Her name was Bambi. She was a mid-western white girl, not burdened with an abundance of education, yet opinionated as only the daughter of a lapsed Pentecostal minister can be. She was two weeks absent from her waitressing gig back home, and had spent the last of her money getting down-island. The two-piece knock-off that barely covered Bambi’s boobs and caboose was the last of Bambi’s earthly possessions. It would be the last thing anyone ever saw of the pretty Chicago brunette.
She sat on the cabin roof of the old English guy’s fishing boat, watching the ancient fart pulling in a long line by hand. Bambi knew less than nothing about fishing of any kind, but the old limy was clearly too many sheets to the trades to stand on legs that scrawny, let alone haul in a midnight catch of billfish. But, God, was she hungry! And he had promised her sushi. Tragically however they were miles from port. And lord knows that the promise of food was the only way Bambi was spending one more disappointing evening with Winston Churchill here.
She took a mouthful of vodka with lime from the sweating glass in her hand. The drink wasn’t cold, but the tang and sharpness helped with the boredom, and to ease the weight of this most bitter of letdowns. No matter how hard she tried to envision him, the Brit was nowhere near her usual standards. He was just another old man with a boat who looked rich in a sport coat, but poor as fuck in his all-togethers.
Except for the leather work gloves on his hands, Harry Simpson was naked, drunk, and in no condition to be bent from his long lean waist over the side of the boat so far. The swirling green Caribbean water in front of him erupted with a thrashing silvery shape that flashed in the light of the yellowish work lamps. The billfish flew up at Harry, its saber-like upper jaw nearly skewering him. He sidestepped sloppily, more an act-o’-God than a voluntary response.
Harry shouted triumphantly, “Look cupcake! It’s tuna… for two!”
Bambi scowled from the cabin roof and swallowed another mouthful of citrusy vodka. “Oh God, Harvey, we’ve been over this! I don’t do threesomes – no exceptions – usually… And I don’t know what the fuck that is, but it’s not tuna. Maybe a spear fish or a poker fish or something.”
Harry, struggling with the huge animal, called back over his shoulder, “Of course, Bambi love, you know best… but how about giving this old fisherman a hand…?”
“Job?” demanded Bambi with exasperation. “Another one? Damn, you are a squirrelly old perv. Weird… I like that in other guys. Tell ya’ what… feed me some dinner, Harcourt, and then we can negotiate the question of dessert.”
“I meant a helping hand…with the damn bloody fish,” Harry explained through clenched jaw as he fought to get the marlin onboard. It had to weight close to three hundred pounds.
Bambi threw back her hair and topped off her drink from a bottle of Grey Goose. “Also… as previously discussed: I don’t touch anything slimy. “
The easy retort popped into Harry’s mind, but he held his tongue and freed one hand to reach for a Spalding baseball bat encrusted with dried black blood. The fish thrashed wildly, its deadly bill arced upwards, smashing the work light – then downward, missing the man’s scrotum by less than an inch, but close enough for Harry to feel the wind from it. Sparks rained from the shattered light. Darkness enveloped them.
“Well, well! That was a might close!” Harry announced with nervous laughter. With a deft swing and the WHACK of wood on bone he concussed the billfish. The animal flopped to the deck. Harry straddled the dead fish and held the baseball bat overhead victoriously, whooping and cackling drunkenly.
Bambi set down her cocktail to applaud him with slow mockery.
Between Harry’s dancing feet, the billfish lay dead and oozing. In the near dark its green, ulcerated skin secreted yellow slime. From festering wounds a multitude of writhing, worm-like tentacles gave the impression that the skin was rippling, but Harry saw none of this. Between darkness and drunken stupor, the marlin’s condition went unnoticed.
Bambi was drinking straight from the bottle now. Her shapely tan calves were hanging over the side of the cabin, swaying in the dim light from the boat’s interior. “So Hannibal, honey, you gonna gut that thing and feed some yummy sushi to your princess?”
Harry raised a filleting knife to the sky like a naked knight on the field of victory. “Your grace, my sword is yours to command. If it is sushi thou craves, then sushi it shall be! Luckily, I’ve done this so many times I can manage it with my peepers blind-folded.”
Below deck, the cabin air was foul, like an over-worked blend of rotting road-kill, expensive aftershave, and diesel fumes. The AC had failed two days ago. The aftershave was Harry’s notion of a secret weapon for luring the girl into his small berth sometime after dinner and before breakfast. The ice production unit had gone out earlier that day, which meant, of course, that the entire catch would be a loss.
Bambi was ravenous. She sat behind the small dinette, licking her fingers with relish as she finished her second plate of sashimi. In the port-side alcove that served as ship’s galley, Harry methodically removed slice after slice of flesh from the marlin’s tail section. Exposed to the light of the cabin the parasites withdrew into their fleshy sanctuary with uncanny instinct, out-of-sight. Harry was both too inebriated and distracted by his libido to notice the billfish’s compromised nature.
