Zombie Pulp

PIRAYA

As they pushed deeper into the Amazon Basin, following a winding series of tributaries, their guide told them one randy tale after another of what he called the piraya. He was a kind old Yagua Indian from the Javary named Rico Uara Valqui and had come highly recommended. He told them wild stories about the old Conquistadors who’d made the unpleasant mistake of wearing blood-red trousers in piranha-infested waters. About swimmers getting their nipples bitten off and skinny-dippers who’d gotten more than their nipples bitten off.

At that last one Jack chuckled, wiped sweat from his face, and gave Elise a jab with his elbow so she’d see it was a joke too. But Elise did not think it was funny. The others in the low-bottomed boat-Cutler and Basille-just smiled thinly.

“ And all true, I swear,” Rico said, crossing himself after telling a particularly lurid tale of a madman named Crazy Lupo who’d caught his limit of piranha by using his murdered wife’s corpse as bait. Rico grinned, ran fingers through his stubbly white hair. “But it not all bad, eh? You wait, we catch our limit, conk-conk-conk, we knock the fight out them sumbitch pirayas, then we clean ‘em out, slit-slit-slit, some the garlic, the salt, the spice root, then cook ‘em up over the fire. Taste real good. You see, eh?”

“ That’s what I’m looking forward to,” Jack said. “I heard they taste like catfish.”

“ Sure, like you say.” Rico looked at him and grinned. “Hey, maybe Rico show you how to make piraya- head soup, eh? It make a man more a man. You eat the soup, Jack, your wife she not enough for you! You need ten wives!”

Elise sighed, waving flies away from her face. She hated fish in general. It was Jack’s idea that she come. He told her that she’d never know Peru, the real Peru by hanging around the hotel in Pucallpa. And her answer to that was she did not want to know the real Peru. Pucallpa was bad enough with the bugs and the stench coming in from the docks, she didn’t need to get devoured by man-eating fish to boot. But Jack had explained that there was nothing to fear. There were twenty-five species of piranha in the Amazon and most fed on other fish, on insects, on fruit that had fallen into the water. Only six species were true flesh-eaters and of those six, only the Red-Bellied Piranha and the larger Black Piranha were dangerous to man.

So here she was, deep in the backwaters of the Amazon with a guide who kept telling one raunchy tale after another, showing off the stump of the finger he’d lost taking a hook from a piranha’s mouth. There was absolutely no breeze. The air was damp, the river stank like something dead. They had rubbed Vick’s Vapo-Rub over their faces and arms so the clouds of mosquitoes wouldn’t drain them dry. As it was, she was drenched with sweat, her eyes were burning, and Cutler kept staring at her.

From the moment they stepped into the boat-a flat-bottomed motorized skiff-Elise was aware of his eyes on her. His gaze was perverse. Something about it made her stomach roll. Not that she hadn’t dealt with men like him before, but the way he looked at her, sizing her up like a tasty slab of beef, was just too much.

“Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she told him.

Cutler grinned. His teeth were yellow, tobacco-stained, there was a sheen of sweat on his face. “Was I staring?”

“Yes, you goddamn well know you were.”

Cutler shrugged, licked his lips, and stared out over the shimmering expanse of the upper Amazon. What he saw was pale green flora growing in and out of the dirty brown water, clouds of gnats rising and falling, broken stumps and dead trees rising up like monuments. A steam condensed above the water, rolling over its surface like a sluggish fog. Tanagers and barbets cried out in the treetops, insects buzzed and flies nipped. None of which was as remotely interesting to him as Elise and her fine cleavage which made him feel weak in the pit of his belly.

“Simmer down,” Jack said under his breath and not for the first time.

Elise scowled at him. “If he keeps staring at me, he’s going overboard.”

“Quit staring at her, Cutler,” Jack said, smiling. “I won’t have it.”

