Nighthawk

by Alan Monroe

  Tom and Hugh ran down the trail following the creature’s footprints. The Sasquatch clearly made no attempt to hide its tracks as if it did not care whether it was being followed. They traveled about three miles since they discovered the sheriff’s abduction site. They were amazed at how far and quickly the creature had traveled while carrying a two-hundred and forty pound man.

  Their search party came to an abrupt halt when they heard a menacing scream from the Sasquatch.

  Tom breathed heavily. “Is that a good sign, or a bad sign?”

  Hugh tried to show a small smile. “Its got to be a good sigh. That thing is madder than ever. And only a living breathing Sheriff Will Davis could make anything that angry.”

  “Good point, he’s made me that mad before.”

  “He made me that mad the first time we ever played football against each other. Let’s get moving.”

  Tom, Hugh, and the other deputies resumed their former pace with a renewed hope of finding Davis alive.

  The eyes of the Sasquatch grew wide as Davis actually walked towards it rather than run away.

  “I don’t guess you ever heard of Buford Pusser?”

  Davis stepped to the creature’s right and swung his club in the Sasquatch’s newly formed blind spot. The crack of the impact sounded like a home run when the bat smacked its skull, and the creature took several steps back while holding its head. The blow would have killed a human instantly. Davis parried with the creature like a boxer until he swung a second and snapped the monster’s head to the side. Blood and teeth fell into the mud.

  “You see, before Pusser got elected sheriff in McNairy County, Tennessee, he got beat up by some people that thought they could get away with just about anything. Turns out they were wrong. Pusser got a big stick a lot like this one and took care of business himself.”

  Davis landed a third strike dislocating its jaw.

  “I don’t guess you’ve ever been on the receiving end of pain before.” Davis swung again, but the Sasquatch blocked the swing with its forearm. “How does it feel?” Davis screamed. “You know how to dish it out. Now it’s time to reap the whirlwind.”

  A forearm shot up and blocked Davis’ fifth blow, but he redirected the unspent momentum into a swing that swooped downward into the Sasquatch’s right kneecap. Davis heard a loud pop as the knee exploded; the creature screamed and doubled over in pain as it clutched its knee.

  As soon as the creature lowered its head, Davis used his club to deliver a huge uppercut to the creature’s jaw. The blow actually lifted the seven hundred pound Sasquatch off of the ground; Davis felt the ground shake when the thing landed on its back.

  The creature lay on its back with a jaw crushed to pieces and several teeth on the ground beside its head. Fluid from the burst blisters on its faced mingled with blood flowing from its mouth and nose. Davis walked slowly from its feet to its head where he raised the huge club over his head. All his remaining strength was focused into one massive blow aimed at the creatures face, but Davis felt his swing stop in midair when the creature caught the club its right hand. Davis’ hands suddenly filled with splinters when the Sasquatch plucked the club from his grip like a weed from a garden.

  Hugh and Tom heard the Sasquatch’s screams grow louder with each step. They could even smell the creature’s stink that lingered behind from its passage through the forest.

  The Sasquatch struck Davis in the lower rib cage with the club before it even rose off of the ground. Davis rolled across the ground grabbing cracked ribs; he looked up while fighting for breath and saw the creature rise to its full height. With a hand on each side of the club, the Sasquatch snapped it in half like a twig; the shattered pieces covered the ground in every direction. Davis stood up in an attempt to flee, but the pain from his ribs shot through his body and he stumbled at the base of the lightning shattered tree after only a few steps.

  The sheriff rolled over and leaned against the broken tree and stared at the enraged beast across the clearing. The creature screamed again as blood ran down from the fresh cracks in its deformed skull. It stumbled across the clearing with it knee buckling underneath with each step; the red in its eyes’ seemed to have grown brighter as it staggered nearer Davis.

  Suddenly Davis heard a deep bark to his left, and a pit bull burst from the trees in a shower of leaves. The dog latched its powerful jaws on the Sasquatch’s wrist. The creature flailed its arm in every direction, but the dog only sunk its teeth in deeper while blood flowed from the fresh wound.

  Davis scanned the ground for anything he could use as a weapon until he finally saw that the shattered remains of his club that had been scattered everywhere when creature snapped it in half. Davis picked up the sharpest piece he saw and ran towards the screaming creature. Just as the Bigfoot started to dig its claws into the dog’s back, Davis rammed the shard of his club deep into the creature’s throat.

