Nicki sighed as she pulled her patrol car into the drive outside Lou’s house and killed its engine. Lou’s house was more akin to an above-ground bunker than a real house. God only knew how much the place had set him back. Its walls were made of some sort of metal that reminded Nicki of the large shipping containers you might find on a dock. The few windows of the house were thickly covered in metal bars and there were shutters locked behind them. Not even the front door was a normal one. It looked more like the door to a vault than to a home.
Lou must have been watching for her to pull up through the cameras he had placed in the trees all around the house because the front door swung open as she got out of her patrol car. Dressed in a red flannel shirt, jeans, and combat boots, Lou emerged with an AR-15 in his hands.
Nicki fought the instinct to go for the Glock holstered on her hip at the sight of him. Lou was clearly scared to death of something and ready to do whatever it took to keep himself alive. Even from where she stood, Nicki could see a sheen of sweat glimmering in the light of the early morning sun on his skin.
“Whoa there, Lou,” she called out to him, raising her hands in a gesture of peace. “You’re the one that called me up here, remember?”
Lou’s dislike of anyone on his property, especially law enforcement officers, was well known throughout the town. Nicki trusted that he was still sane enough not to shoot her where she stood though. For all his fear, there was a look of relief about him as his eyes looked her over. His rifle hadn’t been pointed at her, but he lowered it more so that its barrel was aimed at the ground anyway.
“Sorry about that, Officer…” He paused, as if realizing he didn’t know her name.
“Steadman,” she filled in the blank for him.
“I’m Lou Hyatt,” he told her.
“I know who you are, Lou.” Nicki managed a polite smile. “I heard you had a problem with a monster out here and came to check it out.”
Lou’s demeanor shifted on the drop of a dime at what she had said. His cheeks flushed with anger, making Nicki regret her choice of words.
“Just what are you implying, young lady?” Lou snapped.
“Nothing, Mr. Hyatt. Nothing at all,” she apologized quickly. “I just meant I’m here to help.”
Lou seemed to calm a little bit as he looked her over again. “You’re a little young to be a deputy, aren’t you?”
“I’m twenty-five,” Nicki answered. “I’m just one of those people who look a lot younger than they actually are, I guess.”
There was truth to what he said about her appearance. Nicki weighed close to a hundred and ten pounds on her heaviest days. She stood only five foot four and her sharp features resembled those of an elf, or so she had been told. Her hair was chopped short on her head and her body was wiry and lean. Nicki’s looks and size didn’t keep her from kicking butt though. She had served a tour in the Sand Box before returning home to the States and landing her current job as one of Sheriff Jackson’s deputies.
“Now do you want to tell me more about what’s going on out here or not?” Nicki urged him.
“Right,” Lou said, nodding. “Those things in the woods normally leave me alone and I make a point not to bother them, but in the last few weeks…”
“Things in the woods?” Nicki repeated questioningly.
“The Sasquatch,” Lou answered, giving her a look that told her she should’ve known exactly what he had meant.
“And you’ve seen these… Sasquatch?” Nicki asked, not sure of how else to respond.
“No one ever sees a Sasquatch that lives to tell about it anyway,” Lou said, laughing loudly, his middle-aged gut shaking beneath the red flannel covering it. “You haven’t lived here long, have you?”
“A few months,” Nicki answered honestly. “Haven’t heard anyone else mention Sasquatch out here yet though.”
“And you likely won’t either.” Lou shrugged. “They’re not something folks around these parts like to discuss. I can see that you don’t really believe me, Officer Steadman. Well, that’s about to change. Look down right in front of where you’re standing.”
Nicki was puzzled by what he told her to do. Was he trying to distract her to get the drop on her or something, she wondered, but she looked down anyway. As she did, Nicki jumped backward, as if she had found herself standing on top of a ticked-off snake. On the ground, not a foot from where she stood, was a footprint, a massive one. It was far too large to belong to a man, but it had the shape of a human foot, right down to having the marks left by five toes. Whatever left it had to weigh close to a freaking ton too given the look of the print’s depth. Her head jerked about as she scanned the ground for more of the tracks and found them. They were everywhere.
