Author: Adam Cesare; Cameron Pierce
Date: 2015-01-16 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: The Mississippi River is notorious for holding catfish pushing triple digit weights, flesh-eating alligator gar over two-hundred pounds, water moccasins, alligators, and even bull sharks. Top to bottom, it’s a river teeming with top-tier predators. But there’s something else in the water, something far more ancient and evil, something that has been dormant for thousands of years. Now, as Jed Wilkes, a New Orleans casino baron, prepares for the grand opening of his greatest endeavor yet—a floating casino on the Mississippi—these primordial river monsters are just waking up. Faced with losing hi
Publisher: SEVERED Press

BOTTOM FEEDERS

Adam Cesare and Cameron Pierce

Copyright 2015 by Adam Cesare and Cameron Pierce

Prologue

Em thrust out his hand, fingers parted, waving them slightly like he was preparing to conduct a symphony or play with the strings of a marionette.

The water was warm here, warmer than he'd have guessed, considering it was pretty deep; up to his shoulders as he sunk low on his knees. There was a huge drop-off in front of him as he walked along the bottom to the center of the bend. He turned his back to it and felt for his hole with his bare feet.

Winona watched him from the shore, occasionally glancing down at the shallow water by her feet to sneer at a crawfish, waterbug, or some other thing that did not perfectly align with her view of the beauty of nature.

She was prissy, but she was fine. Real fine. Fine enough that looking at her—the thin mesh of her tank top just waiting for a light spritz of water to fully reveal its bounty—it was easy to forget that being seen out with her could get Em killed.

Winona was someone's sister. Not Emmett's. Incest was the one hillbilly stereotype he had not bought into yet. But she was someone's. Someone who liked getting in fights, putting fellas in traction for far less than taking his sister out and trying to fuck her.

"What you doing now?" she asked, trying to sound interested in the process, but the words coming out more full of disgust than anything else. She was not the outdoors type, even though this spot in the channel was a fifteen-minute walk into the trees, a forest that backed up right to her house. Close enough that the Spanish moss touched the chimney.

"I found my hole," Em said, trying to avoid insinuating anything, even though: sure, he'd found his hole alright. "And now I've got my forearm stuck in it, but it's kicked up dirt and I've got to let everything settle down. I'm trying to keep the rest of my body completely still while I wiggle my fingers just a bit."

"Why you whispering? Do they got ears?" she yelled, and Em imagining the sound waves of her voice bouncing along the surface of the canal, echoing down unto the bottoms, causing a hundred pairs of whiskers to prick up, recede deeper into their hiding spots.

“Hush! You’ll scare them away,” he hissed, then wished he hadn’t. This trip was meant for showing off his talents, his muscles and nerve, so that he could get a little more noodling than just the fishing, but the date wouldn’t go anywhere if he kept yelling at her.

“Supposed to be closer the bank, that’s where the holes are,” she said, her grumbling trailing off. Leaning against a tree, Winona looking sexier sullen than she did happy. She was sexy, but wrong. The bank was where the visible holes were, where the fish were most plentiful, and where you had the best chance of catching something with a rod. But Em wasn’t using a rod, he was using his hand, and he wasn’t after any pet cat, any throwback material. He wanted to catch a monster and was willing to put his veins, arteries, and fingertips on the line to do so.

It would have been cool for Emmett to have been able to say that noodling was a family tradition, handed down to him from his father, and his father before that, but in reality he hadn’t known about the practice until he’d seen it on the Discovery Channel.

The most famous noodlers were all from Oklahoma, but not because you couldn’t catch fish here in Louisiana, only that there were more things in the ponds and rivers that could take a bite out of you. Of those, only gators worried Emmett.

Some noodlers wore gardening gloves to protect their fingers from a cat’s small but sharp teeth, but Em didn’t like the loss of sensation.

Gloves made it harder to feel the gush of water that immediately preceded a cat leaving its burrow, getting ready to take the bait. If Em couldn’t feel it coming, he had no time to prepare himself, and thus figured that the risk was worth it. Despite what the Discovery Channel tried to tell its viewers, digit-threatening injuries were pretty rare. Em was more likely to get his foot snagged on some submerged debris and drown.

This part, the waiting with his forearm sunk down in a hole, was a constant source of anxiety, both the good and bad kind.

On the one hand he had to try to remain still, regulate his breathing, and keep his fingers ebbing and flowing, visualizing them as a copse of worms, undulating at the bottom of the shallow estuary. If he was successful, he could enter a kind of Zen meditation, and slow his heart rate until it seemed like it would stop.

Then there was the dread he felt, fought against. It was the dread of the darkness, of the uncanny. The same way his attempts at relaxation felt archaic, metaphysical, so did the fear. The terror he felt trying to shake hands with the unknown, was primordial. It was a trick that the human mind had learned so long ago that it was impossible to override or unlearn.

This deep, so close to where he couldn’t stand with the drop-off at his back, it was exceedingly rare that this hole would be home to anything other than a catfish. Water snakes wouldn’t come down this deep, and this far inland there were no crabs big enough to pinch him badly.

But those were facts, knowledge that he had arrived at rationally. The fear wasn’t rational. It was the same fear that had you crack the refrigerator door open for some light when you came into the kitchen for a drink of water late at night, even though you know you’re alone. The fear that said: don’t put your hand in there, it’s dark and mossy and evil.

He looked to the shore, toward Winona, his cheek touching the brown water as he turned his head. He’d have to remember to scrub his beard later, lest he wanted to be picking out mudballs tonight.

She’d gone quiet, but was still watching the water around him, eyes peeled for the familiar serpentine ripples of a gator tail. He was safe, safer than normal when he was his own spotter.

There was the gush below him, and he had about a second and a half to point his fingers into a spear, get them all together before the impact of…

Teeth. A thick jaw speckled with thousands of them, each one tiny, like stubble, but razor-sharp as they latched onto his forearm a few inches from his elbow.

Unlike regular fishing, the bigger a catfish was, the easier it was to hook, if not land. This bastard was big enough, and Emmett hooked three fingers into its gills, the fish flailing as he did, more distressed. Yeah, Emmett probably wouldn’t like someone finger banging his lungs either.

On shore, Winona snapped to life with a gasp that could have ended in a scream, but instead turned into “Jesus, do you need help?”

“I got it,” Emmett yelled as a long, sharp barbel poked him in the chest. The prod reminded him of the way Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died, a freak accident, a tiny hole in his heart from an otherwise harmless animal. Em hooked his free arm under the beast, feeling the strain of the fish’s midsection where its body met its tail, then pushed out with both feet, jumping closer to shore, hoping to clear himself to shallower water where he could lift the cat out of the water, get the barbels from stabbing him, and stand at the same time.

Em’s muscles flexed. Blood dripped down his forearm as he tried to picture himself in the third person, watch himself from Winona’s perspective to see how cool he looked. What a man.

He took another step, the fish’s tail fighting against him, pushing him back like walking against a windstorm, and then he extended his knees so the tail broke the water.

The tail jumped sideways and slapped him in the face, clouding his vision, the individual ropes of its scales leaving whip marks of pain across his cheek like a cat o’ nine tails.

Emmett was getting cocky, letting the presence of Winona—and her double-tented tank top—kill his concentration.

The animal had clocked him, drawn blood, and was trying its best to drown him and get back into the water, but Em couldn’t be mad at it. The fish was close to fifty pounds of pure beauty. Not beauty like Winona’s, soft and feminine, but instead the catfish held an allure similar to a classic car. Its curves were not pounded out at the Chevy plant, but instead had trickled down through the evolutionary ladder, had been granted time and space to grow in this secluded offshoot of an offshoot of the Mississippi.

Emmett had mad respect for the creature, but that didn’t mean he was going to let it go. He reminded himself that he would be eating both it and Winona tonight if he could land it, and redoubled his efforts.

Em pinched his eyes shut against the splashing water and strained. He lifted with his shoulders and back until suddenly, with surprising swiftness, the water below him was no longer an obstacle, until it seemed to recede. He kept his arms out, his forearm all chewed up, the wound a combination of rug burn and pinpricks.

He opened his eyes again to see that Winona was not much closer than she had been, and was standing on the shore, her mouth agape. She was no longer looking at Em, but beyond him.

It wasn’t his imagination. He looked down to see that he was only standing in water up to his ankles, where it had been previously soaking his waist.

The water’s gone? he thought, watching the blood from his arm dribble down the chin and belly of the catfish, the creature calmer now out of the water.

Then the wave knocked him forward, surging like the surf of the Atlantic Ocean rather than a minor tributary of the Mississippi.

He landed on the fish, able to keep his forearm inside, one of the barbels catching him in the meat of the bicep, pushing all the way in like an oversized needle. The fish kicked under his weight, probably far more injured than Emmett was.

“Get out!” Winona screamed, and Em turned over onto his back to see why.

The giant lips seemed to gulp at the water, sucking in clods of dirt and grass, pulling Emmett toward them. He screamed, trying to echo Winona’s cries, maybe even wake himself up, but all he managed was to swallow a few mouthfuls of warm brown water.

With the hubcap-sized cataracts on both of its eyes, the creature was most assuredly blind, not that it mattered as it sucked in bringing the shore closer to the water, and Em with it.

In the thrashing, the desperate attempt to swim backwards in a baby’s pool worth of mud, leaves, and river bottom detritus, the catfish disentangled from Emmett’s arm. The fish seemed smaller now in the face of the monster.

The childish, still-dreaming part of Emmett’s brain was surprised to see that the giant beast was no defender of the little guy. The large, bloated thing snapped at the smaller fish, biting it in half and then skewering most of the meal on one of its own giant barbels, even the smallest of its whiskers still about the size of a rapier.

Em kept swinging his arms, trying to swim or pick himself up, whatever would work, but finding it impossible as a muddy snow angel formed in the drained riverbed behind him. The giant creature thrashed out with its tail, trying to get its mass up onto the shallows, and in the process sending another wave of murky water down on top of Em, the sweep of it causing him to float closer to the enormous maw, the teeth not looking so little anymore, a few yards below his feet. This close to the mouth, Emmett’s bare toes looked pale and fragile to him now.

As the wave receded again and he clawed at the ground, there were heavy, sucking footfalls against the riverbed behind him. Emmett looked up to see Winona running toward him, arms pumping, mud flecking her long white legs, a dot of foam flying up and dousing her left breast, the reveal of her nipple nothing like he wanted it to be…too clinical in the midday sun.

She grasped at his arms, her one hand sliding off with the blood, his forearm too slick. While he was slipping over his own feet, she was acting: saving his life.

He grabbed her too, and thought that they were going to have one hell of a story to tell their kids, once she dragged him to shore.

That was before the thing had gotten a hold of his feet, the sideways jerk at his broken ankles too quick to give either him or Winona a chance to let go, flinging both of their bodies into the deeper water, the giant burrow that was the drop-off he had avoided before.

Winona was lucky; she was the first to be attacked. Her skull was crushed under powerful jaws before she could let out a full waterlogged scream. The animal swallowed her deflated head, looking like a hairy grape skin on its way down, the rest of her body following.

Em took longer to die, shrieking out bubbles down under the water, the beast dragging him along with it as it moved down the river in search of deeper waters.

