If you’re new here, welcome to Sleep Tight, the section of Kindling where I share original short fiction. This is Part 2 of a work in progress on a short story called Chattel. It follows Clive, a struggling rancher whose cattle start dying mysteriously, left expertly mutilated and missing their vital organs and blood, a real phenomena that sometimes creeps its way into newspapers. Please feel free to comment!
Part 1 | Part 2
The boy’s eyes were on him. He could feel it despite his busy hands as they scooted printed photos against the wooden table. He was arranging them absentmindedly, pushing them back and forth without realizing it. Clive raised a hand, snapped his fingers in the air, and the boy stopped moving. His heart rate ticked up a beat, but he kept his voice steady.
“Sir, I’d imagine you mistook a dog, or a coyote—”
“It ain’t a coyote!”
He had tried to reach someone at the Department of Wildlife for three days now. The woman on the line, Shirley, was the unlucky one to call him back. She let out a sigh. The boy stared straight at him now, the black fear from days earlier when Clive had taken him to see what the wolf had done to the cow right under his nose, filled his face. Clive turned away from him and waited.
“Sir, I know how upsetting this can be.”
“What if I get you pictures?”
The boy was rustling them around again. Clive turned to his kitchen table. The envelopes from the days before had been moved to the kitchen counters. Now, a spread of 4x6’s splayed across the table. Great black cows in each one, arranged with their various missing parts. Bored out holes for eyes, empty mouths where tongues should be, their insides hollow caverns.
“Sir?”
“Of the wolf. What if I can prove it?”
She was silent on the line.
“Well, I guess if you can prove it, and prove that it’s one of our wolves—”
“Then I have a case?”
“Yes, if that were possible you would have a case. But sir, they have all been tagged. We would know if there was a wolf missing from the Wyoming pack—”
Clive hung up the phone.
“Everything okay?” the boy asked.
“Better than okay. You up for a long night?”
The boy nodded, his eyes still uneasy. Clive’s hands were shaky, eyes burning from days with only a few hours of sleep. He reached into his pocket and grabbed two aspirins, then popped them into his mouth and swallowed them dry. The taste of bitter saliva eased the buzzing in his head.
“We need a camera.”
“For what?”
“That bitch on the phone says if we can prove it’s a wolf out there then we have a case.”
“Can’t we just get a trail cam? It might not come if it smells us.”
Clive stepped close to the boy and pointed a shaky finger at him.
“That’s what I thought. So I experimented.” A fleck of spit hit the boy on the cheek. He saw that Clive’s lips were cracked. Little pools of white foam gathered at the edges of his mouth. “I stayed in one night. Didn’t go out with the herd. And you know what happened?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Clive took two steps back and smiled, holding out his hands on either side of him like he had solved the world’s greatest mystery.
“I don’t understand.”
“It wants us out there!” Clive said, slamming his fist into his open hand as he said it.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. But I’ve seen it four times now. The damn thing is fast and black as night. If we’re going to make it through this season, we’re going to have to fight for this herd. You understand me?”
The boy took a long breath and looked at the pictures on the table. The thought of quitting entered his mind again. He had read about cattle mutilations. People said it was aliens, UFO’s coming to do experiments. Experts claimed the cuts were so precise they had to have been done by scalpels or lasers, and only in the hands of the surgically trained. That was bad enough, but the blood, all gone like it had evaporated. The absence of flies. Something was going on here, and he didn’t think it had to do with a wolf. If there even was a wolf. The boy nodded, agreed that he understood.
With that it was settled. By the afternoon, they had two cameras with night vision capability and a dozen batteries as backup. They separated to catch up on what work they could and prepare for the night ahead.
The boy rode the ATV along the perimeter, checking fences and spying two more downed sections on the south end of the property. The sun was already low in the horizon. There wasn’t enough time in the day to fix it. An unsettling thought took hold of his mind then. Flashes of his childhood visits to zoos. They could keep the cows in, but what could they keep out?
He turned and looked at the spindly barbed wire, spooled loose between rotting wood posts. Anything with a mind to could get through, even if the fence was mended. He made a note of the broken line and headed back to rest before nightfall. Whatever it was, wolf or otherwise, he would need it.
Night came, but in the house, the boy’s dread dissipated. Readying the equipment put him back in his childhood boy scouting days. Filling knapsacks with camping gear and jerky, pouring huge thermoses of black coffee, tucking the cameras in with the stands and batteries. Even the rifles reminded him of can targets, the ground littered with shining Bb’s.
The farmer drove him out to the herd in silence, a cool wind with the edge of autumn on its breath whipped past his head and raised goose flesh on his skin. When they reached them the cows were restless. Half the herd was still up and grazing, and low mooing could be heard in the distance, the black shadows of cows speckled across the land.
“It’ll be hard to know where to set up with them feeding like they are.”
Clive shook his head.
“It’s only taken the ones on the edge of the herd, and always from the south.”
The boy peered in the same direction as the farmer. Sagebrush grew wild, stretched out like hands reaching skyward. It could easily obscure a predator, especially a skilled one. They put one camera on a stand, set towards that little outcrop of low brush. The other, Clive gave to the boy.
“Be ready. When it comes, it moves fast.”
They heard a deep, pained scream, then the sound of a cow toppling over, hitting the grass.
“It’s him!”
The boy fumbled the camera, realizing too late that the power hadn’t been turned on.
