The sight of testicles drawing up and disappearing into the body of a severely frightened person was familiar to Albino Paul—what with his side work involving tracking down and eating people. It was one of the human body’s little magic tricks he always got a kick out of. That it was currently his own testicles playing hide-and-go-seek was not quite so awesome.
And it hurt a little.
Looking back over his shoulder, Albino Paul tried wrapping his mind around what had just occurred between his priceless machine and the little piece of crap boat he’d just swamped. His narcissism floated a thought toward the surface of his mind: he’d intended to do that. He’d come raging out of the blinding sun at a hundred thirty kilometers per hour, bearing down on the small, insignificant vessel in his path, cutting the wheel with perfect timing to deliver a sideswiping blow. What felt like a glancing nudge that hardly smudged the seventeen coats of deep lacquer paint on his thirteen meter speed boat was a bare-knuckle punch in the face to the little day cruiser. In truth, Albino Paul had fallen fast asleep at the helm, the warm sun on his back, the massaging rhythm of the almighty horsepower urging him into cozy cannibal dreams. Those bloodthirsty visions came easily, especially since he’d applied his hunter’s paint at the last piss break.
There was a moment in every hunt that was especially meaningful to a cannibal. Consuming the flesh was show time, the big attraction to tourists and magazine writers. When National Geographic had come poking around, his grandpa described eating the victim’s flesh as the high point, the money shot. But it was what they had wanted to hear, the idea that sold the most magazines. The real spiritual moment came from the look in the victim’s eyes when they knew they were damned. In that instant the last flicker of hope escaped their grasp and they realized their terrible fate was sealed. There might be screaming, begging, or dead silence. It didn’t matter. It was all about the look—knowing that the worst possible thing was about to happen to your body, some of it while you were still conscious.
A white Christian missionary from Chicago had given Albino Paul the greatest moment of his bloodthirsty cannibal career thus far. Tracking down and eating drug thieves was good, but they were often stoned and confused men, filled with panic instead of terror. Their lifestyle had also accustomed them to near-death situations. But the missionary had been different. He’d come sniffing around Malakula, figuring a little Bible thumping and cash would score him young island pussy. Albino Paul had taken the money and led the missionary to an empty hut in a remote spot on the island, even promising a choice between three of the youngest and purest girls.
“I’ll be back,” Albino Paul said, and the missionary agreed to wait. Twenty minutes later, the bloodthirsty cannibal returned in full hunting paint, spear in hand, penis gourd polished and proudly worn. At first the missionary appeared to be in complete denial, perhaps clinging to the hope that this was all part of the show for a sacrificial virgin. But there had been no virgins hiding behind the lunatic cannibal who stepped into the hut and slammed the handle of the spear across the top of his head.
When the missionary woke up, he began making all sorts of promises. Thousands of dollars, the cannibal’s very own apartment in a nice neighborhood in Chicago, walking distance to Wrigley Field. Did he like baseball? Did he know about the Cubs? If he was a White Sox fan, the missionary was sure he could get great tickets behind the first base dugout. Was there any chance the cannibal could loosen the ropes? Being lashed to the fat tree trunk was horribly uncomfortable.
Albino Paul bent over the missionary as if to kiss him on the face, but went for his ear instead. Any hope of talking his way out of this mess had evaporated for the missionary, leaving Albino Paul the wonderful pleasure of looking into the eyes of a man who knew he was condemned to the most horrible of fates.
Albino Paul chewed the missionary’s ear lobe as if it were a wad of Juicy Fruit gum, relishing the flavor and the moment.
Albino Paul, like a bat making use of echolocation, was startled awake by a sudden change in sound. The pitch of the engine was suddenly being returned by something closing fast. Eyelids flying open, he cut the wheel instinctively—at the last possible instant—creaming the little boat with a tremendous slap of water and fiberglass.
The cannibal also had a snapshot image of a large white man sitting at the back of the boat, head cocked like a curious dog, about to be ejected as if from a wounded fighter jet. The white man did in fact become airborne, still in the sitting position—an awful lot like Rodin’s Thinker.
At the helm was a woman, also white and particularly large. In that brief moment, she appeared to be frantically trying to start the engine, apparently aware her boat was about to receive a mortal blow.
