by Neil Jackson
The bark felt rough to the touch of his fingers, unyielding; and yet somehow it comforted him with its ageless solid strength.
His whole trembling body oozed copious amounts of salty sweat; seemingly from every pore he had, giving any exposed surface of the skin an oily unpleasant layer of sheen.
The clouds of midges and other buzzing insects, those tiny hateful denizens of the forest closed in on him instantly, sensing the feast.
McKinney was too fatigued to even attempt to bat the miniature whining harpies away. He just let them be.
The young girl, Bobbie, who had been just a little way behind him in the tree festooned, nightmarish tangle, finally caught crashingly up to him scant seconds later, and she stumbled out of the tree line to join him.
She came to a faltering, swaying rest beside McKinney, and leaned her tall willowy form tremulously against his sodden arched back; the sounds of her breath dragging in and out were horribly tortured gasps.
McKinney, so exhausted, that even this simple act of elicited comfort from Bobbie was almost enough to push him wearily down to the forest floor.
With a supreme effort, he straightened up; forcing himself away from the cedar tree’s welcome respite and in doing so, shoved his female companion unceremoniously back and away from him.
However, with some slight vestige of chivalry, McKinney did manage to turn round in time to support the woman’s sagging form so she didn’t end up falling onto the moist mulch of the dank forest floor. That effortless act on her part would have meant certain death for the young woman.
They had to keep moving, McKinney instinctively realized. It was their only real hope of surviving this nightmare.
The others in the small study group that had once numbered twelve only a few hours earlier had foolishly tried to make a stand. They were now all gone.
McKinney believed in God. He did…in the Holy Father and his infinite mercy. So why had He let these appalling things happen to them? Why?
He attempted to close his mind off to the terrible ways in which he had seen and indeed heard his ten fellow theology students and their professors die. But McKinney couldn’t ever quite manage it somehow; the grotesque images and sounds of their awful deaths would not leave him. They echoed in his mind…ripples on a bottomless blood-red pool of abomination…horrors that no one should ever have to witness.
Guiltily it made him oddly glad though, in a bizarre way. Because it was that abhorrence and the utter dread of what he had witnessed, that had kept the young graduate student running…trying desperately to escape, despite his utter exhaustion.
The light was fading fast now, as it always appeared to on the Queen Charlotte Islands, even in the summer months.
First it was light, then came a barely perceived twilight that was quickly followed by a deep, stygian blackness.
And within that dark in the forest, McKinney now knew, there was contained a dreadfulness no one could ever have imagined. As the night began to swiftly creep and seep through the canopy of dense trees that surrounded them; his hopes began to wane with equal alacrity.
Oh God…they were going to die here, both of them. Screaming out in their death agony, just like the others, he thought.
He shook himself mentally…no, damn it, no! This wasn’t going to happen to them; or at least not to him. He had a home to go to. Dear close friends in his church; a family who truly loved him. His mother & father…two younger sisters… He was determined that he was going to see them all again, whatever he had to do to survive the terror that had been foisted upon them all.
McKinney willed himself to believe that he was going to live. He was going to live!
To purge any last negative thoughts of personal defeat from his mind, he shook Bobbie as hard as his remaining strength would allow. The young tall, wispy girl merely sagged even more dispiritedly within his arms. Indeed, the filthy and disheveled woman barely registered his violent action.
McKinney spoke roughly to her, his voice ragged with effort…a shouted horse-whisper from a throat dried out from lack of water and an excess of adrenalin and fear…
“Come on, Bobbie….we just have to keep moving. The Dinan Bay logging camp is close now, it has to be. It’s likely only a few short miles to reach it. We’ll be safe there. We can make it. Please don’t give up now…come on Bobbie, for Jesus Christ’s sake, come on…we can make it”!
His tirade ended and the girl finally now tilted her head up to look back and half acknowledge his presence. Bobbie’s once bright green eyes that has so allured McKinney since their freshman year at TXU, were now dull and dispirited. Almost lifeless, in fact; perhaps a precursor of the fate that she felt certain awaited her.
No real recognition was apparent within their dim depths, only cattle like resignation of what was to be. The girl slumped even further forward; she became a dead weight.
McKinney’s effort weakened muscles couldn’t support the woman’s burden any further. Without him propping her up, the haggard girl slowly collapsed to the soft ground like a tall yet slender felled young pine.
Once there, with finality, amongst the dead leaves and forest floor detritus, she briefly became animated once more curling herself up into a tight fetal ball; angular arms and legs tucked in to wait for what must inevitably follow. McKinney realized that Bobbie had now begun to inexplicably sing in a low, childlike voice. Her mind had obviously retreated back into her childhood…to a place where she felt the safest; where reassurance had always been within easy reach….it was pitiable and terrible and he could hardly bear to listen to her pathetic little voice:
“Jesus loves the little children…”
McKinney looked down at her huddled form with a feeling of incredible sadness. He knew that for his friend Bobbie, the long, hard struggle for life was obviously over and resigned himself to the fact that he’d done what he could to save her. But it certainly wasn’t over for him yet, and if he could save himself, he would.