“Scary, ain’t it?” Lou said with a cackle. “I nearly peed myself the first time I saw them. Something like the creature that left these prints existing in the real world just ain’t right, is it?”
Nicki kept quiet, her mind reeling, as Lou rambled on.
“I mean, we’ve all heard about them, but we write them off as myths and legends. Even the people who live out here right next to them have a hard time accepting that they’re real. It’s like we as a species just can’t comprehend that there might really be something higher up on the food chain than we are.”
“Does the sheriff know about these Sasquatch?” Nicki managed to stammer.
“I’ve told him, sure. I don’t reckon he believes any more than you did until I showed you these tracks though. Never’ve been any around when Sheriff Jackson was up here. Like I said, it’s only been recently that the Sasquatch have gotten…aggressive.”
“And you think they want to kill you all of a sudden after all the time you’ve been living out here with them?” Nicki asked, trying to get her thoughts back together. The prints had really shaken her to her core. Maybe they were fakes. Maybe Lou had set up all this up for her. She’d seen the fear in him though when she first arrived and how he kept watching the trees, so she didn’t feel like there was anything she could do but believe at least that he believed for the moment.
“Dang right!” Lou bellowed and then caught himself as he was terrified something in the trees might have heard him. “They attacked my house last night, as if the bear they dumped on my back porch yesterday wasn’t enough. If you look closely at the front door, you can see the marks their claws left in the metal.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Nicki told him. “Now what did you say about a bear?”
“They killed one and dragged the poor bastard out of the woods to leave on my backdoor step. Gutted the thing good too. I think it was their way of telling me I need to get the hell out of here if I know what’s good for me.” Lou shuddered as he told her about the bear. “I ain’t leaving though. This is my home. That’s why I called you up here. Sheriff Jackson needs to get some men together and clear the buggers out before they clear us out. I’ve got a feeling that’s just what they’re about to do too if we don’t hit them first.”
Nicki stared at Lou, wondering if she had gone as crazy as he was during the last few minutes because she was really starting to believe him.
“I’ve got a lot of weapons up here,” Lou admitted to her. “And my house was built to withstand an attack by looters after the end comes, but I’m just one man. I can’t go out there in the woods and take them on all by myself. You getting what I am telling you, Officer Steadman?”
“I think I am,” she said, nodding.
“Good.” Lou grinned at her. “Now you better get on back in that patrol car of yours and get out of here before we stir them up too much by standing around here in the open. I’m heading back into the house. You give me a call when the sheriff’s ready and we’ll fix those monsters up something good.”
Without another word, Lou turned and walked hurriedly back to his front door. He slammed it behind him as he entered the house, and Nicki heard several locks clicking into place through it like those on a Navy vessel being locked down on the
other side of a hatch.
Nicki remained where she was a few moments longer as she looked around at the tracks again and then into the trees. Her skin crawled as she wondered if there really were monsters somewhere in the shadows watching her. Nicki walked slowly back to her patrol car and cranked it up. She didn’t dare call in what had happened out here over the radio. Nicki wanted to talk to Sheriff Jackson about it face to face as she told him so she could see how he reacted. Sliding the car into reverse, she turned it around at the end of Lou’s drive and drove towards town.
****
Aurelio parked his patrol car as close to the door of Dr. Ferguson’s office as he could. He guessed the wolf corpse weighed somewhere close to one hundred pounds. Getting it out of the car and into the office alone wasn’t going to be fun.
The door to the office opened and Dr. Ferguson came out of it. Dr. Philip Ferguson was pushing sixty with a head of gray hair above his wide-rimmed glasses. He was a round little man who very much looked like an absent-minded academic. There was a fierce intelligence in his eyes that told one right away that he was more than just the town’s resident veterinarian and family practitioner. Dr. Ferguson continued to take online courses despite his age, and his list of degrees was ever growing. He wrote academic articles for various medical journals in his free time. The good doctor loved learning and when he died, it would likely be at his desk where he spent all his time reading and writing except for when he was busy seeing patients. For all that though, his bedside manner was second to none. Dr. Ferguson really cared about all the people and animals he treated as if they were his family. He had no living relatives of his own that Aurelio knew about, so the doc had adopted the entire town when he moved to it around a decade ago. The town loved him back too. He couldn’t walk down the street without folks calling out to him to wish him well.
