The Jersey Devil (2 page)

Her hands shook as she fumbled for her car keys.

“At least that bird did me a favor. Hopefully, he took Henry someplace he'll never be found.”

Dropping the shovel and flashlight in the trunk, she wondered if she should cover up the hole.

She didn't think she had the strength to fill it back up anyway. It felt as if she'd been cored and bled dry.

A shower, Valium, glass of wine and proper sleep in her bed, that's what she needed.

The car door opened with a loud creak. Henry was always promising to grease up those hinges.

A burst of wind washed over her just before a pair of sharp claws dug into her shoulders. In an instant, she was looking down at the top of her car. She tried to scream but nothing would come out.

Leathery wings flapped on either side, the cool morning air biting her flesh.

Up and up she went, until her mind saved itself by shutting completely down.

“I hate this,” Michael said, his mouth full of sunflower seeds. He spit gobs of shells out the van's window. “I really do. We don't know what the fuck's back there. For all we know, that shit is in the air giving us cancer or shrinking our dicks.”

John shook his head, keeping his eyes on the road. They'd been surrounded by pine trees for miles now, without another car in sight. It was like driving in a nightmare—you kept going and going, never getting anywhere, never seeing anything but the same unbroken scenery, mile after mile.

He liked it better when they went to the site by the water, down south more. Getting to it involved some real overgrown terrain, but at least they could chill out at the nearby beach when they were done. The blue water and sand made up for the spookiness of the overgrown woods where they dumped the shit, usually under cover of night.

“How about this,” John said. “Measure your dick now, and measure it again when we get back. Then you'll know if it shrunk.”

Michael held up a finger. “One, I don't have a tape measure. Two, there's no need to be an asshole. You mean to tell me you like carting around barrels of chemicals, not knowing what they're made of?”

“There's worse ways to earn a buck. Look, quit crying. We've done this like half a dozen times already. Do you have cancer?”

“No.”

“I rest my case.”

“That doesn't mean it's not growing inside us, getting even stronger now because we're locked in this van with the stuff.”

John laughed. “You're getting soft, Mikey. Maybe you need to stop eating seeds like a bird and try a steak every once in a while.”

“Wait until you're married and your wife gets these crazy ideas in her head. You'll be a vegetarian, too.”

“I don't think so.”

“Yeah, we'll see. I know this little fad of hers won't last. It's easier to just go along.”

“Even when you're not around her you're eating like the fattest rabbit in Edison. What do you say we go to Morton's for lunch? My treat.”

Michael waved him off. “No can do. When you stop eating meat, you get like this super sensitivity. You can smell it on someone from a block away. If I have a steak for lunch, Gloria will know the second I walk in the door.”

“You're outta your mind.”

“I'm not fucking kidding you. Last week, I ate one of those sausage biscuits at McDonald's for breakfast. I didn't get home until midnight, and Gloria could still smell it. She stopped me before I could even kiss her hello. Next thing I know, I'm on the damn couch. I spent a lot on that custom sleigh bed upstairs and I intend to sleep in it as much as possible.”

“You sure you're the same Mikey who used to knock back twenty White Castle sliders in one sitting?” John said. The turnoff wasn't far. He kept his eyes peeled for the marker—a red bandana nailed to a tree on the right side of the road.

“Ha-ha, single man. I can't wait until Julie gets her hooks into you. You talk a big game now,” Michael said.

“That's not going to happen because that ring finger of Julie's is going to remain the way it is—ringless. I guess I gotta thank saps like you for saving me from myself.”

That got a chuckle from Michael. “It's good to know I'm providing a service.” He moved forward in his seat. “Look, there it is.”

John had to squint to spot the smear of red. Michael always had incredible eyesight.
Must be getting even better with all those carrots he's been eating
, he thought.

He turned the van off the unpaved road. It barely fit within the narrow clearing. That was the point. No one was supposed to know about this spot.

The terrain was treacherous. He wished they could have used a four-by-four, but the van was the only thing that fit the containers. A couple of times, the van almost got stuck, tires spinning and kicking up the soft earth in muddy fountains.

