by K. T. Tomb
Then she saw it, the heel of one of the prints disappearing into the brush to the side of the trail.
Crouching low, she followed the path, weaving around the bush.
“Here,” she mumbled to the rest, following the faint pattern.
“I don’t see anything,” Julie frowned.
“It’s here, I swear,” Lux said, skimming the ground.
A cracked twig here, a dip in the ground there. She came up face to face with a thick tree trunk. There were little nicks in it like claw marks, but nothing as clear as what they had found earlier. She craned her head back, scouring the trees for any form at all that shouldn’t be there. High up in one corner, there rested a leafy squirrel nest, but nothing else.
She swore again. How could she have been so stupid?
“It took to the trees,” she told the concerned looking team.
“Can you track it in the trees?” Samuel said.
Lux, just for a moment, hated him.
“No,” she ground out. “I cannot.”
What a ridiculous question. What they really should be concerned about is what kind of animal moves for miles on the ground, and then takes to the branches and moves amongst them like a chimpanzee? She regarded the upper branches, warily now. Where she had felt the rise of the predatory blood in her when following footprints on the ground; now the tables had turned on her. Danger could come from above. Samuel sneered derision at her, but before he could say anything, Hal piped up from the back of the group.
“We should follow the old trail then.”
As reluctant as she was to take orders other than her own, she knew he was right.
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Come on.”
The trail went nowhere fast. They walked all day, going in random loops and twists. Something smelled wrong to Lux. The air played through her mouth, tantalizing her with the knowledge that something was off, but not telling her what it was. She had always been able to read the forest like that, feeling its moods.
“Hey,” Ben said to her, quietly. “You look like a cat.”
“Thanks,” she said sarcastically.
“When cats do it, it’s called a grimace.”
“Something seems off.”
“What do you see?” he asked, the joking tone gone.
“I don’t know, nothing. And it’s driving me nuts. Something is very strange about this place, I can taste it.”
She scanned the trees over and over like she was reading the same message and not understanding it. But the message was there, she knew it was. Somewhere hidden out there, the trees were trying to tell her something. But it was hidden away in a code she did not speak.
“There is a disturbance,” Ben agreed, his face pointed out deep into the forest. “I just don’t know what it is either.”
She looked away from the forest and into his eyes. There was definitely the same ability lurking down in there that she had. She wondered what insurance policy had really meant. When she was the insurance policy, it meant she was the heavy weight when the situation called for it. She had been told to kill people if needed before; luckily it had never come to that, though close. There had been a few times where she had her pistol at a man’s temple, the metal warm from her body and pressing deep into his skin. There was the same steel, the same almost meanness in his eyes. It was a necessary meanness.
It was the kind of determination, the will, that pushed things; that made things happen. He could be the heavy weight. He could be the killer. But he could also keep them on track. Maybe that was why he was there, just to keep the peace. Maybe he was there just to track the group as she tracked the creature.
She hesitated, then said, “Do you really believe that there’s something out there, something like Bigfoot?”
Ben didn’t say anything for several long seconds. His eyes stayed on her face, tracing the lines there. “You mean a ‘real’ mythical creature?”
She nodded.
“Yes,” he said, simply. She felt like it was the first honest answer he had given her, the first honest answer that meant anything. She swallowed. Maybe she could push her luck. “Why?”
Ben smiled slightly and shook his head.
“See, I knew you would ask that.”
“Are you going to answer?”
“Maybe.”
She took a deep breath, hiding her frustration. Why? Why couldn’t he just give her a straight answer? Was it really that hard?
“Why don’t you? Answer for an answer?” she asked.
“Okay, fine,” he sighed. “I answered yours first. Your turn.”
Lux thought about arguing, but she was too curious.
“Because,” she said, “there’s nothing we’ve seen that a human could not easily recreate.”
“You don’t believe that.”
No, she didn’t.
“Yes, I do.”
“Lux, you’re not a great liar. I am.”
She looked away. There was no other answer. She did not want to believe that something as ridiculous as Bigfoot haunted these woods. There would be more substantial evidence for it based on what they were finding.
“I believe there is because…” He hesitated. “Because there is evidence.”
Lux gave him a sad smile.
“You’re not that good a liar, Makarios.”
He laughed. It was not a happy sound, but she couldn’t pinpoint why.
“Touché.”
“Do over?” she asked, and Ben nodded his assent.
“Why did Dr. Stevens select you as the insurance policy?”
“I’ve worked for him before, successfully. I make sure things stay on track when people lose their heads. My turn. Why did he select you as the tracker?”
“I don’t know, probably because I could do the job and most trackers are more selective about the contracts they take. I was desperate. Have you seen what it is that we are looking for?”
“Yes,” he said, slowly meeting her eyes. “Why?”
“It comes here by night.” It was not a question.
“You’ve seen it too.” His was not a question either.
She didn’t say anything. There was no point, because he was right.
