Finally shining the light onto the cow’s head, Ben saw that it had been twisted in such a fashion that allowed him to see the open mouth ringed in foam, the snot-webbed portals of its cavernous nostrils, and one glazed, soupy, tar-colored eye rolled back in its socket. A pencil-thin rivulet of dark blood snaked out of one ear.
Ben frowned and said, “I don’t see any type of wound that could be—”
“Back of the head,” Porter interrupted.
Ben and the others stepped around to the other side of the cow, Ben’s flashlight beam now training on the top of the cow’s head.
Eddie pulled a face. “Jesus, Ben, the goddamn thing’s skull has been busted open. What the hell does something like that to a cow?”
Ben squatted and took a closer look at the wound. The top of the cow’s skull had been smashed open like a gourd, the concave bowl of its cranium glistening with black blood punctuated by tiny pinkish-white fragments of tissue and brain matter. The stench was beyond brutal.
“Its goddamn brain is gone,” Ben muttered.
“A wolf, maybe?” Eddie suggested, kneeling down beside Ben. Behind them, Porter Conroy stood like a scarecrow waiting to be scooped up and carried away by the next strong gust of wind.
“Coyote, is what I think,” Porter opined.
“Wolves and coyotes don’t do this,” Ben said.
“Been rumors of a mountain lion over in the next county, Ben,” Eddie added.
Ben brought the flashlight closer to the gaping wound, the shadows shifting within the bloody chasm. He held the beam tightly on the bones of the skull that poked up like serrated teeth through the torn flesh, whitish-yellow and marbled with grayish striations. Spongy, brownish marrow was visible around the circumference. The flesh at the edge of the wound looked like it had been burned away, not torn. There were parts along the side of the cow’s head where hair had been completely shorn away.
Without taking his eyes from the wound, Ben pointed beyond Eddie to where a large branch lay in the wet grass. “Hand me that, will you, Eddie?”
“Uh…” The officer snatched up the stick and handed it over to Ben. At this proximity, Ben could hear one of Eddie’s nostrils whistling.
With the branch, Ben gently prodded a clump of greenish sludge that clung to the serrated edge of the skull.
“What the hell,” Porter said somewhere above Ben’s head.
Ben pushed harder. The sludge quivered and appeared to be as malleable as taffy. For one instant, Ben thought of marshmallows roasting over a bonfire, melting and dripping into the flames.
“What is that?” Eddie asked.
Ben withdrew the stick and tossed it into the grass. “I don’t know,” he said. It looked like moss clinging to the bone. There was a webbing of the stuff caught in the cow’s eyelashes too, Ben noted. “What are you feeding these things, Porter?”
“London broil. The hell you think I’m feeding them?”
Shaking his head, Eddie said, “What kind of animal does something like that?”
“I have no idea,” Ben said.
“I know what it is,” Porter barked, shattering the quiet. Apparently something had just dawned on him.
Both Ben and Eddie turned their heads toward the older man.
“Ted Minsky,” said Porter.
“Ted Minsky did this,” Ben said. He jerked his chin due north, in the direction of the Minsky farm. “That’s what you’re saying?”
“The son of a bitch has been skinning deer and leaving them dangling from his porch. Damn things attract buzzards and then the buzzards shit all over the place and tear the hell out of the bedding in my barn.” He jabbed a knotted finger at the dead milk cow. “Buzzards did this.”
“Buzzards don’t go after living animals,” Ben told him.
“Don’t tell me.” Porter was obstinate. “I’ve seen those filthy birds all over the goddamn property. They got claws like industrial machinery.”
Ignoring Porter, Eddie looked back at Ben and shrugged his shoulders. “What about a bear?”
Deep in thought, Ben didn’t answer. It wasn’t unusual for black bears to come down from the mountains and make their way into the surrounding towns. He had seen them loitering around trash cans and at the cusp of Wills Creek on more than just a few occasions. When he was a boy, he’d had friends who’d crossed their paths—unharmed, thankfully—while hiking through the woods no more than a mile or so away from civilization. However, he had never heard of a bear attacking a field of livestock before. And such a precise wound as this? To crack open the back of the skull and presumably eat the contents? Ben couldn’t think of any indigenous animal capable of doing such a thing.