“Home, sweet home,” John said, pulling up to the second marker, a tattered blue bandana tied around the branch of a dying bush. The circular clearing was a shade over forty feet in diameter. The first time they'd come here, Michael had commented how it looked like a landing site for a UFO that'd punched down through the trees. John agreed that it looked pretty unnatural. He'd heard that a whole town used to be out here, built around some kind of factory hundreds of years ago. Over time, people left the town and its rotted structures gradually sank into the earth. He wondered if there was a house or general store right under his feet.

“You wanna start the digging?” John asked.

Michael shrugged. “No skin off my ass. Let's lug those containers out first. I don't wanna get tired from digging, then have to get them out of the van.”

John got out, admiring the new Venuccio Brothers logo on the side of the van. The boss had hired a legitimate designer to come up with it. The sweeping letters reminded him of old-time Little League lettering they used to have on their jerseys.

They opened the double back doors, slipping on thick rubber gloves and white masks to cover their mouths and noses. The four black steel containers looked heavy. They knew from experience that whatever was inside was remarkably light.

Each grabbed a side of one barrel and hefted it out of the van. They made sure not to drop it on the ground. They'd been told time and time again to be very careful. Michael was so paranoid, he treated those things like they were newborn babies.

“Does the lid seem kinda loose to you?” Michael said as they shuffled in tandem to the clearing. Liquid sloshed about inside.

“No. If it was, I'd let you carry it yourself.”

“You're really pushing it today.”

They lugged it to the spot where they estimated the last batch had gone under, near the upper right edge of the circle. As they got closer, Michael pulled up.

“Holy shit, Johnny. What the hell?”

Three months earlier, they had buried six barrels of the waste material only Venuccio Brothers Carting would carry out of the lab in Elizabeth. They both knew whatever was in the barrels was illegal. If it was on the up and up, it wouldn't be in their van. They'd never been told how toxic the materials were, but it didn't take a genius to figure out it was probably some pretty bad stuff.

John's heart pumped faster when he saw that one of the barrels had been dug up. It was still nestled in the tight hole they'd placed it in, but all of the dirt had been removed from the top.

Worst of all, the lid had been pried open.

“Jesus, you smell anything weird?” Michael said, his eyes showing way too much of the whites.

John looked around, taking a few deep sniffs. “Nah, all I smell is trees.”

“I'm not going near that, man.”

“All right, all right, don't get yourself in a panic. We'll just bury them over there,” John said, nodding to the other side of the clearing. “We haven't planted anything there yet.”

“But what about that one? If we leave it like that and someone finds it, we're screwed.”

Sighing, and now cringing with the start of a massive headache, John said, “Look, we'll just throw the dirt back on.”

“And breathe in whatever's in there? No way.”

“Then I'll do it.”

In fact, that was the last thing John wanted to do, but he knew there was no way Michael was going to take one step closer.

Just get it done quick and get the hell out
, he thought.
We'll have to tell the boss someone's been snooping around. Jeez, I hope it wasn't some dumb kids. What if they got sick?

John and Michael were hard men who did terrible things from time to time, but they never, ever harmed a woman or child. John's stomach turned at the thought of that nasty sludge getting on some kid who just wanted to play in the woods. Best to cover it up quick and hope no one else tried to go digging for China.

They gently placed the barrel on the ground while John went back to get the shovel.

Michael was pointing. “Look, is that a boot?”

John peered at the other side of the exposed hole.

There was a brown cowboy boot in the brush.

“Looks like some hick ran out of his shoes,” John said, trying to lighten their mood. “I don't see the other one, though.”

He found the lid and flipped it with the end of the shovel on top of the barrel. Before it landed, he looked at the black sludge inside. It looked like used motor oil.
A tank of oil like that would weigh a ton. I wonder what it's made of?

John quickly went about tossing the dirt back onto the barrel. He wanted it out of sight in a hurry. If there were toxic fumes rising from it, the less he breathed, the better.

It took less than a minute to cover it all up.

“See, that wasn't so hard, was it?” he said.

When he turned around, Michael was gone.

“Hey,” he called out. “No piss breaks until we get these new ones planted. You hear me?”