With sphincter loosening suddenness, a soulless inhuman snigger came from somewhere close back in the darkening tree line. He could smell the rank stench that he now associated with violent death.
McKinney’s head shot up, wildly glaring into the gloom at the direction the awful sound had emanated from, attempting to see the threat that he could only smell and hear.
His legs suddenly found a life of their own. Without his conscious volition he took a diffident, foot dragging, backward step.
Then another. And another.
He had covered six hesitant steps in this manner when he stopped, frozen to the spot. A dimness seemed to detach itself from the deeper darks of the forest. A shadow that snaked out towards Bobbie’s tucked in feet. An amorphous yet unsubstantial mass that encompassed her exposed shins easily. Still singing in the wretched feeble childlike voice, the woman was very slowly, still in a fetal position, being dragged backward, off the logger’s trail and into the trees.
All McKinney could do was be a dumb, motionless witness to the terror that was unfolding before him. In the last few seconds, before the young woman’s face disappeared into the darkness, Bobbie seemed for the briefest second to come to herself and the enormity of what was actually happening to her. Her eyes, alive and animate once more locked with his. There was no mistaking the expression; she was desperately pleading with her friend to help her; to save her from the unspeakable thing that was pulling her away from him…but even that final plea was soon lost to him as she slid from view into the dark.
The last thing he saw of poor Bobbie was her starkly white arm and hand; her fingers now outstretched, clutching and clawing desperately but with an inevitable futility for any anchor she could find within the soft loam of the trail.
Something she could grab onto, some last purchase she could cling to, to prevent her from being dragged away to her own death.
At this last horrific sight, McKinney was suddenly freed from the invisible force that had rooted him to the spot. He turned on his heel and ran down the p
ath for his life.
The rough trail turned to the left, and at first and headed in a generally downward direction. The ambient daylight all around him was fast fading away now, as red dusk gave over blacking night; McKinney could barely see more than a few feet in front of him as he tore along.
But what his human eyes lacked, his ears made up for. They were pursuing him in earnest now he realized in terror. No longer content toying with their prey, they were combining to bring him down quickly.
He could hear their massive scampering forms crashing within the trees in the blackness; their unclean stink gagged him, cloying his nostrils with the odor of corruption, blood, feces and death.
The knowledge that they weren’t as yet in front of him as far as he could tell spurred the young student on to fresh effort.
That logging camp had to be close now. Please God…It had to be! Please let it be!
The path suddenly took an unexpectedly sharp turn to the right, then started up a gentle incline that seemed frustratingly to get steeper and yet steeper with each passing second, slowing McKinney down considerably. The trees on either side of the trail seemed to crowd into him, filtering out what little light there was. Darkness was nearly upon him, metaphorically and literally. He just couldn’t physically go on much further.
His heart was now pounding so hard in his ears, he thought it might actually burst from his efforts. The air that McKinney was now forcing in and out of his lungs had a consistency that made it like a torturing liquid fire; molten, heavy and scalding to the abused delicate tissues within his ribcage. It was an agony to pull it in and out of his wheezing chest. He noticed, dully, that he could now taste the coppery flavor of blood at the back of his throat.
Then with a suddenness that was like a switched on light in a darkened room he realized he had staggered to the apex of the path.
He was groggily looking down with a hazy, blurred vision into the dark of a small but steep valley.
There were lights down there! Bright shining fixed points of light, more beautiful to him than the brightest or most majestic star in the black velvet heavens! It was the lights of the Logging Camp! He’d found it, thank the Lord…He could still actually make it!
With only the briefest of hesitations he stumbled forward once more, willing his leaden legs and numbed body into one final last ditch effort.
He was beyond pain now he was an automaton; a flawed mechanical being of torn muscles and bloodied flesh that could only limp along.
McKinney had become a creature with one single abiding thought; just one purpose to his whole existence…to reach the safety of the Dinan Bay camp.
Then he was on the ground.
He realized he could taste the rich earth of the worn trail in his mouth because he was face down on it.
He had collapsed because the wrenched muscles and torn ligaments of his abused body would no longer obey his insistent brains instructions to move. McKinney just lay there, the spirit was no longer willing; and the flesh was very, very weak.
He smelt them. He heard them. They were literally all around him now. He closed his eyes in terror of what he knew must now come; but part of him was relieved.
God would have him soon enough now.
The growls were soft, almost human...almost.
He felt an enormous elemental strength lift him up high by just his left arm. The shoulder joint instantly dislocated, but McKinney was too much in shock to even scream. He dangled for a few seconds being shaken like a rag doll; then he was on the ground once more.
His face was planted back firmly in the earth of the trail…but now that soil was muddy, wet, nauseating even. He could feel it warm and gluey against his cold skin. He weakly opened his eyes to look. With horror he took in that the reason he now lay in thick sludge. Even in this light he could see that his own blood had provided the medium to make it that way. His torn off left arm, ragged and ripped at the socket end, lay just a few feet from him.