Ben stood up. In the beam of his flashlight he could make out all the other slumped forms dead in the field. They appeared to glow beneath the light of the moon. “They all look the same?” he asked Porter.
“What do you mean?”
“The other cows. Their bodies all look like this one?”
“More or less,” said Porter. “Except maybe for the ones in the barn.”
Ben asked about the ones in the barn.
“Their heads,” said Porter. “Goddamn buzzards tore their heads clean off.”
3
With Ben’s assistance, Porter pulled open the large double doors of the barn, the squealing hinges like the shrieks of pterodactyls. From within—and almost instantaneously—a pungent, almost medicinal odor accosted them. Eddie said, “Ah, phew,” then pulled a face and waved his hand back and forth in front of his nose.
That’s not the smell of cow shit, Ben thought, following his flashlight’s beam into the barn.
The barn was spacious and wide, with a ceiling that yawned to nearly three stories. The floor was scattered with hay and there were great bales of the stuff stacked like oversized building blocks beneath a roost. In the beam of his flashlight, Ben made out farming tools hanging from pegs driven into support beams and tools hanging from a pegboard against one wall. The smell of the place caused his eyes to water.
Porter took down a kerosene lamp from a nail that protruded from the doorframe and lit it. Soft, orange light pulsed ahead of them, making the shadows dance. “Storm knocked out the power to the barn,” Porter said, addressing the electrical outlets gridded about the high beams in the ceiling with a crooked, arthritic finger.
“Where are the cows?” Ben asked.
“I’ll show you.” Porter cut around Ben and headed for the shadows deep in the belly of the barn. The lantern’s light cast a halo around his stooped old frame. Ben and Eddie followed, stopping only when they arrived at a wall of three segregated stalls. Each Dutch door stood ajar. There was more straw here as well, heaped in mounds and scattered with what Ben assessed to be oats and grain. And something else, too. Spotlighting a specific mound of hay, he bent down and immediately recognized the third substance as blood.
Ben looked up and peered into the first stall. Inside lay the patchwork hull of another large cow. It was on its side, hooves out toward the open Dutch door, exposing a quill of tender-looking white udders for Ben’s scrutiny.
“There’s two more just like that one,” Porter said, jabbing his gnarled finger at the other two stalls where similar humped shapes rose up out of the darkness.
Just as Porter Conroy had promised, the cows’ heads looked to have been practically sheared off their bodies, leaving nothing behind, save for a pulpy tangle of tendons surrounding the jagged protrusion of a backbone jutting up through the mess like the tapered and pointy head of a spear. There were slashes of bright red blood on the wooden walls of each stall and in the hay surrounding the stalls.
“Where are the heads?” Ben asked after he’d examined each carcass.
“Beats me,” Porter said.
Ben rubbed his upper lip while Eddie, still peering down at the massacre in one of the stalls, kept muttering over and over to himself, “Sweet Mary.”
Ben jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the barn’s double do
ors. “You typically keep those locked?”
“No, sir. I don’t.” There was an undeniable pride in the old man’s voice. Like many of the old farmers out in this part of the country, Porter Conroy was adamant about not changing his ways. The only way someone like Porter would put a lock on his barn doors was when cows figured out how to work doorhandles.
“Mr. Conroy, have you had any…disagreements…with anyone lately?” Humorlessly, he added, “Aside from Ted Minsky, I mean.”
“Disagreements?” Porter said, as if he did not understand the word. The old man’s eyes reflected the dancing flame contained in the glass housing of the lantern, which he’d set on the half wall of the nearest stall.
“Arguments,” Ben clarified. “Fights. Anything like that.”
Porter laughed. “What kind of fights you fellas think I’m getting into at my age?”
