Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  Rafe struggles with the hairspray can. He pushes the button and drops the lighter into the water, swearing.

  I reach into my pocket for the catfish charm. I grip it in my hand and hold it out before me, like Van Helsing with a cross before vampires. The ladies hiss and grumble, trying to get around me. I keep the charm facing them. “Get back!” I shout.

  Amanda screams into the water, a scream that degenerates into a musical growl. The hair stands up on my neck as I realize that she’s calling Bob’s true name.

  And he comes. A dark, viscous shape pulls the water around it, swirling like something that’s sucking water down a bathtub drain. Black eyes shine in the reflected light, whiskers flipping up over the surface of the water.

  Amanda reaches out toward him, her hand connecting with his green skin. A whisker trails between her fingers. For that moment, in my head, there is silence. It’s beautiful, this communion. Something I can’t grasp, just witness.

  Above us, I hear thunder that jerks me back to the present moment. I hear it again, and realize that it’s not thunder at all. It’s the sound of earth sliding away and water slamming against rock. I spin back to the construction site. A blue flash ignites upstream, racing like foxfire across the surface of the water and the puddles of the land—it’s the eeriest thing I’ve ever seen, the potassium sparking and sizzling as it drives away shrieking Devourers. The front-loader and bulldozer are desperately trying to retreat from a chasm formed in the dam. I know that Ryan and Renee are driving, and my heart lurches into my throat. Above them, the beached tractor trailer turns, slides toward the hole, and plunges through, widening it. Black water rushes toward us in a deafening roar.

  I grab Amanda and Rafe, stumbling back in a clumsy retreat from the bridge onto land. The water tears into the old mill, shattering the walls as if it were made of matchsticks. Wood and water slam into my skin, the water shockingly cold. Shivering, I crawl up the bank, higher and higher up, toward the road.

  The water cuts through everything. It carries the earth from the dam, the tractor trailer, and the skeleton of the old mill downstream. I wrap my rain coat around me, shivering, and stand at the edge of the road. Amanda and Rafe are curled in a knot near top of the bank, arms around each other. The river has risen by at least twenty feet, beginning to pull up trees and wash away road signs.

  Careening flashlights come to greet us, bouncing over the ground like drunken fireflies. I run to Garth and Gramma, relief filling my belly. This is the only time I’ve ever seen Gramma’s makeup disturbed. Her eyeliner is a little wonky, and the rubber ducks on her raincoat are a bit scorched from her homemade flamethrower.

  “Your heart!” I shout, out of habit.

  “It’s fine. But I broke a nail,” she mutters, frowning at her fist.

  Liz and Gem show up next…Gem is limping, and is supported by Liz. When they reach the side of the road, Gem collapses.

  “Where are Renee and Ryan?” I cry out. After all I’ve done, for them to be hurt or killed trying to help me....

  Garth casts his gaze about helplessly. “They were with the equipment…”

  I break away from Gramma to run back to the remains of the construction site. The bulldozer is sliding down the river. The front loader is jammed against a tree, about a dozen feet from shore. I can glimpse the top of the cage, but water is filling it. I plunge into the water, hissing against the shock of the cold, clinging to the bright yellow metal with numb fingers. I kick my boots free, howling as the harsh water pulls the muscles of my feet into tight cramps.

  Renee is inside, slumped against the cage, her chin barely above water. I grasp the door and wrench it open. I reach under her armpits and clumsily pull her out. Her camo clothes are heavy, and she weighs a ton in this water. I hook my right arm under her arms and use my left to pull us back toward shore, clutching the tree branches for leverage until my feet touch bottom. Garth is beside me, and we haul her to the shore.

  I use the last bit of strength I have to help drag her up to solid ground. She lies in the gravel as though she’s dead, and fear lances through me. I should be checking for a pulse or something. Instead, I grab the lapels of her jacket and scream in her face.

  “Renee!”

  She groans. Her heavy eyelashes flutter and she looks up at me. She coughs and smiles.

  “Hey.”

  “Oh my god.” I press my shaking hand to her face. “Hey.”

  I look back to the water, scanning for the bulldozer. I don’t see it. The water has consumed everything. I can feel tears coming.

  Renee sits up. She leans against my shoulder, clutching her ribs. She whispers in my ear: “Look!”

  At first I think it’s a log, floating in the river. But once I dig my flashlight out of my pocket and train my light on it, I see that it’s a wiggling body. Ryan. He’s swimming, towing a dachshund.

  “Look who I found!” he shouts.

  My light draws the flashlights of others, and Liz, Amanda, and Rafe slog into the water to fish Ryan and Lothar out. The dog squirms free of Ryan’s grip and howls on the shore. He immediately begins to dig.

