Open Season

by Gail Z. Martin

  That, I could believe. “Anything else?”

  Carl frowned. “Just…those times I thought I saw something? There was a strange smell. Like really bad B.O. Only not quite like in the locker room. It stank, but…different.”

  “Did anyone else smell it?”

  Carl gave me a look like I was stupid. “You think I was going to ask? They’d blame me for ripping one.”

  I could tell he’d shared all he could. “All right,” I said, rising and setting my empty cup aside. “Thanks for talking to me. And Carl—stay away from the bus shelter. Something’s going on, and until we figure out what, you’re safer in a car, no matter what anyone says.”

  Carl nodded without looking up. I clapped a hand on his shoulder and saw myself out.

  Winter in these parts can be brutal, and it’s damn cold early in the morning with the wind. Rural kids waiting for a bus could turn into icicles by the time their ride came, so little homemade plywood shelters sprang up to, at least, break the wind. They’re not much, just a roof and three walls, open on one side. In some cases, they’re hardly as big as a phone booth, while others have room for three or four people, huddled close. They dot the roadside, empty and a little forlorn. The challenge for their builders is to provide enough cover to protect kids from the winter wind and leave them open enough that they don’t become make-out rooms.

  I stood in front of the shelter where the kids vanished and slowly turned in a circle. The woods Carl mentioned began at the far side of narrow field that ran behind the little shack. I squinted against the cold breeze, straining to see beneath the treeline. In the mid-morning sun, the bare trees were a distant shadow. Even with the lone security light someone at a nearby farm had rigged up on the pole above the shelter, I questioned what Carl could have seen at oh-dark-thirty waiting for the bus.

  From the trampled dead grass, I knew the cops had been here. They were looking for a human monster, and as I’d told Louie, my money still rode on that bet. Still, I’d promised I’d look for other possibilities, so here I was, freezing my ass off in the December cold. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out my EMF meter, moving it slowly through the plywood shelter, watching to see if the needle ticked up with a hint of electromagnetic frequencies that might indicate ghost activity. Nothing. I looked for traces of sulfur and came up empty.

  The ground was frozen hard today, but when the teens vanished, we’d had a warm spell for a day or so, enough to allow for a footprint in a wet spot. I found the print Louie mentioned and put my own size twelve boot next to the giant impression. By comparison, my boot looked almost petite. I bent down. Not only was the print huge, but it wasn’t quite right, even if an NBA all-star had decided to go barefoot in a Pennsylvania field in the middle of winter. Similar, but not quite human.

  I walked toward the treeline, trying to figure out how far apart prints might be if the creature was tall enough to warrant such big feet. Just near the edge of the woods, I found another partial print, one the cops must have missed. The trees overhead were bare, and the scrub on the ground was leafless as well, just sharp, grasping twigs. I moved forward slowly and picked several long, straggly gray-black strands from one of the bushes. Another step brought me to some more hair, nothing that matched any animal I could think of in the Pennsylvania woods.

  A few more feet in not only found another partial footprint but a tangle of blond hair that I bet matched one of the missing kids. Then a couple of threads that might have been part of a scarf. I looked up and found myself at the edge of the Hart Quarry.

  A fence around the perimeter had been twisted and broken open. Odd, because the chain link didn’t look snipped, it looked like it had been torn apart with bare hands. The bare dirt sloped steeply to the floor of the quarry. This section hadn’t been worked in long enough that grass struggled to grow roots to start reclaiming the land. But right through the middle, the rocky ground had been disturbed, showing long, dragging strides.

  I pulled out the binoculars from my pack and scanned the ragged ridges left by the backhoes and power shovels when they scored the ground for gravel. Plenty of crags and shallow caves could give cover to anything, from coyotes to…Bigfoot. Whatever took the kids could be down there, and there were too damn many hiding places. I needed backup, especially if I was right about what our teen-snatching cryptid might be.

  “I think it’s a troll.”

  Blair and Chiara looked at me like I had two heads. “Teenagers are missing, not billy goats on a bridge,” Chiara replied.

