They Stalk the Night, page 11
Beside him, awakened by the phone’s ringing too, Dawn gave him that urgent, questioning look that said she knew something tragic had happened, but she’d wait for him to fill her in when he was able.
Thankful for her constant understanding, he dressed, grabbed his gear, and sped to the crime scene. The sun was just starting to rise on this bleak day, but hovering clouds and drifting fog suppressed the morning in dreary gray light.
At the bowling alley, two Hellum police SUVs, a couple of trucks, and an ambulance were already parked in the front lot. Chief Mike Omdahl and a few volunteer deputies had their guns drawn and were standing behind their cars, watching the derelict building.
Sam got out of his Bronco and grabbed his crossbow. As he approached the cluster of nervous men, he met eyes with the police chief.
Mike said with relief in his voice, “Finally.”
“Are they still inside the building?” Sam said.
Mike nodded grimly. “Randy’s dead, but we were unable to retrieve his body.”
“I feared as much.” Sam felt devastated. He had hired Randy Calland a few years back and trained him.
“We found Jake Hylen’s van out back,” Mike said, “and what’s left of him.”
“And a girl is in there?” Sam nodded toward the bowling alley.
“Most likely Jake’s girlfriend, Tina Aaker. We heard her calling for help. Only…” Mike paused, “…I don’t think it’s her anymore. That’s why I called you in.”
Sam nodded. He pulled a silver arrow from his backpack and loaded the bolt into his crossbow.
“Want me to send a couple men in with you?” Mike asked.
“No, don’t risk them.”
None of the other men were experienced with situations like this. Only Sam and Mike were, but the police chief needed to stay in charge in case Sam failed to make it back.
Before Sam left the group, Mike gripped his arm. “Brace yourself. It’s bad, really bad.” He grimaced, shaking his head. “Watch your back in there.”
Sam held Mike’s worried gaze a moment, and the past horrors they’d shared seemed to pass between them without either saying a word. Sam gave his friend a nod, then left the group of cops to do what Mike had called him here to do.
Sam walked a wide berth around the weathered brick building. Wind whistled through the boarded windows as he passed them. A faded mural of a lightning bolt, along with a bowling ball and knocked-over pins, covered the wall.
Thirty yards past the building, another deputy with a rifle was positioned behind a tree, his scoped barrel aimed at the back of the bowling alley.
Rounding another corner, Sam saw blood on the snow first – long spatters and frozen crimson puddles – then the battered van and the carnage all around it. He winced at the scattered piles of gnawed bones, flesh, and black hair that had once been Jake Hylen. His remains littered the snowfield for several yards, as if the young man had been torn apart by wolves and dragged to different areas to be eaten. The familiar large footprints with claws instantly nixed any wolf-pack theory.
The van looked as if it had been stepped on by a mammoth. The roof was partly caved in and dented. Along the van’s side exterior, long scratches marred the black paint. All the windows had shattered. Glass shards glinted on the ground around the vehicle. The back double doors hung open. They were covered with scratches.
The creature that had attacked and eaten Jake Hylen had left some time before dawn. Mike’s men had followed its tracks to the fence line. The beast had gone back into the forest.
Sam’s concern now was with the girl inside the bowling alley.
When he reached the busted-open back door, he held up his crossbow and switched on the high-powered flashlight that was fastened to it. Where the beam aimed, the point of the nocked arrow aimed. He entered the building slowly, watching for any sudden movements.
To his left and right were rooms half lit by morning light coming in through the slatted windows: a break room with lockers, and an empty room that had once been the manager’s office. Years of dust and debris covered the floors. Cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans. The decaying walls exposed the wooden bones of the building. The drywall that remained was tattooed with graffiti. The flashlight’s beam only reached so far down the hallway before it tapered off into the pitch-dark recesses of the bowling alley.
