“Argh!”
Brubaker was not a happy camper first thing in the morning. When his phone rang two or three times, he had to get up, throw off the blankets, and practically run to the far end of the room. His basement room was over thirty feet long. The only phone jack was at the west end. His bed was at the east end, placed right beside the heater outlet and well away from the semi-permanent puddle in the southeast corner of the room.
Raining all night. Two inches of fuckin’ water in here at dawn.
It rang seven times and stopped. The voice-message feature had kicked in. But almost immediately, or so it seemed to the groggy Bru, it began ringing again.
“Jesus H. Christ,” grumbled Brubaker, who often wondered what the ‘H’ stood for.
He stumbled out of bed for the second time and ran for it.
“What?” he blurted through tense jaws.
Bru was a bad call for early morning telemarketers.
“It’s Nibbles! Get your ass down here! And bring your bow and some arrows,” his little buddy yelled.
Stark, naked fear was unmistakable in his voice.
A short, sharp jab of excitement hit him right in the midriff.
“What?” gasped Brubaker, not sure he’d heard it right. “Are you out of your mind?”
“There’s a big fucking crocodile in the back yard and it almost ate my mom!” Nibbles bellowed. “I’m not fucking shitting you, this is real! Get down here.”
Bru could hear Nibbles’ ma, Bonnie, in the background. Her voice was high and strident.
“Why don’t the cops answer, Dale?”
(Nibbles’ mom was the only one who ever used his real name.)
“How the hell would I know?”
Nibbles’ loud and impatient voice could be heard answering, as Bru’s befuddled mind tried to grasp it.
“Two minutes,” promised Bru with resignation.
Something real was going on over there. Running down the street, even a hundred metres, with a bow and arrow didn’t seem like such a good idea. Chuck strung his new bowstring on to his green and black, re-curved, wood and fibre-glass bow, and tossed the rotten old quiver into the back of his minivan. As some kind of afterthought, he put in the other three bows, all with strings hooked up on one end and wound around them, and another dozen arrows, tied together with a leather thong, and then he left.
This way, there was less chance of someone calling the dirty, no-good Lennox Cops on him.
Would the hate, not the most pleasant way to live, would it never end?
He drove down the street, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.
Pulling up into the end of the driveway, Nibbles and his mother were visible in the front window. Normally he would have gone to the back door, but they were beckoning him to come in the front.
The startling realization came; that for the first time in his life, he’d left the house barefoot. Huh!
“Take a look at this,” said Nibbles, grabbing his arm and pulling him through the living room and into the kitchen.
A pleasant, but fairly small room; it had a bay window overlooking the back yard, the back fence and the public garden plots which were leased from the city by apartment dwellers. These were usually the working poor, the elderly, immigrants, and guys on welfare.
“Where?” asked Brubaker impatiently.
“There,” said Nibbles, pointing to the shrubs along the east side of the yard.
There was something big and dark and shiny in there, camouflaged like a World War II ME 163 rocket-fighter, but it had a foot.
“Holy crap,” said Brubaker. “That’s frickin’ huge! Did you call the cops?”
Nibbles nodded vigourously.
“We’ve been trying for half an hour,” said Bonnie. “Their line is dead.”
“Okay. Try again. Okay, Bonnie? It’s probably a good thing you called me,” he said.
Right then the creature, which looked to be about fifteen feet long, began to move towards the back of the yard.
“That’s not a crocodile. That’s not an alligator,” he told them. “What the hell is that?”
They just stared out of the window in awful fascination.
“Fuck! It’s a school day,” Bru gasped.
He bolted for the front room and the exit.
Bru whipped open the side door of the van, slung the quiver on his shoulder, and notched up an arrow. He drew the string back about halfway, then held the arrow in place with finger pressure.
“We’d better keep an eye on that thing,” he told Nibbles, who stood at the half-open front door. “Any luck on the phone?”
Nibbles shook his head, looking back into the room, consulting with Bonnie.
