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Vayland Rd. [9] — The End

~ The End ~

How do I end a story like this?

We got home with the sun coming up.  By the clock in the kitchen, my part in the whole thing had been only about twenty-four hours.

It seemed longer.

Dad was, if not ‘all right’, at least ‘alright’ in the stoic, bull-headed parlance of the Midwest. He’d survived, he wasn’t talking about it much, and I suppose I understood why as well as anyone – maybe a little bit better.

We’d made it through, and that was it. Tomorrow might be better.

Might be worse, too. Life rarely works out the way a story would, and almost never like a fairy tale.

We don’t usually get a Happily Ever After.

But we don’t have to settle for The End, either.

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Vayland Rd. [8] — The Fall

~ The Fall ~

One of the real people walked up to him. He was limping, and had a

my

gun in his off-hand.  There was a big stick in the other.

”It’s time to go home, Dad,” the young man said.

Steven looked up at his face, with its hurt eyes, and frowned.

”I think that he will stay here.” Churkk’s voice was the same as always.

The real person glared. “His choice, not yours.”

Churrk grinned. “Or yours.”

The man scowled at this, but nodded. Steven could feel Churkk’s surprise that he

Sean?

understood that much; that he –

”Dad?”

Steven looked up.

”I’m here.”

is he?

”Can we go?”

Do you dare?

Steven shook his head; a tiny movement that seemed to pull the strength out of the younger man.

Churkk chuckled into the silence. It sounded like someone with a collapsed lung. “Seems ‘e might stay with me.”

The man glared again, his hand squeezing knuckle-white on the club. “He can do what he likes, but I’ll still cave your fucking head in.”

“The end result‘s the same,” Churkk wheezed. “What d’you think, Stevn?”

Churkk was doing more than asking. Steven could feel the needles pulling.

But the man, the real person, reacted to it too, stepping forward and starting to lift the club. ”You let him –”

“Sean.” His voice sounded

like Churrk

tired. Unused.

The man jumped. “Dad?  Are you–”

”Give me that stick.” Steven’s head was very heavy. The weight of the needles pulled at him.

Silence.

“Give it to me.”

Sean did. Steven accepted it, and let it hang at his side, dragging in the dirt. One of the other people behind Sean make a noise… not even a word.

It was Churkk that finally spoke. “He understands, Sean.” There was a dry rasping sound as it licked its lips. “You’ll understand too, someday, I think. Heh.”

”Damned if I will.” Sean said flatly.

Steven’s head came up.

Damned if I will.

Steven swung as he turned, hard as he could.

Sean almost killed a cow with this goddamned stick one time, when he was fifteen; s’why he only got to use it around the bulls after that.

He only swung once.

After that, everything was quiet.

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Vayland Rd. [7] — The Fight

~ The Fight ~

Most people, sitting back on their couches and watching this play out on television, might have wondered why I believed all this from the start.  It was a good question; if I’d wrtten it out as a story, my main character would have yelled bullshit as soon as Brock and Bhuto showed up and then spent most of the rest of the story being convinced it wasn’t all some kind of dream.

I saw a goblin shambling along the bottom of a ravine with an old, rusted sword balanced across his shoulders like the yoke of a wagon. Even at that age, I assumed I’d imagined it.

Except I hadn’t; not really. My life had gone on — I wrote little stories that I pretended were just stories until even I gave them — but there was always a shadow in the back of my mind that watched the ravines and kept an eye on the alleys that led around to the back of old houses — a part of me that never really believed I’d made it up.

When the goblins boiled out of the thickets around us, waving swords and screaming for blood, that small dark shadow stood up and shouted ‘I fucking KNEW it!’

And it turned out Brock was wrong.

The gun worked just fine.

On the other hand, I didn’t work all that well a first.  There’s a hell of a long distance between target practice, hunting for food, hunting for sport, and finally shooting at something that could talk back to you, even if it was running straight at you and swinging hunk of metal at your head.

