Kill Monster

by Sean Doolittle

  Lexi goosed the ATV up to the top of the next rise and idled there, scanning the pasture in the dying light. Where the heck was the grumpy hunk of beef?

  She felt a hand slide around her waist and smiled to herself. Then another hand patted her on the shoulder. In her ear, Chip said, ‘What’s that?’

  Lexi looked down his arm, following his pointer finger to a dark shape in the grass a hundred yards away. Her heart sank immediately. Oh, no, she thought. Surely not.

  She cranked the handlebars and thumbed the throttle lever, pointing the KingQuad down the other side of the hill. At the sudden lurch, Chip grabbed on to her waist with both hands. Lexi smiled again, thinking: That’s more like it, tough guy.

  When they reached the spot, she saw that her immediate first thought had been correct: Lord Vader, the great and terrible ruler of the north pasture, had finally kicked the bucket. It was amazing, unexpected, and a little bit sad. Lexi hadn’t thought she’d ever see the day.

  But something looked wrong.

  She killed the motor and climbed off the four-wheeler. The tangy, vaguely sickening smell of butchered meat touched her nostrils as she neared Vader’s motionless form. When she got there, it took a few moments of gawking in the dusk, listening to the sound of buzzing flies, before she understood what she was seeing:

  Vader’s head was gone.

  Completely.

  Like, not there anymore.

  The grass all around was matted with syrupy bull blood. In this light, the blood looked almost as black as Vader himself. Lexi Cortland still half-believed that her senses were playing some kind of trick on her. Because their old bull’s neck had been a foot thick if it was an inch, with muscles like bridge cables. And something, somehow, had torn his head clean off.

  Not cut, not sawn: torn. And not clean off, actually.

  Not the least little bit clean.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ Chip said at her side. ‘I guess this is kind of exciting after all.’

  ‘Chip,’ she said. ‘What is this?’

  ‘It looks like a dead cow.’

  ‘Bull,’ Lexi said.

  ‘No, really,’ Chip said. ‘It looks like a dead—’

  She punched his arm. ‘Don’t joke around. This is … what the heck is this?’

  Chip squeezed her shoulder, then left her, following a trampled path in the grass. Ten feet away, he stopped abruptly. ‘Here it is.’

  Lexi turned and looked. The path continued on past the spot where Chip stood, a narrow matted line extending all the way across the pasture, like a deer trail. ‘Here’s what?’ she called.

  Chip stooped, grunted, then straightened again, obviously lifting something heavy.

  ‘Wait,’ Lexi said. ‘I don’t want to—’

  But Chip had already turned and raised Vader’s massive, hornless, disembodied head up by the ears. A bunch more goopy blood poured from the ragged neck stump, spattering the grass in front of him. Probably his boots, too. He yelped and jumped back, dropping the head.

  ‘Ugh,’ Lexi said, feeling her gorge rising in her throat. She swallowed hard, turning back to poor Vader’s headless carcass.

  No help for her there. She bent at the waist, hands on her knees, trying to breathe without smelling anything. In another few moments, she felt Chip’s warm hand on her back, patting gently.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She wished she could talk without opening her mouth. She was starting to feel dizzy. What on earth had trampled that path through the grass?

  A sudden flash of light illuminated a glimpse of raw glistening meat and torn gristle three feet in front of her face. She saw a round white eye in the midst of it all: a cross-section of Vader’s severed spinal column. Some part of her brain simultaneously identified the electronic shutter sound of Chip’s camera phone.

  ‘Good God,’ she said, straightening quickly. She looked at the darkening sky and gulped the fresher air above her head. ‘Chip, what could have done this?’

  ‘Dude, I have no idea.’ Chip shook his head, his face uplit from below. He was already working at his touch-screen with his thumbs. ‘But it’s for sure gonna get me followed on Instagram.’

  The quickest way home was the interstate. The quickest way to the interstate from Christine’s house led back past the office. Near to the office was a sports bar called Small’s Balls, which Ben had never personally entered, but where other people from work congregated regularly. If he turned up murdered tomorrow, he reasoned, it might give the cops a leg up if at least a few folks remembered seeing him with his killer the prior evening.

