by Terry Yates
He hit the ground hard. Whoever it was had fallen with him and was lying on his back and hanging on for dear life, their hot breath blowing on his cheek. In a blind panic, Kyler began to twist and squirm and contort his body, trying to crawl out from the thing’s grasp. He knew it was human, because he could feel its arms as he tried to wriggle free. Finally, he managed to squeeze through the arms and roll onto his back. The top of the person’s head was around his waist now, still clinging desperately to him. The face was buried in his thighs, but he saw black hair. Whoever it was, was no match for Kyler’s fear and sheer panic. Kyler reached into the back of his pants. Shit! The pistol was gone! He must’ve lost it in the hospital when he fell into the mud. He sat up on his elbows and managed to loosen one leg. As he reared back his shoeless foot, the head turned up toward him. It was the stranger. One eye was purple and there were cuts and contusions all over his face. He gritted his teeth as tried to hang on to the doctor.
“Stop!” the stranger grunted. “Stop!”
One thing that Kyler did notice was that the man seemed weaker than he had been when he’d wrestled with him the night before. Much weaker. He’d seen the man bash two soldiers together and take on another six people before finally being subdued.
“I said sto…” The stranger didn’t get to finish his sentence because Kyler sent the heel of his free foot into the man’s jaw, causing his head to snap back. Then he kicked him again…and again…and again…until Kyler felt the man’s grip loosen on his other leg. He got his second leg free. The stranger looked up to say something again, but the young doctor was just too scared and began to pummel the man’s face with both feet while trying to crawl away from him. Left foot! Right foot! Left foot! Right foot, until the man finally relinquished his hold. Kyler crawled away from the man, turned over, got to his feet and began to run, not remembering to look down for sharp debris. He was going to get the hell out of there.
“Stop!” the man yelled. “I’m not going to hurt you!”
You got that right, Junior, Kyler thought to himself. You’re not gonna get the chance.
“Please!”
As he ran, Kyler looked back over his shoulder. The stranger continued to lie on his stomach, his head doing everything it could to keep eye contact with him.
“Please!” With this, the man dropped his head face down into the gravel. Kyler stopped moving. He could see now that the man was shirtless and shoeless. The only piece of clothing that he wore was a pair of army fatigue pants like everyone else was wearing. He’d seen the man…or the werewolf, pant less the night before, so he was curious as to where he might have found another pair.
He watched the stranger for a moment. He could see dirt and dust blowing around the man’s mouth as he panted hard. The doctor himself had a good pant going as well. He could feel his heart beating through his ears.
He stood there, never taking his eyes off of the stranger. He had seen what this man could do. He had watched him kill Burt Burns and for the most part, Nurse Walling. He had killed Pvt. Gibson and another half-dozen soldiers. His gut told him to run…run fast, and find Potts and the other soldiers and let them deal with him, but seeing the man prone like this, he felt like he didn’t have to run away. If the man were still capable of doing the things that he’d seen him do last night, he wouldn’t have been able to get away from him.
“You killed my nurse last night!” Kyler said, breaking the short silence. “And the old man named Burt Burns! You killed them…after they tried to help you!”
The man continued to pant for a moment before finally raising his head up again.
“I’m sorry,” he replied weakly. “I didn’t want to.”
The stranger dropped his head again. Kyler wasn’t sure what to say. He no longer felt threatened by the man, but he didn’t want to get any closer. There was something about this situation that seemed eerily close to one of those ancient children’s stories where a monster convinces the little boy or girl that he’s harmless and would they please unlock his chains, only to find out afterwards that he’d been tricking them all along.
Kyler cautiously took a few steps toward the man and stopped. “Why should I help you?” he asked.
The man paused for a moment, his head still on the ground. “Because you’re a healer,” he answered, as if he’d carefully chosen the right words.
“But you’re not. You’re a destroyer of lives.”
“Only when the moon is full…and then I can’t help what I do. I don’t even know that I’m doing it.”
