Stake

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Her voice hitched. ‘Then he grabbed me, hit me so hard on the back of my head that my ears rang and I couldn’t see straight. He punched me in the stomach and my legs went weak, and he dragged me off. I’ll never forget the look on his face, in his eyes. Why would he do that? Why would he take me?’

  She looked at Lexi as if expecting answers, but in all her research she’d never read anything about an assault like this. In other Bigfoot sightings, the skittish creature always fled.

  ‘He took me deep into the forest, far off the trail. There was a rock overhang and some kind of lean-to with a fire pit. I guess it must have been his home. He held me there and he … he … When I fought too hard, he hit my head against a rock so that I couldn’t resist. He didn’t say anything, just forced himself on me whenever he liked. He kept me tied up.’

  Lexi didn’t need to see the distraught look on Holly’s face to know that something truly had happened to her, something violent and soul shaking.

  ‘On the third morning, he left at dawn, maybe to go hunt. Once I was alone, I fought and twisted and managed to break the rope around my wrists, untied my legs. I threw on my pants and T-shirt, shoved my feet into my hiking boots, and I just ran. I left my backpack behind. I left everything. I didn’t yell for help because I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Who would hear me out there, other than … him? I didn’t even know where I was going.

  ‘I stumbled on to a trail after a few hours, and I just followed it. A while later, I bumped into other hikers, and they had cell phone reception. They called in a rescue party.’ Holly shuddered. ‘I could never find that place again, and I don’t want to.’

  She shook her head, and her shoulders slumped as she sat on the sofa. ‘But in some ways it’s just as bad being back home. Some people think it’s a joke. They laugh at what happened to me. But it was Bigfoot! I saw him, all covered with hair. I felt his big hands hitting me. I felt …’ She hitched a deep breath and looked down at Lexi’s business card. She seemed to be coming back from a distant place. ‘Who did you say you are again?’

  ‘Just someone who will listen.’ Lexi felt as shaken as this woman looked.

  Curious, Holly pulled out her phone and went to HideTruth. When the screen came up, her face darkened. ‘I’m so stupid. Get out of here!’

  Lexi held up her hands in a placating gesture as she stood from the chair. ‘I don’t mean any harm. I promise I won’t post any of this, if you don’t want me to. I’m just trying to understand.’

  ‘Get out!’ Holly screamed.

  Lexi retreated quickly. ‘I swear I won’t post this or give any details. I just wanted to know if it was real.’

  ‘You’re asking me if it was real!?’ Her face was red and outraged. ‘Fuck you. Fuck all of you!’

  Lexi retreated through the front door. She spoke in her sincerest voice. ‘I believe you, Holly. I really do.’

  When the door slammed and she heard the lock click, Lexi felt like shit.

  FOURTEEN

  The bitter smoke of campfires hung among the trees. The man stood shaking in terror as the people muttered, uneasy about what they knew he had done.

  Lucius hardened his heart. This was the difficult but necessary part about leading the Bastion. ‘It is what it is.’

  Roland was a big brute who normally inspired fear, towering nearly seven feet with long, tangled brown hair, a bushy beard that had never seen comb or razor. His eyebrows sprouted like feathers above his big brown eyes. Roland’s neck, shoulders, and arms were covered with a pelt of wiry brown fur, enough to keep him warm even in the autumn chill so that he needed to wear nothing more than an old brown pair of overalls. The hirsute man groaned deep in his throat, shook his head from side to side, swaying his long locks.

  ‘No … No …’

  The settlement was scattered among the trees. Tarpaulins covered piles of cut firewood and crates of supplies, stockpiles that would be used throughout the winter. Tents and lean-tos formed the homes of the numerous families. Pots of coffee or soup hung over cook fires, while some preferred to use small butane burners or camp stoves. Bastion members who desired less social interaction had their own tents out in the surrounding forest. The entire camp could pack up and vanish in the space of an hour, should they be exposed.

  Lucius stood before the prisoner, as implacable as a statue. Though dwarfed by the hairy giant, he showed no fear. He was the leader of the Bastion, and all the people had gathered around in judgment.

