by Tim Young
The pack yelped and barked louder than ever, loud enough to awaken any souls that had ever cursed this land. Another boom of thunder, then another in succession as the storm closed in on Ozzie. Collapsing at the base of the tree, Ozzie plopped down as the alpha male stood before him, charging and snapping at his feet. Retreating and charging. The others circled the tree and ran to the leader at the top of the circle before reversing direction and circling the other way, but so far the tree protected—
Sharp pain emerged from Ozzie’s left shoulder as a starving coyote reached around the tree and inflicted a serious, bone crushing bite. He tried to get up as he realized that the tree had failed him, but he couldn’t rise. There was too much fatigue, too much thirst, too little breath, and too little resolve to mount another defense. The seconds seemed an eternity to Ozzie as he faded, his head bobbing and no longer able to see the forest or the predators. Now he saw only Eduardo’s eyes, his father lying dead in the mud, calling to him. Come with me son. Let go of your pain.
Ozzie felt a wave wash away his pain as a final thunderous clap exploded right before him. The jolt pried his leaden eyelids open once more to see his hunter, the alpha male, staring into his eyes as a thread of saliva suspended from his fangs. Then, the coyote’s legs collapsed as he crashed motionless to the ground at Ozzie’s feet. Ozzie’s eyelids sank again and he drifted away.
***
Jesse used his makeshift walking cane to press away from the creek, and began hobbling up the hill to the target he thought he had seen. “Sixty yards. I can make it,” he said, encouraging himself to press on with each slow and torturous step. The wind had calmed momentarily. There was nothing other than the sound of his left foot planting followed by his cane swishing through the leaves. Each step about half a yard, over one hundred steps to go. Plant and swish, plant and swish. The beat was slow, but constant. Jesse stared only right in front of him. There was no need to look elsewhere, as the darkness gave him a circle of no more than ten feet to discern his surroundings.
He planted his left foot and prepared to move his cane, but a deep depression was right where his cane would have planted. He held the cane off the ground but, to his shock, he heard the sound of a walking stick swish through leaves anyway. It wasn’t his stick. The sound came from above, just to his left. His heart stopped, his skin grew cold and clammy. He needed to calm himself...of course he hadn’t heard that.
But, you did.
Jesse didn’t answer and was scared to make a sound in the darkness. “Just find shelter,” he mumbled to himself.
He planted the cane to the side of the depression and stepped forward, stopping only to listen. Nothing, save the sound he himself had made. He took two steps this time, trying to increase the pace on the second step and then stop suddenly so he could listen intently. Nothing, other than his heartbeat thumping loudly. Five steps this time at a steady pace, then a sixth step that ended with a support tree to Jesse’s left, allowing him to stop abruptly there without lowering his cane. A half swish from his left, maybe twenty feet away, followed a second later by the snapping of a small twig, as if someone’s feet were repositioned.
“Shit!” Jesse said to himself, his mouth drier than an August cotton field in drought.
The wind growled and crept out of the mountain’s ghastly soul as it crossed the slope from his left. And the whispers came again, ghostly whispers saying something, saying nothing. As if every language ever spoken on this land had morphed into a forest opera of hushed voices speaking at once, commingling their words into a haunted stew.
Leave us, suffer, D-E-A-T-H—that’s what I heard.
Jesse took the next step, his cane trembling violently as he moved and planted it. He tried to ignore the whispers and the howls as he moved his cane forward.
A brilliant flash of lightning jolted Jesse. Fear thrust his eyes wide open, turned his head left toward the footsteps he was sure he had heard. He saw nothing but—
He turned his head in front of him, catching the last of the lightning reflect off the target he pursued only a dozen yards away. It was bright white. An erect structure of some kind, tall, like a building in the woods. Definitely something that didn’t belong. His head jerked back left toward—what was it he had seen? There was no one there, he was sure of that, a realization that allowed an audible sigh. But he had seen something.
