The Big Reap (14 page)

Then it ripped his throat out, and he couldn't if he tried.

I wanted to mourn him, to apologize for dragging him into this. But there wasn't time. Not while this thing was still breathing.

The spilled kerosene on the tunnel floor burned off, and the fire extinguished itself, leaving the tunnel full of thick black smoke and precious little oxygen.

My eyes stung. My lungs burned for cool, clean air. I crooked my elbow and breathed through Mendoza's shirtsleeve, blinking back tears as I cast about for a weapon.

Guns were useless against this thing, they didn't do shit. And there was no skim blade in this private hell of mine, replica or otherwise.

There was, however, rebar.

The men who'd constructed the tunnel had used it to anchor the chicken wire. It jutted from the dirt floor and walls as well. Not everywhere, just here and there. Took a good thirty seconds of fumbling in the smoky dimness to find some. It poked out cold as nighttime desert from a nearby wall, and came out reluctantly. I can't say how long I yanked at it before I finally freed it from the wall. Long enough for the beast to disappear into the deeper dark of the eastward tunnel, I suppose, because when I looked back toward Solares, where I'd last seen it, it was gone.

It didn't stay gone long.

I heard its ragged breathing, back and to my left. I spun, but saw nothing.

A sudden pop like a gunshot, only quieter. Then another, then another. All to the west, from whence I came, which was now as dark as was the eastern passage.

The creature had broken the nearest three light bulbs.

A rustle of scale-dry skin. A flash of slightly paler dark amidst the black. And then needles in my shoulder. Teeth or claws, I didn't know.

I swung blindly at the creature's point of contact with the rebar, and hit the fucker so damn hard, I heard something crack. If its reflexes had been better, that crack would have been my meat-suit's collarbone. Instead, given the muffled yowl the beast let out, I'm guessing I took out its jaw. No telling how long that jaw would take to mend. Minutes, maybe less. This thing had been feasting, after all. Its powers were no doubt at their peak.

It retreated some, and let me stew in the black a bit. I didn't much enjoy it. Played Babe Ruth and swung for the cheap seats once or twice with my rebar, succeeded only in tiring myself out. So little air left in this still, dark tomb of a tunnel.

I fell to my knees, then onto my back. Felt consciousness bleeding away, the choking air a pillow against my face. My eyes fluttered shut. And then it struck.

Just as I'd been hoping.

I knew I hadn't much time left, so I figured playing possum was my best bet. A bluff's all the more believable when it's half true. And I'd seen this fucker's game once or twice already. I knew it liked to cover ground all lickety-split with a well-timed pounce.

Unfortunately for it, I was ready. Got the rebar up in time. Felt the thrum of electricity through the iron as it broke through the creature's chest, traveling from my meat-suit's hand up the bar like Lilith had suggested was the case. I pray the Lord its soul to take. Its one intact eye gleamed wet and wide in the near-dark. Its body slackened as the rebar broke through the ancient flesh of its back. Atop the rebar, stuck like iron filings to a magnet, was the gnarled, lifeless hunk that was this creature's soul. I could feel the vibration of it through the three feet of rebar. Weak, but still alive, though the body I'd removed it from was nothing more than empty flesh.

I lay a moment, pinned beneath the impaled creature. Then I heaved it to one side and climbed out from underneath. “You know what?” I asked its corpse as I wrapped my hand around its soul and crushed it to dust like so much chalk. “That one
was
kinda personal.”

The ground rumbled all around me, swinging light bulbs on their naked cords and loosing dust from the ceiling, while the creature's lifeless figure crumbled to bone and dust. My memory cast back unbidden to the collapsing Pemberton Baths, and I feared for a moment the tunnel was going to come down around me. But whatever mystical juice Magnusson had tapped into in the length of his unnatural existence proved weaker tea in this subhuman, feral beast, because almost as soon as it began, the rumbling quieted, and the swaying lights stilled. The cave still stood. And eventually, creakily, so did I.

Then, my task completed, I left the cave of cooling dead behind, and stumbled out into the half-lit predawn of the slowly waking desert alone.

 

8.

“Nicky! Nicky, are you effing
seeing
this?”

As a point of fact, Nicky
wasn't
effing seeing this, because Nicky wasn't home right now. He hadn't been for a while. When he and his cohorts stopped to film their live webcast Q&A in Boulder two days back, I took the opportunity to hitch a ride in ol' Nicky, stuffing that poor, befuddled neo-hippie burnout into a metaphorical steamer trunk in the back of his mind next to some half-remembered Rusted Root lyrics, the abandoned mental blueprints for his pot-themed amusement park, and that awkward memory of seeing his not-yet-stepmom naked that one time by accident only really on purpose.

