The Bigfoot Boys, as they liked to call themselves, all gathered in Bill Jones’s back yard for target practice, as they liked to call it. Target practice wasn’t just about hitting targets; it was just as much about shooting the shit as it was about shooting shit. Before any guns were drawn, the four of them first had to sit in lawn chairs around a fire, drink beer, and eat whatever they’d killed that week. This week, they were having venison steaks.

  “Damn Woodrow, that thing looks gnarlier than I thought it would,” said Slugfoot Sal Johnson with a scrunched up face, gesturing at the Wampus eye with his beer still in his hand. “I think y’all got one a size too big or somethin’.”

  “Looks a sight better than your foot. Works better, too,” Woodrow replied before picking up his whole steak with his fork and tearing a piece off with his teeth. Red juice dribbled down his white beard and he wiped it with his free hand. They both laughed.

  Slugfoot Sal Johnson had earned his nickname a few years back when he fell asleep in a deer blind with a shotgun in his hand and almost took his own foot off when he was startled awake. He’s convinced it was Bigfoot himself that woke him up. Chuck Griffith, who was with him on that hunt and had managed to stay awake the whole time, insists that it was a bobcat. It was hard for either of them to say for sure though thanks to the hole in Sal’s foot distracting them both. Ever since that day, Slugfoot Sal’s right foot has looked like a wad of old hamburger meat and he’s had to walk with a cane.

  “Bet I can still shoot better ‘n you,” Slugfoot Sal continued.

  “You couldn’t even shoot better ‘n me before I had this eye,” Woodrow replied. “Even with that big rifle of yours.”

  “Neither of y’all could hit the wide side of a barn anyway. Not when it counts,” Chuck said. He’d been dressing the next deer so that Bill Jones could hang it up in the smokehouse to make jerky, but he’d heard everything they were saying, and had some words of his own.

  “Remember when we ran into that Goatman last month? Which one of us took it down?” he continued as he pulled out the deer’s guts and put them in a bag.

  “If you would’ve given me a damn second to shoot, I probably would’ve—” Slugfoot Sal started.

  “Which one?” Chuck repeated.

  “Man shut the hell up. You know it was you. I’m sayin’ though that if I would’ve seen it first, then—”

  “You would’ve hid faster?” Chuck interrupted again. “You got behind that tree pretty damn quick as it is, for someone with one-and-a-half feet.”

  “You took that fucker down, can’t argue with you there,” said Woodrow. “But only reason I didn’t get to it first is because I couldn’t see for shit in the dark — especially not a black-furred Goatman. But this right here fixes that and then some.” He pointed to his own bulging eye. “I can see a squirrel take a shit from a mile away now, day or night.”

  “Leave the damn squirrels alone!” Bill Jones shouted from the smokehouse. “You’re gonna have bigger fish to fry pretty soon!”

  Woodrow grinned, but Chuck and Slugfoot both became real serious. The fire lighting the bottoms of their face made them look like they were about to tell a ghost story.

  “So y’all are serious then?” Slugfoot asked. “You’re really gonna try and…” he looked around in case someone might be peeking their heads over the privacy fence, “…kill Emperor Augustus?”

  “That’s the craziest shit I ever heard,” Chuck added. “I don’t care how many animal bits you put on yourself. You’ve seen the footage from the War. That motherfucker took down whole armies by himself without breaking a damn sweat. You think some cat eyes are gonna help you against that?”

  Bill Jones was done in the smokehouse and took a seat between Woodrow and the rest of the boys, spotted with ash and smelling like a fresh piece of ham. The reflection of the fire on his thick glasses obscured his eyes and made it impossible to see where he was looking.

  “Come on,” he said, “do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’d help Woody out with this if I didn’t think it had a chance of working? Y’all know me better than that, right?”

  “Of course, of course,” Chuck said. It wasn’t like him to go against Bill Jones in an argument. It wasn’t like any of them to go against Bill Jones most of the time, as a matter of fact. Even when it looked like there was no way in Hell he was right about something, he usually turned out to be right anyway. It turned out that way when he told them there were all kinds of strange creatures out in the woods. It turned out that way when he told them that those creatures could do things that scientists and politicians told them weren’t possible. And it turned out that way when he told them they could do those things too if they let him perform a couple of operations in his garage. It never did anyone much good to bet against Bill Jones.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “It just seems crazy as all hell, is all I’m saying,” Chuck continued. He took a long draw of his beer, draining the rest of the can and throwing it on the ground before grabbing another one out of the cooler that once held Woodrow’s new eye. “You really want to risk your life, Woodrow?”

  “Gladly,” he replied. “Without a god damn doubt it my mind. That motherfucker killed my dad. If all I do in this life is kill that sonofabitch, I’ll die a happy man.”

  “And what happens when you don’t kill him?” Slugfoot Sal glanced over at Bill Jones. “If you don’t kill him?”

  “That ain’t gonna happen,” Woodrow replied. “But if it does, I hope I can at least hurt him. Show the world he ain’t invincible. If I can at least do that, someone will come after me to take him down, I reckon.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about all that,” Bill Jones said. “You’re not a martyr. This is gonna work. That’s a fact.”

