Rico, looking dead serious now, grabbed it and threw the line overboard. He slashed out with his knife and cut the piranha free. The fish hit the water and swam away like it was perfectly healthy. Nobody said anything for a time. They listened to the jungle. The silence was deadly, ominous.
Then Jack’s line was hit. Cutler’s, too. Both men looked at each other, for the first time in their lives almost afraid to see what was on the end of their hooks.
“This not right,” Rico said.
And then, from below, something hit the boat. In fact, several things hit the bottom of the boat in rapid succession. One after the other, like hammers. Then it stopped. Everyone just sat there, wide-eyed, the boat moving in a slow counterclockwise rotation from the impact. Then it started again and this time there was no stopping it. From below it was hit again and again and again, maybe hundreds of times. The boat shook. It canted this way and that. Bamboo poles were yanked from hands and dragged beneath the surface.
“This is crazy!” Basille cried out. “We’re being attacked!”
Jack held Elise to him, either for her protection or his own. He looked frantically at Rico. “Croc? Is that what it is? A croc? A big fucking croc?”
The boat was hit so hard from beneath that it jumped an inch out of the channel and came back down with a cascading splash of murky brown water. Basille lost his nerve. He screamed, elbowed Cutler out of his way in a frenzied attempt to get out of the bow. Cutler took hold of him. They wrestled, they swore. Rico shouted for them to stop it, stop it, stop it—
But it was too late.
Tangled together, they fell over against the lip of the boat and it flipped up out of the water from the sudden shift in weight. For one frightening second it hung there, its side parallel to the river, while everyone tried to hang onto the seats for dear life.
Then it flipped right over and all five of them went into the drink.
Elise surfaced, her legs bicycling and arms thrashing. She spat out a mouthful of water that was brown, slimy, and warm like some primordial ooze. Rico was only maybe five feet away, pulling himself up onto the overturned boat. Crying out, she swam towards it as it drifted away from her. She could see several fish attached to Rico’s legs as he dragged himself out of the river. They had bitten right through his pants and blood was blossoming from the wounds.
Somebody shoved her forward and she was never sure if it was Cutler or Basille. She heard Jack shouting out in a high, almost girlish voice: “Swim! Elise, swim for the boat! Swim! Swim! Swim!” His voice broke into a note of absolute terror.
Elise pounded through the water to the boat. She felt something bite into her knee. Her ankle. Her hip. Then she was at the boat and Rico hauled her aboard by grabbing her hair and yanking her up out of the water with considerable strength. She flopped onto the bottom of the overturned boat, glad to feel the hot sun upon her. She spit out more water, coughing and gagging. Cutler pulled himself aboard and so did Basille, both men tearing biting fish off their legs. Rico grabbed the one chewing on her knee. It was bloated green, eyeless, its triangular teeth red with her blood. It was so rotten it went to a soft, oozing pulp in his fingers. He tossed it away.
“Jack!” Cutler cried. “Jack!”
Elise, shocked and trembling, looked for him. In her panic she had forgotten about everything but survival, everything but getting out of the water and getting away from those flesh-shearing jaws.
Jack was still in the water.
For whatever reason, he had been thrown out farther from the others. The drift of the overturned boat had put him even farther away. He was closer to the trees so he swam for them. They saw him grip the solid spiraling anchor roots rising from the water. He got his hand on one and pulled himself to it, then up out of the water and it seemed like he was going to make it, he was really going to make it—
And then, as he pulled his upper body out of the slop, the water around him began boiling like a pot, seething in a great fountain of thrashing silver bodies. Jack screamed. Screamed with a wild, almost animal sound of agony and horror that echoed off into the jungle and sent a flock of birds winging into the sky. “Help me! Help me! Somebody fucking help me—”
His cry turned into a moist gurgling sound as he swallowed water, fighting to pull himself away from all those razored, chomping jaws. But the limbs of the trees were damp, green with fungus and he couldn’t quite get a grip. He’d pull himself up an inch or two, then slide back down. His body was shuddering as he was hit by hundreds of piranhas and the thrashing water around him gushed a brilliant red.
The agony.
Oh Jesus, the agony. When they first started hitting him, Jack felt the impacts, boom-boom-boom, and the nipping pinpricks of their teeth. And within seconds, not a nipping, but a biting, a ripping, a feeding frenzy. It felt like a thousand razors were slicing into him, carving him, slitting him open. The water was churning with red bubbles, foaming with blood and tissue and thousands of fish, gutting him to the marrow—
Elise was screaming.
Jack was making a gobbling, clotted sound in his throat as his own blood filled his mouth. The fish kept hitting him and with one last valiant effort he pulled himself up out of the water. Beneath the hips, he was nothing but bleeding red muscle, yellow ligament, and knobs of white bone. There were hundreds of fish hanging from him, biting and tearing. They were bloated green, looping with worms, many nothing but fleshy skeletons. They could not possibly be alive, yet the inborn instinct to feed was driving them on. Blood burst from Jack’s mouth in a red mist, his eyes bulging, his face twisted in a silent scream.
Elise was hysterical.
Rico tried to hold onto her but she was hot and greasy in his hands, squirming wildly.
Jack was pulled down into the water, still trying to yank himself up, but the fight was gone and he slid into the boiling mass, his body thrown from side to side, jerking and jumping like some grisly marionette. He broke out of the water, a bleeding husk that had been shredded down to basal anatomy. A fleshless hand groped over the surface. He let out one last cry and everyone saw that the left side of his neck and face were eaten right down to muscle-covered bone. He looked like a living, bleeding shank of raw beef.
He went under.
Then he surfaced once again, more skeleton than flesh, fish clinging to him by their jaws. His skull was trembling as if there was still life in it, one single eyeball staring from its hollow of bone with a deranged look of absolute shock.
Then he sank from view leaving only a slick of blood and tissue.
Elise was hysterical and it was Cutler who slid over towards her and slapped her across the face. And he didn’t just slap her once, but four times. Maybe he would have kept at it but Rico stopped him, shoved him away and almost into the drink.
“That enough, you crazy punheteiro.”
Cutler didn’t like being handled like that, but he took it and kept his distance because, white-haired or not, he had no doubt that the old man would have given him the beating of his life with those rough, callused hands. They looked like they could split kindling.
Next to Cutler, Basille moaned.
“Easy now, lady,” Rico said, pulling Elise to him. “There, my lady, easy now.”
She was limp, face wet with tears, blood running from her mouth. Her shorts were stained red, her legs open in several places from the bites of the piranhas. He comforted her the best he could even though he himself was leagues beyond comfort.
She kept shuddering, shaking her head from side to side. All she could see was Jack, Jack, Jack—