  “It fits. Trolls like caves and rocky places. They smell bad. They take captives and keep them for a while before eating them. And the coarse hair caught on the bushes, along with the big prints—”

  “The quarry’s been around for a long time,” Blair protested. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed a troll? They’re kinda big.”

  I shrugged. “No idea where it came from. The more we build out into the wild places, the more creatures get grouchy and decide to go walkabout. Maybe it crawled out of an old coal mine and wandered here looking for food.”

  “Trolls can sleep for decades,” Chiara said, looking up from her computer, where I was certain she had already cross-referenced and researched our cryptid. “So it might have gotten displaced from somewhere else, or it might have been buried in another section of the quarry, and the new activity woke it up.”

  “How do we stop it?” Blair asked. “Short of stuffing a wand up its nose.”

  “Pretty sure that only works in the movies,” Chiara replied.

  “If we could draw it off and see if the kids are still alive, we might not have to kill the troll,” I mused. “That’s why I need backup. I can’t be the distraction and rescue the kids—if they’re still alive.”

  “What are you planning to do with the troll after you distract it?” Blair asked.

  “Nothing a little dynamite can’t handle,” I said with a grin.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Chiara muttered.

  “I thought if Blair and Louie went in with me and focused on the teens, I could take care of the troll.”

  Chiara and Blair shared a look. I remembered it from my married days. An entire conversation went on in those few shared seconds, one that included screaming, ranting, and a little begging, all unspoken. “I’m in,” Blair replied.

  Chiara put a hand on her forearm and squeezed, with a pointed glare that added a coda to their silent argument. I was pretty sure it boiled down to “don’t let Mark get you killed or I’ll haul your ass back from the afterlife and kill you myself.” And I suspected more than a few threats to my wellbeing were included just for good measure.

  “Good. The sooner we go after it, the more chance we’ve got that at least some of those kids are still alive. We’re losing the light today, but first thing in the morning, once the sun’s up, we can get in without having to navigate the woods in the dark,” I said. “I need some supplies.”

  “Gonna make a stop at Explosives R Us?” Chiara joked.

  “Nah. I’ve got dynamite. Father Leo and the Occulatum keep me supplied. I need to pick up lighter fluid and bacon,” I said, flashing my best cocky grin.

  “This is really out there, even for you—and that’s saying something, Wojcik,” Blair muttered as I set up for project Whack-A-Troll. Louie snickered but wisely kept his thoughts to himself.

  “It’s perfect,” I countered. “Can you think of any universally appealing smell that carries better on the breeze than bacon?” I gestured toward the bank of charcoal briquettes I’d picked up at Walmart that glowed red as they worked up a good heat. Next to the open luau pit sat a case of bacon I wheedled out of a friend in the meat department at Giant Eagle.

  “Pretty sure bacon isn’t exactly universal,” Blair replied. “Plenty of people don’t eat it—”

  “Doesn’t mean the smell doesn’t drive them wild, or that they don’t have bacon-fueled dreams of forbidden crunchy pork goodness.”

  Blair cocked an eyebrow. “You’re a str
ange man, Wojcik. Even stranger than I previously believed. Now that I know how much bacon presses your buttons, I might have to bleach my brain.”

  This time Louie did snicker, and I glared at him. I would have smacked him, but he’s a cop. “Maybe it’s a guy thing,” I muttered.

  “You sure you have the rest of the stuff ready?” Louie asked.

  I nodded. While Louie and Blair covered me, I scoped out a shallow canyon in the quarry that appeared troll-free, but would do nicely for an impromptu, explosives-fueled landslide to send the creature back to sleep long enough to be someone else’s problem.

  “It’s rigged. And I’ve got plenty of bacon to lure him in,” I replied.

  “All right,” Blair replied, throwing her hands up. I’d be hearing about this later, but now we had a job to do. “Let’s go see if we can find where he’s stashed the kids, and then you can kick off Operation Squeal-Like-A-Pig.”

  “Paddle faster, I hear banjos,” I replied, punctuating my response with a gesture. Blair replied with an Italian hand signal she’d probably learned from Chiara.

