Bottom Feeders

  BOTTOM FEEDERS

  Adam Cesare and Cameron Pierce

  Copyright 2015 by Adam Cesare and Cameron Pierce

  Prologue

  Em thrust out his hand, fingers parted, waving them slightly like he was preparing to conduct a symphony or play with the strings of a marionette.

  The water was warm here, warmer than he'd have guessed, considering it was pretty deep; up to his shoulders as he sunk low on his knees. There was a huge drop-off in front of him as he walked along the bottom to the center of the bend. He turned his back to it and felt for his hole with his bare feet.

  Winona watched him from the shore, occasionally glancing down at the shallow water by her feet to sneer at a crawfish, waterbug, or some other thing that did not perfectly align with her view of the beauty of nature.

  She was prissy, but she was fine. Real fine. Fine enough that looking at her—the thin mesh of her tank top just waiting for a light spritz of water to fully reveal its bounty—it was easy to forget that being seen out with her could get Em killed.

  Winona was someone's sister. Not Emmett's. Incest was the one hillbilly stereotype he had not bought into yet. But she was someone's. Someone who liked getting in fights, putting fellas in traction for far less than taking his sister out and trying to fuck her.

  "What you doing now?" she asked, trying to sound interested in the process, but the words coming out more full of disgust than anything else. She was not the outdoors type, even though this spot in the channel was a fifteen-minute walk into the trees, a forest that backed up right to her house. Close enough that the Spanish moss touched the chimney.

  "I found my hole," Em said, trying to avoid insinuating anything, even though: sure, he'd found his hole alright. "And now I've got my forearm stuck in it, but it's kicked up dirt and I've got to let everything settle down. I'm trying to keep the rest of my body completely still while I wiggle my fingers just a bit."

  "Why you whispering? Do they got ears?" she yelled, and Em imagining the sound waves of her voice bouncing along the surface of the canal, echoing down unto the bottoms, causing a hundred pairs of whiskers to prick up, recede deeper into their hiding spots.

  “Hush! You’ll scare them away,” he hissed, then wished he hadn’t. This trip was meant for showing off his talents, his muscles and nerve, so that he could get a little more noodling than just the fishing, but the date wouldn’t go anywhere if he kept yelling at her.

  “Supposed to be closer the bank, that’s where the holes are,” she said, her grumbling trailing off. Leaning against a tree, Winona looking sexier sullen than she did happy. She was sexy, but wrong. The bank was where the visible holes were, where the fish were most plentiful, and where you had the best chance of catching something with a rod. But Em wasn’t using a rod, he was using his hand, and he wasn’t after any pet cat, any throwback material. He wanted to catch a monster and was willing to put his veins, arteries, and fingertips on the line to do so.

  It would have been cool for Emmett to have been able to say that noodling was a family tradition, handed down to him from his father, and his father before that, but in reality he hadn’t known about the practice until he’d seen it on the Discovery Channel.

  The most famous noodlers were all from Oklahoma, but not because you couldn’t catch fish here in Louisiana, only that there were more things in the ponds and rivers that could take a bite out of you. Of those, only gators worried Emmett.

  Some noodlers wore gardening gloves to protect their fingers from a cat’s small but sharp teeth, but Em didn’t like the loss of sensation.

  Gloves made it harder to feel the gush of water that immediately preceded a cat leaving its burrow, getting ready to take the bait. If Em couldn’t feel it coming, he had no time to prepare himself, and thus figured that the risk was worth it. Despite what the Discovery Channel tried to tell its viewers, digit-threatening injuries were pretty rare. Em was more likely to get his foot snagged on some submerged debris and drown.

  This part, the waiting with his forearm sunk down in a hole, was a constant source of anxiety, both the good and bad kind.

  On the one hand he had to try to remain still, regulate his breathing, and keep his fingers ebbing and flowing, visualizing them as a copse of worms, undulating at the bottom of the shallow estuary. If he was successful, he could enter a kind of Zen meditation, and slow his heart rate until it seemed like it would stop.

