Sycorax's Daughters

by Kinitra Brooks, PhD

  The ground was soft and soundless, but as she picked up speed, she heard branches snapping behind her to the left. Hoping to achieve the same level of strength, speed, and victory as the Greek Goddess Nike, Maleka ran. And ran, and ran. And slammed into a low-hanging branch.

  There was a flash of bright light around the edges of her vision, her feet swung out from under her, and she landed on her back. Her lower back just above her tailbone exploded in pain as it came into contact with a fallen log, and as her head bounced off the ground, Maleka bit her tongue. Running headlong into a thick branch had caused worse injuries than the car accident.

  Maleka swallowed blood and listened to the sounds of the forest. Nothing. She performed a quick mental diagnostic of her body and categorized her injuries. She told herself she was fine and slowly sat up. Without warning, it started raining, not the light misty drizzle that she was accustomed to in Seattle, but a hard and heavy downpour of torrential rain of biblical proportions.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Maleka screamed up to the heavens. “Is this your idea of a joke? Well I don’t think it’s funny! Didn’t you hear me calling you for help?”

  Maleka was standing, though she did not remember the physical act of standing up. Her hands were balled into tight fists, and she defiantly stared into the night sky and blinked away the rain.

  “Give me a fucking break, answer my prayer, do something! I’m not asking you to part the sea, I need a little help. Is that asking for too much? Are you there?”

  God did not answer her. She couldn’t hear anything over the rain. She still couldn’t see, so despite nearly having been

  decapitated, Maleka started running. She counted her steps as she ran. There were 2,112 military steps in one mile with a 30-inch step. Maleka’s running stride was 70 inches, so she knew she had run nearly two miles since plowing into that tree.

  The soft mud that had padded Maleka’s footfalls was now an enemy combatant. Encouraged by the rain, the mud became thick and hostile, her feet were buried to her ankles with each step, she had to use force to wrangle her foot free, and before she knew it, she was calf deep in mud.

  “This is fucking bullshit.”

  Maleka took a deep breath, turned around, and slowly made her way out of the deep mud. A bolt of lightning arched across the sky. In the flash of light, Maleka saw she was in a small valley. It took her almost a full minute to register what she had seen on the valley ridge.

  Her pursuers had morphed themselves into one of the most feared and formidable canines on both the face of the planet.

  The wolf.

  Maleka now had to run from a pack of wild dogs that had the ability to run at speeds of at least 40 miles per hour and sustain those speeds for several miles at a time.

  Though there was nothing remotely humorous in Maleka’s situation, she started laughing.

  #

  Maleka bolted away from the descending predators. It took her ninety steps to reach the slight incline that marked the valley wall. Digging in with hands, forearms, knees, and feet, she scrambled up the hill. When she reached flat land, she stood up and ran. Maleka counted sixty steps before she tripped over an exposed tree root.

  She reached out with her hands to break her fall, but she kept falling.

  Maleka slammed to the ground on her shoulder and began to tumble, roll, and slide. Once again laughing, she received a mouthful of dirt, leaves, and, to her utter horror, a bug. She hated watching the damsel in distress trip and fall in horror movies, and yet here she was falling for the second time.

  Did she see lights? Maleka slid to a stop on her face, stood up, and ran. The lights shone through the window of the cabin like a beacon promising a safe haven from this storm.

  She could hear the footsteps of the dogs behind her. She thought she heard them running past her as well, and knew that they were racing ahead to cut her off and surround her.

  With every breath she took, she inhaled fire. Both of her feet were swollen, cut, and bleeding. Pain exploded from her feet to her jaw with each step she took. Her hands, arms, and face were scratched and cut. The pain in her side was so intense, she might as well have been pierced by the Spear of Destiny. The trees blocked out the light of the moon. It was so dark she couldn’t even see the tips of her fingers. She’d just returned home from the war and was in excellent physical condition; otherwise, she would have been caught two miles ago. She ran faster.

  She was so close that the warm light glowing in the window offered enough light to see the edges of her surroundings, but she didn’t look at what was moving within the shadows. She jumped over the four steps of the cabin’s patio and slammed her shoulder into the door, expecting resistance, but with one turn of the knob, the door opened.

  The rug slid under her feet and she almost fell … again. As Maleka regained her balance, the only thing she saw was a pair of denim-blue eyes. It took three seconds for her vision to pan out, allowing the panoramic view of the inside of the cabin to come into focus.

  The man was shirtless and tattooed. On his broad and chiseled chest was an eagle in flight, and clutched within its mighty talons was a large swastika. The man was sitting in a chair, his foot on the edge of the table, and his chair was tipped back on the two hind legs. Covering the wall he was leaning against was a large Confederate battle flag – an image that, for the majority of Black people living in the United States, is a symbol of racism. His hair might have been red or blond, but his head was shaved. He wasn’t alone. Another man stood by the window, and yet another sat on a small sofa directly in front of the man she had first seen.

  Maleka spun around, slammed the door closed, and engaged the deadbolt. Once the door was closed, she saw a large chair. It was as heavy, and she used all her strength to drag it to the door and position the chair under the door handle. Maleka stumbled a few steps back and turned to face the men she had locked herself inside with.

