by Hunter Shea
No, Liz would be there when he got back.
If he got back.
He came to the beach and nearly genuflected with joy.
A pair of tracks, the biggest goddamn feet he’d ever seen, led from the tree line right to the water’s edge. Another island beckoned to him, a mere fifty or so yards away. There was sand there, too. Rooster plodded into the water, heedless of the other wildlife that could kill him just as easily as the Bigfoot. He didn’t know if God or the Devil were looking after him know, but he did know that neither would let it end with a bite by some damn snake. He draped the dripping skin over his arms, doing his best to keep them out of the water.
Sure enough, the footprints resumed on the next island. The rain had eased back a bit, so the prints were preserved pretty well. It couldn’t have passed by here more than ten minutes earlier.
He stalked into the trees. Why did every island in this part have to have so many trees? There were too many places for momma to hide. He could be out here for the next ten years tracking the thing at this rate.
Somehow, he had to make it come to him.
The huffing noises they made! There were a couple of times he’d seen them do that, and it had looked like they were talking to each other. He wasn’t a friggin’ ventriloquist, but he thought he could imitate the sound. It was that or nothing.
Rooster settled against a palm tree, sliding onto his haunches. He tucked the blade within the wet strips of the Bigfoot hide.
He took several gulps of air, relaxed his throat.
The short grunts and pants sounded, to his ears, on the money. He imagined what a hurt Bigfoot would sound like, and tried to convey that emotion into his call. After several minutes, he stopped. The rain had moved off, but pregnant patters of drops still fell from the trees. He strained to listen.
Nothing.
So he started up again, pausing, starting, pausing, starting. He figured he’d give it a good half hour or more. If this didn’t work, it was back to tracking through impossible terrain.
Gagging slightly, he extracted the liver from his shirt and pierced it with the machete. A new malodorous gust expelled from the split organ. He restarted his call in earnest, louder and louder, feeling the distress bleed from his pores.
Snap!
Whatever it was, it sounded large and deliberate, like a rotted log being stepped on. He kept up with his Bigfoot cry, keeping his eyes peeled.
The momma’s crimson eyes peered out from behind a wide mahogany tree. He could sense its reluctance. No matter how good a job he thought he was doing, he was sure it sounded slightly off to the monster.
Better to stop, let the smell and disguise reel it the rest of the way in.
He tightened his hold on the machete. The Bigfoot came out from behind the tree and sniffed the air. Rooster moved his foot to catch its attention. Momma narrowed her eyes at him.
Come on, you big ugly bitch.
She startled him when she raced forward, stopping a couple of feet from him. It was amazing. One second she was a good fifteen yards away, and the next she was in his face. How could something so fucking big move so fast?
He’d kept his head down, until now.
His chin rose up, and the meaty skull cap slipped from the back of his head. The momma’s eyes scrunched into tight, malevolent slits and her lips pulled back from teeth that could tear through an alligator’s hide.
Rooster swung the blade, barely managing to nick its right shin. The Bigfoot jumped back and cried out in an uncontrolled rage. Both hands pawed the air, flexing open and closed, itching to get a piece of him.
Fat chance!
Rooster tugged the rest of the fur from his shoulder and flung it at the momma’s face. It tried to dodge it, but the fur and skin wrapped around its head nonetheless. Not wasting a second, he cleaved its chest in one stroke, catching it on the inside of the elbow on the upswing.
It ripped its kin’s hide from its face and lashed out, catching Rooster in the shoulder with fingers that were chiseled into talons. Three rivers of heat opened up on his flesh.
He countered with a swipe that severed the tip of its wide nose right off.
“Oh shit.”
That particular blow sent it into an apoplectic rampage. It lashed out with a speed and intensity that no man could defend. He was kicked in the thigh, bashed on the chest and hammered on his wounded shoulder. The machete flew from his hands into the underbrush. The pain was unreal. Still the Bigfoot carried on with its frenzy. He was powerless to stop it, unable to ward off a single blow.
When it kicked him in the stomach, he felt his internal organs shift into places they weren’t meant to be. He crashed onto the ground like a boxer who had taken a hard one to the chin. His arms flopped uselessly at his sides.
Momma stopped her convulsing when she realized he was down and done. She stood above him, chest heaving, urine flowing onto the ground and his legs.
He was marked. He was hers.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Bigfoot reached down and scooped him into her arms. Its pendulous breasts crushed his already shattered chest.
She wasn’t about to play around with him. He had killed her child, and in turn she had killed everyone around him, losing the rest of her family in the process. Every ounce of venom running in her veins was directed at Rooster.
All he wanted now was to die. To make the pain stop.
Maybe this was hell. He hadn’t deserved much else. If this was, the moment she killed him, it would start all over again.
He wondered how it would end for Liz.
Liz!
Dammit, he promised her he’d be back. But he had nothing left. Nada. Zip.
The Bigfoot’s voice rumbled and it licked blood from its lips.
There was only one shot left to him. Rooster opened his mouth, and to his astonishment, the Bigfoot mimicked him. They stared at one another, slack-jawed, both seeming to wait the other out to see what the next move would be.
