A Guardian Angel (15 page)

Barney continued to
stare up at the angel, his eyes moving more than Tim believed his
whole body ever had. After quite a bit of contemplation he turned
around and saw the rancher holding up a severed hoof for him to see.

“Eh?”
Tim offered. “Proof of dead cattle.”

Barney came up to
him to examine the gory foot. He dared not touch it but gave it a
thoughtful nod when he stopped. “Timmy, I buy it. I do,”
the claims agent started. “But I'm already trying to wrap my
head around what insurance angle I'm going for and we need at least a
body for each loss.”

Tim sighed and
bowed his head in frustration.

“It's the
company, Tim, not me. I'm gonna try to get you this,” Barney
assured.

“I know,”
Tim replied. “Thank you.”

Barney turned back
to the angel and put his face in his hands to think. Suddenly, he
lifted his head up and peered around, brow furrowed. Tim noticed.

“What?”
he questioned.

Barney shushed him,
holding out his index finger but keeping his face turned away. He
concentrated on something. Tim tried to lean in, too, as if whatever
the claims agent was listening for is only audible where he was
standing. Then Barney turned to him.

“Did you hear
that?” he asked in a low tone, still peering around and trying
to listen.

“What?”
Tim repeated.

“Sounded like
a vicious little animal, man,” Barney said, ungrinning, then
continued listening. “It's gone. Sounded like a coyote or
something.”

Tim hummed in
interest, walking around the angel to see if he could spot the source
of the commotion. He saw nothing, without surprise, that could have
made the noise. The interest started to fade away and he turned back,
only to hear something himself.

Mooing.

He turned to Barney
who had just turned to him, both with shocked expressions that didn't
do well to hide perplexed thoughts.

Another moo.

“Where's it
coming from?” Tim asked, looking all sorts of directions for
the distressed cattle.

The noises
continued, faint but near, and as Tim started to run to an elevated
slope of the ground to see if it was just beyond, Barney called to
him.

“Timmy!”

“Yeah?”

Tim started to walk
back to the claims agent as the agent himself looked around meekly at
the ground. “Did you build a foundation with your barn?”

“A root
cellar,” the rancher answered. Then he cocked his head as if to
ask, “You don't mean to say...?” and then glanced down at
his feet. He listened to the muffled cries coming from one of his
cattle.

“It's coming
from underground,” Barney stated, picking at fallen bits of
debris to see if he could find a way to get in the foundation hidden
underneath them.

Tim mimicked the
claims agent, getting on his hands and knees and sifting through
boards and planks and rocks and metal. Under one such piece, he saw
the lid to a jar through a small hole in the earth. It was labeled,
in his own handwriting, “Apple Butter.” Hope sped up his
motions and provided him with more deliberation as he stuck his arm
down into the hole, feeling other jars. He sliced his pinky on
shattered glass and jerked his hand surface bound. It was a small
nick.

“Mr.
Slechta!” he called. “Found a way down!”

After slamming the
shovel into the opening several times, trying to carve out what bit
of dirt and rocks were obstructing their way, they swiveled the
shovel around, angled it against the hole, and pushed down like a
lever, which after a few moments of straining, tore the ground open
and unleashed an unholy stench.

“Holy shit!”
Barney cried as he pulled a handkerchief from his suit and covered
his nose, gagging. Tim's eyes watered as he jumped back, hit in the
face by the intensity of the smell. He pulled his shirt over his
nose, clutching it, as he turned back to the claims agent.

“Rotting
meat,” he explained.

Barney retrieved a
flashlight from his glove box, then handed it to Tim as he jumped
down first. It was very dark and warm in the root cellar, the stench
borderline visible in the light cloud of dust that hung in the room.
Barney jumped down too, dusting off his clothes.

“Man, it's
creepy down here,” Barney declared. “Ugh!” he
gasped in disgust as Tim moved the beam of the flashlight to the
center of the room.

It was wet with
red, and it was cluttered. Flesh and blood covered the area.
Mutilated remains of cattle covered the room, some intact, and others
crushed and leaking around their remains like an apple in the road.
Hooves, horns, tails, ribs, and flesh were clumped up in
unrecognizable heaps, flies buzzing around above them.

Tim dropped his
head in emotional disgust. “Jesus,” he said to himself,
finding it hard to look at the scene. At least before he had no clue
what his life's worth of hard work looked like when a forty ton angel
fell from the sky and landed on it. So much blood.

“How many
head did you have?” Barney asked through his handkerchief.

Tim did not look
up. “Twenty-seven,” he replied.

“Twenty-seven,”
Barney echoed. “Okay then.” He brushed past Tim and
walked closer to the gore. He bent down and started examining the
bodies closer.

“One. Two.
Three. Ugh....four.”

Tim approached the
other. “Need help?” he asked.

“Five,”
Barney stopped counting. “Um, no. I don't know if we'll be able
to stay organized.” He strained on the last word.

“Sure,”
Tim said, backing off to the shelves and the hole. He pointed the
light to the middle of the room.

“Um, okay.
Five – Five. And...six. Seven. Eight. Nine.”

The broken jars on
the shelves entertained Tim as he was unable to look at the gruesome
scene any longer. One of the labels hung off one, and an old ten
dollar note sat beside it.