Dr. Ferguson took one look at the wolf corpse in the backseat of the patrol car and said with a grin, “I see you’ve brought me some unexpected work this afternoon, Sheriff. Let me help you get him inside.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Aurelio said. “I could use the help.”
The two of them lugged the wolf corpse out the patrol car and carried it into the doc’s office. They took it to an examination room in the office’s rear and managed to get it up onto a table there. When they were done, Aurelio hurried over to the room’s sink to wash his hands. The doc stayed with the corpse, already looking it over.
“I assume you brought this wolf to me because you need to know what killed it?” Dr. Ferguson asked.
“That’s right, Doc,” Aurelio answered, drying his hands. “Whatever killed it took out its whole pack and left them all in a pile near Henderson’s mining camp.”
“That’s horrible!” Dr. Ferguson exclaimed.
“Oh, it gets worse,” Aurelio assured him. “Whatever killed them didn’t just pile all of them up. Three of them were tied to the tree above where the pile of them was left.”
“Tied to the trees?” Dr. Ferguson asked, frowning.
“By strands of their own intestines, Doc.” Aurelio gagged at the memory of it.
Dr. Ferguson was rubbing at his lips with the fingers of his right hand. Aurelio knew him well enough to know that meant the doc was already thinking over what he’d been told. If there was an explanation, Dr. Ferguson was the person to find it. That’s why Aurelio had come here.
“What you’re describing makes it sound as if the dead wolves were left there as some sort of warning to Henderson and his crew,” Dr. Ferguson said.
“That’s what Chad, Henderson’s security thug, thought too,” Aurelio admitted.
“I would say he’s right then.” Dr. Ferguson was picking and poking at the wolf’s corpse as he talked. His attention was focused on the wounds that covered the body of the dead animal.
“I honestly don’t know what to make of it, Doc.” Aurelio shook his head. “I can’t think of anyone from town sick enough to do what was done to those poor animals but…”
“But you can’t think of an animal that could tie dead bodies up to a tree either.” Dr. Ferguson smirked. “Thus strongly implying that it was indeed done by a person or persons.”
“That about sums it up, Doc,” Aurelio said.
“Well, I can perhaps put you at ease right off, Sheriff.” Dr. Ferguson motioned for him to come closer to the table where the wolf lay.
“You see these?” Dr. Ferguson pointed at a slashed-up portion of the wolf’s corpse.
“All I see is mangled meat, Doc,” Aurelio answered.
“These are claw marks, Aurelio.” Dr. Ferguson calling him by his first name was not a good sign.
“So this was done by an animal?” Aurelio asked.
“Yes, I believe so anyway, but not one that I can identify off the top of my head. The claws that did this were huge and attached to a very human-like hand based on how they are spaced out, be it an over-sized one,” Dr. Ferguson explained. “There are signs that whatever killed this wolf ate part of it too. There are teeth marks in places on his body, though they are mostly masked by the damage the claws inflicted upon this poor animal.”
“I would think that would narrow down the list of suspects from the animal kingdom a lot, Doc,” Aurelio pressed him, hoping for an answer.
“It would if any such animal existed, Aurelio.” Dr. Ferguson sighed. “Truly, the only thing I can remotely think of that could do something like this to an animal and what you described out at the mining camp is either a Lycanthrope or a Sasquatch.”
Aurelio had to force himself not to laugh out loud. “You’re telling me that this was done by a werewolf?”
“Or a Sasquatch,” Dr. Ferguson corrected him. “I find that the more likely of the two to actually exist, don’t you?”
“You’re talking crazy, Doc.” Aurelio frowned, staring at Ferguson and desperately hoping that he was joking.
“Sometimes the impossible is the only logical answer, Aurelio.” Dr. Ferguson moved to wash his hands and then started for the outer part of the office. “Perhaps some coffee is in order before we discuss this more.”
“I think I could use something a bit stiffer right now, Doc,” Aurelio snorted.