Chapter One

The model got Jed Wilkes hot and bothered.

He did not mean the girl, currently doing her best to service him. Skinny and jaundiced, the girl was no model, not by anyone’s standards.

But the detailed foam board miniature on the desk, a scale representation of what the Ole Dixie was going to look like when construction was completed.

That was the stuff. It got him hard, engorged. The building would be powerful and sleek, the greatest casino the world had ever seen outside of Vegas or Monte Carlo. Maybe the greatest ever, period. If he could be so bold.

Of course, it was just a model, an artist’s rendering. There would have to be concessions made, the construction crews bumping up the realities of both engineering and money, but it would still be glorious. It was hard to believe that one little land sale—to the government no less—had been the ticket to funding the casino. On opening day, the satisfaction Jed felt would hardly be diminished by a handful of loony tunes picketing with anti-fracking signs.

The building would be the size of an aircraft carrier, so big and so firmly moored that guests wouldn’t be able to tell they were floating on the Mighty Mississippi unless they looked out their luxury hotel window and saw it for themselves.

He thought of how that penthouse balcony view would look, the sound of slot machines so far below him that they would be inaudible, but still making him money, the golden sun setting over New Orleans. He thought about all this and he couldn’t help it: he squirted into the girl’s mouth.

She gagged.

Pity was not something Jed Wilkes felt often, but do not let it be said that he was incapable of it. He frowned at himself. He could have at least given her a heads-up instead of painting her tonsils.

When her sputtering was finished, when it was clear that she wasn’t going to puke on the carpet and had kept everything down, he peeled off one more twenty than he had to, and showed her to the door.

Well, actually, he explained where the door was, and then watched her leave over the monitors, making sure she didn’t touch or take anything on her way to the elevator. She had to pass through three rooms in his apartment, all of them lavishly furnished, and he wasn’t going to let some Treme slut see her way out unsupervised.

Once she was on the elevator, Jed was allowed about twenty-five seconds of additional afterglow, the same amount of time it would take her to ride down three floors and then walk into view of his receptionist. After that time had elapsed, the light on his desk blinked and he took one last look at the scale model before zipping himself up and taking the call on speaker.

“Yes,” he said, buoyant after the girl’s visit, but also feeling tired.

“Your ex-wife’s on line two, and Harry Albright is on three. Which should I put through?” Denise asked. Jed was sure she knew what the answer would be, but it was not her place to make decisions, just to offer them.

“Gail can sit in it a little while longer. Give me Harry.”

There were a few clicks and then the now-familiar heavy breathing of Albright, the on-site manager for the Ole Dixie construction project.

“Harry, it’s good to hear from you. Hot enough out there for you?” Jed had not been outside today. His office was perfectly climate controlled at a balmy sixty-two, but he could see on one of his flat screen displays that it was pushing a hundred today.

“You can say that again, boss,” Albright said on the other line, huffing.

Jed was glad this was a phone meeting. The man probably stank of sweat and low tide.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Jed asked, in a post-blowjob good mood.

“Huh?”

“What do you want, Harry?”

“Oh. Well, I just emailed you some requisition orders. The concrete guy tried to fuck us. The mix didn’t test for what we ordered. The distributor might as well have shipped along pancake mix, so I told them we weren’t paying, and I had to find a new supplier. It should only be a two day delay, but you need to sign off.”

This sounded like a bigger deal and that Albright was downplaying it, but the foreman was as honest as he was obsessive about his sites, so Jed had no doubts that he’d done the right thing in dumping the suboptimal concrete.

Jed clicked over to his email and sure enough, there were the forms. Albright’s message was sandwiched between two emails from Gail, the subject lines: “Pick up” and “Pick up THE FUCKING PHONE […]”

“Two days. So that means this pour will be Friday now, right?” Jed asked.

“Right.”

“Okay, I’ll sign, and Denise will fax them over within the hour. I see the new numbers. Thanks, Harry.”

Harry started to say something back and Jed hung up, switching over to line two, girding himself for whatever bullshit Gail was up to now.

She must have heard the switch over from the muzak before he knew they were connected, the change of static, because she spoke before Jed could get anything out.

“I want a divorce. A real one this time, you prick.”

Three seconds. That’s how quick the mood of Jed Wilkes could change from great to dog shit.

Chapter Two

Checking her phone at three a.m., only awake to go pee, the news that Gail Bonnet was legally still Gail Wilkes was enough of a shock to draw her fully awake and keep her that way until it was business hours, and she could call her lawyer.

A new lawyer. Not one she found through Jed’s contacts.

Turns out what she’d signed six months ago hadn’t been divorce papers as much as they were a post-nuptial agreement, a financial document that was in no part a divorce through the state of Louisiana. Looking over the files she’d emailed, her new lawyer sounded just as surprised as she was to learn that a post-nup was even a thing.

Jed Wilkes was a slimy motherfucker, and even when she was a kid, dumbfounded by his bravado, part of Gail had known that. Maybe she’d even been attracted to that side of him before she’d grown a conscience. The capacity for abstract thought once her post-college brain had solidified in her early twenties.

Now, three days after her new engagement, Jed was threatening to take another few years out of her life. The years she was planning to spend with Chase, the ones that would be the best of her life, same as the last few months had been.

Jed fuck her again? Not. Gonna. Happen.

She dialed his office number and began to wait for him to pick up, sending a couple of emails while she listened to the elevator music, his secretary putting her on hold.

Their conversation was mostly Gail trying to find new and inventive ways to call Jed a cocksucker, with him trying to take the high road and occasionally interjecting that she “needed to calm down.”

The phone call continued like that, Gail demanding a real, valid, divorce, until she heard the front door open downstairs and thumbed the red end-call key to hang up on Jed.

Chase was home.

*

She was clutching the phone when he came into the room.

“Who were you talking to?” he said, even though he already knew.

“My sister,” Gail said.

“Your sister.” He weighed the options in his mind. Call her on the lie outright or play her silly game. He decided to play it dumb, feign interest. “How is she?”

“Chase,” she said, part genuine shock, part fortuitous change in subject, “your boots.”

He looked down at his muddy, bloodstained boots. “Oh shit, I forgot.”

“And you stink!” She pinched her nose with one hand and wafted the air in front of her face with the other.

He should’ve felt bad or something, tromping through the house reeking like a piscine slaughterhouse, but all he felt was pride. His fingernails were black with dirt and dried fish blood. Silvery scales from baitfish had crusted over his hands and forearms, and yeah, he probably smelled something fierce. He grinned. “If I ever come home clean, it must’ve been a bad day of fishing. Hell, just try cleaning a mess of catfish and coming away smelling pretty as a rose. Not to mention baiting hooks, handling the fish…”

She shooed him out of the room, half-playfully and half-serious. “Go downstairs and clean yourself off, then come back and fuck me,” she said.

Her eyes averted to the portable telephone receiver, which she still held. He remembered that she was guilty. That she made an unconscious association between the phrase ‘fuck me’ and the telephone—rather, who he knew she’d been on the phone with—made her worse than guilty in his mind. He put all that aside for the time being as another disappointment crushed him. If she wanted him to fuck her, it meant she wasn’t pregnant. They’d been trying for three months. Her period had finally been late. She’d never been interested in sex until they decided to have a baby, but the day her period was due and didn’t show, she turned cold. If she’d turned back on now, it meant only two things: her period finally showed and she wasn’t pregnant.

He left the room without another word, retreating to his shack in the backyard. When he wasn’t on the water, he spent the majority of his time in his shack, cleaning fish, rigging, repairing his rods and tackle, and drinking beer. He kept a deep fryer out there, and he liked to fry up heaping mounds of cornmeal-crusted catfish. He’d eat a whole plateful of fish while pounding back bitter, hoppy ales. It wasn’t so much of a routine as a ritual. His way of reflecting on the day that had passed and the day to come.

For two seasons he worked double shifts, taking two groups of people out fishing on the Mississippi seven days a week. The other two seasons were downtime. Reconnaissance. R&R. This was August, and he’d be working his ass off at least through September.

He cracked an IPA and sat at the workbench where he did most of his serious thinking. The first outing of the day had been a success. He’d taken four men from Alaska out for their first-ever catfish trip. They were all salmon fishermen, and initially expressed surprise and even a little skepticism at the rudimentary catfish rigs, but when the first hour on the river yielded four channel cats over thirty pounds, including a whopping sixty-five pounder, those boys from Anchorage had a change of heart.

They released all four fish—big catfish tended to taste fishier and muddier than small ones—and proceeded to catch probably more than a thousand pounds of similar fish before changing spots and downsizing gear to load up on smaller, more delectable fish in the three to ten pound class so the Alaskans could take home some true southern gold. But damn, those big cats put on quite a show.

The Mississippi had run unusually low for a month, allowing Chase and other cat hunters to anchor up in holes that were previously too swift to anchor in. So many big catfish were coming out of the river every day, it was like there was a catfish-filled cavity in the center of the earth, and someone had pulled the plug, unleashing the horde.

Chapter Three

Lucinda Hero’s boot caught on a nest of monofilament. She was out fishing at the locks on the Mississippi, a mile up from the suicide club. She called them the suicide club because they lined up shoulder to shoulder along the steep wall of the locks, and whenever they had a catfish on, they slid a noose down their pole and line, down to the fish, and pulled the noose tight around the fish’s gill plates, then hauled it fifteen feet up the concrete wall. Lucinda loved catfish, but she wasn’t much into lynching them.

Anyway, Lucinda was tilting her head back to drain a can of Pepsi when her boot caught in some monofilament. She stumbled. Stringer of catfish in one hand and rod in the other, she had nothing to support the fall. So she fell. Smacked down hard. It pissed her off. She hated litterbugs, and she hated fishermen who littered even more. She decided to pick up all the discarded line, so she got up off the ground, leaving her fish and rod where they lay.

The line was thick and wiry, forty pound test easy. She pulled and pulled, but the line kept coming, tangling around her hands like translucent vines.

Who the fuck do people think they are?

She pulled on the line until it stopped coming. Some of it was tied under a rock.

What the hell?

She walked over to the rock and cut through the knot with her knife.

That’ll do it.

No, that didn’t do it either. She pulled on the line some more and found that it kept going and going and going. Ten feet away, the fishing line was tied to another rock. Then another and another, leading Lucinda around in a circle twenty feet across. Finally, she stood in the center of the circle, a baby-sized bundle of fishing line in her arms. She looked around at all the rocks the fishing line had been tied to and realized something. The fishing line had been tied to the rocks in the shape of a pentagram. A satanic fisherman? This was some fucked-up shit.

She stuffed the bundle of line into her fishing bag to discard later at home, then she picked up her stringer of fish and her rod, and jetted the hell out of there.

The hike back to her truck was about half a mile. Behind every bush and every tree, the satanic fisherman might hide. She knew he was out there somewhere, watching her, waiting. Waiting for what, she didn’t know.

She was so worked up about the satanic fisherman that she didn’t watch her feet, so when the big coppermouth appeared before her on the trail, she failed to see it until she nearly stepped on it. The snake looked at her and she looked at the snake. Here she was, just a woman holding some fish she wanted to sell to some corner market so she could pay her bills, and here was this snake, a monument of writhing obsidian.

