Bitten

by K. L. Nappier

  Samuel's Adam's apple bobbed, and then he said, "I go, Beast goes. I swear."

  Max mustered a smile and started to leave. But Samuel added, "Maxwell. You'll dance ... at my wedding. After this. All of us."

  Max's throat tightened. He reached down, patted Samuel's leg, and then walked around to David and Mina, perched on the wheel wells inside the truck bed.

  Earlier, David and Max had tapped holes into the meager clutch of eggs found in the coop and blown the contents into the cook pot. A few had broken under the men's pocket knives, but the surviving five were being filled with silver shavings, using a scrap of tin as a makeshift funnel. It was clumsy work. Mina was catching the spillage in the lap of her nightgown. She pulled lint from the rug wrapped around her bare feet to plug the top and bottom holes of each egg.

  As she completed each, Mina set them on a pile of old burlap feed sacks folded on the truck bed. Beside these sat piles of sharp silver shards, gouged out of warped ammo.

  "Samuel doesn't want any more," he said, handing them the pan. He swept the chicken bones left over from their communal meal off the tailgate and tossed them into the fire.

  Mina accepted the pan, took a few drinks, and then passed it to David, who did the same before giving it back to Max. As Doris got out of the Rambler, he offered it to her. She drank all but the last few gulps, and then returned it to him. He drained it, set it on the Rambler's trunk, and then pushed himself onto the truck's tailgate.

  Doris joined him, and they all watched the sun set without saying another word.

  * * *

  How beautiful, how grand it would have been, to let the Great Beast greet the moonrise from the mesa's plateau. But Andrew was no fool. The time for risk-taking had passed. His goal was too close now. Emergence would have to take place in the shadow of the mesa.

  He spread his sleeping bag between the Buick and the mesa's wall, set his handgun and rifle within arms reach, then stripped and lay down. Above him, the sky's color turned slow as a mill wheel: powder blue, peacock, turquoise, azure, ultramarine. Stars began winking through, and then the heavens blackened against the glittering dust of countless stars. The night deepened. Andrew wept for both his mothers.

  He felt the moonrise before he saw it. He felt that familiar surge of nausea as cold sweat burst through his pores. His head began to throb. Shivering, he groped for the loose end of the sleeping bag and pulled it across him, and the wrenching pain he'd felt over Moms' betrayal was hardly more than memory now, replaced with such a fine, aching hatred that his fantasies of her death changed his shivers into anticipation.

  His consciousness ebbed. He struggled to keep his eyes open, fixed to the east, hoping he could hang on long enough to see the moon crest. Hoping the Great Beast would let him look into her eyes as she died.

  "Let me see," he murmured, he begged, as he felt the Beast gnawing, twisting, lurching upward. "Let me see, let me see .."

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chuli's Diner

  Tohatchi, New Mexico

  Spring/Early Summer, 1950

  First Night. Full Moon.

  Normally, by this time of night, Chuli would've had his feet propped up in his hogan, sipping a strong cup of spiked chicory and listening to his wife gossip over her needlework. But several members of the Folded Arms Clan, kinsmen to that poor young man who died in the Greyhound accident, had come all the way from Four Corners. They had gotten into town around sundown, just as Chuli was ringing up the day's last customer. No way he was going to chase them off until their people could find a way into town to fetch them.

  So he was already tired, a little grumpy, and in no mood for strangers when a dusty station wagon drove up while he was locking the diner's door. At first he thought they might be more of the kid's clan. But then a white man poked his head out the driver's side window and said, "How there, Chief. You happen to know the way to the Alma Curar ranch?"

  Chuli glared at him for a moment, and then finished locking up. "Never been."

  He started walking. But the man got out of the station wagon and strode over to him with a piece of paper and stuck it under Chuli's nose.

  "Got a map-a sorts, drawn out pretty good. Just wanna make sure we're pointed right, is all."

  Chuli was no friend to those people at the Alma Curar ranch. He didn't like how trouble found its way there from time to time, and frequently came to town while it was at it. But he didn't count himself an enemy either. He wasn't a superstitious man, so he had never believed that David was a skinwalker, and had a well developed sense of fairness.

