Wolf said nothing.
Sayid shook his head side to side. “I am not afraid of death. Allah will welcome me. I have many brides…”
The man’s belly was tan beneath his clothing. Wolf drew an imaginary line across it with his eyes.
Then he cut.
Sayid’s eyes went wide, and he tried to draw breath. Panic flooded in and he opened his mouth to scream, but no words came out.
After completing the deep cut, Wolf jammed the bloodied knife blade into the dirt by his side and readjusted himself over the man’s torso.
Sayid gasped and tried to speak between labored breaths—but could not seem to get any words to come out that made sense.
“If you knew me,” Wolf said, head shaking slowly, “and all that I’ve done, you never would have tried to hunt me.”
He shoved his fingers through the new cut he had made across the man’s belly. His fingers dug deep, through the bubbling coils of gut, through the various muscles contracting in pain, up past the kidneys and liver, and then pushed aside the quivering twin lungs. When his fingertips located the prize he sought, he gripped it and yanked hard, stretching veins and arteries, feeling flesh tear as ligaments elongated and popped like overstretched rubber bands.
The man below him bucked wildly. Bloody froth bubbled from his lips. But, so too like Krieg, Sayid was a small man, and Wolf was not a small man. He was the bear, and Sayid was the rabbit. And this time, the bear would not save the rabbit.
He slipped his hand out of Sayid’s body cavity and climbed to his feet and lifted the still-beating heart to the sky in offering. The ruined organ continued to pulse, not knowing that it should give up. Blood spurted from it as Wolf squeezed, and then ran freely down his elbows where it dribbled to the dirt in rivulets of crimson. He inhaled deeply, inflating his chest, taking in the scent of the unrepairable damage he had done to this man.
Lifeblood. It was entirely unlike blood that came from any other kind of wound. Once experienced, it was never forgotten. Many times in the past he’d had nightmares about it, when friends and brother soldiers were hit and erupting in fountains of blood, screaming to the Heavens as they died. Not this time, though. This time, the lifeblood he smelled was sweet and savory.
But tainted as well.
Sayid’s mouth was opening and closing like a dying fish. Frothing spit and pinkish blood continued to bubble on his lips. His frantic eyes bulged from their sockets and darted left and right, seemingly without control. His hand and arm came up weakly. His fingertips were grasping only air.
Wolf examined the man’s heart. It was meaty and red. He had learned well what an intact heart meant to this man when he had served in Iraq.
All those who came to Allah without a sound heart were forever rejected from Paradise.
To his own culture, it had meant much as well. His grandmother had spoken of the Raven Mocker—an evil being who robbed the old and the sick of life by stealing their hearts. But this heart was too dark and too vile for even the Raven Mocker to desire.
Wolf bit into the heart and tore a piece from it with his teeth. He then spat that piece at the ground, lowered the still-pulsing heart and, with disgust, tossed it onto Sayid’s chest.
In a final, desperate act, the man who had once hunted children, tried to grab his own ruined heart and put it back inside his body.
- 59 -
FULL BUCKET
“MA, I GOTTA take a leak,” JT Crawford said. “I can’t hold it any longer.”
“Then just go, boy,” Maggie replied. “We ain’t stopping you.”
“Can’t, Ma. Not with all you watching me.”
“I had to do it,” Henry Crawford said, driving everyone’s attention to him. “So just use the damn bucket over there like the rest of us did. Don’t be such a pussy. After what that asshole did, my jaw still hurts like hell, but I ain’t constantly complainin’ about it.”
“But the bucket’s nearly full already,” JT said with disgust.
“Then empty it,” Maggie told him.
“Where?” JT dragged his feet backward on the gritty floor, looking around himself. “That asshole had to be just bluffing us. Had to be. Ain’t no bomb on no door. We can get through it. I’m sure of it. ‘Least we can do is let someone know we’re inside here and need help.”
“Shut the hell up.” It was Deputy Kristina who had said that. “I had to piss in that bucket. And I even caught you peeking at me when I did. That’s not what a real man does. A real man looks away. So sit the hell back down and shut up like your mother told you to do.”
“Listen to her,” Maggie said. “She’s got some sense in her.”
“It’s been almost a full, entire day,” JT said. “No one’s coming, and I gotta pee.”
“Patience, boy.”
“But I can’t hold it.”
Henry Crawford sighed loudly and asked, “Then how about we turn out the light then? Think you can find your pecker in the dark and get the job done?”
His brother Otto laughed, pointing and nodding at his distressed brother.
“Goddammit, Ma,” JT whined. “They should have sent someone to find us by now.”
“Well, then,” she said, “we just need to wait a little longer. They’ll send someone for us. So you go on and take your goddamned piss, boy, and sit the hell back down.”
- 60 -
DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER
HOWARD SILLMAN GOT out of his decaying Ford pickup truck and clanked the door shut behind him. His border-collie Rex joined him by his side after jumping down from the lowered tailgate. As Howard walked toward his massive John Deere combine, Rex circled him, tail wagging enthusiastically.