The first one would have killed me, I think, except that Brock was there. He had his axe out (‘of course he has an axe; every dwarf would have an axe if they could, I guess’ came the errant thought) — a great, beautiful thing of which I’d only previously seen the polished grip — there was a crescent flash, and the goblin-thing was dead on the ground.  Brock clapped me on the shoulder and grinned.

”Dirt-eaters,” he drawled, and I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a bright, clear blue.

I shot the next one before I had a chance to answer him, and after that there wasn’t much time to think.

—-

They’d had to tie him to the Turning Tree for the whole ritual.  The bristlerope had rubbed him to the meat everywhere it had touched him, from the struggle.  He’d done it to himself, fighting them throughout the Anointing, and he was proud of himself for that.

How do I know the names of those things?

He was back in

not mine. NOT mine.

the cage now, and he knew it was the last time he’d get out until they put him in a sack or he walked

shuffled

out on his own.

Or he could escape.  He’d done it once, and the burning on his skin wasn’t even as bad as before.

Or you’re getting used to it.

Or he was — no. It was time to go.

But where will you go?  What if –

”NO!”

No one in the camp looked at him.  He wasn’t even sure if he’d really shouted. He

Steven.  Not ‘he’. Steve. Steven.  My name is Steven.

Right.  Steven.

Steven sat in the cage that wasn’t his and watched the stars, which he still recognized, and repeated his name.

—-

I was sitting on a rock in Faerie. Faery. Fae. Fae’ree. Wa’ri. Whatever. Dirt, or spattered blood, or sweat, burned my eyes. A half-moon hung overhead, leeching the color from the scene of battle. Our battle.

I think I was smiling.  Bhuto and Brock were not.

”The hell’s the matter with you two? We won.”  I scrubbed an itch on the side of my face.

“How’s the pain?” Brock asked.

I frowned and looked down at my shirt. “What pain? I didn’t get hit. None of us got hit. They all got hit,” I pointed at the sprawled bodies around us, “but not us. We won. That’s what that means, right?”

Bhuto’s face didn’t change.  “He means the needle, Sean.”

I stared at him blankly for a few moments before I understood his meaning. “Oh. Ah. Fine. No pain at all.” I patted my collarbone lightly to prove my point, and it wasn’t a bluff — I didn’t feel a thing there except the direction we needed to go.

Bhuto frowned and looked at the dwarf, then back to me.  “How close are you and your father?”

My turn to frown. “I don’t know. He’s my dad. Close enough.”

He’d understood me; that much was clear.

I watched the two of them exchange looks. “What’s the problem? You two look like your dog died and I finally feel like I know what’s going on.”

Bhuto nodded. “You certainly seem comfortable here.” His lips worked, as though he were selecting his next words by taste. “Usually there is more… discomfort.” He shook his head. “I think there’s been a mistake made, Sean.”

I waited.

”You are very comfortable here; you are compatible. You are also strong.” He indicated the corpses. “You remember what we told you of what the… goblins?” He looked at me for confirmation of the word.

I nodded.

”What the goblins planned for your father?”

I nodded again, not liking the turn in conversation. Nothing they’d told me about that had been good.

“You’re a good match to your father; a strong match. It’s possible that what happens to him will carry over to you through the link we created, which is so strong it does not even pain you.” He gestured at my chest. “It even more possible that by bringing you here, we’ll bring you to the attention of those you’d do best to avoid.” He looked at Brock, then back at me. “You might recover your father and find yourself in the same danger, or worse.”

I stared at him.

Then I chuckled. I couldn’t help it. By the look on his face he thought I’d cracked.

”This,” I said, waving my arms all around me, “is about my dad. Not me. Him. His fight. I’m just here to help.”

”But–”

“Shut up.” I said, and glared. “Thank you for the warning, you are a good friend.” I looked at both of them. “Now,” I pointed. “He’s that way.”

