Bottom Feeders

by Cesare, Adam

  He put his facemask atop his head but didn’t pull it down, then helped Lucinda with her own tank.

  Before he slipped on his gloves, he worked open the cases that held their new spear guns, the latches too delicate to be worked with shark-resistant mail.

  Jed had bought them two of everything, but he didn’t buy them the poison Chase dosed the tips of his spears with. Using a Dremel, Chase bore a tiny hole at the end of each point, filled it, then covered the hole with a thin layer of wax so the poison wouldn’t escape until an impact broke the seal.

  Lucinda didn’t know about this and her spears weren’t poisoned.

  The work and a guilty conscience had kept him from sleeping the night before, but it was the right decision. However much he loved her, knew that she had skills, he couldn’t trust Lucinda with something so dangerous, especially if he was leading them into the water.

  It was the same way Jed had balked when Chase asked if they could use dynamite to solve his “big fish” problem. You didn’t give a toddler a rattlesnake as a pet, and you didn’t give a girl with an itchy trigger finger enough poison to take down a white rhino.

  “We stay close, not close enough that I’m flippering you in the face, but close enough that you can see me at all times. Understood?” Chase rarely took this tone with Lucinda, even when she was getting a lesson, but she needed a firm hand now.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, only the tiniest ring of sarcasm in her voice, which Chase took as a real coup. That was good. She was taking this as seriously as was possible for her.

  “Good. Be careful,” he said, the last words he would say to her before blocking up his mouth with his regulator and pulling his goggles down over his eyes. There was no more that needed to be said.

  After taking extra care in slinging his spear gun over his shoulder, but trying not to look like he was hiding anything, Chase picked up his scooter in both hands and let himself fall backwards over the side of the boat.

  His first thought, before even turning the right way around in the water, was: Shit. This isn’t going to work.

  Even close to the surface and looking up at the sun, his facemask was a brown amber blur. Visibility was so bad that he couldn’t even make out the lip of the boat. There could be no turning back now though, so he flipped over, started up his sea-scooter, and held on as it pulled him toward the floating casino. Even with the headlight on his scooter, he hoped he didn’t misjudge his speed and slam into concrete and steel. It was that hard to see, the current that disorienting.

  Behind him, dampened by the water and the hum of his machine, he heard a splash. Lucinda had joined him in the water. A moment later her own headlight carved a sliver of clarity out of the brown water. It would be okay, the lights were brighter than he’d anticipated. They would be able to see enough, once they got down under the building where the waves weren’t churning up the silt.

  Reaching the black hull of the casino, Chase exhaled through his regulator, flashed his light at Lucinda, and then pointed his scooter down into the darkness.

  He let the gentle propulsion and the weight of his kit take him down.

  *

  Lucinda had heard that old diver cliché: that diving felt like being in outer space. That it was the closest any non-cosmonauts were ever going to get to touching the void. But she didn’t believe it.

  She’d never been diving, but she’d been to the deep end of the pool and had even done some night swimming in the Gulf. None of that had ever tricked her into thinking she was John Glenn.

  Those divers, snobby and douche-baggy as it sounded, had been right. There was something about the equipment, the way the wetsuit sucked against her as she kicked out with her flippers, the second-lung sounds of the high and low intake hoses. It felt otherworldly.

  But it wasn’t only that. Instead of feeling protected by the weights, the heavy mesh gloves, her superhuman ability to breathe underwater, the sensation that accompanied diving was one of vulnerability. As they entered the shadow of the casino, the murk around them became easier to cut through with their lights, but the darkness blanketing them became more absolute. Lucinda felt like she was being squeezed, constricted by an unseen snake.

  And then it got worse, because she remembered the sound of the apocalyptic belly flop the giant catfish had made as it landed back in the water after eating its high priest. Why had she been so anxious to get out here?

  Through the cloudy water, she watched the bottoms of Chase’s feet and suddenly wanted to be closer to him. She revved the handheld engine. From her left side, where the facemask had made peripheral vision impossible, there was a flash of movement. Her hands involuntarily tensed and the scooter bucked in her grip, almost breaking free because she’d yanked the accelerator so hard.

  It was only a fish, no bigger than her forearm. The small needle-nosed gar seemed to regard her with one wary eye before darting away into the gloom.

  Running her tongue over the mouthpiece, she realized she must have bitten on the rubber of the regulator hard enough to hurt her gums, maybe even to have loosened a tooth. She took a mental note to do some gar fishing next week to get some payback.

  Chase slowed and turned, pointing his light at her. She reduced speed and waved to him. He pointed to a shape in the distance. With the water, at this distance the long thick rope of metal resembled a Grecian column, shrouded in mist. As big around as a tree trunk, the structure was one of the casino’s anchors. Lucinda gave Chase a thumbs up, unsure what she was supposed to be seeing or doing with the massive cable.

  They swam to the tether. If the construction weren’t so new, if Jed Wilkes hadn’t spared no expense, then the absurdly thick cable would have been a simple chain. A chain of tightly linked cast iron would have worked just as well to moor the casino, but it wouldn’t have had the sleek, space-age feel of the cable. It was like they really were in outer space, investigating an alien space ship.

