by Laura Bickle
I wonder if Amanda is still even there. Part of me hopes she isn’t, because then this whole terrible nightmare would be over for me. There would be nothing for me to do. But a larger part wants her to be there. I have a lot of questions that only she can answer.
I grab my shoes from under the bed. Lothar lifts one ear and stares at me.
“Are you coming?” I hate to admit it, but I’d feel better if he did.
He hauls himself off the bed with a whump and follows me as I slip down the stairs and through the Body Shop. I pause to look around.
Amanda needs flesh, I remind myself.
I flip on the light and rummage around in my mother’s drawers. I come up with a Ziploc bag and a serrated bread knife. I think she uses the serrated one for brains. Something about the bread knife not crushing the delicate tissue. I check my reflection in the knife. This feels like a nightmare—the darkness, the skulking about. My reflection looks crazed, my blonde hair all frizzy like the Bride of Frankenstein’s.
Resolutely, I head into the walk-in cooler. I half expect the other corpses to be sitting up, having a party, but all is still. I poke around at a couple of bodies in bags, then decide on the body of an old woman that’s been in here for a week. If I remember right, there was some issue about where she was going to be buried. A familial tug-of-war of sorts.
I pull down the zipper on her body bag. She’s looking pretty sunken and sad, not having been embalmed yet. The family had been going back and forth on whether she should be embalmed or not for religious reasons. I should ask Amanda if she’ll eat embalmed flesh. She may not know, but it could make things easier.
I poke the old lady with a knife. Her skin puckers a bit.
I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I don’t even want to think of the trouble I’ll be in if my parents find out I’m stealing from the morgue.
Then it occurs to me that perhaps I’m making this harder than it needs to be. Between the old woman’s flaccid breasts is a Y-incision that my mother made. She had an autopsy. Something about one sibling insisting it was pneumonia that did her in and the other arguing that it was poison—it had to do with someone getting their mitts on an inheritance.
So her organs have to be here. Somewhere…
Under her arm is a plastic bag. It looks like lungs in there, all gray and squishy. I hold the bag up to the light. Amanda never said what kind of flesh she preferred. I knew for certain she’d eat these—I’d seen her chewing on one before.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I mutter, repeating what she said to me last night. I grab the bag, zip the old lady back up, return the bread knife to where I found it, and head out into the chill night air. I’m happy to have Lothar with me, too, for the excuse to be outside. If my parents catch me, I can tell them I was letting the dog out.
Lothar charges ahead in the grass, as if he knows where we’re going. The brittle yellow grass is taller than he is. I track his progress by the waves he makes in the grass, zigging back and forth until he reaches the door to the crematorium. I see his head and tail emerging over the step as I approach. He’s holding something in his mouth that’s writhing and squeaking. It looks like a mole. I bend to take it away from him. Before I can get it, he crunches it and it stops.
I don’t even want to know.
I approach the door to the crematorium. I left it unlocked, just in case Amanda needed to escape. I sort of hope she did. If Amanda isn’t there, then I can go home, return the old lady’s lungs to her, and crawl back into bed.
The door opens into pitch darkness. I didn’t bring a flashlight, which was probably stupid. But I never bring a flashlight to let Lothar out. The moon is high and half-full, offering more than enough light to see by. But not in here.
I think about going back for it, but I’m committed.
“Amanda?” I call into the hungry dark. “Amanda, it’s me. Charlie. Charlotte.”
Lothar plows ahead of me into the ink. I follow, hesitating, my hands stretched out before me. I immediately bump into something. Something cold and soft that smells like rainwater.
I jump back.
A light mercifully clicks on. Amanda. She’s holding the flashlight, aiming it toward the ground. Shadows dance over the hollows of her eyes.
“You’re still here.” I don’t know if I’m relieved or disappointed.
Lothar scrambles up to her, pressing against her leg and wagging his tail. I have no idea why he likes her…yes, I do. She’s dead. I don’t trust him not to take a bite out of her. Or vice-versa.