  Then there was the dread he felt, fought against. It was the dread of the darkness, of the uncanny. The same way his attempts at relaxation felt archaic, metaphysical, so did the fear. The terror he felt trying to shake hands with the unknown, was primordial. It was a trick that the human mind had learned so long ago that it was impossible to override or unlearn.

  This deep, so close to where he couldn’t stand with the drop-off at his back, it was exceedingly rare that this hole would be home to anything other than a catfish. Water snakes wouldn’t come down this deep, and this far inland there were no crabs big enough to pinch him badly.

  But those were facts, knowledge that he had arrived at rationally. The fear wasn’t rational. It was the same fear that had you crack the refrigerator door open for some light when you came into the kitchen for a drink of water late at night, even though you know you’re alone. The fear that said: don’t put your hand in there, it’s dark and mossy and evil.

  He looked to the shore, toward Winona, his cheek touching the brown water as he turned his head. He’d have to remember to scrub his beard later, lest he wanted to be picking out mudballs tonight.

  She’d gone quiet, but was still watching the water around him, eyes peeled for the familiar serpentine ripples of a gator tail. He was safe, safer than normal when he was his own spotter.

  There was the gush below him, and he had about a second and a half to point his fingers into a spear, get them all together before the impact of…

  Teeth. A thick jaw speckled with thousands of them, each one tiny, like stubble, but razor-sharp as they latched onto his forearm a few inches from his elbow.

  Unlike regular fishing, the bigger a catfish was, the easier it was to hook, if not land. This bastard was big enough, and Emmett hooked three fingers into its gills, the fish flailing as he did, more distressed. Yeah, Emmett probably wouldn’t like someone finger banging his lungs either.

  On shore, Winona snapped to life with a gasp that could have ended in a scream, but instead turned into “Jesus, do you need help?”

  “I got it,” Emmett yelled as a long, sharp barbel poked him in the chest. The prod reminded him of the way Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died, a freak accident, a tiny hole in his heart from an otherwise harmless animal. Em hooked his free arm under the beast, feeling the strain of the fish’s midsection where its body met its tail, then pushed out with both feet, jumping closer to shore, hoping to clear himself to shallower water where he could lift the cat out of the water, get the barbels from stabbing him, and stand at the same time.

  Em’s muscles flexed. Blood dripped down his forearm as he tried to picture himself in the third person, watch himself from Winona’s perspective to see how cool he looked. What a man.

  He took another step, the fish’s tail fighting against him, pushing him back like walking against a windstorm, and then he extended his knees so the tail broke the water.

  The tail jumped sideways and slapped him in the face, clouding his vision, the individual ropes of its scales leaving whip marks of pain across his cheek like a cat o’ nine tails.

  Emmett was getting cocky, letting the presence of Winona—and her double-tented tank top—kill his concentration.

  The animal had clocked him, drawn blood, and was trying its best to drown him and get back into the water,
but Em couldn’t be mad at it. The fish was close to fifty pounds of pure beauty. Not beauty like Winona’s, soft and feminine, but instead the catfish held an allure similar to a classic car. Its curves were not pounded out at the Chevy plant, but instead had trickled down through the evolutionary ladder, had been granted time and space to grow in this secluded offshoot of an offshoot of the Mississippi.

  Emmett had mad respect for the creature, but that didn’t mean he was going to let it go. He reminded himself that he would be eating both it and Winona tonight if he could land it, and redoubled his efforts.

  Em pinched his eyes shut against the splashing water and strained. He lifted with his shoulders and back until suddenly, with surprising swiftness, the water below him was no longer an obstacle, until it seemed to recede. He kept his arms out, his forearm all chewed up, the wound a combination of rug burn and pinpricks.

