by Bolz, Stefan
“The sand pit’s right on the other side,” Blair said.
The fence was about ten feet high and covered by the remnants of a green, tarp-like cloth. It was tattered and torn and ripped in many places.
“We can climb over those,” Blair pointed at a group of four containers stacked in two pairs of two.
“Hey look!” Aarika said. He stood in back holding a section of the fence up from the ground.
“Good job,” Jennifer said.
“You’re a virgin, really?” Blair said when he passed Aarika.
“Shut up,” Aarika replied. “I’m still much better looking than you ever will be.”
“I’ll give you that.”
They crawled through the opening. To their right, a stack of discarded railroad ties sat on the ground. The stack had partially collapsed under its own weight. Straight ahead, the plateau they were standing on dropped off, leading into a crater-like pit that was approximately three hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep. At the bottom stood a huge, rusty machine with a conveyor belt attached to it. A few bulldozers were dotted around. The early morning light made them look like abandoned sculptures, the front loaders raised up, the backhoe part oddly deformed.
The world changed in one instant, Kasey thought, as they made their way down. Going downhill was easier than she’d expected. The weight of the backpack helped her keep her balance. And concentrating on each step kept the growing despair at bay.
She didn’t have much hope that they could do anything to get Jack out. She was convinced that they were walking straight into a trap from which none of them was coming out alive. But when she asked herself whether or not it would’ve been better not to know him, not to have gotten involved with him, and not to spend a gentle night on the beach with him, she knew that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. He’d given her something she hadn’t experienced before. A quiet strength that let her be just as she was. She knew deep inside, that with him, she’d never have to change one single thing about herself. Kasey realized that thinking about him made it both easier and harder for her, as it instilled the desperate longing in her to get him back, and at the same time comforting her with his memory.
When they were at the bottom, they passed the piece of old equipment. The conveyor belt had seen better days, and the rusty machine was overgrown with vines. From there, a sandy road led steadily uphill until it disappeared around another mound.
“We’re not far,” Blair said.
Kasey could hear the fear in his voice. Part of her wished that she hadn’t involved the others. Bringing them in put them in danger and she hated the thought of it.
“There’s someone ahead of us,” Jennifer said quietly.
They were halfway up the hill when Jennifer stopped. Kasey could see it now, too. Someone, or something, lay on the ground about forty feet away.
“It’s a child,” Jennifer said as she ran the last few feet and knelt next to it. They caught up with her and Kasey knelt down as well.
“He’s alive,” Jennifer said, feeling the boy’s pulse. Parts of his clothes were singed, there was what looked like dried blood everywhere. He was bleeding from multiple wounds on his arms and legs. Carefully, Jennifer turned the boy on his back. His face was swollen and bruised.
“Christopher,” he whispered. “Where’s Christopher?
When Kasey looked up, she saw another person lying on the side of the road about thirty feet away.
“Look over there,” Kasey said and got up.
“He was right behind me,” the boy said.
Jennifer and Kasey ran toward the other child. Before they got there, Kasey already knew that he was dead. He had a large wound in his abdomen. Jennifer took his pulse. She shook her head no.
“He’s gone.”
They went back to the others. Aarika was giving the boy sips of water from the bottle.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“Where’s Christopher?” the boy asked. “He was right behind me when we came through.”
Jennifer took the boy’s hand.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“John J. But everyone calls me Johnny.”
Kasey saw that his eyes couldn’t focus anywhere.
“You’re in shock. Just lay still,” Jennifer said. She sat down next to him, stroking his hair.
“What happened?”
“Hm?”
“What happened to you and your friend?”
“Where is he? Is he all right? He was right behind me. I saw him behind me when we went through the fog.”
“What fog?” Aarika asked.
“Up there,” Johnny lifted his arm weakly and pointed toward the mound of sand to their right.
“Where did you come from?”
“I… Christopher he… he saved me. He got me out, got all of us out. He saved us. He saved us all.”
His eyelids fluttered.
“Johnny, stay with us!” Jennifer wet her hands from the water bottle and patted his face. “Stay with me!”
“Where am I?”
“You’re on Long Island,” Kasey said. She couldn’t stop the tears from coming. “Where did you come from?”
“Texas.”
The others exchanged a glance.
“Texas?” Blair said.
“It’s so dark. Why is it so dark? Is anybody there?”
“We’re here,” Kasey said. She gently took his hand in hers. It was a child’s hand. Small and fragile. “We’re here with you. Don’t be afraid. We won’t go anywhere, okay?”
Johnny looked at Kasey. At least she thought he looked at her. But he couldn’t see her anymore and soon he stopped breathing altogether. Jennifer felt his pulse and shook her head. She looked at her watch.
“Time of death, 05:10 a.m.,” she said quietly. She closed the boy’s eyes with the tips of her fingers and then wiped the tears from her own face.
They stayed there for a while. Nobody spoke. This, whatever this was, had claimed another life. Two lives. And young ones.