—-

Finding the camp didn’t turn out to be that difficult. We watched the place through the tail end of the night, waiting for the thing that passed for dawn. Waiting to see my dad.

Light came back slowly; we made plans and talked of small things.

Just before we moved, I said, “how many have you gotten home?”

They looked at each other. “Many.” Bhuto said.

”Not all?”

”Not all.”

I nodded.

—-

The morning didn’t come the way Steven thought it would. It was much noisier. There were screams and people hollering

dirt-eaterrrrrs!

and an echoing crack.

I know that sound.

Then his cage shook and one of the members of the camp was leaning against his cage. Its beady eyes looked straight in at him, but they were cloudy. Blank.

Dead.

Its knife had fallen just outside the

not my

cage. Much easier than working the ties with his fingers.

Moving very slowly, so that he wouldn’t have to argue with the other voice, he reached out for the tool and started to cut. The camp got quieter around him. The little explosions stopped

ran out of shells

somewhere in the middle. He got the gate open and pushed. Easy. He dropped the knife on the floor of the cage and crawled out.

A few feet away, three real people stood.

And Churkk was right behind him.

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Vayland Rd. [6] — The Needles

~ The Needles ~

I stood on the edge of Vayland, looking down into a ravine. Silver pain pulled at a single point in my body, dredging up memories.

When I was a kid in the first house my family ever lived in, my room was next to the living room and, thus, the television.  After bedtime, whenever I heard the television and no conversation, I would slowly open my door, crouch down next to the floor, and slide into the room on my stomach. My door was right next to the foot of the couch back then, and sat directly between the couch and the T.V., so if I was quiet, I could curl up on the floor and watch TV while my Dad lay not three feet away on the couch.

Some nights, I would fall asleep while watching. What happened next depended on who found me; regardless, I would always wake up in my bed the next morning, like magic, but if my mom had found me, I would get a lecture during breakfast about needing my sleep.

Dad never said anything. I suppose he thought that, between the floor and my bed, I’d gotten enough sleep.

He understood; that much was clear.

When I opened my eyes, we weren’t on the road anymore.

—-

The cage really wasn’t all that difficult. There were no locks, only tie-downs, which weren’t a problem if you ignored the burning of the mud. He’d driven seven loads of winter wheat to town while running a temperature of a hundred four; if he really wanted to, he could get the damned cage open.

Eventually, he proved himself right, although the sweat in his eyes burned almost as badly as his skin.

He slipped past the smallest number of huts possible to get to the edge of the camp, not knowing where he was going except away.

Just past the last hut, it got difficult to walk.

Twenty paces later, the needles started to burn like over-extended muscles. It felt as though he was trying to pull a truck with chains attached directly to his body.

”Stevn,” came the phlegm voice. He was too focused to jump.

”Where are you going, Stevn?” The voice was right in his ear, it seemed.

”The hell… away…” Steven didn’t even know if that was an answer or a command.

”What if there’s no one waiting for you?”

The thought bored right to the base of his brain and waited for him to give. He wasn’t going to. He knew if he could just get a few more steps, he’d be free.

But what then?

What if…

When blunt fingers wrapped around his arms, he was already on his knees, looking up at the sky.

—-

Brock was standing at my elbow. Somehow, the smell of him didn’t seem overpowering anymore.

It’s not. Here, it fits in. It doesn’t clash.

I shook my head, partly to clear it. “Sorry, what?”

He watched me for a few seconds. “How’s the pain?”

I started, suddenly sure I’d lost the needle, and felt for it just below my right collarbone. Still there. Still there? I frowned. “There isn’t any pain.” I looked at him. “Not that I mind, but you said the pain would pretty much stay constant.”

Brock looked at me, then glanced over his shoulder as Bhuto emerged from the gray-green scrub where he’d gone scouting. “I was wrong.”

I wanted to ask what else he might have be wrong about, but the look on his face made me think better of it.

