by Gregory Kay
In less than five seconds, he was back in his car and throwing gravel as he fishtailed back out onto the road, pedal to the metal and blue lights going once again.
Fiona blinked, then blinked again as she took a rapid moving inventory. No excruciating agony? Check. Head moves? Check. Arms, legs, everything else? Check, check and check. Other than feeling disoriented from having her forward momentum instantly arrested by the seatbelt, she decided she was more shaken up than hurt.
When she looked in the direction the deer had come from, she could have sworn she saw the black silhouette of a man standing there in the brush at the side of the road, coming in her direction, but an errant puff of wind came by, stirred the brush, and, when it passed, the figure was gone. She figured it was her imagination, brought on by the shock, but it added a slight tinge of fear to the situation.
Glancing up through the shattered facets of the windshield toward the front of her Jag and seeing the crumpled hood and the steam pouring from the ruptured radiator as the car listed almost forty-five degrees, with its passenger side wheels in the ditch she had lost control and slammed into after hitting the deer, she added ‘pissed’ to the list too.
Yes, pissed! Definitely pissed! Royally, infernally, completely, and utterly pissed!
And, despite being alone with a wrecked car a deserted country backroad, it didn’t improve her mood in the least to see that familiar set of flashing blue lights pulling up behind her.
Deputy Dawg to the rescue! If he comes up here with a damned I-told-you-so grin on his face...if he says one word! Just one word! So help me, I’ll...
She was so angry by that time she missed the noise of him getting out of the cruiser, and the next thing she knew her car door was being wrenched open and she felt his big hand resting on her left shoulder.
“Ma’am, are you alright? Miss Pelligatti?”
At least the irritating son of a bitch got my name right this time!
Fiona turned her head in his direction, ready to blow up at him, but she saw nothing but concern in his expression in the illumination of the dome light.
“Miss Pelligatti? Do you want an ambulance?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure!” she snarled, “My car’s wrecked, I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere, and I-am-just-freaking-fine!” The last words came out as clipped and regular as blows, then she got louder when he shined his own light in her face. “Now please take that damned flashlight of yours out of my eyes! I wish you had it stuck up your – “
“Hold still!” he abruptly barked, and it was one of those angry, official-sounding cop voices that tended to make people obey first and ask questions later, and it worked with her too, despite herself, “I’m going to check your pupils.”
“I’m not on drugs!”
“I never said you were, but you might have a concussion.” Her mouth began opening in a retort but he cut her off. “This is not an option, Miss Pelligatti. Either you let me check you, or I’ll call the EMTs and have you taken to the emergency room strapped to a gurney; it’s your choice.”
I don’t actually have the authority to force her to accept treatment, but she doesn’t have to know that, and I’m not going to risk her going into shock and maybe dying on me, no matter how damned irritating she is!
“Okay,” she muttered, not trusting herself to say anything more, and in less than a minute, he had checked her pupils, asked her if she could move this and that various appendage freely, inquired if she had pain anywhere, and finally asked her if she felt like trying to stand up.
She did, and he insisted on taking her hand and helping her out, holding onto her with one arm around her waist until he was sure she was steady on her feet.
“Now, if you’ll be alright for just a minute, I’ll go take care of that deer, and then I’ll call a wrecker for you. Do you have Triple-A or anything like that?”
She shook her head and he nodded, then turned away, walking toward the opposite side of the road.
For the first time since the wreck, Fiona thought about the deer. She had hit it dead center over her radiator, and the last she had seen of it, its hairy, brown and white airborne body had come flying into her windshield to shatter the glass before sailing off to the left, cartwheeling in the air and headed for parts unknown. She had naturally assumed it was dead, but now she became aware of a strange wheezing, groaning noise: a sound somewhere between that of a human and that of a sheep or goat, and she suddenly felt terrible when she saw the animal struggling in the beam of the deputy’s flashlight. It’s right front and rear legs were moving slowly, pawing at the air with its hooves as if it was trying to walk despite lying on its left side. It raised its head once, then let it drop, and finally just gave up and lay there panting, its chest heaving up and down.
“Shh,” she heard Luke saying softly while he stood beside the deer looking at it critically, “It’s okay, girl. It’ll be over in a minute.”
Fiona saw him reach for his pistol, and quickly turned away, her shoulders hunched in anticipation of the loud crack! that made her jump anyway.
One shot was all it took; Luke had aimed for the head, between the eye and the ear, and Fiona turned back in time to see the two long, graceful right legs straighten and quiver for a handful of seconds before slowly relaxing in death.
When Luke walked back, she swallowed hard and asked, “Did you have to do that?” while carefully not looking at him.
“Yeah,” he said with just a touch of sadness in his voice as he slipped the Glock back into its resting place, “Two of her legs were broken, and I think she had internal injuries; I doubt she would have lived an hour, and if she had, the coyotes or dogs might have gotten to her while she was still alive.” Looking back at the still form on the opposite shoulder, he shook his head and added, “It’s mercy; I hate to see anything suffer.”
