Descending Son

by Scott Shepherd

  He collapsed in my arms. His eyes were cloudy, his body retching with nausea. I could tell he was running a malaria-type fever from one touch of his forehead. He had somehow navigated the jeep back to the base camp, but whatever malady he suffered from weakened him so much he crashed into the trees.

  The director, an effete specimen given to fits of rage that were only condoned because he had won an Oscar, tried to control the situation. I could see he was only interested in his shooting schedule and told him to stay the hell away from the actor.

  “If you don’t let me do what I was hired for, pretty soon you’re not going to have a star on your hands. He’ll be a dead man,” I told him.

  How prophetic.

  It was Clark James himself who put the idea of shooting to rest.

  “Dead. They’re dead. All of them.”

  He muttered it repeatedly, then passed out.

  Thank God for the screenwriter. He convinced the director they needed to look for the missing crew members. This finally knocked some sense into the director, who threw his manic energy into ordering half a dozen people to head for the ruins.

  Hours later, I heard they had arrived back with three dead bodies in tow. (I learned about the missing girl from the screenwriter right before we airlifted out of Santa Alvarado. He was drunk and despondent by then, and my heart went out to him.) There was nothing I could do for the victims, which was a blessing because I had my hands full with Clark James.

  Here I was, trying to keep one of the biggest stars in the world alive, in a place time had forgotten. Clark was in and out of delirium and constantly throwing up. He had developed a particular aversion to being in the heat and sunlight. It was only his bloodcurdling screams demanding shade that made me move him into a tent where he calmed down enough so I could try and attend to his injuries.

  I convinced one of the local women to help me undress him and try to clean up his wounds. We had no sooner exposed a couple of deep gashes in his leg and neck when the woman crossed herself and ran out of the tent.

  I first thought the wounds were from a knife. They were striated, as if the assailant had used a ragged edged blade. But there was something peculiar about them. Just as I traced a delicate finger across the one by his neck, James bolted up and stared at me with genuine horror in his feverish eyes.

  “Teeth! Those teeth!”

  I cradled his head, steadying him before he fell off the table. Clark was so terrified he actually started to whimper. That was when I realized what was so odd about the wounds. They weren’t from a knife at all.

  They were bite marks.

  “Something bit you.”

  Clark nodded, frantically.

  “What?”

  For a moment, Clark struggled to reply. But his eyes clouded over and his voice was just a sad whisper. “I… I don’t remember.”

  The more I pushed the issue, the more vague he got. Clark finally passed out, unable to tell me anything more about what had attacked him.

  But I found out soon enough.

  1

  Tracy remained in the darkness as the three of them stood in eerie silence. Oddly enough, Maria was the first to break it.

  “Why did you come all the way to Mexico?”

  Tracy didn’t answer. Jess, whirring through the ramifications of having just learned of Tracy’s turning, offered up a theory.

  “You’re looking for something to reverse this.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Not a cure.” Her voice was laced with disappointment and fury from being told a lie. “But it has helped fight off the hunger.”

  She pointed toward the deep recesses of the cavern.

  “You don’t expect us to follow you back there,” said Maria.

  “I promise I won’t hurt you. Even when the craving was at its worst, I couldn’t bring myself to really attack anyone.”

  “The farmer. Was that you?” Jess asked.

  He could make out Tracy nodding in the shadows. “I couldn’t go through with it. There’s this yearning deep inside for blood, but when it came to actually cutting through flesh to get it—it just made me nauseous.” She lowered her voice. “Some people aren’t made for this, I guess.”

  The irony of the phrasing wasn’t lost on Jess. Even turned, Tracy had retained more than a shred of her humanity. The girl he had once fallen head over heels for was still there, and it broke his heart.

  “I keep thinking I should just walk into the sunlight and get it over with.”

  Jess flinched. He was still struggling with the idea that part of Tracy was gone forever. But for her to just go and end it entirely?

  “Tracy…”

  “Don’t worry, Jessie. I’m too much of a chickenshit.” She looked over her shoulder. “At least this offers an option I can live with.” She turned back toward them and offered up a sad smile. “Bad pun intended.”

  “Just what is back there?” Jess asked.

  “Depends on how you look at it. Hell. Or salvation.”

  Jess and Maria remained in the streaming sunlight as a trust debate continued for a while longer. Maria, still feeling the swipe across her throat from the previous evening, was understandably cautious about accompanying whatever-Tracy-had-become deeper into the cavern. Jess said it would have been easy for her to attack them after knocking the flashlights from their hands, giving further credence to Tracy’s claim she couldn’t take a human life. Maria was already coming around to Jess’s side when the two cylinders landed at their feet. Tracy had picked up the flashlights and tossed them back from the darkness.

  She stood near the edge of the cascading daylight. “What’s in those things?”

  Jess explained Tag Marlowe’s invention.

  Tracy instinctively backed further into the shadows. “Maybe you can keep them pointed away from me?”

  Jess and Maria agreed—for the time being.

  “So are we good?” Tracy asked.

