Mudcat

by John Quick

  “Pull on three,” Chet said. Mitch winced at the smell of stale beer that wafted over his nose from the man’s proximity. “One, two, three!”

  They pulled in unison, yet instead of dragging the beast back toward the boat, the boat sliced neatly through the water, dragged by whatever it was he’d caught. Mitch risked a look over and saw his own bafflement mirrored on Chet’s face.

  “You sure it’s not a tree limb or something?” Chet asked.

  “It’s moving,” Mitch replied. “You seen many tree limbs do that?”

  “No need to be a smart-ass about it. Let’s try again. Ready?”

  Mitch nodded, and the two of them reared back on the line once more. This time when they felt the resistance, they didn’t let up but kept the pressure on. The line snapped at the same time as the rod, the faint pop overshadowed by the massive cracking sound the fiberglass made as it broke clean in two. Mitch watched as the end of the rod tumbled into the water and began to float away, then looked dumbly to the fractured remains he still held in his hands.

  “Huh,” he said, unable to think of anything more profound. “That’s different.”

  “No shit,” Chet said, picking himself up off the cooler where he’d fallen after the rod’s breakage had thrown him backward. “That was hundred pound test line, and the rod was brand-freaking-new!”

  “Huh,” Mitch repeated, still unable to come up with anything better.

  His eyes narrowed as he saw ripples making their way toward the boat. He could just make out the shadow of something beneath the water, racing toward them. He opened his mouth to point it out to Chet, but he was a hair too late.

  The thing slammed into the side of the boat, knocking it up and out of the water before passing beneath it with a rumbling sound that was unlike anything Mitch had ever heard before. The thing must have passed through to the other side, because the boat suddenly slammed back into the water hard enough to send small waves splashing up over the sides and into the floor. Mitch was still mostly seated, and so was able to hang on with relative ease, but Chet was half-drunk and already off-balance to boot; he went over the side and into the lake with a splash rivaling that of the boat landing again.

  Mitch quickly shifted on his seat, already holding out a hand for Chet when he finally broke the surface again. He watched and waited, but after a good two minutes, his boss was still beneath the water. Maybe he’d hit his head on the way under and been knocked out or something; Mitch didn’t know, but he could feel panic starting at the prospect of his boss drowning because of a damn fish.

  Just as he was about to call out, he noticed something dark drifting to the surface, spreading across the water like an oil slick. At first that was exactly what he thought it was, then he noticed there was a reddish tinge to the water and knew that couldn’t be it. He saw a hand coming up as well, and reached for it, grabbing on and trying to haul Chet back in before he ended up sucking down half the lake out of desperation. When the hand came up attached to nothing more than the ragged stump of a forearm, Mitch suddenly understood what that strange discoloration was, and knew there was no point in trying to save his boss’s life anymore.

  It was blood. Chet was dead, and whatever the hell it was that hit the boat killed him.

  Mitch was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He dropped the hand at once and immediately grabbed the oars tucked in alongside the coolers. He situated them as best as he could, as fast as he could, and started rowing madly, his eyes never leaving the shoreline in the distance. While he’d never played football in high school, he still knew how long the field was, and figured he had about that far to go before he would be able to consider himself safe.

  He made it less than a third of the way there when something slammed into the boat again, this time knocking it sideways. He held on for dear life, dropping one of the oars in the process but somehow managing to stay in the boat and out of the water. The other oar was knocked from his hand when the boat slammed back down level again. He grabbed for it madly, but still managed to miss it. He felt a low whimper escape him as he watched it float away, quickly moving out of his range.