  ‘We took you in, Roland. We helped you. We put up with a lot.’

  ‘No,’ the big man said in a low phlegmy voice.

  ‘You were one of us.’

  ‘Bastion!’ Roland said. ‘I am one of us.’

  ‘Not anymore. Not after what you did.’

  The giant dropped to his knees, crackling dry leaves on the forest floor. He sniffled and sobbed. Around the camp, people shuffled their feet, sad and sickened. But they had voted. They all agreed.

  Roland was one of those outliers who made his home on the fringes, a man who liked to be left alone, yet craved company every week or so. Now the towering man had put them all in danger.

  ‘What is the Bastion about?’ Lucius asked the audience.

  ‘Safety,’ the people muttered in unison.

  Roland groaned. ‘I want to be safe!’

  In one of the campfires, a knot in a log cracked and popped like a gunshot, startling them. Roland bowed his head, clawed dirty fingernails through his matted hair.

  Lucius continued. ‘We have to stay hidden. The outsiders can’t know about us. We are the only ones who will survive whatever comes, but we only survive if we stay safe! You exposed us, Roland. You found a hiker, you grabbed her, and you hurt her.’

  ‘No … didn’t hurt her,’ Roland said. ‘She was my mate.’

  ‘She was not! You hurt her. You raped her.’

  ‘I was lonely.’

  The hairy man’s depths of abject misery almost moved Lucius, but he steeled himself.

  He glanced over at Mama. She looked beautiful in her new fleece jacket. If Lucius didn’t do what was necessary, he knew Mama was strong enough to do it herself. ‘If you were lonely, then come to us for company.’

  Roland had always been a misfit, unlike the better-adjusted members of the Bastion who could make trips back into the city if necessary. The hairy man was born to be isolated in the wilderness. He could never survive in a complicated, civilized world. He was slow-witted, generally friendly, and wore his emotions right out in the open. But he had never before exhibited violence.

  Whenever Roland was angry or frustrated, he would run deep into the forest and just scream at the top of his lungs until he felt better. Lucius had taught him that, and he had thought it was enough to keep him stable. Afterward, Roland would return to the Bastion, smiling as if all had been forgotten.

  But this … this couldn’t be forgotten.

  ‘You hurt a young woman, Roland, and she will never be the same – because of you. Worse, you brought attention from the outsiders. For days, rangers and search-and-rescue teams combed the forest … We are lucky that someone didn’t stumble upon remnants of one of our camps.

  ‘I don’t want to be lonely,’ Roland said.

  ‘Because of what you did, you will be more lonely than ever,’ he answered in a hard voice. Parents placed consoling arms around their young children. They stood with intent gazes.

  Roland was well liked among the Bastion. They sympathized with him, as if he were a family pet or a mascot, but no one questioned Lucius’s decision. He could have taken an even harder line. It is what it is.

  Mama came up beside him and took his hand to give him strength.

  Lucius pronounced, ‘You are exiled. You need to go far away. Leave the camp, leave our home, go into the far hills. Live by yourself, with no contact from any of us until spring. You get no help, no supplies, no conversation. You’re alone.’

  The other members of the Bastion stepped closer to Lucius, standing togethe
r to present a united front, leaving Roland on the outside.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he said.

  Lucius didn’t let his heart melt. ‘Take your supplies, find a cave or build a shelter, but go far away. You know how to hunt. If you are desperate, you know where we’ve hidden emergency caches in the woods. Take them if you need them, but you may not ask us for help.’

  As the shaggy man rose from his knees, he seemed to keep growing as he stood until he was enormous, dangerous looking. No wonder a mere glimpse of him would make people think of Sasquatch.

  But now Roland was broken by what he had done. ‘No,’ he groaned again.

  ‘Yes! And if we see you again before spring, the sentence will be harsher. We’ll kill you if we have to.’

  Gasps went around the camp, but again the people didn’t argue.

  ‘I have to keep us safe – and you are no longer part of the Bastion.’

  Stumbling as if he were drunk, paralyzed with grief, Roland crashed out of the camp. At the outer fringe of Ponderosa pines, he turned back, as if hoping they would change their minds.

