It was pitch black and snowing, with not much other traffic, Because of that, Kenny was making good time. With luck, he would drop his load of closeout furniture at sunrise and have an hour for breakfast before picking up another load for the return trip to Asheville. If he timed his stops right – and didn’t get pulled over - he might just be home by nightfall.
Beside him was his piss-jug and a gallon of coffee. If the coffee didn’t keep him awake, the bottle of little blue pills tucked into his boot definitely would. Driving a big rig was all a matter of balance: Speed vs. road conditions, exhaustion vs. chemistry. Tilt too far one way or the other, even for a moment, and you’d be on the wrong side of five tons of screaming steel.
It didn’t help that Ohio had shit for radio stations. Didn’t anyone here realize that a song or two had been written after 1985? And what they did play, they played into the ground, until you could sing even the songs you hated in your sleep.
Uh-oh - better not to mention the S-word. Not here. Not now.
The truck’s high-beams pushed against the darkness but couldn’t scratch it. The snow threw itself against his wipers, each flake a crystal kamikaze trying to get in. The road hadn’t been plowed - unusual for a state that was usually on top of the weather - but at least the snow was still fresh powder. In a few hours, it would be an ice rink, but Kenny would be long gone by then.
Awake. Wakey, wakey, eggs & bakey. Find something to look at besides the snow. Snow was hypnotic at night; it made you forget where the road was. Sometimes it even seemed like it was trying to get in the cab with him, like a school of piranha in the dark.
Ahead, on the median along the edge of the road, Kenny spotted a dead deer. Well, it was that time of year, wasn’t it? He cast it a glance as he passed. It was a buck with a decent rack, lying on a big pile of snow, legs askew. It had survived hunters, mad cow disease, droughts, coyotes, and famine, only to end up as roadkill.
Going, going… gone.
Such a waste, to be murdered by a road, a thing that killed indiscriminately but didn’t eat. There must be miles of venison on this highway alone, waiting for the county crews or the state to cover them with wood chips so that commuters wouldn’t have to watch them rot. It all seemed unnatural, somehow.
In Kenny’s left rearview mirror, the buck stood up.
Kenny blinked, checked the road ahead, then opened his window for a look back. Behind him, the pile of snow that the deer lay on rose up, wearing the buck like a hat. In another moment, it was lost to the snow, distance, and the dark.
Kenny put up his window and shook the cold flakes out of his hair. He pulled off at the next exit and soon found a Giant Eagle parking lot to glide his rig into. A couple of hours’ sleep might cost him his bonus, but when you started seeing fucking snow banks stand up, it was long past time to put your head down, little blue pills be damned.
The name of the road that the grocery store was on stuck in his mind as he shut the rig down, kicked off his boots, and climbed into his bunk:
Trollbridge.
He clicked on his bunk heater. In less than a minute, he was asleep.
Chad tapped the pen against his teeth, a bad habit from grade school. He looked out the office window; it was already getting dark, and the sky had that weird, yellowish light that meant more snow was on the way.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said into the phone. “What did you say you hit?”
“A big fucking buck.”
“Do you mean a deer?” asked Chad.
“What the fuck did I just say? Can you not hear me?”
“Sir, I’m just trying to be clear.” Tap, tap, tap. This shift couldn’t end soon enough.
“Yes, a fucking deer. I hit it with my fucking truck. It did a fucking number on my grill, and my bumper’s gone.”
Chad hunted around on his desk. Where was the damned form?
“Are you calling to claim the carcass?” he asked.
“What?”
“Do you want to keep the deer?” Ah, there it was.
“What the fuck am I gonna do with it?”
“Some people like to keep the meat,” said Chad. “Or the head, if it’s not damaged. It’s your kill, legally - we just have to send someone out with a deer carcass receipt.”
“People eat these fuckin’ things?”
“Yes. Deer meat is called venison.”
“Why would anybody eat it? Are they poor?”
“Not necessarily,” said Chad, getting a little angry but trying to keep it out of his tone. “Some folks like wild game.”
