by K. T. Tomb
“No, I think people are just lazy,” she said, and instantly regretted it.
Small talk had never been her strength. Now, sitting on a park bench beside her in the Texas heat was a little old man who was about to fund several years of tracking adventures that she’d had to miss out on, as well as the lucrative guide’s jobs that usually came along with them. Here she was, sitting down and telling him that he had the wrong idea about handshakes.
Dr. Stevens’ crinkly face expanded to hide all his features except for his mouth as he let out a dry, cackling noise. For a moment she thought that the fossil was going to die on her right then and there, which would put a severe dent in her travel plans.
“I suppose that’s the best answer I’ve ever got!”
It was a laugh. He was laughing! Lux was relieved, but resolved to keep herself in check from then on out. She was hardly gregarious, which was fine so long as she didn’t have to engage with other human beings, ever. When she did, this sort of social error was commonplace.
“So tell me Lux, about this so-called ‘tracking’ ability of yours. I’ve heard you’re the best.”
Dr. Stevens lay his thick cane against the bench and caught her with his little rheumy eyes. They were old eyes, eyes that had seen a lot – perhaps even too much – of the world. Lux had seen enough of the world too, enough to know when she was being deliberately needed. So-called, indeed.
“Well, I’ve worked as a skip tracker for about seven years now. There isn’t anywhere someone can run where I won’t find them. I haven’t failed yet, and I don’t intend to.”
Bounty hunting paid, but barely. Still, no harm in taking pride in a job well done, no matter if it was usually luring people into traps with her looks so she could cart them off to jail.
Dr. Stevens nodded slowly.
“And other things?” His eyes seemed to clear. Strange. Like she was watching the process of Stevens manually focusing his eyes with strength of will alone.
“What do you mean ‘other things’?” she said.
“You can find people, but can you track things? Non-human things?”
Lux wasn’t sure what he meant. Animals? Why not just say, ‘animals’ then?
“If it leaves a trail, I can track it,” she said confidently, though she didn’t feel anywhere near as confident as she sounded. It had, after all, been a while since she had fired a gun at an animal. Hunting for sport had been drilled into her as a child, and then firmly drilled out of her by a burgeoning moral code that began on Kodiak Island, years ago. Lux had been tracking and hunting since she could stand up and hold a rifle. When she was seventeen and had dropped out of high school, she had spent every bear season in Alaska as a hunting guide and her charges had never gone home empty-handed. In her mind, that was some of the most stringent hunting that the continental U.S. had to offer. Slowly but surely, the thrill of watching fat, gloating morons gun down beautiful, dangerous animals paled. Walking away from animal hunting with no idea of how to support herself financially, she had returned to Texas, lost and freelancing with the local sheriff.
Lux had tracked a man through the woods for a week once, right through the depths of east Texas, and those were some mean woods. But she had found the man and brought him in. Surely with all her experience and expertise, whatever Dr. Stevens had in store for her would be a walk in the park. Her memories had taken her away from the conversation, but she found Stevens waiting patiently for her to come back to him. Polite to a fault, this one.
“Good. What if you don’t believe it’s there?” he said.
Lux was thoroughly stumped. What type of question was that? If she was tracking something, it had to be there. If she didn’t believe it was there, then she looked elsewhere.
“Then I retrace my steps to find where I lost it,” she hazarded.
“I mean something that you do not believe in. A creature, let’s say, a creature that is just a legend.”
Lux breathed through her teeth. She had been commissioned by cryptid hunters before. Each time, she ended up dashing their lifetime supply of hope on the rocks. They were frauds, dreamers, conspiracy theorists. Not logical people, with no understanding of the wild. She would track a creature with them for two days before catching it and proving that it was a simple lizard, nothing special. But Dr. Stevens was different from the cryptozoologists she had met before. He was wealthy for a start; that much was clear.
“In that case, I would follow the trail until I discovered what was creating it, legendary creature or no. Then, once I have proved that the creature doesn’t exist, I receive full payment anyway.”
Dr. Stevens gave her a wrinkly smile.
“That, my dear, is exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said.
Lux wasn’t at all sure that it was. She had been under the impression that Dr. Stevens wanted her to track down a person and had expected some story about his wayward grandchild having run off to Chile and broken off contact. She had worked a few jobs like that as well, though she wasn’t at all sure that they were always within the strictest confines of the law. Stevens told her he had assembled a team for her already, four others. She took a piece of paper which listed a rendezvous point just outside of Belle. A wild goose chase, funded by a crazy old man. It looked like her run of bad luck was going to extend a little while longer. The paper had thinly scrawled handwriting that betrayed the shaky hand of the author. Clearly Stevens had written this himself. ‘Piney Woods’ was printed unsteadily at the top.
Lux had heard the rumors about what lived in there. She had been raised on the outskirts of the woods and knew they were big enough to harbor any monster man could dream of. Almost every dangerous creature in America was represented in those woods. All of them had at “one time or another” been shot by herself or her father. Nothing had escaped the Branson family’s aim when she was a girl.
“What is it that I’m tracking?” Lux asked with her heart sinking.
Dr. Stevens appraised her carefully, but said nothing.
“I can’t trace what I don’t know.”
He reached a trembling hand into his pocket. What he pulled out was a rumpled, slightly coffee-stained envelope, folded over once. It was thick with papers inside, and battered white corners poked out of the opening.
“Here,” he said. “This is the information you need. And this,” he pulled out another packet of folded paper from his other pocket, “is your team.”
Lux took both and stared at them. She had a tight feeling in her stomach. There was no way she could afford to turn down the project. She had tracked animals all over the States, but Piney Woods changed things. It was a surreal place, thick with wilderness, wild memory and her personal history.
Dr. Stevens fumbled through the team envelope.
“This man here,” he brandished a small photo at her, “is Dr. Samuel Smith. He is an anthropologist. You are the tracker, but you need to show him all the evidence you collect. The rest is in here,” he tapped the two envelopes. “You will receive payment upon completion of the assignment.”
She stared down at the coffee rings on the cream paper.
Sloppy, she thought.
Dr. Stevens heaved himself to his feet, his cane digging into the dry Texas dirt.
“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 th
at 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. Even
tually, 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.