Day of the Sasquatch

by Eric S. Brown

  One of the beasts had charged his patrol car on the road, plowing into it. The impact crushed the car’s passenger side, shattering the window there to send shards of glass flying about inside the car. John had lost control of the vehicle. Careening across the road, it had slammed into a stop sign, snapping it, as the sign’s base tore apart the patrol car’s undercarriage. The beast was huffing its way around the car to come at him as John had half-leaped, half-rolled out of the driver’s seat onto the sidewalk. He had whipped his pistol from the holster on his hip like a professional gunfighter but even so, the thing was on him before he could use it. The monster hefted him up into the air and flung him several yards farther down the street. John smacked into the pavement, rolling with the impact. It was only by the grace of God that he hadn’t broken something then. He had managed to keep presence of mind enough to bring his pistol to bear on the monster as it reared its head back in a roar. That roar saved his life. John had used the moment to fire a trio of carefully aimed shots into the soft flesh of the thing’s exposed throat. Its roar became a horrid gargle as its oversized hands clutched at the ragged mess of its neck, trying to stem the rivers of blood that flowed over its chest and turned its shaggy brown hair red. The blasted thing had refused to go down despite the three rounds in its throat, and John knew he wasn’t going to get the kind of luck he’d just had again. He was determined that he wasn’t going be a late night meal for the creature.

  John remembered the partially eaten body of the kid that had been killed outside Mom and Pop’s. He shoved himself to his feet and fired at the monster as it stumbled towards him until his pistol clicked empty. Each round drew blood digging into the thick muscle of the monster’s body but didn’t get any real penetration into its vitals. John figured he was dead but at the last moment, only feet away from where he stood his ground, the beast slumped to its knees. It looked at him with glowing, yellow eyes filled with pain and fear. John’s heart skipped a beat inside his chest as a cold shiver ran the length of his spine. Looking into the thing’s eyes was like staring into the deepest, darkest depths of primal rage. The beast swayed there on its knees for what seemed like an eternity though in reality it was only seconds before it flopped over onto its side and its eyes closed. He had met up with the Debord family less than five minutes later. John had reloaded his pistol with a fresh magazine and taken a moment to get the pump-action shotgun he kept in the trunk of his patrol car before making a run for it. There hadn’t been any other of the beasts on the street, but he could hear them all over in the distance. His plan had been to run like hell for any sort of shelter he could find. That was when the car belonging to the Debords had come along with one of the beasts chasing it. The car was moving slow. One of its wheels blown and the car seemed on the verge of stopping completely based on the sound of its motor. There was a great deal of damage to its front end and steam was pouring out from beneath its hood.

  The beast chasing the car hadn’t noticed him and that gave John the advantage. He was able to come at it from its right side and get off a blast with his shotgun that ravaged its ribs before the monster saw he was there. As it whirled about to face him, slinging blood through the air from its wound, John finished it with a well-aimed blast to its face. The creature thudded onto the road, its facial features a mess of shredded meat.

  The Debord family abandoned their car and joined him on foot. He had led them to the closest, safest building they could find, and that was how they ended up trapped inside the feed store for the night. Ronnie Mill’s feed store was a small building and there were coops of chickens and other animals scattered around it. It had only one entrance to defend and its doors were made of thick, strong-looking wood. John thought it as good of a place as any to hole up. He and the Debords had boarded up the door as quickly as they could and settled in. The Debords consisted of Larry, Melissa, and their son, Sean. Sean was close to twelve years old by the look of him. Larry and Melissa appeared to be in their early forties. All of them were scared to death but happy to have him with them. John had never made it home to change out of his uniform and if they noticed that he wasn’t wearing a badge, none of them commented on it. Having turned in his badge or not, John knew the Debord family had become his responsibility. Besides, Jerry and Simon had been right about the monsters. They were real and the town was about to pay the price for that being the truth of things.