Did you see that hideous walking stick leaning against the tree? The one with the gnarly root spikes on top?
Jesse’s mouth opened, his breath stopped. He HAD seen it, a thick walking stick leaning against the tree with a spiky head. But, it couldn’t have been...there was no one there. There couldn’t be anyone there. He shook his head, prayed silently and aloud, using the words of the Lord’s prayer to silence the ghostly sounds. Step, swish.
“Our Father, who art in heaven.”
Step, Swish. Step, swish. The cadence of the beat increased until Jesse was within feet of his destination. He still couldn’t make it out, but it was indeed white, the brightest beacon in the forest and at least twice his height. Maybe three times. He walked to it and placed his hands upon its smooth surface. Clank, clank, Jesse knocked gently on the object. “Metal? Here, in the forest. Metal?” Cloud-to-cloud lightning ignited the sky, allowing enough light to filter through the opening in the canopy above for Jesse to make it out.
“What the...an airplane? How the hell did...”
Jesse felt his way around the airplane, the image of its orientation imprinted firmly in his mind’s eye due to the brief illumination, like a freshly snapped Polaroid developing slowly. It was nose down, tail up, and wings extending from underneath the fuselage were still intact, somehow, spreading out at about the height of his chest. He made his way to the passenger side and found that the door was spread wide open. The plane wasn’t perfectly vertical. Rather, it was closer to a forty-five-degree angle and rested against a large tree that supported it from behind.
“Just get inside and close the door,” Jesse told himself. Jesse stumbled around the front, unable to see anything in the blackness. His hands moved slowly over the twisted propeller and trembled as they rounded the nose. He limped through the brush, following his hands until his hip crashed into the support arm of the passenger side wing. Jesse reached up for the passenger door.
And then he heard it.
Jesse froze, his spine stiffening tightly as he heard the most terrifying sound he had ever heard, that anyone had ever heard. A chilling, screaming cry from the depths below him that sounded just like a woman screaming. No, a child crying...something in between. And it was so close, down the slope near the stream where he had first seen the plane.
“Jesus! What the hell was that? Oh Jesus!”
You don’t know what that is? Why that’s nothing but a panther.
Jesse’s voice trembled as he argued with the voice. “Isn’t! There are not any panthers around here.”
Well that thing that’s not a panther, it’s coming this way, Jesse.
Jesse grabbed the trailing edge of the right wing and struggled to pull himself up to the door. Again, a bloodcurdling scream that sounded humanlike, but not human. Wind howled too menacingly for Jesse to hear anything else. He pulled himself up on the support and threw his legs over the fixed landing gear that was interwoven with a tree limb, trying not to put weight on his right foot. His cane fell to the ground, but that was the least of his concerns.
The wind quieted, the sound replaced by thrashing leaves being scattered by footfalls, something rising up from the stream headed his way. The thing that was not a panther. Jesse grabbed the inside of the plane and pulled himself up and in. He scurried to the back seat, using the back of the front seats as his floorboard, and pushed back with his good leg as far removed from the forest floor as he could get. The wind howled again, but only the wind. No voices and no screams. Jesse sat, unflinching, afraid to move and afraid to breath. A loud creaking sound moaned from Jesse’s right, the sound of the tree limb wrestling with the
landing gear, forming a bridge between the fuselage and the tree.
“Saved! Oh thank God! If I stay in here, I’ll be all right. Just stay put.”
Sounds good to me, champ.
As he took a moment to calm himself and catch his breath in the safety of the cabin, Jesse couldn’t believe what had happened. He was in a forest so remote, so expansive, that even a downed airplane couldn’t be found. And yet, he had somehow come across it. His heart sank as he realized it meant he was lost in a place that even searchers couldn’t find when they were trying to.
