by Brian Hodge
A rabid squirrel, he thought through a numbing flood of panic. It's a goddamned rabid squirrel!
Rolling back and forth on the floor, he reached out blindly for his knife. Several times he raised his head and slammed it back hard against the floor, hoping to kill the thing or at least knock it unconscious. With each impact, the creature let out a high-pitched squeal as it dug its claws into him all the deeper. Finally, knowing that it was his only hope to get free of the thing, Stan started crawling toward the door.
He needed room to move.
If he could get outside, get down to the ground, he just might be able to dislodge the thing by banging it against the tree trunk or something. He knew that he didn't have much time. Tiny, razor-sharp teeth were burrowing deeply into his shoulder muscles like fish hooks, sending burning pain throughout his body.
But in his pain and panic, Stan over-reacted. Doubling his legs up underneath himself, he pushed back as hard as he could.
Too hard.
He shot out through the doorway and started falling... falling. Branches whipped past him as he plummeted downward. For a frozen instant, he knew that he was going to die as soon as he hit the ground, but then—miraculously—the underside of his left arm hooked over one of the lower branches. For an instant, his fall was halted, and in that split second, his other hand reflexively shot out and grabbed the branch. The impact jerked his body hard, slamming his teeth together hard enough so he bit off the tip of his tongue. The force also was sharp enough and strong enough to knock whatever the hell that thing was off his back. Muscles straining, Stan struggled to hold onto the branch. From down below, he heard an ear-piercing squeal when the thing hit the ground with a sick, heavy plop. Then he head a rustling of leaves as the thing scurried off into the deep brush.
"Jesus Christ! Stan! What the hell are you doing?"
The shout boomed like thunder through the woods.
Frantic and wild-eyed, Stan looked all around, trying to find the source of the voice. Tears, sweat, and blood streamed down his face and neck. His whole body was throbbing from the effort of hanging onto the tree branch. Down below, he heard the heavy tread of footsteps getting closer. In the dense twilight brush below, he finally made out his brother's face, glowing eerily like a pale moon as he looked up at him.
"How the hell did you get yourself—"
Chet's voice was cut off by a loud cracking sound as the branch holding him suddenly snapped. Stan pictured his body as nothing more than a piece of dust, being sucked into a vacuum cleaner as he plummeted down toward the night-stained ground. He landed with his left leg cocked behind his back; but he was unconscious by the time he hit the ground, so he never felt the snap that broke his leg in two places... at least not until several minutes later, once Chet had raced back to the house for help and returned with his mother and two guys from MedCu.
7
With its red warning lights flashing, the ambulance raced through the night, taking the curves of Route 25 perhaps a bit faster than it should have. Stan's leg was completely numb. He half-suspected that it had been cut off. The physician's assistant had given him a shot of something for the pain, but his neck and shoulders still felt like they were burning. His eyes were narrowed to slits as he looked up from the ambulance stretcher at his mother. The physician's assistant, whose badge read Mark Cochran, was also leaning over him.
"I told you I didn't want you going out there to that tree house," his mother said, her voice a perfect mix of anger and concern as she stared down at her boy. "I never liked you playing out there!"
Stan wanted to say something in his defense, but he knew if he opened his mouth, the only sound that would come out would be a faint whimper...or else a scream.
In spite of everything Mark Cochran had done, cleaning and dressing his head and neck wounds, it still felt as though that giant-maggot thing was clinging to him, digging and gouging deeply into his flesh.
"I'll just bet it was one of those rabid squirrels I warned you about. It was, wasn't it?" his mother asked, unable to keep the sharp accusation out of her voice. "Just like I was telling you yesterday... It was one of those rabid squirrels."
Mark Cochran cocked one eyebrow and looked at her with a half smile as if he thought she might be kidding. Then he looked at Stan, who shook his head in weak denial. Tears were pouring from his eyes, and he was ashamed to be crying in front of his mother and this guy he didn't even know.