  Several of the beasts had shown up not long after they had gotten the door secured. None of them tried to get into the building. The lights were off and John kept the Debord family as silent as he could make them. The beasts were apparently after the animals outside. Chickens panicked and goats cried out as the beasts tore into them. After feeding on the animals, the beasts had just lumbered away into the night as far as John could tell. Everything was quiet again outside for a long while. It wasn’t until just before the sunrise that another beast had wandered by. How it had known they were inside the feed store, John didn’t have a clue. His best guess was that the thing smelled them somehow. It had stalked slowly up to the store’s door as John listened to its heavy footfalls on the pavement outside. Lord only knows how long the thing just stood there before it hurled itself into the door. When it did, its first blow punched a hole through the wood of the door. John had cursed as one nicked his cheek, drawing blood. The monster heard him and it was on. The thing tore into the door with a vengeance. John had fired two blasts into and through the door at point-blank range. The Debords were yelling and freaking out, but as the pounding on the door stopped as suddenly as it had begun, John was able to get them to hush. Now the sun was coming up outside and John was ready to try to make a run for it, knowing they couldn’t hide in the store forever. He had given his Glock to Larry and shown the man how to use it enough to hopefully at least prevent the man from shooting him in the back as they moved out.

  “You ready?” John asked the Debords. Larry shook his head no but John ignored him. “On the count of three, I am going to open this door. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Larry croaked, looking as pale as a ghost.

  “One… Two… Three!” John counted down and then flung the door open wide. Both he and Larry jumped back at the sight of the monster lying on the pavement outside of it. The thing was massive, much larger than a man. There was a mangled hole where its right eye had once rested in its now pulped socket.

  “You killed it last night,” Larry said, shocked and in complete awe of John.

  “Lucky shot, I guess,” John said. “It doesn’t matter. There are a whole lot more of them out there.”

  Larry swallowed hard and somehow managed to look even paler.

  “You sure you can keep up?” John asked Sean, the Debords’ kid.

  “Yes, sir,” Sean replied.

  “Good.” John feigned a smile. “We’re going to need to move fast until we can find a car that we can start.”

  John’s hope was that they would stumble onto a car or truck close by that he would be able to hotwire and they could use to get out of town. He knew they would never make it anywhere on foot, not with those things roaming the streets. He just prayed their luck would hold long enough to find one.

  Taking point, John led the Debord family out of Ronnie Mill’s feed store. Larry stuck by his side, pistol in hand, as Melissa and Sean followed them. The park neighboring the feed store was devoid of life, as were the now empty chicken coops and animal pens. John heard Melissa telling Sean not to look at the remains of the animals that had been left inside them.

  The group made their way up the small hill onto the road. From the direction of the center of town, John saw tendrils of black smoke coiling upwards into the early morning dawn. He had left the radio he usually carried on his belt in his patrol car, having taken it off after handing over his badge to Jerry. He longed for it now but wasn’t about to take the time to retrieve it. Each moment they were in the open and exposed like they were was a dangerous thing. At any moment, one of the beasts could be lurking about somewhe
re close by, unseen, and spot them. If one of the things did, they were dead.

  They walked along the road at a hurried but cautious pace. John’s eyes darted about, searching for any sign of the beasts in the area around them. As they drew closer to town, they began to see the bodies of the people the monsters had killed during the night. Some of them looked to have been dragged from their homes kicking and screaming. There was one woman dressed in what looked to be a bathrobe. It hung open, allowing the cavity that had once been her chest to be seen. Her cage was mostly intact, popped neatly along her sternum above the hollowed-out hole beneath its two sides. Another man along the roadside dangled, impaled upon the broken limb of a tree. The limb poked through his chest and the occasional drop of blood still dripped from the wound to splatter onto the ground below him. His legs were gone, ripped off his body, leaving only blood stumps of his thighs inside his red-stained sweatpants. John could hear the music ever so slightly that was still playing over the earpieces the man wore. Larry had been doing a good job at putting on a show of being strong and keeping it together for his wife and kid until they ran across the paramedics.