He stopped, listening for the sound of his partner's heavy stream or the crunch of leaves.

“Mikey! Quit playing around. Let's get this shit done, son.”

He waited a minute, checked the van to make sure he wasn't taking a nap inside.

“Mikey?”

A loud scream put him on instant high alert. It sounded as if someone had just shouted their voice box raw. John drew his gun from the holster he kept at his back.

It couldn't be him. Michael knew better.

John flew forward as something smashed into him from behind. His gun thumped underneath last fall's leaves. John howled. It felt like the back of his shoulder had been shattered. His right arm had gone numb, right down to the tips of his calloused fingers.

“You son of a bitch,” he cursed, struggling to flip onto his back and face his attacker.

Twigs snapped as something stepped beside him.

He looked up.

“No way. No way. No! No!”

The Pine Barrens claimed the Honda and the Venuccio Brothers van as its own, shrouding them from prying eyes. Over time, they rusted, the tires went flat, rubber and seals dried and cracked, until they looked older than the Barrens itself. The earth started the slow process of dragging them to its depths while plant life grew up and over them, twisting tendrils with lush leaves sealing the car and van in Nature's grip. They would never be seen by another pair of human eyes again.

 

Sam Willet—Boompa to his family—woke up with an admirable case of morning wood. Scratching at his chin underneath the wild tangle of his beard, he looked down at his tented pajama bottoms and said, “Not bad. Now what am I supposed to do with this?”

Truth was, it
wasn't
bad, considering his eighty years on God's green earth and disdain for male enhancers. When he was a younger man of sixty, his sex life with Lauren had been better than when they were honeymooners. He'd assumed that things would settle down when he turned seventy. After that, there was no sense funneling PEDs to his pecker, chasing the poor woman around the house. She'd earned her peace. Then he'd pass away and bide his time in the ether waiting for her.

It wasn't part of the plan, her dying ten years ago and his body still champing at the bit to find some loving. Every time he woke up like this, he felt grim satisfaction that he still had it, and pain at the reminder that his days of strutting were long behind him.

There was a knock at his door.

“Boompa, you up?”

That was his grandson Daryl.

“Of course I'm up,” he said. “I've been getting up before the crack of dawn more years than you've been kicking around.”

Daryl gave a short laugh.

“You need me to help you out of bed, old man?”

He flipped the covers back, crossing the room in three heavy strides, his footsteps sounding like thunderclaps on the bare, hardwood floor. Throwing open the door, he barked, “How about I change your diaper, son? Lord knows I seen enough crap come out of you over the years.”

Daryl jumped back, hands held up in surrender. He was tall and solid as a fireplug, just like his father. His frayed Mets cap was on backwards. Sam pulled it off his head, setting it straight, so the bill was facing front.

“I swear you do that just to hound me,” Sam said.

Daryl's sad blue eyes sparkled for a moment. “You found me out.” He happened to look down and said, “No need to salute. I'm not an officer.”

Sam chuckled, covering his slight bulge with his shirttail. “Why don't you go downstairs and fix me some breakfast? Make yourself useful.”

Daryl clomped down the stairs. “Same as always? Farina with prune juice and a Metamucil chaser?”

“Keep it up, kid. You won't be young forever.”

Sam closed his bedroom door, gathered his shirt and overalls and went to the attached bathroom. He looked out the window. It was still dark out, but he could see a pink sliver of light on the horizon. The air drifting through the open window was chilly, but the weatherman said things would warm up by nine. The farm needed constant nurturing. It wouldn't be long before the place was overrun by his farmhands and family. Sam had been born and raised in the Bronx, and he never could get over how just an hour north from a city of concrete and apartment buildings, Pine Bush was as rural and countrified as the Deep South.

Giving himself a dry shave, he heard the dulcet tones of Frank Sinatra wafting from the stereo in the kitchen. The kid, and everyone else around Sam, knew all about his passion for the American standards sung by real men—Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, Bobby Darin and Nat King Cole. The smell of eggs and sausage coupled with the greatest music ever recorded got his old bones in motion. Daryl had become a hell of a cook, and he was Sam's favorite person to see first thing in the morning. Sam only hoped he could help his grandson find his way in the short time he had left. Farming just wasn't in him. He did everything they asked of him, but Sam could tell Daryl didn't have a passion for it.

