“I’m sure I’d have found my way eventually,” one such idiot had proclaimed haughtily, as if he were Davey Crockett himself. The fat bastard had been missing for about eighteen hours. He’d been heading in exactly the wrong direction when they had found him, lost and scared – tears of joy streaming down his face at being rescued.
“Well if that’s the case, mister,” Byron had replied at the time, “howsabout I take you right back in there and you show me what for?” That shut the son of a bitch right up.
He was about a mile south of the outskirts of Bonanza Creek when he suddenly slammed on the brakes. Byron was usually a careful driver, but he had been caught up in his reverie. A stopped car loomed in his headlights, causing him to jam his foot on the brake pedal. Fortunately, his truck was kept in good repair. He managed to skid to a halt with plenty of room to spare.
He sat there for a few moments, breathing hard and cursing himself for not paying better attention. When he had himself under control, he took a good look through the windshield at the other vehicle. There was no mistaking it. It was wholly unremarkable for the most part, a grey Ford Taurus a couple years old. The bubble light stuck to the top, though, identified it immediately as Mark Watson’s car.
Putting his truck in park, he remembered that Grace had been planning on tracking Mark down on account of their chickens. It was doubtful she had caught up to him, though. The part-time deputy had obviously been on his way back from a day of combing the woods.
He’s probably off taking a piss in the bushes, Byron thought, getting out of his truck. He left the lights on. No point in wandering around blind. He decided to go and wait by Mark’s car for his return. If he could chat with him about their chickens right now, it’d save Grace the effort of doing so tomorrow.
It wasn’t until he had walked around the Taurus that he realized it wasn’t just parked. The front of the car was badly dented and partially crumpled. Stepping closer, he could see there were streaks of blood on the hood and grill. Unlucky bastard probably hit a buck. Big one by the looks of things. It wasn’t uncommon around these parts, especially after dark. Deer were everywhere, and they almost seemed to love jumping out in front of cars. “The stupid things must have a death wish,” he had told Grace one night after stopping just in time as a small herd leapt from the surrounding forest.
He leaned against the side of the car and began looking toward the woods. If Mark hadn’t walked too far, Byron figured he’d be able to pick out the beam from his cop Maglite pretty easily. It’s not like there were a lot of other light sources out there. He had scanned perhaps a quarter of his field of vision, seeing no light other than his truck’s, when he felt an emptiness where his elbow should have been touching glass. Turning, his first thought was to wonder why Mark had left the driver’s side window rolled down.
He put his hand on the door, then quickly pulled it back as something sharp jabbed him. He lifted it and saw a shallow cut on his palm, a small sliver of jagged glass stuck in it. Safety glass, my left ass cheek. He pulled the shard out and tossed it aside. Leaning in, he took a closer look at the door. In the darkness, he had initially missed all the bits of broken glass littering the front seat. The window had been broken inward, pretty violently, too, by the look of things.
He was just starting to consider this, his mind going over more scenarios, when he was suddenly plunged into darkness. At first, he thought that maybe his truck battery had up and died. It would be just his luck. Then he realized the light was still there, it was just being blocked.
He turned back toward his Dodge and saw that someone was standing directly in front of it. He couldn’t see who – all he could see was their silhouette, a dark outline against the light.
“Mark?” he called out, even as his brain made the connection that Mark Watson was a man of medium height and build. Whoever was standing in front of his truck was built like one of those wrestlers he and Grace sometimes liked to watch on TV.
His thoughts turned to that fool drunk, Joel Bean, just as the figure took a lurching step toward him. Whoever he was, he was limping badly. Byron Clemons was not an overly kind man, but he wasn’t a bastard either. He took a step forward to offer assistance. As the figure neared him, Byron held out a helping hand and touched what felt like slick fur. Before his mind could process this, a hand much larger than his own reached back toward him. It was fast and strong, far stronger than Byron would have been able to imagine had he been given time.
Sadly, he wasn’t.
The hand grasped the front of his face, and its jagged nails dug into his scalp. He barely had time for a muffled scream before the fingers cracked through the bone of his skull and pulled. The front of Byron’s head – face, eyes, bone, and muscle – was peeled like a ripe banana.
The creature leaned forward toward the raw bleeding cavern that had been Byron Clemons’ face. Its mouth closed around the gaping wound. For the next few minutes, the only sound that penetrated the dark woods was a thick slurping as it gorged itself.
♦ ♦ ♦
Grace Clemons wasn’t psychic, nor did she even believe in such silliness. She had a cousin from Nebraska, Natalie, who claimed to have the sight. After a few drinks, she could always be counted on to pull out her tarot cards and give grand proclamations for love, money, or both. As far as Grace was concerned, though, she was full of shit up to her beady brown eyes.