Lucinda had no phobia of snakes, but she wasn’t much friendly with them either. She agreed to stay out of their way if they stayed out of hers. This time, the fault was on her. The snake and Lucinda looked at each other for what felt like a long time, then it slithered away about as fast as it’d appeared. She was unnerved, sure, but also convinced. Convinced the satanic fisherman was real, and that he appeared before her in the form of a snake. That made her feel no better about the monofilament pentagram or the blacker-than-black clouds rolling in, so she ran the rest of the way to her truck, and by a quarter past six, she’d already cashed in her fish and settled in for the night with a whiskey on ice at Rawhide 2010 in the French Quarter. She ate shrimp and watched the men dance, throwing money at some of them, but her mind was somewhere else. She thought of where she was in life, what she’d done and failed to do, how the choices she’d made led her to be sitting there. The suicide club was full of fish lynchers who rubbed shoulders with the satanic fisherman who littered, and could take the form of a snake. They were bad news for the earth, for sure. But maybe Lucinda belonged right there alongside them. Shit. She’d grown up in a hippie household. Freegan, free-loading, loaded. Her parents were pretty much up for whatever scored them ass or grass, but they’d always been hard-asses about eating animals. Cows or catfish, it didn’t matter. The road that led Lucinda to pay her bills selling catfish to mom-and-pop stores was a long and twisted one.

When she was sixteen, her family hitched a ride to Burning Man with some douche of an occult bookmaker from New York. The dude was wealthy, and paid way too much attention to Lucinda, but he kept her parents high, so they pretended like everything was fine. The douche had a son who was Lucinda’s age, and like Lucinda, he despised the free-spirited upbringing he was born into. By the second day of Burning Man, they’d shared their first kiss together. They stayed up all night camped out in their own little tent on the Playa, and by morning they’d devised a plan to run away together. They were only sixteen, but they’d both practically cared for themselves for years. They didn’t need their parents. In fact, they felt they were better off without them. They wanted a new life. A different life. A life together.

By the end of Burning Man, they connected up with a circus act set to hit the road for New Orleans. The clowns agreed to let them come along for the ride so long as they helped them busk along the way.

When they arrived in New Orleans, the circus folks offered to let them stay on as apprentices, maybe even join the troupe full-time, but Lucinda and Daniel felt eager to move on. After all, joining the circus wasn’t exactly their idea of a life away from their parents.

Within two weeks, New Orleans had eaten them alive.

Honest work did not come easy to two sixteen-year-old runaways, and they discovered that the real world was not as friendly as the freaks and geeks they’d always lived among. In order to make some cash, they offered tarot readings to tourists in the French Quarter. They actually did pretty well at that initially. Within their first couple days, they brought in over five-hundred dollars. They ate well, bought some new clothes, stayed in a decent hotel, and even found a bar that didn’t card them. New Orleans was a dream.

Then they got mugged.

After that, some tarot readers in the area ran them out, said if they ever spotted them on their turf again, they’d pay the price.

Lucinda and Daniel got in a screaming match that got them kicked out of their hotel, and the next thing they knew they were on the streets during one of the hottest summers on record. They resorted to giving handjobs in alleyways in order to afford a roach-infested room at a shithole motel and eat one hot meal a day. They told themselves it was only temporary, that they’d find another way to survive soon enough. But the worst hadn’t come to pass. Daniel got attacked by a john. The dude beat him over the head with a cinderblock, and fucked him as he convulsed and foamed at the mouth. That was it for Daniel. He called his father and begged for a bus ticket home. Lucinda accompanied him to the bus station. They exchanged salty kisses and tearful promises to reconnect soon, but Lucinda never heard from him again. A week later, she missed her period. A week after that, she stole a pregnancy test from a Rite-Aid and peed on the paper strip in an alleyway (without Daniel’s contributions, she could only scrounge up enough money for a room a night or two each week). The results were positive. She was pregnant.

Little good can be said about being sixteen years old and pregnant. Being sixteen years old, pregnant, homeless, alone in a strange, hostile city? Let’s just say Lucinda grew up fast. Abortion was out of the question because any legitimate doctor would ask questions and require a guardian’s signature, and any sort of facility that would take in a sixteen-year-old girl no questions asked was the sort of place she didn’t want to go. Somehow, returning to her parents never crossed her mind. She’d wondered a lot about that in the ten years that had passed. After all, her parents weren’t abusive. Neglectful, sure. But they weren’t bad people. So why did she never reach out, even when she hit rock bottom? Even now, sitting in the strip club, eating shrimp and drinking whiskey as dudes slapped their big dicks together onstage, she did not know.

Things turned so dark at that time, her memories of it were hazy. She couldn’t even remember how she met the man who gave her a chance to turn things around.

Chase.

He was a gangly young man not much older than herself, and he loved catfish above all else. She’d never fished a day in her life. Her freegan parents had taught her that hunting and fishing were savage, barbaric practices. Eating out of dumpsters was much more ethical. Then one day she was wading through hip-deep water with this guy she didn’t know. She held a stout cane fishing pole in her hand. They were in some sort of backwater, with low-hanging trees blocking out most of the light. The water was warm, but the air was less sweltering than she remembered. Her belly was swollen with child. It was the beginning of her first autumn in New Orleans.

She had no idea how she’d gotten there, no idea how she’d survived, but when they came to a clearing on the bank, the man nodded at her and she cast out in the turgid water as if she knew what she was doing. She caught two dozen catfish that day, twice as many as the man did, and back at the shack that she presumed was his, she cleaned all their fish and carried them to a market down the road and haggled with the owner over the price. Then she returned to the shack and sat down on the couch next to the man and a strange dog and watched the Saints whoop the Falcons on Monday Night Football.

She honestly had no idea how long she’d been living like this, and she was too afraid to ask.

When the man said he was turning in for the night, she dreaded that he intended for her to follow him to the bedroom. Maybe he’d been drugging her, keeping her alive for sex and whatever else. But the man did no such thing. He said, “Goodnight,” and he went to bed. It was only later, in recent years, that she learned the severe effects of trauma. Memory loss was real, and it could be extreme.

Eventually, she lost the baby due to complications during birth.

Sometime after that, Chase received a sizable inheritance from his grandfather and decided to set off on his own, become a fishing guide. He bought a boat and a ranch-style house. Lucinda assumed full control of his prior business, selling catfish to markets and restaurants. She’d been doing it ever since, for nearly a decade now, expanding her clientele, and making a name for herself. Even several of NOLA’s higher-end restaurants occasionally bought their catfish from her.

She didn’t know why the monofilament pentagram and the encounter with the copperhead had gotten her dwelling on her past. She guessed that a part of her new age upbringing remained rooted inside her, and encountering such omens unsettled her, even if the rational side of her thought portents and premonitions were bogus. And yet, there was darkness in the bayou.

She ordered another whiskey and flagged over her favorite stripper, a blonde Frenchman who called himself Jean Baptiste.

“How’s it hangin’?” Jean said, rubbing his testicles on her knee, along the frayed edge of her jorts.

“You got time for a private show?”

“For you, baby, any time.”

He took her hand and they slipped behind the velvet curtains that separated the rest of the club from the lap dance booths.

If there was one thing that would take her mind off the past, it was a hot piece of ass.

Chapter Four

Harry Albright needed to lose some weight. He told himself this again and again, but on pour days—or pour nights, as the case may be—he found his internal monologue running the message in a loop.

Lose some weight. Lose some weight. Cut out the cornbread you fat fuck.

“No, no. Stop! It doesn’t go directly in. You don’t assume every truck has broken up the same, numbnuts. Get back up there and test it before you pour,” he yelled at some mook he’d forgotten the name of, some French-Creole fuck with a fleur-de-lis tattoo on his neck like he was in the beignet mafia or some shit.

The mook just looked at him. Harry squinted, and the guy clambered up to the drum, going to do what he should have done ten minutes ago.

There were three trucks idling on the banks of the Mississippi, all propped up high so that gravity could work on the system of troughs, scaffolding, and funnels they’d built to get the foundation out as far as it needed to go. Three trucks, two of the three drums rotating, two workmen at each, and Harry was running in between them, putting out fires before his site could be ruined by some union cum-stain who got too impatient.

Yes, running. On pour days the three-hundred-fifty pound Harry Albright was constantly running.

They had plenty of lights, but intense lights also meant intense, inky shadows, so his boots were tripping their way through muddy catwalks as often as he was able to watch where he was going. It had rained this morning, meaning that the crew had spent all afternoon swabbing all the surfaces down with industrial shammies. Any place that concrete was going to touch had to be dried, or the rainwater would dilute the mix.

It wouldn’t rain tonight, though, which meant that they were going to pour until dawn if they had to.

The casino was one of the first buildings of its kind part convention center and part cruise ship. When finished it would be shaped like a baseball diamond, with homeplate mooring the rest of the building to the shore, and first, second, and third bases all represented by giant floating steel buoys. This meant that Harry and his crew were now pouring concrete down into three interlocking floating plates, each rising out of the water and recessed about ten feet to accommodate the concrete. As backwards as it seemed, filling the buoys up inland and then setting them to sea would have been too difficult. The crew would have needed an aircraft carrier to get them overlapping like they needed them.

Not that this was easy, building on a river, but once they had the foundation in place, and each of the plates anchored to the riverbed by giant chains, then the ground under them would be solid, and it should be business as usual.

But the construction team had to pour first, and do it from vertigo-inducing heights, so far out in the river that passing trawlers and barges would have to be careful not to collide with the site. It was such a massive undertaking, the Coast Guard was involved, a few patrols surrounding the site like beat cops directing traffic around a busted water main, collecting overtime.

If he looked to his left, Harry could see the twinkling lights of the city, civilization glowing in the darkness of Louisiana, a state below sea level; land that was trying its best to kick the humans out. To his right, there was a similar twinkle, but it was lower down, below the horizon line instead of in the sky. The current of the river caught both the lights of the city and the crew’s work lights, and reflected them back into the starless expanse. The water looked cleaner at night, obsidian black instead of leaf brown and copper runoff.

That was if he looked to either his right or left, but he didn’t look, not more than a quick glance to orient himself after slipping in the mud, almost falling down the wall they’d built over the bank. If he fell and couldn’t grab onto a safety railing, Harry’s body would pinball against the scaffolding, the water below maybe deep enough for him to survive and swim to safety, but also maybe not.

He thought of the substantial belly flop he would have to endure, hitting the water, and his stomach grumbled in protest, forcing him to reach out for the railing on either side of him.

Pataki was manning the north-most truck, the highest of the three chutes, so also the trickiest.

“It checks out, some real standing-spoon oatmeal you’ve got here,” Pataki said as Harry approached, huffing with exertion. Christ, how was he going to make it through the night? There were three more loads.

Pataki was one of the only men on the crew who didn’t have a Mexican or French last name, and this—combined with his general competency, of course—was what led Harry to trust him with the biggest jobs. Pataki was a Slav, or a Pollack, or something. Whatever he was, he had a slight accent, and because he found himself ostracized by both the Latinos and the Cajuns, was less likely to goof off and fall into an environment of cronyism.

Instead of saying anything and risking sounding even more out of breath than he was, Harry just clapped Pataki on the shoulder and plucked his walkie from his belt. Harry swallowed down a glob of phlegm and exhaustion before trying to speak into the mouthpiece.

