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  “So you guys find the diver and make him tell you where it is. Then what?”

  “Then we go hunting,” Billy said.

  “I just want to tow that fucking boat and get the hell out of here,” Duke said. “I’m already going to have to stay here one night and I don’t want to make it two.”

  “Suit yourself,” Billy said. “Just so that you keep your mouth shut about this and nobody gets hurt.”

  “Except the diver,” Duke said, tightening his grip on his shotgun.

  “Should I reconsider our agreement?”

  “I won’t tell anyone nothing,” Duke said. “I’ll get the boat, tow it back, get my payment and move on. That’s all I want.” Billy looked at Duke as if considering what he said, then got back to readying the speedboat for launch.

  “Why don’t you head out to the Cadillac and see if Marty needs any help with the gear? I’ll finish up here. We should be on the water in about twenty minutes or so.” Duke turned and headed back out to the parking lot to help Marty.

  Chapter – 7

  Duke went over to the Escalade and Marty handed him some weapons and a paper bag full of food. Marty picked up the GPS tracking equipment and they walked through the parking lot on their way back to the boat.

  “Billy told me the real reason why you’re going after the diver,” Duke said.

  “I figured he would,” Marty said, “My brother wasn’t much for keeping his mouth shut.”

  “Do you really think there’s a giant crab out there?”

  “Maybe,” Marty said. “Couldn’t be too sure from the video, but we saw something big. Means a lot of money if we could catch it and sell it. I’m not sure that’s the question you want to be asking me though.”

  “You’re right,” Duke said. “What are my chances of living, having been told this information?”

  “Probably not great,” Marty said. “Billy isn’t the smartest and probably won’t think about what he’s told you until we’re out on the water. He doesn’t think much ahead, and that means he might try and put a bullet in your head rather than try and work something out.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Are you still coming with us?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Duke said. “Billy doesn’t bother me. Just as long and I don’t have to watch my back with you.”

  “I’m not going to kill anybody,” Marty said. “I just want my money back.” Marty was pissed off that his brother gave the tow truck driver the information. Billy was as dumb as he looked. Marty didn’t want much of anything to do with the sea creature and he thought that it was highly unlikely that they would ever see it again. Billy could only see dollar signs and nothing else. Marty was right that Duke should be worried about being killed, but not by Billy. Marty had planned on putting a bullet in the tattooed man himself. The tow truck driver was here on federal contract. The feds would be soon scouring the area whether they got their boat back or not. When the Bartelle brothers tried selling the stolen goods, the feds were tipped off. It wasn’t against the law, finding out that pawned goods were stolen. A broker could just hand them over to the proper owner. The Bartelle brothers didn’t want anything to do with feds because of other trouble they were in. It was time to cash in on this little town and move on. The tow truck driver would have to die, he knew too much. It was just a matter of finding the best time to put a bullet in the back of his skull and dump him overboard.

  Marty had no qualms about this. Duke wouldn’t be the first man he’d killed and most likely wouldn’t be the last. Billy had a lot more bluster than Marty did. Most people didn’t have the sense to beware of the dog with no bark.

  Chapter – 8

  Cindy woke up and shivered all over from the icy chill of the water. She tried to move but could barely raise her head. Her stomach ached terribly under the freezing water. Her arms and legs weren’t responding to the call from her brain. She put her face back down upon the rough, nobbly armor of the crab claw. The memory of what happened to her flooded back, even in the horror of it, and she couldn’t bring herself to move. She remembered the tip of the claw piercing through her. The shock of pain awash amidst the terrifying unreality of it all. The myriad of scrambling beneath her.

  Then she remembered her feet. The crabs had feasted on her, tearing off her flesh piece by piece. It hurt so horribly bad, there wasn’t anything she could liken the experience to, and she didn’t have to experience it herself for very long as she passed out before the onslaught of pain. She tried once again to move her legs but couldn’t. She felt a dull throb of pain in her stomach. The icy chill of the water had numbed her well, but her several attempts at movement were opening up her wound. She looked down and saw that her blood was staining the water around her red. The huge claw didn’t move either. The monster crab was holding her there, probably indefinitely. Cindy thought she would be held there until she died. She didn’t know how much blood she had lost, or why she wasn’t feeling horrible pain from her punctured stomach. She wondered if maybe she was in shock. Whatever it was, the crab wasn’t moving and she couldn’t very well move, unless it did, because she couldn’t tear herself in half. That would be a stupid idea.

  Again, Cindy’s thoughts went back to her legs. She couldn’t move them and the crab stabbed her through her stomach and out her back. What if the monster severed her spine? What if she was paralyzed? The thought scared her enough that she raised her head six inches and pushed her arm, using her forehead, off the crab and into the water. She winced as the frigid water shot pains up her arm, but she was exhilarated inside, for if she could still feel pain in her arm, then at least the top half of her wasn’t paralyzed. With great effort, she was able to wiggle her fingers and pick her hand up out of the water. Moving anything took intense concentration and incredible effort. Cindy laid her head back down on the crab claw. She was so tired. She never felt this tired before.

