by Jeff Strand
"Yeah, it scraped up the side and back wall," he told Mia. "I don't think it was actually trying to get inside. If it was, it would dig at the wall, not just run its claws along it."
"So, what, you think it was just committing vandalism?"
"I don't know what it was doing. I don't see any reason to panic, though. It didn't get in and it might not even come back. Most likely, it came by looking for food, didn't find any, and left. We're fine. I mean, we won't be idiots, we'll stick close to the cabin for a day or two, but we're not in any danger."
"I wish we'd made more of an effort to get the truck free," said Mia.
"We're not going to need to flee our home. The cabin is safe. All that thing did was scrape up the wood a little. If it wanted to get in, it would've already tried."
Rusty believed what he was saying. They'd made the right call on the truck—trying to get it back on the path in those conditions would've been a waste of time. And he wasn't thinking, "Oh, Lord, why oh why have I refused to get a telephone?" They didn't need to call for help. They didn't need to drive into town. Yes, the recent weirdness was disconcerting, but they could handle an aggressive bear-or-whatever without calling for help. Rusty was a good shot, and he had enough ammunition to miss a lot of times without running out.
"If we had the truck, we could go into town and get a few bear traps."
"We don't need bear traps. If it gets close enough, we shoot it. If it doesn't get close enough, it doesn't need to die."
"All right," said Mia. "Then what's the next step?"
"It's almost one o'clock. Go back to bed. I'm going to sleep out here so I can be ready to check if I hear something."
"I'm sleeping out here, too."
"I already called the couch."
"Then I'll sleep in a chair."
"Just sleep in your bed with the door open. I promise I'll wake you up if something happens."
"Are you scared?" Mia asked.
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm feeling the need for caution. I'm not frightened."
"Well, I'm scared."
"That's okay," said Rusty. "No shame in it. You're probably just smarter than I am."
"We should have kept trying to find somebody who could tell us what was going on."
"We can spend all night second-guessing our decisions, or we can get some sleep. Personally, I'd rather be well-rested in case we need to run for the truck."
"That wasn't funny."
"It wasn't supposed to be."
"It wasn't reassuring, either."
"It wasn't supposed to be that, either."
"What was it supposed to be?"
"I'm not sure," Rusty admitted. "All I'm saying is, maybe we screwed up, maybe we didn't. We can't change it, so why make things more difficult for ourselves? Let's get some rest. Even if we forget about the bear or whatever, we've still got an hour-long walk, so why be exhausted when we do it?"
"I don't think I'll be able to fall asleep. You go to bed and I'll keep watch."
Rusty started to protest, but decided there was no reason to not let her keep watch. In an absolute worst case scenario, where the creature came back and aggressively tried to get into the cabin, it wasn't as if it could break right through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man. He'd have plenty of time to spring to action. "That sounds fine," he said. "Wake me up if you change your mind."
He went back into his bedroom, leaving the door open, and set the pistol and flashlight on his dresser. He climbed into bed, unsure whether he'd be able to fall asleep himself, but he drifted off moments after he closed his eyes.
* * *
"Uncle Rusty?"
Mia was shaking his shoulder. Rusty flinched, forgetting where he was for a moment, and then he remembered and sat up. "What's wrong?"
"I heard a growl."
Rusty got out of bed. They both went into the living room and peered out the window.
"Oh, shit, do you see that?" asked Mia, pointing.
Rusty did. It was too far away from the outside lights of the cabin to be seen clearly, but the silhouette did indeed appear to be a bear. A really freaking big one. Huge.
He went over to get the flashlight then returned to the window. He turned it on and shone the beam through the glass. Too much glare. He couldn't see anything.
The silhouette was slowly moving.
"It's not going to charge at me," said Rusty, mostly believing that as he walked over to the front door.
"How do you know that?" asked Mia. "You didn't think the squirrel was going to leap at you from the tree, either."
"Okay, let me revise that. I'm not going to leave the porch. If it does charge at me, I'll run back inside and slam the door."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"It's not a supersonic bear. I'll only be a few steps from the door. We need to know what's out there."
Rusty didn't want to keep arguing until the bear left, so he opened the door and stepped outside. He shone the flashlight beam on the animal and, yes, it was a bear. A gigantic grizzly. Biggest one he'd ever seen. Maybe a hundred feet away.
It turned to face him. Rusty couldn't see its eyes clearly, so he didn't know if they were bloodshot, but it sure as hell didn't look like a friendly bear.
The bear began to lumber toward him.
Rusty quickly stepped back into the cabin. He extended his free hand toward Mia. "Give me a gun."
The bear continued moving toward the cabin. It seemed to be in no hurry, but there was no question about its intended destination.
"Get the hell out of here!" Rusty shouted at it. "Go away! You don't belong here! Fuck off!"
The bear did not stop moving. Its eyes glowed in the flashlight beam.
Mia handed Rusty the pistol. He gave her the flashlight. He took aim, not at the bear but directly over it. It was dark and his hands were trembling and you didn't want to shoot a bear unless you knew you were going to get a direct hit.
He squeezed the trigger.
The bear stopped moving. It looked up, as if it had felt the bullet sail over its head.
