Ruthie Fear

by Ruthie Fear (retail) (epub)

  It wouldn’t escape this time.

  Calm down, she told herself. But when the creature suddenly jerked upright, Ruthie jerked the shotgun to her eye in a mirrored motion. Her finger slid from the trigger guard. She remembered her father’s words. “Only touch the trigger when you’re going to shoot.” She and the creature stayed like this for a moment, faced off across the fifty yards of water, the muzzle of Ruthie’s gun and her gray eyes visible between the slats of the duck blind. Then the creature turned to flee, and Ruthie fired.

  •

  “I SHOT SOMETHING.” Ruthie’s voice shook. She was back at her truck, leaning against the cab, with her phone at her ear and the shotgun propped beside her. The sickness in her stomach had spread to her limbs. She felt, perhaps, that she’d done something terribly wrong. “I was out hunting ducks and I shot something.”

  “Who?” her father asked.

  “Not someone. Something. At the pond. I killed it.”

  She heard Sylver’s voice in the background. “An animal?” Rutherford said.

  Ruthie nodded, chewing her lip. “I . . . I think so. It doesn’t have a head.”

  The line was silent for several seconds. “You been drinking?”

  “Jesus Christ, Dad. It’s six a.m.” Ruthie squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them. A red-tailed hawk winged overhead into the stand of pine trees around Sitka’s house. “It’s what I saw when I was a girl. When you didn’t believe me.”

  The line went silent again. Then rustling as her father muttered something to Sylver and climbed out of bed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

  Ruthie hung up. She looked through the trees and across the water to the rocky beach, where the humped feathered form lay motionless.

  NEXT, SHE CALLED PIP. “It came back,” she said.

  “What?” Pip’s voice was faint and sleepy on the other end of the line.

  “The creature. It came back and I shot it.” Ruthie was surprised by how difficult it was to keep from crying.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Ruthie paused. “I felt like I had to. I didn’t want to let it get away again.”

  The line was silent. Adrian began crying in the background. Ruthie’s goddaughter, named after Pip’s uncle, she was a year old, with a thatch of black hair and bright brown eyes. Ruthie was astonished by the love she felt every time she held her. How tiny she was, the perfection of her hands and feet. Each digit so finely formed. Ruthie didn’t know what the reappearance of the creature meant, but she was determined to send Adrian out of the valley. “I think you need to take Adrian and go,” she said. “Just to be safe.”

  “What for?”

  “I have a bad feeling. I can’t explain it.”

  “Come with us,” Pip said, hearing the fear in Ruthie’s voice.

  “I will,” Ruthie answered. “But I want to make sure people see it first. I’ll meet you in Missoula, at Bonner Park.”

  “Okay,” Pip said. “But I want to see it, too.”

  “I’ll take a picture.”

  The line was silent again.

  “Please, for Adrian.”

  “All right,” Pip said. “We’re going.”

  Relief flooded through Ruthie.

  SHE AND HER FATHER walked shoulder to shoulder along the water’s edge, avoiding the branches strewn across the path. There’d been a windstorm the week before, and Ruthie had yet to clear the debris. The property was beginning to fall into disrepair: paint flaking off the mansion walls, weeds growing up through the deck. It was too much for her to take care of on her own. Each winter left new potholes in the driveway.

  As they neared the corpse, Ruthie slowed, wondering again what she’d done.

  “Looks like some kind of a bird,” Rutherford said, hitching up the Smith & Wesson Governor holstered at his waist—his midlife crisis weapon: oversized and unreliable. “Maybe an emu got loose from Del’s farm.”

  “That’s what you said last time.”

  Her father went quiet for a moment. “If it is one we’re going to have to sink it and not tell anyone it was here. You know how much an emu costs?”

  “They were five thousand dollars twenty-five years ago,” Ruthie said in exasperation. The pop of a gun across the valley interrupted her. Rutherford squinted after it, his brow furrowing.

  “Everybody hunting in May now?”

