by K. T. Tomb
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.
Which was worse... or wilder… was still up for debate.
Growing up not five miles from the spot they stood now, at the eastern edge of Belle, they had kept a shotgun by the door; kept it there and used it there.
As the final step in her setting out ritual, she touched the lump of charms hanging from her neck. She had protection against the evil eye, which she would never tell a soul that she believed in, a bent cross that belonged to her mother, a narrow dog tag from her brother; and the chipped locket which held the only picture of her whole family. Almost her whole family, at least.
“Okay, everyone ready?” she said, partly to get
going, and partly to keep her mind from dark history lessons.
Four pairs of eyes turned to her.
“Why are you in charge?” Ben Makarios said.
“Because,” she snapped, though trying to stay calm, “I’m the tracker.”
“What are you tracking now?” he said.
“Common sense. You think you can do better?”
He didn’t break eye contact, but an almost sheepish look came over his face.
Good, Lux thought.
“We go this way,” she said, starting into the woods.
A weight seemed to drop out of the sky and onto their backs as they crossed the invisible line in the trees. There was no wind, no breeze, and no movement. Lux knew she was imagining things, but she always felt like there were eyes on her in these places. The wet ground absorbed sound. All the sounds of the forest were erased. Her ears pricked to the sound of a squirrel scrabbling along bark, a rabbit peaking forward and stepping on a leaf, a bird cooing. The sounds returned once she relaxed, became one of the animals instead of an interloper. The people behind her crunched along through the scrub, ridiculously loud. Birds scattered in their bold wave of noise. She frowned. Now that she paid full attention, she could only hear two sets of feet. That was interesting, she thought. Half the team knew how to become invisible in the woods. She turned to see who was loud and who was silent.
Samuel Smith and Julie were walking side by side, crunching away at the ground. Lux suspected there was something between them and hoped it developed, provided they did their jobs and watched her back; they could keep each other out of her hair at least.
Like ghostly sentinels on either end of the couple, Ben and Hal melted along, neither talking, neither making a sound, scanning the woods, a pair of automated security cameras on legs. Lux turned back to face the forest, the hair on her neck standing up. There was nothing wrong, she kept telling herself, but something about the place had her on edge. Unusually so. What was going on with the air? It felt thick, psychotropic almost. The trees were beautiful and thick, but keeping secrets. The forest stayed quiet and so did the team as best they could. Samuel and Julie would strike up conversation occasionally, but it never seemed to last long.
The woods became a unit of wind to her, a wind that would pass through her and whisper lies and sometimes things that were true. But when the woods spoke to her, it was never beautiful like the trees. Forests, she had long ago learned, kept only the darkest secrets, the vilest ones. Things born in the forest always died in the forest.
Her first true assignment had been in the forest, the southernmost area of Piney Woods in fact.
A convict from Gib Lewis Prison had greased himself up and slid out a duct. Lux had thought that was just in the movies, but he had done it and escaped into the woods. She had tracked the man through the trees for a week. The bugs there had never been smaller than the pad of her thumb. The gnats would crawl up her legs, biting. She could feel the sharp sting of their bites still. By the time she found the convict, he was almost dead. Dehydration and exposure had wreaked havoc on his body.
The forest had told her where to find him. A bent twig could be from any animal passing by, but the trees would smell of dog or hog or man. Somehow, she could always tell the difference. The wind would send little whispers of the convict’s voice, even when she was miles away. Lux had a connection to the forest; it was in her blood and her lungs. Even when she was in the city, the forest was always there.
They set up camp at an arc in one of the little feeder streams. It was narrow, but the water ran and was clear. The hot colors of the sun were spreading out on the ground like melted butter. Lux was feeling more pleased with her team than when they started out. She hadn’t heard a single complaint about the pace or how much distance they covered.
Even in the pictures of them that Dr. Stevens had shown her, they had the sun-burnished look of people who could hold their own against the elements. But Lux had learned from the school of hard knocks that people could look different from what they truly were. When she crawled into her hammock that night, she kept her Bowie knife close to her hand. The team wasn’t unified enough for her to trust, and the forest crawled with danger. She knew how to handle that danger, but she knew there was no such thing as being too cautious when in the woods.
It was the moment the sun began to rise the next morning that Lux knew that the trip would not go how she planned. The morning was already saturated in heat. It was the wet heat that sunk down through skin and organs into the bone. There was no dismissing it, no ignoring. She had learned as a small child that the heat had to be accepted, never fought.