“Just stay in the house,” he told Nibbles. “If I have to shoot it, I don’t want the arrow to miss, and bounce off the ground and hit someone.”
Drawing the string to its fullest extent, Brubaker moved cautiously up the driveway.
That was one big fucking animal. He didn’t have it in view. Stalking was an old skill, perhaps grown rusty over the years. The neighbour’s house to his left was silent and the car was gone. Anne’s kids were probably in day care. He moved to the right, up against the wall of Nibbles’ house. He went around the corner, and peered over the gate. He could just see the tail of the animal slithering along. It was about to disappear from view. Suddenly Nibbles was right there with him, reaching out and pulling on the string that operated the gate latch.
“Shhh,” noted Bru, with a wry head-shake at Nibbles’ reluctance to miss anything.
The other nodded. Once the gate was open, Bru went through it and hid behind the corner of the garden shed. He searched the bushes visually, and found what had to be it; a dark sheen visible through the barren branches and still-clinging autumn foliage.
Brubaker was not a hunter. He preferred the camera. It had fewer moral ramifications. He once shot a robin with a BB pistol at extreme range, not expecting to even hit the thing. He literally pointed the muzzle two feet above its head. But he was getting real good by then.
He really didn’t expect to hit it.
But he must have. It started walking around in circles, with its head wobbling around, and he felt so fucking shitty after that one, he never did it again. He was about seventeen at the time. A couple of guys in a canoe, and a case of beer. Fun up to a point.
Bru studied the layout. If he missed, the arrow would be stopped by the neighbour’s garage. Holding the bow ready, the drawn string up near his cheekbone, he approached very cautiously. It was evidently aware of him, for it made a sudden turn.
He fired without hesitation.
A hit!
Right in behind the left shoulder.
It began to twist, and turn, and whip around like a mad thing. Over and over it rolled, trying to get at the intolerable pain in its side. It must have thought some invisible thing was attacking it. It kept trying to bite at its side. Bru stepped back right smartly, almost bowling over his little buddy Nibbles.
Bru was having a hell of a time getting another arrow out of the quiver.
“Fuck,” he bellowed. “What’s going on?”
Bru was livid with anger, reaching awkwardly over his shoulder and not having much luck.
“They’re all falling out the bottom!” shouted Nibbles.
“Well, fuckin’ yank one out the God-damn bottom!” yelled Bru.
Finally Nibbles handed him an arrow, and stood there with a half dozen in his hand.
Brubaker flung off the quiver in disgust, noting a few more arrows in there.
“Get them,” he instructed.
Bru fired again, and again, and again, as Nibbles stuck arrows into the soft turf beside Charles where he coul
d reach them easily.
“These fuckers are hard to kill,” he told Nibbles, standing there in horror.
Watching open-mouthed, Nibbles saw blood everywhere, sprayed all over by the thing’s deadly thrashing. He could feel the spray. Brubaker was speckled in red dots, running down in little streams now.
“Jesus Christ, Brubaker!” yelled Nibbles.
“Stand back,” said Bru, and the tail came whipping through, although it missed their ankles by inches.
“Don’t go near it,” he advised, as the thing seemed to be running out of steam.
* * *
“Well, aren’t you the fucking hero!” grinned Nibbles.
“Are you kidding? I’ll probably get charged with something,” said Brubaker in potent sarcasm.
“What?” queried Nibbles’ mom in disbelief.
She stood in the yard, a knitted sweater over her shoulders, arms crossed underneath it to ward off the chill. Bonnie was disgusted, but simply couldn’t look away.
“Don’t forget, I’m paranoid and delusional,” he reminded them. “Not even human, really.”
“No one believes that, Chuck,” Bonnie gasped, shaking a little with the cold and probably a certain amount of upset.
“Well, you can testify to that effect at the inquest,” he said.
“What inquest?” they both said at once.
“Next time they take me to the loonie bin, I’m gonna make ‘em shoot me dead,” he told them in no uncertain terms.