"Well, whatever it was, Mrs. Walters" Mark Cochran said mildly, "it's too bad it got away." He looked down at Stan and clasped him firmly on the shoulder. Turning to Stan's mother, he said softly, "We'll have to keep a watchful eye on those cuts for a few weeks to make sure they don't get infected."
Stan's mother bit down hard on her lower lip, sighed deeply, and shook her head. "If only you had listened to me, Stan," she whispered, "this never would have happened."
8
"Look out!" the man riding up front with the ambulance driver suddenly shouted.
They were approaching the construction site where the state highway workers had been blasting away at Watchick Hill. The asphalt ended abruptly, and the road changed to hard-packed dirt, but that wasn't what had drawn the man's attention. Off to his right, in the flickering light of the yellow warning light, he had seen a dark blur of motion. Before the driver could respond to his warning, something small and fast-moving darted out of the woods, heading toward the trench on the opposite side of the road.
The driver hit the brakes, but it was already too late. The tires skidded on the gravel just as a heavy thump sounded from underneath the ambulance.
"Aww, shit! You hit him!"
"Hey! Watch your language up there!" Cochran said.
"What the hell—? Was that some kind of dog or something?" the ambulance driver asked. His expression was tight as he played the steering wheel back and forth while stepping down hard on the brakes. The ambulance swerved to a stop, its tires skidding on the dirt as the siren died with a descending hoot
"Come on, man," the passenger up front said. "You can't stop now. We have to get this kid to the hospital."
"Shouldn't we check it out? If that was a dog, we have to report it," the driver said.
"We have to get this kid to the hospital. We can check whatever the hell that was on our way back."
They delivered Stan and his mother to the hospital in Portland and, once the paperwork was completed, headed back up Route 25 to the Thornton Fire Station. As they neared the construction site, the driver slowed down so they could scan both sides of the road.
"I know it was right around here," he whispered.
A second later, he saw a dark lump of... something lying on the road ahead. He braked to a stop, jammed the shift into park, and opened his door. As he stepped out into the night, the other man got out and walked around to meet him at the front of the ambulance. The headlights shined brightly, and both men stared at the dark splotch in the middle of the road.
"What in the name of—?" the driver muttered, shaking his head.
Flattened onto the hard-packed dirt was a tangled piece of dark, scaly flesh. Blood and purple guts had spurted out of its opened mouth. Huge, rounded eyes bulged up out of the eye sockets, glistening like exposed bone in the glare of the headlights. Not quite daring to touch the thing, the driver knelt down and stared at the array of tiny, pointed teeth that lined the squashed lower jaw. The body—at least what was left of it—looked like a long, flattened tube with long, distorted hind legs, and stick-thin arms that were tipped with flat, clawed hands.
"What the fuck is that thing?" the driver muttered.
"Looks to me like somebody else ran over it after we did," the passenger replied. "Either that, or else you really creamed it. You were going kind of fast."
The driver wiped his forehead with the flat of his hand as he leaned closer, tensed, half-expecting the thing to leap up at him. "You ever see anything like this before?" he asked. He was barely able to restrain the nervous quaver in his v
oice as he looked back and forth between his partner and the splattered roadkill.
"Nope," his partner replied coolly. "Can't say as I have. But I'll tell you one thing. Whatever it is—or was—it sure as shit wasn't no dog. Come on. Let the crows have it. Let's get our butts back to the station.'
The driver just stood there for nearly a full minute, his eyes glued to the strange mess of twisted flesh and bone on the road. Then he heaved a deep sigh and followed his partner back to the ambulance, got in, and drove away. The next morning, one of the construction workers noticed the roadkill and scooped up what was left of it and threw it into the gully by the side of the road.
