Yeah, it's that bad. I'm beginning to wonder if I have hit the point with this 'book' where resuscitation has become necrophilia. I have two chapters left to properly rewrite and I feel like I'm hitting myself in the head trying to finish. I know this is narcissistic claptrap, blogging for help like this. I'm sure to pay for it in the next life, possibly by being reincarnated as a barnacle or a turnip left to rot in my own juices.
To that end I have decided to post the first chapter, still not totally polished, for review. If any of you believe in either helpful consideration or euthanasia, please let me know. I am not above killing this thing before I embarrass myself further by submitting it for possible publishing. If you like what is here enough to lend a much needed hand, please leave suggestions for a title in the comments section or hit me up on facehead.
One final disclaimer, it is trash. Entertainment, not literature. Don't expect meaningful reflection on anything.
Thanks, and please, be cruel.
Conscious of the lightness of this dream, the freedom of it, I know I am about to wake.
Here in the dream there are no stars overhead and still my eyes focus perfectly in the seamless night. They are tuned to a luminosity seeping from every edge and motion of the forest. The dank of the near morning swims with life, insects churn in the stagnant air.
Everything is stripped back here, before waking. The ugly, folded pages of memory and the itch of present frustrations are pared down to a naked hunger.
For a few more moments of the dream, I am nothing but a hunger as ravenous as all of hell.
On all fours and tied to a ribbon of scent standing out hot against the forest, I slip past brush and deadfall, a shadow racing under the pines. All of my festering bullshit vanishes while I dream a little longer. The resentment of moving from place to place, from one crap job to the next, never escaping the pointless and constant drone of humanity is forgotten for a few more moments. I get to become only hunger and ride the pitch and timbre of my prey’s scent like a needle in its groove. Electric and undeniable, the promise of a kill pulls me through the trees and thicket like a rag on a wire.
It feels as if I am finally real in the grip of this dream, lost and content with the night alive against me in the rushing twist of my pulse…
Then, inevitably, the continuity of the dream degenerates into feeble images and sensations strung too loosely together to tie whole again.
The next moment arrives in a wash, taking the rhythm of my heart with it as the delirium peels back. The cottony disconnection of sleep falls away and I am alone in the light of first waking.
Awake.
I am awake and facing the kill that drew me through the woods. Here my dream is broken by the sight of what my instinct has brought me to.
The source of my obsession is crumpled before me, the elder girl maybe sixteen, the younger less than twelve. Both of them boil in unseen plumes of odor. I am transfixed by their irrevocably bent shapes. They are empty, still as bread crusts left for winter robins. Broken.
I’m no longer sure where or if the dream has ended.
Inhaling through mouth and nose the forest’s cacophony of scents becomes tangible. This noise settles into shapes, igniting textures and stories of the night. Certain things are immediately obvious.
The air tells me that less than a single hour has passed since their small hearts grew too tired to continue. I find room enough in my confusion to focus first on the smaller girl. Her only wound is tied with a pantleg torn from her older sister’s sweatpants, it is still lavender where the blood hasn’t seeped through. There are plumeria flowers in the print of the fabric rising white above the stains.
Pajamas.
Her whole shape soaked through with sweat, the little one’s pajamas are that peculiar color of yellow that parents seem to dress their children in, as if not to lose them in the expanse of their young sleep. Her hair is smoothed back from her forehead, the thin hand of her sister still fixed there at her brow.
They have the same nose, and a similar chin, their hair, where not matted with fever is nearly the same color, and by their last scent I know they share both mother and father.
Sisters, let to run into the woods, each having been bitten exactly once.
The little one was bitten on the thigh, the elder, just above the elbow. While I would have to move the makeshift dressing to look at the younger girl’s bite, I can tell by the relative lack of bleeding that this was a nip… just a taste.
The same can be said of her big sister’s injury.
Had the killer lost himself in the frenzy of his hunger the length of her young limbs would have been snapped. Her arm would be rent from its socket in a moment of whipping torsion. The bone would have been stripped of flesh in the same crimson flash.
Yet she has only three small, shallow punctures almost lovingly draped across her bicep.
