Bigfoot Crank Stomp (8 page)

“Take Lyle and go pick it up and bring it back here,” Gabe said.

“Sheriff, are you going to clue me in on what we’re doing?”

“We’re going to catch it.” Betts and Pronger came around the corner carrying clear plastic boxes of meth. “And here comes the bait.”

RUSSELL

Branches whipped his face. His toes connected with a rock or log, sending him somersaulting head over heels. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t stay down. Russell jumped back up and kept sprinting. Because the giant feet still pounded behind him. They rumbled the earth with every fall. It sniffed the air, tracking his movements. He swore he could feel its breath on the back of his neck.

Keep running
, Russell thought.
Stay ahead or end up like Mickey.

Hell no. He’d kill himself first.

But he’d left the shotgun behind. Shit. All he had was the bag of money, bouncing and digging into his spine.

The footfalls grew louder. His stomach quaked under their drops. It growled. Not roared. No, it wanted him to know it was close. That it would have him soon.

Keep. Running.

Russell’s thighs were on fire. The burn spread up his hips into his guts. He wanted to stop and throw up. He wanted quit. The adrenaline kept him going, though. It pumped what little energy he had through his limbs. It sharpened his vision, his hearing, helping compensate for the scattered moonlight peeking through the treetops.

Whoa!

Tree trunk. Russell slammed on the brakes, pivoted about forty degrees, and managed to make it around. His deltoid caught some bark and he felt it scrape skin through his shirt but there was no pain. Not yet at least.

There it was. A sharp needle-like stabbing throb spread into his shoulder. He felt something warm and wet trickling down his arm. Blood.

KEEP. RUNNING.

Flickering. Something flickering in the corner of his left eye. Russell risked a glance without slowing down. A fire. Campfire.

Something else. A shadow by the fire.

Oh, shit
, he thought.
It’s a person.

KEEP. RUNNING.

He risked another glance. Sure enough, a woman. By herself, as far as he could tell.

KEEP! RUNNING!

If it was a dude, maybe he could. Just ignore him. Maybe pretend he never saw him. A woman though…

Russell slowed and altered course, heading for the fire. “Hey, lady!”

The woman leaned forward over the arm of her camping chair, squinting into the dark beyond the flames. She had a bottle of beer in her hand.

“Who’s there?”

Russell was about twenty feet away. “You need to get up and run!”

“What?”

Ten feet. “Run!”

She jumped to her feet but remained still. She wore a 49ers jacket and blue jeans. Her dark hair was pulled back in a pony tail. “Who the hell are you? One of those assholes blasting
Seinfeld
and cop shows at the top of the hill?”

Russell skidded to a halt a few feet away from her. He bent over and grasped his knees, sucking air and coughing. “Cop shows?” he managed between breaths.

“Yeah, I heard gun shots.”

“We need to go.”

“Why?” Wood snapped in the dark. “What was that?”

“The reason we need to run.”

Another snap. Sniffing.

“What is it?”

“No time now. It’s close.” A low growl. “It’ll kill us.”

Her eyes showed fear. She backed away from Russell as if he were the beast. “I-I-I—”

Fuck it
, Russell thought. He reached out and grabbed her arm. “We need to go. Now!”

“I-I—”

In the dark beyond the flames, Bigfoot roared. The woman screamed. Russell tensed up for a moment but his reflexes kicked in. He dragged the woman away as the beast bounded into the light.

“Oh my God!”

She moved with him. Russell stayed ahead of her, holding onto her hand as they sprinted deeper into the woods. Bigfoot roared again behind them. Its feet pounded earth, resuming the chase.

“What does it want?” she said.

“To kill us.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Away from it.”

They rounded a pine and scurried down a hollow. The woman tripped on something and went flying forward on her chest. Russell tried to catch her but lost his grip on her hand. She connected with something hard, crying out in pain. He bent over to help her up but she wasn’t moving fast. She was barely moving at all.

“Come on, we got to move,” Russell said, yanking up on her arm.

“I’m dizzy.”

Russell noticed blood on her forehead. In the moonlight, it looked black. “Can you move?”

She took a step and lost her balance. Russell caught her this time.

Shit
, he thought. Behind them, the thundering footfalls stopped. A few seconds of tense silence. Russell held his breath. He felt the woman at his side doing the same.

Something hit something in the darkness. Like a baseball slung into the side of a house.

“Did you hear that?” she said.

“Yeah.”

Another moment passed.

Then the sniffing started. A roar followed.

“Fuck.” Couldn’t run. Not with her like this. He couldn’t leave her behind, either. Not now. Not after basically leading the thing to her.

The footfalls resumed. It was close.

There
, he thought. He pulled the woman over to a tree. There was a boulder near the trunk. Above it a limb. Maybe they could climb it.

“What are we doing?” she said, wiping blood from her eyes with her sleeve.

“Get up on that rock.”

She didn’t ask anything more. She managed to pull herself up. Russell followed. He almost slipped but righted himself before sliding face first back down. They were a good four feet above the forest floor now.

“Come here,” Russell said. “I’m going to boost you up.”

Again, the woman didn’t say anything. She let Russell wrap his arms around her hips and lift.

“Can you reach it?”

“Yeah.”

Russell couldn’t see but felt her weight diminish in his grasp as she pulled herself up. Behind him, the footfalls grew louder. They seemed like they were on top of him.

He turned on the top of the boulder in time to see Bigfoot sprint from behind a tree toward him. Russell’s eyes widened and he jumped and caught hold of the limb.