  He opened his eyes again to see that Winona was not much closer than she had been, and was standing on the shore, her mouth agape. She was no longer looking at Em, but beyond him.

  It wasn’t his imagination. He looked down to see that he was only standing in water up to his ankles, where it had been previously soaking his waist.

  The water’s gone? he thought, watching the blood from his arm dribble down the chin and belly of the catfish, the creature calmer now out of the water.

  Then the wave knocked him forward, surging like the surf of the Atlantic Ocean rather than a minor tributary of the Mississippi.

  He landed on the fish, able to keep his forearm inside, one of the barbels catching him in the meat of the bicep, pushing all the way in like an oversized needle. The fish kicked under his weight, probably far more injured than Emmett was.

  “Get out!” Winona screamed, and Em turned over onto his back to see why.

  The giant lips seemed to gulp at the water, sucking in clods of dirt and grass, pulling Emmett toward them. He screamed, trying to echo Winona’s cries, maybe even wake himself up, but all he managed was to swallow a few mouthfuls of warm brown water.

  With the hubcap-sized cataracts on both of its eyes, the creature was most assuredly blind, not that it mattered as it sucked in bringing the shore closer to the water, and Em with it.

  In the thrashing, the desperate attempt to swim backwards in a baby’s pool worth of mud, leaves, and river bottom detritus, the catfish disentangled from Emmett’s arm. The fish seemed smaller now in the face of the monster.

  The childish, still-dreaming part of Emmett’s brain was surprised to see that the giant beast was no defender of the little guy. The large, bloated thing snapped at the smaller fish, biting it in half and then skewering most of the meal on one of its own giant barbels, even the smallest of its whiskers still about the size of a rapier.

  Em kept swinging his arms, trying to swim or pick himself up, whatever would work, but finding it impossible as a muddy snow angel formed in the drained riverbed behind him. The giant creature thrashed out with its tail, trying to get its mass up onto the shallows, and in the process sending another wave of murky water down on top of Em, the sweep of it causing him to float closer to the enormous maw, the teeth not looking so little anymore, a few yards below his feet. This close to the mouth, Emmett’s bare toes looked pale and fragile to him now.

  As the wave receded again and he clawed at the ground, there were heavy, sucking footfalls against the riverbed behind him. Emmett looked up to see Winona running toward him, arms pumping, mud flecking her long white legs, a dot of foam flying up and dousing her left breast, the reveal of her nipple nothing like he wanted it to be…too clinical in the midday sun.

  She grasped at his arms, her one hand sliding off with the blood, his forearm too slick. While he was slipping over his own feet, she was acting: saving his life.

  He grabbed her too, and thought that they were going to have one hell of a story to tell their kids, once she dragged him to shore.

  That was before the thing had gotten a hold of his feet, the sideways jerk at his broken ankles too quick to give either him or Winona a chance to let go, flinging both of their bodies into the deeper water, the giant burrow that was the drop-off he had avoided before.

  Winona was lucky; she was the first to be attacked. Her skull was crushed under powerful jaws before she could let out a full waterlogged scream. The animal swallowed her deflated head, looking like a hairy grape skin on its way down, the rest of her body following.

  Em took longer to die, shrieking out bubbles down under the water, the beast dragging him along with it as it moved down the river in search of deeper waters.

  Chapter One

  The model got Jed Wilkes hot and bothered.

  He did not mean the girl, currently doing her best to service him. Skinny and jaundiced, the girl was no model, not by anyone’s standards.

  But the detailed foam board miniature on the desk, a scale representation of what the Ole Dixie was going to look like when construction was completed.

  That was the stuff. It got him hard, engorged. The building would be powerful and sleek, the greatest casino the world had ever seen outside of Vegas or Monte Carlo. Maybe the greatest ever, period. If he could be so bold.

