Bottom Feeders

by Cesare, Adam

  “There it is,” Lucinda said. Simple as they were, the words were her catchphrase whenever she hooked a fish.

  Chase craned his head as he finished his retrieval. Sure enough, Lucinda’s rod was buckled over, and the fish was peeling line. Probably a nice-sized smallmouth. On the first cast too, he thought with not immoderate pride, a little envy. Maybe there was something to the UV coating after all.

  Lucinda played the fish, gaining ground when she could, and otherwise allowing it to run. As she worked it in, the smallmouth leapt out of the water several times, its green tiger stripes prominent. Chase estimated it to be about a four pounder. A good fish.

  Chase set his rod down and unstrapped the landing net from his pack.

  The fish was swimming in now, defeated, its fins cutting through the water. Chase watched the line, ready to net the fish, when suddenly it jerked out into deeper water. The line screamed off the reel at a blistering rate. The bass wasn’t stopping either. Lucinda kept her rod tip up. She tightened down on the drag so that maybe the extra force would slow the fish down, but it kept on moving. “It’s gonna spool me,” she said.

  “Damn girl, you got a state record on the line?” From what Chase had glimpsed, the bass was a trophy, but it didn’t look that big.

  Lucinda flashed him a grin, but it quickly faded. Sweat beads rolled down her forehead, from not just the heat of the swamp surrounding them, but from exertion and nerves as well. Chase guessed she was nervous about landing the big fish. As line continued to scream off the spool, she looked at him and shook her head. “Something’s not right,” she said.

  “Tighten down on the drag, see if you can turn it back this way.”

  Lucinda did as he said and the fish’s momentum slowed.

  And then it came to a dead stop.

  Lucinda cranked the reel. Her rod arced into a horseshoe. She jerked up on the rod three times in quick succession. Short jerks, not enough to risk snapping the line, but just enough to agitate the fish and hopefully get it moving again. No matter what, the fish would not budge.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

  “Think a gator’s got it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Didn’t feel like a gator to me.”

  From time to time on the Mississippi and its bayous, alligators, snapping turtles, and even the occasional bull shark were known to snatch fish off lines. One moment you had a beautiful red coming toward the boat, and the next an apex predator had swooped on in and turned your dinner into a bloody head on a hook if they didn’t steal the whole damn thing.

  “It doesn’t feel like a bass,” Lucinda said.

  “But we saw it, and that’s what it was.”

  “I think a cat may’ve gobbled her. The weight’s the same as a big cat, and this fish has planted on the bottom the same.”

  Chase pondered the prospect of a massive channel catfish munching a good-sized smallmouth bass. He’d never seen such a thing before, but anything was possible. And something was certainly weird here.

  “Well, shit. What do you wanna do?” Chase said.

  Lucinda opened her mouth to speak when suddenly her line went slack. The fish was swimming toward shore. Chase watched her crank the reel, keeping the line tight.

  Thirty feet from shore, the fish leapt out of the water.

  At first its mottled brown head, the size of a VW Beetle, emerged, followed by a stout, slimy body, and a forked tail that looked sharper than all the guillotines in hell. The behemoth rose about five feet out of the water, struck a Free Willy pose, twisted in the air, and emitted a guttural, demonic noise. When it crashed down in the river, Lucinda’s line snapped and the fish, if it could even be called a fish, plummeted back into the depths, the water displaced around it. The wake it left behind was enough to send waist-high waves crashing against the bank, soaking Chase’s shorts through to the underwear, nearly knocking him over.

  Lucinda dropped her pole and plunked down on the wet shoreline, a distant, stunned gaze on her face. Chase’s knees wobbled. Before he could decide whether to sit or not, they gave out, and he collapsed down on the beach beside her.

  “What the fuck was that?” he said.

  “The catch of a lifetime,” Lucinda said, not missing a beat, like she hadn’t just seen the same thing, the same monster that he’d seen.

  Chase shook his head. “The teeth on that thing must’ve been six inches long.”

  “I’d have made a necklace out of them.”

  “Are you crazy? It would have eaten us whole!”