  He lifted his gaze from the paper and looked toward the station wagon. The sun was long gone and the moon was only just now rising, so he couldn't see inside well. It looked as if there was someone on the passenger side, slumped, maybe dozing. And every once in a while, there was movement in the back seat, like the top of someone's head popping up, then settling down below the windows again. Chuli gave the man a hard look, trying to figure out if these were friends or foes to Alma Curar and his lot.

  "If the one who drew it knew what he was doing, it should get you there," he finally said, and started walking again.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  One Half Mile North of the Alma Curar Compound

  Thirty Miles South of Tohatchi, New Mexico

  Spring/Early Summer, 1950

  First Night. Full Moon.

  The wall of the mesa swam before the Great Beast's sight, and then solidified. Panting, it heaved its mass onto all fours, swiveling its head about, making certain it was alone. Then it shook itself from ears to tail.

  It recognized where it was now, not only from the fractured pieces of recall it stole from the host, but from its ageless memory. It had been here many times before, through many hosts, through many incarnations. But few as great and powerful as this one.

  Now, to the top of the mesa, to meet the full moon. To taunt its host, struggling within for some semblance of consciousness. To look down on the Ones Lost and present its unnatural majesty.

  To make sure they saw the Great Beast coming for them.

  * * *

  The howl of the Great Beast.

  Eight years of hunting, and Max had never heard anything like it. Never. His blood went icy in his veins. Everyone looked up.

  Doris half-sobbed, "My God ...!"

  It perched on a mesa. Massive, arrogant, fearless. Twice as large as any incarnation Max had known. Its great hide flared under the full moon, as if its hair not only bounced the lunar glare back into the night but burned from within, fueled by the blood-borne terror of its own kind. It all but burst the tortured casing of its host, its head too large, even for its unnatural bulk, its great forelegs and shoulders bulging to the point of deformity.

  In a lesser incarnation, there was an awful beauty that caught a victim unawares, just before terror dawned. But there was no beauty in the Great Beast, and there was no doubt in Max's mind that it wanted them to see its grotesqueness. It wanted them to hear its bone-grating howl. I'm coming for you.

  "Mina, get to the cars!" David yelled.

  Instead she bent down again, pushing sand and red soil over the last of the burlap sacks that marked the boundary of a large circle. David yanked her up and pushed her hard toward the vehicles. She stumbled as she ran. In a flash of silver, the Great Beast disappeared from the mesa.

  Inside the circle of burlap, Max, David and Doris raised their guns, forming a triangle within. Mina made it to the truck's bed, kneeling behind the right wheel well, her handgun trained toward the east. Samuel had pushed himself into a sitting position, double-fisting his gun and steadying his grip on one knee, pointing west.

  They waited.

  Max's pulse hammered in his ears. Another howl, long and scraping. It came from the northwest. Doris jerked toward it.

  "Don't!" Max snapped. "Hold your direction!"

  Doris pulled back into position, her voice trembling. "Oh, God, oh, God ..."

  Max kept focused on the hole
in the barrier beyond the house's ruins. But he asked, "Are you all right? Doris, can you do this? We need to know now, right now."

  The shake in her voice was strong enough to rattle Max's nerves. "I've never seen him like this ... I've never .. seen it since ... not since Butte County. My God! How did it become so ... so .."

  "Doris! Can you do this !?"

  Her breathing was too rapid. He wondered if she'd collapse before the first shot was fired. But he heard her take a deep breath, then one more.

  "Yes," she finally said. Her voice strengthened and she repeated, "Yes."

  Another howl. Closer. Yes, I'm coming for you.

  They waited. Max's palms went clammy. He wanted to check them for the pentagram, but he didn't dare lower his rifle. He wanted to close his eyes and focus on the twist in his gut, try to figure out if it was a telltale of the Great Beast's approach or just raw, wrenching fear. But he didn't dare.

  "David. You feel anything?"

  It was a moment before David replied, "No."

  "Samuel," Max called, "You feel anything?"

  Samuel didn't answer.

