Red Blaze

by Jason Kucharik

  I take comfort in the fact that he wasn’t expecting that last hit. The wind acted as a sweeping cloak of camouflage that pulled me across the woods unheard. Invisibility at all costs. The fog is a blessing, a comfort that whispers to me in the bleak evening euphoria that consoles me with three trophies.

  “What you want?” He shouts into the forest, his mind reeling back from the black and animal within. My proximity is a testament to my skill and the consent of the night. I pity this poor creature. I know this creature and his own tracking skills are quite impressive, but that all goes out the window in the black.

  “Beyond your life?” I ask quietly, throwing my voice from the left.

  He rotates quickly in space, scanning the woods for any indication of where I am, but I am a wraith, I am the night. He looks so scared, so helpless in the dark. It’s moments like this that I cherish to the best of my ability. The hunt and, of course, the kill are delicious on their own. The feeling of blood on my hands, that essential life force for all that occupy our race is indescribable. With just one drop, that coppery taste twists my facial muscles into the most satisfied of smiles. The tender way that someone’s soul quietly seeps out of their body when I make that last precise cut, is…(sigh)...unbelievable. However watching someone unravel is an experience all its own. It’s an opportunity that should never be squandered, never be unappreciated.

  He’s still rotating frantically in place, trying to figure out where I am. “What could have possibly turned you into this?” he asks, trembling in the dark.

  Alas, they always want a reason. They can never understand that sometimes...people are just different.

  He cautiously moves a few feet away, head continuously darting from location to location, searching the forest for any kind of clue that validates my existence. I wait for the wind to pick up, then like a silent specter, glide away from my current position. The leaves under my feet rustle, the branches in my way get moved when need be, but the wind clouds the ambient air and his heart rate is too high to focus on noise. I’m confident that given any other situation, he’d be able to zero in on my movements without issue.

  “I was raped.” I whisper from my new vantage point. With each new sentence, I direct my voice from a different location, using the wind and trees to my advantage so he’ll continue guessing. “Brutally after class one day, in an alley, my face pressed against the wet pavement, barely able to breath. The bruises healed but…” I trail off waiting for a response.

  He remains quiet. The wind has died down and the forest calms as we both stand in the dark, waiting for the other to speak. For the first time on this delightful eve, there’s silence in the forest.

  He ventures a chance, an empathic offering in an attempt to stay his own execution, “I’m so sorry, but…”

  There’s no need for him to finish, “That was junior high. Then there was my fiancé, murdered at home for the watch on his hand and the plastic in his wallet. Do you know what it’s like to come home to a husband bleeding out on the floor? I can’t be sure that he recognized me in his last few moments. I tried to scoop the blood back into the gaping hole in his stomach, but it didn’t help.”

  Silence again.

  “Don’t forget my parents. The start of it all. They weren’t drug addicts or anything. No they were people of God. See, they were born again and I had just so happened to be born out of wedlock, before they converted. Before they knew the truth.” The wind’s picked up again, so I change my location while continuing to throw my voice around the forest.

  “I was a dark stain on their shiny new life. Physical retribution came into play. I remember my first taste of blood. It was when I was five and my father backhanded me for asking why we had to go to church every Sunday.”

  “Jesus,” he spat toward the ground.

  “Little did I know, that was the best I could expect. A backhand became a shining light in the darkness. It grew to be what I longed for. I was so ignorant as a child,” I make my voice extra raspy and deep for the next line. “But I learned quickly.” Theatrics help as much as anything. I can go unseen, I can slice in the night and mask the location of my voice, but changing the tone of your voice, appearing inhuman, will push a person beyond comfort in such a manner, that there is no return.

  “I tried to rebel in silent ways, ways that wouldn’t invite pain, but it wasn’t easy to do. The worst was when I was fifteen and got pregnant. My parents couldn’t afford to support me and a child, even if they could get past the blatant heresy. My mother took care of that one...the tools weren't precise, or all that clean, but she got the job done.”

  He staggers and steps to the side, barely catching his balance with his right foot. He’s not in the black, but if I continue to push he will be. It’s not something that I want just yet. There’s more satisfaction to be had from this one.

  I slither up a tree to gain some height, then muster all the unique criticism I harbor for our species and quietly begin to chuckle within. Soon, the action can no longer be contained and the humor bursts forth from my lips in a wickedly, maniacal assault on the air. My cackle reverberates through the trees and envelopes him from every direction. He doesn’t know how to react to that, they never do.

  “It’s all bullshit,” I say matter-of-factly. “Sometimes we just need to accept that there are things in this world we will never understand.”

  Landon part 3

  What the fuck is wrong with this crazy bitch? I’m panicking, spinning in all directions. I have to find her, I have to get eyes on her. You need to calm. The fuck. Down. You need to slow your breathing and think. Don’t cross into black.

