Hawg

by Steven L. Shrewsbury

  Then the beast had left them alive, moving on like it was God’s work. He hadn’t brained one of the bikers. The creature had went about its business and filled the helmet, then started back toward the tavern door when Hux had burst out a side window and had run toward the car. Roberts had broken from his shock and they drove away.

  “Were there any alive in the bar?” Roberts wondered.

  Hux said, “Hawg killed the bar tender when he forced the door. Splattered ol’ Gunner’s head.”

  “I see. Hawg?”

  “As good a name for the thing as any.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Big Ed…” Hux mumbled, his voice falling away like the wind dying down.

  “What?”

  “It was him Hawg wanted, well, him and me I guess as we escaped him at the farm. How he tracked us I’ll never know.”

  “Did this Hawg get your scapegoat, Big Ed?”

  “I guess. He went after Hawg with a saber from the wall of the bar. He never drew blood on Hawg, though.” Hux almost wept as he said, “Gotta hand it to Ed, he was himself unto death. Hawg bit into his knee, took Ed out low. It was a crush of bodies, but next thing I knew, the guys were all knocked out and Hawg had started to drag them outside.”

  “How was it you survived?”

  Tears sprang to Hux’ eyes as he admitted, “I played dead, rolled Ed’s lifeless body on top of me. When Hawg went out with two guys to the hitching post, I ran in the shitter and hid. When you showed up, I ran. I busted out the kitchen window and jumped.”

  Roberts nodded. “No glory in dying for that thing.”

  Hux nodded, but the tears came again. Over and over, the extractions played out in the man’s mind. The claw coming up, the spray of blood and clear fluid, the screams so deep changing pitch…

  CHAPTER NINE Night and Morning

  Andrew took a call from his brother. He sat up on the bed and listened for a long time, never speaking. He turned the phone off and stared off at the darkened wall. Slowly, Andrew got back into bed. He told Lynne what went on at Solow’s and in the territory near them that night.

  Lynne snuggled close to him and said, “All that around us and we were none the wiser. God, that’s terrible.”

  He stroked her long hair and said, “Angel of death passed us by, couple times today. I thought I heard the bikers out and about.”

  “Good night. What’s going on out there, really, Drew?”

  “Sounds like a crazy killer. It’s all so nuts. Doug sang the song from DCFS again, that they will want to review the kids tomorrow.”

  Lynne’s voice lowered and her attitude bristled as she said, “Better they are in their own beds than at some strange place.”

  “Yeah.” Andrew thought of how many guns he kept at his home and felt safe against any intruder. The fact that many died so near to them would abolish sleep for the night, though. “That prick of a Mayor Sullivan will have a load of crap on his desk in the morning. Hope he gags on it.”

  His mind afire, Andrew thought of how many times he failed in life, screwed up at better jobs at work that landed him in his position…thus making sure he was no where near Jordan when he really needed him. If the boy had died, it’d have been his fault and Andrew couldn’t get that out of his mind. He struggled to force such thoughts away. This was the life he had now, he told himself, and he’d protect his family better than before.

  “What is it, Andrew? I mean, what is this thing?”

  “Doug seems to want to believe Solow, who saw it, that it is just a big guy, a lunatic or some such thing. That sounds more plausible than a giant pig-man, no matter what the kids say they saw.”

  Her fingers drummed on his hairy chest. “That’s how he must’ve looked to the children. Terrible.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Lynne was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “Mr. Solow is lucky Alex stopped by when he did. Poor old man, that killer would’ve made fast work of Solow. Him with no family, wife or kids.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some crazy maniac would’ve done him in.”

  “He’s probably armed, but so was the cop,” Andrew mused, eyes staring at the tiles on the ceiling. “Still, whacked about the bikers at Elias’s trailer. Sort of lucky all that commotion drew the killer away from Solow.”

  Again, Lynne was lost in thought for a time. “I wonder why Solow never married.”

  “Dunno. My Pa used to think he was injured in the war and couldn’t have kids or perform, you know?”

  She heeded Andrew and said, “You need injured.”

