Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  Its mouth was prickled yellow with teeth that made her want to throw up in horror. Nature had certainly never made such a creature. But there was another behind it. Slightly darker, slightly larger. It looked hungry, as all wild predators did when faced with an easy meal.

  Lux felt like she should say something, but it was a beast, no matter how humanoid the eyes were. And beasts could not speak. The dark music of the wind and the wild stirred the forest, sucking more of the beasts out from the trees.

  There was no getting out of this, she realized. They would die right where they stood. Their blood would turn the dirt red for only a few days. Then the Texan heat, wild, and weather would erase their remains. Lux felt a hysterical laugh brim and bubble up her esophagus. Maybe it was vomit.

  “Stand opposite of how it is, mirror it,” Samuel said, his voice high and sudden in the stillness.

  Lux expected a war to break out at the simple sound, but nothing happened. The creatures exchanged looks, intelligent looks, she reminded herself. Samuel’s words sunk in.

  The beast held a strange posture of being curled forward. His shoulders were hunched to offer protection to his chest, and his head was thrust forward and downwards slightly. Lux sucked in a deep breath and decided she didn’t have anything to lose. She jutted her shoulders back and tilted her head to expose her neck slightly. The angle was small as she could not bring herself to completely bare her skin to the beast. The creature advanced to within a couple of feet, close enough to touch and close enough to smell the damp animal stink of it and Lux stiffened with fear, but held her ground, her heart bounding in her chest and blood pounding in her ears. The wait was agonizing hours, though perhaps only a moment or two, until the beast let his stance drop into something more relaxed looking, though not by much.

  He took a step forward and reached out. His fingers were claw tipped, but fingers all the same. One thick claw grazed the taut skin of her neck, and caught on the chain hanging from it.

  He bared his teeth and gave the chain a slight tug, though not enough to break it. The sight of all of those sharp teeth so close to her almost made Lux soil herself.

  “I think he wants the necklace we found,” Samuel said.

  Lux didn’t care where the conclusion had come from, anything to get those teeth away from her face. “Then please get it, at once.”

  Her voice cracked with the stress, but the beast didn’t move. His face was vaguely simian, although what she had thought had been horns were in fact merely boney protuberances of the skull, still covered with flesh, skin and fur. These didn’t quite correspond to the legends of the Bigfoot she had been told as a child. Another of the creatures crept forward, this one clearly a female from the swollen teats on her chest. She was dark, almost blacker than pitch, her fur like night wrapped around a strange body.

  The male gave the chain another tug and his other hand, for it was a hand, landed on the female’s back, just where her neck ended and her shoulders began.

  In the voice of an earthquake, the male said one meaningless yet unmistakable word.

  “Taj.”

  “Do you have the necklace yet?” Lux demanded, again in a croak that she kept as calm as she possibly could, given the circumstances. Clearly, in their human error the team had stolen the female’s necklace. Lux guessed that these… beings, not animals, had no concept of keeping things in a container, or wardrobe. Hell, that tree that they had found the necklace on might well be a wardrobe to them.

  “It’s on Julie somewhere.”

  Hal’s voice came from behind her. Great, her life lay in the hands of the packing skills of a botanist.

  Movement rustled behind her. Lux did not move a centimeter. The beast had no weapon on him, just the claws. The claws were more than enough. She felt like she was at gunpoint. In fact, she would prefer gunpoint.

  “Here,” Hal’s voice whispered in her ear, and the ape-man’s eyes darted to where Hal had moved, over Lux’s left shoulder, and bared his teeth in a snarl. The leather touched her hand and she closed her fingers around it. She brought it out, the shapeless rock dangling down. Every beastly eye sunk through the air to land on the rough stone.

  “Here,” Lux said with a gasp, holding it out to them. In a moment, the female was upon her, but the killing blow never came, and when Lux’s right hand was only halfway through drawing her pistol, the necklace was tugged free of her fingers, and she had bounded back to join their three fellows, waiting in the tree line.

  The female’s sharp fingers cradled the stone reverently. There was no mistaking reverence, and Lux could see it in every eye, every warped face and body. The hanging rock meant much to them. The male met her eyes again. His breath whistled between his glistening teeth, wafting the scent of fetid meat and decay over Lux’s nose. He grimaced in a threatening brace of teeth. One curved claw ran delicately along the line of her clavicle, nicking just the tip and bringing a trickle of blood to the surface of her skin. It was a warning, and Lux had no trouble understanding that. He stepped back, and then again. The rest of the creatures melted into the forest, their glowing eyes disappearing one by one and then all at once until just the male and female stood in the shade of stout oak.

  Then they, too, were gone.

  Lux braced her hands on her knees and retched on the foliage covered ground. She was a girl of the forest, but her fear betrayed her. Panting, she reached for her canteen to rinse away the filth.

  ***

  They did not stop for lunch and kept walking well into the night, although in the dark they had not made as much distance as Lux had hoped. Whilst time had calmed her, she could still taste the creature’s breath on her, and the scratch on her chest itched. Perhaps she had been poisoned, some foul toxin that the creatures carried in their deadly fingers. When they finally stopped, the low glow of the moon was the only light they had to string their hammocks up by. Lux was relieved to have the others there, their hammocks rocking gently into hers in the breeze and restlessness of their sleep. But Lux did not sleep. Her eyes would not close.

