DAY OF THE SASQUATCH
Eric S Brown
Copyright 2017 by Eric S Brown
DAY OF THE SASQUATCH
Robert finished his cigarette. He tossed the butt onto the sidewalk outside the store and ground it out with the sole of his shoe. The bells above the door of the shop jingled as he entered. Will looked up at him from behind the counter. Normally, Will would have been happy to see him, given the amount of money he spent in the shop, but Robert hadn’t picked up his pull list in over a month. Robert didn’t have the cash to do it today either, but as much as he wanted the stack of comics waiting on him in his box, they weren’t why he was there.
Lyle stood digging through a row of boxes containing back issues. Robert walked past him to start examining the new release wall. The week’s selection was pretty bare for a guy of his eccentric comic tastes. The wall was mostly full of the latest big event and crossover issues that the big two publishers were churning out. Robert had no interest in those whatsoever. His gaze roamed over the rest of the wall and he shook his head in disgust. Politics had done so much damage to the world of comics, like everything else. Sometimes, he wondered why he bothered to keep reading and collecting at all. So many of his once favorite characters were utterly unrecognizable, now trashed and tarnished in the name of being “PC.” Like so many other comic fans, he didn’t buy books to have a writer’s biased view of what was moral and politically right shoved down his throat. Robert just wanted something fun to read to help him escape from the hell of life in high school.
“Hey, Spaceknight,” Will called to him. “I got your books over here.”
Robert heard Lyle snicker at Will’s use of the nickname he had been stuck with. He ignored it and walked over to the counter that Will had just slammed a stack of books down on.
“I don’t have the money to get them all,” Robert said, meeting Will’s eyes.
“Who does these days?” Will sighed. “Any that you can pay for though…”
Robert sorted through the stack carefully, picking out the issues he wanted the most.
The bells over the door jingled again as Ashley, Rita, and Sarah entered. Robert felt his heart skip a beat inside his chest as he saw Ashley. She always had that effect on him. In his opinion, she was the epitome of female perfection: pale skin, long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a geek at heart. He tore his eyes away from the trio of girls, refocusing his attention on the comics he was going through before they noticed him staring at them.
“Afternoon, ladies,” Will said, beaming at them. “Can I help you find something?”
“We’ve already found it,” Rita said gruffly to Will as the girls headed straight over to Lyle.
Lyle’s mouth fell open as the three of them approached him.
“That’s not a good look on you,” Sarah commented.
Rita moved closer to Lyle to reach out and close his mouth gently for him.
Lyle had turned red. It was as if he couldn’t decide whether to make a run for it and bask in the attention of the three hottest geek girls at the school that he and Robert went to.
“We were hoping you could help us,” Sarah told Lyle.
Finding courage from somewhere deep inside him, Lyle managed to stand up a bit straighter. He shoved his hands into the pocket of his grey trench coat, rocking back and forth on his feet. “Help you with what?”
“Jinx has gone missing again,” Ashley said with a profound sadness in her voice. “I don’t think he’s coming back this time.”
“Ashley,” Rita snapped. “Don’t be so defeatist.”
“Your cat?” Lyle stammered. “Has gone missing?”
Ashley nodded. “He disappeared a few days ago and I haven’t seen him since.”
Robert wondered if the girls were playing some sort of cruel game with Lyle. Doing something like that was so Rita’s style. She was the type of girl who liked to use her looks as a weapon, leaving a trail of humiliation, broken hearts, and fist fights in her wake wherever she went. Ashley wasn’t anything like that though and neither was Sarah. He doubted the two of them would mess with Lyle just to make Rita happy. Besides, Ashley sounded sincere.
“What makes you think I can help you?” Lyle asked.
“Come on, Lyle,” Sarah pressed him. “Everybody knows you’re the best hunter in this county.”
Lyle blushed again and shook his head. “No, that would be my dad, not me.”
“Cut the crap, Lyle,” Rita suddenly snarled at him. “Are you going to help us or not?”
Flinching at Rita’s tone, Lyle somehow managed to turn even redder as anger bled into the other emotions already raging within him. “You haven’t even told me what you want,” he snapped back at her.
