How the West Was Weird, Vol. 2

by Barry Reese

The next seven hours were hell. The evolution of these werewolves had brought out a level of sadism that I can only compare with how a cat toys with a mouse, except there were eight of them, and a mouse does not beg for pity. Despite my wishes, Fraser watched until dark. He saw them surround Seth, saw them bat him around the circle, claws causing a thousand stinging cuts as he screamed for mercy, screamed for help, screamed at the sheer horror of realizing he was going to die, and badly. And then he saw the extreme level of harshness that these creatures had evolved into. There was a stumble and one of the were-wolves left a gap in the ring. It was enough for Seth to breathe his final hope and he ran for it. Fraser watched and momentarily stiffened but I had seen this twice in the last two nights and I wished to see it no more. Just as he seemed to get away, the one that had stumbled lashed out with a claw, severing the ankle just above the joint. It was a cruel trick and the cut was so swift that Seth took a step and fell, not realising he had nothing to stand on. The savage beast grabbed for the ankle and held it up as a trophy, drinking from it as the blood poured into his throat before flinging it away and taking his place at the feast.

  Seth took another ten minutes to die. It was as if they left his throat to work for as long as possible, that the noises and sounds of struggle excited them. They gorged into the night and long past dark we could hear the sound of their powerful jaws crunching bone, their tongues dislodging bone marrow, their claws carving up the flesh. Fraser closed his eyes and sat with his back to a tree, and I know he didn't sleep a wink. Neither did I.

  At about four in the morning we heard the wind change and it carried the sound of the beasts in slumber, sleeping off their excesses.

  “Just after dawn,” I said. “The sooner the better.”

  “Will this work?” said Fraser.

  “It should. If it doesn't, we come back with a platoon and a Gatling gun.”

  As daylight approached Fraser took his position. I had pointed out a target but he had spotted a former victim's handgun that had slipped from their lair and rolled down the slope. It had settled just below what I considered to be the critical line and would if lucky have a casing or two that might ignite.

  “Take your time,” I thought, then realized I had said it aloud. In order for this to work and for me to gain my salvation, evil had to perish and the executioner had to be a good man, which was why I had spent five years looking for the right way to engineer the two to meet. Fraser ignored my comment, grunted, settled the stock into his shoulder and aimed, and at that moment one of the monsters stirred. It was too much for my good man. He heard the noise and, raising himself, swung his barrel as he stood and screamed in fury as he fired at the monster. He hit him to no avail, as the others stirred and began to move. We were losing our chance.

  I ran towards him, screaming, “The target! Shoot the target!” and with his last shot he clipped the handgun. The spark ignited the low-lying gas and a fireball exploded instantaneously.

  Seven.

  I threw myself to the ground and was lucky. Fraser did not and was hit by a flying branch that now, four days later still has him concussed. When the dust had settled, I tended to the constable, made sure he was comfortable and then went and looked at the damage. The exploding gas had incinerated the entire marsh for fully fifty yards each side and all the way up the hill. Where their lair had been I saw only ashes. I searched carefully and found no evidence they had existed, but also no evidence they were destroyed. I would know in thirty or forty years whether we had killed them all. The curse would be lifted and I would be an old man... or I'd still be hunting.

  So Constable Fraser, you are indeed a good man and Galahad, the name I knew Galeas by, would have been proud to call you friend.

  Hide this account. No good can come of it seeing the light of day

  Signed,

  The Wandering Jew.

  *

  “Wow,” said Bart.

  “Yup,” said Erica. “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing. This is exactly how you do not want to write a thesis.”

  “But it's mind-blowing,” said Erica.

  “And nobody will care. You will spend the rest of your life not as Erica the serious historian and noted academic, but rather as Erica, the woman who believes in werewolves. You will officially be a flake forever.”

  That was enough to scare Erica back to her senses. She had worked too hard to lose everything now. She placed the folder back in the box, resealed it and returned it to the inventory.

