THE CRYPTID MENAGERIE, Part V

The Guards, searching the premises, wondered what was upsetting the animals so much. They’d never before been this vocal; forget about loud enough to be heard outside the buildings.

The first group to figure out what was happening, sadly, wasn’t the one that had any of Shuker’s lethal weaponry. It was a trio of guards, all with tranquilizer guns, who came across the tribe of Sasquatches, marching down a trail out of the woods.

One of the guards, stupid enough to assume he could successfully hit a moving target’s head in barely any early-morning light, fired and hit a tree.

Alerted, the alpha male – a towering, gargantuan monster of dark, black color and very poor disposition, lunged for them.

One of the guards was seized, his arm still connected but the bone wrenched from the socket. He was lifted up and hurled into a nearby tree, where his vertebrae shattered and one of his shoulders dislodged.

When he fell eight feet to the ground, both of the female Wood Apes descended upon him and pulled in different directions. The sound was awful. Snapping, tearing, soft parts rended and spilled as though they were made of tissue.

One of the guards tried to run. He wasn’t fast enough.

The Second male, with upsetting speed, launched itself at him and slammed him into the ground. With Bigfoot’s namesake, it crushed his skull and ribs, putting all 500 pounds of weight onto his body.

The last guard made some progress before mistakenly tripping on a Juvenile that hid in the underbrush. Letting out a cry for help, it called one of the females over to it.

The final man was grabbed by the shirt and slammed into the ground until he could no longer move. Blubbering and crying and shouting incoherently, he was dragged away by one of the Males.

They would find a new home in these woods. Campers and Hikers would not out-compete them.

Sasquatch was home amongst any of the strays of this creature called ‘man’.

* * *

The Yeti roared in fury. It was not a violent beast by nature, but it still had protective instincts and would protect its mate and offspring to the end.

Another one of the trios of Guards had arrived, and in the open they saw something they wanted no part of.

The Chupacabras, crowding like pack animals, were trying to bring down the Yetis.

The Male was already scarred up, claw-marks running down his arms and chest and blood staining his snow-white coat.

He roared again as the male Chupa lunged, pressing its claws into the much larger beast as it pushed off.

Besides it was the female Yeti, swinging its free arm and holding the baby in the other.

The guards simply watched. One even jeered, shouting and yelling. At least one tried to place bets, but the other two were too sure of the larger creatures winning.

And they were right.

The female Yeti made an uppercut as one of the Chupas leapt – it was thrown almost twelve feet and landed on one of the pointed fences, impaled.

With a raucous growl, the Chupacabras died.

And the other two, at least bright enough to realize they were outnumbered, sought newer prey.

The watching men.

Before they could ready their tranq guns, the male and the female landed on their respective quarries.

The guard the female had pinned managed to push her off; but not before she came away with a chunk of his throat. The other, unable to fight off the assaulting male, felt his life drain away as the monster began ripping him open and diving down like a bird to devour his organs.

The last thing he saw was the third guard, running away before things got any worse.

‘I bet he’s sure glad he didn’t make the bet’ the guard thought numbly, sinking into hazy darkness before fading out forever.

 * * *

Elsewhere, maternal instinct was kicking in within another animal.

The Jersey Devil, in all its awful horse-faced, red-eyed, gangly-limbed glory, was locked in combat with another altered flyer – the Mothman.

Its offspring was in the corner, lying still as an infant lion. The Jersey Devil kept making its awful, eagle-like sound that echoed through the building, while the huge and silent phantom continued to lunge back, land, and dive again.

The interior lights were one, and as the Mothman had been built to seek out light and movement – a feature that would’ve driven it to dive-bomb cars after being released – it continued to go for the one above the Devil. Each time it did, the Devil kicked, gashing the Owl with its hoof-like talons.

As the Mothman of Rural Folklore had been a demonic apparition, diving at preoccupied and likely intoxicated teenagers in the years preceding various catastrophes, the biologically constructed Mothman had its self-preservation instinct overridden by the urge to charge lights.

The diseases it would have carried once released in the Midwest would have been damaging enough to justify its role in Sanderson’s Armada, but most of the diseases it carried the Devil was essentially immune to. Though it would begin transmitting them itself if it ever got out of here.

