John Robinson

Bikini Beach Bloodbath

Jack Ashley and Joe “Show No” Mersey were speeding down the coast in a black top down Jeep, three days into a two week lam from work and any shred of responsibility. They were best friends, approaching their mid-forties and clinging to what looks they still possessed.

Joe turned the radio up full volume and sang with the oldies station: “Motorin’/ What’s your price for flight?” They were celebrating his most recent divorce, his third. Jack only had one under his belt. Between them they had three kids to accompany the four ex-wives. This trip was to relive former glory, to briefly recapture a moment of their youth they missed. They planned to party like they did in their twenties, if age allowed it, following less traveled paths and touring whatever dive bar along the highway drew their interest.

The trip, so far, had found tequila shots and a topless billiards contest in a little town called Casla. Jack got a hangover, Joe got a t-shirt proclaiming him a FREELANCE GYNECOLOGIST. In San Guerre del Bendita they met a “biker chick” named Lola Monroe whose claim to fame was blowing JFK before he shipped out to WWII. Seeing Joe’s t-shirt, she hit him up for a pro bono exam. Bets were made whether he would or would not. Whiskey fortified him as Lola removed her dentures and led him to a back room with a drippy smile. Afterward, when questioned, Joe would only say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” as Jack counted his money.

By the fifth day, Jack and Joe arrived at their ultimate destination: Baniki Bay, a small beach town that learned early to get tourist dollars by advertising themselves as Bikini Beach.

Baniki thrived on out-of-towners and their expendable cash. It was brimming with mom-and-pop shops, restaurants and the odd chain business. There were boat and jet ski rentals for fun in the summer sun, deep sea fishing, and any number of artisans crowding the streets and beaches to sell their crafts. The laws were lax on Bikini Beach, clothing optional, if at all, with ragers and keggers going all night during the height of the tourist season. Local law enforcement didn’t have a drunk tank, they had the beach. Everything was good as long as nobody was severely injured.

The bendable laws are what brought Tri-State Chemical to Bikini Beach, or Baniki Island more accurately. The island sat just offshore, far enough away from prying eyes but close enough for an easy commute. Tri-State donated generously to the town, which got it through the off season, and town officials ignored improperly disposed industrial waste. Tri-State took residence of the island from Longview Prison for the Criminally Insane. Lethal treatments of questionable legality, and body dumping, closed Longview once federal and state authorities learned of its practices. But none of those things were listed in the Chamber of Commerce’s brochures and they were expunged Bikini Beach’s history.

***

When Jack and Joe made it to Bikini Beach, Baniki Island was a dot of silhouette on the horizon thanks to the setting sun. Music blared from various venues while a band was strumming at one end of the beach near the cliffs. People were dancing and jamming, raising drinks to the tunes.

Jack parked the Jeep in the lot of Bikini Motor Inn, which set right on the beach. “Doesn’t look like anything has changed,” he said. Cars inched along the boulevard, throngs of people going from one good time to another. There was laughter, chatter, and a pervasive vibe of happiness and freedom— a groovy kind of spirit.

Joe scanned up and down the lane. “I wonder if that tattoo place is still here?”

“I count four just looking,” Jack said.

“No, don’t you remember? Agony and Ecstasy Tattoo and Body Piercing.”

“Oh, yeah. You were too afraid to go inside.”

“So were you,” Joe said.

Jack grimaced. “I’m not big on the agony part.”

They checked in, they got their room keys, 9 and 10, adjoining. They unpacked and refreshed to discard road grime. For dinner they sought the Gator Tail Seafood Shack, a place they had enjoyed years prior. They were happy to see it still a staple of the local cuisine, and that the waitresses still wore short-shorts and cut-off t-shirts.

After a feast of gator tails and coconut shrimp, the guys hit up Skeeter’s Bar for a couple of Coronas and an unflattering turn on the dance floor for Joe. It was there they met Janet and Ronnie, cousins and divorcées fresh from their thirties, on their way back to Baja from a family funeral with a couple of days to kill.

“So what do you do?” Janet asked Jack.

“Does it really matter?”

“No,” she said. “We’re not using our real names,” which sent her and Ronnie into rolls of laughter.

Joe said, “I wish we’d thought of that.”