  “I’d hardly say ‘good,’ but I want to see what’s back there,” Jess responded.

  “Then follow me.”

  Maria was still unsure. “How do you know where you’re going? Do you… have some kind of night vision?”

  Tracy let out a little laugh. “Don’t I wish?” She produced an ordinary flashlight from her back pocket. “I brought my own. Far as I can tell, AA batteries won’t make me burst into flames.”

  That bit of levity propelled the three of them deeper into the cavern. Tracy used her flashlight to illuminate the cave walls while Jess and Maria were extra careful to keep Tracy out of their solar beams.

  The walls had plenty of cragged nooks. Stalactite formations hung from the ceilings and they needed to duck more than twice. As they traveled farther, Jess became aware of a rushing sound.

  “What is that?” he asked as they rounded a narrow bend and it grew louder.

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Maria hung close by Jess and eventually took hold of his arm. He was happy for the human contact and gave her hand a tight squeeze. Up ahead, something glowed in the deeper recess of the cave.

  “I don’t presume that’s sunlight,” Jess said.

  “I brought a lantern.”

  Jess wondered if Tracy had been a Girl Scout and adhered to the “Be Prepared” motto. Then he remembered that was the Boy Scout credo, and he was anything but ready for what lay around the corner.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Maria.

  All of a sudden, Jess smelled it too. It was sickeningly sweet and had a metallic feel.

  Tracy stopped outside the entrance to a deeper cave. “Not pleasant, right?”

  “Disagreeable, I would say,” said Jess.

  “That’s how I know things have changed.” A dangerous edge had slipped into her voice. “I find myself craving it.”

  She walked into the glow of the cavern ahead. As they followed, Jess kept hold of Maria’s arm. The rushing sound was loud, the smell even more acrid.


  A lantern on the ground washed light over a hollowed-out cavern. The walls sparkled, partly from the minerals buried within, the rest from the condensation coming off the body of water below.

  But it wasn’t quite H2O. It had a more gelatinous consistency; thicker.

  It was also tinged with red.

  Jess suddenly understood the smell and Tracy’s attraction to it.

  “Blood.”

  “Not completely. It’s definitely water-based. But I don’t think a scientist has been down here to take a sample.”

  Maria turned her face away; the smell was so overpowering.

  Tracy knelt down and dipped a finger in the bloody river, which she brought up to her parted lips. The ensuing slurping sound sent a shiver up and down their spines, causing Maria to stifle a gag reflex and Jess to momentarily squeeze his eyes shut.

  When he opened them, Tracy had just finished licking her finger clean like the last vestiges of a favorite dish. “It curbs the hunger.”

  “How often do you need to…?”

  Jess couldn’t find the right word to complete the question. He realized he didn’t want to.

  “Every day or two, I think. I’m just getting used to this.”

  Pained by what she had become, Jess turned away. He took in the strange surroundings. “I presume you learned about this place from your father.”

  “He described how to get here. But he wasn’t the one who told me about it.”

  Jess turned to face her again. “Who did?”

  Tracy looked up at them from the river. A helpless look fell over her.

  “I don’t know.”

  After witnessing the ghoulish spectacle of Tracy feeding from the river, Maria, clearly unable to take any more, exited the cavern room. Jess began to follow but then spotted something near the entrance. He bent down and gingerly examined a pile of bones.

  “I think they were sacrifices,” Tracy said. A few crumbled in his hands; others didn’t seem so old.

  Tracy came up behind him. By the time Jess looked up, she had wiped her mouth clean. All traces of the ghastly aperitif were gone.

  “Sacrifices?” Something in the remains glinted: metal. Jess started to finger through the remains.

  “To replenish the spring,” she said, pointing at the river of blood. “Whatever it’s made of seems to regenerate, but it helps getting a new infusion every so often.”

  Jess picked out a few metal objects, stuck them in his pocket, and straightened up. “And you know this how?”

  “I can’t explain it. I just knew after I was turned.”

  “Like what? A shared consciousness? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “More like a whisper that kept wiggling inside my ear, running through my head. I can’t tell you where it came from, but by the time I was fully aware, I just knew all this stuff.”

  “By fully aware, you mean after you were…” Jess broke off, unable to finish the sentence, as if by refusing to do so, he could possibly undo it.

  “Attacked. Bitten. Turned. Whatever you feel comfortable saying.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable saying any of it. When did this happen?”

  “The night they came for you at my house. I screamed but they knocked me to the ground and dragged you away. I got up to run inside and call the police but never made it that far. He was waiting for me.”

  “Your father?”

  “Not mine, Jessie. Yours.”

  Tracy’s eyes brimmed with tears once again.

  “It was Walter who turned me.”

  2

  Jess knew that one day he would end up talking about his father with Tracy, but in his wildest imagination, he never thought it would be in a situation like this.

  They had moved out of the cavern room. The metallic odor of the spring had finally become too much for Jess. Tracy held the lantern to lead the way. Maria was nowhere in sight.