  The sun was high above them and the ducks had disappeared. Only the algae remained on the surface of the water. Its bright green was dulled by the sunlight. With the mist and luminescence gone, the pond looked like what it was: a sad little feed swamp seeping back into the hills around it. They stopped at the edge where an old bleached paddleboat lay half submerged. The thin willow branches above them swayed. A red hummingbird feeder hung over the water. Deer ran by, heading for the mountains. Pharaoh barked from the mansion below, no more a hunting dog than a guard dog. Ruthie forced herself to look at the creature. Its feathers weren’t plain gray up close, but held a bluish incandescence, a shimmer. They were bunched at the sides like wings yet there was no sign of bones nor arms nor any way to raise them, any way to fly. The force of the bullet had knocked it backward and its legs lay splayed out on the rocks. They were bare, horribly so. Nothing but grayish bones held together by orange sinew at the two joints.

  Rutherford let out a low whistle and walked gingerly toward it. He nudged the creature’s chest with the toe of his boot. It flopped back into place. He leaned over to inspect its rear. He grunted. “Where’s its head?”

  Ruthie bit her lip.

  The sound of more gunshots drifted across the valley. Rutherford nudged the creature again and a bluish ooze leaked from the wound on its chest and trickled over the rocks. A horrible smell, somewhere between sewage and melting rubber, wafted out. Ruthie covered her mouth with her forearm. Rutherford straightened. He reached down to his waist, touching first the butt of the revolver, then digging into his pocket for his phone. “Terry will know what it is,” he said, fear in his voice.

  “You sure we shouldn’t just sink it?” Ruthie was suddenly desperate to be done with the creature. To go home, call in sick at the diner, and spend the rest of the day in bed under the covers. She needed a week off. Or a month. She felt herself fraying at the edges.

  A branch cracked behind her and her father spun, dropped his phone, drew the revolver, and fired. The .410 shotshell exploded past Ruthie’s arm. She leapt back and turned in time to see another of the creatures convulse, twist on its stilt-like legs, and topple into the underbrush.

  “Goddammit,” Rutherford said. He looked down in disbelief at the smoking gun in his hand. “It spooked me.”

  Ears ringing, Ruthie fought to return the air to her lungs. Her heart rattled her rib cage.

  Dark tissue splattered the willow trunk behind the fallen creature. “What’s wrong with you?” she managed, finally. “You could’ve killed me.”

  THE CREATURE WAS like an anvil in the back of Ruthie’s truck. She could feel its weight when she toed down the accelerator. She could feel the specter of its presence in the cab. A doom, a pall. Carrying them around the pond had been one of the most horrible experiences of her life. They were fantastically heavy and slipped out of her fingers like sacks of sludge. The hellish smell that steamed out of them was so strong she kept having to set her end down to wipe her eyes. And now her eyes burned.

  Her father’s enormous dual-cab bounced on the dirt road in front of her, commandeering both lanes, weighed down by his own kill. She slowed to keep from driving in the tornado of dust. Sitka’s ranch shrank in the rearview mirror. The fields on either side of Willow Creek Road were newly harrowed, ready to seed. Their rich black soil glowed in the sun. It reminded her of the creature’s belly, and brought a fresh wave of nausea up through her chest. Christ. If only she’d missed. But she hardly ever missed, not since the fiery day her father had taught her to shoot. She pushed her hair back from her forehead and rubbed her temple.

  Off in the distance
, a man ran across a field carrying a long-stock rifle. Ruthie rolled her window down to see more clearly. The crackle of gunfire greeted her. What was happening? The old men in the diner joked that a war might break out and they wouldn’t hear about it in the Bitterroot Valley until the bullets were snapping by their ears, but not like this.

  They passed Old Well Road and Whipple’s and the new artisanal bakery. Its clapboard sign advertised fresh biscuits and gravy. The tables on the porch were empty, something Ruthie had never seen before on a Sunday morning. Usually they were full of ranch wives in church clothes nibbling scones and gossiping while their silent husbands looked across the wind-blasted fields and longed for football.

  More houses appeared on the outskirts of Darby. Her father pulled onto the grass by the entrance to the Whispering Pines Trailer Park. Kent Willis was standing shirtless in jeans and cowboy boots smack-dab in the center of his driveway with his Weatherby semiauto cocked to the sky. He appeared to be making some kind of last stand. His face was lit by excitement. The unkempt ring of hair on his head stood up crazily. He rose on his toes to look into the bed of Rutherford’s truck.

