Bottom Feeders

by Cesare, Adam

  He heard the beep before he saw where it was coming from. She was typing something into a small flip phone, the kind of cellphone that you saw all over ten years ago, but now only saw when a drug dealer on TV needed a “burner.” Heh, BURNer, Jed thought, a weird hiccup in his throat that sent a pang of heartburn through his chest.

  Gail tossed the blinking stick of dynamite over the desk. It landed on the carpet beside Jed. She was blowing up his baby, the Ole Dixie. She was blowing up him.

  He made one herculean effort to climb to his feet, only to be crippled again by a stabbing pain in his chest. Yes, this was a heart attack, but no, it was not so mercifully severe that he died instantly. He was very much alive as the LED blinked, a digital fuse running down, but no real way of telling when the end would come, and he watched the blinking LED count down the seconds of his life, babbling prayers to a god he did not understand, wishing he'd been someone else, had lived differently, knowing he'd lost out on life.

  *

  Gail was a floor down in the stairwell when the first stick blew. Everything had gone according to plan in Jed's office, except for the added drama of tossing him the stick. That could have mucked up her whole plan if Jed hadn't fallen to the floor like he'd gone catatonic or something. She'd never seen him act that way. All he would have had to do was reach over and pluck the wire from the end of the charge. It wasn’t rocket science.

  The next step of her plan entailed dialing up the rest of the dynamite on the bottom floor of the Ole Dixie. She knew there was almost no chance in hell that she'd get out of this alive. At the very least she was leaving in handcuffs, with the top floor burning above her and the secretary and hooker with enough time to call security. That was fine with Gail. No way in hell was her husband dying while the man who killed him not only walked free, but profited off his death. Her only hope was that she got lucky and took out the monster fish—or whatever it was—that Jed sent Chase to kill, and that Bel forgave her for doing this.

  Fire alarms were resounding throughout the casino, but she encountered no one as she descended the stairs. You took the stairs in the event of a fire, not the elevator.

  Finally, she reached the lowest level of the casino. The carpet squished beneath her feet, damp from water seeping up from the river. There was something already going on beneath the structure. Maybe she was too late. The carpet was swelling, bubbling and tearing in some areas, geysers of river-water forming at the intersection of the foundation.

  She jogged among the rows of blinking slot machines to the center of the empty casino floor. Everyone was gone. Good. She had no way of knowing whether Jed had skimped on construction or not, so the dynamite was a serious gamble, but what other options were there? Playing underwater diver had gotten Chase and Lucinda nowhere. Fuck it. She'd already blown Jed Wilkes to shit. Now to finish the job...

  She began to dial the final number.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her vision was dim, but still she could see that they were beautiful. Semi-translucent and luminescent and all bore small soft whiskers like their mother. The Mother.

  The first of them hatched with the first light of morning. The rest followed throughout the day, ten at a time at their highest rate of frequency.

  Although Mother felt the strong, primal urge to suck them into her mouth by the bunch to fill the empty, ravenous pit in her stomach, she refrained. She would not eat these children. She would not eat any of her children, whether in or out of the water.

  The first explosion sent a tremor through Mother’s barbels, made the structure above her and her children tremble.

  Good. She could feel the plates begin to separate. Instead of fleeing the vibrations, her children rose and pressed their bodies close to cool, hard mass wanting to get in.

  If she helped them, they could split the building into three pieces and send the rubble into the river. It would make a nice cove for her children, with its empty chambers and small crannies. It would be a reef, the Mother’s nursery.

  Using her bulk, it was no problem for Mother to brush the swarm of her children away from the plates. She pushed, paddled with all her might, and could feel the concrete beginning to give way.

  Her instincts had been correct, but not in a way she would ever understand.

  She took the brunt of the ground floor explosions, the heat searing her scales, the rubble becoming shrapnel.

  Mother reached out to her children with her final breath.

  All of her children.

  Epilogue

  It took a little bit of luck and a little bit of preternatural skill for the baby to open the gate to the crib.

  There were two latches that needed to be undone so the side of the cage would fall away, and it had to be done quietly, so the grandparents could not hear it on the monitor.

  After she’d worked the bassinet open, her trip down the stairs and out the screen door was something like instinct, something like divine intervention.

  In the hours the trip took, the thing that resembled a human child never tired. It collected some scuffs and dirt on its onesie, but it was never picked up and captured by a well-meaning onlooker, never taken into a home. That was not surprising. The city was in chaos. People had their own problems.

  As all this was going on, the explosions that cracked the foundation of the Ole Dixie, the waves lapping onto shore and overtaking the levees, the panic in the streets of New Orleans: baby Bel was crawling toward the banks of the river, ready to join her brothers and sisters as they swam downtown.

  Most of them had already hatched, and they were working their way inland to greet her.

  Read on for a free sample of Gargantuan a deep sea thriller by Alan Spencer

  On the Boardwalk

  Five o'clock on a California summer afternoon, you bet the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk was busy with tourists. The boardwalk bustled with citizens enjoying the classic amusement park rides, like the Giant Dipper, Cyclone, Logger's Revenge, and Double Shot. Across from the vintage rides, the beachgoers were trying to catch what was left of today's sunshine.

  What they would also catch was death.