  Jess realized Maria thought he should be alone with Tracy. After unburdening his darkest secret the night before, he could tell Maria knew there was unfinished business between them. Lena’s daughter’s sensitivity and maturity continued to amaze him.

  “My father attacked you,” Jess said after they found a spot far enough from the cavern room.

  “I actually don’t remember.”

  “You said he was standing there.”

  Tracy nodded. “But everything immediately went black. I might have passed out; I can’t say for sure. I thought your father was dead. The shock of seeing him was the last thing I remember.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s hard to explain. I drifted in and out. I kept hearing this voice, whispering…”

  “Was it Walter?”

  “No. I had never heard it before. The words were jumbled—I didn’t understand them. It was like when you’re swimming underwater and someone tries to talk to you. Garbled like that.”

  Jess nodded, encouraging Tracy to continue.

  “When I woke up it was nearly dawn and I was on the living room couch.”

  That explained her bed not having been slept in, thought Jess.

  “My father was sitting beside me. He was crying. I hadn’t seen him do that since I was a little girl—when my mother died.”

  Tracy paused. She looked around the cave, trying to comprehend how she had ended up in such a strange place so far away from home.

  “And then I knew, I could just feel it. I had died too. And my father was grieving once again.”

  Jess tried to line it up with all the fantastical things he had experienced the past week. He had learned enough not to reject anything out of hand, but still had questions.

  “You knew what had happened to you?”

  Tracy nodded. “I realize now it must have been the whispers. I didn’t understand what they were at the time, but I knew so much more when I woke up. It was like when you have a strange dream where nothing makes sense while it’s happening, but in the morning you remember the nightmare. Only in this case, it was my new reality.”

  “You understood that you had been turned.”

  “Pretty much. What I didn’t get at first, my father explained to me. That was actually the hardest thing, wrapping my brain around my father being the same as me.”

  “You had no idea before?”

  “That my father had died and come back to life?” Tracy managed a slight laugh. “Are you kidding? If it had occurred to me and I said it out loud, someone would have committed me. Hell, I would’ve done it myself.”

  Jess knew the exact feeling.

  “All I knew was that he had gotten really sick in Mexico and made a remarkable recovery. I totally got him retiring and going into seclusion afterwards.”

  “What about the fact that he didn’t go out during the day? Or eat?”

  “He was an eccentric movie star. Also, remember I went to grad school for a few years. He urged me to. Of course, now I understand why. And it wasn’t like we spent a ton of time together. It was mostly parties and premieres in the evenings. I occasionally saw him during the day, but it was always somewhere inside. I once asked about his weird hours and he said he loved sleeping in to make up for decades of crack-of-dawn movie calls. He did say he was happy to get a second chance at enjoying life. A couple of days ago I realized the irony of that statement.”

  Sitting in the darkness with the woman he had once loved so deeply, Jess could appreciate it too.

  “So it was totally surreal waking up to my find my father sobbing beside me.”

  “He’d lost his daughter, at least the one he knew.”

  “Maybe. But I think he felt responsible for what had happened to me.”

  “How so?”

  “Because my dad told me he had turned Walter.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Walter found out about the deaths at Meadowland…”

  “… from Tom Cox.”

  “Right. Walter started asking questions and Dad ran the risk of being exposed, not to mention having his blo
od supply run out.”

  “Why not just kill him? He certainly possessed the ‘skill’ to do it.”

  “Dad said that wasn’t enough—he wanted Walter to suffer, just like he did.”

  “How come?” asked Jess.

  Tracy hesitated. Long enough for Jess to ask the question again.

  “Tracy. Why would he want that?”

  She lowered her head and answered. Softly, and painfully.

  “Because of what happened between Walter and me.”

  Jess’s heart sank.

  “My father said he wanted Walter to—how did he put it? ‘Feel a ravenous thirst for blood he couldn’t quench and fear the approaching dawn.’ He thought it only a matter of time until Walter ‘threw himself upon the mercy of sunlight and experienced the excruciating death he deserved.’ ”

  “But it didn’t work out like that.”

  Tracy shook her head. “Walter came for me instead.”

  “When my father was alive he perfected the art of finding someone’s Achilles’ heel and exploiting it. I suppose it’s no different in death.”

  “I don’t know what was worse. Waking up on that couch and understanding what had happened to me, or finding my father on his knees telling me how sorry he was.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I knew he would never do anything to purposefully hurt me.”

  “That was pretty understanding.”

  “More than you were.”

  Jess flinched. He probably deserved that.

  “You never gave me a chance to beg you to forgive me,” said Tracy.

  And suddenly, after all these years, in the most peculiar place, they were finally talking about it.

  She mentioned the numerous attempts to reach him by email and the unreturned cell phone calls. She told him how she locked herself in her room and didn’t come out for a week after he disconnected his number. When she could no longer hear Jess’s voice on his outgoing message, she felt a lifeline had been severed.

  As for what happened with Walter after Jess found them together that day, he didn’t want to hear about it. Seven years later the wounds were still deep enough that scratching would only make them bleed anew. But Tracy didn’t back off—she knew this was probably her last chance to make her mea culpa.