The Face on its back.

The waves crashed against the boat, rocking it, he hadnt set down the anchor before he had passed out drunk the night before. As he slowly came to his senses he realised he was near an island, he wracked his brain trying to think where he was. It mustve been somewhere in indonesia. His head ached, hed hit the booze a little hard the night before, he ran his little sailboat himself, it had a motor clamped to the back for emergencies but hed never really used it.

Being a man who'd had an intensely boring life of quality assurance, hed naturally had his fill and one day quit, being drawn to adventure and what greater adventure was there than sailing. After all the depths of the unknown and vastness of the sea was truly one of two great frontiers of the unknown. He'd sold his house, divorced his wife and decided he wanted to sail around.

He was wealthy from his job and investments, the dividends alone easily restocking his boat every quarter with high quality food, booze and fuel. Hed discovered his favourite thing, sailing into storms drunk and getting truly lost in the open ocean, then for days he would try to deduce where he was using the sun and stars, and cheap maps he bought whenever he restocked in port. If it got too much he could rely on his gps and motor, but so far he hadnt had to as he drifted far off the northern coast of australia and now was heading north with a vague plan of visiting somewhere in the pacific indonesian island chain.

As he looked around his boat for a landmark all he could see was deep dark blue water. The kind over the deep trenches that house 6ft tall spider crabs and collosal squid and octopii with their alien inteligence and ability to manipulate their body shape ab colour for perfect camoflage.

The now slightly familiar thrill grabbed his stomach and his heart beat a little faster and with more purpose. He was no longer writing safety methodologies for tasks tradesmen ignored to complete instinctually and intuitively or writing countless reports of progress one small task at a time.

He was alive, lost somewhere strange alone at sea. Things actually mattered. The outcome was uncertain. He had a quick breakfast shelf stable crackers in the middle of the completely isolated blue. After breakfast he worked out his bearings from the sun rise using his sextant. Looking west he knew that direction was toward the indonesian islands coastline somewhere anyway.

3 days west later he ran out of water, he had tried everything, west, north west, south west, he had measured the current and attempted to estimate where he was on the map. Nothing had worked, he had created a solar still to create water out of sea water using evaporation and the sun but it was painfully slow when a man had no water. He had sat in the shade and made a series of water drains and gutters along the side of his cabin to catch rainwater.

In addition to that he had initially tried boiling seawater on his stove. But it had only made it saltier, it was then he made a series of plastic sheets with a downward coned roof draining into a cup to catch the vapor. It had worked but it too was slow and costly in terms of fuel.

He was eventually saved by a storm which replenished his water supply. He stayed out in it drinking his fill and letting it saturate and wash his body. He immediately saved and rationed his captured water.

A couple of days later the food ran out, when it came to food he wasnt truly concerned, he could try to fish but he also knew you can survive weeks if not months without food. Bobby sands the famous ira hunger striker lasted 2 months. He himself had done fasts with his church of several days at a time. Once a week long one, people really do not know how long one can go without food.

He expected to be saved before then. One day was no problem, two the pangs came, three the pangs and the irritability, four the headaches, five the headaches and the cramps and the weakness.

Then he managed to catch a small fish, it was strange, pale a species he had never seen before, he ate the meat fast and it only made the headaches worse. He was adjusting to his new hell of headaches and cramps when he spotted a huge shade in the water larger than a man, tentacles huge, a huge body.

He jumped dropping his rod. He barely caught it before it went overboard. Shock gripped his stomach with its icy fist, he could've sworn he saw a face on it, milky white eyes, pale, mouth open in a silent scream. He looked around but all he could see now was deep dark blue. Endlessly deep water. Water deeper than everest was tall.

The next afternoon a storm hit. Waves grew large, the ocean violent, the deep water black, his boat groaned cresting every wave, boards creaking. He worked the pump to drain the water desperately. Knowing if he went into the water it would mean endless black beneath him, hypothermia and sharks or worse. He thought of the face and began pumping a little faster.

He soon fell into a rhythym pump pump pump, breath, crest wave, groan pump pump pump. The storm lasted six hours, he was exhausted before he started, now post the adrenaline he was a spent force. He didnt even see the island as he approached.

He awoke to his boat stuck on the beach of the island, his cramps and headache immediately returned he lowered himself over the side of his boat after he dropped the anchor in the sand. He was hot and cold in turn despite it being a sunny hot day.

The exhaustion and lack of food was playing a game with his body. He shambled up the beach past the stringy grasses, looking for food, for anything, he knew coconut meat would probably make him shit or vomit. But he held the hope in his mind. He visualised the easy coconut, the energy from the fat, the eloctrolytes from the water.