We started moving. The way they’d explained it, we’d still have a long way to go even after we came through. Now that I was here I knew that was true; I knew exactly where we needed to go. I had no idea what lay between here and there, but I could point out the direction we needed to travel with my eyes closed.

I did, and we walked into the land of the fae.

Hours passed, during which the ache in my legs and feed subsided into a dull burn, giving me a chance to take in the sere landscape and starry sky. “Are there territories?” I asked of no one in particular.

Brock glanced around. “Here?”

I nodded.

“Aye,” he said, “we’re nowhere near a friendly place or one of those princess palaces they put in those ridiculous fairy books, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“You should read one of those books.” I let my expression convey what I thought of his guess. “I have, and I wouldn’t go near one of those palaces.” I rubbed sweat out of the corner of my eye. “Why aren’t there any friendly territories around here?”

He shrugged, looking around. “Dirt-eaters lose most of the fae wars. The losers get driven to the hinterlands, and these are they, no offense.  Even on your side of border, it’s nothing but violent winters, vicious heat in the summers; it’s the worst of all the worlds in one place. The things that survive here…” he broke off a branch from a bent tree that seemed to have grown up in the middle of a high wind. “They don’t have much choice.”

I frowned, feeling like I should be on the defensive. “At least they’re strong enough to take it.”

“Oh, aye.” Brock grunted. “That’s why the dirt-eaters want ’em.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, but Bhuto hissed a warning before I could say anything.

—-

They let the thing that used to be Ted Schafer out of his cage that morning. The clouds weren’t a complete shroud over the camp, but it didn’t really improve the light; the sky was the wrong color to begin with.

There weren’t any helpers to clear away muck and detritus from Schafer’s body; it wasn’t necessary. The last batch of muck — Steven understood that that meant the third batch — was left on until it was absorbed almost completely, over the course of weeks. The camp then waited to see if the captive lived or died. In Steven’s opinion, Schafer had been unlucky.

There weren’t even any needles left to remove.

The tall creature stood before the Schafer creature in the center of the gathering and spoke in its gurgling hiss. “You have lived.”

The Schafer-thing wobbled its head.

”You are part of us now. We are part of you. I am Churkk. You are Zef.”

The thing paused, cocking its head as though listening to a distant sound, then nodded. “Zef.” It swayed slightly, and several of the creatures came forward to help it to a hut.

Churkk turned towards Steven’s cage. “It is the third day.” It gurgle-growled, and its smile returned.

This time, Steven fought.

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Vayland Rd. [5] – The Quest

~ The Quest ~

Twenty minutes later, I was ready for whatever they were going to tell me.

The dwarf and the ogre were looking doubtful.

“I don’t think those work where we’re going.” Brock gestured with some distaste at the gun slung over my left shoulder.

I raised an eyebrow. “You ever shot a gun, Brock?”

The dwarf glared at me, finally shaking his head.

”Then how the hell would you know?”

He shrugged. I ignored him. The gun was an open-sight .300 Savage; a family heirloom that my great-grandfather had bought the year of its making. My grandfather had an alaskan grizzly pelt in his guest bedroom the gun had taken. The stock was solid hardwood with a stainless steel shoulder plate; the barrel was three and a half feet of blued steel. Frankly, if the thing didn’t fire ‘where we were going’, I’d could do worse than just hitting things with it.

Bhuto had a different problem. “Do you not have a more… formidable hand-weapon, Sean?”

I readjusted the grip on my old ‘herding stick’, which I’d found in a barrel of similar tools in the machine shed. I’d cut it from an ash tree when I was thirteen and had used the four-foot club whenever I had to push one of our bulls into a new pasture, on foot.

I could have explained all of that to them, but as far as explanations went, I didn’t really feel like it was my turn.

I motioned towards the trees behind the house. “Let’s just go.”

—-

When we got to the edge of the trees farthest from the farm, Bhuto extended his hand to me for the second time, doing the same for Brock. It was my turn to look doubtful.

”Explanations come shortly, Sean, but we need to move quickly now, when we are not marked by others.” Brock said. “I can assist with that.”