Then it turned to the side and began to lumber away.
Rusty's mouth fell open and he dropped the gun. He couldn't be seeing this right.
Mia kept the flashlight beam pointed at the bear's side. They could see its ribs.
Not in a "the bear was starving and emaciated" manner.
Though the bear looked otherwise healthy and alert, they could see its exposed ribcage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rusty slammed the door.
There would be no more sleep tonight.
He didn't need to ask Mia if she'd seen that. Her hand was clamped over her mouth and she looked positively horrified.
Now he regretted not owning a telephone and leaving the truck stuck in the mud.
If not for his encounter with the squirrel, Rusty could come up with a logical explanation for the bear's condition. It could have a flesh-eating bacteria, or been seriously injured in a fight with a wolf or another bear. An exposed ribcage didn't necessarily mean that it couldn't walk around like a normal bear, right? It wasn't as if its guts were trailing behind it. Everything seemed to still be contained.
Yet after what the squirrel had done, there was no way to simply say, "Yep, this is a quaint but natural occurrence." Rusty wasn't ready to commit to the idea of a zombie bear yet. It might not be, or have been, dead. But there was something wrong with this bear that went beyond "afflicted with a flesh-eating bacteria," and if Mia went with zombie bear, he wasn't going to correct her.
Mia removed her hand from her mouth. "You saw that, right?"
"Yes."
"I mean the ribs."
"Yes. I saw it."
Mia didn't ask what he thought was wrong with it. She must've known that he had no answer. She hurried over to the front window and looked out. "It's coming back."
Rusty rushed over and looked for himself, even though there was no reason to doubt his niece. "Okay,"
he said. "No big deal. No big deal. We've got bigger guns."
He took the shotgun out of the cabinet. Then he peeked through the window again, hoping the bear had changed its mind. It hadn't.
He was pretty sure the bear couldn't get inside the cabin, at least not without significant effort, but better to blow it away than to let it cause serious damage to his home. And then he'd kidnap Dr. Teal, bring him out here, and force him to conduct a scientific investigation at gunpoint.
Rusty opened the front door. Thank God the bear was still moving slowly. It was about fifty feet away. If it had a sudden surge of velocity, Rusty could still get back inside in time.
"I told you to get the fuck out of here!" he shouted at it, as he took careful aim with the shotgun. Then he raised his aim a bit. The shotgun would make a much louder bang than the pistol, and that might be sufficient to frighten it away for good. If he fired directly at it and didn't kill it, he could have an enraged bear coming at him.
He squeezed the trigger.
The bear flinched as if he'd startled it. It stopped walking but didn't turn away.
"The next one goes in your face," he shouted, hoping the bear would understand his intent if not his words.
The bear resumed walking toward him.
"Shit," said Rusty. He lowered his aim. He took a moment to concentrate on making his arm stop trembling, put the bear's head in his sight, and then squeezed the trigger.
Too low. He hit the creature, but in its chest, or whatever that part was called on a bear. Its fur burst open without blood. The bear let out a roar of pain.
It stopped moving again, but didn't run away.
Rusty was pretty sure he now had an enraged bear in front of him.
The bear looked at him. Its bloodshot eyes were clearly visible. A large flap of brown fur dangled where it had been shot. When it snarled at him, Rusty didn't know if it was consciously showing off its many sharp teeth, but he got the message.
"You only get one more chance!" he informed the bear, hoping it was in a lot of pain and receptive to being scared away by threats.
It continued to stare at him. And then walked toward him.
Rusty might have had enough time to reload the shotgun before it reached the front porch. Or he might not. The consequences of being a little too slow or dropping a shell with his trembling hands were really freaking dire, so he decided that this was not the best time to test out his speed. He went back into the cabin, then slammed and locked the door.
"It's still coming," said Mia, looking out the window. She held her rifle against her chest.
"It can't get inside," said Rusty, who, as of a minute ago, no longer believed that.
"It's on the porch."
"Get away from the window."
Mia did. Rusty popped open the shotgun, removed the empty shells, then accidentally dropped the two replacement ones onto the floor, so it was probably for the best that he hadn't decided to face off against the bear. He scooped them up and reloaded the shotgun.
There was a loud thump and the door shook on its hinges as the bear struck it. Though Rusty couldn't see what was happening out there, it sounded more like the bear had bashed the wood with its paws than trying to smash through it at a run. That was good. The door could keep out a bear that attempted to pound it down—probably—but it wasn't going to withstand an animal that size coming at it like a battering ram.
Of course, the front window was problematic.
Another thump. The door held.
Rusty and Mia kept a safe distance—not that there was a safe distance inside the cabin if a goddamn undead grizzly bear got in there—and pointed their respective guns at the door.
Another thump and the top right corner of the door jutted forward.
It was definitely pounding on the wood with its paws, and Rusty's belief that the door would keep it out was clearly wrong. Two or three more slams and that door was coming completely off its hinges, no question.
Rusty was wrong about that, too. It only took one more slam.