  The creature whipped its body in Davis’ direction, and the sheriff fell to the ground with the shard still in his hand. The creature opened its mouth to scream again, but no sound left its mouth; air just moved out of the hole in its throat along with an increasing amount of blood. The dog dropped to the ground and began to bark at the dieing beast. It staggered toward Davis with lurching steps until it fell forward onto the Sheriff’s chest pining him to the ground. The creature’s final gasping breaths were spent hissing a scream into its intended victim’s face; Davis wrenched his head away from the fang filled mouth that sprayed his face with blood.

  Davis twisted his body wrenching his ribs in the process as he crawled out from under the Sasquatch. The creature already smelled worse now that it was dead than it did while it was alive. After moving away from the remains of the creature, Davis simply lay on his back and stared at the forest canopy above his head; the dog limped to his side and licked his face.

  After several minutes, Davis heard the sound of running through the forest. And soon, Tom, Hugh, and the rest of their men ran through the trees into the clearing. They stared in disbelief at the Sasquatch’s dead body as they slowly walked toward Davis.

  “I was worried at first when I saw all of that blood,” Hugh said. “Thought it was yours.”

  “No, most of it’s not my blood. About time you boys got here. Your timing is great,” Davis said.

  Hugh kneeled down next to his friend and scratched the dog’s head. “Well, if we knew you two had everything under control, we would have stayed in Nighthawk and had breakfast.”

  Davis rolled his eyes. “Well at least the dog got here in time to save my bacon. But I’m glad you boys came anyway. Get me off the ground.”

  Hugh and Tom each took one of the sheriff’s hands and helped him to his feet. The sheriff winced as they pulled him upward. “Easy on the ribs.”

  Sunday, May 19 11:30 p.m.

  The baby Sasquatch followed its angry parent down the mountain to the town of Nighthawk and witnessed its parent’s death at the hands of a human. The baby hid in the nearby trees as the human and dog battled its father. Even though it had already been abandoned by the alpha male as soon as its mother died, hatred of humanity filled its tiny heart after witnessing the big male’s death. The hatred for people was equal to or even stronger than that of the alpha male; the hatred of humanity became an inherited trait of the entire family group.

  Being too young to feel any attachment to the old growth forest or even Little Chopaka Mountain, the baby Sasquatch wandered through the trees aimlessly longing to grow strong like its father. It instinctively wanted milk from its mother, but at this point it would have taken anything that remotely resembled food. Since the family dynamics of the inbred creatures had seriously eroded, it was never taught how to forage for food on its own. The mother had just enough maternal instinct left to provide it with milk and nothing else; occasionally, it stole some scraps from unfinished meals of the older Sasquatch.

  The pain of hunger in its gut grew as the creature roamed the forest. It attempted to chase a rabbit at one
point, but the nimble rabbit dashed into a tiny hole before the inexperienced Sasquatch drew near. Finally its young but very sensitive nose detected something that smelled like the rotten food it was used to finding in the pit back on the mountain. Like a dog drawn to a garbage can, it began to creep toward the smell’s source hoping he would receive an easy meal. It licked is short but still growing fangs with anticipation of its first food in days.

  The smell seamed to be emanating from a particularly small wooden structure; the sound of pigs began to fill its ears. The baby knew its father would have been capable of carrying away any one of the gargantuan pigs and rending it into countless pieces. It, on the other hand, knew the best chance for a meal would to follow the scent of decay flowing from underneath the wooden building. The small creature skulked toward the structure until the smell overwhelmed its senses.

  The baby reached the structure and felt something cold and metallic under its feet. The small bigfoot did not know it was standing on a large bear trap powerful enough not only to snap both of its legs in half, but its small immature spine as well. The baby was also unaware that its small size was the only thing that kept the trap from snapping shut on its intended victim; it was simply not heavy enough to pop the big rusty springs.

  The wooden building seemed almost as tall as the alpha male in the eyes of the baby Sasquatch while in reality it only reached a height of about six feet. The rear of the structure met the ground without leaving so much as the tiniest crack for the baby to seek out the source of the rotting stench. It slowly began to sneak towards the front of the building to see if it could gain access to its eagerly sought meal.

  The painful impact was completely unexpected as was the ringing noise that accompanied the sharp crack that was its own skull splitting open. The creature did not scream or stagger; it simply fell to ground with a quiet thud instantly dead. Its last thoughts were of food and literally a splitting headache.

