by Wilson, Tia
Tom hopped out the back of the truck and addressed his men. “We got what we were looking for. Lets ship out. We will all feel a lot safer when we are out of their territory. Let’s go.”
Two of the men helped the elder Silas into the cab of the truck, and then they all climbed into the rear. Tom asked Trent to wait outside the cab for a few minutes, he needed to talk to elder Silas alone. Tom jumped into the cab and joined the elder Silas who was strapped in and wrapped in two heavy blankets. Silas turned his head as Tom got in and he nodded slowly. He took a sip of water from a bottle and licked his dry cracked lips.
“What was that place?” Tom asked the elder.
He looked straight out the window at the road ahead and said, “I could hear the roars of pain on most nights. I’d never heard anything like it in all my life. Those poor men they never had a chance,” Elder Silas said trailing off.
“Were they eating them?” Tom asked.
“Worse I think. They fought them. They made the men fight the bears. Tore the men to shreds then bandaged them up with a couple of days of rest and then threw them back in to fight all over again. This is a clan of savages, they have let the animal side win out,” he said reaching out for Toms arm and placing his old withered hand, light as a bunch of dried twigs, on Toms forearm. “Do you know what the humans would ever do if the found out about something like this? They would hunt every last one of us down and destroy every clan member. Humans believe they are the apex predator, they wouldn’t be able to live with knowing that there was something stronger and faster than them out in the world. Do you think that any human would listen to us if we told them we are a peaceful clan that has lived in coexistence with humans since the first men walked on this continent? Men would be blinded by blood, all they would want to do is hunt us down like the rabid animals they believe we are. I don’t want to be a mounted and stuffed head on some dentists wall so he can brag to his friends. I’ve been through too much in my life to see it all come crumbling down because of these white bears,” the elder Silas said pausing to take a drink from his bottle.
“What do you think we should do,” Tom asked.
“Honestly Tom, in my youth I would have said that we fight back and destroy this evil clan. I’m too tired for war, too old to see the people I love chewed up and spat out by this clan,” he said looking older and frailer than Tom had ever seen before.
Tom looked him in the eyes and said, “We think we may have found the girl.”
Elder Silas sat up in his chair as some colour came back into the skin of his papery cheeks, “Are you sure it’s her. Has she passed the trials yet?”
“She doesn’t know about the trials, I was afraid to tell her,” Tom said looking out the window and avoiding Silas’s gaze.
“Have you fallen in love with her? I warned you about that Tom,” he said, “you know what the Prophesy says about what lies ahead for her. You cant get too attached to her, you will bring yourself nothing but heartbreak and sorrow.”
“Maybe the Prophesy is wrong,” Tom said.
For a man his age and even though he had been through so much at the ranch Tom didn’t have time to stop his hand from slapping him across the face. “Don’t you ever disrespect the great tales of our clan. If we don’t have those stories to hold onto and guide us we will be no better than these animals here. If the Prophesy has written that we will be saved by this woman then it is true, even if it includes the many sacrifices she is going to have to make along the way to forge a lasting peace. You know better than anyone Tom that the old stories should not be ignored. How did you find her” he asked.
Tom stared straight ahead his cheek stinging and his heart aching and said, “I fell for her on sight, fell hard. When I first saw her she, I don’t know, I’ve never felt anything like it before in my life. It was like I’d stuck my finger into a plug socket. The old stories were right it was her scent that lead me to her. I had caught an after trace of it on a subway ride a few days before I finally found her. The scent was faint, nothing more that an after image like a bulb flashing in your eyes. I took that train ride maybe thirty or forty times trying to find out where she got off. Every time I caught a hint of her scent,” he said trailing off.
“It was like nothing you’ve ever experienced before?” Elder Silas said.
“How do you know what its like?” Tom asked.
“You don’t know all my stories yet young Tom, I’ll tell you mine at another time. Continue,” he said.
“I tracked her for days. Any time my search lead me in the wrong direction I could feel a painful tug inside me, a deep well of loss. When I did eventually start to get closer to her I felt like a schoolboy about to go on a date with his first crush. I found myself daydreaming about her constantly, I’d zone out and stare off into the distance and all I would be thinking about was her. I hadn’t even seen her yet and still I thought I knew her already,” Tom said.
“That’s the draw of a woman so powerful, her scent is like a drug to our kind,” Elder Silas said.
“Well, it was coursing through my blood by the time I eventually tracked her down to a cafe near her place of work. That first time when I saw her, any feelings I had were simply magnified. She was more than the woman who was going to save our clan, I could see myself spending my life with her and settling down,”Tom said.