I almost refused, until I saw Brock’s expression. However uneasy I felt, the dwarf was far worse, and part of me wanted to see why. I took the ogre’s hand.

I’m not sure what I was expecting… a puff of smoke, a swirling of my perceptions, maybe. When we just shot off the ground and into the sky without a word or gesture, I couldn’t help but shout.

—-

The night passed and the clouds rolled back in on cue.

They came for Steven not long after and started again.

First they stripped the mud away with blunt fingers, accomplishing in less than a minute what had been denied him through the night. The mass came away in huge chunks, dry and dusty, though it had clung like putty the day before. They finished the cleaning with an orange-tinted liquid that foamed when it hit made the the needles burn all the way down to his joints. Completely clean, his skin had a greyish cast — probably the light from the clouds.

Then they tied him to the tree again and brought a new cauldron of the mud. Packing it back on took most of the day. The tall one watched the whole thing without moving or relaxing its corpse-smile.

Steven never made a sound. Damned if he would.

The worst part of it was when they put him back in the cage.

My cage.

The day ended, the clouds pulled back, the stars came out, and he wondered for the first time if anyone would come.

—-

We landed on a curving stretch of blacktop a few miles away from the farm. Ravines dove away from the road on both sides.

I shook my head. “Why are we here?”

Bhuto looked up at the sky. “This is the only place we could be, Sean. We must reach your father.”

“Oh.” I thought for a second. “You do realize that’s the most pointless, circular answer I’ve ever heard, right? And I went to a liberal arts college.”

Brock advanced toward me as Bhuto sighed. Much to my dismay, he didn’t stop until he was nearly touching me.

”What do you call this road?”

My eyes were watering. I blinked rapidly and focused on the question. “Ahh. Vayland. Vayland Road.” The problem with people telling you to breath through your mouth when around a bad smell is that instead of smelling it, you taste it.

He smiled up at me and I was glad for the darkness that largely hid his teeth. “Why is that?”

”Why is what?”

”Why do they call it that?”

”Because…” I thought about it. “I don’t know why.”

His smile broadened and I had to take a step back. “Let me tell you why.” He turned away from me and threw out his arms. “This place is a border between realms. The very first people who lived here and named things called the people on the other side wa`rii we because they didn’t understand. Others came and gave the border different names. When the people of my lands came,” he thumped his chest “they took the names it had already and translated the words and the idea. They called it a fae land.” His eyes glinted as he turned back to me. “You know what that is?”

I nodded, not bothering to explain why.

He spun on his heel, pacing toward the shoulder of the road. “The border to the fae land was marked by those who knew enough about it, and the name stuck, changing, after they’d all gone to dust.” He spat on the blacktop. “Then some dog-buggering half-wit built a road here, since the markers were already there. No one remembered that they were meant to show you where not to go.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing someone would do,” I said. “And I suppose I get why we’re here.”

“Do you.” Brock wandered in a wide circle around us.

I didn’t bother answering him. “What’s next?”

Bhuto studied me for a moment. “That is something you will tell us, Sean.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Really?”

”Understand, we are here to help you, but we are also here to help your father, and we could not — can not — do that without you.” The ogre pointed to me with a knobby finger that ended with an elegantly painted claw. “You are our link to him.”

I looked up at the stars, letting myself marvel for a second at how many more there were away from the city, then blew out a breath between my teeth.

“Okay,” I said, “what do I do?” I was looking at Bhuto, but he gestured to Brock.

Brock was holding a silver needle.

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Vayland Rd. [4] — The Talk

~ The Talk ~

“ …it wasn’t your imagination. The plains are thick with goblins, especially along those dark gullys and river bottoms where no man has traveled in a thousand years. The natives learned to avoid the areas and the white settlers soon after. There are goblins and ogres all along there. No trolls though, no trolls…”

— transcript of a raving madman in Watertown, SD

I don’t know how long I sat on the deck. The moon wasn’t bright, and the lights were off in the house by the time I pushed myself to my feet and kneaded my back which was still pissed about the sixteen hour drive. I hadn’t slept since the night before last.