Sam weaved around stacks of chairs and stepped over several that had been knocked over. As he slowly crept forward down the hall, he listened. It was mostly quiet, except for the wind that occasionally moaned through the boarded windows. Then he heard grunts and greedy gnawing sounds, like when Sam fed their dogs steak bones with some meat left on.
As he stepped into the carpeted concessions area, his light beam found the shoes and uniformed pants legs of a prone policeman. Randy Calland lay on his back. His shirt had been ripped open, as had his chest and belly. Randy’s body jerked from side to side from what was happening at the head end. Sam’s light shone on wild black hair. Then he found a girl in a flannel shirt crouched on the floor, eating the flesh of Randy’s neck. She snapped her head around, looked up at Sam. Blood covered Tina’s chin and a mouth that stretched inhumanly wide. Her lips were shredded, exposing gums. All her teeth had grown sharp. Her eyes reflected the light and seemed to glow silver.
She growled like a feral animal.
Sprang at him.
Sam stepped back and shot an arrow into her chest. As he fell backward, she flew over him and rolled on the carpet. Sam quickly got to his feet. He found her writhing on the floor. Her chest wound smoked where the arrow’s silver burned through her skin. As she was dying, she looked at him with eyes full of pain.
“I’m sorry, Tina.” Sam loaded another arrow onto his crossbow. His second shot pierced her heart.
Keeping a safe distance, he blessed her, asking Odin to free her spirit from the evil that had taken possession of it.
The preternatural light in her eyes faded. At last her body gave out.
Sam pulled his arrows from her chest. As he made his way back out of the building, he teared up for Tina Aaker.
* * *
The field behind the bowling alley had been sealed off with crime tape.
A young deputy named Ballard stood near the van, looking shaken. A pool of fresh vomit stained the ground at his feet. He looked up at Sam and Mike, wiped his mouth, trying to compose himself. “Sorry, I’ve never seen anything this bad before.”
Paramedics brought Tina’s corpse out in a body bag.
“I knew Jake from the feedstore,” Sam said, feeling just as devastated. “A good kid.” He’d never gotten to know Tina, but he’d seen her around. She often sang at community festivals and had a hauntingly beautiful voice. He knew her father, Russ Aaker, more than he’d like to.
When the second body bag came out, Mike’s face tensed up as he struggled to hold in his emotion. “Randy was a good cop.”
“This is so fucked-up,” Ballard said. The rookie was just learning what the Hellum police secretly had to deal with, and the cover-up that would follow.
“I have to somehow contain this,” Mike said. The burden Sam had carried for years as police chief now weighed heavy on the shoulders of his successor.
Sam told him, “Talk with Nettie before her reporters write a word about this. She’ll keep the details out of the paper. Contact the mayor’s office and council immediately. They’ll prepare the community.”
When it came to matters of this nature, the lone village paper, the police, the mayor, and the town members conspired to keep their secrets within their community. No one wanted outsiders or Feds coming in and poking around. Sam had made the mistake of getting Sheriff Hoyt involved the last time. Hoyt had witnessed things he didn’t understand. The laws the sheriff enforced did not apply to the sacred laws and ceremonies the village’s ancestors had implemented to keep evil at bay and survive.
Sam left the police officers to do their grisly work. He walked around the field, keeping to the outside of the yellow tape so as not to disturb the crime scene. The same monstrous footprints he’d seen at LeRoy Skagen’s ranch riddled the snowfield. Some of the tracks were red. Scanning the field of shredded remains, it was difficult to tell where Jake began and ended. Ten yards away, a spine and broken rib cage lay on the ground. Very little flesh had been left on the bones.
A square of crime tape was staked off around a tree. Looking up, Sam spotted the young man’s leg stuffed into the branches. Other than a few lacerations, the leg had been uneaten, presumably stored in the tree for a future meal.
Sam felt absolutely sickened and wrought with guilt. This is your fault. You should have done something long ago to prevent this, and you failed.
