Bewere the Night

Kilgore shouldered the bag and shook his head. “Almost exactly the opposite, my friend. I do this because I’m not a preacher. Now if you’ll kindly point me at your barn, I’ll get myself to work.”

“It’s back over there. You see the roof, through the trees?”

“Yes, I do.”

“All right. There’s the barn over there, and behind it there’s a little run-off that turns into a creek when it rains. Watch out for that. It’s none too deep, but it’ll trip you up if you don’t see it.”

Mark reached out a hand and Kilgore took it and shook it. “I want to thank you,” Mark said. “I appreciate you coming out like this. Is there anything I can do to help you, or anything you need?”

“No sir. Just you and Josh here go in the house and stay there, and don’t come out—no matter what you hear. You two understand?”

“Sure do,” Josh answered for them both.

And when they were safely inside, Kilgore looked into the distant sky. He saw the outline of the barn roof, and as he began to walk toward it, he started his mental checklist. He kept his voice to a whisper. It wasn’t the world’s quietest whisper, but it wasn’t supposed to be.

If he was too quiet, nothing would hear him.

“Probably not a vampire,” he said. “It would’ve sucked the goats dry but not torn them up. Might be a demon. But usually they get other people to do the sacrificial killing. It’s not much of a birthday present if you’ve got to buy it yourself. Chupacabra, maybe?” He’d never met one, but that didn’t mean they didn’t happen. “Never heard of a goatsucker this far north.”

The barn was barely more than a sharp-shadowed shape, squatting low and square along the ground. Within it, a few odd bleats of curiosity gabbled and small hooves shuffled back and forth. The smell of straw and shit wafted from underneath the locked and barred-up door.

Kilgore held his head against it. “Everyall right in there?”

“Na-aa-aa-p,” someanswered.

And something else answered, too—from over in the gully. First it was just the sharp, out-of-place pop of a branch, and then there was another rattling, the hard clack of two rocks coming together as if they’d been stepped on.

Kilgore pulled his head away from the barn door and reached for the gun that hung under his left armpit. He was a practical man, and he saw no good reason to ramp up slowly.

Another big twig broke, and another knocking set of rocks sounded like footsteps to The Heavy. “Josh, Mark. That’d better not be you.” But the pace of the motion told him it wasn’t made by anything two-legged. There were four feet … moving at a sharp and regular clip.

He revised his guess. Not feet, perhaps. “Four … hooves?”

He listened for the firm, approaching patter. The creature was tracking around back, to the right. Kilgore tracked around to the left, keeping the barn between him and the thing that was crawling out of the gully.

The Heavy kept his eyes on the ground and his ears on the edge of the property, at the line where the creek run-off turned and flowed through a row of trees. His squint told him where to tiptoe past the building’s corner and how to miss the watering trough. His ears detected a wet snuffling sound and the hard, knocking clatter that, yes, sounded like hooves.

As Kilgore circled the barn, the thing circled too, intrigued enough to follow but not bold enough to charge.

“Here, critter-critter,” he called softly. “Come on out and get me. I’m just a slow, fat man. I’m easy pickings for a bad old thing like you, and I’m a real hearty meal. Are you hungry?”

He narrowed his eyes and peered through the night.

“Come on, now. Come out and let me get a look at you.”

Around the back of the barn there was a covered storage area that came up to Kilgore’s thigh. He put his left hand down on it and tested the wood. It might hold. It might not. But he was running out of barn and he was going to have to make a stand someplace. The platform was as good a defensive position as any.

He stopped his retreat and lifted one large leg. “Shit,” he mumbled, and he said it a couple more times as he hauled himself up. But then he stood, and the storage lid held. It didn’t want to. It bowed and creaked underneath four hundred and fifty pounds of man plus all his supplies.

Kilgore dropped the duffel bag and unzipped it, all the while trying to keep quiet so he could listen.

Around the corner, something big was tracing Kilgore’s scent trail.

The Heavy pulled out his Bible. It was way too dark to read so he stuffed it into his belt, and the book bent against the strain … but he liked feeling it close. He held up the gun and aimed it down at the corner where the inquisitive snuffling was coming up fast. Mark had been right. Its head was low to the ground.

He shouldered the bag again.

It was too dark to see anything with real certainty, but near the earth there was motion in the nighttime blackness. Something blocky congealed, creeping snout-first from behind the edge of the building.

One dull red eye sparked into view. It blinked and the scarlet dot flickered, and focused, and turned to face the man on top of the storage box lid.

The second eye came around, and behind it came a high set of peaked shoulders.

The eyes locked on Kilgore and they brightened with greed.

“What … a werewolf?” he asked, knowing this guess couldn’t be right. The shape was all wrong, the joints and muscles were strung together differently.

It snorted and scraped its hooves beneath its body.

The suddenness of its momentum almost took the Heavy off guard, but not quite. This wasn’t his first rodeo, so to speak, and his trigger finger answered the charge with three rounds fired quickly and directly at those vicious little eyes.

The thing screeched a piercing objection. The bullets knocked the creature away from its path and it shook itself like a dog but it didn’t go down. Instead, it went forward—head set low and set barreling—into the storage bin.

Two boards busted outright, and combined with Kilgore’s exceptional weight, this was enough to buckle the whole structure.

He tumbled down and off, falling and rolling over the edge and onto the creature, which grunted and tried to turn around in time to bite.

But once he got rolling, Kilgore was hard to stop, especially when he tucked his head down, pulled up his knees, and let the momentum take him. There was too much mass and too much inertia; nothing short of a gorge or a brick building could slow him down.

As it turned out, he happened to be rolling toward a thickly overgrown gully.

His steamrolled over tall grass and skinny sapling trees. It bounced where appropriate and jolted to a rough and terrible pitch over the edge of the gully and down only a couple of feet to the V-shaped bottom … where he wedged himself to a stop.

He lowered his arms and shook his bullet-bald head.

Above, and around the curved path he’d mowed or flattened with his accidental retreat, the clattering quick clop of four hard feet approached. It wouldn’t be long before the creature saw the man or smelled him, or simply followed the trail of the trampled foliage.

At least, thank God, Kilgore thought, wasn’t stuck. But his leg was pinned underneath him, and his ribs were aching from the turbulence. He sat up and retrieved his leg. He’d dropped one of the guns, but he had both hands free—and he used them to pat himself down for a damage check.

His ass was numb. His knee was torqued. His right wrist was starting to swell. A dozen other assorted bumps, bruises, and scrapes made themselves known with a low-grade hum of pain.

None of it was so bad that he couldn’t get up.

The twisted knee made a loud pop when he bent it, but then it felt better so he kept on crawling to his feet. Somewhere along the way, his bag had come unzipped and the contents had scattered; he’d lost some of the stakes, and the water gun had broken, leaking its contents all along his path. But he still had a light he was afraid to use, and he still had that second gun, which remained in its holster.

And his Bible was still stuck in his belt.

When he placed his hand on the rocks at his waist in order to make that final pull to bring him upright, he