Somewhere in mid-stretch, I realized I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure what gave me the hint, but when I turned the direction my intuition pointed, there was a shadow where there shouldn’t have been in the treeline next to the house.

“Who’s there?” I said, glancing around the deck for some sort of weapon.

The voice that spoke was gutteral in a way that made me realize I’d never truly understood the word. “We’re not your enemy, Sean.” The large not-supposed-to-be shadow split into two: one shorter than me and one… still quite large. The shorter one spoke again. “We’re after the things that took your father.”

“Things?”

“Dirt-eaters.” He sounded hungry when he said it. He sounded like he was smiling.

There was a long pause while I searched for an appropriate response.

“You are directly the fuck out of your mind, aren’t you?”

The larger shadow snorted in amusement. It sounded like a prize bull huffing to scare off predators.

“You father’s missin’, yes?” The short one said.

“My dad, yeah. What do you know about it?”

“We know who did it.”

“Call the cops.” I thought about it. “Or turn yourselves in.”

The air actually got chilly. “You think we did it?”

I shrugged at the open night, wondering if they could even see it.

“You think we’re… dirt-eaters?” There was movement I caught only a bare second before the speaker was holding me by the shirt and pressing me against the side of the house. I looked down into a face a good foot and a half lower than mine, covered in random smears of grease that ran into his hair and beard. The knotted tree-branch of the arm that held me was covered in grease as well, or tatoos, or both. His eyes were bright in the moonlight and I could hear his teeth grind.

“Brock.” The larger shadow, still standing near the trees spoke softly, but his voice seemed to vibrate in the ground. “He did not mean anything by it. Let him go. You’re choking him.”

The voice was right; I couldn’t breath, but not because of the hand on my chest — the stench of sweat and oiled hair surrounded the short bastard in a miasma that made my eyes water. “Take…” I managed to choke out.

“Whazzat?” He growled in my face. His breath was a whole new color in the bouquet surrounding him.

I shoved sideways on his arm as hard as I could, using whatever leverage advantage that my height gave me, and staggered away from him. “Take a damn bath, you putrid son of a bitch.”

Another pause, this one broken by a deep chuckle from the trees that his partner on the deck joined in on. I glared while the chuckling died down. “Yeah, I’m hilarious, I’m sure. Who the hell are you?”

“Allies, if perhaps not friends.” The large shadow took a step that carried it into the moonlight, and nearly to the edge of the deck.

It held a spear in its left hand and stood close to nine feet tall, but I found it hard to focus on anything past the curving horn in the middle of its forehead.

—-

Steven stared through the bars of his cage, looking at stars exactly the same as the ones he knew.

Which made it worse.

He didn’t feel the pain. He knew it was there, but it wasn’t active unless he tried to scrape away the mud. They definitely didn’t want him to touch the mud. He watched the stars and tried not to think about the sunburn feeling that itched along his skin.

“It’s alright…”

He jumped away from the sound behind him and turned. The space behind his cage was shadowed darkness but he could make out some kind of movement. He thought for a minute that someone had found him until he realized that the movement was constrained by a cage like his own.

“Who’s there?” He tried to keep his voice pitched low.

“T- ahh…” There was a long pause. “Ted… Schafer? Do you know me?”

He did, although not well. Schafer and his wife were supposed to have auctioned their farm and declared bankruptcy a month ago. Folks said they’d moved.

“I know you. What–”

“It’s alright.” The voice in the shadows continued while a hunched form Steven couldn’t make out shifted uneasily within. “It’s alright if you want to… make noise. I watched them put the needles on you, and the mud. I know — know what it feels like for you right now.” The shape shuffled back into the shadows. The voice already sounded tired. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s alright.”

Steven watched the shadows for a moment in silence, then turned his back on the voice and sat back down.

