by K. T. Tomb
“Wait,” she said, standing as he began to make his way back to the sleek sedan.
“Why are you sending us out to find this… thing?”
“That is something you will have to discover later, Lux.”
She did not like that answer, but she scooped up the envelopes and watched the man slowly shuffle back to the sedan and disappear inside. The Texas sun baked down on her head, and at that moment, Lux resolved that this would be her last contract tracking job. With the money from this job, she could buy some new equipment, maybe a truck and finally work where she wanted, when she wanted and for whom she wanted.
***
Belle, Texas was tiny; minute in the grand scheme of things. It was a community of rundown houses and hot swamp air that cloistered against every available inch of skin. The boggy forest stopped just short of the town, creeping up unnoticed on city limits, encroaching like a hungry predator, waiting eagerly to take back what had once belonged to it.
Lux eyed the forest as she stepped down from her truck into the parking lot of a little diner called Crawford’s Choice. The two envelopes were tucked safely into her pocket, bulging out and making it impossible for her to forget them. She had promised herself that she would not open them until she was in Belle. When it was too late to chicken out. She had to take the job.
She perched in a corner booth and ordered coffee, her fingers tracing the edge of the paper through her jeans. The crinkling noise it made was addicting to create. The brightly lit diner was friendly and crowded; jovial old men discussing the changing times, teenagers badgering each other, parents were reining in their wild rug-rats. The hubbub had not changed.
She carefully opened the envelope containing the details of her team. There were four photographs inside, each with a name scribbled on the back. Dr. Samuel Smith, whose photo Dr. Stevens had waggled around, and three others: Julie North, Hal Woodward, and Ben Makarios.
Lux felt relieved. They all looked sun-weathered and capable of handling Piney Woods. She had been afraid that she would be stuck with a bunch of city folks who couldn’t get their shoes dirty and thought they knew everything. But they all had scars, tan lines, and that dark glint of the wild in their eyes.
She pulled out the information sheets on each one of them and began to read. They were a strange lot, her team. Dr. Smith was an anthropologist. Julie North was a biologist and survivalist. Hal Woodward was… well, she wasn’t sure what he was. The sheet read simply: adventurer. Ben Makarios was even less titled. His sheet gave him no label at all, and only the faintest of descriptions.
Lux had worked as a bounty hunter long enough to recognize a criminal and she would bet her life that Ben Makarios was a felon; whether he had been convicted of anything was irrelevant. His eyes were a hard, steely blue and three teardrops were tattooed down his cheek which indicated death, sentence length or a victim of prison rape, according to prison tattoo culture.
“Do you need another minute?” her waitress, bearing the name tag Jane, asked, her eyes too curious as she scanned the table.
“No.” Lux shook her head. “I’d like whatever the breakfast special is,” she said, sliding the photos into a pile and flipping them over.
Jane jotted it down on her little notepad.
“Anything else, hun?”
Lux cringed at the common term of endearment. Over-familiarity was anathema.
“No, thanks.”
Jane nodded and moved on. Lux was about to pull the photos back out when the door tinkled and she glanced up. There was no doubt about it; the woman who walked in was Julie North, biologist and survivalist. Julie had curly brown hair that was cropped close to her skull and barely skirted the base of the battered Wisconsin Timber Rattlers baseball cap that sat crushed low on her brow. Julie took a seat against the opposite wall and ordered coffee. Her gray eyes scanned the room every few seconds, not looking for a familiar face, but watching for potential danger.
Lux pulled out Julie’s sheet again. She was from Wisconsin, born and raised. After high school, she had studied at Madison before joining the Peace Corps and heading off to Guatemala. Julie had no next of kin listed.
Lux frowned. There was a small box for next of kin on all four sheets, and none had a single person listed. A cold feeling crawled into Lux as she absorbed that. Lux herself had only one sister to whom she never spoke.
