And so they created Chupacabras Incorporated, an extermination company specializing in “pest control” in Mexico and the southern United States. Their clients were mostly rich Mexican ranchers who paid handsomely to protect their livestock from the predations of the strange creatures. The most difficult aspect of the job involved maintaining a functioning workforce. Team members kept getting killed.
Lupita had joined the crew three years ago and was still going strong. After a few months she had even convinced Joe to bankroll her acquisition of the dogs. It was a wise move, as the canines had proved to be invaluable. Chupacabras smelled very pungent, like rotten fish. Well-trained dogs could track them easily—and Lupita’s dogs were very well-trained.
««—»»
It had been a hot and windy day, dry as a buzzard’s ass, when she answered the “help wanted” ad and walked into their base of operations in Mexico, a decrepit airplane hangar near the edge of the Samalayuca Dune Fields, about 175 miles from the U.S. border in the state of Chihuahua.
The place had reminded her of an American military firebase in a war movie, gun-heavy and always expecting trouble, with sandbags lining the ramparts, razor-wire coiled around the perimeter, and twin Browning M2 heavy machine guns on flexible AA mounts located on each side of the huge hangar door.
It practically oozed a sense of imminent besiegement, a real “Fort Apache” vibe, and she had been wary. Then she met Joe, and was surprised to find a gringo in charge. She soon came to understand that Joe shared the responsibility of leadership with Ramón, more or less. It was a pretty loosely run outfit.
Neither man showed the slightest inclination to flirt with her, something she found extremely refreshing. Her large breasts and prominent butt were an inevitable lure to every overly confident would-be Latin lover in Mexico. Lupita did not enjoy the attention and the constant come-ons—especially as she happened to be a lesbian.
Born in the slums of Tijuana, the seventh of nine children, she had worked in a maquiladora from the age of thirteen until she was twenty, slaving away in a manufacturing plant, churning out cheap tennis shoes in the “Free Trade Zone” along the border.
It was a dreary life. Mexico was a patriarchal society steeped in the culture of machismo and her sexual preference made her an outsider. To survive, she developed a very thick skin; a bone-deep toughness. She knew how to take care of herself.
Joe and Ramón had sat at a battered conference table tucked into a corner of the giant warehouse, which also contained a machine shop and living space for six people.
“So Lupita,” Joe asked her on that first fateful meeting. “You want to know what your lifespan is if we let you on the team? Eighteen months.”
Lupita remained silent.
“Eighteen months is the average,” Ramón put in, and she was struck by the amount of emotion in his voice, the tenderness, and the sadness. “We have lost far too many people since we started doing this. Far too many.”
Then he paused, groping for the right words.
“Chupacabras are not like regular animals. They are smart. And they are getting smarter. This will be the most dangerous work you will ever do.”
She had taken the job anyway. No matter how bad they said it was (and she had a suspicion—mistaken it turned out—that they were winding her up and trying to see if they could frighten her), it was better than what she’d been doing. Anything at all was better than being a virtual slave in a maquiladora. Even hunting monsters had to be better than that, didn’t it?
««—»»
The Impala pulled off the Interstate and onto a secondary road, following a sign that said “Dadeville 22 miles.” The scenery flashed by, an unbroken curtain of green on either side of the cracked blacktop, bleached gray by the stifling sun, so faded that the yellow line running down the center was barely visible. It was a long, winding stretch of road flanked by tall pines interspersed with moss-covered palms. Time ticked by as they rolled through the countryside.
Forty-five minutes later they approached a weathered sign that welcomed them to Dadeville in six-foot-high peeling letters. Joe’s eyes caught a glimpse of something in the ditch. He pulled the car to the side of the road and slammed the brakes.
“What’s going on?” Lupita called from the back seat.
Joe motioned with a jerk of his chin out the window. “I think there’s a dead body over there.”
“What?”
