Lawless Lands

by Emily Lavin Leverett

  “Seriously? You hauled a bloody coyote leg back here in my truck?” Tyson griped.

  “Son, looking at that truck, I could have strapped it into the seat next to me and you wouldn’t even have noticed another stain,” I said, pushing back from the table.

  Tyson gave me a sour look, but Vanessa just laughed. “He’s got you there, Ty. What’s next, Bubba?”

  “Well, I’m gonna sleep most of today, I reckon. I’ll take some pictures of the leg and send them to Skeeter before I crash, then tonight I reckon I’ll go back out there with more lights and try to hunt this thing down.”

  “I can take the pictures for you,” Tyson said. “You go sleep.”

  “You sure?”

  “Let me feel like I ain’t completely useless with this damn bum foot,” he said, lurching to his feet and clumping across the kitchen. “I’ll go get my camera.”

  “Just use my phone,” I said, handing him my cell. “The camera’s good enough, and Skeeter’s got it all synced up with his computer so it transmits any picture I take straight back to him.”

  “That’s useful,” Vanessa said.

  “Yeah, long as I remember to turn it off when I want to take pictures of my girlfriend,” I said.

  “You’re terrible,” she said with a grin.

  “You ain’t wrong,” I grinned back. “But I’m also whooped. I’m gonna go sleep for a few hours, then when I get up, we can figure out the next step. Thanks for breakfast. It was awesome.” I stood up and swayed a little on my feet. Between flying halfway across the country and being up all night, I was wore slap out. I lumbered back to the spare bedroom, unbuttoned my pants, and intended to lay back on the bed for just a minute before I got undressed and crawled under the covers.

  The sun had moved all the way across the sky by the time I woke up, still flat on my back with my pants and shirt on. Somebody, Vanessa I reckoned, had come in and thrown a blanket over me at some point during the day. Tyson was a nice enough fellow, but he seemed about as nurturing as a drill sergeant, so I didn’t expect it to be him. If I’d woke up with a dick drawn on my forehead, then I’d think my fellow Hunter might be responsible.

  First thing I did after I went to pee was make sure there wasn’t a dick drawn on my forehead. It was clear, so I washed my face, ran a comb through my hair, pulled it back into a ponytail, and freshened up my deodorant. I didn’t see a whole lot of point in another shower, so I just brushed my teeth and wandered out into the house.

  Tyson was sitting at a desk typing on a computer and waved me over as soon as he noticed me. “Come look at this,” he said. He pointed at the screen, which showed an image of short, razor-sharp teeth.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s a computer model of the teeth of the thing that killed your coyote,” Skeeter’s face popped up in a corner of the computer screen, like a less-helpful Microsoft Paperclip. He went on. “That tooth pattern doesn’t match anything in any of our files or in DEMON’s database.”

  “Skeeter, did you hack the government again?” I asked. The Department of ExtraDimensional Monsters and Occult Nuisances was the federal agency that didn’t officially exist, but didn’t exist specifically to handle the kind of threats that Skeeter and I dealt with every day.

  “No, Amy ran a check against the computer model,” he huffed. I would have apologized if he hadn’t shown a tendency in the past to hack anything he felt like whenever he felt like it. Knowing he asked my girlfriend for help made me feel a lot better about the odds of us not getting sent to Gitmo this week.

  “So we don’t know what it is, but we know it’s got a shitload of teeth. What else in this part of the world fits that description?” I felt a little shiver run up my spine. It was exciting, hunting something new for a change. After all these years, I’d put down enough werewolves and wrestled enough naked sasquatches to last a lifetime.

  That number for naked sasquatch wrestling is one, by the way.

  “Skeeter,” I started, barely able to contain myself. “Do you think…could we be on the trail of the elusive…chimichanga?”

  Tyson looked at me like a cat watching somebody pee in the toilet. It was like he was pretty sure he understood the words I was using, but he didn’t quite comprehend how they were put together.

  “Wait, I got it wrong again.” I held up a hand. “Don’t tell me…it’s a chalupa!”

  Still staring.

  “Churro?”

  Nothing.

