The sun hammered down into Frank’s eyes, sizzling into his skull and he lunged forward, giving in to the screaming urge to run. Something clenched at his neck and yanked him back. He grabbed at it; a dog’s choke chain, padlocked to another length of chain wrapped around a T-post that had been driven deep into the soil. Only a foot or so of the post rose above the water. He tested it. He might as well been trying to pull Sturm’s Lutheran cross out of the yard with a four foot length of twine and some spit.
As ready as he’d thought he’d been for death, this was different. This wasn’t simply death. This was something far worse. Panic clawed at his skull. He kicked at the post and wished he had been wearing shoes.
It wasn’t just the shoes. He was completely naked. He squatted, dropping back into the water, drew his knees to his chest, and scanned the horizon. To the south and east, nothing but more of Sturm’s fields.
To the west, thirty yards behind him, Frank spotted the silhouettes of Sturm’s truck, the refrigerated Komodo truck, the police cruiser, and Jack and Pines’ pickups parked along the edge of the highway.
In front of Sturm’s truck, a row of lawn chairs had been lined up along the water. It looked like some surrealist’s vision of Da Vinci’s last supper, arranged in front of truck grilles. Sturm was in the center, flanked by Theo and Pine. Jack lounged on the other side of his brother, playing with several pistols on his lap. Olaf and Herschell sat next to Jack. Olaf drank Coke out of a glistening bottle with a straw. The taxidermist and Billy waited on the other side of Theo.
Theo was quite dead. He had been propped up next to his father, sunglasses shrouding his blank, dry eyes. His right hand was gone, a shredded stump of flesh that began at the wrist and ended with a few splinters of bone; blood seeped out of his ruined groin. Sturm kept touching his son’s shoulder, dribbling sips of beer into Theo’s open mouth. He patted Theo’s hair, caked and matted with blood. The gesture was affectionate, loving; it didn’t look like Sturm knew his son was dead.
Billy, the owner of the Komodo dragon, jumped out of his chair and flung a beer bottle at Frank. “Goddamn you. I had you drowning in the next five minutes. Fall back down, boy!”
Sturm whispered something out of the side of his mouth to his son, waited a moment, chuckled at the answer.
* * * * *
For the most part, they left Frank alone. There was no jeering, no gambling, no singing, no screaming, and no shooting. They all seemed content to simply wait and watch.
Frank kept one eye on the men and the other on the alligators. He stayed low in the water, knees straddling the T-post, and worked on unwrapping the chain, uncoiling it and yanking it at his chest.
Two hours later, the first alligator got close. It coasted in just under the surface, using its legs to occasionally to steer the seven or eight feet of cold muscle, gliding along like a submarine full of teeth.
It got to within five feet before Frank sobbed and the panic took hold. He tried to attack the reptile, kicking and screaming and sobbing and slapping at the water. He had two feet of chain loose by then. The gator whirled away and shot away into the far corner of the rice field.
The men laughed and applauded.
Sturm put his arm around his son’s shoulders and finished his beer.
The sun crawled across the sky.
Four alligators went at Frank the next time. By then, he had nearly three feet of chain loose, and whipped it at the gators like he was popping a wet towel. He drove them off, but an hour later, he watched as every gator he could see get closer in slow, lazy movements.
Heat waves shimmered off the water, attacking the air with shards of light.
Frank splashed water on his face and chest, eyeballing the sun. He squatted again, now holding a chain loop almost five feet in length. He scooped up a handful of mud and smeared it across his scalp, his face, his shoulders.
He couldn’t help himself and swallowed a few sips of water from his palm.
* * * * *
Sturm watched Frank the way a housecat will watch a rattlesnake, waiting, learning, full of hunger and reluctant respect. He bent down at the water and splashed some over his skull, imitating Frank’s movements, smearing mud across his face. Frank watched him right back.
Sturm unzipped and pissed in the rice paddy. Some of the others looked like they had to take a leak, but weren’t sure if they were supposed to, worried that this might be some kind of important ritual. Sturm zipped and unsheathed his Iron Mistress. He dipped the blade in the water, held the blade to the sun, then sliced Theo’s shirt open. He touched the edge of steel to his own chest, drawing blood, and in a precise and methodical manner, cut into Theo’s chest, cracking the ribcage and prying his son’s heart out.
Sturm held it out and sprinkled blood into the water, as if blessing the land with a sacrifice. He took a bite out of Theo’s heart and tossed it into the rice paddy. Jack and Pine silently wrapped Theo in a sheet, and put him in the back of Sturm’s pickup. Sturm pulled his chair closer to the edge and sat, watching Frank.
Conversation bubbled up, like vultures going back to a dead squirrel after a truck had passed. An alligator took the heart.
Frank vomited. He knew it was from drinking the water from the rice field, and it was his own damn fault. He retched again. It foamed around his shins and haunches. He didn’t know if the drugs were still affecting him anymore, and just as he began to lose faith in the pills to either kill him or give him a fantastic burst of energy, the whisper of the drugs wearing off was enough to corrupt the waves of energy that he imagined floating up through his chest and head, and he felt the fire go out as if someone had turned a knob, killing the BBQ burner.
Frank tried to scare himself, to shock himself into an adrenaline overdose, something to clutch at the strength in his limbs. He sank to his knees, too exhausted and hurt to stand anymore, forcing himself to see it as it would happen, feeling the gators go after him like pack of pit bulls ripping at a three legged cat, twisting and tearing him until he was pulled apart like taffy, all while the men watched.
The gators closed in, their tails sweeping great swaths of dead rice stalks in the creamy mud. Frank gripped the chain tight, tighter, cried out, and slashed it at the first couple, but the others came in from the side. He kicked out, using his heels and elbows. Teeth snapped on bubbles and steel.
Two gunshots, flat and quick, ripped across the water.
* * * * *
It was Alice. She had a worn Remington semi-auto .12 gauge, moving quickly through the mud. The Glouck station wagon waited behind her, on the east bank. They had clearly come from Sturm’s, and Frank knew they had found their boys. Alice got closer and shot two more alligators. Fifteen feet from Frank, she stopped to reload.
Pine jumped up. “Are you aware that these animals are private property?”
Alice shot another gator. “You oughta be ashamed of yourselves.” The reptiles stopped stalking Frank long enough to attack their dead kin.
Sturm stood. His voice boomed across the water like the shotgun blasts. “Ashamed? Ashamed of what? I’m ashamed abominations of nature such as yourself still walk the earth.” He drew his pistol and shot Alice in the hip.
She spun, firing the second round into the white sky, fell into the water on her wounded side. Bobbing up, water still running off her face, she tried to take a breath and Sturm shot her in the shoulder. Her mouth was still open when she flopped back into the shallow lake.
Frank lunged for the Remington.
Alligators came out of nowhere, clamping down on Alice’s hand, her knee, her feet, her head. They twisted and rolled until the water exploded in a churning vortex of mud and blood. A tail slapped the shotgun away.
Even over the thrashing water, in the baked silence of the valley, everyone could hear Edie’s howl. She floored the 4X4 and the motor growled as if matching her scream. Tires spun in the dust and she raced around the rice paddy.