Most personal talk ended there for the foursome, other than Joe’s last IRS audit. They talked in generalities, adult topics that would bore the predominantly younger crowd: paying bills, fine wine, expensive meals, cell phone overage charges, great works of literature, guilty pleasure movies, dream vacations in exotic locales, Joe’s next IRS audit. They cracked wise about the “poor, dumb kids” and pointed out which ones would be burned by their vacation hook-ups.

Once a couple of rounds had come and gone, the newly formed group made their way to the gathering on the beach. The band was playing fifties and sixties pop songs and the accents of the waves yawning on shore added a dose of heart to the performance. Jack and Janet slow danced to a slithery instrumental of “Sleep Walk” while Joe and Ronnie were half buried in the sand in each other’s arms. That’s when the earthquake hit.

***

As far as earthquakes go, this one was a sneeze. It didn’t register on the locals’ Richter scale. Shelves rattled, pictures fell, some nerves frayed. People clung to each other as police, paramedics, and firefighters arrived. Aftershocks were nonexistent. No buildings crumbled and neither did the earth open wide to swallow the town. No one was seriously injured and mass hysteria was avoided. Not even the rocks of the cliffs were disturbed. Within an hour and a half it was business as usual.

Under the water it was different.

The mass graves of barrels that Tri-State Chemical had discreetly dropped under the placid waters of Bikini Beach were disturbed. A large number of those barrels were cheaply made and improperly, even incompetently, sealed. They shifted beneath the waves and foam. Caps popped, sides split. Chemicals leaked and mingled, and while a slick surfaced, some compounds settled on the seafloor where other things rested long buried.

Those things woke. Those things stretched limbs, flexed fingers and jaws.

Those things gave up their dark burial sites and inched their way through the water to the morning rays that were breaking over Bikini Beach.

***

Jack woke up and checked his phone. A little after eight, no messages, no calls, battery at half life. Janet was asleep beside him, her long brunette hair fanning over the white slip of the pillow. The sheet covered her naked body and he admired the roundness of her hips. Next door, he heard an irritated Ronnie cussing at Joe’s snoring.

He got up and slipped on his underwear to fetch a Pepsi from the mini fridge. He peeked out the curtain of the patio doors as he drank. People were already sunning on the beach and swimming. Gulls darted a cloudless sky as the sun was gearing up for a scorcher.

Janet woke. Sitting up to stretch, the sheet fell below the full volume of her breasts. Her large dark nipples were hard in the air conditioned coolness. Jack’s dick twitched in matted pubes at the sight of her.

“Please tell me you have coffee,” she said.

“No,” he said, adjusting his beginning stiffness. “Joe’s the coffee drinker.”

A loud snore like a landslide came from the closed adjoining door. It was followed by Ronnie, “For shit’s sake…”

“I’ll pass,” Janet said.

Jack put his drink on the nightstand. He laid beside her, on top of the covers. Hands behind his head, ankles crossed, the head of his cock poked through the fly of his tented boxers.

Janet snuggled partially atop him. Her breasts were cool when they touched him. She spread her leg over him, nudging her knee against his erection. She teased her nipple with a long pink fingernail. “I can pass on the coffee, for now,” she said, biting Jack’s nipple hard enough to make him wince.

He kissed her, feeling kind of silly for smiling so big. Janet threw her head back as Jack kissed her neck and traced his teeth down her throat. When she guided his hand between her legs, he found her fevered and wet. Before he could probe too deeply, she pulled his hand to her face and smeared his moist fingers across her mouth.

Jack crawled out of his shorts and forced her flat. He partedd her legs with his own. She gnawed at his chest as he traced his cock along the folds of her pussy. A small yelp escaped her lips when he slapped it against her clit.

Janet pulled his head down to hers. Her breath in his ear wrung his spine.

Her heat intensified as he patiently entered her inch by inch. The ache in his balls threatened to explode inside her as his thrusting became feral. Her nails raked his back as she tried to suppress her moans and screams. But she did scream as she clenched his pounding cock, her cries filling Jack’s ears and shaking his bones while her body trembled and shook beneath him.

Jack yelled as he came inside her with a stabbing fury. He kept going, slick and slippery between her legs, plunging as deep as he could, urged on by every tense twitch of Janet’s writhing body, by each moan and prayerful breath.

His hips slowed even though her body still gripped him tight. Utterly spent, he licked the sweat from between her breasts before rolling off her.

Janet dipped her fingers from where their juices mingled and closed her legs around her hand. “I’m throbbing…”

“I’m dying…” he replied.