Bambi had already swallowed a small army of the parasitic copepods. In her stomach, one of the hybridized crustaceans had already devoured the others, releasing a numbing agent that masked any pain that tearing through the gut lining might cause. With Bambi’s ability to produced digestive acid quickly neutralized, the dominant crustacean prepared to metamorphose. Its next destination was the Chicago girl’s nervous system, specifically, her cerebral cortex.
Tequila now replaced vodka. Bambi threw back a shot of Patron, belched and slurred simultaneously. “Oops, I was a piggy. Didn’t save any for you.”
“Not to worry, my dear,” purred Harry. “I loathe fish. Always have.”
“More for moi! Sashimushigushi. Mmmmmmm.” Burp!
Harry refilled her shot glass and nodded. “Whatever floats your boat, angel cakes. Or my boat, as the case may be. At least I think it’s mine”
Bambi pointed her well-manicured fake fingernail at Harry. “Wait a minute… I thought you were rich.”
Harry feigned a look of mock surprise. “Who me? Whomever told you that, my queen, was a liar, boldfaced and blatant.”
“Well fuck. That just figures.”
“Filthy rich would be a better descriptor. How about we adjourn to the capitaine’s boudoir? “ Harry’s eyebrows did the rumba as he sucked in his gut and expanded his chest like a courting guinea rooster.
Belching, Bambi looked up from the licked-clean plate of fish, to Harry, to the marlin carcass in the galley. Her face lit up with sudden revelation/confusion/outrage. “Oh my God! I think that sushi was raw!”
Harry eased onto the settee next to Bambi, making no attempt to conceal his erection. He responded with pretend concern. “You don’t say.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, and leaned in to steal a kiss… that never happened.
That’s when deep gurgling sounds, like warm pudding pressed through a protesting bullfrog in an oil drum, came from deep inside Bambi’s gastro-intestinal system.
Harry nimbly hopped away. “Sound the alarm!”
Her face fast approaching the hue of over-cooked broccoli, Bambi reached desperately across the dinette table, grasping for anything to catch her last three meals. Harry recognized the look. Bambi’s need was extreme and the pressure in her belly was approaching volcanic. Harry offered her the first receptacle that he could grab.
Bambi, her eyes swimming with tears, glared disbelieving at the tiny Royal Albert china cup being offered by the ever-helpful Brit. “You can’t be serious!” she bellowed, discolored saliva flowing over quivering lip and down her chin.
She slapped the teacup from Harry’s hand.
Harry recoiled, though not because of the slap; he had just noticed the angry blotches materializing on Bambi’s exposed skin, her bulging weeping eyes, the hidden irresistible mass moving up through her throat.
Sensing the inevitable Harry bellowed “Not in the cabin! Vomitus non grata!” Then overcome by his own sympathetic nausea, he bolted out the companionway and onto the deck.
Harry filled his lungs with clean air and cleared his head. His chances of getting lucky tonight had just dipped to less than slim, yet he had to admit, the stars were ridiculous this night. They were mirrored in a sea so calm that it created an illusion that the boat was drifting at the center of a starry sphere.
A trio of meteors punctuated the glittering infinite.
Harry began counting. At four-Trafalgar the meteors burned out. He whispered the same wish he had always wished – for sex five times a day. In actuality the wish had changed significantly over the decades. At age fourteen the wish had been for one hundred times a day – with Sophia Loren. With age came pragmatism.
With a baker’s dozen of slimy marlin now on deck, Harry opened the refrigerator hatch covers and dropped the fish into the hold one by one. With a heavy splat they came to rest on yesterday’s catch. His accumulated three-day total was just over a ton of rapidly thawing billfish. The parasitic copepods wasted no time infecting the untainted marlin. Before the sun rose this day, every fish in the hold would be riddled with a Martian hybrid of podoplea monstrilloida.
“Alas,” bemoaned Harry to the last billfish he dropped into the locker, the one that looked back up at him with black dead eyes. “Another promising date succumbs to bikini bottomus interruptus.” Harry was just taking off the work gloves and wondering if the girl had yet recovered when he heard a distinctly inhuman utterance.
“Aarrrrrghhhh…. I need you, Hannibal! I hate you sooooo muuuuchhhh!”
“A moment, Bambi, dearest.” Harry assessed the fish goop clinging to various parts of his exposed anatomy. “Give us just a moment to tidy up…”
Bambi’s silhouette appeared in the light of the open companionway. It was contorted somehow, hands clutching the hatch frame for support, legs angled unnaturally. Head and neck askew. As if produced by shredded vocal chords, the ragged voice coming from Bambi’s tortured body was that of purest agony.