Rooster pushed his head forward and clamped down as hard as he could on the remains of its nose.
The Bigfoot screamed for the heavens to hear. She swatted his face, which freed an arm. He reached up and drove his thumb as deep into its eye as he could, stopping when he felt hot, membranous resistance.
She dropped onto her back. He did the same with his other hand, blinding it, probing for its brain to perform an Everglade lobotomy. Something popped under his thumbs, and the Bigfoot suddenly ceased moving, its final cry dying in its throat. His thumb slid easily into the hot, soft mass of its brain.
He rolled off her body and winced when his ribs struck the ground.
“Gotta make sure,” he wheezed.
It took a few minutes to find the machete. His legs felt like cotton candy.
No sense fooling around. He slashed at its neck again and again until the head rolled free. The monster’s body jerked with every blow, nerve endings caught in a death twitch.
Rooster staggered back to admire his kill. No one would ever believe this. In a couple of days, all of the Bigfoot bodies would be ‘reclaimed’ by the Everglades. Probably wouldn’t even be bones left to have as a souvenir.
Fuck it. The rage high they’d given him was reward enough. Now maybe he could live a peaceful life.
Peace.
Rooster’s world spun like a tilt-a-whirl, and he passed out.
“Rooster? Rooster?”
Liz cradled his head in her lap and poured small drops of rainwater she had collected in a palm leaf onto his mouth. The guy looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. She couldn’t tell where his blood ended and the skunk ape’s blood began. And beneath the blood were bruises so purple and black, she worried about internal bleeding.
She’d panicked when she’d woken up under the shelter, and in her daze set out searching for him without thinking the skunk ape could be near. When she saw the remains of their footprints at the shore, she came to this island and heard their struggle. It was like listening to two bears go at it
whole hog, except one of the bears could talk and curse with the proficiency of a maestro.
By the time she found him, the skunk ape’s head sat several feet from its body and Rooster lay on the ground. The whole scene looked as if it had been a fight to the death, until she saw his chest rise and fall. Then she set about doing what she could to take care of him. Without a full medical team nearby, there was little she could do other than wash some of the lacerations and stay by his side.
It had been four hours and he hadn’t stirred. Night was coming fast. She had to wake him.
Liz tilted the palm leaf so the rest of the water splashed across his face. He winced, and a hand lazily tried to swipe the water off.
When his eyes did open, she smoothed his hair back and stroked his cheek.
“Am I dead?” he asked, his throat parched, hoarse.
“Not yet,” Liz said and smiled. “Although I can’t say the same for our skunk ape pal. I don’t know how you did it.”
He held his palm against the side of his head as he sat up. “A little something I learned from Rage Against the Machine. Anger is a gift.”
She gave him some time to get to his feet and set his bearings. The machete rested against her thigh, blood crusted over every square inch.
Rooster looked up. “I think we can make it to the shack before night.”
Liz had never heard more magical words.
He pointed to the west. “It should be on the next island over. You think canned fruit can last nine years?”
She felt her stomach growl. “I’m willing to face the consequences if it can’t. Here, rest on me.” She pulled his arm across her shoulders. He laughed.
“After all this, you want to get crushed to death?”
“You should know by now, I’m tougher than I look.”
Rooster nodded, and she felt more of his weight lean in to her.
Together, they limped away from the skunk ape’s decapitated body, and the smell grew fainter with each step.
A lone gator watched them make the water crossing. Rooster asked Liz for the machete, but thankfully didn’t need to use it. The reptilian eyes bobbed atop the water, following every painful step. At one point, the water washed over their heads and they had to swim. Every stroke brought fire to his arms and lungs. He breathed a sigh of relief when they made land.
A pink and purple dusk bathed the swamp, and he knew they had to double-time it.
“It’s not far now, just a couple hundred yards,” he said, spying a gumbo tree that his father had carved a series of deep notches and swirls into as a marker. Time had almost erased his handiwork. For the first time since jumping on the airboat, Rooster felt like he had some control.
“Does it have a bed?” Liz asked, still doing her best to prop him up.
“A couple of old army cots that probably have more mildew than a politician has bullshit.”
She patted his back lightly. “That sounds like a night at the Ritz right about now.”
There were a couple of times his head spun and he thought he was going to pass out, but Liz sensed the slackening in his body and swelled under him to keep him upright and moving. The chick was the goods, all right.
She let out a whoop when his father’s cabin came into view. One side of the roof was sagging something fierce, and the local flora had grown so high around it that it looked like the earth was trying absorb it, board by board.
Thank you, Daddy. Sometimes, having a criminal father had its advantages.
Rooster straightened as if he’d been hit with a cattle prod.
That smell!
Liz had caught it, too, because she whispered, “Oh, no, there’s more.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rooster told Liz to stay and moved up closer to the cabin. She could hear a muffled commotion and her heart sank into her shoes.
The skunk apes were in the cabin.
She held her breath as Rooster, calling up a fifth or tenth wind, crept outside the cabin, peering inside the half-open door. She saw him clench his fists, and when he turned back, a dark veil of rage had descended over his face.