Dr. Ferguson waggled a finger at him. “No, Aurelio. That’s never a good idea. It would only cloud your thoughts and slow your synapses. Besides, aren’t you on duty?”
“I was joking, Doc,” Aurelio said, chuckling.
“Oh.” Dr. Ferguson raised an eyebrow. “It’s hard for me to realize things like that at times.”
“It’s okay, Doc,” Aurelio told him. “Some coffee would be great. It’s been a really long day already.”
“I can imagine.” Dr. Ferguson poured them each a cup and handed Aurelio his.
“I need a better answer than ‘maybe a Sasquatch,’ Doc,” Aurelio said as he sipped at his coffee carefully.
“You’re worried that whatever killed the wolves might aim its sights a bit higher the next time it makes a move,” Dr. Ferguson said. “I understand that. However, a Sasquatch is the most likely correct answer to your question of what killed them. The evidence can’t be disputed.”
“Doc, you barely looked at those bodies. Can’t you run some tests or something and find out what really killed them?” Aurelio pleaded.
Dr. Ferguson glared at him. “Aurelio, you’ve known me a long time. Do you honestly believe that I would tell you anything less than the truth or that I am not competent enough at my job to know what I am talking about without running unneeded tests?”
Aurelio realized he was starting to sweat. Dr. Ferguson had never been wrong about anything medical or scientific ever in the entire time he’d known him. If he said it was a Sasquatch, it most likely really was. Aurelio still couldn’t bring himself to believe though.
“Doc—” Aurelio started.
“Stop it, Aurelio,” Dr. Ferguson cut him short. “There is a difference between not believing and not wanting to believe in something. I think you need to ask yourself close
ly about which you are doing right now.”
“Let’s assume you’re right,” Aurelio relented. “Doesn’t all the research out there about Sasquatch say they’re peaceful giants who just want to be left alone?”
Dr. Ferguson smiled, utterly beaming, as he answered, “Not all of it, Aurelio. What you read and see about Sasquatch in the media, aside from horror films, all do make the claims that you’re talking about. However, if you get down to the real nitty-gritty legends among the tribes native to this region, they tell an entirely different story. The Sasquatch were feared predators. They hunted men just as those early tribes hunted animals. There are many stories of Sasquatch attacks on native villages and of outright wars with the creatures in attempts to drive them away.”
Aurelio’s eyes bugged as he took in what Dr. Ferguson was saying. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you, Doc?”
“Aurelio!” Dr. Ferguson snapped.
“Sorry, Doc,” Aurelio apologized. “I had to ask.”
“What you need to start asking, Aurelio, is what it means if I am right,” Dr. Ferguson cautioned him. “If a Sasquatch left a warning like the wolves you’ve told me about at the mining site, then what do you think will happen if Henderson and his men don’t pack up and leave?”
“God help us, Doc,” Aurelio breathed. “I really hope you’re wrong for once.”
“Me too,” Dr. Ferguson agreed, his expression dark and worried.
****
Roy carried a double-barreled shotgun, the pockets of his coat filled with shells, as he opened the gate and walked into the field. Another person might have called the sheriff if they had found what he had this morning, but Roy hated Sheriff Jackson. The guy was a punk, always acting like he was God’s gift to Lowah. As far as Roy was concerned, Aurelio Jackson could burn in Hell. Two years ago when he really needed the sheriff’s help, Jackson had let him down and Roy had never forgiven him for it. Oscar, the drunk that he was, had walked away with nothing more than being stripped of his driver’s license after the accident that had cost Claire her life. Roy had never believed the sheriff’s claims that Oscar had been sober behind the wheel that night and never would. If Jackson had just manned up and helped him fight for justice in the courts, Oscar would have been behind bars like he deserved instead of in a cushy rehab place down in Canada. No, calling the sheriff wouldn’t do any good and it would mean he’d have to look the punk bastard in the eyes again too. Roy knew that wouldn’t go well. He didn’t know the penalty for knocking a law enforcement officer on their butt, but he didn’t have the time to sit in a jail cell. He was already late on his land payments. If things didn’t pick up soon, Roy might well lose the farm that his father had built from the ground up before he died.
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