Cash Cassidy Adventures: The Complete 5-Book Series (Plus Bonus Novels)

by K. T. Tomb

  “It’s just sitting there?”

  “So far as I can see. I think Samuel really upset them.”

  Ben nodded. “We should have just left him,” he said, without bitterness.

  Lux watched her feet swing in midair. There was something entrancing about being in a tree so high up. The branches were thick and sturdy and could hold more weight than the team had to offer. It was so stable, yet an easy drop to serious injury if she wasn’t careful.

  The creature stood in the graveyard, the moon sending out a shadow making its already tall frame even longer. Samuel had estimated their average height to be about six foot for males, five-seven for females. They seemed to be just slightly taller than the average homo sapiens.

  “I feel like they’re planning something,” Ben said.

  “Why?”

  “What would you do if you watched some psychotic creatures come along and start digging up your dead?”

  She nodded. She would be planning something.

  “I really want to get out of here.”

  “Me, too,” Ben confessed.

  “I don’t like this,” she whispered. “I liked dealing with things that had rules. I mean, I broke them all the time, but they were there. Rules are nice, even if you don’t follow them.”

  Ben snorted. “You’ve got a way with words.”

  The creature was leaving the graveyard, its shadow warping in the night lines. It made its careful way back towards them, following the path it had arrived by, passing right beneath their feet without an upward glance, though Lux was sure that the beast knew exactly where the humans were. When it had finally erased itself into the darkness once again, she felt like she could breathe again.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” she asked Ben.

  “Couldn’t,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Lux stared back out at the night. They needed to get out of the woods desperately. It was changing them, warping them like the shadows in the night. Lux wanted to walk free of the trees. Maybe she would go to New Mexico. She’d never been there, but she’d heard it was quite beautiful.

  “Where are you going after this?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Washington State or New Mexico. I’m done with Texas,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Dallas for a week or two, then I’m going down on assignment in Australia.”

  “Another mythical animal hunt? Vampire kangaroos?”

  Ben’s white teeth flashed in the night.

  “Can’t tell you that or I’d have to kill you.”

  The thing was, she wasn’t entirely sure that he was joking, despite the half smile.

  “I’m not going to track again after this.”

  “Really?” He clearly didn’t believe her.

  “No. I think I’ll do something boring and normal like nursing school or agriculture, or be a cop or something.”

  “It’s not boring if you like it,” he said. Lux was sure that there was something sad hiding in his words, but she couldn’t find it.

  “Australia, huh? That’s exciting.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.” His eyes did not agree.

  Lux looked away. She was going to leave everything about this trip behind, Ben included. But Ben was like her, was her, but with ten more years in the business. Hiding out up in a tree, she knew that if they survived and made it back to civilization that she would slowly become like this vulture-man, predatory but impassive, doing the terrible things that no one else could or wanted to do because it was all he knew. All she knew.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said eventually. The night had developed a pressure that she did not want to think about. Makarios said nothing, but shimmied back around the tree trunk to his own hammock.

  She was awakened by a scream. At first she thought it was part of her dream, a twisted half-nightmare about being trapped in a great green glass bottle she couldn’t climb out of, but then she realized the scream had not been her own. Dropping down the tree, she was on the ground at the same time as Ben and Hal, who had similarly been awakened, rubbing sleep out of their eyes, but alert. Looking around wildly, she yanked out her Bowie knife and thumbed the safety on her pistol, prepared to fend off a whole tribe of warrior monkey things descending down on them. There were none.

  At first all she saw was Julie, unconscious in the dirt by the banked fire which was now long fizzled out and cold.

  A half congealed pool of red in the dirt. A shadow swinging ever so slightly. A body. Lux wanted to puke. She wanted to pass out like Julie. She wanted to just run and not stop.

  Dead bodies were not foreign to her. She had touched her fair share of the recently deceased. But this was different. This was disgusting. She shivered, her fingers wrapping around her knife tighter and tighter and tighter.

  The disemboweled body of Samuel Smith swayed gently in the wind from where it hung from the elm. The purple and swollen white intestines dripped down, catching on his foot. His lungs were pulled half out, the ribs cracked at horrid angles in the bright sunlight. She had read a story once, about a method of execution performed by the Vikings. The blood eagle. It was performed by cutting the skin of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled bloodstained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim’s back. If they suffered in silence, the executed man would be granted access to Valhalla. Samuel had not been able to scream at all, she saw, as his own tongue had been removed and then used as a gag to stifle his screams.

  Chapter Five

  When was the first time you realized you would die one day? Ben’s words played through in her head.

  Samuel’s dead eyes held nothing. They were misted over, foggy. It was life that kept them clear, and now he was like an abandoned car, smashed, broken.

  They had to go. The green eyes were in the trees somewhere, watching. They did this on purpose. They wanted to send a message. Go! Her brain screamed at her. She had to get out, run. She was a tracker, a pursuer. The pursuit was over. Survival was all that mattered now.

  They scrambled through the tree, hauling their gear down in a rush, carelessly tearing the fabric of their hammocks clean of their rigging. Lux packed Julie’s things and Hal scooped up Samuel’s research. Julie came round, but there was no time to provide comfort to her. She had been close to Smith, and his death would hit her hardest of all, though later. Now they must go.