She looked back at Julie and this time, made eye contact. She could see recognition in Julie’s eyes. For a moment, neither moved. Coolly breaking the temporary Mexican standoff, with casual grace Julie picked up her coffee and purse and wove her way across the diner. Lux scrambled to tuck all the papers and photos away and stuffed it all in her pocket just in time.
“Hello,” Julie said. “Can I sit?”
Lux nodded and held out her hand. “Lux Branson.”
“Julie North.”
“Have you met any of the guys?” Lux said.
They were due to meet that evening, but she had decided to arrive earlier. She needed to think, and she needed to do it in Belle.
“I’ve worked with Dr. Smith before, but not the other two,” Julie said, as she slid onto the bench.
She craned her head around to scan the diner and then propped her back up against the wall so she could see Lux on one side and the diner on the other.
“Yeah? What’d you think of him?” Lux looked down to her lap and fiddled with the assignment envelope. She should open it, read it, but every time she tried, something stopped her. She already knew what was in there.
“He was strange.”
Julie’s eyes flicked up to the door and back as a mother of three herded her wild-haired children to a table. “I mean, he was fine, you know, just a little weird. He studies mostly primatology and biological anthropology. Talks about bones all the time. But he’s a pretty great guy I guess.”
Lux nodded along and sipped her coffee. Her stomach rumbled with an even mixture of hunger and nerves, neither of which were assisted by the roughly brewed caffeine. She wished the kitchen would hurry up, although she had no idea what she’d ordered.
The door tinkled again, and this time it was a familiar face; the anthropologist, Samuel Smith.
His eyes settled on Lux instantly, almost as if he knew she was there. Lux didn’t blink.
“Look, there he is,” Julie murmured.
Lux watched him walk towards them, his dark eyes taking in every inch of the diner by the time he stood in front of them. Jane, the waitress, was swiftly back with a black pot of coffee dangling dangerously in one hand. Smith raised his eyebrow at Julie and slid in next to her. Lux couldn’t tell if it was a statement of some sort, but she decided to stay out of it.
Jane eyed Smith and Julie.
“Here’s this,” she said, handing menus to both of them. “And your breakfast is almost ready,” she told Lux.
“Thanks,” Lux said.
Lux pushed her almost empty coffee towards Jane. It was going to be a long day, and she could already tell she would need the caffeine, despite the gastric discomfort it would cause.
“You know,” Smith started, pinning Jane with his dark eyes, “we’re just passing through, but I’ve heard this is a rather dramatic place.”
Jane swallowed. Lux watched the woman’s throat flex, up then down.
“It sure is,” she said, her face lighting up.
Lux could sense a story coming from the portly waitress. Women who gossiped were a dime a dozen in Belle, and the art of tattling was elevated to the status of an unofficial news network.
“We ain’t had nothing really going on in a while, but I heard from the Charleston boy, and he’s trustworthy mind you, that there was a little girl taken from her house just outside of town. The authorities have been all up in a fuss about it too. I read about it in the paper, I did. There’s not a single sign of the kidnapper either. Just the girl’s window was open and she was gone. They made a fuss about not findin’ none of that, what do they call it, forensics?”
; Jane spoke in a low voice, bending into them slightly so the people in the booth next to them wouldn’t hear.
Lux wanted to go back to sleep and just start the day over. She found herself again promising that she would never take another tracking assignment. A table across the room was desperately trying to catch the waitress’s eye. Eventually Jane could ignore them no longer.
“There’s the paper over there if y’all get curious,” she said, pointing and then bustling off to the other table.
Smith stood and crossed the diner to find the paper while Lux opened the envelope and pulled out the assignment. The first page was a newspaper clip from 1995. Lux had grown up not far from Belle and she vaguely remembered the headline. A girl wandering in the woods had lost her way. Eventually, after exhaustive searching, the authorities decided that, in the absence of any evidence of abduction by humans, either the wild pigs or wild dogs had taken her. Organic matter decomposed quickly in the boggy woodlands and it was just too wild for a little kid to survive on her own.
