The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Croatan Cowcatcher

Some cows are missing. Normally, that’s not a call the Office for the Cataloging of Unusual Occurrences would take, but times have changed. Years of impersonating FBI agents have caught up to them, and they owe J. Edgar a favor. He is cashing in by shoveling every call about haints, boogers, flying saucers, and black dogs at them.

And that’s where Inspector Royce Freeman, last seen in The Case of the Broken Fixers, finds himself: on the trail of a monster with a taste for steak, extra rare.

The Croatan Cowcatcher is the first of three short stories from Another Three Cases of Mayhem and Mad Science and will be featured in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Old Dogs Still Got Teeth.

Content warnings: violence, animal violence, mild swearing.

THURSDAY MORNING, OCTOBER 8, 1942
CATFISH LAKE WILDERNESS
CROATAN NATIONAL FOREST, NORTH CAROLINA

Deputy Inspector Royce Freeman was distracted by the sweet sugar scent of candy when he stomped his way into a pile of acid-pitted bones.

“Guess I found the cows,” he muttered to himself. The area he was in was spongy and damp, with ferns and moss growing everywhere. The plants had taken extremely well to the skeleton he'd decided to desecrate, coating it in green and sprouting between the joints. That's why he didn't see them, he reasoned, 'cause they were camouflaged, not 'cause he was following an enticing aroma like a cartoon hobo searching for a warm pie on a windowsill.

Freeman grunted as he extricated his boot from the ribcage, grimacing as the brittle bones crumbled apart. They were as light as balsa.

At least he was done hiking.

Not even the kids who'd let their cows wander the national forest for free fodder wanted to walk him out there. They'd seen a monster, and that's all there was to it. Not even as a pretense to ditch school. Instead, they'd drawn him the most God-awful excuse for map the backside of a napkin had ever been sullied with and sent him on his merry way.

And the rangers didn't care what badge he showed them, they weren't about to wander through the woods with a Negro and they weren't shy about letting him know it. That was fine by him, he didn't want a pack of territorial peckerwoods watching his back, especially not miles from nowhere, North Carolina.

Freeman checked the 'map' again: sure enough, he was near the blob and between the triangles. The words the kids had scrawled as a means of identifying landmarks might as well have been hieroglyphics; they just didn't teach penmanship in school any more. No one took pride in their letters. Back in his day, one misplaced i-dot would earn him a rap upside the head hard enough cross his eyes.

He looked around and checked his bearings. He was indeed south of the little lake, walking along a shallow gully that ran east of the big pine copse. His exact position matched the point on the map graced by a cow skull that looked like it was drawn during an earthquake by a rheumatic blind man.

“This has got to be the place,” Freeman muttered, 'cause how many cattle graveyards could there be south of the lake?

He mopped sweat off his forehead with the back of his sleeve, none too pleased to see the dark spot on the fabric squirming with no-seeums eager to lap up the salt leaking from his pores. The upslope from the little gully he'd followed was lousy with bones. He walked his eyes to its apex and spotted at least eight cow skulls peeking through the disintegrating skeletons and thick vegetation. He only counted the skulls because he was pretty sure each missing heifer had just brought the one.

“Now all I got to look out for is what got 'em,” he said.

The kids that had lost their cattle had been pretty clear: a green monster ate 'em, one with a mouth ten feet across and teeth as long as Freeman's arm.

Their drawings of the thing were about as legible as their maps. It could've just as easily have been a frog as a clam as a crab. All they knew for sure was that it had been gnawing on their livestock.

Freeman adjusted his canvas field kit where he'd slung it over his shoulder and unholstered the pistol he kept at the small of his back. It was Colt Detective Special, a little snub-nosed thing better for brandishing than shooting. He wished he had a Thompson or an Ithaca, but that was a no-go in those woods. That was the thing about dealing with cops, it wasn't worth the risk of making them feel jittery. Not that there were cops in a national forest, but with a Black man around, the rangers would start playing that part real quick. That meant that no matter where he was or what fake badge he was waving, he couldn't carry a gun big enough to settle his nerves.

Not that a gun like that existed, either.

Freeman took a long breath to refocus. His chest ached and rattled. He was too old to be tromping around the woods, looking for boogey men. He missed his usual beat, hauling in white collar malcontents. Paper trails were easier for follow than bones. He'd been an accountant once, before all his present mess with the Office. He wondered for a moment about the trajectory his life might have taken if he hadn't reported his old bosses' insider trading to the S.E.C., and how long he would have avoided a knife in the back if Wailey Earp hadn't recruited him.

For a time, he'd been traveling the east coast, his nose in folks' books, sniffing out money launderers and human traffickers. Then that oaf Malloy had to piss off Hoover.

“Idiot,” he grunted as he began his long trek up the short, bone-scattered rise. He wasn't sure if he was calling Malloy that or himself. His life had been pretty damn cushy before he'd turned that evidence over to the feds. He'd had a house in Decatur and a brand new Ford, and was doing well enough that his older brothers had never decided whether they were jealous or proud.

Then that cooperation mandate had come down from the top and he was ankle deep in cow bones, hunting monsters in the damn woods.

Freeman let his pistol lead the way. If there was a monster, and it was hungry enough to make a meal out of him, he'd at least give it a little pepper as it choked him down.

