Free Bonechiller by Graham McNamee

together.
    “Pike, when he was little,” Howie tells me, “wanted to run away and join the rodeo. He saw this bull-riding competition on TV and thought that was, like, his destiny. So he started out practicing his riding technique on the local dogs. He tried this big rottweiler named Napalm. A hundred pounds of mean, slobbering muscle. Pike hopped on, grabbed its collar and locked his legs against its sides. That thing spun, twisting and trying to take a chunk out of him. It rolled in the dirt to get him off, but Pike wouldn’t let go.Finally, Napalm just gave up and lay down on its belly, exhausted.”
    “That was when we knew Pike was kind of wrong in the head,” Ash says.
    Howie grunts. “We knew way before then. But seeing him break Napalm—that was something.”
    He’s proud of his brother, no matter what.
    Ash taps my shoulder. “Let me out. Gotta take a leak.”
    When she’s gone, I remember my cell phone pictures. Now that I’ve got Howie alone, I can’t put it off any longer.
    “Gotta show you something.” I dig out my cell. “I found these weird tracks in the snow. From some kind of animal, I guess. See if you can tell me what made them.”
    I pull up the shots from the ditch. “There.” I hand my cell over to him.
    Howie pages through the shots on the little screen. “Where was this?”
    I gulp some of my Coke, stalling. I don’t want to say too much, don’t want to come off like I’m nuts.
    “Down by the lake,” I say. “In a … ditch.”
    “Hmmm.” He frowns. “What were you doing in a ditch?”
    “Doesn’t matter. Long, weird story. But what do you think? What kind of animal left those?”
    He makes more
hmmming
sounds, squinting at the pictures. “The claws marks are bizarre. Eight digits to a paw? And the impression of the pad …?”
    Howie keeps flicking back and forth through the photos.
    “What size shoe are you?” he asks, looking at the shot where I set my foot down next to the tracks to get scale.
    “Ten.”
    Howie blinks at the image on the screen. Then he pulls out a pen. “Give me your shoes.”
    “Huh?”
    I hesitate as he clears some space on the tabletop. But then I pull them off and hand them over. Never question a genius.
    Using the photo and my running shoes for reference, he paces out lengths and widths, drawing lines in ink on the pale wood of the table. Then he draws an outline, adding little circles in a curve at the top to show the position of the claw marks.
    The outline stretches most of the width of the table.
    “Wow, that’s …” His voice dies off. “I don’t know what that is.”
    “How about a bear or something?”
    “Nah. Even if you had one gigantic polar bear on steroids, the structure’s all wrong. The heel, the span of the digits.”
    “So what then?”
    Howie shrugs, with a puzzled half smile. “Bigfoot, maybe? The Abominable Snowman?”
    “Any way you can look into it?” I ask, glad that he’s not pressing me for the full story yet.
    “Definitely. Just let me e-mail these shots.”
    He sends the digital images to his own address.
    Ash shows up then and sees my shoes on the table.
    “What’s this? Strip poker? Can I get in on it?”
    I grin, glancing at her sideways as she slips in next to me.
    Midnight is closing time at the Legion Hall.
    This was a good night. The best in a long, long time. Aswe make our way out to the parking lot, the crisp air shivering in our lungs, we’re all flying high.
    Ash is pumped with her victory in the ring. Pike’s bragging about beating the Reaper and then getting some girl’s number after. Howie’s staring into space, focused on the mystery monster tracks.
    And me? I’m still riding the electric buzz of Ash’s touch. The feel of her heat.
    Right now, there’s no past, no future. Nowhere else we need to be. Beneath a clear black sky crowded with stars, the shock of the cold braces us, shouting that we’re alive. Right here and now.
    And we’re all feeling—invincible,