  They headed toward the old section of the quarry, and I started ripping into the case of bacon. While I waited for Blair and Louie to finish their recon, I readied some of the ammunition I needed to send the troll in the right direction without making him chase me. Since the goal was to blow up the quarry around him and bury him beneath tons of dirt and gravel, it would be really good for me not to be there when it happened.

  Half an hour later, Blair and Louie came jogging back. “We found them,” Louie reported. He pointed off to the left. “There’s a narrow cleft back there, with some overhang, kind of a shallow cave. Blair spotted them. The troll—or whatever that thing is—looked like it was napping across the entrance. We saw at least three people behind it, but they weren’t moving so no telling whether they’re still alive.”

  Damn. “We need to bring them home, one way or the other,” I replied. “Get into position. I’m going to throw some bacon on the grill.”

  A case of bacon is a hell of a lot of smoked pork awesomeness. I flung those beautiful fatty strips onto the banked coals. A pit like I’d made probably could have roasted a whole pig, but we were fresh out of banana leaves, and I didn’t look good in a grass skirt.

  Even with long tongs, the heat nearly scorched my arms as I laid out the meat on the hot coals. The aroma of cooking bacon filled the air, and I knew I drooled a little bit. Blair and Louie waited out of sight, near the cleft in the hillside where the kids were stashed, opposite where I hoped to lead the troll to buy them time.

  If I’d have had an electric source, I would have brought fans to waft that powerfully salty-wonderful scent deeper into the quarry. There was enough bacon on the coal pit to make BLTs for all of Conneaut Lake, and have some left over. A troll might consider it a snack, but I just hoped he’d be hungry enough to come find those delicious smells.

  The ground shook with a heavy footstep, and I figured the troll woke up. If he wanted coffee with his bacon, I was screwed.

  Grabbing my bag of supplies, I made myself scarce, figuring it wouldn’t be good if the big guy saw me by the food. Trolls weren’t the sharpest tacks in the box, but even he might figure out a trap if he spotted me, since I had to reason to invite him for breakfast.

  Each footstep sent a slight tremor through the ground. Here and there along the scraped sides of the quarry, little rivulets of rocks began trickling down. The troll had stomped his way out of the part of the dig where he’d left the kids, his whole attention focused on the bacon.

  I finally got a good look at him. Carl was right: tall, muscular, vaguely human with feet and hands far too big for his body. But there, the resemblance ended. The troll’s skin looked greenish-gray, and his bald, misshapen head and ugly, squashed-in features didn’t resemble the big-nosed, funny-looking dolls I’d seen in gift shops. No friendly smile and mile-high shock of pink hair could turn this mofo cute. And when he opened his mouth, panting for the taste of the grilling meat, his sharp, filthy teeth suggested that his real preference ran more to long pig. He wore a ragged loincloth, for which I will be eternally grateful, and had a cow-horn that I guessed he used as some kind of trumpet on a strap around his neck.

  My hand itched for a gun, but I fought down the urge. Although I had my Glock and my hollow-point bullets—as well as a shotgun—nothing short of an elephant gun or a cannon was going to punch a hole in the troll’s thick hide. For that, I had dynamite and C4, but I had to get him into position. And I had to get myself out of his range, which meant scrabbling up to higher ground, on an outcropping that the gravel diggers had, for some reason, left behind. Now I stood above the bacon pit as if I were perched on my own rocky island. I could see Blair and Louie leading the kidnapped teens out the back way. And I had a clear shot at the troll.

  First though, he intended to eat every strip of bacon on those coals. Then I watched in fascinated horror as the long gray cow-like tongue proceeded to lick the hot coals clean of every trace of pork drippings. Holy fatback, that was a sight I wish I could un-see.

  When the troll was done choking down the bacon and sucking the briquettes clean, he looked around for more and gave a lonesome, anguished howl. I’d heard something like that when the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet ran out of crab legs, but the troll managed to be even louder.

  Time to play fetch.

  “Hey, ugly!” I yelled. And I held up a tennis ball wrapped completely in bacon. I tossed it up in the air to waft the smell his way, and his dark little piggy eyes lit up. Then I threw it toward the canyon on the other side of the old section, where I had the explosives set. “Go get it!”

