Bigfoot

by Eric S. Brown

  As it was, what he had found this morning might have cost him the place anyway. Half of his livestock had been killed during the night. Not just killed either but mutilated and partially eaten. Every single cow on the farm’s northern side was dead. He’d seen the mess, there was no other word to describe it, when he first woke up and stepped out on his porch into the morning air. It had taken him until past noon to muster the nerve to come out into the field beyond the gate and really look at the bodies. And he had armed up to do it.

  Checking his shotgun again to make sure it was a loaded in case he ran into whatever had massacred his livestock, Roy wandered about the field. It was like something out of a cattle farmer’s nightmare. The corpses of his cows were strewn about everywhere, some of them mostly intact but utterly mangled and others in literal pieces. He kicked at the gnawed-upon leg of one of his cows as he stood looking down at it. Roy kept wondering if it all really was just a nightmare and he hadn’t woken up for the day yet. That was too much to hope though given how his luck ran and he knew it. What he didn’t know was what could have done this to his cattle. Not even an entire pack of wild wolves could have killed so many cows so fast and made such a mess. He kicked himself for all the drinking last night. If he hadn’t been passed out in his living room’s recliner in front of the TV, he surely would have heard all of it happen. It was too late now to do anything but figure out the hows and whys of it all and get some vengeance. Whatever did this was dead, plain and simple. There was no way in hell Roy was about to let something like this go unanswered. Oscar might be beyond his reach, and always would be because drunk or not, the man was too smart to return to Lowah with him still living close to the town, but whatever killed his cattle wasn’t. He just had to figure out what it was and find it.

  Roy had heard of aliens killing cattle and the ravaged state of his dead cows made him think of that. Aliens didn’t eat the cows they tore up though, at least as far as he knew from TV and movies. None of the stuff he had seen said they did anyway. That meant whatever did it was still out there in the woods somewhere. Roy knew he could wait for it to come back another night for the rest of his cattle, but he didn’t have the patience for that. His blood was boiling with rage. He wasn’t that bad of a tracker. His dad had liked to hunt and taught him enough to get by, so Roy’s plan was a simple one: Find the tracks of the animals responsible and march right on into the woods after them, shotgun in hand.

  The tracks he found in the field were as disturbing as what had been done to his cows. There was no way he could have ever missed them. They were huge. Roy squatted next to one, examining it. The footprint had the shape of a man’s foot but was far too large to belong to anything human, and its depth told Roy that whatever made it had to weigh hundreds of pounds, maybe even close to a ton. The tracks creeped him out. He didn’t have a clue as to what kind of creature could have made them, but that wasn’t going to stop him from hunting it down.

  Roy followed the tracks to the edge of the field. They led into the woods beyond it just as he knew they would. There was still plenty of daylight before the sun set and he had his shotgun, so Roy took one last look at the field of his dead cattle behind him before walking into the trees. The tracks were easy to spot when you knew what to look for like he did. Keeping alert for any sign of the creature that made them, Roy moved through the woods at a cautious pace, following the tracks. They led him deeper and deeper into the woods in the direction of the mountain where that slimebag, city slicker Henderson’s mining operation was setting up. He’d followed the tracks for about an hour before he looked up and around to realize that he had made a mistake. His attention had been so focused on his tracking that he hadn’t bothered to stay aware of his surroundings enough to be able to easily find his way back to his farm.

  “Bugger it all!” Roy swore loudly and took off his cap to throw it onto the ground. Most of the snow in these parts had melted, turning the dirt of the forest floor into mud and scattered puddles. His hat splashed straight into one of them and he let loose a litany of curses that would have made a sailor blush. Roy reached to pick up his hat and shook it savagely, trying to fling some of the mud off of it. Still cursing, he crushed the cap up in his hand and rammed it into his coat pocket instead of putting it back on his head. That was when he heard the growling.

  It was coming from somewhere up ahead of him. Roy’s gaze traced the direction of the noise to its source. His heart skipped a beat in his chest and his breath caught in his throat as he saw the monster. The thing was almost twice his size and a hulking mass of muscle and hair. Its burning, yellow eyes were looking right at him. Roy and the monster stared at each for what felt like an eternity. There was no question in Roy’s mind that this thing, whatever it was, had killed his cows. His thumb cocked the hammer of his shotgun as he continued to stare at the monster. The slight noise of the shotgun being readied was enough to set the thing in action. It gave a roar that seemed to shake the very trees around them and launched itself at him.

  Roy swung the barrels of his shotgun upward toward the charging beast and fired. The shotgun boomed as it bucked in his hands. The blast caught the monster full-on in the chest. The monster staggered backward from the impact, its chest a mess of flowing blood and punctured flesh. The monster didn’t drop though. Regaining its balance, it stood up straight to its full nine-foot-tall height and glared at him with murderous rage in its yellow eyes. Roy felt his bladder release itself. Warm urine ran down over his legs inside his pants even as he fought to snap open the shotgun’s breach and shove new shells into the weapon. The monster plowed into him like a runaway eighteen-wheeler. Roy was lifted from the forest floor as the thing’s shoulder struck him and flung him several yards through the air. He felt his ribs snapping inside his chest and grunted as he landed, his right arm breaking beneath him from the weight of his body coming down on it. He was screaming in pain and begging God for mercy as the monster advanced on him. Roy rolled over onto his back, managing to grab his shotgun with his left hand. He raised the shotgun’s barrels at the monster again but all that happened when he pulled its trigger was a dry, clicking noise. Roy hadn’t been able to get the weapon reloaded.

