Bitten

by K. L. Nappier

  "We'll make it right. Anyway, from the way things are looking, the whole town might be deserted. Hell, this is their whorehouse and nobody's here. What does that tell you? They're not coming back."

  "I dunno, man." Mezz looked toward the road. "I mean, it ain't like I got jelly in my spine. But maybe I should truck along, get square with my friends, y'know? Why don't you think about setting up camp close to here? Not such a bad spot, close to water and all."

  Art waggled the rum bottle. "Aw, come on! They practically make this stuff in their back yards, why do you think they didn't bother to take it with them? Besides, the bus hasn't come through yet. You show up too early and you're cooked." He stood and looked around. "You're right, this is nice right here. Let's quench our thirst, and then hike back for the rest of the equipment."

  Mezz seemed unsure. Art gave it the briefest of rests, then -as if coming up with a new idea- he set the rum down and shrugged out of his backpack, setting it on the bar in front of him as he opened it.

  "You know what? Screw going back for the supplies. There's nobody around to bother them, even if they weren't tucked into the scrub. I can borrow some bedding, grab some mangos and some spuds from the garden, get a can of Spam out of my pack. I'll get a fresh start at first light. Let's park our asses right here and you'll be able to see when the bus comes through. I'll toss some pesos in the locker for what we drink."

  He watched Mezz watch him as he picked up the bottle, rocking it back and forth like a metronome. Finally Mezz wiggled his eyebrows, a conspirator in mischief. "Open that queen up, jack."

  * * *

  Art made sure Mezz quenched some of his thirst from the brothel's well before pouring the first drink. If Mezz were to start feeling queasy instead of high, he might not make it through the first rum. Perhaps he'd try to leave for Luperón, and that would make things much harder. But the cool well water paved the way for the booze and, on an empty stomach, Mezz relaxed quickly.

  Drinking wasn't something Art looked forward to. He hadn't touched a drop in years. But there was no getting around it this time. He cut his own drink with water far more than he did Mezz's, shielding the ruse behind the tin pitcher and the rum bottle on the table. He distracted Mezz by pointing out plant and bird life while he made up facts about them. The first rum was followed by a second. Mezz didn't seem to notice how Art nursed his. A third rum followed the second for Mezz. The sun dipped below the tree line. They watched the Luperón bus coming in late, lumbering toward town.

  "Hey!" Mezz exclaimed woozily, "there's my cue, jack. Y'say I'm about a thirty minute hoof to town, y'think? No way in hell I'll be there before the bus circles back now. I'm set."

  Art yawned and leaned on the table as if he felt the rum as much as Mezz. "Sure you don't want one more for the road?"

  "Thanks, man, but I better split." Mezz rose, dug into his pants pocket, and then laid a palmful of pesos on the table. "Here's my part of the damage. This's been the cat's meow, meeting and drinking with you. You're the best. One righteous jim."

  Art smiled, stabbed his cigarette out on the table and stood, too. Mezz thrust his hand out unsteadily. "Gonna see ya 'round, right?"

  Art slapped his hand into Mezz's for a firm shake. "Sure. I'm going to be here a few days."

  "Hoo!" Mezz exclaimed with a loopy grin, still shaking Art's hand. "Man, I am sent . Sure you ain't tryin' to do what you surmised of my buddies? Y' know ... get me all boozed up so you can ship me out?"

  Art chuckled, still clinging to Mezz's hand, shaking it, tightening his grip, as he grabbed the rum bottle by its neck. "Naw," he said. Then he swung.

  Mezz fell hard against the dirt, blood spurting from beneath his beret. He groaned, tried to pull himself up. Art switched the bottle to his right hand and hit him again. This time he stayed down.

  He looked down at Mezz's still form and said, "I boozed you up so I could cold-cock you."

  Chapter Twelve

  Luperón , República Dominicana

  Spring, 1950

  Morning. Third Quarter Moon.

  An hour after sunrise, as they sipped strong Dominican coffee under the tin roof of their pavilion, Max and David saw Sister Veronica walking up the road. She was escorted by Aldo and Reubén, whom she sent on their way when Max and David rose to meet her.