“All three teams are go. I repeat, go. One man on the truck, one with his light on the chute. No leaks, fellas,” he said, then added, “Good luck. Over.”

Pataki nodded and smiled behind him, flicking off the protective casing of the corded unit in his hand and then depressing the button, a red light flicking to green under his thumb, giving his fingernail a radioactive glow.

Harry turned to look back down the walkway, and he could see the two other lights switch to green in near unison.

Pretty good, he thought. But then the scaffolding under them groaned and he remembered that they were standing on this temporary construction along with three dump trucks, their front ends jacked up on six-foot risers. How much weight could the supports take? Would the concrete on the plates help or hinder their stability up here?

Harry had done the math, trusted himself, but there were variables here, hundreds of thousands of cusecs worth of variables, each variable a cubic foot of water flowing through their construction site every second.

“Look at it go,” Pataki said, his accent thicker, but the tone still transparent: the man had seen how the natural sway of the walkway caused Harry to cringe and grip the railing tighter, and Pataki was trying to calm his boss down.

Pataki pointed his flashlight down, watching the first of the mix cross the halfway point on the chute now, the angle steep enough that it wasn’t going to slow, get caught up on itself, but slight enough that they weren’t just pouring straight down into the hole, giving the three guys in the boats a chance to direct the flow.

“See? All good, boss,” Pataki said. It was such a humane gesture, almost tender. Wow, George Pataki, the softy.

It was George, right? Harry tried to picture Pataki’s full name on his paystub or call schedule and couldn’t. He had been working with Pataki for the better part of a decade, and their relationship had been so inextricable from the site, from last names for everyone, that he’d forgotten the guy’s first name, if he’d ever known it.

Harry leaned against the railing, feeling better, and resolved to look it up when they were through here, maybe even ask Pataki and his wife—he did have a wife, Harry was sure of it—over for dinner, if Sissy could be bothered to cook.

In ten minutes or so, Harry was going to have to work his way down the staircase to check on the three guys standing in the plates, pushing the concrete around with oversized rakes. But now he could relax, stand beside Pataki, and watch the plates fill in. Already there were three small disks of mix spreading out like dark pancakes in giant griddles. The two men leaned over, the lip of the northern plate, third base, below them.

“All so people have another place to spend their paychecks if they’re starting to get bored with Harrah’s,” Harry said, loving the work, proud of it, but not too thrilled with the reasons behind it.

“Nah, it’s not gonna be like that at all. It will be classy. You’ve seen the pictures. It’ll pump some life into this place. It’s not going to drain it like those other casinos,” Pataki said. So the guy was an optimist.

Harry stood there, trying to think of something to say that wasn’t: “If you knew Mr. Wilkes like I did, you wouldn’t be thinking hope and change, you’d be thinking fucking dystopia.” But he couldn’t find the words before the scaffolding shuddered under them, the metal ringing like a tuning fork.

Twirling to face the trucks, sure that one of the risers had slipped out from under its wheel, the wedge of the vehicle possibly about to push them into the Mississippi, Harry was surprised to see them all in place, drums still turning.

If the top of the structure was fine, that meant that there was some kind of problem down below causing the movement.

There was another hit, and Pataki made a sound. Not a scream, more of a surprised bark that trailed off as soon as it started.

With a flash of light hitting the right side of his face and gone before he could lose much vision, Harry turned to see that he was now alone on the walkway, the railing still shuddering from the shift, twanging like a plucked guitar string.

The Slav was not on the truck, not down on the landing below them, not on the steps: Pataki was gone.

Harry bent to grab the man’s flashlight, keeping one hand on the railing. Pataki had been gripping that same bar just seconds ago, and it hadn’t helped him any. Harry felt his palms begin to sweat, the skin going rubbery.

He pointed the flashlight beam down into the plate. The man below him with the rake just stared up, shielding his eyes.

“What was that?” the guy yelled up.

The guy either didn’t hear the splash Pataki had made hitting the water, or didn’t put together what it was. At least Pataki hadn’t hit the plate, pinged his head off the lip like that guy smacking against the propeller in Titanic. The best part of the whole movie if you asked Harry.

“Back to work!” Harry yelled back down to him, and the man juggled his rake handle in surprise.

He directed the beam over to the water. There were ripples there, but it could have just been the wake of a passing trawler.

“Pataki!” he yelled, cupping his hand over his mouth on the off chance that the guy had slipped around in front of the truck to grab something he’d forgotten.

“What?” the man on the plate below yelled back up.

“Is your name fucking Pataki?” Harry responded, wishing he knew who the guy was, looking to fire him to just relieve some stress.

Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus.

He put the light back on the water.

There were fewer ripples now, just the gentle wake of a splash still reverberating between the scaffolding and the plate.

Did he stop the pour? When they were so close to finished with the first phase? Everything had been going so well.

Of course he did. Harry had a great track record with on-site accidents, he shut everything down and scrubbed the scene. He’d even done some EMT and Triage training modules, because he didn’t trust anyone but himself to know what to do.

So why wasn’t he screaming for them to stop, ringing everyone up on the walkie and getting all hands on deck, every light they had on the water, looking for Pataki?

Because he could be clawing his way up onto shore right now. He could be fine and you’ll be endangering the pour for nothing.

Or he could have knocked himself senseless on the way down, was now drifting to the bottom of the river, being carried away by the current, and losing brain function as his nostrils sucked in water instead of air.

And if it was that second version of events? Would they be able to save Pataki anyway?

If they did save him, would Pataki be brain-dead, a burden on his family?

Harry Albright knew he was extrapolating, equivocating, inventing. He also knew that every second he wasn’t doing something to find the missing man he was committing a crime.

The ripples were gone now, the water normalizing, and the pancakes of wet concrete kept spreading, their masses just about to meet.

Harry unclipped his cell phone from its holster. It was a clunky Nokia flip phone; there was no place on a construction site for the dainty glass of a smartphone. He hovered his finger over the ‘9’ of 911, and then hesitated.

He cursed himself and called Jed Wilkes’s number instead.

There was a brief exchange of expletives, inquiries into whether Harry knew what time it was, never to call on this number.

“Mr. Wilkes, I have a problem down at the pour and I’m not sure how to solve it.”

Chapter Five

The cleric dipped his head in prayer, and placed both hands down between the roots and felt the warm water press through his fingers. A pill bug ran under his palm, trying to escape the puddle that had formed in the damp ground.

“She has fed once more. Hallelujah,” the cleric said, and from behind him, all bowing to the tree, its exposed roots encompassing their leader’s arms, all of their cloaks soaked through at the knees from the marshlands below them, his parishioners repeated: “Hallelujah!”

The tree was old and had supped on more swamp carrion, more decay, than had ever entered even the oldest gator’s gullet. The tree wasn’t any more or less sacred than those beside it, their branches connected by a network of hanging moss, all of them one system to be worshiped and revered.

“She will return soon. Already the waters are rising, warmed with the blood of sacrifice. Can you feel it, too, brothers and sisters? If you can, cry out.”

“AMEN! She comes!”

“I feel it, Reverend! Amen!”

“Where is she? I need to see her!”

This third exclamation was a false note in an otherwise flawless ceremony, and the cleric stood from the roots, pushing the hood back from over his bald pate, the fabric of his cloak drying his hands as he did so.

“Who among you speaks so brazenly? Asks to see Her with such presumption?” he asked the gathering, even though he knew full well who had demanded to see Her. There were only five worshipers, but even since yesterday their numbers had grown, and would continue to grow.

“I didn’t mean no offense, Reverend,” Jonny Niven said, standing to face the cleric eye-to-eye. The boy’s hair was wild, unwieldy enough that it had made his hood lumpy, misshapen. He would need to shave it, show his cloak a little more respect.

“You think She will have your sister with Her? She has taken her inside, Jonny. She is in a different place now, my son.”

“No, well…I just want to see it, know She’s for real. I’ve seen waves, but I haven’t seen—”

The cleric cut him short. “Or do you want revenge, Brother Niven? Do you wish to face down a god?”

“Well, not at all,” Jonny said, his corn-fed accent thick, something that made the cleric think that maybe Jonny and his sister were more relation than siblings, that perhaps they were carrying on some kind of vulgar family tradition.

“Winona is gone, Jonny, but she is not erased. It is only through singing Her praises that we can one day hope to join Winona. In the beyond.”

Chapter Six

Chase watched Lucinda crawl through the clearing in front of him, allowed his eyes to fall onto her ass, and then moved them away. It never failed to fascinate him how completely unattracted he was to the girl.

Not because she was ugly. Quite the opposite was true. But because he cared for her so deeply, in such a different way than he cared for Gail.

When he was a kid, the lowest hanging fruit if you were going to pick on some comic book nerd—not that he ever did that—was pointing out that Batman and Robin were clearly gay for each other.

Or was that even the right term? How old was Robin supposed to be? Was Bruce Wayne just a pederast? Even if there was consent there?

These days, Chase got it.

Now he understood how that relationship could remain platonic. The Caped Crusader effect wasn’t make-believe stuff, it could happen. There could be a platonic master/apprentice relationship, as powerful as father and daughter. Chase guessed at that last part, not having any children himself, and wriggling his nose because the thought reminded him of the problems he was having with Gail.

“What’s your problem, grandpa?” Lucinda asked, catching him with his thinking face on. She pushed cattails out of the way and moved past, letting them fall and thwack Chase in the knees.

“Nothing. I was just deep in thought about how happy I am to have a young ward of my very own to lead me on foolish adventures.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go fuck yourself, Kemosabe,” she said. “You can think I’m lying all you want, but it’s true: I did find some weird shit out here yesterday.”

“And you’re sure we’re in the right area? You don’t want to just chalk it up to too much sun and try to salvage the day, drop a line out there?” he asked, and pointed to the estuary parallel to where they were walking. They’d been hiking unfamiliar territory for a good long time without any sign of the satanic esoterica she’d described.

Lucinda took an exaggerated look around, her expression telling him all he needed to know, then shrugged. “May as well wet a line,” she said.

Even though they both made a living more or less from catfish—Chase also guided for reds and prehistoric paddlefish at certain times of the year—whenever they had free time together, they preferred to spend it pursuing other species. To keep it interesting, they usually agreed upon a specific technique to target a particular species, a kind of friendly challenge. In the winter, they might hit New Orleans City Park and fish the golf course ponds for bass using only tenkara rods, a Japanese method of fly-fishing designed for trout in small creeks and rivers. Sometimes they proposed a challenge, aiming for biggest fish or quantity. If it was a morning trip, the loser would have to buy the Bloody Marys afterward. Day or evening, then the loser bought the beer. Other times, they simply fished without bothering to keep track of numbers or size. Those were Chase’s favorite times, when fishing was just that. Fishing.

Today was one of those days. Lucinda had seen something that spooked her out this way, a pentagram constructed from fishing line, and she’d asked Chase to return with her to check it out. They’d packed ultralight rods and a small case of UV Panther Martins. The spinners, painted fluorescent shades of purple, pink, blue, and red, looked more like earrings some raver chick might wear. Chase had received them as a commercial sample, and because classic Panther Martins (black body, gold blade) were his all-time favorite spinners, he’d brought them along today to test them out as they investigated the markings of this satanic fisherman that had rattled Lucinda.

