Predatory Animals

by Gabriel Beyers

  “Clifton Arnold,” he said almost in a sigh. “He was the first to go missing.”

  Patrick squatted down to check the strange deflated sacks surrounding the bed. “This is bad. There’s no way of telling just how many of those things were in each sack. There could be six or six-thousand.”

  “Are we done here?” Casper asked. He didn’t like being here. The walls seemed to have eyes and he felt vulnerable. He kept checking his corners as if a horde of the giant bugs would at any moment spill out of the shadowy depths. “I don’t see much here that will help us.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Patrick asked.

  “I’m going to go to the hospital,” Dale said. “Maybe I can convince them to put a guard on Sly Felton. If he really does know something about the Pummels, they’ll try to finish what they started.”

  Patrick stood and dusted off his hands. “I’ll go, too. You coming, Cas?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Casper’s eyes swept from the gritty remains to the empty sacks. Rebecca Reid’s frightened face filled his mind and he wondered just what her final thoughts had been. Had she regretted trying to poison King, Sky and Shadow when they tried to come to her rescue? He remembered how the dogs had jumped into the Animal Control van without even a whine of objection; he remembered how his children had screamed. The dogs had killed one of those creatures. The giant bug had dealt some nasty blows to the dogs, and in the end it had killed Rebecca Reid.

  But still, the dogs had killed one.

  “I need to go get my dogs,” Casper said.

  They left the cabin and returned to the Jeep. But even as they drove away, Casper still felt hidden eyes watching him.

  Attacked at Home

  The control room was empty except for her and Wexxel. The man poured over the monitors, barking orders into the radio. Nan waited for him to finish.

  “Everything good?” she asked.

  Wexxel nodded. “Business as usual. The guards are taking care of the day-to-day. The trainers and volunteers seem edgy, but I don’t think they suspect anything.”

  “Good. Keep me informed.” She turned and left control room.

  Gordon had locked himself away in their bedroom for the past two days, forcing Nan to take charge of the effort of cleaning up the mess they seemed to have fallen in. She didn’t mind being the boss. In fact, it was what she was working toward, but she didn’t like the mindset her husband had taken since Art had vanished.

  Gordon had always been a master of his emotions. Cold and methodical, he was typically quite calm, but now he seemed tossed between abysmal sorrow and wild uncontrollable rage. Frankly, she didn’t see what he was all worked up about. Arthur was no big loss. He was foolish and uneven—a liability in more ways than one. The only thing that irked her was that Arthur’s sudden disappearance threw a snag into her plans. She’d had it all worked out so perfectly. She’d had her pawns all in place. Arthur would kill Gordon, then after a bit she would eliminate Arthur, leaving her at the top. Now she was going to have to switch things up. It was all very annoying.

  Nan stepped into their bedroom and found Gordon sitting at his desk, weeping over Arthur’s duffle bag.

  “Did you take the explosives out of that?” Nan asked. “If not, you might want to stop manhandling it.”

  “He killed my little brother.” Gordon’s voice quaked with anger. “I’m going to empty this on that bastard’s family.”

  “If you mean the Marine, you don’t know that he had anything to do with it.” Nan kept her voice cold and even. At first she had tried to play the doting and grief stricken wife, but that only seemed to feed Gordon’s rage. When she stayed distant he was less likely to hit her again.

  “Of course he did,” Gordon said. He clutched at the bag like a mother eagle protecting her nest. The glass bottles clinked together inside.

  Nan highly doubted the Marine had killed Arthur, but she knew there was no getting through to Gordon. The bad blood that had existed between Art and Casper Brown was all the proof that Gordon needed. She didn’t argue, though. Either way, the Marine was a threat and need to be dealt with.

  Nan tossed a newspaper down next to the duffle bag. “Four more people have vanished over the past three days.”

  Gordon glanced over at the headline. “And that means what exactly?”

  Nan stepped behind Gordon and placed her hands on his shoulders. He didn’t recoil from her touch, but he didn’t yield to her, either. “If people are vanishing,” she said, “it gives a bit of leeway to cause a few disappearances of our own.”