  The monster stomped towards him as Roy struggled to break open the breach of the shotgun again. It was hard to do with only one good arm. The pain coursing through him from his ribs was blinding and it was difficult for him to breathe. His right arm was utterly useless and hurt almost as badly as his ribs. The monster was on him before he even realized it. Its thick, hairy fingers caught the front of his shirt to haul him up from where he lay. Being jostled about in such a fashion sent fresh waves of pain ringing through his nerves. Roy was on the verge of passing out as the monster raised him directly in front of it so close that their faces almost touched. He tried to scream but was in too much pain. What came out of him was little more than a weak whimpering noise. The monster reached with its free hand to take hold of his neck and with a flick of its fingers snapped it. Roy’s hand dangled at an unnatural angle as the monster shook his body a final time, roaring at his corpse, before tossing it aside.

  ****

  The sheriff wasn’t at the department when Nicki got back. Gail said the last time he’d checked in that he was on his way over to Dr. Ferguson’s. Harold and Larry were around though. The two deputies sat at their desks, talking up a storm about the fishing trip they had planned for the coming weekend. Kevin and Scott were out on patrol. Nicki really wanted to talk to someone about what she had seen out at Lou Hyatt’s place, but there was no way in heck she was going to talk to Harold or Larry about it. They were both good old boys who were already a part of the force when Sheriff Jackson took office and it showed in their work ethic. On any given day, the sheriff was chewing one of them out over something. Why they hadn’t just been let go, Nicki didn’t know. She considered driving over to Dr. Ferguson’s herself and catching the sheriff there but decided to just wait for him.

  “Hey, Nicki!” Larry called to her. “Ho
w did it go with that crazy Hyatt guy?”

  “Yeah,” Harold spoke up, taking his feet from the top of his desk and flopping them onto the floor. “He tell you all about how the world is going to end or what?”

  Larry and Harold were both laughing as she walked over to where they sat. “Either of you could have taken that call, ya know? Have you guys even been out of the department today?”

  “Paperwork,” Larry answered, picking up a stack of papers and thumping them on his desk. “It’s a beast but someone has to deal with it.”

  Nicki turned to look at Harold.

  “I’m helping him with it,” he said defensively.

  “Right.” Nicki shook her head. “I’m sure you are.”

  “What’s it to you anyway?” Harold said, getting up from behind his desk to tower over her. Harold was a good fifteen years older than she was and likely twice her weight at least. A dark beard flecked with gray covered the lower half of his face. Nicki figured she could take him if it came to that, but for all his bluster, Harold wouldn’t really come at her unless he truly felt she was a threat to him, which he didn’t.

  “Nothing… Nothing at all,” Nicki said sharply and headed to a seat at her own desk.

  She had plenty of paperwork of her own to do, but she knew that she wouldn’t be able to focus on it. She was too keyed up and nothing except talking with the sheriff was going to settle her nerves down. Nicki started flipping through the papers on her desk anyway just to look busy so that Harold and Larry would leave her alone.

  The department’s front door opened and Sheriff Jackson came through it. Nicki said a silent prayer of thanks in her head as she leaped out of her seat and headed straight for him.

  “Sheriff!” she said as she stopped him on the way to his office. “We need to talk.”

  He looked as shaken up as she felt.

  “Whatever it is, Nicki, it’ll have to wait,” Aurelio told her and slipped by her to put his hand on his office’s doorknob, turning it.

  “This can’t wait, Sheriff,” Nicki’s voice was almost shrill.

  Aurelio seemed to notice that Larry and Harold were smirking at them. He ignored them though as he turned his attention back to her. “Look, Nicki, I really don’t have time—”

  Nicki was done asking. “Make time,” she snarled and shoved him on into the office. Following him in, she shut the door behind them.

  “What’s this about?” Aurelio asked, frowning.

  “I took a call this morning and had to drive up to Lou Hyatt’s place,” she told him. “Lou says that there are Sasquatch trying to break into that bunker of a house of his at night and kill him. I didn’t believe him at first, Sheriff, I mean, who would? But I saw tracks up there, tracks that I can’t explain,” Nicki rattled.

  Aurelio blinked and looked like she had just punched him in the gut. “Did you just say Sasquatch?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Nicki challenged him. “Lou says that they’re real and he’s told you all about them before.”

  Aurelio stared at her as he raised a hand to run it across his forehead, brushing aside strands of his jet black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He appeared to think about his words very carefully before answering her. That put Nicki on edge even more than she was.

  “Lou’s told me a lot of things. The man’s a loon,” Aurelio said. “But he just may be right for once this time.”

  “So you’re telling me that the tracks he showed me up at his place are real?” Nicki asked, watching Aurelio closely.