  The members of the Bastion remained silent. Lucius took Mama’s arm.

  Finally, the hairy man stalked into the forest, devastated. Come spring, Lucius would track him down, but for now he felt shaky with relief.

  FIFTEEN

  Working online at home detached Lexi from clocks, calendars, and normal human routines. Some entrepreneurs called it freedom, the ability to set her own hours, to run her own business, to take a day off whenever she didn’t want to work. But if she didn’t complete her work, she didn’t get paid.

  Thankfully, Blair kept to a regular schedule, and that grounded her. He worked his day job at Rags to Riches three or four days a week and served cocktails at Olive U on weekends and other nights.

  Tonight, though, Blair had the Happy Hour shift, so he had to leave before dinner. He dressed in a trim blazer and a pewter-colored raw-silk shirt. Sometimes on Fridays he liked to party after he got off work.

  ‘You’ll feed yourself, Lex?’ he asked, more to reassure himself than to remind her. If he didn’t check on her, she would subsist on granola bars, cold cereal, and microwaved dinners. And he did not find that acceptable.

  ‘I’ll order a pizza or something. Don’t worry about me.’

  She went back to her room to work, spending hours for PRUUF and more hours pulling up the weeds of phishing addresses. She remained unsettled by her clumsy and disastrous conversation with Holly Smith. What had she been thinking? Her heart was in the right place and she wanted to be understanding, but the young woman would never believe that now. Lexi wasn’t trying to profit from a victim’s misery, didn’t see herself as a predatory reporter. But her actions were – she had to admit – creepy.

  After spending so much time with social misfits and fanatics on her website, had she lost all of her own social skills and common sense? Had she forgotten how normal humans interacted, especially in a tragedy? By claiming to be a sympathetic ear and saying that she was open to hearing more about Bigfoot, Lexi had hoped the other woman might see her as a friend. Not too bright.

  She shook her head and felt the hard weight in her heart, the twisting of guilt and dismay as if she had scorpions instead of butterflies in her stomach. No matter her innocent intentions, she had certainly put her foot in it. She hoped Holly didn’t file a harassment complaint with the police.

  Later, she was shocked to see that it was 1:45 a.m., and the growling in her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t, after all, called for her pizza. Knowing Blair would scold her if she admitted that, Lexi picked up a flyer for Checkers Pizza, which delivered 24 hours. She placed an order for a large pepperoni and black olives so she would have leftovers in the fridge.

  Even when she was home alone, Lexi left her bedroom door mostly closed, a habitual concession to privacy that came from living with a housemate. She had been in her room for so long that the rest of the house was dark, the lights off in the hall, kitchen, and living room.

  Waiting for her pizza, she went back on HideTruth and was annoyed to find even more offensive, crude troll postings about Bigfoot sex, and in disgust she deleted them all. ‘Enough of this shit.’

  Annoyed and unsettled, Lexi switched to the vampire thread to read what was new on the stake killing. Stoker1897 had again posted his theories – lists of mysterious deaths that might have been vampire victims, missing persons that could have been drained of blood and conveniently eliminated.

  Lexi compiled and posted a summary of related materials she had found in addition to Stoker1897’s evidence – not just the details on the Mark Stallings murder, but the possible other stake killings in California and Texas from years past, as well as the decapitated meth dealer in Colorado Springs whose head had not yet been found. She organized the list, made connections, and presented a compelling argument.

  ‘It’s all circumstantial,’ she typed, ‘but it’s still evidence. I’ve submitted this to the Colorado Springs Police Department tip line, but they have not yet responded. If vampires do exist in our society, infiltrating night jobs, feeding on innocent humans and then erasing all sign of their presence, how can we prove it? We certainly won’t know if we don’t look.’

  One of the trolls on the deleted Bigfoot thread popped up, accusing her of censorship, of hiding the truth, calling her a patsy for the puppet masters. She deleted that comment too, knowing there would probably be more. What if one of those trolls turned into a sick stalker like Dicked Over? It was her site, dammit!

