Thank you for your patience--and for reading.
There was something in the water,
and it didn’t want them to leave.
The Harrison family discovered this
on day three of their vacation. The patriarch of the family, Josh Harrison, was
a large man whose pleasure in escaping his Amazon packing facility was matched
only by a passion for fishing and beer. The island was the perfect place for
this: white sands, warm sun, and a bungalow quietly rented with cash from a
friend who knew a friend. Technically, his salary wasn’t even sufficient to
rent a quarter of this tiny tropical paradise, but he had done some favors for
people—shipped “packages” that did not exactly contain products on the
inventory sheet. As far as he was concerned, those opioids had gone to a good
cause. You didn’t need to meet the people who took those, to understand an
overdose was the best thing that could happen to them.
The patriarch drank, and he fished,
and although he caught nothing he didn’t find it too concerning. His bait was
tailored for muddy New Hampshire lakes, not the glittering blue flatness of the
Gulf, and so when he came up with nothing he cast once more. And again. And
again. And finally, when he caught nothing for three straight days, Josh began
to grow a little annoyed. What the hell was the point of dropping illicit money
from illicit gains on this little adventure, if he couldn’t prove his manhood
by hauling in a tuna, or whatever the hell they had down here? It was just frustrating.
Not as frustrating as his family,
of course. While he was busy turning brown and sucking at his nigh-infinite
supply of Coors, his wife Sandra was doing her best to ignore the twins, who
had begun fighting again. Charlie was convinced Tam had been stealing his Sunny
D, and he went after her in the cruelest ways possible, employing the barbs
only a sibling could twist so effectively. Opening salvoes included: Calling
her fat (Josh thought this was harsh; she was pushing chubby, at most) and
hiding her sunglasses. Subsequent strafing with sand, head-bonks with coconuts
found in the shadows of the scrawny palm trees, and stolen beach toys led to a
massive Tam meltdown where Josh had to step in and behave as the Voice of
Authority. It ruined his buzz for most of Day Two.
On Day Three, he reported for
fishing duty with the same plodding, round-bellied slowness that had marked his
days at Amazon. He placed his cooler in the white sand, already growing warm
from the rising sun, and slapped on some sunscreen. The last thing he wanted on
this shit trip, he thought, was a sunburn, thick strips of red skin bubbling
and peeling off. They only had eleven more days before the friend of a friend
sent a ferry to pick them up, doubtless the same pot-reeking speedboat that had
delivered them here. He had to make the most of his time.
Placing his lures and thumbing a
morning cigarette into his mouth, he found he’d left his lighter in the
bungalow where his family (blessedly) still slept. “Well, ain’t that just a
pisser,” he said, and left the cigarette dangling where it sat, his saliva
soaking the paper and leaching raw tobacco from within. Josh Harrison would be
fucked if he was going to get up off his comfortable beach chair and go all the
way back inside, perhaps waking Charlie and Tam and beginning the day’s war of
attrition between them. No, he was going to park his ass right here and fish,
wife and children be damned. He had beer, he had a tackle box, and he had his
rod. If a man needed anything else (other than, he supposed, a nice rack
nearby, or some mary-jane to make it all complete) he didn’t know what it was.
His thick lips rolled the cigarette
back and forth. He cast the hook with a flick of his wrist, and he planned for
his suicide.
Josh had been thinking about
suicide a lot lately. You don’t get to a point in life where you’re dealing Oxy
out of Amazon boxes, he’d decided, and just sit down and congratulate yourself.
No, he was on his way down a slippery slope to an ugly end: either the packing
station manager was going to catch him at work doing his little ‘favors’ to
druggies across the East Coast, or his debts would get him first. Either way,
it wasn’t a pretty picture. Sure, he manufactured the appearance of wealth: the
reinforced-steel diver’s watch on his wrist, the leased Mercedes-Benz sitting
in their driveway in New Hampshire. He even had a singular ratty, three-piece
suit he wore to big meetings, when he slipped on the mask of Assistant Manager.
