Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies Read online

  “Go on, git,” she said, but it wasn’t spoken in the same harsh tone she had used with him. She sounded like a mother telling her children to go and play. The wild animals melted off into the shadows. Pilkington felt something small brush past his pants leg as it went about its business. Granny stood alone in the moonlight with her head bowed. She looked up and glared into the trees. Pilkington felt as if she could see him. He started to back away slowly, taking care to set his feet down silently. After a moment, she turned and went back into the house.

  That was nothing, he told himself. There. Nothing. Just like he’d thought. She was just a crazy old woman.The animals were easy to explain. Sometimes wild things knew that there was no harm in a person like that, like the old lady he once saw at a nature preserve who charmed a deer to come to her just by holding out her hand.

  He went home, shaking his head. She wasn’t no one to worry about. Them damned raccoons was, though.

  Low in the bushes, dozens of pairs of glowing eyes watched him go.

  Rolling the combine harvester over the yellow-green hayfields was pretty much mechanical: sweep up and down, keep the rows even, make sure the baler behind him was working smoothly. The roar of the engine was too loud for conversation, something Pilkington es chewed most of the time anyhow, and gave him time alone with his thoughts. Maybe he was the crazy one. If somehow the old lady could keep the wild critters from vandalizing his crops, maybe he should go along with it. How many other nutty things did he do for good luck? Cross his fingers? Throw salt over his shoulder?

  “Mr. Pilkington?” Walter Sill ran out of the swaying hay ahead of him and shouted over the roar of the diesel engine. The lean farm worker waved his arms. “You got to see this!”

  Pilkington threw the enormous machine into neutral and killed the engine. He swung down from the cab. Rain was forecast for later that day. He needed to get the hay harvested as soon as possible and get the covers on it, or it was going to rot. His other employees, mostly Mexican, were following the harvester, pulling bright blue pockets of plastic over the baled hay. He signed to them to keep working. A couple of them wiped their faces and nodded.

  He followed Sill over the field until he came to the edge of the tomato field. Sill pointed. Pilkington stared at the place where the deadfall had lain until he had filled it in the other night.

  “Practical joke by someone, huh?” Sill asked, with half a grin.

  The mound of earth had been piled twice as high as it had been deep, but the new addition wasn’t earth. It was dung, yards and yards of it, fresh enough to still be attracting flies. Pilkington felt his face get hot.

  “That damned Granny Lawson!” he snarled. “I went over to talk to her the other evening. She must have told her grandsons what I . . . I mean, about our discussion.”

  “I can just bet,” Sill said, with a grin.

  Pilkington fumed. He paced up and down, feeling fury rising in him like indigestion. “Dammit, I am not going to take that from anyone! Go get the front loader.”

  “What for?”

  Pilkington jabbed a finger toward the pile. “I want you to pick that up, take it over the road, and dump it next to her driveway. If they think it’s so damned funny over there, let them deal with it.”

  “Mr. Pilkington, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea . . .” Sill’s voice tapered off, and his lean face wore a sheepish look. Pilkington looked at him in astonishment.

  “What’s the matter? Come on, man. You went to Ag school. You’re a college graduate in the twenty-first century. You got a MySpace page. You can’t tell me you believe in her evil eye like some kind of ancient yokel. It was a prank. We’re playing one back. Go do it.”

  Sill gave a sigh, but Pilkington could tell he liked the idea of a little mischief, especially if he could blame it on someone else if he got caught. While the hand was off getting the loader, Pilkington took a look around the heap of muck. There weren’t any tread marks or footprints in the crumbly, gray soil to show how it had gotten there. If he didn’t know any better, he might have said that animals had gone there one at a time to make their deposits. But that was ridiculous. That would suggest they were capable of spite. And organization. Too bad. If she was in charge of their behavior, then let her deal with the results. He went back to harvesting hay. Rain wouldn’t hold off for anyone.

