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The Hudson reeks of bodies tonight.
Matt hasn’t killed them—he never does—but he’s lured his fair share that have, convincing them to get closer and closer to the lip before he takes them, pulls them into the grimy water, swallowing their screams, their sins. He takes a payment. He lets them go.
The business by his territory became less and less frequent. Rumors in the city ran rampant about the devil in the waters. Lies about deals, too, which Matt never made. He’s unwilling to debase himself that far. But he listens.
Now, however, the bodies come dropping. A mass of them, a wave of their own, and it's vulgar even in this place, his place, where death of all kinds is already rampant.
The dumping comes with voices, too, of course. “Fuck, hurry the hell up.”
Not all the bodies are dead, Matt realizes. Many are just close to it, their heartbeats weak, their lungs quick to take on water. He’s already swimming through the people like a pod of fish, sifting through to find the living among them, take them in his arms before he’s hitting his tail hard in the water to drag them somewhere safe.
“Seriously, Gare, you can’t possibly believe all those rumors.”
Even in the water, Matt can hear them as clearly as any current. Two at a time, he brings survivors to an outcrop. Seven are alive.
It’s his nature to want to go after the men first. Violence has always called to him. But it’s the living he must attend to—and he does, hissing as he pulls himself up, spinning his hips to get the entirety of his body ashore. He’s soaking wet, obviously, but he sucks in the air like the humans do—another nasty thing—if only to prepare himself in case these ones need air. Adjusting is the worst, and he never lasts long out here.
The first step is dispelling their lungs of water. He can hear it in them, the way it wedges deep, slipping to fill the holes not already made liquid. Humans cough and sputter, and Matt tries to move quickly, though the fact that there are seven of them makes this difficult. He still uses that violence, even if it's only to purge their lungs. Knock one, crawl on his arms to the next, praying that the coughs of the former don’t tunnel inwards toward something collapsing, praying further still that their bodies remember how to breathe. It’s strange, how quickly these humans seem to forget.
One by one, Matt moves. It’s times like these he wishes he knew how to actually fix all the problems in bodies he can identify. But no. Much better at simply breaking them.
He has to revisit people two and three before he’s opting to dive back into the water and monitor them in the back of his attention. None of them acted conscious: the base nature of surviving tends to take focus above everything else, regardless, but he’s going to choose to entirely disregard the possibility of one of them having actually truly seen him, let alone remember him.
He tries not to think of the bodies he can’t save, the ones sinking and floating alternatively, the decay treating them slightly differently based on body types. All killed around the same time.
Thirty altogether. Twenty-three dead.
“Hurry up. Boss is already in a mood.”
Five up at the docks, only one close to the ledge. That’s the harder part.
“Dude, c’mon.” The one called Gare is speaking, gesticulating, too, it sounds like.
The man near the ledge peers deeper. “And here I thought you wanted to see the devil.”
“That is the opposite of what I was saying!”
There’s always the easy option. The one that would get the others to run away: and that’s what they would do. If Matt takes the bait, he takes one and loses four. He’s going to lose at least one, regardless, but the spiteful part of him wants at least a few of them to properly pay.
Luckily for him, the Hudson isn’t entirely cleanly cut, and one man is near a sewer grate.
Matt takes that one first. He’s quick enough to pull the man under without a splash, hand over his mouth, dragging him under until the water muffles him entirely. Matt pulls him back into the Hudson, too deep too quickly to burst the man’s eardrums. He breaks both the man’s arms, too, right at the elbows, the snap a satisfying jolt in the water. Quicker than anything human-made, he’s dropping the man off and returning for the others.
They’ve noticed the man’s absence.
It’s nothing too dramatic just yet: calling out his name (Nathan) as they putter around. One of them tells him to stop fucking around.
Matt can’t do much. He gets lucky, takes the opportunities presented to him. He’s as careful as he can afford to be. The one near the lip is starting to pull away, presumably to help with the search, but Matt can hear his heartbeat thundering with abrupt fear, anxiety slothing off him in waves.
Matt grabs him, clean and quick, and pulls him under. The man barely has time to scream, but something comes out, based on the way the others jolt to look in that direction, three sets of heartbeats spiking further still.
