Police visits to the ranch were an inevitable part of Kurt’s job. One day Kurt spent the better part of an hour standing on Buren’s ranch house roof looking for the UFO that had abducted Buren and deposited him in the woods twenty miles away and short four hours of his memory.
Kurt saw it as a matter of perspective; he could view Buren as a nuisance or he could consider Buren a necessary part of the
Concerning:
Kurt McCammus
Clay Hickman
Buren Peoples
Small Town Monsters
5
whole. Buren was harmless and kind in his own way. A twisted part of Kurt actually liked answering the rancher’s calls.
“Happened out on the west forty,” Buren said. Buren carried a slight body with spindly legs and whip-like arms. He always wore the same battered cowboy hat, a mangled Stetson with dark sweat-stains around its brim. Most of his teeth were gone, rotted out and long since pulled. Buren could afford to get his teeth fixed, but who was he trying to impress?
Kurt looked in the rearview mirror at Clay, who sat in the back seat with a snide grin on his face. Kurt shot him a reproachful stare and looked back out the windshield.
The Blazer cut across Buren’s rough property. With no roads, the four-wheel drive bounded through ruts and holes, bouncing and splashing through mud puddles. Buren had a nice spread—over twenty-one-hundred acres. He kept nearly three-thousand head of sheep. For a recluse, he made a nice living.
“There,” Buren said, pointing at a copse of evergreen trees to the far right of the Blazer. Kurt turned the wheel and the Blazer bounded toward where Buren pointed. “I think we got something big on our hands,” Buren said, a deep sense of concern in his voice. “Something bigger than us humans, that’s sure.”
As the Blazer rounded the trees, Kurt spotted the reason Buren had called; Easily 20 head of sheep lay mangled across the ground in discarded heaps, their bones broken, much of the meat torn from their carcasses.
“What the hell?” Clay asked, sitting up and gawking out the window from the back seat, all levity leaving his expression as he overlooked the carnage.
“Something big,” Buren said. “Park over there.” He pointed to a flat plane of ground. “Hope you didn’t wear your good shoes.” Buren said.
Kurt 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.
Craig Nybo
6
“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
Small Town Monsters
7
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