“We want you to help find Ashley’s cat,” Sarah said point blank.
Rita’s demeanor shifted again as suddenly as it had changed before. She was all smiles as she placed a hand on Lyle’s arm and drew close to him. “You’ll help us, won’t you?”
Robert was impressed by Lyle as he brushed Rita’s hand away.
“Why don’t you guys just post on social media and put up flyers like everyone else?” Lyle challenged Rita.
“We have,” Sarah told him. Ashley had moved away from them all, looking on the verge of tears.
“Oh…” Lyle muttered and then scrambled not to be a total jerk. “I didn’t know.”
“Look, we’re desperate, okay?” Sarah urged him and then said in a whisper that Robert could barely hear despite how unintentionally close his position at the counter put him to the group. “Ashley really loves that cat.”
“So what’s it going to be, Lyle?” Rita demanded.
“I can try, I guess,” Lyle reluctantly agreed.
“Great!” Rita jumped up and down, acting like an overexcited California bimbo. “I’ll text you Ashley’s addy later on! See ya later tonight, Lyle.”
Rita started for the door but paused as Sarah lingered to say, “Thank you, Lyle. I know you’ll do everything you can.”
Sarah walked over to Ashley, whispered something to her then they followed Rita out.
Robert kicked himself for not even trying to talk to Ashley while the girls were in the shop.
As soon as Will appeared to be sure that the girls were out of earshot, he started laughing so hard he nearly fell out of his chair behind the counter. “Crap, man! Did you just agree to hunt a freaking cat?”
Lyle acted like he was as stunned as Will, though without the humor. “I guess I did.”
“I didn’t even know you could hunt a cat?” Robert spoke up.
“Looks like he’s going to find out if he can,” Will roared. “God help you, brother.”
Robert was thankful that the mess Lyle had got caught up in had taken Will’s attention away from the comics he was browsing through. As much as he wanted some of them, he didn’t feel like spending the last of his money in Will’s shop at the moment.
“Come on, Lyle,” Robert said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They weren’t exactly friends, but they knew each other from their shared love of comics.
“Hey!” Will shouted after them as they darted out of the comic shop together. “What about your books?”
“I’ll be back!” Robert promised just before the door swung shut behind them and they escaped onto the street outside.
“Hell of a thing,” Lyle muttered under his breath as he shook his head. “What did I just agree to in there, Spaceknight?”
Robert resisted the urge to grab Lyle and choke him for calling Spaceknight and flashed a wry grin. “You agreed to meet up with the hottest girls in school tonight.”
Lyle managed a laugh. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”
“Need any help?” Robert off
ered.
****
Jerry was a big man. The patrol car squeaked and bounced as he hauled himself up out of its driver’s seat. He wasn’t fat. Jerry was big boned and a walking mountain of hardened muscle. Though barely in his forties, it was a fight to stay in the shape he had been in during his time in the military. He worked at it every day, weightlifting at the gym, which he despised with a passion, long morning jogs when he got the chance, and anything else he could do to keep his midline from turning to flab. So many folks let themselves go when they came home from the Sandbox. He had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t be one of them. The stress of his job made binge eating tempting, but he assuaged those urges with enough black coffee to keep an army awake and keenly sharp.
This was his third call to the farms on the edge of town this week, and Jerry was afraid he already knew what he was about to run into. Herald had responded first to the call but had radioed for Jerry not long after. As Jerry walked up the gravel drive towards the Hendriks’ house, Herald stood waiting on him.
“You’re gonna want to see this one for yourself, Jerry,” Herald assured him.
Jerry frowned. “Where are—?” he started but Herald answered before he could even finish the question.
“I sent them all into the house,” Herald told him. “The kids were the ones who found it. They were pretty torn up.”
“Let me guess. Another dead cow?” Jerry asked.
Herald shook his head. “You’re going to be wishing it was another dead cow when you see it.”
Jerry cocked an eyebrow, not sure how to take the deputy’s remark. Herald led him around the house. The Hendriks kids were watching them, teary-eyed, from the house’s window. He waved at them and gave them a smile that he hoped said everything was going to be okay.