“Maybe there’s a flashlight or something in here! Maybe even a gun!” Jesse moved his hand on the seat cushion, finding nothing since the plane had nosedived at such an angle. He felt along the floorboard and found nothing of substance, only some papers. He slid between the two front seats, his hand finding the throttle for balance. Jesse pulled his legs through and planted his left foot on the instrument panel just above the left yoke. Now completely in the front of the cabin, he felt along the floor. In the black chill of night he concentrated on what his finger tips were telling him. He traced smooth, knobby limbs that must have—
He paused and slowly moved his fingers along the surface of the limb he held until he came to the end and felt four long, cold, jointed extremities.
“SHIT!”
Jesse jerked back, trying to compose himself, realizing that whoever had flown this plane head first into the ground was still here with him, or at least his remains were. His heart felt as if it would beat completely out of his chest. He was sure that any creature around would be able to hear it.
Something did.
The most bone-chilling scream imaginable rose from just beneath him. The sound of claws scraping against metal raked slowly across the underside of the fuselage. Jesse groped, feeling for something, for anything. He felt along the floor on the passenger side and found something hard...headphones, he thought, as he tossed them aside. He continued rummaging in a panic and grabbed something oblong, somewhat round. He placed his fingers in three openings positioned like eyes on a bowling ball, only––.
“A fucking skull! Shit!” Jesse shrieked as he dropped the skull and shut his eyes, fighting through his terror. He continued to feel around for something useful, but found nothing but bones. He felt along the dashboard and raised his hands to the windshield, which was still largely intact. There he found fabric, a bag of some sort. He detected pockets along its side and a zipper on top. The pockets had papers...maps he assumed. A flight bag! Jesse tore open the zipper and fumbled inside feeling for anything hard. A gun, a flashlight. Anything. His fingers went to the bottom of the bag and felt something very cold and very hard. About six inches long, tubular. A fingertip felt for a switch, finding it. “A flashlight!” he said. He pulled it out and pushed the switch, but the light didn’t respond.
“Damn it...c’mon!”
He smacked the light against his hand as he always did when trying to coax more life out of a dying remote control. He switched it on and a light flickered forth. His hands quaked violently as he steered the flashlight to his left. In the utter darkness, the light reflected brightly off the glass and plunged him into momentary blindness, but not before an image of what was reflected in the glass burned into his mind’s eye. Two glowing orbs. Only, he hadn’t seen them through the glass. No. They were reflected by the glass. Behind him!
As his vision returned he swung the flashlight around to the passenger door and reached for the handle, remembering only now that it still hung open. There, glowing in the blackness were two slits, yellow eyes, each the size of a silver dollar, perched on the branch at the door’s entrance.
The night yielded one final blood-curdling scream, and it came from Jesse.
Chapter 10
Blake walked through the front door of his A-frame home just as Angelica hung up the kitchen phone. He breathed in the nostalgic smell of southern cornbread and smiled. Angelica’s eyes dropped, her lips not returning his smile as she said simply, “Hi,” with no discernible inflection.
Hmm, gonna be one of those nights, Blake thought to himself as he strolled through the kitchen. The kitchen opened into an extended family room with a stone-walled fireplace on the far end. The dark, hardwood floor throughout gave the kitchen and family room the shape and appearance of a long and narrow alleyway. Blake plopped on the sofa and grabbed the remote. “Who was that on the phone?” he called to the kitchen, hoping for an innocuous way to break the ice.
“Rose.”
Blake didn’t want any drama, any stress. Couldn’t handle any more stress. In that moment he realized that he just wanted a sanctuary with Angelica. Just the two of them, the way it had been when they first got married. The way she said she wanted it to be and the way he—yes, he too now wanted. “Hey, you wanna watch a movie tonight?” Blake managed a smile with the question that Angelica couldn’t see, but she picked up on the tone. She turned her head from the stove back to Blake.
“Sure!”
Blake admired Angelica’s ability to forgive and forget as much as he was jealous of it. He hadn’t found a way to do that in life no matter how hard he tried, but Angelica didn’t even have to try. It took no effort and seemed unfair to him. “You can pick it out,” Blake said partly to be generous, but mainly because he just didn’t care.