But sooner or later, it was all going to come crashing down, and he didn’t want
to be there when that happened. He didn’t want to be there to see the
disappointment and blame on his kids’ faces, on Sandra’s. They already hated
him for being distant and truculent: he wasn’t going to stick around and see
what they thought of him when they were penniless, and living out of a trailer.
But most of all, he didn’t want to
give up his creature comforts. He didn’t want to live in a world where he
couldn’t afford a six-pack and a pack of Camels a day, a world in which he
couldn’t safely fund his kids’ education from a distance and provide Sandra
with nice jewelry on her birthday. He refused to give up the mantle of Worldly
Wealthy Man, and it was for this reason more than any other that he was
pondering the end of his life. He saw a crooked path ahead of him, one where he
was forced to reconsider everything about himself at the tender age of
forty-three: he would have to face the choices he had made, and either go to
jail or change everything about himself. Neither were tenable, to a man of his
temperament. And he was too tired to deal with that shit after forty-three
years of getting crapped on by the world.
No, this trip was his last-chance
dance, his Hail Mary pass. This trip, thought Josh, was the final movement of
an orchestral piece called “My Fucked Life.” The encore, entitled “Fat Loser
Hangs Himself In his Bungalow” would be a special, invitation-only performance,
which he would probably arrange once he sent Sandra and the kids back to the
mainland a day early. He would call the speedboat guy, Chuck, on their single
satellite phone and say they needed to be back in town—and then make up a
reason to stay behind. He hadn’t really sussed this part out yet, but it would
get done. Oh, yes, it would get done. He refused to go back to the frigid,
snow-grimed village of Westmeer, that anus of New England: no, he was going to
die where he wanted to, looking out at this gorgeous vista with its endless
robin’s-egg sky and subtle, scudding pale clouds.
As it happened, he was entirely
correct about dying, although the method turned out to be different.
The first tug on his line shocked
him so completely, he almost lost his grip on the pole. The tiny translucent
wire had gone straight, vibrating with a hidden purpose. He had a bite! By
Christ, three days and he finally had a bite! He honestly hadn’t expected this,
and now he was at a loss as to what to do. “Reel it in, dumbass,” he told
himself at last, and began to grin. “Reel it in, sucker!”
He reeled. But the tension on the
line was growing, the pull on it powerful, insistent. Violent. Against his
will, Josh rose from the chair—wheezing—and hauled on the rod’s grip. The
bobber zipped and zagged through the surf, the blinding reflection of dawn playing
over it. It filled his vision with spots, yet he was ecstatic; he had been
delivered from dullness, from the inactivity that had plagued him all vacation
long. All his life, in fact. At the zenith of his sad and peculiar existence, Josh
Harrison was a pot-bellied king of the beach in that moment, raging a noble
fight against what he (wrongly) assumed to be a very feisty fish. He felt like
the Old Man of Hemingway, at war with nature yet at peace with it, and the
experience filled him with a masculine vigor he hadn’t felt in years.
Then something odd curled out of
the waves, clutching at the line. Something long and glistening, and sinuous,
like a rope, which twined around the fishing wire as if trying to form a strand
of DNA. The body of it was thick and pulsed with muscle. There was a grasping
set of digits on the end, like a hand, pink and wriggling; it crept, and
squeezed, with patient curiosity.
Josh was half-drunk, and no expert
on fish, but when he saw that oozing appendage climb up his line, his survival
instincts jerked on by reflex—and he let go of the rod. It sailed out into the
wetness, tugged underwater and lost, and he was left standing there with empty
open hands and a chill in the cavity of his chest.
What
the fuck was that?
No, seriously, what was that? If that was a fish, then Josh
was the Queen of fucking England. His vision wasn’t as good as it had been—his contacts
were back in the bungalow, probably palling it up with his lighter—but he knew
what he had seen. An arm, or a
tentacle of some kind, reaching up the line… probing, seeking. There was
something out there. He thought he could see a hump of water being displaced
among the ripples, a current disturbed. Suddenly, the warm brightness of the
sun seemed a lot less comforting. He was on the edge of admitting that maybe he
didn’t want to fish anymore; maybe he wanted to go inside.
