Bottom Feeders by Cesare Adam & Pierce Cameron

Author:Cesare, Adam & Pierce, Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2015-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

ONE YEAR LATER

Chapter Eight

The baby’s gurgles crackled in over the monitor some time past three. Chase scratched his nuts in the dark, laid in a half-dream state listening to his newborn until Gail sat up beside him in bed. “Don’t worry about it, honey,” he said, “I’ll feed her.”

Gail kissed his bare shoulders and nestled up under sheets sticky with their sweat. It had been the hottest summer on record, and aberrant in other regards besides.

Chase took a slug from the warm, half-full tallboy on the nightstand and stumbled out of the bedroom, blind in the darkness. Their daughter, Bel, was three weeks old. Her name was short for Jezebel, something they’d eased off calling her a few weeks after returning from the hospital, and once Gail had taken the time to Google the biblical origins of the name.

Chase had voluntarily cut the number of nights he guided in half to help out with Bel. What he didn’t admit to Gail was that the fishing was worse than Chase had ever seen in his whole life angling along the Mississippi.

After last year’s record hauls, he’d forgotten what it felt like to take cash from people after guiding them to an abundant catch. Lately, jack and shit was all anyone caught on his boat.

He didn’t get it. After sitting on an aluminum boat for eight hours in triple digit heat, no less, people tended to get cranky. That they paid good money for that privilege and brought home nothing to show for it, well, let’s just say some of them shared some harsh words with Chase, as if he could somehow control the fish; as if he was a catfish god himself. But he’d come face to face with one of those, and he was nothing like the thing had been.

The summer had been demoralizing, so he’d cut his trips back, taking out just enough suckers to pay the bills and keep Bel stocked in Gerber formula, himself in beer.

As he cradled Bel and held the bottle for her to suckle, he thought back on the previous summer. All those glorious days and nights of catching big cats. Beyond that, he recounted the day they’d discovered the biggest one, the one he’d come to refer to as the queen of the catfish, Lucinda merely as “the one that got away.”

Standing there, his baby spitting and cooing against his bare chest, he also thought about that weird cult, how they had scattered into the marshland after the queen ate their leader. Because he’d been looking, keeping an eye on the local newspapers, Chase knew that there was a spate of disappearances that had cropped up all along the Mississippi over the last year, but nobody ever connected them to reports of a giant catfish.

How was that possible? How had nobody else seen it, caught it, twelve months later? Was the creature the reason the lines were coming back empty? Had the “mother” cannibalized the entire catfish population?

Mostly because she’d tagged the queen as their catch, Chase had made a pact with Lucinda to never speak of it to anyone else.

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