“Look, I’m not Tarzan, okay? I just wanted somebody to know.”
“We appreciate that,” said Chad, crumpling up the form and sailing it into the wastebasket. “Is the carcass off the road, or do you need us to come move it?”
“I don’t give a fuck what you do with it. It’s on 480 by the bridge.”
“Which bridge?” said Chad. He waited. “Hello?”
The line was dead. The fucking fucker had hung up.
“Fuck my life,” said Chad. “Now I’ve got to go out.”
The problem with being a wildlife officer, aside from the pay, was that the job often sucked. Like - just for example - having to go out in a fucking blizzard to flag and maybe move a deer carcass when there was just twenty minutes left in your shift - a carcass that you didn’t know the location of, mind you - because those twenty minutes could mean the difference between a clear road or a dead motorist. With a baby on board, because that was just what life was like, when you were Chad Danzig.
Jesus, thought Chad. When did I get so fucking dark? And when did I start saying fuck all the time?
But he knew what it was. Spending a sizable portion of your workday dealing with dead things - or sometimes even killing things, when necessary, like that coyote that kept biting joggers by the canal last summer - reinforced the otherwise carefully avoided truth:
Everything died. And more often than not, death was sudden, cruel, and unbelievably messy.
And for a large chunk of every year, that meant deer.
Lots of other animals had adapted to people. You hardly ever saw a dead squirrel by the side of the road any more. Instead of running across the pavement, they almost seemed to swim across now, spreading their bodies out and staying low. Maybe it was learned behavior, maybe it was passed down in their DNA, but they had figured out the system.
Hell, coyotes had adapted so well that there were more of them now than ever before - the one he’d taken down didn’t even put a dent in that. You sure couldn’t say that about buffalos, or any other animal that Chad could think of.
But at the top of every road kill list, year after year… raccoons.
Okay, well, that was true - you did tend to see a lot more dead raccoons than boneheads, but a raccoon carcass more or less took care of itself, falling to pieces over time or flattening out and becoming one with the pavement. Run over a dead deer, though, especially a big buck, and you just might join him.
Which meant he wasn’t getting home any time soon.
“Sean, I gotta go mulch a deer. Wanna go with me?”
Sean looked up from his desk where he was texting his girlfriend, Brittany, because that was what Sean always did.
“Aren’t you off?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“You don’t have to stick around,” said Sean. “I can get it.”
“It’s a buck.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“You pull around. I’ll call dispatch and log it. Where’s it at?”
“Somewhere on 480. He said it was by a bridge.”
“Which one?”
Chad shook his head.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“There’s, like, 3 bridges.”
“Maybe he meant overpass.”
“Oh, dude…”
“Let’s go.”
At least the truck is warm, thought Chad, as they crawled along 480 in the weird light that you sometimes got on winter nights. Visibility was bad, but the plows had been through, so the roads were still passable.
“I don’t get it,” said Sean.
“What?” said Chad, turning on the wipers, which didn’t seem to change much.
“We live in a place where it snows, right?”
“Yeah?”
“How come everybody drives like they’ve never see it before?”
“Hmph,” said Chad.
They passed an SUV on its side in the ditch. Neither remarked on it.
“How far until the next bridge?” said Sean, bored.
“I think it’s Harper, so about… eight miles?”
“Ever seen deer around there?”
Chad shook his head, squinting into the snow. “Not one of the crossings.”
“I’m betting it’s Granger. We mulched four there last year, remember?”
Chad nodded. He had mulched two of them himself that summer. You covered them in wood chips so they decomposed quickly, didn’t attract scavengers, and didn’t distract drivers. Mulch hid their stink pretty well, too. Winter was different - snow, sleet, and temperature swings did all the work - all you had to do was make sure the carcass was off the road.
All part of the magic of being a wildlife officer.
When they got there, Harper was a bust, but traffic was thinning out the later it got, so they made it to Granger in less time than Chad expected. He slowed as they approached.