“We should lay them together,” Blair said. “They were friends, we should let them… rest together. Rest in peace together.”
The others nodded. Blair lifted the boy up and carried him to his friend and put him down gently. He started to cry.
“This could’ve been me. Thirty years ago, this could’ve been me. I had a friend like Christopher.”
Aarika put his hand on Blair’s shoulder. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
They sat there for a while.
“Should we say a prayer?” Blair asked.
“If you want to,” Jennifer said.
“I don’t know any.”
Jennifer nodded. “May they stand with all the angels,” she said quietly, “who know Your love and praise Your saving will. Amen.”
“Amen,” Blair said while making the sign of the cross.
“Amen,” Aarika said.
“Amen,” Kasey said.
Kasey’s eyes met Jennifer’s.
“Let’s find your friend,” Jennifer said. “And get him back.”
They got up wordlessly and walked up the sandy road. At the top, to their right, the fog masked another plateau next to a large mound of shale. It was thick and impossible to penetrate with the eyes.
“What did he mean by ‘they came out of the fog’?” Blair asked.
“I don’t know,” Kasey said.
From here, they could see the contours of the warehouse behind the fence.
“Is that it?” Kasey asked.
“Yes,” Blair answered.
Kasey had been afraid for her life only once before today. While she was surfing in high winds, she’d fallen off the board and the undercurrent had dragged her to the bottom. She had lost her sense of whether she was up or down and she couldn’t find the surface. She’d thought then that she’d die. Today was different. She wasn’t fighting for her life and wasn’t in immediate danger at this very moment. But the fear was just the same. It w
as the sense that she would not survive. She could feel the heat of it in her chest and upper abdomen. Jennifer must have noticed something because she put her hand on Kasey’s shoulder.
“I’ve gone into some pretty dicey situations, especially during my second tour,” she said. “Fear is a constant companion, believe me, I know. But you can lessen it.”
“How?”
“Focus on your fellow soldiers. Be there for them. Look out for them. And you’ll see, the fear will become less.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.”
“You’re doing great.”
“Thank you.”
Kasey had never met a warrior until she met Jennifer. From her radiated a calmness and surety that spread to the group. She’d read once that there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to do whatever it was the other asked you to without thought, with total trust.
They left the sandy road and moved toward what was left of the fence. Vines had covered it over the years and had pulled parts of it to the ground. The warehouse behind it didn’t look much better. Kasey’s hope that Jack could be in there sank. It looked utterly abandoned. Many of the narrow windows higher up were broken. Some were covered in fading plywood. Others were left intact, and had been like that for a decade it seemed. The surrounding grounds were overgrown with weeds and thorny bushes.
“Doesn’t look like anyone has been here in ages,” Kasey said. She suddenly couldn’t believe that she put all her hopes of getting Jack back into a single piece of information off a license plate. But what she saw and what she felt were two different things altogether. If her fear was any indication, there was something in this warehouse and the closer they came, the surer she was.
“There’s an entrance on the other side,” Blair said. “At least there was.”
They slowly made their way around the building. Blair reached the opening first. The overgrown metal door hung half off its hinges. It was rusty and covered in graffiti. From there, they entered a small room. The walls were black with mold. The smell made Kasey gag. It was sweet as it crawled up her nose and left a sour aftertaste when she breathed out. Kasey had never smelled death before.
“Someone died here,” Jennifer said.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the smell of a dead person.”
“Could it be an animal?” Blair asked.
“Yes. But it would have to be a big one.”
The ground was covered with a slimy substance. It reminded Kasey of decomposing leaves. The door on the other side of the room was shut. When they got there, she put her hand on the rusty doorknob and pulled. Nothing happened at first, but on the second try, the door opened with a screeching sound. So much for keeping this a surprise.
Kasey saw several things at once. Ahead of her, about fifty feet away and in the center of the huge space, knelt Jack. His hands were tied to a pole above his shoulders. He looked pathetic and even though Kasey had steeled herself in preparation for this moment, the shock made her gasp.
The second piece of information had to do with the light, or the lack thereof. The sun had risen at that point and the windows high up should have illuminated most of the space. The area beyond the circle of light that surrounded Jack, however, lay in impenetrable darkness. Kasey couldn’t see anything beyond that. Except the dark red glow of a dozen skeletons.
Blood Riders
She caught them in the wild — the mustangs — as they flew across the plain, free as only wild horses can be. The rangers she had hired for the job came from the surrounding farms. They were fathers and sons, workers and stable hands. She offered them one month’s pay for a single day’s work.
