webs larger than men in the branches and huge Amazonian leeches clung to the thick cable roots just under the water. Moths fluttered over the clotted surface of the channel and crab-eating raccoons chattered in the jungle.
All was well in the hot, misty night world.
Elise went to the edge of the hull and peered into the water. What the moonlight showed her should have been shocking, but she was well beyond things like shock or fear. She was bruised, bitten, slit, peppered with dozens upon dozens of swelling insect bites. Botfly larva were already wiggling in her wounds. She knew only agony and misery and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Only nature at its fiercest and a channel filled with unnatural things. This is what the moonlight showed her in the water: the piranhas.
Hundreds and hundreds of them surrounding the overturned skiff. Just waiting. Row upon row of them breaking the surface, their jutting jaws wide open. Greening things, bloated things, wormy things, glaring evil skulls. They were not alive and had not been in some time so they did not need to swim to force oxygenated water through their gills. The leaking chemicals from the biotech ship that poisoned the school also resurrected them. Once they had been alive, filled with a rapacious vitality. Social creatures that lived to defend the school. Not truly dangerous to man except in the dry season when food was scarce. But now they no longer mated and swam for the glory of the school. Now all they had left was an insatiable appetite.