AFTER

by Kelly, Ronald

  "Damn!" he said, his blood running cold. "It's those confounded snakes again!"

  Cassie jumped up out of her rocker. "Lenora, help your brother in the house! Hurry… before they get here!"

  Lenora did as she was told. She laid the book down and went to Seth. Her little brother shivered beneath the blankets and seemed reluctant to leave his spot on the swing. She finally picked him up and carried him bodily through the front door. Cassie followed.

  As Jubal approached the door, he turned and watched as the winged rattlers grew nearer. They uncoiled their bodies and grew rigid, like the shafts of arrows, then glided in, gaining speed. As he grabbed up his banjo, one of the critters swooped downward, heading straight for him. Jubal tightened his fists around the neck of the instrument and swung at the flying snake. Its mouth opened, its long fangs glistening with venom as it prepared to strike in flight. It hit the skin of the banjo's body, breaking through and becoming trapped within its wooden pan. Jubal flung the ruined instrument aside and quickly slammed the cabin door behind him. He heard two or three more of the serpents hit the wood on the other side as they flew beneath the overhang of the porch.

  "Get those shutters closed!" he called out. But Cassie and Lenora had already gotten most of the barriers in the house secured. Only the front window was unprotected.

  Jubal was heading to secure those shutters, when the glass of the window shattered and three of the snakes invaded the cabin. Two landed on the boards of the floor, while the third continued to fly about the room, dive-bombing their heads, its fangs snapping maliciously.

  The farmer slammed the shutters shut and slid the bar in place. Then he turned and confronted the snakes. They were unlike the diamondbacks or timber rattlers he had grown up with in the Smokies. Their bodies possessed the same patterns upon their hides, but were a peculiar purple and blue in color. Their wings – leathery like those of a bat – were a pale green hue.

  Jubal grabbed up his shotgun by the door. "Cassie, Lenora… take care of the ones on the floor. I'll get the one that's in the air!"

  The womenfolk did as he said. Cassie took her hatchet and went for one of the snakes that flapped and flopped on the living room floor. She dispatched it quickly, severing its head clean off. Lenora took a heavy-bladed butcher knife off the kitchen counter and did the same with the other one.

  Jubal aimed at the flying rattler and pulled the trigger. The first shot missed. He centered his sights again just as the snake spotted Seth's form lying upon his bed, drawn up into a ball and shuddering with fever. The snake's jaws yawned wide as it swooped downward.

  "I don't think so, you sonuvabitch!" growled Jubal beneath his breath. He took aim and fired. The creature disintegrated amid a hail of double-aught buckshot, scarcely three feet from the boy's bed.

  Outside, they could hear the army of winged serpents attempting to gain entrance into the cabin, hitting the walls and shuttered windows. At least a dozen flapped and slithered upon the rusty tin of the roof, looking for a crevice to squeeze through. Jubal was glad then that he had spent most of that day patching the roof. Perhaps, in some way, he'd had a subconscious inkling of what was to come.

  Suddenly, Jubal hollered out. "Dammit to hell!" He looked down to see the head of a rattler protruding from a narrow crack in the cabin floor, an inch or so from his feet.

  Cassie looked over and spotted the snake. "Did it bite you?" she asked.

  Jubal said nothing. He cracked open the breech of the scattergun, shucking the spent shells and replacing them with fresh ones.

  His wife's eyes bored into him. "I said… DID IT BITE YOU?!"

  "There's one coming through the wall yonder!" he told her, glaring back.

  Cassie turned and, axe in hand, headed toward a serpent that had bored a fragment of clay chinking from betwixt two hand-hewn logs. It was nearly all the way through when she chopped it in half.

  Jubal looked down at the snake that was inching its way up through the crack in the floor. "Nasty bastard!" he cussed. Angrily, he brought the butt of the shotgun down on it, crushing its skull.

  He took Cassie's cedar chest from the foot of the bed and pulled it over the crack, blocking any further intrusion. He joined his wife at the wall. A second serpent was attempting to gain entrance. Jubal forced it back out with the muzzles of his shotgun and, for the time being, left the gun hanging there to plug the hole.