But its programming was its downfall.

On its final charge, it buzzed and jumped for the other red-eyed monster head-first.

This exposed its throat.

With a shriek and one final kick, the Devil bit down into the bird’s skull and slashed it across the neck.

The huge, darkish bulk fell to the ground.

Its head was still in the Giant mammal’s horse-like, blood-red jaws.

Dropping the appendage it had removed, it nuzzled its offspring away from the carcass, towards the sunrise that lay outside.

It would find a safer place to raise its young.

Hopefully someplace rich with water, foliage…and game.

* * *

As slow as they were, they were still engaged in chase. The forty-foot long, drooling and hissing Monitor Lizard, Mokele-Mbembe, was sprawling in pursuit of a gigantic amphibian – Nessiteris Urodela.

Nessie’s four limbs, halfway between flippers and feet, were enough to keep it at the same speed as its pursuer; but it wasn’t an animal built for long runs. It had been designed for an environment where it would be the apex predator, and its metabolism wasn’t as fast as a reptile. It wasn’t terribly bright, either. It had been engineered with self-programmed instincts, like to flee light and to stalk animals by shores. The only reason it was panicking at all was that the open areas of the Menagerie that had kept it were full of lights. It may have been trying to outrun them, and not Mokele.

 The Enormous Reptile had been faced with innumerable prey items. After downing two guards who clawed at his throat as they kicked and screamed down into his gullet, he looked around at the maddened escapees for something that more closely resembled the animals he’d been engineered with a desire to kill – Elephants, Rhinos, Hippopotamus.

Nessie, huge and smelling of water, was the closest thing. So, with that same one-minded determinedness that made reptiles so threatening, he began to lumber after it, going as fast as his cold-blooded body would allow him.

When cornered, Nessie possessed some self-defense mechanisms – the late Dr. Sanderson wouldn’t have wanted some other enterprising submariner to discover her beloved Salamanders first, after all.

When it was finally cornered, the massive amphibian swished its tail and head, trying to create confusion. It its tail was struck, it would live, and if it made it hard to tell which organ was which it had at least a fifty-fifty percent chance of survival.

Mokele, however, didn’t have much of a prejudice. Its tactic was to latch on and tear, and after a lash of the Salamander’s whip-like tail broke its skin and cracked its frill, the monitor bit down into the Loch Ness Monster’s torso and began to rip its soft, moist flesh with its poisonous jaws.

Nessie let out a low, gurgling roar of pain and began to bite into its attackers head, trying to pull it off without success.

It pulled out and snapped its jaws around its assailants head again, this time getting a six-inch tooth lodged in the creature’s eye.

With another roar, the monstrous Lizard lunged backwards; taking a strip of meat with it.

Its great claws scraped against the pavement and, sensing that this prey was not worth the effort to take down, lumbered off in search of something that wouldn’t offer as much struggle.

Nessie lumbered off itself, leaving a trail of blood and viscera. It might find another body of water that might support it for a few weeks, but that would be all. The Monitor’s infectious saliva had already begun to work its way into the Amphibian’s system, and soon it would succumb and die.

But it might have time to find prey before then.

* * *

Alva Keel no longer had nightmares about warp-faced children pretending to be human, trying to lure him into darkness.

He’d stared as Sanderson’s corpse for all the six hours they’d been trapped in her private office. Eventually one of the Scientists had called the police, describing an outbreak of animals in the zoo, and the survivors who hadn’t fled were rounded up and rescued.

Six hours with Shuker, and Sanderson’s body. Still slumped back in her chair like a Queen on a throne, both figuratively and literally having the last laugh.

In his dreams, she returned to life, still laughing and laughing and coming towards him.

The Jersey Devil’s face emerged from the darkness, over and over again, to tear him apart with an awful sound.

The Sasquatch lunged.

Nessie struck.

The Chupacabras corned him.

His parents had actually lived that one – after escaping, the Chupas fled into the woods. In time, they found a house.

His.

His parents were dead now. He was with a functional foster family, and he occasionally got a letter or two from Shuker. He responded in kind. Fair enough, given the man saved his life and he may have saved Shuker’s.

He had started School a second time this year. He was expelled from the last one after a kid thought it would be funny to spring up on him and yell “Boo!”

