Growth Read Online Free PDF

meat. The old man’s head was thrown back, dead eyes staring at the sky.
    Bob Jr. rose to his knees, gathering his bearings. The island was off to the right now, and the relentless waves were pushing them closer. He hit the throttle again, knowing that he had to keep moving, put some distance between him and the island.
    He coughed again. This time it felt like something ripped in the back of his throat, and he swallowed before he could stop himself. A thick lump the size of a peach pit, wet and smooth, slid down his esophagus. He couldn’t breathe through his nose.
    Soon as he hit land, he was gonna have to find some antibiotics or something.
    That brought him back to Slade’s body. He couldn’t exactly take the old man back with him. Bob Jr. left the engine for a moment and scrambled forward. He flopped Slade over, got hold of the back of his belt and collar, and slung him onto the side of the boat, then rolled him over.
    The corpse hung facedown in the swells, suspended in the sun-dappled greenish-blue water. For a second, Bob Jr. was afraid the old man might twitch and jerk his head out of the water, gasping for breath at the last moment. But he stayed down, legs drifting under him, arms splayed out. A thin haze of blood spread out slowly, clouding the water.
    Good. It would draw sharks and anything else in the deeps that wanted a free meal. No one would ever know. As far as anyone else was concerned, Slade had died on the island.
    Bob Jr. almost lost his balance as the boat rolled over the crest of a large wave. He shook his head. He didn’t feel right. He looked back and saw that he was being driven back to the island again. Crawling back over to the engine, he cranked the throttle over again and headed in what he hoped was a southeasterly direction.
    His stomach heaved and he almost threw up. Strangely, it didn’t feel like he was seasick. Once the boat had moved away from the island, the ocean had been fairly calm, and besides, he had only been out there ten or fifteen minutes. This was something different, something connected to the goddamn head cold.
    Thinking about the heaviness in his head made it worse, somehow. He slumped over, feeling all of his strength evaporate, bleached out by the Caribbean sun. It was all he could do to hold on to the tiller and keep the throttle twisted. He tried to reassure himself. It made sense. After all the adrenaline and shock from the morning, he was bound to feel exhausted once all the excitement was over.
    He managed to turn his head to watch the island grow smaller and estimated it was at least a half mile behind him. The light from the flames was still plainly visible. He dropped his gaze to stare at his right hand, the one gripping the throttle.
    A fat gray spider had nestled in the soft webbing between the knuckles of his fore and middle fingers. It didn’t move. Bob Jr. wasn’t sure if it was dead or simply content to rest there, motionless. He went to flick it away with his left thumb. The abdomen sac wobbled, but it remained rooted to the spot. A dozen or so irregular legs uncurled from the center.
    Bob Jr. blinked and wondered what was wrong with him.
    He hoped he was hallucinating.
    Spiders didn’t have that many legs. And these legs looked . . . wrong, as if they weren’t spider legs at all. Some of them looked grotesquely disproportionate, as if they belonged on grasshoppers or crickets. Some were so tiny he didn’t even realize they were legs at all until he squinted and got closer.
    He wanted to whip his hand away, smash it against the side of the boat, drag it in the water and drown the damn bug, anything, but he didn’t want to let go of the throttle. If just one of those choppers saw him, he was as good as dead. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure if he could even move as fast as his panic wanted as it pleaded with his muscles.
    What if it was poisonous? All kinds of nasty, poisonous insects lived in the tropics all