Howard stopped to adjust his tattered baseball cap, pinching the brim together with thick, calloused fingers. He’d bought the big John Deere for nearly a steal almost seven years back. The woman who’d sold it to him still owned the farm next to his. She was a real piece of work, she was, as were her good-for-nothing kids. There’d been an accident on her property with the big machine way back when, and she’d come to believe the huge thing was cursed. Though, she’d not gone right out and said it.
But Howard knew. He knew for sure. It wasn’t a damn curse that had caused the accident. The guy who had bought it brand new, a Mr. Quentin Krieg, had gone and gotten himself in way over his head, in more ways than one. First mistake he’d made was marrying that old sow Maggie Crawford after her husband had passed on. Then Mr. Krieg had somehow thought he could become a country gentleman and farmer by reading books and watching stuff on his computer.
It wasn’t all that easy being a farmer. Book learning wouldn’t do it, nor would a computer. Not in Nebraska, nope it wouldn’t. It took a lifetime of experience and hard labor—an apprenticeship Howard had received from his father, and his father before him.
That dumb Mr. Krieg had almost died from what he’d gone and done, too. The only smart thing he’d done about it later was divorcing that damned harpy and moving somewhere out of state.
Where had he gone, again? Howard stopped and looked down at Rex, wondering why he was thinking about Kriegs and Crawfords all of a sudden. He shook his head and took another step.
He stopped.
Rex barked once and quit, and then let out a short whine. A chilled breeze blew past, causing the hairs on Howard’s neck to prickle as the wind whispered in his ear. He squinted at the far-off horizon.
“Yeah, I heard it too,” he said to Rex. “Sounded like thunder, didn’t it, boy?”
But when he looked to the sky, there wasn’t a single cloud anywhere in it.
- 61 -
ONE MONTH LATER
THE CARPETED HALLWAY was long. So too had the elevator ride been, and so too had the lengthy cross-country ride.
Wolf was still recovering from his various injuries, but they were fading into memory already. Riding so far and so slowly had given him plenty of time to think and recover. He’d avoided contact with anyone along the way, except when stopping to pa
y no-questions-asked money for a slightly used Indian Chief motorcycle in Dallas. The former owner had found the bike too big to fit him, and when the guy had taken one look at Wolf, he most assuredly had thought dollar signs right away.
During his trip, he’d been working through all that had happened to him and reconciling everything and editing the darker parts out as much as he could. He would forever remember those all-too-brief moments he had shared with the girl who called herself Melody.
And he would remember forever that he had failed to save her.
When he had set her body in a clearing and had placed every flower he could find around her, he’d called on the spirits of his ancestors to guard over her in Heaven. The animals had even come from the trees to watch what he was doing. Then he had waited until nightfall and burned the house full of trophies and other horrors to the ground.
Neither task had quelled the pain he felt inside. But he knew that the pain would fade into scars, just as the wounds to his flesh would fade into scars, just as his time in Iraq was beginning to do.
He stopped at apartment 224 and knocked twice, retreated a step, and watched as the peephole in the door went dark. Then came the sounds of deadbolts being turned and bars shifting and chains coming unhooked.
When the door opened, a grinning Olivia Pearson stared back at him, blinking in surprise.
“Get in here,” she said.
He complied, turning slightly to one side to fit through the narrow doorframe. Her apartment was small and sparse, and not very neatly kept. There were stacks of boxes and folders and a corkboard on the far wall. On that board was his picture and the pictures of all the men he had killed, and others he did not recognize, but they appeared to be either military ID photographs or something similar.
Over his lifetime, he had killed dozens of men. He remembered the faces of most because he dreamed about them often. But many of those new faces on her board were unfamiliar to him and out of place.
“How?” she asked as she led him in by the hand to the only piece of mismatched furniture present in the room not covered by paperwork.
She shook her head when he did not answer and asked, “Would you like a drink?”
He twisted his head no and took off the baseball cap he was wearing. He remained standing and tossed the cap onto the plaid sofa. It seemed appropriate, as most of her laundry was there as well.
“My God, you are all over the news,” she said. “How in the world did you get here without being picked up?”
“Are you well?” he asked.
She stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “I’m fine. But we saw it all. Someone found videos on a backup server. They are all over YouTube now.”
“What’s a U-tube?”
“Jesus,” she breathed. “You are now an internet sensation. No one has figured your name out yet, but I knew it was you the second I saw you. I’ve been studying all that you have done ever since I was released from the hospital.”
“How is the waitress?”
Pearson inhaled deeply. “She’s doing okay, I guess. I set her up in a place not too far from here with a friend of mine. She has a new job waiting tables downtown. And…well, I think she is happy, but you never can tell. Women who are abused like that can be ticking time bombs. She’ll be a lot happier when probate clears and she inherits her husband’s assets. Did you know she’s the lone remaining Crawford and they were sitting on millions of dollars…? That money’s probably dirty, but still. Can you believe that…?”
“They chose their own fate,” he said levelly.
