Jeffrey Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

"Were you expecting someone?" Alana asked me pleasantly, as things came back to very horrible normal. "I'm afraid he's not going to be much help."

That thought had occurred to me, along with several others, but none of them offered me anything more than a semihysterical commentary on the rising sense of hopelessness that was now flooding the basements of Castle Dexter. I could still smell the lingering aroma of flesh toasting on the grill, and it did not take a great stretch of the imagination to picture that precious, irreplaceable Dexter would be sizzling there soon, one slice at a time. In a really good story with a perfect Hollywood structure, this would be the moment when a fantastically clever idea would pop into my head, and I would somehow cut my bonds, grab a shotgun, and blast my way to freedom.

But apparently, I was not in that kind of story, because nothing at all popped into my head except the forlorn and unshakable idea that I was about to be killed and eaten. I saw no way out, and I could not still the pointless yammering in my brain long enough to think of anything but that one central thing: This was It. End of game, all over, fade to black — Dexter into darkness. No more wonderful me, not ever again. Nothing left but a pile of gnawed bones and abandoned guts, and somewhere one or two people would have a few vague memories of the person I had pretended to be — not even the real me, which seemed deeply tragic, and not for very long. Life would go on without fabulous, inimitable me, and although it was not right, it was unavoidable. The end, finish, finito.

I suppose I should have died right then from pure misery and self-pity, but if those things were fatal, no one would ever make it past thirteen years old. I lived, and I watched as they dragged Chutsky up the wobbly ramp and dumped him on the deck with his hands taped behind him. The black-robed figure with Cesar's shotgun moved over to the grill where he could cover me and Chutsky, and Bobby and Cesar dragged Chutsky to Alana's feet and let him flop facedown into a limp and quivering heap. He had two darts sticking out of his back, which explained the quivering. They had somehow sneaked up behind Chutsky and Tasered him, and then knocked him out somehow while he shivered helplessly. So much for big-time professional rescue.

"He's rather a large brute," Alana said, nudging him with a toe. She glanced at me. "Friend of yours, is he?"

"Define friend," I said. After all, I had really been counting on him, and he was supposed to be good at this sort of thing.

"Yes," she said, looking back at Chutsky. "Well, he's no bloody use to us. Nothing but gristle and scar tissue."

"Actually, I'm told he's very tender underneath," I said hopefully. "I mean, much more than me."

"Ohhhh," Chutsky said. "Ohhh, shit…"

"Hey, looka that; he got a good jaw," Cesar said, nodding with approval. "I hit him good; he should still be out."

"Where is she?" Chutsky said, trembling. "Is she all right?"

"I did, I hit him good. I used to fight," Cesar said to no one in particular.

"She's here," I said to him. "She's unconscious."

Chutsky made a huge and apparently very painful effort and rolled his body so he could see me. His eyes were red and filled with anguish. "We fucked up, buddy," he said. "Fucked up bad."

It seemed a bit too obvious to call for comment, so I said nothing, and Chutsky collapsed back into his original shivering position with a weary, "Fuck."

"Take him down with Sergeant Morgan," Alana said, and Cesar and Bobby grabbed Chutsky again and dragged him to his feet and then through the door and into the cabin. "The rest of you, run along to the Steeplechase and make sure the fire is going. Enjoy yourselves," she said to the flock of pirates crowding the gangway, with a nod to Antoine. "Take along the punch bowl." Someone let out a whoop, and two of them grabbed the five-gallon pot by its handles. The figure in the black robe stepped carefully around them, keeping the shotgun pointed toward me while pirates trooped off down the gangway and away into the park. Then they were gone and Alana turned her frosty attention to me once again.

"Well, then," she said, and although I knew that she could not feel any emotions, there was certainly a dark and awful amusement shining out from the scaly thing that lived inside her as she looked at me. "And now we come to my man-piggy." She nodded at the bouncer and he backed away from me to the rail, gun still pointed at me, and Alana stepped forward.

It was a spring night in Miami and the temperature was in the upper seventies — and yet as she approached I felt an icy wind blow over me and through me and whip up from the darkest corners of the deepest parts of me, and the Passenger rose up on its many legs and cried out in helpless fury, and I felt my bones crumble and my veins turn to dust and the world shrank down to the steady and happy madness of Alana's eyes.

"Do you know about cats, love?" she said to me, and she was almost purring herself. It seemed rhetorical; in any case, my mouth was suddenly very dry and I didn't feel like answering. "They do love to play with their food, don't they?" She patted my cheek lovingly and then slapped it, very hard, with no change of expression. "I used to watch for hours. They torture their little mousie, don't they? Do you know why, dearie?" she asked me. She ran a long and very red fingernail down my chest and onto my arm, where she found one of the cuts there, made by the saw palmetto thorns. She frowned at it. "It's not mere cruelty, which seems a shame. Although I'm sure there's some of that, too." She put her fingernail into the cut. "But the torture releases the adrenaline in the little mousie."

Alana dug her fingernail into the tender open flesh of my wounded arm and I jumped as the pain needled in and the blood began to flow. She nodded thoughtfully. "Or in this case, the adrenaline in the piggy. The adrenaline flows out into the wee cowering timorous beastie's whole body. And guess what, love? Adrenaline is a marvelous natural meat tenderizer!" She jabbed her nail into the cut in rhythm with her words, deeper and deeper, twisting the nail to open the wound more, and although it did hurt, the sight of it was worse and I could not take my eyes off the terrible red of the precious Dexter blood running out in ever-increasing gouts as she poked harder and deeper.

"So first we play with our food, and then it actually tastes better! Some terrific, relaxing fun, and it pays off at table. Isn't nature wonderful?"

She held her long sharp nail deep in my arm and looked at me for a very long moment with her awful frozen smile. I heard a few of the revelers laughing madly somewhere in the distance, and Samantha moaned again, much softer now, and I turned my head toward her. She had lost a great deal of blood, and the pot Bobby had put under her arm had overflowed so that it was slopping onto the deck, and as I saw it I got a little bit dizzy and I pictured the blood from my cut pouring out to join it until the two of us covered the deck with a flood of terrible vile red sticky mess like that long-ago mommy time with my brother Biney in the cold box and my head began to spin and I felt myself whirl away from the pain and off into the red darkness —

And a new and deeper stab of pain brought me back to the deck of the wretched old pretend pirate ship, with the very real and elegant cannibal woman trying to push her fingernail all the way through my arm. I was sure she would soon open an artery, and then my blood would be everywhere. I hoped it would at least ruin Alana's shoes — not much as final curses go, but really just about all I had left.

I felt Alana's grip on my arm tighten, driving her fingernail even deeper into my arm, and for a moment the pain was so bad I thought I would have to yell, and then the cabin door banged open and Bobby and Cesar came back out onto the deck.