Bottom Feeder

by Matt Cole

  He all of a sudden felt sick inside. He coughed, and the men stepped away from him. He flapped a hand at them and said, “It’s not the cigarettes. I have a nasty cold.”

  They stayed back. Chapel did not blame them. He cleared his throat and gazed out at the frigid landscape. Their only hope was that Joey Fischer could be found very soon.

  He spent another half hour on the ridge before calling it a night. There was nothing more he could do. The crime scene gals and guys would go over the vehicle and surrounding area with fine-toothed combs and sophisticated equipment; the car would be towed to the garage where it would be examined again and again.

  How were these missing women connected to Joey Fischer?

  Now the clock was ticking down, vital seconds in these women’s lives slipping away. Chapel needed to put the pieces together.

  He rubbed his gloved hands together, trying to get some feeling back in his fingers. His toes, too, were beginning to tingle and go numb despite warm socks and boots. And the cold medication he’d taken hours before had worn off. His nose was running and his ears were plugged.

  Walking to the edge of the cliff, he looked far below to the area where Fischer’s car had landed.

  Frustrated, he turned and looked up at the hill rising above the road. The weather began to take a turn for the worse.

  In the morning if the weather held off, officers would scour the ridge and hill, searching for any shred of evidence or Joey Fischer. Maybe they would find something, maybe they would not.

  He squinted up through the darkness.

  The wind kicked up, bitter cold, and some of the firemen were gathering their gear and packing up.

  There was nothing more to be done tonight.

  A headache had formed at the base of Gary Chapel’s skull, his eyes were scratchy, and his nose was now running like a faucet. He logged out of the scene and headed back to his apartment, determined to get some rest, have a fresh view of the case in the morning. But as he drove along the eerily quiet mountain road, his headlights reflecting brightly off the packed snow and ice, huge trees laden with snow surrounding him, he felt the winter cold seep into his bones. Shivering, he experienced a deep-seated fear that he’d not find any of the missing women alive.

  Chapter 12

  Marsden decided all the three remaining women needed punishment, so he put them in the hole and watched their eyes as he filled the pit with water, using a hose and a nearby faucet. Earlier he had drilled several holes in the plywood covering air vents. When the women were in the hole they could see little of what was going on in the basement.

  On this day they crouched in the hole in fear. The hole had been made bigger by Marsden as he dug at it. Jennifer Raymond, physically the largest of the three, was on the floor of the pit with Angela Quirino and Maria Pinella in her lap. Through one of the air holes they could see Marsden urinating on the board. Behind them in the dark, they could sense it…whatever it was.

  Then they saw it.

  They could see the tentacle. They watched as it inched toward their chains, which snaked out of the hole around a pipe. When the tentacle touched Raymond, a chill shot through her body. She screamed.

  “It’s killing me,” she shrieked.

  She was sort of correct. Seconds later she went limp. Thick, copious amounts of liquid with the consistency of Jell-O began to cover Jennifer Raymond’s skin and body. Quirino and Pinella heard a splash and looked over. Raymond was bent over, face down in the muddy pit.

  “She’s dead,” Pinella screamed. “You let this fucking thing kill her. I don’t feel a pulse.”

  “No,” Marsden replied, “nothing’s wrong with Jennifer. She is just starting another journey. But she is not dead…yet.”

  Marsden walked over to the pit and looked in. “You know, Jennifer’s face is down in the water,” he told Pinella.

  “And she’s covered in slime, asshole,” shouted Angela Quirino. “Get us out of here.”

  As Marsden contemplated what to do next, Maria found enough courage to look into the darkness and saw the tentacle and what lay behind it—a tunnel. Perhaps a series of them. She shivered at the sight of the beastly limb and screamed at Marsden to get her out.

  “Hold your hand up,” he told Pinella, unfastening the cuff that linked her to Quirino. He lifted Maria out of the hole and then reached for Angela, but she looked to be in shock. He grabbed her arm, lifted her out, and pulled her clear.