  He said it so casually, like he was reading it out of a textbook, that it seemed ridiculous to think that anyone could possibly think otherwise.

  “Now,” Bill Jones clapped his hands together, “how about we shoot some shit?”

  The boys were all just about done with this uncomfortable conversation and heartily agreed. They’d all brought their weapons of choice — Sal with his old wooden Browning lever action rifle, Chuck with his slick gray Ruger semi automatic, Bill Jones with his weathered M1 carbine, and Woodrow with his dad’s old Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, with a mahogany grip and steel barrel as polished as the day it was made. They stood one behind the other and took turns shooting at a life sized wooden sculpture of Bigfoot that Bill Jones kept in his yard for occasions like these.

  Slugfoot Sal went first and nailed him all five times, twice in the chest, twice in the leg, and once in the head.

  “A solid eight points for Slugfoot,” Bill Jones said and scribbled into a little notebook. “Your turn, Chuck.”

  Chuck did a little better, with three shots to the head and two to the chest.

  “Fourteen for Chuck.” Bill Jones scribbled it into his notebook. He looked at Woodrow and grinned. “You’re up, Woody.”

  Woodrow looked down the barrel of his revolver and aimed at the wooden sasquatch. One, two, three, four, five — he shot each of the sculpture’s fingers clean off. He turned to the rest of the boys, blew the nonexistent smoke off the barrel of his gun, twirled it around his pointer finger and slid it back into its holster.

  “I think Woodrow won,” Bill Jones said.

  “I don’t think Bigfoot’s gonna sit there and let you shoot off all his fingers,” Slugfoot Sal grumbled as he hobbled over to his cane that he’d leaned up against the fence. “Neither is the Emperor.”

  “They’re not gonna have to let me do a god damn thing,” Woodrow replied. “I’m gonna do it anyway.” He shot the sculpture right between the eyes.

  It was safe to say he was enjoying his new eye. He wasn’t a bad shot before, not by any means, but he reckoned he couldn’t just see that squirrel shitting in the woods a mile away now — he could probably shoot it too.

  The Bigfoot boys spent the next hour or so taking turns putting holes in the sasquatch sculpture (and occasionally in Bill Jones’s fence), drinking, and trash talking one another, until Woodrow saw something peculiar in the woods just beyond the fence.

  A single, yellow eye was leering at them all from behind a tree. It was bright, fearsome and familiar. The second Woodrow met its gaze, it disappeared.

  “Boys,” he said and gripped his revolver tightly. “We got someone peeping at us. A one-eyed Wampus.”

  “You mean the one y’all got that eye from?” Chuck whispered.

  “More than likely,” Woodrow replied. “He’s gone now though. Left as soon as I spotted him.”

  “You sure about that?” Bill Jones said. They all stood as still as their drunken bodies could manage and listened out for any signs of Wampus cats in the area. They didn’t hear any. But wherever you see one Wampus cat, there’s a whole slew more lurking about that you didn’t see. They braced themselves and held their fingers just above their guns’ triggers, but there was still no sign of any Wampus Cats lurking.

  “Maybe you were just seeing things, Woodrow,” Chuck suggested. “Still getting used to that new peeper.”

  “Nah, I saw what I saw,” Woodrow insisted. “It was one eye that looked just like this one here.” It was getting dark, and when it did, it’d be tough to see the black fur of the Wampus cat hidden in the woods, even for Woodrow.

  “We should probably get inside,” he continued.

  “What? No way!” Bill Jones said. “You want another eye right? Well they were kind enough to bring one right to us. And you’d have a matching set, no less. Let him come into my backyard and we’ll turn him into a pair of boots and a couple pounds of jerky.”

  “Fuck that. I’m going inside.” Slugfoot Sal hobbled across the back yard towards the sliding glass door. He went inside and Woodrow saw him through the window throwing himself onto the leather couch in the den and turning on the TV. The remaining three took cover behind the smokehouse and waited — but the one-eyed Wampus never came.

  They waited behind that smokehouse for a good twenty minutes before they decided there wasn’t going to be any action that night. “Come on. I’ll drive y’all home,” Bill Jones said, disappointed. “Sorry Woody. Guess we’re not getting that new eyeball after all.”

  Woodrow, Chuck, and Slugfoot Sal climbed into the back of Bill Jones’s pickup truck and he dropped them off at their homes. Woodrow was the farthest away, so he was dropped off last. Bill Jones nodded his head, Woodrow did the same, and the truck took off down the road.

  Woodrow was dead tired. Used to be, he could stay up drinking until the sun came up and be ready to do it again by noon. As soon as he turned forty, though, he was ready to turn in by 11pm most nights — and he turned forty damn near a decade ago.

  He rolled into bed without a thought in his head and closed his eyes. He didn’t even bother to close his window, and didn’t give any thought to the chilly night breeze that would run up his electric bill. He also didn’t give any thought to the fact that he hadn’t opened that window in years — until he heard footsteps coming towards him from his living room.

  His eyes shot open, and the One-Eyed Wampus leered at him from the foot of his bed.