  All she could see when she stared at the solid overhead in her hammock was a pair of glowing green eyes. That intelligent face was there, burned into her open eyes with an invisible cattle brand.

  ***

  The morning brought no respite.

  “We need to go back to the graveyard,” Samuel said.

  “Are you nuts?” Julie said. Her face was pale and sunken, which actually made Lux feel a little better about her own mental state. At least she wasn’t alone in madness and fear.

  “We need proof,” Samuel insisted.

  “We have this proof,” Hal said, his thick finger gesticulating wildly to Lux’s neck. “They did that to get back a lost necklace. What’s going to happen when you go in and dig up a body?”

  Samuel did not say anything, but Lux could see he was still just as determined.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m leading everyone out, and I’m leading everyone out now. We don’t split up, and you aren’t calling the shots. We have photographs of the graveyard, and we have a map leading directly to it. Stevens can send someone else in.”

  “We’re going back,” Samuel said.

  “Fine,” Lux growled. “Go back, but don’t expect me to haul your ass out of here. We’re leaving. I don’t care where you go.”

  Hurt flashed through his eyes, though they had never been friendly. Lux felt guilt flood her. She knew she was too stubborn to leave someone behind on a mission.

  “I will,” Samuel threatened.

  “Do it then,” she sneered.

  The camp was silent. Then Samuel picked up his pack and shouldered it.

  “I will,” he repeated.

  Lux was so tired that her eyes shook and she felt dizzy. She hadn’t slept for a single second the night before, and just barely the night before that. Exhaustion was like lead fishing lures puncturing every square inch of her skin, dragging her to the ground.

  But when he walked away, Lux recognized her
failure and shouldered her pack, too.

  “Get your shit,” she barked at the others.

  “Are we leaving?” Julie asked, her sunken face drawn.

  Lux sighed.

  “Not quite.”

  “Are we leaving Samuel?” Hal asked.

  “No,” she said.

  The three faces blinked at her expectantly, ready to go, awaiting her leadership.

  “Samuel,” she called out. “It’s this way.” She pointed.

  He looked relieved, but Lux marched out before he could say anything. She was too tired for talking, sick of the job, sick of these foolish scholars who seemed hell bent on getting them all killed, but she knew that without empirical proof of what they had seen, no one in the real world would believe any of them, even if all their stories were the same. She would be ruined professionally, as would everyone else with her. The graveyard was well lit in the dawn. Having brought the team to their destination, she looked Samuel square in the eye.

  “Don’t take anything with you when you’re done except pictures and notes.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but she turned her back, leaving him, Julie, and Hal to the graveyard. She tied up her hammock twenty yards away and slid in, her eyes shutting. Ben was awake, his sharp eyes on the forest, the others too. She could finally sleep.

  When she woke, the sun was high in the sky, mid-afternoon. Tiredness scratched at her eyes, but she sat up and climbed her way out and to the ground, desperate to pee. The graveyard was still a buzz of scientific research, and she could hear Smith directing the works. Lux walked into the brush to relieve herself. As she squatted, she found herself thinking about the creatures again. How many were there? These woods could probably support a fairly large population, but not without discovery. The discovery was a problem. How had they never been found before? Piney Woods was a wild place, but people were a common sight even deep within the woods; although, they had not come across any human trails within the creatures’ territory. Was it possible that this place was truly isolated? Lux did not believe that. The creatures had been doing something proactive toward it, something to keep humans away. Whatever it was, it had not kept them away.

  Lux briefly considered that it was an elaborate hoax. It was possible, but highly improbable. She wiped on a leaf and pulled her britches up. She wondered what would happen to this place when they returned with the pictures to Dr. Stevens. They would need to search around the other end of this territory, further to the south, and around the bluff that was the highest peak, and around which the team had been making their way for what seemed like weeks. To truly finish the project, they would need to spend months in the trees. They needed a linguistic anthropologist to work on the language of the beasts, if they could be found again – one more friendly than Samuel, for sure. Stiffly, she climbed back up the tree. Her hammock looked beautifully soft and inviting, and her chest was burning. She felt a little feverish after all. She crawled down and stretched out in it, zipping herself shut. She had her knife and pistol and the creatures were nowhere to be seen. She was safe to drift back off.

  When she woke, Samuel was digging. As Samuel dug dirt, it flew from the ground around him. Julie documented, the camera clicking rapidly. Hal reviewed notes with Julie, the pages of their notebooks flipping in still morning air. Unzipping, flying down the tree, sweating like a marathon runner, Lux kicked the small shovel from his hands.

  “What did I say?” She couldn’t keep her voice down. “Are you a total moron? Do you not remember what we are dealing with here?” She slapped Smith hard in the face. Smith slapped her back, backhand, knocking her to the ground. Makarios shoved him in the chest, but Smith did not swing for him. The confrontation was over, as a physical contest. Instead, he yelled at her over Ben’s shoulder.