  “I don’t know,” Aurelio answered with a shrug. “Maybe. I ran into the same kind of crazy stuff over at Henderson’s mining camp this morning. Someone or something killed an entire pack of wolves, tied three of their corpses to a tree with their own guts, and piled up the rest of them just outside Henderson’s camp. Never seen anything like it.”

  “Who would do something like that?” Nicki blurted out. “Those poor animals.”

  “But here’s where it gets really interesting given what you’ve just told me. I took one of the wolf bodies over to Dr. Ferguson for him to take a look at. I figured if anyone could tell for sure if they were killed by a person or another animal, it was him. Interestingly enough, his best guess was that a Sasquatch was what killed them,” Aurelio told her.

  “Wait…” Nicki said. “You’re telling me you haven’t always known about the Sasquatch like Lou said you did?”

  Aurelio shook his head, a wry smile forming on his face. “I ain’t crazy, Nicki. Nobody believes that Sasquatch are real. Not really. I’ve heard stories like Lou’s before on this job. His isn’t the only one. I never gave any of them any credit though, and Lou’s is for sure the first time ever I’ve heard about Sasquatch attacking anything aside from cattle or other farm animals in these parts.”

  “The tracks I saw…” Nicki shuddered as she thought about them. “I think they were real, Sheriff. Lou sure was scared to death and as crazy as he seemed, the man didn’t strike me as the sort to play a hoax on a law enforcement officer.”

  Aurelio nodded. “Lou would never have called an officer up there if something wasn’t really going on. He hates people outside of that group he hunts with, and he can barely stand them. Add in his paranoia about me coming for his guns one day and…”

  “It means those tracks really did have to be real,” Nicki said.

  “Unfortunately so,” Aurelio agreed. “And that leaves us in a very bad place, Nicki, because that means we have got a killer Sasquatch running around out there in the woods somewhere and only God knows what it’s going to do next.”

  “Lou pretty much said there was more than one of them, Sheriff,” Nicki corrected him and then added, “He said to tell you to round up whoever you could and get up there. He wants you to help him go to war with the Sasquatch and drive them away from his place.”

  Aurelio grunted. “Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

  “What are we going to do?” Nicki asked.

  “Frag me if I know, Nicki.” Aurelio shrugged again. “But we’re going to have to do something. We can’t take the chance this thing or however many of these Sasquatch there are get riled up enough to start going after people instead of just wolves and livestock…even if the first person they go after is Lou Hyatt.”

  ****

  Calling the local authorities had amounted to nothing. The local, redneck sheriff had shown up, looked at the wolf bodies, and taken one off to run tests on and that was it. Chad supposed he should have known that the locals weren’t about to do squat to help Mr. Henderson and the firm that was bankrolling him to get the mine open again. Maybe if Henderson had bothered to hire on some of the locals, things would have been different, but he hadn’t. Henderson had brought his own group of miners and engineers with him from the States. All that was water under the bridge though. What mattered now was making sure that the camp and mine were safe. That’s what he had been hired to do anyway and Chad took his job seriously. After the bumpkin sheriff had taken off that morning, he had gone straight to Mr. Henderson about what they could do in case whoever left them a message with the dead wolves returned. His plan to protect the miners was simple: Chad wanted to arm them. Mr. Henderson, having seen what had been done to the wolves, agreed without hesitation.

  Chad spent the day in town buying guns and passing them out to the miners afterward. Everyone employed by Mr. Henderson who was willing now carried at least a sidearm holstered on their hip. Chad gave them all a talk about the limits of the law in terms of defending the mine and the camp but also assured them that Mr. Henderson’s legal team in the States had their backs if anything untoward happened. Beyond that, Chad had pulled two of the miners away from their normal jobs and issued them hunting rifles. One walked a patrol around the edges of the camp and the other Chad had placed outside the mine itself. If any punk kids came around looking to cause trouble, they’d be the ones finding themselves in it. It was the best he could do, and Chad thought it would be more than enough to deal with any zealous l
ocals so he had spent the remainder of the afternoon getting some sleep. He planned to stay up all night with the two men he had picked for the overnight guards. The men obviously weren’t professionals, they were miners, and Chad wanted to make sure that if the troublemakers did come back, he would be there himself waiting on them.

  The day shift ended and the workers all clocked out, heading to the hotels in town they were staying at. Mr. Henderson and his aide had long departed for the day before them. The camp was empty except for himself and the one guard he had assigned to it. Chad made sure all the lights, including the perimeter ones, remained on though. It wasn’t so much a tactic to scare any troublemakers away as it was a means to ensure he could see them if he needed to take a shot at them.

  Chad hadn’t needed to buy a gun for himself during his trip into town. He always came prepared when he took on a gig. Walking to the trunk of his car, Chad opened it. There was a small arsenal inside. He had permits for all of it and the credentials back them up. He selected a .44 Magnum for his sidearm, sliding a holster belt around his waist. Sliding the heavy pistol in its holster, Chad opted to go with an AR-15 for his main weapon. Shoving an extra magazine for it into the pocket of his coat, he slammed the trunk shut. He was ready and God help anyone that showed up to mess with Mr. Henderson’s camp tonight, he thought.