LOVE ON THE ROCKS
Spring, 1977
1
Eddie LeFevbre figured he was approaching the bridge at a rate of about twenty-five feet a day. By his calculations, he was probably going to be in the right spot by Thursday, Friday at the latest. Being the flagman on this stretch of road construction along Route 25, ten miles north of Thornton, Maine, was one boring bitch of a job. But even if he did have to stand out here freezing his ass off in the cold drizzle or sweating it off when the sun came out, it was a whole lot better than staring at three concrete cinderblock walls and one wall of iron bars every day for the rest of his life.
Spring had come, and Eddie had a bad case of spring fever... so bad, in fact, that he didn't really give two shits about what he planned to do even if it all went to hell in a hand basket. He was serving a life sentence plus for killing a punk-ass college kid in a fight outside a bar in Portland. Every day was the same, and he was no closer to getting his sorry ass back on the street... not with a ninety-nine year sentence hanging over his head.
Every day after lunch, he walked up to the bridge and pretended to be interested in checking out what the construction crew was doing. In fact, he was scoping out the area. The bridge they were repairing spanned a good seventy-five to one hundred foot stretch of the Saco River. Straight down, the water looked pretty shallow, maybe four feet deep at best. It was white-capped with rapids that raced over the stony riverbed, but that wasn't what interested Eddie.
What had caught his eye was the sharp right hand turn the river took about a hundred yards downstream. A huge patch of briars covered the near side of the riverbank, and from there it looked like nothing but dense pine forest stretching, as far as he knew, all the way to the distant, purple-hazed mountains of New Hampshire.
Fred Webster, the guard from the prison who was watching Eddie and the other two prisoners on work release, usually took a nap in his car after lunch. Eddie knew Webster always had a mean-looking shotgun in the front seat with him, but he was willing to bet his life that he could get down to that fast-moving water and swim clear around the bend before Webster or anyone else knew he had bolted.
"But plu-eze, don't fling me inta that briar patch, Brer Fox!" Eddie whispered, chuckling to himself as he studied the tangled mess of branches and thorns. He took the cigarette from his mouth and snapped it out over the railing. It twisted end over end before it finally landed in the raging water and was instantly whisked out of sight. Eddie smiled with satisfaction, thinking that Thursday or Friday at the latest, he was going to be just like that cigarette, bobbing and floating its way down the river to freedom!
2
"Don't be such a retard about it, okay?" Mark Murray said. Flames from the campfire lit up the sneer on his face before he leaned his head back and guzzled a huge mouthful of red wine from the bottle. He smacked his lips, gasped, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"I'm not being a retard, all right?" Janie said.
She was sitting in front of the fire, huddled in a thick sweater against the chilly spring night. At least the rain has stopped, she thought as she looked from Mark's glazed eyes to the dark sky overhead. A crescent moon ripped like a scimitar through the fast-moving cloud cover. A few pale stars winked in and out of existence.
"Then what are you being?" Mark asked sharply. He tilted the wine bottle to his lips again and took several more noisy swallows. "I mean—besides a God damned bitch!"
"Yeah, well fuck you, too," Janie snapped, narrowing her eyes as she glared at him and wondered how the hell she had ever convinced herself she loved this jerk. Okay, so he knew how to make her squeal and twitch in bed, but that was lust, not love.
"All I'm saying is, you're a God damned idiot if you think you can read any of that shit," Mark said. His words we're slurred, and there was a dull, unfocused glow in his eyes. "No one can decipher that shit!" He hooked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the streambed, but it was too dark for either one of them to see the carvings Sarah had found on the slanting rock ledge above the stream. "You're starting to sound like that guy from... wherever the hell he's from—that guy who says these petroglyphs are... are Egyptian hieroglyphics or whatever."
Janie held her hands out in front of her, then—in exasperation—clenched them into fists. "I'm not saying I can read them all. Well, not word for word, anyway. Actually, I don't think they're words per se. I'm just saying that—"
"You're just saying they're … What? Some fucking warning, right?" Mark leaned back for another chug-a-lug of wine, but the bottle was empty, so he tossed it off into the brush behind him where it made a hollow thump.