The strike from the sleek speed boat cracked the hull of the much less significant boat, splintering wood and fiberglass. And although it threatened to roll, the full gas tank provided just enough counter ballast, which allowed it to rock back into an upright position. Water flooded the wound, swamping the boat in seconds, but by the time it was a mere speck on Albino Paul’s aft horizon, the white peoples’ little boat was still refusing to sink.
Heart pounding robustly and testicles still in absentia, Albino Paul checked his GPS, corrected the wheel slightly, and began surveying the location where East Pukapuka was about to appear.
Tempted to circle the island and get the lay of the land prior to commencing his attack, the cannibal could see he may have come all this way for nothing. It was immediately apparent why the scumbag coke thieves hadn’t gone any farther. A mid-size fishing boat floundered capsized and decapitated on the shallow reef that appeared to encircle the archipelago.
Albino Paul approached the wreck and dropped anchor. He was pissed that he’d have to swim—his hunting paint would wash away—but any hopes for a hunt seemed to be dashed. If the bodies were recoverable and fish hadn’t done too much damage, he could still stage a massacre. The very idea of eating cold meat turned his stomach, but he’d do what he’d have to in order to get paid. He grabbed his spear and jumped in. Propelled by one arm, he got enough of a foothold to swim up and over the reef to examine the ravaged hull. He prodded empty seats that would have held bodies and peered down into the single berth, but there were no drowned thieves still attached to the wreckage. There were just oscillating bits of the mangled fishing charter, and a dissipating ring of oil and gas that made the water slick and rank.
Albino Paul turned toward the island and lunged back into the deep water, swimming until his feet hit sandy bottom. The shoreline showed signs of some recent disaster—a tropical storm, or maybe even a tsunami. The palm and puka trees that hadn’t snapped were beginning to right themselves, reaching back for the sun. He paused, waist deep, leaning against his spear, the gentle push of small waves from behind urging him forward. No signs of people—no smoke from cooking fires, no buildings. He stood sniffing the air, but being upwind only smelled the boat wreckage. At the closest jut of land, Albino Paul tried to make sense of a huge mound of sand. Piled up away from the beach, at the fringe of the decimated vegetation, it would have been completely out of place anywhere except at some touristy resort beach.
The huge sandcastle was protected by a moat and head-high walls. There were turrets and arrow slits, and the front entrance was a barbican where the encroaching enemy was to become confined and lose the ability to defend itself. Enthralled by the deadly weapons of the period, Albino Paul had read dozens of books on medieval castles but was completely confounded by the one facing him here in the South Pacific.
A flash of motion from the parapet followed by a heavy kerplunking sound in the water a few meters behind Albino Paul made him jump. Another blurry flash … This time the projectile struck the cannibal squarely in the forehead, knocking him off his feet, backwards and underwater. Coughing and rubbing at the angry knot sprouting from his sore head, Albino Paul saw that the small hairy coconut that had struck him now bobbed at his loin cloth.
“Son of a bitch!” Shifting into bloodthirsty cannibal hunting mode, he let out a tribal shriek and began plowing through the water amid rapid volleys of more small coconuts. Once out of the water, Albino Paul could see the castle defenders twenty meters dead ahead: two skinny black men on the parapet whose wide eyes expressed absolute terror. Like any good cannibal, Albino Paul could smell fear, and this close up the air was absolutely dripping with it. The fear turned him into an unstoppable killing machine. He let out another ancient tribal shriek to let everyone know resistance was futile. Coconuts bounded off his shoulders and chest; one clacked off his right knee and opened a nasty cut. But he charged on, breaking into a sprint as he pulled away from the deep sand. He leaped across the dry moat and scrambled up the side of the wall, making the same battle cries of the hunt—practiced over recent years in front of pasty-white tourists with video cameras and dumbstruck faces—that his grandfathers had made. As he breached the wall, Albino Paul pulled back his spear, intending to force these two thieves into surrender with sheer terror; then a new, unexpected weapon was introduced into this combat. A sliced-open brick of nearly pure cocaine slapped him across the eyes and nose, like a pie to the face, sending a miniature mushroom cloud all around his upper body, temporarily blinding him and filling his lungs with burning powder.
As he lay slumped over the sandcastle wall, clenching his eyes and gasping for breath, Albino Paul braced for the spears he expected to tear into his defenseless body. Instead, he heard retreating footsteps and the unmistakable sound of two grown men crying like frightened children as they escaped into the devastated jungle.