Cutler was one of his drinking buddies from Pucallpa. He was a small, wiry man with the eyes of a rodent. He made Elise’s flesh crawl. Basille, the other occupant of the boat, was a round, portly businessman from Lima. The only thing that excited him was money.

Elise tried to ignore the both of them.

They were on the Ucayali River in central Peru, the main headstream of the Amazon formed by the junction of the Apurimac and Urubamba. A wild green world like something out of the Mesozoic: hot and steaming, clotted with palms and creepers and hanging vines, the jungles haunted by jaguars and poisonous snakes, black caimans and anacondas waiting in the stagnant river bottoms and flooded undergrowth.

They had come because Jack wanted to go piranha fishing.

And that was so like Jack, Elise thought. If he couldn’t catch it with a hook or shoot it with a gun, he had no interest in it.

The jungle seemed endless as it pressed in from all sides. Rank, uniform, monotonous, licked by the foul-smelling serpentine river. Now and again they came upon clusters of palm huts belonging to families of Yorba Indians. But that was it. Rico moved the boat along, still telling stories, still making the men laugh. Elise sighed. He was exactly the kind of man Jack always seemed to find.

There was a sudden gagging stink of fleshy decomposition that put Elise’s belly in her throat. She smelled it right through the Vapo-Rub and the pungent brown river. And from the looks on the faces of the others, they smelled it, too. Rico steered them around a few stumps, navigated a turn in the river and there-in the center of a wide channel-was the bow of a large boat rising from the murk. A wood stork sunned itself atop it. All around the bow were hundreds of dead fish floating, belly-up. There were flies all over them.

“ What the hell is that about?” Jack asked.

Rico shrugged. “Some kind research boat…she sink. Hit something and sink. They suppose to come, tow her away. Ah, but the state…ha! Probably be year before they do!”

“ What killed the fish?” Cutler wanted to know.

Rico shrugged again. “Chemical or something. It were a biotech boat out research things. Everyone get off okay. So no worry…except for them sonofabitch fishies, eh?”

Elise was holding her nose. The stink of those rotting fish was hot, nauseating. It crawled up her nose and down her throat, tried to drag her stomach back up with it. She noticed that there was a funny purple sheen to the water around the sunken ship. Something about that she did not like at all.

But no one else seemed bothered.

Rico steered them away from the main channel and into the igapo, or flooded forest. The meltwaters of the Andes overflowed the rivers between January and June, creating a weird world of flooded jungle. He steered them around huge vine-covered trees and clotted stands of foliage, finding the channel where he knew the fishing would be good.

“ Yes,” he said, “this will do. Them sonofabitch pirayas travel in schools, hundreds of them, eh? They come to the igapo because they know game in the water and the eating she is good.”

Jack was excited. “All right, let’s do some fishing.”

*

As they made ready with the long bamboo poles, Rico told them that during flood season the pirayas were not truly dangerous. Their hunting range was expanded into the jungle and there was plenty to eat. They were only really a threat when there was no food. In fact, he said, during this time of year men wade into the river and spearfish, women wash clothes, and children swim in piranha waters without any harm.

Elise figured he was saying that for her benefit.

The jungle was primeval, silent, unbearably eerie. The channel they were in was maybe forty feet across, a stew of brown steaming water. Leaves and sticks floated on its surface. Trees grew from the water in tangled, knotted masses to either side, rising up on snaking roots and filling out, growing thickly until their twisted limbs joined together overhead like woven canestraw. The result was like being in a tunnel…a hot, smelling, claustrophobic tunnel of stagnant water and warm decay.

Rico tried to give Elise a pole, but she refused. The bamboo poles were about four feet long, set with six-pound nylon lines and triple-barbed hooks that were baited with chunks of raw beef and chicken liver. To attract the piranhas, Rico tossed some bloody chum into the water.

“They smell this for miles,” he said.

The men tossed their lines into the water.

