The Hunting Tree

by Ike Hamill

  Roland exited the van. He stepped over Mike.

  “Oh, fuck no,” he said. With two large strides, Roland approached his brother and reached out with a thick, strong hand to grab the creature by the neck. He pulled at the little creature and Mike saw the bones of the thing in sharp relief. Mike heard a soft tearing sound as Roland pulled.

  Merritt moaned and stumbled forward; the creature remained firmly attached to him.

  “Wait—fire,” said Mike, regaining some control of his body and trying to stand. Roland glanced back at Mike, but continued to pull the thing from his brother. Mike didn’t wait for him to understand, but stumbled over to Gary and fished the lighter out of Gary’s shirt pocket. He registered that Gary was still breathing as he stood and struck the lighter.

  Once he had a flame, he shoved it under the creature’s right ear. The effect was immediate—Mike heard a pop and the creature pushed away from Merritt. It turned to Mike, showing him huge eyes with sideways slits of pupils and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. Repulsed, Roland let go of its neck. With a wide swipe, the creature knocked the lighter from Mike’s hand and tore a deep gash in his forearm.

  “Hey,” they heard from the van. Katie’s camera flash lit the scene, but the pale creature didn’t seem to react.

  Free from the thing’s bite, Merritt released his grip and the creature dropped to the ground, falling into a low crouch. Roland mastered his revulsion and tried to fall on the nimble parasite, but it scurried after Mike as he retreated. It followed Mike as he backed up against the van. Roland scrambled after the bloodsucker and stretched out to grab it, but it was too quick. Instead of attacking Mike, the creature fled off to the right and disappeared out of the circle of light at the back of the van and into the woods.

  “Holy Fuck,” said Roland.

  “Call nine-one-one,” Mike yelled to Katie as he pushed away from the van and stumbled towards Gary.

  “Hold on,” said Roland. “Don’t call anyone until we check this out a little.”

  Mike stopped and turned towards Roland, ready to counter his order until he saw the resolution written on Roland’s face. He carefully crouched next to Gary and lifted his limp arm to check his pulse. When he found a strong beat, he leaned in to listen for Gary’s breathing. Mike looked up to see Roland performing roughly the same diagnostics on Merritt.

  “Get off me,” said Merritt, “I’m fine." Merritt sat up with one hand clutched to the side of his neck.

  “You’re not fine,” said Roland. “You’ve got a giant fucking bite on your neck.”

  “It’s totally cool,” said Merritt. “Hey, splash some water on his face,” he said to Mike.

  Mike was busy probing Gary’s neck for possible trauma and ignored Merritt’s suggestion. He turned back to Roland to plead his case again: “Look, I’m not sure what’s wrong with Gary, but I’ve got to get him to a hospital. He might have a concussion or a spinal injury or something.”

  “Who does?” asked Gary.

  Mike whipped around to see Gary rising to a sitting position. “Take it easy, Gary,” said Mike. “We don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

  “She put a spell on me,” said Gary.

  “That’s right,” agreed Merritt.

  “She snuck up and put a spell on me so she could go after Merritt,” continued Gary.

  “How do you know?” asked Mike.

  “She told me,” said Gary, tapping his forehead. He turned to his side so he could climb to his feet. “I’m fine now that she’s gone. It was a weird state—I could hear everything and I could see the whole thing, but like from ten feet up, looking down.”

  “We’ve got to get Merritt some medical attention for that bite though,” said Mike.

  “Nah, I’m fine,” said Merritt. “Don’t worry about me. She won’t be back until next week and I’m going to be ready for her then.”

  “This is crazy,” said Mike. “You’ve got to treat that thing like a dangerous animal. We should be looking for some way to defend ourselves and laying in heavy ammunition for the next time.”

  “I tell you what,” said Merritt. “You guys get the fuck out of here, and Roland and I will do whatever the fuck we want. We found her, and maybe she’ll be strong enough to come back without your little machine next time.”

