by A. R. Daun
The man screamed then seemed to disintegrate in an explosion of blood and body parts. Pham halted and watched as the Drakon's coils seemed to flow and merge with the remains, absorbing them into the body of the creature. Its triangular head, flanked by opaque malevolent eyes, swiveled back and forth in search of its next victim.
He gripped his weapon tighter. It was a spear that he had made from the straight wood of a sapling, on which he had lashed with rope a metal spearhead. He hefted it, feeling its balance, knowing full well that he would probably not survive the encounter, but feeling nothing but exhilaration at the coming confrontation.
The point of the spear was bathed in the blood of Lord Marco and crawled with his essence. It glowed dully in the light, the reddish hue that coated it giving off a heady coppery smell that Pham inhaled with every breath. He felt intoxicated by the aroma, his spirit lifted by the knowledge that he was now merely an instrument of his Lord's will, and with a roar of defiance he started to run towards the Drakon, which had snatched another running man and was busy tearing the limbs off from the body of the luckless soul.
Pham threw his spear in a flat arc. It struck the Drakon several meters below its blunt head, and bounced off the scaly armor, clattering harmlessly onto the muddy ground. A dark smear immediately appeared where it had glanced off the creature, and Pham could see the monster's scales falling off and shriveling as the stain widened.
Pham turned to run, although he knew the Drakon would catch him and grind him to meaty chunks long before it had succumbed from its mortal wound. He spotted a throng of harnessed oni at the periphery of his vision. They had been left behind by their absconding human handlers, and were now milling mindlessly around with confused expressions on their vapid bovine faces.
He wondered briefly whether he should swerve towards the group. They might provide a long enough distraction for him to escape with his life, but for some reason unbeknownst to him he vetoed the idea and run in the opposite direction. His legs ached, and his back prickled in fatalistic anticipation of the crushing hug of the serpent.
Pham heard a whistling sound right behind him, and suddenly he was airborne. He crashed onto the soft muddy ground and rolled, stunned by the blow, his left arm numb from the shoulder down. He looked up and saw the Drakon rearing up above him, its poison fangs jutting outwards from open jaws, and slaver running in thin rivulets to spatter and hiss around him like falling rain.
The damage to the Drakon from the deflected spear had grown dramatically into a black stain that extended along one side from its mid-section all the way to just below its head. Pham watched in awe as the hardened scales around the black center seared and bubbled fiercely, then tumbled loose like ash, and a widening trail of soot marked the progress of the Drakon from where Pham had speared it to where it now towered over him.
He smiled and closed his eyes. The blood of Lord Marco spelled the end for this particular monstrosity. It would neither reanimate nor escape from the tiny susuwatari that consumed it, and Pham's only regret was that he himself would not live to see the Drakon's last shuddering moments.
“Đụ má mày!” He swore at it, invoking the harshest curse words he could muster. Fuck your mother. Then he waited for the end.
Nothing happened. After several heartbeats, he cautiously opened one eye and at first could not understand what he was seeing. The Drakon was still looming over him, but its head swayed disjointedly, and the long wooden shaft of his spear protruded from the top of its head. A whirlwind of ash fragments gushed upwards from the impact point of the spear, swirling in the gentle breeze and fluttering down to cover the immediate area in a thin blanket of soot.
The Drakon's jaw widened as a convulsive tremor seemed to take control of its body. The eruption of ashy gray fragments ebbed, and Pham suddenly yelped as the massive head started to list to one side, then fall straight down towards him. He rolled frantically as the monster's body thumped to the ground in a massive cloud of ash. The disintegration of its body seemed to accelerate, and the creature was soon nothing but a soggy pile of soot and mud.
Pham coughed uncontrollably. He was wondering what inhaling the remains of the Drakon would do to his long term health when the silhouette of a tall long-limbed figure stepped forward, then held out a hand to him. He took it tentatively, and was suddenly pulled upright with one effortless jerk.
He swayed unsteadily on his feet and looked up. Towering over him was the oni that had stumbled earlier when working on the tree root. It gazed at him calmly with its large green eyes, the serrated double row of teeth that lined its mouth glinting even in the ashy air. It had retrieved his spear from the ground and was now offering it to him with one hand.
“You're...Tara right?” Pham asked hesitantly as he took the proffered item, then wondered why he was again talking to an animal that probably lacked the brainpower of one of the colony's many pet dogs.
The oni gave no indication that it understood his question, and Phan sighed and looked around at the devastation caused by the errant Drakon. Two of the rice trunks had been damaged by its passage, and a part of the riverbank had collapsed under its weight, causing water to flood into the field. Most of the men who had fled were now carefully making their way back to the scene.
Pham turned back to the oni.
“Listen,” he began. “You probably don't understand anything I'm saying. But...thank you..for saving my life there.”
The female continued to stare blankly at him, and Pham fetched another sigh and patted it gently on one forearm. He owed it his life. He'd make sure this oni would not end up in a slaughterhouse when it was too old and decrepit to continue working, as was the usual lot for its kind in the colony.
