“Now who in the hell would be dumb enough to be outside on a night like this?” she wondered.
It couldn’t be Elroy; he would know the door wasn’t locked. Must be someone whose car got stuck in the muddy road. That was probably it. She shuffled down the hallway to the front door as the bell kept ringing.
“Alright! Alright! I hear you, damn it!” she growled. “I am coming.”
She reached for the handle and swung open the door.
A chupacabra stood there with its long, clawed finger pressing the doorbell buzzer. Mavis had time for a sharp gasp of surprise before the creature leapt on her.
If Joe or any of his team could have seen what occurred that night, they might have given up, thrown in the towel, and decided to do something else with their time.
The chupacabras had learned: no need to attack a house and expend a lot of energy, smashing windows and beating down doors. Just hide on the front porch and hit the little button on the wall. Invariably, the door would open, revealing food, standing right there, asking “Who is it” or “Who is there?” or “Do you know what time it is?” or sometimes just “Hello?” Some of the creatures had dim recollections, the last fading vestiges of a shared experience transmitted down through their collective consciousness like genetic memory, of similar conditions, when they had navigated a series of obstacles—run a maze—and at the end of the maze, there was a button—and if they pressed it, a section of wall slid back, and there was food. The memory took root and spread through the others like a fast-moving virus.
And so, sometime after midnight, they stopped their rampage, and became stealthy. They slithered through the shadows, using the howling wind and slashing rain of the tropical storm as cover. They crouched on the front porches all throughout the neighborhoods and then, all at once, as if a signal had been sent, hundreds of scaly hands reached out and pressed the doorbells on a hundred houses.
It was so easy. The food came right to them. The creatures drank blood until their bellies felt as if they would burst. They ate every human eyeball they could find, scooping them out with their talons, sucking them from the struggling humans’ eye sockets and chewing them slowly, savoring the taste, which to a chupacabra was exquisite.
When their hunger was satiated, a new urge began to take hold. It came like a rush of rage, a boiling anger that built inside them. It made them want to overturn cars and smash through plate glass windows, made them want to plunge their claws into soft, pink flesh, and feel it come apart under the strength of their blows. To exult in the power and the speed with which they could kill.
The dim genetic memory came seeping through again, reinforcing their blood lust. Something about “taking enemy positions” and wiping them out to the last man. Killing was the new goal. And so the creatures went berserk again, destroying everything they came in contact with, moving through the town like a tornado, indiscriminate and furious, a force of nature gone out of control.
««—»»
Dawn broke gray and wet and ugly on Dadeville. No one in the jail had slept. The cacophony of screeching monsters and the dying cries of the doomed citizens prevented anyone from getting any rest. When the sun had been up for ninety minutes, Joe cracked the front door and poked out his head. The storm had subsided, but the trees and buildings still dripped with rainwater. He took a few steps out onto the sidewalk, and then stopped and peered around warily.
Dadeville looked quite the worse for wear, with street signs knocked down, telephone wires dangling, and plywood hanging from the facades of buildings like decomposing flesh peeling from a line of corpses. Every car he could see was trashed: windows gone, and tires flat, and some even had their hoods up…fucking weird.
There had been some heated debate earlier between Colgate, Joe, and Ramón about chupacabras and their aversion to light. Joe could only come to the same conclusion as Ramón, that the storm had dampened down the light yesterday just enough for them to tolerate.
Joe moved to the trunk of his beloved car—just the sight of it, all beat up, was enough to fill him with deep, gnawing resentment. Oh, I am going to make these fuckers pay, he fumed.
When he lifted the trunk, his anger quadrupled. They’d ripped apart the backseat, torn open the secret panels to the trunk from the inside, and shredded the hose for the flamethrower. How in the hell did they know it was in there? he wondered. Seething, he went to the front and lifted the dented hood. The creatures had made off with the distributor cap.
“What the fuck?” he murmured.
On a hunch, he moved to the nearest car, a 1974 Dodge Dart sitting two spaces over. Joe popped the hood, which was easy because it was hanging by only one hinge, and checked the engine. All of the wiring had been torn out, distributor cap missing. Ramón and Lupita came up behind him. Duke and Panocha sniffed the air. Lupita grasped their leashes loosely. “What’s up, boss?”
“We’ve got problems,” Joe said tersely. He let the hood drop with a bang that echoed up and down the street.
“What is new?” cracked Ramón.
Singer, Colgate, Doppler, and Johnson were edging out on the sidewalk as a group, hesitant to get too far from the sanctuary of the jail. Singer had her scissors. Johnson still carried the axe. Doppler had the pistol she’d grabbed from the floor of the old guy’s basement.
Colgate didn’t need a weapon. He needed a drink. He started off in the direction of the River View Café.
“Don’t go too far,” Ramón called.
Colgate pointed to the sky above. It was a uniform gray. Heavy clouds still lingered like infection clogging a wound. “If this isn’t too much light for a chupacabra, then I will eat my hat.”
“Watch out, they may pop out wearing sunglasses and then they will eat you!” Ramón teased. Colgate waved him off and kept walking. He soon disappeared into the smashed front of the café. Ramón turned to Lupita and Joe with a grin. “Old Toothpaste is fearless.”