“Nothing’s worth that,” Bonnie said in dismay. “Chuck, you have to get over this.”
“When them creeps are gone, and we have the OPP in here, then I may sleep a little better at night,” he told them. “Mind you, the Nassagewaya people may have something to say about it.”
One of their people was a martyr to OPP bungling and former Premier Mike Smegma’s offhand racist remarks. Brubaker was still feeling the effects of his early-morning angriness. He brought himself up short. Try not to shit on these people.
It wasn’t their fault. Maybe it was just low blood sugar or something.
“Is it really that bad around here, Chuck?” she asked.
“This is the dumbest, creepiest cop-force in the whole damned country,” he vowed with conviction.
Suddenly she was dry-retching, and turning away.
“Go in the house, mom,” Nibbles suggested; perhaps more aware of the little nuances of Bru’s moods.
“Sorry to drag you out of bed for no reason,” he snipped with a grin, his expression one of wonder and humour.
Nibbles’ relief was a palpable thing. He sagged all over; but especially at the knees.
Bru just grinned.
“Thank God you put some pants on,” guffawed Nibbles. “Tee, hee!”
“I see your point,” Chuck admitted.
A smiling Bru was a thing to behold.
He felt like Conan the Barbarian at this juncture. Bonnie caught her breath, looking at Brubaker, all two metres of him. Bow in hand; breathing like a race horse, no sweat, as calm and cool and collected as a cucumber.
Was this the same guy?
Nibbles looked on in silent contemplation, unable to articulate what he felt or saw.
Brubaker…Brubaker was magnificent…in a virile, masculine sort of a way, of course.
“I’ll try the phone again,” she offered and headed for the door.
“What’s with all these sirens?” asked Nibbles.
Brubaker had a thought. His smile gone now, he cautiously approached the dying critter. Standing well back, he wandered around it, looking at the thing, studying it.
“What the fuck are you?” he asked in astonishment.
Much to his surprise, he got an answer.
“Muh…muh,” it croaked in the saddest, most pain-wracked, and lowest little voice, a voice he would remember in dreams for the rest of his life.
The creature crouched there with just the slightest suggestion of breathing, as its sides rippled in and out.
“I’m not your mother,” he told it, stepping back, the response torn out of him in sheer awe.
“Then…you…must…be…God,” the thing observed.
It finally died with a horrendous death rattle, the ragged breath coming out of its mouth in a horrid stench.
He stood there with his jaw hanging.
“Jesus…fucking…Christ…” breathed Bru. “What…the…fuck…?”
After a long silence, he let the tension go on the string and lowered the bow left- handed to his side. He stood there for a good two minutes. Chuck rubbed at his whiskers absently. He hadn’t even splashed water on his face yet.
“I don’t like this at all,” Chuck finally concluded.
Then he edged closer and studied the animal some more.
“Get me a big knife,” he asked.
Nibbles scurried to the kitchen door.
He brought Bru a good-sized kitchen carving knife. Brubaker studied the creature intently. Placing the tip at a certain point just ahead of the back leg, where there was a hint of swelling, he shoved it in, and pulled down with a grimace.
There was a fair amount of blood, and then Nibbles saw it. He saw what looked like tennis balls, all covered and smeared in gore, and goo, and a milky, mucus-like sloppy substance.
“Eggs,” said Bru in answer to Nibbles’ unspoken question.
“Does that mean there’s more of them?” gaped Nibbles.
Brubaker nodded uncertainly.
“We don’t know if they’re fertilized, or what,” he added. “I can never remember the difference between ovoviparous and viviparous.”
Bru’s voice trailed off uncertainly.
“The one means that it lays eggs, and the other means it brings forth live young,” explained Brubaker.
There was nothing but silence from Nibbles, who was transfixed by all the blood on Bru’s hands.
“I’m really starting to hate this,” Chuck concluded. “Got a smoke? I kind of forgot mine.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Thunder in the Mountains…