Watchers in the Woods

by William W. Johnstone

  But the guide would only smile and shake his head.

  “Even if we do get your people out, Nick, public sentiment is going to run very strong against the tribe when the kidnap victims start telling their stories about being held as slaves and breeders.”

  “They know that. They also know that this might very well be the last shot they’re ever gonna have at comin’ out. They don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter, folks. Not only is civilization closin’ in on them, but time is runnin’ out. Remember what I said a minute ago about there bein’ a slim chance of the triberemainin’ undetected?”

  “I’m not sure I understand that, Nick,” Dennis said.

  “I think I do,” Matt said. “There are those on the outside who want their kin out, who are proud of their heritage, and those who don’t want them out—who’d rather see them dead.”

  “Like I keep sayin’, Mr. Secret Agent Man: you’re a smart one. Me and Dan, we’ve seen this comin’ for years. As those on the outside grow in number and in prestige, some of them also get a little jumpy about what might happen if their real background was to be checked too damn close. You see, a lot of them have taken a chance and bred with so-called ’normal’ people . . .”

  Not “married and had children,” Matt noted, but “bred with.” Interesting.

  “Some of the babies was born real monsters. Not many of them, but a few.”

  “What happens to them, Nick?” Nancy asked, walking over with a fresh pot of coffee and a stack of tin camp cups.

  Nick squatted down, looked far across the valley, then answered softly, “There are places around the country that take in those types of babies.”

  “I know there are homes for children who are . . . well, mentally disturbed and . . . disfigured physically,” Milli said. “But do the parents who take them in really know what they’re getting?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nick said.

  “Homes of ex-tribe members, Nick?” Matt asked.

  “In a manner of speakin’,” he said softly.

  Matt sighed and stared at the man. “More and more, Nick, I’m beginning to think there are no clear-cut good and bad guys in this little play. I have to assume by your ’manner of speaking’ remark that if a baby is born with clear-cut markings, that is to say, it is more tribe than . . . let’s call it outsider rather than normal, once the baby is nursed . . .” He almost said “weaned.” “It’s given to a family, say out in the country, so it can run free when the urge strikes it. And I getting warm, Nick?”

  “Right on the money, Matt. But only a small percentage of the families do that. Most families . . . ah . . .” He shook his head.

  “Kill the child?” Susan said, horror in her voice.

  “Yeah,” the guide said. “A lot of them do that.”

  “How do they get away with it?” Dennis asked.

  “Home births. Man, you don’t think a first- or second-generation outsider would risk a hospital birth, with extensive blood tests and all that, do you? Hell, no ... no way. When the doctor is called, he takes one look at the dead baby and says something like ‘Well, sometimes death is a blessing, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.’ Usually, the first and second generation of outsiders live ’way back in the country. In the mountains, in the wilderness, away from civilization, but close enough in so their kids can get on a bus and go to school. Them that hide their tribe-marked kids in those homes I was talkin’ about, those are the breakaways, the renegades, the ones who relate to the wild more than the others.” His voice broke and he paused, clearing his throat. “Men like me and Dan, and we’re all over the country, we’re the ones who have to go in when they’re found and . . .” Tears were running down the man’s tanned cheeks. “... kill them!”

  He stood up and walked away.

  * * *

  The attack came without warning, just as Matt had warned the others it would. Only the screaming of Judy gave them a few second’s warning. The Sataws were rappelling down long ropes, skillfully and silently coming down the sheer face of the cliff, attacking from the rear. Before the first echo of the child’s screaming faded away, Matt had raised his Mini-14 and was putting lead into the Sataws. Norm soon joined in, then Nick with the Mini-14 Matt had loaned him. Those caught halfway down the ropes were wounded and fell screaming to their deaths. Those already on the ground were a different matter.

  A huge, animal-faced Sataw came loping and dodging and slithering across the flats, moving so swiftly Matt could not get a shot at him. He was naked except for a loincloth, and the man-beast was heading straight for the stockade and the women.