The article was from the day after she disappeared. It was just talking about how she had vanished from down by the creek playing after school. There were several further reports of missing children, which explained why Smith was so interested in the most recent case. But Lux wasn’t convinced that they were connected. East Texas was her home, but she would be the first to say that it was not a very nice place. It was a tangle of Wild West remnants; abandoned tin roofed cabins, sinkholes, mine shafts and hideouts littered the woods. Outlaws and convicts would hide there, survive there. It was the type of place where people went missing and were never found.
Over the years, there had been a long list of sightings of demons and all kinds of sinister creatures in Piney Woods; the kind of demons that were tall and strong and covered in hair. Lux sighed. She had seen it coming and now she would have to shatter the convictions of an old man.
Because Sasquatch didn’t fucking exist.
Maybe Dr. Stevens knew that too, and there was some other agenda at play here.
She stuffed the envelope in her pocket in irritation. Why couldn’t it have just been someone who owed him money or something? Those jobs were always fast and easy. After all, humans were real flesh and blood.
***
Hair still wet, Lux met Julie at her hotel room door. With the advent of evening, the baking Texas air would be enough to dry it in only a few minutes, not that she was overly concerned with sartorial elegance. The Quiet Cloud Motel wasn’t the Ritz. It was barely a motel, but as they weren’t planning on spending much time there, Julie and Smith had agreed with her that the proximity of the motel to the woods was a small advantage.
“Hey, do you know if Smith has worked with either of the other guys?” Lux said as Julie locked her door.
Julie shrugged her shoulders, light leather jacket echoing the motions of the thin frame underneath.
“I think he worked with the adventurer guy, Hal Woodward.”
Lux nodded and pulled the door shut, jamming her key in her pocket. The three worked in different enough fields that they shouldn’t have been on the same projects except for those assigned by private parties. She wasn’t sure what the information meant, but it was interesting.
“But he didn’t really say anything either way.”
They fell silent as they rounded the corner to face the main building, which suited Lux just fine. The Quiet Cloud Motel was a concrete abomination of architecture, and grimy for good measure.
The lobby was only a lobby in the loosest meaning of the word. A handful of chairs were thrown off in a corner and coffee was offered in the mornings. Lux was willing to call it a lobby for all intents and purposes, but there was none of the sleekness or shine that usually accompanied the word.
From the window, Lux could see Samuel Smith and another man sitting amongst the castaway chairs. She thought the other man was Hal Woodward, but she had only glanced over his picture.
“That’s Hal,” Julie mumbled in confirmation as they reached the door.
The two men looked up when the girls entered. Lux noted the casual way they interacted. There was a friendliness there that would have taken time to build.
Hal was a man who belonged in a Sci-Fi movie. His light brown hair was long and done in intricately twisted dreadlocks. A scar, red and rather fresh looking, ran the length of his temple. His eyes were light, bright, and friendly, but hawkish. He held out a tan hand, the fingers thick and square.
“Hal Woodward,” he said, grasping her hand firmly.
“Lux Branson.”
“Julie North.”
“So where’s this Ben guy, huh?” Hal said, peering around them.
“Guess he hasn’t shown yet,” Lux said.
“Too bad. So you’re our tracker,” he looked at Lux, “and you’re the biologist?”
He looked from Lux to Julie. Lux felt rather relieved when he looked away. She didn’t much like being pinned by those bird eyes.
“Yes,” Lux said, sitting.
The chair sagged farther than was healthy for it, but when it didn’t collapse, she relaxed into it. Julie perched on the edge of her seat, not even risking the saggy middle.
“You are planning on gunning us all down in a lobby?” Hal said. At first, Lux didn’t realize she was being addressed, then realized that her hand was resting on the grip of her pistol, holstered on her hip.
“I was thinking about it, if Makarios doesn’t get his ass in gear. Before anyone starts mouthing, I have a permit for this,” she said, waggling the pistol slightly.
