Asian Horror Invades Iowa's Manure Lagoons

submitted by Morton Charnel

Louisa: A global economy has brought to this country more than just trade. Africanized honey bees, best known as Killer Bees, swarm along our border with Mexico. The unwelcome Baltic immigrant, the Zebra Mussel, now steadily sets up house in factory water intakes throughout the Great Lakes. Other as yet unknown foreign varmints have stressed native species to the limit of their endurance, sometimes producing unusual behavior. In 1983, two teenage boys hooked and landed a six foot sand shark in the Mississippi River near the town of Neunert, Illinois. Why the shark meandered so far into fresh water has since baffled most zoologists, though there were some experts at the time that interpreted marks on the shark's body as bite wounds.

     On July 13 this year, Amber Wagman, a Naturalist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources called me to describe what she called a 'weird" phenomena. On the night of July 10, Hillsboro was suddenly overrun with varmints as every raccoon, skunk and opossum that dwelt in the storm sewer system suddenly burst onto the street squeaking and chattering as ghastly noises rang throughout the storm grates. The following day, county maintenance crews investigated the storm sewers and found nothing out of the ordinary. That night, the residents' pet cats and dogs that normally spent the night outside began disappearing. Wagman found a total of 23 sets of dog and cat remains some 2 miles southwest of Hillsboro where the town's storm sewer emptied into Turner's Creek. Just what killed them, Ms. Wagman declined to discuss over the phone. She asked me to come and see it for myself.

     An alluvial fan is the geologist's term for the broad, flat area I found myself by mid-afternoon the following day. To the northwest and northeast, the ground rose steeply. A wide but shallow stream ambled by, gurgling southwards into a culvert that passed under the gravel road about two hundred feet away where my car was parked. To the north, a larger concrete culvert some six feet in diameter protruded from the stream bank, indicating it was where the storm sewer emptied from Hillsboro. Sticks and leaves littered the edge of the fan, indicating a recent flood. At first glance, the place looked placcid enough, until my errant foot dislodged an animal skull from beneath a clump of weeds. I discovered more bones and soon realized I was surrounded by decaying animal remains.

     A few feet above the high water mark, skid marks showed that something had churned up the waterlogged sod. These marks surrounded a large mud puddle but I couldn't make out any sign of tread-marks. The mud puddle looked like any other mud puddle and I nearly missed it but for a black cloud that blotted out the solar glare and allowed me to see. A thick mass of jelly or translucent goo floated near the bottom. I fished some out with my hand and discovered it was some sort of slime or mucus and that other blobs of the disgusting ichor bobbed in the puddle as well.

     "I've never seen anything quite like it, either," a woman's voice said behind me.

     I whirled around. She was tall, blonde and inspite of the jeans, work boots and Iowa Department of Natural Resources cap she wore, thoroughly gorgeous. I burned out a few brain cells before stammering, "Uh, yeah."

     "Are you Charnel," she smiled.

     "Uh yeah," I repeated and automatically thrust out my hand, "And you're?"

     "Amber Wagman, DNR Naturalist," she said as she took my hand.

     The mucosal ball of goo I had forgotten to drop oozed all over our hands. We both cringed in disgust.

     "Sheriff Wallace said I was supposed to avoid you. Guess I'll listen to him next time," she sighed as she shook the sticky stuff from her hand."

     "Me, too. Nice of him to remember me," I answered embarrassed, making a mental note to shoot myself.

     "Wallace is very concerned about media coverage---especially your magazine. People say they've seen or heard things out here. That's why he warned me to avoid you."

     I smiled at that. "Frightening public officials is just part of my job, ma'am."

     She beamed. Encouraged, I made a mental note not to shoot myself after all.

     "So, what is this stuff?"

     "I don't know yet. But the cytology shows it's from a fish."

     "What's been causing all the fish stories, then?" I smirked.

     An uneasy expression stole across her face.