If pressed for an answer to the strange feeling in her gut, Grace would have claimed woman’s intuition – or perhaps the simple knowing that develops when couples had been together as long as she’d been with Byron. Regardless of how or why, though, she felt something was wrong.
She had been feeling it all day. First, there was the incident with the chickens. Later on, their hunting dog, Zeke, had nosed around near the coop. Without any warning, he had then scampered down into the basement, tail between his legs, and huddled in a corner, whimpering. Since then, he had refused to budge from down there. Finally, the lights had gone out, although that wasn’t really an issue. Their generator had kicked in almost immediately, but something still didn’t feel quite right.
There had been plenty of outages before. Tree branches were always coming down on a power line somewhere. But even with the low hum of the genny out back, something still felt wrong. She and Byron had always laughed at those silly TV shows about haunted houses, especially when people claimed to feel like they were being watched. Now she understood. It was like a prickling sensation at the back of her neck. It was an odd feeling, something she had never felt before – not even during the many hunting excursions she’d taken with her husband.
That must be it. She was spooked because Byron had been gone all day. If it had just been that, then maybe there wouldn’t have been an issue. But all of the strangeness of the day, coupled with his being out, must be having a cumulative effect on her. “That’s me. Getting old and jumpy,” she mused out loud with a laugh that didn’t sound all that convincing to her.
Oh, this is stupid, Grace thought, disgusted with herself. Best to nip this in the bud before I wind up in the basement cowering with that fool dog. She decided to do a quick perimeter sweep of her property. The generator kept the lights on in the house, but the external system was still off due to the earlier damage. However, the darkness itself didn’t bother her. She knew the area around their house like the back of her hand.
She debated reaching for her thirty-aught-six, but then dismissed it as being overly paranoid. Still, she had no intention of being stupid about it either. She opted to strap on the holster holding her nine millimeter semi-automatic. It didn’t have much stopping power – not that she was expecting to need it – but it was light, fast, and quick to reload.
She tossed on her jacket and grabbed the three-cell flashlight that hung near the back door, checking first to make sure the batteries were fresh. She turned it on, then stepped out into the cool night. It would be the last time she ever walked out of her house. Had she known, she might have stopped to t
ake one last look around. It was a comfortable home, and she had been happy there. She had never been blessed with children, but that had been fine because she and Byron had been good company to each other. It had been enough for her.
Grace walked straight toward the tree line at the back edge of her property. If there were any threats to be found, she reasoned that was where they would likely be. Had she gone the opposite way, or even made a circuit of her house first, she might have heard the footsteps approaching from the direction of town – along with the wet snuffling sounds as the apelike creature breathed through its increasingly congested nostrils.
She was a full fifty yards away when it came around the house and spotted her. She was facing away from it, her flashlight beam lancing out toward the trees. Once more, if there had been just a slight change in the events that followed, Grace Clemons might have lived to see another day. Unfortunately, luck was not with her that night. In fact, had her cousin been there with her tarot cards, she might have told Grace her luck had plain ole skedaddled out of town.
The creature let loose with an earsplitting roar as it began to race toward her. Grace, already on frayed nerves, jumped at the sound and lost her grip on the flashlight. It fell to the ground and rolled a few feet away. It was here that she made her final mistake of the night. Rather than pull her gun and unload it in the creature’s direction, she bent down to retrieve the light. Maybe it was nerves or an instinctive need to see the source of her torment. Whatever it was, it was a mistake that cost Grace Clemons her life.
She did manage to retrieve the flashlight first, though, bringing it up just as the beast was upon her. She was given a momentary glimpse of fur, dripping mouth, and red eyes before being plunged into darkness again. A hand – easily three times the size of her own – tore the light away, along with the rest of Grace’s arm.
Clutching at the ragged stump, she fell with a cry. She hit the cold ground, and the beast brought its foot down onto her torso. Her ribcage gave way as if it had been made of balsa wood. Bone fragments shredded whatever organs of hers weren’t outright crushed on impact.
With her last thoughts, she considered that maybe there had been something to the feeling of dread that had been building all day. All at once, she realized what it meant: her husband was dead, and she was going to join him. See you soon, hon...
As the glimmer of life faded from her eyes, she never knew that her first intuition regarding the absurdity of psychic powers had been correct. She wasn’t going to join her husband. In fact, he was coming to join her. It was still half an hour until Byron Clemons’ final face-off with another of the creatures out on the lonely country road.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Why can’t I turn on the light, Elmer?” Vera Gentry asked her husband for what, to him, felt like the hundredth time. The only illumination in their small cabin came from the living room fireplace. He would have preferred it pitch dark so as to make it look like nothing was alive in the place. Sadly, their old oil furnace hadn’t kicked over for some reason. He’d made the concession to get a fire going, not keen on freezing his ass off while he kept listen for whatever was screaming like a banshee out in the woods.
