Swamp Monster Massacre (15 page)

She felt her stomach growl. “I’m willing to face the consequences if it can’t. Here, rest on me.” She pulled his arm across her shoulders. He laughed.
 

“After all this, you want to get crushed to death?”

“You should know by now, I’m tougher than I look.”

Rooster nodded, and she felt more of his weight lean in to her.
 

Together, they limped away from the skunk ape’s decapitated body, and the smell grew fainter with each step.
 

A lone gator watched them make the water crossing. Rooster asked Liz for the machete, but thankfully didn’t need to use it. The reptilian eyes bobbed atop the water, following every painful step. At one point, the water washed over their heads and they had to swim. Every stroke brought fire to his arms and lungs. He breathed a sigh of relief when they made land.
 

A pink and purple dusk bathed the swamp, and he knew they had to double-time it.
 

“It’s not far now, just a couple hundred yards,” he said, spying a gumbo tree that his father had carved a series of deep notches and swirls into as a marker. Time had almost erased his handiwork. For the first time since jumping on the airboat, Rooster felt like he had some control.
 

“Does it have a bed?” Liz asked, still doing her best to prop him up.
 

“A couple of old army cots that probably have more mildew than a politician has bullshit.”

She patted his back lightly. “That sounds like a night at the Ritz right about now.”

There were a couple of times his head spun and he thought he was going to pass out, but Liz sensed the slackening in his body and swelled under him to keep him upright and moving. The chick was the goods, all right.
 

She let out a whoop when his father’s cabin came into view. One side of the roof was sagging something fierce, and the local flora had grown so high around it that it looked like the earth was trying absorb it, board by board.
 

Thank you, Daddy.
Sometimes, having a criminal father had its advantages.
 

Rooster straightened as if he’d been hit with a cattle prod.
 

That smell!
 

Liz had caught it, too, because she whispered, “Oh, no, there’s more.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rooster told Liz to stay and moved up closer to the cabin. She could hear a muffled commotion and her heart sank into her shoes.
 

The skunk apes were in the cabin.
 

She held her breath as Rooster, calling up a fifth or tenth wind, crept outside the cabin, peering inside the half-open door. She saw him clench his fists, and when he turned back, a dark veil of rage had descended over his face.
 

He walked to her and said, “I’m going to need the machete.” His voice was atonal, like a zombie.
 

“You’re in no condition to go in there. Maybe we can just wait them out, go in when they leave and see if there’s anything salvageable.”

“The machete.” He held his meaty hand out, his arm steady as a steel girder.
 

“But−“

“Just give me the blade.”

She reluctantly handed it to him. He stalked back toward the cabin. He wasn’t sneaking this time. He wanted his presence to be known. She watched him stride through the door, and then the gates of hell opened up.
 

When Rooster looked inside the cabin, he had expected to find one or two of the Bigfoots. It made sense to use the place as a shelter. His first inclination was to hide out until they went out looking for the rest of their family or tribe or whatever the fuck they were.
 

Instead, what he witnessed was something that could not be tolerated, could not be waited out while cowering like a scared boy.
 

Maddie lay on the big oak table that he had helped his father cart out one nice early spring day.
 

Her skin was a dark blue. She was dead. At least there was closure on that front.
 

Around her stood five of the creatures, only smaller than the band that had been picking them off for the past two days. The tallest was maybe a little over five feet.
 

Bigfoot adolescents.
 

One was taking a turn at Maddie, its grotesque body between her legs and pumping like mad while the others hooted around it. They pawed her face and breasts while stroking what could only be their erections under their fur.
 

The rage he felt was unmatched by every angry moment he had ever experienced, combined. No one deserved this.
 

Maddie, above all, didn’t deserve this.
 

They would pay, now, and with as much pain and suffering as he could administer.
 

Rooster knocked on the door with the end of the machete. The gawking Bigfoots stopped, but the one screwing her corpse continued with complete disregard.
 

“Well, now I know which one gets it first,” he grumbled.
 

With the back of his foot, he kicked the door shut. These Bigfoots were nothing like the other ones. There was cold fear in their eyes. Most of them were scrawny, almost fragile. He was anxious to see just how fragile.
 

The others backed away when he swung the machete, catching the one with Maddie along the top of its head. A quarter-moon slice of its skull slipped away, and its brain bulged out of the opening. Still it pumped away.
 

Rooster felt the storm of his anger overtake him.
 

And it felt good.
 

When he emerged, he did his best to brush the bits of fur, skin and bone from his clothes, but it was impossible to get everything. Liz saw him and she made to run over.
 

“Stay there!” he shouted. “I’ll bring out anything we can use.”

Jesus, he could never let her see this. After massacring the Bigfoots, he had covered Maddie with an old wool blanket.
 

There were a couple of cans of peaches and pears, a tin of chewing tobacco, one cot that hadn’t been bashed into splinters and not much else. The ham radio was in pieces. It looked like it had been smashed years ago. So much for calling for help.
 

He brought the cot and cans to Liz.

She twitched back slightly as she took hold of the cot, studying him like you would an agitated cobra. Shit, he didn’t want to scare her, but he wasn’t sure he would ever recover from this.
 

