“So are you gonna tell me what the hell was in that syringe?”

  The gashes in Bill Jones’s chest were looking better by the next morning. Woodrow spent the rest of the day and all of that night applying ointments and replacing gauze — he felt he had earned an explanation. The cuts from the Wampus claws were nasty, but superficial, and weren’t the reason Bill Jones had coughed blood onto the bathroom wall. Whatever he had injected into his neck was responsible for that.

  Bill Jones got up slowly from his bed, holding his stomach.

  “Fine,” he said. “But you can’t tell anyone. I don’t even feel comfortable saying it out loud.”

  “Then write it down,” Woodrow suggested.

  “That’s even worse.” Bill Jones peeked through the blinds in the living room. “I got some shit off the dark web. It was listed as waste from the Two Man Revolution — from Emperor Augustus,” he whispered. “And I’m inclined to believe them. I studied the substance for weeks, wasted damn near half of it just trying to identify it and came up with nothing. It’s a liquid, but it’s alive. It’s got DNA, it responds to stimuli. It thinks.”

  “It thinks?” Woodrow echoed.

  “I think so,” Bill Jones replied. “You ever seen those shows the Emperor used to put on? Where he’d craft those slimy black monsters out of thin air and make them fight each other?”

  “‘Course,” Woodrow said. “Seen the videos at least.”

  “Yeah, well, once he makes them, it doesn’t look like he’s doing a whole lot to control them, you know? I don’t think he needs to. I think they think for themselves, once he tells them what they should be thinkin’.”

  “So you injected one of Emperor Augustus’s magic puppets into your neck and it gave you the strength to kill a Wampus Cat with your bare hands?”

  “Kind of. Not really. I modified it a bit — expressed a few genes, suppressed some others. Made it more docile, though you see the way it still tore me up inside. It’s got a pretty short half life too, thank God. If it didn’t die off after a couple of hours, I’d probably be dead right now.”

  It never ceased to strike Woodrow how Bill Jones could say the craziest damn thing he’d ever heard like it was a normal part of every day life.

  “Jesus, you didn’t have to do all that, you know. We could’ve found another way to kill that Wampus Cat, I’m sure.”

  “Honestly, I just wanted to see if it worked.” Bill Jones almost let out a chuckle but his chest advised him against it. He made a small heaving motion like he threw up in his mouth and then swallowed. When he finally smiled, his teeth were stained pink.

  “Won’t do it again,” he continued. “Not without making a few more adjustments.”

  When Chuck and Slugfoot Sal heard what went down the day before, they came on over to Bill Jones’s house as quick as they could to lend their injured friend some moral support — and to get more details.

  “Don’t you two have jobs or somethin’?” Woodrow said wryly when they walked through the door. Chuck tossed his baseball cap onto the coatrack to his left and rubbed the bald spot on his head.

  “Shit, you think I spent twenty years in the Marines so that I’d still have to work when I’m forty-five? Uncle Sam works for me now, boy. And even if I had a job, I’d call in sick today. Bill Jones, what the hell did you get into yesterday? You look like a bowl of warmed up shit.”

  “Oh you know, just wrasslin with a Wampus Cat. If you think I’m in bad shape, you should see what he looks like,” Bill Jones said.

  “He’s in the freezer if you really wanna see,” Woodrow added. Slugfoot Sal hobbled over to the garage.

  “God damn. Looks like he got hit by a train,” he said. Chuck went in to see for himself and confirmed that the Wampus didn’t look like it was doing very well.

  “How’d you manage that?” Chuck asked. Bill Jones recounted the tale and told them about the serum in the syringe, though he didn’t go into detail about what exactly was in it. Neither Chuck nor Sal tended to ask about things like that anway, afraid to encourage Bill Jones to go on a long, boring rant about science mumbo jumbo.

  By the end of the story, Chuck and Sal both came to the same conclusion that they’d come to a long time ago: Bill Jones and Woodrow Brown were some crazy sons of bitches. Most days, Woodrow would deny it, but that morning he found it hard to argue against the accusation. Bill Jones never tried to fool anyone into thinking he was sane. Sane people never did anything interesting, in his humble opinion.

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  They spent most of the rest of the morning sitting around Bill Jones’s living room doing just about nothing. Slugfoot Sal lit up a cigar and filled the house with dank smoke. The rest of them were more partial to marijuana, and puffed on hand-rolled cigarettes filled with finely-ground green that Chuck always kept in a tin in his shirt pocket. They smoked, talked and laughed until Bill Jones suddenly went quiet. For a second, they thought he might’ve keeled over, but then he sprang up out of his La-Z-Boy and grabbed a map and a pen out of the garage. He handed them to Woodrow.

  It was a map of the country, covered in black circles and red Xs. Each circle represented a place they thought they might run into the next beast for Woodrow’s experiment. Each X represented a place where they failed to find him. There were no uncrossed circles left.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner,” Bill Jones said. “The cats — you can ask the cats where he’s hiding.”

  “You think the Wampus Cats keep tabs on Whirling Whimpuses?” Chuck asked.

  “I think they could find them if they wanted to,” Bill Jones replied. “If Woodrow asked them to.”

  “The Wampus Cats ain’t gonna jump up and do somethin’ just because I ask them to,” Woodrow said.

