by Tim Curran
She produced a Marlboro Red. “Light me up, Jimmy,” she said.
He patted his pockets even though he knew he didn’t have a lighter. “Sorry. I don’t smoke.”
“Not even weed?”
“No.”
“Argghhh, said the pirate.” She saw a young guy smoking a cigarette across the parking lot and said, “Hey you! Move it over here!”
He practically came running. She borrowed his cigarette to light her own, then dismissed him, telling him to go jack off somewhere else. He took off with a frown. She pulled off her cigarette and took Jim around the other side of her Neon to show him three deep drag marks gouged into the paint.
“See that? That was my last warning from Big Bird,” she told him. “Oh, you’re thinking somebody keyed me? No. Not unless they had a set of keys like a garden trowel. And, no, I didn’t sideswipe anything. Anyway, where’s your ride? I’ve got one more story for you.”
They went over to his pickup and she sat on the passenger side, crossing her long legs, her short plaid skirt hiking higher up her thigh. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Jimmo, and get your eyes off my pliant flanks. Listen up. After about a year of threading the needle after my wreck out on 50, I just couldn’t take it anymore so I started surfing the World Wide Waste for monster bird stories. I concentrated on Utah and Nevada and I found plenty. I finally zeroed my search and discovered Cryptodesert.com and hence, I became ingratiated with Petty and Shineboy. There was another sci-fi nerd there named Skippo but he got busted selling God’s own herb and is out of the picture now.”
“I see.”
“You got any pot?”
“No, I don’t smoke anything.”
“What a guy.”
“I’m a teacher.”
She broke up into a bout of cackling. “No chizz? Wow. I remember Mr. Fountaine from tenth grade. I was a sweet little cup of sugar then who wore short skirts to flash my wrappers—that’s stripper lingo for legs, you know—and Mr. Fountaine would always come to help me ride the isosceles and put his hand on my ass. You believe that shit?”
Jim nodded. He’d known a few like that.
“You sure you don’t have any weed?”
He sighed. “I’m straight.”
“Don’t go all conservatwat on me, Jimmo. You got high before. We all have. Wicked weed? Mary Jane? El smoko dopo?” She flicked her ash out the window as if to dispense with him. “Anyway, I ended up becoming Cryptodesert’s flavor tart of the month. Crusty white vanilla on the outside, gooey cherry within, more than a hint of bitter almonds.”
Pettis and Shiner were thrilled to find her and were fascinated by her story which matched that of several other survivors from Route 50. They took down her account in detail which garnered thousands of hits on the site. By then, of course, even she got more into it because she wanted answers, she wanted to understand what had happened and how a creature like that could even exist in this day and age.
“I mean that thing is strictly Roger Corman—latex and glue and fucking coathangers all the way, you know? But it’s alive, like my beating heart it lives, boyo. Something, methinks, that should have died out long ago or never existed in the first place. A monster bird, a creature of lore and legend in this day and fucking age. Existing side by side with us wee mortals and we don’t even know it! Wrap your brain around that. You think hard enough on it, you’ll pop the seams of your skull like a biscuit tube.
“So, I went bopping out in the desert with the boys, hunting the elusive dragon. We cut trail and sniffed spoor. Then one day I seized up out there. My shit dropped into my socks and the boys nearly had to carry me back. See, I sensed it out there. I sensed…I don’t know…its power and rage and ferocity. More than that, I sensed that thing was pure fucking evil and I just bet you know exactly what I mean if it gave you a fly-over tease out in the desert last night.”
He did.
He really did.
He’d never felt more helpless and more vulnerable. Not since he’d seen that thing take Rita out of the SUV that awful night. He’d felt unbearably weak, impotent, and gutless in the presence of something malevolent and darkly sinister. He could have vomited out his stomach. But he supposed that’s the way prey felt. Any prey. Whether it was a rodent fearing a circling hawk or a stray rabbit running from a coyote, he knew that fear and he knew it deeply. It was an inherited terror from his ancestors who’d known, once upon a time, exactly what it felt like to be stalked by vicious predators.