  As the three of them started out, Sister Veronica said, "I was torn between two emotions after the two of you left me yesterday. I worried for you staying in the house you chose. I would have preferred you took up with a family or at least stayed in an empty house closer to town. Yet, if I may speak plainly, there is a strength about you both that helped me sleep a little better, so that my worries were not so great."

  She looked long at Max and David. In the brilliant morning -in spite of the fatigue in her eyes- her youth was more obvious than it had been in the muted light of the church. In a motherly voice that made Max chuckle, she gently chided, "But you don't seem so very rested yourselves."

  David replied, ""We were a little restless. But we're feeling fine."

  And also a little guilty , Max thought. Because of their late night trek, they knew what they would find at Papo Salvador's or, more to the point, what they wouldn't find. Yet they wanted the sister with them, anyway. They wanted to walk with her, learn as much as they could about her nature. If what David had seen in the gloom of the little church really was forming in her palm, then they had to take advantage of it ... no matter how bad the spider-crawl in their guts got for doing so. She would be the reason the Beast was lingering in Luperón. They needed her as much as she was going to need them.

  As the road angled upward, Max feigned small talk. "Did you have many stay at the church last night?" He already knew the answer. He and David had had a very busy night, trekking between Papo Salvador's homestead and Luperón.

  "A handful."

  "How about you, sister? Do you stay with them?"

  "Only until most of them settle into sleep. I moved into Father Bartholomew's apartment not long after ... not long after his passing. Before, I lived with the Patricio family. But, they are gone now. They are among those who left after Bonito Alvarez was lost to us. "

  "The father kept an apartment, then," David said.

  "Well, to call it an apartment is, perhaps, too generous. There is a cot and little side table in a small room adjoined to the church's office. I stay there to be close to those who shelter in the sanctuary at night."

  "And maybe," David suggested gently, "so you're not so alone yourself."

  They walked on silently for a moment, then Sister Veronica replied, "Yes. Of course. It would be a sin against God to not admit my weaknesses."

  "Fear itself isn't a weakness," David said. "But when we don't learn how to deal with fear, we become weakened."

  The sister looked at him, an impish appreciation in her eyes. "My goodness, Mr. Daniels. Perhaps you should consider conversion and priesthood."

  That had both men chuckling. David replied, "In my people's tradition, I'm a healer. That doesn't quite translate to priesthood in Catholicism, but ..."

  The sister smiled. "I understand better than you may think, Mr. Daniels. This is, after all, the República Dominicana . The Indian blood of the Tainos is still strong in her people. I see it every day."

  They walked on, the road following the rise and fall of the land, the conversation rising and falling, too, between moments of pleasantries and companionable silence. The day began to heat up. Then the palm thatch roof of Papo Salvador's log house appeared over the final rise.

  The sister brushed at the sweat trickling from beneath her head covering, then pointed. "You see that place? We're almost there."

  We know , Max thought. Just as he and David knew the hill would flatten into a small steppe that Papo Salvador and his wife Rosa had painstakingly turned into a modest plot with chickens and, probably, a pig or two. Where they had been raising not only a brood of farm animals, but also a happy little brood of children.

  Where Papo must
have left his bed every morning, long before sunrise, to mount the bicycle that now leaned abandoned against the house, and rode into town and on toward the wharf. Where he must have returned in the early evening, as exhausted from fishing and the trading of those fish as Rosa would have been from tending their children and their farm.

  Where they would have faithfully risen every Sunday morning to dress the family in their least worn and least patched best; to walk into town and begin their day at Mass. To collect what earthly pleasure they could in the plaza central with sisters and brothers, cousins and friends, and while away a few precious hours before beginning their labors again in the pre-dawn morning of another Monday.

  We know , Max thought, that the only thing remaining of that hard, sweet life was a log-and-plaster house suffering neglect, an overgrown yard where the chickens now fended for themselves and where the pig pen lay empty, its mud dried and cracked.

