The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories by Aaron Polson

hair and
rubbed his head with a towel. “I did last night.”
    “ Yeah?”
    “ His mom said he was pretty
bad. Stomach flu, or something like it.”
    When Scab missed school on Wednesday, Barry
met Allen and Joel in the high school parking lot.
    “ 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