  Jubal and Cassie moved to the center of the room, while Lenora sat on the bed next to her brother, her hands clamped tightly over her ears. The jittering of rattler buttons seemed to come from all directions, nearly overwhelming in its fury.

  "Make 'em stop, Papa!" the girl screamed. "Make 'em stop!"

  Her parents ignored her hysteria. It seemed like a commonplace thing with her lately. Cassie grabbed her husband by the sleeve of the shirt. "Now honestly… did that snake bite you?"

  "I do declare, woman!" snapped Jubal. He lifted his trouser leg and showed his right ankle. The skin was unblemished. "There… are you satisfied?"

  Cassie grew quiet. Together, they stood and listened as the racket outside grew to a deafening pitch. Then the flapping of leathery wings sounded and the rattling receded. "They're going," she said, relieved.

  "They'll be back," Jubal told her. He felt exhausted, both physically and mentally. He looked toward the bed. Lenora sat there, face in hands, sobbing loudly. Seth simply lay there silently, shivering in sickness, as though oblivious to what had just taken place.

  How much more of this can I endure? he wondered to himself. Before I go completely mad?

  That night, long after they had fallen asleep, Jubal was awakened by Cassie's hand on his shoulder. "Jubal?" she whispered.

  He rolled over. "I'm up."

  "I'm worried… about the young'uns."

  When aren't you? he wanted to say, but didn't. "Seth will be okay. He's just caught something. He'll be fit as a fiddle in a day or two."

  "I'm not so sure," she said quietly. "I'm afraid he might have that radiation poisoning that folks have been getting down in the valley. I found some ugly sores on his arms and legs tonight, and some of his hair fell out when I put him to bed."

  "If it was the radiation, why hasn't it made us sick, too?" he countered. "Naw, it's probably just a bug." Deep down in his heart, Jubal knew it was a bug of some sort, but of an entirely different kind.

  Cassie lay in silence for a while longer. Then she spoke again. "It's Lenora that's really weighing heavily on my mind."

  "How come?"

  "Jubal, I don't know if you've noticed, but she's changing."

  He had noticed, but didn't let on. "In what way?"

  "Her hands are changing, Jubal. Her fingers are growing longer and the nails are getting sharp and curved at the ends. Her feet are turning that way, too. She's been wearing that long skirt of hers to hide them, but her toes are pert near as long as her fingers now."

  "Good Lord!" he whispered, truly alarmed. "But how…?"

  Cassie paused for a moment. "She… she was bitten."

  "Bitten?" Jubal exclaimed, sitting upright in bed. "By what?"

  "Hush!" she warned. "Don't wake 'em up."

  When he had settled back on his pillow again, she continued. "It was something down in the earth… when she was toiling in her flowerbed. She couldn't say exactly what it was, just that it came up out of the ground and took a chunk out of the meat of her thumb."

  "And she told you about it and didn't tell me?"

  He could sense her staring him down in the darkness. "Sometimes you come on a little too strong, Jubal. I think she's scared of you. And lately you've been onto her about that Goodman boy."

  "You know my reason for that," he told her flatly.

  "I understand. I feel the same way you do. It's just that she knows you're closer to Seth than you are to her."

  Jubal said nothing. It wasn't that he didn't love his daughter… he just didn't understand her the way he did his son. It wasn't precisely a father and daughter thing. She just se
emed peculiar to him and always had.

  "Let's get some sleep," he told her, rolling back over on his side. "We'll talk more later."

  Cassie's weight shifted as she made her nest in the soft folds of the feather mattress. "Jubal?" she asked softly.

  "Yes?"

  "You were straight with me about that snake tonight, weren't you?"

  "I'm fine, woman." Jubal rolled over and kissed his wife upon the forehead. "Now go to sleep."

  Jubal laid there and listened as Cassie's breathing evened into a gentle, feminine snore. As the wound on his left ankle throbbed like a heartbeat, he couldn't help but stare into the darkness and feel like the most vile and heartless of liars.

  "Papa."

  Again, a voice out of the darkness, but hours later. "That you, boy?" he muttered sleepily.

  "No, it's Lenora." He felt those long, pale fingers touch his hand and he nearly recoiled. "Get up, Papa. Something's the matter with Seth."