I was asleep, bounding in silver darkness, tracking a dream of prey. Now I am naked, human, filthy and enveloped in the smell of two dead girls. The cuts and scrapes of a midnight run through the forest are knitting themselves scarpink shut on my skin. The abrasions on my bare feet are tender for a second as they close against the litter of the forest floor. The hunger that was all of me moments ago in that dream relents with my slowly opening mind. The heavy blanket of night is still shining at every outline. Wild vines and thorny bushes are all lit from within, and the tangle of the brush still holds their last breaths. This close to them, the fungal tang of their fevers stands out in the taste of their sweat on the air. I kneel next to their small bodies carefully tucking myself in against the ferns and chokecherry that cradle their curled shapes.
The small hours of morning hold the four of us close to one another in the September darkness.
What eludes me is a feather’s brush of a smell, like the papery odor that marks them as siblings there is something else hiding in the air, a secret I can’t quite tease out.
In the watery silver light of the forest I can see a clear trail cut through it. Attacked, chased, and finally let to slip, these two ran and staggered here, never letting go of one another. Their bond maintained right up to their last minutes alive. They passed together, shivering against the fever carried on those delicate, almost surgical bites.
I know there is more to be learned from their corpses, some other hidden secret they could tell me. The elder might have house keys, or one of them might have their initials drawn onto the tag of her PJ’s. I know that somewhere on their small, shattered bodies there is more evidence.
But I can’t touch them.
One touch could easily be overwhelming to my urges, and no good can come of it. As the man and not the beast I know that to touch them could rekindle the hunger that moved me here. All of their nobility, their devotion to one another, all of that impossible bravery in the wake of this, their last nightmare, would be lost. Aware as I am to the loss the world has suffered with their early passing, I might still lose control of my hunger and reduce these angelic children to scattered rags and ripped meat.
I am shaken from this moment’s reverie by a sound. Determined men are closing on my position, on these lost children. They are coming fast, professionally loose on the turns and ruts of the road in huge four wheel drives. Hearing the men near, I can’t move from my place curled next to these brave sisters. So close, the elder shelter to the younger, I am nearly scalloped around her just as she is around her baby sister.
Right to the last of their breaths, they were here, keeping each other warm while racked with fever. I can smell that last push their bodies made to fight off the same infection that I carry. What is bestial and ravenous in me comes from that infection, and like all of my kind, I am perpetually fighting against it. To lose would mean to succumb to the hunger and become nothing more than an extension of the affliction. The courage of a young girl, to flee from one of my kind, and be a final comfort awes me.
I don’t know how I got here, or even exactly where I am. All I am sure of is that I did not kill these girls. I’ve never killed anyone. But to any independent observer, including the men I hear rushing towards me, my innocence will be less believable. And judging by the rough sound of tires on gravel, these men will not wait on a jury to decide their actions.
I need more than my humanity to get me out of this situation in one piece.
So I take it off, as I have in so many dreams, I step out of the shape I wear as a man and drop, again, onto all fours. My nakedness, chilled against the damp air and the first rays of morning is turned on itself with the twist of stretching limbs. Just as in the freedom of my dream, what I am as a man is eclipsed by iron sinew and a devil’s spread of teeth. I’m not a wolf running through the dark woods and I’m certainly not a man. What my kind become when Changed is harder to pin down than what can be read about in legends. Imagine something between a jaguar, a pit bull and a wiry, seven foot gorilla moving too fast to be more than a blur.
Simply put, we’re monsters, and people have been trying to figure us out for as long as we’ve been hunting them in lonely places.
And in this terrible shape, I juggle the sounds of men in their SUV’s with the effortless pull and spring of sprinting through the heavy vegetation. Moving this way, I catch that curious scent again and I realize that the trail I’m following was made by one of my own. I find his smell, his presence close enough to know he has been watching me linger near his kill. What drove me through dream and into the forest was instinct, but what whet that hunger was the beast I am following now.
He is watching me just as he watched his quarry hold onto one another as they died.
The weight of his work rides easy on him, making no mark on his odor. I can’t detect anything like the grassy smell of joy or the caustic rush of animal urgency.
He’s a murderer as much as he is a beast.
So there are two of us here, two monsters. He drew me here, sleepwalking in an inhuman shape, to his small trophies. He’s testing me, playing my urges against my determination. If my hunger wins, then I’m as bad as he is, and stuck between his pursuers and a fresh kill. That would make me either his stool pigeon or his comrade. If my humanity prevails, I’m in the middle of a fight I didn’t start. I damn sure would rather be anywhere else right now.