  "Samuel?"

  Mina called back, "He's out! I'm going to check on him."

  Can't be closer than half way here, Max thought. No more than that. Can't be closer than half way.

  Waiting was agony. Time ebbed in and out of existence. He heard David singing a prayer under his breath, then the prayer was done and the cold vacuum of silence stretched out in every direction.

  "Come on ," Max murmured, "come on, you steaming pile of Satan's shit."

  He saw it! In the burned out gap of the barrier. He yelled and very nearly fired until he realized it was just a coyote. A coyote, for cripe's sake! It skittered back out into the night. Sonofabitch!

  Eternity replaced minutes. The coyote returned and followed its nose to the henhouse. It started digging under the fence wire.

  Mina cried out. She fired. Before he realized what he was doing, Max turned in her direction, glimpsed her standing between the truck and the car, her gun raised toward the chicken coop. He caught a blur from the corner of his eye: the coyote, ducking for cover behind the henhouse. He cursed himself for turning from his post and jerked back into position.

  " Damn it , Mina! Leave the coyote alone!"

  "I saw something!"

  "Save your fire! Save it 'til you're sure!"

  "I am --!"

  "Max," David interrupted, " ... I feel it."

  Fresh, cold sweat trickled down Max's temples. "You sure?"

  A high-pitched, strangled yelp came from the henhouse. Mina stammered, "Behind ... the coop ... It's behind the coop !"

  Couldn't be. It couldn't be! It couldn't move that fast, it couldn't already be here, not from a mesa a half mile away, couldn't have rushed through the barrier's gap in the time I looked away, not with its bulk, not with its size. God in Heaven! If it can, how do we stop it?

  He felt it now, knew the convulsing wrench in his gut for what it was. With his rifle still fixed toward the barrier's hole, his eyes tracked to the chicken coop. The hard, white light of the moon spread over the compound, cutting deep shadows behind everything standing. What he saw had to be a trick of the eye: a silvery, cast-off glow within the coop's shadow. Max blinked to clear his vision. A trickle of blood escaped the shadow and pooled in the moonlight.

  The Great Beast burst through the henhouse.

  Shattered wood and birds, shrieking and clawing, blew out like shrapnel. Mina threw herself over Samuel. The Beast charged the circle and Max, David and Doris opened fire.Then Max yelled, "Drop!"

  All three hit the ground, grabbed the edges of the closest burlaps and flung them upward, scattering needle-sharp shards of silver into the face of the Great Beast. It yowled, rolling as it landed, shaking its massive, misshapen head, bolting due east, out of range.

  Max, David and Doris were already up and had their weapons trained in its direction, David yelling, "Hold your fire, hold your fire! Not yet!"

  So damned near and, yet, too damned far! It knew their ammunition was limited, it knew they wouldn't risk what precious silver they had until they were certain of their chances. The very size of the thing tempted Max. Exposed to the full moon, the Great Beast's pelt flashed and rippled like no Lesser Beast Max had ever seen. As if the bastard was still glowing white-hot from Hell's own furnace.

  "What are we waiting for?" Doris yelled.

  "Hold your fire!" David yelled back. "It's not as close as it looks." He called out, not taking his eyes off the Great Beast, "Mina! Are you all right?"

  "Yes ..."

  "Samuel?"

  "Still out," Mina said, "but ... yes ..."

  "Wake him! Do your best and wake him! But, whatever happens, do not fire again, you understand? Either of you. Not unless the Beast comes for you. No matter what!"

  Max heard Mina start coaxing Samuel, calling his name, urging him to consciousness.

  The Great Beast finished pawing the last of the silver shavings from its face and ears and was pacing. It let go with a deep, tremulous snarl and feinted a lunge, taunting them, tempting them to waste silver. The three didn't move, weapons raised and waiting. The Beast sank back on its massive haunches, looked left, then right, then back at them. It stood and began a slow, northward circuit, its eyes fixed on the three.

  Then it charged.

  Again they fired, again they dropped, jerking more shard-strewn burlap upward. Silver and sand flew skyward, but this time surprise wasn't on their side. The Great Beast ignored the sting and yanked David out of the circle.