  You take my food from me just as I begin to savor them?

  “Shut up, you got yourself one, right there,” Marsden said out loud. The other women cowered from him but looked at him, thinking him crazy and talking to himself. “Aren’t you two glad it wasn’t one of you?”

  * * * *

  Arlene was silent, with a series of emotions sliding across her face, chief among them incredulity. At last, in an over controlled-sounding voice, Arlene said, “What you’re telling me is that you think Frank Marsden is doing something evil in the basement.”

  “No, I’m telling you I don’t think everything is as it should be down there,” Deena replied.

  “Well, there is but one way to find out what is going on down there, Deena,” Arlene said.

  “But that is the one thing we should not do, because what if I am wrong about him?”

  “What if you’re right?”

  “What then?”

  “Think about it, about us…what we could uncover.”

  Deena smiled slightly. “I don’t know.”

  Arlene waved at hand at Deena. “It was your idea.”

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “We should.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes.” Arlene was confident in her answer.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on, for Pete’s sake. Go and do it!” Arlene said, almost snapped.

  “Okay. But he barely leaves anymore. What happens if I do go down there and there is something sinister going on?”

  “Sinister, good word,” remarked Arlene. “First things first, we have to get Marsden out of the basement.”

  To Arlene, Deena was going to do this with her, or without her. No question; they would both as well do it together. But she wanted Deena to understand that she believed in her just as Deena believed in her. She had to find the right words. Arlene had experienced the saddest of all human experiences besides death. Helplessness. Terminal helplessness in her case, culminating in the absurd spectacle of her marriage to that drunken fool, Steve.

  “Leave the planning to me, Dee,” Arlene said. “I’ll work it out somehow to get Frank Marsden out of that basement. For how long, I am not sure. But we will have a limited amount of time. You’ll have to be quick and get out of there in plenty of time before he returns. I don’t know if the man is evil or not, but why chance it?”

  “Okay. I’ll trust you to come up with a way to get him out. I’ll start planning for the descent into the basement.”

  Arlene closed her eyes and recited softly, “Soul of Christ, make me holy. Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ, fill me with love. Water from Christ’s side, wash me. Passion of Christ strengthens me. Good Jesus, hear me. Within your wounds, hide me. Never let me be parted from you. From the evil enemy, protect me. At the hour of my death, call me, and tell me to come to you that with your saints I may praise you through all eternity. Amen.” She opened her eyes. “The basement, Deena.”

  The basement.

  All of a sudden Deena saw it as it had been; she saw the sweaty, ancient stone walls, the packed, ugly dirt floor, and tiny windows too high in the wall to let in light or air; she smelled the rancid, rotten odor, the dirt, the mold, and that heat from the stench that wafted at her on breaths of icy air, and she thought, I’m not crazy…something’s down there. Something evil.

  “Do you really think something is down there?” Deena asked.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘do you think something is down there?’ Or do you think it is just a b
asement?”

  Arlene gave her an evil grin, the old mischievous grin Arlene was famous around town for because it was so utterly defiant, and hated because it usually spelled trouble.

  “Who said it was anything but a basement?”

  * * * *

  Arlene Balleza was hot.

  Not in the sexual or temperature sense.

  Hot as in furious. As in consumed with rage. As in teed off as heck. Even in this state there was no reason to use derogatory language, she told herself.

  Her hands gripped the wheel of her Mercedes so tightly her knuckles bleached white, her jaw was set, and she glared through the windshield as if she could conjure up the image of the soulless bastard who’d sent her into this stratosphere of rage.

  “Jerk,” she muttered as the car slid a bit on the icy incline. Her heart was racing and her cheeks were flushed despite the subfreezing temperature outside her vehicle.

  No one, not one person on this planet, could make her see red the way her husband Steve Balleza could. And today was no exception. In fact, today, he’d crossed the invisible line Arlene had drawn and he’d heretofore avoided. Darn it, he was a loser. In all the years she’d been married to him, the only feelings she had left for him were bad.