  Of course, it was just a model, an artist’s rendering. There would have to be concessions made, the construction crews bumping up the realities of both engineering and money, but it would still be glorious. It was hard to believe that one little land sale—to the government no less—had been the ticket to funding the casino. On opening day, the satisfaction Jed felt would hardly be diminished by a handful of loony tunes picketing with anti-fracking signs.

  The building would be the size of an aircraft carrier, so big and so firmly moored that guests wouldn’t be able to tell they were floating on the Mighty Mississippi unless they looked out their luxury hotel window and saw it for themselves.

  He thought of how that penthouse balcony view would look, the sound of slot machines so far below him that they would be inaudible, but still making him money, the golden sun setting over New Orleans. He thought about all this and he couldn’t help it: he squirted into the girl’s mouth.

  She gagged.

  Pity was not something Jed Wilkes felt often, but do not let it be said that he was incapable of it. He frowned at himself. He could have at least given her a heads-up instead of painting her tonsils.

  When her sputtering was finished, when it was clear that she wasn’t going to puke on the carpet and had kept everything down, he peeled off one more twenty than he had to, and showed her to the door.

  Well, actually, he explained where the door was, and then watched her leave over the monitors, making sure she didn’t touch or take anything on her way to the elevator. She had to pass through three rooms in his apartment, all of them lavishly furnished, and he wasn’t going to let some Treme slut see her way out unsupervised.

  Once she was on the elevator, Jed was allowed about twenty-five seconds of additional afterglow, the same amount of time it would take her to ride down three floors and then walk into view of his receptionist. After that time had elapsed, the light on his desk blinked and he took one last look at the scale model before zipping himself up and taking the call on speaker.

  “Yes,” he said, buoyant after the girl’s visit, but also feeling tired.

  “Your ex-wife’s on line two, and Harry Albright is on three. Which should I put through?” Denise asked. Jed was sure she knew what the answer would be, but it was not her place to make decisions, just to offer them.

  “Gail can sit in it a little while longer. Give me Harry.”

  There were a few clicks and then the now-familiar heavy breathing of Albright, the on-site manager for the Ole Dixie construction project.

  “Harry, it’s good to hear from you. Hot enough out there for you?” Jed had not been outside today. His office was perfectly climate controlled at a balmy sixty-two, but he could see on one of his flat screen displays that it was pushing a hundred today.

  “You can say that again, boss,�
�� Albright said on the other line, huffing.

  Jed was glad this was a phone meeting. The man probably stank of sweat and low tide.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Jed asked, in a post-blowjob good mood.

  “Huh?”

  “What do you want, Harry?”

  “Oh. Well, I just emailed you some requisition orders. The concrete guy tried to fuck us. The mix didn’t test for what we ordered. The distributor might as well have shipped along pancake mix, so I told them we weren’t paying, and I had to find a new supplier. It should only be a two day delay, but you need to sign off.”

  This sounded like a bigger deal and that Albright was downplaying it, but the foreman was as honest as he was obsessive about his sites, so Jed had no doubts that he’d done the right thing in dumping the suboptimal concrete.

  Jed clicked over to his email and sure enough, there were the forms. Albright’s message was sandwiched between two emails from Gail, the subject lines: “Pick up” and “Pick up THE FUCKING PHONE […]”

  “Two days. So that means this pour will be Friday now, right?” Jed asked.

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I’ll sign, and Denise will fax them over within the hour. I see the new numbers. Thanks, Harry.”

  Harry started to say something back and Jed hung up, switching over to line two, girding himself for whatever bullshit Gail was up to now.

  She must have heard the switch over from the muzak before he knew they were connected, the change of static, because she spoke before Jed could get anything out.

  “I want a divorce. A real one this time, you prick.”

  Three seconds. That’s how quick the mood of Jed Wilkes could change from great to dog shit.

  Chapter Two

  Checking her phone at three a.m., only awake to go pee, the news that Gail Bonnet was legally still Gail Wilkes was enough of a shock to draw her fully awake and keep her that way until it was business hours, and she could call her lawyer.