  Plus he hadn’t eaten yet.

  ‘You don’t drink beer?’ Wasserman asked him after the waiter left their booth, raising his voice enough to be heard over the boisterous Thursday night crowd.

  ‘Among other things,’ Ben answered.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  Wasserman looked at the pitcher of Goose Island he’d just ordered as if wondering what he was supposed to do with all of it.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Look, man, I think you probably need some help,’ Ben said. ‘And I’m not a completely unsympathetic person. But you and I are not teammates.’ He gestured at the major league play-off game duplicated on screens everywhere around them, indicating people who were teammates. ‘And we’re definitely not going to be drinking buddies. So start over at the beginning. What’s a grommel?’

  ‘Golem,’ Wasserman said.

  ‘Big Lord of the Rings fan, huh?’

  ‘No. That’s Gollum.’

  Ben felt his headache coming back. And he was starting to feel shaky. He sipped his ice water, wishing his burger would hurry up and arrive.

  ‘A golem is an artificial man,’ Wasserman said. ‘Created by magic to serve a master.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘I know how it sounds. I didn’t believe it, either.’ Wasserman shrugged. ‘Then again, some say that Adam was technically a golem. At least until the big guy gave him a soul.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Adam,’ Wasserman repeated. ‘Mr Eve?’

  ‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘That Adam.’

  ‘I’m not on medication, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m worried about, actually.’

  Wasserman hauled his shoulder bag up into his lap and started unfastening the buckles. ‘In that case, I’m not sure this will make you feel any better. But if I’m crazy, then so was my brother, my father, my grandfather, and his grandfather, all the way back to—’

  ‘Whoa.’ Ben held up a palm like a traffic cop, hearing Gary’s voice in his head: He tried to leave some kind of package for you. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it.’

  Wasserman ignored him, pulling some kind of thick, banded folio out of the bag. Like a scrapbook. Or a photo album. He dropped the book on the table between them with a heavy thud.

  Ben said, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘That’s the Middleton file.’

  ‘The what now?’

  ‘Well, your part of it, anyway. See for yourself,’ Wasserman said. ‘For the record, most of the stuff in there was gathered way before the book came to me. I guess all of it, really.’

  Ben looked at Reuben Wasserman for a long time.

  Finally, against his better judgment, he sat forward just enough to slip the elastic strap free of the album’s leather cover. He leafed through the first several pages, felt springs pop loose somewhere in the gears of his brain, and then sat there, staring. A strange sensation rose in his chest.

  He looked at Wasserman again. Back at the book.

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ a voice behind him said. ‘Is that you?’

  Ben glanced over his shoulder to see Anabeth Glass, still in her work outfit, now holding a beer in each hand. In this context, it took him a moment to recognize her. She laughed and craned forward,
clearly delighted to get a closer look at the photograph he’d landed upon: a grainy, black-and-white portrait of his own Little League baseball team.

  This picture had run in Ben’s hometown newspaper just over a quarter century ago. Alongside the team photo was an action sidebar of a game-tying home run caught in mid-swing. The caption below the batter’s box read: Ben Middleton, age 11. He remembered the moment well. It had been his only hit of the season.

  ‘Look at you go,’ said Anabeth, beaming. ‘I’ll bet those middle school chicas didn’t stand a chance, did they?’

  Ben felt as though he’d woken up in an unfamiliar room. He couldn’t seem to gather his thoughts. ‘What’s happening?’

  It was probably natural enough for Anabeth to assume that the question was directed toward her. She tossed her head toward a far-corner booth and said, ‘Team meeting. We’re battling Google tomorrow night. I believe that with the correct mission planning we stand an excellent chance of mowing their doodle-making asses down systematically.’

  Ben followed her gesture, spotting a few familiar faces crowded together: Ajeet Mallipudi, Gordon Frerking, Devon Miller, and Jeremy Zwart, the other four members of the First Floor IT crew. Ajeet grinned and waved. The others raised their beers.

