“You won’t spare anyone?”

“No one deserves it,” she snapped, then quieted and smoothed her hair back.

The water was up around her shoulders, past Eugene’s waist. The corpses pressed in from all sides, rotten limbs tangling around his arms and legs and holding him in place. When his hands brushed them, they were cold and clammy like dead fish. He hadn't smelled them before, but now the stench was overpowering. The heavy, sick sweetness of decay lodged in his throat like the smell was coming from inside his own body.

"And Father Latimer?" The scent coated his tongue as soon as he opened his mouth. "They said he retired, but you got him, didn't you? Like you wanted."

“He’s still alive. I wanted him to see what he had wrought.”

Mary Beth lifted her arm from the water and Eugene followed her finger to the wide, black branches of twin trees. Between them, Father Latimer hung suspended, a sapling thrusting up from the water to disappear between his legs, impaling him straight through. Its uppermost branches poked out from between his lips. His arms were outstretched in a facsimile of Christ, the older trees' branches growing through the tendons of his hands and between the bones of his legs. His eyes were glassy, the whites showing all around except where flies landed on them to suck the salt, and his mouth was stretched open around the sapling's tip in a grotesque, silent scream. The gators had taken chunks from him: his torso was ripped open from chest to groin, his intestines hanging out like ropes, glistening in the filtered light, but he was alive. Blood congealed on his thighs, sticky and black, from where the sapling penetrated him, and from where he'd been emasculated. As Eugene stared in horror, the priest's head lolled forward and he took a crackling breath through ruined lungs, his mouth working around the wood in madness or in prayer.

Eugene forced himself to look until the sharp, dizzying sickness that spiraled through him and set his mind trembling with panic subsided into a buzzing hum. Mary Beth had delivered the justice that he had been too cowardly to manage; he owed it to her to look on her work without flinching. Father Latimer struggled weakly, his unseeing eyes rolling in his head, tongue escaping from split lips again and again. Eugene didn’t understand how he was still alive, and wracked his heart for any shred of sympathy. The man had no trial, no jury, and only what remained of Mary Beth to pass judgment.

“Good,” Eugene whispered, and wet his lips. They were cracked; the ridges of dead skin were rough under the tip of his tongue. Cracked deep enough to bleed, but it would be over soon enough. “Will you do the same to me?”

It was what he deserved. Now that those memories had resurfaced, they were all he could think of, playing over and over in a horrifying loop behind his eyes. He had just stood there, paralyzed and useless, watching it happen. If the priest's actions merited such a fate, then Eugene's inaction must, too.