  As they crested the steppe, Sister Veronica slowed. It had to be difficult for her to be here, where Rosa and the children met terrible deaths. But after a moment, she collected herself and called out, "Papo! Hola, Papo ...! ¿Está en su casero? " When she got no reply, her smooth, young forehead creased. "He must not be here," she said.

  We know that, too, sister. He's gone. Because the Beast doesn't feel safe here as First Night approaches. Cunning bastard that it is, it never emerges twice in the place of its inaugural kill. So it spurs Papo on to somewhere more secretive, to prepare its unwitting host for its return.

  Still, they walked her to the door of the little house. The sister rapped her knuckles against it. "Papo ... Hola ... Buenas, Papo .." She looked around as if to take in the creeping decay of the homestead then tentatively opened the door and peered into the empty house.

  "Have you been here since the family's deaths?" David asked.

  "No." She closed the door. "I should have been, but .. No. Not since the burial ceremonies."

  "Where do you think Se?or Salvador might be?"

  Sister Veronica rested her palms against her hips and seemed relieved to turn from the house. She looked toward the dense mahogany of the foothills marching ever upward, the foliage moving from hardwood to conifer as the hills gave way to mountains. "Oh ... I would suppose he is off harvesting the fresh water shrimps." She turned back to look around the property again, and then said thoughtfully, "He's not living so well here, it seems. Maybe he is not living here, now, at all. Who could blame him, but ... I would have thought he would tell me."

  "When was the last time you saw him?" Max asked.

  "Perhaps ... last week, maybe. No ... sooner. Four or five days ago."

  "In town?"

  "Yes, getting supplies." She shook her head, suddenly irritated with herself. "I'm sorry, I should have thought of this before bringing you all this way. He visited me at the church, for prayers. He always does before heading off to camp." She looked around one more time. "See, his cart and burro are gone, so he must yet be there. But I would have thought he would return by now. The harvesting is very good in the nearby streams. He isn't usually gone for so very long."

  There wasn't any reason to linger at Papo's, except for one remaining matter. Max took a few steps to the sister's right, angling between her and the sun. "So he came to see you before he left?"

  Still taking in the condition of the homestead, she replied, "Yes, he comes often. Especially since his family was taken."

  "He comes to see you just to pray, you think," Max said gravely.

  That brought her attention fully around. She turned quizzically toward him and, in doing so, was stabbed in the eyes with sunlight. She lifted her hand, palm outward to block the glare ...

  And there it was. Deceptive to the untrained eye; a seeming aberration, a fluke of nature, if noticed at all. A circle roughed out within the natural creases. And within the loose circular shape, the uneven -but to Max and David- the five unmistakable points of a star. The pentagram, deepening on Sister Veronica's palm as First Night approached. Not the dark pentagram of the Beast, but the paler one of its prey.

  "Of course," she said, offense at the fringe of her reply. "Why else?"

  Right here, right now, Max could change everything. He could grab her wrist, show her the lines joining, deepening, entwining in her palm, moving toward fulfillment just as the moon was. He could tell her everything and to hell with the consequences. Even if it meant she recoiled with denial and fear and hatred for him and David. Even if it meant she might rally what few townspeople were left and send him and David fleeing for their lives into the high foothills, forcing them to abandon the hunt for the Beast.Or even if it meant Max and David would beg her to flee. To get the hell out of Luperón . Run! Run while Papo Salvador is at his camp, thinking that he's only there to harvest crayfish instead of preparing the Beast for its emergence. Max could do that. He could tell Sister Veronica go now! Before the Beast returns for you! She believed in Chupacabra. Would it be so hard to convince her?

  But if she went, so would the Beast. Long before it approached the church, it would sense the absence of her fear. It was notoriously adaptable. It would change its plan; choose a new victim, someone wholly arbitrary if necessary, anything to get by. There would be no telling if Max and David could find the Beast before it dragged the victim off for a slow, torturous feed on the unlucky one's fear. And then it would disappear into the Dominican wilds, vanishing until the next First Night, weeks and weeks away.

