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Slim Jim chattered his teeth. “Good call, Miss Twila. Ned, feckin’ scoot on over.”
I placed my palms on the table as Slim Jim fiddled with the cameras. The screen with the night vision switched to a different angle of trees, but the surroundings were empty.
“Do these things record when we’re not watching them?” I asked Slim Jim. His lip curled in a smile, making his teeth appear even larger, and he started to tap on the keyboard again. The screen started to rewind like an old VHS tape, and as soon as the figure appeared, I grabbed Slim’s arm.“Stop, there!”
He stopped the tape.
We all crowded around to see the figure that pushed past the trees, bending the weaker ones back with the force of its flight. Two massive arms spread out to its sides, fleshy wing-like skin stretching over them and connecting to its body. The legs were long and humanoid, and the face looked like it might have once been human, but its nose had gone pig-like and two fluffy ears perched on top of its head.
Ol’ Ned let out a cry of satisfaction.
“Bat-man, three miles south’a Dagwood’s edge. Got it.”
***
“Why did you makemecome?” I moaned as we trudged through the brush.
It was the dead of night, and all of us except for Slim Jim had been walking for the past hour, hauling supplies for Ol’ Ned’s traps like pack mules. Ol’ Ned was hell-sure we were going to catch the shifter this time; this wasn’t the first bat monster we’d found in Windy Ridge, but the other one had been easily rehabilitated back into society. This one I wasn’t so sure about—it was more feral, and me and the boys had been tracking it for at least a week and a half, with several failed traps littering our path.
“What d’you mean, why?” Ol’Ned called back. His arms were full of home-made blueprints and toolboxes, and he was making a mighty racket for someone who was supposed to be sneaking through the woods. “We can’t just let this thing get by. We got us a shifter to catch, Twila!”
“Yeah, butI’msupposed to be the one on cameras. That was the wholepoint!”I shouldered the backpack of supplies for a stronger grip. “Can’t you guys set this thing up on your own?”
“You saw how fast that thing was, Twila,” Bud said, turning to face me with a smile that was pretty much hidden by his enormous beard. Yes, he was a wolf man with a ZZ Top beard. “We’re gonna need you in case we need’a chase it down. Anythin’ with a wingspan like that is outta our league, you know that.”
I scowled. “Just when I thought I was gettin’ a break.”
Bud snorted and shook his head, but did give me a reassuring back-pat as he lifted the cell phone up to his mouth and looked like he was seconds away from dropping it—his paws weren’t exactly good with gripping small things. “Any sign o’ it yet, darlin’?”
“Not yet!” Sicily’s voice came crackling out of the receiver. She’d taken my spot in Slim’s trailer as soon as she’d gotten home from school and finished her homework (at least, she’d said she’d finished her homework). Even though I wished I could have been sitting beside her while manning the cameras, it was nice to hear the enthusiasm in her voice. “Keep heading southwest. You should be entering the radius where the bat-man was last spotted in the next half hour.”
“L-l-let us know when to set up the t-t-trap, Brother Ned!” Boone said, by far the least tired out of all of us. Apparently, getting immunity to diseases also meant Boone had an extended stamina reserve. “I really t-t-think this one oughtta work!”
“It better,” Ol’ Ned grumbled back, shaking his head. “This damn flyer is gonna have a piece’a my mind once we catch his sorry hide.”
Dagwood’s section of forest was even more unpleasant than Windy Ridge’s. Instead of the thick bushes we usually had to cut through, now we were getting sliced with thorns and brambles in our attempts to find a safe path, tripping over pinecones that acted as the ground’s main covering. Monsters were rarely seen around Dagwood thanks to our limited technology, but now with Slim Jim’s setup, we had a net of cameras at nearly every mile. We were gonna have to get used to trekking through less familiar terrain in the weeks to come, and honestly, I was the only one who wasn’t thrilled by that fact.
Eventually, Sicily notified us that we were in the right area and we helped Ol’ Ned set up his trap. We’d tried a variation of nets and cages for the previous traps, but the bat-man’s speed and disproportionate body had made him difficult to trap. Ol’ Ned had insisted instead on a wide array of baited snare traps that would catch the thing as it glided to the ground, and so we set the snare traps up and hid in a clump of trees nearby, hushed as we waited for the thing to appear.
I was surprised just how fast it arrived.
We heard the rustling not five minutes after we’d taken cover in the branches of the bushes surrounding us. Twigs snapped, wind blew in short gusts, and then in a sudden burst of sound, one of the snares triggered. The rope zipped up the branch it was connected to and something gave an otherworldly screech. Ol’ Ned hollered in victory, slapping his thigh with a clawed hand.
“SHEE-OOT, WE GOT’IM!”He turned to me. “Come up front ‘case the damn thing squirms, Boone, get the buckshot loaded just in case! Let’s get us some game!”
“This isn’tgame,Ned!” I snapped, running behind him as he barreled through the woods. “This is a person, no matter how many traps it managed to break!”
The three of us approached. We saw the bat-man hanging from one of his humanoid legs, screeching in a horrifyingly uncanny way—sounding sort of human but sort of not. I cringed as I walked toward it, hands up beside my head.
“Hey, calm down, now—” I tried to speak over its screeching, but the thing didn’t seem to want to listen. Instead, it flung itself upwards, trying to get at the rope around its ankle, and in doing so, I managed to catch its wing right to the side of my head. It felt like I’d been punched right in the temple by the Hulk.
I fell, a sick pain shooting up my neck, and opened my eyes to see Bud tugging everyone away from the snare.
“Summa bitch! It’s escapin’!” Bud pointed up, and from my position, I could see the bat man’s clawed hands had managed to fray the rope significantly. Bud rushed ahead to try and grab the thing, but with another sharp thwack of its arm, Bud got nailed across the chin and stumbled backwards, crying out a decidedly canine sound.
“Boone, git ready an’ shoot the damn thing!”
Buckshot wouldn’t kill it, but hopefully it would cause the creature enough pain to be subdued. I managed to roll out of the way to avoid another powerful wing blow, but as Boone hurried forward, I saw the rope snap. The gun raised just as the bat-man fell, its wings spread, an angry face of fangs aimed right at him.
