Redneck Apocalypse

by Eric S. Brown

  Mayor Thompson’s personal assistant, Mary, met him at the door of the house.

  “Good to see you, Sheriff,” she smiled at him. “Fred’s waiting in his study.”

  “Thank you Mary,” Bryson nodded at her, removing his hat.

  As Bryson entered, Thompson looked up from the stack of paperwork that lay before him upon his desk.

  “You really let it all drop in the pot this time, didn’t you, George?” Thompson frowned at him.

  “With all due respect, sir,” Bryson said, “how the Hell was I supposed to know that thing was really real?”

  “We’ve both known for a long time that it might be. Don’t matter though. What we need to talk about now is damage control. This mess will for sure grab some national attention and we need to put the right spin on it.”

  “Gonna be hard with that crazy vet out there telling folks the truth,” Bryson warned.

  “Then we shut him up, don’t we, George?”

  “And just how—”

  “I think you know what you have to do,” the mayor’s smile was thin across his lips and very feral.

  “What about that kid who was with him?”

  “Scott’s boy? I don’t think he’ll be a problem since you played ball with clearing that idiot trucker’s name in the press. Leave him be for now.”

  “Understood,” Bryson answered, putting his hat on as he turned to leave.

  “Wait,” Thompson ordered, and Bryson stopped where he was. “One more thing, George. Are we sure that creature was the only one out there?”

  “Surely, it had to be, sir,” Bryson answered. “I can’t imagine there being more things like that around here, or there would have been a lot more trouble than even what we’ve seen over the years.”

  “Good,” Thompson eyed him. “I don’t want any more surprises blindsiding us like the one last night. Got it?”

  “Yes sir,” Bryson nodded and left the mayor sitting at his desk. He had work to do, and it was the kind that was best to get done quickly so that it could be forgotten about.

  It was late when Danny made it home. He’d spent some quality time with Claire on the back roads, where he knew Bryson’s deputies wouldn’t be, getting used to how she handled with her new transmission.

  The house was dark except for the porch light. Likely, Scott had given up waiting up, got so drunk he couldn’t stand up, and went on to bed. That was fine with Danny. He wasn’t in a talking mood and Lord knew they’d done enough of that in the last two days already. He wasn’t worried about Bryson coming after them even if Scott was concerned. Bryson had no grounds. Sure, the man could make something up but with all the attention he had on him right now that wouldn’t be a smart thing to try.

  Danny started up the steps to the porch. As he did, something moved in the trees beyond the house. He paused, squinting into the darkness to try to see what it was. Whatever it was, it didn’t move again and he couldn’t see anything but the trees themselves. Despite the sleep he had gotten earlier in the day, he still felt more tired than before. He felt kind of stupid, jumping at shadows and went on into the house.

  He flicked on the living room light as he entered. No surprise, the place was the housekeeping disaster it normally was. An empty and open pizza box sat on the coffee table surrounded by crumpled beer cans. The TV remained on but muted. Scott lay on the couch in front of it, asleep, a lit cigarette, burnt to nearly its butt. Danny sighed and removed the smoke from Scott’s hand, stabbing it out in the ashtray next to where he lay. It was only the grace of God that kept Scott from burning down the house on any given night.

  A blanket was draped over the lower half of Scott’s snoring form. Danny tugged it up to cover more of him and left Scott on the couch, heading for the kitchen. His stomach grumbled at the thought of food. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ate something.

  He opened the fridge, setting a jar of mayonnaise, some slices of questionable bologna, and the reminder of the loaf of bread on the counter. Grabbing a plate from the cupboard, he slapped two sandwiches together onto a plate and carried them with him to his room. Danny scarfed them down in a frenzy as he sat on the side of his bed. He yawned as he sat the empty plate aside and his thoughts turned to Rita. He wondered if she and her folks had finished packing up. Rita hadn’t told him where she planned on moving to but he figured she would be staying with her parents over in Babble Creek until she could get onto her feet again.