He might look like Indiana Jones on steroids, but like hell Lux was going to feel inferior to this guy’s swagger. Hal merely waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
As they waited for Ben Makarios, Julie talked about recognizing poisonous berries and animals in the woods. Lux barely paid attention; there was hardly a thing that Miss North could tell her about the flora and fauna in the region that she didn’t know, but the two men paid polite attention.
The sun outside began to set, hot orange lines crawling into the window. It was late, but the Texas heat still oozed around them.
“So how long are we going to wait for this Ben guy to show?” Smith said. He had slowly but surely been displaying a slow withdrawal from the conversation, which admittedly had grown a little stilted as the length of time spent waiting for Makarios had extended beyond reasonable. Now his irritation was expressed in gritted jaw and drumming fingers. A lack of patience, Lux thought. Not ideal for a prolonged hunt.
“Not long,” a voice from the hall said.
Ben Makarios was a strange looking human. Like Hal, he had avian features, but where Hal was almost regal in his resemblance to a bird of prey, Makarios was a vulture. Carrion bird, all hunched angles, beaky face and beady, glittering eyes. A half smile that wouldn’t be out of place adorning the face of Loki, the trickster god.
“Sorry I’m late,” Ben said with a smirk.
Lux glowered at him. Her stomach rumbled quietly, the calorific content of her meager lunch at the diner now long gone.
“We’re leaving tomorrow, so you better sit down,” she grumbled.
“Tomorrow?” Julie asked, looking over.
“Yes.” Lux nodded. “Dawn. Makarios, this is Julia, Hal and Smith. Get yourselves acquainted; I’m going to get some food and an early night. But before I do, let’s get one thing clear. I’m sure you all think that you are the best thing since the combustion engine, but when we go into those woods, when I say do something, you do it. Any deviation from this will result in me dumping your asses and going home. Understood?”
The four members of her team, and it was going to be her team, looked dumfounded. Lux had barely spoken two words in their hour together. Lux let it hang, got out of her chair, and left. Let them talk. She had a job to do, and the respective egos of these four misfits had nothing to do with finding, or not finding, the mythical beast known to all as Sasquatch.
Chapter Two
The
woods breathed out foggy humidity. The rivers and bogs that were twisting deep beyond the tree line provided great moisture, but the canopies of leaves prevented the sweat of the earth from escaping. Lux sucked down a deep lungful of the broiled forest air and let the myriad tastes roll themselves out along her tongue. Her pack was strapped tight to her back and her hair was starting to curl in the humidity. It pleased her to note that Julia and Ben were already sweating. Discomfort now should make them more amenable to her lead later.
Piney Woods looked impenetrable, a thick line drawn in the earth. Belle lay on one side and Lux felt like humans were not supposed to go to the other. The wild places of this planet were slowly giving way to the asphalt, the carburetor, the chainsaw, the plow. In her experience, the soul of the wild places only grew more aggressive as their territory was encroached upon by humans.
Her fingers ran over the rumpled texture of her map. It was topographical with an overlay of roads and towns; Lux had planned on taking them into the deepest part of the forest and then start to track their quarry, not that she expected there to be anything to track. She glanced up and located their direction.
She stuffed the map into the small pocket on her pack and looked to the others. Julie stood by Samuel Smith, unfazed by the prospect of being outdoors for a few days. Despite outward appearances, she was allegedly a competent woodsman in her own right. Hal Woodward was next to them, but slightly in front, eager like a hunting dog about to be unleashed. He was the only one of them whom Lux truly thought was excited about the adventure. His hawk eyes danced with the light of someone in their element. Ben Makarios stood to the side, his face not giving anything away. He watched the woods with wary eyes, but there was no fear in his face. He simply observed.
Strapped to her waist under her shirt was a thick Bowie knife. The sheath was plain leather, but the blade was sharp enough to cut a piece of paper that fell on it. Lux rarely went anywhere without the knife, and she certainly wasn’t going to leave it behind on this particular assignment. She didn’t know her team, the woods were crawling with wild pigs and feral dogs, and she knew colonies of meth heads lived out there too.