They pieced together their two-piece ultra-lights and cast the garish lures into the turgid estuary.

Fish could see ultraviolet light. UV allowed them to detect enemies and mates. Shad, crawfish, and plankton all gave off UV light, so in theory, UV lures offered a more visible and natural presentation to fish.

However, Chase had read enough on the subject to know that UV light scattered underwater, so maybe these new lures wouldn’t do much for an angler at all. After all, trends came and went in the fishing world, just as they did in the beer world, and everywhere else. One season it’d be black IPAs and floating frog umbrella rigs. The next, it’d be watermelon grubs and farmhouse ales.

Chase counted to ten before flicking his wrist to get the lure spinning and retrieved it at a slow pace, occasionally pausing to let it sink and flutter, then snapping it into action again.

“There it is,” Lucinda said. Simple as they were, the words were her catchphrase whenever she hooked a fish.

Chase craned his head as he finished his retrieval. Sure enough, Lucinda’s rod was buckled over, and the fish was peeling line. Probably a nice-sized smallmouth. On the first cast too, he thought with not immoderate pride, a little envy. Maybe there was something to the UV coating after all.

Lucinda played the fish, gaining ground when she could, and otherwise allowing it to run. As she worked it in, the smallmouth leapt out of the water several times, its green tiger stripes prominent. Chase estimated it to be about a four pounder. A good fish.

Chase set his rod down and unstrapped the landing net from his pack.

The fish was swimming in now, defeated, its fins cutting through the water. Chase watched the line, ready to net the fish, when suddenly it jerked out into deeper water. The line screamed off the reel at a blistering rate. The bass wasn’t stopping either. Lucinda kept her rod tip up. She tightened down on the drag so that maybe the extra force would slow the fish down, but it kept on moving. “It’s gonna spool me,” she said.

“Damn girl, you got a state record on the line?” From what Chase had glimpsed, the bass was a trophy, but it didn’t look that big.

Lucinda flashed him a grin, but it quickly faded. Sweat beads rolled down her forehead, from not just the heat of the swamp surrounding them, but from exertion and nerves as well. Chase guessed she was nervous about landing the big fish. As line continued to scream off the spool, she looked at him and shook her head. “Something’s not right,” she said.

“Tighten down on the drag, see if you can turn it back this way.”

Lucinda did as he said and the fish’s momentum slowed.

And then it came to a dead stop.

Lucinda cranked the reel. Her rod arced into a horseshoe. She jerked up on the rod three times in quick succession. Short jerks, not enough to risk snapping the line, but just enough to agitate the fish and hopefully get it moving again. No matter what, the fish would not budge.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

“Think a gator’s got it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Didn’t feel like a gator to me.”

From time to time on the Mississippi and its bayous, alligators, snapping turtles, and even the occasional bull shark were known to snatch fish off lines. One moment you had a beautiful red coming toward the boat, and the next an apex predator had swooped on in and turned your dinner into a bloody head on a hook if they didn’t steal the whole damn thing.

“It doesn’t feel like a bass,” Lucinda said.

“But we saw it, and that’s what it was.”

“I think a cat may’ve gobbled her. The weight’s the same as a big cat, and this fish has planted on the bottom the same.”

Chase pondered the prospect of a massive channel catfish munching a good-sized smallmouth bass. He’d never seen such a thing before, but anything was possible. And something was certainly weird here.

“Well, shit. What do you wanna do?” Chase said.

Lucinda opened her mouth to speak when suddenly her line went slack. The fish was swimming toward shore. Chase watched her crank the reel, keeping the line tight.

Thirty feet from shore, the fish leapt out of the water.

At first its mottled brown head, the size of a VW Beetle, emerged, followed by a stout, slimy body, and a forked tail that looked sharper than all the guillotines in hell. The behemoth rose about five feet out of the water, struck a Free Willy pose, twisted in the air, and emitted a guttural, demonic noise. When it crashed down in the river, Lucinda’s line snapped and the fish, if it could even be called a fish, plummeted back into the depths, the water displaced around it. The wake it left behind was enough to send waist-high waves crashing against the bank, soaking Chase’s shorts through to the underwear, nearly knocking him over.

Lucinda dropped her pole and plunked down on the wet shoreline, a distant, stunned gaze on her face. Chase’s knees wobbled. Before he could decide whether to sit or not, they gave out, and he collapsed down on the beach beside her.

“What the fuck was that?” he said.

“The catch of a lifetime,” Lucinda said, not missing a beat, like she hadn’t just seen the same thing, the same monster that he’d seen.

Chase shook his head. “The teeth on that thing must’ve been six inches long.”

“I’d have made a necklace out of them.”

“Are you crazy? It would have eaten us whole!”

“I’d have sold it to the Smithsonian. Just the head, the rest is steaks.”

Chase was impressed by her calmness. Personally, he was feeling pretty lucky that he didn’t piss his shorts, not that she’d be able to tell with how soaked his shorts were. “You telling me that thing didn’t scare you?” he asked.

“Oh, it scared me. I just can’t believe it.”

“Well, you’re gonna believe it if that thing returns and we’re still sitting here. Come on, let’s go.”

“After that, I could sure go for a beer,” Lucinda said, climbing to her feet and breaking down her rod for easier carrying. Her casualness was disconcerting, maybe a kind of shock. Chase himself could still feel the tickle of adrenaline coursing through his arteries, his left-side extremities regaining feeling, letting him know he wasn’t having a heart attack.

“You want to keep going, look for that shit you told me about?”

“I think we’ve seen enough weirdness for today,” she said, starting back the way they’d come, her sense of direction impeccable, one of the many skills he’d helped foster in her.

Chase turned, looking beyond Lucinda into the trees, the Spanish moss so heavy on some boughs that the masses were touching the ground. Between the trunks and branches, he caught sight of the figures moving into position. She had jinxed them by claiming to have her fill of weirdness. “Then you’re not gonna want to turn around,” Chase said, his heart beginning to thud again.

The grin on Lucinda’s face vanished when she turned toward the people standing ten yards away on the river bank. Where did they even come from? Chase wondered. The men and women wore tunics, the material made out of wrinkled baize squares, giving it the appearance of scales.

The wind changed, the group’s cloaks billowing. The air smelled fishy. The men and women’s cloaks were apparently made from dried catfish skin.

The women wielded spears and knives, while the men clutched large fishing nets. In addition to the catfish tunics, they wore crude shoes that also appeared to be made out of catfish leather. It wasn’t exactly the most durable material for clothing or footwear, and something about the impracticality of wearing catfish unnerved Chase.

The impracticality of living things, he thought, but the notion remained incomplete, half-formed, because then an old man parted the group and stepped toward him and Lucinda.

Chase observed that the old man’s hands and arms were heavily scarred, the mark of a veteran noodler.

“How’s it goin’?” Chase asked the old man, attempting to maintain an outward appearance of cool. He was no gun-nut, and when he wore his piece it always weighed him down, made him too aware of himself, but if this, investigating a satanic, possibly violent, fisherman with his young ward, wasn’t an opportunity to bring along the weapon, what was?

“This is private property,” the old man said. “You’re trespassing.”

Chase opened his mouth to express acquiescence, let the old man know that he and his friend would be on their merry way, never to return to the land of the freaky fish people again, but Lucinda spoke up first.

“I used to fish out here all the time,” she said. “What’s different now?”

The old man turned his gaze to the turgid river. “The difference is…She has awoken.”

“She? You mean that monster?” Lucinda said.

“So you saw her.” The old man kept his eyes on the river, but motioned with his hands. The armed women stepped forward, fanning out in a half circle. “That’s very lucky of you. Twelve orbits of the moon from now, She will rise and reclaim Her throne as master of this sacred ground where this city, this pestilence, swarms,” the old man said. “But by then, you’ll already be dead.”

It may have just been because the old man was locking eyes with her, but the you’ll in you’ll already be dead sounded less like a kooky proclamation and more like a threat meant specifically for Lucinda.

Nobody threatened Chase’s Robin.

Chase was glad to be packing heat. He trained the Glock on the old man as a couple of the catfish cultists, two women, seized Lucinda.

“Harm her in any way and Jim Jones gets it,” Chase said, pulling back the hammer for emphasis, even though he didn’t need to. It was an automatic.

The women eyed their master who nodded his head for them to listen. They released Lucinda and fell back to a cluster with the men.

Chase nodded, liking the weight of the gun in his hand, how suddenly it had shifted the power dynamics of this fucked-up situation. “Okay, good. Now I’m gonna ask you a few questions. You’re going to answer them. Then we’re going to leave and you’re going to return to whatever backwoods shithole you came from. You got it?”

The old man nodded emphatically.

“First of all, what was that thing?”

“She is the mother of all catfish, an infernal thing that has remained dormant for thousands of years…”

“Not very helpful, my man. Let’s try another question. Did you bring it here? Simpler diction this time.”

“No, we are merely Her worshipers.”

“If you captured us, what were you going to do with us?”

The old man got a look to him like a guilty child.

“Hey, gramps, I asked you a question.”

“We would have sacrificed you and turned your skulls into soup bowls.”

“Not what I was hoping to hear, but at least you’re honest. Keep it up, and we might all leave this river alive. You said this land was private property. Last I heard, that’s not the case, and judging by your clothes, I don’t take you as someone with the cash flow to purchase riverfront property. So who put you up to running people off?”

The old man uttered a name, but Chase missed it. He’d been so intent on alternating his glance between keeping the gun trained on the old man and watching that Lucinda went unharmed, that he hadn’t even noticed the banks of the river rising. Before the old man could repeat what he’d said louder, the giant catfish snuck up—to the extent that its mass could sneak—and snatched the old man off the shore. There was no real chewing, just the gaping opening and closing of its giant maw, and the man was down as the beast retreated back under the water. There was only time for one abbreviated scream. All that was left of the cult leader was one catfish leather moccasin, foot intact.

Before he could realize that nothing could be done, Chase squeezed off two shots, turned back to the rest of the cultists to find them on the ground, bent in prayer, bowing to the beast. Lucinda stood above them, unharmed, her eyes wide.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Chase said, unsure he wanted to hear what she had to say about the beast, about how it was still her mission to catch it.

Chapter Seven

It was one of those days on the water where nothing went right. Bo Stevens and his son, Bo Stevens Jr., had hit the river early to break in the new boat and hopefully land some lunker bass.

Things started off rough on the highway to the marina. A nail punctured one of the boat trailer's tires, and they had to make a detour to a tire shop to get it patched. That set them back, killing their plan to be on the water and fishing by eight in the morning. Arriving at the marina, they discovered a frat party in full swing. After twenty minutes of harsh words and threats to call the cops, Bo Stevens finally convinced the frat boys and sorority girls to clear out of the boat launch long enough for him to get the boat out on the river. Why the hell were they swimming in the boat launch area anyway? There was a public swimming dock fifty yards away. With the new boat finally on the water, Bo gunned the throttle and let his new bass boat fly. He'd named the boat Bass Slayer, but in all honesty, that's what he named all his boats. This one was special, though. He'd won it in a tournament.

What went wrong next?