“You bastard! You poisoned me!” moaned the girl from Chicago. “ You poisoned me with raw fishy-wishy!”
“In all fairness, I’ve heard it’s an acquired taste.” Harry struck a virile pose. “On the upside, it’s never too late for dessert!”
“I hate this whole evening! And… and… your cooking sucks ass!” declared Bambi. The word ass became an extended hiss of sobbing anguish.
“If that’s how my princess would like to begin…” said Harry stepping toward the companionway, but he never made it three steps. The long line he had neglected to stow went taut in an instant, a new fish pulling it tight between the outrigger and the starry black water. The line caught Harry under the chin and sent him flying backwards, out-cold before he hit the deck.
Framed by the cabin light, Bambi’s body contorted violently. Blood flowed in dual streams from her nose. Where bones didn’t bend in the desired direction, the new tenant of her body made corrections from within. Bambi’s ribcage exploded from her torso to make room for new organs. The veins in her neck bulged as the organism within made its next critical move.
“I never should’ve left Aurora-a-a-a!” … then snap, crackle, pop! Bone broke, tissue shredded, tendons snapped – all to accommodate a rapidly growing mass. The parasite forced its way up through her foramen magnum, into her brainstem.
Bambi’s final utterance as the girl known as Bambi was a scream trailing off to miserable moan. Tentacles reached around the cerebral cortex, extended a million nerve fibers into the gray matter. With no room left to expand, the parasite came bursting from Bambi’s skull in a fountain of pink, red and beautiful clumps of L’Oreal Intense Ombre´.
Harry saw stars in front of stars. Half conscious, he heard the sickening crunch of Bambi’s skull opening down the middle. His head was still swimming, his vision unfocused. Even if he could’ve seen through the fog of semi-consciousness, his mind would not have known what to make of the monstrosity pulling itself up through the split in Bambi’s cranium – an aberration that was both crustacean and jellyfish, and yet something utterly neither.
Bambi, or rather what used to be Bambi, shuddered. Her nervous system was still adjusting to the unusual nerve impulses from the parasite. Her limbs twitched. Her mangled torso heaved from the bloated egg case that now displaced her internal organs. Her tortured face, almost unrecognizable now, seemed paralyzed with the permanent expression of anguish. Her eyeballs rolled randomly in their bloodied sockets… and were suddenly sucked into her skull. From the empty orbits appeared a pair of insect-like antennae that reached out, feeling the air.
Harry had seen antennae like this before. He had observed similar behavior in beetles and ants and other creepy crawly critters, of which there were a good many here in the balmy, buggy tropics.
The organism was searching. It detected gradients in temperature and air-borne chemicals. It had found heat and pheromones. The parasite’s antennae stiffened, pointing directly at where Harry lay on the deck. Bambi’s legs staggered forward, exiting the companionway, propelling the organism toward its first victim.
Harry was almost blind, at least for the moment. The dim light flowing out from the cabin and his own concussion-caused blurry vision made it impossible to make out the shape that lurched toward him, still wearing Bambi’s blood spattered canary yellow two-piece. But in his swimming, confused mind, Harry’s other senses registered a laundry list of things not right, no sir-ee, not right at all – despite that teenie weenie bikini.
First there was the non-mammalian clicking that sounded like one of those big land hermit crabs working on a fish carcass, then the sweet raw meat stench of a scavenger/predator’s breath, and finally a sickening wet sloppy sound like earthworms tunneling through Jello.
Without thinking, Harry reached to his right. His groping hand found the worn maple of his trusted Louisville slugger. He rolled toward the baseball bat, closing a second hand around the handle. He tensed his core.
The Bambi organism stood over him, paused, as if assessing where and how to strike. Its genetic behavior triggers waited for an accumulation of various environmental signals to determine what to do next. Would it feed? Or use this weak warm-blooded host as a parasitized incubator? Or maybe introduce another larva and turn the feeble biped into a drone – many would be needed.
Decisions, decisions.
But Harry’s well-tuned survival instincts knew better than to wait one more moment. Like a tempered steel tension spring, he sprung. With every ounce of strength he swung the maple wood bat in a swift and graceful arc. The solid end smacked into Bambi’s skull with grand slam perfection. Her head and the parasite within separated from her shoulders in a wet cloud and flew screaming over the gunwale, into the dark. Bambie’s lower half staggered away from Harry and tumbled over the side. Ker-splshhhhhh….
“Bollocks…” gasped Harry, pulling himself up to peer over the rail. In the strangely glowing sea below a drift of foam formed a vanishing ring around Bambie’s yellow double-D bikini top. But the creature that had worn the K-Mart knock-off was gone. And Harry’s life, as you probably guessed, would never be the same.
Author’s note: Bikini Zombie Warrior is now being featured on the Top Horror Blogs & Sci Fi Blogs list!
Bikini Zombie Warrior 