Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Chapter 21

From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

Boulder, Colorado, 1991. The town looked like a paradise. Lush and green and totally unspoiled by humans. Only it wasn’t unspoiled because it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The area around Boulder is naturally semi-arid. It was the townsfolk who pumped in all that water for their lawns and fruit trees. And when the fruit trees came, so did the deer. Locals loved it. “Hey, Honey, there’s a deer in our yard!”

And with the herbivores came the inevitable carnivores. Mountain lions were pretty scarce back then. Early Europeans had driven them to the brink of extinction. Those that were left went deep into the Rockies, far enough to avoid any possible contact with humans. But when they followed the deer out of the mountains, they found that this new breed of human wasn’t anything like their “shoot on sight” ancestors. These humans shot with cameras. “Oh wow, kids, look! A real puma!”

Some wiser individuals tried to speak up. “You’re not in a zoo. These are predators. They’re dangerous. They need to be tagged and relocated before somebody gets hurt.”

No one listened. They couldn’t believe how lucky they were to see big cats “out in the wild.” Who needs a zoo when you’ve got the woods right behind your house? And then the dogs started disappearing. The little ones at first, the tiny toys who couldn’t defend themselves. That’s why no one listened when folks with badges tried, again, to convince them of the danger. “Oh c’mon, what do you expect if someone’s bichon-poodle mix gets off leash?” I think one of the casualties was a cockapoo literally named “Fifi.” Never mind that the attack didn’t happen in the woods but right in front of Fifi’s house. Naysayers still thought she was “low-hanging fruit,” that no way a cougar’s gonna go for a full-sized, fighting canine.

Until they did. A Doberman barely escaped with its life. A black Lab and German shepherd didn’t. “What do you call a dog on a leash? A meal on a string.” That was one of the jokes going around, like that cartoon in a local paper. It showed a dog’s owner handing her pup a letter from a cat saying, “Welcome to the food chain.”

She shakes her head.

The food chain. Nobody remembers where our link is supposed to be. The warnings were right there. The trail of escalation leading right to people’s front doors.

They did start to react, I’ll give them that. One lion was killed after it attacked a game ranch, and there was a town meeting on what to do. But like so many other problems, it was too little too late. The cats were there, they were multiplying, and after testing our boundaries, they were getting bolder every day.

Once killing dogs became common, it was only a matter of time before they worked their way up the chain to us. A jogger was chased, treed, and only survived because she’d learned to fight back in her “model-mugging” course. A hospital employee was chased in the parking lot. Several people couldn’t leave their houses. The list goes on.

And then Scott Lancaster went for a run and never came back. Scott was eighteen years old, healthy, strong, doing a cardio workout on his free period up the trail behind his high school. Two days later, they found what was left of him, chest torn open, organs eaten, face chewed off. Those remains were found in the stomach of a cougar. The investigation proved that the cat wasn’t rabid, or starving. You know what that attack also proved, along with all the other fatal attacks we’ve had since then?[34]

They’re not afraid of us anymore.

“It wasn’t your fault.” Mostar, standing behind us. Reading my mind again, the inevitable punishment she knew I’d inflict on myself. I didn’t have to go home. I could have pushed back. Together with the lights on, with me calling for help. I might have saved him. If I’d only stayed!

“Not your fault,” she repeated. Then, “It’s mine.”

A flash of something I couldn’t recognize. A nervous swallow, an unwillingness to meet my eyes.

Guilt?

“I didn’t think they’d be this bold this soon.” Her voice was low, just loud enough for me to hear. “I thought with the fire… their first kill to satiate… I thought we’d at least have one more day….”

She shook her head, dry-spat another foreign phrase that sounded like, “Majmoonehjedan!”[35]

Then it passed. Back straight, eyes clear, looking us over like a general in a war movie.

“We don’t have time anymore, not enough for a full perimeter. We have to make a smaller one, right now, around the Common House. Carmen…” The poor woman practically dropped her hand sanitizer. “Go get Bobbi out of bed. Do whatever you have to do but get her up and dressed. Go.”