  I don’t know if it’s my way of dealing with the stress or what, but my mind jumps back to a book I read some time ago. It was about survival techniques in the event of a societal collapse in modern society. The beginning of the book described a color chart that the government made up to diagnose the effect that stress could have on an individual in various situations. Crossing into the black zone meant that your brain essentially shut down. It would continue repeating your last action until the stress in your body reduced to an acceptable level and you came out of the black. That is assuming you weren’t dead due to the inability to act accordingly. One situation they discussed involved a police officer jamming away at the trigger on his pistol, only the safety was still on. Bad guys shot him dead, and the autopsy revealed all the ligaments in his hand torn to shreds from hamming down on a trigger that couldn’t move.

  Close your eyes. I take a deep breath. The wind flows across my face. I take another deep breath. The trees creak, the leaves scatter about the ground, and an owl hoots in the distance. Take a breath. You heard the owl earlier, before...before. Breathe. The smell of the woods, the ambient sounds and chill air, makes me feel calm again. It makes me feel at home.

  Pain radiates from shoulder. Quick, sharp pain that dulls as quickly as it hit me. I open my eyes and look down to see another cut in my jacket. I can feel the warm blood begin to soak my base layer. She hit you again and you didn’t even hear her coming!

  Breathe.

  “No, no,” she says quietly. “You stay with me now.”

  She’s playing with you, wearing you down, stealing your endurance little by little. I quickly scan the forest, looking for the trail. Ten feet away, I dash back onto it and find the remains of my phone. Shoving the mangled phone into my jacket pocket, I start back on the trail. It’s several miles to the nearest parking lot, which just so happens to have my car in it. Scaling either side of the ridge in the dark is suicide. I could misstep by an inch or apply the wrong amount of pressure on my boot and tumble down to the bottom, body shattered. Likewise, staying put is suicide. The only hope I have is to move quickly and pray that she exposes herself through any attack she may try.

  “Where are you going?” It sounds like she’s directly in front of me. I keep moving, scanning the trail and forest. My headlamp is still off, my eyes have adjusted to the dark again.

  “C
ome now, you don’t think I’ll let you out of here alive, do you?”

  I ignore her, and continue to scan. It’s a ruse. I know she won’t show herself. My primary focus is on the sounds of the forest, the little nearly imperceptible changes around me. My eyes are of no use in this situation, she’s done this too many times, her skill certainly outweighs my own. I must rely on deception if I’m to have any chance at all.

  I pick up the pace. A twig snaps to my right and behind me. Another in front of me and to the left. Trees creak, the wind picks up and dies down. Beyond the ambient noises of the forest, there’s silence for some fifty yards. I stop dead in my tracks.

  It’s out there...just beyond my ear, on the tip of my tongue, a betrayal in her process, her skill. She’s close and closing for another attack, I can feel it within. The dull scraping sound comes from my right, as if a boot slid off a rock. I turn to the left assuming it’s a decoy. I was right.

  Slightly calmed and attuned with my surroundings, the blow hits harder than I expect. It starts as a dull ache, near the bottom left of my jaw as I turn to face her. That quickly mutates into a burning pain as the rock digs through my skin. There’s a bone-chilling crack, that I would assume was a branch, had it not been for the fact that my jaw just shattered. My head whips to the right and I lose any sense of weight. It feels like I’m floating above the ground as the warmth drains from my legs. I go down hard.

  I’m not sure how long I was out, it could have been minutes, or an hour. I’m flooded with a horrific sense of déjà vu. The first thing I feel upon coming to is blood running down my jaw, it’s warmth caressing my skin. I try to move, but am met with agony. My ribs still cry out, but they’re subdued by my flaccid, bleeding jaw. My eyes well up, the pain is overwhelming.

  “Look Landon, we could do this all night, but I have a little more cleanup than originally expected.”

  I freeze. My heart starts racing again. “Ho, how do ooh kno my name?” I manage to squeeze out between burst of fire radiating through my face and chest.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve stalked you, Landon? You and Rufus? Dozens. Neither of you knew I was there. Must be embarrassing for such a skilled tracker. Don’t beat yourself up though, I’ve spent most of my life training to avoid people like you. Truth be told, your skills always fascinated me. You were a challenge, the highest of challenges, if I could stay hidden from you, especially with Rufus in tow, well then I was golden. You caught me off guard, you weren’t supposed to be up here this weekend.”

  I muster any strength left and try to crawl over toward a tree. Now that the reality of the situation with my jaw has sunk in, I’m able to focus on my ribs a bit more. As I move I can tell that the fall made that situation much worse, possibly breaking another rib or two. I manage to make it over to a small tree and begin to push myself up from the ground.

  “Though truth be told, this day was inevitable. I knew it would come after I took her.”

  I freeze. My muscles tense, my throat seizes, and I can’t breathe. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed with emotion, adrenaline floods my body, subduing the physical injuries. “Who?” I raspily squeeze out, forcing a proper pronunciation of the word through my dry throat and broken jaw.

  “I think you know, Landon.”

  “TELL ME!” I scream to forest in pain.

  “Do you know how easy it is for someone like me to survive in this day and age? People disappear all the time and with the advent and rise of technology like the smartphone, well, all it takes is a well-crafted email to get the cops thinking the victim just hated their life and needed a change of pace. Happens all the fucking time. Not to mention all the horrible shit that is going on in the world. People forget about missing persons so quickly in this age of information, their minds get drawn to other, more visible, unsightly deeds. They’re blind to the true horrors of humanity that exist among them. At times, they even get to the point of forgetting what their loved ones said when they left. Like say…‘I never loved you, I thought that it would come, I thought that I could get there, but I just couldn’t...I couldn’t.’ They block it from their mind to prevent further pain.”

