THAT NIGHT SAT A FULLMOON ABOVE THE FARM fat and immaculate as some newly furbished pearl and in the silverish moonbeams various bovines cropping up great jawfuls of grass, their ears lifting and a dull chomping of teeth and the serene eyes squinting with sudden vigilance as a slant black shape whipped past them in hellish silhouette. Appearing before the backdrop of the moon and vanishing just as quick and the cows just looking at each other with their eyes blinking mindlessly until one of them in a violent puff of grass and dirt was sucked down to the very ground where it stood.

Plaintive bawls. Startled stock bunched up in a warped semicircle, beneath their clomping hooves the dry earth trembling, all around them splitrail fenceposts rattling. The one that had gone down was laying on its back and rocking side to side like some capsized boat, you could see punched through the upturned belly a watermelon-sized hole from which the frayed intestines bloomed like the tendrils of some predacious plant, bloodslimed and bilecovered and dragged off in different directions, all of them still grossly quivering.

“Alright god damn ye. I said alright.” The farmer finally rose from bed with the terrible din and he rubbed groggily at his eyes and jogged to the front porch with rifle in hand, muttering something about bastard kids and their cow tipping. The hound had already risen up from the porch howling, head turning side to side, cheekfolds pendulous. The farmer looked into the cowpen ahead, saw a slant shadow fall on a big longhorn in the center. He watched the bull crash facefirst, bawling, the ground quaking again as the others moved away from it and then blood went spraying in a thin mist that arced across the nightsky, he could hear the thin pelting sounds as it came back down and slapped the dirt. His jaw dropped.

Still staring in disbelief when before him on the porch steps came a crash. He looked down, eyes enormous. Lodged there in the splintered wood the fattened head of one cow, thick ropes of blood oozing. Curved bits of bone poking from the frayed meat. The dog bolted off into the night and he whistled loudly in protest.

“Shit fire, Gabby. Ye get back here now, girl. Don’t go rushin’ off afore ye know what’s out there. Hell, I said git back here.”
He saw it pass before the moon again, glimpsed it by the far fence hulked over a fallen cow. The shoulders all angular and the knee joints strangely inverted and the body twisting and it never stood still, it seemed to shiver in place. Rabid crackling noises as it fed. The farmer raised the rifle to eye level and flipped off the safety but it was already gone. Like some malign mirage. He looked all around, rifle trained in front of him. His forehead slavered with sweat and his breathing heavy. “Gabby? Where are ye girl? God damn ye.”

He turned to go back in the house and felt something sharp go through his left shoulder. He could see something twisting in front of him, it looked like a bunch of poles tied together with three long claws on the end. He grabbed for it with his other arm but it sucked back through his shoulder and then he felt that arm collapse at his side in dead weight. Another stab through his lower back, his spine locked up and he stood up very straight and he felt very cold all of a sudden. He was leaning back now, the thing holding him up and the hot breath of it loping across his neck like a lover’s and it was stabbing him more and more now but he had stopped struggling, his whole body was going numb. He could hear Gabby crying but he couldn’t see her. Stumbling forward to one knee with his hands on his stomach, he was trying to hold in his guts. He felt something pass through a crack in his fingertips that was fat and membranous and white, it didn’t look like something that belonged inside a body. He closed his eyes and when they reopened he was flat on his back. Everything spinning, the stars wheeling all across the nightsky in long bright winks of light. He couldn’t hold his head up anymore and it lolled to one side and he saw Gabby slumped on the porch next to him. She wasn’t breathing. He wanted to reach over to her but he couldn’t move. “Gabby? Oh God, girl.” When he spoke he spat up a thick oyster of blood and mucus onto the porch boards.

Tears going down his cheeks, they made it hard to see but he looked up anyways and watched his front door open with a creak. Laying there in a pool of his own blood, more of it stamped across the furred welcome mat where the thing had walked and he saw it then standing there in the doorframe, it seemed to bow its strange head to him in thanks before it stepped inside. The door closed behind it, a slow click of the latch.

___________

HE’D BEEN DRIVING SOUTH ON THE OLD BACK ROAD for close to an hour now. Past rows of gaunt dead trees reared crookedly like charred bones of things tacked together and beyond them as far as you could see darkly rolling country stretched spectral and sourceless. He reached over and fiddled with the radio dial. There was no signal but he sat there fidgeting with it anyways and leaning back in his seat, just listening. As if from among the muted whispers of static some substantiality might manifest.

His eyes dragged to the little radioclock, the green numbers said 1:45 AM. He shook his head, groggy as he fumbled with one hand for the foam coffee cup on the seatrest beside him and brought it to the corner of his mouth and sipped from it and sat there peering out the driver’s side window. A green road sign said “Welcome to Portsfield.” Thick sheets of snow now on the hillslopes, they seemed to creep towards him of their own volition, hazardous white seepages made animate beneath the glaring headlights.

When he came around the next bend he saw the man. A haggardlooking old vagrant stooped and shambling roadside, his misshapen form in tattered winter jacket whose ends flapped like old rags in the wind and his head turned to one side owllike and lips quivering in strange subvocalization and his hands balled in the coatpockets. A gait strangely birdlike, Thom could see with each step from the cold tar the old running sneakers kick up little dustcoils, no socks, peeps of bare ankles bonewhite and knifesharp as they bulged from beneath the too-short trouserlegs. When the man heard Thom driving up on him he made a perfunctory turn and outstretched one arm, thumbing the road. The look on his face funereal. A dry old beard like clumps of bedraggled wool tacked onto the slant chin and eyes like dead stones plugged in the sockets, that cold, that lifeless.