  Cindy bit her lower lip and concentrated her full efforts on moving her arm. She let the hand drop back into the water and down to her side. She reached forward and grabbed her thigh, but, “this can’t be my thigh,” she thought, “it’s too small.” Cindy didn’t feel any pain as she lifted the limb to the surface. Lifting it was easy with the buoyancy of the water, which she was thankful for. Her thigh felt hard and greasy to her, but she couldn’t close her hand tightly to get a good feel for the damage done to her by the crabs and she didn’t want to try too hard lest she drop the leg and have to go fishing for it all over again. Cindy felt too damn tired to do that. Blackness was closing in at the edges of her vision, her weakness increased and she knew that she was about to pass out again.

  This time was different than the last. The pain is what drove her consciousness over the edge of darkness the first time. This time there was more of a sense of giving up rather than being forced to let go. She thought of her brother sitting across the cave in the near darkness. For the whole time she had been awake she had thought about nothing but herself and felt shamed because of it. She wished she had just let her brother go on his way with the townie girls and not bothered him to come along on the boat ride, but she was bored and knew that he would take her with him, especially if he didn’t want her telling their parents that he was shacking up with who were probably the biggest townie whores in the whole state. She felt bad again as she thought of the blackmailing words she’d spoken to him. She knew he would have taken her if she had just asked. He was playing along with showing that he minded having his little sister around. She knew that he loved her. She loved him too.

  She felt a deep swoon and felt her mind attempt to slip over the cliff into the beckoning sea of darkness, but she stirred herself back to her situation. There was something about drifting off this time that scared her a little bit. She wasn’t sure that she was coming back again. She pulled at her thigh with a will stronger than anything she had tried before. It rose to the surface, pale grey and white – not her thigh – couldn’t be. She had pulled up a set of bones attach
ed with gnawed sinew and masticated muscle. She gazed at the bones for several moments before she realized that they were hers. Her leg had been eaten, almost picked clean actually, by the voracious crabs below. Cindy dropped her leg back into the water and let her hand drift to her side as she searched for, and found, her pelvic bone, soft and round and removed of all flesh.

  Cindy pulled her arm out of the water and put it back onto the crab claw. Her situation notwithstanding, it was pretty difficult to deal with finding out that you were half a skeleton. She cried some; a dry moaning cry that did nothing to make her feel any better, but did give her a little extra strength. She left her hand drift back down to her side, reached between her pelvic bone (trying hard not to lose herself with wonder that her vagina and ass was all eaten away) and found her spine. She felt no pain. Her spine had been chipped away by the scrabbling claws of the spider crabs very thoroughly, and one section held on by a meager thread of the spinal cord. She jabbed at it with her finger, said a prayer and whispered goodbye to her brother; whom she expected to be meeting again very shortly.

  Cindy sliced through the spinal cord remnant with her fingernail. She felt herself lighten significantly as the lower half of her body sank to the ocean floor below. Her top half, slipped easily over to the side. Bereft of anything holding her below, she fell into the water, letting the icy cold wash over her. She saw a slight trailing of her intestines as they unfolded out of her torso and sprang out to trail behind her like tentacles. She sank, her eyes open. The salt stung her eyes, but she couldn’t stop from looking. She wanted to see all that she could before the darkness took her. She regretted the decision. Her last view before fading into black, was the rising horde of armored claws, twitching mandibles and twisting eyestalks as the teeming crabs came to finish their feast.

  Chapter – 9

  Fred Stein drove his police cruiser through the entrance of the parking lot of the docks. He had gotten a couple calls for a variety of problems and drove down to check it out as quickly as he could. The docks were a far piece from where he was sitting in his cruiser along the highway. He was doing his usual job of giving speeding tickets to drivers with out-of-state license plates. It would be wrong to admit such a thing, of course, but that’s what he did. People were pissed off when they got a ticket and Fred thought it best if they were pissed off from another state than have to deal with any local hard feelings over things.

  Fred was puzzled over the calls. The clerk over at the dock office said he was, “Fucking off for the day,” after he allegedly was strong armed by three different people. He got a couple more calls about some tow truck driver, sporting several tattoos no less, walking around with a shotgun. There were several more calls about people seeing the Bartelle brothers walking around with their own guns. Fred didn’t like the idea of Billy and Marty being anywhere but their little shyster pawn shop. He knew they were trouble when they came into town in the first place, but they minded their own business enough so that he got soft on them.

  As he was walking toward their boat on the docks and saw what they were loading aboard, he wondered if they were getting ready for world war three. He didn’t like the look of the large, tattooed stranger with them either. Fred didn’t like out-of-towners in general. He didn’t mind if they came into town, spent a little money on gas or at a local restaurant, as long as they got on their way soon after. Sometimes he had taken it upon himself to make sure they got on their way. Mostly vagrants or people who had no real business in the town anyway. A little boot in the ass on the way out the door was a good way to keep a quiet town quiet and keep town secrets under wraps.

  He was good at that.