They got out and clustered around the corpse; it was a man, middle-age and overweight, but not grossly so. He wore a tattered pair of plaid Bermuda shorts and a filthy blue and white Hawaiian shirt. His flesh was bloated and speckled with rot. He was sprawled on his right side, half-in and half-out of the shallow drainage ditch running along the side of the road.
Joe studied the scene. A battered yellow ten-speed bicycle leaning against the welcome sign probably belonged to the dead man. An unopened can of paint and a frayed brush at the man’s feet suggested that he’d been sent to paint the welcome sign. Something interrupted him before he could get started. Joe scrutinized the area for a few minutes. He detected no obvious signs of foul play. It was a mystery.
Lupita held her nose. “What a lovely welcome for us.”
“What should we do?” Ramón queried.
“We will tell the sheriff about it when we get to town,” Joe said, turning back to the car. “Not much else we can do.”
The town in the panhandle of Florida where they were headed had been founded in 1895 as Frog Bayou, a name it kept until it changed to the more conventional-sounding Dadeville in 1926. Ten years later a disastrous fire struck Main Street, and a good portion of the historic downtown area was destroyed. The fire began when a small blaze in the laundromat next door to the River View Cafe got out of control on Memorial Day. Thirty-five businesses smoldered in flames along with an untold amount of goods. Coupled with the Great Depression, the fire sucked the life out of the town, and it limped along for the next few decades.
The 1960s saw the city decline even further. A massive hurricane in 1966 caused even more destruction than the fire thirty years earlier and the rebuilding was even more half-hearted. The general economic malaise continued throughout the '70s. The downtown area—or at least what was left of it—was given over to bars and a few small shops. In 1973, the city adopted a Historic District Ordinance protecting historic buildings and structures from inappropriate alterations and demolitions, and encouraging the design of new construction keeping with the historic character of the district.
But it was too little, too late. People began to leave in droves. First a trickle and then a flood, a general exodus; people wanted out, and people wanted to get away to someplace where things were happening, where jobs were plentiful—and that meant anywhere but Dadeville. The local lumber mill—long a mainstay and for sixty years the economic backbone of the city—closed down in 1989, and soon after the paper mill closed its doors as well.
By the late ’90s, over half of the population had left the area. Abandoned houses and empty neighborhoods abounded on the west and south sides of the city. The streets were rutted, the pavement cracked and weed-choked. The sagging, mold-covered houses turned the color of decomposing sun-bleached flesh.
Joe parked the Impala in front of the local jail on the corner of First and Main Streets. This was the downtown business hub. There wasn’t much to it: a video store, an empty movie theater, the Time Out tavern, a motel, a café, a hardware store, a bank, and an ice cream parlor strewn out over six blocks, with a scrubby lot on the backside of the ice cream parlor leading to a burned and gutted neighborhood. Half of the lots contained nothing more than concrete foundations.
“What a dump,” remarked Ramón.
Leaving Lupita and the dogs in the car, Joe and Ramón walked up the chipped concrete steps to the sheriff’s office. Joe pushed open the solid steel front door without knocking.
The office was functional and box-like, its rear divided into three smaller and even more box-like holding
cells. The sheriff, in his mid-forties, mustachioed, curly-haired, and fat-bellied, had his feet up on his desk, reading a dog-eared copy of Hustler. A brass nameplate near his boots said his name was Richard Walters. A ceiling fan beat the air listlessly over the sheriff’s head, but failed to do anything other than push the hot, mushy air around.
Without preamble, Joe said, “Sheriff Walters, I don’t know how else to tell you this, but there’s a dead body laying on the side of the road on the way into town.”
The sheriff stared at them, his jaw muscles working. Then he tossed the magazine down on his desk and slowly began to shake his head. “God damn it,” he said, drawing out the curse. “Is that thing still there?”
He leaned forward and snatched up the telephone. After dialing and waiting a moment, he bawled into the receiver, “Charlie? What the hell have you been doing? I told you to get over and pick up Mr. Sorenson!”
