The slide by the sea 6

By Strega

It was eleven at night when Dave, a pleasant buzz of alcohol dulling his better judgment, suggested the three of them take the little dinghy out for a bit of night fishing.  Karl and Matt agreed, looking forward to fish for breakfast, and soon enough the three were undoing the mooring line and checking the bait bucket.

All were too distracted to note the beady eyes watching from the shadows of a nearby pier.  The sea lion lay nearly submerged, only his nose and eyes exposed. He'd had his eye on these three for several nights. He knew where they liked to fish and as they readied the oars he vanished with the flip of a fin, off to gather his friends.  Moonless nights like tonight were exactly the time they liked to hunt.

So it was that by the time the little boat settled into the slack water in the lee of a rocky outcrop three sets of unsympathetic and hungry eyes were watching from the water. The otter nudged the sea lion and nodded to the dolphin.  Though he and the dolphin were years younger than the sea lion he was the one who started then eating humans and he knew what he was about.

Above the water Matt stretched, stripping to the skin as his friends made every effort not to watch.  He had he habit of going for a quick swim before fishing and for years he'd enjoyed his brief nightly dips without incident.  He was not so fortunate tonight.  As he dove headfirst into the water he found the sea lion lurking just below the surface and fanged jaws snapped open with well practiced timing.  Matt's momentum drove him into the waiting maw almost to the waist and the big sea lion turned almost casually away from the boat, a great bulge moving through his thick neck as with a few tosses of his muzzle he swallowed his prey whole.

Entirely unaware of Matt's slimy digestive end, Kurt was baiting a hook when the boat bumped into something.  He too was two sheets to the wind and let out a laugh as he toppled into the water.  It wasn't the first time he'd fallen in and he knew perfectly well he'd simply climb back onto the boat with Dave's help. This had happened a hundred times before. They were so accustomed to shore life they didn't even bother with life vests.  Shorts were enough for a true mariner.

The hundred and first time proved less fortunate as he opened his eyes underwater and found himself nose to nose with an enormous sea otter. The whiskery beast grinned toothily at him before darting forward with a kick and before Kurt knew what was happening his head was in its mouth.  The otter bent itself onto an S and then straightened, thrusting its jaws forward and shoving him in with its webby forepaws. With a series of quick motions the otter bolted Kurt down,transferring the startled man from the cool welcoming ocean to the much hotter and less hospitable environs of a suddenly donned otter-fur coat. 

It happened so quickly that Kurt slid whole into the otter's lengthy stomach before he really grasped what was happening. Eventually it did occur to him that he was being eaten but by that time the otter's jaws closed and with a heavy gulp Kurt was gone, reduced to a long bulge in the water-weasel's body. Like Matt he was swallowed entirely underwater.  There wasn't even a burp to give it away.

Dave did not miss his friends at first.  He was used to Matt swimming and it certainly wasn't the first time Kurt fell in.  He had no idea anything untoward was happening until the webbed otter paw reached up and grasped the gunwale. He had just stood to ready his fishing pole when a powerful tug sent the boat heeling to the side and launched him through the air.

'No problem,' Dave thought as he plummeted toward the water.  'Hit a wave.  I'll just get wet and climb back in.' That thought lasted as long as it took the dolphin's beak to erupt from the water.

Dave's eyes widened in alarm as the thing appeared, sure he was about to collide headfirst with the curious dolphin. That worry turned to alarm in midair as the dolphin's beak yawned wide. 

With no way to stop or swerve aside he had a fine view of peglike teeth and wet purple gullet in the instant before things went dark.  His arms, stretched out to break the surface of the water, disappeared first and with a wet thump he found himself halfway down a dolphin's throat.  Only his broad shoulders kept him from sliding in as neatly as a letter into a postbox and even so his momentum shoved him so far in his hands pushed past a rubbery sphincter into what must be its stomach.

Stunned but now aware that something bad was happening Dave squirmed, trying his damnest to wriggle his way out of the fleshy trap in which he found himself.  It was no use. His arms were stretched out in front of him, squeezing through the sphincter that led into the dolphin's stomach, and slippery gullet pressed against his head and body from all sides. His lower legs were still in the cool Pacific but the best of him was gripped by the dolphin's beak and throat.  He was young and strong but at most his thrashing just made the dolphin twitch in the water as its half swallowed meal complained that he really didn't want to be digested tonight.

The dolphin, naturally, was not sympathetic to his protests. He felt it arch and felt the muscles tense all around him.  He knew what was about to happen but there was no escape. The dolphin straightened out its body in the water as it swallowed and a great rolling contraction of its throat gripped him and squeezed him deeper. Dave let out a despairing cry as he slid helplessly into the aquatic beast's long stomach. There was a brief scrape of teeth against his toes and then the dolphin's beak closed around a smile.  It had taken a little more effort than it had the sea lion or otter, but like them it now had a whole human stretched out inside it.

Slippery folds of belly wall flattened out as the gut expanded to take him in, his forward motion pushing his forearms against his face and then forcing them downward until his arms were pinned against his sides by the fleshy stomach wall.  A thick layer of slime coated the walls and unlike the mucus that slicked him down for swallowing this belly ooze was caustic.  The only part of him that escaped its attention was his lower legs, for he did not fit entirely into the dolphin's stomach. The same sphincter that opened to let him in now wrapped tightly around his knees.  His calves and feet lay safely in the thing's throat even as its digestive juices began to sting him everywhere else.

