Chapter 10 #2
“Where?” Pike asked, squinting out the window into the night as if he’d somehow be able to spot crows circling in the darkness.
“Way back in the trees, kind of near where the trail comes out of the forest. We’re gonna check it out tomorrow, right, Zach? We can show you guys where it is. We thought maybe it’s an elk, because Zach saw a dead one on the way up.”
“Can’t believe I forgot!” Bram interjected with a slap on his forehead.
“We saw a dead buck all right—huge, just off-trail. Strangest damn thing. The neck and skull were stripped to bare bone. But the body”—Bram sliced a hand across his neck then gestured toward his feet—“from here on down, it was totally intact. Except for a little gnawing on a leg.”
Steve frowned, then forced a neutral expression as if trying to hide his skepticism. “I’ve only ever come across a few bones. Scavengers generally make quick work of things. And they don’t eat just one part of something.”
“It was pretty unusual, all right,” Bram said. “Maybe we can poke around after skiing tomorrow, see if the boys found something similar.”
Pike pressed three fingers to his lips as if he were physically forcing in his nausea before saying, “I’m not gonna go looking for some dead thing.”
“So the skull, the spine, those bones were exposed?” Dave asked.
“Yep. Maybe birds had been at it, like the boys saw,” Bram said.
“What about the privates?”
A confused look from Bram and sardonic chuckles around the table from the others.
“Yeah, didn’t exactly check the state of those,” Bram said with a half smile.
Undeterred, Dave asked, “Was there any blood? Around the head and neck?”
Bram’s eyebrows shot up. “Nope. Did you see it? On the way here?”
“No, but I’ve seen that before,” Dave intoned, voice heavy but with a lilt that held the promise of a campfire story.
The others unconsciously leaned toward him in anticipation.
“I grew up on ranches.” The group nodded, already aware that the Dowling name had been stamped on beef products in stores across the country for nearly one hundred years.
“On our place in central Colorado, we had a bull show up like that in the seventies, when I was about Zach’s age.
It happened—still happens—all over. And no one knows why.
My dad, he was convinced it was the federal government intimidating ranchers—taking out breeding stock while testing bioweapons or the like.
Some of our neighbors thought it was satanists doing rituals. But most people thought it was aliens.”
Jon, who had just taken a long inhale, choked on his vape. “You mean, like, little green men?”
Dave settled back into his chair at the head of the table, framed by the soft chaos of the snow out the window behind him.
“Yep. Plenty of folks saw what looked like black helicopters flying silently at night. Next day they’d find an eviscerated animal, looking like Bram described—head and neck nothing but bone.
And the privates cored right out.” Dave’s hand made a scooping, snapping motion that caused a simultaneous flinch around the table.
“Our veterinarian at the time checked out the bull killed on our place. Said he couldn’t’ve made it look like that with a full set of tools. Too perfect. And no blood.”
Though on the way up Bram had rationalized the elk down to a simple case of bird bait, he now leaned toward Dave conspiratorially. “The cuts on the elk looked surgical. Creepy as hell.”
“There you go.” Dave nodded. “Ranchers started shooting at anything that crossed the sky, guys like my dad made all kinds of stink about government conspiracies, born-agains were praying over cow remains, and the hippies ran all over trying to offer themselves up to alien invaders. Got bad enough the feds investigated. We’re talking the FBI. ”
“Seriously? What’d they say?” Shane asked.
“Nothing that satisfied anyone, that’s what.
Blamed flies. Like a certain type of fly that preys on the soft tissue first, so works from the mucus membranes, the anus, that kind of thing.
But flies don’t show up in one state for a few months, then vanish and move to another.
If it was flies, every rotten cow, every dead animal left exposed would look like that.
And they didn’t. They don’t. Years’ll go by with nothing like it, then all at once—a bunch of things like this elk.
Make fun of me if you want,” Dave said with a portentous look around the table, “but seeing what I saw, I know a man couldn’t’ve done it.
So if someday a monster crawls out from somewhere, I’d say, ‘Well, that explains it. They’ve been watching us all along. ’ ”
Russ and Zach exchanged a nervous look, and Zach knew that like him, Russ was remembering the elongated, claw-crowned tracks curling through the woods, and the mysterious creature Zach couldn’t describe.
“I can say one thing for sure.” Dave held up a finger for emphasis, the rapt eyes of the group on him, awaiting their final lesson. “It showed me there’s evil in this world you can’t explain. All you can do is hope it leaves you alone.”