  “Don’t give me that rubbish, Lux. This is the most important work I will ever do as an anthropologist. Look at this!”

  She looked to where he was pointing. The creatures did not bury like westerners. They dug narrow tubes straight down into the dark earth and left their dead to stand in their graves. The shafts were hard to find as the grave marker apparently gave no detail to where the body was in relation to it. North, east, south, or west, it seemed completely random. Lux got to her feet.

  “These aren’t some ancient human ancestors you’re digging up, Smith. These creatures are here, alive, and I don’t think they like us too much.” Samuel was about to retort, but Ben beat him to it.

  “I see both your points,” Ben said. “But you’re right, Lux, I don’t like it either. They aren’t stupid. They bury their dead.”

  “That makes them human, doesn’t it?” Julie said.

  “No,” Ben corrected. “It makes them sentient. It’s a human arrogance to assume that we have the monopoly on conscious thought.”

  Lux dug her toe into the ground and kicked dirt into the air. Sweat rolled down her neck, probably leaving a streak in the dirt that had collected there since the day before. Other traces that she had worked had not taken this long in the wild. Actually, that wasn’t true, she realized. She had once been in the Arizona desert for two weeks tailing one woman. But somehow, that had not been as bad. The woman had only been human. There had been nothing to be afraid of. Out here, fear had oozed its way into every tree and every root. It leeched out into the atmosphere like noxious gasses, possessing everything. She was tired of that fear, but everywhere she looked, there were green eyes to remind her that it was there for a reason. The woman in Arizona had been human, though she had truly been a master of the desert like no other. But these creatures, she couldn’t call them Bigfoot, they were different. There was true knowledge in their green haunting eyes, but they were animal, surely.

  They wore decoration, but no clothes. If she paid attention to her memory of the previous day’s encounter, she could see little beads in their mane-like hair or deliberate designs painted on their hairy skin.

  The temperature at noon that day was over a hundred degrees, and the wet air made it feel hotter. The men had long ago abandoned shirts and she wasn’t very far behind. Lux had to instruct Julie and Hal to keep Samuel from overheating as he dug enthusiastically into someone’s last resting place. Makarios, like herself, was more interested in keeping the live creatures at arms-length and getting out alive than bringing up a dead one.

  “We’re due back in town in three days,” Lux said. “It will take at least that to get back.”

  Ben gave Samuel a dark look over his shoulder.

  “I don’t like people with doctorates. This is a really, really bad idea. I don’t mind taking a look, but taking bones…”

  Lux snorted. “What if I told you I got my doctorate last year?”

  “I would ask if they did degrees in tracking and woodcraft.”

  “Have you ever been on a trip like this?” she said changing the subject. She also was uncomfortable with the mood in the camp.

  “No. I’ve worked pretty much strictly in the city until now. It doesn’t matter, I can read these woods well enough to know that the longer we stay here, the more likely we end up dead.”

  Makarios didn’t seem overly concerned about his own demise. Objective, really.

  Samuel photographed, sketched, measured, and took samples from the skeletons in what Lux was sure was every way possible. When he reburied them, every lump of dirt disappearing back into the dark depths was a relief. Lux did not like messing with the dead, human or animal. It felt taboo, and Lux did not want to anger the creatures.

  “I do believe they are what people call Bigfoot,” Samuel said, a little pompously. Ever the lecturer.

  Lux glared at him. “Well spotted.”

  “They are certainly a new species of hominid,” he continued as if Lux hadn’t spoken. “This research trip shall be documented in history!”

  Lux turned away from him and let him continue to prattle on to whoever was left behind her.

  The sky was a low burnished red, darkening in the evening. No time to move
on today. Another night in the woods. She instructed the team to take turns at watch. Although she was sure that the creatures – whatever they really were, sentient primates like humans or not – must sleep at some time, it was unclear if they were nocturnal animals by nature, or even if they had a conventional sleep cycle at all. It was with these thoughts in her mind that Lux found sleep escaping her entirely. She perched in a forked branch just above her hammock and listened to the night. Now that they were leaving, she was remembering all the reasons why she loved the woods. The drone of insects in the distance could be a lovely sound. An owl in the distance. The almost silent rustle of small animals under the leaves. Movement.

  Lux straightened, all her senses trying to fire up at once giving her brain an overload. There was something moving below. She squinted through the night, thankful for the full moon. The mane of one of the creatures was visible in profile, identifiable by the arching of its horns. It moved slowly, not like it was old, just cautious almost. Her eyes followed it as it dodged through the trees, the moonlight shining on its horns.

  It went into the graveyard and Lux felt a chill run through her. Species didn’t matter; nighttime graveyard visits were always concerning. But all it did was sit. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that it was performing some ancient type of voodoo magic to bring the dead to life. She shook herself. There was enough going on without making matters worse by imagining things.

  “What are you watching?” Ben asked. He had somehow managed to scale from his hammock to her branch without her noticing.

  “There’s one of them in their graveyard,” she said very quietly.

  “How long has it been there?”

  “I dunno, ten minutes?”

  He followed her eyes. She watched his focus in on the creature and then relax again once he had found it.