“Point being, friend Jim, is that a couple days later I found my cute little car with those scratches on it. Coincidence? Maybe. But my tingly parts say no. It was a warning—one bitch telling another bitch to stay off her turf. No poaching, girl.”
Jim just stared at her. “Wait. You’re saying it’s a female?”
“Yes.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
She laughed with a cold, sharp sound like cracking ice. “Oh, it’s female, all right, chummy. I can sense that much. One bitch can smell another bitch in heat and this one’s cooking so hot, you could toast marshmallows off her vulva. She’s burning with it. She’s in deep rut. This is estrus city, baby, and she’s the queen breeder waiting for a good long stinger to uncage what’s seething in her loins.”
He didn’t know what to say to that.
Okay, it was more than a little weird that Reese had picked him out of the crowd at the restaurant. Weirder that she believed she could sense the thunderbird (he had a bit of that himself since the encounter, so he accepted it). But the idea that she knew the sex of the beast or that its territoriality stemmed from breeding grounds rather than hunting grounds, that she was hot to trot, perfumed and oiled and ready for the act…that was just stretching things a bit far.
“You think I’m shoveling shit, Jimmo? Of course you do. But I speaketh the truth. Call Pettis. Go ahead. He’ll tell you that the only survivors—barring me—were male. The ones that got killed were female. That this only happens in the spring of the year and at no other time.” She let that sink in. “She’s a bitch in heat and this is rutting season. She can smell females a mile away and she does not like competition, even if it’s of a completely different species. She’s an arrogant, possessive, horny old cunt, fertile and hungry for seed, and you had better respect that.”
“I see.”
That laughter again. “No, you don’t. You don’t see anything. But heed my warning: just because she stomps other bitches like you stomp ants, it don’t mean you’re safe. Anything or anyone that plays footsie on her turf at this time of year is asking to die in the worst way. Keep that in mind.”
“I will.”
“No, you won’t. You’re like most men, you think you’ve got Excalibur in your pants but upstairs you’re strictly Toaster Strudel. Well, my tale is told and your fate is sealed, oh fatted calf, let the blood ritual begin. If you need me—and God knows, you will—text me. I check it constantly because I’m one of these pathetic losers who think I’m that important.”
She pulled out a slip of paper from her purse and scribbled something on it for him. Then she left without another word. It was only when he got home that he read what it said:
[email protected]
15
Reese was 100% right: he did not heed her warning. Maybe he didn’t think he had a mighty, invincible sword in his pants, but at the same time he was most definitely guilty of the comic book mentality she had warned him of—he wanted to kill that bird because it had taken his two best friends from him. He had been wronged and only violence would make it right. It was a stony path leading to heartbreak and he knew it, even if he would not admit it even to himself. His justification was as applicable as the plot of an action movie in the real world.
But he couldn’t accept it.
Testosterone was leading the charge, his balls blowing the bugle, and he mindlessly followed along, patriotic and inordinately stupid.
For two nights running, he went out into the desert with Pettis a
nd Shiner. They came equipped with thermal cameras, night vision monoculars, and parabolic microphones. Shiner documented the trip with a Sony Handycam, both he and Pettis introducing themselves and explaining where they were and what they hoped to find. Jim refused to be filmed…though he was almost certain they were filming him anyway.
The first night was a bust.
They scouted a wide swath of desert, moving around in ever-widening concentric circles the way Pettis insisted, always filming, always looking for the elusive scat or clue or even a dropped feather—though Jim was pretty sure what he saw did not have feathers—and finding nothing save a couple jackrabbits darting off into the brush and scaring the shit out of them and a sidewinder rattlesnake that Shiner nearly stepped on. Nina would have loved that.
They kept moving in their grid search pattern and while the other two scanned with their night vision devices, Jim kept an eye on the sky, knowing the creature of his nightmares was out there somewhere and not about to be caught off guard by it.