  “Perhaps we should just get out of here,” said Gary.

  Katie moved to start tearing down the equipment.

  “I’m not giving up that easy,” said Mike. “This is a major discovery.”

  Roland grabbed the rifle that had been leaning against the side of the van. He walked up to Mike and put his arm casually around his shoulders. “You’re just not welcome here anymore, buddy,” he said to Mike. The barrel of the rifle was pointing loosely at Mike’s chin.

  “Fine,” said Mike, ducking from under Roland’s arm.

  The three researchers tore down and had their equipment packed within thirty minutes. They were on the road moments after. Mike drove so Gary could rest.

  “He’s not going to try to capture it,” said Gary. “I think he’s addicted to her already.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Mike.

  “I could sense it when I was out. It was really weird, like being aware or something. I could tell what she was thinking and what Merritt was thinking too. It was like watching a movie with a constant stream of narration.”

  “So what do you mean, addicted?” asked Katie.

  “You ever read one of those vampire stories where the victim becomes entranced or whatever?” asked Gary.

  Katie nodded.

  “It’s almost like that. I even felt that way about the coma she put me in. It must be the magic she gets from the devil or something. Merritt just wanted to be drained. I could feel it. And I wanted to stay out. Don’t vampire bats have some kind of anesthetic in their saliva or something? I think it’s like that, but mental.”

  “That’s a myth,” said Mike. “They have anticoagulants in their saliva, but not anesthetic.

  “Well anyway,” said Gary. “I wouldn’t have minded if she had bitten me next. I wanted her to do it.”

  “You’re not going to try to sneak back there, are you?” asked Mike.

  “No way,” said Gary. “I think that Merritt would have killed us if we stuck around. He became a junkie with that first bite.”

  “What did we get on video?” asked Mike.

  Katie sat in back with the footage. “Nothing,” she said. “It moved around the perimeter and never crossed any of the camera angles. I’ve got one still photo though.”

  “Any good?” asked Mike.

  “Not really,” Katie answered. “You and Roland were mostly in the way while it was on Merritt. You can see a pale arm and the back of her head. That’s about it.”

  “Next time we work one of these cases we’re going to make sure to chase away the civilians first,” said Mike.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Crooked Tree

  AS RUNNING DEER WHOOPED, he surprised Crooked Tree by reaching out for him. Falling at such a close proximity, Running Deer was able to throw out both hands and push Crooked Tree’s chest. Crooked Tree’s mouth fell open in shock as he and his brother were flung apart.

  Crooked Tree flipped backwards in his descent and flailed his limbs, trying to control his fall. His shoulder hit first, bouncing back against the cliff wall. His backward rotation was immediately countered when he hit. His head spun down as his legs tucked under and scraped against a different rock. He caught a brief glimpse of Running Deer and saw that his brother was gaining speed faster, and had somehow managed to point himself headfirst towards the ground.

  For a fraction of a second, Crooked Tree thought he had arrested his spin, but his head continued rolling forward until he faced the cliff wall, watching it streak past him upside-down. He wrapped his long arms around his head as he spun towards another set of rocks. His brother was brave and welcomed death. Crooked Tree couldn’t suppress his survival instinct.

  Hi
s feet hit first, but not on the jagged rocks where all his relatives lay dead or rapidly dying. Crooked Tree’s right leg touched down on a sloping rock and snapped backwards, rotating him even faster. Next, the back of his shoulder struck the soft belly of his pregnant aunt. He crashed through bloody limbs and torsos, flipping across the piled corpses; his eyes remained shut tight.

  Crooked Tree finally came to rest on his back. One of his hands still cradled his head, the other was pinned, useless, under his back. The trapped hand was stuck to the end of a ruined arm. A twisting break in his humerus jutted through the skin of his biceps, and breaks in both bones of that same forearm allowed the limb to double back on itself.

