Jackals

by Charles L. Grant

  Jim and Maurice still hadn’t moved.

  The engine rumbled.

  Her eyes began to bum from staring too long. She rubbed them quickly with the back of one hand, and didn’t say a word when Jim whispered to her, “Watch,” and stepped around his open door, rifle at the ready.

  She checked out the back and saw nothing but black; it was no use trying to spot anything beyond the shoulders; she could only watch as the two men approached the white car, one cautious step at a time. She had no idea how many others were in Peter’s car, but she assumed they were doing the same thing.

  The engine rumbled.

  She felt herself shaking and pressed against the back of Jim’s seat, gripping it with her free hand until her fingers ached. She licked her lips. She swallowed. She almost cried out when, as the two men were midway between Jim’s car and the Caddy, the Caddy’s engine suddenly bellowed, whined, rear tires spinning and smoking for purchase on the blacktop.

  There was no time to duck.

  Gunshots and fire.

  The Caddy lurched side to side, not getting far at all before it dove nose first into the ditch on the right.

  Without thinking, she pushed the seat forward and scrambled out while Jim and Maurice walked forward, slowly. She could see no marks on the white vehicle’s surface, but the tires she could see were shredded.

  The passenger door swung open.

  Jim stopped.

  Maurice moved on, angling toward the far shoulder.

  A dark figure split the headlamps of Peter’s car.

  The engine died.

  She heard the laughter.

  Soft. and mocking, more than one, more than two.

  There was a woman in there.

  Oh God, she thought, grabbing the doorframe to hold herself up. Her legs felt weak, the gun too heavy.

  A man slipped awkwardly out of the white car, fell to one knee on the slope and shook his head, long hair slapping his arms as he pulled himself upright.

  She held her breath.

  She heard the laughter, and saw movement inside.

  Creaking metal told her another door had opened.

  The man tried to stand normally, but the slope defeated him and he leaned back against the door, legs wide and braced. His face was gaunt and unshaven, his body lean. He gripped the top of the door.

  He smiled.

  Rachel froze.

  “I see the fawn,” he said, looking straight at her.

  A dark figure settled in the doorway, but she couldn’t see more than a blond head, a plaid shirt.

  He looked at Jim. “You ruined my car.”

  Jim didn’t answer.

  The creak of the driver’s door opening.

  “Don’t, lady!” she heard a man’s voice warn from somewhere down the road.

  “Stay put,” the standing man said calmly.

  Rachel wanted to see where Maurice had gone, but she didn’t want to move her head, barely dared to breathe. But she couldn’t help thinking that this was the man who had pushed her over the Ridge; this man, or someone else in there, was the one who had nearly killed her.

  The man took a slow breath. “Now what, Scott?”

  The firing began.

  Someone on the other side darted into the light, and was slammed to the ground by a shotgun’s blast. By the time Rachel’s startled scream escaped, there were more guns, glass shattering, the standing man on his hands and knees and toppling, the blond falling headfirst into the ditch, his legs still inside.

  It didn’t last very long.

  And when it was over, acrid smoke curled and hovered in the headlights and the moonlight.

  Rachel sat heavily on the ground, looked at her hand, grimaced, and tossed the gun into the car. She watched Jim approach the Caddy, the bodies, rifle down at his side. Maurice stepped into the light from the far side, and the other man, Peter, joined him. They shook hands, solemnly: a meeting, not congratulations.

  Jim stepped over the dead man on the slope and peered into the car. He straightened. “Four,” he said, no inflection m his voice.

  Four. Rachel thought numbly; four.

  It seemed like more.

  Maurice and Peter joined him as he walked around the trunk. Peter was not quite as tall as Jim, dark hair and dark mustache, his legs thick in tight jeans. They spoke quietly, just the sounds not the words reaching Rachel as she hauled herself to her feet. swayed, and grabbed the door.

  Jim saw her.

  She shook her head: stay away, please stay away.

  He beckoned.

  She shook her head again.

  The smoke was gone, but the smell of gunpowder remained.

  Jim handed his weapon to Peter and started over, and even in the car lights’ glare, she could see the lines and the weariness in his face, in his eyes. He stumbled once, recovered, and gave her a sickly grin.

  He stayed by the front bumper. “You’re in shock,” he said simply.

  She found her voice: “Shock?” She pointed at the bodies, unable to stop the shaking. “I’m an accomplice, for Christ’s sake! You murdered them!”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “In an hour none of this will be here. Less. You’re an accomplice to nothing.”

  She wanted to sit again. She swung herself around and dropped onto the front seat, lowering her head, clasping her quaking hands between her thighs. She heard him come around the car, felt him hunker down in front of her, heard him breathing, felt him watching.

  “Modeens,” he said softly.

  She couldn’t look, but her attitude said, you killed them.

  The sound of a car’s engine and, oddly, a truck’s.

  She didn’t look, not even when she was sure she heard a woman’s voice.

  I will not pass out, she ordered, and stared at the road, at one small pebble poking out of the tarmac, until her eyes began to water; I will not pass out.

  I will not cry.