  So much screaming, Max couldn't tell which cries were his and which were the others. Everything in him was rage and terror and panic. Gun fire from everywhere, bullets zinging past his head, his feet pounding the earth as he ran after the Great Beast. He saw David grapple inside in his pants pocket as he bounced across the ground, an arm and shoulder caught in the Beast's jaws. His hand came out clutching something oval ... one of the eggshells filled with silver shavings. He smashed it across the Great Beast's eyes.

  With an ear-piercing yowl, the Beast dropped him and bolted through the ruins of the house, dancing with pain, kicking up embers and ash as it went. Doris was screaming right behind Max, then next to him, then in front of him, firing her shotgun, reloading and firing again in the Great Beast's direction. Without realizing it, Max had pulled David past her and back into the circle. She picked up Max's rifle and kept it trained in the Great Beast's direction as she backed up, following him.

  Mina, clinging to Samuel, was screaming David's name.

  "Stay there!" Doris yelled to her. "Don't move, stay there!"

  Max looked up as Doris backed into the circle with his rifle braced on her hip and clinging to her empty shotgun with her free hand. As she dropped the shotgun next to him, he brought his attention back to David. His head lolled across Max's legs.

  "He's alive," he told her and she shouted to Mina, "He's alive!"

  But, God, the blood, all the blood! Max ripped open David's shirt and mashed the heels of his hands into the deepest wounds. David was gasping and his eyes, rolling crazily, finally focused on Max.

  "Bitten," he rasped, "I've been bitten."

  "Yeah, buddy, I can see that."

  "No ... no, Max ... I've been bitten. Don't. Don't do this."

  "Shut up. I'm doing this."

  "No ..."

  "Shut the hell up, David! Screw your Indian bravado! It's a shitty day to die, so you're gonna have to wait for a better one."

  "No ... I'm bitten ..." He lost consciousness.

  The Great Beast was once again out of dependable range, on the other side of the ruins, smoldering more heavily along the track of the Beast's mad dash. Max could glimpse it behind the smoke screen, shaking its massive head, pawing at its eyes and snarling. He gauged the likelihood of getting David over to the Rambler and decided against it. He scanned the grounds for David's rifle, but didn't see it. The force of the Great Beast's attack could well have
flung it into the ruins.

  The circle was down to two guns, now. With Doris still keeping watch, he tried to figure out how much ammunition was left. Couldn't be much. They had all gone crazy when the Great Beast took David. And look at the bastard, pacing out there, chuffing and growling. For all of that, not a single spot of silvered blood marred its fur. Too fast. It's too damned fast. Max swallowed against the tightness in his throat.

  Keeping his eyes fixed on the Beast, Max called out, "Mina! You still have bullets?"

  Her voice was thick with anguish when she replied. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Max. When it took David ... I'm empty."

  "I'm not," Samuel said. Conscious again, thank God. "Gotta couple."

  "Remember what I said, Samuel. Remember ..." His words caught against hopelessness. "You're our last chance."

  "Understood."

  Max looked at David once more and dared to lift his hands from the wounds. The blood was beginning to clot. Max pulled David's tattered shirt back over his chest and wriggled out from beneath his head. He grabbed the shotgun and Doris said warily, "Max ..."

  He looked up. The Great Beast was edging closer. Doris let out a shaky sigh, planted her bare feet more firmly and brought the rifle's sight to eye level. Max grabbed the bag of shotgun silver and felt around inside. Two left. He loaded them and stood next to Doris.

  He made sure the Great Beast saw the barrels trained on it, then asked Doris, "What's left in the rifle?"

  She hesitated a moment, then lowered it so she could check the chamber. "Four."

  Max was the better shot. "We're going to switch guns. The last two cartridges are in the barrels."

  He brushed a hand over his two front trouser pockets, where he had placed a pair of the eggshells filled with silver shavings. They'd been crushed during the skirmish. No doubt, the one remaining in David's pockets had been, also; useless, even in the impossible likelihood Max could have reached it in time.

  "Doris. Check your shirt pocket."