they all must die: redux: continued. "Shadows of the Blood God."
Garcia was reading rights. He shouted judicial principles into the air with a breathy exhaustion, his words cloudy. When he was through he asked them if they understood.
“God yes...” Amalia said, but it wasn't elation this time - it was density in her throat that she was trying to work around.
Randy had begun to sob and mumble.
“Is this it?” Elaine asked. She suddenly saw the ghost of the black wolf in her mind, it was standing in her memory rigid and against the backdrop of moonlit trees. “Is this the time I get to make a difference?” Her heart was a broken headlight, sagging off the front end of a car wrapped around a pole, it flickered on and off, thrusting its brightness against death.
Garcia had begun trying to corral the teens toward his patrol car. His mouth grimaced through the sweat that was beading on his face despite the chill. He was crooked over the sight of his gun.
“Stretch it out Officer.” A gruff voice came from the night behind Garcia's shoulder.
Elaine pressed her face into the wall, Randy's sobbing was pulling out the threads in her brain - he was a blubbering score over her anxiety. “Now now now now...” She kept pressing the word through her lips. “Its cold... Its cold and I feel alive.”
She turned slowly to see Garcia's hands in the air, his pistol on the ground before him. Dhalia was behind with something in her hand, jamming it into the small of his back. “Didn't think we robbed that bank with no guns did you?” She was playing along. Elaine struggled to read her face. “Let's take that radio off and get you into the back seat of your car.” Dhalia reached down and snapped the keys off his belt. “Round real slow friend, and down the hill here.”
Elaine saw Dhalia's weapon, a shaft of rusty brown rebar. She gasped. “Poser.” She called out.
Dhalia looked back over to her.
“Faker!”
“What the fuck woman?” Dhalia was startled by Elaine's counter-productive intuition.
“This is my moment, this is my life!” Elaine scrambled for the pistol. Just then Amalia turned around.
“She's lost her shit!”
“Shut up slut!” Elaine stood up, gun in hand, surrounded by the dust of her scuffle. “This is the poem of my world! The wolf! I'm the wolf!” There was a shot.
Inside the dark cabin, the sitter, Conrad's cooling juices on his hands, snorted out of a self-focused daze.
Officer Garcia slumped to the ground clutching his side. Dhalia looked down and saw that she was bleeding. She dropped her useless weapon. Elaine's head was shaking. Her eyes were wired on the gun. “I'm alive...” She said.
Randy rolled over on the ground clutching his stomach - he threw up sick that steamed into the night. Choking back his bile, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What the fuck Elaine? What the fuck!”
Elaine was possessed though. “I'm alive. This is it, this is my song.” She turned to Randy. “The wolf, Randy, we're the same.”
Amalia was running now. Up the incline toward the mine. Her arms were flapping hard against her sides, her elbows digging into her ribs. 'Away from the sound,' she thought, 'Away from all the noise and the pain and all the shitty decisions I've made'.
She was real in her terror. She became who she was when she was nine years old, before her father had left, before she had sought to fill his place with so many men. She was real in her fear - full of feature and character - and humanity.
“I'm sorry!” She yelled. A nest of birds flapped away from her excitement. “I'm sorry!”
She ran face first into a slow-heaving wall, her nose smashing into a massive sternum, covered filthy with a stained jumpsuit. She fell back and whined, her nostrils askew and bloody. “I'm sorry...” She looked up to him standing just under the moon, his broad shoulders nearly twice the length of a normal man's. Only his stern brow was caked in the dim sheen of natural light, only his brow and the curious scar across it.
“Daddy? I'm sorry... Don't leave me.” A gravestone-sized foot found her chest and pinned her down. There was a curious groan that came from the man's chest - a furnace churning coal deep inside. Amalia wept upward with her fingers, clawing, grabbing at his shins. Her mouth was sucking air silently, taking what it could as his foot ground down, popping things inside of her. The toe and heel of his boot kept crushing down until it was grinding naked spine to earth, splintering bone and body into soil. Amalia closed her mouth, her eyes kept weeping only for seconds.
He paused, her corpse smoking around his ankle, and then bent over and took her by the neck. He pulled Amalia halfway up his leg, his appendage posted through her, and grunted into her face before letting her flop back down.
Dhalia punched Elaine in the face. She felt her brittle symbolism crack under knuckle. The bullet had grazed her as well. It hurt. “Jesus...” Dhalia flicked her hand and grabbed at the tatters of jacket and skin, blood meandering through her fingers quickly.