  Mitch gave serious consideration to trying to just use his hands, and then the boat rocked and something flopped into the spot where Chet had been sitting not that long ago. Mitch stared at it, amazed, trying to figure out exactly what it was he was looking at. The face was obviously that of a catfish, with wide, thick lips and a pair of long tentacle-like barbs on either side that gave the creature its name, but that was where the similarities ended. Every catfish he’d ever seen had a simple hard ridge on the inside of their mouth that acted as teeth, but this one had individual ones that looked extremely sharp. The eyes were still heavy-lidded, but there was an intelligence burning in them that he would never attribute to any kind of fish, much less one as reputedly stupid as a catfish. Worse, those eyes seemed to be staring at him, marking him somehow.

  Then, impossibly, the thing’s lips twitched, giving Mitch the distinct impression it was trying to smile.

  “Naaah tick eee,” the thing hissed at him, but that was impossible. Fish couldn’t speak. Could they?

  “Naaah nicesssssss.”

  The thing slid backward, disappearing back into the water again. Mitch dove forward, searching for it, wondering not only what the hell it was, but where the hell it could have gone. When he heard the massive splash behind him, and felt the crushing weight land on his back, he knew. He managed what he thought was a fairly respectable scream, and then he became engulfed in darkness an instant before those razor-sharp teeth snapped closed, neatly snipping his head from his body, and then he ceased to care at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rob maneuvered his Blazer down the tight service road, wincing as the front tires slammed into a pothole filled with water. It seemed like it had done this every few feet, and he still wasn’t used to it yet. He finally pulled to a stop behind an ambulance parked along the edge of the gravel road. Just beyond it, he could see Andy’s patrol car. Both had their emergency lights flashing, casting the surrounding woods in a strange alternating glow of orange, blue, and red. With the way the sky had begun to darken once again, it made the scene look distinctly ominous. He supposed that was appropriate, if what Andy’s panicked call said was true.

  He got out, leaving the engine running and his own lights flashing, and pulled on the raincoat he’d remembered to grab from the locker room before heading out here. He glanced over when he heard some strange noise, and was a little surprised to see Brandy Hart, one of the town’s two paramedics, emptying the contents of her stomach into the bushes. He moved past her as quietly as possible, trying to give her as much privacy as he could.

  Once he stepped into the little clearing that led down to the lake’s edge, Andy came running up from where he’d apparently been discussing the situation with Tom Randolph, the town’s other paramedic, and the closest thing they had to a medical examiner without calling the county coroner. While he waited for Andy to catch up to him, Rob looked over at the Dodge Charger and the Public Works truck parked in front of the patrol car, and wondered exactly what he’d managed to get himself into by letting the chief go on vacation this week.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Andy said, stopping in front of him and breathing heavy. He hadn’t really exerted himself on the jog up from the lake, and Rob could see just how close to outright hysteria the man was. “This is way out of my depth, here.”

  “What’ve we got?” Rob asked, focusing on Andy and trying to adopt the authoritative tone the chief used whenever he was in a situation he wasn’t sure how to deal with.

  “Two bodies,” Andy said, pointing back toward the lake. “We think one’s male and one’s female, but….”

  The way he’d phrased that made Rob’s blood run cold. “What do you mean, ‘you think’?”

  Andy shook his head, his own complexion taking on a decidedly green shade that matched Brandy’s. “Well, boss, they’ve been… chewed on.”


  “Chewed on.”

  “Aw, hell,” Andy said, glancing back to where Tom stood waiting for Brandy to finish being sick and come help him. “It looks like something ate parts of them.”

  “After they died, you mean,” Rob said, not liking the direction this was going in the slightest. “They died, and then something started eating them.”

  Andy just stared at him, which was all the answer he needed. For the first time, Rob allowed his gaze to fall on the two forms lying prone in the muddy clearing. The one closest to the lake appeared to be mostly intact, except for a red smear where the face should’ve been. He could just make out the gentle rise of a breast, and while it was filthy and caked with mud, the hair looked to have been blonde at one time. He would probably need dental records to be sure, but he was fairly certain that was Annie Fordham. How he was ever going to break the news to her father, he had no idea.