Not that Topher (pronounced Tow-fer, like we didn't know his name was really Chris) or Zadie'd noticed. Firstly, because Nicky – the cameraman, equipment tech, weed supplier, and webmaster behind their all-the-sudden way-more popular web series
Monster Mavens
– who oh, by the way, really hated being called Nicky it's Nicholas or at least just Nick you guys c'mon – was the quiet type, usually too baked and too absorbed in tinkering with his many gadgets to offer up more than a crooked half-smile or a grunt to register his happiness or displeasure (excepting those rare instances in which he felt he'd been Nicky-ed to excess). And secondly, they were too busy basking in the their newfound fame.

Until two weeks back, Monster Mavens was a modest internet success, with their blog generating a couple hundred unique hits per post, and their YouTube channel clocking in at somewhere around twenty-five hundred subscribers, half of whom were smartass college kids at least as baked as Nicholas-not-Nicky, who only tuned in to mock Topher and Zadie's stubborn, moronic credulity in the face of no evidence whatsoever.

See, Topher and Zadie hunted monsters.

Badly.

Of course, they called them cryptids, and played them off as animals as-yet undiscovered. You know, Bigfoot and Nessie and the like, only they talked about them like they were a hair's breadth away from coelacanths, those fish everybody thought were extinct until some fisherman netted a live one off the coast of South Africa. But if you ask me, finding a seven-foot ape in the Pacific Northwest or a dinosaur in a goddamn loch is a frick-ton less likely than a new fish in the sea. As anyone'll tell you, there are plenty of them. Plus, these two patchouli-stinking, constantly bickering Deadheads (their shirts all said “Phish” or “Moe” or “Dave Matthews Band” on them, but I've been around a while, and I know the type) didn't strike me as the scientific-method type – all the jargon-laced talk of fossil records and investigative methods in the world couldn't convince me this gig of theirs was anything other than the two of them successfully forestalling their entrance into the real world, in favor of nights spent swigging jug wine around the campfire and boinking in tents while – and unfortunately, I know this part for absolute, if unscientific, fact – don't-call-me-Nicky here surreptitiously recorded audio for his own, uh, personal use.

Then came Ada Swanson.

And then came fame and fortune.

And then came me.

You've heard of Ada Swanson. Hell, anyone who walked past a TV set in the summer of '09 couldn't have missed her. Those blond locks all twisted up in perfect ringlets, the tweezed eyebrows and bleached baby teeth that somehow so grotesquely aged her. Cheeks rouged rounder than round. Lips sculpted by cosmetics until their childlike fullness more resembled a grown woman's. Every picture perfectly staged, her twirling a baton in the front yard of her family's modest raised ranch in their quiet Colorado Springs suburb; playing piano at the local senior center; volunteering at a Denver soup kitchen. Always in sequins and a smile. And all of America wondering what kind of sick fucks did that to a six-year-old. Dolled her up. Pranced her about in front of crowds and cameras. Toured the pageant circuit like she was some kind of prize poodle: sit up, roll over, beg.

It was only a matter of time, the eager sad-faced viewing public told themselves, before someone went and took her. After all, that's what happens in these twisted cycles of exploitation. They escalate, become self-feeding. Pageant-kids become targets for predators. And twenty-four-hour news networks make stars of murderers in their endless quest for new sets of bones to gnaw on.

The lack of irony with which we exploit the exploited to feed our endless need for misery-based entertainment is astonishing.

She was three days shy of her seventh birthday when she was taken. Straight out her bedroom window sometime between midnight and 6am, if her parents were to be believed. Not that anybody thought they were. They were creepshows, said America, and on that, at least, America probably wasn't wrong. Mom was a pill-popping, big-haired, crispy-banged former cheerleader who ran the front desk at a local Chevy dealership and occasionally, after hours, lay atop it with the owner/manager. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship: his bad back kept her in Oxy, and the jungle-gym sex she treated him to in return kept him in a bad back. Dad was a general contractor with big hands and a big mouth who'd been between jobs for going on six years, which didn't stop him from racking up a four-figure tab at the local watering hole, and low fives at the track. Then there was his best buddy, a local ski bum by the name of Dick Hartwell – five feet six of pure douchey smarm, always photographed in the same fleece vest and wraparound Oakleys, like he'd just stepped off the slopes. His picture was splashed across every news outlet the nation over for weeks when kiddie-porn was found on his computer. Never mind that it turned out to be a bunch of images downloaded from the sort of “barely legal” site where the chicks are all twenty-something behind their lip gloss, knee socks, and pigtails, by the time they cut him loose, his rep was ruined. Which was fine, I guess, since it turns out ol' Dick Hartwell of Colorado Springs was once Richard Hartwell of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who just so happened to be thirty-two months in arrears on his child support payments for the three children by two women he'd left behind.