Elaine dropped and began to sob but there was a thick, malty laughter under it.
Garcia was trying to stand. Randy met him with the tip of his boot.
Garcia went down again, after his head snapped back and he spit some teeth. The air smelled like rust.
“Stop fucking with the cop!” Screamed Dhalia, but her fury made her bullet-hole complain. She winced and knelt trying to curl into herself.
“Its okay Elaine!” Randy yelled, suckering a few more kicks into the officer's ribs. “I got you!”
Dhalia looked down at the gravel of the yard. The small pebbles were flecked with her blood. Her eyelids were flinching, she just couldn't comprehend the situation. Everything had happened so fast and none of it made sense.
“I can't go to jail!” Randy, again, his voice so needlessly violent.
'That was it,' thought Dhalia, her saliva backing up and slipping out. 'something's gotten into them.'.
She had to go. She had to get away from all the maniacs and red-splattered stones and trees.
She stood up, forcing down the pain and turned on her heel. She scampered down to the windowless building and saw that the door had been forced open. She saw the lock and the chain coiled limply on the ground and suddenly remembered Conrad. Curiously enough, the man now seemed the most collected in her brief memory of him, through the recent unfurling of events. She poked her head into the building and retched at the smell. Hot death, sweaty with the sound of flies.
She felt her legs aching forward, felt an invisible something shouldering up against her back, forcing her in, in to see what the source of the smell could be.
She had to know.
She had to validate it, or it remain a speculative nightmare.
Standing in the thick, humid darkness, she felt for her lighter and struggled with it for a few moments, before zipping out its flame and illuminating the room. But it wasn't the mess of man next to the door, crushed and squashed, punctured by its own pieces that drew her attention.
It was the message on the wall, scrawled in something messy, long dried, behind the single wooden chair that sat against it. Four words that rang out from the age-old wood with clear intent.
Dhalia backed away, stepping into what was left of Conrad. She felt the wet mound give and jiggle a little, the organs slipping around her weight as she subconsciously looked for footing.
The words were too much, even so dimly lit, too much for her to maintain herself. She mouthed them, silently, over and over again, until she saw herself in their definition. Somehow the message on the wall was describing everything that had happened that night, somehow the words and whoever had written them, knew what was going to happen. Four words that clutched her heart and made her mouth dry.
'They all must die.'
a slasher epic,
written by thedore sallis.
When the morning came the day was no less terrifying. The scent of murder hung over the entire compound. The density at which the drone of nature hummed on had become watery, moist with hesitation and lingering horror.
Dhalia had gathered no sleep beneath a small bridge that covered one of the camp's runoff trenches. She was dirty, covered with the sweat of the night before mingled with the mist of early dawn. Her feet were still pruned and cold in her boots from marinating in the sludge gathered up from Conrad's pummeled corpse. She hadn't even bothered to take them off, or to move at all since she had seen the message on the wall. She knew that three people were dead and that two of them had been disfigured beyond recognition by unimaginable brute force. There was another presence that had entered the camp last night. Or one that had been there all along. This was the thought that kept her motionless and breathing as lightly as a rabbit would. That she felt hunted in a place she had lived most of her adolescent life. There was a place she had made home against the odds. Alone and nearly craven with sadness in the high woods above the world - she had learned that place - the sounds it had made - the habits it kept... Now that had all come down. It was a nightmare plain shaded darkly.
She was insecure. Tough as nails and scared to death.
With all her will she managed to shift out from under the bridge peek over the ledge of the ditch. The sunlight that filtered through the canopy only served to enunciate the savagery of what had happened. Nothing was glossed or softened but intensified. Reds and colors deeper all shining out despite their tumorous, out-of-place arrival. The officer's body still lay just feet from his patrol car, the door to the vehicle ajar, the weapon Elaine had stolen tossed to the pines beyond. Dhalia closed her eyes and willed it all away. In her sightless want she heard the birds high above and the chilly mountain wind pass over her. It soothed her momentarily, until it carried past her nostrils the carrion stench that lurked noxiously out from that dreaded shack.
She told herself she could handle it. She said to herself. “Get up. Walk away.” And put a sturdy hand into the dirt and pulled herself out.
She stood for several minutes and listened, holding her breath. She listened. She wondered if Randy and Elaine had already left the camp or if they were hiding like she had been. She listened for any human sound at all. Nothing but the forest and the hissing of the radio from the squad car. For a second she thought to contact the police, use the radio and let them know what had happened. She walked to the car and stared at the radio. Dead cop she thought. Don't call he police. Nothing explains away a dead cop.