“Ten. Jesus.
Eleven. Twelve. Umm....thirteen? No, sorry, still twelve. Ah!
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

He turned the label
toward the light, then the light toward the label. It said, in his
dear deceased mother's fragile scribbling, “Timothy's College
Jar!”

“Sixteen.”
Barney halted. “Timmy, light?” he hinted.

“Hmm?”
Tim asked as a knee jerk reaction, still preoccupied. Then he
realized that he had stolen the beam to read the label. “Oh!
Sorry,” he said in an alert voice, turning the light back.

“Seventeen.
Eighteen. Nineteen and twenty. Ew. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.”

Tim snatched the
ten dollar bill and realized that it rested on a twenty, which he
took as well. Even though the jar had been smashed, the contents
seemed to be scattered around. He looked around for more.

“Oh man. Ick.
Jeez....twenty-three. Twenty-four, twenty-five. Wouldn't wanna be
twenty-six.”

The rancher dropped
to his knees, trying to find the rest of the money. He found a
dollar, and then another ten on the ground. He kept looking around,
getting more and more disheartened as time passed in which he didn't
find more money.

“Timmy!”
Barney said from the other side of the root cellar.

Tim looked up as if
he had been caught, ceasing his search. “Yes?”

“Can't find
twenty-seven,” Barney explained. “He might be part of
this clusterfuck here,” he indicated a gory heap, “but
there's a pretty obvious blood trail leading over...” he walked
a bit away and turn around another shelf and said from behind it,
“here.”

Tim turned the
corner too and saw the light bleeding in through a well hidden hole
in the wall. It must have been where the corner section of roof had
been, now replaced by shards of misplaced wood and tons of dirt.

“Something
burrowed through,” Barney suggested, indicating the marks
around the edge of the opening. The blood led out.

After a look that
communicated each of their suggestions to follow the trail, they did
so, enlarging the hole with the shovel before proceeding. They came
out further from the crash site than expected, on the opposite side
of the house. The blood was not so evident up here on the dirt, but
the trail of something being dragged ran up and around a small rocky
hill and a pile of boulders. They followed it.

They stopped as the
soft sounds of excited growling that grew closer. Here, a wolf stood
protectively over a trembling black form. It growled at the two of
them, yipping and snarling. They had accidentally cornered it at the
edge of a cliff and the base of another, blocking its only escape.

The wolf coiled
back, and leapt through the air at Barney. It missed. The men moved
out of the way and the beast bounced off the cliff wall. It turned to
confront the humans again.

Barney turned to
Tim. “Cover your ears,” he ordered.

Tim obliged as
Barney reached behind his jacket and pulled out a snub nose revolver.
While trying to plug his own ears, he raised the gun and fired
straight into the air.

The booming and
shocking concussion of the gunshot startled the canine, making it
jump back with two paws off the edge of the cliff. It lost its
balance, barking fearfully as it slipped off in slow motion and
tumbled down the face of the cliff. Its extremities hit and bounced
off protruding edges until its whole body collided with the side of a
tree trunk that grew at the base of the cliff. It dropped hard and
with a sudden halt at the bottom.

Barney had been
thrown off balance by the gunshot, coping with the ringing in his
ears as Tim looked over the edge and saw the wolf run away into the
distance.

He turned back to
the now recovered insurance agent with an incredulous look upon his
face. He raised his arms and pushed down his eyebrows so that his
displeasure of being so close to a discharging weapon was clear, but
Barney replied by pointing at the black shape the wolf had been
chewing on.

It made no noise
anymore, its throat punctured and its mouth filled with blood. The
bull was mutilated, an ear torn off and an eye punched out. It was
covered in ragged wounds just up to the waist of the creature, which
was where the rest of its body wasn't. Its bottom half had been
liberated of muscle, flesh, and fat. The bones were all that
remained, covered and held together by bloody sinew. Instead of
bleach white, the bones were charcoal black. Burnt.

Its hind legs had
been broken off throughout its encounter with the wolf. Still alive,
the bovine gurgled and puffed its anguish through its nose.

Tim turned to
Barney, who stared at the scene with an agape jaw and widened eyes
that wandered over the disintegrated half of the bull.

And then the motion
ceased. The noises stopped as the bull succumbed to its wounds and
expired.

-Chapter Fifteen-

Fifteen
Minutes

“What the
hell was that?” Tim asked after the commotion maintained
stillness for longer than a moment.

“It was some
pretty messed up beef, Timmy,” Barney said, holstering his gun.

“Care to
explain to me why you're carrying a firearm?” the rancher
asked. “On my ranch?”

“It's a
personal thing, man. You could say that I'm a,” Barney started,
“paranoid individual.”

“Paranoid
individual?” Tim repeated. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, Timmy –
”

“Tim,
please.”

“Tim! Yes.
I'm just a nervous guy,” Barney chuckled. “Got a lot of
enemies.”

“And why is
that?” Tim demanded, now getting close enough to peer down at
the man. His temper came across in both his demeanor and the octave
of his growls.

“Because,”
Barney said, sidestepping the rancher, “I'm an insurance claim
agent.”

Opening his mouth,
Tim stopped in his tracks and his expression changed from one of
retaliation to honest contemplation. “Oh,” he said.

“Yeah,”
Barney replied. He gestured to the path down and started toward it
himself.

After they had
gotten down the slope, past the angel, and just to the door of the
Simacean residence, Barney stopped and turned to Tim.