“Hell if it is.” He murmured to the stars. “Hell if it is.”

—-

“So…” I said, sitting on the back of a tractor in the machine shed and watching my ‘guests’, “you’re a dwarf from the nordic wastelands who’s been fighting your ancestral enemy–”

“Dirt-eaters,” Brock growled helpfully.

“Whatever.” I turned to his monstrous companion. “And you…” I’d somehow managed to miss that it was wearing full fifteen-century samurai armor, but in my defense it was nine feet tall and did have a damned horn sticking out of it’s forehead. “You’re some kind of ogre wizard –”

“Magi” it corrected.

“– Magi who’s been working with him for how long?”

The creature made a dismissive gesture and stepped toward me. “The duration of my partnership with Brock is not relevant, Sean.  What is relevant is our partnership with you, one which can save your father. Also, please call me Bhuto.”

I stared at the proffered hand — one that could easily palm my skull — and shook my head blankly. It was withdrawn.

“What kind of partnership?”

Bhuto straightened and adjusted his armor. “The only one which can save you father from these –” he used a word that slid away from my mind like oil. “We should travel as I explain.” He appraised me. “Do you have a weapon?”

For the first time in two days, I felt like smiling.

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Vayland Rd. [3] – The Cage

~ The Cage ~

Steven didn’t want to wake up; sometimes you know things aren’t going to be good when you open your eyes.

On the other hand, better to see the trouble coming than get hit by it. He shook his eyes into focus and looked around, then shook his head again and squinted.

The sky was the color of an old bruise — solid cloud-cover in dusty grays and purples from one end of the sky to the other — but that wasn’t really the problem; in fifty years you can see some pretty odd weather kick up.

The problem was, he was looking at the battered sky through the bars of a wooden cage. Worse, the cage was in the middle of some kind of camp. There was a fire burning a few feet away, cooking something that smelled like rotten corn silage in a pot almost as big as the cage he was in, and there were about a dozen little huts around him that looked like they were made out of sod.

The people walking around, including the two looking at him in the cage, were short little wiry bastards with dried mud caked all over their skin.

And they didn’t look like right at all.

—-

He tried to get loose when they opened the cage doors, but they were strong and there were a lot of them. They pulled him to a stunted, leafless tree that stood in the middle of the camp, and tied him too it. The rope they used was never intended for this purpose; over an inch thick with harsh bristles jutting from the weave like thorns, it chafed his skin even when he didn’t move. They wrapped him in a coil from shoulders to knees, leaving him with his back pressed to the surface of the dead tree. The knots required by the thickness of the rope were twice the size of his fist.

Two of the… things, walked up to him after he was secured. Their noses were about three inches too long, same as the chins, and what skin he could see where mud had flaked away was the same color as the sky. Their eyes were the black of used forty-weight oil.

Not human. Sean would know what to call them, probably; he sure as hell didn’t. He’d hoped he was dreaming, but he knew himself well enough to know he’d never come up with something like this.

The taller one (a little more than four feet tall, and not quite as bowlegged) spoke, phlegm rattling in the back of his throat like the sound of a kid’s straw that’s hit the bottom of a chocolate malt. “You the man Steven. You ours now.” The second one sniggered, and Steve was sure he saw the first one twitch in annoyance.

“I’m not a damn thing to you. Let me go and I’ll be on my way.”

The rest of the crowd around him murmured when the first one nodded, acting as though he’d expected that answer.

“Good. Fight is good.” He gestured to the second one, who stepped forward and unfolded a cloth on which he laid out the first bright or clean things Steven had seen in this place.

Needles.

—-

They rearranged the ropes so they could get easy access.

That was necessary; the needles weren’t very long, just thick.

He’d tried keeping track of how many they’d driven into him, but he lost count when they moved past his arms and shoulders and into the area between his collarbone and neck. It had all been very quiet, though; the things seemed very intent on what they were doing and aside from sucking his breath in past his teeth, he wasn’t making any noise.