She walked over to the tree-line and found the gun. She checked the chamber and saw that it had five bullets. Five chances against whoever had killed Conrad as she made her way out.
“We're lost Elaine...” Randy dropped down against a rock.
They had both ran into the woods. Elaine's revelry had faded. Her and Randy had been stumbling away from the camp and further up the mountain for hours - exhausted and confused. They had talked in frantic dialogue all through the night of what had happened. They had tried to piece together the events as best they could amidst a strange mist that seemed to cloud their short term memory.
“And then he was dead...” Elaine had wept. “Face down and fucking extinct, and the gun was in my hand. My hand.”
“All I remember is you saying something about that wolf... And then I threw up... And then we were running. And now I'm tired...”
“Come on Randy. We have to keep going.”
“Fuck it man, we're far enough away from whatever happened that no one is going to find us any time soon. Let me sit, its been a minute.”
“My hand...” Elaine repeated. The words she had spent the night before came to her only in fading fragments - the way a vivid dream fades into rationalization as the day grows long. There was an incredible sense of liberation about her but it was snared back, pulled at by the hooking talons of the reality of what she had done. She had killed a man.
The wolf was snarling in her mind again.
Randy rubbed the dirt from his eyes. “You attacked that hippie chick too. She was about to pull our asses out of the fire and you just got after her.” Some of it was coming back to him now. “Right?” He looked at her expectantly.
She just shook her head.
“You said something about your moment. Something about your life.”
Elaine squatted down and held her knees. She let out a long sigh and leaned on Randy. He didn't push her away and for a moment the two of them stopped their shouting and their advertisements and found one another. “I'm scared.”
Randy put his arm around her. “We've done some bad things.”
“Yeah...”
“Are we bad people?”
Elaine looked up into the trees. “I never wanted to kill anyone.”
“What happened back there Elaine?”
“I don't know... It felt like a scream I couldn't stop. I just kept trying to close my mouth but it kept coming. It got so loud that it started to destroy everything.”
“We're in trouble.”
“We've passed trouble. We have to get back to trouble from wherever it is we are.”
“Maybe we could just stay up here. Dhalia didn't seem to mind. They'll never find us.”
Elaine stood back up and rubbed her arms. “They'll come looking for the cop Randy. And when they find out what happened they'll never stop.”
“What do we do?”
“Up or down.” She whispered, motioning up the mountain first and then down to where they had come from. “Either way I guess. We walk until we die.”
Dhalia had made it to safety. She thought. She hadn't come into any resistance within the compound and was working her way down the road that would eventually link her back into civilization. The only evidence of man, the paved way, worked its way hazardously down the mountainside. The road was cracked and forgotten. She seemed more in the wilderness now than ever before - such was the growth of brush and tree around her that it seemed to solidify into a sheet of green - thick and confusing as endless patterns of branch and leaf forbade her sight any further beyond the overgrown trail. Her ears caught something and the hand she was reserving for the gun popped and cracked. There was a human sound coming from down the road - what sounded like a low mumbling. It rumbled softly up the way with the pitch of song. It was rhythmical. Low and subdued. Unbroken. Then the scent of sandalwood. The look of perplexity had come unnoticed over her brow. Dhalia found herself enraptured with the sudden mystery, so much that she loosened on her weapon and armed herself forward more so with her curious chin.
As she rounded the bend she became of aware of more. There was a dim effect casting against the trees. It was almost in time with the murmuring song, washed out from the sunlight - the cycling of blue - the color of a police beacon.
She ground her heel into the road. She weighed her angles - the gun in her hand and the bloody sweat all over her aching body. She could stumble down and pretend to be oblivious, confused, relate the whole story and try to cement her circumstantial part in it. Her sleep-depraved mind began convincing her of things. Had she done anything wrong? Frantically Dhalia tried to replay the events of the night in her mind - looking over them for incidents that would hold her against the law. Still - cops at the moment were certainly more inviting than what she had left behind. With a resolve in her sigh she quickly tossed the weapon into the woods and began limping toward the blue lights. She had forgotten already about the song and the incense.