  One of the ambulance’s rear doors lay in the grass at the side of the road. A beast had yanked it off the vehicle and threw it out of its way. The other door swung, creaking in the gentle wind that was blowing, barely attached to its hinges. The roof of door had been bent upwards where the beast had gotten inside. The bodies of the two paramedics were little more than chewed upon bits of meat and bone that littered the ambulance’s floor. The smell was like that of a carnal house. When Larry saw it all, he collapsed onto his knees, scuffing his pistol on the pavement, as he puked up everything his stomach had. His body was still shaking with dry heaves when John approached him. Melissa had forced Sean on up the road without allowing him to pause and get a look at the horrors inside the ambulance. As John offered his hand to Larry to help him up, Melissa started screaming. She and her son came running back, past the ambulance. John heard the snarls of the beast before he saw it. It charged after Melissa and the boy, its yellow eyes locked onto them. John whipped up his shotgun and firing from the hip at the beast. The shotgun thundered. His shot missed the fast-moving creature entirely, but it did succeed in getting its attention.

  The Sasquatch spun at him and Larry. Larry fumbled whatever he was trying to do as the beast leaped at him. His pistol clattered onto the road at his feet as he stood up. A single blow from one of the beast’s oversized hands severed his head from his shoulders. It went bouncing along the asphalt as a geyser of blood erupted from the stump of his neck. John had pumped a fresh shell into the shotgun’s chamber and fired into the beast’s stomach at near point-blank range. The beast grunted as the heavy slug tore into its guts. The shot slowed the beast just enough for John to pump a third round ready. He fired again. This time, his shot caught the beast in its shoulder, blowing a chunk of flesh from it in a spray of red. Growling with fury and pain, the beast leaped to swat the weapon from his hands. John screamed. His trigger finger had gone with the shotgun as it went flying through the air. Blood spurted from where the finger had been attached to his hand. Gritting his teeth against the pain, John knew he had to act fast or he was dead. He dove into the rear of the ambulance, kicking his body farther into it the moment he landed there as he struggled to draw his pistol. The ticked-off monster wasn’t going to be denied its prey. It lunged into the rear of the ambulance after him as John’s pistol cleared its holster. The pistol cracked in rapid succession as John emptied half its magazine into the monster’s face. One of its eyes burst in a shower of gore as a bullet pierced it. Another round left a red streak along the monster’s right cheek. Then bullet after bullet punched its way into the monster’s mouth, breaking teeth, and tearing its tongue apart. The monster lurched upwards only to slam into the roof of the ambulance. The roof bent upwards from the Sasquatch’s almost supernatural strength. The impact caused the Sasquatch to slam back downwards onto the floor of the ambulance’s rear. As the monster struggled to right itself, John fled into the ambulance’s cab and out its open driver’s side door. His feet hit the road running. Despite the deep crap he was in, all John could think about was Melissa and her son. If he died here, they would be alone and without a single weapon between them.

  John’s eyes scanned the direction he had seen them headed in, but there was no sign of them. Cursing, his legs pumped beneath him as he ran full out towards where he had last seen the two of them. He heard the beast behind him roar as it emerged from the ambulance to come after him. John kept running as he ejected his half-empty magazine and exchanged it for a fully loaded one. Running was useless. As fast as the Sasquatch he’d seen so far were, the thing was going to overtake him easily despite the lead he had on it. John did the only thing he could. He turned to stand his ground and engage the monster. Holding his Glock in front of him in a two-handed grip, John opened up on the monster. Bullet after bullet struck the ongoing juggernaut of muscle, hair, and rage, but they didn’t even slow it down. The Sasquatch plowed into him like a runaway eighteen-wheeler. His body was lifted from the ground and sent toppling along the street. John heard several of his ribs give way inside his chest as he tried to scream. The noise that came out of him reminded him of the shriek of a terrified, preppy school girl. The Sasquatch was on him before he could even attempt to get to his feet. It slammed its weight down atop his body, its legs spread over him. John made a sound akin to a grunt as the last of his breath left his pained lungs. Somewhere in the distance, John could hear Melissa and Sean screaming. He was still conscious as the Sasquatch’s thick fingers found his eye sockets and sunk into them. John’s body thrashed about as those fingers snaked about inside his skull.

