Walkers Read Free Page A

however, the medical examiner managed to
hook the end of the stick underneath one of them and flip it out on to the
beach.
    The eel was almost three feet long,
with a flat chisel-shaped head and tiny blind eyes. It flapped and writhed on
the surface for a while; then it burrowed its head into the sand, and within
seconds it had disappeared, leaving nothing on the sand but a slight
indentation. Almost immediately, the remaining eels poured out of the dead
girl’s pelvis, and scattered in all directions, burying themselves deep into
the sand.
    ‘Catch one!’ the medical examiner
shouted, urgently.
    One of the uniformed policemen
snatched at the tail of the last eel to disappear, and tugged at it furiously.
    ‘Give me a hand for Chrissake!’ he
gasped to his uniformed partner. His partner came hurrying across and gripped
the eel’s body nearer to the sand, and between them, cursing and grunting, they
gradually managed to drag the creature backwards out of the hole it had been
burrowing for itself.
    As soon as its head was clear,
though, the eel lashed and looped and twisted wildly around in the air. Henry
saw its teeth flicker; and then it wriggled like a whip, and caught one of the
policemen directly in the face, clamping its jaws over his upper lip and part
of his nose.
    The policeman shrieked out loud, and
snatched at the eel’s head, trying to prize its jaws apart. Henry watched in
horror as the man danced around the sand, the silvery-black eel wriggling from
his face like a carnival nose. Bright-red blood began to sprinkle all around
them.
    Lieutenant Ortega dodged forward,
and seized the officer from behind, tripping him up so that they both fell
heavily on to the ground. The policeman was screaming wildly, and his legs were
jerking like an epileptic marionette. Lieutenant Ortega reached around to the
officer’s face, and clutched the eel right behind its chisel-shaped head,
squeezing the gills closed so that the creature would be unable to breathe.
Then he held up his free hand and yelled, ‘Knife, for God’s sake!’
    The medical examiner dug hurriedly
into his pockets, and came up with a single-bladed clasp knife. Lieutenant
Ortega snatched it from him, and then cut into the welter of blood in front of
the policeman’s face. The policeman screamed again and again while Lieutenant
Ortega sawed through the eel’s body. The eel’s own blood spurted out dark, like
bile, and splattered all over Ortega’s hands and arms. Its tail lashed
furiously from side to side, right up until the last moment when Ortega cut its
spinal column, and flung its body across the sand. The headless body lay
twitching and jerking, and the medics cautiously stepped away from it.
    The medical examiner knelt down on
the sand and examined the policeman closely.
    The policeman was shivering and
trembling and Lieutenant Ortega was doing everything he could to soothe him.
The eel’s severed head was still gripping the policeman’s face, and when the
medical examiner quickly dabbed away the blood with cotton and distilled water,
he could see that the creature’s teeth had already detached half of the
policeman’s nostril and most of his upper lip. The eel’s jaw muscles showed no
signs of relaxing; it was plain that any attempt to pull its head away would
make the injury far more severe than it was already.
    Henry came up, and although he was
trembling himself, he said, as steadily as he could, ‘You know what they used
to do in Vietnam, to get the leeches off?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said the medical
examiner. ‘They used to burn them off with lighted cigarettes. Does anyone here
have a cigarette?’
    Everybody looked at each other. In
the end, Detective Warburg said, ‘Nobody smokes, sir.’
    ‘Jesus,’ said the medical examiner.
‘Only in Southern California.’
    ‘Perhaps a cigarette-lighter, from
one of the cars,’ Henry suggested.
    Detective Morris jogged off to the
nearest car, and came back a minute or so later with his