Finally, they reached a tower of rocks that lifted a good sixty feet off the desert floor and climbed up it. In the daytime, it would have commanded a pretty decent view of the countryside, but on that dark and starless night, they saw very little.
They waited and waited.
“What did you think of Reese?” Pettis finally asked.
“She’s…interesting.”
They both laughed.
“She’s got her own way,” Shiner said.
“And a lot of her own ideas about the bird. She thinks it’s a female,” Jim said. “Do you buy that?”
“It’s a reasonable assumption until we learn differently,” Pettis said.
“She’s got something going, man,” Shiner said. “She’s connected to it. I don’t understand that part of it, but there’s something strange and psychic going on. You can laugh at that if you want to, but it’s there. Nobody who spends time with her doesn’t feel it.”
“I think the jury’s still out on that,” Pettis pointed out.
Shiner snorted. “You just don’t want to believe. You refute the evidence. You were there that night she had that attack. Man, she went all loopy. She sensed something and whatever it was, it really took the guts out of her.”
“Well, she had an episode, but that hardly proves anything.”
“The scratches on her car?”
“Inconclusive.”
Shiner chortled with a dry, sarcastic sound. “Don’t mind him, Jim. Our Mr. Pettis is the supreme skeptic. He’s like one of those eggheads who demands a carcass, something he can touch and feel and cut up before he can accept the reality of anything.”
“If I was that skeptical, I wouldn’t be out here with you. I can think of better company.”
“Ha!”
When they were done picking at each other, Jim said, “Tell me the truth—you guys didn’t describe me to her? Nothing?”
“No, we did not,” Pettis told him. “Not even whether you were male or female. That was more her idea than ours. She seems to believe that once you encounter this thing, you’re sort of psychically marked and one survivor can always sense another.”
“And she found you, didn’t she?” Shiner said.
“Yes, she did. And that’s what troubles me.”
And it did trouble him. It troubled him greatly. And mainly because ever since he’d come into contact with that horror, he had the oddest and most inexplicable sense that they were connected somehow. That there was something almost tangible connecting him to the bird. It was insane, yes, but the feeling persisted. Reese’s abilities only seemed to confirm that.
The second night, things got a little more interesting. Not conclusive exactly, but interesting. As they followed yet another grid search far to the east of the previous one, they came upon the carcass of a mule deer—at least, that’s what Pettis said it was. What Jim saw was a loose collection of bones and fur and very little else, not even a skull.
Pettis examined it in some detail.
By flashlight, he brushed the ants off it and showed them the deep lacerations in the bones. “That’s the result of something with claws tearing at the deer, probably while it was alive, peeling the meat from the bone.”
“Our bird?” Jim said.
“Hard to say.”
Jim got no special feeling from the thing, no flashing psychic vibe in his head. The carcass was just a carcass: it was ugly and it smelled bad. He wondered what Reese would make of it.
Not twenty minutes later as they scouted the deadlands between two mesas, they found a second carcass amongst the cholla and cactus. Like the other, it wasn’t complete—just more fur and bones, a few strings of meat. But the same deep grooves in the bones were visible.
“Another mule deer,” Pettis said, examining it. “Killed by an unknown predator. Notice how it’s scattered? Could be from scavenging animals, but if I had to go out on a limb I’d say it was dropped from great heights.”
“Without a doubt. The thunderbird did this. A creature of myth has become a terrifying monster of reality. There’s no doubt we’re looking at the remains of a meal dropped by an unknown, undocumented predator,” Shiner said.
Pettis giggled. “He writes copy for Monsterquest in his spare time.”
“Piss off. Just saying is all.”
Jim liked them. Maybe Nina wasn’t sold on cryptozoology and its adherents, but he liked these guys. He really did.
Undaunted, Shiner went on. “Think of it! We may be right on the verge of discovery here. Our thunderbird might be a modern day survival of one of the giant teratorns! Maybe even Argentavis magnificens! Man oh man, it gives me goosebumps!”