He got downstairs before the rest of the family so he could sneak a sausage link.

“You want a slice of toast with that?” Daryl asked, working up a huge pan of scrambled eggs. He'd baked two loaves of bread the day before. The butter was also made right on the farm. Sam felt sorry for all the billions of people who didn't own farms and had no idea how incredible breakfast could be.

“I can wait,” he said. “I think I'll check my e-mail first.”

The old floor creaked under his weight as he walked to the living room. Sam was old, but he was still a big man, just over six-three, and spry as a man half his age. He found his iPad on the side table next to his lounge chair and turned it on.

The first thing he looked through were the multiple Google alerts that his granddaughter, April, had helped him set up when he got the tablet a year ago. He was not one to be left behind by the changing times. He'd bought a computer in the early nineties, using it mostly to keep records for farm business. When the Internet came along, he was hooked.

Can't believe all the stuff these tablets can do
, he thought, marveling at the slim device in his thick hands.

He was about to click on the links for his
cryptid
alert when his daughter-in-law, Carol, swept past, patting his shoulder.

“Morning, Boompa,” she said with a yawn. Carol was just shy of fifty and slender as a pitchfork handle, with a bosom that looked surgically enhanced, though she was as real as the day was long. He looked at her, silhouetted by the lamplight, and said to himself,
You picked a wonderful woman, Bill, even though you had to do your picking awfully young. Not many guys win that lottery.

She tied her long, dirty blond hair into a ponytail while she looked out the big front windows. There wasn't much to see now, but soon enough, the entire farm would be lit by the morning sun.

“Mornin', dear,” Sam said.

“Isn't it a wee bit early to be looking for monsters? I bet you haven't even had your coffee yet.”

“I did have a bite of sausage,” he replied with a wink.

“Bill will be down in a bit. Give me a shout if you find any,” Carol said as she walked to the kitchen.

At his age, if he found what he was looking for, he'd do more than shout. He'd ring the damn bells at St. Luke's church. With each morning he woke up, he had less and less time.

But something told him big changes were blowing on the wind, just the way that scruffy Bob Dylan used to sing in his nasal whine. Like his old great Aunt Ida, he'd been looking deep into the tea leaves, and things were starting to stir again.

* * *

Six hundred miles away, Norm Cranston considered finishing the warm dregs sitting at the bottom of the bottle of Modelo he'd left on his back porch. He never was one for the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-ya theory. Instead, he poured it onto his lawn, tossing the bottle in the blue recycling bin on his deck. It had rained overnight. The air smelled sweet, renewed.

He greeted the singing birds with an echoing belch.

Boy, he'd had too many last night.

Norm liked to drink alone, throwing one-man, one-cat welcome home parties whenever he'd been away for a spell. He'd returned yesterday from a weeklong stint in Ohio, following up on a rash of sightings of a Bigfoot–esque beast near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The Grassman tended to be a little shorter than your typical Sasquatch, with a tendency to track deer, its favorite prey. Though relatively quiet over the past several years, three sightings had been made by backpackers two weeks back. Word had spread and people were starting to fear going to the park. The Ohio Forestry Service had hired him on the QT to come out and follow up on the stories, hoping he'd find nothing and report it as simple misidentification. He'd gone so far as to camp out alone for six nights. As expected, he didn't come across the Grassman. What the backpackers probably saw were bears.

When he'd interviewed the witnesses, he wasn't shocked to learn that they were all city dwellers with scant experience in the great outdoors. They weren't accustomed to coming across any wildlife bigger than a raccoon. Bear encounters were frightening, and easily misconstrued by a brain that was misfiring while allowing the bladder to empty its contents.

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my,” Norm said, drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He'd spend the weekend working on a couple of articles, then a blog post, reassuring folks that the Grassman was not a threat to those seeking to bond with nature in Ohio.

Of course it wasn't. If there'd been an actual Grassman, Norm was pretty sure his ass wouldn't have been out there. At least, not alone.

