Fishing Trip Part Two

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She nodded and ran to go below deck where the living quarters of the boat could be found, a pair of bunk beds, a small kitchen, a fire extinguisher and spare gasoline tanks for the engine should it run low. The first aid kit was built into the wall and, once opened, revealed to have four smaller boxes. Kate grabbed three and ran back upstairs, slipping on some of the frothy blood seeping into the cabin where the controls were from the main deck.

As she came above deck, she found Elsa holding her hand over the gushing wound that ringed Eric’s right shoulder, crying as the boy seemed to fade in and out of consciousness. She was kneeling on the deck, his head in her lap, while David was finishing the shark off with a few stabs to the head. Turning, he saw her with the medical supplies and nodded toward Eric.

“Patch him up as best you can, we need him!” David commanded, turning back to the thrashing shark.

She dropped to her knees, ignoring the splash of blood that spattered over her thighs, and dumped the medical packages onto the deck before opening one up. Inside she found some antiseptic, a roll of gauze, some bandages and a number of other small injury tools. Luckily, Kate was in school for pre-med, so she knew her way around a human body.

Though they were normally already dead.

Thinking on her feet, she reached over to the fishing pole and, using a knife strapped to Eric’s side, cut the fishing twine free from the shark. Unrolling a good deal of it, she grabbed Elsa by the shoulder and told her to start cutting long lengths for Kate to use. The poor girl was in such a state of shock she didn’t ask what for, only nodding dumbly while tears leaked down her cheeks.

Opening the small bottle of alcohol, Kate poured it over the bite wounds as she stuffed the holes with wads of gauze, causing Eric to cry out in fits as she worked. He didn’t resist, thank goodness, but one could tell he wasn’t enjoying the process.

“Good, he hasn’t gone into shock…” Kate muttered to herself, pulling him up into a sitting position to treat his shoulder. The wounds were horrid, gaping half inch long, quarter of an inch wide holes that sawed through the tissue roughly, leaving flaky bits of greying skin to hang off the injury like paint peeling from an old car. Using the knife and the alcohol, she cleaned the wounds as best she could before packing them with gauze, trying to staunch the bleeding.

Turning to Elsa, who’d already cut several foot and a half long lengths of the thick fishing line, Kate smiled and grabbed her shoulder. “You’re doing good, keep it up.”

She nodded shakily, handing over the lengths she’d cut before moving back to cut some more. Her face and stomach were smeared with blood, both the sharks and Eric’s. Kate hoped that Eric was a clean guy and that he didn’t have any diseases or anything, but now was hardly a time to actually worry about that kind of thing.

David walked over, harpoon in hand dripping with gore, his chest heaving. “Is he going to be alright?”

Kate nodded slowly. “I’m sewing the wounds up with alcohol soaked gauze inside them. I’ll have to change them in the next four hours, but he’s lost a lot of blood; he won’t be able to stand for a while.”

“Damn it!” David cursed, slamming the butt of the harpoon into the deck. “He’s the only one that can drive the boat… do we have enough supplies to get him healthy enough to stand for a few hours by tomorrow?”

“He won’t be able to do anything for us until thirty six hours from now, at minimum.” Kate said as she looped the twine through a long needle. “Now hold him down, he is not going to like this.”

David moved and placed both hand on Eric’s chest. “Okay buddy, you’re gonna make it through this. Just gotta hold out a little while and we’ll have you good as new.”

Eric just groaned until Kate began placing the needle through his flesh of the first tooth wound. Screaming as she slid it through the haggard skin, he tossed and fought as she pulled through the twine slowly, piercing the other side and pulling the twine through after the needle, slowly closing the wound. While each wound was relatively small, there were a lot of them, some larger than others because of the sharks thrashing. Over the course of the next half hour, as the afternoon sun began to turn to descend in the west, Kate sewed up perhaps a fourth of the wounds, when Eric finally passed out from the pain.

Turning to Elsa, who was white as a ghost, she snapped her fingers. “Go lay towels down on one of the bottom bunks, hurry! We need to get him somewhere where it isn’t so damp. And you,” she said, looking to David, “clean off this deck would you? I don’t want my sister traumatized any further by her walking around in some guys blood.”

“Sure, let me get him down below for you first.” David agreed, hefting Eric’s pale frame up off the bloody deck. Half his body was drenched in dark, clotting blood while the rest had dried flaking layers of brown and red plastered over him. “Dude is going to need a serious bath after this,” David grumbled, walking into the control room and slowly down the stairs with him to the bunk lined with towels. Elsa stood off to one side, her bloody hands up by her face, trembling, eyes locked on Eric’s half sewn up frame.

“Will he be okay?” She asked quietly, quivering all over.

David looked at her and closed his eyes. “We think so, but without him up and about, we’re going to be on this boat maybe two, three days. We have plenty of meat thanks to what we brought and the shark hanging outside, but we’ll need to use the liquor we brought for Eric.”

“To disinfect his wounds?” She asked, trying to grasp something about this situation that she could understand.

“As painkillers,” David laughed a short choking laugh. “He’s going to be plenty sore and all we have is aspirin.”

