Bigfoot Crank Stomp (7 page)

A hellacious scream cut the valley in two. A roar of triumph followed. Beast one, man zero.

Seconds stretched. The Sheriff’s vehicles stopped moving. Deputies shouted. Overlapping. The echo effect of the valley made it impossible to discern one from the other. It didn’t matter as more shotguns opened fire.

What in the Hell is going on?
Manny thought as he jumped to his feet. He raised the rifle and peered through the scope at the other side of the Loop, hoping to see something.

Too many damn trees and not enough moonlight.

Silence. No gunshots. No roars. The lights still rotated on the cruisers but that was it. Maybe they were all dead.

Feet scurried. No, raced. Snapping branches and stirring brush. Someone was running. Fleeing.

Another set of feet chased. Heavy. Thudding. Snapping rotten logs instead of sticks by the way it sounded. Manny glanced at the tops of the pines in the direction of the footfalls. Every few seconds one of the tops shifted against the wind.

It’s chasing someone
, he thought.

Whatever the thing was, it was down in the valley now. If that was the case, the cops hadn’t stopped it. Which meant they were either dead or too chickenshit to pursue.

Shit. There was at least one camper down there. He’d ran into her at the 7-Eleven earlier. A woman in her mid-thirties buying beer. He’d overheard her asking the clerk how to reach the site.

Damn it
, Manny thought. With the thing down there and innocent people down there, he didn’t have much of a choice anymore. The Marine in him stopped resisting all together.

He turned and hustled down the steps of the deck and into the valley, rifle at the ready.

GABE

“Sheriff,” Pronger said. “Maybe we shouldn’t go up there.”

Gabe bit his tongue, wondering the same thing. It wasn’t a bear. He was dead sure about that. But whatever it was sounded like it was on a rampage and he didn’t want to deal with an animal on a rampage in the dark.

More roars. Stanger jumped in the seat next to him. Gabe checked the side view. Lyle was staring up the drive, white as a sheet. He shifted to his other deputies. Pronger and Betts also gazed at the driveway, eyes glassy and wide, mouths hanging open.

Either get up there or get out of here
, Gabe thought.

A shotgun blast reverberated down the driveway. Gabe’s head jerked left, focusing on the gravel path. Some animal and some asshole with a gun. Meth involved. What the fuck was going on?

“Hit the lights,” Gabe said.

“What?” Stanger said.

“You heard me. Time to go see what in Christ’s name is happening up there.”

Stanger reached for the switch. His fingers trembled. But he managed to flip the switch.

The rotating red and blues seemed to wake Pronger and Betts from their frightened dazes. They blinked and straightened up in their seats. Lyle, too, looked more alert. His eyes narrowing and lips tightening.

Gabe stuck his hand out the window and rotated it in a vertical circle several times. Then he pointed up the driveway.
High-ho Silver, away
.

Stanger shifted and accelerated, turning up the drive. Lyle followed. Pronger and Betts brought up the rear.

“Don’t drive too fast,” Gabe said. “We don’t want some crazy animal or asshole with a shotgun to run out in front of us.”

Stanger eased off some on the gas. “Yeah, I don’t want to run over a bear.”

The roars were almost deafening as they reached the top of the drive. Gabe scanned the area but couldn’t see anything. Stanger parked and Gabe grabbed a shotgun and got out.

The roars stopped. The other vehicles pulled up. Doors opened and closed behind Gabe. He turned and found all his deputies armed up and looking at the front door of the house.

“Busted open,” Lyle said.

Stanger pumped his shotgun. Betts and Pronger followed suit.

“Betts, Pronger, take the front,” Gabe said. “Lyle, take—”

The roar again. Gabe flinched as it echoed around him. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw some one run from behind the house into the woods.

“Shit, go, go.” He took off running toward the back of the house, Stanger pounding behind him.

Something big and hairy bounded from behind the house. Gabe froze and Stanger ran into his back. The thing spun toward them, no more than ten feet away.

“Jesus.” Gabe fired a round blindly and back peddled.

The buckshot hit but he didn’t see where. The beast bellowed and closed toward them. Gabe grabbed Stanger and threw in front of him and retreated toward the car.

Stanger fired a round of his own as the thing reached for him. It hit him square in the chest and the bellow became a cry of anguish. But it didn’t stop coming toward them.

Gabe studied its face for a second. Apelike. Sort of. Thick brown fur. Maniac eyes. Huge body.

Betts and Pronger stepped forward and fired. Stanger re-engaged. Gabe hung back and watched.

The next couple of shots tore hair and flesh from its right arm and part of its leg. It stopped advancing and turned and sprinted into the woods, breathing heavy and clutching its chest.

“Let’s go get it,” Pronger said.

“Hell yeah,” Betts started to run toward the tree line.

“Hold fast,” Gabe said.

“Come on, Sheriff, it’s hurt pretty bad,” Betts said.

“I said hold fast.”

Betts kicked gravel. “Damn.”

“Stop whining and secure the house. Pronger, go with him.” Gabe turned and found Stanger staring where the beast had been. “You okay?”

Stanger blinked. His lips moved but it took a few seconds to form words. “I think so.”

“Good.” Gabe looked around for Lyle. Nowhere to be found. “Lyle? Where the hell are you?”

A hand shot up from behind the back end of one of the cars. “Over here, Sheriff.”

Gabe grimaced. “It’s gone. You can get up now.”

Lyle rose. His whole body shook. “I was just taking cover to reload.”

“Is that a fact.” Gabe walked over to him and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun. “Pretty cold for having fired so many rounds.”

Lyle swallowed and shrugged.

“Go secure the back of the house.”

“But Sheriff—”

“Go secure the back of the house or I’ll make you go into the woods after it.”

