James Axler - Breakthrough

The villagers sent up a cheer and began preparations for the butchering. After untangling the net, several of the strongest men pried open its jaws, propping them wide apart with an ironwood stake sharpened at both ends. One of the men crawled inside the yawning mouth. Using the tip of his knife, he cut the lining of the throat away from the surrounding bone and muscle, and then disappeared into the dark cavity of its body. After a few minutes passed, he stepped out of the mouth, covered in blood and pulling the free end of the throat lining behind him.

The other villagers joined in and they began draging the guts out of the catfish, five feet at a time. As they gave the empty, pale gray tube of muscle the heave-ho, it stretched down to the size of a man’s arm. On the third pull, the tube caught on the far side of the stake. Redoubling their efforts, the villagers managed to free it.

The cause of the hang-up popped out onto the mud.

Inside the opaque gut lining was a blue-dark bulge easily as long as a man.

“Is it a person?” Dean asked, awed. “It looks like a person!”

The village leader immediately stopped the proceedings and using a borrowed sword, hacked through the gut tube in a single swipe. Covered in slime, a hairless, earless, mottled blue head peeped out. Its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needlelike teeth, its beady eyes had been turned the color of milk by the fish’s corrosive digestive juices.

“Mutie eel,” Jak pronounced, matter-of-factly. “Big un.”

The eel’s jaws snapped shut like a bear trap.

It was blind, but it sure wasn’t dead.

The headman could have easily lopped off its head, but he just stared at it, sword at his side. The eel, sensing freedom, shot out of the fish’s gut, frantically sidewinding for the defenseless women and children clustered on the bank. The women and children could have scattered to safety, but they didn’t. They stood there. Waiting.

Whether the eel intended them harm or just wanted back in the river, Krysty reacted at once. Stepping between the onrushing animal and the innocents, she raised and fired her Model 640 Smith & Wesson. The .38-caliber slug hit the eel square in the head, knocking it down, but not out. It writhed in the mud, toothy jaws snapping. Krysty gingerly pinned the thick neck to the ground with her boot heel, leaving the tail end free to slap and churn. Kneeling down, she held the muzzle of the revolver against the side of its head and snapped the cap. The coup de grâce cratered the eel’s skull and sent a plume of blood, brains and bone fragments splashing into the river.

As Krysty straightened, the women and children encircled her, making cooing noises as they stroked the arms and hem of her fur coat.

“It’s okay, really, it’s okay,” she told them, carefully holding the blaster out of their reach. They wouldn’t be put off. They continued stroking the furry coat sleeves and cooing at her.

When things finally settled down, Ryan and the others retired to the shade of the forest’s edge to watch the rest of the butchering. The village men skinned back the hide at the tail and started hacking out great, foot-thick slabs of pale pink flesh. These were passed to the women, who skewered them on ironwood sticks and began char-roasting them over the open fires. The sweet aroma of blackened catfish set the companions’ empty bellies to gurgling.

After a few minutes, the headman walked over to where they sat. He carried an uncapped antifreeze jug, which he handed to Ryan. The one-eyed man sniffed the spout. “Whew!” he said. “That’s powerful stuff.”

“It’s brewed from the fruit of the strangler vine,” the village leader told him. “Drink and enjoy your-selves. After she has been served, the feast will begin.”

“Who’s ‘she’?” Krysty asked.

“Sirena,” the leader said. “She told us of your coming, of the great fish, of Chambo’s death on its spine and the eel alive in its gut. Sirena sees all, and knows all.”

“A doomie!” Dean exclaimed.

None of the others said a word. Ryan knew they were all thinking the same thing.

Bullshit.

Though doomies actually existed in Deathlands, the genuine article was as rare as a thirteen-year-old virgin. Real doomies were a unique race of humans, possibly mutated, possibly not. Each individual was gifted to a varying degree with the second sight, the ability to see past and future events. Usually, however, the folks claiming to have the doomie sight turned out to be con artists or coldheart chillers.

The companions watched as a floppy-breasted young woman carried a smoking hunk of fish past them on a carved bone platter. Escorted by the village leader, she disappeared into a hut at the end of the line.

Doc took the antifreeze jug from Ryan and tried a long swallow.

“By the Three Kennedys!” he croaked, wiping his streaming eyes and nose. “A ferment drawn straight from Satan’s piss pot!”

“That good, huh?” J.B. said, accepting the jug.

“Go easy,” Ryan warned.

After a single gasp-and-shiver-producing gulp, J.B. handed the joy juice to Krysty, who whiffed it, made a face and passed it on to Jak without tasting.

In contrast to the companions’ restraint, the male villagers hit their blue jugs hard, and the effects were immediate. Joined by their headman, they started singing, waving their arms and stamping their feet in the mud. Their tuneless song was as repetitive as it was nerve grating. And they directed it, and the accompanying rhythmic hip gyrations, toward their guests.

“We are rulers of the forest and the river,” they howled. “We chill the great beasts with their own bones. Our powerful and manly seed will live forever.”

“Now there’s a comforting thought,” Mildred muttered to herself.

At that point, another woman stepped forward and laid down a heaping platter of cooked fish before them. The companions used their bare hands to tear into the char-crusted and still scorching-hot meat.

“Tastes like free-range snake,” J.B. remarked around a full mouth. He paused to extract a thin fibrous strand from between his teeth. “A hell of a lot more parasites, though,” he said, flicking the three-inch serpentine of unchewable tissue into the forest.

The dinner bell ended the village men’s caterwauling. They took seats in the shade across from the companions and started to eat. The women and children sat behind them.

Partway through the feast, one of the men gave the leader a nudge, indicating the young woman waving at him from the doorway of the far hut. The headman, who had washed down the fish course with numerous gulps of strangler wine, rose unsteadily to his feet, and said, “Sirena has been fed. You will pay your respects to her, now.”

Ryan nodded. “It would be our pleasure.”

The village leader ushered them into the tiny hut that was occupied by a withered old woman. She sat in an inverted catfish skull, a rocking chair hollowed out and packed with an excelsior of dried vine fibers. Over her skinny shoulders, she wore a fish skin cape with a tall, spiky fishbone collar. In her hand she held a long bone pipe, which gave off the pungently sweet smell of herbal tobacco. Even in the dim light filtering through the translucent yellow walls and the haze of smoke, Ryan could see that Sirena’s pupils and irises were the color of milk. Like the eel’s.

Dean was struck by this, as well, and whispered to his father, “Was she swallowed by a fish, or was she born blind?”

“If you’ve got a question, young man,” Sirena said in a gravelly voice, “best ask me direct.”

“Okay,” Dean said. “You get eaten by a fish?”

A hoarse, cackling laugh burst from the old woman’s throat. “Eaten and spit right back on the bank,” she said. “See these beauty marks it gave me?” Skeletal fingers traced down both sides of her face, pointing out the stripes of pink-white discoloration where the flesh had been etched away. Her scalp had hairless patches of the same color. “Right off, folks around here took my coming out of that fish alive as a sign and a wonderment. And it was a bigger wonderment than anyone dreamed. Inside that fish’s belly I lost normal sight, but I gained the doomie sight. Or mebbe I had it all along, and never knew until my eyes got melted away.”