  Jubal opened his eyes to find his daughter's slender face illuminated. She held a candle in her hand, one of those cheap scented candles she'd bought at the dollar store the last time they'd gone into town. The scent of rose pedals filled the air. It hung sickeningly sweet in his nostrils.

  He got up, leaving Cassie asleep. Quietly, he accompanied Lenora to Seth's bed. The instant the candlelight fell upon the boy, Jubal knew he had taken a turn for the worse.

  Seth's pallid face protruded above the folds of the woolen blanket. Sweat bathed his skin and plastered his hair to his head. The eye patch had come loose. The mirrored eye had grown much larger. It had fractured the fragile bones of the boy's eye socket and bulged from the left side of his face, glittering red and pulsating. Seth's good eye was bloodshot and swollen, as though something alien were pushing at it from behind, attempting to force it out.

  "Oh dear Lord Jesus in heaven!" wailed Cassie from behind them.

  Jubal turned and placed his hands on his wife's shoulders. "Now, Cassie…"

  "Away from me, deceiver!" she screamed, shoving him aside. "What have you kept from me? How long have you known my son has been damned?"

  "I… I didn't want you to worry none," Jubal explained, feeling both helpless and dishonest.

  Cassie's face glared at him in the flicker of the dollar store candle. Just looking back at her was like staring at the naked wrath of God. She stepped up to the bed and, without hesitation, whipped the blanket aside.

  "No," muttered Lenora, backing away. "No, oh, no."

  Seth laid on his side in a fetal position. His arms and legs were rigid and misshapened, drawn up closely to his body. The fingers of his hands curled inward so tightly that the nails bit into the palms of his hands. His breathing was shallow and his skin was so pale that the sprinkling of freckles on his face and arms stood out as dark as moles. Most of his hair had fallen out upon his pillow and tiny blue veins ran throughout the thin flesh of his scalp.

  Cassie wailed and dropped to her knees beside the boy's bed. Despite her facade of faith and strength, she lifted her hands to the rafters and cried like a baby. Tears streamed down her face as she clutched at her dying son. "Lord have mercy on my poor baby!" she pleaded.

  Jubal stepped forward and put his hand on her heaving shoulder. "Sweetheart…"

  She pulled away, as though something unholy had touched her. "So what's bitten him?" she demanded. Cassie watched, horrified, as the red-mirrored eye shifted toward the sound of her voice. "Tell me, Jubal… what will he become?"

  The farmer could only stand there. He had no answer with which to ease her mind.

  "No!" shrieked Lenora. Her long fingers clawed at her face, drawing blood. "Not him!" She backed into a far corner, then slid slowly to the floor. "Not him too!"

  Jubal sat down heavily in a kitchen chair. He stared at the chaos around him, two sobbing, shrieking women and one silent and comatose boy.

  And, at that moment, he knew that his family, once happy and strong, was slowly dying, as if from a slow and creeping poison.

  The next time Jubal roused from a sound sleep, the gray light of dawn was arching through the cracks of the shutters.

  He jumped as someone gently shook him. "What is it?"

  Cassie was standing before him. Her scornful expression had softened, changing into one of dark melancholy. "You'd best go looking for Lenora. She's gone."

  Jubal sat up and looked toward the door. The bar was still securely in place. "How?"

  Cassie motioned to the corner where Lenora had vented her anguish hours before. She had pried several of the sturdy oaken floorboards loose… something that should have only been possible with a claw hammer and pry bar. Yet she had done it… with her bare hands.

  "She waited till we were worn out and asleep," his wife told him. "I think that Goodman boy came for her."

  Jubal stood up and dressed hurriedly. "They'll be heading for the valley."

  Cassie watched as he pulled on his work boots, put on his hat, and, walking over to the far wall, yanked the shotgun from the chinking between the logs. When the barrels dropped, a baby snake – left over from last night's attack – fell from the left chamber and writhed upon the floor, tiny fangs snapping with contempt. Jubal grumbled and brought the buttplate of the gun down upon the winged serpent. He didn't dare try doing the little bastard in with the sole of his boot.

  Silently, Cassie went to the cupboard and loaded Jubal's knapsack with leftover cornbread, a small jar of pickled quail eggs, and a canteen she dipped up from a bucket of spring water. She walked over and handed it to him. "Take care where you walk."