  Something loud thudded against the side of the house just outside his room. Danny leaped to his feet. He rushed to his bedroom’s only window and peered out. The night was dark outside and it was hard to see. A fresh batch of rain clouds had crept in blocking the light of the moon.

  He opened the window and stuck his head out to get a better look at things. The oil barrel that fueled the monitor heater in the living room had been knocked over somehow. It lay perched up against the house’s siding. What the Hell? Danny wondered. Then he saw the beast. It stood at the corner of the house near the front lawn. Its back was turned to him but he could see it was a monster just like the one Richard had killed the prior night, but only larger. This sucker had to be at least ten feet tall. Danny nearly wet himself at the sight of it. He could hear the thing breathing, loud, angry, panting noises that chilled him to the bone.

  Danny considered shutting the window but decided against it. No little pane of glass would stop that thing if it wanted to get at him. As quietly as he could, he crept toward the door of his room. Scott kept his own personal arsenal across the hall in his own bedroom. If he could just make it there and get at Scott’s guns, he’d have a prayer of at least surviving the next few minutes.

  He heard the beast moving about outside as he eased into Scott’s bedroom. The closet door creaked as he opened it. Danny cringed at the sound, hoping the thing outside hadn’t heard it. He grabbed the closest weapon, a pump action shotgun, and thanked God that Scott kept his guns loaded. He worked the pump, chambering a round, as the beast outside loosed a roar that shook the glass of every window in the house.

  “What in darnation!” Scott yelled from the living room Shotgun in hand, Danny crashed out of the bedroom, racing through the hallway towards him.

  “Scott!” Danny shouted. “It’s one of those things!’

  Scott stared at him, dumbfounded. He shifted about but remained stretched out on the couch.

  Before Danny could explain, the front door of the house exploded inward. Pieces of its wood flew through the air like shrapnel. Danny threw himself at Scott, taking them both to the floor as the beast came tearing into the house. It was so large it broke the frame around the door as it entered.

  Danny didn’t wait to see what it did next. He unloaded the chambered round into the creature’s face. The beast gave a pained shriek as its nose was reduced to a mass of shredded tissue. Danny worked the shotgun, readying another shot, but the beast was gone. It had pulled itself back through the doorway and was outside somewhere again.

  “Danny,” Scott rasped in slurred voice, “am I dreaming or was Bigfoot just in our living room?”

  “Shut up and grab a damn gun!” Danny ordered him, shoving Scott in the direction of the bedrooms.

  “On it!” Scott shouted, already sounding sober. He came back down the hallway carrying an illegal, fully automatic AK-47. “Wanna tell me what’s going on?”

  The two of them stood in the center of the living room, away from the front door and any windows. Danny could still hear the thing outside the house as it moved about. It sounded like it was somewhere near the front porch.

  “The Babble Creek monster,” Danny whispered. “It apparently wasn’t the only one of its kind.”

  “No fragging way in Hell,” Scott said. “You telling me there’s a damn Sasquatch out there?”

  “Don’t have to tell you,” Danny glanced nervously at the large front window. “You saw it with your own eyes just a second ago.”

  “Holy crap,” Scott muttered. “What we gonna do?”
>
  “Pray like Hell it goes away?” Danny suggested.

  “That ain’t no fun,” Scott argued. “I like the idea of blowing the thing’s freaking head off more.”

  Scott moved slowly toward the front door. “Cover me,” he said as he stepped off to the right of the door’s shattered frame, taking a peep outside.

  Danny held his breath and waited.

  “Don’t see nothing,” Scott told him.

  The night outside had fallen silent. If the beast was still out there, it was keeping quiet.

  “Don’t mean it ain’t there,” Danny said, moving up to stand opposite from Scott, on the other side of the hole that the beast had made.

  “Make a run for it?” Danny suggested, nodding at Scott’s pickup out in the drive. It was parked closer to the house than Claire.

  “You’re still thinking about this all wrong, son,” Scott said. “What we want to do is draw it out so we can get a shot at it.”

  “You volunteering to be bait then?”