A strangeness came over her as she walked. The world seemed to slow. The wind in the trees sounded like string instruments. She felt old. In the middle of the road, covered softly by the shifting shade - three police cars, one over-turned completely, sat askew and abandoned. The doors of the vehicles were ajar. The inverted vehicle's door had been separated from the body completely, the piece lay in the woods beyond halfway into a tree. The windows were smashed and trails of pulverized glass scattered the length of the path. Dhalia took it in slowly, her brain would not allow it otherwise. Her bright eyes searched for any explanation to the arrows - primitive weapons lined with inky black feathers - that peppered the cars - impossibly penetrating their metal frames. There must have been hundreds, stuck into tires, thrust into the seats inside, piercing the vital chambers beneath and bleeding gas and fluid onto the street. She still tasted the lingering woody scent. She muttered a prayer not knowing why but for certain that her life was in danger. There was a small effigy in front of the wreckage - a small spire of nearly burnt thatching - rich chalk-white smoke blistered from it. It had been made intentionally Dhalia thought - she was reminded of the roadside laurels and wreathes people would make for the victims of car accidents. Near the thatching was a small pile of smooth, rounded rocks also with the look of deliberation.
It all seemed fresh, too recent. These were the police that had surely come looking for their missing comrade or those that had failed to follow the youth-criminal element up into the mining camp the previous evening.
But where were the bodies? Dhalia looked to the sides of the road and into the trees. Nothing. Maybe the were still alive? There was a rustling in the distance and Dhalia reached for her pistol - the one she had thrown into the forest. She clutched her fingers into her palm violently, punishing herself for acting so stupidly.
A great wolf came from the woods. Great in the fact that she could only fantasize the enormous frame that maintained its black, twitching body, pressed to strike and still hidden in the trees - for its head was of such a staggering value that Dhalia first thought it to be a crazed bear protruding its neck into the open. Its muzzle tore up into a mythical snarl and steaming, hearty drops of saliva smacked audibly onto the pavement below. The titan-wolf held its eyes on her, milky-white things swimming in madness.
Dhalia was trapped between it and the cars behind. She became aware of the buzzing of flies. The wolf put a paw into the road and leaned out its torso, hunkered down and preying - Dhalia saw the glint of bone shine out from its mass - a portion of the animal's side was vacant - the hollowed cavity fibrous with stands of hanging meat between ribs. The wound was as big as the beast's head and seemed weathered - an old gape that stunk with the decomposition that comes with exposure to air. Dhalia's mouth was bitter. The flies were coming from the gash - she saw clumps of larva and eggs dribbling out - wriggling into the pools of slobber that moistened the ground. The fear that lingered the most though was that the wolf seemed all too vibrantly alive despite the fatal puncture. It heaved and lurched and snarled with the warmth of existence, with the bristling hunger of its ancient ilk. It moved no less fluidly than whole wolves would and it seemed intent on filtering her flesh through its fangs.
She would have to make a break for the vehicles. Possibly lock herself in one of the cars and crawl out the other side. She knew as soon as she moved though that the monster from the trees would surge into purpose - and with the sheer size of it - it would overtake her in seconds.
Something split the air. A sharp slicing sound came from over Dhalia's shoulder. An arrow had lodged into one of the wolf's eyes - she stared as yellow-white froth came down from the beast's orb and collected at the base of the projectile. It howled a great primeval howl. Some childish instinct that was drug out from her terrified mind made her cover her ears and weep. The glass that was still intact on some of the police cars shattered.
Two soft words were spoken to her - from somewhere beyond the howl and the thrumming of her own over-excited pulse - words that were not English or any other language she had ever heard.
“Skek Eth.” The voice was soft but deliberate. “Go now. Run.” Words she understood.
Dhalia made a pass for the cars. She ran - he jaw snapping up - her whole body pleading with gravity to relent and let her fly as far as she could away.
She dove through one of the empty windows and kicked out the opposite door. On the other side of the makeshift barricade she stopped only for a second to look behind to who had saved her.
“No...”
On top of one of the cars, facing away from her - bow drawn with tense fingers - was a man. His head and shoulders were wrapped with mountain lion pelt, the tail of the dead animal running down his back. From his waist hung stone age weapons and tools, instruments chipped from the crust of the earth. The only other clothing was draped across his pelvis and strapped hard around his feet and ankles in furred boots.
Not else but scars adorned his body - deep and old - marks of savagery.
He turned to her slightly - showing his striking jaw and mane of black facial hair. “Wolves are the ghosts of this place.”
Dhalia slowly nodded. “Who... who?”
There was another howl that rattled her bowels.