  The tennis ball landed in the direction of the cleft where I wanted him to go, and he lumbered toward it. I thought he might pick off the bacon, but no, he just popped the whole ball into his mouth like a bouncy appetizer and swallowed it whole. By that point, I had my wrist-brace slingshot out, and I used it to shoot another bacon ball into the mouth of the canyon.

  The troll followed, even as his heavy footsteps made the ground around me shake. I stepped back from the edge, not wanting to have it crumble beneath me. I shot more of the bacony lures to draw the troll farther into the deep, narrow “v” between excavated cliff sides, until he was far to the back, right where I wanted him.

  Out of pity, I shot the last of my bacon balls, because even a troll deserves a good last meal. Then I pressed the button, and the hilltop and cliff walls exploded.

  First, I fell flat on my ass as the whole quarry rumbled and the walls of the dig came tumbling down onto the troll, sending up a huge cloud of dust and dirt. I was just a little under an eighth of a mile from the target, within the range for my slingshot, but far enough away I thought I’d be safe from the blast.

  I underestimated. The next thing I knew, I was tumbling, caught in a landslide of gravel and dirt, coughing and choking. When the earth stopped moving, I was buried alive, with no idea which way was up.

  The waning oxygen limited my time for debate. I shifted, trying to figure out where there might be give around me. That wasn’t a guarantee, but I hoped I had ended up toward the top of the cascade. I dug with my hands and felt heavy resistance. Then I kicked backward with my feet and felt the dirt shift.

  Digging, wriggling, and kicking, I managed to turn over, only to get a face full of grit. I closed my eyes and clawed with my hands, as I felt myself begin to get lightheaded. Buried by an exploding troll and covered in bacon fat was not the way I wanted to meet my maker, but as my chest burned and I started to see sparks behind my eyelids, I feared I was running out of time.

  As my strength failed, I thought I heard scratching and felt the dirt shift around my legs. Then voices, and the pungent smell of bacon. Either I was being rescued, or I was in Heaven, because I’m certain there’s smoked pork in the afterlife.

  “Got him!” Louie said, and I felt strong fingers dig into my arm. A moment later, Blair grabbed my other arm, and then hauled me free. I wa
s covered with dirt, bruised from head to toe, and I smelled like a diner on a Saturday morning, but I could breathe again.

  “You might have overdone the explosives,” Blair noted. When I got my bearings, I followed her gaze. Where there had been a cleft between two cliffs each about four stories high, a bowl-shaped depression now lay. And underneath those tons of stone and dirt was the troll, if the charges hadn’t blown him to smithereens.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Louie said, helping me stand. I waved off further assistance, and though everything hurt, I figured I could make it as far as the truck. I kicked at something in the dirt. The hollowed horn trumpet I’d seen on a strap around the troll’s neck lay near the bank of charcoal, where it must have fallen when he was worshiping the buffet. I picked it up as a souvenir and put it in my pack.

  “The kids?” I asked.

  “Got them. They’re traumatized, but not hurt,” Blair replied. “Be interesting to see what kind of stories they come up with for their therapists because ‘taken by a troll’ probably isn’t going to fly.”

  I shrugged. “They’re smart. They’ll lie, tell the shrink what she wants to hear. They’ll be okay.” I glanced back at the blast site. “Shit. I’ve got to make sure Father Leo gets the higher-ups to pay off the quarry and declare that section untouchable.”

  Louie loaded two of the kids in his truck. The third rode back with Blair. They could be the heroes and see the kids safely back to their families. Although my ears rang, my head throbbed, and I felt like I’d been tumbled inside a cement mixer, I ignored Blair’s advice and drove home.

  Demon greeted me at the door, tail wagging hard enough to sweep everything from the coffee table. I scratched him behind the ears, tossed him a cookie, and staggered into the bathroom. A hot shower did wonders, washing away the grit and bacon smell. Bruises bloomed all over the front of my body, and from the way my muscles ached, probably the back as well. I was sure I looked like I’d lost a cage fight. My lip was split, and a rock had clipped me hard on the back of my head as I’d been swept away with the falling gravel. Tonight seemed perfect for pizza delivery, a couple of beers, and whatever was on The History Channel.