  Footsteps and grinding gears.

  Without moving her head, she met Jim’s gaze. “I didn’t think you’d … he didn’t have a gun or anything.” It was a plea more than an accusation. “He just stood there.”

  The sound of a winch, of groaning metal; whispered voices.

  “Rachel,” he said at last, “let me tell you about the jackals.”

  Chapter Ten

  I’ve never believed, not after what I’ve seen these past few years, that people are really all that much different than animals. Call it God’s plan, call it evolution, I don’t know and I don’t care, there are animals out here and they live in houses instead of dens and they like to pretend they’re not the same as their pets or the things they see in their zoos or on TV or in the movies.

  Maybe they aren’t.

  Maybe they are.

  But some of them ride mostly with the night.

  On your way here, Rachel, you saw it more than once, I know you did—those cars on the side of the road, late at night, white cloth hanging from a door handle or a window, signaling for help from the cops or a passing trucker.

  Maybe they’re just sitting there, and maybe it doesn’t look like anyone’s inside.

  You drive by, maybe you think God, I’m glad that’s not me, and you go on. You don’t stop, probably, and so you don’t know if there’s really anyone there, in the car, waiting for someone to fix the engine or fix a flat.

  Most of them are for real, and two seconds after you pass, some poor guy’s cursing you and yours for not stopping, lending him a hand.

  Some aren’t.

  They’re the ones not near any real light.

  They’re the ones where you can’t hardly tell the color, and the windows look black, and it doesn’t look like there’s any trouble, but you can never tell, it could be a blown hose, something like that. Sometimes the hood’s up, sometimes you catch a glimpse of a jack and tire iron near the back, sometimes there’s a kid sitting in the grass.

  It’s quick.

  In and out of your headlights so fast, you’re not
even sure you saw what you saw.

  But if you had stopped, five minutes later the place would be empty, no cars, no people.

  You’d be dead, Rachel.

  They’d say: Just one more stupid woman, out alone when she shouldn’t be.

  That’s dangerous, though, the lures like that. Sometimes people fight back, sometimes they’re a little stronger than they look.

  The lures are mostly winter rules, when people stay inside.

  Most of the time they cruise the back roads, the small towns, the hollers when they’re down here in the South. They mostly keep away from the cities. Too many people.

  No; too many strong people.

  I’m not sure how to explain it because I’m not really sure myself, but there are times when I think … I think they can smell death on you. Not that you’re dying, cancer or something, but that you’re just not ready to go on living anymore. It all has to do with weakness. Physical weakness. Mental weakness. It doesn’t matter if you’re old, if you’re like me, if you’re a kid. Weakness, that’s all.

  Carrion.

  Walking, breathing carrion.

  Herds are a society, did you know that? There’s good guys and bad guys in zebras and lions and whatever you can think of. Sounds dumb, but it’s true.

  Herds have their garbagemen, too. I know you know that. Sometimes they work alone, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in packs and flocks. Vultures, buzzards, crows, you name it. Hyenas.

  Jackals.

  Picking off the dying. Taking care of the dead.

  They circle around, staying just out of reach, keeping mostly to the shadows where they can wait, where they can watch.

  The herd doesn’t care. It can’t survive, dragging the weak and the old and dying with it all the time.

  Trouble is, jackals, like hyenas, don’t always follow the rules.

  Trouble is, Rachel, when they’re hungry, they gotta eat.

  They ride mostly at night.

  They hunt mostly at night.

  They find … they find a kid, not even twenty-five, like Maryanne Scott, her car broken down in some godforsaken place in Kentucky, south of Lexington. She reckons the folks that finally stop, they’re going to help her with her car, a junker that shouldn’t have even been on the road in the first place. She doesn’t know. Nobody knows. She doesn’t care, either, because she’s had a hell of a battle with her family, and she’s going to prove every damn one of them wrong, by God, and then, when she’s proven it, when she makes it on her own, she’s going to ram it down their throats and laugh while they choke. Especially her pig-headed brother who thinks he knows it all.

  The police found her before they were done with her.

  She’d been skinned chest to knees.

  Lord, parts of her were gone.

  One of the cops, an older guy just hanging around ’til he could get his pension, head for Arizona, he met me in a bar after the funeral. We got drunk, I guess, talked about just about everything. You know, it helps being rich, but it helps more looking like I do. You put a tailored suit on me, I look like a clown; stick me in a pair of jeans, I’m one of the guys. I’m not young enough to look stupid, not old enough for folks to think I’m one step away from senility and drooling.

  So we talked.

  Next night we talked again.

  Third night we were practically friends, damn near brothers, and the bar was empty, nothing going on the jukebox, and he says to me, fella, they ain’t never gonna catch the guys that did this.

  He tells me why, and tells me why no one’s gonna believe me if I make a stink, make a holler, try to warn the whole damn world what’s going on, in the dark.

  I figured he was drunk, that’s all.

  I kept asking around.

  I spread money, posted a reward, took a practically permanent room in a motel and generally made myself so unpopular, the local cops were ready to run me in on general principles, just to get me the hell out of their way.