* * *
Word traveled fast as a brush fire across the village. It didn’t take long for Nettie Hove from the Hellum newspaper and bystanders to arrive at the bowling alley. The police held them back. Nettie stood among the crowd, demanding answers. Police Chief Mike Omdahl debriefed the town’s leaders who had gathered around him.
Sam was walking back across the parking lot when LeRoy Skagen pulled up in his truck. Stig and Gordy rode in the back bed. Each held rifles.
Russ Aaker climbed out of the passenger side of LeRoy’s truck. “Where’s my daughter?” he yelled. “Where’s my Tina?” Clearly hungover from another night of boozing, the dead girl’s father was in tears as he tried to cross the taped border.
The deputies held Russ Aaker back. He wailed as paramedics loaded body bags into the ambulance.
As LeRoy and the Skagen brothers joined the crowd of onlookers, LeRoy shouted, “The beast did this! It slaughtered our cattle and now it’s coming to slaughter us!”
Stig raised his rifle. “We have to defend our turf!”
The shouts from the Skagens riled up the fear as people demanded that the village elders and police do something to protect them.
Feeling responsible, Sam watched his community unravel.
The daylight had only given them a temporary reprieve. By night, the thing would return in search of prey.
Chapter Fourteen
Mason Thornhill met with Tex Gannon in the conference room at the corporate office. The first week on the job, this Wilderness Watchdog Security guard had proven to be overly communicative and flooded Thornhill’s phone with text messages throughout the day.
“You’ve got two minutes,” Thornhill said. “What’s so important you have to show me in person?”
Tex’s eyes were big and bright as he grinned. “Sir, you’re not going to believe what I found.” He dug through a backpack and retrieved a rugged outdoor laptop. The back of it was covered in stickers of national parks and wilderness towns. The center sticker was a side profile of Bigfoot walking.
As Tex fired up his computer, he explained, “I took the liberty of setting up some camera traps around the blasting area where Rick Scofield disappeared. I mounted motion detection cameras in trees facing Stonefield Pass.”
“That wasn’t what I hired you for,” Thornhill said, agitated.
“I thought it was necessary to get an edge on our predator. I had walked the pipeline searching for that rogue bear, but saw no sign of it. So I figured maybe it hunts the woods mostly at night. That’s why I installed the cameras. And lo and behold, look what they captured.” Turning his computer screen, he showed Thornhill a still image of a forest. Using the touchscreen, he swiped through several boring photos of the rocky field and woods cast in twilight gray shadows. A ghostly mist hovered over the rubble that had once been mounds of stacked stones.
“I don’t see anything but trees and fog,” Thornhill said, growing impatient.
“Weather was bad that day. These were taken at dusk, about an hour before sundown.” Tex stopped swiping when he found a photo of interest. “There.”
The digital image showed a man in a hooded coat hiking with a staff across the rocky field. He carried a crossbow and arrows on his back.
Thornhill leaned forward. “Is that one of the men from Hellum?”
“Yes, sir. Here’s one that offers a better look at him.”
The hooded man had turned his head toward the camera when it snapped. Thornhill frowned as he got a clear look at the trespasser’s face. “That’s Sam Larsen. What was he doing at Stonefield Pass?”
“This.” Tex swiped to a photo of Sam with his back to the camera. His hood was off his head, his silver hair visible. He was holding up both arms, his hands spread open, like he was blessing the slope of Buckhead Hill.
“Pretty strange, eh?” Tex said.
Feeling uneasy, Thornhill said, “That spot where he’s standing was an old pagan ceremonial site. There used to be some rock mounds and a shack there that got destroyed. Sam’s family is attached to that place for some reason.”
“Maybe this is why.” Tex swiped past a few nighttime images that looked like black-and-white negatives of the forest with no humans present, until he stopped on one that showed something else lurking in the fog.
“What the hell?” Thornhill breathed.
The night photos had been washed in light from camera flashes. Part of what might have been bent legs and the sharp end of a large rake had passed through the frame. Oddly, while the rocks and surrounding trees were in crisp detail, the animal’s limbs were blurry and streaked with light flares.
