Michael Bray - Feed

‘Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,’ Karl said as he helped Scott onto the boat.

Still shaken, Scott took off his regulator and goggles, catching his breath and grateful to be back on the boat.

‘Hey, you okay, man? You don’t look too good.’

Scott nodded. ‘I’m fine. It was cold down there.’

‘You find anything?’ Karl asked.

Without missing a beat, Scott shook his head. ‘Not a thing. Whatever legend you’ve heard is bullshit. Nothing there but rocks and sand.’

Karl looked disappointed and grabbed another beer from the cool box. ‘There goes the get rich quick idea.’

‘Yeah,’ Scott said as he dried his hair with a towel. ‘Shit happens, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anyway, it’s getting cold. Let’s go in,’ Scott said, moving into the warmth of the cabin and starting the engines. Before they set off, he made a note of the coordinates on his GPS for later when he intended to come back and make himself a very rich man. He steered the boat towards the scattering of lights on the mainland, leaving the gold and boat graveyard behind.

Nash knew that when even getting out of bed hurt, Father Time was really starting to put the boot in. He rolled to a sitting position, grunting and squinting against the sun which was obtrusive in its probing between the curtains. Once upon a time, the forty-five year old only felt this bad in the aftermath of one of his amateur boxing bouts, but now it took nothing but a night sleeping in the same position to fill him with aches and pains. He flexed his hands, muscles in his tanned forearms rippling beneath the fluff of hair which was now as white as that on his head. He grunted at the sun again, and rubbed his stubble-covered cheeks, knowing the day ahead wasn’t going to be good. Usually, if he woke up with pain, it would stay with him until he tried to sleep again later. He found he could medicate it with drink, but didn’t want to get into such a mug’s game as that. Addiction was something he’d seen too much of back in his Army days. Addiction to alcohol or drugs was the breaking of many a good man, and so he avoided both.

He walked towards the bathroom, stifling a yawn and wondering if there was any way he could get out of going on the boat. Fishing used to be something he enjoyed until it was how he was forced to make a living. Now he hated it, the smell, the monotony, the uncertainty about if they would catch anything and be able to survive another day. Plus, there was the other thing to worry about. His plague, his nightmare. The curse he couldn’t shake. He paused on his way to the bathroom as he did most mornings and looked at the folder on his dresser. He opened it, leafing through the papers inside. Reports. Sightings. Speculation. All about something that most people laughed off. Something he knew for a fact was true and that he had seen up close. His hand started to tremble, and a tear fell from his one remaining functional tear duct. He had tried to warn people about what he had seen, but when he told them what had happened to him, they laughed him off like he was some kind of crazy man. He could understand that. Even to him, the story seemed like it couldn’t be true. He had asked himself if he had exaggerated what he had seen, if the terror and fear of death had skewed things in his mind, but he didn’t think so. What he had experienced was as fresh now almost thirty years after the fact and was exactly as he remembered it. He closed the folder and continued on to the bathroom. It was still dim, the sun not yet reaching that side of the house. He pulled the string for the light, waiting until it flickered into life and bathed the room in its sterile artificial glow. The abomination in the mirror had long ago stopped frightening him. Now it just terrified others and made any hope of a social life next to impossible. He stood and started to brush the teeth he had left on the right side of his mouth. The left side had been pulverised during the attack to the point where he should have died. This, he mused, should have been his evidence. If they had measured the wounds, they would have been able to tell how big the teeth were of the thing that had done this to him. Instead, they told him he was imagining things and that it was just a large shark that had attacked and decided for whatever reason to let him live. They told him he was lucky and he should be grateful. He spat in the sink and rinsed his mouth, then put his half denture in, filling the hollow, sunken look that filled half his face. The eye on that side was sightless, a milky orb which still saw the horrors that had happened to him that day. No hair grew on the right side of his head. His natural scalp had been removed during the attack. The skin that replaced it was grafted from the rest of his body, leaving a bumpy alien landscape filled with ruts and scars. His lower lip had been lost, and the resulting graft made him look as if he was melting. Granted, the doctors had done a remarkable job to put him back together, but sometimes, when he was at his loneliest and trying to figure out what the point of his existence was, he sometimes wished he had died instead of being saved. It would have been better than such a lonely existence where it was just him and his scrapbook, a collection of sightings and speculation which only made him question if things had been as he recalled them or if, as the authorities suggested, his frightened mind had simply exaggerated it and made it into something impossible. He didn’t think so. As broken down as his body may be, his mind was still sharp when it came to that day. The smell of salt and blood in the water. The fire licking at the overturned hull and spewing black smoke against the pale blue sky as the ocean prepared to take another victim. The fin, huge and scarred, a slate grey wedge of terror as it cut towards the stranded crew. Watching as it took them not one at a time from beneath, but in twos or threes at once. The pull of the water as it moved underneath him, the wake pushing him back twenty feet as it claimed more victims. Then the waiting. Waiting for his turn, waiting to be taken. And yes, being lucky. Because as devastating as the injuries to his face and shoulders were, as bad as the shattered bones had been, it was a glancing blow. It surfaced without warning. It’s mouth a pink maw, a cavernous passage straight to hell. The two men in front of him may have screamed or it may have been him. The beast’s jaw closed, the two men pulverised in a bloody froth of bone and flesh, but he suffered only a glancing blow, the serrated teeth closing in him and doing damage but not taking him down, not into the depths with the others. Bobbing there waiting to die, face hanging off and dripping into the warm waters, bones shattered in their shredded skin coverings. Smoke, salt, and blood burning his nostrils, his tongue lolling out of the gaping hole where his cheek once was. Then the waiting. Waiting to be taken waiting to be next. A dull explosion as the boat went under, water rushing to swallow it as its distressed hill creaked in protest. Then nothing. Silence. Darkness until he woke in the hospital, a rearranged, man-shaped jigsaw puzzle. Then, it was just snatches. Hazy memories. Someone giving him the last rights. A man saying how he had pulled him onto a lifeboat. A group of doctors by his bedside sure he wouldn’t last the night.