Lyle swallowed again and glanced at the woods where the thing had disappeared. He nodded and walked toward the back of the house.

“Chicken shit,” Stanger muttered.

“Let it be,” Gabe said and moved over to the tree line. “How many rounds did it take?”

“A lot. Double ought buck, too.”

“Got to be hurt pretty bad.”

“You want to go after it?”

Gabe shook his head and turned to his deputy. “If there’s one thing I learned watching scary movies, it’s you don’t go into the woods after a monster in the dark.”

“Monster? Looked more like a gorilla.”

“You ever seen a ten foot tall gorilla before?”

“Why I’ve never seen any gorilla before.”

“I’ll tell you then, they don’t get to be ten feet tall.”

“It wasn’t a bear, Sheriff. That I’m sure of.”

“Yeah it wasn’t a bear.”

“Then what the hell was it?”

“Well, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say we just had an honest to God encounter with Bigfoot.”

“There’s no such thing as Bigfoot.”

“Seeing is believing and I saw Bigfoot take a bunch of rounds of double ought buck before running away into these woods here.”

Stanger lowered his shotgun and put his free hand on his hip and spat. “So this didn’t involve drugs?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Gabe motioned Stanger to follow. “Let’s go around back and see what’s what.”

Around back, Lyle bent over and puked his dinner into a dead rose bush. Several feet away from him was a body with no arms, said arms nearby, and someone blown to hell by scattershot. A bunch of splintered wood, too. Busted chain.

“Holy shit.” Stanger walked around the bodies, whistling. “This boy got his arms torn off right at the shoulder.”

Gabe studied the scene. Guy with no arms had a shotgun on the ground near the corpse. Lot of damn shotguns out tonight. Other dude killed by a shotgun blast. Easy to put two and two together there.

He turned to the entrance down to the cellar. Busted hinges. Scrapped wood. Giant chains to the side. Huge locks.

On the ground near the entrance, a plastic bowl. Gabe squatted and picked it up. Covered with saliva. Little bit of white clear residue. He picked up a small chunk of glass.

Nope, not a piece of glass. Meth.

He set the bowl down and dropped the piece of meth in it. Then rose and walked to the edge of the cellar entrance. The distinct smell of shit and piss rose to greet him from within. Not regular shit. More like cow shit. Only stronger. Gabe thought about it for a moment. Sicker. Like a sick cow with the runs.

“Sheriff, this is Mickey Gannon,” Stanger said. “He’s covered in blood but it’s him all right. I’d recognize his asshole face even if he didn’t have one.”

“That makes a lot of sense.” Gabe kept his focus down the stairs, trying to make out as much of the cellar as possible. Shit puddles coated the floor. Some had merged with others to form a lake. Black footprints everywhere. Big footprints. Plastic bowls like the one he just held a second ago. He wagered they’d find meth residue in them as well.

“You think that guy we saw run into the woods was Russell?”

Gabe stepped away from the cellar, taking in the busted chains and door. “That would be a reasonable guess.”

Footsteps. Gabe turned, shotgun at his hip. Betts and Pronger jogged around the side. When they saw what was left of Mickey, they skidded and stopped.

“Whoa.” In unison.

“Inside secure?” Gabe said.

Betts nodded. “Two dead upstairs.” He turned and pointed up at a busted window. “One tried to fly away.”

Pronger had moved to the back of the lot and stood on top of a berm, shining his flashlight down the hillside. “Didn’t fly too far.”

“You see him?” Betts said.

“What’s left of him.” Pronger turned the light off and headed over to them. “Looks like he tried to kiss the inside of a tree trunk at high speed.”

“This is one big mess,” Stanger said.

“Don’t go stating the obvious.” Gabe turned to Lyle. “You okay?”

Lyle wiped his mouth the back of his hand. “I think so.”

Stanger sidled up next to Gabe. “So what do you think was going on?”

“I think our boys Mickey and Russell stumbled into some shit they didn’t expect.”

“You mean Bigfoot?”

“What else would I mean?”

Stanger shrugged. “Just making sure.”

“They came to eliminate their competition and ended up dealing with a fiending Sasquatch.”

“Fiending? You think Bigfoot was going through withdrawal or something.”

“That’s exactly what I think.”

Stanger laughed. Gabe didn’t. Betts and Pronger walked over and they all formed a circle.

“Excuse me,” Betts said. “But did you say we’ve got a hooked Bigfoot on our hands?”

“That’s right.”

Pronger scratched his head. “How in the hell did they get Bigfoot hooked?”

“It doesn’t really matter how. We’ll probably never know. Point is, our boys had themselves a Bigfoot trapped in their cellar and they were feeding it steady doses of meth.”

“That’s not good.”

“No it isn’t. Especially for Russell and anyone else who has the unfortunate luck to cross its path right now.”

“Well we need to find it and kill it then,” Stanger said. “We can’t let that thing runaround in a withdrawal craze.”

“No we can’t.” Gabe spat. “But we’re not going after it.”

“What?”

Gabe ignored Stanger and turned to Betts and Pronger. “Was there meth in the house?”

“Yes, Sheriff,” Betts said. “Whole shit ton in the garage.”

“Go get it. Bring on out here.”

Betts and Pronger headed back into the house without another word.

“What are you planning?” Stanger said.

“Is that armored car still in the impound lot?”

“Yeah. Still smells like piss and shit, too.”

Gabe smiled. A disgruntled worker who’d been laid off over the phone while doing a transport had decided to leave a couple of presents in the cab for his supervisor and walked off with the money. Parked it in a tow-away zone for good measure. It was scheduled for pick-up by the company next week. No doubt they’d be picking up a more heavily damaged vehicle than planned. But hey, this was police business. Serving the public good and all. Gabe figured they’d understand. And if they didn’t? Fuck ’em.