This is the first part of an on-line group writing experiment that we did for POD a few months ago. I made up a situation and some characters, wrote a few pages and posted them. People then jumped in and took the story from there. The experiment fizzled when people finally got their issues of POD. I thought that the story beginning was good enough to preserve in a more permanent form, so here it is. I have only the sketchiest of ideas as to where the story would go from here, so I doubt that you’ll see any more of it from me anytime soon.

Some people attract trouble. Some attract accidents. A few lucky ones attract money or women. Kyle Simpkins attracts weird.

Up until the time he hit the thylacine with his car, the weird had been relatively normal weird if that's possible.

The time he came to work at the bar and claimed to have seen Ostriches—that was relatively normal weird. The "ostriches" turned out to be rheas (sort of a South American ostrich) that had escaped from a local farmer.

 

Everybody just kind of nodded and said, "Yeah, if anyone is going to see South American ostriches running around in an Illinois cornfield it would be Kyle."

Kyle's a good guy. He bartends at Liver Damage, which is where my friends and I hang out most weekend nights. He looks sort of like Roy Orbison, with a little early Elvis thrown in, especially when the bar makes him put on the sunglasses and sing. He's got a good voice. It isn't a Roy Orbison voice or an Elvis voice, but it's close enough to be fun.

Anyway, back to the thylacine Kyle hit. Hitting a thylacine was out of the ordinary weird for a couple of reasons.

First thing is, they've been extinct for over sixty years. Second thing, well even when they were still around there weren't any in Illinois or anywhere else except in Tasmania, which why some people call them Tasmanian Wolves.

See what I mean about this not being relatively normal weird? Normal weird would have been hitting some animal that wasn't supposed to in Illinois, like say a chimpanzee. It could have also been hitting something that was supposed to be extinct but used to live in Illinois, like maybe a passenger pigeon. But no, Kyle had to hit an extinct animal that had lived about as far away from Illinois as you can get back when it lived anywhere at all.

We heard about Kyle's thylacine one Saturday night. Of course he didn't know it was thylacine at the time. He came over to our regular table looking more rumpled than usual and said, "I Just got in. Hit a dog on the way here." Jordan McCurry asked, "What kind of dog?" Jordan's a big blonde ex-basketball player.  He breeds Siberian Huskies, and knows just about everything there is to know about dogs.

Kyle shrugged.  "I don't know. Some kind of mutt. Kind of strange-looking. You guys can take a look.  It's in the back of my van. I think it's still alive. I was hoping one of you guys could find a vet to take a look at it."

"Good luck finding one on a Saturday night." That was Cindy Curtis. Cindy hangs around with us between `serious relationships'.

That means she's around every other weekend on average. Cindy can't have kids—had a car accident a few years back that left that part of her innards messed up. I think that knowing she can't have kids messes with her mind a lot, and may explain all of the `serious relationships', but that's a whole other story. She's good company when she's around.

Kyle said, "I know it's going to be hard to find a vet. Tried to find one on the cell phone while I was driving in. Hope she makes it. Got puppies. Barely have their eyes open, but they grabbed onto her when I picked her up and wouldn't let go."

Earl Williams, the one married guy in our little group, shook his head. "Puppies. Don't let my wife hear about that." His wife works with a couple of rescue groups—takes in stray dogs for a week or two until the rescue group can find a home for them.

Liver Damage is usually pretty quiet even on a Saturday night, which is why we like it. Oh, once in a while they'll get a good band in and fill up the place, but usually there's just the three of us—Jordan, Earl, and of course me, Chris Barnes—and maybe a couple of dozen others, all regulars, all in their late twenties to maybe pushing forty at the oldest. I don't know how Bill (the owner) keeps the place open—or at least I didn't then. We used to joke about the place being used for money laundering, but we didn't say that very loud because we weren't real sure it wasn't true.

Anyway, Liver Damage isn't usually all that crowded, and this Saturday night wasn't an exception to that, so Kyle got the other bartender to cover for him and we went out to his van to have a look at his `dog'.

Kyle paused and looked in the window before he opened the rear door of his van. "She was unconscious when I left, but she was still breathing."

The light came on when the door opened, startling the puppies. (I guess that's what you call young thylacines. At least that's what I'm going to call them.) All four of them hissed and opened their mouths in a threat display.

Jordan looked at the puppies and then at their mom. He shook his head. "Don't think you've got a dog here."

I was already thinking that myself. One thing threw me though. Momma thylacine had a collar on. I asked, "What are they? Coyote, fox, wolf?"

I think I had probably heard of thylacines somewhere along the way, but if I'd ever seen a picture it didn't stick in my mind.  None of the others knew what it was either, so I don't feel bad.

We didn't figure out what the thylacine was until Dave Rickert got involved. Now Dave's a biologist at the local college. His wife's a veterinary technician, and a member of one of the animal rescue groups that Earl's wife's in.