He blacked out, but the next thing Alva remembered was sitting in the Office next to him. He saw there were animalistic clawmarks all over his neck and face.

The sight of them had made him sick. He threw up shortly afterwards.

He kept Newspaper clippings and bookmarked articles on the internet.

Anything relating to ‘Cryptozoology’.

The creatures of Cryptozoology had taken on a frightening new life in the past ten months.

The Yetis and the twenty-foot Pinniped that Sanderson had intended to be Ogopogo were found and kept alive. They were the harmless ones.

The Chupacabras had begun to breed and now at least four states had them.

At least.

The corpse of a massive amphibian, closest in relation to the Salamander genus Urodela, was pulled out of Lake Champlain. It had attacked a swimmer and killed him, judging by its stomach contents.

Vampiric Serpents were showing up in the lakes and rivers of Canada. Swimming had been banned in those areas after a group of Seventeen Triathletes lost eight of their members during a swim across Lake Huron.

 Sanderson had them built wrong. They bred too swiftly. Each one gave rise to three more before it died. Soon they were exhaust their food supplies in those lakes and be driven out onto land, too far from the nearest body of water…or into the sea.

A gigantic Monitor Lizard was skulking around the Bayou, killing fisherman and swampers. At least one School bus had been driven off the road, three children eaten alive before police arrived.

A Sea Serpent was touring the coast of Alaska. Half-eaten Polar Bears and seals were showing up in its territory. Just the other day, four men had gone ‘missing’ after it rammed their boat, sinking it.

No bodies were recovered.

A massive bat, making a distinctive sound, was bringing down women and children in Florida. One child injured, another dead. One woman currently in treatment, soon to be transferred to a Psychiatric hospital. What interested Alva most were the sounds the animal was supposed to make.

The papers rendered it as ‘a-HOOOOOOOOOO-oooooooool.’

The Bunyip had seized a sunbathing teenage girl in the Mississippi river. The calf had been captured alive – it was now ten feet long – but the mother remained on the loose.

The Jersey Devil and the Bigfoot Clan were now regularly reeking havoc up and down the thickest parts of the northwest. Similar enough to the Pine Barrens for the Devil not to be driven eastwards, apparently.

The Genetic Engineer responsible was now in Prison. Some of the Scientists, and the surviving guards Sanderson had hired, were free.

Shuker returned to his native Australia.

Keel sat alone at his desk.

He got little sleep. He got almost no peace.

Sanderson, still slumped in her chair, stayed in his mind.

Often he’d try to shove it out, to block it out with music and movies and books.

It didn’t work.

Sanderson, now almost a year dead, still owned his mind.

She’d had her victory. The beasts of yesterday’s myth were fast becoming today’s reality.

In spite of his Foster Parent’s requests, he’d kept two things from the whole ordeal.

One was an old book, somewhat tattered. But one he’d keep holding on to, as long as he would live.

The other was a desire to watch the Sun rise.

Yes, it could be a trigger. Yes, it could remind him of the single worst thing that had ever happened to him.

But he would watch it anyways.

He wondered how long he’d live before all of the things were captured or killed. If they ever would be.

He wondered if Sanderson would’ve approved how her plan eventually unfolded, even if it ended up being…messier than she’d wanted it to be.

He wondered how mankind would adapt to the changes that were now happening in his world.

Robert Bakker once said that the biggest threat to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.

Shuker had told him in a letter that rabbits and pigs, introduced to Australia decades ago, could now not be completely exterminated. People could only attempt to control them, with varying degrees of success.

Al wondered if any of Sanderson’s Chimaeras could gain that kind of a footing.

He occasionally looks through the book he’d stolen from Sanderson’s office. He reads about the mysterious, unknown animals, and honestly wonders if any of them ever really did exist.

On those early mornings, when he is alone with his thoughts, Alva Keel thinks of the awe and wonder that must have stirred in little Terry Sanderson’s heart when she first picked up that book. She would have been just a little younger than he was.

He sometimes imagines that maybe he can hear animal calls and see drifting shapes, moving together like in a herd; in the red light of the rising sun.

He wonders.

Before all this happened, were there ever any real monsters left in the world?