“Just back in the woods a bit here,” Herald told him, leading him into the trees.
The smell hit Jerry before anything else. He gagged and raised a hand over his mouth. It was like rancid meat, vomit, and crap all rolled into one very powerful and evil odor that assaulted his nostrils.
“Guess I’ve gotten used to it waiting on you to get here,” Herald said in way of an apology for not warning him.
Jerry glared at the deputy. “What in the devil am I supposed to be seeing here, Herald?” he complained. There was some dried blood on the grass but no corpse.
“Look up,” Herald said.
He had been looking around at ground level because by all rights, that’s where one would expect to see a body. Jerry raised his eyes and let out a grunt of shock as he saw the dogs. There were two of them dangling from the limb of the tree above him. They were strung up a full eight feet or more from the ground. The dogs hung by the strands of their own ripped-out intestines, purple and red-smeared cords that literally had crap leaking out of them from where they had ruptured as they were tied around the limb of the tree and each other. The bodies of the two dogs were wound together by the strands. Neither dog had much of a face left. The one on the right looked like something had broken off its nose and then gnawed on the meat behind it. The other’s face was a caved-in mass of pulp and the white of jagged, broken bones that protruded from what remained of it. The front legs of the dog on the right were broken too, and the tip of its spinal column poked out from under the bloodied hair and skin at the base of its neck. The hollow eye sockets of the dog on the left seemed to stare vacantly at him as its body twisted about by the weight of its body pulling downward on the intestines that kept dangling from the tree’s limb.
Jerry coughed, barely managing not to vomit. He had seen his share of death and messed-up crap in the Sandbox: people blown apart by IEDs, women and children gunned down in the name of Allah, and more, but these poor dogs…they got to him in spite of all that. What kind of a sicko did it take to do something like this to a family’s pets?
“Cut them down,” Jerry ordered Herald.
“I don’t…” Herald started to protest being the one to do it.
“Now!” Jerry snapped at him and Herald rushed over to where the dogs hung, fishing out his pocket knife. As Herald flicked its blade open and reached for the thickest of the strands of intestines, Jerry turned away from the disgusting sight in front of him.
“You still think it’s a crazed bear doing all this, Sheriff?” Herald asked.
Jerry didn’t answer him. He waited to hear the bodies of the dogs thud onto the ground before he turned around. They lay at Herald’s feet still tangled up in each other. Herald’s hands and uniform sleeves were smeared with red and brown. Some of it had splattered onto his cheeks too. Herald had stuck his knife into the tree’s bark and taken off his jacket. He was using it to wipe at the gunk he had gotten on him. How the man wasn’t on his knees barfing his guts out was a mystery to Jerry.
“We’re going to need to bury them too,” Jerry commented. “We can’t leave them like this for those kids to see again.”
“Gimme a minute,” Herald pleaded. When he had done what he could to clean himself up, he said, “I’ll go get a shovel.”
“Hold up.” Jerry caught him by the shoulder. “I think I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t blame you.” Herald tried to smile and failed. His lips twisted into a rictus of disgust.
They walked back to where their patrol cars were parked in the house’s driveway. Herald had fallen silent, but Jerry could see a shudder run through him every few seconds.
“That makes three this week.” Jerry popped open the trunk of his car so Herald could get out the emergency shovel stored in the gear there.
“You’re seriously going to lump this in with those cows?” Herald asked.
“They were gutted too,” Jerry reminded him.
“Yeah…but they weren’t strung up in a tree,” Herald pointed out.
“I didn’t say I had an explanation for what’s happening out here,” Jerry said, “but whoever did this, my money’s on those kills over at the Watson’s and the Henrys’ too.”
“This is some seriously messed up—” Herald began.
“Language,” Jerry warned him, knowing that the Hendriks kids might be within earshot given how close their cars were parked to the house. “I think Mrs. Hendriks is upset enough already. Lord knows I would be in her place. Those poor dogs…”
“Should we maybe bring those dogs in for the doc to take a look at instead of just burying them out there?” Herald asked, but Jerry shook his head.