The front door toppled forward, shaking the entire cabin as it struck the floor. A couple of the floorboards broke on impact. Mia screamed but didn't panic. She kept her rifle focused on the now-open doorway. If they lived through this, Rusty would tell her how proud he was of the way she'd handled this situation.
The bear let out a loud snort and stuck its head through the doorway.
"Don't shoot yet," Rusty said.
The grizzly bear's massive size was not a good thing, overall, but it did give Rusty and Mia one advantage at the moment: the animal was too big to fit through the doorway.
Oh, there was no question that it could widen the doorway if it really wanted to. Rusty's hope, possibly delusional, was that the bear would get frustrated and give up if it had to work to get at them.
The bear let out an angry roar. Mia screamed again, and Rusty somehow kept from wetting his pajama bottoms.
They weren't trapped in here, technically. There was a large window behind them in the kitchen and a smaller one in each of their bedrooms, so worst-case scenario, they could escape that way. But Rusty was far more confident in his ability to keep the bear out of the cabin than to outrun it. Fleeing their home would be a last resort.
The bear roared again. The sound was terrifying, but the beast could roar all it wanted as long as it didn't try to get inside.
Then it stepped forward, squeezing itself into the doorway. It obviously wasn't going to fit all the way through that opening, so the question was how long the frame would last. Since Rusty could already hear the wood cracking, the answer seemed to be: not long.
More cracking, and a large chunk of wood fell to the floor.
"I think we should shoot it now," said Mia.
Rusty nodded and squeezed the trigger. The shotgun blast got the bear right in the face, blowing off most of its lower jaw. Teeth scattered everywhere. Its tongue, half-gone, dangled from what remained of its mouth, not bleeding.
Mia fired her rifle, sending a bullet directly into the hole that already existed in its chest.
Rusty fired again. This shot wasn't as impactful as the first, blowing off most of the bear's left ear.
Mia fired three shots in a row. The first hit the bear in the chest again, but lower, creating a new hole. The second missed, putting a hole in the wall inches from the doorway. The third struck the bear in the side of the face.
This time when the bear roared, it was with pain instead of fury. It backed out of the doorway and disappeared from sight.
Rusty quickly reloaded.
Mia walked across the living room to get a better view from the window. "It's still on the porch," she said. A moment later, her report became unnecessary as the bear walked right in front of the glass.
"Should we open fire?" Rusty asked. "Just pump as many bullets into it as we can?"
"If the bear's fucked up, and the squirrel was fucked up, lots of other animals could be fucked up, too. What if we have to run for the truck and fend them off? We should conserve our ammo."
She was right. They had a generous supply of ammunition from the perspective of hunting and target practice. When you added "defending themselves during a three mile run through a forest full of nightmare creatures" the ammunition situation didn't seem quite as optimistic.
That said, they had no idea how widespread this was. There was the squirrel, the bear, and whatever had killed the deer, which could've been the bear. That might be as far as it went. Still, Rusty agreed with Mia that they shouldn't go all Bonnie and Clyde on the bear unless it became absolutely necessary.
The bear walked past the window.
Mia moved again to get a different angle. "It's still there," she said. "It sat down."
"Maybe it's dying."
"It doesn't look like it's dying. It looks like it's waiting."
How long would a bear wait for prey after the lower half of its jaw had been blown off? Surely at some point it would slink off to tend to its wounds. A n
ormal bear would be bleeding out by now.
Rusty and Mia could outwait the bear. They could outwait it even if it decided to settle in for a few days; they had plenty of food. Though it would be nice if they also had a front door.
They had the tools necessary to nail the door back in place...but those were in the shed. They'd either have to stroll onto the front porch past the bear or sneak out a bedroom window. The door hadn't done any good before and a newly nailed one wouldn't withstand a second attack, but if other animals less powerful than a bear were affected, they'd be glad to have a front door to keep them out.
Rusty didn't want to take the risk quite yet. They'd keep tabs on the bear through the window, watch the doorway closely, and see how this played out.
Mia wiped a tear from her eye. Rusty wouldn't have blamed her if she succumbed to hysterical shrieking and mad cackling laughter, so a tear was amazingly brave. He felt like he was one more bear-roar from weeping himself.
"Changed my mind," he said.
"What?" Mia asked. Rusty realized that he hadn't said anything about his shed plan out loud. He was losing it a bit. They couldn't afford for him to do that if they were going to survive this.
"We've got a hammer and nails in the shed. To nail the door back up in case something smaller tries to get in. I was thinking that we should wait until the bear left, but right now we know exactly where it is. If you keep an eye on it, I can go out a window and get the stuff. You just shout out to me if the bear moves."
"Are you sure we don't have anything already in the cabin?" Mia asked.
"Not that I can think of."
"Couldn't we just prop the door up and push some furniture against it?"
Rusty thought about that. "Yes," he said. "That's a much better idea."
He set the shotgun on the floor. As he crouched next to the fallen door, Mia moved to help him. He waved her away. "Stay on bear watch. I'll ask for help if I need it."
Mia nodded and returned to her best view of the bear through the window. Rusty placed his hands underneath the top of the door and lifted it. He didn't remember it being this heavy when he installed it in the first place, but he'd been twenty-five years younger back then.