  Ms. Feyhee stood over the creature and shook her heavy cast iron skillet at its corpse. “I bet that’s the last time you’ll sneak around an old lady’s outhouse.”

  She laughed as she reached down to pick up one of its scrawny legs.

  “You musta been too scrawny to set off that old bear trap,” she laughed.

  She began to drag it across the yard towards the pig pen.

  “I been carryin this skillet around for days just incase one of ya’ll showed up. Maybe the rest of ya’ll will get the message and leave me alone.”

  The hogs grew excited as she approached with the snorting increasing in volume and urgency. They shuffled as close to Ms. Feyhee as the wooden rails of the pen would allow. With a single swift motion, she tossed the carcass over the rails into the muddy pen. The pigs wasted no time in beginning their unexpected meal.

  “Enjoy the midnight snack pigs.”

  YEAR: 1997

  MONTH: November

  STATE: Tennessee

  OBSERVED: My father always used to hunt deer on the same land every fall; the owner of the land was always known to me as Mr. Webb. My father and Pee Wee (Mr. Webb’s son) must have found every good hunting spot in that forest. Pop was walking along a creek one afternoon when he noticed something following that same creek in the distance. My dad followed this tall something for several minutes until he saw it go down into the creek and climb up the other side. When he reached the spot that the creature had climbed up, Pop realized that he would not be able to climb up that bank. The marks it left were large and far apart. My father is six feet six inches tall, and his arms and legs were not long enough to climb up the bank. When Pop returned home later that night, he simply said, “I saw bigfoot today.” As a young man at the time, you might say I was intrigued.

  Alan Monroe

  Monday, May 20 10:30 a.m.

  Davis slowly walked through the parking lot of the sheriff’s office and opened the driver’s door of his wife’s Ford Explorer since his truck became a permanent part of the firebreak. He had every intention of going straight home and doing nothing at all for the next several days.

  However, his cellular phone began to ring. Davis felt the pain in his bandaged ribs as he slowly sat down in the driver seat and pulled out his cell phone. He looked at the caller i.d. and saw his secretary’s name pop up on the screen.

  Davis accepted the call. “Krista, I just walked out of the office. What can you possible need already?”

  “Sheriff, two things. First, Ms. Feyhee just called and said she killed a Bigfoot and threw it to her pigs last night. She wants an officer to come out see if there are any more around.”

  “Send Hugh,” Davis said without hesitation.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Very sure. Our newest lieutenant doesn’t need to get bored. What was the second thing?”

  “I just got a call from the hospital. That girl who was in the car wreck about two weeks ago has been out of a coma for a couple of days now and nobody from the sheriff’s department has gotten her statement.”

  “Well, we have been just a little busy.”

  “You want me to call Tom since he was the officer in charge of the investigation?”

  Davis sighed. “No. He’s at home. I helped him work the case so I’ll get her statement on the way home.”

  Davis tossed the phone in the passenger seat.

  The drive to the hospital was a short one, and Davis took the elevator up to the second floor. He quietly knocked on the door as he opened it to find the young lady sitting up in bed staring out the window. Bruises from the airbag still covered her face, and the cast on her right leg ran all the way up to her hip. Davis could not help but feel sad when he saw the melancholy look on her face.

  “Ma’am,” Davis said. “I’m Sheriff Davis. How are you feeling?”

  “Still sore.”

  “It’s good to be awake again though isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I was hoping to get a statement about what happed before your accident. If you don’t feel up to it, I can come back another day.”

  She shook her head. “You might as well stay, but I really don’t know where to start.”

  Davis sat in the chair beside the bed. “Why don’t you tell me what you remember about the accident? Just do the best you can.”

  She turned away from Davis and stared at the wall. “Why? No one will believe me anyway.”

  “It never hurts to try. We couldn’t tell what caused your accident. We thought you might have been trying to avoid a deer or some other type of animal.”

  She slowly began to turn toward Davis and meet his eyes. “It wasn’t a deer. I don’t know what it was.”

  Davis wrinkled his eyebrows and leaned forward in his chair.

  “It was like a big hairy monster.”

  “A bear?” Davis asked.

  “It wasn’t a bear. I know what a bear looks like. It was like a, well; I couldn’t help but think it was a Bigfoot. It sounds crazy, I know.” She turned back to the wall refusing to look at Davis any longer. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  Davis sat back in his chair as the corner of his mouth slowly curved into a crooked smile. “Ma’am, you’d be surprised what I would believe.”