short run, but boy do you pay for it in the back end. And, my little dirties, we were paying for it.
“Thing was, the lifeboats had been filled. About a hundred and ten of us in those boats. There were a few folks left over. We had to give them our best wishes and a couple of knife wounds to keep them out of the lifeboats. When the big boat came all the way apart it left us floating, and those unfortunates who hadn’t been fast enough to get their nasty asses in the boats, that hadn’t been stabbed, well, they were just out there, hanging to lumber or going under, or getting finished off by boat paddles to the head. It sounds cruel, but it was better than just leaving them there. Especially the little ones. The three- and four-year-olds who were struggling so hard. You can’t stand to see that, I will assure you, so we beat them down.
“The wind kept up, and we had to bail water out of the lifeboats, and there wasn’t much room to bail, so we put some of the mothers and children over the side and wished them luck. We had to stop hitting them with the paddles, due to the fact we had shattered one and cracked another. That wouldn’t do.
“I know that sounds cold, and I suppose it is. I got to come back to that, me saying how cold it was, but how necessary it was. You see, for the bulk of us to survive, we had to rid ourselves of the weak. And most of the mothers and children were weak. We hung onto the stronger women with the plumper babies (food should always be considered), and kept at it.
“The night came and that was bad, but at least the wind had stopped and the moon had come up. During the night, some of the folks in the boat disappeared. I don’t know what happened. I think someone must have cut their throats and drank the blood and put them over the side. It had to have been seen by just about everyone (not me, though), but no one was complaining. Not when the bailing buckets had warm blood in them to drink.
“When the sun came up, we checked our boat, took a head count, and determined how our survivors were doing. There were some who had been injured when the big boat came apart, you see, and now, in the daylight, we could see they weren’t doing so good, so we put them over the side.
“Except for one. We cut him up and ate him.
“I might also mention, that the ones we put over the side that morning we didn’t let drift and we didn’t bust them with boat paddles. We drowned them, pulled their bodies close to the side of the boat, and tied them off with rope. They were our larder. We had come to that, and thank God we were wise enough to do just that. I only regretted that we had thrown so much fine meat over the side the night before. I remembered one of those women quite well, seeing her ass in the wet moonlight, bobbing up and down like a round-ended barrel. She would have provided us with rump roast for days. She had been a volunteer. Someone who just couldn’t take it anymore. She bobbed about for awhile, that ass up in the air, and then she dove in and went down with hardly a splash, and didn’t come up. My guess is she swam down till her breath played out and the water filled her.
“The other boats floated nearby, and they too had gone through a thinning. I suppose with our experiences in the drive-in, this kind of ruthlessness was to be expected. Sentimentality had long passed us by, and though for a time, there in Fort Drive-in, I thought we might be gaining our humanity, I learned quick-like we had not, and thank goodness for that, or I, and the bulk of us, would not be here today.
“Considering we’re all inside a giant fish, that might not be such a good thing in the long run, but I suppose the best any of us can hope for these days is extension of life, and not quality. In the past I often thought, quality, not quantity, is what’s important. Until I was faced with the big sign-off. The idea was unappealing to me. I didn’t have the courage of the fat-assed woman who went over the side and swam deep down.
“I am still ready to grab at whatever bit of life I can get, no matter how sour it might taste, how foul it might look. I still wish for better food and cleaner pussy and having my ass outside of this fish and back at my house in East Texas.
“Hell, I’d settle for being back at Fort Drive-in. It was a pretty good deal. You could bathe regular, fix meals that didn’t stink so bad you had to hold your nose, or worse, just get used to.
“But, I was telling you about the boats.
“Drifty, drifty, drifty, that’s me.
“We went a couple of nights and some days, and then one night, in the moonlight, all of the boats floating close together, the dark water rose up high and broadened. We thought it was a freak wave. But it was not.
“The darkness froze for a moment, then opened up into greater darkness, and the boats, even though we paddled hard to not let it happen, flowed into the big ole darkness of the black hump, and down we went.
“You know what’s next. You experienced it. We shot out of a gut or throat, or whatever, and landed here on the grid, splashing water behind us, shattering our boats and spilling us willy-nilly, this way and that, breaking some of us up. As a side note, I should add that those poor unfortunates got eaten. That was their unintentional contribution, but, I think, if their ghosts could be here to discuss it, they would tell you they were proud to share, considering they weren’t going to recover from their wounds.
“The lights that hang above us, went way back. Not to the tail. But way back. They are starting to play out now, but then, they were bright and far. Not like now, where there are almost less than half the lights there used to be.
“And, so here we were, where you are now. In the fish’s belly, lit up and stinky, all of us lost causes.”
That was the first part of Bjoe’s story. And we’re going to pause there.
When he finished telling us all that, Cory rose up, asked for more grog, fainted dead away again.
I thought, this guy, this Bjoe fella, decided he wanted to eat one of us, or all of us, because he always seemed to find some justification for long pig preparation, and that ladder was going to be hard to navigate with us running all over each other’s asses.
And, Cory, shit, way it looked to me, he was first on the menu. I wasn’t going to try and drag his big unconscious ass down that ladder. He was on his own. Pickled and ready to serve.
I said, “So the lights were here?”
Bjoe nodded.
I scooted back closer to the ladder, tugged on Reba’s sleeve a little. She looked at me and slid back too.
I looked at Grace and Steve. I could tell from the way they looked at me, they too were hip. Thinking: this guy could go snacky-whacky at any moment.
“Wow,” Grace said. “The lights were here, right?”
“Yes,” Bjoe said. “Yes, they were. Brighter than they are now, and they went way down the fish, and for awhile… But I said that.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “Tell it all. Tell some of it over if you have to.”
Bjoe nodded.
“We lived back down there as well, at the back, away from the big rushes of water, not up here on the scaffolding and in the caves. But that was before the Scuts.”
“The Scuts?” Grace asked.
Bjoe nodded. “Yep. The Scuts.”
3
“Oh yeah. The lights were here. And that was a mystery to me, at first. Then I began to put some things together, draw what we like to call in mathematics some goddamn fucking conclusions.
“I’ll begin with the robots.
“Don’t look so goofy. Really. Robots. Fuckers made of metal with lumps for heads and a single light for an eye. Tentacles instead of hands. All cabled up and ready to go. Guess there were six cables, flapping this way and that. Reckon there were twenty or thirty of them metal, multitentacled doohickeys. Don’t know for a fact, didn’t count them, but it was in that range.
“Maintenance.
“Bless their little electric hearts.
“Place was a hell of a lot neater then.”
“So,” I said. “What you’re saying is, the grill was in place, all this was in place before you came.”
“Do I look like a fucking electrician? A carpenter? A metalworker? And where would I get the tools? Yeah. It was all here.”
“And you think you know why?” Grace asked.
