Monsters of the Week

Swamped

If there was a good time for Thanh to have been found floating face down, blood washing out from a multitude of wounds across his legs, stomach, and neck, in the broken enclosure of the sixth outer pond, it was definitely not just as the Voice of America station out of Manila announced that Typhoon Emily had changed course, and would be hitting Saigon – they still called it Saigon, even this long after normalization, this was VoA here – after all, rather than pitching up towards Hainan and Hong Kong. The storm was still a day or more out, pinwheeling out of the Sulu Sea across Palawan, but the clouds were already gathering up, and the hands had enough to do locking down the other ponds without thinking about patching up the broken one. Phillip had to leave the radio to Angelina, pushing through the last week's Times crossword, and Nhung, cleaning up the breakfast dishes, to go out with David himself and see what had become of Thanh.

Phillip's bulk made the launch balance weird – he was out here to run the shrimp plantation as a business, a sustainable business, not to go out on the launch and manually inspect the ponds they had open to the water – but Trong (David to his boss and to practically nobody else west of Austin, Texas) was able to keep the propeller of the outboard in the water and follow along the float line to where they were hanging out into the tidal flows, the broken lines trailing away from the buoys that anchored the pond net in place and out towards the sea. They slowed as they crossed into the sea pond, more worried about the ropes than any remaining shrimp: the pond had been blown since at least dawn, and anything that whatever had broken in hadn't gotten was getting plundered by all the crabs and bottom-feeder fish in the river, who were always hanging around looking for anything that made it past the nets. The pond was as dead as Thanh was.

Trong cut the engine, and they drifted in closer. Phillip picked up a pole from the bottom of the launch, and reached out towards his erstwhile foreman with the boat hook on the end. He hitched the hook in under Thanh's body, but as he tried to lift and turn him over, the attempt to get some kind of leverage unbalanced the launch and sent water slopping over the gunwales as the boat rocked back and forth. He sat back down with a bump, sweating more from fear and the storm-driven humidity than from the exertion, and Trong bent to pick up the pole. An oar swipe brought the stern around closer to Thanh, and Trong carefully caught the hook under him and pulled directly up, turning the body over without rocking the boat.

The look on the dead man's face was one of twisted, absolute horror, but that was a minor consideration for Phillip. What had him fighting every impulse to lean over and puke out the far side in front of the help wasn't the face, but the wreckage that whatever had attacked Thanh had made out of his neck: the chunks out of the jugular, carotid, and windpipe left him halfway to beheaded. Any one of those... bite marks, there was no getting away from it, might have been fatal, the leavings of the blood still clotted into his hair, still not completely washed out of his shirt, and that was leaving aside the rips and punctures in his abdomen that had wisps of gut contents slithering out into the water, already attracting crabs, and the wreckage made of his lower body, the holes in the legs towards the femoral arteries, the right shin flensed straight down to the bone. Piranhas could do this – deliberately-starved piranhas in jazz-age backlot jungle flicks – but there were no piranhas in the Mekong Delta. There was nothing in the delta – that anyone knew about at least – that could do or would do this much damage to a human being, especially nothing that would increase in precision as it came higher on the body. Thanh had been brought down and finished off, finished off by something that stood about a foot high, feared nothing, and took away flesh in ragged scoops two inches wide.

Phillip forced his gorge down and turned to his foreman. "David, you're the expert. Any idea on what happened here?"

Trong had been in Vietnam just less than two years longer than the Crestworths, taking care of a war-disabled uncle via what he had come to understand was a profoundly misplaced sense of filial piety after his grandmother passed away, but those nineteen months made him the most senior English-speaker on the plantation, and automatically the expert on everything Vietnam and Vietnamese. He shook his head slowly. No, nothing... unless... no, that was nothing, the ramblings of an old man whose brain had rotted with his body on a near-fatal dose of pesticides, leaving him still a child those forty-odd years gone. "The grove men..."