  “You can talk to ‘em though, right?” Sal said. “Just need ‘em to like you.”

  Woodrow laughed. “I don’t think the Wampus’s even like each other. I don’t know if they’re capable of liking someone.”

  “Couldn’t hurt to ask,” Bill Jones said. The three other boys all looked down at the half-raw wound on his chest.

  “It sure as shit could,” Woodrow replied. “Just because they’re not hunting me down doesn’t mean they won’t try anything if I pay them another visit.”

  “But you can talk to them,” Sal repeated. “How many humans you think they ever talked to? If they’re half as smart as you seem to think they are, I can’t believe they wouldn’t be curious about you.”

  “You really want to do this, right?” Chuck asked. “You want to get the best parts off of the baddest critters and wear them yourself?”

  “You know I do,” Woodrow said.

  “Then this seems to be your only option.”

  “Shit. It’s never good when y’all are right.”

  Woodrow finally agreed that he’d pay the Wampus Cats another visit that night, but he added that Chuck had to come with him for backup in case shit went sideways.

  “Abso-fuckin-lutely.” Chuck said. “Bill Jones, you got any more of that serum?”

  “Nope,” Bill Jones lied. “Fresh out.”

  “Shit. Guess we gotta do it the old fashioned way, Woodrow. Oh well. Bullets were my first choice anyway. Probably best if you just don’t fuck it up though.”

  “I’ll do my best. Come to my house around nine o’ clock. I’ll show you the way to the den.”

  Chuck nodded solemnly, fastened the baseball cap back onto his head, and went out the door. Slugfoot Sal soon followed, wanting to take his early afternoon nap in his own bed.

  “Really, if you got any more of that black shit left, it might do me some good,” Woodrow said.

  “I do, but it won’t,” Bill Jones replied. “Not now.”

  Woodrow opened his mouth to argue, but decided that going home and getting some sleep was a better use of his time.

  The night was warm and muggy. Crickets sang somewhere in the distance and the full moon lit the wooded path to the Wampus Den for Woodrow and Chuck. Chuck held a shotgun firmly to his chest and had two pistols fastened to his belt, one on each hip. He and Woodrow both hoped they wouldn’t be necessary.

  When they arrived, the den was bursting with activity. Young Wampuses playfully pounced on each other, and older ones left and came back with freshly killed squirrels hanging from their mouths. Many of them barely stopped to take notice of the two men who’d just walked into their home, but the Mother Cat approached them almost immediately and met them near the entrance. Chuck white-knuckled his shotgun as the old lady moved closer. Woodrow put a hand on his shoulder and told him to relax — he knew this one.

  The Mother Cat stared at Woodrow for a moment. Woodrow held the gaze and then turned to Chuck.

  “They keep tabs on all of the creatures around here,” he said. “None of them have much reverence for the Wampus Cats, and the Wampus Cats won’t miss them if they’re gone. They’ll help us.”

  Chuck looked shocked for several reasons. Firstly, he didn’t hear the Wampus say a damn thing. Secondly, this whole thing was going much better than he could’ve imagined.

  Woodrow looked back at the Mother Cat.

  “But,” he continued, “Wampus Cats aren’t in the business of doing favors and getting nothing in return. They’ll tell us where the cryptid we want is hiding if we give them the cryptid they want.”

  “Well, what cryptid do they want?” Chuck asked.

  “The Patriarch of the Not Deer,” Woodrow replied.

  “Shit, that’s all? Killin a Not Deer ain’t a problem at all, I can’t imagine,” Chuck said. Woodrow didn’t appear to be as happy about the request.

  “Not just a Not Deer — the Not Deer. The head honcho. Big Papa. I don’t think we’re gonna be able to just walk up and shoot ‘em.”

  “Y’ain’t scared of a couple of Not Deer, are you Woodrow?” Chuck asked with a shit-eating grin. His hold on his shotgun had loosened and the blood returned to his knuckles.

  “If you’re not scared, then you’re dumber than you look, boy,” Woodrow replied. Chuck still liked to fancy himself a spry young man just because he was a little younger than the rest of the Bigfoot Boys at the tender age of forty-five . Sometimes, this caused him to butt heads with the rest of the group. Any time they considered doing something stupid and dangerous, it was usually Chuck’s idea, with the notable exception of the big yellow eye in Woodrow’s head. If he passed up an opportunity to hunt down some wily creature in the woods, though, it probably meant he was dead.

  “There’s a reason these cats aren’t doing it themselves,” Woodrow continued. “It ain’t gonna be easy to get near the fucker, let alone kill it.” But he knew he had no choice. They kept looking for the Whimpus and kept coming up short.

  Without waiting for a response, Woodrow turned back to the Mother Cat and said “We’ll do it.”

  He thought they ought to shake on it, but the Mother Cat did not seem to care about such formalities. As soon as Woodrow agreed to do what she asked, she turned and left and curled up in a mound of leaves. Some of the other cats shot glances at the two men, as if to say “Why the Hell are you still here?” and so they left unceremoniously.

  “Man, Bill Jones is gonna love this,” Chuck said on their way back to civilization.

  “Yeah, I know,” Woodrow sighed, pinching his nose to stave off the oncoming headache.