“I guess so,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly when we left them. I had no idea what you’d actually done. The sensationalists in the news media were calling it a tragic accident and are still trying to scare people about the dangers of fertilizer. They’re even questioning how much farmers should be allowed to have on hand at any one time. They think the government should step in and better regulate it. Can you believe that?”
He neither could nor could not. He did not watch the news. Nor did he care about the government. Their rules were not his rules any longer.
“What you did,” she continued, “was so savage. Sorry, that’s not the right term. Brutal, I mean. Most of the country seems to think what you did was justified when you hunted down and killed all those men on their own property. You even had the animal rights people singing your praises. What others are saying about you is pretty sick. I’m sure they will be investigating more of those hunting operations now, and the government plans to step in there, too.”
Wolf did not disagree with the assessment. What little he did care about the government was what he thought of as a healthy skepticism. Anything the government did, rarely—if ever—worked out well. His grandmother had told him many unfavorable stories about how her ancestors had been treated. And they hadn’t been the only ones.
Pearson grinned. “And no one is connecting Krieg with the Crawfords yet. Imagine that? I did a trace, though. Turns out that Quentin Krieg was Maggie’s ex-husband. Seems so obvious now. It makes me wonder why the media is not focusing on that.”
Wolf rubbed his chin and shrugged with his eyes.
Pearson studied him for a beat. “So, mister,” she said, “you really exposed a whole shit-storm of emotions in this country. So many people were able to see what depravities those sickos on that hunting ranch were into.”
None of that really mattered. Those people were all with their ancestors now, and that was all that really mattered to him.
She continued, “There are even some calling for investigations into who that Iraqi man was and who it was in our government that supported him. The media is ignoring it for the most part, but that’s what they do, given how all the politics line up. So…” She turned and indicated the board behind her. “I’ve been investigating it myself. I was hoping you would show up eventually and I could share this with you.”
Wolf crossed the short distance between them. He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to his chest. There would be time later to discuss such matters.
“Oh?” she said, responding to his embrace.
“I tried,” he breathed softly.
“I…I know,” she replied as she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight.
And what happened next was that special kind of healing of the spirit that only the closeness of two human beings can bring.
THE END
BOOKS BY STEVE R. YEAGER
Raptor Apocalypse Series
Raptor Apocalypse (Book One) 2012
Red Asphalt (Book Two) 2013
Righteous Apostate (Book Three) 2014
Zombie Team Alpha Series
Zombie Team Alpha 2016
Zombie Team Alpha: Lost City of Z 2017
More…
Mechantula 2015
Colvin’s Plight 2015
Gators 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve R. Yeager lives in Northern California with his wife, two kids, and a pair of crazy dogs. He was as a corporate software engineer for over twenty-five years and now spends his spare time writing as an exercise in sanity retention.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sryeager
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sryeagerauthor/
Email: [email protected]
Table of Contents
Contents
Copyright
Opening
- 1 - Girl on the Bus
- 2 - Man In the High Tower
- 3 - Iron Horse
- 4 - Got Gat?
- 5 - Two Cheeseburgers, Two Orders of Fries
- 6 - In Route
- 7 - Going to California
- 8 - Sheriff's In Town
- 9 - Crow Canyon Ravine
- 10 - Gone Girl
- 11 - Runaways
- 12 - Cluster Buck
- 13 - Where's the Sheriff?
- 14 - Status Update
- 15 - Four on the Floor
-
16 - Hands Up, Don't Shoot
- 17 - Get Out of Jail Free
- 18 - Bad Guys Arrive
- 19 - Sexual Tension
- 20 - Nightmare
- 21 - Appreciated Closeness
- 22 - Crow Canyon Repel
- 23 - Tires Spitting Gravel
- 24 - Got the Girl
- 25 - Downed Sheriff
- 26 - Hostess with the Mostest
- 27 - Turn Away
- 28 - Reroute
- 29 - So Close
- 30 - Just a Thing
- 31 - Tale of Two Phones
- 32 - Full Admission
- 33 - Delayed Justice
- 34 - The Binding
- 35 - Come Together
- 36 - Down in the Hole
- 37 - Improvised Explosive Device
- 38 - Non-Perfect Condition
- 39 - Needle in a Haystack
- 40 - Which Door?
- 41 - Lights Out
- 42 - Unanticipated Arrival
- 43 - Right in the Gut
- 44 - Reunion
- 45 - Bad Dog
- 46 - Lost
- 47 - Armed
- 48 - Game Changer
- 49 - Little Rabbit
- 50 - Blame the Wind
- 51 - Voices of the Wind
- 52 - Death Ground
- 53 - Slow Ride
- 54 - Hunter is Hunted
- 55 - Mounted
- 56 - Doubly Cautious
- 57 - Cold-blooded Decision
- 58 - Raven Mocker
- 59 - Full Bucket
- 60 - Delicate Sound of Thunder
- 61 - One Month Later
Books by Steve R. Yeager
About the Author
Wolf Who Walks Alone: A Raymond Wolf Mystery Novel Page 24