OVERWHELMED BY CRABS

 

OVERWHELMED BY CRABS

 

Fred did not survive the crash landing. Amelia had done her best, but putting the

Electra down on the reef was like running a tin can over a cheese grater. When she looked

east down the atoll, she could see that Fred had washed ashore on the beach, same as

her.

She couldn’t be certain he was dead. He hadn’t moved for what seemed like hours, but

then again, she could barely move herself. All of her limbs were broken and completely

immobile, and she could see the jagged end of a rib poking out of her chest, through her

leather bomber jacket. She could turn her head, but only just barely. The pain was sublime.

When she looked to the west, she could see the Electra still hung up on the reef. It

dangled there like a gum-ball charm, rolling and shifting like a little toy on a chain every time

the waves crashed over the wreckage. Before long, the sea dislodged the Electra and

swallowed her to the bottom. Amelia watched as she sunk, the wing of the plane going

under in a final, mournful wave. That was it, then. Without the Electra, there was no hope of

rescue. No means to contact help, no wreckage visible to search parties flying overhead.

She and Fred would be lost without a trace.

She turned her head east to look again at Fred. He still hadn’t moved. Some coconut

crabs had moved down from the palms to investigate his body. One used its gigantic claw to

remove one of Fred’s fingers and deliver it to its mouth, where the mandibles made quick

work of devouring every bit of bone and flesh before the crab reached its claw out again to

remove and eat another finger. Once the crabs realized that Fred posed no danger to them,

his body was quickly overwhelmed by them, and they proceeded to devour every bit of him,

dragging pieces of him down the beach and up into the palm trees, tearing apart his body

bit by bit, until there was nothing left of Fred but his flight goggles.

It happened very quickly, and Amelia knew with grim certainty that she was next.

She couldn’t raise her arms or kick her legs to defend herself against a small army of dog-sized crabs, so it was just a matter of time. She wondered what she should do with her last

minutes. She tried to find some beauty or enjoyment in the blazing sun that beat down on

the beach, but the heat was turning her blood to a sticky, itchy syrup, and being helpless in

the face of a rather surprising death only made her wish the whole thing was over and done

with already. A wish that would be granted her, to be sure. The crabs would come for her,

any minute now, and she would have to endure it.

She thought about when she was a kid, maybe 8 years old, bouncing a ball on the

pavement after a rain. The storm had driven the worms out of the saturated earth and onto

the sidewalk, and Amelia moved up and down the sidewalk, bouncing her ball, intentionally

aiming for the worms. She smashed and killed them one after the other, turning the puddles

on the sidewalk into lakes of worm gore.

Her older sister had come outside and told her to stop. “Those worms aren’t hurting

anyone,” she had said. “Leave them alone, or I’ll make you eat them.”

“These worms will eat me someday,” Amelia had said back. It was true. The worms

got to everything in the end. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out the worms play

pinochle on your snout. The worms always had the last laugh, and so she had

never felt bad for killing those worms. Not once in all these years. In fact, she had enjoyed

killing those worms, those representatives of death and mortality. How dare they remind her

that one day they would feast on her dead remains, as they feast on the dead remains of all

things? It seemed fair somehow to smash such horrible little creatures into oblivion.

But now she thought, “Imagine being wrong about something like that.”

There was a scuffling of movement through the sand, down towards her feet. and she heard what

sounded like a snapping branch. A gut-loosening jolt of pain scorched through her ankle,

and she turned her head just in time to see a coconut crab skittering up the beach with her

right foot in its claw. It only took a few minutes for the crabs to overwhelm Amelia, as they

had Fred, and as they fed in a frenzy on her body, she couldn’t help but think that at least

the worms were decent enough to wait until a person was dead before eating them. Piece

by piece, the crabs methodically disassembled her and carried her away, until all that was

left of her was her skull and the vanishing wish that she had been kinder to the worms. And

that she had eaten more crab.