  Renee, Garth, and I slowly make our way to the rest of the group. It’s apparent that she’s hurt pretty bad, and that we’re going to have to make a trip to the hospital. But right now, we are being watched.

  Devourers are all around us. They stand as silent sentinels, all along the road and the new banks of the river. It’s not just the retirement bus group—I see a firefighter, another hunter, a couple of teenage girls, and some guys in ball caps and windbreakers. They seem to be converging here, and we are surrounded by them, silent as rot.

  We huddle in a little knot, between the Devourers and the river. They aren’t saying anything. The river is howling in a triumphant rush, singing to them in a language I can’t understand.

  I look over Renee’s head at Amanda. She’s listening too, facing the river.

  Rafe reaches for her. “Amanda?”

  She doesn’t answer him.

  The Devourers move toward us. I reach into my pocket for the catfish charm…but it’s not there.

  “The charm,” I hiss at Garth. “It’s gone!”

  He turns my pockets inside out, swearing.

  In my peripheral vision, I spy Lothar, covered in mud and running toward me. He skids to a stop and spits something out at my feet. I reach down and grab it.

  I blink. Lothar always eats whatever he gets his mouth on. But he hasn’t this time. This time, he’s found the charm. It must have gotten stuck in the silt by the river.

  “Good dog!” I shout, and he sticks his chest out like the mighty hero he was bred to be.

  I ball my hands, the catfish charm buried in my right fist. We have nothing else left to fight them. I turn to the river, shouting: “We gave you what you wanted!”

  The Devourers still advance. I try holding the charm at arm’s length again, like a ward.

  “Get behind me!” I order. I know that the charm has a very limited range, but it’s all I have.

  The Devourers come to us, but walk past us, like water flowing around a rock in its path. The charm has cast a spell, protecting us. I can feel it, shielding us. The Devourers walk around us, into the river, into the swirling black current. It’s like a picture I saw once of a mass baptism in a river. They walk in, and they keep walking, until their heads are submerged and the current sweeps them away.

  Only Amanda is left. I put the charm in my pocket and reach for her hand. Rafe has the other.

  She kisses him tenderly on the cheek. She kisses Gem and Liz, and they dissolve into tears.

  She stands before me next and takes my hands. She’s smiling.

  I don’t have words. She holds my hands to her heart. They are cold and slimy. A dark spot, like a speck of rot on an apple, is forming on her cheek. I swear I see a gill fluttering in her neck.

  “Thank you,” she says. “For everything.”

  “Don’t go,” I say.

  “I have to. I want to.�
�� Amanda smiles, a brilliant toothy smile.

  She releases my hands and walks to the water.

  Just beyond her, Catfish Bob’s head breaks the surface of the water. She wades in, and he dances around her, seeming joyful. His tail flips and he shows his belly, the color of moonlight.

  She walks into the water until it closes over her head.

  And that is the last time we ever see Amanda.

  EPILOGUE

  Nearly one year later…

  The sun bathes my face in light, and the warm water licks my back. Birds sing, and the wind rustles through the trees.

  I’m floating down the river on an inner tube. Finally, I’m experiencing the Beer Float, minus the beer. It’s summer, the summer following the Second Great Flood. I kick my feet in river water that’s the temperature of bath water. I can’t remember the last time I felt so relaxed. My skin is tanned the color of iced tea, and my long dark hair trails after me in stringy curls, like a mermaid’s. The catfish charm sits in the hollow of my throat. I drilled a hole in it so that I could wear it on a leather thong as a necklace.

  I catch fragments of my reflection in the water. I still sometimes expect to see the timid little blond girl that I was only a year ago. But I look different now, and I feel different. I look like a picture I found in my bedroom after flood, one that Amanda must have sketched for me when she was bored in my crawlspace. She drew a girl with long, curly dark hair and dark eyes looking into a goldfish bowl. There’s a cool magnifying effect with the water, making the subject’s eye look even larger and darker. And the goldfish in the bowl isn’t really a goldfish—it’s a catfish.

  Something bumps my inner tube. I lift my head. Garth spins past me and throws me a drink from the cooler tethered behind his inner tube. I catch it, grinning.

  There’s splashing up ahead. Gem and Liz have made a tree swing out of an old rope and are taking turns playing Tarzan. Liz loses her bikini top when she hits the water and screams at the top of her lungs. Lothar catches it and swims away with a doggy grin. Rafe gives chase, but the dog is too fast. He climbs up on the bank and tries to bury it. Ryan goes immediately to Liz to try to console her, but she howls in humiliation. I mean, maybe it’s humiliation. I know she’s sweet on Ryan, so it could be flirting.

  “You’re awfully quiet.” Renee’s inner tube nudges up against mine. She spins lazily in the water, looking at me from behind her giant sunglasses. She hooks her toes in my inner tube, and we float down the river connected.