  "Thanks," he said. Jubal walked over to Seth's bed. In the glow of a kerosene lamp, he examined his son. The boy looked no better than he had several hours before. To tell the truth, he looked much worse. His skin held an ashy grayness and running sores had sprouted up the crooked column of his neck and across his scalp. Just looking at him, one might have mistaken his condition for radiation sickness… if it hadn't been for that confounded eye.

  Jubal went to the bureau, took a handful of shotgun shells from the top drawer, and deposited them in his pocket. He removed the beam from the door and stepped out onto the porch. The man looked back to see his wife standing in the middle of the room. She looked smaller and frailer than he had ever remembered.

  "I'm sorry for not telling you about the boy," he said.

  Cassie nodded. "And I should've told you about Lenora earlier. I reckon that makes us even."

  Jubal walked across the porch, making sure there were no lingering snakes about. "Well, I'd best be going."

  "I've seen how that boy looks at Lenora," she told him. "First chance he gets, he'll talk her into laying with him. You mustn't let that happen."

  Jubal nodded. "I'll pepper his ass with buckshot. That'll break him out of the mood."

  He was down the steps and halfway across the yard, when Cassie called out again. "Remember, Jubal… she's still our daughter, no matter what she's becoming. Please, don't kill her."

  He turned and stared her flat in the face. "I can't guarantee that."

  Tears bloomed in Cassie's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. "I know."

  Before the pain and grief of his wife's expression could engulf him, Jubal turned and walked off into the early morning mist.

  He took a narrow footpath that led from the ridge, westward down the face of the mountain. From a rocky slope, he could see the jagged points of pine and fir piercing the foggy vapor that clung high amid the Smokies so early in the morning. As he progressed along the trail, he descended into the mist. He had once found comfort in walking along the fog-shrouded trails. But now Jubal knew that there was danger around every bend, concealed in each clump of thicket, behind each jutting boulder.

  A mile or so down the face of the mountain, Jubal paused to take a sip of water from the canteen. He ducked behind a heavy deadfall when he heard something making its way noisily through the underbrush. Unseen, he watched as something black and bristly waddled its way through the briars
and bramble. From the looks of it, it had once been a porcupine. Its broad face was now bear-like and its quills were barbed like fishhooks, pert near eighteen inches long.

  Soon, he was on his way again. As the steep face of the mountainside eased into rolling foothills, Jubal found himself walking along a winding stretch of freshwater stream. A long, pebbled sandbar cut directly through the center of the creek bed. He took it as a walkway, to avoid picking his way through the heavy brush on either side. Tall ferns, almost prehistoric in nature, grew plentiful along the banks, as well as thick mats of green moss and stringy groves of weeping willow.

  Jubal was a good quarter mile down the creek bed, when something snagged his sore ankle. He winched in pain and cried out. When he glanced down, he found that one of the leafed vines of a tall willow tree had reached out and grabbed him. "Damned tree!" he snapped. Jubal took a Buck knife from a sheath on his belt and cleaved the willow branch in half. A shrill piercing scream cut through his ears, then, abruptly, a dozen other vines were shooting toward him, clutching at his arms and legs.

  Quickly, he tried to avoid the angry willow, but he was much too slow. The tree bent nimbly, entrapping him. The edges of the slender leaves were like those of the cornstalks, their corners as sharp as the edge of a razor blade. He cussed as they sliced past the material of his flannel shirt and the heavy denim of his jeans. He met their slashing attack with one of his own. His hunting knife separated the slender coils, parting them, drawing screams.

  He was nearly beyond their reach, when one particularly long branch lashed out and wrapped around his throat. Black specks danced before his eyes as the leafy strand tightened around his neck, pulling taut, choking him. But that wasn't all. Jubal suddenly found himself lifted bodily off his feet. The willow's branch began to lift him, kicking and struggling, toward the top of the tree and a gaping, salivating crack in the uppermost peak of the trunk. As Jubal slowly dangled there, like a condemned man at the end of a hangman's noose, he saw row upon row of jagged wooden teeth within the willow's gullet. They gnashed hungrily, eagerly.