She eyed his erection still at full salute. She grabbed it and yanked it like a gearshift, and he jerked from the sensitivity and laughed. She licked him from his asshole to the head of his dick. She rolled his balls in her mouth, lapping up anything that tasted like sweat and cum.

With a fistful of hair he guided her down his dick. Her throat was as scorching as her gash. The clouds of desire thinned in his head and he wondered how she could still be screaming and choking on him at the same time. He let go her hair and she came up for air, teary eyes and a big grin dangling a thick cord of spit.

“What’s wrong?” Janet asked, following him as he abruptly left the bed.

“You hear that?” he asked, pushing the curtains apart.

She did. Screams. Bloodcurdling screams. Pleas for help.

Jack stared out at the unfolding commotion on the beach.

“What in the actual fuck?”

***

When Roger Banks, the mayor of Baniki Bay, answered his cell phone, he listened intently to the harried explanation being blurted into his ear. His response was an irritated, “Not again…”

When Chief of Police Lacretia Sullivan received her reports from the beach, she simply asked, “How many this time?”

When Mayor Banks spoke with Chief Sullivan, she didn’t mince words.

“We’re fucked. I’m en route, but there’s no containing this one, Roger. We’re being butt fucked with a live chainsaw on this one. It’s all up in our asses. Pictures, videos. I’m sure this shit’s gonna be plastered on the web. Some little fuckhead is probably live streaming on some bullshit something right now.”

“Sweet Italian Jesus,” Banks said.

Sullivan disconnected the call. She never could stomach a grown man crying.

***

Jack pulled on his jeans and a pair of shoes. From a duffel bag in the closet, he removed the gun case in which rested his Glock 22.

“What is all this?” Janet asked, standing at the window naked and glistening.

Jack chambered a round and released the safety. “I don’t know.” He had an urge to kiss her neck, to bite her ass or smack it, but there’d be time for all that later. At least he hoped.

He pounded on the connecting door. “We got a situation,” he said through it.

“You got a fucking gun?” Janet asked.

“Cop.”

“You looked like one…”

The door opened. Ronnie was mostly dressed, but her hair was disheveled with bags under her eyes. Joe, in tighty-whities and a FREELANCE GYNECOLOGIST shirt, already had his Glock locked and loaded. “What’s up?” he said.

“Not sure,” Jack replied. “Lock the doors,” he told Janet and Ronnie, before charging outside.

***

Five things had crawled from the waters. The early beach-goers had assumed junk and seaweed had washed ashore. Then the things stood on two legs, like men, and walked, like drunks, toward the sun addicts. The things reached with arms. Grabbing a burly jock who wore a too form-fitting speedo, one of the things bit into his neck with a chomping mouth. The other four things lunged for stunned sunbathers, and those that couldn’t grab a meal dined with the creatures who were more successful.

When Jack and Joe came running onto the beach, the things had taken down three victims. Joe tried stopping a busty girl that was running by with a tit flopped out of her bikini. “What’s going on?” he asked her.

“Terrorists!” she shrieked, not tarrying as she ran straight by.

“Did you see that titty?” Joe asked Jack.

“Couldn’t miss it,” Jack replied, continuing toward the chaos.

Friends of the burly jock beat at the creature eating him. Another of the soggy monsters fell on them. They thought they had that thing beat down until it rose and plunged a hand through one of their tight, tanned stomachs.

Joe fired two rounds into a creature presently munching on a woman, face deep in her guts. The bullets hit the back of its head and it lay motionless, buried in a mound of intestines.

Jack aimed for the heads of the other two eating the jocks. One bullet hit a jock in the chest as he tried to dodge grabbing hands. He fell screaming, staring up at the rotted maw as it closed over his face. Jack’s next shots finished both the creature and the doomed jock.

“Fucking zombies…” Joe said, scratching his balls.

Jack swiveled his neck until it popped. Meanwhile, the water had spit two more creatures out onto the beach in search of a flesh buffet.

“Who’d have thought, after almost thirty years,” he said, “this shit would happen to us, here, again?”

“Wasn’t in my crystal ball,” Joe replied, raising his gun to pop the head of one the waterlogged bastards. “I ain’t giving this place a third chance though, that’s for sure!”

“To old times then,” Jack said with a smirk.

Guns raised in unison, together they closed in on their targets.