“No lights! I already told you, woman,” he spat from his favorite chair. He had moved it to the center of the room where he now sat, – a loaded double-barreled shotgun resting on his lap. Next to Elmer, on the tray table where he normally kept the TV remote, sat a full box of ammo.
“And I’m telling you you’re being a darn old fool,” she shot back. “No lights. No TV. Heck, I can’t even see enough to knit. All for what? You probably just heard a wildcat yowling out back.”
“Weren’t no cat made that noise,” he said with grim finality. “Now pipe down, I’m listening. Can’t hear nothing with you clucking like a hen.”
She made a sound of disgust and got up from the couch where she had sat, complaining nonstop, since supper. Elmer breathed a quiet sigh. She was his third wife and by far his favorite. She could cook and she kept the house clean, but once she got on a nagging kick, the bitch just didn’t shut up. He’d never been a violent man. He believed a sharp tongue lashing was always the better solution. Regardless, every so often, he found himself wondering if maybe a good smack upside the head might be in order. Now was one of those times. His sharp ears didn’t mean squat while she was cawing like a bird.
She walked over to the closed shutters. “Well, at least let me open the window a crack. It’s getting stuffy in here. If I have to be cooped up in the dark, I might as well be able to breathe.”
He opened his mouth, meaning to tell her to sit back down and, for the last time, shut the hell up, but in the split second between the end of her rant and his intake of breath, he heard it. It wasn’t much, just the crunch of some dead leaves. Regardless, he definitely heard something. Elmer Gentry’s ears were sharp. They had never failed him ... until now.
“VERA, GET AWAY FROM...”
The window exploded inward before he could finish.
The spray of wood and shattered glass caused his wife to back up a step, but it wasn’t far enough. An arm, muscular and covered in brown hair, shot through the opening.
Elmer’s eyes weren’t that good, especially in the dim light. He couldn’t see exactly what was standing outside the window except to tell that it was big. He didn’t need to, though. He already knew what it was.
Before he could steady the shotgun against his shoulder, the hand grasped the front of Vera’s housedress and hauled her toward the opening. She was dragged halfway out, her slippered feet kicking wildly in the air. Under other circumstances, it might have been comical, her legs flailing away while her dress rode up to show her bloomers. However, there was nothing funny about what happened next.
An animalistic snarl came from outside, followed by a wet ripping sound. Vera’s feet stopped moving and fell limp after one last twitch. A second later, her lower half fell to the floor, the rest of her having been torn clean off. She hadn’t even had time to scream.
Elmer raised the gun. There would be time to mourn later. For now, though, there was business to attend to. Unfortunately, even as he brought the gun to bear, he could tell there was nothing standing at the window. Another soft crunch outside alerted him that it was moving. Still seated, he quickly pointed the shotgun toward the front door.
Oh no you don’t, you sneaky son of a bitch. The creature possessed impressive natural stealth for its size. It was moving quickly and quietly, but it hadn’t counted on Elmer Gentry’s uncanny hearing.
He watched calmly while his front door was literally torn from its hinges, as if it were made of nothing sturdier than tissue paper. The creature stepped through with a grunt. Runny red eyes locked first on Elmer, then on the barrel of his gun. They opened wide as if in surprise – the last bit of sanity in its hairy head asserting itself at the very end.
Elmer unloaded with both barrels. Had he been standing, the recoil would have knocked him flat on his old ass. Either way, he was going to have a nasty bruise on his shoulder. It more than did the job, though. The only thing left of the beast’s head was a fine red mist. The rest of it crumpled unceremoniously to the floor.
“That was for you, Vera,” he said to the empty room once the echoes from the blast died down.
He sat back in his chair with a sigh and closed his eyes.
That was when he heard it ... when he heard them.
With the door now wide open and Vera’s incessant prattling silenced – permanently – he began to understand. Roars, cries, snarls – all of them reached Elmer’s sharp ears. Soon enough, more of the creatures would come, many more. Had he been a younger man, he might have tried to make a stand, but he was old ... old and suddenly very tired.
As he listened to the sounds of Bonanza Creek dying, he lit his pipe for one last smoke. He took several deep, satisfying drags, then grabbed some shells from the table beside him. He calmly reloaded his shotgun, his wrinkled hands steady – moving as if he had all the t
ime in the world.
He took one last puff from his pipe before setting it down. He kicked the loafer from his right foot, noting with some amusement that it landed on the body of the slain beast. Kicked yer ass all the way to Hell, he thought with a grin.
Elmer placed the barrel of the loaded gun under his chin, then positioned his big toe on the trigger. His had been a good life. He found he had no regrets. If anything, the anticipation of seeing Vera again so soon gave him one last smile.
Bigfoot Hunters (Tales of the Crypto-Hunter Book 1) Page 22
