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manpower than us. We don’t have to do this on our own.”
    “ Yes, we do.” Jeff walked to stand directly in front of the big man. “Do you really think anyone else would take this seriously, no matter what we told them? They’d screw it up. People would die, or worse, we could scare the thing into hiding for a few months then all this would just start again later with the thing more angry than ever. It has to believe it can take us or we’ll have lost before we even started. We’re not going to find it unless it wants us to or it comes after us.”
    “ All right,” Becca snapped. “We go in at dawn with the biggest guns we can find and show this thing whose town this really is. We do this ourselves and fast. Understood?”
    No one challenged her. They all knew she was in charge. As far as Babble Creek was concerned, her word was the law.
     
     
    Powell
     
    As the sun rose above Babble Creek, a convoy of cars followed by a beat up pickup truck, with a bed full of dogs, and an expensive, high class SUV came winding up the road toward the old Taylor farm where Jeff’s rental car waited. The line of vehicles came to a halt in the large area of gravel around it. The entire Babble Creek sheriff’s department along with Jeff, Taylor, and Justin with Fred and Terry were soon standing staring into the trees at the edge of the Taylor land. Everyone was armed. Becca, Powell, Justin, and Jeff carried high-powered rifles which were in theory capable of scoring a clean kill with a single shot. The others carried shotguns and AR 15s. Each officer also had their standard issue Glock 40 sidearm in holsters at their sides.
    Fred tightly held the leashes of the finest hunting dogs in the county. The department often used them for search and rescue. Today, the dogs were not only trackers, but also an early warning system for the thing that lurked somewhere deep within the forest. Jeff had argued fiercely they should all stay together, but Becca had decided to split them off into smaller units with Powell’s group, which contained Fred and the dogs, in the lead. The other two groups were going to flank Powell’s, staying a little bit back to both widen their search and serve as reserves in case Powell wasn’t able to take down the monster when or if it came after them.
    Powell slapped Fred on the shoulder. “Lead the way.” He and Warren followed Fred and his dogs into the trees. They definitely had the scent of something and started tugging them along.
    About a half hour later, the dogs came to a dead halt. Their excitement and eagerness suddenly changed into a reluctance to move forward at all. The smallest of the four dogs tucked its tail between its legs and began to whimper.
    Fred looked spooked by their behavior. “I have never seen them act like this before.”
    Powell took the radio from his belt. “Becca, I think we’ve got something.”
    Warren stood watching the trees, his knuckles white from the death grip with which he clutched his AR 15. “Powell,” he said quietly, “I hope you’re ready.”
    Powell raised the high-powered rifle to his shoulder. The scream scared him so badly he almost squeezed the trigger. There was no question that it belonged to Becca . . . but Becca never screamed. It wasn’t in her nature. Warren was already darting through the forest in the direction it came from. “Wait!” Powell shouted after him. Fred stood looking at him, as if waiting to see what he was going to do. Powell cursed, lowering his rifle. “Follow the idiot!” he said, taking off after Warren.
    Powell arrived in time to see the thing —he had no better word for it—catch Warren as it emerged from the trees, and lift his fellow deputy from the earth with a single hand. It flung Warren several yards through the air. The man struck a thick tree trunk head first with a sickening thud and the loud snapping of bones. Warren fell to the earth, his face a bloody mass of pulped and torn flesh, and lay still. Powell