  As bad as Annie’s body appeared to be, it was the one lying about halfway between the gravel road and the lake that really made him glad he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, for fear he’d end up puking into the bushes right alongside Brandy. It was roughly human-shaped, but it was in two pieces to start with, and was missing the head and part of the shoulders. The clothing that draped it was shredded to hell and covered in blood, but Rob thought it looked quite similar to the uniforms worn by the town’s Public Works employees. With no head and a demolished uniform, he’d probably have to check in with Boyd over there and see who’d been out this way today in order to even guess at an ID on that one.

  He looked back to the truck, thankful for the opportunity to look away from the carnage that was awaiting his further inspection. The number fifteen was painted in black just behind the cab. That would make it easier, at least. He could just verify with Boyd who was driving that particular truck today.

  Then he remembered the Charger parked in front of the truck, and turned back to Andy again.

  “Two bodies, you said. Not three?”

  “Just the two,” Andy confirmed. “There’s some clothes scattered around, men’s and women’s both, but the only one we found naked was the one we think’s female.”

  “Annie Fordham,” Rob said, hoping that by saying it aloud it would make it easier to deal with. It didn’t. “I’d bet money on it. And that’s Brandon Snyder’s car, but he’s not here, is he?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Andy said. “Surely you’re not thinking he did this, are you?”

  Rob shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m thinking just yet. All I know is that he’s the only one I can tell should be here but isn’t.”

  “Then he’s probably dead, too,” Andy said. “Boss, you’re not understanding me, here. These people were eaten. According to Tom, the one missing his head looks like it was bitten off. Now, Snyder’s not exactly the world’s most upstanding citizen, but even he’s not capable of anything like this.”

  A part of Rob wanted to point out that people most likely said the same thing about Jeffrey Dahmer back in the day, but he kept his mouth shut. For one thing, he tended to agree with Andy’s assumption that Snyder was incapable of doing something like this. If nothing else, the dead man torn in half was larger than Snyder, and would’ve most likely been able to hold his own in a fight. And he didn’t know of anyone who had the strength to rip a man in half and literally chew his head off.

  “Where is he, then?” Rob asked, putting voice to one of the many questions running through his head. “He’s not here, so where did he go?”

  Andy shrugged. “In the lake, maybe? The girl, I mean Annie, I suppose, was lying right at the edge of the water when I got here, so maybe he was all the way out there. With the way it’s been raining all day, the undercurrents could’ve dragged him anywhere. For all we know, he’s halfway down one of the rivers by now.”

  Rob nodded and forced himself to look back over at the victims lying in the mud. “Any idea what kind of animal could’ve done that to them?”

  Andy barked out a humorless laugh. “You kidding me, boss? Only things running around out here even big enough to try might be some coyotes. I suppose it’s possible a bear or something found its way out here, or a cougar maybe, but those are some long odds either way. Besides, I have never seen bite marks like the ones on that Public Works guy, and Tom says he hasn’t either. Much as I hate to admit it, neither of us has any idea what kind of beast could’ve done this.”

  It was the answer Rob expected, although he’d been hoping for something more helpful. And as much as he would prefer otherwise, it fell to him to figure out some way of dealing with the situation; not just the removal of the bodies, but of finding and stopping whatever had gotten to them as well.

  “You got your camera in the car?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Andy said, his face paling at the implication.

  “Go get it,” Rob told him. “Take pictures of everything from every angle you can think of. The bodies, the damage done to them, where they were found, the clothes laying around, even the car and Public Works truck up there. Once that’s done, provided Brandy’s done losing her lunch, you oversee her and Tom getting them bagged up and loaded into the ambulance. Tell Tom I want some theories as to what did this as soon as he can possibly get them.”

  Andy nodded, swallowing hard. “What’re you going to do in the meantime?”

  “I’m going to radio in to Charlene,” Rob said. “Tell her to start putting together a list of folks for a hunting party to go searching for this thing later tonight. I know it’s going to be rough with the rain, but there’s houses not that far from here. I’d hate for whatever it was to get somebody there if we have a chance of preventing that.”

