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.