  The Sataw leaped the tall, crudely built walls of the compound, and Matt heard a dull smacking sound, followed by the crash of a body to the ground. He ran for the stockade.

  Matt rounded the corner in time to see Susan standing over the Sataw with a club in her hand. Matt put a bullet in the Sataw and then noticed Cathy Nichols was right behind her, a terrible look on her face, a club in her hand, the club raised to bash Susan’s brains out.

  Matt lifted the assault rifle. “I’ll kill you, Cathy!” he shouted. “Drop it or die!”

  As Cathy turned to face him, a grotesque growling and snarling came from her throat. She flung the club to the ground just as her husband came running up.

  “It’s over, Matt. The rest of them ran off . . .” He pulled up short, staring at his wife’s savage face. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “Now we know who took the radio,” Dennis said, his long-barreled .44 Magnum in his hand. He had already proved himself a man who’d stand and fight, and he’d shown he could shoot with some degree of accuracy that day. He had killed or wounded at least two of the attackers.

  “Cathy!” her husband said. “You’re . . . I mean . . . you are one of . . . my God, Cathy!”

  She sprang for the wall and Susan clobbered her right in the butt with her club. With a howl of pain and a snarl of anger, the woman fell to the ground. She came up fighting and decked Susan with a right hand balled into a fist. Matt stepped over and knocked her sprawling to the ground. She sprang up with amazing agility and came at him. He was not gentle with her. He punched her hard in the stomach with his fist and she doubled over and dropped gasping and choking to the ground.

  Matt handed his rifle to Wade and quickly trussed her up with rope. “Where’s the radio, Cathy?”

  “Go to hell!” she spat at him.

  Frank was ashen faced, obviously very near shock. “The kids . . . ?” he managed to say.

  “They’re in the network,” she told him with an ugly grin. “Helping others like us.”

  “Then they’ve got to be stopped,” Nick spoke.

  Cathy laughed at him. “You’ll never get out of here alive, you traitor.”

  “Traitor?” He looked at her. “Woman, this is the last shot we’ve got to stay alive. This relocation plan has got to work or we’re doomed.”

  She cursed him.

  “But . . . your family,” Frank stuttered. “They’re old and respected . . . they go back a hundred and fifty years. I don’t understand this.”

  “Probably one of the first to come out,” Nick told him. “It was easy to hide your identity back then. Names and background didn’t mean anything; it was what you did that counted.”

  “No,” Frank refused to accept the obvious. “No.” He shook his head. “Our children were both born in a hospital.”

  “A lab technician would have to know what to look for,” his trussed-up wife told him. “Our blood is ninety-nine-percent pure. Someone would have to run dozens of separate tests to isolate anything abnormal.”

  Frank stumbled away, clearly stunned with disbelief. Matt pointed to Milli and she nodded, walking out of the stockade after Frank.

  “Now maybe you can get some idea of how big this thing is,” Nick said to the group.

  “You’ll never stop us,” Cathy said calmly. “We must be allowed to maintain a level of purity. We have a right to our heritage the same as any other culture. I
f we do make the news, we’re ready to petition the Supreme Court for our rights.”

  “You’re foolish,” Nick told her. “Woman, the tribe has kidnapped and killed over the years.”

  “So did the Indians. They have their place in society.”

  Nick shook his head. “That ain’t the same. If you can’t see that, then you’re not thinkin’ logically. Call your people off. Let the relocation go on as planned. I’m tellin’ you, it’s our only hope.”

  “You can’t stop it now. No one can. We knew Matt’s orders even before he did. We knew them even before the operation was handed to the CIA.”

  “But my orders were changed,” Matt said. “You couldn’t have known that would happen . . .”

  Cathy grinned at him, and it was the most savage curving of the lips Matt had ever seen. “It’s a movement, within a movement, within a movement,” Matt said, after a few seconds.

  “I’m not followin’ you,” Nick said.

