Despite the Darkness #6

They completed the circuit around the town, he realized later that they had walked right up to the start of Isaiah’s trail creating an unbroken loop; of course he didn’t realize at the time because Jan was barreling towards them.

“Isaiah!” A part of him shrunk when he noticed she didn’t bother to say his name.

“I caught up with him on the backside of the buildings there.”

“What were you thinking? Its freezing and its dark,” she smothered her son in a tight embrace and then started him towards the haus. “This is not alright.”

He fell back a step and let the two of them go ahead. He was now coldest he’d ever felt, far worse than the time the “igloo” he and his brother had built had collapsed. He’d been trapped in snow while his brother ran for help. Now, the chill came from the inside not the outside. He looked off into the dark treeline. How easy…

There was a howl, close… very close. Another answered but in the opposite direction. The townspeople were starting to file out of the Dambuster, slapping each other’s backs and staggering in a few different directions. One brushed off the windshield of a Dodge Dart.

“Hey! Next time Pete just record the good parts!” Stu barked from the steps.

“There’d have to be good parts to record!” The assembled throng laughed loudly and without reservation.

“They ain’t never gonna be any good.”

“Ain’t winning a Super Bowl, that’s for sure.” Another bout of laughter.

Pete jumped in his car, started it up, and threw it in reverse.

“Bye, Pete,” they all said in unison.

The Dart started down the road, blazing its own trail through the fresh snow. Everyone had turned to go their separate ways. A loud snap caught their attention and they quickly looked back. A tree fell across the roadway right in front of Pete’s car, both blocking the road and crushing the front of the Dart. The horn wailed in the quiet night.

“Pete!” Even Jan was looking back to see what the commotion was. He was already running towards the crash, cutting across a field, while the others stood dumb struck. The horn stopped and a bloodied Pete forced his way out of the car. There was a noise, a mix between a growl and a laugh, so close that it raised every hair on his body and it seemed Pete had a similar reaction because he was looking around wildly for the source.

He was about thirty yards from the wreck when he saw a dark shape leap out from the trees, bound into the roadway, grab ahold of Pete, and then drag him screaming into the woods. He slid to a stop. The act had happened so quickly it was impossible for his mind to make sense of any of it. Pete’s scream were loud and insistent – then there was a snap and the screams stopped. A howl erupted from the woods and the scream started in his own mind; the scream was now a mix of the first and now Pete’s.

“Oh… my…" The man crossed himself.

The half dozen men finally awoke from their stupor; Stu grabbed the collar of the man closest to him and barked something about “guns”. The man ran off to a building past the Dambuster.

“Steve!” Jan’s voice broke, but the commanding tone was still clear. The men were arming themselves now, a mixture of shotguns and scoped rifles landing in ready hands. He looked from them to Jan and then back into the woods. Everything was moving slowly now; a part of his mind nagging him that he was missing something. He looked down and his breath caught.

Stu was leading the pack, his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the point in the woods where they all thought Pete surely was – he didn’t even notice the man standing stone still until his arm came up to block his path.

“What?!” Stu’s breath was pregnant with the smell of alcohol.

“You can’t go out there.”

“Who are you to stop me?!”

“You have to trust me. You can’t cross the trail there.”

Stu and the rest gave him a mixture of incredulous and bewildered looks. “The fu…”

Three senses were flooded simultaneously. First there was a bright golden light that blinded everyone huddled around the two men. There was also the sense that a great force had just crashed into a granite mountain face. Finally, there was a powerful growl that died out suddenly in a whelp. Three men fell back into the snow from the shock and everyone else jumped.

Struggling to look through the bright spots still blurring his vision, he tried to spy what it was that had caused all the commotion. There was a bright golden light that dimmed and then flashed back to life, again and again. It started low and then went upwards, then to the left, and then low to the right, just a few feet from where they all stood. Eyes adjusted to the explosions of light and they all started to catch glimpses of what was causing the ferocious thrashing. It was still too dark, even with the flashes of light, to see anything with definition, but it appeared to be as large as a man and covered in course hair. He thought he spied claws during one swipe.

The attacks stopped just as suddenly as they had begun and the shape disappeared back into the darkness of the woods.

So I had a hard time with this part for kind of an interesting reason - swearing. You see before I posted this I had a little more colorful terminology for the guys to say, but that was really bothering me. Anyone that knows me, knows I don't swear (mostly), so its not really something I'm comfortable with or want to encourage. Course big tough guy Stu would have no such problem. So how do you reconcile that? I sought out the advice of another writer (Marcus Brotherton) and he gave me a few things to think about. One take away was that swearing can be an easy out, lazy even. I'm still thinking about it, but that one take away has got me writing differently later in the story, so when posting this I changed this section to hopefully reflect my current thinking. And if you are wondering about, "The fu..." that just from the Sound of Music... you know Doh, Ray, Me, Fu, So, La, Te, Doh... isn't that how it goes?