Angelica drained potatoes in a colander over the sink. The evening was starting to get better and she thought of asking Blake if he wanted to help with dinner but quickly thought better of it. She put the potatoes back in the pot and cut off some home-churned butter, adding it to the pot with one hand as she grabbed the hand mixer with the other. On numerous occasions, she had thought of getting an electric hand mixer, but could never bring herself to do it. She just cranked her grandmother’s hand mixer and slowly drizzled warm cream into the potatoes.
The phone rang. Angelica put the mixer down and answered since it was next to her.
“Blake, it’s for you.”
The stress boiled in Blake’s gut and billowed to his chest almost instantly. He had no idea why he got upset so quickly, but tried to calm himself by taking a deep breath. He rarely got a phone call at home and sure as hell didn’t want one now when he had mentally checked out for the day. If it was a telemarketer, Blake swore to God that he’d let him or her have it.
Blake walked to the phone, footfalls heavy on the hardwood floor.
“Yep,” Blake answered. There was nothing on the other end of the line, only a faint scratching sound. “Hello,” Blake said.
“Blake,” the voice on the other end was out of breath and difficult to understand. “You got--a g-- -p h-re!”
“What? Who the hell is this? You’re breaking up,” Blake said.
“You gotta get – here!”
“Who is this? Jesse?” Blake tried lowering his voice, but there was no place to hide.
“No -t’s Terry. I on-y got one b-r on my ph-ne. Y-u gotta get up --re now,” he said gasping for breath.
“Damn it,” Blake began, then tried to compose himself in front of Angelica. “What is it that can’t wait til tomorrow?”
“Jesse and Shane are missing, haven’t been back since midday,” Terry shouted. “And that’s not all—we got some escapees.”
Blake fumed. “Where are you now?” he asked between clinched teeth.
“I’m,” Terry began, “I’m – t-e wo-ds, at the sheds.”
“I’ll be right there.” Blake slammed the phone on the cradle and dropped his head, preparing himself for disappointment both inside the house and out.
Blake was about to speak, but Angelica did it for him.
“I know,” Angelica said, looking the other way. “You’ve gotta go. I’ll leave your dinner on the stove.”
***
Terry sat on a log in the darkness outside shed number one and watched the headlights from Blake’s F-150 fishtail up the mountain road. Blake drove right to the shed, putting Terry in his high beams. Blake’s farm truck was sitting there a
round the cul-de-sac facing down the mountain. There was no sign of Jesse or Shane.
Blake jumped out and looked in the direction of the main fence charger as he approached Terry. “Why is the goddam fence off?” Blake asked.
“What?” Terry replied dumbfounded.
“The green light is on,” Blake barked. “Hell the fence ain’t even turned on!” Blake threw the lever up turning the fence back on, the red light glowing. The fence was hot again. A five-joule charger was powered by a large solar panel that Blake had installed, which in turn juiced a bank of twelve-volt batteries. There was no electrical power on the mountain and no lights.
“Where are Jesse and Shane?” Blake asked as he stormed by Terry and headed back to his truck.
“Hell if I know,” Terry snorted. “I got my damn ear bit off and was knocked unconscious for a bit. I came to about 1:00 this afternoon or so and nobody was here, but the truck still was. Jesse, he’s got the keys. I don’t know what the hell happened!”
Blake fumbled through his center console until he found a flashlight. He shined the light at the right side of Terry’s head and grimaced. Dried blood painted the side of Terry’s head like Gorbachev’s stain, with the back center of his ear completely bitten off. His ear had the shape of the number nine.
“D-A-M-N,” Blake said. Terry looked up, anger and disbelief in his eyes.
Blake went back and cranked the truck so that the battery wouldn’t die as the high beams lit up everything in their path. He walked toward the old, beat-up F-100 farm truck. Just as Terry said, there was no sign of Shane or Jesse. Blake shined the light inside the truck. The keys weren’t in it, but two cell phones were on the seat.