Mrs. Rickert—I think her first name's Beth—was the best we could come up with to help with the unconscious animal. Kyle gave Jordan his spare keys and the four of us—Jordan, Cindy, Earl, and I—drove over to Dave Rickert's house. Momma thylacine was still unconscious when we got there. Kyle had managed to get a jacket under momma and her puppies to get them into the truck. They were still on the jacket, so we each grabbed a corner and hauled the whole works into the Rickerts' kitchen, and then plunked them all down on the kitchen table.

The puppies hissed the entire way to the house, and I was afraid they'd get scared enough to bite one of us or make a run for it. They didn't though, and we managed to get them inside without doing any noticeable additional damage to either the puppies or their mother. Mrs. Rickert put a muzzle on mommy thylacine in case she woke up, and then she started fussing over the injured animal.

Dave Rickert sauntered in a few minutes later, took a quick look at mommy and her puppies, and suddenly got very interested.

I could see him eying mommy's paws. Finally he walked over and cautiously moved his hand near one of the puppies. The puppy hissed and opened its mouth again.

Dave looked at the teeth, and then looked at us. "Where did you get this?” He tried to sound casual, but it didn't work. We told him about Kyle hitting mommy thylacine. He looked at us and shook his head. "Well, there's only one thing this could possibly be. Some details are different, but the teeth and the paws are right. Only problem is, there is no way this could be a thylacine."

Mrs. Rickert looked up like she was startled. I guess she knew what a thylacine was and how impossible it was that someone would hit one at the edge of an Illinois cornfield. None of us really understood that. We just kind of figured that it was some kind of dog or wolf from some other country that someone had gotten as a pet and let get loose. Mrs. Rickert asked, "Are you sure? It can't be a thylacine."

Dave shrugged. "I know that. What else could it be though? It's a marsupial. I can tell that from the teeth. I should know a marsupial when I see one. I did my dissertation on opossums. A marsupial that looks like a dog. What else could it be?"

Mrs. Rickert said, "No stripes." I found out later that thrylacines normally have stripes like a tiger. This one did have stripes, but they were very faint. If you really looked for them you could see them. I noticed them as soon as she said that. Dave did too, and he pointed to one of them.

"Not dark enough," Mrs Rickert said.  "And if it is a Thylacine I'm out of my league here. I can do a little emergency repair on a dog, but how could I even start to help a thylacine? If I do what I would do for a dog it might kill the thing."

Dave said, "Trust me. It's a thylacine. All of the other choices have been extinct for millions of years."

"Thylacines have been extinct for over sixty years. And this one has a collar."

Dave ignored that and started questioning us about where Kyle had hit momma thylacine. We couldn't help him on that. We decided to see if Kyle would take us back to where he hit the thylacine when he got off of work. Cindy stayed with Mrs. Rickert and Dave came with the rest of us when we drove back to Liver Damage in Kyle's van.

Bars close at two in the morning around here—city ordinance, so we made sure Kyle could go back with us and waited around until the bar closed.

Kyle didn't have much trouble finding the spot where he had hit the thylacine. He had been slowing down for a stop sign when the thing ran in front of his van, which was why the collision didn't kill momma thylacine instantly. He parked the van near the stop sign and we quickly found hair and blood on the shoulder of the road. Dave put the hair and a little bit of blood that he scraped off the pavement into a baggy, and then we started backtracking mommy thylacine.

Now at that point I would have figured that things couldn't get much weirder. They did though.

I didn't know it at the time, but Dave had done a lot of fieldwork in getting his doctorate. Somewhere along the line he learned how to be a pretty good tracker. It had rained earlier in the day, which helped too.

In any case, Dave worked his way back along the thylacine's trail through the cornfield, working by the light of a flashlight.

Dave followed the trail for about fifty yards, with us following him. After those fifty yards he stopped abruptly.

Earl started to go around him, but Dave grabbed his arm. "I wouldn't do that."

We all gathered around and looked at the scene that Dave's flashlight revealed. A man in an animal-hide loincloth was laying face-up in the dirt. He was obviously dead, with much of the back of his head gone. A faint dome of shimmering blue light rose like a transparent igloo around and over the body.

The dead man still held something shaped vaguely like a pistol in his hand. His skin was dark and he looked sort of like a picture of an Australian aborigine I saw once in a National Geographic.

The bottom of the shimmering blue dome was surrounded by a ring of dead bugs. I smelled a faint odor of burned flesh or burned insect.

As we watched, a moth attracted by the flashlight flew into the blue light. We heard a snapping sound, like the kind bug zappers make, and the moth disappeared. Earl picked up a rock and tossed it at the dome. The rock disintegrated with a flash and a much louder zapping sound when it hit the dome.

Earl said, "We'd better call the police."

Kyle took a deep breath. "I'm not sure police and thylacines mix."