driven mad by the smell of blood, the taste of blood, the warm saltiness of blood. Chesbro clawed his way back up into the raft and the fish fell away momentarily, except for a few whose tiny, cutting teeth were imbedded simply too deeply. George saw raw meat where those fish had been, punctured and gashed. Then a flash of gleaming white that must have been bone.
“Grab that ring!” Pollard was calling out to him. “Chesbro! Grab that ring! Grab that ring! Grab that fucking ring you goddamn idiot!”
His face was red and his eyes were bulging, tears streaking down his face. His fists were gripping the life ring rope and had Chesbro been able to just get a hand on it, Pollard would have probably yanked him fifteen feet with the first pull. Because he was half out of his mind, something in him hot and arcing and violent with the need for action. Any action.
But it was too late for anything.
The raft was not a raft anymore, was looking more like a kid’s blow-up pool toy that had deflated. The water was thrashing and those fish were hitting Chesbro from every possible direction, tails flapping and jaws working like the needles of a sewing machine. The water and weeds were red and frothing. Chesbro managed to rise up once, about six of them hanging from his face and they had managed to nearly chew all of his clothes from him. Before he came back down, George noticed with mad hysterical laughter echoing in his head that a pod of them were hanging from his crotch like the remoras on a shark, emasculating him.
There was nothing to do but watch.
That was the really heartbreaking, maddening thing about it all. They could only watch as hundreds of those luminous little fish with their serrated, scissoring jaws reduced Chesbro to a pulped and bitten husk, to a bleeding and stripped thing that looked oddly like a raw and living shank of beef. But you had to hand it to him, you really did. Because Chesbro had a lot of life in him, he was coming apart like the raft… a red and gored thing composed of fleshy flaps and folds and scratching bloody digits… but he did not die easily.
Pollard had lost his anger now. It was replaced by a sort of frightening, paralyzed shock, his mouth contorted in awe and revulsion. “Gah… gah… gahhh,” he kept saying. “That blood. .. all that blood… how can there be so much goddamn blood? Have you ever in your life seen so… much… fucking… blood?”
And George didn’t think he honestly had.
Chesbro’s face broke above the bloody, boiling water and it had been stripped down to tendons and muscle and they were going fast. He looked up toward the Mystic, what remained of his eyes splashed down the basal anatomy of his face in a pink, snotty slime. A mist of seething blood was expelled from his mouth in a cloud and then… then he just sank in that luminous sea of tearing mouths. Like meat in a piranha tank, he was divided and peeled and torn until he was just a red-stained skeleton and then nothing at all.
Pollard looked over at George or maybe right through him. Then he turned back, looked down at the red, greasy slick that marked Chesbro’s passing, and promptly vomited right down the front of his shirt.
And George was thinking, oh, Chesbro, oh Jesus Christ I’m so sorry I never ever meant to hit you oh my Christ…
And then he felt himself sliding down the railing to the deck, empty. Just completely empty and so numb, so cold and frozen he thought he might shatter if someone touched him.
And then there were three, he thought.
17
When Cushing came back, he knew something had happened.
Maybe it was the atmosphere on the Mystic, which was positively tense and guarded, worn just as thin as an old blanket. If Cushing, coming down the ladder into the main cabin, had to put a name to it, it would have been apocalyptic. Because it was there on everyone’s face: doom and gloom with an extended forecast of dread. Pollard was just sitting there and so was George, both looking pale and despondent.
Cushing knew it was something more than Gosling’s death.
Whatever it was, it was recent. The wound still open and bleeding. It hadn’t even had the chance to scab over yet.
“Okay,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “What now?”
Pollard and George looked at each other, maybe both hoping the other one would put it into words. Pollard finally just looked down.
George cleared his throat, said, “Chesbro… he’s dead.” He paused, swallowed something down. “I think he was trying to escape in the raft… it got torn up and him with it.”
George gave him the quick version and from what he said and what Cushing could see in his eyes – a simmering black horror – he was glad he had not seen it. He’d seen plenty of bad by that point, but this he could do without.
“Well, I guess… I guess it was his own fault.” It was cold and cutting, but Cushing did not retract it. Did not even consider doing so. He pulled something out of the duffel bag hanging at his side: a fifth of Jack Daniels. He tossed it to George. “Looks like you guys need one.”
George’s eyes lit up. He broke the seal and threaded off the cap, took a good pull off it. Pollard practically fell off the settee trying to get a taste himself.
After he had, he just shook his head. “Fucking civilization,” he said, the whiskey filling him with something that had long been missing.
Cushing smiled, dug a carton of cigarettes from his duffel. “Here, George. Bad for your health, they say, but piss on it.”
George’s eyes lit up. “Cigarettes? No shit. My perverse addiction thanks you.” He fired one up and smiled. “Oh baby, oh yeah.”
“Goddamn junkie,” Pollard said. He took the pack and fired one up himself. “I’m supposed to be quit… can’t see it mattering now.”
“Where’s Elizabeth?” George said, blowing out smoke. “Aunt Else has all but accused me of kidnapping her.”
“She’s coming,” Cushing said. He cocked his head. “You sure as hell aren’t gonna believe what she found.”
They heard her coming down the steps, saw her enter the cabin. She offered Pollard the thinnest of smiles and gave George the obligatory death-stare. He winked at her. Maybe she didn’t like him and his mouth much, he figured, but she understood him. Understood him just fine. She stepped aside and four men stepped in behind her.
“Jesus H. Christ!” George said, jumping to his feet. “I can’t.. . holy shit!”
Pollard was up, too.
They both looked like they were seeing ghosts.
But there was nothing spooky there, just Menhaus, Fabrini, Saks, and Crycek. And for all them, it was like the ball had just dropped at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Saks gave him his porcine, wicked smile. “Well, can’t say I’m surprised, George, figured you and Cushing were holed up somewhere swapping spit.”
That made George laugh. Didn’t seem like he could stop. “Yeah,” he gasped, “but the whole time we were thinking of you, Saks.”
“Shit,” he said.
George shook hands with Fabrini, his favorite muscle-bound Italian. Fabrini looked so glad to see him, he had tears in his eyes. And Menhaus? Same old Menhaus. Thinner, certainly, more lines on his face… but the same old Menhaus.
“Jolly Olly,” George said and they hugged, slapping each other on the back.
“Boy, I’m glad to see you guys.”
“Glad to see us?” Menhaus laughed. “Shit, after… what? A week with Saks here? We’re definitely ready for some human company.”
Fabrini chuckled.