“It was pretty quiet,” she said. “Until an old lady showed up this afternoon.”
My heart flip-flops. “An old lady?”
“A blond woman. She came in holding a gun and a flashlight. She threw a bunch of salt on the floor.” Amanda pointed at the glittering rock salt.
“That’s my grandmother. Did she see you?” My heart is hammering. This snooping around can’t be any good for Gramma’s heart.
“I don’t think so.” She gestures to a pile of empty pallets. “I hid.”
I exhale. It was a good sign that Amanda left her alone. “Good. I think she knows something’s up, though. Please don’t eat her.”
“Speaking of…Did you bring me something to eat?” Her hand presses to her abdomen. “I’m really hungry.”
I extend the Ziploc bag before me. It dangles like a jellyfish in my fist, organs swimming at the bottom. “Yes.”
She snatches for the bag, but I draw it away. I feel a pang of guilt, like the one when I didn’t stand up for Renee.
Her lips curl back. It could be a snarl or an expression of desperation. Rows of tiny teeth glint in the weak light.
“You can have it, but I need to know what happened to you. All of it.” My voice quavers. But I’ve got to get some power, some leverage in this situation. Nothing else is stopping her from eating me.
Amanda nods. She reaches again for the bag. I let her have it.
She drops the flashlight and rips the bag open with a sloshing sound. Lothar yips and begs, but Amanda does not give him any. She turns her back to me, digging her hands into the plastic and lifting the lungs to her lips.
I turn away to pick up the flashlight. Warily, I cross to one of the tables on which cremation boxes are stacked. I climb up on it and tuck my legs under me. The flashlight feels like my lightsaber, some kind of ineffectual weapon against the dark. I bring myself to watch her finish eating.
She wipes her lips with the back of her hand. She licks the inside of the bag, the way I might lick cake batter off a spatula. Her eyes are slitted in bliss. “Umm.”
“Amanda.”
At the sound of her name, she turns back to me. “Yes?”
“Tell me. Tell me how you got this way.”
She sits down on the floor in front of the crematorium oven, resting her chin in her hand. Now that she’s fed, she seems very human. “I’m not sure of all the deets. But I’ll tell you what I remember.”
“You were found beside the road,” I prompted. “Did someone kidnap you? Did they hurt you?”
She dips her head. “Not like that. It was sort of… a slow slide into craziness.”
I wrap my arms around my knees, nodding. I could understand that.
I think her gaze goes unfocused, but it’s hard to tell with the black eyes. Lothar crawls into her lap with a burp, and she idly rubs his ears. “It started when I went down to the river this summer. I got some new watercolors and thought I might try a landscape.” She shrugs. “I suck at landscapes. But I gave it a shot, mostly because I wanted to get out of the house.”
“Bored?”
“No. My house is…sort of dysfunctional.” Her hair falls over her face. “I live with my aunt and her husband. She’s okay, when she’s sober. He’s just…creepy. So I don’t spend a lot of time at home. Anyway…” She takes a deep breath before continuing. “I was trying to do a semi-transparent water effect with the paints up near the new dam they’re building, but it wasn’t g
oing so well. The water was really muddy in this spot, since it had stormed earlier in the day. Everything I painted sort of turned to shit. But that’s when…when I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“This thing. At first, I thought it was some sort of a mermaid, the way it undulated and moved in the water.”
“The catfish,” I breathe.
“Yeah.” She stares up at me in surprise. “Catfish Bob, I guess. He was huge, like a sea lion, his whiskers just splayed out in the water. I swear that he was looking at me. I was…kind of mesmerized. Like I’d met the Loch Ness Monster, some sort of powerful creature. You’ve…you’ve seen him?”
“Yes. Outside the museum. And inside.” I fish the charm out of my pocket and hand it to her.
She reaches for it, but frowns. She doesn’t touch it, her hand hovering over it, as if there’s a force field surrounding it. “I can’t…That thing…that thing gives me the willies. It…” She shudders. “What is that?”