  Surging from the Pacific Ocean, the two-ton creature displaced enough water to cause a rolling tsunami wave to smash into the boardwalk. Rides were shattered into high-flying tatters by the force of the enormous wave. Helpless citizens were sucked under the water's wicked power. Those who were far away enough from the shoreline were screaming and running for their life. Barbara Hampton, who had been about to relax on the beach, called the police on her cell phone. Barbara was screaming for the authorities to send help, and send it now.

  What can the police do about this, Barbara thought, even as she heard the dispatcher talking on the other end. Every ounce of gall drained from her body once she saw the beast surface from the ocean. The eye really had to take in the enormity for several seconds before recognition of any kind could be made. This was like no beast she had ever seen before. The thing was spinning like a thrown disc and traveling high up in the air. The chopping sounds were deafening as it kept taking flight. There was only one thing she could compare it to, and that was a giant starfish. The five prongs were made of thick bone and caked in an ancient greenish-black algae. The rest of its mass was a drab gray color. Each prong was slashing through the air, slicing through the tops of skyscrapers, tearing highways into pieces, and colliding into cars and downgrading them into steel pulp.

  Ten city miles were turned inside out in less than fifteen minutes. Flames were breaking out in pockets of the city and spreading in residential and business districts. Fire trucks and emergency response crews struggled to help the citizens in need because most of the roads and highways were in shambles. Emergency crews wouldn't be able to save Barbara. The flying starfish creature flew above her, eclipsing her in its shadow. Before the starfish splashed back into the ocean, Barbara's heart stopped dead in her chest.

  Golden Gate Terror

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa shit! Sorry for the crazy driving, fo
lks. Jesus, did you see that thing? Holy mother of God!"

  Arnold Goodman steered his cab towards the shoulder of the Golden Gate Bridge. The suspension bridge was jolted by the impact of the raging waves below. The other cars also pulled over in unison to the side, right after the giant geyser of water spewed from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Arnold had seen many things in San Francisco he would rather not have seen, but this, this, topped everything in his prior life experience.

  Arnold's patrons, a young couple who couldn't be older than twenty, stared in horror through the window with their eyes bulging from their sockets.

  They won't help me one damn bit, Arnold thought. Wet behind the ears, dry inside the brains. Young kids have no common sense or ability to think critically. Generation dumbasses, that's what they are. The "do everything for me" generation. I guess it's up to me to deal with this mess, as always.

  "Leave it to me, folks," Arnold said with incredible determination, "I'm not taking any chances. Whatever that was, it's not coming near us."

  The cabbie dug under his seat for his .45 revolver.

  "Stay in the cab, folks, I turned off the meter and I'll be right back."

  Arnold thought the young couple was going to piss themselves. Leave it to me, he kept thinking. Leave it to Arnold fucking Goodman to deal with the world's problems. Like always. Like fucking always.

  The geyser of water stopped spewing. The moment that happened, something blasted high up in the sky. Arnold swore it was a government aircraft of some kind. It was thin, aerodynamic, and made of shiny black material. Definitely an aircraft, Arnold thought.

  Figures. This is some kind of government testing ground. I'll not be a part of any cover up. I'll shove this .45 up their bureaucratic assholes, and I'll never stop popping rounds until every last one of 'em are dead. I don't care how many times I have to wipe the shit off my gun. You can't keep me silent. I know what I'm seeing, damn it. Arnold fucking Goodman can't be silenced.

  Arnold realized in the next moment that he was dead wrong about his observations.

  This was no government aircraft.

  The black mass was almost as long as the Golden Gate Bridge itself. It hovered over the bridge waiting. Arnold could hear air hiss through the numerous holes in its body. The hermetic pressure caused the water in the San Francisco Bay to boil.

  Arnold fired four shots at the black mass. He ducked back into his cab when the mass lowered itself closer to the bridge. The bullets got the floating mass's attention, and it was not happy.

  Arnold flipped the meter back on and started driving down the bridge. "I know when it's time to get the hell out of here. My watch says go! Strap your seatbelts on, kiddos!"

  The couple in the back was screaming. Arnold said everything in his customer experience canon to calm them down. Nothing would work. Arnold's heart was running a marathon in his chest. He was almost to the point of losing his cool, too.

  The thing looks just like a giant string ray.

  No damn way.

  The suction sound of air, like a hundred airplanes engines about to take off at once, kept increasing in power. So deafening, Arnold had to stop the car and cover his ears. Every window in the car burst. Glass shattered on the hundreds of vehicles scattered about the bridge.

  Arnold ducked down when the hood and trunk of the cab were wrenched upwards and flung aside by the massive surges of air. Cyclone forces spun vehicles on their wheels. Some vehicles were pitched over the side of the bridge, flung like toy cars. The bridge became a deadly high-speed destruction derby of chaos.

  Right when Arnold shouted, "Hold on, folks!" the top of the car was peeled back like a tin can. Arnold was lifted up so hard that it snapped the seatbelt restraining him. The young couple hadn't worn their seatbelts and were spring-ejected upwards immediately. Arnold did four upside down, right side up spins. Massive numbers of people were hovering in the air after being forcibly removed from their vehicles.

  Arnold craned his neck as he was suctioned towards the string ray's body. Black sleek skin covered its underbelly, as did thousands of mouths with lips the texture of black licorice. Arnold was sucked head first into one of the champing maws and devoured alive.

  Blood rained down upon the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Gargantuan is available from Amazon here