  “You just be ready,” Scott told him as he darted outside. Scott ran along the length of the porch and jumped out onto the lawn. Sure enough, the beast had been waiting on them. It came tearing around the corner of the house at Scott. Danny jerked up his shotgun towards it as he darted through what was left of the door frame. Leveling the weapon, he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun’s blast caught the beast dead on in its chest. And yet it didn’t even slow the thing down as it barreled towards Scott.

  Scott opened up with his AK-47 in full auto. Spent casing flew from its side as the weapon chattered and spat a stream of high velocity rounds into the monster at point blank range. Explosion of red spotted the thing’s brown hair as the bullets tore at its flesh. The creature closed the distance between it and Scott. Scott, however, kept firing even as it was on top of him. The beast took the man off his feet and sent him flying through air with a backhanded blow. Danny heard the sickening cracking noise of breaking bone as Scott’s rib cage folded inward from the impact. Scott thudded onto the ground several feet away.

  The beast staggered around to face Danny and its yellow eyes met his. Danny emptied the shotgun in a series of rapid thunderclaps into the beast at near point blank range. Each shot blew chunks of flesh from the beast’s already bullet scarred and bloodied chest as it sprang at him. Danny dodged to the side as the thing’s corpse flopped to the ground where he had been standing. It lay in the grass, blood pooling around it.

  Danny tossed the shotgun aside and ran to Scott, kneeling next to him. Scott was in bad shape. White jagged spears of rib bones poked through the red slicked cloth of his shirt. Scott’s breath came in wheezing gasps.

  “We got the bastard,” Scott coughed as blood leaked from his lips.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Danny told him. “I’ll call for help.”

  Scott shook his head. “No. You don’t have time. You need to get out of here.”

  Danny saw that Scott was looking passed him towards the tree line. Slowly, he turned his head and followed Scott’s gaze. Two more of the beasts like the one they had just killed were emerging from the woods.

  Scott squeezed Danny’s hand and then let it go. “Run,” Scott managed to get out the word even as his skin was turning blue and his features were twisted into a grimace of pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Danny said, getting to his feet. He ran for Claire, digging for her keys as he sprinted across the drive. He didn’t bother to take time to open her door. Her driver’s side window was down so he jumped up, sliding through it, and landed behind her steering wheel. The two monsters had stopped where Scott lay and were tearing into him as Danny shoved the keys into Claire’s ignition. With a twist, her engine roared to life. Tears welled up in his eyes and he floored the gas. Gravel flew as Claire’s tires spun out before they caught grip and she sped along the drive towards the main road like a bat out of Hell.

  Ryan yawned, stretching his hands above his head, not giving a crap if Doc Mills noticed or not. He sat in the corner of the morgue’s main examination room. The body of the creature that Bryson had them bring here lay on the table in the center of the room. It was cut open from throat to groin and the Doc was excitedly babbling into the small recorder he carried with him as he worked.

  At first, Ryan had been amazed by the thing on the table. Lord knew, the thing resembled a man enough to get even someone like himself interested in it. Get him interested in where it had come from, and yet there was only so much even he could take. The Doc, however, was like a kid on Christmas morning. He bounced about taking audio notes and working on the creature like the Energizer Bunny on speed.

  “Hey Doc,” Ryan interrupted Mills, “I’m gonna go check on Phillip.”

  “Sure, sure. Whatever you need to do,” Doc Mills answered him, clearly not really listening or caring.

  Phillip was having a hard time with everything that was going on. Ryan could understand that. Being cooped with Doc Mills, with him acting like this, wasn’t an easy thing on anyone. Ryan knew Phillip had a weak stomach and the sight of Mills decked in his white lab coat, the same white lab coat that was now as bloody as the gloves the Doc wore while he worked, was likely too much for him to handle. Phillip had politely excused himself and never came back.

  Ryan left the Doc and headed for the morgue’s reception area where the bathrooms were located. The men’s room was along the corridor that connected to the morgue proper. The morgue was officially closed so there was no one at the desk and the outer doors of the building were locked up tight. The lights, too, were off per Paul’s orders. He had told them the sheriff wanted to keep things as “hush, hush” as possible.