  Neither of them noticed the article in the Vancouver Sun that they had both abandoned with their morning coffee.

  Tenth severed foot found on Pacific Northwest beach.

  December 19, 2010.

  The remains of a human foot still encased in a shoe was found washed ashore near Tacoma about a week ago, raising to 10 the tally of feet found on Pacific Northwest beaches since 2007.

  The discovery of this foot adds yet another layer to the unsolved mystery of several human feet that have washed ashore in recent years in British Columbia and Western Washington.

  What was not reported was that the lead investigator, Detective Sergeant Melmoth, was expecting a break in the case very soon.

  RAID AT RAZORFANG RANCH

  by David Golightly

  “Break that filly, Jimmy! Break her in real nice!”

  The crack of the whip cut through the air, slicing into the ears of those near enough to flinch. The beasts within the bullpen had come to know its sound well, and reacted instantly to its snap by trotting away from the wielder of the whip.

  It was a hot day in Suffrage, hotter than usual. You wouldn’t know that the New Year had just begun two months prior, marking the beginning of 1890 with unusual heat and dryness. It hadn’t rained in almost a month and the ground was cracking and thirsty.

  James Henry Hoffer yanked his arm back quickly to crack the whip again, striking at nothing in the air to get the result he wanted. His charges tore up the ground around him. The onlookers thought him insane to work the way he did; Hoffer preferred to face his fillies head-on in the center of their corral. When asked, he would say he didn’t think he could get the kind of respect he needed from them if he stayed safely tucked behind a cage on the outside of the bullpen.

  People always crowded around to watch him work the whip. The story went that not a creature on God’s green Earth could defy James Henry Hoffer for long once he started cracking that slip of leather. Anyone West of the Mississippi that needed an animal with its will shaped to a man would eventually put their ear to the ground and end up in Suffrage, looking for Hoffer’s establishment. There was no one else that did quite what he did.

  “She’s rearing to buck, Hoff!” someone called from behind him.

  Hoffer paid them no mind. His full attention was centered on the muscular specimen in the center of the bull-pen. He didn’t mind an audience; it helped his reputation grow and in turn got him more business. There wasn’t anything that could distract him once he had locked eyes with the beast.

  And a fine beast she was. The green scales didn’t have a single trace of imperfection. The sun reflected off of the smooth coat of scales beautifully, bringing out the emerald color that rich men sought.

  Her teeth were jagged, but not too long, just barely spilling over the retracted pink gums that lined her snout. Perfect for brawling, but not exaggerated to the point of ugliness. In truth, the fangs were just the right length.

  The tail snapped back and forth nearly as fast as his whip, and it looked to be the appropriate length. If a tail was anything short of one and a half times the height of the beast then buyers would simply move on. It was a mark of prestige, and even in this dried out, barren town of Suffrage, prestige still mattered.

  All of the finest dinosaurs came straight from Hoffer’s ranch. That was no secret.

  The pack of raptors swung around both Hoffer and his new prize dino, skirting the edge of the bullpen’s fence. He cracked the whip once more, commanding them to
change direction. The pack, eight in the bunch, swiftly obeyed his command and turned in their tracks, reversing their trot.

  The whip had unique circuitry sheathed by the leather. He didn’t pretend to understand it. He assumed that the whip worked something like the resonators, but he didn’t much care how it worked, so long as it did.

  With each swing of his switch, Hoffer never once let his eyes fall from the beast’s. He knew that whoever broke that stare first would be the loser in this silent game. It was something he had learned early on when learning to raise the dinos from his uncle.

  Together they had made a name for themselves, becoming the foremost experts in breaking and training dinos. Until their disagreement they had quite a lucrative business on their hands.

  The Dromaeosauridae was a bipedal, theropod dinosaur, and one of the most coveted. They ran more wild than most of their breed, and thus brought in the most money. The one standing in the center of the bullpen, staring down Hoffer, was specifically a Velociraptorinae, or raptor for short. His wranglers had been lucky to find her, and even luckier to have gotten her back to his ranch alive. They tended to put up one hell of a fight, and this raptor was just itching to take a bite out of Hoffer’s throat.