This is his ambush, and the two dead girls are just the bait in his plan.
The men arrive in a pair of customized black Suburbans and lurch into confident stops in the open field. I can see them from my vantage a quarter mile away, safe from the reach of their senses.
I am down wind and bathed in the current of the dawn breeze. The smell of men and engines idling, the dead girls and the forest mix and shake loose some of my reason.
I dig through my half awake mind and pulsing instincts to say my own name like a mantra.
My name is Jack Arrington. I am a welder (and a damn good one) I live in a sawmill town with no sawmill, a shithole, the same one I was born in. I am Jack and not the monster who took two lives barely an hour ago.
I am Jack Arrington, an innocent hiding inside a beast crouching in the ferns and blackberry briars just inside the line of the forest. I am not a pawn moved here so I can fight by the side of a killer who can’t best this gathering posse on his own.
I watch the men leave their vehicles, careful, practiced and decisive. I can drink their odors and not move save to continue breathing, to listen to the blood in my veins pound with the arc of my pulse.
Watching and in turn being watched, I’m not too happy with the notion of being stuck in a fight. I’m guilty of nothing but my nature. The desire to turn against the breeze and chase the killer competes with my own better sense. To give away my position to these men would be an obvious mistake.
The first of their team gets out of the lead vehicle, a broad pillar of a man clad in a muted patchwork of camouflage. Four more armed and uniformed shapes pile out behind him. His face is fiercely tanned. It is obvious that he has been abroad, spent a career doing hostile time in hot climates. This is a man who has been fighting wars long enough to have been honed like a block of finely grained wood. The easy power in the muscular punctuation of his smallest gestures conveys an impression of lethal confidence. He has “combat leader” written all over him.
Now I know I’m in trouble. I’ve never seen cops in camouflage. And I’m pretty sure there aren’t any SWAT teams out here in the boonies. Nothing adds up about this night.
With their chief out of the first truck, the second vehicle spills out four more men. Each of them are wearing sterile fatigues, no patches, no nametags, just camouflage smocks and trousers laid over with assault gear.
Assault gear that includes the brisk weight of what are obviously automatic weapons. I can smell the gun oil and TSP solvent from here, their weapons are fastidiously clean. Well used and kept immaculate. The scene unfolds as my orientation sinks deeper and I begin to realize just how oddly dangerous things are getting. The more I look them over the more obvious it becomes that these characters are bad news. But where the hell did they come from?
There could be more corpses in the forest before the sun climbs over the height of the mountains… including my own.
I went to bed after a solid day of work and a long night of going rounds in a dingy boxing ring only to wake up pinned down between a fresh kill, a hidden monster, and a team of guys who can’t be cops and sure as hell look like professional soldiers.
This is shaping up to be an ugly fight that I want nothing to do with. What is animal in me is pressing against my judgment with the threat of being cornered. I want nothing more than to run.
The soldiers form a semi-circle around the hood of the first truck while their leader makes a chopping motion uphill. As the first fingers of sunrise come through the peaks to the east, I realize that I’m about ten miles away from my farmhouse at the edge of the national forest.
I know where we are, and I can tell he’s laying out the positions of the nearest residences. After waving at these closest homes he turns to his team and traces a finger over the screen of what looks like a GPS unit or some type of ruggedized notepad.
My fear doubles. I have no desire to experience that narrow moment where one goes from being hidden to being hunted. But the obvious skill of these men is enough to tell me that any movement, any clue as to my location would be a disaster.
I’m probably better off just staying still, a forgotten stone in the undergrowth.
The metallic scent of the killer registers high in my sinuses, cuts a little deeper into the morning air. The thought of a confrontation stirs his blood more than his recent kill.
Their leader pops in an earpiece and stick of gum one after the other. It looks like a well practiced ritual.
The men break away from the hood of the truck where they have been comparing a map to the GPS unit, fanning out in pairs toward the site of the kill. The leader is paying a great deal of attention to his notepad. I can tell by the way he moves his eyes from the screen to the track of his men that the team is reacting to whatever data the unit provides him.
The killer stirs in his hiding spot. I smell him shift, and then catch the slippery noises of his shape bounding through the forest about two hundred yards from my patch of cover. He makes less than the sound of a small deer leaping through the undergrowth, and I know the men couldn’t possibly discern this sound from the usual din of the early morning wilderness.