Bo Stevens Jr., who had yet to take up fishing as seriously as his father hoped, managed to snag up and lose a fifteen dollar Lucky Strike diver, only to put his rod aside and pout about bass fishing being boring. Just about the only type of fishing Bo Stevens Jr. enjoyed was fishing with a night crawler under a fat red and white bobber. Catching palm-sized bluegills made him happy, but Bo Stevens was trying to make a man of his son, and real men fished for fierce, predatory, hard-fighting, tail-walking bass.

Sure, both largemouth and smallmouth bass could be caught on worms, but where was the skill in that? Where was the finesse? A fisherman had to define himself not just by what he caught, but by how he caught it.

Still, after Bo Stevens Jr. hardly failed to even look up after Bo Stevens landed two quality smallmouth bass, he realized it was time to appease his son. That's why he'd secretly packed a container of a dozen night crawlers, just in case his son pulled his I want to fish with worms crap and became inconsolable.

"Alright, boy," Bo said, reaching into his tackle bag. He rerigged Jr.'s pole with a single red hook and a couple split shots for weight. "The bass are holding deep on account of all the speed boats and jet skis on the water today, so no bobber this time, but here's your worm." Bo looped a night crawler onto the red hook. The worm writhed violently each time the hook pierced its brown flesh.

Jr.'s eyes lit up. "Thanks, dad!" He took up the fishing pole, pitched the worm out into the murky water, and let it sink to the bottom.

Bo continued fishing a crawfish-patterned jig, pitching it up underneath the trees hanging over the riverbank, while his son farted around with the worm. Bo was busy dwelling on his son's uncertain future as a fisherman, and because of it, missed a big strike. "Dammit," he muttered.

"Dad, I've got a big one!" Bo Jr. said.

Bo looked over to see that his son's pole was buckled over into a horseshoe. The damn rod was going to snap if the kid didn't go easy on it. "Let me see, son. You're probably just snagged up..."

"No, Dad. It's a big one. I can feel it pulling."

"Let me see." Bo took the rod from his son and gave it a tug, assessing the weight on the other end. There were no head shakes, no epic run, just dead weight. "Dammit. It's what I said. You're snagged up."

"I'm not, Dad," Bo Jr. said quietly.

Bo jerked up on the rod, figuring he had no choice but to break off and tie on another hook. The snag came loose and he began reeling up, but he hadn't reeled for long when the line stopped dead again, caught on the same dead weight. "Huh, maybe you're not snagged." Bo had barely begun to agree with his son when whatever was on the other end took off like a rocket, burning off a hundred yards of line in seconds.

"Take it, son! It's a big one," Bo said, handing the rod back to his son.

Maybe this trip wouldn't be a bust after all. And yeah, if Bo Jr. caught his first true trophy on a worm, he'd never want to fish with anything else, but if this fish was half as big as it felt, Bo didn't really care if it turned out to be a damn carp. Any big fish was better than a bad day, and that's all they'd had until now.

The fish came close to spooling Bo Jr., when suddenly the line went slack. The fish reversed course and began swimming directly toward them.

"Reel, reel! Keep the line tight!" Bo shouted.

Bo Jr. did as he was told, and Bo picked up the net. The fish was approaching fast. Unless it dove deep again, they'd get a glimpse of it soon.

That's when it dove straight under the boat and planted itself on the bottom.

But then it rose again, and kept rising, until soon Bo and Bo Jr. felt tremors like an earthquake, only they were out on a river, not on land. Bo watched the water all around. Had his son hooked into a gator? That'd be a hell of a story to tell.

"Keep the line tight," he reminded his son, but he should've reminded his son that he loved him, because in the next instant they were swallowed up, boat and all, by a monster far more evil than Jonah's whale, and unlike Jonah, they would not live inside its cavelike belly. Their skulls were crushed in the fish's jaws, and it all happened so fast that none of the boaters out on the river even noticed that anything transpired. In their presence, a river monster appeared, feasted, and vanished.

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. Still, the beast and its worshipers crept into his thoughts and dreams often, and whenever he and Lucinda fished together or went out for beers, they couldn’t help speculating on the matter, but never above a whisper in public.

At first, they’d attempted to construct plausible scenarios, but everything sounded so ridiculous. A catfish the size of a diesel truck? Primitive people dressed in catfish skins worshiping it? After a while, trying to get it all to make sense got tiresome, so they took to stringing together ridiculous scenarios. The more ridiculous the better, a kind of drinking game when they were alone. In their drunken conversations, the monster came from outer space, escaped from a top secret military lab, was mutated by the latest Gulf oil spill. They didn’t know the truth. They would never know the truth. Somehow, laughing at the unknown made that fact a little more acceptable. What was hard to accept right now was Jezebel’s condition.

She’d been born with fins and a tail.

No, she was a healthy baby girl.

It was just a tiny skin condition, some oddly placed birthmarks.

Bel was fully human.

Beautiful.

When she’d finished feeding, Chase tucked her back in her crib and turned on the white noise machine that helped her sleep. He smiled.

Instead of returning to bed, he headed out behind the house to his work shed and set about sharpening hooks, a simple, repetitive task that helped him think. Before the beast had swallowed the old man, the guy had said that She would take to the land in twelve orbits of the moon. One year. Next Friday marked the one-year anniversary of his death.

What were those crazy fuckers doing? What had they done, if anything? Had they been just witnesses, rubberneckers gathered to watch a solar eclipse, smoked glass in hand, ready to watch some phenomena they had absolutely no control over?

Their god wasn’t an obscure cosmic deity.  He’d seen the monster. He knew it was out there in the dark water, and if it was anything like the darkness that could hide inside a man, he knew it was liable to rear its ugly head again. He lit a cigarette, and when he smoked that one, he lit another. Finally, as blue light filtered in through the window and birds began to sing, he looked down at his work. A mound of razor-sharp fish hooks lay before him.

No. Chase wasn’t worried about the one-year anniversary of the sighting. After all, who trusts a guy in a catfish tunic?

Chapter Nine

Harry Albright stood behind Jed, shifting his weight, rubbing his hands together, and generally being a sweaty, annoying, fucking mess.

“You’re going to call him?” Harry asked.

“Do you see any other option?”

Jed waited, phone in hand, for Albright to give him an answer, then said: “No, that wasn’t rhetorical. Do you see any other option? Do you know anyone else who would be able to fix this shit?”

The rug stretched before them in all directions had been Persian. Well, at least it had been modeled on an exquisite Persian rug that Jed had seen at some high-end supplier. He’d snapped a picture with his camera phone and had his carpet guys make a knock-off of the pricey design, enough of the material to wrap a football stadium with some leftover to cover the parking lot.

Now most of his precious knock-off carpeting was ruined, water-damaged, and he hoped that the cleaning crew could vacuum off the river water and mud so that it didn’t set into the base of the video poker and slot machines. The machines were new, top of the line, but their bases weren’t meant to get wet, were still particle board. There was no reason for the gaming manufacturers to build them out of anything stronger, considering the speed with which most class A casinos turned over their machines.

If they were allowed to soak for much longer, they would mildew and stink, and the circuit boards would fog up. In the worst areas, it was possible the machines might even crumble or sag under their own weight. Droopy Lord of the Rings penny slots: not something the Ole Dixie’s opening day crowd was looking forward to.

The cleaning crew was already on its way, but if things had gone down on the surveillance cams like Harry Albright had described, then Jed had one more call to make and he didn’t like it.

“The flooding wasn’t caused by a structural problem. Not yet. The windows are still sealed, so it wasn’t a boat or any other change with the river. The water didn’t sweat out from the walls, but was pushed up from underneath,” Albright said, pointing down at the muddy carpet. “Look, the darkest parts are at the joints of the foundation, like fault lines. It’s a fish, or fishes. I’m telling you. Something big under the casino, coming in and out at night. And no, I don’t know anyone else who could help,” Albright explained, breathlessly recapping his hypothesis before circling back and actually answering Jed’s question.

“And you think this was the same thing that fucked up the pour? Caused the bump and disappeared your Pollack?”

It had been a year, a whole year, and Harry Albright still bristled when Jed mentioned the lost contractor, Pataki.

“Could be. You’ve seen the stuff on the news, same as I have.”

Jed had. There wasn’t much except grainy cell phone recordings of giant dorsal fins, six-foot high wakes in tributaries that should have been naturally still and weren’t deep enough to drive a boat through. They weren’t run as real news, though. The videos were puff pieces at best, local channels desperately trying to pad out their runtimes by poaching YouTube videos marked as “Mysterious Giant Fish” and “Cryptid Cat Strikes Again” and airing them as wacky weird news segments.

At the same time, the fishing trade was going tits up and experts were speculating that it wasn’t just the BP spill, or the fracking, or any of the other reasons that the commies and the loonies usually pointed to when dead fish were washing up. In fact, there were no dead fish washing up, just less fish to catch.

And now his multi-billion-dollar investment was floating apart at the seams, his project lead insinuating that everything was connected.

All Jed had to do to be sure was to call that motherfucker. That wife fucker.

“Fine,” Jed said, taking a step toward the middle of the casino floor, the carpet spongy under his boots. As he walked, the smell of wet acrylic and the finishing touches of the construction—wet caulk and tacky paint—melded into a swampy chemical bouquet in his nostrils.

Jed dialed Gail’s number on his phone. He didn’t have a direct line for the bastard fisherman, that Crocodile Dundee guy who’d knocked her up.

It rang three times before Gail snapped “What is it?” from the other end of the line. So she hadn’t deleted his contact information from her phone. That was something, Jed thought, and put on a smile. Even though she couldn’t see him, it was easier to sound nice when he was forcing himself to grimace.

“Well, hello to you too, darling. I’m sorry to be calling you this early. I hope I didn’t wake the baby. I know it’ll sound strange, but I actually wasn’t looking to talk to you. I need to speak with your beau. Is Chad around?”

“Chase?” Gail asked, sounding suspicious and annoyed. Jed hadn’t talked to her in six months, not since her park bench lawyer had finally been able to pry an actual divorce from him, the legal foot-dragging his own in-house guy was capable of positively miraculous. It comforted Jed Wilkes that he still had it, was able to still rile the bitch.

“Yeah, Chase. Sorry, I just forgot his name. That tends to happen when you don’t think about someone at all. Even when they’re balling your ex-wife.”

With that she hung up and he dialed again. There were enough rings that it seemed like she wasn’t going to pick back up. Maybe he misjudged.

Nope, there was the click. No voicemail.

“I’m sorry, that was uncalled for,” Jed said before she could speak, the apology quick, like pulling off a Band-Aid. “I really do need to speak to him. Business stuff. An opportunity for you to get even more of my money.”

She growled, started to mumble “I didn’t get much in the...” her voice trailed off, the receiver being pulled further away from her mouth until there was a clatter and new breathing on the line. She’d handed the phone to her man.

“Hello. Is this Chase? The fish man, the gill hunter?” Jed asked, flicking his eyes to Harry Albright. The cleaning crew had arrived and Harry was directing them away from where Jed was standing, their pumps and vacuums looked like they could be loud, once powered up.

“Speaking,” Chase said, his tone not as outwardly hostile as his wife’s, but still not warm.

“I’m going to cut to it, Chase,” he paused for laughter, and there was none. “I think I have a problem down at the Ole Dixie. A big fish problem. By which I mean problems with big fish, not a problem with many little fishes.”