Eddie was looking at Ben with wide eyes, his face narrow and slack and nearly translucent in the firelight.
“What are you getting at, Ben?” Porter asked evenly. “I’m not following.”
Ben had raked a set of fingers slowly up and down his chin before mumbling something about just being curious. Animals don’t do this, he thought. Someone broke in here and took these cows’ heads, mutilated these poor animals. It would have had to have been someone—or a group of someones—who possessed more than just a mean streak and had some bone to pick with Porter; it would have had to have been someone evil.
A papery, rustling sound from above caused the three of them to jump. Ben looked up. In the glow of the lantern, it looked like the underside of the hayloft, which was directly above their heads, was moving. Ben clicked his flashlight back on and directed the beam upward.
The underside of the hayloft was teeming with bats, dozens of them, dangling upside down by their tiny, clawed feet, their piggish heads bobbing and jerking while the thin membrane of their wings quivered.
“Oh, yeah,” Porter said conversationally. “Been having a bat problem lately, too.”
4
On the car ride back to the station, Eddie said, “You know what eats brains, don’t you, Ben?”
“What’s that?”
“Zombies.”
“Ah. Of course. Zombie cows.”
“You joke, but strange stuff like that happens all the time.”
“Is that right?”
“Quit humoring me. You ever hear about those exploding sheep over in Ireland?”
Ben clicked off the cruiser’s high beams as another vehicle approached him on the wooded road. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“I read this news article on the computer once, about a farmer in Ireland. A bolt of lightning hit one of his sheep while it was out grazing on a hill. The static in the wool or something caused some kind of electrical chain reaction, and the lightning zigzagged from sheep to sheep—blam, blam, blam!—and fried every single one of the buggers right there on the spot.”
Ben laughed. “That sounds like bullshit.”
“Next day, there were thirty, forty of the sons of bitches sizzling in the field, looking like chicken legs that had been burned to charcoal on a barbecue.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think lightning was the culprit this time.” He was thinking about the dead cows in the barn. What instrument would someone use to take off a cow’s head like that? Those didn’t look like cuts at all. And how would someone get a goddamn cow to stay put for the amount of time it would take to do something like that?
There was a ratcheting sound as Eddie reclined his seat. He took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his khaki uniform, poked it between his lips, but out of respect for Ben’s rule about not smoking in the police cars, he did not light it. “Well, don’t sell that mountain lion business short,” he said, the cigarette bouncing. “Paulie Davenport over in Garrett said they had one been coming into the neighborhoods at night, knocking over trash cans and eating house cats or whatever. A bunch of guys saw it slinking away into the hills one night behind Torry’s Tavern, and one of them took some shots at it with a handgun but missed.”
“Just what I like to hear. A bunch of rogue drunks firing guns out behind a bar.”
“One of the other guys snapped a photo of it on his phone. Can you believe that?”
“Sure.” He knew the Potomac Highlands was no stranger to the creatures, though he had never seen one in person nor heard of them attacking livestock, especially not an entire field of grazing cattle. Not that it was impossible, of course. Recalling the crescent-shaped wounds at the throat of the first cow, Ben could acknowledge that they resembled the type of attack wound generated by a set of claws…
Even if it was a rogue mountain lion, Ben thought, that doesn’t explain the state of the carcasses. Mountain lions attack the head, sure…but what mountain lion eats only the brains and leaves the rest of the meat behind? That part troubled him the most.
“Davenport called someone at Fish and Wildlife, and they told him that it wasn’t unusual for a particular mountain lion to migrate halfway across the country,” Eddie said. “I mean, they said it’s rare, but they’ve seen it happen before.”
“How do they know?”
“They dig through its shit, see where it’s been and what it’s eaten. Also, I heard they do DNA tests on them, too. See, mountain lions out here have slightly different DNA than, say, mountain lions from Arizona or wherever.”
“I don’t think there are mountain lions in Arizona,” Ben said.
“Or wherever they’re from. The son of a bitch could’ve been from Colorado or Montana or the goddamn Pacific Northwest.”