  Lux was afraid now, truly afraid for her life. Not the fear of facing down a wild creature, but the fear that the mouse knows in the split second that the wings of the owl blot out the moon. The sound of footsteps encroached on the camp. Lux didn’t know how to think anymore. She just stood, her pack strapped to her and her knife in her left hand, pistol now free of its holster for the second time in these woods. The male that had led the last encounter came towards them. His gait was slightly ataxic and labored. He came unarmed, but for the claws tipping his fingers.

  Lux looked into his eyes and knew she was going to die. It wasn’t the first time in her life that she had made eye contact with what she thought was her death. He stopped, not twenty feet from her.

  There was no threat in his poise, unlike the last time. He made several rumbling words like a storm coming in, but there was no understanding it. No language that she could know. Lux felt dizzy. This wasn’t real. None of this was real. She had contracted a fever the first few days in the woods. The bugs were killers. They had shared a crazy disease with her, that was all.

  Ben’s warm arm brushed hers, offering support. Hal was there too, standing just in front of Julie. Lux felt like crying again. There was a monster standing there, a monster that in no uncertain terms was not real. They stood behind her anyway. The creature spoke again, his voice sounding vaguely assertive, but she couldn’t be certain. His hand waved, the claws glinting in the light. Kill it, she thought, and her pistol rose to point at the creature’s chest. From this distance it would be impossible to miss.

  But she didn’t. Her trigger finger
could not close. She thought back to the firing range, a lifetime ago. How could she fire seven shots in seven seconds? It would take her an hour now to fire just one.

  The creature reached behind him and all three of them bristled like angry porcupines.

  He was preparing to kill them all. He could pull anything out from behind his back. Anything. Very carefully, the male stooped, his arm lowering deliberately to the ground. From the strong seat of his large hand, a grubby form appeared. Wearing only a filthy pair of bloomers, a girl no older than three looked up at them. Her body was dirty but not harmed. Her hair was wild and two mud beads hung in the wispy tips. In very deliberate and prolonged syllables, he said, “Kah Bay.”

  “Abbey!” the toddler chirruped.

  The body of Samuel Smith hung from the tree. The girl did not look at it once, her wide eyes on Lux. She felt like the contrast was too much to handle and wobbled. Ben’s hand was clamped into her shoulder, strong fingers digging into her flesh. Hal bent down to meet the girl’s eyes.

  “Hi Abbey,” Hal said. “My name is Hal.”

  The girl smiled at him, her little baby teeth shining.

  “Is that the little girl missing from Belle?” Lux asked to no one in particular.

  “Yes,” Hal said. “Hey Abbey, do you want to come over here and we’ll take you home?”

  Abbey looked back up to the monster male’s face. There was a kind element on it, soft and gentle. Lux dismissed it. He was a monster, and that was all. Not just a wild beast, a ritual killer of men. But try as she might to dismiss it, the kindness was there.

  The male nodded to her and pushed her very gently towards Hal. She wobbled over to him, her little legs trundling ambitiously across the dirt. Lux could hardly breathe.

  “The bears found me,” the girl said. “But I miss my mommy.”

  “Your mommy misses you, too,” Hal said, picking her up and swinging her onto his shoulders.

  “Did she say that to you?” the girl said.

  “Yup. She told me that I better come back with her Abbey or else!”

  The male turned, his furry back broad in the dappled sunlight at once huge and perfectly camouflaged.

  “Bye!” Abbey hollered, waving a chubby fist. She seemed entirely unfazed by what should have been a terrifying ordeal.

  The male turned around, and Lux was sure that there was surprise on his terrible face. He mimicked the wave hesitantly, unsure of the motion. It came out jerky and ill practiced. Then he was gone. The glow of green eyes was gone. They were gone, all of them. The trees could breathe again; Lux could breathe again.

  Lux turned to look at Ben and Hal.

  “I don’t understand,” she confessed.

  “Neither do I. They kill one of us and look after a defenseless child? What does that mean?” Ben said.

  Lux was glad Hal was there. She certainly didn’t know what to do with a baby or a little kid. She saw the child looking reproachfully at her from her position atop Hal’s shoulders and realized she still had her pistol drawn.

  “My mommy says guns are bad.”

  “Yes, Abbey,” Hal said, “guns are bad. Why don’t you put that away, Lux? I don’t think we need it anymore.”

  Lux nodded, and holstered her useless weapon.

  Hal, as it turned out, loved kids. More importantly, he knew how to handle them and Abbey appeared totally at ease. Lux had never thought about kids of her own; after all, that would at least require a relationship of at least one night to occur, but watching Abbey convinced her that she absolutely did not need any. Not yet, at least. The little girl did not stop chattering. By midday, it had slowed to a sleepy drawl, her cloudy Texan accent weighing down her little words, half of which Lux was sure weren’t even real. Julie stumbled along on the other side, still in shock. Her face was pale, drained of something more than blood. Her eyes were wide and did not blink as many times as Lux felt they should.