  “Brown and his family are going to burn. Just like Art wanted.” Gordon shrugged away from her touch.

  She couldn’t deal with him like this. There was no good reason to murder the Brown family in such a conspicuous way. They could just as easily grab him, kill him, and sink him in the lake. With all the weirdness in town, the authorities would just link him with the rest. But this wasn’t her battle to fight.

  “All right,” she said. “If that’s what you want, then we’ll make it happen. When do you want to do it?”

  “Tonight.”

  “That may be a problem.” Nan backed up a step when Gordon turned his venomous glare upon her. “Tonight is when Sly Felton receives a special visitor, remember?”

  A small smile flashed at the corner of his mouth, then vanished.

  The intercom on the wall buzzed. Nan pressed the call button. “Yes?”

  Walter Coining’s voice sizzled through the intercom, losing none of its panic along the way. “We have a serious problem,” Coining said. “You need to come to the control center right away.”

  Wexxel met them just inside the security door, his eyes wild and full of a disconcerting shadow that neither had ever seen before. He clenched his jaw and his nostril flared like a spooked stallion’s. His right hand gripped his pistol in a knotted fist.

  “What’s wrong?” Gordon asked, trying to read Wexxel’s expression.

  “The perimeter has been breached.”

  Wexxel led them over to the main desk where Coining closely studied the line of monitors, running the video back and forth. “Twenty minutes ago was the shift change. We have been running three on and three off in twelve hour shifts ever since Art vanished.”

  At the mention of his brother’s name Gordon’s face took on a look that would have made most men cower. But Wexxel was either all business or was too shook up to notice.

  “We know the protocol,” Nan said, irritated. “You still haven’t told us the issue.”

  “The three guards on duty are missing.” Wexxel’s voice fell like an axe splitting wood.

  “What do you mean missing?” Nan stepped forward to peer over Coining’s shoulder. “Have they gone AWOL?”

  “I’m afraid not. Both gates are closed and the fence’s sensors haven’t been tripped. The only other option is to scale the razor wire.”

  “And you’ve checked the labyrinth?”

  Wexxel nodded. “I did so personally. They are nowhere to be found. I’ve got guards searching the grounds as we speak.”

  “Is it possible that they left during the time the trainers were feeding the cat?” Nan asked.

  “No. All three reported in once the trainers left for the day.”

  “Holy shit,” Coining said suddenly. “I’ve got something here.” The three crowded in behind him and looked over his shoulder at a still shot of a man standing partially concealed by the trees. “That’s Phelps. He was walking the grounds while Dunning and Pearson covered the gates. Thirty-seven minutes ago he stopped to take a piss.”

  Nan restrained from slapping Coining in the back of the head. She couldn’t stand pointless information. “How stimulating.”

  Coining pressed the PLAY button. “Just watch.”

  The video showed Phelps stepping from the path and slightly out of view. He holstered his gun and unfastened his belt. Then, just as he started to piss, he was suddenly thrown off of his feet as if hit from be
hind, rolled into the underbrush and out of the camera’s view.

  “Roll it back,” Gordon ordered.

  They watched the same thirty seconds of video five times. Gordon slammed his fist on the table. “Damn it. Can’t you enhance this? I want to see who grabbed him.”

  “It looks like something hit him from behind,” Nan said.

  “That’s impossible,” Wexxel said. Then as an afterthought he added, “Unless he was shot. Maybe we have a sniper.”

  “Where is this at?” Gordon asked.

  “Sector four,” Coining said. “Over by the African Serval enclosures.”

  Gordon charged to the door then turned back. “Let’s go.”

  Nan didn’t like the look in his eyes. He seemed on the border of a breakdown. Wexxel and Coining seemed to share her thoughts.

  “Do you want me to come, too?” Coining asked.

  “No,” Gordon said. “Stay on the monitors and see if you can find what happened to Dunning and Pearson. Radio the others. Tell them what we know, and advise them not to stand in the open just in case it is a sniper.”