“You know how deeply we bears feel,” Elder Silas said, “our extreme emotions have lead to the downfall of some of our greatest clan members. Sometimes we feel too intensely,” he said in a soft voice.
“Then why did you send me after her,” Tom said feeling angry suddenly.
Elder Silas put a thin and bony hand on Toms arm and said, “You know why we sent you Tom. You are the best tracker that the clan currently has. You know how the elders feel about you, we couldn’t have choose anybody more suited to the task than you.”
“Did you know about the kind of intense feelings I would have for her?” Tom asked shrugging Silas’s arm off his.
Elder Silas looked him in the eyes and said, ”We knew and suspected this would happen. I know this is going to be hard, but you need to ignore your feelings for this woman, you know what has to come and getting further involved is going to only lead to heartbreak for both of you.”
All the fight was gone out of Tom. It would be a waste of time arguing back and forth with the elder as all roads would lead to the same thing, his feelings would need to be ignored for the greater good of securing a future for the clan. “You’re right. I’ll try to limit my contact with her once we are back in Twin Rock.”
Tom rolled down his side window and shouted back to the men sitting in the back of the truck, “We move out in five minutes.” He rolled back up his window and said, “We should be at the border within four hours and after that home by nightfall.” Tom nodded at Trent standing outside by the tree line and he got into the cab and joined them. Tom started the engine and they headed back to the town of Twin Rock.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Third Faction
Nasak Tresode ran his fingers through his hairline, the rough scar leading from front to back across his skull itched. The scar was met by other scars that crisscrossed his skull. From his left eye a thick and gnarled scar ran down his cheek and into the thick bushy beard covering half his face. The left eye was milky and opaque and it seemed to accentuate the emerald green of his right eye that surveyed the people before him. He cracked his knuckles as he surveyed the crowd. His hands were those of a brawler, someone whose path had been forged with the smash of bone against flesh. His knuckles were gnarled and covered in a lattice of scars. When he balled his hands into a fist the tendons and joints cracked loudly as if he was crushing a bunch of dry twigs within his grasp. The fingernails on one hand came to sharpened points and coarse tufts of white blonde hair protruded from the back of this hand.
He stood in the back of an old army truck stripped to the waist and wearing camo green army pants and heavy leather boots. His exposed torso was a
map of the hardships of his life. Running across his chest ran three red scars, the flesh puckered and wrinkled along the lengths of the gouges. From his armpit to the waistband of his trousers the flesh along his side was pitted and rutted as if he had been dragged behind a moving vehicle. The flesh was waxy and stiff on that side of his body. If he turned his back to the crowd everyone would see two scars across his shoulder blade on each side. At the base of his spine was a circle enclosing a star and burnt into his flesh.
The people before him were looking to him for guidance, for a leader to stand up and fight, ultimately they were looking for a leader who would take them home. The crowds eyes were on him and collectively they held their breath waiting for him to speak. Nasak observed the twenty or so people before him, outcasts the lot of them, branded and designated mongrels.
In earlier decades some of these deformed and misshapen people would work for the travelling freak shows that travelled across America. Clawed feet or hands, or unfortunate tufts of facial hair might earn you the moniker of a wolf man. Raised in the wild and tamed and presented for the good peoples amusement is how the patter would go. It wasn't a dignified living but it was a living of a meagre sort. As time moved on and the freak show became something to be pitied or boycotted, the outcasts no longer had an outlet that would at least give them a sliver of access to a proper life. Once the last freak show packed up for good the only choice was to run and hide. They migrated north and for several decades this small band of people had been eking out a living in the boreal forest of Canada.
Their numbers were small, the hard winter conditions killing off the weak and the infirm and leaving behind a hard and chiselled group of survivors. They had resigned themselves to a subsistence life, barely scraping by, living off the land and always afraid that humans would find them. That all changed with the arrival of Nasak ten years ago.
Nasak jumped down from the bed of the truck so he was level with his people. They crowded around forming a semi circle. A handful of the mongrels could just about pass for human. Their transformation mostly taking place on their chest and legs and so easily hidden from prying eyes. Even so there was still something odd about them if you got to look at them close enough or under bright enough lights. Eyes that were slightly misshapen, an incisor or front tooth a little too sharp or elongated, a strange texture to their skin. Most of these details could be hidden with a hood up and a pair of sunglasses. The people inflicted with these aberrations were the only ones the group of mongrels trusted to go into town and get supplies, all without drawing any attention. These trips were few and far between. Somehow even without too many surface mutations people sensed something was off, some sort of primal warning system made the people wary as if they somehow knew they were in the presence of a dangerous animal. The mongrels tasked with supply runs would spend as little time as possible in town, avoiding the half angry, half confused stares and how people would hurry their kids away from them if they walked into a shop.
