Small Town Monsters. Craig Nybo

parked the Blazer and the three men got out. The smell of decomposing flesh hit Kurt hard. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth and nose. Clay followed suit.

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      “Stinks, don’t they?” Buren said as he lead the two officers to the nearest of the mangled carcasses.

      “Coyotes?” Kurt asked as he looked down at the twisted animal remains.

      “T’weren’t no coyotes,” Buren said, kicking one of the dead sheep over with a pointy-toed cowboy boot.

      “Must have been an awfully big pack,” Clay said as he took in the scene. It looked like a sheep battleground, carcasses twisted and thrown like stuffed animals over rocks. Blood stained the gray wool of the animals and pooled around their remains.

      “Twenty-two head. I reckon it’ll cost me seven or eight G’s.”

      “Do you have insurance on these animals?”

      “Hell no,” Buren said. “I’d never trust no insurance man. All they want is your money and when it hits the fan, they just walks away laughing.”

      “Looks like wolves to me,” Clay said as he crouched down and poked at one of the corpses with a pen.

      “Doubtful in these numbers,” Kurt said. As he investigated the broken ground brush and creep he estimated that there had to have been no less than fifteen predators.

      “T’aint wolves,” Buren said.

      “Then what were they?” Clay asked.

      “El chupacabra.”

      “El chupa-what?” Clay’s eyebrows netted.

      “El chupacabra. What you have here is animal mutilations on a large scale.” Buren led the two officers through the field of broken sheep, occasionally kicking at one of the mangled corpses as he stepped around pools of blood, bits of torn sinew, and bone. “They come up from Mexico. I’ve know’d they was coming for a long time. Now they’re here.”

      “What are you talking about?” Clay asked.

      “Here we go,” Kurt said to himself under his breath.

      Buren went on: “There are two types of animal mutilation. Sometimes a stag or a milk-cow will turn up along the side of the road, torn up with almost surgical precision. It’s

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      unexplainable.”

      Kurt rolled his eyes.

      “This doesn’t look like surgery,” Clay said and crouched down on his haunches next to another of the animals. The sheep’s throat was torn out, leaving its head to lie back at an obscenely unnatural angle. A gust sent a waft of fetid decomposition to Clay’s nose; he struggled with nausea and raised his handkerchief to his face.

      “You’re right; this isn’t surgery. This is the other kind of mutilation,” Buren said.

      “These tracks are only a few hours old,” Clay said, touching one of the padded wolf-like impressions in the ground. Only a micro-layer of dust had blown into the freshly packed clay. “They look wolf to me.”

      “T’aint no wolf,” Buren said, turning abruptly toward the deputy and putting his hands on his hips. “It’s el chupacabra.”

      “I’ll put a warning out to the other ranchers,” Kurt said through his white handkerchief.

      “A warning ain’t gonna help,” Buren said.

      “Buren,” Kurt leveled his blue eyes at the rancher. “I don’t want any talk of el chupacabra, aliens, or anything else. What we’re looking at here is a wolf attack and nothing more. I don’t want you stirring those who can be stirred up with your fantasies.”

      “I can prove it.” Buren pointed back over his shoulder with a crooked thumb.

      Kurt sighed. “Fine. Show me your proof.”

      Buren led the two policemen through the death field, sidestepping corpses and leaping over pools of bloodied clay. They stopped at a grouping of five slain animals that were mutilated more brutally than the others. The flesh of the five had been ripped from their skeletons to reveal racks of sinewy ribs and discarded guts.

      Clay retched.

      “Can you control that, deputy?” Kurt said.

      “Sorry.”

      Kurt had to admit, it seemed that something extra cruel

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      had attacked these particular sheep. Bones had been fiercely broken, almost ground, as if a huge predator had clamped its maw around the necks of the animals and whipped them about like toys.

      Kurt crouched for a better look. He removed a pen from his breast pocket and used it to turn one of the mangled carcasses over. Its intestines unfolded from within its defiled rib cage, spilling onto the earth. Its sternum gaped open. Its heart had been eaten from its chest. Whatever had feasted on the animal had been ravenous and twice as violent as the other predators in its pack.

      “You suppose they ganged up on these five?” Clay asked.

      “Look at the teeth-marks.” Kurt pointed to a wound on the animal’s spine. “They seem to be the same pattern as the others, only…”

      “Bigger,” Clay said.

      “El chupacabra,” Buren said.

      “I don’t want to hear anything else about el chupacabra. These sheep were attacked by wolves.”

      “You need to warn the others, or I will—as if a warning would do any good,” Buren said, scratching under one of his sweaty armpits.

      Kurt stood up and put a hand on Buren’s shoulder. “Buren, do you remember when you visited Pearlman’s, had a few beers, and told everyone about the time you were abducted by aliens?”

      “I WAS abducted by aliens.”

      “I believe that you believe you were abducted by aliens,” Kurt said.

      “I was.”

      “Whether you were or were not isn’t the point. The law is in charge of warning the people about imminent danger; you are not. I can’t have you drunk at Pearlman’s spouting off about this, is that understood?”

      “You’ll have half the livestock dead around these parts.”

      “That is my responsibility.” All Kurt needed was a liquored up right-wing wacko brigade wandering around the forest

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      with loaded guns. “If it makes you feel any better, Clay here is going to bag a couple of these animals.”

      “What?” Clay protested.

      Kurt raised a finger in Clay’s direction to shut him up but kept his eyes on Buren.

      “After he bags them, he’s going to send them to the university. They’ll take a look and confirm that your sheep were, in fact, attacked by an unusually large pack of Rocky Mountain wolves. I will warn the other ranchers that wolves, not el chupacabra, are in the area.”

      “Fine. I’ll keep my lip buttoned down,” Buren said and crossed his arms over his chest like a pouting child.

      “Good.” Kurt turned to Clay. “Get a couple of trash bags from the rig. I’m going to take some pictures.”

      Clay kicked one of the dead animals as he walked back to the muddy blazer.

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      Chapter