Rico rolled a cigarette, told a story about Isobel, his first wife, who was so crazy she’d once chased him down the muddy, winding streets of Cerro de Pasco with a baseball bat. She had been naked at the time. “And that, my friends, is no thing to be looking on first thing in morning.” He shivered. “Yah!”

Then the waiting began. Elise sat there, beads of sweat rolling down her face. Swarms of gnats and mosquitoes hovered over the water. Dragonflies buzzed about. Howler monkeys wailed in the treetops. Elise listened to the blue macaws screech and watched palm vipers thread through the spoking branches.

Basille suddenly stiffened, his bovine face beaded with perspiration. “I…ah…I think I have a nibble,” he said.

“Easy,” Rico told him. “The piraya is sneaky little devil. Don’t scare him off. Let him take good bite first…then he yours.”

Basille waited, looking very nervous. Suddenly his rod jerked, then bowed as something below tugged at the line. He pulled up his bamboo pole and there was an oval-shaped fish on the hook. It was silvery, its belly a dull orange. Jack and Cutler cheered. Elise was the only one that saw something was terribly wrong with the fish. But as Basille swung it on board they all saw it. On one side the fish looked like any other Red-Bellied Piranha, though maybe faded in color, but on the other: just bones. The head was intact, but it was just bones straight down to the tail.

“You hooked a dead one,” Cutler said.

Jack laughed.

“It wasn’t dead,” Basille said. “You saw how it attacked my bait.”

Rico swallowed. “Yes…but they are the cannibals, them piraya. They attack one another. You hook a live one, but its fellows… ha!…they strip it before you pull him in.”

And that seemed a perfectly logical explanation…but then the fish moved. Stripped to bone on one side or not, it began to flap its tail and writhe on the line, its hooked jaws snapping.

“That’s not possible,” Jack said.

Elise was getting a real bad feeling now. She didn’t believe for a moment that other piranhas had cannibalized this one, at least not recently. Because the fish stank…it was putrescent.

Basille, a look of horror on his face, just stared at the fish dangling over his lap. Then a slender green worm slid out of its side and dropped into his crotch. He tossed the pole, shrieking, brushing the corpse worm off him and smashing it beneath his shoe.

Cutler jumped away from the dropped pole and what flopped on the end.

Rico, looking dead serious now, grabbed it and threw the line overboard. He slashed out with his knife and cut the piranha free. The fish hit the water and swam away like it was perfectly healthy. Nobody said anything for a time. They listened to the jungle. The silence was deadly, ominous.

Then Jack’s line was hit. Cutler’s, too. Both men looked at each other, for the first time in their lives almost afraid to see what was on the end of their hooks.

“This not right,” Rico said.

And then, from below, something hit the boat. In fact, several things hit the bottom of the boat in rapid succession. One after the other, like hammers. Then it stopped. Everyone just sat there, wide-eyed, the boat moving in a slow counterclockwise rotation from the impact. Then it started again and this time there was no stopping it. From below it was hit again and again and again, maybe hundreds of times. The boat shook. It canted this way and that. Bamboo poles were yanked from hands and dragged beneath the surface.

“This is crazy!” Basille cried out. “We’re being attacked!”

Jack held Elise to him, either for her protection or his own. He looked frantically at Rico. “Croc? Is that what it is? A croc? A big fucking croc?”

The boat was hit so hard from beneath that it jumped an inch out of the channel and came back down with a cascading splash of murky brown water. Basille lost his nerve. He screamed, elbowed Cutler out of his way in a frenzied attempt to get out of the bow. Cutler took hold of him. They wrestled, they swore. Rico shouted for them to stop it, stop it, stop it But it was too late.

Tangled together, they fell over against the lip of the boat and it flipped up out of the water from the sudden shift in weight. For one frightening second it hung there, its side parallel to the river, while everyone tried to hang onto the seats for dear life.

Then it flipped right over and all five of them went into the drink.