“I see a bumper,” said Sean.
“Where?”
“Just under the overpass, on the right.”
Chad pulled the truck up and over. Sean was right - a bright blue bumper was lying next to one of the overpass’s supporting columns, just at the edge of their headlights. It wasn’t even covered by snow yet.
He turned on the hazard lights and the flashers. No sense getting winged by some asshole who thought that he knew how to drive sixty in the snow. Sean was already up and out, flashlight in hand.
Chad opened his door and zipped up his coat, but snow got in at the neck, anyway, shocking him with its abrupt, cold bite. He slammed the door to shake it off.
“So where’s our deer?” he said.
He turned on his own flashlight and scanned the road. There was almost no traffic, by now, but it wouldn’t have mattered: There was also no deer.
Sean picked up the bumper to examine it more closely. “There’s definitely blood and fur on here,” he said. “Maybe he took it with him.”
“Not this guy. He’s never eaten anything that didn’t come in a box or a bag.”
“Somebody else, then, maybe,” said Sean.
He tossed the bumper under the overpass, farther from the road. It struck something wet, and both men turned in surprise.
“Bingo!” said Sean.
In the light of their flashlights, the six-pointer mooned at them from behind the next column, its eyes wide and dull. The bumper had landed squarely on its neck.
Sean wandered over to take a look. Chad took out his log book to document the carcass.
“You’re gonna want to see this,” said Sean, after a moment.
“What?” said Chad, writing while trying to hold the flashlight at the same time. He glanced up. Sean was holding up the deer’s head. The rest of the deer wasn’t attached to it.
“Wow,” Chad said, genuinely impressed. “How fast was he going, do you think?”
“It gets better,” said Sean. “That’s all there is over here.”
“No body?”
“Not unless it vaporized on impact.”
Chad walked over. There was a lot of blood on the ground where the head had lain. Too much.
He turned in a slow circle, looking for footprints in the snow. He wouldn’t be surprised if another driver had taken the deer - venison was tasty, if you cooked it up right - but why chop the head off before loading it? That would make a - pardon the pun - bloody mess.
That was when he noticed the dripping, and pointed his flashlight up.
“Jesus…”
The buck’s body was fifteen feet above them, draped across what Chad assumed were drain pipes. It hung mostly from its hind legs, like a side of beef in a butcher’s shop.
That’s stupid, he thought. First, nobody’s going to dress a deer outside in the middle of a fucking blizzard. Second, especially not alongside a highway. Third, the buck had to weigh two hundred pounds, even without its head, so how could anyone have gotten the damned thing up there?
“Holy shit!” yelled Sean, eyes wide. He pulled out his phone. “This fucker’s going on YouTube!”
Chad shook his head. Even if the caller had been driving an SUV, upon impact the deer would have traveled mostly in the same direction as the vehicle - that is, parallel to the ground. Sure, it might catch a little air, but there’s no way that it would end up that far off the ground.
Not unless it was pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh, he thought.
Sean laughed, swinging his phone around to capture the bumper, the deer’s head, and the body.
“That’s fucking amazing!” he said.
Chad strode over to the column near the head, pacing off the distance. There was some blood on the support, he saw, but not much. If the body had traveled through the air, leaving the head here, wouldn’t there have been more spray?
He wasn’t sure. And what was that smell? Like cabbage and sweat and feet.
He swung his flashlight around the rest of the underpass above him. I-beams, pipes, concrete, some faded graffiti on the concrete blocks nearer the road, but no ladders, ropes, or chains. Nothing that could have hauled a full grown buck up under there.
“How do we get it down?” said Chad, staring at it.
Sean stopped laughing. “What do you mean?”
“We can’t leave it up there,” said Chad. “It’s right over the edge of the road. If it fell on a car…”
Sean put away his phone and brushed snow off his hood. He shrugged.
“Grapple?”
It was Chad’s turn to laugh. “You a cowboy, now? You Batman?”
“Spider-Man, maybe. Why not?”