  Early the next morning Pilkington remembered the dung incident and felt a little guilty about it. He took the old jeep he used on the property and went for a little ride around the perimeter. Without seeming as though he was looking, he checked out what he could see of Granny’s drive. Streaks of earth from his side to hers proved Sill obeyed orders, but the site where the front loader had stopped was empty. So her grandsons had gone and cleaned it up. Well, one prank deserved another. He was sure that’d be the end of it. He wouldn’t do nothing else unless they did. He rolled back to office and started in on the day’s paperwork. Seemed as though he had as many forms to fill out as plants in his fields.

  “Señor Pay?” Pilkington glanced up. His Mexican foreman Esteban Ruiz was at his elbow. Most of his summer employees referred to him by his Spanish initial. Pilkington was too much of a mouthful.

  “What’s up, Ruiz?”

  “Los tomates, Señor Pay. It is a curse!”

  Pilkington headed for the old jeep. Ruiz jumped in beside him. Pilkington gunned it in the direction of the low hill covered with rows of lush green plants.

  Pilkington couldn’t remember a sunnier month. Rain fell just when it was needed, but most of the time the earth was bathed in hot golden light that was a farmer’s godsend. The crops in his fields burgeoned. Thick masses of green leaves sheltered fat little fruits and vegetables. He was furious that so little of it could be harvested.

  Ruiz didn’t have to tell him what was wrong. He could see it. Every tenth plant—he could count it for himself—had been yanked up and left on its side. Most of them were already wilting in the heat. The rounded mounds of semiripened tomatoes poked up through the greenery.

  He plucked one half-red, half-green fruit after another. There were fresh bite marks on every one of them. He dashed the last one to the ground. It was still so hard it bounced. He mashed it into the earth with his boot. Those goddamned raccoons!

  “It’s the devil, Señor Pay.” Ruiz crossed himself.

  “It is not a devil, dammit!” Pilkington roared. “It’s a menace, and I am not gonna put up with it for one more second! To hell with Granny! I’m gonna take care of those damned critters!”

  Bob Lerner leaned over the counter of the Club Hardware store and shook his head as Pilkington finished unspooling his litany of woes.

  “Sounds like you have a big problem, Ide,” he said. “Raccoons are tenacious little bastards. Once they get the idea you’re feeding them, they come around forever, and they tell their friends.”

  “I’ve tried every damned thing I can think of,” Pilkington said. “Nothing works. I’ve tried poison. They don’t take the bait. I’ve tried snares. I’ve tried deadfalls. Got one, that was all. What I need are traps, leg traps.”

  Lerner shook his head. “Sorry, Ide. They don’t make ’em any more. They’re brutal as hell. The fish and wildlife people brought me a video on a laptop. It was pretty horrible. What they do to animals—and what animals do to themselves when they get caught in them . . .” He shuddered. “I wouldn’t sell them even if I had them, and I’m a man who doesn’t shrink at shooting deer or gaffing fish every year.”

  “But you had some a few seasons ago,” Pilkington protested. He smacked a hand down on a shelf across from the counter. “They were right here.”

  “They’re illegal everywhere. I couldn’t sell them.”

  “So what did you do with them?”

  Lerner shrugged. “Took ’em down to the dump. Good riddance.”

  Pilkington eyed him. “Where in the dump?”

  Lerner shook his head. “Sorry, buddy, but you’ll have to find another way. I’ll ask around, see
if anyone has any ideas. Say, have you thought of putting out a few apples or something? Like a gift to the little people?”

  Pilkington felt his jaw drop. “Not you, too, Bob!”

  Lerner looked sheepish. “Well, I’ve heard what some of the other guys say when they’ve had a few beers. Doesn’t seem to hurt. Nature’s a funny thing, Ide.”

  “I’m not going to let a few raccoons push me around, or one crazy old woman, either. Thanks anyhow.”

  Lerner gave him a nod. “Good luck, buddy.”

