Old Friends and the Sea, Part Three

“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.