the last six months. Six she’d convinced to bob and each one was eventually taken by what was beneath the waves. She’d given him one last chance to leave, but he’d foolishly remained firm in his desire to prove his love and banish his fear.
“They have a tradition here that goes back a thousand years,” she’d whispered while they lay in bed the previous night awash in the sweat of their sex. “Their god must be fed. There once was a time when they’d feed those captured from other tribes, so they had wars, and captured victims to be sacrifices. But the 20 Century came and peace overwhelmed them, as it eventually does when cultures become more civil. So to appease the god, they began a tradition. Three times a man could tie himself to the statue. And three times he must survive. And if this man survives, he gains a power over his own fear greater than any other man, because fear, more than anything else, controls and makes us a slave. This process, this thing they do here on the Sea of Cortez, is a crucible of heroes.”
She’d been one of the only women to tempt the god. She’d said that at first they wouldn’t let her. She'd had to convince them. She'd had to beg them to let her be a part of the sacrifice so she could banish her own fear. In the end they’d relented.
Pain like a pin piercing his leg made him yelp. This was followed by another and then another as something with teeth attacked his ankle. He thrashed in the water, his legs kicking, one free, the other attached to the rope that held him to the undersea god. The man beside him thrashed as well. Their eyes met momentarily and he recognized his own terror in the bulging orbs of the other.
A scream erupted from farther down the line. Thomas turned in time to see a man disappear beneath the water, but had no time to contemplate the other’s fate. Something hard moved against his own leg.
Then he was jerked beneath the water.
He’d managed to take a breath and now held it as hard as he’d ever held anything. Like a rope to freedom, the oxygen in his lungs was the only thing that kept him safe from drowning or... Panic electrified him as he finally saw the beast moving beneath him.
Or the beasts, to be more specific. First came the shrimp. Thousands of them. Their pereopod and pleopod spines pierced his skin as they skittered over and around him. The man on his left was completely covered, as if the crustaceans were feasting, their dagger-like legs rising and falling as bubbles escaped in an undersea cloud. As the shrimp swarmed him, Thomas scraped his hands across his chest and arms, shoving them away, ignoring the pain as best he could. He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry at the surreality of the events that were transpiring, but he dared not. Instead, he kicked and scraped and stared agog at the fates of the others.
Following the rope to where it was affixed to the statue, he saw that part of the statue had come alive. Eight antennae from the gargantuan shrimp were whipping through the water like scythes through wheat. Two men had been grasped around the waists and were being pulled deeper and deeper. One had already died, his lungs filled with water, his eyes wide with lifelessness. The other was determined to live and as he sought anything that might help him. His gaze darting desperately around him, he spied Thomas. He willed the man to hold his breath longer. He willed his own breath into him. He prayed that the great beast might forget about its human morsel and release the poor man. But none of that happened. Instead, Thomas watched as the air finally exploded from the man’s mouth when he was unable to hold his breath any longer. Eyes that were at first wild with panic softened as the weight of life left him. Then Thomas was released and he popped above the water like a bobber that had just been teased by a fish. He gasped. His chest heaved. The man next to him and two farther down the line were gone. There were nine of them left and he felt a little less human for the happiness he felt, glad it wasn’t him.
He remembered something June had told him. “I used to think