  By then the Beast would know of Max and David's presence. Luperón , struck yet again, would complete its transformation to a ghost town; abandoned even by its tormentor for fresh hunting grounds. And in this new day and age of mobility and travel, even in a poor country like this, those hunting grounds could be anywhere.

  Or maybe, just maybe, Sister Veronica would stay. Maybe she would willingly put herself in harm's way to help them strike this blow to the Beast. Maybe she would work with them, as Doris Tebbe had, the likes of which neither Max nor David had seen since.

  So many maybes. Too many. With the approach of First Night, less than seventy-two hours away, Max was thinking of all the failures in between Doris and now, not the successes.

  "I'm sorry, Sister," he said, moving to relieve her from the sun's glare. "I didn't mean any offense. I only meant that he might have a little crush on you, lonely and sad as he must be."

  She tilted her head, still looking perplexed and ready to be insulted. "I don't understand your meaning with this 'little crush'?"

  "It's American slang. Innocent infatuation."

  David suggested a Spanish equivalent. " Un enamoramiento inocente "

  Sister Veronica blushed and looked away with a shy smile. "Mr. Stonehill, such silliness. Certainly not. Papo is an honest man and a good Catholic."

  "I'm sure. I'm sure he is."

  The offense apparently forgiven, she glanced around the homestead a final time and said, "Well ... there is little point in remaining. Shall we leave?"

  "Where does Se?or Salvador go for the crayfish, do you know?" David asked as they began walking.

  "I'm sorry, I don't."

  "Do you think anyone else would know?"

  "Perhaps. There are a few men who do the same. But, you know, they would all be very jealous of their favorite camps ... like fisherman are of their special places. So I'm not certain those who are still here would know of Papo's camp. But we can ask, of course. Truly, though, I see no reason for you to go to such trouble to find him. The forests are dense and a stranger to them can be easily lost. Papo will return soon, I'm certain."

  Me, too, Max thought, as certain as moonrise .

  * * *

  Under the pavilion of their little house, Max poured rum into his coffee cup, then looked to David, who shook his head and sipped his coffee straight. Max brought his cup to his lips and turned to watch the setting sun shoot bands of amber through a cloud cluster. For just a moment, the sun seemed snagged on the rolling western horizon. It had been another long day. But another night'
s work was ahead of them. It was the only one left to them before First Night.

  David picked up the conversation Max had interrupted to fetch the rum. "We're not going to find him in those hills. Not in time for emergence."

  It was hard to say if the men Sister Veronica had introduced to them didn't know the location of Papo's camp, or if they didn't want to be caught in the foothills with Chupacabra on the loose. It didn't matter. The bottom line was that nobody was guiding them anywhere. About the only insight the village men offered was that they thought Papo was loco to go out on his own. But, it was to be expected of a man who had suffered so much. They chalked Papo's behavior up as a death wish.

  Max and David stared blindly forward, lost in thought. But, hell, Max knew if they sat on their asses and pretended to think this through until sun-up tomorrow, nothing would change. There was only one way to play this now and they both knew it. The Beast could come in from any direction. But there was only one place it would head.

  Or, more to the point, to one person.

  "She usually beds down around 9, 9:30," Max said. "This month, that gives the beast plenty of time before moonset. It can afford to wait until she's left the people in the sanctuary and gone into the apartment."

  David nodded, as he took another sip of coffee. "Always grateful for small favors."

  The Beast preferred stealth. Since there would be plenty of time to wait for the sister to bed down, it wasn't likely to go plowing through the hold-ups in the church, slashing and slaughtering on its way to her.

  Of course Max and David could hedge their bets. One of them could watch the approaches to the sanctuary while one waited near the little apartment at the church's northeast corner. But it was never a good idea to separate unless it was absolutely necessary.

  So here was the plan. The lure: a secluded little room in the back of Luperón's church. The bait: Sister Veronica. Young. Unwitting. Determined in her duty and in her faith.

  David sighed. "Well," he said. He put his cup on the ground, then stood. "I need to get ready for sunset."