The man let slip another arrow. “Shadows of the Blood God. Go!”
She ran. She ran down the mountain.
“God yes...” Amalia said, but it wasn't elation this time - it was density in her throat that she was trying to work around.
Randy had begun to sob and mumble.
“Is this it?” Elaine asked. She suddenly saw the ghost of the black wolf in her mind, it was standing in her memory rigid and against the backdrop of moonlit trees. “Is this the time I get to make a difference?” Her heart was a broken headlight, sagging off the front end of a car wrapped around a pole, it flickered on and off, thrusting its brightness against death.
Garcia had begun trying to corral the teens toward his patrol car. His mouth grimaced through the sweat that was beading on his face despite the chill. He was crooked over the sight of his gun.
“Stretch it out Officer.” A gruff voice came from the night behind Garcia's shoulder.
Elaine pressed her face into the wall, Randy's sobbing was pulling out the threads in her brain - he was a blubbering score over her anxiety. “Now now now now...” She kept pressing the word through her lips. “Its cold... Its cold and I feel alive.”
She turned slowly to see Garcia's hands in the air, his pistol on the ground before him. Dhalia was behind with something in her hand, jamming it into the small of his back. “Didn't think we robbed that bank with no guns did you?” She was playing along. Elaine struggled to read her face. “Let's take that radio off and get you into the back seat of your car.” Dhalia reached down and snapped the keys off his belt. “Round real slow friend, and down the hill here.”
Elaine saw Dhalia's weapon, a shaft of rusty brown rebar. She gasped. “Poser.” She called out.
Dhalia looked back over to her.
“Faker!”
“What the fuck woman?” Dhalia was startled by Elaine's counter-productive intuition.
“This is my moment, this is my life!” Elaine scrambled for the pistol. Just then Amalia turned around.
“She's lost her shit!”
“Shut up slut!” Elaine stood up, gun in hand, surrounded by the dust of her scuffle. “This is the poem of my world! The wolf! I'm the wolf!” There was a shot.
Inside the dark cabin, the sitter, Conrad's cooling juices on his hands, snorted out of a self-focused daze.
Officer Garcia slumped to the ground clutching his side. Dhalia looked down and saw that she was bleeding. She dropped her useless weapon. Elaine's head was shaking. Her eyes were wired on the gun. “I'm alive...” She said.
Randy rolled over on the ground clutching his stomach - he threw up sick that steamed into the night. Choking back his bile, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What the fuck Elaine? What the fuck!”
Elaine was possessed though. “I'm alive. This is it, this is my song.” She turned to Randy. “The wolf, Randy, we're the same.”
Amalia was running now. Up the incline toward the mine. Her arms were flapping hard against her sides, her elbows digging into her ribs. 'Away from the sound,' she thought, 'Away from all the noise and the pain and all the shitty decisions I've made'.
She was real in her terror. She became who she was when she was nine years old, before her father had left, before she had sought to fill his place with so many men. She was real in her fear - full of feature and character - and humanity.
“I'm sorry!” She yelled. A nest of birds flapped away from her excitement. “I'm sorry!”
She ran face first into a slow-heaving wall, her nose smashing into a massive sternum, covered filthy with a stained jumpsuit. She fell back and whined, her nostrils askew and bloody. “I'm sorry...” She looked up to him standing just under the moon, his broad shoulders nearly twice the length of a normal man's. Only his stern brow was caked in the dim sheen of natural light, only his brow and the curious scar across it.
“Daddy? I'm sorry... Don't leave me.” A gravestone-sized foot found her chest and pinned her down. There was a curious groan that came from the man's chest - a furnace churning coal deep inside. Amalia wept upward with her fingers, clawing, grabbing at his shins. Her mouth was sucking air silently, taking what it could as his foot ground down, popping things inside of her. The toe and heel of his boot kept crushing down until it was grinding naked spine to earth, splintering bone and body into soil. Amalia closed her mouth, her eyes kept weeping only for seconds.
He paused, her corpse smoking around his ankle, and then bent over and took her by the neck. He pulled Amalia halfway up his leg, his appendage posted through her, and grunted into her face before letting her flop back down.
Dhalia punched Elaine in the face. She felt her brittle symbolism crack under knuckle. The bullet had grazed her as well. It hurt. “Jesus...” Dhalia flicked her hand and grabbed at the tatters of jacket and skin, blood meandering through her fingers quickly.
Elaine dropped and began to sob but there was a thick, malty laughter under it.
