“Trrrick!” said the scarecrow in a gleeful voice, as it held high in its right hand the pumpkin it had carved.
“Trrrreat!” it continued, as it raised a shiny hand sickle in its left, the blade stringy with pumpkin innards.
Hezekiah renewed the struggle for his weapon, exposing the side of his neck, the part the scarecrow knew would splash and spray blood so wonderfully.
In his nifty new scarecrow costume, Everett Geelens, many centuries later to be known as the Trick-or-Treat Terror, played with his pretty new toy, sharing it, in his way, with Hezekiah Hardison.
* * * *
Modern day
“When I’m sheriff, I’m gonna get a helicopter for stuff like this,” Yoshida had quipped to Hudson as they set up the hunter’s blind. That was three days ago. It seemed like three years.
The culmination of months of planning, this “stakeout,” for lack of a better word, had the Cronus County Sheriff’s Department’s two ranking officers camped out in what was essentially a treehouse for potentially as long as four days.
It was no pleasure outing. Despite consisting of precious vacation and sick time, this outing was pure duty.
The elevated shelter, which Hudson and Yoshida had started planning and building the previous winter, sat nearly two dozen feet off the forest floor, wedged in the strong fork of a towering elm and hidden from below by strategically placed poplar branches and camouflage netting.
Eight feet square, the wooden box barely accommodated the duo. Food supplies were limited to bland necessities meant to provide energy and limiting waste scent production. Water was consumed sparingly. Latrine buckets were emptied into heavy-duty garbage bags that were hoisted through the roof above the hide and left to hover over them like a disgusting sword of Damocles. A flashlight, wax paper taped over its red lens and pointing straight up, gave a modest hint of illumination in the cramped shack.
Rugged as these conditions were for the deputies, they were mild compared to those suffered by their bait down on the ground, a juvenile fawn. They had placed her in a painless snare just for this purpose, to keep her relatively comfortable while they watched her through the scopes of their tranquilizer rifles, which lay poised in the narrow slot that was the blind’s third opening.
They passed notes using legal pads—they were on their fifth—and traded off watching the bait while the other did push-ups and sit-ups, read or napped. Long before day three, the cramped solitude had begun to wear on them. If the two longtime friends had allowed themselves to speak at this point, they would surely have screamed at each other.
Hudson peered through the night-vision scope of a tranquilizer rifle loaded with high-dosage darts, which he had ordered from a gunsmith in Eagle Ridge. Beside him, Yoshida peered through an identical scope attached to a more traditional hunting gun.
Unlike Hudson’s, his rifle was loaded with silver-tipped bullets, for a worst-case-scenario shot.
They had good reason to remain vigilant. This spot was less than a mile from where the first of many cattle killings had occurred, starting less than a year ago. It had been abandoned by bears and other known predators. This was a sure sign that a more dominant carnivore had taken over the area.
After the events of the previous year’s Devil’s Night, they knew that only one animal could be more dominant than bears and wolves.
Nearing the end of twilight, their inertia was violently shattered when their sights fell on a hulking, dark shape stealthily approaching the fawn.
The shape was familiar. It raised a terrifying memory Hudson and Yoshida had shared with a pair of punk rockers, a memory less than a year old.
Hudson drew the breath that braced his body to take the shot.
The skulking black hulk got set—and made a leap. It covered over twenty feet, landing upon the fawn. Following deftly with the luminous sights, Hudson pulled the trigger; no more than a mute clink.
“You got her!” Yoshida said, breaking the three-day silence. “She’s moving!”
“Keep eyes on her!” Hudson rose and hurried to the trapdoor, clicking on the radio clipped to his belt. “Maybe I won’t have to chase her too—”
“Get away from that hatch!” Yoshida sprang up and aimed his rifle at the square door. The way the weapon shook in his hands, he might have stepped on a live wire. “She’s coming to us!”
Hudson leaped back from the hatch and reached for the knapsack slung across his back. The sound of scattering leaves in the wake of something massive—coming lightning-fast, and snarling with carnivorous rage—sent their adrenaline soaring.
Hudson’s hand went to the silver chain in the sack, found the lock that coupled the links. He pulled the loop taut, as he had practiced hundreds of times.
The hunter’s blind quaked when the bulk of the beast hit the elm. The growing volume of its growl told them the creature was climbing the trunk as deftly as a spider.
The enormous wolf’s head burst through the plywood hatch like a torpedo, sending convulsions of terror through the seasoned deputies. Then the beast was upon Yoshida before he could pull his trigger.
Hudson lunged toward the monster with the chain loop held out—and missed, landing awkwardly across the monster’s sinewy back.
The werewolf sprang to her hinds, sending Hudson face-first to the floor. Seeing stars, he thought for an instant that he was ascending into the night sky.
“The chain!” Yoshida’s cry and the beast’s ear-shattering roar brought him back. “Now!”
Hudson posted his foot to stand—and stepped right through the shattered hatch.
He caught himself on his hands, as he made out, in the dark mass of movement, Yoshida on the creature’s back, pulling the rifle across its throat. He was sure to be tossed off at any second.
Hudson got his footing and launched himself again, aiming the chain loop for the pointed ears that nearly touched the ceiling. This time the hoop found home—only to get stuck halfway down the werewolf’s thick head. Hudson cursed that he had made the loop