  Ryan didn’t see the point. Everyone in Sylva already knew about the monster out back on the table from Richard’s wild ravings about it to anyone who would listen. With all that going on, Bryson had made Paul discretely kick the crazy old man out of town and send him home.

  There was no sign of Phillip as Ryan entered the reception area. The street outside was dark. Great. Ryan shook his head, Must be some kind of power outage.

  Something crunched on the floor beneath his boots as he moved across the large room. He looked down and realized it was glass from the front doors. They were smashed to pieces. Ryan drew the Glock holstered on his hip and took a step back. He wanted to shout for Phillip but he kept silent. There was a strange noise coming from the men’s room to his left. Someone moving around in there and the bathroom’s door lay several feet away on the floor as if it had been yanked off its hinges and just flung aside.

  Gathering up his courage, Ryan approached the doorway to the bathroom and cautiously poked his head inside. Blazing yellow eyes looked up at him as he disturbed the creature’s meal. A monster, very much like the one Doc Mills was working on, sat on the floor beside Phillip’s corpse, shoveling strands of the deputy’s intestines, hungrily, into its mouth. Its lips and mouth dripped a wet red onto the floor of the bathroom as it showed him its teeth in a gruesome mockery of a smile.

  Ryan jerked his Glock up and fired. In his panic, the shot went wild, flying over where the beast sat and slamming into the side of a stall door behind it. The thing gave a low, rumbling growl as it stood to its full height. The beast stood a good nine feet tall and its head smashed into and through the ceiling of the bathroom. As its arms lashed out, destroying the ceiling tiles it had just driven its head into, its growl became a roar that echoed in the enclosed space of the room. It shook dust and pieces of the tiles it had just smashed from the hair covering its massive form then, hunching over as it came, the thing stomped towards him. Ryan spun about and broke into a run, sprinting for the morgue proper.

  “Doc!” Ryan yelled as he sped along the corridor back to where he had left Mills, “We got company!”

  He skidded to a halt, stopping in his tracks. Ahead of him, two more of the creatures were emerging from the morgue, dragging behind them the dead body of their brother from the Doc’s workstation. From the fresh blood slicking the hair of the b
igger beast’s hands, it was clear that Doc Mills was as dead as the corpse they had with them.

  Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the monster from the bathroom coming after him. He was surrounded with nowhere left to run. Ryan spun and opened fire at the beast between him and the reception area. He figured if he could get passed it and onto the street outside, at least he would have a chance.

  His pistol jerked as he held it in a two handed grip with his arms extended and put three rounds into the advancing beast. The first buried itself in the thing’s shoulder. The second and third hammered into the monster’s chest. None of them so much as slowed the thing down.

  The beast swatted his pistol away as it reached him, breaking Ryan’s right wrist in the process. Ryan cried out in pain as he watched his hand fold backwards at an unnatural angle. Before he could do anything else, one of the beast’s large hands grabbed him by the front of his chest. Its fingers broke ribs as they sunk into his flesh, and the monster lifted him effortlessly into the air. The creature holding him cocked its head to the side like the animal it was, looking him over, as Ryan’s legs kicked and twitched in the air above the hallway floor. Ryan could taste his own blood seeping up into his mouth. He pounded on the thick muscle of the arm that held him, with his good hand, trying to break free of the beast’s grip. It ignored his blows as if it didn’t even feel them.

  Another of the beasts grunted at the one that held him. The two of them seemed to be talking back and forth in a series of angry grunts and snarls. Finally, the beast with its fingers buried in Ryan’s chest shook him free of its hand. He went flying and bounced off the hallway’s wall landing hard, face down, on his stomach. From where he lay, Ryan could hear the trio of creatures leaving the morgue, dragging the body of their dead brother with him. He tried to find the strength to move and failed. A growing coldness swept over him as he gave a final cough that released a blood spray from his lips. Afterwards there was only darkness.