Xeno Sapiens (47 page)

He gave a backwards glance in the darkness
toward the sharp sound of the dogs baying and shrilling. Despite
his headlong rush, he had to stop and look.

Outlined against the darkened sky at the
crest of the slope he had just traveled, he saw flashlights and
lanterns. Silhouettes of braying dogs and shouting men scurried
back and forth at the top of the rise, illuminated by the lights.
Gaunt silhouettes of rifles and shotguns were visible. He watched
for perhaps a full minute before it dawned on him what was wrong
with this scene.

Doyle could have been no more than half a
mile from them, possibly even visible to them, even in the
darkness. He had escaped from one of their prisons, killed one of
their own people. Yet they refused to make the final effort to come
the last half mile after him. They paced restlessly back and forth
across the top of the rise, both men and dogs, but none would come
closer. No-one took a pot shot at him, no men shouted. After a few
seconds of excited activity, the lights and the men stood still,
the dogs stopped baying and pacing, as if standing sentinel.

Again, Doyle didn't question his luck. He
turned and plunged forward, but more slowly. He slowed to a casual
walk, catching his breath, letting his heart slow. The woods were
still fairly heavy around him, but the town was plainly in sight.
This close he could finally make out more than just impressions.
Somewhere in the distance behind the houses, he caught the flicker
of burning fires. Then the smell of smoke, but odd. Not like
charcoal, but a thick, meaty smelling smoke, like grease that has
gone rancid on a charcoal grate.

He stumbled slightly and caught himself. He
looked down to see what he had tripped on and was surprised to see
snow on the ground. This far south, even in the mountains, there
shouldn't be snow in October. But this snow was crunchy. He stopped
and looked more closely. His stomach racked into a noxious coil.
Not snow. Bone. Chips and dust and powder and fragments and even
full specimens. Bones ahead of him and to the side of him, as far
as the eye could see, a pavement of bones all the way into the
town. White bones, not sun bleached or time scarred, but white.
Boiled
white;
stripped
white.

It was then that he saw the unsound, yellow
eyes of those who had been hiding and waiting for him. They came
from their concealment behind the trees and closed in on him from
all sides. Doyle smelled stinking, diseased breath, foul body odor,
sour, rancid clothing. Scant night light glinted on teeth filed
into tearing points. He tried to run but got no more than three
steps before they fell on him, subdued him, and carried him into
the town, gagged and bound, and still alive. Behind them, the men
and eerily silent dogs turned and walked back to where they came
from, leaving the night totally dark again.

Even hell on earth has its benefit.

William Keane awoke as tipsy as a kid on
Christmas morning, but happy June sunlight shining through his
window made a lie of that. Yet it was still a day all the ten year
old boys and girls in Judas Point anticipated with the same high
spirits. Coincident with the first weekend after school let out, it
was the kids' first step into adulthood. No longer would they have
to be constantly chaperoned by adults, or remanded to return home
by seven in the evening even on the long, summer days when the sun
lingered in the sky until nearly nine o'clock. After today, the
young boys could go fishing, or bike riding, or treasure hunting,
or all the other things ten year old boys do without the onerous
and joy-killing shadow of an adult hanging over them.

What actually went on at the “commencement”
was a closely guarded secret from those who had yet to attend, but
older kids would always drop subtle hints about the commencement,
enough to scare and captivate those uninitiated tenderfoots.

There was talk of burnings and piercings and
spooky stories with the adults sitting out in the audience in their
Sunday clothes, all glassy eyed and hanging onto every word of the
stories. The stories, William figured, were always embellished to
frighten the younger kids, and they worked. William had convinced
himself that it was like a trip to the doctor. You didn't know what
he was going to find, and sometimes you got a shot. But there was
always a reward after the pain, even if it was nothing more than
feeling better. He felt a little heave of pride in his heart.
Today, he would know the secret.

“
Will-Yum,”
his mother called.

“Already up.”