“How do you know so much about mountain lions?”
Absently, Eddie said, “It’s just what I heard from Davenport.”
“This wasn’t a mountain lion,” Ben assured him.
“I’m just saying.” Eddie sucked his tongue along his teeth. “What you were asking Porter back in his barn about having been in an argument with anyone lately?”
“Yeah?”
“You think a person could have done that?”
The radio crackled. Ben hit the CB and said, “Go ahead, Shirley.”
“Possible 71 on Full Hill Road, between mile-markers ten and eleven,” Shirley said, her voice laced with static.
Eddie sat up straight. “Well, shit.” A 71 was a pedestrian struck by a vehicle.
Into the transmitter, Ben said, “Go ahead, Shirley.”
“Just got a call from Cal Cordrick. Says Maggie Quedentock was in a car accident over on Full Hill. She told him she hit somebody out in the road but Cal, he says he checked the area but couldn’t see nothing. He thought maybe she was just shaken up.”
“We’re on our way back from Porter Conroy’s farm now,” Ben said. “We can be there in two minutes, Shirley. You call for an ambulance?”
“It’s on the way.”
“Thanks, Shirl.”
“Well, goddamn,” said Eddie, sticking his cigarette behind his ear.
Ben switched on the cruiser’s bar lights, washing the world around them in alternating blue and red. He pressed down on the accelerator and felt the raw power beneath the hood of the cruiser burst to life. Ben executed a graceful U-turn in the middle of the street then continued along in the direction he had come from.
“There,” Eddie said, pointing through the darkness at the turnoff onto Full Hill Road. Not that Ben needed him to do so. Ben Journell could walk the circumference of Stillwater blindfolded and tell you the name of every tree he bumped into along the way.
Ben took the turn at a quick clip, the dark, swampy trees bowing over the roof of the cruiser and closing in around them.
“Who the hell would she hit?” Eddie said. “I mean, who’s out here walking after midnight?”
“There they are.” Ben slowed down as he spotted the headlights up ahead, smoky in the buildup of exhaust fumes that hung in thick clouds above the roadway. A figure moved in front of one pair of headlights, long limbed and slump shouldered. Ben bro
ught the cruiser to a stop at the side of the road. He reached beneath his seat and grabbed his spare Maglite, then quickly stepped out.
Cal Cordrick waved both arms over his head as Ben and Eddie approached.
“Is everyone okay?” Ben asked, already surveying the situation. Cal’s Buick was facing Evan Quedentock’s Pontiac, and one of the Pontiac’s fog lamps was out. He could see that the cheap plastic grille was cracked and there was a nice little ding in the hood. “Where’s Maggie?”
Cal jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “She’s sitting on the side of the road. She wouldn’t get back in her car and she didn’t want to wait in mine.”
“Go check her out,” he said to Eddie, who hustled down the road while lighting a flare. A moment later, a bright spark of purple magnesium illuminated the darkness. The fog seemed to coalesce.
“She seems okay, aside from being pretty well shaken up,” Cal said. He gulped audibly. “She thinks she hit somebody. I walked around but couldn’t—”
“Let’s take a look,” Ben said, handing Cal his spare Maglite.
They walked down the center of the road, the asphalt glowing with an unnatural pink-purple hue from the road flare, their flashlights piercing the heavy foliage of the underbrush at the shoulders of the road. A cursory review of the surrounding area showed no evidence of a struck pedestrian.
“When did you get on the scene?” Ben asked Cal.
“Just after it happened, I guess. Ten minutes ago? I was coming down the road and saw her headlights facing me, so I slowed down—you know how the road narrows and you need to slow down if there’s a car passing, Ben—but when I got closer I could see that her car door was open and that the car was in the middle of the road. Then I saw her standing out there, looking off into the dark.”
“You said you looked around for the pedestrian?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have a light on me and I just did it real quick, in case there really was someone hurt out here.” The tone of Cal’s voice suggested he did not believe Maggie had hit anyone.