  “Thanks. Dad never knew for sure. Said Solow used to keep company with an old widow, then another one after she passed on. I think they willed part of their cash to Solow, as they had no family or some such thing. It happens. Folks get lonely when they are old.”

  “Sad he has no kids or family to pass on his property to.”

  Andrew thought of the specter of losing Jordan again and shivered. “Yeah. I think he does have relatives down south, Arkansas or Louisiana maybe. When I was about twelve, I recall a trailer coming up from down south with some of his kinfolk along. They brought new stock for the farm.”

  “How can you recall it so exact?”

  “I was in confirmation and that is about the time they caught John Wayne Gacy in Chicago. I remember Pa and Solow talking about executing Gacy themselves as they built on the big round barn.”

  “I never knew your dad helped build that barn? I saw it on PBS as part of Illinois events once. I thought it was a hundred years old.”

  “They used parts of a crib and barn razed by a tornado. It’s an old practice. Yeah, after they brought in the new stock, Solow, his family, Pa and my older brothers helped to build it. I generally screwed around on the farm, but I watched, fetched iced tea and nails, the usual.”

  “New stock all the way from Louisiana? I wonder if he had more calves back then.”

  He said to Lynne, “Not good to keep breeding the same bloodlines together. You get bad yields in any animal I guess if ya do that long enough.”

  “I’m glad Luella is all right.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lynne half laughed. “Gramma told me Luella was the fat lady in the circus years ago and she wasn’t from around here. Wonder how she ever landed here?”

  “She’s been a fixture out there on the Solow place as long as I know,” Andrew said. “My older brother Thomas said she went blind as a kid, drinking grain alcohol.”

  “I never knew that. Wonder what the connection is to Solow, why he lets her live out there?”

  His hand rested on her back as he said, “I think he claims Christian charity or some such thing. I dunno. Never asked him.”

  Lynne raised her head and asked, “Doesn’t Luella have a Cajun accent?”

  ***

  Hawg hated town. It was loud and he felt as if the buildings would collapse on him at any moment. Even though the structures he passed by were small he worried they would suddenly join as one, form walls and then crush him down. The open spaces were better. Glad he’d found the bikers who escaped at the edge of the small town, Hawg happily returned to the rural fields. When he regarded the stone streets of Miller’s Fork, all he saw was Hell. When he turned his head and the country loomed, home wasn’t far away.

  Something tugged at the edge of his mind, as if the job was not complete, but he buried this idea and went where it felt safe. He kept off the streets and jogged in the gravel by the worn road. Hawg traveled near a huge metal building that housed several trucks and then past a tractor repair business. The orange glow of the parking lot to Ambrose Brothers Printing caught his eyes, but he kept on, searching after the open spaces.

  The night deepened and he grew tired. Sleep would come soon, but he had one more duty to perform. Unable to run on all fours because of the load he carried, Hawg jogged along slower than usual. A few times, he went down and ran badly on three limbs. He abandoned this idea and returned to his hind legs.

 
Pain coursed over his body, burning down his back, worse in his side. Hawg needed rest and a chance to feel better. Still, he persevered.

  The flashing lights of the men with guns littered the country night. The moonlight set a glow across the barren fields, but the police drove several of the country roads. On these vehicles long spotlights flashed across the fields, probing the plowed lands for a figure. Hawg comprehended they were out in force, probably with police from neighboring counties, looking for him. Overhead, he spotted a helicopter with a spotlight beam scanning the waterways. This was an easy enough object to avoid. It was slow and far from him. The light beam made it easier to evade.

  With his pace steady, legs and side aching, Hawg made his way back toward the Solow farm. His body hurt so from the gun wound, but the bleeding had ceased. Hawg touched the tender area around the place where the big biker had shot him. Pain reared up again as his claw neared the spot. He wondered if the bullet had passed through him or left a fragment in there. Hawg stopped, rested a few minutes to let the new pain he caused himself subside, and then kept on, his velocity never slackening.

  His wound brought a different emotion to Hawg, fear. His anger and energy had suppressed the feeling for the most part. He couldn’t deny the sensation and only wanted to be closer to home the nearer to the forefront of his mind the emotion came.