The man is still screaming in the water, bubbles of oxygen soaring from his throat as Matt dives deeper. He’s thrashing, too, trying to escape. He’ll get himself killed by the water before Matt can do anything, if he keeps this up.
Matt compromises. Snaps a femur and swims sharply up to shore, fast enough to prepare to launch the man at one of his compatriots, who still haven’t run away. It takes a lot of force, a lot of speed, his tail drilling through the water, and he does it, anyway.
The man’s somehow still conscious right until he collides with two of the other men. Matt stays near the surface of the water, not quite breaching it, but close enough to hear the chaos. There’s more rustling, the third man grabbing something, perhaps preparing to make some tourniquet for the injured man.
Only, he turns sharply toward the water, grabs a bundle gathered near the edge, and throws it in the exact moment he falls back to be safely out of Matt’s reach.
It takes him a moment to understand what the man’s just done—right until Matt’s frowning, trying to pull things off him only to realize he’s surrounded by rope.
Panic jolts through him.
He reaches blindly around him, his hands trying to navigate for weaknesses, and upon finding none, he grits his teeth and begins diving sharply downwards.
There’s yelling above him—not from the injured man, but the others, someone shouting at Gare to help him, and then the net is pulled taut, Matt’s momentum is shucked aside, and he’s being pulled upwards.
He thrashes wildly, and it feels desperate, this kind of trapped helplessness he can’t even wonder if the man he’d taken before had felt before his leg was snapped. He yells into the darkness, trying to dive downward again, but it’s completely useless. It’s not just the men yanking him up, but some kind of pulley system Matt had been entirely oblivious to. Had this been planned?
His mind is yawning open. His hands try to tear through the rope. He even bites down on it, all of it useless, and soon, far too soon, Matt’s body is breaching the water as he pulled gruffly onto the land.
“What the hell do we have here?”
Matt’s teeth are bared, his nostrils flaring as he accidentally breathes in some of the putrid air, now instead seeking out anything sharp, something to cut himself out. The wrongness of this is barely hitting him—they’re looking at him, seeing him.
“I can’t be fucked to believe the Devil of the Hudson is a fucking mermaid.”
“Holy shit. It’s real! Holy— holy shit, I—”
Matt’s hands scrape against too-dry ground, and he clicks his tongue to sense around himself better, finally finding a shard of something hard and sharp—
Only to be lifted in the air.
He suspended at the end of some kind of crane, stuck in this net.
Desperately, Matt reaches a hand through the holes to try to grab the shard, but it’s too far away.
His own heartbeat is thundering in his ears.
For a moment, he pauses, finding his body breathing, his eyes searching even as they remain unseeing, his own trapped state settling slowly over him. He can’t get out. He wasn’t careful. He should know better and he— he—
“Can’t believe boss was right,” one of them says. “Christ, look at it.”
“Did you see what it did to Nathan’s leg?” says Gare.
“Nathan asked for that shit. Fuckin’ moron.”
Matt bares his teeth and starts thrashing again.
He gets laughter in return. “We’re gonna make a fortune.” The man grabs a pipe, spins it in his hand, and pokes Matt in the tail.
Idiot.
Matt grabs the end of the pipe, yanks it from the man’s grip, and slams the end of it into his head.
Only Gare conscious now. He’s taking a step back, gulping, then turning as if to prepare to run.
Matt throws the pipe. It hits the back of Gare’s head, and the man drops.
The docks are quiet again.
Matt’s still suspended, still stuck.
He shakes out his head, gnaws at the ropes for a moment more.
Someone’s coming.
This man walks right on past him. Matt stays perfectly still, but it’s clear by the man’s breathing he knows Matt is there.
Only, he grabs the shard Matt had reached for earlier, turns, and steps up to him. “Want me to do the honors, or do you wanna get yourself out?”
His voice is slick, casual.
Matt blinks. It doesn’t sound like a trick.
Carefully, he stretches out one hand toward the man.
“Figures,” the man says, then carefully places the shard in Matt’s hand, not seeming the least bit surprised when Matt yanks it away as if the man may change his mind. “Thanks, by the way. And be more careful out here.”
Matt furiously saws through the ropes, barely sparing the man a grunt in return.
The sound of footsteps returns, gets quieter as the man leaves.
Too soon, or not soon enough, Matt’s hitting the ground hard, then diving silently into his water.