Carl Hiaasen – Lucky You

“Will it stop ’em?” Chub peered dubiously at the container. Bode Gazzer had purchased it at the Lauderdale gun show.

“It’s made to knock grizzly bears on their asses,” the woman had told him. “Ten percent concentration of oleoresin capsicum. That’s two million Scoville Heat Units.”

“What the fuck’s that mean?”

“It means big medicine, Gomer. Good luck.”

Moments later: the sound of an outboard engine revving. Sure as shit, they’d left him out here. She and the white guy—deserted him on this goddamn island with his dead friend, and the sky darkening with vultures.

They’d come down for Bode in the midafternoon, just as the woman predicted. At the time, Chub was squatting in the mangroves, huffing the last of the WD-4O. It didn’t give a fraction of the jolt that boat glue did, but it was better than nothing.

Teetering from the woods, he’d spotted the buzzards picking eagerly at his partner’s corpse—six, seven, maybe more. Some had held strings of flesh in their beaks, others nibbled shreds of camouflage fabric. On the ground the birds had seemed so large, especially with their bare, scalded-looking heads and vast white-tipped wings—Chub had been surprised. When he ran at them they’d hissed and spooked, although not far; into the treetops.

On the bright sand around him he’d noticed the ominous shrinking shadows of others dropping closer, flying tighter circles. That’s when Chub decided to run far away from Bode’s dead body, to a safer part of the island. He grabbed the pepper spray and half lurched, half galloped through the mangroves. Finally he came to a secluded clearing and keeled in exhaustion, landing on his wounded shoulder.

Almost immediately the first nightmare began: invisible beaks, pecking and gouging at his face. He bolted upright, sopped in sweat. In his next dream, which followed quickly, the rancid scavengers encircled him and, by aligning wing to wing, formed a picket from which he couldn’t escape. Again he awakened with a shiver.

It was all her fault, the nigger girl from the Black Tide—she’d put the crazy buzzard talk in his head. They were only birds, for chrissake. Stupid, smelly birds.

Still, Chub kept his good eye trained on their glide pattern, the high thermals.

At dusk he made his way back to the abandoned campsite, in hopes of finding a dry tarp and some beer. When he spotted the paper grocery bag in the bushes, he got an idea about how to pass the long nerve-racking night. He dumped out the crinkled tube of marine adhesive and gave one last squeeze, to make sure he hadn’t missed any. Then he shook the can of pepper spray and shot a stream inside the empty bag.

Thinking: Stuffs gotta be heavy-duty to take out a fuckin’ grizzly.

Chub had never heard of “Scoville heat” but he assumed from its potent-sounding name that a whiff of two million units would produce a deliriously illicit high—exactly what he needed to take his mind off the buzzards and Bodean Gazzer. Chub further assumed (also mistakenly) that the pepper spray was designed to impair only an attacker’s vision and that the fumes could be ingested as easily as those of common spray paint, and that he’d be safe from the caustic effects if he merely covered his eyes while inhaling.

Which is what he did, sucking the bag to his face.

The screams lasted twenty-five minutes; the vomiting, twice as long.

Chub had never known such volcanic misery—skin, throat, eyes, lungs, scalp, lips; all aflame. He slapped himself senseless trying to wipe off the poison, but it seemed to have entered chemically through his pores. Daft from pain, he clawed at himself until his fingertips bled.

When his strength was gone, Chub lay motionless, mulling options. An obvious one was suicide, a sure release from agony, but he wasn’t ready to go that far. Possibly, if he’d had his.357… but he surely couldn’t work up the nerve to hang himself from a tree or slice his own wrists.

A sounder choice, Chub felt, was to club himself unconscious and remin that way until the acid symptoms wore off. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the vultures and what the nigger woman had told him: Keep moving! Once the sun came up, blacking out would be dangerous. The deader you looked, the faster the hungry bastards would come for you.