  For almost five minutes, no one spoke.

  She pressed her hand to the pain in her side and took a closer look at the guy by the window. He wasn’t standing, as she first thought; he was sitting on top of some type of cabinet. He had a huge sucker in his mouth, and she could smell the cherry scent of the candy. He had the same denim colored eyes as the one leaning back in his chair. He wasn’t completely bald, because his red hair had grown out a little. It reminded Maleka of a peach. The thought of such a juicy fruit only served to underscore the dryness of her parched throat. As if reading her mind, he tightened the cap on his bottle of water and tossed it to Maleka. She drank it down greedily. Cool water ran down the sides of her mouth as she drank until she started coughing.

  Both of the man’s arms from shoulder to wrist were covered in colorful, incredibly detailed tattoos, but what stood out the most were the flags. On the inside of his upper right arm, near his chest, was a tattoo of a red flag with a black swastika in the center. On

  the left was the American flag. The man sitting on the couch wore a Dewalt wife-beater and a ball cap that read, The South shall rise again. It was clear that the one leaning back in his chair and the one in the window were related, possibly brothers.

  The cabin was just one big square room, the kitchen was along the wall to her left.

  A large brick fireplace sat in the center of the widest wall, and there a door off to the side that Maleka guessed to be a bathroom. There were three sleeping bags rolled up in the corner along with a slew of hunting rifles.

  On the wall above the couch hung pictures of Hitler standing in a moving Jeep, bikini-clad blond women displaying tools,

  and redheads posing with cars. There was also a poster of the University of Alabama football team running on the field. Maleka was surprised to see that poster hanging so proudly, as most of the players in the poster were black.

  Finally, the guy in the window swirled his candy to one side of his mouth and asked, “So what the fuck are you running from to make you think you’re safer in here with us than out there with a gun strapped to
your belt?”

  “A pack of wolves,” Maleka answered.

  “No ma’am, you might wanna try that again. We ain’t got no wolves down here.” The candy man explained.

  “I know, but they weren’t wolves at first.” Maleka’s thoughts were jumbled and confused.

  “See, she told me to keep it with me, then I didn’t think I needed it, so I threw it away,” she said.

  “You threw what away?”

  “I really didn’t think it would do any good; it’s just a stupid superstition.”

  He slowly took the candy out of his mouth and asked again, “You threw what away?”

  “The man at the gas station tried to give it back to me, but I didn’t take it.”

  “HEY!” he shouted. “Do you hear me fucking talking to you?

  I’m not going to ask you again. What did you throw away?” “The charm,” she said.

  “The charm?” he echoed. “What charm, what was it for?”

  Maleka noticed how his eyes lowered to the gold cross she was wearing around her neck as he asked the question.

  “It was to protect me from the monster.”

  The man leaning in the chair slowly lowered it back to all four legs, and the one on the couch took off his ball cap and ran his hand through his thick blond hair. As his blond locks unraveled to fall against his sculpted shoulders, Maleka knew without a doubt that this man was a direct descendant of Thor.

  “Travis, she’s high. She’s probably from California, and they say they got some good-ass weed out there.”

  The three of them shared a laugh as Travis put the candy back in his mouth and leaned against the window.

  “I’m not high, and I’m not from California,” Maleka hissed.

  Travis shrugged his shoulders. “That might be so, girl, but you ain’t from around here. You say you ain’t high, but you done spooked yourself so bad you ain’t thinking straight, and you ain’t making no damn sense, so I can’t tell either way.” “I scared myself?” Maleka was furious.

  “What you was running from is most likely coyotes.”

  “I know the fucking difference between a wolf and a coyote,” she started, but the man in the chair interrupted her.

  “Really, Big City? Because you said they weren’t wolves at first, so what were they then, dingos?”

  More laughter. “Fuck you!” she said.

  “Fuck you too, you stupid fucking nigger cunt bitch! There ain’t no fucking wolves down here.

  The only dogs we have out there in our woods are the coyote and maybe … maybe a pack of strays. You was running through the woods at night. It’s dark out there, and the woods has a way of playing tricks with your senses. You was just seeing things.”

  “Caleb’s right,” Travis explained. “You fucking people are all the same; you come down South and act like it’s a trip to the fucking zoo. Y’all come down here so that you can laugh at us ignorant, po’ white trash, redneck hillbillies, and point at the dumbass country niggers.”

  “Y’all watch movies like Deliverance and think we’re just a bunch of inbreeds sitting down here making moonshine, playing banjos, eating fried chicken and spitting out watermelon seeds. Then the next thing you know, y’all is running through the woods in the middle of the night, shooting at shadows and running from dogs.”

  More laughter. Maleka started to say something, but stopped.

  She turned her head toward the door. The others heard it too. Scratching. The door shook gently. Something heavy landed on the roof, and the ceiling creaked in protest under the weight of whatever was walking across it. Everyone looked up at once.

  The door shook again, forcefully this time. Travis tracked the footsteps on the roof with his head, leaning farther and farther back until he was looking directly above him. There was a long deep howl lasting almost ten seconds before the others in the pack answered the call.