  “I’d have sold it to the Smithsonian. Just the head, the rest is steaks.”

  Chase was impressed by her calmness. Personally, he was feeling pretty lucky that he didn’t piss his shorts, not that she’d be able to tell with how soaked his shorts were. “You telling me that thing didn’t scare you?” he asked.

  “Oh, it scared me. I just can’t believe it.”

  “Well, you’re gonna believe it if that thing returns and we’re still sitting here. Come on, let’s go.”

  “After that, I could sure go for a beer,” Lucinda said, climbing to her feet and breaking down her rod for easier carrying. Her casualness was disconcerting, maybe a kind of shock. Chase himself could still feel the tickle of adrenaline coursing through his arteries, his left-side extremities regaining feeling, letting him know he wasn’t having a heart attack.

  “You want to keep going, look for that shit you told me about?”

  “I think we’ve seen enough weirdness for today,” she said, starting back the way they’d come, her sense of direction impeccable, one of the many skills he’d helped foster in her.

  Chase turned, looking beyond Lucinda into the trees, the Spanish moss so heavy on some boughs that the masses were touching the ground. Between the trunks and branches, he caught sight of the figures moving into position. She had jinxed them by claiming to have her fill of weirdness. “Then you’re not gonna want to turn around,” Chase said, his heart beginning to thud again.

  The grin on Lucinda’s face vanished when she turned toward the people standing ten yards away on the river bank. Where did they even come from? Chase wondered. The men and women wore tunics, the material made out of wrinkled baize squares, giving it the appearance of scales.

  The wind changed, the group’s cloaks billowing. The air smelled fishy. The men and women’s cloaks were apparently made from dried catfish skin.

  The women wielded spears and knives, while the men clutched large fishing nets. In addition to the catfish tunics, they wore crude shoes that also appeared to be made out of catfish leather. It wasn’t exactly the most durable material for clothing or footwear, and something about the impracticality of wearing catfish unnerved Chase.

  The impracticality of living things, he thought, but the notion remained incomplete, half-formed, because then an old man parted the group and stepped toward him and Lucinda.

  Chase observed that the old man’s hands and arms were heavily scarred, the mark of a veteran noodler.

  “How’s it goin’?” Chase asked the old man, attempting to maintain an outward appearance of cool. He was no gun-nut, and when he wore his piece it always weighed him down, made him too aware of himself, but if this, investigating a satanic, possibly violent, fisherman with his young ward, wasn’t an opportunity to bring along the weapon, what was?

  “This is private property,” the old man said. “You’re trespassing.”

  Chase opened his mouth to express acquiescence, let the old man know that he and his friend would be on their merry way, never to return to the land of the freaky fish people again, but Lucinda spoke up first.

  “I used to fish out here all the time,” she said. “What’s different now?”

  The old man turned his gaze to the turgid river. “The difference is…She has awoken.”

  “She? You mean that monster?” Lucinda said.

  “So you saw her.” The old man kept his eyes on the river, but motioned with his hands. The armed women stepped
forward, fanning out in a half circle. “That’s very lucky of you. Twelve orbits of the moon from now, She will rise and reclaim Her throne as master of this sacred ground where this city, this pestilence, swarms,” the old man said. “But by then, you’ll already be dead.”

  It may have just been because the old man was locking eyes with her, but the you’ll in you’ll already be dead sounded less like a kooky proclamation and more like a threat meant specifically for Lucinda.

  Nobody threatened Chase’s Robin.

  Chase was glad to be packing heat. He trained the Glock on the old man as a couple of the catfish cultists, two women, seized Lucinda.

  “Harm her in any way and Jim Jones gets it,” Chase said, pulling back the hammer for emphasis, even though he didn’t need to. It was an automatic.

  The women eyed their master who nodded his head for them to listen. They released Lucinda and fell back to a cluster with the men.

  Chase nodded, liking the weight of the gun in his hand, how suddenly it had shifted the power dynamics of this fucked-up situation. “Okay, good. Now I’m gonna ask you a few questions. You’re going to answer them. Then we’re going to leave and you’re going to return to whatever backwoods shithole you came from. You got it?”