“Which he can’t have, seeing as he’s already almost bled out.” Kate said as she walked into the lower deck, loosening her bikini top, which was speckled with blood.

“Kate! What are you doing?” Elsa asked, eyes darting towards David as her sister removed her top.

“They’re breasts Elsa, he’s seen them before. And I need to change my clothes. As do you. Now seeing as you haven’t seen my sister naked, David you go on up and begin cleaning the deck and preparing lunch for us.”

“Slave driver,” David murmured with a smile, eyes lingering on Kate’s chest.

“You love it and you know it,” she smirked, slapping David on the butt as he squeezed past her. “Now, Elsa I need you to go change and get cleaned up, I’m going to be stitching up Eric here in one of my old tee-shirts.”

Kate began rooting about in her bag, located on the cot across from Eric’s prone form. Pulling out an old red shirt with a few worn holes in it, she shrugged it on and adjusted it until she was comfortable.

“That’s not one of your shirts,” Elsa said in a flat tone.

“Yeah, it’s one of David’s. What, you know I’m sleeping with him, you think me wearing a spare shirt of his is weird?”

“I’m… just not used to you being as open as you are about all this.”

“You mean my sexuality?” Kate said with a wide smile, teasing her prudish sister. “Just because you listened to Mom and Dad about what a good and proper girl does, doesn’t mean I did. My body is my own, and nobody is going to change that.”

“Alright, alright… can we just change the subject?” Elsa was clearly disturbed by the topic.

“Sure, you go get cleaned up and stop judging me, and Ill help prevent your eye candy from dying. Sound good?”

Elsa just blushed scarlet and turned away, undoing her own bikini and swimsuit bottoms in favor of a shirt and panties, with denim shorts. Meanwhile Kate had turned Eric onto his side, and begun sewing up the wounds on his back as well. The blood-soaked gauze was peeking out from the sawed openings in his muscle of his shoulder, with dribbles of blood oozing out from the wounds onto the towels below.

“Great… the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Elsa, I’m going to need you to help me sew him up. Grab a flashlight and shine it over here so I can start working on these bigger ones, he’s losing too much blood from them as it is.”

“Okay!”

While Kate and Elsa worked on Eric below deck, David was moping away the bloody water up top, throwing buckets of salt water brought up from the side of the boat and thrown onto the deck. With a constant supply of water being thrown over the frothy mess, he was able to mop away most of the blood, pushing the bubbly red slime off the deck and into the open waters below. Looking up at the shark, David just scowled.

“This is your entire fault,” he growled, bringing up his mop and striking it in the side. As he pulled back, he was surprised to find that the mop was sticking to the side of the shark, as if it’d been snagged on something sharp. Yanking hard, he tore the mop down while sliding something long and sharp out of the Hammerhead’s side. Clattering on the deck, he leaned the mop against the railing and stooped down to pick it up, before it rolled off the edge of the boat and back into the churning sea.

“Huh,” David muttered as he stared at the long metal point, slightly bloodied, he held in the palm of his hand. Heavy enough that it had to be iron or steel, the nine inches of metal was a cap of some sort, with wrist thick bone jutting out from the flat end. “It’s some kind of spear head, I guess?”

Looking over the well-honed point of the spear, he examined the engravings on the metal. Alien symbols and sigils stared back at David as he looked at the spear tip, the whole thing glinting in the sunlight.

Standing up and looking out over the Gulf around him, David scratched his head in wonder. Who was spear fishing against sharks in this region? Did the people of Mexico still fish that way? David couldn’t think of any Americans that fished this way, nor anyone within a couple hundred miles.

Looking up at the shark, David palmed the stake. “Where did you come from?” He asked the hanging corpse, which of course gave no discernable reply save to swing softly in the salty summer breeze. David shrugged and tucked the steel spear point into his pocket, choosing instead to continue cleaning the deck.

As he cleaned, he thought about what would happen if Eric wasn’t able to wake up, if he died. They’d have to wait it out until another boat found them, or he’d have to try and learn how to drive one of these boats on the fly. Neither prospect seemed good, but they had sixty gallons of fresh water below deck, and enough Red Snapper and Warsaw Grouper to live off of them for a while, thanks to the gas grill they’d brought along. Opening the chest where all the fish sat packed in ice; he fished out a twelve pound Red Snapper, closing the lid quickly to preserve the frosty interior.

David spent the next few minutes filleting the Red Snapper, first removing the tail and head, and then the internal organs, all of which he dumped overboard. Setting one half of the snapper on the bench next to the Polaroid of Eric being chomped by their latest and greatest catch, he set the other half on the grill, turning up the heat as he cut slits along the muscle so it wouldn’t curl in on itself as it cooked.

Staring off into the deep blue sea around him, David stumbled a bit when something crashed into the side of the boat, portside. Flipping the Red Snapper fillet around, he moved to look at what had hit the boat in such a way that had caused it to stir like that. Walking up to the emergency boat hanging from special rigging, he looked over the edge and saw a large flat tailfin swim under the boat.
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