Evil Harvest

Mary Bigfoot was a product of the 1960’s. Her long frizzy hair looked exactly as it had for her 1968 senior picture. She had changed her last name to Bigfoot after an eighteen month stay at a commune outside Los Angeles where she moved after graduation, much to her mother’s lament and to the echo of her father’s final go ahead, you won’t amount to a pile of shit anyhow! One of her partners, and she had had many while living in the progressive commune, had said Mary’s habit to never shave her legs and her unusually amount of body hair reminded him of what it might be like to have sex with bigfoot. In a haze of hash and possibly with a halo of smoke around her head at the time, she had made a legal petition to change her last name to Bigfoot in order to please her man. The petition was swiftly granted by the liberal judge, who also was in a hash haze a good deal of the time, and Mary Bigfoot was born. She left the commune after the property they had been living on was sold to a developer and communes lost their appeal after the 1970 conviction of Charlie Manson and several of his infamous family members. Mary drifted from job to job and moved from place to place somehow migrating from sunny California to the cold of Pennsylvania, ending up in a homeless shelter came about when she was out of work, out of money and out of a place to live because of the previous two events. The shelters original supervisor thought Mary to be a nice woman, but never expected her to become a permanent fixture, much less take his job. Her residency there seemed to bring out one of Mary’s better traits; although she really did care for the residents that came in went each week, (they became her cash cows as she liked to call them) she was extremely talented at developing story lines (telling lies) to present to city council in order to bilk money from them to supposedly run the shelter. It was all so easy really, no one checked. The forms she had to fill out for the state and federal grants were a breeze for someone like Mary and she was able to maintain a very nice apartment in the shelter; not too nice though, she didn’t want to set off any bells or whistles if someone managed to get a good look at her digs. The bulk of the money she funneled off though was used for a far darker vehicle for her to amass her wealth. It was used to smuggle young girls into the country to be used in porno and often times snuff films. From their suffering and sometimes death, she had made an absolute fortune. A fortune which was currently housed in several accounts throughout Europe and offshore investments. Mary Bigfoot was thinking through her planned retirement in 2014 as she made her nightly rounds through the facility checking that lights were out (the increasing electric bill was eating into her cut of city, state and federal funds don’t you know), the doors were locked and the security system was on. She always carried a mini baseball bat with her, a purchase she made several years ago when the baseball All Star game was hosted by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Her trip to the game was a ploy to cover a money drop for a beautiful Brazilian child newly arrived the day before. All of the existing inhabitants in the shelter were currently housed on the second floor with instructions not to leave their areas after lights out. She didn’t want anyone trying to depart in the middle of the night leaving the place open to vandals. That too, would cut into her take if she had to replace anything, hence her nightly tour. That was when she noticed the basement door, the last one she always checked, had a blinking red access light. Blinking red meant the door was unlocked. Almost simultaneously she noticed with her peripheral vision, what seemed to be stealthy movement outside the door. What the fuck? The mini bat that she had been holding loosely in her right hand between her index and middle finger immediately was being gripped tightly in her closed fist. The back yard area was enclosed with an eight foot high link fence that had been planted many years ago in thorny climbing roses she had allowed to grow unchecked and wild, in effect forming a kind of razor wire at the top. She knew that access into the back yard was extremely difficult, it was meant to be difficult by her wishes and the prolific growing of the roses. Therefore anyone out there was up to no good. Mary wasn’t afraid, she thought she was the toughest broad in the city and no young punk was going to intimidate her much less vandalize her property. She waited a long moment to see if she witnessed the movement again, and when she didn’t, she figured out the kid, or kids whatever the case may be, could possibly be casing the rest of the back side of the building to see a better place to gain entry. The little bastards don’t know that red means GO in my house she thought smugly. She pushed the door open slowly, just enough for her to wedge her thin body through and show as little of her profile as possible. She saw a large shadow to her immediate left behind the huge rhododendron and thought gleefully, Oh good a fat one, he won’t be able to run while I beat the shit out of him. She stepped slowly down the cement step and took four more quiet steps, gripping the mini bat tightly, anxious, excited even, to pummel and punish the dirt bag invading her space. With inhuman speed, two hands, each seemingly the size of dinner plates, shot through the foliage of the bush, one grabbed her by the back of her head, entangling her long, frizzy 60’s hair in a death grip that ripped several huge portions of scalp from her skull and yanked her through the bush, tearing clothes and ripping skin. The other snatched the bat from her hand and in one fluid motion, stuffed it down her throat up to the rounded handle. The only sound was a quite gurgle escaping momentarily around the head of the bat. Unfortunately for Mary Bigfoot it took her a full 30 seconds to actually die. The creature above her, its eyes gleaming yellow with evil delight, slid its jaw forward its teeth unfolding and buried its face into her steaming guts.