He was cut off by a blood-curdling scream. I don’t use that phrase lightly. That scream was inhuman and made my insides shrink in terror.
“This isn’t good,” Dex said quickly and I felt his arm go around my waist, holding me against him. I appreciated it but it didn’t make me feel any less terrified.
“What was that?” I squeaked. “Was that…Mitch?”
“Kiddo, I don’t even think it was human.”
Another scream punctuated the end of that sentence, followed by a few drooling rasps and growls. I pressed myself harder against Dex as the growling continued. It sounded like a pack of lions feasting on something. No, this wasn’t good. This was a nightmare. And we were far, far from home.
A shotgun blast suddenly ripped through the air, making us both jump where we were standing. It sounded from the other side of the cabin and was followed by a “Jesus Christ.”
It was Mitch. Dex grabbed my hand and began running toward the cabin. I kept the camera on though it was capturing nothing but our legs as we scampered through billows of soft snow.
When we came around the corner and were able to see a bit from the firelight of the cabin windows, we saw Mitch’s silhouette near the outhouse. The motion detector lights hadn’t come back on despite the commotion, which made me wonder if they were even working anymore.
“Mitch!” Dex yelled and we walked toward him cautiously. After all, he had just fired off a shotgun and we didn’t want to surprise him.
As we got closer we could see a tiny light bobbing up and down, then fix its focus on us, blinding us for a second.
“It’s us, lay off,” I said through a shaking breath. Mitch lowered the flashlight so it was illuminating the ground again.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he replied blankly.
As we got closer, the color red jumped into my vision. The ground near Mitch’s feet was smeared in it. My heartbeat intensified in my throat and I felt unsteady all over. Dex squeezed my hand again for comfort as we stopped just a couple of feet away.
At Mitch’s feet lay a pool of spreading blood, an ugly dark blot on the pristine whiteness. In the middle of that dark, bloody smudge was a llama’s head. One of them had been decapitated, and cleanly from the look of it.
Not that I was looking long. Upon the realization of what it was, and that this was all real, I turned away and buried my head into the crook of Dex’s arm. With stealth, he simultaneously hugged me and got the camera out of my hand.
“Twatwaffle?” Dex asked.
I felt a wad of disgust come up my throat. “His name was Apricot,” I sneered into his sleeve.
“Or Jackass,” Mitch offered, sounding faintly amused. “What a way to go.”
I still didn’t dare look, so I kept my head buried in Dex’s coat while they talked.
“How does…” Dex began. I felt his muscles tensing. “How does this happen?”
“I don’t know. I heard him scream, so I ran back out of the woods and saw something bending over him ripping him to shreds.”
I shuddered and Dex held me closer, though I knew he was trying to film at the same time.
“You were in the woods?”
“I heard something growling, I thought it was a black bear.”
“You keep saying bears, but don’t bears hibernate?”
“Not for as long as you’d think. Anyway, I didn’t get far before this sorry bastard started hollering. I saw the thing and I shot at it.”
“You didn’t get a better look at it?”
“I saw the thing and I shot at it,” Mitch repeated, his patience being tested. “I didn’t have time to figure out what it was.”
“Well, shit.”
A silence filled the air and I lifted my head up out of Dex’s arm to get fresh air. I kept my eyes facing toward the cabin. Besides, someone had to watch our backs.
“Where is the rest of the llama?” I asked. “What kind of animal decapitates another animal?”
“Beats me,” said Mitch. “Heads are usually eaten. There’s a trail though, all blood, leading right down the slope. I know where Rigby says it would go.”
“Into the hollow?” Dex asked.
“That’s right.”
“Is that what you believe?”
I heard Mitch grunt. “I believe something big and bad lives out there. I don’t believe it’s Rigby’s beast or Sasquatch but it’s something I want stuffed and mounted in my house.”
“Are we going to be safe tonight?” I questioned into the night air, my nerves still on fire.
“I scared the thing off, didn’t I?” Mitch challenged behind me.
“Technically you meant to shoot it, not scare it,” Dex pointed out. “And you missed by the likes of it.”
Oh God Dex, don’t piss off the man with the shotgun, I thought.
“You try shooting in the dark, you punk,” was Mitch’s response. I felt him push past us and watched as he stormed his way back to the cabin.
I pulled away and looked up at Dex, who was now lapsed back into darkness. “Way to go, dumbass.”
He shrugged. “What? He was acting like he was doing us a favor.”
“Well he kinda fucking did. Dex, your llama’s head is on the ground.”
“I feel kind of bad for calling him Twatwaffle now.”
“You should feel bad,” I yelled. “For all we know, Twatwaffle saved our lives and maybe Mitch did too. There’s obviously something out here. Who the fuck decapitates a llama?”
“I’m sure this particular llama was on many a hit list.”
I jabbed him sharply with my elbow, so much so that he almost stumbled back onto the bloody area near the head.
“Whoa easy, kiddo,” he said. “I’m just joking.”
“You’re not taking this seriously enough!”
He came up to me, lowering his head until his face was inches from mine. I could barely make out the gleam of the cabin light in his eyes. “I told you we’d look at this rationally first, before we start freaking out.”
“Your idea of rational is thinking Christina and Rigby are behind this,” I whispered harshly. “And if you think it’s not even remotely frightening that they’d go so far as to rip the head of their own precious llama, then you’ve got a screw loose.”
“I have no screws loose,” he shot back in anger. I could feel him tense up, on the defensive.
“Oh we both have screws loose. Just fucking look at us, Dex! We’re in the mountains trying to find Sasquatch and we’re arguing over the llama formally known as Twatwaffle.”
He sucked in his breath and looked down at the grainy shape that was the llama’s head in the darkness. “All right, all right. So I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.”
I coiled my gloved fingers around his coat sleeve and pulled him toward me. “Neither do I. So then what do we do?”
He looked back at me and in the thin light I saw the look of defeat on his brow. “Wait until morning I guess.”
I sighed and turned around, heading back to the cabin. He was right as he often was. There wasn’t much we could do until morning. There was no way we were going to make our way back to Rigby’s at night, which meant we were shit out of luck.
Once we were back inside, Mitch went to make sure the remaining llamas were OK. Luckily they were fine, though thoroughly spooked and uneasy about the whole event. We still didn’t know what happened, whether Twat– I mean, Apricot got loose and then was attacked or whether he was taken from the pen. I wanted to think it was the former, because if it was the later, then it meant that we could be taken from the cabin. That’s if there was a beast, and you know what, I was starting to think there was. Why on earth would Rigby and Christina decapitate their own llama – something that would have cost a pretty penny – in order to prove a point? There were better ways to do it, however from the furrow on Dex’s brow as he sat near the fire, I could tell he was still thinking it over. I knew he had a darker view of humanity than I had and would be quicker to place the blame on a fame-hungry business.
Even with all the doors locked and Mitch taking watch for most of the night, his eyes bug-eyed and creepy as hell, shotgun in his lap, I barely slept. In fact, because I couldn’t sleep by our feeble bedroom window, Dex and I ended up bringing all of bedding out into the living area and sleeping in front of the fire. I felt a hell of a lot safer this way, even though trigger-happy Mitch was in the room with me. And unlike my fantasies, this was no time for sex with Dex on the rug.
When I finally did drift off though, I found no respite. I dreamed of teeth, blood and claws.