The rest of the mongrel tribe was not so lucky with their alterations. A myriad of ways the human to bear transformation did not take, manifesting in clawed hands, elongated jaws and snouts with tufts of hair, one human and one bear eye, twisted flesh trapped in stasis between human and bear transformation, skin twisted and rutted like wax. Every mongrel was deformed in a different way. Worst of all was Ben Shoals. His mouth was opened in a perpetual snarl and one side of his face showed the emerging properties of a bear. His jaw had begun to lengthen and his teeth elongate and fur sprout out. On the other side his human face drooped, his skin pallid and pale. His eye lid hung heavy over a red ringed eye permanently looking downwards. He had a hunched back and spiky bone stubs poked though his skin from neck to ass. Clothes were not an option for him as bony protuberances all over his body tore at the material and anything touching his bare skin drove him crazy with constant itching. He towered over the other people in the crowd and his head jerked back and forth as he sniffed the air. If humans ever found him, Ben’s life would end in a lab with endless painful tests to figure out what he was.
From the barely noticeable to the twisted and gnarled bodies of the half formed creatures all the mongrels shared something in common, they could never return home to see their family, they had all been branded, and they all existed in the world between bear and human. A painful place of being that granted them nothing but suffering and confusion at what they had lost.
All eyes were on Nasak. “Today, my family, we finally return home. A life of eking out a shallow existence, living off scraps is coming to an end. I have arranged transport for us and we will travel south. We will be the first ever mongrels to return home, the first forsaken sons and daughters of the great white bear clan to be welcomed with open arms. What lies ahead is not going to be easy for any of us. We mongrels were forged in the crucible, as I look at my brethren before me I know that we will prevail,” he said raising his arms in the air.
The crowd before him erupted into roars and shouts of bestial sounds, half bear and half human. Their broken roars echoed through the forest as they prepared for the future.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Together
People were out on the streets enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. Men and women sat on a long wooden bench outside the diner and waved and smiled when Grace and Tom walked by hand in hand. The soft strum of a guitar wafted through the air from the pagoda. Some of the younger town folks sat on the grass and listened while Trent played a jaunty upbeat piece of music. Some of the girls got up to dance and tried to coax the boys up to join them amidst much joking and pushing and pulling. Elder Franklin stood outside his hardware store his wooden pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth, a thick blue grey smoke hung above him in wispy clouds. He raised his hand and waved across as the people passed him buy.
They walked the length of main street, stopping to look in the window of the Brimmners family toy store. The husband and wife team hand carved beautiful jigsaw puzzles of the lakes and forests that surrounded Twin Rock. Everybody in town owned one of their puzzles and they were usually proudly displayed on a table for all to see. The couple made them out of love and any sales were icing.
Tom and Grace walked ten minutes out of town as the road started to slope upwards into the mountains towards the clans first real home hundreds of years ago.
“I’ve never been happier,” Grace said to Tom squeezing his hand. She could see herself growing old in the town of Twin Rock. The people had been so open to her arrival and she had never felt so welcome in any place before. Her quirks that she had used to control her life had faded into the background and were now nothing more than a distant memory. When Grace really thought about it she couldn’t believe that it was how she used to live her life, all the rules and regulations she put on her self, afraid of the very idea of anything new or exciting happening to her. Tom had changed all that for her. Shifters lived in the moment, she was starting to see that now. They felt more deeply and were more in tune with their feelings than a regular human. The melding of animal and human had somehow forged something better from the parts. She saw that now, they were not something to be feared, they should be embraced. Grace knew that their fear of the outside world was correct, regular people feared change and when groupthink took over their first instinct was to destroy what they did not understand. She knew the clan could never integrate into society, people would always be suspicious even if they showed how peaceful of a people they were.
She could feel Tom stiffen beside her as they walked. Grace turned to him and said, “What’s wrong?”
“I have to ship out again. I leave in the evening,” Tom said averting his eyes from her.
“You’re only just back,” Grace said trying her best to hide her annoyance,
“I have to go. It’s a direct order from the elders. I need to go to the border to meet someone who may have some information for us. It’s a quick overnight trip. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “The elder
Silas and elder Franklin have called a meeting with us both for later this evening. I leave after that,” Tom said.