“Are you sure you don't want to kiss her as well?” A voice behind him piped in, and Pham jumped in surprise. He whirled around and saw a girl standing under the shade of a nearby tree. She was short and very slender, but in an athletic sort of way. He could see the delineation of muscles and tendons working just below the skin of her arms, and her legs were taut and finely-sculpted.
She walked into the light and crossed her arms over her small breasts. She had brunette hair that had been cropped short, and her large brown eyes twinkled with amusement as she looked at him, radiating a calm self-assurance that was strikingly at odds with her youthful appearance. “Hello Pham,” the young woman said, and Pham finally recognized her.
“Jaq!” He exclaimed. “It's been so long that I didn't recognize you at first.”
He took hold of her shoulders and scrutinized her. She had changed a lot since he had last seen her as a shy and gawky adolescent during one of his few trips to the Conch Settlements. “You've grown into a lovely young woman,” he finally said. “How long has it been? Three years? Four?”
Jaq smiled again, then shrugged. “I think more like five,” she told him, as a man jogged up to confer with Pham.
Pham nodded to the man, then turned back to face her.
“Listen, let's catch up after I get this mess cleaned up, ok?” He said. “You'll need to tell me all the news from the Conch.”
Jaq nodded, and Pham whistled to a worker who was rounding up some of the wayward oni.
“Hey Frederick,” he yelled, and the man turned to face him while holding onto the leash of a red-haired oni. “Come and get Tara over here, okay, but be gentle about it.”
The man waved his assent, and Pham walked back towards the other laboring workers, who had managed to contain the breach into the cleared field. Behind him the sun slowly made its way down the western horizon, as the shadows lengthened and twilight crept in on taloned claws.
CHAPTER 35
Day -249 A.R.
20 miles west of Bandera, Texas
In rural parts of India, many villages and towns have a traffic circle and a community gathering place around a big old banyan tree. At night many people come to sit, relax and chat around it. There is usually a small deity placed and worshiped at its foot.
Maureen w
anted to go home.
It wasn't that the trip was a total waste. She did enjoy the horse back riding, and the surroundings, with their gently sloping hills and scrub vegetation was a nice departure from the steel towers of the Big Apple.
But she was bored. She had been pushing for Hawaii for their 10th anniversary trip, but Doug had taken one look at the airfare to go to Maui and had balked.
She looked up from her musings and regarded her husband's sweat-stained back as he trudged along in front of her on the winding dirt path. They had been hiking for about an hour now, going west along one of the many guided paths that radiated out of the Western Oaks Guest Ranch like irregular spokes from a wheel.
It had been years since she had gone on a long hike, and she realized she actually enjoyed it. There was a certain meditative quality to the process, and a sense of tranquility and oneness with nature. She could hear birds twittering from afar, the rustle of small animals as they hid inside the tangled scrub vegetation. She looked up, meaning to ask Doug about the bird calls. He was an avid bird watcher and perhaps he could tell her what type of birds were in the surrounding bushes.
He wasn't there.
For one moment she thought he had simply gone beyond her sight along the path, which was winding and covered with vegetation on either side. But when she got to the next corner, she found that the path continued on in a straight and unbroken line for perhaps half a mile, and that she still could not see her husband anywhere.
She stopped in her tracks, perplexed at this slight anomaly. Then a sound behind her made her smile and she whirled around, fully expecting Doug to jump out of the bushes and flash that infuriating grin that he usually reserved for practical jokes.
“Douglas Winters!” She cried out in exasperation. “Don't you dare...”
She gasped.
It wasn't her husband who had stepped out into the path.
It was tall, fantastically tall and thin. It loomed over the path like some mythological creature, all sharp edges and angled protrusions. Two eyes glared malevolently from a face that was a grotesque conglomeration of human and non-human features. Splashes of red decorated its muscled torso, and it took a second or two for Maureen to realize that the reddish stains that continued on down the length of its body and pooled on the path was flesh blood.
A harsh whistling sound escaped from her. She had seen one of her husband's dark blue Nike sneakers laying on its side next to the path edge. A pale stump that ended abruptly in ragged strips of flesh protruded from the forlorn shoe. Next to it, hidden mostly behind the foliage of some dark green brush, she could barely make out the outline of something lumpish sprawled awkwardly on the ground.
Her harsh whistling graduated into stuttering gasps. Maureen whirled and started running at breakneck speed along the path. She fled away from her dead husband, and away from the monstrosity that had just killed and dismembered him. She heard the distant twittering of birds, and felt the sun on her, the heat of its presence. But she also sensed the thud of heavy feet on ground, and the subsonic growl of something feral that was fast gaining on her.
She stumbled, and as she started falling, something sharp pierced her from behind and lifted her bodily from the ground. It passed between her shoulder blades and severed her spinal column, instantly rendering her paralyzed from the chest on down, then slicing her heart into two wildly pumping bags of flesh that sluiced their bloody contents all across her thoracic cavity.
Maureen wailed in despair as the darkness rushed in and claimed her.
The sound drifted in the dry wind and caused Papi Anderson to glance in the direction of the fading sun.