  But the rampaging brethren to the beast had confused her. Hoffer had quickly ordered the raptor to be put in the pen, with the other captured raptors thrown in likewise. These were the ones he had already broken and were awaiting sale, the ones that already knew that he was the real master of their pack.

  Just when the perfect specimen of a dino looked to be getting ready to pounce, Hoffer would snap his whip and command the pack of tamed raptors to switch their route. The large raptor would back down, unsure of what was happening.

  It was a tactic that his uncle had called crazy. He said that dinos were too stupid to know when they were being tricked like that. The only way to break a dino was to turn the whip on it, and then toss on the resonator before it could catch you in its jaws.

  Hoffer didn’t use resonators. Never had, and never would. He thought them lazy, a tool used by men who couldn’t do the work the way it was supposed to be done. It was why he had split away from his uncle and started his own ranch – Razorfang Ranch.

  The raptor screeched at him, flashing its teeth. Hoffer didn’t even blink. He was caught in a struggle of wills and there was no way he was going to back down. His life depended on it.

  He snapped the whip twice, hard, and the running pack of dinos came between them. He snapped it a final time and the raptors all shuffled in place, barely able to contain the energy in their powerful legs. They squawked at each other, and at Hoffer, but he just kept staring ahead into the large, black eyes of the dino he sought to break.

  The raptor took half a step forward, but her one leg never touched the ground. It just hung in midair, as if unsure of how to proceed. She pawed at the air mindlessly with her scrawny arms. Her tongue darted in and out of her teeth, tasting the air.

  She screeched once more, although this warble was half the volume of the last. She bowed her head slightly, not enough to stop looking at Hoffer, but enough to break the stare.

  Hoffer smiled.

  He motioned for Frank Mallory and Cal Hendricks, two of his wranglers behind the fence, and they jumped down into the bullpen without a second thought. They had been on either side of the bullpen, among the crowd, awaiting his signal. He trusted them more than any other men in the world, having trained them himself.

  Mallory slipped a saddle up onto the back of the raptor, which screeched, but did not try to break away. It was a fine saddle, with leather boot straps and a hard horn in the front for tying off a rope. The wrangler worked quickly to tie the saddle down under the beast’s gut.

  Hendricks had the trickier and more dangerous assign-ment of the two. The muzzle wouldn’t take if it wasn’t set around the snout correctly the first time. If he slipped or the dino bucked, he stood the risk of being slashed by either teeth or claws. As it stood, Hendricks moved quickly and successfully got the muzzle on while Mallory finished tying off the saddle.

  The watching crowd was roaring with applause. When word had gotten out into Suffrage that a fine filly had just been brought into Hoffer’s ranch the night before, the people had started gathering at first light. They showed their appreciation and gratitude for being allowed to see him work by slapping their hands together and calling his name.

  Hoffer silently tipped his hat at part of the crowd and stepped around the pack of raptors to inspect his new prize.

  “She’s a beauty, Hoff,” Hendricks said as he approached. “Healthy, too.”

  “I’d say she ain’t even birthed none yet, sir,” Mallory added, always the more respectful of the pair. “Doesn’t look to me that she’s had a stud come a callin’. You’re sure to get top price from the Boston folk if you let that slip. They’re always lookin’ for breeders.”

  Hoffer stroked the top of her snout, over top of the muzzle. She eyed him steadily but did not trap him in a stare again. She had already lost that fight and wouldn’t take it up again.

  “Put her in the stables,” Hoffer said. “Keep her by herself for now. She’ll be trying to take over the pack if we let her.”

  “Sure thing, sir,” Mallory replied. He patted her side and took up the reins attached to the muzzle.