Nash gripped the edge of the sink and looked away from his reflection, the face of a dead man who somehow survived against the odds. Unable to stand looking at it any longer, he went back into his bedroom and dressed.

#

Across town, just as Nash was battling his demons and preparing to face another day, Tyler Matthews was waking up, face buried in the carpet of a cheap motel. His mouth had the unmistakable aftertaste of another night of debauchery, and he could feel his head pulsing with the familiar rhythm of a hangover. He pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around the room. At least he had made it to the bedroom this time, if not the bed itself. He was still in last night’s clothes, and only then realised the awful smell was him. He saw the empty Jack Daniels bottle by the bed and then the overstuffed ashtray and realised Amy had been right. No matter how far he went, his problems would just follow him. It had been two years since he walked out on his life. He had travelled across America, exploring the small towns and drifting wherever his instinct told him to go, invariably a place where he could get a drink. That, at least, hadn’t changed. Although he tried to convince himself that he was on a journey of exploration and self-discovery, in reality, it was just a huge tour of the bars and dives of the world, each smoky, sweaty watering hole leading him to the next. New Orleans had been particularly eventful; the drinks were cool and the weather and women were hot. He thought that when it eventually came to settling down and getting some kind of life in order, that was the place he would like to go. Once he had finished his lazy jaunt across America, he had moved over to Europe, which he didn’t like as much. After the joys of the Deep South, the hospitality and friendliness to strangers in Europe was lacking. Most treated him with a cold sense of indifference, especially when the drink took over and he became the foul-mouthed violent demon he kept locked away most of the time. Some parts of Europe were better. Spain and Italy were nice. Switzerland was beautiful and relaxed, Russia large and intimidating. Despite Amy’s misgivings, he had taken to life on the road well and was thrilled to be out of the rat race. There was a simple sense of joy of knowing everything he owned was in his backpack and he didn’t know where he would be resting his head until he arrived there. He had lost weight and grown a beard. Back in his old life, he used to dye his hair black to hide the onset of age. Now he had a shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper style. During his journey, he had met some wonderful people with amazing stories to tell. He had experienced tragedy and joy, seen violence and compassion. There were no regrets apart from wishing he had done it sooner. His body felt old, that much was true, no doubt in part to his constant alcohol abuse which had escalated now that he didn’t have to fit it around a nine-to-five day job. When there was nothing else to do, it was never too early for a drink. He glanced at his watch, squinting to see the display. It was a little after ten in the morning which meant the bars would be open. Pushing himself up off the floor, he staggered to the window and looked out at another crisp Australian morning. Of everywhere he had been, he was starting to think Australia was a close contender with New Orleans for where he might like to settle when the time came. He liked the heat, and the people were as friendly as those in the Mid-South. People, though, were not what he needed right now. His body craved alcohol and he had learned that denying it was pointless. He considered showering but settled instead for throwing on a different T-shirt from the pile in the corner, spraying a little deodorant, and heading out to find somewhere to feed his craving.