The wind shifted, and Fiona could suddenly smell the animal, the odor of musk and blood and shit and pain, overlaid with burnt powder, and she promptly doubled over and threw up, embarrassing herself even more. It only made things worse when the deputy quickly and deftly pulled her long hair back and held it out of her face and laid his other hand on her back, steadying her while she heaved the contents of her stomach out on the road, spattering her shoes.
“That’s it; it’s done.”
“Good,” Colonel Davis said simply, “Kill the power now.”
A switch was flipped, and the humming that had permeated the concrete room’s air ceased, except for quiet background noise of the air conditioning that kept the large room, along with the Cray supercomputer and the other electronic gear, cool. It wasn’t designed to keep the half-dozen men comfortable, but it did that anyway, and they were glad; comfort was often hard to find in their business.
The smell of blood still hung in the air, but that would fade; in any event, that was an odor they were all used to.
Lieutenant Barnes asked, “Sir, do you think there will be any repercussions?”
Davis didn’t really know, and had been wondering that very same thing ever since Mr. Smith had notified them the job was done and ‘requested’ they send a team over to clean up the mess and remove the dead subjects’ vehicle from the scene. Since the makeshift temple was already covered with dried blood spatters from previous sacrifices, they’d felt it best to just give it a cursory mopping after all the fresh bits and pieces were carried out, lest they arouse suspicion by radically changing the place’s appearance, just in case some other group was frequenting it.
Once they finished, the Colonel had confronted Smith about the collateral damage, and had been assured by him that it had been necessary.
“It was the only way to neutralize the garuda in a timely manner. Our behavioral algorithm predicted that the combination of the blood and the weakening symbols would prove an irresistible attractant.”
When Davis asked him why he couldn’t have ambushed it outside, Mr. Smith told him that, in
order to make a sure kill on a garuda, it had to be caught in a confined space where it couldn’t fly off. The four teenagers were the bait who just happened to be in the way.
“Couldn’t you have just shot it?”
Mr. Smith had smiled chillingly.
“Of course I could have, but what would have been the fun in that?”
At that, the officer had let the matter drop. It was over and done with now, so nothing could be changed, plus four dead social outcasts were a small price to pay for something of the potential of this project; over the span of his career, Davis had seen thousands die for causes far less valuable than this one. Besides, he had examined the bodies himself, both that of the creature and those of the humans, and there were wounds and missing parts that couldn’t be explained by the violent interaction between just them. He was afraid, if he pressed the issue, the ever-smiling Mr. Smith would tell him why that was, and that was something he really didn’t want to hear.
The Colonel shrugged at his subordinate standing beside him, then answered, “I seriously doubt it; considering the contents of their school and police records and their social media pages Sergeant Windsor accessed, my guess is that most people will be glad they’re gone. For those who aren’t,” another shrug, “these are just the type of deviants who tend to run away. With them and their van missing – they didn’t even have a license plate on it, according to our recovery team – that will be the automatic assumption, and a quartet of runaway teenage Satanist weirdos aren’t high on the list of missing persons investigations.”
Barnes smiled tightly at the thought.
“When you put it that way, sir, it was probably a public service; considering what they were into, they would have eventually gone to sacrificing people anyway.”
Still another shrug, this one even colder and indifferent than the previous ones. “Whatever; at any rate, it shouldn’t affect security or the mission. Do your people agree, Mr. Smith?”
The stranger who had killed the creature, and whose name was not Smith, nor anything even remotely resembling that, nodded from the corner where he stood quietly, sponging off his black suit and white shirt. The motion of his head was strange, jerky and uncomfortable, as if it wasn’t a gesture he was instinctively familiar with.
“Yes, Colonel, I agree. Do you have any more of that fabric cleaner in the small tubes I have seen your men use? The black bodily fluids come off easily, but the red ones tend to stain.”
CHAPTER 6
What an asshole!
Sitting in the passenger seat of the tow truck as it rumbled down the road, Fiona was still seething over Deputy Carter.
He thinks this is my fault! He didn’t say so, but he didn’t have to! I can tell!
The really irritating thing about it was that the reasonable part of her – the part that couldn’t realistically blame the cop for merely doing his job – was that she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt it was her fault. She blamed herself, for the ticket, for her car and for the deer. For some reason, the sound the wounded animal made wouldn’t leave her, and the smell...
She heaved slightly, and caught herself before she threw up again. She’d never seen an animal bigger than a mouse or a rat killed before, and had never imagined what it would be like. It wasn’t sanitized like the nature documentaries on TV; the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet didn’t have the technology to film in smell-o-vision.
Her stomach spasmed again at the thought, and she decided she really hated the Deputy, hated this trip, and, at the moment, even hated her whole freaking life, if for no better reason than it was more comfortable than hating herself.
“You okay, honey? Do I need to pull over?”
She glanced sharply at the tow truck driver before realizing that the “honey” was intended as just a common pleasantry, not a pickup line. He was a big, stocky man – Russ, the white name tag on his blue work shirt informed her – and his pleasant, bearded, fifty-something face showed nothing but concern, although no doubt it was for the cleanliness of his truck as much as her welfare.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” And I’ll be damned if I’m going to humiliate myself again with another show of weakness like I put on back there! The memory of spewing all over the roadside while the solicitous cop held her hair, rubbed her back, and quietly told her it would be okay was absolutely mortifying.