“Give me the damn thing!”
Clive snatched the camera out of his hands and turned it on, his hands steadier than they had been in days. The boy looked around wildly as another cow hit the ground and let out a low moan. It was moving in a line.
“There it is!” Clive yelled, and the boy looked to where the camera was pointed. He saw something in the dark. It moved quickly in total silence, a black shadow moving through the herd with impunity.
“Why don’t they move?” he asked, but Clive didn’t hear him.
“I’ve got you now you son of a bitch.”
The wolf had moved to the center of the herd now. Another cow dropped, the only sound a crunch of dry grass beneath its huge body, its ribs breaking against the earth.
“It’s coming towards us,” the boy said. He took a step back, caught his heel, and fell hard, his hands stabbed by prickers and burrs in the dry grass beneath him. He held them in front of his face and watched as tiny droplets pooled on his palms.
The farmer focused, tracking the wolf’s movements, and murmuring as one cow fell, then another. The thing was close now, and from the ground the boy could see its black shadow move amongst the herd.
It paused, hovering over one large cow laying in the grass. The boy could see its face in the dark. The farmer pulled his own eyes away from the camera and watched. The wolf opened its mouth, but didn’t move from where it stood. Black smoke poured out and enveloped the animal, moving into her. Her skin rippled, the legs stuck out suddenly rigid, and then flopped, emptied. The wolf inhaled the smoke again, taking what had left back into itself, and seemed to grow larger. It turned towards them.
The boy clamored to his feet. “Come on!”
Clive turned to run. The boy reached the truck first and threw the passenger door open. He leaped into the seat, his nails digging into the upholstery as he pulled himself up and slammed the door behind him. The farmer was running full sprint now, the camera in his hand. He reached the truck and dove in, hands fumbling in his pocket for the keys.
The wolf approached slowly, sniffing the ground as it went. It was bigger than the boy had thought, made larger by its distance from the cattle. Its head stood nearly as high as the camera on its tripod. When it reached the lens, Clive chuckled.
“We got him now.”
The creature looked in their direction, ears perked at attention. Its fur was long. It hung stringy from its head like a wilting mane. In the dark its eyes glowed yellow, but against what light, they couldn’t tell. It sniffed around the legs of the stand, then pushed against one with its head. The leg kicked inwards, and for a moment, the camera was suspended on stilts, a strange robotic circus performer balancing in midair. It toppled, crashing to the ground, then looked back at them, teeth bared. Its face was naked. Black leathery skin stretched from its muzzle to the top of its head.
“Where did it go?” Clive asked, leaning forward and peering into the dark.
“It’s there,” said the boy, a finger pointed at a mass of black fog moving quickly over the landscape. The farmer started up the truck. “But the camera—”
“Forget it,” Clive said, face pale and hands stimming with that familiar shake. He flipped on the headlights and turned the truck around towards home.
Inside under the familiar glow of electricity, the events of the night took on a dreamlike quality. The boy could only remember in flashes. Cows toppling as whatever it was moved through them like a plague. The black smoke pouring from the wolf mouth, rushing in and around the cattle before returning to the massive body that contained it. He shivered.
Clive sat at the table, a cup of steaming coffee in front of him and the camera plugged in to a laptop. He was watching the footage. The boy poured himself a cup and stood behind Clive, watching over his shoulder. The shot was good, showed what looked to be a black wolf emerging from the brush as it approached the first cow.
“Look at its feet,” the boy said, his head leaned forward now, eyes squinting as he looked. The farmer paused, rewound, and hit play again. The night vision made it impossible to miss. A cloud of smoke blurred the wolf’s feet as it walked.
“I thought it was just soft footed,” Clive said, staring in wonder.
The boy was staring too, watching in disbelief at what the camera had caught. When it reached the cow, the wolf dissolved into smoke, only a shadow of its shape left behind. The black mist entered through every opening, through the cow’s eyes and mouth, into its anus.
“There’s our proof,” Clive said, sitting back with his arms crossed, a smile on his face.
“Of what?”
The smile faded. He held a hand out to the video playing. “To what? The damn wolf we just caught on camera.”
“The wolf?”
“Well what in the hell else would it be?”
The boy stared at him. Clive looked back at the video and watched as the black creature breathed itself into yet another cow, consuming its insides in that poisonous vapor.
“That lady owes me one hell of an apology. We’ll go out once the sun comes up and get pictures of ‘em. God, it must have got—what—five? Eight? We’ll count ‘em up tomorrow. Tell me I don’t know what a damn wolf is—”
He stopped at the sound of a hinge creaking. The old screen slammed against the door frame. A cool breeze filtered in.
“Sam?”
Clive stood up and went to the kitchen window that overlooked the dirt driveway. Sam’s car was already halfway down, driving the same way his wife had when she left that early morning over ten years ago. His headlights bounced up and down as his tires hit rough road, pits he had meant to fill in months ago. An empty black loneliness poured into his chest and threatened to steal his breath.
He turned and looked back to his computer. He thought of that woman on the phone that morning, his cattle laying dead and mutilated in his field. That wolf, black as night and quieter than death moving unchecked amongst his herd. He looked back to the road, but the glow of headlights had disappeared in the dark. He was gone.
The boy’s threat to join the army foreshadows later events well. It also helps to make sense of his changed demeanor and resolve once he “suits up” to confront whatever is out there.
I freaking love how it feeds. Such a cool detail.