Minutes of silence passed as the trail wound on.
“It can’t be real though.” Lux said.
Ben shrugged.
“The woods, they change reality.”
The woods had always been reality for Lux. The city was a weird state of dreaming to go and visit, but the trees stood as an army forever. But Ben was right. Humans only wrote the rules under city skies surrounded by metal and concrete, rules that couldn’t always be followed in the forest.
“Why though?” Lux mumbled. “Why are they here? Why are they out there?”
Ben laughed. “I’m not God.”
Lux smiled weakly.
“Good to know. He might come strolling by any minute.”
***
It was nearing evening when the marked trees began to show up again. The marks were deeper, older, repeated. The marking stench around them was getting stronger too. The smell was thicker and wilder, almost making anyone who sniffed it too closely to involuntarily gag.
“We’re getting close to something,” Lux said to Julie, eyeing the sky around them.
She had not been pleased to know they could take to the trees. Julie was on her haunches, untangling something from the root of one of the trees.
“I don’t like it,” Samuel said as he drew up next to her.
“No,” she agreed, “nor do I.”
“Look at this,” Julie said, holding something up. It was mud encrusted, which hid the form of the object somewhat.
“What is it?” Lux said, leaning in close.
“A necklace?” Julie said.
It could have been a necklace. A dull and rather shapeless lump of rock hung from a leather strip. The leather was rough, a length of animal skin perhaps, that had been treated with feces and dried in the sun. There was what appeared to b
e a hole worn through the middle of the small rock, shaped by something about the size of a man’s finger, and that was what it was strung through.
Samuel looked at it like he had found a shaft of gold in the middle of west Harlem. Lux stepped back and let him take over. He was, after all, the anthropologist.
“Lux,” Ben said very low, almost whispering. The other three were still inspecting the stone jewelry. “Come look at this.”
The look in his eyes was one she had to follow. He knew something, and she had to know what that was. “This,” he mumbled, reaching and pulling the thick branch of a low and bushy tree aside. It took Lux several long moments to absorb what she was looking at. Stacked in a neat pillar, a cairn of stones stood. She looked up at Ben. He let the leaves fall to mostly hide the stack again. It was easy to see how she missed it; the light dappled color of the stones hid them naturally. Ben was like her. He saw.
“What is it?” she managed to get out.
“I don’t know, but it’s too human for comfort,” Ben said.
“There could be people,” she insisted.
Ben raised a dark eyebrow.
“Where did you see any human signs, anything that would suggest intelligent life other than that lump they’re marveling over? If this is human, it’s from a culture that is totally untouched by modern society. This is Texas, not the Amazon.”
Lux swallowed deeply, and drank a little water from her nearly depleted supply.
“Should we tell the others?”
She was surprised he would ask her that.
“You’re the insurance policy,” she said before she could stop herself. His face clouded. “So I should be asking you,” she hurried, but it was too late.
“Let’s just go,” he said irritably. But as he stepped back, he bumped the brush again and she saw beyond it. He turned to face the others and took a step, the brush swallowing her view rapidly.
“Wait,” she said, grabbing for him with one hand and reaching forward with the other.
“Are those... graves?” Ben asked. The carefully placed rocks were deliberately organized into neat rows, perhaps a half dozen of them in a cleared area of the woods. A cleared area, which meant that somebody, or something, had done the clearing.
“What else could they be?” Lux said.
“We need Samuel for this.” Ben crept through the brush and silently gained Smith’s attention and brought him to Lux.
“What?” he snapped. “That artifact is clear evidence of intelligent life!”
“Keep your voice down, damn it!” Lux said in a whisper. “You’re going to want to see this.”
He muttered some choicer expletives under his breath, his eyebrows forming a formidable furrow on his face.
“What?” he groused again, clearly wanting to go back to the jewelry.
Ben pulled aside the dark vegetation to reveal the unsettling scene before them.
“You tell us,” Lux said.
Smith exclaimed, far too loudly and barged through the vegetative barrier, accompanied by Hal, who had followed him to see the new discovery. Ben and Lux went around, leaving the foliage undisturbed and Julie followed suit. Three other stone pillars marked a small rectangle of land, and smooth rocks a foot high and clearly selected for their uniformity jabbed up from the earth like fingertips of some giant statue, buried deep underground and attempting to claw his way out. The rows were neat and tidy, measured. There was no writing on them, although they all bore a number of gouges, similar to those already seen on tree trunks, but without any urine stench.
Samuel turned to Lux.
“We need to stay here and document this, right away. This could be the anthropological find of the century. With the information we can get here, we’re going to be incredibly famous, do you understand? I’m talking Nobel Prize level of fame here.”
His eyes lit up with the scholar’s thirst for information. Lux feared it, it was the same fervor radical preachers and political extremists had when soapboxing.
“Mark this place on the map. We’ll come back in the morning,” she said.
The look on his face was that of a disappointed child. Then it hardened into anger.