Chad shrugged. “Sure. Why not. There a grapple in the truck?”
“I think so.”
“More power to you, buddy.”
Chad put away his notebook and took a couple of pictures with his own phone. They would be blurry, with all the snow, but a dead deer was a dead deer. The important thing was recording where it had happened and when.
Is that really the most important thing? he asked himself. Because I can think of one or two more.
“Found it!” said Sean, coming back, a coiled, yellow nylon rope in hand. Well, mitten, anyway. The steel grapple dangled at the end of it, looking for all the world like some kind of medieval weapon.
“Should I get back in the truck?” said Chad. “Should both f us?”
“Laugh it up, Overtime Boy,” said Sean, smiling in the wind.
He played out a few feet of the line, swinging the grapple like a pendulum. Chad took a step back, then several more.
“Don’t you trust me?” said Sean.
“Hell, no,” said Chad. “That’s why I don’t let you drive.”
Sean laughed. He swung the grapple around and around like a propeller, eyeing the distance to the carcass above them, then suddenly let fly.
“Nice web-shootin’, Spiderman,” laughed Chad. “Now how do we get the grapple down?”
Sean grunted. The grapple was wrapped around a pipe a good five feet from the deer. He jiggled the line, but the metal hooks were lodged fast.
“Fuck!” he said.
“What do we do now?” said Chad.
“Tell you what I’m gonna do,” said Chad. He drew his service revolver.
“Dude, you can’t…”
Pow! Pow pow!
In the darkness behind Sean, something silently dropped down from above, but it wasn’t the deer. It was wide and covered in shaggy grey hair like a goat. When it stood up, it was easily half again Sean’s height.
“Fuck!” said Sean, still looking up at the deer. It hadn’t moved.
The thing behind him had a prominent nose - a drinker’s nose, Chad would have said - and eyes like softballs. It stood on two thick legs, with hairless, long-toed feet as big as end tables. Even fully erect, its arms reached all the way to the ground.
Chad caught its eye. It stared at him, shaggy head tilted slightly to one side. Then it smiled, and its mouth went on and on.
“Hunh,” said Chad, blinking in the snow.
It spread its arms to either side - seven, eight feet, easy. There were big hands at the end of them, with long, clawed fingers, like the sloth Chad saw once at the zoo.
“Don’t tell anybody I did that, okay?” said Sean. He looked over at Chad for confirmation, then frowned.
“What?” he said. Chad wasn’t looking at him. He turned. Then it had him.
The moment that Chad heard Sean’s first scream, it was like someone fired a starter’s pistol. He turned and ran away from the truck and onto the road, all instinct and blind panic, because pavement was faster going than snowbound grass.
Behind him, Sean’s screams rose in pitch and volume. Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
It’s coming for me. Sean’s dead and oh God those teeth and Mommy don’t let it get me I won’t look back that’s when they get you…
But he did, and slowed, then stopped in the middle of the road, blinking in the snow. He could see Sean, or a pile of what used to be Sean. But whatever it was, it was gone, as if it had never been there.
Ambush predator. It’s waiting for me to come back, so it can pick me off just like it did him. The deer was just roadkill - easy meat. But now it’s hiding, waiting for another meal to come along. This is what it does.
Chad never heard the semi that hit him. In the driver’s defense, the snowfall had worsened to the point that visibility was almost nonexistent, except for under the overpass. He felt the rig shudder, and shuddered himself, but put it down to the wind.
For a moment, Chad flew. As he had surmised, his direction of travel was more horizontal than vertical. He felt no pain from his impact with the semi or the column that it threw him into. That would come later. For now, there was only the pavement, swirling snow, and Sean’s face.
Correction: Most of Sean’s face.
A shadow moved at the edge of his vision, but he couldn’t turn his head. That was all right; after the semi was out of sight and things had quieted down, the troll came right over and squatted down in front of him.
It was still smiling, its eyes like merry little raisins.
“Good mourning, bleckfust,” it said.