Wind rolled through the trees, whistling a haunting tune she hadn’t heard in years. Lux peeked at her watch in the predawn glow. Five thirty. She sighed and looked at the top of her hammock tent. It was a comforting, familiar olive drab. She rolled over and looked out of the mosquito netting. The gray light did not show everything, but it revealed the slow outlines of dark trees and light birds. A squirrel skittered across the ground, just a silent dark.
Fumbling with the zipper, she slid out of her hammock and alighted quietly on the ground. The warm breeze brought to her the smell of sweat and blood and dirt and leaves. There were several deer near them. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. By the river, there was the still, slightly silhouetted form of a man sitting. She recognized Ben after a moment and unfroze. He was just sitting there, silent like a still tree. Not a tree. A vulture. Lux craned her head around, but she could not see anything disturbing. The forest didn’t smell or feel like it had witnessed violence.
“You think this trip is useless.”
It wasn’t a question. She squatted down on the sandy bank next to him. She could smell the murky dampness of the water and the mud and the rankling of dried sweat coming from Ben.
“Yes,” she said.
“The others do not,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
They were quiet. The sun reflected off the water. The forest slowly woke. Lux kept her body relaxed, but she was tense. Something was going to happen soon, she could feel it in her blood.
“You think this trip is useless, but,” his eyes turned to hook hers, “but you know that something out there isn’t natural.”
Lux caught her breath. The air itself was heavy with the weight of something that was just wrong, and he knew it too. “You speak like a shaman or something.”
For the first time Ben smiled.
“When was the first time you realized you would die one day?”
She wasn’t sure whether she should be freaked out or sad. His face was expressionless, an absolutely still mask. She watched his pulse beat even and steady in his throat.
“When I was very small,” she said.
“Me too. This is a trip for people who have realized that.”
Lux shifted uncomfortably. His words didn’t have an innocent ring to them, and Lux was one to always trust her gut. Ben Makarios made her uncomfortable.
“Why are you here?” she said.
He didn’t respond for a minute.
“I’m here for the same reason you are.”
“And what is that?” she said.
His fighting eyes sunk down to the river. He didn’t need to answer because Lux knew it. He could read things like she could, the little details written in invisible ink on trees and wind and faces. But at the same time, there was something very different inside of him. He could read those details like she could, but he saw them differently, of that she was sure.
She watched a bead of sweat roll down his side over the dark green letters of one of his tattoos.
It was something in Greek. The letters were little and square. She looked back up to his face, but his eyes were still very far away.
“Why does nobody here have a next of kin?” she asked.
The sun was bright by then, the gray of the dawn gone. Hot rays burst white into the leaves, shattering yellow all around. Behind them, there
was the ripping noise of a zipper being pulled.
Ben looked back to her.
“Some things are better left unsaid.”
He stood, his boots digging into the dirt and his chest flexing.
“I imagine we will move out soon.”
Lux sighed, nodded, and stood along with him. The day was growing up, but her worries were too. Ben had only made the whole adventure more unsettling and strange rather than clearing anything up.
The dark green that enveloped them like water was lush and alive. Lux felt like every leaf was an eye in disguise, watching them, watching her, waiting for her to make a mistake. She led them deeper and deeper into the bristling forest.
“Wait,” Julie called out from the rear of the column.
The group froze; the tension in the forest palpable. All ears scanning for noise.
Lux turned.
“What?” she said, doubling back to come alongside the other woman so that they could speak softly.
Julie stood by a tree, her delicate face scrunched in confusion. The expression made her look much older than she actually was. It was not a look of fear or even of having been shaken up. There was only confusion, and Lux found that reassuring. The tree was a normal tree, so far that Lux could see anyway. But Julie obviously didn’t think so.
“Look at this,” she said.
Lux crouched down close, the rest of the team peering in. There were four thick gouges along the base of the trunk. Lux sniffed at it, ignoring the questioning looks on their faces. She was the tracker and she would track how she wanted. Through the scents of the team’s sweat and deodorant, she caught a whiff of the faint tangy odor of urine. It was weak and barely there, but she was certain.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Julie said. “And I’ve been in the jungles of both South America and Africa.”
“What do you think made it?” Hal asked.
Lux did not miss the excitement in his voice.
“I don’t know; your guess is as good as mine.” Julie was looking nervous again, but she didn’t seem to be freaking out. She examined the ground around the tree carefully. “It’s old, whatever it is.”