  One night the old guy comes to the door. Get the hell up, he says, and come with me.

  I did.

  He was off-duty, and we drove for over an hour, maybe two, him not answering my questions, and I stopped asking after a while. Eventually we came up this road in the hills, and he slowed down, not much faster than a walk. He says he heard they were around this week, but he wouldn’t tell me who.

  I thought he was drunk again.

  He was shaking like a leaf.

  Then we come down into this valley mostly farms and such, and he tells me that when we get back to the motel, he wants ten grand. I got pissed. I thought he was shaking me down, and I almost laughed because he was a little bigger than me, but my hands were free. I couldn’t lose.

  Ten grand, he says again.

  Why?

  Because when I show you this shit, I’m heading out West and I ain’t corning back.

  I didn’t know what in hell he was talking about, and I tried to tell him I don’t pay that kind of money for extortion, not from a guy like him.

  Then I saw something in the field off to the left.

  Something running.

  Something large.

  He saw it too, kind of sucked in his breath, and pulled a gun from under his shirt.

  I figured I was a dead man.

  He’d stop the car, his buddies would come out of the bushes, and I was a dead man.

  But he didn’t stop.

  And that dog, which is what I figured it was, ran through the high grass, too far away for me to make out much more than a vague shape.

  It angled toward the road.

  The cop rolled down his window.

  Then I saw another one, this one on the right, and two more beyond it.

  The cop asks me if I can shoot, I tell him I can, pretty good, and he tells me to get the gun he’s got in the glove compartment. I did.

  There were five of them now, two on one side. Those three on the other.

  Large.

  They weren’t dogs, but they were running on all fours.

  Then one of them leaps the fence, hits the middle of the road, and stands up.

  The cop stopped, and I thought I’d gotten drunk myself.

  It was a man.

  He stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips like he was daring us to do something. Smiling. Standing there, just smiling, and shaking his head.

  You ever hear the expression, scared spitless?

  It happens.

  I was.

  When the car rolled up a little, the headlights caught him full in the face.

  His eyes glowed white, the white spreading a little over his face.

  Not a pretty white or a soft white, not even the kind of white you think about when you think about ghosts.

  Moon white.

  Dead white.

  Then he laughed.

  So did the others.

  Then the cop turns to me, points a finger and says, jackals, sticks his left hand out the window at the same time and fires a shot, then jams his foot on the pedal. The man … the jackal … I don’t think he was hit, or hit badly, but he got out of the way damn fast.

  When we went by him, I turned to look, maybe get off a shot of my own.

  But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  He was kneeling on the shoulder, the others standing back behind the fence.

  That red glow from the taillights caught them all.

  Their eyes still glowed white.

  End of story.

  I’ve been down here ever since.

  Like I told you, it’s what I do.

  I hunt jackals.

  Chapter Eleven

  He rocked back on his heels and searched her face for belief, or disgust, or something in between.

  She said, “Are they …?” She rubbed her cheeks harshly with her palms, pushed he hands back through her hair. “Are they human?”

  He reached down and grabbed a stone, tossed it up and caught it, then flung it away over his shoulder with a hard sn
ap of his wrist.

  “Well?”

  He used the door to help him to his feet. “What does it matter? You saw them.”

  Her look told him that wasn’t an answer.

  He looked over at the spot where the Caddy had been, where the bodies had been. Empty, now, except for Maurice walking toward him.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But yes. I think they are.” They ride mostly with the night.

  Chapter Twelve

  The living room was warm, one lamp glowing. Rachel was in her room, James in the shower, and Maurice stood at the window, hands clasped behind him, watching Nola leave her car, a cardigan caped over her shoulders, her waitress uniform still on.

  His jacket was off, tossed onto one of the chairs, and as she headed short-stride for the porch, his thumbs hooked around the tartan suspenders he used not to hold his pants up but to give his fingers something to do besides trace webs in the air. He stared through his reflection, but he saw it anyway; he didn’t like it. It was a ghost.

  Nola’s hurried footsteps on the redwood flooring only made his jaw twitch; he didn’t turn. He believed, when times were calm and all he had was his church and his children to lead through the times that made them cry, that what he did with James wasn’t wrong. Even scavengers were prey. But each time it happened, the fire and the smoke and blood painted on the ground, he doubted; each time it happened, he returned to his house and went down to the cellar. There was a room there, made by his own hand, with no windows and no light. He would sit there on a stool, the door closed and locked. His angels locked him in. They would not release him, not even if he screamed.

  When he screamed.

  Which he did when the jackals came through the walls and stood before him, watching, weeping, begging him with their eyes to understand how it was and how it had to be, demanding he pay penance, showing him the Hell he had carved for himself.

  Every time.

  And every time he screamed, but only when the children spat at him and cursed.

  “How many?” Nola asked quietly, slightly out of breath.

  He held up four fingers.

  “Modeens?”

  He nodded.

  She dropped onto the couch; he could see her ghost too, below him in the glass. “Peter called. He told me about Charlie.” She looked around, leaned over and rubbed one ankle. “He’s in the bathroom?”