'I don't want to be a dolphin's lunch,' Dave thought, and desperately tried to get his arms up in front of him.  Maybe if he pushed hard enough it would discomfit the dolphin and get it to spit him back up.  It was a pointless effort. The slimy dolphin flesh pressing in from all sides allowed him to slide his arms around in front of him but it proved impossible to get any leverage at all. His hands just slid to the sides when he pushed.

For all intents and purposes he was stretched out in a form fitting coffin of dolphin stomach, barely able to move. The slowly growing tingle over most of has body told him what would happen now.  Despite his best efforts to escape he was doomed to a short trip through the digestive tract of a dolphin, swallowed whole and digested starting at the head where the acids were strongest.  When his upper body was gone his legs would slide in as well and though his shorts might make it intact through the bowels of the thing the rest of him would not be so lucky.

It had swallowed him with its beak above the surface and the dolphin let out a long belch as the inward squeeze of its belly pushed out most of the air that went down with its meal.  Stubborn to the last, Dave swore and tried once more to get his arms in front of him.  The dolphin merely let out what sounded like a giggle and turned in the water. A sudden pressure against its belly pushed the walls even more tightly against him and for a moment he thought it had pushed its belly against a rock to stifle his squirming.

Then the humping started.  Something grabbed the dolphin, judging by the paws he felt pressing into the bulge he made in its body, and as the dolphin arched enthusiastically toward whatever it was the other creature slammed itself against her with equal vigor. He heard the slither as something entered her body, less than a foot from his face.  It didn't take much thought to figure out what it was.

He didn't know what the dolphin was screwing but it was screwing something.  He could even feel the long bulge in the other creature's body and feel the squirming inside it.  Just as the randy dolphin had a living human inside it, so did her lover.  Any thought of rescue by Matt or Karl fled.  Dave was suddenly - and correctly - sure that they were the victims of a coordinated hunt.  One of them was in the guts of the dolphin's mate and no doubt the other wasn't dong any better.

"Really?  Really?" Dave kicked and squirmed, as did either Karl or Matt - no telling which of them was in the other critter but it had to be one or the other. Their struggles only seemed to excite the two animals more.  Dave felt the dolphin tense and shudder as her lover bucked against her. The intense thrusting squeezed the last of the air out of her gut.  One more burp and he lay helpless and suffocating, unable to squirm free and destined to serve only as dolphin food. He was spared feeling the next mating from inside the dolphin, and the ones after that.  By the time they started up again he was quite dead.

"Teenagers," the sea lion said good-naturedly, for no sooner did the two finish mating then they started a bout of playful teasing that could only end in more sex. By the time they were belly to belly again he'd turned away, taking the mooring rope of the little boat in his fangs.  Someone had to do it and for various reasons it would be him.

For one thing, he was larger than the other two and the long bulge of human in his long body didn't stand out the way out did on his slimmer friends.  A human who saw him, even if they saw his entire body and not just the part of him above water, probably wouldn't suspect what had just happened. A human stretched out in a fat sea lion's lengthy stomach doesn't make much of a bulge.  The thick layer of blubber all around it rounds off the incriminating swelling of skull and shoulders and hips.  Soon enough even those would be gone as they digested and passed their meals but at the moment the dolphin in particular had a very incriminating bulge indeed.  The one in his friend the otter was almost as obvious and in any event his friend was intent on establishing for the Nth time that Otter Tab A fit snugly into Dolphin Slot B.

Unlike his horny friends the sea lion could concentrate on making sure no evidence remained. Their stomachs would handle most of that work and a coughed up or shat-out pair of shorts wasn't anything to worry about evidence-wise but then there was the boat.  Awkward questions would be asked on shore if three men went out in a boat and it was later found sans men.

He'd been the one to watch the shore and knew where the boat came from.  Staying mostly below the dark surface he towed it back to its berth. There in the dead of night he poked his muzzle from the water, making sure no humans were watching before wrapping the mooring line around its post.  There.  Boat went out, boat came back.  Obviously the three missing men were on shore somewhere.  Obviously.

By the time he'd swum back to their little rocky island his belly had begun to gurgle and churn. The long lumpy bulge of swallowed man had a slippery feel to it already as the flesh began to break down. The bones would take longer but in a day or so his belly would be empty, another entire human consumed by his digestive juices and expelled into the ocean, what wasn't turned to fat anyway. This one didn't even have clothes to worry about, a welcome change for someone who'd had to pass shoes after they made their way reluctantly through his body.  

The sea lion stretched out on the rocks, comfortably full and lulled into a doze by the warm gurgle from his middle.  Somewhere out in the water his otter friend was attending his dolphin lover.  They'd be hungry again before he was but they'd settle for fish until his appetite roused as their tactic now was to hunt as a team.  By the time the humans on shore began to worry what had happened to the three men and perhaps began to look for their bodies said bodies simply wouldn't exist any more and the sea lion, otter and dolphin would be miles away, picking their next victims.

That was the great thing about humans, thought the sea lion as with a belated burp - perhaps the air from his meal's lungs - he settled down to sleep off his meal.  No matter how many you ate, if you were careful you never ran out.