Coffin Island by Will Berkeley Page A

thoughts that were in
opposition to each other so that I might hatch an effective plan to
kill my captor.
    Hunting is nothing more than that. You
study your prey deeply. Then you kill it with brutal force. Don’t
forget to drink the blood afterwards. If you’re going to be a
brutal savage then go all in. Why stop short of eating the beating
heart?
    The stitches that had fallen off the
sails were being devoured by enormous sharks in the near distance.
Even the stitches were getting killed? Ignorance seemed like it
should be some sort of protection in this world. What to make of
this slight against ignorance? Was this world devoid of a shred of
rationality?
    Ration just got rationed out to you
like so many crumbs periodically so you wouldn’t go completely mad?
There was going to be some hell to pay if I could figure out who
was truly in-charge of this world. I wasn’t buying that whole
witchcraft excuse. It was certainly out-of-control. There was no
question about that. However I had reason to believe that someone
was manipulating the chaos.
    My chief suspect was Professor Coffin.
That was one of my diversionary thoughts. I tried to play that one
out to distract the mermaid. The funny thing is that it was true
too. I aimed to kill Professor Coffin. I wanted to chow on his
heart. I figured it was fake so what harm in that?
    The stitches were letting out blood
curdling cries as we swam past them. Sharks were devouring the
stitches piecemeal. The dreaded fins were beginning to close in on
the sinking skiffs that contained the remaining living pirates and
all the mermaid parts. It was a fine day on the emerald ocean for
the shark. The other occupants were too busy butchering each other
to bother with the corpse collector. It helped explain the enormous
size of the beasts. They were the last mouth on the emerald ocean.
They ended all arguments with a snap.
    The emerald ocean looked like it had
been chummed with tankers of blood. It was an oil spill of plasma.
There were also hearty hunks of pirate and mermaid flesh. It looked
like a fine soup for the primordial. A heel of bread was all that
was lacking for the steaming bowl of red chowder. How about a
Bloody Mary on the side? Might as well make it extra spicy seeing
as chances are your stomach is coming out.
    There weren’t any coffins on the
emerald ocean apparently. Someone had forgotten to draft that.
Bobbing around like soup crackers for the squeamish. The emerald
ocean looked like a sewer of death. It was a cesspit in that cheery
little burg, the hamlet of Hades. Was there anything to be
concerned about here? Welcome to aquatic hell. Who needs Flemish
Hell as Professor Coffin suggested when we can do the Caribbean
version of it?
     
    Chapter
     
    Fortunately a primordial shark of
apocalyptic proportions attacked my mermaid as we reached Doctor
Fast. I hadn’t come up with much of an alternative plan of attack.
I was merely going to try to pluck her eyes out. I was thrilled
that the shark had bailed me out. Now I just needed to get out of
its primordial way. It was like trying to duck a mechanical street
sweeper after the contraption has sucked up your vehicle. Sorry
about that miss. I didn’t mean to devour your automobile. Stop
complaining about that. You went through the windshield.
    The shark looked like a dinosaur that
had somehow had the pluck to survive the last ice age. It had been
swimming around for millennia under the ice eating all the frozen
corpses that dated back to the dawn of creation. I immediately
liked the beast. I wasn’t put off by the fact that it had been
consuming my web fingered predecessors since the dawn of dawn. Why
let Darwin trouble your mind at a moment like this? Who cares if
fish can walk?
    Ribbons of blood floated out of my
mermaid’s skull as it was separated bodily from torso. There was
that appalling horror to quiet the mind. A splash of hot blood in
the mouth settled my nerves.
    I pushed her lifeless corpse towards
the barnacle