  The old man nodded emphatically.

  “First of all, what was that thing?”

  “She is the mother of all catfish, an infernal thing that has remained dormant for thousands of years…”

  “Not very helpful, my man. Let’s try another question. Did you bring it here? Simpler diction this time.”

  “No, we are merely Her worshipers.”

  “If you captured us, what were you going to do with us?”

  The old man got a look to him like a guilty child.

  “Hey, gramps, I asked you a question.”

  “We would have sacrificed you and turned your skulls into soup bowls.”

  “Not what I was hoping to hear, but at least you’re honest. Keep it up, and we might all leave this river alive. You said this land was private property. Last I heard, that’s not the case, and judging by your clothes, I don’t take you as someone with the cash flow to purchase riverfront property. So who put you up to running people off?”

  The old man uttered a name, but Chase missed it. He’d been so intent on alternating his glance between keeping the gun trained on the old man and watching that Lucinda went unharmed, that he hadn’t even noticed the banks of the river rising. Before the old man could repeat what he’d said louder, the giant catfish snuck up—to the extent that its mass could sneak—and snatched the old man off the shore. There was no real chewing, just the gaping opening and closing of its giant maw, and the man was down as the beast retreated back under the water. There was only time for one abbreviated scream. All that was left of the cult leader was one catfish leather moccasin, foot intact.

  Before he could realize that nothing could be done, Chase squeezed off two shots, turned back to the rest of the cultists to find them on the ground, bent in prayer, bowing to the beast. Lucinda stood above them, unharmed, her eyes wide.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Chase said, unsure he wanted to hear what she had to say about the beast, about how it was still her mission to catch it.

  Chapter Seven

  It was one of those days on the water where nothing went right. Bo Stevens and his son, Bo Stevens Jr., had hit the river early to break in the new boat and hopefully land some lunker bass.

  Things started off rough on the highway to the marina. A nail punctured one of the boat trailer's tires, and they had to make a detour to a tire shop to get it patched. That set them back, killing their plan to be on the water and fishing by eight in the morning. Arriving at the marina, they discovered a frat party in full swing. After twenty minutes of harsh words and threats to call the cops, Bo Stevens finally convinced the frat boys and sorority girls to clear out of the boat launch long enough for him to get the boat out on the river. Why the hell were they swimming in the boat launch area anyway? There was a public swimming dock fifty yards away. With the new boat finally on the water, Bo gunned the throttle and let his new bass boat fly. He'd named the boat Bass Slayer, but in all honesty, that's what he named all his boats. This one was special, though. He'd won it in a tournament.

  What went wrong next?

  Bo Stevens Jr., who had yet to take up fishing as seriously as his father hoped, managed to snag up and lose a fifteen dollar Lucky Strike diver, only to put his rod aside and pout about bass fishing being boring. Just about the only type of fishing Bo Stevens Jr. enjoyed was fishing with a night crawler under a fat red and white bobber. Catching palm-sized bluegills made him happy, but Bo Stevens was trying to make a man of his son, and real men fished for fierce, predatory, hard-fighting, tail-walking bass.

  Sure, both largemouth and smallmouth bass could be caught on worms, but where was the skill in that? Where was the finesse? A fisherman had to define himself not just by what he caught, but by how he caught it.

  Still, after Bo Stevens Jr. hardly failed to even look up after Bo Stevens landed two quality smallmouth bass, he realized it was time to appease his son. That's why he'd secretly packed a container of a dozen night crawlers, just in case his son pulled his I want to fish with worms crap and became inconsolable.

  "Alright, boy," Bo said, reaching into his tackle bag. He rerigged Jr.'s pole with a single red hook and a couple split shots for weight. "The bass are holding deep on account of all the speed boats and jet skis on the water today, so no bobber this time, but here's your worm." Bo looped a night crawler onto the red hook. The worm writhed violently each time the hook pierced its brown flesh.

  Jr.'s eyes lit up. "Thanks, dad!" He took up the fishing pole, pitched the worm out into the murky water, and let it sink to the bottom.

