Aaron Polson - The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories

“What the hell are you doing here?” Joel asked.

Barry, his eyes rimmed with dark circles as if he hadn’t had much sleep, cleared his throat. “Gavin’s not well.”

“Yeah, your mom — ”

“It’s worse than that. I drove in yesterday after class. I’ve been up with him all night. He’s been vomiting. Sometimes blood.” Barry slumped against his steering wheel and looked past the others at the school building. “She’s got to work nights at the new job, and didn’t want to leave him alone. I told her he needs the hospital, but she’s afraid they’d take him to Kansas City.”

Allen and Joel exchanged a look. Allen shifted his weight nervously.

“Hospital?” Allen asked. “Why not just go to Doc Carlton’s?”

“Mom lost her insurance when she was laid off at the plant.” Barry rubbed his eyes. “You guys need to see something.”

They followed Barry to the Hullingers’ house. The place was quiet, Scab’s mom gone for work, having left a note for Barry on the counter. Upstairs, the odor started, hanging in the air like a blanket of rot.

“What’s that smell,” Allen said, his voice pinched as he held his nose.

Joel punched him in the arm.

Scab lay in bed — Springdale’s all-league middle linebacker reduced to a pallid smudge under his sheets. The putrid smell radiated from his room. Joel and Allen both tugged their jackets off in the stifling humidity. Barry pulled the comforter down to show Scab’s left hand, and his brother’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hey…guys,” he managed to say.

“Look.” Barry held up Scab’s left hand, peeled back the gauze, and titled the wound into the light so the others could see. The area around the small cut in Scab’s hand had blackened, and little dark fingers stretched out from the wound. His face was pale, but his hand, other than the black gash, was utterly gray.

“God…” Allen backed toward the door.

“God doesn’t have anything to do with this.” Barry gently laid his brother’s hand back on the mattress. Scab’s eyes blinked open and shut a few more times. “Do you still have the fish?”

Allen flashed a nervous glance at Joel. Joel set his jaw and shook his head.

“What? Why would we need the fish?” Allen took a step away from the bed.

“We dumped it,” Joel said, his voice flat and serious. “We dumped it in Potter’s Pond.”

Barry nodded his head slightly. “Potter’s Pond?”

“It’s what the old guys in town call that pond out behind Greenwillow.”

Barry stood and moved toward the door. “I want to find that fish.”

Joel, noting the stoic determination on Barry’s face, nodded and followed him down the stairs. “I’ll drive,” he called.

For a moment, Allen hesitated. He glanced back at Scab, and then scurried after them.

Barry grabbed a fish net and a couple of rods from the garage and tossed them in the back of Joel’s truck. It was an extended cab, but Barry jumped in the front seat, leaving the back for Allen.

“What’d you catch that thing with?”

“Just worms,” Joel said. He turned the key and fired up the truck. “We tried blood, liver, all kinds of stink bait, frozen shrimp…nothing else worked.”

“Figures…”

“What figures?”

Barry shook his head. “Just a theory I have. Let’s go — this could take a while. Can we stop by Jenson’s and pick up some more worms.”

“We have some over at Allen’s place.”

As Allen slammed his door, Scab came shambling out of the house wearing a heavy coat and unlaced boots. He waved for them to stop.

“I’m…going…too. I don’t…want to be left…alone.”

Three of them spilled out of the cab while the fourth leaned against the small, rear window of Joel’s truck. Scab’s eyes were open, staring out at the field of granite grave markers. “I’m going…to die,” he muttered.

“Stop saying that negative bullshit,” Barry said. “Look. You stay here. Stay warm. We’re going to catch that god-forsaken fish and figure out how to help you.”

The three healthy men started toward the fence. Joel and Barry were laden with fishing poles, a net, and various tackle; Allen carried his shotgun, his hands squeezing the stock and barrel until the knuckles went white.

Joel set his rod on the other side of the fence and pushed a heavy boot against the loose barbed wire, pushing it down so the other two could climb over. “I don’t know why you brought that thing. Not like you’re going to shoot the fish out of the water.”

“I just feel safer.”

“You’ll probably just shoot yourself in the foot.”

Joel and Barry led through the winding path to the pond, their feet cracking fallen twigs and sucking against soft patches of mud. Allen trailed behind.

“Why do you need the fish?” Joel asked.

“Well…the doctor might need to see it, to help figure out what the hell is wrong with my brother’s hand. I’m taking Gavin in either way — with or without Mom’s permission.” Barry looked at the sky. “We don’t have long.” Sunset was still two hours away, but the maze of dark branches overhead blotted out much of the light.

“You said you had a theory — about the live worms.” Joel pulled back a limb so Barry could climb underneath.

“Yeah. It’s a little crazy maybe, but I figure all that run off near the Republican must have something to do with that weird fish. None of my professors had heard of anything like it, but all of the chemicals the farmers dump on their fields, all the crap folks in town dump in the sewers…add up to a pretty nasty cocktail.”

“So?” Joel asked as he stepped into a small patch of clearing by the water’s edge and laid down his tackle.

“It’s called non-point source pollution, and the ditches around the edge of the fields are full of it. If anything could survive in that shit, it would have to be pretty hearty.”

“The fish you mean? I still don’t get it.”

“No — not the fish, exactly. I think all that chemical soup has bred some sort of super disease, a virus or bacteria maybe. Something that thrived in the polluted water. When the river flooded last spring, some of the super bug spilled out. Something that zombified a channel cat — that’s why it only went for the live worms. You assholes caught it and brought it home.”

“Zombified?” Joel tried to laugh as he squeezed a wriggling worm onto his first hook. “That’s nuts.”

“I told you that it was a little crazy. I figure the super bug killed the fish, but animated it enough to help seek out a new host — another living thing to infect. That ‘fish’ my brother caught on Sunday is one of nature’s grim adaptations.”

“Do you think, well, is Scab okay? A germ like that couldn’t jump from a fish to a person, right?”

“I don’t know. If it was hearty enough to survive in that crap, it could adapt to almost anything.”

Joel stopped baiting his hook for a moment. “Look, Barry. Sorry I’ve given you some much shit for being a college boy.”

Barry shrugged. “I’m not sure I know what the hell I’m talking about.”

Both men turned around as Allen stumbled from the brush. Allen smiled briefly, but his grin drooped into a frown as he glanced beyond his friends. “Hey, what the hell is that.” He pointed with barrel of his gun.

On the muddy bank only ten feet from where they gathered, a group of gray, flopping things crawled toward them, using their fins as makeshift legs. Joel thought they were too big for the bullhead that used to live in the pond; these creatures, drained of color like the fish Scab caught a few days prior, were the length of a man’s forearm.

Barry picked up the net and took a few steps toward the pale, writhing lumps. “Maybe we don’t have to catch that big one after all.”