Janie shrugged. "Well... yeah, sort of." She closed her eyes and scratched her head as she tried to measure her response. "I mean, I think it says something about some kind of cycle—something that looks, at least to me, like some kind of danger. I can show you if you'd just take a minute to look at the rubbings I did. There's this wolf figure, see, that—"
Mark cut her off with a derisive snort of laughter as he stood up and kicked viciously at the fire. Sparks cork-screwed like comets into the night sky.
"You trying to start a forest fire or something?" Janie asked with a bitter edge in her voice.
"Fuck it," Mark said with a hardened sneer. He wobbled on his feet as he stared at her, his eyes almost crossing. "Fuck your rock carvings! And fuck you!"
Janie shook her head sadly as she looked up at him. "No thanks. Not tonight," she said between clenched teeth.
With that, she got up and walked over to the tent that was pitched under the trees. After unzipping the fly screen, she grabbed Mark's sleeping bag and flung it out onto the ground, the edge just missing landing in the fire.
"You can sleep it off outside, thank you very much!"
3
"I feel like such a damned idiot," Mark said the next morning. He was curled up in his sleeping bag, leaning against a tree trunk when Janie came out of the tent. His hair was disheveled, and his eyes had a frosty cast.
"You were a damned idiot," she said, scowling at him. Kneeling beside the campfire, she stirred up the coals, trying to bring them to life, but the fire was just cold, gray ashes. Without another word, she got up and went off into the woods to collect an armload of firewood. When she returned, Mark hadn't moved; he was still huddled in his sleeping bag, leaning against the tree.
"You plan on staying there all day?" she asked. "I maybe could use some help getting breakfast going, you know."
Mark nodded and then eased himself out of the bag. The clothes he had slept in were rumpled and dirty, and his eyes were red-rimmed. Janie wished he had a monster headache, too.
"I was pretty obnoxious last night, wasn't I?" he said, more comment than question as he walked over to where Janie was trying to get the fire going again and placed both of his hands on her shoulders.
She cringed beneath his touch and looked at him over her shoulder with a fixed smile. Shaking her head as though deeply saddened, she said, "I think it might be the dominant characteristic of your personality."
"Can you forgive me?" he asked as he massaged the knotted muscles in her neck.
Janie turned away because she knew damned well he'd have that earnest-little boy-pleading look in his eyes that she found so irresistible.
"You do have to understand that I—we're
both under a lot of pressure, here," Mark said earnestly. "We've got less than a week left, and we haven't done a tenth of the work we should have done."
Janie sniffed with laughter. "Yeah, but that was before we found those petroglyphs."
"I know, I know," Mark replied. He hissed between his teeth as he nodded. "You've spent a lot of time working on them, but I've been thinking, you know, that something's happened here that we haven't even noticed."
"Oh? And what, pray tell, might that be?"
Mark shrugged nervously, then walked around in front of her and knelt down. He picked up a stick and poked at the cold fireplace between them, his eyes going unfocused.
"I think, what with all the pressure I've been feeling—we've both been feeling to get this excavation done, we've kind of let what we feel for each other go by the boards." He reached out for her hands, but Janie didn't reach out to him, and he let his hands drop uselessly at his side. Her lower lip began to tremble, and her eyes started tearing up even as hot rage filled her.
"I think," Mark continued, "you know, what with the budget cuts the department just found out about and my having to get my thesis done this year—or else—we're forgetting how much we really love each other."
"Pu-leaze," Janie said as she looked at him with a cold, steady gaze. "You're the only one feeling any pressure." Her voice was low and measured. "I'm just along for the ride, remember?" She almost said something about just being here to keep his sleeping bag warm for him but decided to let it drop.
"Com'on. You know you're more than—"
"And if I want to spend my time working on translating those stone carvings, even if I'm not even close, well then—that's my choice. I don't have to have any fieldwork to report for Professor McCray or you or anyone."