Garcia was trying to stand. Randy met him with the tip of his boot.
Garcia went down again, after his head snapped back and he spit some teeth. The air smelled like rust.
“Stop fucking with the cop!” Screamed Dhalia, but her fury made her bullet-hole complain. She winced and knelt trying to curl into herself.
“Its okay Elaine!” Randy yelled, suckering a few more kicks into the officer's ribs. “I got you!”
Dhalia looked down at the gravel of the yard. The small pebbles were flecked with her blood. Her eyelids were flinching, she just couldn't comprehend the situation. Everything had happened so fast and none of it made sense.
“I can't go to jail!” Randy, again, his voice so needlessly violent.
'That was it,' thought Dhalia, her saliva backing up and slipping out. 'something's gotten into them.'.
She had to go. She had to get away from all the maniacs and red-splattered stones and trees.
She stood up, forcing down the pain and turned on her heel. She scampered down to the windowless building and saw that the door had been forced open. She saw the lock and the chain coiled limply on the ground and suddenly remembered Conrad. Curiously enough, the man now seemed the most collected in her brief memory of him, through the recent unfurling of events. She poked her head into the building and retched at the smell. Hot death, sweaty with the sound of flies.
She felt her legs aching forward, felt an invisible something shouldering up against her back, forcing her in, in to see what the source of the smell could be.
She had to know.
She had to validate it, or it remain a speculative nightmare.
Standing in the thick, humid darkness, she felt for her lighter and struggled with it for a few moments, before zipping out its flame and illuminating the room. But it wasn't the mess of man next to the door, crushed and squashed, punctured by its own pieces that drew her attention.
It was the message on the wall, scrawled in something messy, long dried, behind the single wooden chair that sat against it. Four words that rang out from the age-old wood with clear intent.
Dhalia backed away, stepping into what was left of Conrad. She felt the wet mound give and jiggle a little, the organs slipping around her weight as she subconsciously looked for footing.
The words were too much, even so dimly lit, too much for her to maintain herself. She mouthed them, silently, over and over again, until she saw herself in their definition. Somehow the message on the wall was describing everything that had happened that night, somehow the words and whoever had written them, knew what was going to happen. Four words that clutched her heart and made her mouth dry.
'They all must die.'
a slasher epic,
written by thedore sallis.
When the morning came the day was no less terrifying. The scent of murder hung over the entire compound. The density at which the drone of nature hummed on had become watery, moist with hesitation and lingering horror.
Dhalia had gathered no sleep beneath a small bridge that covered one of the camp's runoff trenches. She was dirty, covered with the sweat of the night before mingled with the mist of early dawn. Her feet were still pruned and cold in her boots from marinating in the sludge gathered up from Conrad's pummeled corpse. She hadn't even bothered to take them off, or to move at all since she had seen the message on the wall. She knew that three people were dead and that two of them had been disfigured beyond recognition by unimaginable brute force. There was another presence that had entered the camp last night. Or one that had been there all along. This was the thought that kept her motionless and breathing as lightly as a rabbit would. That she felt hunted in a place she had lived most of her adolescent life. There was a place she had made home against the odds. Alone and nearly craven with sadness in the high woods above the world - she had learned that place - the sounds it had made - the habits it kept... Now that had all come down. It was a nightmare plain shaded darkly.
She was insecure. Tough as nails and scared to death.
With all her will she managed to shift out from under the bridge peek over the ledge of the ditch. The sunlight that filtered through the canopy only served to enunciate the savagery of what had happened. Nothing was glossed or softened but intensified. Reds and colors deeper all shining out despite their tumorous, out-of-place arrival. The officer's body still lay just feet from his patrol car, the door to the vehicle ajar, the weapon Elaine had stolen tossed to the pines beyond. Dhalia closed her eyes and willed it all away. In her sightless want she heard the birds high above and the chilly mountain wind pass over her. It soothed her momentarily, until it carried past her nostrils the carrion stench that lurked noxiously out from that dreaded shack.
She told herself she could handle it. She said to herself. “Get up. Walk away.” And put a sturdy hand into the dirt and pulled herself out.
She stood for several minutes and listened, holding her breath. She listened. She wondered if Randy and Elaine had already left the camp or if they were hiding like she had been. She listened for any human sound at all. Nothing but the forest and the hissing of the radio from the squad car. For a second she thought to contact the police, use the radio and let them know what had happened. She walked to the car and stared at the radio. Dead cop she thought. Don't call he police. Nothing explains away a dead cop.