Normally Kyler would’ve thought the man insane. He would’ve been just one of those crazy people that was normal in the daytime, but at night became a stalker and a predator, but after the last two days and nights, everything about truth and knowledge and legend and fact, had been re-written in stone.
Kyler moved up another eight or nine feet, until he could see the man completely from the side. The man looked almost unable to even move. Kyler slowly sat down on the ground, keeping a good distance between himself and the stranger. The stranger moved his eyes to meet Kyler’s. There was a pleading look in the man’s brown eyes. He couldn’t tell if the eyes were pleading for mercy, compassion, aid, or just pleading for someone to sit with him for a while.
“Thank you,” he said, closing his eyes for a moment, before opening them again.
He slowly pushed his body up. To Kyler, he looked like someone who had just finished his five hundredth pushup, his arms and chest up, but his lower half stuck to the ground. He struggled for a moment before finally making it to his hands and knees. Kyler watched as exhaustion caused him to drop his head and shoulders back to the ground while his butt remained in the air. Finally the man rolled onto his side and managed to prop himself up on his elbow where he stayed for a few seconds, once or twice glancing at Kyler to make sure that he was still there. Kyler was still there, but nervous. He didn’t want to be duped by someone whom he thought was weak and in pain, only to find them springing at him like a lion on a pheasant.
The stranger finally managed to get just high enough to make it into a sitting position. He kept his head down, seemingly trying to catch his breath. The doctor kept a wary eye on him the whole time. After what felt like an eternity, the stranger looked up and into Kyler’s eyes.
“Who are you?” Kyler had decided to come straight to the point. He saw no use in a nice friendly chat just then.
The man started to speak again, but instead, closed his mouth and put his nose to the air. He crinkled his nose in disgust.
“You stink,” he told Kyler.
“You ain’t exactly a bouquet of tulips…especially at night.” Kyler wasn’t in the mood to take even werewolf shit at that point.
The man nodded, getting the point. “I don’t know where to start,” he said, a look of confusion on his face.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
The stranger let out a loud and hardy laugh, his head falling backwards, his face turned to the sky.
“If I started at the beginning, my friend, we’d be here all day.”
He continued to laugh at Kyler, who was about two more chuckles from getting up and leaving the man to his own devices. Noticing this, the stranger immediately stopped laughing, his face returning to normal again. The two men now sat facing each other, no more that eight feet apart. Kyler sat cross-legged while the stranger sat, one knee bent, which he hugged with one arm, while the other leg extended straight out. He kept the other hand on the ground, balancing himself. The doctor could see that the man was in pain. More small, round, purple dots covered his body where the soldiers’ bullets had hit him. He had to give it to Potts. His men were trained well. There must’ve been eighty to a hundred of these little dots. They couldn’t have missed too many times. Where the bullet marks didn’t seem to be causing him any pain, he noticed that the man was rubbing the back of his calf while he sat. He hissed once or twice as if it were very tender. He also noticed what looked like to be torn skin on h
is forearm, as well as another chunk of torn skin on his ankle. He could see that the blood had not quite coagulated. Unless he got the marks just recently, they didn’t seem to be healing at an alarming rate like the bullet marks were. The stranger noticed Kyler looking at the torn skin, and quickly slapped his hand over his ankle, but not before wincing in pain once again.
“Are you in pain?” Kyler asked him, treading lightly.
The stranger studied his face for a moment, and then nodded his head. Kyler reached over for the pillowcase, not wanting to take his eyes off of the man, but would have to for at least a few seconds. He pulled the dirty pillowcase to him and felt around inside it, his eyes still on the stranger. He felt around for a few moments, searching for the Tylenol that he’d found in the hospital, but naturally he couldn’t find it with his hand. He could feel the bandages, the band-aids, the alcohol, the hydrogen peroxide, everything but the aspirin. He finally looked away from the man and down into the case, where he found the Tylenol wedged in one of the corners. He looked back up at the man as he retrieved it from the pillowcase. He tossed the plastic bottle to the man, who caught it one handed with unnatural dexterity. He tried to pull the cap from the bottle, but was struggling.