  His opposite leg, the right leg, pointed straight up bent the wrong way at the knee. As Crooked Tree opened his eyes for the first time on the ground, his first image was his right leg flopping to the side, so badly reversed that he could see the upside-down sole of his right foot.

  He shut his eyes and took inventory. He could hear his own heartbeat, sense his own breathing, and even feel his fingertips of his right hand brush across his stomach, but he felt no pain. His eyes flew open as he realized what he had become.

  Crooked Tree moaned and understood that he must have died and instantly become a roaming spirit. Glancing around, noticing that his family all lay perfectly still, he understood that he was the lone roaming spirit of his extinct family. The weight of the responsibility settled on his laboring heart. A new feeling began to awaken in his broken body; it was hunger. He felt hollow. He squinted up at the sun and knew he had to find shelter from the light. Roaming spirits stalked the night, and now that he had become one, he had to seek a place to wait.

  Even divorced from pain, his ability to move was severely hampered by his injuries. He pushed back with his right arm and managed to elevate his head a few inches. His breath hitched and his body convulsed until he managed to cough out a mouthful of thick blood. He spit to the side and a glob of phlegmy blood splattered on the forehead of his dead cousin.

  Crooked Tree didn’t worry about the cough or the dozens of lacerations he saw in his flesh, he simply scanned the cliff until he found what he needed. Up the slope a dozen paces, a jagged rock created a dark shadow. He reached back with his good arm and grabbed at the sharp, blood-soaked rocks. Pulling with his arm and pushing with his left leg, Crooked Tree carved slow progress to the shallow cave, leaving blood and bits of flesh in his wake.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Davey

  “HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING OKAY LATELY?” Melanie asked her son. She gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, compulsively checking her mirrors every ten seconds, and staying alert to the traffic around her.

  “What do you mean?” asked Davey without looking up from his video game.

  She glanced over her shoulder to look at Davey in the back seat. “I wish you wouldn’t play that in the car. You know it makes you sick,” she said.

  “Mom, that was forever ago. I don’t get sick anymore.”

  “Well still, it’s pretty rude when I’m trying to have a conversation with you,” she said.

  Davey paused his game and looked out the window. Attuned to his mother’s moods, Davey knew that such talk led to direct orders. He had learned that by turning his attention to his mother in these situations, he could often avoid the impending decree.

  “Thank you,” said Melanie, glancing back again. “So you feel normal?”

  “Sure,” he replied. “I guess.”

  “Everything okay at school?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Have you decided if you want to play baseball this summer?” she prodded. Switching randomly between topics sometimes startled Davey into revealing something.

  “Yeah.” He maintained his complacency.

  “Are you sleeping okay?”

  “Sure,” he said, hesitating.

  Melanie waited to see if he would make the connection to something else.

  “Hey Mom?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know right before you’re going to fall asleep?”

  “Sure,” she replied.

  “What happens if you open your eyes and you see something? Does that make it real?” he asked.

  “No honey,” she replied. “You can’t just make something real by dreaming about it.”

  “I’m not talking about dreaming,” he protested. “You know that time when things are possible? Like that time with the sideways-head thing?”

  “Oh Davey, that wasn’t real. That was Dad’s accident, remember?” she asked.

  “That wasn’t Dad,” he objected.

  “I know it’s hard to think about,” she said. “But sometimes people have accidents and they get hurt, but you can’t just make that happen because you thought about it,” she thought back to that night two years ago, when her husband died. Since that night, she had convinced herself that when Davey had seen his dad, contorted and deceased, he’d made up his story about the sideways-head thing. “Have you been thinking about Dad?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I know Dad is gone. I’ve been thinking about the underground guy. I think he’s asleep, but he’s trying to wake up.”

  Melanie wanted to pull over, but forced herself to keep the car on the road. Considering her own fragile emotions, she wanted to project an air of normalcy, and thought that pulling over to interrogate Davey would just scare him. “What’s that?”