Yet they react.
They break from their huddle, cock rifles, finger off safeties, and move in coordinated pairs to the tree line. They leapfrog into the thicket with casual type of alacrity that serve impresses me with how dangerous they must be.
One group of four patiently moves along the edge of the forest and begins to close with the murderer’s position. The other four fan out to search, widely scanning the boundary of the woods with the clunky scopes mounted on their assault rifles. Like the team moving into the thicket, they are taking turns, scanning carefully, their fields of view overlapping in their sweep. While two take a knee and scope the trees, the others stay further back keeping their weapons at the ready.
These guys are dialed in, totally cool, and professional almost to a fault.
The killer has stopped moving.
The first group, the one’s I’d guess to be the chase team plunge into the dark of the forest making huge noises, crunching through the tangled brush. I can’t get a fix on the other beast with all of their clattering.
The other four scouting the tree line break into two pairs, the first signaling their leader with an abrupt hand gesture before slicing into the trees only a few yards from the spot where those girls held each other in their last moments.
I can hear a few syllables of their messages back to their leader.
“Eyes on… bodies… two juvenile females… no obvious sign of … requesting orders…”
His bronze jaw clenches twice, visibly pausing the rhythm of his steady chewing.
The second pair of scouts is still sweeping the edge of the clearing, one standing guard while his teammate scans with what I assume is an infrared scope.
I can’t think of what else would penetrate the dense layers of foliage.
The two men round a large stump. The skeletal roots of the titanic pine stand ten feet in the air, grey and moss blanketed by time. They come into line with me. I’m trying to shrink, to seep into the cool soil while my heart slams against my ribs. The instinct to run, to burst from the forest in a frenzy of shredded leaves and rend these two men open like ripe plums, is nearly overwhelming.
The first man takes a knee and the second takes his watch tight into the roots of the great stump.
Fear threatens to overtake me just my hunger did in the dream. It takes everything, the price of my every regret, the mark of each of my memories, to override my instinct. I’m saying my own name over and over again in my head to try and keep the shreds and patches of my humanity intact.
My blood is boiling through the tightening springs of my limbs. Thinking of their infrared scopes, I become painfully aware of the heat rising off of me in waves, rippling like still air on summer asphalt.
I watch the first soldier, breathing measured, slowly scan the green edge of the forest. The moment stretches wide and swallows the whole of the late summer dawn.
I can hear every bird in a half mile radius around us. The sun is aching to mount the southern ridge of Tanaimo Peak fifty miles east of our clearing. All crash and thunder, the push of the chase team into the gauntlet of undergrowth and fallen timber booms at me on the breeze.
Against the scarred toe of the nearest man’s boot I watch the paintbrush tops of the tall grass ignite in tiny prisms as the first clinging crystals of frost unwind into dew with the sun breaking over the mountains…
A burst of suppressed fire from one of the pursuit team at the far end of the clearing establishes his location as well as that of the killer.
Time loses its momentary elasticity and the men nearest me fall back and regroup. They are immediately joined by the two who have just reported finding the girls. All four of them watch the source of the gunfire through their scopes. The leader is using a set of what look like military spec infrared binoculars.
I close my eyes and get a feel for the running hunt three hundred yards off. I do not have an infrared scope, or even the vantage to see what is happening. I can hear the men’s boots in the litter of the forest, the staccato rip of one rifle through the morning air and the soft drapery of the foliage. The sound of slugs landing against tree trunks and soft soil defines the location of the other creature, now hunted himself.
The still dark canopy of the forest shrouds the men, and their first sight of the beast starts the gunfire. But their vision is limited to scopes and shadows in the wilderness. As the first shots zip through leaves and bark, the killer reacts just as I was prepared to a minute ago. He falls into the first of his attackers, closing with them faster than they can react. The whistling rasp of the killer plunging through the brush fires my instinct.
The gunfire continues from all four points, it comes on more sporadically, less controlled.
Bullets meet flesh, eliciting a guttural yelp that twists in mid release from an expression of pain to the hissing bark of a strike.
There is a howl, the loose scream of a man being killed, torn open in some form or another. The sting of fresh blood in the air lights my senses to even sharper definition. I am invested in his fight, as close as comb’s teeth to this, his third kill of the day.