Damned if he’d make any noise.

Eventually the sky was dark and they were done with the needles, finishing with his face — pushing the last few into the muscles of his jaw had almost got him to make a sound, but he hadn’t.

He hadn’t. He was sure he hadn’t.

He looked up to see the taller thing standing in front of him. Its lips were pulled back to damn near its rear molars in a dead man’s grin.

“Good. Ver’ good.” It nodded approvingly. “Strong.” It turned away. “MUD!”

The hell?

He had time to puzzle it over. Several of the scrawnier creatures began wrestling the foul-smelling pot off the fire, dragging it through the dirt toward him.

When they began to pack the hot, stinking mess onto his body, using the pins as anchors to prevent it all from sliding off, Steven still didn’t make a sound.

But it was much harder this time.

—-

It was starting to get dark.

It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.

My family weren’t the sort of people who ended up interviewed about alien abductions in the Daily Sun; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over… what?

Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door — broad, flat things that made me think of Gollum. Smears on the windows that looked like finger marks with no prints. Drag marks heading toward the shelterbelt behind the house, before they vanished.

The kind of crap I used to think up.

Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom, her arms crossed as though she was cold. “You want anything to eat, bud?”

I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what…” I let it go and shook my head again. It was quiet for several minutes, except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.

“I thought–” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be… I thought you might know something.”

“About this?”

She sighed, and shrugged her shoulders in a way that seemed like an apology. “About… things that might help.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.

Posted on

Vayland Rd. [2] – The Road

~ The Road ~

Churkk scowled.

“I like night, Churkk.  Dun like day.  Dun like heat or light or pantin’ or th’ way groud puffs up dust atcha when ya run.”

Churkk’s scowl deepened. He liked the night as well, but it irritated him to agree with the creature skulking alongside him.

“Night is cool.  Night is good.  Wraps us up and lets us come out of the cracks and up to see things.  What I think is the best is –”

“Jek.”

“Yeh?”

“Shut it.”

Jek did, looking suitably cowed.  He still walked alongside, however, and Churkk swore even the runt’s feet slapped on the ground different than anyone else.  Everything about Jek was annoying.

The light from a house poked through the trees at them, but rather than turning to go around it, Churkk took them in closer without explaining.  Slowly, they crept up to the corner of the building, then along a wall to the lit window.

Jek started to whisper a question, but stopped short when Churkk smacked him in the middle of his forehead without even glancing back to aim.

Inside, Churkk could see a people-room with things to sit on.  The woman sat on one, but didn’t see his long, mud-caked face at the window or the light glinting off his beady eyes, because she was crying — great, shaking sobs that shook her bent shoulders and moved her whole chair.

Churkk watched this for some time.  It made him smile.

—–

I lie to myself when I say nothing ever changes back at home — nothing ever seems to change in a place you lived for twenty years — but there were always fewer houses. Farming was a dying profession; every time I drove into familiar territory, the wide open plains seemed wider, flatter — less and less to do with people.

The road was mostly straight, rolling over gradual hills in what could often be an infuriating exchange of Passing and No Passing zones. It would start to wind soon. I knew this area; could still recite the mileage between every major and minor landmark for a hundred miles in any given direction, even landmarks that didn’t exist anymore, such as the old country school house that had apparently been torn down since my last visit and whose absence nearly made me miss my turn onto Vayland Road.

After a few miles, the curves began.

The farmland my family owned was on the high side of the county, raised above the lower, eastern half by a ridge of hills that Vayland Road crept along, curling around cuts in the earth that were somewhere between narrow valleys and broad ravines, filled with thickets and brush that by local wisdom wouldn’t even let a breeze through without a couple of good scratches. Gullys. That was the word.

I’d grown up riding in cars along this stretch of highway, then driving it myself, then driving away. The blacktop lead right past the farm’s driveway.

Mom was out on the front step before I got out of the car.

No one else was there.