Carmen dashed out as Mostar pivoted to Effie and Pal. “Go home and grab some blankets, the heaviest you’ve got. One armload, one trip, and get them over to the Common House.”

Without question or pause, they left.

Turning back to me, she said, “Go through Reinhardt’s kitchen. Grab what’s frozen, canned, dried. One bag.”

I nodded as she grabbed Dan’s sleeve. “C’mon.” And they were gone.

There wasn’t any emotion in her voice. There wasn’t time.

I raced back into Reinhardt’s kitchen, my shoe sticking on the floor’s red trail. I grabbed a plastic garbage bag off the roll, shoved in the remaining frozen meals, then ran for the Common House.

Their stink was stronger, and it wasn’t my imagination. Neither was the figure on the ridge. A tall black outline between two trees. Just standing there, watching me. My eyes flicked down to avoid a rock from two nights ago, then back up to a now-empty slope. The howls began a second later, a solo swelling to a chorus. I felt naked. My new spear. Back at home. I hadn’t thought I’d need it. No time now.

I kept my head down, trotting the last few steps to the Common House. I threw the meals in the freezer and ran back outside to see Mostar and Dan exit her house. Both had armloads of stakes. Both dropped them when Mostar pointed up to something just behind my field of vision. Dan reached for his spear leaning against Mostar’s entryway as she called for Effie and Pal. “The Durants!” Voice like a megaphone, frantic waves to follow her.

We all met her at their house; myself, Effie and Pal, and Carmen with a very dazed, pajama-and-robe-clad Bobbi in tow.

I’m not sure what Mostar was thinking by then. Rallying us all to their door. All of us together? Societal pressure? Or maybe just the physical force we’d need to drag the two of them out.

“Yvette! Tony!” No doorbell or even knocks. Mostar hammered at the elaborate wood with side fists and open palms. “Open up! Open the goddamn door! Now!” The urgency, the violence of her assault.

Bobbi, now fully awake, pulled back a step. Carmen and Effie both hugged their daughter. I grabbed Dan’s arm. A new thought closing my throat: What if Reinhardt hadn’t been the first house?

I was about to take Dan with me around back, my brain filling with what might be waiting, when the front door slowly swung open. This relief wave broke though as soon as I saw the ghoul who answered.

Red, wet, unfocused eyes glimmered out from sunken, dark cavities. Thin, unshaven cheeks hung above chapped, cracked, scab-rimmed lips. Shoeless feet, a stained white T-shirt, sagging, worn sweatpants held up by a shaking hand with dirty nails. The reek slammed me a moment later, wafting out from the doorway in an invisible, humid cloud. Body odor. Bad breath. The slightest hint of feces.

“Tony?” I could see Mostar’s slump, thought I heard her sigh. Am I projecting? Filling a gap? I feel like she wasn’t surprised. The rest of us though, that collective flinch.

“Tony.” A little louder this time, her words matched by the slow, air chop of her hand. “Where’s Yvette?”

“Oh…” His mouth hung open at a crooked angle, exposing a row of stained teeth. “Yeeaaah.” A slight narrowing of the eyes, like someone who accidentally walked into the wrong room.

“Yvette.” Mostar tried looking past him, around him, then back for a third, “Yvette!”

Licking of the lips, and another “Yeah…” as he turned his back.

“No, Tony…,” Mostar started to say, then followed him in. A slight jumble from the rest of us. Dan’s spear catching on the doorframe. A quick “Sorry” to the nearly struck Effie as he left the weapon outside.

I was already ahead of him by then, almost gagging from what I smelled inside. Sweat, feet, and concentrated, stale urine wafting from the downstairs bathroom. And what we saw…

Had it been anyone else, in any other circumstance, I would have just considered the homeowners to be slobs.

Towels on the floor. A few clothes. Wineglasses amid the bookshelves and empty bottles. The pillow and comforter on the couch, stained brown with the darker residue of body oils. No worse than a college dorm room, or a few of my fellow twentysomethings in their first apartments. But this home, these people.