“What kind of problem?” Chase said, the man’s interest clearly piqued despite his best efforts to stay unfazed.

“You’ve heard about the project, yes? The casino? Either from your charming wife or just from the news?”

Chase said he had and Jed continued.

Of course, the rube had heard of the Ole Dixie. It didn’t matter how much of a slackjawed swampboy Gail had found for herself, the media saturation level that the Ole Dixie had attained meant that everyone in Louisiana had heard of it. And the majority of the rest country on top of that.

“You know how it floats, yes? I mean, it’s not a boat, it’s moored, but it does float, there is water underneath the casino floor.”

Chase said that, yes, he’d heard something along those lines too. Jed wasn’t much listening to the other side of the conversation, was too in love with gloating, talking about his casino. He ignored who the other person on the line was, that Chase even was a person. Because he really wasn’t a person, a guy like Chase—even if he was fucking Jed’s ex-wife—was just a tool to someone in Jed’s position. He was an exterminator, the cable guy, the plumber you called when your toilet backed up as a result of too much filet mignon, excess success.

“Well, now there’s not only water underneath the casino floor, there’s water on the casino floor, seeping up through the plates of the foundation. My foreman thinks that there’s something swimming around down there, somehow futzing with the plates. I think he’s crazy, but I thought I might humor him, reach out, and ask if you thought something like that was even possible. Like maybe a rogue whale, or a shark the size of Jaws or something swimming up the Delta?”

There was silence on the other end of the line, a pause so long that for a moment Jed Wilkes wondered if he’d been hung up on without hearing the click.

“It might be possible,” Chase said, sounding like he was feeling the words out. “And I might be able to help. I’ll need new equipment though.”

“Ha! Already gouging the price, sounds like, putting the screws on me for a fancy new boat because you think I owe you something. I admire that, Chase. Maybe you’re not half the dumbfuck rube I thought you were.”

“No, I'm not, so tell me what this is all about,” Chase said.

Jed could get away with calling him anything now that he had him on the line, heard the interest in his voice. You aren’t the only one who knows how to reel ’em in, boy.

“But my partner and I will need scuba equipment.”

Chapter Ten

“Don’t do this,” Gail said.

Lucinda was in the boat, running her fingertips over the equipment, and trying not to look like she was eavesdropping, but Gail could tell that the girl was.

Chase’s teenage sidekick was a big part of both their lives, yet Gail didn’t know much about the girl; hardly spent any time around her. In fact, Gail didn’t even know if Lucinda was a teenage sidekick. The girl may have been anywhere from seventeen to thirty-five. Gail had never asked.

She trusted Chase enough to know that they weren’t sleeping together, and that was all she needed to know. If he required someone to talk bait and tackle with, so be it. It was better than a group of rowdy male friends, the kind of guys that drove home drunk from strip clubs and left cigar ash wherever they went.

“It’s going to be fine. We know what we’re doing. There’s probably nothing down there, just shitty workmanship on Jed’s shitty casino,” Chase said.

Just because she trusted her husband’s fidelity didn’t mean she thought he was incapable of lying. Or that she couldn’t immediately tell when he was lying. Chase was expecting to find something down there. If she couldn’t tell from his voice, it was easy to see that his partner was practically vibrating, trying to hold her excitement in as she looked over the scuba gear and personal sea-scooters that Jed had shelled out to buy them.

None of the equipment looked like it was rented. Jed was serious, or at least serious enough to drop coin.

“Everything loaded up?” Chase asked without turning away from Gail, telling his wife with his eyes that everything would be fine, that Bel wasn’t going to be an orphan. Bad enough she had that skin condition. With no dad around to help her fight off the bullies, Gail would have to do it.

Lucinda stood up in the boat, the aluminum rocking slightly against the trailer hitch. She stared down the sights of a spear gun, pointing it into a nearby tree, ready to take out a squirrel. “It all looks good to me, cap.”

“Don’t look so worried,” Chase said, taking Gail’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, the calluses tickling her. “What do you think? That your ex has some kind of Bond villain trap set for me? I’ve been over there, seen the damage. He’s not making it up, he needs help.”

“Expert help!” Lucinda chimed in, as if there had been any doubt that she’d been listening to the husband-wife conversation.

“And he’s so desperate he’s willing to pay for that help. We’re going to go down there, take some pictures of whatever barnacles, lampreys or whatever he’s got boring holes in his casino, then we’re going to collect our check.”

“And if he tries to screw you?”

“He won’t, but if he does,” Chase turned and indicated the boat, “look at all the shit he just bought us. All of it makes a pretty good consolation prize.”

He pecked her on the cheek, giving her one last look in the eyes for confirmation. He was looking for some kind of consent or permission that it was okay for him to be going diving in the Mississippi, a river with terrible visibility, looking for a big fish while her nefarious ex-husband waited above.

In Gail’s mind’s eye, she could visualize Chase in old-timey scuba gear. The lead boots and helmet were weighing Chase down so he couldn’t swim to the surface, and Jed was standing in the boat above, kinking his air hose.

Even on the tenth time hearing them, this time with an audience, none of Chase’s justifications did anything to ease Gail’s mind. The baby monitor on her hip began to whine, a whine that stretched into a more pronounced wail. She had to go feed Bel, couldn’t stand in the driveway arguing with Chase any longer.

The man was going to do what he was going to do.

And she was going to kill Jed Wilkes if anything happened to him.

Chapter Eleven

They launched a mile upriver from the Ole Dixie.

While Chase piloted the boat toward the floating casino’s gaudy glass and metal exterior, Lucinda sat cross-legged and played with one of the sea-scooters. Her wetsuit wasn’t a perfect fit, so the extra material bunching up at her thighs and crotch only enhanced the effect that she looked like a little girl.

Chase watched out of the corner of his eye as she held her arms out in front of her. Under the wetsuit he could see her muscles twitching and shaking with the exertion needed to hold what was basically a small outboard motor as if it were a Fisher-Price steering wheel.

Between making burton burton burton noises with her lips, she muttered, “Can’t believe that asshole bought two of these.”

Chase didn’t look at her to let her know he’d heard, but he couldn’t help smiling. Her calmness and how she could still be so unaffected by the fact that they were about to strap on scuba tanks and get into the water? They were looking for a monster.

Pushing the thought out of his mind, he brought the starboard side of the new boat into alignment with the casino. The u-bolt connecting the stick to the rudder was sticking, only slightly, nothing that affected their trajectory. But this meant that the boat was too new, would need some WD-40 when they got back to shore.

“Are we ready?” Lucinda asked.

“Me first?” Chase asked, not really a question because he turned himself around and hefted the tank onto his back. Lucinda took her time, adjusting each of his straps until he gave her the thumbs-up, then tugging against the tank to make sure it wouldn’t wiggle.

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.

But 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, and 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."

"Cut the crap and tell me why you're here." Gail's heart was thudding. The guy looked underfed, but there was definition in his muscles. He was maybe a junkie who used to be in good shape. From his build she could believe that he was once the town badass. But still, she had the high ground, on the top step, was trained in self-defense and had no doubts she could take him if he attacked, but if he had friends out there watching, waiting...

...Then the sound of Bel stirring, beginning to cry, echoed from upstairs.

Gail glanced away from the man for a moment. She wanted him to go away and never come back. She wanted to hold her baby close to her without her baby’s hands crawling desperately to get away, to feed her baby and know that everything was fine, but everything wasn't fine. Her husband was dead and now a strange man was on her doorstep, wearing grotesque handmade shoes and babbling about a god.

"I watched your husband die," the man said, the words causing Gail’s muscles to tense, the tone a mystery through his fluster and accent. "Mother killed him. Killed his partner too. Swallowed 'em both right up into her big black belly, like she did my sister and most everyone else who's disappeared around here lately. But I ain't here to harass you. I'm here to tell you, if you want revenge on Mother, I know where she lays at night, and I wanna help."

"Why?" Gail said. Bel's cries were growing louder, and Gail couldn't help the irrational suspicion that this man was trying to stall her, keep her from her baby. That was how thieves worked, right? In teams? One of them playing the mailman or the Avon lady, while the other snuck around the back of the house and jimmied a window? But shutting the door in his face would not make him go away. He would stick around until he got what he came for. She was certain of that.

"My sister, as I said, was eaten. Some believed her death was necessary. I fell in with those folks and got confused. We—"

"We? Who's we?"

The man grinned a mouthful of teeth like broken, sun-yellowed beer bottles. "The family, of course," he said, and took a step toward Gail.

"Stop right there," Gail said, but the man didn't stop.

He put out an open hand that, in retrospect, may not have been the open-handed strike that Gail’s brain immediately interpreted. The side of his hand grazed Gail's chin, but his swing was clumsy as he lost his footing, tripping over the threshold. As he stumbled across the doorway, Gail slammed the door across his ribs. The instant, loud crunch and subsequent shriek from his lips was music to her ears. She slammed the door again and again as he flailed, struggling to worm his way out of the house, but he was trapped, and each time he moved, Gail unleashed new pain on other parts of his body. His robe crumbled at the blows, scales flecking off and mussing the hardwood.

She slammed the door on him until long after he stopped moving. His tunic clung tight to his body from all the blood.

Just to ensure he didn't get up again, she opened the door wide, stepped past his broken body, and took a running kick as his crotch. She was barefoot and he wasn't wearing any underwear. The sick squish of his testicles crushing against her foot was almost unbearable, and the pain that splintered through her foot was surprisingly intense and nearly brought her to her knees, but she gritted her teeth against the pain. She'd brought the intruder down. He would not get her baby. Nobody would get her baby.

Bel was screaming now. It was a sound that brought her back into the real world, brought her doubts, brought some of the dead man’s words back to the front of her mind: “I want to help.”

Did he? Then why had he watched her husband die?

She ran upstairs to the baby's room, threw open the door, and ran to the crib. Bel was safely there. She'd awoken from a nap was all. Nobody was there to abduct her. Everything was fine in their world, except for Chase and the dead guy downstairs.

She rocked Bel in her arms and took slow, gentle steps in circles around the room, exactly the way Bel liked to be rocked to sleep. "Hush little baby don't you cry..." she cooed softly. To herself, pushing beyond the notion that she might have just committed a grievous error, thwarted someone’s redemption, she added, “Mamma’s gonna kill her a fish to-nite” to the lullaby.

*

The wonderful thing about Gail's parents was that she never had to offer an explanation for bringing Bel over to their place, even for a few days. They were always happy to watch their little granddaughter. Along with Friday evening bingo matches in the community center of their retirement village, Bel was the light of their lives. So when Gail hatched her plan, she called her mother and asked how they might like to watch Bel for a night or two. She refrained from saying a word about Chase. If her parents found out what happened, they'd worry, insist that Gail stay with them too. They wouldn't leave her alone, and that's exactly what she needed. To be alone.

Of course, her mother agreed, so now Gail was driving through the mobile home park at the five-mile-per-hour speed limit, Bel gurgling in her car seat, past the heated pool and community center where the cutthroat (in her parents' words) bingo games occurred, past bird feeders and fountains, gardens blooming with all varieties of succulents and wildflowers, and old people driving golf carts, until she came to a stop outside her parents' honey-colored double-wide mobile home.