  Nan and Wexxel followed Gordon topside where they took one of the golf carts over to the African Serval enclosures. Coining radioed to let them know they were in the right spot. They slid to a halt and Wexxel—who had traded his pistol for an assault shotgun—jumped out.

  Gordon and Nan exited the golf cart, but Wexxel waved them back. “You two take cover. Let me go in first.”

  Gordon nodded and Nan certainly wasn’t going to argue. For the first time in a long while, she was scared. Oh, sure she had been frightened before, but that fear was always over something tangible like going to prison, or Gordon finding out about her and Art. But this was different. The world had taken on a level of creepiness she had never felt before. She stood now in fear of the unknown, as if every corner she turned would bring her face to face with shadows and ghosts and hideous demons. The lions roared to each other across the grounds and she shuddered hard enough to rattle her teeth.

  What if Penelope never really escaped St. Francis?

  Nan retrieved her 380 pistol from the holster hidden at the small of her back. She chambered a round, released the safety and held it low in both hands. The lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards continued their sporadic roaring, while the birds sang as if nothing was amiss. The trees shimmied in the breeze, shuffling their leaves together. The first of the summer cicadas started their quivering symphony. It was as if everything that could make a noise was doing its best to deafen her. Her chest ached from the assault of her raging heart. How long had Wexxel been gone? Should she call to him? She tried to catch Gordon’s eyes but he wouldn’t look at her.

  The underbrush shifted and both Nan and Gordon drew a bead on the movement. The gun begged her to pull the trigger; her finger longed to obey. The foliage parted and Wexxel stumbled out looking pale but otherwise uninjured.

  “What is it?” Gordon demanded. “What did you find?”

  Wexxel pushed back the branches. “Come look for yourself.”

  Nan followed behind Gordon. She slipped a little on the grass as her shoes left the gravel, but managed to steady herself with the aid of a sapling. She muttered under her breath, more than a little pissed that neither man had made an effort to catch her. They followed a drag-path cut in the fallen leaves and grass for about fifty feet when they came upon Phelps’s shredded clothes, belt, shoes, gun and radio. All of it was covered in a light gray dusting of sand.

  “It’s just like what we found at that log cabin,” Wexxel said.

  His voice lacked its usual confidence and swagger, and Nan realized he was terrified. And with good reason. When they had searched for Art all they had found was his duffle bag and one lone shoe snagged in a briar bush twenty yards back in the woods.

  Gordon reached down, scooped up a handful of the gray sand and Nan’s stomach rolled. “Is this shit Phelps?” He let the grains slip though his fingers. “It’s like he was disintegrated. What in the hell could do this to a man?”

  Nan thought back to the day that they had played Good Samaritans and helped search for Clifton Arnold, the museum curator. Art had told them about finding the Asian girl’s clothes all torn and spread about. She had accused him of lying to cover up that he had raped and murdered the girl, but now looking at what remained of Phelps, she knew he had been telling the truth.

  “McTreaty,” she said, shaking herself from her revelry. “Gordon, do you remember what Art said about that Asian girl that went missing?”

  Understanding blazed in his eyes and he looked back down at Phelps’s clothes. “McTreaty was there that day. Either the giant, the Marine or the cop always seem to be around when there is trouble.”

  Wexxel looked at them as if they had changed color. “I’m not saying those three haven’t stirred up some shit for us, but do you really think they are able to do this to a person? What the fuck are they? Vampires? Aliens?”

  Gordon stood up. “Art thought that McTreaty might be CIA. And Brown was a high ranking Marine.”

  “So?” Wexxel asked. “I’m not following. Connect the dots for me.”

  “What if they’re testing some new kind of weapon? Maybe it’s a gun. Or it could even be a chemical or biological weapon. They come to a small town to test it, and come across us. Maybe killing innocents rub them the wrong way, but taking out criminals is right up their ally.”

  Gordon’s eyes were wide and wild as he stared off into space; his face was sheened in a layer of oily sweat. Everything about him spoke of a madman pushed past his limits, and the words pouring from him were no less insane. Yet, she couldn’t help but believe him. Perhaps it was his own faith that made her want to accept it, or maybe she really was in love with him after all. Whatever the reason, she found herself nodding in agreement.