  “Just thinking,” I say. “About how different the river is now.”

  “After the flood? Yeah. They say that they’re never going to rebuild that dam. No money, and that it was ‘environmentally unfeasible’ after the flood took it down. ‘Act of God’ and all.” She winks at me and then looks around at the broad banks and the trees still growing in the water, gathering debris for beaver dams. She reaches for the tow rope around her inner tube and reels in her cooler. I try not to stare at the scars on her chest, splaying across her ribs underneath her yellow bikini. Renee broke a rib and collapsed a lung during our placating of Catfish Bob, and the guilt kills me. I never wanted anything to happen to her.

  She catches me looking. “Stop.”

  I start to apologize again. But she silences me by tossing a Styrofoam container close to my head. I catch it before it explodes on my forehead. I crack it open, finding dirt and earthworms. I reach in and cast some in the water.

  “Are you gonna take college prep classes next year?” Renee asks.

  “I think so. I kind of want to go to art school, though.” I’ve been practicing, really hard. I even got into the school art show.”

  “What does your mom think of that?”

  “I think she’s okay with that. As weird as it sounds. She’s really loosened up.”

  She sort of had to. After the house got flooded and we had to do all the cleanup, she had an epiphany about the world being beyond her control. To my utter amazement, she did not ground Garth and me for life when we got back after the Sacrifice to Catfish Bob. There was enough completely batshit stuff going on around town that night that anything we said would be considered mundane. Reports of monsters, the walking dead, and shit exploding. One egghead got on television and suggested that excess oxycodone in the water system screwed everyone’s brains up.

  So we told her that the car washed away in the flood after we picked up Liz and Gem, who were hitchhiking. Evidence of pretty much anything—including Rafe’s supposed crimes—got washed away when the jail flooded. Rafe had a hearing, but the judge found the note inadmissible, so there wasn’t anything to do but let him go. We thought he’d get in trouble for breaking house arrest. Apparently, the power went out at the juvenile parole office, so nobody was really keeping tabs on his whereabouts. A lot of bad things happened that night, but some very lucky things, too.

  It was, after all, Halloween. I didn’t even realize that until the next day. And Halloween in Sumner County is legendary. In the cold light of day, people were more concerned with mourning what was sacrificed to the river than pointing fingers about who was drunk enough to have made up what story.

  Renee and Ryan’s mom and dad were horrified to find them in the hospital. They got grounded for a good long time. I was afraid they would forbid me to come over. But Mrs. Carlton grounded them from everything but me, which was weird. But we played a whole lot of Settlers of Catan and Risk on their rec room floor that winter and rebuilt our bond.

  My parents managed to mostly recover from the professional fallout of the missing bodies. There was a dip in business for a while, but dead folks eventually returned. We are the only game in town, after all. The petition to get my mother recalled didn’t gain enough signatures by the deadline, either. But I know that people still whisper. Small town gossip never goes away. She’ll be up for re-election again this fall. If she loses, she’s decided that she’ll go to work for my dad. The idea of being her boss amuses him to no end.

  We float past some fishermen on the bank who look askance at us spreading worms on the water. Fishermen from all the neighboring counties have been descending upon Sumner County, following rumors of man-sized catfish taking over the river. But no one has ever caught one.

  “Fishing. We’re doing it wrong,” Renee giggles as we drift down the river.

  A dark shape swims beneath my inner tube. I glimpse a dark eye, green-speckled skin, and a flash of whisker before it’s gone.

  I settle back into my inner tube and gaze up at the sky.

  “I think I’m doing it right.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MANY THANKS TO ALL THOSE who diligently read, edited, and helped me bring this book into form: Marcella Burnard, Kelley Grant, Michelle Fox, Double Vision Editorial, and my long-suffering husband. Thanks to Michelle Fox and Michael Lucas for all the business help.

  Thank you to Roxanne Rhoads at Bewitching Book Tours for her ongoing support of my work.

  And many thanks to Danielle Fine at By Definition for a beautiful cover and general awesomeness.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LAURA BICKLE GREW UP IN rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology-Criminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs, also writing contemporary fantasy novels under the name Alayna Williams.

  Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015-2016.

  The latest updates on her work can be found at www.laurabickle.com.

  MORE BY LAURA BICKLE

  The Wildlands Series

  Dark Alchemy

  Mercury Retrograde: A Dark Alchemy Novel

  Nine of Stars: A Wildlands Novel

  W
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  Anya Kalinczyk

  Embers

  Sparks

  The Hallowed Ones

  The Hallowed Ones

  The Outside (The Hallowed Ones Book 2)

  The Oracle Series (Writing as Alayna Williams)

  Dark Oracle

  Rogue Oracle

  Other Books

  The Dragon’s Playlist

  See more at Laura Bickle’s Author Page