*

Elise surfaced, her legs bicycling and arms thrashing. She spat out a mouthful of water that was brown, slimy, and warm like some primordial ooze. Rico was only maybe five feet away, pulling himself up onto the overturned boat. Crying out, she swam towards it as it drifted away from her. She could see several fish attached to Rico’s legs as he dragged himself out of the river. They had bitten right through his pants and blood was blossoming from the wounds.

Somebody shoved her forward and she was never sure if it was Cutler or Basille. She heard Jack shouting out in a high, almost girlish voice: “Swim! Elise, swim for the boat! Swim! Swim! Swim!” His voice broke into a note of absolute terror.

Elise pounded through the water to the boat. She felt something bite into her knee. Her ankle. Her hip. Then she was at the boat and Rico hauled her aboard by grabbing her hair and yanking her up out of the water with considerable strength. She flopped onto the bottom of the overturned boat, glad to feel the hot sun upon her. She spit out more water, coughing and gagging. Cutler pulled himself aboard and so did Basille, both men tearing biting fish off their legs. Rico grabbed the one chewing on her knee. It was bloated green, eyeless, its triangular teeth red with her blood. It was so rotten it went to a soft, oozing pulp in his fingers. He tossed it away.

“Jack!” Cutler cried. “Jack!”

Elise, shocked and trembling, looked for him. In her panic she had forgotten about everything but survival, everything but getting out of the water and getting away from those flesh-shearing jaws.

Jack was still in the water.

For whatever reason, he had been thrown out farther from the others. The drift of the overturned boat had put him even farther away. He was closer to the trees so he swam for them. They saw him grip the solid spiraling anchor roots rising from the water. He got his hand on one and pulled himself to it, then up out of the water and it seemed like he was going to make it, he was really going to make it And then, as he pulled his upper body out of the slop, the water around him began boiling like a pot, seething in a great fountain of thrashing silver bodies. Jack screamed. Screamed with a wild, almost animal sound of agony and horror that echoed off into the jungle and sent a flock of birds winging into the sky. “Help me! Help me! Somebody fucking help me-”

His cry turned into a moist gurgling sound as he swallowed water, fighting to pull himself away from all those razored, chomping jaws. But the limbs of the trees were damp, green with fungus and he couldn’t quite get a grip. He’d pull himself up an inch or two, then slide back down. His body was shuddering as he was hit by hundreds of piranhas and the thrashing water around him gushed a brilliant red.

The agony.

Oh Jesus, the agony. When they first started hitting him, Jack felt the impacts, boom-boom-boom, and the nipping pinpricks of their teeth. And within seconds, not a nipping, but a biting, a ripping, a feeding frenzy. It felt like a thousand razors were slicing into him, carving him, slitting him open. The water was churning with red bubbles, foaming with blood and tissue and thousands of fish, gutting him to the marrow Elise was screaming.

Jack was making a gobbling, clotted sound in his throat as his own blood filled his mouth. The fish kept hitting him and with one last valiant effort he pulled himself up out of the water. Beneath the hips, he was nothing but bleeding red muscle, yellow ligament, and knobs of white bone. There were hundreds of fish hanging from him, biting and tearing. They were bloated green, looping with worms, many nothing but fleshy skeletons. They could not possibly be alive, yet the inborn instinct to feed was driving them on. Blood burst from Jack’s mouth in a red mist, his eyes bulging, his face twisted in a silent scream.

Elise was hysterical.

Rico tried to hold onto her but she was hot and greasy in his hands, squirming wildly.

Jack was pulled down into the water, still trying to yank himself up, but the fight was gone and he slid into the boiling mass, his body thrown from side to side, jerking and jumping like some grisly marionette. He broke out of the water, a bleeding husk that had been shredded down to basal anatomy. A fleshless hand groped over the surface. He let out one last cry and everyone saw that the left side of his neck and face were eaten right down to muscle-covered bone. He looked like a living, bleeding shank of raw beef.

He went under.