  That night, Lux helped Julie set up her hammock.

  “We’ll be back in Belle before you know it,” she said, trying to be reassuring. “Just a little longer, alright?”

  Julie nodded numbly.

  Lux was tired, but she sat out above her hammock while the others turned in. She wanted to talk to Ben. He was the sane one, the calm one. His face never broke its controlled rigidity, and she needed that.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, folding his long legs up next to her, but not touching her. She appreciated that.

  “What do we call them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I was going to leave that to Julie, but I think maybe that will be Stevens now.”

  Lux nodded in the twilight. “They’re like us, aren’t they?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, although she knew that he knew what she meant.

  “They have emotions, thoughts. They took revenge for disturbing their dead. I think it might be some form of religion at play. And they looked after a child for no reason other than it was a child and defenseless. That’s altruism, too.”

  “Yes.”

  Lux felt like a little girl just older than Abbey. But she needed the simplicity of that view to comprehend what she had seen. She needed to be able to categorize in black and white, but the beasts made that impossible.

  “They aren’t all bad. They made sense, actually. Brutal sense, but sense all the same. I can’t say as much for some groups of humans. I can respect that.”

  Lux shivered. “I really thought I’d seen it all.”

  “No one can say that.”

  Lux looked over at his face. She was going to miss him. “I don’t think I like the world anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” Makarios said.

  “The rules have changed. I liked the old ones better. Now, I don’t get to just know what’s real and what isn’t.”

  Ben shrugged.

  “It’s the same rules. You’ll surely die one day. There’s an abominable hand to do it, or a natural one.” He emphasized his bad pun, cracking a genuine smile.

  “Thanks Ben, that makes me feel so much better,” she said sarcastically. But it did. His placid humor was comforting in a way that she was definitely going to miss.

  “I try,” he grinned.

  “I want to start over after this,” she said. “Start a new life. But,” she hesitated, “we should keep in contact.”

  For just a moment, there was a wild and reckless look in his eye, but it was gone before she had the time to process it. Neither of them moved as the night dropped into permanence and the stars began to glow slowly.

  He gave her a sad smile. “We’ll see.”

  Lux looked away.

  The night was alive, and it was calm. The prickly feeling she had been fending off since she entered the woods was gone. She felt like the woods were hers again, like she grew in them just like any of the plants. The trees were no longer keeping secrets.

  “I wanted to go back so desperately,” she said. “Now I just want to stay here.”

  Ben frowned.

  “I was born about fifty miles north of where we are right now.”

  “Really?” he asked, a mixture of curiosity and something else weighting down his tone.

  She nodded and looked up to the sky. The familiar map of the heavens was only visible in patches through the cover of the treetops. With that stellar cartography, she could find her way home from anywhere, go anywhere she wished, and never be lost.

  “I always liked the city,” Ben said, following her wistful gaze.

  “Why?”

  “Everything about the city is taking things too far. It’s free as the woods in a lot of ways. I like it.”

  “I could live in the woods for the rest of my life and never come out,” Lux said. “But maybe not Piney Woods. I think the neighbors might take some getting used to.”

  He snorted a laugh.

  Lux looked back to his face. It was covered in dirt and sun even in the dark. He was like her, but maybe that was too much. But the wild that had only
been in his eyes for an instant wouldn’t leave her. She wanted to bring it back, but she had no idea how.

  They broke camp cautiously around Julie. The sight of the flayed body had triggered a near catatonic mania. She refused all food, but was eventually convinced to take on some water before the team left the camp. Makarios took her pack as well as his own, and stuck close to her, whispering gentle words.

  The path back to Belle was a slow one, ambling along at the pace of a Sunday stroll. The sunlight streamed through the trees, which were becoming thinner and thinner. The gaps between the foliage were growing with every step. Lux no longer felt the strange wrongness, but she knew the creatures watched them as they exited the forest. Her old truck was still parked up in the same place she had left it. Looking between the vehicle and the woods, it was as if nothing had happened, no time had passed, that Smith had not died. Only the disheveled appearance of the four adults and the addition of a tiny child gave permanence to the memories of the previous days and nights. Grateful for this link to the safety of civilized humanity, all of them piled into the vehicle, and headed back to Belle, in silence.

  ***

  The diner was crowded like the day she had arrived. But this time, she smelled like the petting zoo and probably looked worse. She didn’t care. All she cared about was hot coffee and food that did not come from a can.

  Hal didn’t join them, heading straight down to the police station with Abbey snoring over his shoulder. Julie was still borderline catatonic, her eyes only focusing loosely on anything. Lux hoped desperately that some waffles would help her, but she doubted it. Jane, the same waitress as the first day, sloshed three cups of coffee in their direction.

  “What can I get y’all today?”

  They ordered and a quiet air set over the table no matter how peppy Jane was or how boisterous the other customers were. Julie never looked up, her short hair lank on her head.

  “I’ve never felt like this after a job,” Lux mumbled when Jane was out of earshot. “It’s never been that big of a deal.”

  Ben chugged half his coffee. Lux wasn’t sure how as it was so hot she felt like one sip would burn her throat. “A job is a job. But a person is a person.”