Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“How you feeling?” he said. His voice echoed around. At least it seemed impossible to pinpoint anything that way.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said.

“Killing you.”

“Why?”

“My dad found out it was you that killed Kurt Limme.”

“That’s bullshit! Your dad killed Kurt Limme. Or paid some Russian to do it.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Why would I do it? What did I give a fuck? Get us out of here!”

“It’s a bit too late for that,” he said.

“For what? You know I’m telling you the truth!”

“Don’t think you’d know truth if it bit you on the ass, pal. Which I believe it is about to do.”

“Skinflick!” I shouted.

He was silent for several moments. Then he said, “You know why my dad hired the Virzis to kill your grandparents?”

“What?” I said.

“You heard me. You know why?”

“No! And I don’t care!”

I didn’t, actually. I didn’t know whether it was true, I didn’t know what it meant if it was, and I didn’t want to hear Skinflick go on about it.

“It was a favor to some Russian Jews,” he said. “Your grandparents weren’t actually the Brnwas. They were Poles. They worked at Auschwitz as teenagers.”

His voice intermittently cut out as the water got above my ears. I was pushing against both glass walls at once, trying to keep Magdalena and Rovo lodged into the corner. But they kept slipping down the front of my body.

“The real Brnwas died there,” Skinflick went on. “And your grandparents took their identities to get out of the country after the war. But they met a Russian guy in Israel who recognized them, and who had known the real Brnwas. A friend of his called my dad.”

I couldn’t help taking part of this in. It had the feeling of something that would require figuring out, and possibly feeling bad about.

If, say, I was alive in a week.

Right now I needed Skinflick to shut up and help us.

“So what?” I screamed.

“So you don’t know shit.”

“Fine!” I said. “I forgive you! I forgive your dad! I forgive my fucking grandparents! Get us out of here!”

Skinflick didn’t answer. Then he said, “I don’t know, dude. You killed all my guys.”

“That’s a good thing,” I said. “No one knows about this. Come on!” When he didn’t say anything, I added, “You want me to help you kill someone else, I will!”

“Yeah. Like last time?” he said. “I think I’ll take what’s on the table, thanks. And that’s you. Literally.”

“The Farm wasn’t my fault. You know that!”

I started to panic. My legs and arms were burning. Living things were sliming along my ankles. And I was having no luck whatsoever pulling the tape off Magdalena’s and her brother’s bodies. I could only stare into their terrified eyes, and feel their hot breath on my face.

“Whatever, pal,” Skinflick said. “Or maybe I should say ‘chum.’ As in ‘feeding time.’”

The guy dying over us dropped his gun into the water. It hit about three feet away, but there was nothing I could do about it. Skinflick fired a couple of shots into the water randomly when he heard the sound.

“Now I’ve got to get these fucking bodies out of here,” he said, when the echo died down. “You know, I thought about bringing some meat in case the fish weren’t biting. I guess that’s not going to be necessary.”

I figured that meant he was planning to throw one of the bodies into the water, and wondered if that might help us: a chunk of food the sharks could compare to us, and use to decide we weren’t food.

Then I felt something on my face, and tasted copper. I looked up, and a big drop hit my eye. It stung. It was warm.

“At least let Magdalena and her brother out of here!” I yelled at Skinflick. “They didn’t do anything to you!”

“Casualties of war, chum. Sorry.”

Two seconds later the sharks began to strike.

The sharks had a choice of me or Rovo, because as soon as I realized what was happening I covered most of Magdalena’s body with my own.

Rovo was throwing a lot fewer elbows than I was. The surface of the water bucked and splintered as they attacked him.

People sometimes say that all sharks do is swim and kill, but that gives them too much credit. They use the same muscles, along their sides, for both. They clamp their jaws shut on something, then just whip side to side until a mouthful of it tears free. Then, if they feel they have the luxury, they back off until their target bleeds to death.

The sharks at Coney did not have that luxury, and they knew it. There were too many of them. That tank was an obscenely concentrated slice of organic hell, packed with animals that in the wild would swim hundreds of miles a day, and stay the fuck away from each other. Here, if they bit and backed off, there wouldn’t be anything left. So the ones that struck Rovo pulled him off the wall toward the center of the tank, and dragged Magdalena and me with him.

It felt like we were being flushed down a drain. Underwater, with my legs around Magdalena, I found the tape around her arms and ripped it with my teeth. It tore out my lower left canine tooth and the one just behind it, but it got her free.

At the surface, though, she flailed away from me toward Rovo, who was being turned and yanked from every direction, and was still screaming blood in the light from above. I grabbed the tape around Magdalena’s legs and pulled her back into the darkness just as Skinflick started firing again.

I think that’s what actually killed Rovo. I fucking well hope so.

I got Magdalena back to one of the corners and pressed a hand over her mouth. I think she could see over my shoulder. She didn’t have to. The water was alive, and you could feel the tearing and the snapping of the sharks fighting over her brother’s body.

I don’t know how long we stayed like that. I was holding us both against the walls, kicking to keep us afloat and also freaking out every time I felt or imagined I felt something brush against my feet or legs. Which was constantly.

What felt like a couple of hours went by. Over time the skirmishes got less violent and less frequent, until they ceased to break the surface of the water. God knows what pieces of Rovo were still worth fighting over. Things turned relatively quiet.

Then there was a voice up above. “Mr. Locano—Jesus fuck.”

Somebody else spoke: “Holy shit!”

“Yeah,” Skinflick said. “Just clean it up, would you?”

Someone started to drag bodies. It took a long time. The toes of the mob assholes’ shoes made xylophone noises on the metal grating of the balcony.

Eventually they finished. Skinflick shone a flashlight around, but I kept us mostly underwater.

“Pietro?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Nice knowing you, pal,” he said.

He went and retracted the ramp before he left.

When I look back on it, half the time I ever spent with Magdalena seems to be that night.

We moved with infinite slowness around the perimeter. I kept her as high as I could against the glass, and she reached up into the darkness, searching for some low-lying strut or faucet or anything else we could use to pull ourselves out. I also searched with my feet for the rock I’d hit earlier. Neither one of us had any luck. The grating, five whole feet off the water, might as well have been a mile away.

In the corners you could sort of push outward against both panes of glass, even though the angle was wide, and hold yourself up. If you pushed too hard, you pushed yourself backwards off the wall. If you didn’t push hard enough, you sank. My arms and neck were in agony.

And of course there were other, more trivial problems. The salt that made us buoyant enough to keep our heads above the surface was harsh in our eyes and mouths. The water itself was about eighty degrees, which feels warm at first but is easily cold enough to kill you if you’re in it long enough.