Then he surfaced once again, more skeleton than flesh, fish clinging to him by their jaws. His skull was trembling as if there was still life in it, one single eyeball staring from its hollow of bone with a deranged look of absolute shock.

Then he sank from view leaving only a slick of blood and tissue.

*

Elise was hysterical and it was Cutler who slid over towards her and slapped her across the face. And he didn’t just slap her once, but four times. Maybe he would have kept at it but Rico stopped him, shoved him away and almost into the drink.

“That enough, you crazy punheteiro.”

Cutler didn’t like being handled like that, but he took it and kept his distance because, white-haired or not, he had no doubt that the old man would have given him the beating of his life with those rough, callused hands. They looked like they could split kindling.

Next to Cutler, Basille moaned.

“Easy now, lady,” Rico said, pulling Elise to him. “There, my lady, easy now.”

She was limp, face wet with tears, blood running from her mouth. Her shorts were stained red, her legs open in several places from the bites of the piranhas. He comforted her the best he could even though he himself was leagues beyond comfort.

She kept shuddering, shaking her head from side to side. All she could see was Jack, Jack, Jack The school of living dead piranha hitting him again and again, chewing and tearing, engulfing him in a primal bloodlust of cutting teeth, and that look in his eyes, that terrified, agonized, insane look in his eyes as they reduced him to a bleeding pulp.

She sat straight up and screamed.

Rico held her tighter. “Easy, you got to be easy now.”

“ You better shut her the fuck up,” Cutler said. “We got enough problems here.”

Rico gave him a look that burned right through him. It was easy to read. It said: Just you and me alone, sonofabitch. That’s all I ask. You and me alone and, God above, how you gonna hurt when I put my hands on you.

He looked away. “I fish these waters sixty year,” he told them in a wounded voice. “Never…never I see a merda like this.”

Cutler offered him a sarcastic grin. “Zombie piranhas.” He shook his head. “That boat…that research ship. They must’ve spilled something in the water, set some bug loose, a virus or something…”

Rico shrugged. “I not know. And what does these things matter, eh? God help us.”

Basille had been badly ravaged and he kept moaning and groaning. He had lost consciousness now and was probably in shock. His white pants and shirt had nearly been ripped away. What remained were bloody rags. He was laid open in a dozen locations with deep, cutting wounds. Blood ran from him, pooled under him, and trickled down the boat into the water where it floated like a slick of grease.

Cutler stared at it, his face sunburned, blue-eyed, and stark with fear.

“ We gonna get out of this,” Rico said. “We gonna use shoes as paddles and get us to the riverbank. You see if we don’t.”

Cutler laughed with a dead, hopeless sound. “We ain’t fucking going nowhere and you know it.”

“ You shut that mouth, punheteiro.”

Cutler turned away, staring at the blood seeping from Basille into the water. He started to make the connection. “His blood,” he said. “It’s in the water.” He looked over at Rico, his eyes wide and glassy like he was out of his mind. “You hear me, you goddamn idiot? His blood… it’s in the fucking water…his blood is in the fucking water…”

Rico got it, all right.

Blood in the water. Those devil-fish. And them floating on the overturned skiff, its flat bottom a scarce four inches above the river.

Elise snapped out of her fugue. “Listen,” she said. “Listen…”

Yes, they heard it, too. Beneath, in the water, the piranhas were hitting the boat again, one after the other. The sound of their gnawing teeth on the wood was almost like a muted sawing. They were trying to chew their way through it. It was insane but that’s what they were doing, driven by some malefic force to eat and kill. The water was filled with their darting bodies, slivery, scaly, discolored and putrefied…but alive, somehow alive.

“ We have to get out of here!” Cutler cried out, beside himself with fear.

More fish now.

The water began to roil. The piranha were swarming like locusts, pouring themselves at the boat in a steady stream of teeth. They chewed from below, from the sides, so many pressing in that hundreds were pushed flopping up out of the water and hundreds more were pulverized by the greedy appetites of the expanding shoal. And they were not just centered around the boat, it seemed, but the entire channel as if there was not a school of hundreds, but perhaps a school of thousands or hundreds of thousands. The frothing of the water made the boat roll in the water like it was caught in a good swell.