  “That’s a smell I won’t soon forget,” he said. “Shot one of the fuckers off my back porch. It was staggering around the sprinkler in Danette’s little flower garden and before I even knew what I was doing I’d killed it.” He wiped his forehead. “Folks been shooting them all over.”

  “They creep up on you,” Rutherford said.

  Willis nodded. “Must be some kind of experimental creature. Got loose from the labs.” His voice was exultant; he’d been waiting for this his whole life. He looked to the eastern horizon—the drones and fighter jets couldn’t be far behind. “I been saying it for years, who knows what they’re doing up there, messing around with all that government money. They got no more sense than pig shit.”

  “Anybody seen them do anything?” Rutherford asked. “The creatures, I mean.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, eat something or run or fight back.”

  Ruthie looked down at her fingers on the steering wheel. Long and thin and chewed around the nails. She wondered what else they were capable of beyond pulling the trigger. She wondered if many of the misdeeds in her life that she’d blamed on others had been her doing all along. “It was just out there sniffing for water,” she said.

  “Better not to find out what they want with it,” Willis said, turning to her. “Last thing we need are some headless laboratory freaks contaminating our feed ponds.” He gripped the stock of his shotgun. As if he’d ever had a feed pond.

  “We’re finding somewhere to dump these, be done with ’em,” her father said.

  Willis nodded. “Go on downtown. That’s where everyone else is.”

  Rutherford pulled away. Ruthie followed, ignoring the shotgun wave Willis sent her. He lumbered off through the grass in her rearview mirror. Past the trailer park came the Super 1 and the Sinclair. Two men were shouting back and forth over the pumps. One of the creatures lay between them in a puddle of gas, its feathers shimmering in the sunstruck, viscous liquid. Ruthie wondered what had become of the one she’d seen as a girl. Or had it been a premonition, a ghost image of what was to come?

  She imagined a wave of the creatures flooding out of No-Medicine Canyon. Silent, lurching in the dawn, like a biblical plague.

  Trucks lined the curb on Main Street. Some were rolled halfway up on the sidewalk, as if the drivers had been in too much of a hurry to even fully stop before hopping out. The lone stoplight blinked red. Sheriff Badger’s cruiser was angled out in front of Glacier Bank. Its flashers strobed wildly across the pavement and into the Montana Café, where Danette and Judy sat at the window table, hunched together over cups of coffee, wide-eyed, staring out at the street. Seeing them filled Ruthie with relief. The world might crumble but they’d meet it with the same cowlike wonder they reserved for every other event. She raised her fingers from the steering wheel. Danette looked up but didn’t wave back.

  “Don’t even think about dumping those here,” Badger called, as she and her father rolled to a stop. His wide ass was planted on the cruiser’s bumper and his arms were crossed. “Air’s hardly fit to breathe as it is. Folks been bringing ’em in all morning.”

  Rutherford started to speak but Badger cut him off. He was so mad he couldn’t look at Ruthie. “I’ll ask you the same question I been asking everybody else: What’d you shoot it for?”

  Both father and daughter were silent.

  “That’s what I thought.” Badger dropped his hand onto the butt of his Glock. “Like everybody’s lost their damn minds.”

  “They don’t have heads,” Rutherford said.

  “Just because you can’t see a thing’s head doesn’t mean you can kill it, goddammit. Maybe they’ve got heads inside.” Badger pushed off the bumper and took a step toward the grille of Rutherford’s huge truck, as if the force of his indignation would be enough to hold it back. “Did it become new species hunting season all of a sudden? Is that what May is now? About fifty of them have come through in the last half hour, all shot to hell.” Badger wiped the spittle from his chin and rubbed his hand on his rumpled beige uniform. “What am I supposed to say when the news gets here?”

  “Hell, just tell ’em they’re aggressive,” Rutherford said.