  But when he slowed close to Elias’ trailer, he saw police cars and ambulances still working the scene.

  Over at Luella’s, a policeman sat on her deck, watching the scene at Elias’ home. The area by Elias’ trailer was cleared out for the most part, so Hawg stayed in the distant waterway and waited. He held the biker helmet and watched the helicopter in the distance.

  Though weary in his body, Hawg faced in the direction of where he slept the night before. The helicopter hovered over in that area of the country, shooting its beam down on the railroad tracks near the graveyard. Frustrated, Hawg stuck to a long treeline that divided the fields. Certain he was covered. Hawg watched Luella’s house and waited.

  After a while, he decided to cross-country again, toward where he slept before.

  ***

  Micki heard distant rumbles and dived for the deep ditch by Route 66. Her thoughts of Hawg boiled in her brain as she discovered the open culvert. She wished the edge of old 66 would open up and swallow her, anything to hide her from the monster. The culvert would have to do. Micki’s mind snapped into lucidity every so often, but her waking moments still clogged with bleary visions of a distorted world. Nothing showed right and sharp to her hazy eyes. The moonlight glowed green and fuzzy. The highway tilted and threatened to discharge her off the planet. She wondered how cars would drive on a diagonal path. Afraid of the beast returning for her, she hid. Once down in the culvert in the deep ditch beside the road, she turned over on the cold stone tunnel and the pain increased.

  She felt worse sensations than stabbing pains from her ruined sex. Tiny taps, like children poking her, that’s what it was—no, she felt the sensations like rivulets of fluid, but they had smaller paths. A swipe of her right hand sent some of this feeling away, and brought the realization that a host of bugs infested her crotch. Grubs, ladybugs and a few things she couldn’t identify in her weary state tormented her further as she let out a deep sob. Too afraid to cry out, she suffered and hid from the distant rumbles. The pain from the cold surface was too much so she crawled outside again. The weeds felt better on her, but the pain was still there. Micki felt exposed and afraid, though. She could feel the monster.

  Never would she experience that again…she had to hide.

  Again, she prayed. Prayed very hard.

  As if in response, a beam of light struck the ground near her. At last, her mind burned, deliverance!

  But this elation was short lived. The beam of light from the heavens moved on, traveling away from her. By the time she got to her knees to wave her arms, the craft overhead was gone.

  No tears came. Her arms still up, she looked across the way toward the trestle.

  In the gap of the beams stood Hawg, holding a helmet like a bucket. He stared right at her in the ditch near the culvert.

  ***

  Jack Sullivan didn’t get much sleep, either. Calls from the local police, the county cops and then the State Troopers kept him up all night. The Sheriff proved apt at covering the bases and even coordinating a search effort for this killer and missing persons.

  He regretted taking on the job of Mayor of the small town then. Certainly, it lavished him with more power…a grip on county affairs, and more pots to poke his fingers at, but this was proving a hassle. Who could’ve foreseen such a nightmare unfolding? He kept telling himself there had to be a simple explanation for it all. If a deranged killer was butchering people, Jack reasoned it had killed the drug mules Mr. Roberts wanted so badly. But there was no way to know that and it only made matters worse.

  Jack swore in his mind many times over it all. What were the chances of some lunatic escaping and slaughtering people in his town?

  Doug assured him, “There are no cases of escaped maniacs that I know of. I’ll keep looking.”

  Jack offered him on the phone, “So, maybe some peckerwood up by Godly had a kid go rogue. Ever think of that?”

  Godly was a town of yellowhammers. In fact, this was common knowledge as far back as before the First World War.

  Doug replied, “We are keeping our eyes open. I’ll learn what makes this fucker tick by autopsy, sir.”

  While Doug White, and of course, his drunken loser of a brother, Andrew, weren’t high on his list of favorite folks, that line made Jack smile. Doug was passionate and a good egg. He’d kill the bastard if he caught him and not string matters out with a trial or a media circus from out of town.

