Читать книгу Small Town Monsters - Craig Nybo - Страница 15

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