  Hoffer signaled for three of his other wranglers to jump down into the bullpen and round up the other raptors. He handed the whip off to Hendricks. Hendricks was a few years younger than Hoffer, but the two men got along like brothers.

  “Just don’t let them out, Cal,” Hoffer said with a smile. “We’ll keep them here until the crowd wanders away.”

  “Yes, boss,” Hendricks said quickly. He gripped the whip tightly, causing his knuckles to turn white. He had been with Hoffer’s crew for a few years now, but still looked anxious every chance he had holding the whip. Hoffer chalked that up to a memory of being bowled over by a loose raptor once, a memory that had left a deep scar in the man’s shoulder.

  Hoffer turned to leave the pen and catch up with Mallory, when Hendricks called after him. Hoffer turned and looked at Hendricks with a raised eyebrow.

  “She told me to tell you that she ain’t leaving your office until you pay up. Uh... that is, she said she would like it if... uh...”

  “Don’t need to be putting polite words into her mouth, Cal,” Hoffer said with a wave of his hand. “She look mad?”

  “Hell yes,” Hendricks proclaimed.

  Hoffer sighed and stared longingly off in the direction that Mallory had carted off his new prize raptor. He loved his job and wanted nothing more than to keep at it, but the business end of things apparently needed to be handled first.

  As it stood, he would rather take his chances with a wild T-rex, without his whip, than go into his office and face off against Rachel Timbers.

  “James Henry Hoffer, I ought to send you to hang!”

  Hoffer finished closing the door to his office and strode casually through to sit behind his desk. A stack of papers that required his stamp waited on the corner, and he would get to them one day.

  Today was not that day. Not when his top wrangler was in a certain mood.

  “And the sheriff would probably thank me for it!” Timbers continued. “Hell, I bet I would get a commendation or even made deputy. Word has it you like to raise a little fire and brimstone in Suffrage after a night in the saloon. I bet you think—”

  Hoffer raised his hand to silence her. “I paid you this morning, Rachel,” he said.

  Rachel Timbers was a stout woman, but not without fine features that a man would find attractive. She had a strong jaw and lean eyes, but that betrayed the softness that Hoffer knew was behind them. He knew because he had the misfortune of making one late night mistake with her, and being smart enough to see what a mistake it had been the next morning.

  He didn’t think that she had thought the same way at first, which was evidenced by the amount of anger in her tone every t
ime they were in the same room.

  She slid a leather pouch off her belt and tossed it on his desk. “You mean this?” she exclaimed. “I took that for a first payment! You can’t be serious that you’re going to stiff me what I rightfully earned. You think I’m joking about stringin’ you up?”

  “There’s five hundred dollars in that purse,” he replied, making sure to keep his voice steady. “That’s the price I set for all the wranglers that bring me a raptor.”

  She pointed out the window. “You mean that’s what you pay them. Hoff, you and me both know that filly I brought you last night is worth twice that much. And do you know what I went through to get her?”

  She stomped over to the same window she was pointing through, and fixed Hoffer with a glare that would have put the raptor to shame. She stuck her chin out toward the beast that was roped up on the stall just outside, where he knew his own mount to be, a stunning raptor named Spitfire. Her own Megalosaurus was there, which she had dubbed Silvermane. Hoffer knew the beast well, as he had been the one to tame it for her. It was strikingly similar in form to the raptors he mostly dealt in, only it’s body was easily twice as long. The teeth weren’t as pronounced either, and the tail was thicker.

  He noticed that it had been fixed up with a first-class resonator since he had last seen it. The metal box was tied directly to the beast’s nervous system and gave the rider greater control over its actions. Hoffer hated them and he was upset to see one installed onto a creature that he had broken.

  “She nearly killed me,” Rachel continued. “Silvermane there had a gash on his side that almost made him bleed out. That raptor I brought you from Fox Canyon is a killer, Hoff, and I deserve more than your standard pay for getting it here.”

  “Fox Canyon,” he repeated. “You didn’t say you got it from there.”