The horses had grazed high up on a plateau overlooking the Rio Grande as it gently flowed in the setting sun, a sliver of gold in the dry landscape below. The rangers were experienced folk. They had dealt with horses all their lives. The steep cliffs on one side made it easy to steer the herd downstream and into a makeshift corral. It hadn’t been there yesterday. And tomorrow, if an accidental hiker had passed it, he’d have thought it was abandoned years ago — the wood of the fence decayed, the buildings fallen in. And he would’ve felt an emptiness inside, as if his heart had been vacated and made lonely. Until he’d pass it and, on his way out of the valley, not even remember encountering this place. He’d have thought it a trick his mind played if he’d seen the fog at the end of the meadow as it crawled low to the ground, circling slowly, glowing with an orange light.
Branding. Each of the rangers knew his way around it, was familiar with every step in the process. At the end of the corral, the fence abutted a small barn. The rangers led the horses in one by one — one horse with one ranger. The rangers thought their jobs would be completed less than an hour later. Once the horses were branded and led into the corral beyond the barn, they would receive their pay for a job well done.
But the rangers were deceived.
She waited inside, next to a squeeze chute, a branding iron resting in glowing embers. First, she would push the iron deep into the horse’s flank and when she took it away, the scorched image of a black dragon coiling around itself had been burnt into the horse’s skin. The horse’s screams fueled her senses and when she was done with it, she would grab the ranger by his throat, pulling him against the bars of the chute. They wanted to cry out but their voices abandoned them as they looked into the abyss. And the abyss looked back at them as she pushed the branding iron into the center of their chests.
She did this with each rider and each horse, and when she was done, the riders mounted their horses in the corral on the other side. She opened the gate at the most westerly end. Horses and riders pushed through the grass past the gate and into the open field. And while they rode — forty-four riders on forty-four horses — at full speed across the plain and toward the orange fog, the unsuspecting eye would have caught a transformation of utterly disturbing proportion.
The horses had changed. Now infused with the evil of their host, they cried out in pain as their legs, flesh and skin and bone, transformed into machine. And what entered the fog were horses no longer. The rangers, void of any past emotion, their families forgotten, their loved ones obliterated from their mind, had become something utterly displaced — imbued with an evil will that was not their own. Their thirst for blood gave them their name.
And power was given unto them to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.
Sunday, 5:42 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.
Kasey squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. The red glow in the darkness across from where Jack was kneeling was still there. She counted about a dozen but suspected there were more to her left and outside her field of vision. She took a step back. Her brain was unable to process the information. It was too much. Her emotional state didn’t allow for more input. She was shutting down. Something in her gave up, and the part of her that wanted to save Jack simply drowned in the terror she felt. It was as if she stared into a chasm of incomprehensible fear.
“They’re here,” she whispered.
“Who?” Jennifer whispered back.
“The riders. About a dozen. Maybe more.”
“How is that possible?”
“Stay here,” she said quietly. “Don’t follow me. Under any circumstances.”
She didn’t know what made her step forward. It was something inside her that she had no connection with. It was a part of her so deeply buried she had only gotten in touch with it through fragmented dreams in the past.
“Jack?” she said as she walked toward him. She saw him shake his head no. “Jack!”
She saw the glowing skeletons to her left and slightly behind her as well. Two dozen. She doubted the others could see them, could see anything other than complete darkness there.
She ran the last ten feet and knelt in front of him. His face was deeply bruised. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the other looked at her. Kasey saw hope in it, and despair.
“I’m so sorr
y,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”
Her heart broke when she saw his tortured body up close. His right rib cage was black and blue and covered with dried blood. He could barely hold himself up.
“They want the amulet,” he said. His voice cracked. “They want you to take it off and give it to them. For some reason, they can’t touch it.”
“Jack, I’m getting you out,” she said quietly. And while she said it, she reached around his neck with both hands, unlocked the amulet and put it around her own neck.
“Better they leave you out of this,” she said.
“Kasey!”
The voice behind her sounded both familiar and utterly strange. When Kasey turned, she had no idea what to expect. Nothing could have prepared her for this.
Out of the shadows stepped a child. Kasey couldn’t see more than a silhouette at first. The child was about eight years old, she guessed. Her long blond hair was straight and fell over her shoulders. She was wearing a flowery dress. Kasey remembered that dress. She had grown out of it about five years ago, but before that, she wore it almost every day during the summers.
“Kasey,” her younger self said.
In her peripheral vision, she noticed that the others had stepped out of the small room and were moving toward them.
“Remember me?” young Kasey asked.
There was something so real about this. Not just the girl’s appearance but her emotional footprint was undeniable. Kasey knew this girl was herself. There was no doubt. The question how this was even possible didn’t register. Kasey had kept pictures of herself when she was younger but they were all part of a past that was gone and no longer part of her.
“I’d like you to give me my amulet back,” young Kasey said. “I had it first.”
“Don’t give it to her,” Jack said from behind her. “That’s not you.”
“Silence!” the younger Kasey screamed. Then she smiled again. “You’re a thief and a liar, Kasey. You know that. You lied to our parents all the time. You lied to them when they asked you where you were when you skipped school. You lied to them when you told them nothing happened with that boy. Remember Richie? You lied about him.”