     "A couple of days ago, I came out here to check out the storm sewer. That's when I found all the cat and dog bones. Logs had blocked up the culvert under the road there and the whole fan here was under ten feet of water. Even the storm sewer culvert up there was under. I had just found the mucosa when I heard something in the water. When I turned around, I saw the wake of something underwater swimming up and down the length of the pool. Well, I really wanted to see what it was so, I climbed up to the place in the road over directly over the culvert so that the sun would be at my back and I could see into the pool. Well, my shadow fell on the water as soon as I got up there. The thing went straight for it---very aggressive behavior. It was dark tan or brown, possibly two feet in diameter. But anything that big had to be a predatory fish that went extinct before the last ice age. It thrashed about like crazy in front of the culvert until it knocked loose the blockage and got sucked away out the other side. There's a deep, overgrown gully there. I spent the rest of the afternoon creeping around down there but found nothing.

     "I can see by your smile you're about to say it was the Loch Ness Monster. Hell, if I told this to another naturalist, they'd recommend a good therapist. But I need someone willing to stake their reputation---even yours, such as it is---to say they saw it, too. Look, Science doesn't know even a third of what lives in the Mississippi drainage, let alone what we might have killed in the past hundred and fifty years; this might be an undocumented species! "

     I shifted my weight, looked around the fan at all the bones lying around and took in what she said. In the end, I fell prey to her pretty face and my own damnable curiosity. "Okay," I said, "I'm game."

     "The creek goes south three miles to the Iowa River before it joins the Mississippi. About a mile from here, it flows along the road past my uncle Cletus' hog farm. He's got a manure lagoon and I've seen one of these ruts down there the day before yesterday. I think what ever it is lives in there."

     I looked again at the ruts in the mud, recalling a photo of wavering lines in the sand left by a Sidewinder Rattlesnake. "Two feet across," I muttered.

     It started raining then. A steady, oppressive rain.

     When the sudden anguished wailing echoed demonically in the near distance, Amber's gorgeous face contorted in terrified recognition. She ran onto the road to her pickup truck; I only just managed to scramble in beside her in time before we roared over the gravel road and up the hill. At the top, she swung the truck southwest over a farmer's field lane until we jounced over a partially buckled culvert and onto another gravel road. We soon came upon a single muddy rut that crept from the ditch on the left side of the road and passed under a barbed wire fence into a close-cropped meadow. Large chunks of damp sod had been pushed off to either side as the thing cut its way towards a grassy rise. Behind it, a low, long roofed building was just visible.

     Amber skidded into a gravel driveway and raced up the rise to a farm. And as we pulled into the farm yard, I unwillingly noted the pungent stink of pigs. We pulled in between a huge 200 foot long rectangular lagoon to the south and a simple white two-story farm house a few yards to the north across a well kempt lawn. East of the lagoon and slightly up hill, a long hog confinement shed squatted. The unusual rut led straight to the lagoon and disappeared. No other trace; no bubbles broke the surface, no eddy indicated the subtlest of movement. Nothing betrayed any sign of the thing that had made the strange track.

     The rain now came down in buckets, the ground rapidly grew treacherous as we prowled along the wide rut. Suddenly, I stumbled over what felt like a log and landed next to it on the ground. It wasn't a log.

     The hog's horrible mauled head leered at me, the skin stripped from half of its face. The hideous grimace drove me to my feet, looking around in fright. Other hog mutilated carcasses lay scattered around and I saw the huge hole torn in the side of the hog confinement shed. Suddenly, Amber shouted to me. She had seen the house's front door swinging in the breeze and was running to investigate. I bounded onto the front porch just as she entered the lifeless house.

     "Uncle Cletus! Aunt Christie!" she shouted, scarcely waiting for an answer as she ran inside. She led the way across the dimly lit but pleasant living room and headed down a short hallway towards the kitchen. I followed after, but abruptly slid on the goo-smeared wooden floor and careened into a china cabinet, the contents clinking furiously. At Amber's shout, I got to my feet and discovered her tugging at an upended kitchen table on the floor amidst pots and pans, plates and shards of glass. A pair of woman's legs protruding from underneath the upended kitchen table. Splotches of blood covered everything.

     Amber lifted the table frantically.