“We need to see if we can find any of these creatures and see them alive,” Lux said, before Samuel could say anything. “And we are not splitting up.”
“It’s almost night; we should make camp, and we should make it here,” Samuel said hopefully.
Lux frowned. They could cover more ground if they kept going for another hour or so.
“We’re not spending the night in a graveyard. We don’t know what it is, or who tends it.”
“I thought you weren’t superstitious? Yeah, ok, it looks like a graveyard to our eyes, but who knows what it is. Could just as easily be a stone circle, like they had in Celtic Europe,” Hal said, with wryness in his smile.
Lux shrugged.
“Do you want to spend the night in this?”
Julie inched towards Lux, “No. Lux is right; this isn’t a good spot, at all.”
“Then let’s move out. We can still cover quite a bit. We’ll come back, Sam.”
She could tell by his face that he didn’t believe her, but went along with the will of the group. Perhaps he wasn’t quite so unreasonable as Lux had thought. Passionate, fervent for sure, but maybe he could be reasoned with.
***
The tree they slept in wasn’t marked up with unknown territory gouges, but it was in the minority of the trees in this area, and they had had to move a half mile or so to the south before they found a suitable place to make camp. Lux didn’t feel any more comfortable in the tree than she did on the ground, but it didn’t matter. They would be safe, or they wouldn’t, but she couldn’t do anything about it.
She strung up her hammock tent and squatted on the branch, tiredness in her bones leaking out.
She really should have pulled herself out of the tracking business a long time ago. Maybe set up her own guide company or hunting outpost in Alaska and had younger, dumber guides working for her. Something to strive for, she guessed.
Her fingers found the charms she wore around her neck. The thin dog tag was just like one of the graves out there in the trees, only they were unnamed. Her brother had at least been recorded when he died. His name was cast forever in the steel of the tag and the marble of his grave up in Corsicana. The indentations always felt rough when she touched them, the name standing out so strong like a part of his soul was in it. Lux did not believe in that, but she wished she did. The tag in itself was not her brother, and she desperately wanted it to be. Ben watched her. Lux let the tag go and the lump of charms disappeared into her shirt, the sweaty collar swallowing them hungrily. The thump of metal braced against her skin, reminding her why she had left the woods in the first place.
“Whose were those?” Ben’s voice said from a branch a few feet over her head.
Lux looked into the gnarled eyes of a tree far away. The swirls of bark almost gave it a perfect human face, but it was miserable and a little angry, so she looked away.
“My brother,” she said finally. “He was in Afghanistan. Probably the only member of my family to do anything good. Not that that war is anything good, but you know what I mean. He believed in serving his country, and he got repaid with an IED because he was in a country he shouldn’t have been in.”
She stopped herself. It would be too easy to continue, which would lead to an argument with someone in the team for sure who didn’t share in her liberal views on interventionist foreign policy. This was Texas after all.
“My sister died in war,” he said, something in his eyes moving like a snake in water. It was a sad look, but one that held the slickness of the city. “But not overseas.”
Lux looked from his face to one of the tattoos on his arm. She knew the symbol, but she also knew not to say it out loud. Tracking had pulled her into the gang world a long time ago. Staying unaffiliated had been the hard part and key to her continued survival. Ben saw where
she looked. “You’ve tracked one of them before, haven’t you?”
Lux said nothing.
“I got out,” he said, knowing what she was thinking. The sun was setting bloody on his face. “I got out when I started working for Stevens.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“Just making conversation.”
She smiled, but there was no happiness in it.
“True. I have tracked some cartel members. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. All I’d done prior to that was haul some missing kids out of a forest and some petty thieves out of their buddies’ attics. Kinda threw me for a loop.”
“That was right after, wasn’t it?”
She didn’t have to ask what he meant. When Jonathan died, Lux ran, leaving all her contacts with the cartel behind.
“Yes,” she said, but it came out very quietly.
“It probably saved your life.”
“Yes, I think it did,” she agreed.
He was silent, staring out into the wild. She could see it in him too, permeating his being, the wild. It was there, a strong wind that blew right out of most people. But his skin was strong enough to hold it in. He was like her.
She let her fingers skim the necklace.
“This was my mother,” she said, the bent cross showing. She didn’t know why she was talking, but it was like she suddenly couldn’t help it. And she told the truth. “She died when my little sister Trix was born.”
“Trix, Lux, Jonathan.”
“Trix is short for Bellatrix. It means warlike. She’s gentle as a lamb though. I think we were misnamed. She should have been Lux.”
“You don’t wear anything from her?”
Lux shrugged, still partially confused why she was even telling him any of it. “I’ve got this locket, and there’s a picture of her in it. There’s me and her and John and our mother.”
“Where’s your sister?” Ben asked, his eyes curious but innocent. He was curious just for the sake of it, and Lux relaxed in the feeling of not having to gauge political motivations.
“She went to New York; still there, last I heard. We don’t talk.”