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ Anabeth said.

  Reuben Wasserman piped up, handling his own introduction. ‘The last name means water carrier.’

  ‘Hi, Reuben. Anabeth Glass. I guess my last name means water carrier, too. Or, you know,’ she raised her hands an inch, ‘beer.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Anabeth.’

  ‘Call me Abe.’

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ Ben said. He pushed out of his side of the booth, jostling Anabeth unintentionally as he made a beeline toward the exit. His hunger had turned suddenly to nausea, the burger he’d ordered now forgotten.

  Halfway to the doors, he turned around and went straight back to the booth. Anabeth stood where he’d left her. She looked baffled, her wrists and forearms still wet from sloshed-over beer.

  Reuben Wasserman brightened. ‘Hey! You came back.’

  Ben ignored him. He grabbed a wad of napkins from the table dispenser, dabbed Abe’s wrists lightly, and said, ‘Sorry about that. Knock ’em dead tomorrow.’

  Then he grabbed the so-called Middleton file from the table and took it the hell with him.

  FOUR

  On Friday morning, Reuben camped out at Caribou Coffee until past nine o’clock. He didn’t hold out much hope that Middleton would stick to his usual routine – not after the way they’d parted company the previous evening – and he didn’t honestly know what he planned to do even if Middleton did appear on schedule. All Reuben knew for certain was that he hadn’t yet fulfilled his promise to Eli.

  Screw that noise, a voice inside his head insisted. You told this loser everything he needs to know. Warning delivered! If you start driving now, you’ll be back in Hyde Park by dinnertime.

  But another voice – Eli’s voice, it sounded like to Reuben – said: You know he still doesn’t believe you. Which led Reuben Wasserman to wonder:

  What had he really promised in the first place?

  While he pondered that question, Reuben drank six Americanos and scoured the online editions of every newspaper he could find between here and Kansas City.

  Two news items jumped off the screen at him.

  The first story concerned the brutal murder of two deer hunters near the town of Brownville, Nebraska. The strange killing of Lance Baxter and Arnie Dillon was a matter of ongoing coverage by the Omaha World-Herald and the Lincoln Journal Star, as well as the local network television affiliates. More than one reporter had landed upon the word ‘barbaric’ to describe the violence that had befallen the hunters, though investigating authorities so far had announced no suspects, no leads, and, indeed, no official mechanism of death.

  But then, how could they?

  The second item was a small story from the Nebraska City News-Press about mutilated livestock on a local farm. Reuben might not have noticed this one at all if not for the eye-catching adjacent banner ad for a rural go-go bar called Cow Patty’s, which had drawn his eye. That was probably an example of irony.

  He plotted the locations of all three incidents on his phone’s GPS map, beginning with the killing of Randy James Bierbaum – the treasure hunter found with a crushed trachea at the Arcadia dig site three days ago – and ending with the heaping pile of steak tartare in a pasture just north of a small farming town called Peru. In connecting these dots, the GPS map plotted a line that followed the Missouri River valley north, jogged northwest at the end, and finally pointed, like a finger, directly toward Ben Middleton’s house.

  If Reuben’s calculations were accurate, the creature appeared to be covering approximately forty-eight miles every twenty-four hours. This worked out to slightly less than the average walking speed of an adult human male, if that man walked continuously, around the clock, never stopping.

  Which meant that the creature – barring unexpected complications, such as a nuclear strike, or perhaps a lucky meteor – ought to be arriving in their lives any day now.

  Presuming, of course, that the creature didn’t know how to run.

  On Friday morning, Ben woke up alone in the childhood home he’d inherited: a creaky, rambling farmhouse on fifteen wooded acres overlooking the Platte River valley.

  He called in sick to work. While the coffee brewed, he put out some food and a pan of fresh water for the dozen-odd feral cats that lived in the timber. Reuben Wasserman’s scrapbook remained on the scarred kitchen table where Ben had left it the previous night. He pretended he didn’t see it there.

