Ben adjusted the straps around Mark’s chest, then crossed his limp arms to keep them from flopping, securing them with a soft Velcro loop. Tobias buckled the primary harness around Mark’s torso, cinching it until the fabric dug into his flesh, thenattached a length of climbing rope to the D-ring at the back. They worked in tandem, and by the time they were done, Mark’s body was hanging in the air like a strung-up puppet.
Then they waited, maybe to let the snakes get a read on the new shadow overhead, maybe to give Mark, wherever he was inside that body, a chance to see what was coming.
It was, if I’m honest, a little bit beautiful—the way the snakes gathered near the surface, their bodies painting shifting, ghostly brushstrokes in the water. They were cautious, not aggressive, more interested in the movement of the harness and the tremble of Mark’s loose feet than in Mark himself. The harness hit the water first, and the snakes instantly darted away, then circled back, wary and clever. They didn’t trust it. They remembered, maybe, that sometimes what fell from above was dangerous, or at least unfamiliar.
Tobias and Ben let the rope out centimeter by centimeter, lowering Mark until only his upper chest and head were above the surface. His eyes were open. If there was any recognition in them, it was unreachable.
The snakes withdrew to the far end of the tank, all their attention on the new arrival. For a minute, the only movement was the slow spin of Mark’s body as he rotated on the harness, his chin dipping at each oscillation so he seemed, in some sick way, to be nodding along with the whole thing.
Ben braced a boot on the lower rail, his stance casual, like he was waiting for a bus and not orchestrating the last moments of a man’s life. Tobias watched with a scientist’s detachment, arms folded over his chest, eyes locked on the scene below him.
I kept my eyes on the snakes, trying to imagine what they were thinking, their alien little brains trying to map this hunk of meat into some schema of edible or inedible, threat or reward.
After four or five minutes, nothing happened. The snakes spiraled, surged, then retreated, each time growing a littlebolder. It was clear they were trying to solve the problem of Mark, not just as food, but as a puzzle. He was too big, too inert, dangling in the dead center of their territory, and they were smart enough to know the difference between prey and trap.
Tobias was patient. He could have stood there all night, letting the tension draw tighter and tighter, but Ben was less willing to linger in a standoff with a tank full of venom, so he broke the stalemate by tugging the rope, causing Mark to bob and twitch in the water.
That was all it took. The largest of the snakes—a thick-bodied olive and cream brute with a scar across one eye—struck at the foot, biting and recoiling in a single ripple of motion. The snake latched on and hung, its jaw flexing, attached to Mark’s ankle like a living handcuff. It was almost comical—Mark’s limp foot and the snake’s stubborn mouth, the animal refusing to let go, even when it realized this meat wasn’t struggling.
The other snakes, emboldened by the first strike, darted in and out of the water’s surface, snapping at the exposed skin, sometimes missing and hitting the harness, sometimes tangling with each other before peeling away.
I couldn’t look away. My own horror had calcified into a kind of chemical fascination, a need to see the experiment through. Not because I was rooting for the predators, but because I needed to know how it would end, how fast the venom would work, how much of Mark was still in there as his body started to dissolve from the inside.
Ben operated the descent, gloved hands taking in the thin increments of rope, lowering Mark’s body until the water crested over the top of his head, the harnessed body now fully submerged. The snakes had moved past their caution and now vied openly, jostling and winding themselves around Mark’s legs, the bites coming in quick succession.
I imagined the venom, a neurotoxin sharper and more certain than anything Tobias could have dosed him with, shutting down the last, desperate lines of communication between meat and mind. Mark’s eyes stayed open. I didn’t know if he was seeing anything. It didn’t matter. There was a finality in the stillness that crept in after the fourth or fifth strike, an interval where even the snakes seemed to acknowledge their work was finished.
They loosened their coils, then retreated, their sinuous bodies disappearing into the dark, leaving Mark to lapse into the buoyancy of the water, his head lolling back so his face hovered just below the surface.
Above, Ben and Tobias reeled in the rope, hand over hand, until Mark’s blank face rose from the water and bobbed gently above the surface, as if he were floating in a backyard swimming pool and not the scene of his own murder.
I didn’t expect anything like remorse, but I did expect some kind of reaction—a joke, maybe, or at the very least a comment on the efficiency of the method. Instead, Ben and Tobias just watched the dead, dripping figure for a long moment, like a pair of flight controllers confirming their plane had gone down in the right ocean.
I looked away then.
Only for a second.
Not because I couldn’t handle it, exactly, because apparently my brain had decided it could handle a shocking amount if it was forced to, but because there was something too final about the heaviness of him when they laid him flat on the catwalk. He was not a supervisor anymore. Not a man who had made me feel small in service corridors, or looked at me like my good luck was offensive, or said things that stayed in my head longer than they deserved to. He was not even really Mark in that moment.
He was just a body.
And that, somehow, made me feel worse than I expected.
Ben crouched beside him and checked something, though I didn’t know what there was left to check. Tobias stood over them both, one hand resting on the railing, his expression unreadable from this distance.
I hugged my knees tighter against my chest.
For a while, no one spoke.
Then Ben said something too quiet for me to hear, and Tobias gave a small nod. They loosened the harness from Mark’s body with the same efficiency they had used to put it on, removing straps, unfastening buckles, and coiling rope.
I wondered if maybe the terrible part was never terrible to Tobias for long. Maybe it became a sequence of steps almost immediately—what needed cleaning, what needed moving, what needed explaining away. Maybe that was why he could look at a dead man and see only the next thing to be done.
I felt his gaze before I saw him turn.
Even from below, even with the tank lights rippling over the catwalk and Ben shifting around the body, I knew the moment Tobias’s attention left Mark and found me again. It landed on me with the same physical weight it always did.
I looked up.