  “Chorizo?”

  “Bubba what the hell are you trying to say? Are you hungry or something?” Tyson looked at me like I had a second head growing out my neck, and this one had a green face.

  “He means a chupacabra,” Skeeter said. “I don’t know if it’s a mental block at this point or if he just thinks he’s funny, but he has never been able to get away from the menu at a Mexican restaurant when we’re talking about a chupacabra. Which I don’t think this is, by the way.”

  “Why not? Do we have a quesadilla’s bite to compare it to?” I asked.

  “No, we do not,” Skeeter said. “But by all reports, the chupacabra drains the blood from its victims, which indicates fangs. There are no fangs in this bite pattern.” He rotated the image on the screen, and no matter how many ways I looked at the imaginary digital teeth, there weren’t any fangs there.

  “Maybe they’re retractable, like vampire fangs,” I said.

  “You said there was a lot of blood at the scene,” Skeeter said.

  “Yeah, there was so much it made a mud blood puddle. Heh, that sounds like something out of a Harry Potter book,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Not a very good bloodsucker if it leaves a bunch of blood behind,” Tyson remarked.

  “Et tu, Tyson?” I asked.

  “Hey, man, don’t get all Latin on me,” he protested. “Just because it ain’t a chupacabra don’t mean we don’t need to shoot it.”

  “We don’t need to shoot nothing, Hopalong,” I said, motioning to his leg. “I couldn’t catch up to that thing with two good wheels, how you gonna do it with one?”

  “I ain’t,” he agreed. “I’m gonna catch it with four.”

  An hour later we pulled out of Tyson’s driveway with a trailer hitched behind his pickup. A pair of four-wheeled ATVs with high-powered spotlights mounted on the front were strapped down the trailer, and we were loaded for bear. Or enchilada. Or really any damn thing we might run into. I had Bertha, my Mossberg, and a pair of H&K MP-5 submachine guns mounted to the handlebars of one ATV. Ty had his Colt 1911 loaded with hollow point .45 rounds, a Benelli M4 shotgun, and a Remington 700 with a night scope across his ATV’s gear rack. I didn’t so much think we were in danger of anything that might be out there as I thought we might be in danger of being mistaken for an invading army if we got anywhere near the Mexican border. We also had a couple of battery-operated flood lights and a flare gun with white phosphorous flares to light up the whole area if we needed it.

  We pulled up to the house where I stopped the night before and unloaded the ATVs. I turned to Tyson. “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “Son, that’s at least the fourteenth time you’ve asked me that since we left my house. For the last damn time, yes, I’m fine. I ain’t gonna go running after the damn thing. I’m gonna hang back and shoot the shit out of it.” He threw his leg over the four-wheeler and cranked the machine to life. We pulled our night vision glasses on and rolled out toward where the chalupa killed the coyote the night before.

  Once we got to the creature’s known hunting ground, we started our search there. We made concentric circles on the ATVs, spiraling out from the kill zone at center in an ever-larger radius. After two hours of literally driving around in circles, I slowed down to let Tyson pull up alongside me and we turned off our rides.

  “This ain’t working,” I said.

  “It’s early yet,” Tyson replied.

  “We ain’t seen so much as a coyote in the last hour,” I argued. “We’re making too much damn
noise. Ain’t nothing going to come near us on these things.”

  “Shit.” Ty nodded his agreement. “I was a little bit afraid that might be the case.”

  “But you couldn’t stand the thought of being left out,” I finished the thought for him.

  I reckon he was glad it was dark so I couldn’t see him blush. I didn’t blame Ty, though. We weren’t the kind of men who sat at home and made plans or watched the computer screen. We were meant to be out here, in the middle of the shit, and anybody who didn’t believe that had no place being a Hunter. “Alright, so now what?” I asked.

  “Well, my ideas ain’t worked out so good so far, so I don’t reckon I know.”

  “Well, I ain’t an expert in desert hunting, so even though this was a shitshow, I reckon I’ll still take any ideas you got,” I said.