She walked over to the tree-line and found the gun. She checked the chamber and saw that it had five bullets. Five chances against whoever had killed Conrad as she made her way out.
“We're lost Elaine...” Randy dropped down against a rock.
They had both ran into the woods. Elaine's revelry had faded. Her and Randy had been stumbling away from the camp and further up the mountain for hours - exhausted and confused. They had talked in frantic dialogue all through the night of what had happened. They had tried to piece together the events as best they could amidst a strange mist that seemed to cloud their short term memory.
“And then he was dead...” Elaine had wept. “Face down and fucking extinct, and the gun was in my hand. My hand.”
“All I remember is you saying something about that wolf... And then I threw up... And then we were running. And now I'm tired...”
“Come on Randy. We have to keep going.”
“Fuck it man, we're far enough away from whatever happened that no one is going to find us any time soon. Let me sit, its been a minute.”
“My hand...” Elaine repeated. The words she had spent the night before came to her only in fading fragments - the way a vivid dream fades into rationalization as the day grows long. There was an incredible sense of liberation about her but it was snared back, pulled at by the hooking talons of the reality of what she had done. She had killed a man.
The wolf was snarling in her mind again.
Randy rubbed the dirt from his eyes. “You attacked that hippie chick too. She was about to pull our asses out of the fire and you just got after her.” Some of it was coming back to him now. “Right?” He looked at her expectantly.
She just shook her head.
“You said something about your moment. Something about your life.”
Elaine squatted down and held her knees. She let out a long sigh and leaned on Randy. He didn't push her away and for a moment the two of them stopped their shouting and their advertisements and found one another. “I'm scared.”
Randy put his arm around her. “We've done some bad things.”
“Yeah...”
“Are we bad people?”
Elaine looked up into the trees. “I never wanted to kill anyone.”
“What happened back there Elaine?”
“I don't know... It felt like a scream I couldn't stop. I just kept trying to close my mouth but it kept coming. It got so loud that it started to destroy everything.”
“We're in trouble.”
“We've passed trouble. We have to get back to trouble from wherever it is we are.”
“Maybe we could just stay up here. Dhalia didn't seem to mind. They'll never find us.”
Elaine stood back up and rubbed her arms. “They'll come looking for the cop Randy. And when they find out what happened they'll never stop.”
“What do we do?”
“Up or down.” She whispered, motioning up the mountain first and then down to where they had come from. “Either way I guess. We walk until we die.”
Dhalia had made it to safety. She thought. She hadn't come into any resistance within the compound and was working her way down the road that would eventually link her back into civilization. The only evidence of man, the paved way, worked its way hazardously down the mountainside. The road was cracked and forgotten. She seemed more in the wilderness now than ever before - such was the growth of brush and tree around her that it seemed to solidify into a sheet of green - thick and confusing as endless patterns of branch and leaf forbade her sight any further beyond the overgrown trail. Her ears caught something and the hand she was reserving for the gun popped and cracked. There was a human sound coming from down the road - what sounded like a low mumbling. It rumbled softly up the way with the pitch of song. It was rhythmical. Low and subdued. Unbroken. Then the scent of sandalwood. The look of perplexity had come unnoticed over her brow. Dhalia found herself enraptured with the sudden mystery, so much that she loosened on her weapon and armed herself forward more so with her curious chin.
As she rounded the bend she became of aware of more. There was a dim effect casting against the trees. It was almost in time with the murmuring song, washed out from the sunlight - the cycling of blue - the color of a police beacon.
She ground her heel into the road. She weighed her angles - the gun in her hand and the bloody sweat all over her aching body. She could stumble down and pretend to be oblivious, confused, relate the whole story and try to cement her circumstantial part in it. Her sleep-depraved mind began convincing her of things. Had she done anything wrong? Frantically Dhalia tried to replay the events of the night in her mind - looking over them for incidents that would hold her against the law. Still - cops at the moment were certainly more inviting than what she had left behind. With a resolve in her sigh she quickly tossed the weapon into the woods and began limping toward the blue lights. She had forgotten already about the song and the incense.
