Gayne Young - The Tunnel

He awoke to see Hunter and another Anglo looking down at him.

“Wake up, Julio,” Hunter commanded. “It’s time to tell my friend here all you know.”

Carlos exited the Porta Potty in a furious mood.

“What the hell is wrong with you guys?!” he called across the haze of dusk to the campfire where his nine coworkers sat. “That thing is nasty enough without y’all not tossing your paper down the shitter or leaving the lid open. All that just attracts flies and it’s bad enough taking a crap in a hot house without a swarm of flies descending down on you!”

The men laughed at Carlos’ complaints and watched in anticipation of his rant continuing.

Mario held out a joint for Carlos then pulled it from him and laughed, “Are your hands clean?”

Carlos ran his hands down Mario’s face and cackled, “You tell me!”

The men exploded in laughter and Carlos ripped the joint from Mario’s hand and took a long toke.

“Are my hands clean?” Carlos mocked. “Asshole.”

Carlos sat next to Mario and handed him back the joint. The laughter died after a time and the men sat silently staring at the fire, watching as the last light of day faded into darkness. The joint was passed around from man-to-man as well was a bottle of cheap tequila and several tall boys of even cheaper beer. All sat contently happy in the moment except for Antonio whose stare was more of a case of worry and concern. Angel saw this and tried to pass him the tequila. Angel passed on the offer with a small gesture of his hand.

“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Angel asked with fatherly concern.

“Ain’t nothing wrong,” Bartoli interrupted. “We got paid to do nothing but wait for most of the day. We got good herb and drink. No wives or girlfriends around to bitch and moan. Life is good!”

The men laughed and when the joy died down, Antonio detailed what was wrong.

“I’m just tired, I guess,” Antonio confessed.

“You ain’t tired,” Mario stated through the firelight. “You’re scared.”

“Scared of what?” Antonio asked.

“You’ve been scared ever since you climbed out of that hole,” Mario declared as he gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the cave in the construction caused earlier in the day.

“Yeah,” Carlos agreed. “You’ve been all kind of weird since you went down there. You see a ghost down there or something?”

“No, it was scarier than a ghost,” Mario said, laughing. “He saw that gal he knocked up down in Piedras Negras down there. She had his kid on her arm and a hand out looking for money.”

All but Antonio cackled in laughter.

“There weren’t anything down there to see,” Antonio snapped. “Just a bunch of old bones.”

“So, you’re scared of bones?” Carlos said.

“Y’all need to lay off the drugs,” Antonio commanded. “You’re all acting crazy. I told you I wasn’t scared. Not scared now. There’s nothing down there.”

The men chuckled at Antonio’s mood and passed the marijuana, liquor, and beer to one another. Antonio stood from his folding chair and intercepted the bottle of tequila going around. He took a long pull and put the bottle back in rotation. He walked from the fire and away from the jokes and the chatter and into the darkness. He made his way past his hammock that hung between two mesquite trees and toward the construction equipment that stood idle in the starlight. He made his way to the edge of the cave-in and stood staring downward into the dark abyss. He unzipped his pants and began urinating into the darkness below.

“Didn’t nothing down there scare me,” Antonio told himself aloud. “Not a damn thing. That was just the wind or something I heard.”

Antonio listened to his urine stream hit the rocks below and looked to the star-filled sky above. The tranquility of the place was suddenly interrupted by faint chattering.

Of a sound reminiscent of castanets.

Antonio scanned the horizon for the source of the intrusive sound. His gaze turned downward and into the hole he was still urinating into. A blaze of motion shot from the hole. Antonio was knocked upward and back. He slammed to the ground and instinctively threw out his hands to hold the terror on top of him at bay.

Antonio screamed as a muzzle of glistening canines thrust forward. His nose was ripped from his face with a blinding shock of pain. Blood and tears poured over his cheeks, into his mouth, and down his neck. He howled in anguish then shrieked as four fingers were bit from his left hand. He wrestled to free himself from the terror, but the beast’s strength and tenacity was too great. He focused the last of his strength into a scream for help, but it was ripped from his throat by the jaws atop him.

“What the hell was that?” Angel asked in a visible state of shock.

The scream he and the others around the campfire heard was bloodcurdling.

Terrifying.

Primal.

From someone or something in the last grasp of life.

Angel stood and the others followed.

“Was that… Antonio?” Carlos wondered aloud.

“Shit ain’t funny if it was,” Mario stated.

“Sure as hell didn’t sound like he was joking to me,” Carlos continued. “Sounded like… like… Hell, I don’t know what it sounded like….”

Carlos trailed off, not wanting to share what evil scenarios were flashing through his head.

Angel pulled a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on. He walked toward the screams and the others followed. Carlos and Mario turned on their flashlights and made their way to the front of the group.

The group marched cautiously past the campsite where their hammocks hung and toward the wide clearing they carved had through the scrub with bulldozers and backhoes in the days previous. Their lights panned over the construction equipment and into the open cabs of each, looking for Antonio.

“Sounded like he was over this way,” Angel clarified.

“Where’s that cave-in?” Bartoli asked. “Maybe he fell in.”

“Hole’s over…” Angels voice went stone dead at the scene his flashlight illuminated.

Three white animals stood feeding on what was left of Antonio’s body. The lead creature raised its head and bared blood-soaked fangs. It growled in warning and the other beasts bared their canines that glistened with blood and viscera. The lead animal charged forward and the men turned in unison and ran in the direction of the campfire.

The scrub brush turned into a maelstrom of violence, of flashlight beams strobing the darkness, of screams and cries, of barks and howls, of men cut down and opened with teeth and claws, and of animalistic strength over human frailty.

“No, no, no.” Jared laughed in drunken euphoria. He was 11 Lone Star Lights into the evening and feeling rather intelligent and felt that challenging his professor in front of his classmates was the best way to prove such. “Chupacabras are real.”

Dr. Cooke laughed across the campfire. “They’re a myth. No different than Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.”

“Okay. Back up,” Jared suggested with a laugh. “Bigfoot is more likely than not to be an actual animal but has yet to be proven. The Loch Ness Monster is total bullshit. But chupacabras are real and that my good doctor is 100% true.”

“What’s a chupa… cupa… chalupa?”

The students drinking around the campfire exploded into laughter at Angie’s question.

“A chalupa’s like an open-faced taco,” Aubrey explained to her roommate. “A chupacabra is a Tex-Mex myth. It’s like a kangaroo-looking thing that sucks the blood out of goats. Kind of like a vampire.”

“And according to Jared, they’re real,” Dr. Cooke said with a chuckle.