“You’ve got to line up the arrows,” he told him. “Child proof.”
He watched as the man squinted. “This is one modern day invention that I’ve never been happy with,” he said, smiling. After a moment, he popped the top from the pill bottle and turned it up. Kyler watched as maybe six aspirin went into his mouth while another dozen or so ran down his face and into the dirt. He could hear the aspirin being crunched between the man’s teeth as he chomped greedily on them. After a moment, Kyler watched as the man’s Adam’s apple began to move up and down as he swallowed the pills. He grimaced as the last of them went down his throat. The two men silently stared at one another. Kyler was going to make the stranger speak first. He’d asked him who he was and to start at the beginning, so the ball was in his court. Realizing this, the stranger spoke.
“My name…” he started, looking almost nervous about revealing himself. “Is Nicholas Klefka…originally Nicola. Nicola Klefka…but over the years, it’s become Nicholas.”
“Sounds Russian,” Kyler said, matter of fact.
“Very good, Doctor. I was born near modern day Stalin grad.
“What do you mean by modern day Stalin grad?”
The man smiled, impressed with Kyler’s wiliness. “Doctor, I was born in the year 1462 in a small village called Kravania.”
Now it was Kyler’s turn to smile. “You’re over five hundred and forty years old?”
Five-hundred and forty-nine to be exact. I’ll be five hundred and fifty this November.”
Kyler searched for the right response. “You don’t sound Russian,” he told him, not exactly happy with his comeback, but it would do in a pinch.
“When you live in the same place for one hundred and eighty-three years, you tend to pick up the accent.”
“Where’ve you been living for the last hundred and eighty-three years?”
“North America. New England mostly, but I’ve lived in Virginia, Georgia, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, and California. Also England, France, and Australia.”
“Assuming you are five hundred and fifty years, why are you…well, still alive?” Kyler asked him.
“Well, this is where it gets long, my friend.”
“I have time…that is until sundown, I guess. So, go on.”
“As I told you, I was born in Russia. My father was a peasant farmer. In America, he would’ve been considered successful. He always had good crops, but in Russia, ninety percent of the profits went to the Tsar. I had four older brothers. Tescha, Igor, Valentine, and Ivan. I also had two younger sisters, Anna and Sovia. I suppose we were happy as far as children go. Our mother was a very merry person. She saw the best in things. “Let the Tsar have the money!” she would say. “Who needs money?”
She was always bright and cheerful even till her dying day. I was thirteen years old when she died of pneumonia. Doctors didn’t come out to homes that couldn’t afford to pay. She was sick for weeks, always coughing and trying to take in air but the fluid in her lungs drowning her bit by bit. My brothers were away at the time. They had become tired of the Tsar and the tax collectors and the soldiers taking everything from us, and all of the families in and around our village. They formed an order I guess you would call it. The Knights of Kravania. Not very original, I know, but it’s the age-old story. They were simply fed up with things being the way they were. The rich getting richer while the poor remained poor.”
“Things don’t seem to have changed much, have they?” Kyler interrupted.
“No. Anyway, my brothers were all very skilled at fighting, both with weapons and barehanded. Many were the times when I saw the four of them take on twice their number in a fistfight. They were experts with swords, knives, bows, and horsemanship. They wanted to make things as hard for the Tsar, the tax collectors, and especially the landowners as they could make them.
“So, your brothers took on all of Russia?” Kyler asked smugly, not sure that he really believed the man.
Klefka laughed. “No. It started off with the four of them wreaking havoc over the countryside. They would relieve the tax collectors of their purses, rob the landowners in their carriages and then sneak into their homes before they returned, and would rob their homes, as well. They always…and only…took from the rich.”