  “The letter…” I stutter. It can’t be. “She?”

  “I wrote the words.”

  I collapse back to the ground. Sounds dissipate. All I hear is her voice. We are all that’s left in the frigid dark of the night.

  “She was a challenge just like you, Landon. I had used animal attacks too many times, the Game Commission would have started getting suspicious, so I had to go a different route. Most people don’t lock their phones, but I couldn’t afford any mistakes in this case. I couldn’t have you on my trail, not at the time, and honestly you fascinated me too much to take. I needed to swipe Tara’s phone before I took her, just to make sure that I could get into it. That was a challenge in itself. Unfortunately she used a fingerprint lock, so I needed to keep her alive long enough to unlock it. Contrary to what the movies tell us, you can’t use a decapitated or dead person's finger to activate a touch ID sensor. The capacitive sensor needs to read the electrical charge running through your skin.”

  I can’t move, can’t talk. I don’t have the energy or the will to do anything. The weight of the words coming out of her mouth is too great, like a stone slab on my back, slowly crushing me into the dirt.

  “I think you deserve to know the truth, given how much you and Tara pushed me to increase my skill level. You looked so happy in all her pictures,” she paused. Her voice got quieter. “She loved you, you know. Despite what I wrote. She was saying your name over and over in the end,” she sighs. “She didn’t want to leave you.”

  “Ah!” I wail into the forest whipping my pistol out. The five remaining rounds tear through the darkness, a destructive testament to my torment and rage. For minutes, there’s silence beyond the sounds of the forest. For a moment, I think that I hit her, but the tension in the air is palpable, and I know that can’t be true.

  “Of course,” she continues, “my plan didn’t work out so well. Several real animal attacks cropped up over the following months and the Game Commission started sending the likes of you out to investigate. Pity. I was hoping that Tara’s situation would have driven you away from the trail. I quite respect you, and I don’t relish this situation by any means, but we can’t fight who we are, can we? I know you can relate to that. It’s why you’re out here.”

  “I don’t murder!”

  “No. No, you don’t.”

  “Monster.”

  “I’m necessary, Landon. Me and the people like me, the world is overpopulated, it...”

  “Like you’?”

  “Oh,” she says in an oddly soothing voice. “Look at you, so cute. There are so many of us out there, we all have our own territories. Some even share tips and techniques. Have you seen how easy it is to self-publish a book, or post a story online these days? We can hide our actions in plain sight and no one would think twice, no one would for one second believe that all the horrible things we write could really happen right under their noses. All it takes is one tiny little identifier, a small grammatical error or say an innocuous little...The end dot, dot, dot...after the story’s complete. How many people do you think have read our confessions, our detailed accounts of murder and ravenous organic destruction none the wiser? Can you imagine, Landon, what would happen if everyone knew? If say, a family of trackers for example, had a few...unsavory members in their ranks. What would happen to your world, if you indeed knew the truth? I have more than several open-ended relationships like ours Landon. For now they serve as incomplete short stories, but in due time, I’ll bring them to a close and share my veiled success with the world...”

  There’s movement behind the small tree I used to try and stand.

  “Just as the others have,”

  I look up to see her face come into view, no less than a few inches from my face.

  “Just as you have.”

  I want to jump back, I want to swing the pistol at her
head or push her away, but I can’t. Something warm is trickling down my chest. She reaches up and turns on my headlamp, bathing her beautiful and hideous looking face in light. She’s smiling from ear to ear as the dried blood cracks on her skin.

  Her expression changes to almost mournful and, as the world goes black she whispers, “Thank you, Landon, for all that you’ve taught me.”

  My head begins to slump forward and I see the blade in her hand, covered in thick, fresh blood. My blood. I can feel its warmth seeping from my throat and rolling down my chest.

  The end...

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jason is a self-published author who grew up in PA and always enjoyed writing various poems and stories as a kid. He felt comfortable with writing, but there was never much thought or time put into it.

  After going to Florida in 2006 to study 3D animation/film, he discovered a passion for the creative process. Years later, he moved out to California to pursue a career in animation, but eventually discovered that his heart just wasn't in it. Unsure of what to do next, he decided to create a bucket list and subsequently started writing.

  Jason fell in love with writing and became intoxicated by the process involved in world and character creation. He took to Facebook and Wattpad to interact with other writers and polish his skills. After his military sci-fi novel, VOK, received over one million views and made the #1 spot in Sci-Fi and #2 spot in Fantasy on Wattpad, Jason began to branch out.

  While Red Blaze is Jason’s second published short story, (Fledgling in the Brave New Girls Anthology being his first) it is, in fact, his first attempt at writing horror. Red Blaze was submitted into TNT’s Horror Contest on Wattpad, at the end of 2016. It rose through the ranks, making the top ten before the contest was over. At the time of this publication, TNT holds the option to make Red Blaze into a TV series if they so choose.