Hunt: Showdown 1896 - Law of Salvage

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Crabs came for him first. They pinched off the softest flesh and chewed with diseased mandibles. He rolled on razor shells as an urchin lapped up bile with the spines of its mouth. All beings of low tide trawled the marsh to join in the dismemberment. Above him the sky was pure, deep water, and the fate of all drowned men flooded mud-ripe into his lungs. Time did not exist for Burman Laffite in the Land of the Dead, and his torment stretched forever. Memories surfaced, sank, and surfaced again while a scarab behemoth gnawed his spine: Tossed overboard as a baby. A steamboat’s searchlight swiping over his infant, lice-ridden flesh. A boyhood spent on docks, knee deep in fish guts, beaten at every saloon in New Orleans. Civil War. Hiding under a flag from Rebels. Horses beheaded by cannonballs. The Union Navy. An explosion, abandoning the Housatonic. Reveling in a failed succession. Failed marriage. Failed fatherhood. And finally, a failed steamboat captain. Cursed upon the deadest of seafloors. Inside his lungs a kingdom of mud festered. It kept him alive as crustacean goliaths swallowed his parts and regurgitated them once more. The Delphine’s spirit mocked him on the wind. “How dare you abandon me,” the wind said. Captain Laffite vowed an apology but found no tongue with which to speak. He began his life as salvage, and as salvage it would end. A forsaken soul wandered across him. They picked his head off a starfish, lubricated his nervous system with oil and sewed it back into place. Captain Laffite’s mind fractured through his decayed organs, either making him alive ten times over or not alive at all.