  Now closer, and with both their beams on it, Lucinda could see what Chase was after.

  There were five of the spheres, all stuck to the back side of the cable and obscured from their view as they rode up. They were a little under a foot in diameter, and Lucinda couldn’t stop herself from wanting to touch one, just to test how hard or soft it was.

  The growths were fish eggs, roe. They were pale yellow and each the size a basketball.

  Lucinda pushed one finger into the closest egg. She then switched to two, worried she might pop the thing like a giant whitehead. Fixed there like a giant mushroom clinging to the bark of a tree, she’d begun to pry it off when Chase grabbed her wrist. She looked to him and he pointed his idling scooter straight up so that its headlight bounced against the obsidian shell of the casino’s base.

  Only it wasn’t black, not purely. The hull was pocked with similar yellow, vaguely bioluminescent growths far too large to be barnacles. They glimmered as Chase directed his beam over the bottom of the floating casino.

  Oh you preggo bitch, Lucinda was able to think before the massive shadow passed between the building and Chase’s beam.

  *

  She’s here! She’s here and she’s reproducing!

  Chase wanted to scream it out, regulator be damned. He would empty his lungs to the words, part of him preferring to let himself be drowned than to keep holding in the sheer terror of it.

  He’d spearfished in the Pacific, out in the forests of seaweed where it was impossible to tell the sharks from the playful sea lions until they were five inches in front of your mask, playing a pants-messing game of peek-a-boo, but that was nothing compared to the panic he felt now.

  No. It was no time for terror. If the catfish, the Mother, was passing that close to them, within fifty yards, then she already knew they were there. And if she knew that, she was probably on the hunt. With any other fish—a shark that wasn’t smelling blood in the water or a barracuda that needed the iridescence of scales to get a good picture of its prey—they would have been able to go undetected.

  B
ut those barbels: the whiskers that made a catfish a cat, those massive antennae would have picked up their boat the second they’d hit the water, a mile away. Catfish, with their tiny eyes and massive frames, were not elegant hunters, but their bat-like echolocation helped to make up for their lack of large teeth or aerodynamic fins. Even if they missed prey with the first few gulps, they would catch it eventually. There was no hiding.

  While he was stuck ruminating on it and how fucked they were, Lucinda was doing the right thing. She had her speargun off her back and up in front of her, the silver spur at the end gleaming in her own light.

  Before he could motion for her not to, she squeezed the trigger and fired upward, the massive shape of the Mother already moving into the darkness, obscured by distance and sediment. The spear moved like a laser beam, leaving a few tiny bubbles in its path, but otherwise gone without a trace, no way of telling if the hit connected.

  “Go!” Chase heard himself screaming, the sweet, dirty water of the Mississippi filling his mouth from where he’d broken the seal around the regulator. She looked over at him, and he pointed to her scooter.

  He wanted to tell her so much more than just to go.

  He wanted to tell her that it was time to run, not to fight. That they needed to warn Jed. No, fuck that, not just Jed: they needed to warn the city, the world. About the Mother. About the eggs.

  He wanted to tell her that her shots wouldn’t do any good anyway. That Mother was too big. That she didn’t have any poison.

  He wanted to tell Lucinda that he loved her more than he loved Bel. That he didn’t want to love her more than his own blood but that it was true. That she was the perfect daughter. That he was ashamed. Bel’s scales and webbed fingers disgusted and confused him. That he had been a bad teacher.

  But he didn’t get to say any of that.

  *

  Chase swatted at her hand as she tried to work another spear into the chamber. He’d hit her so hard that she’d almost dropped the gun. She understood what he wanted, that he wanted her to flee, but she didn’t want to listen to him just yet.

  They had a moment to work, the fish had been moving away from them.

  Away to where?

  Her eyes scanned the area, finding very few landmarks except for the cable at her back, the casino above them, and the darkness everywhere else. Lucinda’s head whipped back and forth. Just because the fish had been above them one moment didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to sink low and try to come up below them. She hoped it would. Its broad face would make a nice target.

  Beside her, Chase revved his scooter to get her attention. She didn’t look, but instead kept her eyes and her light making small circles at her feet, sure that she was going to see that big whiskered mouth open at any moment. Unless she hit it directly in the brain, she wasn’t killing it with a single spear, maybe not with ten, but she hoped the bite of the harpoon would deter it from attacking.

  Then Chase grabbed her, shook her with both his hands. She looked, and saw that he had his scooter wedged between his knees. Behind the plastic of his mask, his eyes were pleading, the light of his scooter coming up under his chin like he were about to tell a campfire story. He so badly wanted them to flee together, and in a terrible instant, Lucinda realized that her teacher had never steered her wrong before.

  But it was too late. She felt the suck against her wetsuit and a sharp change in pressure before she saw any of the pull’s effects.

  Almost too fast to see, Chase was sucked backwards in the water. If Lucinda hadn’t had her back braced against the thick cable, she would have been pulled along with him. Chase’s scooter fell from between his knees and the light pinwheeled, catching the glint of his speargun as it sunk to the bottom of the river, its point down.