His boot clunked against something metal, nearly making his jump. He'd started to ignore the little thumps of ribs and vertebrae in the underbrush, but the hollow clank shocked him out of his single-minded advance.

“What the Hell?” he said, covering his shock with annoyance. He reached down a plucked a metal flask out of the underbrush. It was uncapped and empty. He waved it under his nose, but couldn't detect any odor. Whatever liquid had been in there was long gone, leaving a thin blue crust behind.

Eyeballing it put it at about a quart. The stamped logo on it featured a crown inside a vial, an emblem he'd seen but couldn't place. The letters 'FWS-X3' were stenciled beneath.

“Well if that ain't a clue, I don't know what I'm doing out here,” he muttered as he stashed it in his field kit.

Freeman took a long breath, held it, then sighed and continued up the small rise.

He came face-to-face with a distressed cow, wall-eyed and huffing in front of a towering green briar tangle in red and green.

“Hey there, Bessie,” he said softly. The cow grunted and lurched toward him, nearly sending him tumbling back down the hill ass-over-elbows. Her efforts only moved her about an inch forward, and Freeman was glad he'd held his ground. He'd been walking too much already and didn't want to wear out his boots climbing the same hill twice.

The cow lowed forlornly.

“What is it, girl?” he wondered. Seeing the big animal face-to-face brought him right back to his parents' farm when he was fifty years younger and a foot shorter. He laid a hand on her snout in a practiced attempted to calm her. She continued fidgeting and tugging against her back leg.

Freeman leaned to the side to look at her flank and saw it: a massive mouth, teeth like thorns, clamped onto her haunch. Its surface was smooth and pea green, veined with blue. It was translucent and didn't look like anything a thirty-eight would have trouble with.

He didn't see any blood, but he smelled it beneath the overwhelming sweetness. His pistol stayed locked on it.

“And what are you?” Freeman asked, poised to jumped back if it thought he looked tastier than the rarest steak on the menu. It made no indication that it heard him.

He took a step to the side to examine whatever it was when the morning rays traced across the huge clump of vegetation behind the cow.

It was moving.

That's when Freeman recognized it: the cow was trapped in one of the hungry maws of an enormous Venus fly trap, big as a stack of phone booths. It looked like the angriest topiary ever cut and was larger than any fly trap he'd ever seen by an impossible degree. Every inch of it was covered in hundreds of waiting mouths, their dewy, sugary centers bright red and ranging from the size of dimes to pie plates to pup tents.

The one chewing on the wayward cow was big enough to swallow a truck tire whole.

The cow groaned again.

“I'm working on it,” Freeman assured her. He holstered his pistol and examined the situation. From when he remembered, fly traps only worked because flies were dumb as rocks. He picked up a stick and poked the closest one right in the middle. It closed slowly, like an old screen door rather than a bear trap.

“Oh Bessie,” he groaned, shaking his head at the ensnared cow. She lowed back. He wasn't mad, he was just disappointed.

Freeman grabbed the trap latched to the cow's leg between its spiky teeth and hauled back on it. It wouldn't budge. He needed a different tack so he shoved some of the opportunistic traps aside and reached beneath the big one. It took a little while to dig around under there until he found its stem.

“That's why I brought you,” he said to the switchblade that rarely left his pocket. It had only ever seen action as a letter opener; he actually felt a little guilty sullying it by sawing through the fibrous shoot.

After a lot longer than he thought it should take, he'd hacked his way through. The cow huffed and kicked, knocking the suddenly limp jaws aside.

“Hey!” Freeman yelped as he was sprayed with green fluid. He wiped it off his face in time to watch the cow trundle down the hill. Its right rear leg was stained red and burned bald. It limped a little but that didn't slow it down as it disappeared down the south end of the gully.

“You're welcome,” he muttered. He sat flat on his can and worked the decapitated jaws like a sock puppet while mimicking what he thought a grateful cow should sound like: “Thanks Inspector Freeman.’”

His fingers started to tingle and he threw it aside.

“Whoah!” he snapped. He wiped his hand on his coat and checked his fingertips. They were pink and swollen. The fluids from the plant burned like acid. Hell, they were acid. He'd been standing there watching that poor cow get digested alive.

“That won't do,” he said, considering the towering mass of hungry traps and what might happen if some halfwit tripped into it. He sighed and began rummaging through his field kit. He shoved the fingerprint kit, miniature camera, bandages, audio tape recorder, and radio transponder around until he found what he was looking for. “There we go.”

He held the incendiary grenade in one hand and was about to pull the pin when a thought occurred to him.

“Say cheese,” he said with a smirk, then snapped a photo of the writhing green mass. He noticed a bundle of gleaming black seeds nestled in between some of the reds mouths and plucked them out. They went in his kit right next to the strange flask with the crown logo.

“All right, no more free meals for you, pal,” Freeman grunted. He plucked the grenade's pin and tossed it into the ravenous bush. Several spiky mouths closed around it, eager for a taste.

Freeman stuck around just long enough to make sure that the molten iron sparks lit everything all the way up. The gigantic fly trap was little more than a crackling, spitting tower of flame when he made his way downhill into the gully, crunching acid-cored bones with every step.

He held the crumpled napkin and spun it around, hoping in vain to interpret the kids' sorry excuse for a map.

“Terrible artists,” he said to himself, then balled it back up and headed in a direction that he hoped was north.

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.