Original Short Fiction: Hunting Bigfoot for Fun and College Credit, Pt 5 Mom to the Rescue

I hugged the inside curve of the road, pine branches slapping by the passenger side window, staying as far away from the sheer drop off that I only caught occasional moonlit glimpses of.

If you haven't read the beginning of the story yet, here is part one, part two, part three, and part four! Enjoy!

Driving without headlights in the dark, on the side of a mountain, is not something I would have ever put on a bucket list, and I don’t recommend it. I will say my adrenal gland got a hell of a workout that night and driving without lights was by far not the scariest thing to happen.

As we raced through the first town, several stray dogs ran out, barking at the jeep. It was all I could do not to swerve to avoid them, but a few inches further to the left and it was goodbye cruel world for me, the tiny sasquatch that had been given into my care and two of the coolest people I’d ever met.

Phil sat in the back seat with one tiny sasquatch clutching him on either side. Gwen seemed to be enjoying the whole thing and I wondered if perhaps she would have been better behind the wheel.

At one point, the moon came out from behind a cloud and bathed the roadway in blue light, bright enough to drive just a bit faster. I had no idea exactly how fast, since, without the headlights, I had no dashboard lighting either.

The jeep, for its part, handled all of this as if it were just another jog into town. Someone had spent a lot of hours under the hood to keep it in such great condition.

“How long have we been driving?” I asked.

Gwen checked the time on her phone, “About thirty minutes, seems like the next town should be coming up pretty soon.”

And around the next bend, there it was, the largest of the four tiny mountain burgs we’d passed through on the way up. As it came into site, we all noticed the light at the same time. High up in an attic window, was a clear, white light, that looked electric. Framed in the window, was the clear silhouette of what looked like a man, looking out over the roadway.

I had no idea how much noise the jeep was making on the outside, but from where I sat, it seemed like this lookout, perched less than a hundred feet off of the road, had to see us. The moon had just run behind the fringe of a wispy cloud, and the flat black finish on the jeep helped. I slowed and crept through the town, the figure in the window didn’t appear to notice.

“Maybe it’s a decoy,” Phil suggested.

“Could be,” I said.

Right outside of the town, which was labeled as Beaverton, a hairpin turn took us out of site of the window and out trip continued, without a hitch. We hadn’t seen a single living thing since the dogs and it was beginning to feel way to easy, when I saw a tiny pin prick of light in my rear view mirror and growing fast.

I pressed the gas, but had to let up due to a series of S curves that nearly set the jeep on two wheels. One branch, one baseball sized rock, anything and this all ended badly, I kept thinking.

As we approached the third town, according to signs that said there was food three miles ahead, the lights were nowhere to be seen and I convinced myself it had just been a passing airplane, or a reflection. As we came out of the last curve into the town, the roadway behind began to glow, dimly at first, then getting brighter.

Whoever it was, wasn’t just still there, they were right on top of us. Even if they didn’t mean us any harm, at the speed they were going, they’d drive us right off the mountain.

“Um, guys, there’s someone back here,” Phil said, peering over his shoulder. “Whatever it is, it’s big.”

I couldn’t make out much in the ancient mirror. The glass in the rear doors was small, scratched and covered in dust. All I could tell was that the lights were setting high.

“It’s an SUV,” Phil said, just as a set of huge lights on top of the truck flashed on, illuminating the whole road.

They must have seen us, I thought, but what choice did I have? I turned the wheel hard right as we reached the first street of the third town. It ran steeply down, at an angle to the road we’d been on, and the jeep shoved between pine bows that had grown to nearly cover the street, concealing us.

I rolled to a stop and cut the engine. From where we sat, we could see the lights on the truck slow, then a spotlight started sweeping the trees, just above the jeep’s roofline. I cranked down my window to see if I could hear what was going on. The SUV had stopped now.

“See anything?” a voice shouted, as the light flashed back across our roof.

“Nope! They either went off the mountain, or sped up, either way, they have to come down and we’ll catch ‘em. Let’s go!” The truck started up and squealed tires, the lights casting shadows against the trees as they pulled away.

“What now?” Gwen asked.

I opened my door, “We might as well get out and look for some place to hide. We can’t get past a roadblock, and I don’t want to have a showdown on this road in the dark.”

“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said since this whole thing started,” Phil said.

We climbed out, helping the two Miracle Bears out of the jeep. The girl immediately climbed up onto Gwen’s shoulder, while the boy wrapped itself around my waste and refused to budge. I pocketed the key and we walked down the road past where the jeep had stopped.

Phil turned on his flashlight app, but we quickly decided we could see better and further without it, plus, what if Esau were wrong? There could be watchers here too. After what felt like a couple of blocks, we came to an intersection, that led to the main part of town we’d seen from the road earlier that evening.

If you’ve never been to a ghost town, you should go, but not with people chasing you in the dark, when no one in the outside world has a clue as to where to find your cold bodies.

It’s every stupid thing you’ve ever shouted for a character not to do in a horror movie rolled into one.

We approached the abandoned buildings slowly, listening for any hint of someone watching us. Gwen was closest to the board walkway along the store fronts, Phil, brave as ever, was in the middle next to me, while I walked a line along what used to be the middle of the dirt street.

At this distance in the dark, the buildings did not feel as abandoned as we remembered from the roadway in the light. In fact, there was a suspicious lack of grass growing up for a street that hadn’t seen traffic in thirty years.

“I was afraid of this,” Gwen said.

“What?” Phil asked.

“They’re back,” she replied.

Phil and I both stopped, looking to Gwen for an explanation, “What?” She said, defensively.

“Put your hands over your heads, and stop talking,” said a quiet voice behind her, “Well, Gwendolynne, your mother is going to be so happy to see you.”