He smelled coffee in the percolator and
frying bacon and eggs. He threw the covers back and rubbed his hand
over his close cropped crew cut. He walked through the living room
and saw his sixteen year old beagle, Baby Pig, slurping coffee out
of his mother's cup. She was nearly toothless now, giving her gray
muzzle a sunken, puckered look like old people without their false
teeth in. Numerous skin lesions peppered her coat and there were
hard calcifications of bone on her ribs. She was skinny now, not
muscled up as she had been many years ago. She was no longer able
to jump up onto the bed or even furniture and she had her own
little dog bed she now slept in. Scattered around her dog bed were
the remains of chewed cigarette butts.

“Mom! Baby Pig is drinking coffee and
smoking again.”

“Leave her be. Let her enjoy herself. She
hasn't got that long left.”

Baby Pig looked up at him with her still
bright, brown eyes and seemed to smirk at him before going back to
lapping her coffee.

William went over to the stove and poured
himself a cup of the “Black Drink” his mother had steeping in a
pot. There was some good natured rivalry in the town among the
Indian kids who called it the “White Drink” while the white kids
called it the “Black Drink.” It was all the same thing. Brewed from
the leaves of yaupon, and various toxic seeds and flowers, the
specific recipe itself was handed down only from mother to daughter
(his sister knew how it was made), and it was as much a part of
William's morning meal as the coffee his parents drank, and had
been for as long as he could remember. As a younger kid, it had
sometimes made his hands and tongue tingle, but the poison
administered in low doses over so long had so saturated his tissues
by now that he rarely felt its effects anymore.

“You have to look your best today,” his
mother said with a smile. “My little boy's growing up.”

“Aw, jeez, ma.”

“Are your nails cut?”

“Last night.” All the parents in town were
fanatical about keeping their children's fingernails and toenails
cut. Most of the labor in town was farm work and not favorable to
long fingernails, anyway, even among the grown women. Biting, also,
was strictly forbidden and woe was the kid who resorted to using
his teeth in a schoolyard brawl.

“Your dad will get off work early today.
You've got a couple of hours to get ready. Soon's you finish your
breakfast, you'd better get hopping.”

While William dressed, he heard his father
come in; the squeak of the door, the thump thump of his booted feet
on the floor. The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hallway
to William's room.

“Your mom's frettin' a little,” he said from
the doorway. “All moms do, I guess, when their kids take one more
step away from them. Dads, too, I won't kid you about that. You'll
be brave for her, no matter what, right?”

William was a little disturbed. This wasn't
like his dad. Hesitant, openly concerned.

“I'll be okay, dad.”

William's father smiled.

“I know you will.” He turned to go, looking
back once.

“We'll be leavin' soon as I get changed,” he
said. “Time to wrap it up.”

They walked to the school, where the
ceremony would be held in the auditorium. There were maybe twenty
kids who would go through the ceremony today, and they walked -some
a little grimly- with their parents down the narrow streets. Older
brothers and sisters who had already gone through the ceremony
congregated in superior little groups, giving knowing glances to
the younger kids on their way to the ceremony.

William saw his own brother, Ken, four years
older than William, with a gang of his teenage buddies, giving him
the wise old eye that said
“I know something you don't.”
William had tried without success to get Ken to tell him what would
happen, but Ken had adamantly refused to part with his hard won
knowledge.

“You'll find out soon enough,” he had told
him ominously.

Among the throng of folks streaming to the
auditorium, William saw the Kellis sisters, buxom teenage farm
girls from the spread across the way. Once, William recalled, he
had been hanging around with Ken and some of his friends down by
the railroad tracks.

The two Kellis sisters had been walking
along the other side of the tracks, trying to ignore the taunts of
the teenage boys.

“
Hey, Lynne, why don't you show us your
candies?”

This had gone on for some time, until one of
the Kellis girls had finally called back.

“
Come on down here and we'll show you
what we got.”

Interested looks passed among the teenage
boys and Ken, the bravest of the gang, had ventured down to the
Kellis sisters while the rest watched with breathless
anticipation.

Sauntering with a false swagger up to the
girls standing between two idled boxcars, his grin had quickly
turned to a look of chagrin when the sisters fell on him, got him
down, and rubbed dirty sand from the rail bed into his eyes. Ken
had run back, fighting back tears, while the Kellis sisters
laughed.