  Fred walked up to the boat, keeping his fingers stuck in his belt. He drifted his right index finger on his six-shooter out of force of habit. It made people a little wary of him, but he never drew his piece on anyone who didn’t deserve it. He hadn’t even shot the damn thing in almost a decade. The tattooed man sat down on the bench seat in the back of the boat and lit a cigar. The Bartelle brothers saw the sheriff but didn’t pay him any attention as they filled the boat with gas and checked the oil. Fred did his own job of ignoring the pawn shop hoods and spoke to the out-of-towner.

  “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” Fred said.

  “No you haven’t,” Duke said. “My name is Duke. I live in Nevada and own that big tow truck at the end of the lot.” Fred followed Duke’s pointing finger and took in the large rig. It looked well-kept enough to push off his suspicion of vagrancy, but not enough that he wanted the thug hanging around his town as long as necessary.

  “Sheriff Fred Stein. What are you doing here with that rig?”

  “Business,” Duke said, taking a long pull off the cigar. “I have a repo contract out for a boat on one of these docks.”

  “You have paperwork on that?”

  “I do,” Duke said, “and I don’t mind you having a look at it. It’s in the glove box of the tow and I can show it to you when we get back. We’re about to leave.”

  “Why don’t you show it to me now?” Fred said, his finger rubbing his gun fervently.

  “Later,” Duke said, staring down the sheriff. “Unless you got a warrant?”

  “I don’t as well as you fucking already knew,” Fred said, “I just wanted to keep things nice and friendly-like as we like to do here in small towns.”

  “I’ll make sure to show you the paperwork and that everything is to your satisfaction before I leave. I hope you don’t mean to make a hassle out of it, as I don’t want to spend any more time here than I have to.”

  “I agree,” Fred said, “You may find out that your welcome to stay very long in this town will run out on you. Is that your gun?” Fred pointed at the shotgun on Duke’s lap.

  “No,” Duke said, “It belongs to one of those guys.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Just met them,” Duke said, “We’re going the same way so we thought we might save on gas. I don’t know about the ‘friends’ part.”

  “Okay,” Fred said. “Hey Bartelle!” He called the two brothers, looking bored as they straightened up from checking the boat to speak to the sheriff. “Most people use fishing poles out here. What do you need all that artillery for?”

  “Makes me feel real warm and safe to have guns around,” Billy said. “You never know what trouble you might run into on the water.”

  “Your brother won’t tell me shit about what you boys are up to either, will you Marty?” Fred asked. Marty just shook his head and turned on the ignition. Fred laughed. “You boys be careful out there, and don’t worry about our little chat. I’ll find out what you’re doing out there and bust all your asses for sure. Stranger,” Fred pointed at Duke, “you’re going to find out what we do with strangers around here.”

  “I can’t wait,” Duke said. Marty put his foot on the gas pedal and the boat took off from the docks, leaving the sheriff behind.

  Chapter - 10

  Claire screamed as the giant crab stabbed her through the stomach and pulled her back slowly to the water. Susan shook and clutched herself, while Clive and Shiro kicked and punched the huge armored surface of the claw with zero results. They may as well have been attacking a brick wall. All they had to show for their efforts were bleeding knuckles and bruised toes. Shiro ignored the pain and hammered away at the claw until he got too close to the water and was nearly dragged in by the waiting crabs. Clive had to pull him away. Shiro turned the fight on the friend who saved him, until Clive shoved Shiro into the wall. Shiro’s head hit the rock with a dull thud. Blood poured down the back of his neck, but his eyes were clear of fury.

  “We’re all going to die,” Susan said. Claire had begun to whine in deep suffering, knowing that she was being eaten alive at that very moment. Unlike the younger girl, Claire wasn’t passing out. Her fear had diminished and cold reality doesn’t let go easy.

  “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up?” Clive said. “Am I the only sane one still here?”
r />   “You must be the only insane one here,” Susan said. “To not be scared shitless.”

  “Piss off.”

  “You have no idea what we’re dealing with here,” Susan said. “You think this is something new? You are just another out-of-towner looking down your nose on us. You think all we are good for is a fuck, and you can take or leave us like some trash, but what does that make you? You don’t think we really give a fuck about some stuck up rich kids? If you want to play with our used up bodies, that’s fine, doesn’t cost us anything, and you get stuck with the bill. You can go back to whatever prude girlfriend you have at your weekday life, but she’s bound to find out sooner or later and then you’d be begging to be thrown a fuck by me. I’m tired of it.”

  Clive shook his head and mumbled something profane. “You think you know us here,” Susan continued, “but you don’t. Small towns have interesting people. Whole lives are lived within these small confines of territory. Those that leave don’t hardly come back. Those that stay are here until forever. Thing is about here, if you’ve been here long enough to know about our happenings, you can’t leave.”

  “Does this have something to do with your friend being eaten just a few feet from us? I don’t see how it fucking can.” Clive was furious. He was of half a mind to backhand the blabbering townie across the face to shut her up.

  “You’re going to hit me,” Susan said, she was smiling, but the smile stopped before it reached her eyes. “I’ve been hit plenty of times. I know when a man is about to hit me. It doesn’t matter. Go ahead.”

  “I’m not going to hit you,” Clive said, his ire dropping considerably when the reality of his violence was put to his attention.

  “It doesn’t matter. If you live or die you can never leave this town.”