The carrion fish were whipped into a wild eating frenzy, driven mad by the taste of blood dripping into the water. Sawdust was floating to the surface as they chewed at the skiff. The flat hull Rico and the others sat on was greasy with water and blood. They gripped each other so they’d didn’t slide off.

All except Basille.

His unconscious form was sliding nearer and nearer the edge.

Nobody made to grab him for there just wasn’t time. The boat was rocking under the onslaught of the fish, the water a churning maelstrom of snapping jaws and bones, piranhas and parts of them. And maybe the motion of the boat would have carried them to the treeline, but something happened first: the fish started leaping on board. Driven by a relentless hunger, they leaped out of the water and started landing among the survivors, grotesquely bloated and decayed, some little better than living skeletons held together by leathery sinew and ligament.

But dead or undead, they were united in a single purpose.

Rico shouted as he ducked away from two or three that sailed at him, swatted two more out of the air, and was hit by three more that fastened their sawtoothed teeth right into his flesh. He yanked them free, tearing out flaps of skin as he did so.

They landed on the hull, flopping and chomping their jaws.

Cutler kicked them back in, slapped at them, smashed a dozen to a foul putrid paste with his fists. But for every one he destroyed, there were ten more vaulting at him. They bit into his arms, his shoulders, his hands, dozens affixed to his boots, their teeth sunk into the leather. One caught him by the chin, biting deep.

The air was filled with fish, a steaming brew of blood and corpse gas.

They hit Elise, too. They fastened on her legs, her arms, one sank its triangular teeth right into her breast. She pulled them off, screaming, hitting and crushing them under her fists. She was completely out of her mind, ripping them free, kicking and slapping. She smashed them in her hands into a black gushing slime of drainage and tiny bones. She tore one off her left arm and the whole body came away in a pulping flap, but the small chambered skull remained, those serrated jaws holding tight, teeth punctured deep. She beat at it until it shattered to fragments.

And when one clamped its interlocking jaws on the knuckle of her pinkie, she attacked it without thinking: clamping its foul, festering body in her own jaws and biting down until it exploded in a gushing spray of putrescence in her mouth. More hit her, but she craned her head and vomited putrid flesh, scales, and tiny bones along with a few squirming, severed worms.

More and more were coming out of the water and there was simply no defense.

Cutler fought through the rain of fish, shouting, “It’s him they want…don’t you see?” He ripped piranhas free, tearing one from the end of his nose and leaving several teeth sunk into the cartilage. “THEY WANT HIM! THEY WANT BASILLE! NOT US! THEY DON’T WANT US-”

And with a sideward kick, he knocked Basille’s body into the foaming water.

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.

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.

And this is what they offered Elise: their appetite. Serrated rows of triangular teeth activated by powerful jaws. The sort of jaws that could bite through fishing nets and steel hooks. It was all they had and they offered it to her now.

Elise looked down at them surrounding her little island. Like loyal subjects surrounding their queen. And they were loyal. She did not doubt this.

They waited.

They knew she would come to them.

Finally, staring out across those yawning, tooth-studded jaws gleaming in the moonlight, all open in her honor, she said, “Please, I hurt so bad, so terribly bad…let it be fast.”

Somehow, she knew they would make it so.

She thought then of Peruvian cattle herders. Jack had told her how they would sacrifice a cow downstream in the dry season to the hungry piranhas so that the rest of the herd could cross safely upstream. Elise knew then that she would be such a sacrifice.

Sucking in a breath, she slid into the water and submerged amongst them and they accepted her. And true to their promise, as the water gushed red with her blood, it was mercifully quick.

The skiff drifted on upstream.

A giant otter splashed in the distance.

And in the treetops, a pygmy owl screeched.