I put my hands in the air, Phil raised his momentarily, but couldn’t quite let it go, “Mother? Gwen, what is he talking about?”

“Hey, chubby guy, shut up. I am aiming a 12 gauge shot gun at your balls right now, don’t make me regret not shooting you already,” said the voice.

From the hillside above the town, a low, bloodcurdling howl lifted.

Everyone froze, “What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Nothing for you to worry about, is what that is,” the voice said.
We turned toward the voice. There, in the middle of the street was a boy. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen, and he was indeed pointing a large shotgun at Phil’s junk.

I lowered my hands, then thought better of it and put them back up, as he shifted the barrel of the gun toward my own nether regions. This kid had a fetish of some sort.

“Gwen, who’s your friends here?” the boy asked. But, Gwen was gone. The space where she’d stood just an instant before held nothing but a confused baby sasquatch. Phil knelt and picked her up. The kid looked around nervously, as another growl, decidedly closer, sounded from the forest.

“All right, get moving,” the kid said, moving the gun toward me.

I backed away. “Turn around and start walking,” he said. I did.

“Where are we going?” Phil asked. He was past the point of caring what happened. I had seen him like this before, if it went any further, he would become completely irrational and there was no telling what he might do. Sometimes he just shut down and hid in his room, other times he lost his cool and scared unwitting bystanders who assumed he was capable of violence. He wasn’t.

“Keep walking, I’ll let you know when we get there,” the boy said. He was walking far enough back to prevent me easily grabbing his gun without getting shot, it kind of seemed like he had done this before. “All right, turn left.”

We turned down a narrow alley between buildings, ahead on the right, a door opened, and a patch of light fell out onto the ground. A third howl sounded, this time, seeming to come from the opposite side of the town than the last two. The two tiny sasquatch were trembling.

The female jumped down and took a step away.

“Hey! Grab that thing! No way they’re getting away now,” the boy moved to the side, where I could see him. I grabbed the little female by the hand and we stepped into the room behind the door.
We were in a low room, along the back of a building.

It looked like it had originally been horse stalls, but was walled in at some point to create cells. It was a makeshift prison. There were two cells, one leading into the next. The boy took the female bigfoot by the hand and led her into the first cell, unlocked and opened a door into the second and led her into it.

A woman stood to one side, a nickel plated pistol extended in her hand.

“Don’t try nothin, I know how to use this and I ain’t afraid to kill,” the woman said, pointing the pistol at Phil and I.

“What’s going on here?” I asked. “Who are you and why are you detaining us?

“My ma there is the sheriff, I’m her deputy and this is what we do to everyone comes into our town. You’re trespassers. Once you paid your bail, you can go,” the boy came out of the cell with two sets of chains, similar to the ones the baby sasquatch had recently freed me from.

We couldn’t win tonight apparently. He dropped the chains on a nearby barrel and frisked, confiscating our cell phones, and the note, but missing my buttonhole camera.

“You mean a fine?” Phil asked. “Because, I don’t think you have jurisdiction to put us on trial, so bail wouldn’t really be appropriate.”

“Won’t be no trial, you pay your bail, you go,” The woman said.

“Well, see, that’s not bail that’s a ransom, which makes this kidnapping,” Phil explained, “Do you know that? Since you didn’t identify as police and tell us we were under arrest, you are kidnappers. That’s a federal crime.”

The kid moved angrily toward Phil, slapping a set of chains into his chest, “I don’t see no federal government officials here, do you?” he asked. “Put these on and shut up.”

He handed me the second set of chains and I decided my best chance was to do as he said. Once we were secured with handcuffs, leg irons and chains between them, he herded us into the first cell and locked the door.

“Look, I get that you need to shake us down, make a little money,” I said, “But, I think these little guys back here miss their mother, and unless I miss my guess, that’s her out there in the dark. So, how about we let them out, and see what happens? We could use my phone there to film it and you’d make a lot more money for that reunion footage than you would from us.”

The kid seemed to think about it, he had a whispered conference with his mother then turned back to them.

“Nope. We think it’s best if them Miracle Bears get back where they belong. They’re the hope of this whole mountain and when things are back to normal, Ma’s gonna make me mayor here.” He said.

“Well, then how about you hand me my phone and I’ll just transfer the money to you?”

“Do I look stupid to…” he never finished the sentence, with a single Thump, the door to our makeshift prison, crashed through it’s jamb, landing flat on the floor, sliding up against the bars of the cell.

There, framed in the moonlight was the largest primate I’d ever seen. The sasquatch roared, then shoved through the opening, which now looked incredibly small, the creature’s shoulders took out lumber and plaster on both sides, causing a cloud of dust as it leaped into the room. Behind us, the male infant let out a squeal in response to the adult’s arrival.

The creature screamed and stood to its full height, or almost. It was impossible under the eight foot ceilings in the jail. All that stood between us and a full-grown sasquatch was a row of iron rebar, welded into a grid, with squares a little smaller than a man’s head.

The smell was overwhelming, as the thing beat its chest with massive arms and showed a row of yellowed teeth, it’s blood orange eyes, boring right past us to her offspring.

“Jack.”

“Yeah, Phil?”

“Next time you think it’ll be funny to apply for a research grant…”

“Yeah?”

“Go screw yourself, man. I think I just wet my pants.”

In the cell behind us the babies, seemed to be laughing. Their mother was now gripping the bars on the front of our cell. As far as she was concerned, the only way to her babies, was through the space we were currently occupying.

The boy and his mother abandoned the shotgun, dropped our phones and bolted out the door into the night.

“Wait, could you just throw me my phone? Not sure the button hole camera is catching all of this!” I yelled after them.