A strangeness came over her as she walked. The world seemed to slow. The wind in the trees sounded like string instruments. She felt old. In the middle of the road, covered softly by the shifting shade - three police cars, one over-turned completely, sat askew and abandoned. The doors of the vehicles were ajar. The inverted vehicle's door had been separated from the body completely, the piece lay in the woods beyond halfway into a tree. The windows were smashed and trails of pulverized glass scattered the length of the path. Dhalia took it in slowly, her brain would not allow it otherwise. Her bright eyes searched for any explanation to the arrows - primitive weapons lined with inky black feathers - that peppered the cars - impossibly penetrating their metal frames. There must have been hundreds, stuck into tires, thrust into the seats inside, piercing the vital chambers beneath and bleeding gas and fluid onto the street. She still tasted the lingering woody scent. She muttered a prayer not knowing why but for certain that her life was in danger. There was a small effigy in front of the wreckage - a small spire of nearly burnt thatching - rich chalk-white smoke blistered from it. It had been made intentionally Dhalia thought - she was reminded of the roadside laurels and wreathes people would make for the victims of car accidents. Near the thatching was a small pile of smooth, rounded rocks also with the look of deliberation.
It all seemed fresh, too recent. These were the police that had surely come looking for their missing comrade or those that had failed to follow the youth-criminal element up into the mining camp the previous evening.
But where were the bodies? Dhalia looked to the sides of the road and into the trees. Nothing. Maybe the were still alive? There was a rustling in the distance and Dhalia reached for her pistol - the one she had thrown into the forest. She clutched her fingers into her palm violently, punishing herself for acting so stupidly.
A great wolf came from the woods. Great in the fact that she could only fantasize the enormous frame that maintained its black, twitching body, pressed to strike and still hidden in the trees - for its head was of such a staggering value that Dhalia first thought it to be a crazed bear protruding its neck into the open. Its muzzle tore up into a mythical snarl and steaming, hearty drops of saliva smacked audibly onto the pavement below. The titan-wolf held its eyes on her, milky-white things swimming in madness.
Dhalia was trapped between it and the cars behind. She became aware of the buzzing of flies. The wolf put a paw into the road and leaned out its torso, hunkered down and preying - Dhalia saw the glint of bone shine out from its mass - a portion of the animal's side was vacant - the hollowed cavity fibrous with stands of hanging meat between ribs. The wound was as big as the beast's head and seemed weathered - an old gape that stunk with the decomposition that comes with exposure to air. Dhalia's mouth was bitter. The flies were coming from the gash - she saw clumps of larva and eggs dribbling out - wriggling into the pools of slobber that moistened the ground. The fear that lingered the most though was that the wolf seemed all too vibrantly alive despite the fatal puncture. It heaved and lurched and snarled with the warmth of existence, with the bristling hunger of its ancient ilk. It moved no less fluidly than whole wolves would and it seemed intent on filtering her flesh through its fangs.
She would have to make a break for the vehicles. Possibly lock herself in one of the cars and crawl out the other side. She knew as soon as she moved though that the monster from the trees would surge into purpose - and with the sheer size of it - it would overtake her in seconds.
Something split the air. A sharp slicing sound came from over Dhalia's shoulder. An arrow had lodged into one of the wolf's eyes - she stared as yellow-white froth came down from the beast's orb and collected at the base of the projectile. It howled a great primeval howl. Some childish instinct that was drug out from her terrified mind made her cover her ears and weep. The glass that was still intact on some of the police cars shattered.
Two soft words were spoken to her - from somewhere beyond the howl and the thrumming of her own over-excited pulse - words that were not English or any other language she had ever heard.
“Skek Eth.” The voice was soft but deliberate. “Go now. Run.” Words she understood.
Dhalia made a pass for the cars. She ran - he jaw snapping up - her whole body pleading with gravity to relent and let her fly as far as she could away.
She dove through one of the empty windows and kicked out the opposite door. On the other side of the makeshift barricade she stopped only for a second to look behind to who had saved her.
“No...”
On top of one of the cars, facing away from her - bow drawn with tense fingers - was a man. His head and shoulders were wrapped with mountain lion pelt, the tail of the dead animal running down his back. From his waist hung stone age weapons and tools, instruments chipped from the crust of the earth. The only other clothing was draped across his pelvis and strapped hard around his feet and ankles in furred boots.
Not else but scars adorned his body - deep and old - marks of savagery.
He turned to her slightly - showing his striking jaw and mane of black facial hair. “Wolves are the ghosts of this place.”
Dhalia slowly nodded. “Who... who?”
There was another howl that rattled her bowels.
The man let slip another arrow. “Shadows of the Blood God. Go!”
She ran. She ran down the mountain.