“Teratorns?” Jim asked.
Pettis said, “Teratorns, yes. Greek. It means monster bird, which is fitting. The teratorns were an extinct group of predatory birds. They died out about 10,000 years ago. Argentavis was the biggest one yet discovered. It had a wingspan of something like twenty-five feet. Many paleontologists believe that it’s almost certain that Neolithic Native American tribes encountered the teratorns and the legend of the thunderbird is a memory of those encounters…which must have been more than a little terrifying, I’m guessing. No wonder the old tales live on.”
“Ah,” Jim said.
“And we might have a living example out here somewhere in the desert,” Shiner said. They could almost hear his heart beating faster as if what was out there was not a primeval horror, but a lover long lost about to be found again.
“Why stop at a teratorn?” Pettis said. “Reach for the stars. How about an extant Quetzalcoatlus? They had a wingspan of possibly thirty-five or forty feet and have only been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous. What’s sixty-five million years, give or take?”
Shiner snorted. “That’s what I love about you, Pettis. You have the mind of a scientist and about as much imagination.”
“I can’t escape my roots.”
Pettis, when asked, explained that he had graduate degrees in evolutionary biology and zoology. And had once been involved in biomedical research before the cryptozoology bug bit him.
“Which was about the same time his mother left him something like twenty million in her will,” Pettis pointed out.
“Hunting the unknown ain’t cheap,” Pettis said.
16
Jim decided he would go out with them one more time and if there was nothing more than a few deer carcasses, he was going to call it a bust. He had no doubt of the reality of the beast, but for all he knew it might have since departed for some other locale. Pettis and Shiner believed that such creatures maintained a yearly migratory route and did not stay in any one location for more than a few weeks.
The third time, as they say, was a charm.
It was a night expedition as before and they went far to the north-east this time, scoping out a series of rock towers that Pettis thought were promising.
As he said, “If it’s still out here, it has to be roosting somewhere.”
They
chose one of the rock towers at random and climbed up there. Shiner kept calling it a mesa and Pettis kept correcting him, telling him it was a butte. Both were flat-topped, but mesas were much larger than buttes. Jim pretty much figured by that point that they would playfully argue about anything.
The night was bright, the moon nearly full. Its light washed down the surrounding countryside in pale light making everything look ghostly.
They sat up there for two hours, scanning about with their thermal cameras and getting nothing. After a time, Shiner got bored and started telling Jim an eerie tale of something called La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, who was a supernatural wraith that wandered the shores of rivers and lakes by night, crying and looking for children to drown. It was a sort of Mexican folktale that migrated into the American Southwest. La Llorona was supposedly a tall, beautiful woman with long black hair that covered her face. If an adult saw her, she disappeared into the water. But if a child encountered her, it grabbed the waif with long clawed hands, revealing its hideous batlike face before pulling the poor kid under for good.
“Sounds like a good one for Halloween,” Jim said, starting to feel uneasy. He wasn’t sure if it was hearing that tale out here in this lonely desolation or something else.
“Lots of Mexicans believe in her and they never let their children wander about at night, especially near water. Which, I suppose, makes perfect sense when you think about it—”
“Sshh,” Pettis said.
“What?”
“Shut up.”
By then, that uneasy feeling that Jim had became something quite near dread. Something was about to happen and he knew it. He could feel it from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. The air seemed to shiver around them. Whatever slight breeze had been blowing died away and they found themselves in the middle of a sort of dead zone. Pettis and Shiner wasted no time in getting out their thermal cameras.
“Come on, bitch,” Shiner said under his breath. “Show yourself.”
Jim crouched there, not saying a word, an irrational sort of terror jumping in his belly. It’s circling us, he thought. Like a hawk or an owl, it’s circling us, around and around, creating conflicting circular air currents and creating this dead calm. The very idea of it, that they were being toyed with by a monster, made everything inside him suddenly go inert like quick-drying concrete.