  ****

  Jerry flinched and instinctively bent at his knees in an awkward to duck as he heard a rifle crack from the house up the road from where the patrol cars had come to a stop. A second shot struck one of the sirens atop the car. The siren disintegrated into shards of flying, colored shrapnel.

  “Get down!” Simon yelled at him, but Jerry was already in the process of doing just that. Roger and the kids who had just gotten out of the patrol car behind theirs threw themselves onto the gravel of the drive.

  A heartbeat passed in silence. Jerry knew exactly who was shooting at them and knew too that they would’ve been dead if it had been the man’s intent to kill them.

  “Told ya he wouldn’t be happy to see us,” Simon griped snidely.

  “Hold your fire!” Jerry yelled at the top of his lungs. “We’re not looking for trouble!”

  “Then you came to the wrong place, Sheriff!” Jenkins shouted back at him as he stood up from the cover he had been using, his rifle aimed at Jerry’s head. “You may not have noticed, Sheriff, but the world’s really ending! What’s mine is mine and you ain’t got no right to it!”

  “Damn him,” Simon swore from the other side of the patrol car.

  “Jenkins!” Jerry shouted. “Look, you were right all along okay? We’re sorry we didn’t listen to you before, but you’re the only hope we’ve got right now.”

  “Your problems ain’t my problems, Sheriff. Now, I suggest you get back into those fancy cars of yours and get the hell out of here before my trigger finger gets twitchy again,” Jenkins warned.

  “Please!” Sarah cried out from where she cowered near Roger’s car. “Please, mister! You’ve got to help us! There are monsters everywhere!”

  Jerry heard Jenkins snort. “Them ain’t no monsters, girl. Them things is Sasquatch. They’ve always been around these parts. Ain’t nothing new.”

  “You’ve seen them then?” Jerry asked as Jenkins started walking down from the house towards their position, making sure he kept his sights locked onto them as he did.

  “I’ve seen ‘em, Sheriff. I ain’t blind, ya know? Killed three of them things last night. Bastards just came out of the woods, all snarling and raging before I put them down.”

  Jenkins said it all so calm and matter-of-fa
ctly that Jerry wondered just how crazy the man really was.

  “Please, sir!” Sarah pleaded, tears running over her cheeks. “Please help us.”

  Jerry noticed that Jenkins was staring at her. Maybe there was a shred of humanity in him after all because Jenkins lowered his rifle.

  “Okay, Sheriff, you can thank the girl for you getting to keep that bite-sized piece of grey matter between your ears for now. What do y’all want anyway?” Jenkins asked.

  “We need somewhere these kids can stay,” Jerry said.

  “And firepower!” Simon added. “We need a hell of a lot of fire power.”

  Jenkins laughed. It was a wheezing noise from all his years of smoking but nonetheless sincere.

  “Fire power I got, Sheriff, but it’ll cost ya,” Jenkins told them. “As to the kids, I ain’t no babysitter. I’ll loan you what you need if we cut a deal, but they go with you when you leave.”

  “Agreed,” Jerry said, getting to his feet from where he had dropped behind the patrol car’s half-open door after those initial shots.

  “Jerry…” he heard Simon whisper. “Those kids…”

  Jerry waved a hand at Simon, gesturing for him to shut up and keep it together.

  “Come on then, Sheriff!” Jenkins called to him. “You bring the funny-looking little ex-military punk with you, but the others stay here. If we’re going to strike a deal, you need to see what I got to offer.”

  Jenkins didn’t lead them up to the house, and Jerry made sure to give it a wide berth noticing that. He didn’t want to do anything that made the prepper feel threatened or insulted. It was a small, metal building off to the side of the house that Jenkins took them to. He produced a key from the pocket of his dingy overalls and unlocked its door, swinging it open. As sunlight lit the small building’s interior, Simon whistled in appreciation of what they saw within it.