Thom gave the guy one good look as he drove past and shook his head. “You’re shittin’ me right now if you think your crazy lookin’ old ass is getting picked up.”

He shifted the truck into first gear and chuckled, nervous sounding, watched the old man diminish in the rearview mirror. He could see the guy already turned back around, walking the same way as before, perhaps his pace had quickened. Through the pale rags of dust the deadlooking face staring straight ahead, eyes infused with a sort of inscrutable determination.

“Poor son of a bitch, you’re gonna be walkin’ for some time lookin’ like that.” His eyes back on the road now. The moon hidden beneath a bruisecolored skein of clouds, he could barely see anything past the narrow beams of the headlights. He squinted and hulked up over the wheel, both hands on it. The truck started shaking drunkenly. “The fuck,” he said. He pumped the brakes. The frame bounced in jarring spurts and the front tires swept obliquely and the motor howled like a thing wounded. A popping sound from underneath the hood. He swerved into the breakdown lane, hands grappling the spinning steering wheel until the truck came to rest slantwise with one end of the rear bumper jabbing the guard rail and he looked to the road and saw sown there like enormous grey seeds all along the yellow road lines thick chunks of shattered cement.

“Well ain’t this some bullshit.”

He sat there for a few moments, just collecting himself. The engine gave one last moribund sigh. Then silence. The dim silhouette of his truck stranded there appeared like the blackened form of some bottom dwelling sea creature. The hornlike jutting of the power bulge on the hood and the dorsal fin wing mirrors and the waning headlights blinking into the night like strange bioluminescent eyes.

He sighed and lifted from the seat and swung open the front door and spat off to one side and walked around to the front of the truck and reached underneath the hood for the release and popped it open. A dull hissing sound as he stared down into the steaming guts of the truck, thick whorls of enginesmoke that caged his squinting face. He worked the hoodprop into place and was about to mess around when he heard not too far off the shrill of a police siren. He watched an old cop cruiser come trundling along like a toy car on the opposite highway lane. It turned through a tiny interstice between the grade separators and then drove coming the wrong way on the lane next to him. It stopped in the breakdown lane and an officer stepped from the car and looked around at the rubble and prodded at some debris with his black Danner steel toe boots and when the police lights diminished the highway became a vast sea of darkness, no shore in sight, grey chunks of flotsam drifting.

The officer approached the truck, flashlight held at his side, the beam of which looped little pirouettes upon the pavement. A stocky guy with a weatheredlooking face beneath which a slatejaw shifted relentlessly upon a thick wad of chew. He knocked upon the passenger window and Thom rolled down his window and peered out, squinting at a flashlight brought eye level.

“You need some assistance here, son?” he said.

“Truck broke down, sir.”

“I can see that. What kind of damage you lookin at?”

“Not sure just yet. Looks like the radiator might be dried up.”

“You got someone you can call at this hour?”

“Not really. It happens sometimes, I just hafto mess around with her some. I got some water in the backseat. Shouldn’t take long to get her kicking again.”

The officer nodded. He started to smile and then stopped. “Well, alright then.”

Thom looked out at the nightsky behind them and then turned back to the officer. “You see that hitchhiker some ways back? Real weird lookin’ old bastard? Come out of nowhere. Nearly hit the poor son of a bitch.”

“Hitchhiker?”

“Yeah, he was walking all weird.”

“No. I ain’t seen nobody but you for the past hunnerd miles. And I clocked in a good three hours ago.”

“Oh.”

The officer arched a brow, he looked like he had come to a sudden realization. “While we’re here, how about you kindly take our your license and registration for me?”

Thom looked at him strangely, went back around to the front door and reached inside the glove compartment and came back with his information. The officer looked them over with his flashlight. “How much you had to drink tonight, son?”

“Had myself a whole coffee, sir. One of them extra large containers. Might have been overkill, I know.”

The officer made an annoyedlooking face, gave him back his information. Cutting the flashbeam past Thom’s squinting face and over to the passenger’s side, then back to Thom’s face again.

“Yer reading that Metamorphosis book by that Kafka guy are ye?”

“When I got the time, yeah.”

“Never did understand all the hubbub over that book. Never really finished it but to me he could have just summed it up in a couple sentences instead of dragging the damn thing out. Of course everyone’s gonna hate the poor sumbitch: he’s a goddamn giant cockroach.”

Thom just looked at him, not saying anything.

“Am I right?”

Thom didn’t say whether he was or he wasn’t.

The officer cleared his throat. “Alright, well as soon as ye fix up that old truck of yers ye head to wherever you’re going. It’s getting late.”

“I thank you sir, I’ll do just that.”

When the officer turned back around Thom dragged his shirt sleeve across his sweat streaked brow and sighed. Out of the corner of one eye he thought he saw the air around the officer move. Like little dimples pressed onto the surface of a dark pond. He reached for his coffee and brought it up and felt only the empty Styrofoam against his lips and he flicked the weightless container to the floor. He was going to start up the truck again when he heard some commotion coming from the outside. The cop sounded like he was choking.

TO BE CONTINUED. . .

© 2011 Russ Whiting. All rights reserved.