Maybe he was scared.
Then his stubbornness rolled over
inside him and kicked—hard. He had paid a lot of money for that rod: money he
didn’t have, money he couldn’t afford. It had been a KastKing Black Hawk, with
extra trimmings, bells and whistles the tackle shop website had cajoled him
into buying, seduced him into buying. Josh had always been bad with money, but
never before had the universe simply stolen
a purchase off him and sucked it down into the depths like that. He thought of
the price tag on the KastKing, and cringed. A purchase like that could have
bought school supplies for the kids for three years. There was no way he could
justify leaving it behind.
He took a tentative step into the
water. The sea was warm, already cooked by the sun as it travelled up the
shallows towards the edge of their tiny slice of heaven. Or at least, what would have been heaven, if he hadn’t
brought his family along. His toes sank into the cool sand, meshed with the
fragments of shells and the occasional seaweed strand, and he relaxed. It’d
probably been an octopus or something, curious about the lure, that had clung
on and been pulled out by the current. He had handled hundreds of thousands in
illegal narcotics; he could handle one stupid goddamn shellfish.
Josh went deeper; the sea was up to
his knees, now, and the sun was hot and so very, very bright, lancing into his
eyes despite the tint of his Raybans. He peered about, looking for the rod.
Unless the hook had sunk really deep into the octopus or whatever-it-was (his
mind whispered octopi don’t have claws
and he told it to shut up, he wasn’t letting his vacation get ruined by a fish) it would have let go when the
current hit, and the rod would float to the surface as it was designed to do.
It should be around here—
Something grabbed his leg.
It was firm and rough, yet clammy,
like a sponge full of sharp grasping wires. He felt immediate pain as something
pierced his angle, and sucked in his breath to let out a yell, an indignant and
very frightened yell. Josh Harrison’s interactions with animals were limited to
crushing spiders Sandra wouldn’t go touch, various sickly fish pulled from New
Hampshire lakes, and his childhood dog Bobo. He was not prepared for whatever
this thing was—he had not evolved for it. His mind, set in its ways as a
packager and mover and shaker of the world, took time to understand what was
happening.
During that time, he was pulled off
his feet, a brutal twist hauling his leg out from under him and crashing his
heavy body into the sea. Salty, warm water filled his mouth, nose and eyes and
he began to panic. The thing that had his leg was digging into it, grasping,
scraping. Sucking at his flesh. Lost and in pain, with adrenaline dumped into
his system by the bucketload, he grabbed at the sand, coming up with plumes of useless
silt. There were no handholds on this lovely beach, nothing to grab onto, and
the chair was so far away—maybe he could get a beer can, beat the creature off
with it—
But the strength and the commitment
of the thing to its meal was far greater than Josh’s commitment to stay alive.
Just as he raised his head over the waterline and took a bleary-eyed, desperate
lungful of air, it pulled again. This time, strips of flesh were raked off his soft
calf and the skin of his shin, and he let the air out in a scream. Suicide was
one thing—a quick jerk of the vertebrae, or a slow demise via car exhaust had
seemed romantic to him, almost poetic. This was different. This death was red, toothy
and clawed, and it hurt. Christ alive, it hurt so much. Nothing he had experienced, even in his nightmares, had ever hurt this much.
His last thought was, It’s eating me. It’s eating me alive.
The tugging turned into a steady
pull, and he was dragged out of the shallows with a wake trailing behind him
like a boat. Thrashing, burbling, grasping at nothing, Josh Harrison vanished
beneath the warm sub-tropical waves.
He did not come up again.
This was how the family found out,
on day three of their fourteen-day trip, that the thing in the water wanted
them. It had grown large, hungry, and strange on the pollutants in the Gulf, on
desperate natural selection, and it wanted them very badly indeed.
It would be hours before Sandra
came out to check on her depressed, dismissive husband. It would be hours
before they even realized he was gone.
The sun rose, scintillating and
brilliant. Waves hissed. A few gulls wheeled, crying.
Underneath the blue, something fed
on Josh’s meat.
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