Thinking of that now, William was able to
forgive his brother's superior attitude.

Just outside of the school, there was a
small, tasteful statue of the town's founder, Judas Wakalona, a
full blooded, Cherokee Indian. Judas, his father had once told him,
was not his real name, but one given to him by his own people.

“Why,” William had asked.

“You'll find out,” his father had told him,
“when you're ten years old.”

That day, William knew, had come.

********************

What poisonous secret laces the ground and
flows through the black waters of Essex, turning men mad and
filling them with a taste for human flesh? The terrifying secret is
revealed with only a few mouse clicks....

Available at
http://www.wandilland.com

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

I might never have found myself in this spot
if three things hadn’t happened: If I hadn’t heard the woman
screaming behind my house last night; if
she
hadn’t worn
that dress; and if I hadn't known her a long time ago.

So I'll tell you the second thing first, the
first thing second, and the third thing last.

I noticed her, of course the very pretty,
very dark-haired lady who supervised the little Sub Shop in our
store while I was concealed away in the sporting goods department.
Curiously enough, I don't recall speaking to her for the first
couple of years I worked at the big box store. It was sort of like
if an empty cab drove up, out I would step. I was that
invisible.

It was common enough to hear her laugh ring
through the workplace. Some of it was, I supposed, PR for the
customers, some of it real. Since I didn't know her name I simply
thought of her as The Laughing Lady. We passed each other on our
assorted errands, not speaking or acknowledging each other. She was
just one of a hundred other people drudging away in obscurity.

Until she wore that dress.

Our normal work uniform was a T-shirt, blue
jeans and a baseball cap with the company logo on it. But one day,
as I sat out front on the employee's bench taking my break, she
walked up from the parking lot. Gone the way of an honest
evangelist were the hat and the blue jeans and kicks, in their
places a Victoria Falls of shining black hair, a simple, black,
tiered peasant skirt that stopped an unassuming inch above the
knee, and a pair of high-heeled sandals (I wouldn't have believed
it possible but, yes, there really is such a thing). Her blouse was
an eye-burning, multi-colored palette of diagonal stripes that
formed a bodice that crossed her bosom like a double set of
bandoleers. I suppose there's a
haute couture
name for such
a contrivance, but I didn't -and don't- know it. What I did know
was that I could never look at her the same way again. We didn't
speak even then, and she swept by me like a freshly born spring
wind as I scooped my clattering jaw up from the ground, sadly
pondering that I would have to bandage it later where it had
scraped on the sidewalk.

Had she never spoken to me, all might have
been well -at least for a while. Some notes will
always
come
due- but speak to me she finally did a few days later. What she
said doesn't really matter because -as threadbare and cliché as it
sounds- the moment I turned and full-on looked her in the eyes for
the very first time, that was it. In one stumbling instant I
wondered how I could have passed by this woman year after year and
not noticed she was breathtakingly gorgeous, a troubled white rose
fretting in a thicket of wire grass. There was a thing indefinable,
and bewitching, and provocative in those deep-green, all but brown
eyes, and it took me but a moment to mark it.

She had the eyes of a little girl.

She was lithe and cream-skinned, maybe
ninety-five pounds soaking wet and wearing a beach towel and a gold
chain, as if her preferred breakfast was comprised of a carrot
slice and three kelp strands. But the willowy look suited her. Trim
ladies didn't fool me. I once had a similarly trim girlfriend many
years ago. We worked third shift at a hosiery mill and one summer
morning after work, we decided to go to a local water park. When
she came out of her house sporting a bikini fashioned from three
eye patches and a couple of hanks of twine, buddy, my cap snapped.
So I knew what might be decorously concealed beneath the sedate
jeans and loose smock of my little sandwich maker. I spent many a
moment trying to get a look at her without her catching me (which
really wasn't difficult, since she hardly ever glanced my way). I
had
seen
those legs. It was hard to believe those pins
wrapped in blue denim had been rolling for better than four
decades.