  He pulled on a fleece, poured a cup of coffee, and sat outside on the porch for a while, steam rolling from the mouth of the heavy white mug in the chilly morning air. It had been ages since he’d risen with his head so full of noise. Or with such a powerful urge to trade in the java for something strong enough to quiet down the racket in his brain.

  Instead, he watched a whitetail doe and three spotted fawns grazing a stand of fiery red sumac along the shelterbelt. After the deer bounded away, he tightened his focus to a woolly bear caterpillar inching its way along the porch railing. The caterpillar’s fuzzy bands of brown and black undulated purposefully, presumably unhindered by inner turmoil. Ben thought about what his mother used to say: when the brown bands are narrow like that, get ready for a tough winter. He’d read somewhere that the brown part of a woolly bear caterpillar didn’t actually predict anything at all – that this was just some old chestnut the farmers pulled out when the days started getting shorter. Still, he made a mental note to make sure that he had plenty of gas on hand for the tractor and the snow blower.

  When the last of his coffee had gone cold, Ben dumped the dregs into the bushes and went back inside. Wasserman’s scrapbook still hadn’t moved from the kitchen table. Part of him had begun to hope that he’d dreamed the events of the previous day, but there the evidence waited for him: leather-bound, banded shut, chock-full of psychosis.

  Right?

  Still thinking about the caterpillar on the porch, Ben filled a Thermos bottle with coffee, traded the fleece for a Carhartt work jacket, and went out to the workshop to put in a few hours of honest work on Charley’s birthday present.

  Contemplating that steady blue line on the GPS map turned out to be more than Reuben could bear sitting still. So he packed up, paid up, emptied about a gallon of used coffee into a men’s room urinal, and took the Challenger back to Middleton’s office. He trolled the parking lot for half an hour, unmolested by security, searching for Middleton’s turd-mobile.

  No dice.

  Which made it time to do what Reuben ultimately had put off doing last night, given Middleton’s demeanor when he’d stormed out of the sports bar. One final, last-ditch effort:

  A house call.

  Just as Reuben made it onto I-80, heading roughly southwest out of town, his phone rang in the dash cradle.
His heart rose for a moment, buoyed on the hope that Middleton had finally come to his senses. Then he noticed the caller ID on the stereo read-out. He thumbed the call button and spoke to the empty car.

  ‘Morning, sweetie. How’d you sleep?’

  ‘Where are you?’ Claire said. Her voice – normally one of the warmest things about her – came over the Challenger’s Bluetooth system like shards of ice.

  Reuben didn’t understand her tone. ‘Still in Omaha, unfortunately.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. I meant to call last night, but yesterday was brutal, and I was pretty well toasted by the time I finally—’

  ‘Uh huh. How’s your uncle doing?’

  ‘Not great,’ he said, doing his best to sound natural. He didn’t want to get too fancy. He was a business student, not a thespian. ‘He took a turn yesterday. I’m on my way back to the hospital now. Between you and me, I don’t think he’s going to last through the weeken—’

  ‘You don’t have an uncle in Omaha.’

  Stab of panic. Sudden, deafening roar of blood in his ears.

  Reuben gripped the wheel and said, ‘What?’

  ‘Your sister just called your apartment, looking for you,’ Claire said. ‘I told her where you’ve been all week. Wait, let me correct that: I told her where you told me you’ve been all week. And why you claimed to be there, too.’

  Oh, no.

  Shit.

  ‘Claire …’

  ‘She was fundamentally confused by that information, let me assure you.’

  ‘Claire, listen—’

  ‘Oh, I’m listening,’ Claire said. ‘Because I’m absolutely dying to hear you explain this.’

  A car horn blared just off his port side, informing Reuben that he’d drifted a few inches into the passing lane without realizing it. He overcorrected, swerving abruptly back to his own side of the dividing line, tires moaning against the roadway. The other driver kept on the horn all the way past him, and Reuben thought: Up yours, cock-knocker.