  It didn’t take Pilkington long to figure out where in the “county recycling center” Lerner was accustomed to discarding unwanted merchandise. He drove along the winding passage between buried mounds of trash and sorting stations until he saw a heap of boxes with the Club Hardware logo still on them. Underneath bushels of rotten gaskets and rusty nails he found what he wanted. In spite of their months out in the elements, five of the six toothed, metal bows cranked open and snapped shut like sharks’ jaws. Pilkington regarded them with grim satisfaction. He piled the traps into the back of his pickup under a tarp. He didn’t want anyone to see what he was up to. Lerner was starting to sound like one of them PETA people. Even some of his hunting buddies cringed at anything but a clear kill-shot. What the hell was this county coming to? They weren’t the ones staring bankruptcy in the face. They could mouth morals at him all they wanted, but would they pay his mortgage?

  He’d have to wait until dark to put the traps out, then find an excuse for keeping his workers out of the area where he’d planted them. A few nights of surprises, and the critters would be telling each other to stay away.

  The sweet smell always drew the hungry ones. Wriggling meat there was in plenty beneath the soil, frogs in the ponds, fish in the streams, but the raccoons loved sugar. Their sensitive tastebuds, much more than humans’, could appreciate even small amounts in ripening fruit and grain. It took too long to wait for full ripeness. A long winter had melted away the fat stored up under their molting pelts, and a long spring nursing young had left them with insatiable appetites.

  Under the moonlight, the rounded shapes with the thick ringed tails held low looked like lines of fat beetles swarming toward their objective. Each female was accompanied by anywhere from one to seven offspring, usually no more than three or four. The baby raccoons, their snubbed ears and tails rounder and shorter than the adults’, had to be reminded to stay within range of their mother. Still, like young of every species, their curiosity led them to sniff their way off the path. With their little black noses, they investigated the stalks of plants, or followed the trail of a slug that had crossed their path sometime earlier in the day. Their mothers summoned them back with snarls or nips. While the parents nosed carefully up and down the heady-smelling plants looking for tomatoes to eat, the litters of babies engaged in wrestling matches with their brothers and sisters, dug up grubs and roots, and tasted anything that came their way with alacrity. In their experience, nothing had ever happened that did more than surprise or momentarily frighten them. Nothing had ever hurt them. Not yet.

  SNAP!

  A shrill cry from one of the tumbling youngsters brought one of the browsing females to a halt. She threw up her head, then went running toward the sound.

  The rest of her babies were milling around, bleating near the body of one that hung upside down in midair from a metal hoop. It was limp as a hunk of moss. Blood ran down its belly onto the roiled earth beneath. The mother nosed the baby frantically, touching its ears, its nose, the side of its neck, refusing to believe her ears and eyes. It didn’t move. Taking the scruff of its neck in her teeth, she backed away. The body did not come loose. She could not leave her child in this human-smelling thing. She pawed at the metal jaws of the trap. She could not budge them. Her heart pounded and she panted out her panic. What should she do? The rest of her children milled alongside her, fearful that the evil would befall them, too. There were no trees to climb, no burrows to race into. She was their only protection.

  She was almost too upset to pay heed to them, but she did not want to lose any more. Where could they go that was safe? It was a long way back to the hollow log that was their home. Should she stay with the dead one or abandon it?

  The other raccoons were upset and frightened by the baby’s death. They ran around hysterically, hissing and growling at each other.

  SNAP! SNAP! More of the metal teeth leaped out of the earth. One strong young male tried to leap as he felt the soil give beneath his feet, but the jaws closed on his neck. A young female lost part of her tail. An older female, too slow to get away, was crushed between the toothed hoops. Her lone kit ran around, crying, bewildered, and terrified.

  At last, the dowager female of the pack took charge. She was the smallest of the adult raccoons, but she had seen more summers than any of them, being the mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother of all but a few newly arrived males. She chivvied them away from the terrible field. The mother of the dead baby didn’t want to go, but her grandmother herded her away with bites and nips at her back. Her remaining youngsters followed. All the raccoons were shocked and frightened.