I tuck it back into my pocket. “Something I found at the museum.” I feel guilty, but it’s not like she’s going to be able to turn me in for it. “I don’t know what it is.”
Amanda rubs her arms, as if she’s cold. “But you say you saw the catfish there?”
I nod.
“Heh. I wonder if he likes girls. He got really close. I leaned over the cement barrier and tried to reach down to touch him. I swear, he came up out of the water, stared at me…and then vanished.”
“You were lucky. He could have eaten you.”
She snorts. “I was lucky. That time. But from then on, I was…obsessed.”
“I saw some of your artwork. Your drawings, the giant fish.”
“Oh god. Somebody showed you those?” A flush creeps over Amanda’s face.
“They’re on display now. At school.”
“Oh god. My friends…” She stares down into her hands.
“The fish,” I nudge. “You were obsessed.”
“Um. Yeah. I dragged my friends down to the river every chance I got. I don’t think they really believed me. Not even Rafe. They said I had a crush on Catfish Bob. But it was so much more than that. I knew that he existed…and I wanted to find out more.” She leans forward, eyes dark. “You gotta understand, this was the first and only magical thing that’s ever happened to me. I had to follow it. Even if it killed me.”
I swallow. “I guess it did.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Amanda closes her eyes.
“Nobody believed me, but that didn’t stop me from believing in Catfish Bob. I chased him. I went back to the dam every day, but couldn’t find him. They’re doing some kind of lame-ass construction project there, altering the water levels to make more power. Gem was pissed about the environmental impact and circulated a petition against it. The water was rushing too fast to see anything, too fast for a fish even as big as Bob.
“So I went looking,” she continues. “I scoured all the trails and the muddy beaches. I went to the places where the water was still—to the island, to the little places where there are beaver dams. I knew he was there, somewhere. I even …I even called for him. I called him Bob, but he never answered. I guess that’s not his real name, anyway.” Amanda ducks her head sheepishly.
“My friends and I went on the Beer Float a lot over summer, too, mostly as a result of my begging. We were on the river the day that guy, Travis, went missing.”
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. “Did you see what happened?”
“Not all of it. Not really. We were tubing down the river. My inner tube was a bit leaky, so I kept sinking into the water and falling behind. There were these jackasses behind us. College guys saying pervy stuff to Gem, Liz, and me. Rafe told them to fuck off, but they paddled up to him in their canoes and cut his inner tube. Rafe doesn’t swim so well, so we headed to shore. I got caught in an eddy and washed up a bit downstream of them.”
Her jaw clenches visibly, her anger almost palpable. “That jackass, Travis, chased me in his canoe. He was faster than me—he had paddles and plenty of Pabst Blue Ribbon rocket fuel. He grabbed me when I got one foot on the river bank. I won’t ever forget the clammy feeling of his hand on my leg as he dragged me back down the bank, into the water. I was kicking the shit out of his face, but he was a lot stronger than me. I was pretty sure that I was gonna get raped. Or worse. It was early evening, and the river was empty by then. Everyone who had someplace to go had already headed home for dinner.” Amanda’s fingers are white on her elbows. “I’ve never felt so alone. Not ever.”
She lapses into silence.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
She presses her fingers to her mouth, as if she’s trying to decide what to keep inside and what to spill. “He’d gotten me down in the mud, had his arms around my knees. He’d gotten my shorts half off, and I remember crying and shouting and pounding on his face, trying to claw his eyes out. And then…and then the catfish came.”
I blink.
“At least, I’m pretty sure it was Bob. Something dark and wet with sharp teeth reached out of the river and latched on to Travis’s feet. He started to scream. I wriggled away, clawed my way up the bank to some tree roots, out of reach. The catfish dragged him down, thrashing, into the water. There was white foam and bubbles and then…nothing. The water flattened like a mirror.” She pauses and swallows hard. “I was shaking like a leaf. I managed to get my shorts back up and wipe my face by the time my friends found me.”