  “When I’m about to go to sleep, I see the underground guy. He’s been asleep for a long time, but he’s waking up now. He thinks that I’m dangerous,” said Davey.

  “Davey, where are you getting this? Who’s been telling you this stuff?” she asked.

  “I told you—right before I go to sleep,” he replied.

  “Why don’t you tell me about school. How was your day yesterday?” she asked.

  “It was okay,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  “We had a substitute,” he said. “I didn’t like her.”

  “Why not?” she asked, slowing for a stop sign. She adjusted her rearview mirror so she could see his face as he looked out his window.

  “Remember how I took my soccer ball, so I could play with it at recess?” he asked.

  “Yes, I told you it would be too cold,” she said.

  “I wasn’t cold,” he said, “but when we went out, that kid Ted said I had to give him my soccer ball.”

  “Did you tell the teacher?” asked Melanie.

  “I couldn’t, because Ted tried to take it from me as soon as we were outside,” he said.

  “But you could go tell your teacher and she would make Ted give it back,” argued Melanie.

  “I told you, I couldn’t. We had a substitute, so Mrs. Roberts wasn’t there.”

  Melanie took a deep breath, balancing her need for logic with wanting to hear the rest of the story.

  “So Ted just grabbed it as soon as we were outside and I told him to give it back, but he said no,” said Davey. “I hate that kid.”

  “Davey,” she warned, “don’t say you hate him.”

  “I do though,” said Davey. “I tried to grab the ball back, but he held onto it really tight and I couldn’t get it away. He said he was going to beat me up, but I grabbed him. He got me on the ground and I couldn’t get up, but his leg was right there, so I bit him. That made him let go. Then the substitute made me go inside and asked if I knew how to tell time. She told me to sit right there until quarter-of, and I missed all of recess.”

  A honk from the car behind snapped Melanie from her concentration. She snapped back around, checked both ways, and pulled through the intersection. She glanced in the rearview and saw that Davey had retrieved his video game.

  “You shouldn’t fight because someone takes your ball, Davey,” she said.

  “I know,” he replied.

  “Next time, go tell the substitute,” she said.

  “He won’t bother me anymore,” mumbled Davey.

  “Pardon?” sh
e asked, looking at the top of his head again.

  “I said ‘I will,’” he said.

  “Davey,” she said, “what are you going to to do the next time someone takes your ball?”

  “I’ll go tell the substitute,” he replied without looking up.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Melanie pulled into her driveway a little past four and pressed the button to open the garage door. Davey waited for his mom to pull into the garage.

  “Have you decided about this summer?” she asked, slowing to get an answer before parking the car.

  “About what?” he asked.

  “If you’re going to do that baseball camp, I need to sign you up now,” she said. “Your coach won’t save your place forever if I don’t put up the money.”

  “Can’t I just hang out at Paul’s house this summer?” he pleaded.

  “We talked about that,” she reminded her son. “Paul’s family is going away for all of July and I’d rather have you at baseball camp than at daycare all day for a month.”

  “It’s not baseball camp,” he corrected. “It’s catcher’s camp. They’ll probably do boring drills all day. That’s what Chuck Detmer says.”

  “Chuck never even went to the camp,” said Melanie. “You know better than to listen to what he says. Besides, it’s only half the day. You can hang out with Chuck at daycare in the afternoons.” She stopped the car just outside the garage and wanted to extract a commitment from Davey before letting him out.

  “Can’t I just go to camp in July then and hang out with Paul until he goes?” he asked.

  “No, Davey,” said Melanie. “You have to be there for the whole camp. That’s what your coach said.”

  “I won’t even get to see Paul this summer at all,” Davey whined.

  Sensing resolution, Melanie pulled into the garage. “If it’s okay with Paul’s mom you can always go over to his house Friday at noon and spend the weekend together, either there or here.”

  “Okay,” conceded Davey.

  “I’ll sign you up in the morning then,” said Melanie.