  “You got it boss,” Andy said before taking off for his patrol car at a jog again.

  Rob sighed, took his hat off, and ran a hand over his damp hair. He’d been hoping for years to get his chance to sit in the chief’s chair, and now that it was finally here, he was starting to want to give it up again. That chance was gone, though, so all he could do was muddle through the best he could and hope that things didn’t get any worse before he could sort them out.

  As he took his first step back toward his Blazer, lightning crackled across the sky in a terrifying pattern, then thunder shook the ground. Immediately on the heels of that, the clouds opened back up, dumping rain as hard as it had been earlier in the day back down on top of him. Rob glanced over the lake and saw nothing but dark clouds as far as the eye could see. Remembering what he’d heard on the weather report as he drove out here, it looked like their brief respite was over; now they were in it for the long haul.

  He glanced upward beneath the brim of his hat, and prayed that God might give him just a little bit of a lucky break instead of continuing to piss on him the whole two weeks he was running the force.

  CHAPTER TEN

  As the afternoon dragged on toward evening, the little town of Ashford Fork—along with every other city and town for a couple hundred miles south—experienced the full force of that storm the hurricane drove ahead of it. Weathermen and reporters were stunned by the ferocity even though they’d been warning people about it for close to a week now. They knew it would be bad, but the sheer amount of rain that fell was still mind-boggling. Some initial reports showed anywhere between four and eight inches falling per hour, which shattered records all across the state. After a second hour in which the rain didn’t let up, but rather seemed to intensify, the warnings went out to beware of extensive flooding. If you lived in low-lying areas, you were urged to find your way to higher ground, and fast.

  Ashford Fork was not only situated between two rivers, with a lake dominating another side, but it also was at the bottom of a depression where several rolling hills converged. Some of the old-timers in town complained about how idiotic it was to construct a town in such a place, but since it was originally established as a line of support for the government research center on the opposite side of town from the lake, those same old-timers ch
alked it up to government incompetence and let it go. Still, many of them—especially those who lived on the outskirts even before the research facility had been built in the fifties—lived in constant fear that one day mother nature would give Ashford Fork a big “fuck you” and wash the town away.

  Now, it was looking like that was exactly what was going to happen.

  Those closest to the lake got it the worst, as they were in the lowest area in town. If it was just the rain it might have been tolerable, but adding in the wind and falling tree branches, and it didn’t take long for a dozen homes to find themselves without power at the same time Carrie did. By dinner time, that dozen had become nearly a hundred. People trying to rush home created even more havoc as the water covering the roads turned traction into wishful thinking, resulting in no fewer than ten accidents along the major roads through town. Many of these accidents took out even more power lines, leaving almost the entire town in the dark.

  The lake overflowed first, creeping up the banks at an alarming rate. Nature tried to compensate by pushing the excess through the twin rivers, but soon they also became swollen and overflowed their banks as well. By nine o’clock that night, as Rob sat in the police station calling and failing to find volunteers for his hunting party, waiting with nervous anticipation for some word back from Ted about what killed those two at the lake, the bridges that were the only means of ingress and egress from Ashford Fork began to feel the strain of all that added water.

  The northern bridge went first, steel bending with a creak that could be heard for a mile in either direction before finally snapping in two and sending nearly the entire thing tumbling into the river. Since everyone was staying in on account of the rain, at least no one was caught on it.

  When the southern bridge went, though, there was someone rapidly trying to get across it, hoping to make it to her mother’s house fifteen minutes away. Brandy had seen all she cared to when she went with Tom to answer that call at the lake, so getting out of town seemed the most prudent thing for her to do, to hell with her duties as an EMT. She hadn’t really wanted the job anyway, was trying to save up so she could go to nursing school, and figured that when people started getting eaten alive it was a sure sign that she needed to get on with that.