  “It’s a helluva thing, Jack,” Doug said with a gentle voice, seldom addressing him in such a way. “If you’d have seen the bodies, not just my deputy Alex, but the others, and the bikers at the Green Parrot. You’d shoot the fucker, too.”

  “Do your best, Douglas. I don’t live far away from this either. All BS aside, it has to be done.”

  When he turned the phone off Jack cursed the hour. Jack decided to shower and get ready for the day. He let his wife sleep. She needed rest. Though her bout with cervical cancer was a year in the past, Betty still was weaker for the trial. Jack pondered for a moment an old fear of his, that his catting around had brought home the HPV virus and set her illness in motion. For a moment, his world of control tilted and there was something in his stable world he couldn’t get a grip on. He squeezed his eyes shut tight, banishing these thoughts. Betty was his foundation, even if she took longer to put her face on than she used to. Surely, he couldn’t have been responsible for her near death trial. Jack wouldn’t allow that his weakness threatened her. His anger rose, boiling that his bad choices could lead to a threat to his son. In any such case, he required action. His idle hands needed to act, to make a stab at his world to right it in his mind.

  After he turned the coffee on, he thought of Andrew White.

  “Mr. Militia, smart mouth, flying a flag upside down on anniversary of Waco.” He ground his teeth and said, “Buddy. Heh. You shit on the wrong guy’s car, you dope. I’ll award you plenty of time to spend with those kids of yours.”

  As he showered, he thought of how he would massage Andrew’s attendance records to make sure he had a legal basis to fire him that day.

  ***

  After Hawg finished with Micki, he rolled on his backside by the culvert entrance. Her hindquarters sticking out, he shoved her rump in farther to banish Micki from his sight. Hawg’s limbs felt tired and his side ached more. He reached in the tube and ripped her tattered half shirt from her. Hawg then pressed this over his wounded side. He gave a low growl as the pain shot through him again. The wound had started to scab, but the pain troubled him. Hawg always healed fast. He had to get better. He knew who would fix him.

  Hawg read the helmet full of biker balls like tealeaves. He then gr
imaced, his original idea returning to his mind. He’d take the offering to her and hope she’d fix him. Damn the man on her porch. He’d kill him, too. Hawg hated killing something one didn’t eat. It was a sin.

  The sun would break over the land soon. Hawg saw the helicopters still in the sky. Daylight would bring more men on the ground. His time was short. He had to heal. He had to hide.

  Hawg ascended to the road and saw a police car in the cemetery. Someone staked out his sleeping place. Angered, needing rest, Hawg turned south. Off to his right he smelled water. Though his eyes couldn’t pick up the source, his other senses understood a rushing water supply was not far off.

  Daylight would bring him trouble, but several miles of timber flecked the landscape around the town. Perhaps this is where the water hid? He pondered this for only a few moments. After he went back to Luella’s, Hawg decided to go south and find a place to sleep. These men out across the land were many, but not omnipresent. Like all those from the country, the earth was his friend.

  Determined to complete his ideas before he moved to a different sector of the rural area, he set off for Luella’s trailer, again.

  ***

  “I don’t know if I feel safe going home,” Hux confessed to Roberts as he tied up the boat on the edge of the quarry. “Glad whoever dumped your people from Cicero did it close to the old shed and my Uncle’s crash cabin. Funny, in a way.”

  Roberts looked across the waters at his car and then at the two rustic cabins set back on the gravel clearing. “You think that thing tracked you to the saloon?”

  “I’d bet on it. Pigs have a great sense of that stuff. I wouldn’t know how he did it, though. I never saw him behind us.”

  “Come now, Mr. Huxtable,” Roberts said, half admonishing him, but wringing his hands in an attempt to hide his nerves. “That creature cannot be a hybrid.”

  Rage leaked into his words as Hux shot back, “I don’t really care if it’s a guy in a costume, man, my pals are just as dead.” They walked across the gravel and Hux fished in his pocket for keys. He unlocked the cabin on the right and said. “I intend to crash here a bit if I can. I suggest you do likewise on the couch if you so choose. I gotta rest and reckon you do as well.”