“Did ya hear that?” He grunted, looking at the pretty girl next to him. He ignored the tall rangy older man who loomed over her. He did not have a keen interest in Yankees in general, transplanted or otherwise, and the fact that this New Englander dressed like some danged cowboy didn't help his already surly attitude.
The girl frowned and tilted her head. Papi surreptitiously took another quick glance at her bosom, which was ample and rather deliciously curved for a girl her size, if he had to say so himself. The Yankee seemed to grimace at this, and Papi grinned widely at him, daring him to say anything.
“It's starting to get dark,” the man said in his flat New England accent. “Perhaps if you could complete your work soon so we could continue on our way to San Antonio?”
Papi grunted and closed the hood of the Jap car that he had been working on for the past hour. They had come to his gas station, which doubled as an auto repair shop, and had complained of screeching noises coming from under the hood of the Toyota Corolla. Papi had quickly confirmed the source of the noise had been a frayed radiator fan belt. He could have done the work in half that time, but he was entertained by the prospect of spending some time with the pretty girl from the nearby ranch, and had deliberately stretched out the repairs. In his mind, you got your entertainment where you could in this godforsaken part of Texas.
“Well now,” he finally said, wiping his hands on an equally oily rag that he had pulled from his back pocket. “I reckon she's all done. That'll set ya back a hundred bucks. Hard to get them parts hereabouts.”
Papi gave the uppity Yankee what he called his shit-faced grin. He thought that the other man would not dare contest the bill in front of the girl, or that he didn't know a lick about cars and would not know he was being fleeced, and he wasn't disappointed. The man nodded curtly and peeled off five twenties, handing them to Papi and moving towards the driver side without another word.
“Y'all take care now,” Papi said, pocketing the bills, but the two did seem to be in a hurry, and they went into their little compact car and started to drive off without even glancing behind. Papi was sorry to see the pretty girl go, but consoled himself with the idea that she probably was a bad lay anyway. Pretty girls were too much into themselves to be bothered about knowing how to really please a man.
He turned to go back into the dilapidated shack that functioned as his office, but stopped when he sensed movement behind him. It was a faint scratching noise that rose in volume, as if something was hobbling towards him from the sparse vegetation that curved around the sides of the station. Something with metallic feet, or perhaps claws.
Papi whirled around. A faint hissing emerged from his wide open mouth, as if he was trying to scream but had no air left in his lungs to power the sound. He felt something warm cascade down one leg in small rivulets as he pissed on himself. In one small corner of his mind he was screaming, telling himself to turn and start running. But out in the real world he was rooted to the spot, frozen in abject terror as something very large and fast and very very mean rushed towards him like some organic locomotive.
In the last few moments before the thing made of sharp angles and razor-edged teeth and claws swooped down on him, Papi finally managed a loud piercing cry, but one which quickly dissipated and diminished into nothingness, as if sucked dry by the gathering dusk.
Haley looked anxiously at her companion as the ramshackle gas station dwindled in the distance.
She had promised to get the plant samples she had taken from the bluff over to a graduate student friend of hers at the university, and she was worried the samples might degrade further if they didn't get it to a -80 freezer soon. But she was also concerned that she might be causing too much trouble for this man, who she had just met a couple days back.
“I'm sorry for all the trouble I'm causing you,” she said. “Also, I can pay for your car repairs the next pay check.”
Richard shrugged, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. They were moving at a sedate 10 miles an hour due to the dilapidated condition of the road.
“It's nothing.” He replied. “I'm just as curious as you to find out anything about that plant and those things on it. And this old clunker of mine has 200,000 on it and was due for some repairs anyway.”
He frowned and turned to look at her briefly.
“Did you hear something?”
He tilted his head slightly, and the setting sun highlighted the sharp angles and shadowed recesses of his lined face. Haley had the fleeting thought that he looked handsome in a craggy sort of way.
“Something's wrong,” he said after a short while. “I thought I heard a scream.”
Then he looked back, probably to check for incoming cars, and did a careful u-turn on the asphalted road. Haley peered closely, squinting her eyes to make out any details, but she could not see the man who had repaired their car, though the two old style gas pumps stood out like lonely sentinels in the gloom.
They parked next to one of the pumps and Richard got out.
“Hello?” He said loudly. “Mr. Anderson? Everything ok?”
He glanced back at the car, and after looking around briefly, Haley got out as well. She waited by the pumps as he moved towards the door of the lone office building and briefly went in. After perhaps a minute he came out again and shook his head at Haley.
“Should we call the police?” Haley asked, as he joined her next to the pumps.
He seemed to consider this for a moment, then shook his head.
“Let's check around the gas station first.” He finally replied. “ I just want to make sure he didn't have a heart attack and is lying somewhere in the darkness. I'll go towards the left and you go the other side. Yell if you see anything.”
She nodded and they moved carefully to either side. It was getting dark, and the lengthening shadows imparted a sinister ambiance to the place that made Haley anxious to leave. She realized that it was unlikely the man would have left the station unlocked. She knew it, but the feeling that they needed to get away from here was so strong that she was about to call out to Richard that perhaps the man had simply left for the night when she spied something lying on the ground.