  He didn’t have time to tell me any ideas he might have because just then I heard another coyote scream. This one sounded closer than the one last night, and it only took me a second to get the general direction locked in. I thumped Tyson on the shoulder and said, “Let’s go!”

  He looked at me, rubbed his shoulder a little bit, and cranked his four-wheeler. We headed in the direction the howl had come from, and this time we had wheels. We crested a rocky dune and looked down into another small depression, where this chimichanga obviously liked to do its hunting. There was an orange spray of blood painting the ground in my night vision, but two bright red shapes still circled each other in the bottom of the ditch.

  “Lights,” I said, stripping off my goggles and flipping on the spotlights mounted to my handlebars. The xenon lamps cut through the dark like lasers, illuminating a battered coyote dancing and jumping around something that I couldn’t quite identify. It was black and orange striped, about five feet tall at the shoulder, and about ten feet long, with a thick tail and a stubby head. It moved fast as lightning on its four stubby legs, and the coyote kept getting nipped when it went in to try and snap at the thing.

  “Son of a bitch,” I heard Ty murmur behind me. He had the high-powered LED floodlight out of the case and up on its stand, shining down into the depression like a miniature blue sun.

  “What the hell is that, Ty?” I asked.

  “That’s another one of them damn were-lizards that bit me, only this one’s about twice the size,” he said.

  “That ain’t no were-lizard,” Skeeter said into our earpieces. “That’s a giant Gila Monster, and if it gets hold of you, it’ll chew your damn leg clean off.”

  “A giant Gila Monster? Is that even a thing? Or are you just messing with me and really it’s a churro?” I asked.

  “That ain’t no kind of chupacabra, Bubba. That thing looks like a Gila Monster, just five times the normal size. That means five times as venomous.”

  “Wait, you mean it ain’t just a giant lizard with a shitload of teeth—it’s a poisonous giant lizard with a shitload of teeth?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Skeeter said. “Try not to get dead.”

  “Always the goal,” I said. I pulled Bertha from her shoulder holster and ran down the sand to about twenty yards from the lizard. I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a chalupa, but either way, it looked a lot like something that was in serious need of killing. I drew a bead on the thing and squeezed the trigger. Bertha jumped a little in my hands, and a sound like a thunderclap came from her.

  The fifty-caliber slug smacked into the lizard right in the side, a little high, but I was elevated and shooting down, so I gave myself a pass on a little bit of accuracy. Truth be told, I was a wee bit excited to be shooting something I’d never put a bullet in before, so that might have made me a little jumpy, too. The bullet hit home with a solid thwack, and the lizard turned and looked at me, its baleful yellow eyes boring holes into me as if to say, “Okay, asshole, you got next.”

  “Shit,” I said. “That shoulda put a hole the size of a damn pie plate in that thing.” Instead, there was a tiny trickle of blood where it looked like I broke the skin, but just barely. “Ty, did you say you killed one of these things with that Colt?”

  “Yeah, but I reckon I got the runt of the litter,” Tyson hollered back. “Get clear so I can put a few into its head!” I ran around to the right to get clear of Ty’s line of fire, and he put five .308 rounds in the lizard’s head and neck within half a dozen seconds. The lizard let out a screech and decided we were way more a threat than the coyote.

  It spun around, looking for the critter that hurt it, and since Ty was way back at the ATVs shooting with a rifle like a sane person, I was the first thing the super-Gila found. It scurried up the hill way faster than anything with them stubby little legs ought to run, and I emptied Bertha’s magazine at it as it came. One round caught it square in the snout, and that pissed it off enough to stop for a second and let out a bellow that sounded a lot like a dragon screwing a really upset billy goat, then it got right back after me.

  I holstered Bertha and squared up like I was back at UGA getting after a quarterback. I didn’t know which way I was gonna have to juke, I just hoped I’d be fast enough and the stupid idea that popped into my head was gonna work. Ty reloaded and put another couple rifle slugs into the critter’s side before it got to me, then it was go time. The lizard came at me like a dead run, and I was facing down more ugly death than I’d seen since the last time I had all-you-can-eat fajitas as La Casa del Fuego on dollar Budweiser night. It ran straight at me, and I jumped just far enough to the right to miss getting a gut full of pissed off lizard teeth.