“He just needs a drink,” snorted Lupita.
“Bravery takes many forms,” Ramón said.
Joe stared at the cars slanting up and down Main Street. They all had hoods that were either up, torn off, or hanging askew. He said what he was thinking aloud: “All of these cars have been sabotaged.”
“What?” Lupita asked incredulously. “Why?”
“To keep us from leaving town.”
Lupita’s eyes were slits. “No way.”
“This just went to a whole new level,” Joe said. “The way these things are acting shows intelligence much greater than we ever figured.”
“Oh, come on,” groaned Lupita.
“This is unbelievable,” Ramón grumbled.
“How far is it to the next town?” Lupita wondered.
“Too far,” said Ramón.
“But the Interstate is only twenty-two miles,” Joe told them.
“Great,” Ramón spat. “What do we do once we reach the highway?”
“Flag down the first car we see and try to get help.”
“The ranger called the State Police last night,” Ramón pointed out. “It didn’t seem to do much good.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Hell if I know.” Ramón shrugged. “They never showed.”
Joe returned to the main group in front of the jail. They were as jumpy as virgins at a prison rodeo.
“I’ve got a bad feeling that all of the cars in town have been demolished,” he told them. “We will have to check each one we find.” He gave them all an apologetic look. “But I am not hopeful.”
“What?” came from several of the group, followed by the inevitable barrage of questions. Joe held up his hand to silence the babble.
“I know it sounds crazy, but it looks like the chupacabras don’t want anyone leaving town.”
“You have got to be kidding me!’ shrieked Doppler. “They’re just animals!”
“Think about it,” Joe said. “They dug a trench across the road leading into town, destroyed the bridge that crosses the river lead
ing out of town, and now they’ve got us bottled up.”
“What for?” cried Doppler. “Why would they do that?”
“My guess is they’re waiting for sundown so they can finish us off.”
“What?”
Joe nodded gravely. “They’re gonna be mopping us up tonight.”
“Oh my god.” Doppler leaned against the jailhouse and began weeping. “Why doesn’t someone call for help?”
“Call who?” Joe reminded her. “The reception cut out last night, remember?”
It had occurred around midnight. They didn’t know that chupacabras had swarmed the cell phone tower, knocking out transmission for a huge chunk of the central Florida panhandle. Everyone in the affected areas automatically assumed the tropical storm had caused the interruption in cell phone service. A repair team had been dispatched almost immediately, but had not been heard from since.
“Hit the fucking panic button, man!” Doppler wailed, pointing to the land-line on the sheriff’s desk. “Call the National Guard! Call the Army for shit’s sake!”
“No way. Forget it.” Joe shook his head firmly. “I’ve been in the Army, I know. They’re the kings of overkill. They like to cure dandruff by decapitation. They’d just drop a fuel air bomb on this whole place.”
“That is not a bad idea,” Ramón said quietly.
Joe turned to him. “What’s that?”
Ramón scratched his ear, thinking, working it out. “We lure the whole big bunch of them somewhere and blow the living shit out of them.”
A light went on behind Joe’s eyes. He had seen some wicked things done with thermobaric weapons when he was in the military. Nothing quite cleansed things like fire.
“I am listening.”
Ramón pointed to the wrecked cars sitting on Main Street. “We go through town and siphon all of the gas we can find from these vehicles. We find some fifty-gallon drums, there’s gotta be some at the gas station or somewhere, and we take the drums full of gasoline into some place big enough, and then use our plastic explosives to blow the building once we’ve got all the motherfuckers inside.”
“The gymnasium at the abandoned school is the only place in town where we could fit a hundred chupacabras,” Joe added, warming to the idea. “But how do we lure them in there?”
“Use someone as bait, of course.”
“Of course,” agreed Joe. Then he added, “We’ll have to seal up every tunnel we find to keep them from going underground.”
Ramón held up his hands. “But how are we going to move fifty gallon drums of gasoline, assuming we can find them and get them filled?”
Joe wasn’t going to give up on the idea. It involved killing a large number of chupacabras, so he was all for it. He smacked his fist into the palm of his hand. “First thing we’ll have to do is find something capable of hauling all this crap.”
“Like what?”
Joe waved his arm in the general direction of town. “I don’t know man. We will have to think of something. We’ve got a hardware store one block over, and a group of farmhouses within walking distance. Let’s get going and see what we can find.”
After a brief discussion with the others, it was decided that Doppler would head out of town and try to reach the Interstate. Ramón and Johnson would retrieve Colgate and then go to the nearest farmhouse on the north side of town and see what they could find to hopefully haul some equipment.
Joe and Singer and Lupita would check the houses on either side of Main Street for survivors, as well as the hardware store on Second Avenue for needed supplies. They would all meet back at the jail in two and a half hours. Each team would take a dog to provide early warning for any chupacabras who might feel like braving the daylight. They synchronized their watches at 9:17 A.M. and headed out into a village of the dead.