He moved through the stringy grass and didnt even see the snake until his foot was next to it. He froze in animal fear like the first monkey ever to see a snake, his cramps and headache forgotten as the jolt of ice struck him utterly aware.

The snake hissing slowly uncoiled and slid away into the green undergrowth. He let out a breath, his heart hammered, he breathed deeply until he regained control. The pain in his head and stomach reasserted themselves his calf and hand threatened to cramp. He moved on into the grassy brush and dead leaves.

He spotted a coconut tree, or what he thought was a coconut tree, around its base were several coconuts like fruits only one of them broken and rotting. He cathered them up and returned to his ship.

He hacked at the coconut for what must have been 30 minutes. Eventually he pierced a hole and drank the coconut water. Its richness made him queesy. He widened the hole bit by bit eventually splitting it down the middle. At first he only ate a couple of mouthfuls until he was sure he could keep it down. This turned into a couple of mouthfulls every couple of hours. The meat was nearly purple he thought coming out of his semi rabid feeding. The headache faded only to be replaced by a lightheadedness.

He looked around and noticed a sign he hadn't noticed before, the sharp crescents of a biohazzard sign with keep out on it. His heart dropped, he had read about infected islands and the measures needed to clean them up before. The nuclear tests on the islands in the pacific. They had rendered Gruinard island dead after testing anthrax bombs on sheep. The poisonous spores had laid dormant in the soil of the island for like 40 years. Breathing the spores was 90% fatal. Touching them barehanded without a cut was like 20% fatal and he wouldnt know for a week.

Not knowing anything about this mysterious contagious island he wondered if he should leave or not to seek help, or perhaps stay where he was. He didnt know what was here, if he fell ill at sea the same outcome would occur only with less food and he would condemn another to his fate if whatever was here, radiation or disease could spread.

Either that or he would just die and leave a plagueship floating. He decided to stay. He figured there must be surveilance on the island if he were infected they may be able to treat him. He absentmindedly scratched his head and a clump of hair and dry scalp fell off. He looked from that to the purple coconut like meat he had just consumed.

As he panicked and scratched more and more dry scalp and hair fell away. Soon he was bald with little more that a comb over of wispy strands, then came the eyebrows shedding like a snake, leaving a pale white new flesh underneath. He looked into his cabin mirror and what looked back he didnt recognise. There was no pain just an itchiness. His teeth began to fall out being replaced by a plate, they ticked as they hit linoleum floor of the cabin. He raised an arm to it and his bones suddenly fragile broke. His arm bent downward 90 degrees at the elbow. Soon the elbow became a parabola as his body reabsorbed the broken bones with eye watering pain leaving a boneless powerful limb.

The fingernails plopped out one by one and the bones reabsorbed from his fingers leaving his hands pale loose hanging gloves of flesh. The nerves bunched sensing searing agony along his senses until they like the bones were reabsorbed.

He screamed as the same happened to his backbone and he collapsed onto the floor of his cabin in a painful boneless slump. The bones in his neck disappeared the ones in his head did the same replace by a fluid filled muscle. His scream became a gurgle which became a sucking noise as his vocal cords were fundamentally claimed in roiling flesh of his throat.

His glovelike fingers reabsorbed and short stabbing pains dotted the underside of his arm as suction cups sprouted through flesh. His head grew and lolled back on his now non existant neck. His flesh rose and fell, changing colour and texture with the pain of his transformation and mood.

His consciousness and perception shrank. He lost a measure of the agony his body was going through and a measure of the awareness of what was happening to his body as more tentacles grew and unfurled from his shrinking torso, his body repurposing the organs to his head. The pressure in his head expanded and then eased.

He moved his arm forward and it stuck easily to the deck. Using that and his other arms he pulled himself bonelessly out of the cabin and blopped into the shallow water of his beached boat.

He saw a crab scuttle underneath the water and whipcrack quick he was crunching it in his beak on instinct. Any thoughts of empathy for the creature decayed before the autonomous label of prey his being imprinted upon it.

Where once there was a deliberate and merciful death for what he was about to eat, now stood an all encompassing reflex indifferent to empathy and morality.

He looked at the boat as he felt his mind decaying further losing a sense of who he was while afflicted with a terrible sadness and longing for the normal. But this very thought frayed his stretched mind, he lost aspects of himself as he desperately tried to hold on, his eye colour, his hair color, his own face, the sensation of feeling with a hand, soon he was just emptily regarding the boat, on instinct he turned and swam into the sea.

On his back and beyond his comprehension not all of the flesh of his former body had reabsorbed, on his back empty eye sockets and mouth wide. Stretched, was a distorted version of the man he had been, a scar of his former life that had now been forgotten. He swam for the deep blue, his new eyes playing over where the beach dropped abruptly off into the endless black. He swam into it on instinct.