  “Aggressive?” Badger slumped back down on the bumper and the rear axle creaked. He looked around helplessly. “I don’t see how they can even walk on those spindly legs, let alone hurt somebody.” Bits of paint were flaking off the decal on the side of his cruiser. It had an old CB radio on the dash instead of a laptop. None of the new bike path and brewery money had trickled down to the sheriff’s department. “Don’t any of you people know how to keep your guns holstered?”

  “It spooked me,” Rutherford said.

  “Yeah, I’ll just tell that to CNN.” Badger sighed dejectedly and waved on down the road. “Head out to the dump, that’s where everybody else is. Fire department, too. I guess they’re gonna burn ’em up.”

  THE DEAD CREATURES were piled in a massive, glistening mound, more than fifteen feet high and thirty wide. Behind them, the trash pit stank and rotted. Dishwashers and nail-studded plywood, pink rolls of insulation, and reams and reams of moldy bread and vegetables. Flies swarmed these, but none touched the leaking corpses. Apparently some things were too foul even for flies.

  The corpses were bent and sprawled and crammed together. A crowd of men and women stood around two fire trucks and a forklift, looking up at them. A regular massacre. Pulling past, Ruthie felt sick, like a cavalryman bringing in scalps for gold in the Indian days. Senseless, cruel. It had just wanted a drink. She found a spot in the corner of the lot. Her father’s truck wouldn’t fit and he circled twice before finally coming to a stop in the lane, boxing her and two other trucks in.

  “We’re not staying long,” he said, hopping down off the runner.

  “You shot one, too,” Ruthie said.

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that?”

  The gravel crunched beneath their boots as they heaved the first creature down and staggered with it over to the pile. Whipple Jr., Tracy Trimble, and Dalton Pompey parted to let them through. “On three,” her father gasped. They heaved the creature onto its fellows. They were all different, Ruthie saw. Every one. Some grayer, some bluer, some with a greenish tint to their bellies. One was nearly double the size of what she and her father had brought. Ruthie had no idea how anyone had managed to carry it. Even the forklift didn’t seem big enough.

  Tracy nodded to her with tight lips. “Hell of a Sunday,” she said.

  “I might start to think I’m going crazy,” Ruthie answered, turning back for the second corpse.

  The fire chief was talking on his cell phone, his right arm draped through the ladder on the back of the fire truck. “Yeah, we set a couple aside,” he said. “Should be in good shape, other than the bullet holes.” He laughed into the phone, his teeth as stained as h
is suspenders.

  Had it been fear that caused her to pull the trigger, or anger? Carrying the second creature, Ruthie felt it was important to know. The skin of the belly was still warm. It felt like rubber, with fine downy tendrils that clung to her fingers then suddenly slipped away, causing her father to curse and heft his end of the load. Her eyes watered. The muscles in her shoulders strained. She searched for signs of an internal head, or teeth, claws, anything that might make the creatures dangerous. The legs bent over her arm and dragged in the dust. They did have spiky little prongs at the end, but she didn’t see how they could raise them high enough to do any damage. You’d have to let one walk right over you. Harmless. Yet even now as she slung the creature onto the pile, she felt a twinge of hatred at its lumpy, foreign shape. She decided that fear and anger equaled more or less the same thing, in the end.

  The fire chief snapped his phone shut and turned to the crowd. “All right, we got the go-ahead,” he said. “Let’s light ’em up.”

  Dalton went to his truck and came back carrying gas cans with his seven fingers. Ruthie’d been at the 4-H parade when he lost the other three, caught up in a float rope. Ever since, his face had swollen like a sad, mottled balloon. She remembered how alive he’d been rubbing against her thigh after the homecoming dance, the night her childhood ended. She felt something else ending now. The fire chief took one of the cans and Hose Corwin took another and all three went to a different corner of the pile. They shook and spewed the gas up over the bodies. The sharp benzene smell was nothing but a slight tang in the air, thoroughly overpowered by the dead creatures’ stink. Ruthie longed to plunge her nose into one of the cans, huff the fumes until her head swam. Forget everything.

  “Let’s get out of here,” her father said.

  But Ruthie didn’t move. She felt they should watch. That it was the least they could do after shooting them down. “You think they’ve got heads inside?” she asked.