  By now it was after two in the morning. She was so intent on her work that she was startled to hear a noise, the click of the door, someone moving furtively inside the house. A chill went down her back and she froze, listening through her half-closed door. Hearing no sound for a long moment, she wondered if she was just jumpy from all the mysterious things on her site. Then she heard a thump as someone bumped into a chair. The living room was dark, and the bright light in her own room reduced her ability to see in the shadows.

  She backed to her bed, dreading that this was finally the day she had feared. Another stalker tracking her down? She slid open the nightstand drawer and removed the loaded .38. Ready to go. Damn, she wished she had gone to the range more often, but she had never intended to shoot anyone. The point of the big revolver was to serve as a threat, but she wasn’t sure she had it in her. She calmed herself. The reason she had chosen this weapon was because she could just point it and shoot. She wrapped her fingers around the grip, held the gun firmly in her hand. The revolver felt alien, dangerous, yet comforting. With her thumb, she cocked it so she could pull the trigger more easily.

  She heard someone stumbling around in the dark front room; there was no doubt about it now.

  Lexi yanked open her door, flooding the hall and the main room with light, and lunged out, barely able to see. ‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?’

  The light shone upon Blair in his rumpled blazer and pewter shirt. He shielded his eyes, wearing a foolish grin. When he saw the gun she held, he recoiled, raised his hands and took a step back. ‘Jesus, Lex! Welcome home to you too.’ She quickly uncocked and lowered the revolver, shaking. His words were a little slurred, and he walked toward her with an unsteady gait.

  So relieved she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, Lexi set the weapon safely back on the desk in her room. ‘You scared the crap out of me, creeping around in the dark! Why didn’t you just announce yourself?’

  ‘Didn’t want to turn on the lights, didn’t want to bother you.’ As if he had forgotten about the gun, Blair appeared happy, even giddy, and much more tipsy than she normally saw him.

  ‘You’re out late,’ she said.

  ‘Late … or early. Maybe, just maybe, I got lucky.’ He laughed and started humming. ‘I think I need to go to bed.’ Again, he gave her a wolfish smile. ‘The most wonderful, amazing guy. He’s come into the martini bar six times, and he just couldn’t resist my charms. Ces
ar.’ Blair inhaled a long breath and let it out. ‘Isn’t that just the most charming name? Cesar.’ He dropped his voice to a scandalous whisper. ‘I may be late a lot more often, if things keep going well.’

  Humming to himself, he strolled down the hall with alarmingly liquid footsteps, and closed the door to his room.

  Still unsettled, Lexi returned the .38 to her nightstand drawer and closed it safely out of sight. She decided to just go to bed. Yes, tomorrow would be a better one. Enough drama for one day.

  She had just pulled off her socks and found the oversized T-shirt she slept in when the doorbell rang. Lexi groaned, remembering the pizza she had ordered. She turned on the living-room light, dazzled by the brightness, and opened the front door to find a thin, thirty-ish man in a Checkers Pizza shirt and cap. He held a flat cardboard box that smelled amazingly of pepperoni. She realized how hungry she was after all.

  ‘Late-night pizza.’ The man had a ragged brown beard, long straight hair, and intense blue eyes under the bill of his cap. Checkers wasn’t the best pizza, but it was the best pizza at two o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Thanks.’ She took the box with her left hand and dug into her jeans pocket, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill.

  ‘It’s twelve dollars,’ said the delivery man. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have change.’

  That was odd. She set the pizza box on the small table beside the door. ‘Let me get my purse.’

  The pizza delivery man stood awkwardly on the porch, just on the threshold. He looked into the empty house, and when he saw no one else there, his demeanor changed. ‘Can I come inside while I wait? It’s cold out here.’ His voice had an odd accent. Russian? Eastern European?

  In an automatic polite gesture, Lexi was about to invite him inside, but she paused. A chill went down her back. It was a cool autumn night, but pleasant, not frigid. The delivery man stared, waiting for her to say the words and invite him in. What kind of pizza guy carried no change? Wore no jacket and then complained about the cold? Her skin began to crawl after a long awkward moment. ‘I … no, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. Just wait there.’