“The doc’s busy working on the stuff from that last group of cows. I think we can afford to give these folks here at least some peace in knowing that their dogs are getting the proper respect from us.”
“Roger that,” Herald said, holding up the shovel so Jerry could see that he had it and stepping away from the car.
Jerry slammed the trunk closed. The sound was so loud it made him flinch. He hadn’t meant to bang it shut that loudly, but his emotions were getting the better of him. Jerry wasn’t a dog person, but what had been done to those dogs… It was an abomination.
Herald led the way back into the woods. He started to get to work, but Jerry took the shovel from him. “You handled the really hard part,” Jerry told him. “I’ll take care of this part.”
“Thanks.” Herald leaned against a tree, watching Jerry stab the shovel’s blade into the dirt and toss aside the first load of dirt.
Herald just wasn’t the sort of person who could keep quiet. A few minutes later, he said, “So how long before whoever or whatever is doing this starts setting their sights higher and it’s a person we find next time?”
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Jerry grunted in response. “We’re just not.”
****
It was late when Jerry finished burying the dogs. He stopped in at the house to reassure Mrs. Hendriks that everything was okay. It wasn’t an easy task. With Zach, her husband, out of town for work, she and the kids were alone. It took promising to her to make sure one of his deputies drove by every few hours to keep an eye on the place t
o get her to settle down. The kids weren’t as tough of a job. He told them that the dogs were buried, good and proper, and that put them at ease almost instantly. It didn’t stop the pain of their loss, but it took the edge away from it.
Herald hadn’t ventured into the house with him. When Jerry finally clawed himself free of Mrs. Hendriks, who was still more terrified than not, Herald’s patrol car was no longer in the drive outside. Jerry got into his and slid his key into its ignition, cranking it up. Before he pulled out though, he picked up the radio.
“You out there, Herald?” Jerry barked over it.
“On my way to the station, Jerry,” Herald’s voice crackled back at him. “My shift is over and I’ve got to get home. Our anniversary is tonight.”
Jerry didn’t know if he should say congratulations or say a prayer for Herald. That wife of his, Melinda, was one pampered woman and had Herald wrapped around her little finger. The man couldn’t do anything without checking with her first most of the time. Her looks matched her temperament. Jerry honestly didn’t know what Herald saw in the woman. She was living proof that love was blind. He knew he wouldn’t be getting any more help from Herald for the evening. Herald might work for him, but it was Melinda who was his boss.
“That’s fine,” Jerry lied; it really wasn’t. “You go on home and take care of what you need to. Just make sure you take a shower first and get that blood and crap off of you.”
“Thanks, Jerry,” Herald’s relieved voice answered him over the radio.
Things like what happened to the dogs weren’t supposed to happen in Canton, North Carolina. They just weren’t. That was why Jerry had come back here after he had gotten out of the military. He figured it was a nice, quiet place to call home. Heck, it was his home. He’d grown up here and maybe that made it all worse somehow. In all the years he lived here before joining up and ever since he had got back, Jerry had never had to deal with anything worse than a few meth-heads and some too-rough bar fights. Those types of things were standard in his line of work no matter where you were these days. And they made sense. Two dogs, murdered and tied up by their own guts, didn’t. Jerry had taken off his hat. It rested in the passenger seat of his patrol car next to him. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to help himself calm down as he thought about the craziness of the last week. The cattle, while akin to something one might see on a show about aliens, were easy enough to write off to a rogue bear or some other predator driven down from the woods due to the drought that had hit the county over the summer. But those dogs… There was an evil about what had been done to them. He had to find out what was behind these attacks before whoever was responsible for them did start aiming for animals higher up on the food chain. His job was to protect the citizens of Canton and keep them safe. Jerry had sworn to do it when he got his badge, but he’d be damned if he knew how to right now. There was no pattern to the three attacks that been committed so far, and he didn’t even know if he was hunting a person or animal. No, he admitted to himself, it wasn’t an animal. At least not one like anything he had ever heard of.
Day of the Sasquatch Page 1