  There was stillness as she poked her head around the cable, looking beyond two yellow eggs. There the monster was, and there, in between the fish’s large, barely parted lips, was Chase.

  He’d been snagged in the catfish’s teeth, the rows of small needles set a good three or four feet back from the edge of the mouth. Catfish didn’t chew as much as they trapped and pulverized. She’d seen smaller catfish do the same thing in aquariums, in YouTube videos. There was always a moment when it seemed like the doomed prey would be able to swim away, trapped behind the lips in the moments after it had been sucked into the maw. But that was only because you could see the fish’s face, its mouth opening and gills fanned out, and not beyond where the catfish had crushed its spine.

  Chase looked like that now, his eyes still pleading for her to go, to run, but all the light and warmth gone from them. The expression was still human, but he had a wax figure’s dead eyes.

  She made the decision to escape while she still could, but not before the cloud of blood washed over her, the giant catfish pushing water through its gills and gushing out Chase’s life force with it.

  Lucinda could taste the tang of the blood on her lips. Instead of opening up with her spear, possibly antagonizing the big fish into further action, she honored Chase’s last wish and hit the accelerator on her sea scooter. She kicked against the cable and drove. She hoped she was facing the right direction, not merely to find the boat, but also that the shock hadn’t caused her to lose track of up and down, that she wasn’t propelling herself toward the deep of the riverbed.

  She could see sunlight, though, and even while she could not feel the tears with all the water that had seeped into her mask, she knew that she was sobbing.

  Above her, she could see the boat.

  Her muscles were weak, and instead of hefting the scooter up into the boat with her, she let it drop. Getting one arm over the side, and apparently not yet numb from shock, she allowed herself a further flash of panic. Had Chase taken the keys with him?

  Raising herself up, her eyes finding the key and the large yellow foam key ring that the guy at the dealership had thrown in, the panic subsided. She had escaped.

  Then there was a light tug at her right flipper as she tried to lift her left leg over the side. Then there was a tug further up, a tickle at her wetsuit. And then Lucinda Hero’s left leg was broken backward, the yank swift enough to send the small motor boat rocking, to nearly capsize it.

  Lucinda was dragged into the milky copper water.

  A moment later the blood came.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jezebel Bonnet, Bel for short, was not the most photogenic baby, but she was precocious.

  Even as an infant, she was crawling.

  This was not a case of a mother calling her child a prodigy just because they’d burped out something that sounded like ‘mama’. She was not wiggling against the hard bed of her crib and accidentally making forward progress. No, Bel was crawling with purpose.

  The baby kept whirling her arms and legs, even as Gail raised her up from the crib. Gail’s hands were trembling and weak from crying all night, but still she kept picking up Bel and placing her back under the covers. It took only a moment for Bel to kick off the blankets and crawl back to the bars. Bel wanted to get beyond those bars, wanted to escape.

  Bel moved as if under the pull of a magnet. She moved east, toward the river and her daddy’s final resting place.

  Gail didn’t know how to soothe her; couldn’t even conceptualize soothing herself, no less a one-month-old.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. There was one thing that would make her feel better: revenge. Gail wanted to kill Jed Wilkes, the man who’d ruined her life once and then proceeded to ruin it further, on more occasions and in more ways than she could count.

  Then, like a sign, there was a knock at the door.

  *

  It was early morning when Jonny Niven knocked. He knew that the woman probably hadn’t slept, that she may not even have started truly grieving yet, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He’d been awake, in his truck, since he’d started following her husband and the other woman yesterday. Through binoculars, he’d watched the catfish guide talk with his partner, launch his boat, a
nd then dive and never come back up.

  He knew what was down there. He’d even pretended to worship the monster in an attempt to get close to it, but now he needed help to kill it.

  Jonny wasn’t sure what, but the wife had some sort of connection to the casino owner. Jed Wilkes was an evil man, but it was his ignorance that made him worse than evil, the thought that he could send two divers with spear guns down into the catfish god’s hole, and be done with it. It would take more than that, it would take bigger guns, and it would take access to the casino.

  He had a plan. He only hoped he could convince the wife, now the widow, to help.

  Chapter Thirteen

  This wasn’t the right time to be dealing with this kind of shit. Gail hadn’t slept, didn’t feel up to holding a conversation, no less making life or death decisions.

  Gail stared at the redneck standing on her doorstep. He was dressed in a weird robe and smelled strongly of fish guts. It was odd to miss that smell, but all it did was make her long for her dead husband.

  The redneck’s greasy hair hung around his shoulders. By the time he'd stuttered, "I'm sorry to bother you, ma’am," Gail had already reeled back to slam the door in his face, but then he said, "Is your husband the fishing guy, the one pursuing Mother?" Gail threw the door wide open again.

  "How do you know my husband?" Gail demanded, skipping over whoever this guy’s mother was. Maybe this was her lead, a chance to achieve vengeance for Chase's death.

  "He tried to kill the god I worship. Worshiped. The god I worshiped. That some people I know worshiped,” the young man said, tilting his head like he had water in his ear, then saying finally: “I don't praise her none anymore."