««—»»
The first thing Doppler did when she cleared the trench dug by the chupacabras on her way out of town was pause and eat the remainder of her methamphetamines, choking the crystals down with some of the bottled water she had in her purse.
She had twenty-two miles to walk. The average speed for a normal person was two miles per hour, which meant ten hours. But she was going to be wired on crank, and so she could probably keep up a gait of five miles per hour, so hopefully it would only take her about five-and-a-half hours to reach the highway. That’s why she had volunteered for the hike. Those assholes had looked at her hefty figure and automatically assumed she wasn’t in any condition to trek twenty miles. But she had her stash of go-fast, her secret weapon. It was going to be a rare case of tweak saving someone’s life—maybe all of their lives.
She was going to be the hero of this piece. She could see it now, herself on the cover of all the magazines, and the accompanying article a thrilling account of how she had saved Jet Ryder’s life on a “hunt gone bad.” That’s what they’d call the book she would have ghostwritten for her and released within six months to capitalize on the publicity. Hunt Gone Bad. Then she’d sell the movie rights for a shit-ton of money.
She set out at a good pace, swinging her arms and concentrating on the first bend in the road, about a mile and a half in the distance. Sweat poured freely down her face. It was warming up, growing muggy, and the air was thick and sluggish after the raging storm winds. Now it was torpid and steamy.
««—»»
Joe, Lupita and Singer formed a moving wedge as they crossed the desolate neighborhood on Second Avenue adjacent to the hardware store. They had spent the first hour on the other side of town, in the neighborhoods abutting the backside of the jail. They had found no survivors. Everywhere there were signs of violence, of struggle, of death; blood on the walls of the houses, blood on the front porches. So much blood that the rain hadn’t been able to wash it all away. It was a nightmare, a ghost town filled with menace, death, and decay. Bloody scraps of clothing piled here and there on the front lawns looked like heaps of leaves on first glance, and only upon further scrutiny revealed the awful truth. Every car, every truck, every motor vehicle of any kind that they checked had been savaged and rendered inoperable. As they continued to search, and find only devastation, their spirits sank lower.
««—»»
On the other side of town, past an expanse of woods that separated the downtown urban core from the more rural neighborhoods on the north side of Dadeville, Colgate, Ramón, and Johnson approached the second house on their journey.
It had taken thirty minutes to walk to the first farmhouse, and only fifteen minutes to see that there was nothing worth salvaging from the place. The inhabitants were nowhere to be found, but the destruction that had been wreaked upon the household spoke volumes. All throughout the house they found hastily improvised defensive positions with furniture and other fixtures used as a barricade. Empty shotgun casings littered the floor and attested to a savage battle, but there was no sign of any bodies, other than some arterial spray on the walls near the blockade in the back hallway. It looked like they had retreated toward the cellar door.
Ramón opened the cellar door and called down. Only silence answered in return. After poking around upstairs and then moving outside and checking the barn and finding it empty, they moved on.
Now a second farmhouse loomed before them. It had a large covered workshop area behind it, and on the side facing them Ramón saw two gas pumps—the type that farmers use to supply their tractors and other vehicles. He smiled.
“I think this farm might be the lucky one.”
««—»»
Joe, Lupita, and Singer had amassed some tools from the hardware store: rubber hose for siphoning gas, hatchets, hammers and nails, axes, lengths of rope, duct tape. They’d found a dozen twenty-gallon jerry cans. They piled it all on the sidewalk. Joe checked his watch. It was time to head back to the jail.
When they got back to Main Street, they found Ramón, Colgate, and Johnson sitting on the sidewalk. They had a small Kubota tractor with a flatbed trailer hitched to it. On the trailer sat a fifty-gall
on drum.
“Holy shit,” Joe cried. “This is awesome!”
Ramón smiled at him. “You haven’t seen the best part yet.”
“Oh?”
Ramón had a lunch pail with him, the old metal type, boxy and bucket-like. He held it up and flipped it open to reveal a dozen sticks of dynamite. “We hit the jackpot at the second farmhouse we checked.”
Joe rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Oh, hell yeah. Let’s get busy.”
The fifty-gallon drum on the back of the trailer was only half-full, so they spent the next forty-five minutes going up and down Main Street siphoning gas from the wrecked vehicles, after first checking to make sure they were indeed inoperable. They used the jerry cans from the hardware store and lengths of hose cut into sections. When they were finished, they had the drum filled and capped. They also had three full jerry cans.
“Okay, first thing, let’s go check the filling station,” Joe said when they had gathered next to the tractor. “It’s just a few blocks that way.” He pointed west. “We’ll zip over there and see what we can scrounge, then head out to the school and start setting up.”
He looked at the devastated town wistfully. “I wish we had one more tractor. Hell, even a riding lawnmower. We could cover more ground.”
He pointed to Colgate, Johnson, and Lupita. “You guys keep checking for survivors. Hit every house you find. Look for weapons, ammunition, anything you think might be useful tonight.”
He turned to Ramón. “Go get the C-4 and all of our blasting stuff. I wanna get started wiring that place as soon as we get to the school.” He clapped his hands together and they scattered. Singer was still standing there.
Fury of the Chupacabras Page 20