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Mike settled in to wait for Sue. He winced. To wait for Benny.
Dolores brought a hot toddy for Creel. The man blinked, and sweat beaded on his
forehead.
“No,” he said, mumbling and shaking his head. “Please, sir.
No more.”
Scowling and filled with a dark anger, Mike grabbed it, thrusting
it at the trembling man. He took a beer and sat that in front of Creel.
Taking his own whiskey and soda, Mike sipped it. Creel’s eyes
closed. Glass trembling in the long hand, Creel raised the glass, and the whole
bar stilled, watching.
Creel dumped it back, the adam’s apple jerking in one long
swallow, and Creel’s eyes widened. As he grabbed at the beer, the crowd
cheered him.
“It’s the extra hot pepper oil,” Dolores said to someone as
she picked up Mike’s creds. “The poor dude had the Killer, and the hot
peppers knocked it out of him.”
“Burned the hair off his chest too, I bet.” The man grinned.
Creel’s hand let the empty beer glass slide to the table. Dolores
sat a second in front of him and took the first to the bar.
Creel’s head skipped down to his chest, then the skinny body
eased to the left, and the head leaned on Mike’s shoulder.
With a small groan, Mike swallowed the whiskey and raised the
glass. Dolores rushed to him with a refill. Mike tried to shrug Creel away, but
the man was glue. It looked to be a long, unhappy night.
Dropping the guard to sink away, the shon:gili popped to the surface. Carl shouted again, and the panic
eased. The shon:gili listened to the
voice. He angled back towards Philadelphia and came up in a jumble of rusting
hulks that ground against each other.
The shon:gili choked and
spat out splinter of armor and bone. Behind him, a thin fin rose out of the icy
waters of the Delaware.
An eddy in the currents pushed one ship against another and closed
in on the struggling animal. The shon:gili
dived, and the steel groaned, rubbing together with thin shrieks.
They parted for a moment, and he came up choking on the filth in
the water.
His leg hit something, and there was a flash of pain. Carl shouted
again, and he was dragged under. He snapped and the thing pushing him through the
water stopped and released him. To his shock, Carl found himself facing a shark
in the murky water.
The shark closed in, snapping at the trail of blood. The shon:gili
snapped his jaws on a wide gray nose, and the shark darted forward, flashing
between rotting pylons of the docks, then driving up and crashing through the
dock and back down.
Stunned and shocked at the snap of bones in his chest, the shon:gili
shuddered. He was ripped away, and they dived into the water to drag along the
muddy bottom.
His claws raked at the shark’s eyes. The shark thrashed and
drove itself up, and then along the walls till it crashed on a muddy strip of
shore and flopped there.
Blood running from his muzzle with every gasp, the shon:gili
threw himself back and away from the shark, gulping air into starved lungs.
Broken bone straightened. Shattered bone moved to link itself
again, and the lungs healed, the fire of the punctures burning and then fading.
He choked, and blood drooled over the jaws. In moments the shon:gili was standing on his feet and growling at the shark.
Fifteen feet long, it was a great white in its prime.
Blinded, blood running out of the ruined sockets of its eyes, the
shark tried to roll into the water it sensed but could not see.
The shon:gili ripped
through the belly. With a jerk of his head he pulled the intestines out. Groping
through the mass of blood and guts, the shon:gili found the liver and began to rip away chunks of it to
satisfy the needs of healing.
The shark shuddered. It started a frantic flopping on the narrow
strand. Then the shon:gili found the
heart and crushed it.
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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