And it wasn’t just the mess that got to me, or the smashed iPhone lying under an iPhone-sized dent in the wall. It was the magazines. Covering the glass coffee table, over and under and wedged in between crust-bottomed coffee mugs. Wired, Forbes, Eco-Structure. All of them wrinkled and bubbled with water damage. All of them with Tony’s face on the cover. THE DAWN OF ECO-CAPITALISM, THE GREEN REVOLUTIONARY, FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT.

“Tony!” Mostar took his arm, turning him toward her. “Where is Yvette?” Gentle, firm. “We need to talk to both of you.”

“Sure, yeah, Yvette…” His eyes—is that what you call a thousand-yard stare?—gazing into space, brow furrowed, tongue circling his lips. “Yvette.”

His pause gave us all a moment to hear it.

zzzzzp zzzzzp zzzzzp

Mostar shook her head, maybe angry with herself for not realizing it sooner. (That’s how I felt, at least, forgetting to check the garage.) I might have knocked on the door if Mostar hadn’t pushed past me and thrown it open.

Bright light flooded in, with an invisible, acrid mist.

Yvette, or what she’d become, practically fell off her elliptical.

“What­WHAT?” Her voice was high, scratchy. Bounding into the living room, dripping, wild. That’s how I’ll always think of her eyes. Wild. Frantically darting to everyone and everything. Her face, her frame. We were looking at a skeleton. Under the soaking sports bra and yoga pants. Skin wrapped so tightly over sinewy bone. Had she been eating at all? What can you do to your body, your mind, in so short a time?

It hadn’t even been two weeks. That quick for someone to fall apart? That easy?

I guess it depends on who you are to begin with, how tightly you’re already holding on.

Adversity introduces us to ourselves.

Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Durant.

“What­what­what­do­you­want!” I could still hear gibberish squawking from the noise-canceling headphones around her neck. Not music, some kind of talking. Inspirational? Guided imagery? Her own voice?

Mostar barely uttered, “Yvette,” but was cut off with a frantic “What­you­want!”

Recognition, adaptation, Mostar shifted from the command stance with Tony to a conciliatory, de-escalating, “Yvette, Love, we have to get you out of here.” Soft, easy, as with a child or a jumper. “You know about the animals out there?” A slow, non-startling gesture to the unrepaired broken windows. “You know they’re surrounding us, right? That they’re getting more aggressive? Did you hear the—”

Yvette cut her off with a chattering, “What­no­I­don’t­know­anything­about­any­animals.” Skin steaming in the cold air, head quivering with each syllable.

“Don’t­know­what­you’re­talking­about.” Her breath, five feet away. I could smell the starvation.

Mostar, caring, concerned. “You must have heard the screaming. Vincent? You heard him, right?”

At that, Carmen put a comforting arm around Bobbi.

Mostar continued with, “And now, last night, Alex…”

“I­don’t­know­anything!” Yvette chattered. Her accent, upper class English, gone. This new one, old one, a thick Australian twang. “You­need­to­go!” Head bobbing maniacally at the door. “Go… go­go­go­go!”

“We all need to go,” Mostar said slowly. “We need to take what we need to live on, and all move into the Common House, where we can protect each other.”

I was already thinking, planning ahead, as to how we’d take care of them. The shower, first, hot water and a scrub. We could hold her down, if we had to. At least Tony might go quietly. Two more mouths to feed. And clothes, I’d wash theirs by hand. I wouldn’t mind. Clean, safe. They’d come around. They’d have to. All of us together, cramped, sharing everything. No choice.

“You need to hurry,” Mostar continued, enunciating each word slowly. “Don’t take anything, just come with—”

“No­no­no!” Yvette backed up a step, jutting out her lower jaw. A cornered animal, that was all I could think of, a monkey in a cage. “You­need­to­get­out! All­of­you­out­c’mon­now­now!”

Tony had sat back down by then, melting into his sleep stain on the couch. He didn’t seem to acknowledge what was happening around him. Didn’t look or move.

“Yvette, please!” Mostar, losing patience, almost pleading, holding out her hands with a desperation that tightened my abs. “We don’t have time for this! They’re not afraid of us anymor—”

She never finished.

At that moment her head happened to face the huge living room window behind us.

I turned just in time to see the dark shape standing right in front of the curtained window, right before that window collapsed.