“You sure you don’t need to go to the hospital? You might have done something to yourself in that wreck.”
“No thanks.” Suddenly, she need to talk to someone, anyone, and it looked like Russ would have to do. “It’s just my car...and that deer.”
“That is a shame about the car.” That was the second time he’d said that; the first was when he was winching it up onto the tow truck’s flatbed. “Still, I reckon it can probably be fixed; Jags are pretty tough. As for the deer, they’re plenty more of ‘em around here; we’ve got one of the highest deer accident rates in the country.” He chuckled once without humor, just a single breathy “tuh!” sound. “They give me almost half my business.”
Fiona swallowed hard and turned her head toward the window, and Russ peered at her in understanding.
“You’re from up north, ain’t you?”
He pronounced it somewhere between the northern “north” and the deep southern “nawth,” but she knew what he meant.
“New York.”
“Um,” he grunted, nodding with the satisfaction of being right, “I figured, from your plates and your accent. Seeing somethin’ like that’s bound to be hard on somebody who wasn’t raised around it. Even when you’ve hunted them all your life, like I have and about everybody else around here, it’s still sad when you have to put one down like that. I know; I’ve had to do it myself a few times.”
She didn’t want to know, but had to ask.
“What do you use? A wrench?”
Russ laughed out loud at that.
“No, although I reckon that would work.” Gesturing in the general direction of the small of his back with his right hand, he said, “I carry a little nine-millimeter with me all the time.”
Fiona’s eyes widened and she felt herself shrinking against the passenger door, but the driver only laughed.
“Nothing to be afraid of, honey! There’s nothing illegal; I’ve got a permit for it. Concealed carry is pretty common around here; you’d be surprised how many folks do it.”
What the hell have I gotten myself into?
“I...I guess I’m just not used to that,” she said diplomatically, “Is it that violent here?”
“No! West Virginia has the lowest crime rate in the country; most of our violence involves a couple of friends getting drunk and whuppin’ the crap out of each other. We don’t generally go around shootin’ folks.”
She was genuinely curious now; besides, she’d need local background for her story.
“So why do you carry the guns?”
His laugh faded to a tight smile.
“Because we want to keep it that way. This state’s motto is Montani semper liberi; it’s Latin. Know what that means?” Once she shook her head, he went on. “Mountaineers are always free. Free from crime as well as from tyranny and oppression; in a way, it’s the same thing. It’s peace of mind, and you can’t put a price on that.”
“So,” she said, feeling a little uncomfortable and deciding to change the subject, “Is the deputy back there a deer hunter too?”
Now why the hell did I ask that? Why should I even care?
The driver nodded.
“He’s probably the best deer hunter around here; spends most of his free in the woods by himself, takes his limit every year in gun and bow season both, and even killed the biggest buck ever shot in Mason County.”
“So he’s a trophy hunter?” she half-asked, half-stated as her anger at the lawman began to renew and build, but Russ shook his head.
“No, not really; that big’un was the only one he’s ever had mounted that I know of, and I halfway think a man might go to Hell if he was
ted a head that nice. Everything he shoots gets eaten, either by him or somebody else. I swear that boy feeds about half the people in this county. He keeps his deep freezers full of deer meat, and keeps his ears open for anybody having a little trouble – out of work, sick, you know – and he’ll see to it they have meat on the table.”
“What’s he doing? Running for office?”
“Him? Hell no! Oh, he could run for anything around here and people would vote for him, but he’s more likely to run from office. He don’t deliver it himself anyway; he usually has one of the local preachers do it, and makes ‘em promise not to tell where it came from. Of course, this is a small area and I ain’t never known a preacher who could keep his mouth shut about a good deed, so everybody pretty much knows anyway. This town’s like a little Peyton Place, where everybody knows everything that goes on.”
“Peyton Place?”
He grinned wider as he slowed the truck, guiding it through a series of sharp curves where the brush and trees pressed tightly against the shoulder of the road.
“It’s an old soap opera, long before your time, honey.” They passed through a short tunnel beneath a railroad embankment, and he pointed toward a green sign, illuminated by the headlights and back-lit by the dim glow in the night sky ahead. “And speak of the devil, there it is.”
She read the words in passing, “WELCOME TO POINT PLEASANT.”
After Fiona refused his offer to carry her bags inside for her, Russ told her to have a good evening – morning, really, now; no question about it! – he drove away with her battered Jag riding piggyback and left her in front of the Lowe Hotel on the corner of 4th and Main Streets with her purse, the shoulder bag containing her laptop, and her pull-behind suitcase on its tiny plastic wheels.
She looked around, shaking her head. She was from the city that never sleeps, but Point Pleasant had obviously gone to bed hours ago. No cars were moving on the streets, no music played, and the only lights were the yellow pools from the street lamps, their beams lying undisturbed on the concrete sidewalks. She heard a cricket’s lonely chirping, the flutter of batwings swooping and diving around the lights, and, somewhere, the faint, almost inaudible static sound of some insomniac’s cheap TV.