     It was a horrid mistake to see what lay beneath. Screaming hysterically, she stumbled to the blood drenched sink and vomited. Beneath the table lay only her aunt's lower abdomen and legs; the rest having been ripped away and now gone. A man's arm lay in the midst of it, too.

     As Amber sobbed hysterically , I tried calming her when suddenly the house shook and moaned as an old, dry cello when bowed by a novice. We froze.

     A flashlight lay in the wreckage strewn on the floor. When the house became still again, Amber picked it up and furtively made her way to a closet near the back door. She softly clanked about inside for moment, the flashlight beam playing eerie shapes on her face until she returned with a pair of hunting rifles. Though still streaked with tears, a granite hardness had come over her. She chambered a round in her rifle.

     Science class was over.

     We silently picked our way towards the front of the house, but soon as we entered the living room, horrible screeching blasted our nerves. I fired my rifle but was knocked on my ass by a young pig hurtling straight into my knees, screeching and squealing. Without breaking stride, it galloped out the front door.

     A thing on the porch shot past the front door; a huge brown and black bulk. An instant later, the squealing stopped with a hideous gurgle. Amber rushed to one of the windows, then crept onto the front porch.

     "It just went into the lagoon," she said, beckoning me to join her.

     "Perfect, let's get out of here," I volunteered eagerly.

     She ignored me, heading out into the rain across the yard to a small shed at the near end of the confinement shed. There, she smashed off the lock on the door with her rifle butt and entered. A minute later, she emerged with a wooden crate in her arms and was heading for the lagoon. I caught up to her just as she fished out two hand grenades. More lay inside the crate padded by tightly twisted old sugar sacks.

     "Uncle Cletus brought a lot of stuff back from Korea," she muttered as she handed me one. "Hope they still work."

     We chucked the grenades into the lagoon, hoping these small depth charges would either force it to the surface or hopefully---kill it.

     The eighth grenade blew a plume of acrid brown water into the air. And as the water splashed back down, the goo-dripping horror slithered out of the lagoon. My God it was big! A full 24 feet---maybe more---its body covered in a blotchy brown, tan and black beneath a disgusting, thick film of glistening slime. The sickening gurgle of its breathing reverberated over the waters of the lagoon as air rushed into the single gill-slit at its throat, sounding more like a sloppy battlefield tracheotomy. Its mouth flexed impatiently in a sneering predatory smile. Its sharp eyes---probably five feet apart on either side of it head---darted, gauging us as targets.

     Clumsily, it lunged towards us, and but for the muddy ground it would have easily had us. I snapped out of my disgust and amazement to aim the rifle for the middle of its head.

     Two or three shots more killed it, I'm sure. I don't recall exactly how many I fired, only that the weapon was empty when Amber finally grabbed my shoulder. I looked at her pale and worn face and smiled weakly.

     Dull crunching shook the earth from the opposite side of the lagoon as 20 feet of its grenade-weakened wall tumbled away and sent the foul waters cascading into Turner's Creek.

     The next day, the DNR announced that a manure spill caused a massive fish kill south of Hillsboro near the Iowa River. I attempted to contact Amber and when that failed, I drove down to her uncle Cletus' farm to see the creature again and pulled up just in time to block the exit of a semi-truck with a refrigerated trailer. Instead, Sheriff Wallace himself turned me away from the place, adding that he'd happily show me the way out of "his county". I went north. The semi headed south with a police escort.

     A week later, a photocopy of a partial document turned up on my desk. It read:

     "The Asian Swamp Eel, or Synbranchidae Monopterus albus, an animal renown for its cunning and voracious appetite, began invading the tidal marshes and wetlands of Florida and Georgia about 5 years ago possibly after being released by or escaping from tropical fish collectors. It has gradually been spreading west along the Gulf of Mexico and as far north as the Carolinas. Under normal conditions, the swamp eel averages 3 feet long and is covered with a thick, slippery coating of slime. Being a highly successful at breathing air, it has the unique ability to wriggle out of a small pond and wander off across dry land to a new home.

     In its native habitat, it knows few predators. In its adopted habitat, it has none."





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