“I suppose they gave it to the poor?” Kyler felt that he had heard this story before.
“Actually, yes…for the most part. They were very much like Robin Hood at first.”
“What happened?”
“The order grew. At first, it was just the four of them, and then a few cousins joined as well as many of the local men. Within a few years, there were several hundred Knights of Kravania. They continued to give to the poor and needy, but with so many soldiers, much of the money had to be spent on horses, weapons, and food. When the order was small, they were just thought of as pests, but as they grew, so did their…” He searched for the right word.
“Crimes?”
“Yes, I suppose you could call them crimes, even though we never really thought of them as crimes.”
“Nobody ever does.”
“I suppose you’re right. After a time, they began to steal horses and attack the Tsar’s men. Seldom did they hurt or kill anyone. Usually, they would ambush them, collect their money, weapons, and horses, and then left them unharmed. Over the years several of the Tsar’s men joined the order. Really.”
“So then what happened?” Kyler had begun to find all of this quite interesting. If the man hadn’t been there, he should’ve been, because he seemed to know the stories as if he’d been right there on the front lines.
“As time went by, the friendly little skirmishes became full scale battles. No one was ever really sure who drew first blood, but the order quit being thought of as pests and started being thought of as cutthroats, bandits, and murderers. The Tsar once had eleven of his own men killed to make it look like the order did it.”
“Wow.”
“Wow is right, my friend. The Tsar and the landowners would do anything to get rid of the Knights of Kravania. They would bribe some of the knights, or they would capture them and torture them into giving information of their whereabouts. The order flourished for years in spite of their treasonous companions. They were heroes to the common man. They never hurt the innocent or the poor, even though the Tsar’s men would burn complete villages in an attempt to blame it on the Order, but there were always witnesses somewhere who told the people what had actually happened. I couldn’t wait to join them, but they wouldn’t take me at first.”
“Because of your youth?” Kyler asked.
“Originally yes, but I was also the youngest boy in the family, and they didn’t want my father to possibly lose all of his sons, so they wouldn’t even take me once I was of age which was about
sixteen in those days.”
“But you did join?”
“Yes…after my father and sisters died in 1479.”
“They died in the same year?” Kyler asked, afraid they he already knew what was coming.
Nicholas Klefka slowly nodded his head.
“The Tsar?”
Klefka nodded again. “As with most wars, not all, but most, the one with the biggest army eventually wins. Very seldom do ten thousand men lose to two hundred, plus the bounties on their heads became larger. When people are starving, they generally don’t care who gives them money. They just take it, and give information.”
“So, people began to sell out the Order?”
“Yes…as you Americans have been saying for centuries…money talks. But there was one man…one Judas…who rode among the knights. He was loved and trusted by all of my brothers. He was our cousin Gregore. For reasons that would take too long to go into, Gregore told the army who the Knights of Kravania were. They had managed to keep their identities secret for years by wearing masks or hoods whenever they raided or burgled, but Gregore…” He stopped for a moment. He looked angry as if he were re-living it. “Gregore gave the army my father’s name. I was eighteen and working in the fields with my father when we saw the soldiers ride up to our farm. My father made me duck down in the field and told me that under no circumstances was I to move until I saw the soldiers ride away. My father walked up to our home to meet them, where he was summarily disemboweled. I actually witnessed his death. My two sisters were in the house as the soldiers killed my father. I watched as they entered the house. For the next twenty or thirty minutes, all I heard were screams coming from inside. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. My brothers were days away from our home so I couldn’t just go and get them. I wanted so badly to run up to the house and rescue my sisters, but I stayed where I was. My father had told me to stay, and he never said anything without a reason. He either didn’t want to lose his last son and for his name to die, or he just figured that the girls were dead once the soldiers rode up, and there was no use for me to run to the house with no weapon and fight twenty soldiers. He wanted me to stay because it was the sensible thing to do. My sisters were going to die because they were in the house and I wasn’t. That’s how it worked out.”