  “The original movement—and I’m guessing here—was for peace: to relocate the remaining tribe members and gradually breed the others into society. Probably through science. Your elders went along with that. But a second movement was secretly formed. That one wanted total purity to remain, to be accepted for what they are. But some of those on the outside didn’t want that. They knew that could never be. The human race wouldn’t tolerate a subhuman species that had kidnapped and killed in order to progress. Even though the human race has been doing that in one form or another since the beginning of time. So this third movement came up with another plan: war.”

  “War?” Nick said. “War?” He began pacing, walking a half dozen steps, then turning and retracing his steps. Back and forth. Back and forth. Cathy lay on the ground and watched him, a strange smile on her face. Nick said, “We have people in Congress, both state and federal. We have people in high-ranking positions in the armed forces. We have federal judges and scientists and heads of large companies and so forth. We don’t need a war. With this relocation plan a success, a hundred more years of careful breeding in a controlled environment and a lot of public education and we’d all be accepted. By those who matter, that is. They’ll always be somebody—like that bunch of nuts across the valley—who hate somebody else because of skin color or religious beliefs or whatever.” His down-home manner of speech had disappeared, the affectation completely gone, at least for the moment. “Why the hell would anyone among us want a damned war?”

  Matt looked at Cathy. She snarled at him, peeling her lips back like an animal. “Because people like her have succumbed to the call of the ‘urge,’ as you put it, Nick. They like it. They’ve probably been networking for years. Meeting in secret to run wild at night and kill. There might be two hundred of them, there might be twenty thousand or more of them. They don’t want that urge bred out; they don’t want it controlled by medication. They want to be exactly what they are.”

  “If that’s true, then everything we’ve done for only God knows how many hundreds of years has been for nothing,” Nick said. He looked at Cathy. “Woman, you and your kind can’t lead a double life. You got to choose.”

  “We have,” Cathy said softly. “Oh, we have.”

  “Leave me alone with her for twenty minutes,” Nick said, a flatness to his words. “Take the kids and go down by the stream and guard them. I’ll soon know everything this bitch knows.”

  “No,” Matt nixed that. “We’ve got to get her out and under supervised interrogation with chemicals. A person under intense physical torture will tell you anything just to get the torturer to stop the pain. That’s no good. We need her alive to tell her story—all of it—and you and Dan to tell yours. You’re correct in saying that the right people will understand. But there is something more here. Something keeps nagging at me. It’s got to be something that neither you nor Cathy have admitted.”

  “What do you mean, Matt?” Dennis asked. “Good God, man, haven’t we got enough to worry about?”

  “Nick is too worried about the damage that a few hundred Unseen can inflict, and Cathy is just too damned sure of herself. All right, people, truth time. Why are you so worried about this third movement? There can’t be that many of them out there.”

  Cathy laughed and said nothing. Nick looked uncomfortable.

  “I guess your bosses are holding back on you, Matt,” Nick finally said. “But you’re probably used to that. The bite of a Sataw is terribly infectious ...”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth, you turncoat!” Cathy screamed at him.

  “There is no known antidote.”

  Matt shook his head. “Nick, they’d have picked up on it and told me about something that deadly.”

  “Oh, you won’t die from it, Matt,” Nick said. “You ever been a fan of werewolf books?”

  “Yes, I still enjoy reading ... Nick, are you telling me this stuff changes people into monsters?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. Not physically, anyway. If the bite is severe enough, and enough saliva is injected into the victim’s blood, some, well, changes in a person’s behavioral pattern can be expected.”

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” Cathy cursed him.

  Nick allowed himself a small smile. “Maybe my grandmother, in the clinical sense of the word.” To Matt: “If the wound is treated promptly, there is little danger of that change occurring. But let it become infected, and the victim is in serious trouble. The change will be so gradual, they will hardly notice it . . . until the moon is full.”

  Matt recalled Richard’s words: “It all depends on phases of the moon.”

  “Cathy,” Matt pleaded with her. “You, all of your kind, must have the foresight to see that your plan won’t work. You won’t be able to infect enough people to make a difference, not before our scientists come up with a vaccine.”

  “We can alter the personalities of enough to ensure the survival of those who feel the pull of the old gods,” she told him. “Not breed it out, like your government wants to do.”