He walked to her and said, “I’m going to need the machete.” His voice was atonal, like a zombie.
“You’re in no condition to go in there. Maybe we can just wait them out, go in when they leave and see if there’s anything salvageable.”
“The machete.” He held his meaty hand out, his arm steady as a steel girder.
“But−“
“Just give me the blade.”
She reluctantly handed it to him. He stalked back toward the cabin. He wasn’t sneaking this time. He wanted his presence to be known. She watched him stride through the door, and then the gates of hell opened up.
When Rooster looked inside the cabin, he had expected to find one or two of the Bigfoots. It made sense to use the place as a shelter. His first inclination was to hide out until they went out looking for the rest of their family or tribe or whatever the fuck they were.
Instead, what he witnessed was something that could not be tolerated, could not be waited out while cowering like a scared boy.
Maddie lay on the big oak table that he had helped his father cart out one nice early spring day.
Her skin was a dark blue. She was dead. At least there was closure on that front.
Around her stood five of the creatures, only smaller than the band that had been picking them off for the past two days. The tallest was maybe a little over five feet.
Bigfoot adolescents.
One was taking a turn at Maddie, its grotesque body between her legs and pumping like mad while the others hooted around it. They pawed her face and breasts while stroking what could only be their erections under their fur.
The rage he felt was unmatched by every angry moment he had ever experienced, combined. No one deserved this.
Maddie, above all, didn’t deserve this.
They would pay, now, and with as much pain and suffering as he could administer.
Rooster knocked on the door with the end of the machete. The gawking Bigfoots stopped, but the one screwing her corpse continued with complete disregard.
“Well, now I know which one gets it first,” he grumbled.
With the back of his foot, he kicked the door shut. These Bigfoots were nothing like the other ones. There was cold fear in their eyes. Most of them were scrawny, almost fragile. He was anxious to see just how fragile.
The others backed away when he swung the machete, catching the one with Maddie along the top of its head. A quarter-moon slice of its skull slipped away, and its brain bulged out of the opening. Still it pumped away.
Rooster felt the storm of his anger overtake him.
And it felt good.
When he emerged, he did his best to brush the bits of fur, skin and bone from his clothes, but it was impossible to get everything. Liz saw him and she made to run over.
“Stay there!” he shouted. “I’ll bring out anything we can use.”
Jesus, he could never let her see this. After massacring the Bigfoots, he had covered Maddie with an old wool blanket.
There were a couple of cans of peaches and pears, a tin of chewing tobacco, one cot that hadn’t been bashed into splinters and not much else. The ham radio was in pieces. It looked like it had been smashed years ago. So much for calling for help.
He brought the cot and cans to Liz.
She twitched back slightly as she took hold of the cot, studying him like you would an agitated cobra. Shit, he didn’t want to scare her, but he wasn’t sure he would ever recover from this.
“Is…is the radio still there?”
He shook his head. “Here, lie down a bit. We’re not going anywhere soon.”
When he went back to the cabin, which now resembled the inside of a slaughterhouse run by wolverines, he pulled up one of the floorboards to see if there was anything in the secret stash. He found an old hurricane lamp, two lighters and a .38.
Guns. That’s what had gotten him�
��hell, all of them—into this mess.
He took the hurricane lamp and smashed the top against the skull of one of the creatures. With a few flicks of his wrist, he doused the entire cabin with the kerosene.
After raising the blanket and looking at Maddie one last time, he flicked the lighter’s wheel and tossed it on the larger pile of Bigfoot pieces to the rear of the small cabin. They caught with a tremendous whoosh.
Black tendrils of smoke followed him as he walked outside.
Liz stood by the cot, holding the cans to her chest.
Red and orange flames danced out of the lone window and licked the sides of the cabin.
“Maybe someone will see that,” he said, and sat heavily onto the ground.
“Do you think there’s a chance?” Liz said, her voice trancelike.
He considered it. “Well, we’ve been gone a couple of days, so the search would still be on. It’s getting dark. Fire like that’ll show up real nice.”
They watched in silence as the fire consumed the cabin, the wood popping and spitting, setting a nearby tree alight.
He heard Liz sit on the cot and felt her hand on his shoulder.
“I wonder if there are more of them out here?” Liz said. “They could be watching us right now, or they could be on another island miles away. What are the chances we got them all?”
“I don’t know, Liz. And as long as they stay the hell away from me, I don’t fucking care.”
The fire burned, night fell, and they waited.
About the Author
Hunter Shea is the author of the novels Forest of Shadows, Evil Eternal, Swamp Monster Massacre, and the upcoming Sinister Entity. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including Dark Moon Digest, Morpheus Tales and the anthology, Shocklines: Fresh Voices in Terror. His obsession with all things horrific has led him to real life exploration of the paranormal, interviews with exorcists and other things that would keep most people awake with the lights on. He is also half of the Monster Men video podcast, a fun look at the world of horror. You can read about his latest travails and communicate with him at www.huntershea.com, on Twitter @HunterShea1, Facebook fan page at Hunter Shea or the Monster Men 13 channel on YouTube.