  He had recently beaten her, again, then in a drunken rage destroyed the house of her best friend, Deena Hopping. Now, out of the blue, the son of a gun wanted her to drive out of her way to pick him up.

  She had other things to do, places to sell and rent out, and one of her clients to get out of his basement. Arlene drove like a madwoman through the steep mountains of this part of Pennsylvania. The Mercedes, windows fogging, responded, engine growling through the pass, tires spinning over the snowy country road that crossed this particular ridge, the backbone of a mountain that separated Strafford from the metropolis that was Harrisburg.

  Usually Arlene loved the barrier.

  Today, with worsening weather conditions, it was a pain just as much as Steve was.

  Her last phone conversation with Steve replayed like a bad recording on an unending loop through her mind. He had called and let her know that his car was broke down, and that he needed a ride to his parole officer. This was a condition of the court stemming from his arrest. As much as Arlene wanted him to serve jail time she still had feelings for the man; after all they’d been married nearly thirty-five years.

  Then, of course, the conversation had escalated from that point and just before she’d slammed down the receiver, her parting words to her husband: “This is the last time I will help you, Steven James Balleza. Do not call me to ask for anything. Understand. You will not bully me ever again. I want your word that this is it. And yes I’m coming to give you a ride, once last time.”

  She’d locked the house and taken off, determined to set things straight and get her kids back.

  The Mercedes engine whined in protest on the snowy terrain as she slowed to an irritating crawl.

  The tires slid a bit, then held.

  She barely gave it any attention.

  Nor did she see the tall pine, spruce, and fir trees, their branches drooping under the pressure of snow and ice as they rose like majestic sentinels in the crisp, frigid air and snowflakes poured from invisible clouds. The wipers were slapping away the flakes while the defrost thrust out BTUs. Despite the fan, the warmed air flow couldn’t keep up with the steam on the inside of the windows.

  Arlene squinted and longed for a single blast of red wine as she braced herself for the confrontation that was about to ensure. It promised to be epic.

  He would not, would not, beat her ever again. His control over her was gone.

  Sure, she worked a lot of late, trying to keep her mind busy and her thoughts off of Steve. The winter was one of the worst she could remember, causing widespread electrical outages, road closures, and icy conditions everywhere; most of her rental clients were calling her 24/7 about what to do; she had been stretched thin.

  Getting back to Steve, she’d hung up from him less than an hour earlier, called Deena to let her know where she was heading, but she did not pick up and her voicemail was full. Popping in a Michael W. Smith CD, she realized it had been a gift from Steve and ejected it. She tossed the darned thing onto the floor of the passenger seat next to an empty plastic diet soda bottle. Arlene thought fleetingly of Steve Carlson, a man with who had rented a three bedroom townhouse last week. He had a way of turning her inside out, a feeling she’d not felt in a long time. A feeling Steve had once made her feel when they’d first met. She knew it was wrong for her. She was married. Way wrong. A good looking, younger man; the type to avoid. It wasn’t very Christian. And one she could not think about now. Not when she had to go and give a ride to her husband.

  The Mercedes tires slid a bit and she corrected once again carefully. She’d been driving these hills in severe snowstorms for years, but she was furious and probably pushing through a bit too aggressively.

  Tough.

  Outrage guided her.

  Her sense of fairness fueled her. She’d been the victim in the relationship. She was denying Steve control over her. Yet here she was driving in a blizzard on the way to do his bidding once again.

  She hit the corner a little too fast and started to slide, only to work her way out of it before the Mercedes hit the shoulder and careened into the abyss that was the canyon.

  She shifted down. The wheels slid again, as if the road was covered in a sheet of slick ice, here near the crest of the final hill. A few more feet and she’d start her way down the hill…

  Again the car slipped.