  Bo continued fishing a crawfish-patterned jig, pitching it up underneath the trees hanging over the riverbank, while his son farted around with the worm. Bo was busy dwelling on his son's uncertain future as a fisherman, and because of it, missed a big strike. "Dammit," he muttered.

  "Dad, I've got a big one!" Bo Jr. said.

  Bo looked over to see that his son's pole was buckled over into a horseshoe. The damn rod was going to snap if the kid didn't go easy on it. "Let me see, son. You're probably just snagged up..."

  "No, Dad. It's a big one. I can feel it pulling."

  "Let me see." Bo took the rod from his son and gave it a tug, assessing the weight on the other end. There were no head shakes, no epic run, just dead weight. "Dammit. It's what I said. You're snagged up."

  "I'm not, Dad," Bo Jr. said quietly.

  Bo jerked up on the rod, figuring he had no choice but to break off and tie on another hook. The snag came loose and he began reeling up, but he hadn't reeled for long when the line stopped dead again, caught on the same dead weight. "Huh, maybe you're not snagged." Bo had barely begun to agree with his son when whatever was on the other end took off like a rocket, burning off a hundred yards of line in seconds.

  "Take it, son! It's a big one," Bo said, handing the rod back to his son.

  Maybe this trip wouldn't be a bust after all. And yeah, if Bo Jr. caught his first true trophy on a worm, he'd never want to fish with anything else, but if this fish was half as big as it felt, Bo didn't really care if it turned out to be a damn carp. Any big fish was better than a bad day, and that's all they'd had until now.

  The fish came close to spooling Bo Jr., when suddenly the line went slack. The fish reversed course and began swimming directly toward them.

  "Reel, reel! Keep the line tight!" Bo shouted.

  Bo Jr. did as he was told, and Bo picked up the net. The fish was approaching fast. Unless it dove deep again, they'd get a glimpse of it soon.

  That's when it dove straight under the boat and planted itself on the bottom.

  But then it rose again, and kept rising, until soon Bo and Bo Jr. felt tremors like an earthquake, only they were out on a river, not on land. Bo watched the water all
around. Had his son hooked into a gator? That'd be a hell of a story to tell.

  "Keep the line tight," he reminded his son, but he should've reminded his son that he loved him, because in the next instant they were swallowed up, boat and all, by a monster far more evil than Jonah's whale, and unlike Jonah, they would not live inside its cavelike belly. Their skulls were crushed in the fish's jaws, and it all happened so fast that none of the boaters out on the river even noticed that anything transpired. In their presence, a river monster appeared, feasted, and vanished.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Chapter Eight

  The baby’s gurgles crackled in over the monitor some time past three. Chase scratched his nuts in the dark, laid in a half-dream state listening to his newborn until Gail sat up beside him in bed. “Don’t worry about it, honey,” he said, “I’ll feed her.”

  Gail kissed his bare shoulders and nestled up under sheets sticky with their sweat. It had been the hottest summer on record, and aberrant in other regards besides.

  Chase took a slug from the warm, half-full tallboy on the nightstand and stumbled out of the bedroom, blind in the darkness. Their daughter, Bel, was three weeks old. Her name was short for Jezebel, something they’d eased off calling her a few weeks after returning from the hospital, and once Gail had taken the time to Google the biblical origins of the name.

  Chase had voluntarily cut the number of nights he guided in half to help out with Bel. What he didn’t admit to Gail was that the fishing was worse than Chase had ever seen in his whole life angling along the Mississippi.

  After last year’s record hauls, he’d forgotten what it felt like to take cash from people after guiding them to an abundant catch. Lately, jack and shit was all anyone caught on his boat.

  He didn’t get it. After sitting on an aluminum boat for eight hours in triple digit heat, no less, people tended to get cranky. That they paid good money for that privilege and brought home nothing to show for it, well, let’s just say some of them shared some harsh words with Chase, as if he could somehow control the fish; as if he was a catfish god himself. But he’d come face to face with one of those, and he was nothing like the thing had been.