  Everyone started moving at once. Maleka unhooked her gun from her belt and reached into her pockets for the extra clips.

  Without taking his eyes off the ceiling, Travis stood, slowly turned around, and closed the interior shutters.

  Caleb grabbed the hunting rifles leaning against the fireplace. The man sitting on the couch ran past Maleka to close the shutters in the kitchen in the nick of time. The glass in the kitchen window shattered, but the shutter was not breached.

  “Ryan,” Caleb called and tossed a rifle to the man who now stood behind Maleka. The silence that followed was deafening. With the enveloping hush, everyone looked at Maleka, who was looking at Caleb with a look that said I told you so.

  Travis ran from the window to loom over her. “You fucking threw the Goddamn charm away? You just fucking threw it away?”

  Travis was a foot taller than Maleka, and as he screamed down at her, she realized the candy he had had in his mouth was not cherry flavored but, in fact, strawberry.

  Neither his size nor his proximity intimidated Maleka, since both were to her advantage.

  Maleka had mentally established that the inside of the cabin was her zone of security, and she knew where everything was.

  “Travis,” Caleb warned.

  “If you knew it was to keep you safe, why did you fucking throw it away?” Travis said.

  She knew how many steps it would take to reach Caleb, understood that he would have to be the next one neutralized, because under no circumstances was she going back outside into unfamiliar terrain while it was dark.

  Caleb called his brother again, “Travis.”

  “Y’all think y’all so much better than us, so sophisticated and educated,” Travis said.

  Maleka’s breathing slowed. She was unprepared to deal with deer that changed into people and then into wolves, but fighting men was what she had been trained to do, and she had seventeen confirmed kills under her belt this year alone.

  Maleka slowly slid one foot in front of the other, but kept her hands at her sides, assuming a basic battle stance. Close-quarters combat was Maleka’s specialty. Because of her stealth, speed, agility, and ferocity in hand-to-hand combat, comrades in her unit started calling her “the black mamba.”

  Caleb walked to his brother’s side and gently pulled Travis away from Maleka and protectively stood between them.

  “What the fuck were you doing out in the woods at night for anyway?” Travis demanded over Caleb’s shoulder.

  “They crashed my car.”

  “Of course they fucking crashed your car! Dumbass.” Travis was furious and pacing back and forth.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Travis,” Maleka taunted. “You said I was shooting at shadows and running from dogs. Maybe we should open the door and give them some doggie treats and scratch their heads.”

  “Travis. There are four of us in here and enough guns for three each. We just have to maintain our zone of security until morning, and then we’ll be able to offer adequate cover to reach the truck. The nearest town will be our extraction point,” Maleka explained.

  Travis and Caleb looked at each other in astonishment, and Maleka fought feelings of frustration.

  “Extraction point?” Travis echoed. “Are you in the Army?” Something else jumped onto the roof. The door bulged in violentlyas if kicked, but the chair under the doorknob held.

  “These ain’t terrorists you was shooting at out there. There ain’t no fucking extraction point, and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re surrounded. The cavalry ain’t coming, and you just fucking got us all killed,” said Travis.

  Maleka was losing her patience with Travis. “I killed two of them on the road.”

  “Did you kill them, or did you just shoot them?”

  The voice came from behind her. Maleka pivoted 180 degrees and took three steps back so her back was toward the door and the three men were in view full.

  “You said at first they weren’t wolves, so then, what were they?” Ryan said.

  Whatever was on the roof was now jumping, as if trying to stomp its way through. The door w
as kicked again and splintered along the hinges. The front- room window shattered. The noise outside sounded like breaking tree branches, and a mixture of hyena calls and wolf howls.

  Ryan burst into hysterical laughter, and Maleka decided it wasn’t such a good idea to have her back to the door.

  “Ok, Big-City, if you have a plan to get us all outta here alive, you might want to tell us, because that would be some pretty good fucking information to have right about now.”

  Before Maleka had the time to ignore Travis’s hysteria, Ryan asked his question again. “What were they at first?”

  Before Maleka had a chance to answer, Caleb offered his hypothesis. “So what are we dealing with here, werewolves? Well, if that’s the case, we’re all fucked because none of these bullets are silver.”

  “Can they fucking do that? The moon’s not even full!” Travis said.

  As Travis’s question drifted slowly toward silence, all of the men turned to Maleka for the answer. She thought that she was going to collapse as the heavy weight of their situation settled upon her shoulders. As if things were not challenging enough, unlike the men in her unit, these guys were not going to do what they were told, and Travis was already becoming a problem.

  Maleka’s Plan A was to stay inside the cabin until daylight, but whatever monster had chased her in here, had a different idea. She was going to have to come up with a Plans B, C and a Contingency Plan, and she should have done that 20 minutes ago.

  Maleka took Caleb’s rifle to inspect it and was disappointed at her discovery. His weapon of choice was a Winchester Model 70. A bolt rifle.

  This was the perfect weapon for a sniper – and for hunting – but the mere seconds it took to reload this gun manually would cost someone their life in a combat situation.

  With a quick scan of all the weapons, she knew she would find what she was looking for.

  “What’s the matter?” Caleb said.