“Did you tell them?”
She shakes her head. “No. I couldn’t. I knew that, deep down, something really terrible had happened. Something secret. I thought he was dead.”
I stare down at my hands. “Look, I have to be honest with you. Travis’s body came into the Body Shop—er, the morgue—last week.”
Amanda leans forward, eyes wide. “He did?”
“But the body vanished. There was slime and fingerprints all over the inside of the cooler. Like he just got up and walked out.”
Amanda’s mouth presses into a hard line. “I thought…I thought that Catfish Bob had saved me. He was sort of my fishy hero, y’know?”
“I can see why.”
“So I was determined to say thank you. I picked all kinds of flowers and brought a jar of pennies to the river. I threw the pennies in and floated the flowers on the water. I don’t know if he ever saw them. I never saw him again.” Her fingers lace together. “But I saw Travis again.”
“Where?”
“I was at the riverbank near the old mill. I had brought a bunch of black-eyed Susans for Bob. I pulled the heads off of them and floated them on the water, like I did when I was six. And then I heard something behind me, like something breaking. I thought it was maybe raccoons in the old mill, but it wasn’t.
“It was Travis. He looked…swollen and…green. Eyes as black as motor oil. I screamed my head off and ran, ran up the bank toward the picnic area by the road. But he was faster than me. He caught me. I still…I still remember what that stinking breath felt like on my face.”
She wipes at her cheek, shuddering. “I thought he meant to finish what he started, but…he bit me. I felt my skin tearing away, like it was Saran Wrap. I fought as hard as I could, but I knew…I knew that I was on land. That there was no way that Bob was gonna be able to help me. So I had to help myself.”
Amanda takes a deep breath. “In the picnic area, there were some worn-out picnic tables and a hibachi grill that still had hot coals in it. I rolled over and shoved his face in it. He howled and was smoking pretty bad. He fled back down the bank, toward the river.
“I was losing a lot of blood. I could feel it. I stumbled up to the road. Well, I tried to. I think I blacked out when I saw headlights. I was hoping that someone would see me and help me.” She looks down at the sleeping Lothar. “I guess they never did,” she says in a small voice.
Silence stretches between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry that happened t
o you.”
“I’m sorry, too. Sorry I’m…dead? Undead? Whatever.”
“You think that this is like vampirism, then? Contagious?” My skin is crawling. I can feel it prickling under my clothes.
“I think so. I had to have gotten this from Travis. The walking-around-dead thing had to come from him.” Her fingers pick at the ruined skin around her neck. “Bastard.”
“You’re alive. Sort of. We’ll figure something out.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” she insists. “You can’t.”
“Travis is running around out there. Loose. And there’s also another guy. A guy we buried a couple of weeks ago, Jesse, just busted out of his grave. He attacked a woman in a parking lot. We can’t let this happen to anyone else.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“This is going to spread. These guys are…. They’re hungry. More than you are. And they have no ready source of food. So they’ll take it from the living if they have to.”
Of this much, I’m certain. I struggle to wrap my brain around how big this could get. Maybe Amanda was behaving herself and not chewing on me because she’s been fed human flesh. But maybe the hunger was making Travis and Jesse insane. Desperate.
“I just need to…figure out what the rules are,” Amanda says. “How to survive. Then I’ll get out of here, and stop…haunting you. I promise.”
“Well, it looks like human flesh is a big part of the ‘rules.’”
Amanda presses her fingertips to her lips. “Yeah. But I don’t wanna become a lab animal, locked up in the basement of some university. I won’t. I want…I want to get out of here. Away from here. Away from my stupid family and start over.”
“But what about your friends?”
Her hands ball into fists. “This is hard. Especially…especially with Rafe. I don’t want to hurt them. And I don’t want him to see me this way.” She looks me in the eye. I think. “Would you do something for me? If I was to give you a note, would you give it to Rafe?”
Oh, Jesus. There are so many ways this can go wrong, but I can’t refuse. “Okay.”