“Hurry,” she said.

Splinters bit into his hands as he pulled up. He managed to get his right elbow over the branch. Below, Bigfoot roared and jumped on the boulder. It pawed at his dangling feet. Russell flailed his legs and connected with its head. It bought him enough time to swing his left foot onto the limb. His right still drifted in space.

Bigfoot didn’t go for his stray foot, though. Instead, he felt its fingers trying to grab the bag on his back. Its putrid breath baked his neck. If it got a hold of the bag, it could rip him and the whole branch down.

Russell swung his other foot onto the branch and pulled himself the rest of the way up. He looked around for the woman.

“Up here.”

He looked up. She was already another three branches above him.

He hurried, managing to get to his feet while moving his hands to the trunk for balance. Bigfoot roared again and jumped and grabbed the branch. The whole tree shuddered under its weight.

Beneath his feet, the wood creaked and then cracked like a thunderclap. Russell leapt for the next branch above as the other snapped free from the trunk. He grimaced as he scratched and clawed to hang on.

It took a minute or so to regain a firm hold. Once he had it, Russell pulled up and sat on the branch just below the woman. His arms and shoulders burned as much as his thighs. His lungs fought hard for air. Dizziness squeezed his head.

“You think it’s dead?”

Russell rubbed his temples. “What?”

“Look.”

He blinked and glanced down at the ground. Bigfoot lay on its back to the side of the boulder. “Fell when the branch broke?”

“Hit the rock on the way down. Sounded like it snapped its back.”

Could we be that lucky?
Russell thought. He squinted, trying to improve his vision. It took a few moments to adjust but his night vision sharpened enough to make out the beast’s chest rising and falling in shallow waves.

“It’s still breathing.”

She sighed. “Maybe we can get down and head for the Loop.”

“You want to risk your neck that it won’t wake up as soon as you hit the ground?” She didn’t answer. “Me neither.”

“What happens when it wakes up?”

“It’ll probably go bat shit crazy and try to get us again.” Because it’s a junkie and hasn’t made it through the withdrawals yet. “Hopefully it’ll go away once it realizes it can’t reach us.”

“Or it’ll just knock the whole damn tree down.”

Russell leaned back against the trunk and wondered if the thing could actually knock something this big down. Then he remembered what it did to Mickey. If it could rip someone apart so easily in a drug-fiend craze, what was a tree to it once the withdrawal got worse? No, they needed to start thinking of another way to get out of this mess. Waiting up here wasn’t the answer.

He wished he had his pipe. A hit would help. It’d clear the cob webs. Help him think straight. Definitely would ease the fire raging in his muscles and joints.

“You’re bleeding,” she said and pointed at his shoulder where a section of his shirt had been torn away.

Russell checked it out. Nice little gash but nothing too bad. He motioned at her forehead. “You, too.”

She wiped more out of her eyes and pulled a tissue from her jacket pocket and pushed it against the wound. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Huh?”

“Your name, what is it?”

“Russell. Yours?”

“Persephone. Everyone calls me Seph, though.”

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “I wish I could say it’s nice to meet you.”

Seph chuckled. “Yeah, me too. Pretty hard to believe.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Russell chewed on his bottom lip and tried to figure out what to do next. They couldn’t stay up in the tree much longer. But he had no idea what to do next.

“I think we need to find a way—”

Russell broke off when he heard movement. He looked down to find Bigfoot rolling onto its side.

MANNY

It hadn’t been hard to track and locate. The continuous pounding of the earth. The labored breathing followed by frenzied sniffing. The snapping of limbs and bouncing off of tree trunks. Anyone could have found it. When Manny did, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

It’s Bigfoot
, he thought when he first saw it through the scope. The moonlight illuminated the crazed eyes and savage maw of the beast. He couldn’t make out much more than that. There was little doubt what it was. The facial features, prominent brow, and an almost cone-like skull were all too familiar from the thousands of artist renderings seen on television specials and tabloid journal reports.
Woman Escapes Bigfoot in Northern California
with a pencil sketch of the monster under the headline. Or one of those
Monster Hunter
-type shows on Discovery or History Channel with all its fancy computer animation. There were differences here and there. More hair, less hair, bigger teeth. But essentially the same across the media.

Manny hated to admit it but they’d been pretty much dead on with their renderings. Which meant there had been some truth to those loonies and their encounters. At least a few of them.

Now I’m one of the loonies
, he thought.

He remained downwind of the creature, staying about three hundred feet away. He kept it in the crosshairs when he could. He didn’t plan on shooting it but if it caught on to him and decided to charge, he didn’t want to be surprised. If he had to fire, he wasn’t sure the bullet would have an impact. Not a center mass shot, at least. He glimpsed several wounds across the creature’s torso as it sprinted in and out of the moonlight. Looked like the deputies had tried to stop it with scattershot before it made it into the woods.

Then he saw what it was after. Some skinny guy ran for his life. Bigfoot wasn’t running away from people, it was pursuing. A predator after its prey.

What the hell did that poor son of a bitch do to end up in this fix? Then Manny remembered his own position and realized he could end up much the same way if he wasn’t careful.

Manny pursued at a brisk pace for several hundred feet before stopping and finding the creature again in the scope. It had changed course several times, keeping pace with the guy who was trying like hell to shake the beast. Manny did the best he could to maintain his distance but the thing was fast. Determined. Still in pursuit. The skinny guy broke off suddenly on a perpendicular course. Toward flickering light.