  “It’ll never work,” Matt told her.

  “You won’t be alive to see one way or the other,” Cathy said with a sneer. “None of you.”

  2

  “Them folks had a good fight over yonder, Monroe,” Jim Bob said. “Twenty-five or thirty shots fired. Sounded like M-16s to me, maybe the civilian model.”

  Monroe nodded absently. “We got to join up with them folks, Jim Bob. I done decided on that. They’s strength in numbers. Send a team over yonder and sound them out on us joinin’ up with them. Whitman talks real good—he’s got a high school education. Make him the spokesman.”

  “You mean we gonna be friends with them niggers and Jews?”

  “I don’t figure we got a choice in the matter. We can’t use our radios to call for help. This frequency’s done been assigned to us ... in a roundabout way. ’Sides, they ain’t got the range to get over the damn mountains. We ain’t got no choice in the matter.”

  “You worryin’ about tonight, ain’t you, Monroe?”

  “I’d be lyin’ if I said I wasn’t. Them folks, now, they got them a fine defensive position. That tells me the pale-eyed man knows what he’s doin’. Once we get in amongst ’em and win this fight, we can kill them government people and no one’ll ever be the wiser. See where I’m at, Jim Bob?”

  “Oh, yeah, Monroe, yeah. And I like it. I’ll get Whitman and a few others to ride on over.”

  * * *

  “Here they come,” Nick said to Matt, lowering his binoculars. “I didn’t figure on them this soon.”

  “Get the women placed north and south to watch for the breakaways, kids to the rear of the stockade. All the men up here with us. Put a gun in every man’s hand, whether or not he knows how to use it.”

  “Right.”

  Matt looked across the mile-wide valley. “There could be a hundred breakaways out there and we couldn’t see them.”

  “True. And they probably are out there, too. Them nitwits might be ridin’ into an ambush. But I doubt it.”<
br />
  “Because it’s open country and the CWA have guns?”

  “Yeah. But in the timber, that won’t make a damn bit of difference.”

  “Howdy, folks,” Whitman said, reining up about fifty feet from the crest of the hill. “How y‘all doin’?”

  Silence greeted his words.

  Whitman shifted in the saddle. “We kind of got ourselves in a bind across the way. And judgin’ from the shots we heard a while back, y’all are in the same bind. Colonel Bishner thinks we ought to join forces and maybe we’d be better off.”

  “Colonel?” Matt said with a laugh. “That stupid son-of-a-bitch couldn’t command a row of fence posts to stand still. We’re doing just fine, boys. Now ride on.”

  “It’s a free country, mister,” Whitman said. “We’ll ride where we damn well please.”

  Matt leveled his Mini-14, the muzzle pointed at Whitman’s chest. When he clicked the weapon off safety, Whitman started to sweat in the cool air. “Get down off the horse,” Matt ordered.

  Whitman got down.

  “Walk up here.”

  Whitman walked.

  “The rest of you back off a good hundred yards and sit tight,” Matt told the riders, and they did.

  “What are you men up to?” Matt asked Whitman.

  “Ain’t none of your damn business, mister.”

  Matt slugged him. The blow was sudden, unexpected, and very hard. Whitman’s butt impacted with the ground. His eyes were glazed and his mouth was bloody.

  “Do you want your face kicked in?” Matt asked.

  “No, sir,” Whitman mushmouthed.

  “Then answer my question.”

  “We come after some of them missin’ links. We was gonna capture some of them and sell them to the government.”

  Matt flipped open his wallet to his I.D. “I’m not interested in buying any of them.”

  “Yes, sir. Can I get up?”

  “No. How many in your group?”

  “Forty some-odd. I guess them links killed Wilmot and Telford. We can’t find them nowhere. I know they killed Ray. Stuck him up on a broke-off limb ’bout ten foot off the ground. Awful sight to see, Colonel Bishner said. We’re stuck in this valley, mister. We can’t get out. And I got me a suspicion that your group can’t get out neither ’cause if you could, you’ve have done got gone. It appears to me that our plans backfired, and so did yours.”