“Hey, Salem, you mind g-going out to get some groceries? The cupboards are pretty empty,” he said to his black cat, perched on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Salem followed him with his wide, orange eyes. Norm's neighbor, Pam, always watched the lazy ball of fur when he was away. She made sure there was plenty of food for the cat. It wasn't lost on Norm that the cat was taken care of far better than he had ever been.

“Or maybe you'll share your Fancy Feast with me.”

Salem made a contented cooing noise. Norm patted his head.

“You always were generous.”

He put a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage and biscuit in the microwave. While he waited, he spotted himself in the small oval mirror he kept by the fridge. His eyes were bloodshot. His goatee that hung six inches from his chin was kept from going wild and woolly with a series of different colored rubber bands. Norm stepped back, rubbing what was becoming a considerable beer gut. He'd be forty-two in the fall. There were aches and pains that came with the age, but he could still motor when he had to. Hell, he'd just backpacked and camped in a mild wilderness for a week without any ill effects.

The Modelo was what was making him feel old today. He loved his beer, but it was starting not to love him back.

Norm plucked his straw hat from the kitchen table and plopped it on his head. The hat, for some reason, made him feel whole. He knew he looked like an extra from
Hee Haw
, but he didn't give a rat's ass. The hat had become part of his brand—the brash cryptozoologist who'd been featured on more cable shows than he could count.

His hook was his ability to remain impartial while still retaining his childlike wonder and fascination with tales and sightings of creatures both strange and mythical. When he was young, his father had pulled him aside one day and told him in confidence about his encounter with a Bigfoot while hunting in East Texas. He'd only mentioned it that one time, but it had been enough. Norm exhausted the library's stash of books on Bigfoot, lake creatures and Thunderbirds. When online bookstores came along, offering a worldwide library of tomes on the unexplained, he dove in headfirst. He went and got a degree in zoology so he'd have a broad knowledge base of all known creatures, their habits and habitats. With that in hand, it would be easier for him to separate the known from the unknown.

And now here he was, hungover but with a decent check in his bank account from the state of Ohio, talking to his cat while wearing a straw hat.

The microwave dinged. He set the sausage aside to cool. His stomach growled. He wasn't sure whether it was from a craving to tear into the patty of processed meat or a growing need to expel last night's party.

“Let's liven this day up a little, sh-shall we, Salem?”

The cat crept down from the window and made figure eights around his legs.

Norm booted up his laptop, opened his iTunes account and clicked Play on his Shooter Jennings playlist. Waylon's wayward son growled out his mix of country and Southern rock while Norm bit into the sausage.

“Jimmy D-D-Dean, where did you go wrong?” Norm dropped his breakfast onto the plate with an eye roll.

He must really be awake now. The stutter came back as sure as night follows day the moment he was truly and fully awake, as if his awareness of himself and his place in the world was enough to smack the confidence straight from him.

Salem jumped up on the table, putting a paw on the laptop.

Opening up his e-mail, he saw over four hundred messages. Sure, a few were spam, but he got a lot of emails from believers and skeptics alike. Being unplugged for a week wreaked havoc on his in-box.

“Why don't w-w-we write to Sam first?” he said. Salem meowed.

Norm and Sam Willet had been friends for the past ten years, ever since he'd gone to Pine Bush in New York to film a piece on big cats roaming around the farms up there in a place where there should be no big cats. He'd met Sam Willet when he and the crew visited his farm to take some B-roll. It turned out the old man had an incredible story of his own to tell, so long as the young cryptozoologist kept it hush-hush. Norm had proven himself a worthy confidant, and the two had been corresponding by e-mail ever since.

Whereas Norm had an interest in a wide range of cryptids—land, air and sea—old Sam was fixated on one particular nasty little creature. Norm had promised to keep him apprised of any mention of the beast.

Just last night, Norm had read an online article from a mid-Jersey paper about several campers hearing something unnatural in the woods. One of them was brave enough to leave the tent, looking up at the night sky just in time to catch the fleeting form of a winged creature that shouldn't be.

It was the second Jersey Devil sighting in as many weeks.

Maybe
, Norm thought as he typed
, we have the start of something we can both sink our teeth into.