He listened for a brief moment and then roared out, “It’s been two days, Charlie! I am sure he’s starting to stink. Get off your ass and go and get him. What the hell do we pay you for?”
He slammed down the phone and then looked up at Joe and Ramón with an exasperated sigh. “I swear to Christ, it’s like workin’ with my sister’s kids.” He paused before adding, “And they’re both half-wits.”
He leaned back and scrutinized the pair in front of him. “You’re the guys that Mayor Sexton called?” When they nodded, the sheriff pursed his lips. “Well, we could sure use your help. We’ve definitely got a problem.”
“That man out in the ditch didn’t look like he’d been attacked.”
“Nah!” Walters snorted. “Fred Sorenson probably just had a heart attack or something. You’d a knowed if these…what do you call them?”
“Chupacabras.”
“That’s right. You’d a knowed if it was yer critters. They suck a body dry or else shred it like coleslaw, just rip it apart. Makes the biggest damn mess you ever saw. They like to eat eyeballs too. Suck ’em right outta your head.” He waved at them dismissively. “Nah, all them double-cheeseburgers is what caught up with Freddy Sorenson. Poor dumb bastard.”
Joe and Ramón glanced at the sheriff’s big belly and then at each other. The porcine civil servant hardly looked like a health food nut. Joe rubbed his hands together. “Well, Sheriff, daylight’s burning, if you know what I mean.”
And so the fat sheriff apprised them of the situation. He explained how the empty junior high school on the southwest end of town had become a haven for vicious, predatory animals; some sort of flying lizard-things, with eyes like a bug. They had dragged five people into the abandoned building in the past week. The two deputies who went in there and attempted a rescue never came out. Since that time the creatures had emerged each night to hunt, but so far had not managed to land any additional prey. They were getting hungry…and mean.
When he was finished, Joe gave Ramón a questioning glance. Ramón nodded by way of answer and Joe turned to the fat cop and said, “No sweat. We’ll just bring down the building with charges and then burn and shoot anything that crawls out of the rubble.”
“But we’ve got to do it during the day,” Ramón added. “Chupacabras hate the light.”
“Oh, now just hold yer horses there son,” the sheriff drawled lazily. “Before you go demolishing historic structures, we’ve got to hear this out. Mayor Sexton has to give his approval.”
“Where is he?”
“Judging the Bronze Lady beauty pageant over in Delmore Beach. He’ll be here later tonight.”
“Tonight?” Joe turned for the door. “Thanks for the call, Sheriff, but we’re not waiting around. Good luck.”
The man’s belly bounced as he jumped up. “Wait, wait, hold on a second.”
They turned and stared at him. He came around the desk. “How about we go over and take a look before you fellas decide anything?”
Ramón looked questioningly at Joe. But Joe wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He was pissed. They’d come all the way from Mexico for this job at the behest of the mayor, and he couldn’t even be bothered to be there when they arrived. It was unprofessional. And what was this horseshit about historic buildings? He’d had a look at Dadeville, and it was a dump; the whole town looked abandoned, looted, ransacked. What difference did a few more burned-out buildings make?
On the other hand, he was here; his team was here. Killing chupacabras was what he’d sworn to do ever since they massacred his brother. Every time he executed one of the hissing monstrosities he gained enormous satisfaction; he felt like a hero; he was keeping people safe from the predations of these bloodthirsty beasts. That’s right. Joe Gifford: motherfucking monster-slayer!
And if they left now they didn’t get paid.
That decided it.
“Okay, Sheriff,” Joe relented. “We will take a look.”
««—»»
It was twenty minutes after four when the Impala and the sheriff’s truck pulled up to the curb in a neglected area of town slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation. Weeds flourished, pushing up through cracks in the crumbling asphalt, some as tall as four feet. Vines, unheeded, crept from the cracks to crawl across the pavement and up the curb to cover the sidewalks across from the abandoned junior high school.