  The elder female looked back, torn. One male was left alive and struggling in the last trap. He would follow later if he could chew his foot off and escape, but his strength was waning. The others must not stay in case the threat wasn’t gone yet. The raccoons were still hungry, but hunger was not as strong an instinct as fear. They must go back to their safe place, the safest place they knew.

  They streamed away over the field, until they could no longer hear the whimpers of the male they had to leave behind.

  Pilkington was in the middle of the morning briefing to his employees when Granny, immaculately neat in a pressed pink denim shirt, blue jeans, and rubber boots, got out of her ancient station wagon and marched up to him. The top of her head only reached his breastbone, but he felt he was the one who had to crane his neck back to look at her.

  “What do you want?” he growled.

  “Give me the bodies,” she said.

  Pilkington glanced at the shocked looks on the faces of his men, then turned a stern face to her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her blue eyes glared at him like a lightning strike. “You ain’t been able to lie to me since you were a child. I know what you’re hidin’. Save me the bother of lookin’ for ’em and makin’ you a bigger fool than you are. Give me the bodies.”

  Pilkington felt like marching her back to her car and making her leave, but the farmhands were all looking at him with shocked curiosity on their faces.

  He snarled, “Get to work! This is just a pile of crap.”

  Sill opened his mouth to say something but snapped it closed when Pilkington scowled at him. He signed to the others to follow him. The Mexicans closed ranks behind, whispering to one another in Spanish.

  “Well?” Granny asked. “Perfidy don’t get any better in waiting.”

  “You got a lot of nerve coming here and saying something like that in front of my people!”

  “Better they know what kind of trash they’re workin’ for,” Granny said. “Take me to the bodies. Right now.”

  There was no sense in arguing with her. He took her by the arm and steered her around the side of the hay barn to where the men dumped the organic trash like dead vines and branches they intended to burn. He kicked aside a canvas tarpaulin and stepped aside. He had gotten up before dawn and buried the dead raccoons, traps and all, figuring to set the whole thing on fire. No one would ever know what he had done.

  But someone had told her. He refused to believe it could have been the raccoons. Someone must have seen him!

  In the nest of rotting hay and leaves, the bodies looked pathetic, not dangerous. The black masks wore a tragicomic aspect. The largest of the trapped animals was a big male. Blood stained the sides of his jaws. His handlike paw was a mass of torn tissue and blood below the teeth of the snare. He must have tried to chew it off before he died. Guiltily, Pi
lkington recalled what Bob in the hardware store had said about the video the Fish and Wildlife people had made him watch.

  Granny dropped to her knees beside the bodies and keened aloud. She looked up at Pilkington, tears in her eyes.

  “O woe unto you, who have sinned against God! Weep for the children! That youngster isn’t more than three months old. Poor little pup. This is the child of the one you killed before.”

  “You’re a crazy old woman. You can’t know about wild animals. They can’t talk!”

  Granny’s voice was husky. “I know. I know them all. And her! It was her first season out! Your poor wife, may God keep her at his right hand, would have been so ashamed of you!”

  Pilkington felt hot fury boiling enough to blind him.

  “Now it’s my time to tell you to get off my land, you crazy old bitch!” he roared. “Go on. You saw them. Now, go!”

  Granny took her time prizing each trap open flat and easing each of the ragged bodies out. She rose to her feet and looked around. A wheelbarrow was propped against the wall of the barn next to the waste pile. She retrieved it and piled the small corpses in it. Pilkington watched her stonily.

  “That was a crime against decency,” Granny informed him, as she settled the last body. “Against Mother Nature herself. You can make amends.”

  “I ain’t gonna make amends to a bunch of thieving varmints, and I sure ain’t gonna make them to you.”

  “You’re gonna pay for that, you idiotic Ide Pilkington. May God have the mercy on you that you didn’t have on none of His natural creations.”

  Pilkington had had about enough of her preaching. “I don’t care what kind of delusion you have. I gotta make money to make a living, to keep this farm going. If this is what it takes, then I’d do it again.”

  Granny regarded him sadly. “We all have to live, unless we forfeit the privilege.”