  I landed, spun around, and jumped again, landing on the Gila-Gigante’s back just forward of its front legs. It bucked, and I wrapped my legs around its neck like a stripper on a wobbly pole, holding on for dear life. I managed to squeeze tight enough to lock my feet under the monster’s throat, and it wasn’t shaking me loose come hell nor high water. It thrashed, jumped, and wiggled, but I was stuck tighter than a tick in a poodle’s butt hair, and frankly, I was too scared to let go. It even rolled over one time, squashing all the air outta my lungs and mashing one ball flatter than a penny on a railroad track, but I still hung on.

  Ty couldn’t shoot no more, on account of him kindly not wanting to kill me, and the lizard couldn’t shake me, so I was the one in the catbird seat. Or maybe the lizardbird seat. Super-Gila kept running around and thrashing, but I just unslung that big Mossberg 12-gauge from my back, pressed the barrel to the back to the lizard’s head, and cut loose with eight shotgun shells right into its brainpan. The first three didn’t penetrate, but even the toughest hide can only take so much abuse, and a twelve-gauge shotgun at point-blank range is a hell of a lot of abuse. The lizard stopped moving after six shots, but I plugged a seventh one in there just for good measure. The eighth was just cause my nuts hurt and I was pissed off.

  The creature flopped to the dirt on its belly, its skull a destroyed mess all over my shoes. I unhooked my feet, my ankles and knees screaming at the abuse I heaped on them, and I collapsed right beside the lizard. Tyson cranked his four-wheeler and drove down next to me, stopping a couple feet from my head.

  “You alright?” he asked.

  “I ain’t dead, but my knees are shot and my balls hurt, and if this don’t give me a ferocious case of hemorrhoids, I’ll eat your hat,” I said.

  “So what you’re saying is you’re fine.”

  “Yeah, I’m alright.”

  “Good, cause we seem to have another problem.” Tyson pointed past me to the other side of the little gulley the lizard was hunting in. Just on the edge of the floodlight’s throw was a cave, just about the perfect size for this Uber-Gila to crawl into. Poking out of the mouth of the cave were a pair of little lizard heads. By little, I mean they looked to be the size of normal Gilas, about a foot high and probably two feet long.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  “Yup,” Tyson agreed. “I reckon the one I killed last week was Papa.”

  “And I just killed the mama. Shit.”

  I pressed the
button on my earpiece, but Skeeter was already listening. “I got you, Bubba. What are you gonna do with two baby Giant Gila Monsters?”

  “Why do I even have an off switch on this thing if you can just turn it on whenever you want?”

  “So you have the illusion of being in control of one thing in your life. Don’t avoid the question. What are you going to do with them baby super-lizards?”

  I let out a sigh and dug my phone out of my pocket. To my surprise, it was still intact after being rolled over by me and a giant lizard. Them Otterbox things are the bomb. I scrolled through some contacts until I got to the M’s. I pressed a button, and a big goofy face filled my screen.

  “Bubba? Is that you?” a voice came on the other end.

  “Mason, I need a favor,” I started. I explained what I needed, then hung up the phone. A minute later, I looked at Ty. “It’s handled.”

  “What are you doing? You ain’t killing them things are you?” he asked.

  “Nah, looks like they only got to be real feisty when they had babies. This lizard’s probably been hunting around here for decades without hurting anybody. It just had to widen its hunting ground because the babies needed fed. No need to exterminate what might be the last two just because their territory shrank the same time their family grew. I got a guy in Missouri. He’s friends with a…dude that runs kind of a wildlife preserve for the wildest kind of life. He’ll take these little guys out there where they can make friends with a couple gowrows and some other critters, and they won’t need to bother nobody.”

  Ty thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “That sounds good. I reckon if they didn’t have to hunt for food for their babies, I never would have run afoul of the papa.”

  “Yeah, but papa turned manhunter. It was only a matter of time before some hiker or camper ended up out here and became lizard food. This way they’ve got a safe place, and we don’t have to kill ‘em,” I said.