No one believed their story. Not even me. I mean, who pries open a second-story window in a quiet, closely packed development with no trees or hedges to speak of and absconds with a freakin' six-year-old girl and her trusty stuffed rabbit without raising enough ruckus to wake the whole damn block? The way I saw it, the parents had to know more than they were letting on. They seemed all lovey-dovey on the surface, sure. But once the media spotlight blistered off the thin veneer of normalcy they'd overlaid onto their life, the rot beneath only served to make them look even guiltier than the hard-to-swallow lack of evidence.

No wonder Ada's pop decided to eat a gun six months into the investigation.

Anyways, given the lack of evidence, the leads dried up pretty quick, and once every speck of dirt in the Swanson family's life had been well and truly inspected by the tutting masses, folks lost interest. Then some nutjob psychiatrist in Fort Hood went on a rampage that left thirteen soldiers and civilians dead, and America moved on. The grand pageant of misery had found another head on which to rest the crown. Funny to think the well-coiffed anchors said the shooter-shrink's name a thousand times, but the victims in that case were nothing but a hashmark on his tally. At least when a kid went missing, they were given the dignity of being exploited by name.

So what's any of that got to do with Topher and Zadie and Nicholas-you-guys-not-Nicky? That's easy. See, two weeks ago, the three of them were trudging through the chill Colorado wilderness, hot on the trail of some nothing-at-all they were convinced had to be Sasquatch (a local hiker snapped a blurry photo of something brown and maybe moving, which didn't seem that remarkable to me, since damn near
everything
in Colorado that isn't snow is brown, and half of it is moving) when they, uh, found her. Or she found them. Or not, depending who you ask.

You wouldn't think the event would be so contentious, so up for debate. I mean, Nicholas-not-Nicky caught the big moment on camera, and once word spread, the footage was picked up by the mainstream media, first local, then national. The handheld camera jittering in time with the sound of trundling footfalls, crunching over dead leaves and crusted, desiccated snow as dry and noisy as breakfast cereal. Topher's breath pluming as he whispered his narration – all mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and “majesty of nature” monologuing. Zadie with her emphatic “Nicky! Nicky, are you hearing this?” as their bull-in-a-china-shop parade through the stunned silence of the old growth forest was joined by a fourth set of footsteps – crazed, ragged, and coming ever closer. Topher, Nicholas-not-Nicky, and Zadie crouched for a moment, silent, behind a thicket of brambles, beyond which that fourth set of footfalls shuffled out a confused solo while it tried to figure out where its accompaniment went. Topher prattled on in a reverent whisper about how they were going to change the course of modern science when they revealed the gentle giant behind these bushes – this missing link between man and beast – to the world.

The big moment: Nicholas-not-Nicky's hand reaching out past the lens to push aside the branches. Zadie gasping. Topher shouting, “What the fuck?”

And then the three of them gang-tackled by a gaunt, hunched, and apparently stark-raving-mad woman – ninety years old if she was a day – with wild eyes, tattered pajamas, and matted hair that looked like strands of iron and steel against her blue-tinged hypothermic skin, which was speckled white with frostbite. She smashed head-first into the camera, mashing a cheap pink plastic barrette into the lens. The four of them went ass-over-teakettle – the five of them if you count the old lady's stuffed bunny – and slid down a small embankment to a creek. The whole while the three monster hunters are screaming, and the woman's prattling on the same nonsense five-syllable phrase over and over again. “Ahwahmahmommee!” stacked end-on-end, without so much as a pause for breath. She mouthed the words with every inhalation as well, sounding like a cross between a bullfrog and a set of soot-choked bellows. When they finally came to a rest at the bottom of the embankment, snow-dusted and sprinkled with pine needles, Topher and Zadie tag-teamed trying to calm her down, one soothing while the other asked Nicholas-not-Nicky if he was getting this. It didn't take, so Topher – fed up, I guess, or else he spent too much time in college watching soaps – slapped her. America didn't like that much, as it turns out, and he later admitted on the Today show he shoulda maybe had Zadie do it. But still, it did the trick; the old lady stopped talking.