“Is…is the radio still there?”

He shook his head. “Here, lie down a bit. We’re not going anywhere soon.”

When he went back to the cabin, which now resembled the inside of a slaughterhouse run by wolverines, he pulled up one of the floorboards to see if there was anything in the secret stash. He found an old hurricane lamp, two lighters and a .38.
 

Guns. That’s what had gotten him—hell, all of them—into this mess.
 

He took the hurricane lamp and smashed the top against the skull of one of the creatures. With a few flicks of his wrist, he doused the entire cabin with the kerosene.
 

After raising the blanket and looking at Maddie one last time, he flicked the lighter’s wheel and tossed it on the larger pile of Bigfoot pieces to the rear of the small cabin. They caught with a tremendous
whoosh.
 

Black tendrils of smoke followed him as he walked outside.
 

Liz stood by the cot, holding the cans to her chest.
 

Red and orange flames danced out of the lone window and licked the sides of the cabin.
 

“Maybe someone will see that,” he said, and sat heavily onto the ground.

“Do you think there’s a chance?” Liz said, her voice trancelike.
 

He considered it. “Well, we’ve been gone a couple of days, so the search would still be on. It’s getting dark. Fire like that’ll show up real nice.”

They watched in silence as the fire consumed the cabin, the wood popping and spitting, setting a nearby tree alight.
 

He heard Liz sit on the cot and felt her hand on his shoulder.
 

“I wonder if there are more of them out here?” Liz said. “They could be watching us right now, or they could be on another island miles away. What are the chances we got them all?”

“I don’t know, Liz. And as long as they stay the hell away from me, I don’t fucking care.”

The fire burned, night fell, and they waited.

About the Author

Hunter Shea is the author of the novels
Forest of Shadows,
Evil Eternal, Swamp Monster Massacre,
and the upcoming
Sinister Entity
. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including
Dark Moon Digest, Morpheus Tales
and the anthology,
Shocklines: Fresh Voices in Terror
. His obsession with all things horrific has led him to real life exploration of the paranormal, interviews with exorcists and other things that would keep most people awake with the lights on. He is also half of the Monster Men video podcast, a fun look at the world of horror. You can read about his latest travails and communicate with him at
www.huntershea.com
, on Twitter
@HunterShea1
, Facebook fan page at Hunter Shea or the Monster Men 13 channel on YouTube.
 

Look for these titles by Hunter Shea

Now Available:

Forest of Shadows

Evil Eternal

Coming Soon:

Sinister Entity

How can you escape the ghost of yourself?

Sinister Entity

© 2013 Hunter Shea

The Leigh family is terrified. They’ve been haunted by the ghostly image of their young daughter, Selena. But how can that be, when Selena is alive and well, and as frightened as her parents? With no where else to turn, the Leighs place their hopes in Jessica Backman, who has dedicated her life to investigating paranormal activity. Accompanied by a new partner who claims to able to speak to the dead, Jessica will soon encounter an entity that scares even her. And a terror far worse than she imagined.
 

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Sinister Entity:

This was the way it always started. Your body reacts faster than the mind can comprehend and a person with experience learns never to ignore what the hairs standing at attention on your arms are telling you. The house was quiet, had been deathly silent for the past three hours. Silent, dark and empty.
 

Jessica Backman was about to move from her position at the end of the bed and head to the hallway when she felt the first prickles of gooseflesh break out across the back of her neck, until every follicle on her scalp was tingling with anticipation. The sharp whine of a monitor went off in the living room below and stopped suddenly, as if smothered by someone or something that didn’t want its presence to be known. Jessica’s heartbeat started to race as the first jolt of adrenaline raced through her system. She had to force herself to inhale slowly from her mouth to dampen the noise of her own breathing in her head. Here, in the dark, her sense of hearing was the primary tool in her arsenal.
 

She carefully clicked her penlight on, shining it onto her notebook so she could mark the time.
 

2:36am – Living Room EMF/Trifield alarm…short burst…goosebumps…not alone

Craning her neck, she could just make out the empty driveway. Sometimes clients made surprise visits in the middle of the night, ultimately throwing a fat monkey wrench in the works. Unless they walked from Bedford to Bronxville, an almost thirty mile distance, the McCammon family was not the cause of the sudden change in the atmosphere. Jessica sat as still as a stone, waiting.
 

Pap.

Just outside the bedroom door, a slight tap, like the sound of a pebble bouncing off the carpeted hallway. The night vision camera sat on a tripod in the corner of the room, pointing at the doorway. If something had fallen onto the floor, the camera would hopefully have captured it. Jessica waited for more. She could feel the building tension now in her chest and head. It was as if the house was gathering its strength, building and building until the air was redolent with static electricity and the pressure in her ears was ready to pop.
 

The sound of scratching on the walls, like a large determined cat trapped between the rafters, wafted throughout the house. Jessica couldn’t tell where it originated from, and it stopped the moment she rose from the bed and took her first step to the door. She paused, waiting a few moments for it to resume, then continued into the hallway. Leaning forward over the steel banister, she looked down into the living room and adjoining dining room.