“It’s the Chupacabra,” Andres declared while glancing warily around the grassy range under the pale moonlight.
Dan frowned as he studied his dead goat. It was the fifth goat he’d found in the past weeks with two messy puncture wounds in the neck and very little blood spilled, but the goat had been sucked dry of blood and moisture. It had become a dry husk within hours. Dan looked around for his recently adopted cattle dog.
“It got your poor dog, too,” Andres added mournfully.
“Shut up! There’s no Chupacabra!” Dan shouted in sudden rage.
Andres went silent. Andres was a short and slim, middle-aged Latino with long dark hair and clean-shaven face.
Dan was a tall and very muscular middle aged white man with a shaved head and goatee. Dan had blue eyes and facial scars from his youth brawling.
Dan had bought the California ranch with all the goats on it because the former owner was selling it so cheaply. Dan was wondering if this was why.
“I’m sorry, Andres,” Dan apologized.
“I understand boss,” Andres was sympathetic. “Tito sold this ranch cheap because he was scared. Numerous goats turned up like this and three of his dogs disappeared. One night he came home terrified and the next day packed up and left. He wouldn’t speak of it, but he saw something out here that scared him so bad he fled this ranch.”
“Whatever it is, I’m going to kill it,” Dan announced somberly.
“Legends say the Chupacabra can’t be killed,” Andres pointed out.
Dan gave Andres a skeptical look. Dan had served in military combat in Iraq long ago. He knew what it was like to kill both animals and humans. “There’s nothing on God’s green Earth that can’t be killed.”
“The Chupacabra doesn’t come from God’s green Earth,” Andres objected. “It is a demon from hell. It crosses from hell’s dimensions to feed here and then goes back. Many men have spoken of shooting this thing and know they hit it, but it always got away. And some of the men that chose to hunt it disappeared. The Chupacabra took them back to hell with it.”
Dan managed to bite his tongue instead of snapping at Andres. Dan looked around the grassy vast fields of his ranch under the moon’s glow and shivered as a chill wind blew on his sweating back. “That’s just an old wives tale, Andres. It’s an animal feeding on my goats. I’ll hunt it down and kill it. The damn dog probably just ran away. He’ll turn up.”
Andres offered no response. He looked both scared and skeptical.
***
Andre quit without notice.
Dan found a note the next day that Andre had left behind stating that he wanted no part of hunting the Chupacabra.
Dan was an experienced hunter and former Army ranger. He was puzzled when he looked at his trail cam recordings because the trail cam feeds turned to static when the goats had been killed. It seemed a bizarre coincidence. Dan set up a tree-stand and waited with his scoped rifle for the goat killer over the next several nights.
The Chupacabra came without warning. Dan’s trail cams filled with static and he frowned looking at his phone screen feed of the cams. He scanned through his rifle’s night scope vainly. The goats in the herd started bleating and one went down thrashing around. Through the scope Dan found himself looking at what seemed to be a barely perceptible shadowy creature. The creature’s vague outline was small and baboon-like. Dan settled his crosshairs on the center body mass of the shadowy creature and squeezed his trigger.
Dan’s .308 caliber rifle thundered with a colossal boom. His bullet belted the beast’s body with fatal force in a flare and fulmination The Chupacabra floundered but was still moving. With steady aim, Dan tugged the trigger twice more bludgeoning the beast’s body with more bullets.
The Chupacabra seemed to disappear.
Dan waited while scanning through his scope. He knew he couldn’t have missed it. He was about to come down when the ladder of his tree stand was struck by something that knocked the stand and Dan cleaned out of the tree. Dan hit the ground on all fours but lost his rifle. The small baboon- shaped shadowy creature attacked Dan. He pulled his pistol and propelled a passel of projectiles that pummeled the pouncing predator. The creature scrambled across the short space and ripped the pistol from Dan’s grip and hit him with a low blow so powerful Dan was knocked out.
***
Dan woke up just as he was being dragged through a shadowy small dark energy dimensional doorway. Suddenly he wasn’t on Earth anymore. He was under a dark sky interspaced with hellish orange light. He wildly looked around seeing a nightmare landscape of hellish black rock and flowing rivers and lakes of fire where monstrous dark demons with huge horns, teeth, talons and tails moved torturing and raping glowing human souls. The human souls shrieked in anguish having their souls torn apart and sexually raped by demons biting and clawing them and dousing them in the fiery lava waters. Some souls floundered in the lakes of fire screeching.
Dan looked at the small Chupacabra demon clutching his ankle. It was now fully visible back in its own dimension and looked like a crossbreed of baboon and demon. Dan desperately kicked and fought breaking free of the small strong evil entity, but more of the bigger demons swarmed in seizing him
“You are still alive,” a demon thundered in a deep inhuman tone. “Good, our little cousin has brought us another live victim. It’s more fun when the victim is still alive to feel the pain.”
To emphasize his point, the demon violent began raping Dan while the other demons held him helpless.
Dan screamed even louder than the damned souls.
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in The Horror Zine, J Journal, Chiron Review, Churches,
Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, Freedom Fiction Journal, Short-Story Me, Blood Moon
Rising, Dark Harbor, Flash Phantoms, You Phantomaniacs Anthology, The Listening Eye,
Evening Street Review, Conceit, Spotlight on Recovery, Outdoor Life and Muscle and Fitness.
His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in 2019. He has numerous
novels and audiobooks available. You can read more of his writings at
https://tomkropp.wordpress.com.