Post #340811 by Cammo on Sat, Oct 27, 2007 6:42 PM

Monsters
Part 3

“We should call that Crazy Horse,” my dad said. We had all slept fitfully the night before, the sounds had been getting worse lately and they were definitely coming from the Ducey’s farm. They couldn’t be the wild pigs, though, these sounds were horrible, evil, full of pain and anger. We hadn’t heard of any pigs being hunted, hadn’t heard much from Jim since we had seen him last. The sounds weren’t of death, either; they were terrifying and demonic. Completely unlike anything I’d ever heard.

“Hi Jim,” my dad said, jovially, into the phone. “We heard some, you know, strange sounds last night. You and the wife going at it?” he joked. Then he was silent, he turned his head a bit to listen closer. We looked at each other. He kept listening, apparently to Jim talking. It went on for quite a while.
“Oh, but…” he said. Then nothing for a long time.
“Really? Yeah, but…” he said again. Then, “Fine, we’d love to.” Then he hung up.

“What’s going on? We’d love to do what?” my mom asked.

“Go over there and see for ourselves. He’s pretty proud about it.”

“Proud about WHAT?” I asked.

My dad wouldn’t say a thing, other than we were going over to the Ducey’s at dusk. He was particular about that, though. It had to be dusk, no sun in the sky at all. It sounded kind of ominous to me.

When we got there we were all pretty curious, especially my dad. He had walked up their driveway cautiously, and we all were nervously looking over our shoulders when we finally came around the side of the Ducey’s home, and saw what had happened to their backyard.

The chicken wire enclosure had been ripped apart. It was lying in pieces up against their barn. In its place was an enormous ten foot tall chain link fence stretching off into the woods in both directions. There was some kind of low box on the other side, and the ground was all trampled. Beyond the fence I could see dim black shapes everywhere on the ground. Were they moving? We heard the house door slam behind us, and Jim strolled up, all smiles and handshakes.

“Glad you could come over,” he said, “isn’t it great?”, gesturing to the fence.

“Yeah, boy, that’re really something. Really something!” my dad exclaimed. My mom and I just nodded our heads.

“It cost a lot but it’s sure worth it!” Jim moved over to the fence, pulling us along with his eyes. “Look at ‘em! They’re coming along just great! You’d never have thought they’d grow so fast, huh? But they eat like PIGS! Ha ha ha haaaahaaa!”

Jim was laughing his head off now, we all smiled and looked into the fenced clearing.

HOLY CRAP! The huge black shapes on the ground were the WILD PIGS! They were ten times bigger now! My mom moved back in revulsion, and even my dad stopped walking when he saw them. They were big, muscular, and moving around now they had noticed us. The light was going fast, so it was hard to see details, but they must have stood a yard tall, with long tough legs and thick bodies. We could smell them, though, the dirt, wet, sweat and excrement of months of slothful living.

Right then, the red barn night-light went on behind us. The whole scene was suddenly illuminated in deep reds, just like a photo developing lab. Every one of the pigs was standing up, tense, looking at us now. Their eyes were bright red points in the darkness. You could see them much better, all black spiky hair, tall ears that flared out and came to sharp points above their heads. Some had small tusk teeth that were projecting out from their bottom jaw. Damn, they were the ugliest, smelliest things I’d ever seen.

Jim just kept talking. “They’re growing at twice the speed the book said they’d grow at, you know, I think they get way more forage here in a Canadian forest than in Europe. Maybe it’s a new breed! Think of it, nobody’s ever grown a full sized Wild Boar on this land, they can eat and exercise all they want all day, there’s no limit to the size they can grow, they just keep getting bigger, look at ‘em it’s all meat, too, no fat on ‘em, that’s Grade AA meat right there, yessir…”

I looked at the feeding setup Jim had built, it should have been built right into the fence, but he had a sort of slide system where you dumped the slop in one end and it filled the trough that was five of six feet away. Jim noticed my interest, and explained “it just didn’t work with a hole in the fence. They’re really smart little buggers, smarter than dogs they say, and when they’d hear me bringing their lunch out they’d try to come right through the fence. They’d bite the edges all around, look!”

Oh my God, the edges of the fence around the patched-up hole were all tangled and sheared off. He had used lots of thick wire to tie it back up, then had added some razor wire around the edges for good measure.

“Ah, we’ve been hearing lots of sounds at night… um, are they fighting or something?” I asked, finally.

Jim smiled. “They’re rutting. That big one in the back is quite the man about town!” and he winked at my dad. I had no idea what they were talking about. But ‘the big one in the back’ was huge, he was apart from the rest of them and hadn’t taken his eyes off us once. He didn’t blink, he just glared at us with a dull vicious hate.

He hated us. He hated the fence.

My mom nodded her head, smiled sickly at my dad, grabbed his arm, and started backing up. He got the message, and we all turned back to the house.

That’s when he charged. The big one dashed at us full on, right at the fence that was a bare yard behind us.

WHAM! The whole thing buckled, pushing out a few feet, shaking the uprights, an enormous noise in the red darkness.

We all jumped. I just about crapped my pants. There’s a wave of nausea that hits you a few seconds after physical fear pushes all those chemicals into your brain, then a split second later you sweat it out, then the blood drains out of your head and you almost faint. That’s what happened to all of us. We jerked around, and that bastard pig had his mouth wide open, locked onto the fence, and was pulling it, his neck muscles ripping back and forth. We all froze, then he let go, glaring at us. I knew he could smell the cold fear on our bodies, and I thought –

he had waited until we turned away. And he was doing it to see if we were afraid after the rush. We were, so he knew now that we could be killed.

Now my dad is just great at going along with everybody and anything, he’s learned a long time ago not to argue with neighbors. But right then, he looked at us and we knew he thought Jim was a nutter. We all put up a good front, chatted with Jim and got the heck out of there but fast.

“Well, that was really something,” my dad said in the car.

My mom was just staring straight ahead. “That … guy … is … crazy,” she said slowly.

“You know, Mark would love to do a story on this. We gotta call him up.” I put in.

And my mom is nobody’s fool. She wasn’t going back there for all the tea in Taiwan, but she considered for a moment and said:

“That’s the best story Mark’s magazine’s ever going to get. I’ll call him when we get back.”

Mark was really up on the whole thing. He asked lots of questions, especially about pictures (we hadn’t taken any) and when he could visit. He said he’s come as soon as possible, but it was months before he could get a full week to cover the Wild Hogs of Hell Gulch.

The problem was, by then they had disappeared.