  Wexxel backed away from them as if they were raving lunatics. “You two are serious, aren’t you?”

  “You explain this then,” Nan said. Wexxel remained silent.

  “I want to go to that log cabin,” Gordon said. “I want to see it for myself.”

  Wexxel shook his head. “Why? I told you what was there. We should have burned it when Art went missing.”

  “I don’t know. I just need to see it. Maybe there is something that you missed.” Gordon turned without another word and walked back to the path.

  Though he protested, Wexxel drove them out to the log cabin. He insisted on hiding the car down the road and hiking through the woods. Through it all, Nan was surprised to find she was enjoying herself. The initial fear had eroded, revealing a hidden vein of mystery. There had always been an insatiable hunger within her, but this adventure somehow quieted the storm raging in her heart, or perhaps just focused its energy. The danger was exciting. The mystery was pulling her. There were questions that needed answering, and Nan would draw as much blood as she had to until she understood it all.

  They moved surreptitiously through the forest. The closer they drew to the cabin, the more its energy throbbed like a beacon. When they arrived, the three of them knelt in a patch of honeysuckle just to the side of the tool shed. Nan wanted to push ahead, but Wexxel suggested they wait and watch a bit.

  As it turned out this was a good idea. A few minutes later McTreaty, Brown and the cop Wicket stepped out of the back door. They didn’t stop to talk, but moved with purpose around the front of the cabin. Moments later, the trio sped off in a Jeep Wrangler.

  When they were gone, Gordon walked out into the open. Nan and Wexxel followed. The gravel dust from the Wrangler drifted in the breeze and settled back to the ground.

  “Let’s go back to the command center,” Gordon said.

  “You don’t want to go in the cabin?” Wexxel asked.

  Nan looked up at the log cabin. The windows were dark and void like the eyes of dead shark. Though there was nothing wrong with the building itself, it still seemed crooked somehow, as if the foundation had started to sink on a spiritual level. She knew it was empty, but the fee
ling of danger remained. Almost like coming upon a hornet’s nest in the winter. Just as millions of years of evolutionary programing told you not to touch the nest, everything about her said to stay away. But she had never been one to let fear rule her, so she was disappointed when Gordon said he didn’t want to explore the cabin.

  “We’ve learned all we need to know,” he said. “It’s time to end this. I want them all dead by morning. Do you hear me, Wexxel?”

  “I hear you. How do you want to play this?”

  “First we put Sly out of his misery. Then we burn the rest.”

  Nan reached out and took hold of Gordon’s hand. She did this not to comfort him, but to tap into the murderous rage pulsing through his aura. The energy of a killer was better than any other vice in the world.

  She had never felt more alive.

  Condemned

  Casper pulled into his garage, but left the Jeep running. Patrick and Dale jumped out and started for Dale’s cruiser.

  “Be careful,” Casper told them as they stepped outside.

  It was a simple phrase that he used almost every day, but he never felt the weight of those two words as he did right then. Danger was everywhere, in the form of man and monster. Here he was right back in the river, swimming in vain against the current and struggling to keep his head above the water. Except this time he had managed to drag the two who had saved him back into the depths.

  Casper had seen his share of combat, both planned and violently spontaneous. He had looked into the faces of countless soldiers only to wonder if he would see them alive when the smoke cleared. Many times he didn’t. He prayed silently that this was not one of those times.

  Dale turned the police cruiser around and he and Patrick sped off toward the hospital. Casper went inside.

  Tad lounged on the floor of the living room while Beth and Lucy sat together on the couch. Their melancholy had waned a bit and they mustered a half-hearted greeting when he entered. Lucy even ran up and hugged him around the knees. He scooped her up and clutched her tight, though the simple act caused his bad leg to ignite with pain. Lucy’s golden gossamer hair tickled his face, and he hadn’t realized just how frightened he was until he saw those three bright faces safe and sound.