Tex explained, “That was a ground camera that captured what I believe are two legs and a hand with extremely long claws. Some of the cameras malfunctioned for some reason. However, one of them captured a prize shot.”
The last image was an angle of the thing crouched. It was partly veiled by the fog. Streaks of light smeared its face and around its spiky head and body as if it shimmered with an aura.
“Those are camera artifacts from the flashes,” Tex said. “Not sure why the camera couldn’t capture the creature in focus. I found that completely bizarre.”
It was hard to make out what the animal was, only that something abnormal was crouched there.
“That’s the best image we’ve got,” Tex said. “It’s enough to see your predator is definitely no rogue bear. This appears to be bipedal. Some kind of cryptid, I’m guessing.”
“Cryptid?” Thornhill said, unfamiliar with the word.
“The term comes from cryptozoology – the scientific field of animals whose existence have yet to be proven.”
“Is that what you’ve been after all along?” Thornhill said angrily. “Evidence of Bigfoot or Chupacabra?”
“No sir, neither of those.” Tex tapped the screen. “That right there is a different kind of cryptid entirely. Its body is much too skeletal. And I believe those pointed streaks spiking from its head are horns. I’d say this is more akin to the Jersey Devil.”
The notion was so absurd, Thornhill laughed. “Bullshit. What you have here, Tex, are partial images of some kind of animal, probably a white-tailed buck. Your camera artifacts just warped it to look like something you imagine it to be.”
Tex looked disappointed. “Sir, with all due respect, I think we need to keep an open mind and take this predator seriously.”
Thornhill’s temper flared. “I hired you to protect my workers, so I am taking this seriously. But I’m not paying you to hunt for some mythical beast. Don’t waste my time with blurry images. And I better not see these on the internet or any mention of where they were taken or I’ll sue you for all you’re worth. Are we clear, Tex?”
The ex-soldier saluted. “Understood, sir. Sorry, I didn’t mean to cross the line. I was only trying to outfox this predator.”
“From now on, stick to guarding the pipeline.” Thornhill nodded toward the door. “You’re dismissed.”
Chapter Fifteen
Wednesday, December 20th
A horrible nightmare awakened Shelby at three in the morning. She’d dreamt of finding Justin’s bed and Olivia’s crib empty. Frosty wind had blown in through their broken windows, as if something had taken them in the night. Their cries grew distant in the snowstorm. Then Shelby woke up frantic.
She jumped out of bed and raced across the hall into the baby’s room. Olivia lay curled under the blanket, sucking her thumb. Shelby touched her daughter’s back to confirm that she was really there, that this wasn’t some dream within a nightmare, and her baby girl would vanish like a ghost. Shelby felt Olivia’s breathing through her palm. She’s fine.
After quietly leaving the nursery, she ran down the long hallway of their oversized lodge house, past the central stairs, and down another length of hall to her son’s bedroom. Justin was in his bed, sound asleep. Ranger lay curled up at the foot of the bed.
A breath of relief escaped Shelby. It was just a really bad dream.
Ranger followed Shelby as she went to the end of the hall and down the back staircase to the kitchen. Too rattled to sleep, she made some toast.
The pantry door was open and a light was on in the basement. She walked down the stairs with Ranger right behind her.
She was shocked to find Josh, fully dressed in his brown coveralls and bright orange wool cap. He was packing ammo into a rucksack.
“You’re going hunting?” she asked. “On Justin’s birthday!”
He didn’t respond, kept his back to her.
She got her answer when Kujak’s rumbling truck pulled up in their driveway. The headlights brightened the basement’s one rectangular aboveground window. He honked his horn three times.
“What the fuck is he doing at our house?” she asked Josh. Her whole body tensed knowing that creep was right outside her home. She hadn’t seen Kujak since she’d called her father last Saturday night all upset. Dad had assured her he’d handle the problem. She had hoped Kujak had gotten the message and would never come back here again.