They were sitting out on their AstroTurf patio, drinking lemonade spiked with vodka. Secretly spiked. It was much too early in the day to openly be spiking anything. Gail's mother stood up from her lawn chair as Gail went around the car to retrieve Jezebel from the back seat. "Is that Grandma? Are you ready for a sleepover with Grandma?" Gail said in her happy-baby voice.

The sky was a shade of blue like someone had stabbed a Smurf in the heart and smeared its blood across a dirty window.

"Thanks so much for watching her on short notice," Gail said as her mother unloaded Bel's things from the trunk.

"No problem, honey. You deserve a break."

"How's dad?"

"He's sore."

"Oh no, he didn't fall again, did he?"

"No, that schlep Leonard cheated in Bingo again last night. Your father was supposed to take home the jackpot. Big money was on the table."

Gail repressed a smile. It was funny when her mother attempted Yiddish. Even Gail, a Sunday School veteran, knew that “schlep” wasn’t the word she was looking for.

"Hi, honey. How are you?" Gail's father said as she stepped up onto the patio. He kissed her on the cheek and then took Bel from her, planting a big kiss on his granddaughter's forehead. "Chase catch any big ones lately? I heard that casino project's been mucking with the fishing."

Gail fought the overwhelming urge to break down in tears. "He's doing fine," she said. "He's so busy on the river, I haven't even seen much of him this week."

"That's good then," her father said, giving her the look he always gave her when he knew she was lying, but he was a good father and wouldn't push the subject. She always came to him when she needed to. He knew that, and so he kept out of her business. "You tell him don't be a stranger. It'd be nice to see him around more often."

Gail nodded her head up and down, felt the tears welling in the corners of her eyes. "He's got some nights off next week. We'll take you out, maybe check out that new floating casino for ourselves.”

"Ohhh, you hear that, Vern?" Gail's mother said. If there was one thing she loved more than bingo and her granddaughter, it was gambling.

And for a moment, Gail could almost forget that she was only pretending her husband wasn't dead. She could almost forget that before their too-brief time together, she was married to that hideous blob of a man, Jed Wilkes. She felt extremely relieved that her marriage to Jed Wilkes had remained a secret her parents never knew about, not only to avoid the shame of their knowing, but also so that this dream of dinner at the new casino next week could exist inside her mother's head, if only for a while. They would find out soon enough that Chase was dead. As soon as she killed whatever monster took her husband, the thing called Mother, she would tell them. Then there'd be the funeral and...the funeral...if she didn't leave here now, she was going to break down in tears.

She kissed her mother on the cheek and turned, strode toward her car, refused to turn around as she called out, "I've got to run. I love you, Bel."

Her parents probably exchanged a confused, disapproving look before turning their attention to their grandbaby and their vodka lemonades, but they'd get the full story in time.

She drove home from the retirement village, the stereo turned up loud to drown out her thoughts.

Gail had rarely ever set foot in Chase's work shed out back, which she referred to as his man cave. She found herself surprised as she stepped inside and discovered that it wasn't half as filthy or disgusting as she'd always pictured in her mind. All his fishing gear looked to be perfectly organized, his workbench was recently wiped down, the empty beer bottles were stacked neatly in a cardboard box to be recycled, the deep fryer was scrubbed clean, and everything was free of dust. She'd never thought of her husband as a clean or orderly man, but seeing inside his own private space, she realized that he was. It made her miss him all the more. What else about him had she failed to notice?

His tidiness would aid her. She needed that dynamite he'd always kept around. She yelled at him about it so much, saying it was unsafe to keep dynamite in a house with a child. She worried he might have thrown it out. One wall was stacked high with labeled bins. Hooks. Sinkers. Reels. Line. Floats. Spinners. Plugs. Stickbaits. Jerkbaits. Buzzbaits. Flashers. Panfish jigs. Except for the odd bin marked Dad's Stuff or Trophies or something of the sort, it was all fishing stuff. And then there was a bin labeled Fun.

She slipped the Fun bin off the shelf and lowered it to the ground. It was heavy and her arms trembled after she set it down. "Okay, Chase, don't let me down here," she said, as she pulled the plastic lid away from the bin, only to reveal stacks of yellowed, vintage porno magazines.

Of course. His fun box.

"Oh, Chase," she said.

She lifted one of the magazines, a Playboy from 1983. She flipped it open and noticed that the issue contained a short story by Stephen King. Chase had never been much of a reader. Neither of them were, really. On occasion, though, maybe once a year, she'd find him with his nose buried in a tattered paperback, always a novel by Stephen King. He'd be so enraptured by what he was reading that he wouldn't even notice Gail if she said his name. Maybe he bought the issue of Playboy to read the Stephen King story. Not likely, but the thought of her husband buying all these porno magazines for the stories amused Gail, and so she held on to the thought. She wasn't jealous of pictures, anyway.

Sighing, she tossed the magazine back on the stack. Then, curious if Chase really possessed a full Tupperware bin of porno magazines, she removed the top stack and tossed the magazines aside. As she removed the magazines, she felt something else beneath them. She cleared out the rest of the magazines.

Oh please, she thought. But lifting up the last dirty magazine in the box all she revealed was a collection of empty cigar tubes and bands. They were something Chase had kept to make the box smell better, no doubt.

No, it would have been too convenient to find just the tool she needed in her dead husband’s work shed. It was sweet, heartbreakingly sweet, that now with Bel in his life, Chase had finally listened and gotten rid of the explosives.

It only took ten more minutes of looking until Gail found the dynamite she needed in the dead redneck’s truck. He’d left it parked up the street from their house. The keys for the cab were in his pocket.

Maybe he did come to help her.

Chapter Fourteen

Jed Wilkes was this close to creaming in the whore's mouth, his way of breaking in his new penthouse office on the upper floor of the Ole Dixie, when Denise phoned in over the intercom. "Sir..."

"Not now! Didn't I tell you I was in a meeting?" It was an impulsive lie told for nobody’s benefit in particular, blurted out as he was about to crest. His secretary was damn well aware what kind of meeting he was in and knew the ramifications for disrupting it.

The woman going down on him paused, licked the pre-cum and spittle from her lips, and asked with her eyes whether she should continue. Jed pushed her head down. As she took him in, he moaned loudly, forgetting momentarily that Denise was on the line.

"Sir, it's your ex-wife. She's been flagged by security for suspicious activity downstairs."

He felt himself begin to wilt, a fast-motion dandelion in a commercial for weed killer.

"Then call the police," he said, willing himself to stay hard. “No, wait, have security grab her and then have them sit on her for a little while. Then call the police. That’ll fix her, if she was planning on making a scene during opening day.”

“Will do,” Denise said, and he heard the click of a broken connection. His secretary hanging up should have been a relief, allowed him to re-engorge himself, but it was useless. He could feel the girl becoming frustrated, giving little sighs between sucks like this was somehow her fault.

What a trooper, big tip for her. He felt himself brought back to the edge before the speaker chimed again. There was no answer, only heavy breathing.

“Are you trying to help me along, Denise, or do you actually have something worthwhile to share?”

“Denise is busy. How can I direct your call?”

He heard Gail’s voice and nearly tore his bell-end off when he jumped up from the chair.

“Fuck!”

The girl immediately began to apologize.

“Not you, put your fucking shirt on and get out,” he said to the girl, who awkwardly began to extricate herself from under the desk, bra in hand.

“Am I interrupting something, Jed?” Gail’s voice came over the speaker.

"Son of a bitch," Jed muttered into the speaker on the phone. "Fine, Gail, you want me: here I come." He tore the cord from the phone, severing all chance of another quippy response.

The woman put on her top and began to gather up the twenties scattered across Jed's desk.

“Are you the slowest whore in America or is it a regional title? Like just the southern United States?” The woman looked at him, some bills poking out of her waistband, obviously confused. “Hurry the fuck up!” Jed added, shooing her out the door. Maybe if Gail was waiting out there with an automatic weapon he could use the girl as a human shield.

"You know what?" she said. "I respect myself, and with the rare exception of scumbags like you, clients respect me. You're the worst kind of person, but I don't feel bad for me. I feel bad for you."

"And why's that?" Jed said, giving her his most obnoxious smirk, momentarily forgetting whatever shitstorm his ex-wife was trying to bring to his place of business.

"Because at the end of the day, I'm surrounded by people who love me. I have love. I have respect. I have family. And what are you with your casino? You're dog shit on a fancy rug. And you know what? Your style is tacky. I've seen Red Lobsters with more taste. You make Donald Trump look like fucking…” she trailed off, unable to complete the analogy. “But I guess it doesn't matter, because you'll die alone. Have fun in your private hell, Jed Wilkes." The woman turned and left his office without another word, bills flaking off her like shed skin.

Jed could feel his face redden. His heart rate quickened and he fumbled in his desk drawer for his cholesterol medication. His pants were still around his ankles and he was trembling badly. It was hard to stand. She'd rattled him. That's all there was to it. Maybe it was frayed nerves. The catfish hunter had died trying to save his casino, and now it looked like opening night would have to be postponed, but worse than that, Jed's father had passed away the week prior and not a single member of his family had reached out to him about the funeral. He'd only found out because he still read the obituaries in the daily paper every morning, a morbid habit he'd developed as a young man. Jed wasn't a broken man. He was a self-made businessman, successful in most endeavors and with much to look forward to, business-wise. But the woman was right. He was sick, sad, and lonely.

Dog shit on a fancy rug, she'd said. Yeah, that sounded like him. Maybe it was time for a change.

"That your new girlfriend?"

Jed looked up, caught off-guard. Shit. It was Gail. He'd forgotten... "Hi Gail," he said, not ready for a fight.

"My husband is dead because of you," she said.

"He knew the risks. We had an agreement."

"That's how you fuck everyone over, Jed. With your agreements. You always claim to hold up your end of the bargain while laying all the risk on everyone else."

"I don't want to fight with you, Gail."

"Shut the fuck up."

"If you want money, I'd be happy to cut you a check."

"Fuck your money, and fuck you."

"Then what do you want?"

Gail slammed down the duffel bag on his desk. Jed had failed to notice it when she entered. It looked mostly empty, but she unzipped the bag and dumped its contents onto the desk. Dynamite. A single stick of dynamite, less a cartoon red than it was a rusty discolored brown. There was a small blinking LED hanging out the end by a wire, a far cry from the sizzling fuse that the media conditioned you to expect.

Jed pushed himself back in his wheeled orthopedic chair and tried to stand, but his pants were still around his ankles and he tripped up, fell to the floor, his face landing near a suspicious stain. The hooker had been right: it wasn’t that great a carpet.

"What are you doing? What did you do? What do you want?" Jed pleaded, thinking of the fact that there was only one stick of dynamite, that these things usually had friends. He wanted to be angry, wanted to put Gail in her place, but all he felt was fear and helplessness. For the first time in his life, Jed Wilkes felt powerless.

Jed lay there on the floor, unable to move, his heart beating rapidly, aching. Was this the onset of a heart attack? He didn't know, but he couldn't breathe. Gail was out of his line of sight, but as much as he wanted to stand up and face her, he found himself immobile. What did she want? Why didn't she answer him?

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, folks.  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.

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