Before he could fully take that entire gruesome discovery in, something was yanking at his wet denim jeans, moving his torn away limb from his line of sight…tearing and stripping away the last vestiges of the material from his numb legs.
The strength used was such that his thick leather belt snapped like rotten twine. He couldn’t even resist as his underpants were torn away from him; the force of that cruel action lifted his whole body off the ground for a second, and then slammed it back onto the wet trail floor as the drawers were ripped off.
Dizzy, sick and unresisting, McKinney dimly accepted that the same something was tugging hard now at his genitals, pulling; twisting at them eagerly with a vicious animal force…their efforts were sliding him bodily along the rough ground.
He lifted himself up weakly on his remaining arm just in time to see a huge grotesque hand completely tear away the scrotum and penis in a shower of bodily fluids from his unyielding body.
Then he did scream, not from pain but from shock; McKinney short death screech was a signal to the others and they were upon him at once in frenzy; greedily tearing out greasy loops of wet intestine and warm succulent organs that they gained access to by simply tearing open his soft belly. They were eating him alive. And he knew it.
And as McKinney was sent into his final oblivion, he thought, with an odd sense of wonderment that he heard, at the very last, an awfully strange thing….
“Jesus loves the little children…”
THE SUN TRAP - Rhys Hughes
It was hot. I went into a bar. Inside it was cool. The barman looked at me and said, “What’ll it be?” He was sweaty. I needed a drink, so I licked my lips and asked for a gin sling. It was hot outside. The barman frowned and said, “What did you say?”
“I’ll have a gin sling, that’s what I said,” I said.
“A gin sling?” the barman said.
“A gin sling,” I said.
He made me a gin sling. It was cool. Outside it was hot. I finished my drink. I needed another.
“I’ll have another,” I said.
“Another gin sling?” the barman said.
“Yes, a gin sling,” I said.
He made me a gin sling. It was cool. Outside it was hot. I licked my lips. There was a fish on the wall. Not framed behind glass, but nailed to the wall. It stank a little.
“It stinks a little,” I said, “that fish.”
The barman frowned at it. “Because of the heat,” he said.
“Because it’s dead,” I said.
“As well,” he said.
“I need another drink.” I said.
“A gin sling?” he said.
I nodded. He made me a gin sling. I drank it. Outside it was hot. Inside it was cool. “A fish is like a novel,” I said and nodded at the fish. The fish didn’t nod back. It was stiff.
“In what way exactly?” said the barman.
“The moment a fine fish is hooked, the sharks come along like critics and bite chunks off until the fish is just a skeleton and those critics don’t ever give any credit to the lone fisherman on his boat who hooked the fish in the first place. That’s how.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” the barman said with a shrug.
“By the way, I’m thirsty,” I said.
The barman nodded. “What can I get you?” he said.
“A gin sling,” I said.
“A gin sling?” he said.
I nodded. “A gin sling,” I said.
He made me a gin sling. I drank it. It was cool. Outside it was hot. The barman nodded at a book on a shelf behind the bar. “That novel isn’t like a fish. It was left behind,” he said.
“Who by?” I said.
“Someone,” he said, “many years ago.”
“One of mine,” I said.
“One of your what?” he said.
“Novels,” I said. “I’m a writer. I’ll have a gin sling.”
“A writer, a gin sling?” he said.
I nodded. Inside I was cool. Outside I was bearded. The barman made me a ginsli
ng. “I’m Ernest,” I said.
“Earnest about what?” he said.
“About my name. Same name as the name of the cover of that book on your shelf that’s a novel.”
He read the cover. “Ernest Humblebee,” he said.
“That’s my name,” I said.
“Coincidence,” he said, “that your name’s the same.”
“Not really, I wrote it,” I said.
“That’s why, is it?” he said, frowning. “But don’t you use a pen name? I thought writers used pen names.”
“Not me. I’ll have a gin sling,” I said.
He made me a gin sling. “So what’s your style like?” he said.
“Simple,” I said, “and repetitive.”
“Does it do much?” he said.
“No, it doesn’t,” I said.
“Why are you here?” he said.
“Because it’s hot outside, cool inside. I’ll have a gin sling,” I said.
“Waiting for assassins?” he said.
“Not this time,” I said.
“Here’s your gin sling,” he said.
I drank it. Then I nodded at the fish on the wall. “Nailed it while it was still swimming, I bet,” I said.
“With a crossbow,” he said, “but no one has explained what the fish was doing at that altitude.”
“A crossbow,” I said as I drank my gin sling.
“The marvellous thing is that it’s painless. I’m awfully sorry about the odour though. That must bother you.”
“Don’t! Please don’t! I’ll have a gin sling,” I said.
“What’s that out there?” he said.
“Out where?” I said.
“Out there. Through the back door,” he said.
I craned my neck. “I think it’s a garden,” I said. “A good cool place to drink a good cool gin sling.”
“No, it’s not. I know that garden,” he said.
“If you know it, why did you ask me what it was?” I said.
“You’re a writer and I was testing your powers of observation. It’s a garden. And here’s your gin sling.”