The dogs in the backseat of the Impala immediately sat up, ears alert, noses testing the air. Even before Lupita opened the back door to let them climb out they were growling softly, like two chainsaws idling.
“Something is here,” Lupita announced.
Joe and Ramón answered with brisk nods. The dogs were never wrong—they never went on-point over a coyote or a rabbit; they never went on-point over anything other than chupacabras. This was a legitimate case. Their first question had been answered. Next?
When they stood across the street from the empty school, Joe asked, “How many are in there, Sheriff?”
Walters lifted his hands. “No idea, partner. More than one, that’s all I know. If I had to guess, I’d say at least four.” When no one replied, he asked, “What’s the most number you’ve dealt with?”
The true answer to that was hundreds, but they hadn’t dealt with them very well, and not all of them had survived. The first time Joe and Ramón had been attacked was in a little nowhere town in northern Mexico called La Esperanza. Hordes of the creatures swarmed the entire village. Joe and Ramón had barely made it out alive. Joe’s younger brother Keith had been killed. But since then, they’d not seen the creatures in such large numbers.
“Fifteen, I think,” Ramón finally said, scratching his chin in thought.
“In Matamoros,” added Lupita. “We found them hiding in the storm drains after a hurricane.” It had been her second hunt. It had been very bad.
“What did you do?”
“We tried to flush them out with CS gas, but it didn’t bother them in the slightest.” Lupita’s voice took on a far away quality. Her dogs fell silent, sensing her mood. They sat on their haunches and kept their eyes trained on the school. “We finally had to take the flamethrower and go in after them.”
Their most prized possession was an M-9 flamethrower from the Vietnam era. When the idea of hunting chupacabras had first occurred to him, Joe made a deal with a shady associate at Fort Bliss, trading five thousand dollars worth of cocaine for the vintage weapon. The flamethrower had proven to be invaluable. Sure it was bulky. Sure, it was old. But it worked. It had an effective range of sixty feet, and it spat jellied fire at the creatures with the squeeze of a trigger. In this business, it was priceless.
In Matamoros they had used it to devastating effect in the cramped tunnels of the antiquated sewer system. Even so, they’d had a hell of a time taking out all of the creatures. They’d lost one member, a skinny ex-car thief named Alejandro, only nineteen years of age. He’d been savagely blinded, and his eyes were devoured before he died. Not a pleasant way to go.
“Lord almighty, but you folks got some guts,” Sheriff Walters admitted. Truth was he though
t they were crazy. He’d seen the creatures from a distance, and there was no way in hell he would have crawled into a storm drain to go after them. No way. He’d never seen an animal move that fast—at least not an animal that big.
They were reptilian and yet humanoid. They had long arms with extended fingers—twice the length of a man’s fingers—tipped with curved talons ending in razor-sharp points, more like a bird of prey than a reptile. Flexible, folded membranes under the arms served as wings—they looked as if they should only function as gliders—but the sheriff had seen the damn things flapping like bats through the air.
A row of spikes ran from the top of their heads down the length of their backs, ending in a long tail with a barbed stinger on the end of it. Their skin was green-tinted; not quite scales, and not quite scutes, but more like shark skin. Strangest of all were their eyes: bulging compound eyes like a wasp or a dragonfly, they looked completely at odds with their reptilian bodies. It was an impossible combination, like nothing on Earth, or maybe like everything in the animal kingdom mixed together, a genetic gumbo.
“Where do they come from?” the sheriff wanted to know.
The three hunters shook their heads. No one knew where chupacabras came from. Lupita thought they were from outer space. Joe opted for some sort of government-created bio-weapon. Ramón, just to be different, claimed they were demons who came from Hell itself, although he didn’t really believe that.
Joe kept his eyes on the front of the school. The windows were boarded up with plywood, but the front doors hung open, and inside lurked a pitch-black rectangle of darkness that he didn’t want to think about. Any amount of chupacabras could be in there—waiting.
Fury of the Chupacabras Page 8