Determined, controlled fear lifts off in a collective stink from the men watching from their reserve position in the field below. I can tell they are caught between the urge to rush in, guns blazing, and to run hard in the opposite direction. Discipline wins out and they stay put. I don’t imagine it would go any other way with these guys.
The snarling quits with another sharp bark followed by the rush of brambles across monstrous limbs and planes of hardened flesh.
The men obviously realize that there is no catching up to the beast in this forest. Seeing them fall back into the clearing provides me with some relief. Obviously, they are aware that further pursuit would be fruitless at best and more likely lethal for more of them. With the other gone, none of them seem to give a thought to my position.
I don’t think they know I’m here. It’s as though they only expected there to be one of us. Like they knew where he was the whole time. They zeroed in on him fast, and now they don’t seem to care, or even suspect that I’m watching them. That’s fine with me.
More shouting as two men leapfrog back to the vehicles, a third is struggling through the forest, half dragging their single casualty. The man being carried by his teammate is missing his jaw, his face a mass of coagulating blood and ruined tissue. That he’s alive and conscious is a testament to the measure of his strength. I can tell that seeing one of their own ruined so completely by the beast that carefully killed those girls has the men nervous.
I catch another whiff of his fresh blood and feel my hunger return to life.
As the men return to the perimeter of their vehicles, the familiar safety of technology and support, their captain moves to the rear window of the Suburban he arrived in. The window rolls down and an older fellow, maybe sixty or so leans out to speak with the team leader. He looks wealthy. His skin has that meticulously toned burnt orange hue that radiates money and influence.
They confer as the wounded man is laid down and the first means of aid are applied. The fellow in the car, the head honcho of this operation, sneers openly in disgust and disappointment.
A quick but respectful nod from the captain and he moves singly, without hesitation, to the prone form of his injured trooper. The others don’t even see the pistol until two rounds are sent through what is left of the wounded man’s skull.
The captain holster’s his firearm, spits his gum into a napkin he produces from his pocket, and gets back into the Suburban.
The three men applying aid, all stained in their comrade’s gore, are each on one knee and silent, none of them looking at one another. Those standing turn away while the fallen man’s heart slows one last time. Each man takes a few dour seconds to say his own prayer.
As the first vehicle leaves the clearing, the copper colored millionaire barks a single order to his mourning henchmen.
“Unfuck this mess and get back for debrief.”
The black rig moves out along the rutted road.
The men on the ground stand and return to their vehicle, there is a body bag and rolls of absorbent pads.
I watch them fill the bag and stuff the stained pads in with the dead man.
They lift their grim burden into the back of the Suburban. They leave just as fast as they came in. I don’t move from my patch of shadow until my heart evens out and returns to a familiar quick thud somewhere in the low hundreds.
The last odors of cordite drift away and I let myself ease back into a human shape again before I rise in my crouch to survey the dawn. The mountains are drifting slowly into the first notes of autumn. White blades of light glance off the angles of the mountain and cut pink ribbons into the morning sky. The night retreats behind me, a roiling violet soaking up the first shafts of daylight.
Even though the men and the monster have all fled, there are two shattered children warming just a few dozen yards away. The pink and white hues of the rising sun light the belly of the clouds overhead a brilliant, burnt orange. Little cottony twists of cloud cling to the underside of the closed sky, all of them tulip pink for a few seconds, edged with the same color of yellow on the pajamas of the smaller girl.
I can’t fix this, this isn’t my fight. But the blossoming daylight on the clouds overhead calls back the image of those girls, the teenager curled around her baby sister, both of them in pajamas painted the color of the sky. Between the flint and steel of beast and man I can feel the first embers of rage kindle. This isn’t my fight, or my kill. But I have just Changed for the first time in years, and that makes me a part of it. My head spins harder, the orbit of its track growing loose with every detail of what I’ve been made a forced witness to.
I’m naked in the face of tragedy. The sky settles from the contrast of warm dawn and violet night into the muddied cottons of overcast daylight.
I don’t know who those men were, or how they can kill their own so easily. I don’t know why one of the Changed has taken human lives or why he did so with such meticulous care. Nor do I know which of us it could have been, he didn’t smell familiar, in fact he barely had any scent at all. And these are just the questions I’ve found this morning, more fresh and ugly errata with no frame of reference
All I know for sure is that I’m too close to a crime scene for my own good. It’s time to run.