  “Get a grip, Arlene,” she chided as she reached the corner.

  Crash!

  The forest echoed with the sound of a high-powdered rifle blast.

  In fear Arlene ducked and with one hand on the wheel.

  The Mercedes shuddered and she realized what was happening. In the middle of the friggin’ blizzard, someone was taking potshots at her vehicle.

  Terror knifed her heart.

  Her car spun, tires skidded, her seat belt clutched, and behind the wheel she was useless.

  Faster and faster the Mercedes spiraled, sliding over the edge of the cliff. Frantically, she grabbed her cell phone, touched it, but it fell from her hand as the car bumped and crashed through the trees, lurching over rocks, metal crunching and screaming, glass and cold air spraying inside, the air bag slamming her.

  Boom! The Mercedes landed on its side, metal shrieking, sharp rocks and debris tearing through the door. Pain screamed up her neck and shoulders and she knew she was injured.

  Warm blood oozed from the side of her face as the Mercedes tore through the brush as if on rails, then began to roll.

  Dear Lord…

  She clung to the wheel with one hand, her world spinning, teeth slamming together and chattering. In her mind’s eye Arlene saw her life pass before them. Rapid-fire images of her youth, her abusive marriage, her sadness.

  Oh, God…

  The front end crunched on impact, jarring Arlene to her bones. Her shoulder felt as if it were on fire, and she was pressed tight by the air bag, the grit from its release in her eyes.

  With a scream of twisting metal, the Mercedes spiraled off a tree, spinning down the slope, front panels crumpling, a tire popping as it rolled ever faster down the hillside.

  Arlene could barely think past the kaleidoscope of agony and fought to stay conscious.

  She was prepared to meet her savior. Please, Lord, take me.

  Gritting her teeth, she tried to release her seatbelt, but nothing happened. It would not budge. Despair welled but she still had her faith. If it was her time to go, she’d go with little regrets.

  She heard another grinding metallic groan as the roof crumpled, crushing down on her.

  In a blinding second of understanding, she knew her wish was about to granted, she was to meet her Lord and savior.

  Chapter 13

  Arlene could barely breathe.

  Her lungs were tight
, so darned tight. And the pain…Lord, the pain.

  She felt as if all the weight of the crumpled Mercedes was compressing on her body, grinding against her muscles, squeezing the air from her lungs, the life from her body.

  Get out!

  Get out now!

  Save yourself!

  Desperately, adrenaline spurring her, she tried to release her seat belt, to thrust the darned air bag away from her face as pain splintered up her shoulder and she let out a wounded yowl.

  Take me, Jesus.

  Where once her body responded to her every command, now she was helpless.

  She could feel the evil looking for her.

  She attempted a prayer but couldn’t find the breath to recite it.

  She realized that evil was coming for her with deadly and sure intent.

  Oh, God in heaven…

  Sucking in her breath, gritting against the pain, she forced her fingers into the space between the seats and pushed hard on the seat belt release button once more.

  Finally, click!

  Now she could force the crumpled door or somehow try to get through the windshield… But nothing happened, the belt didn’t so much as budge.

  What in Pete’s sake?

  She tried again.

  She heard the same metallic sound of release, but the darned thing was jammed or something.

  Panic-stricken, she tried over and over again, grimacing against the pain, fearing that any second the evil presence she’d felt would appear and that would be the end of it. Of her.

  The blood that was oozing from a cut near her eye was freezing on her skin and she was shivering, her teeth chattering as the wind and snow raged through the shattered windshield, yet a nervous sweat ran down her spine.

  Any second she expected the sinister evil spirit that was stalking her out there in the frozen darkness to appear.

  Again she tried to release her seat belt and realized it was no use; the cursed thing was jammed tight. She was going to have to cut the seat belt…but with what? Grabbing at the console, she tried to open the lid, but it, too, was mangled. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she muttered, forcing one finger through the opening, while in her left hand, she still tugged at the seat belt.