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The
thin lights of Wilkes-Barre showed through the fog. Leda stumbled in a pot
hole and crouched low. She sniffed, scenting him, smelling Benny in the
dampness of wet leaves and dying grass. And the smell was old.
Snarling,
she cross the four lanes in one bound. Before dawn she had to feed.
A
drunken kid was passed out next to a girl. She was rooting through his pockets
and coming up with little more than change. The girl took out a knife,
scratching the tip over the kid’s throat.
Leda
pounced. She tumbled over with the girl in her jaws and twisted her head,
ripping the throat.
Blood
poured down her jaws and she fed noisily and with abandon until her shrunken
muscles were tight again. Raking brush over the kill, Leda raced up the
mountain, following the faint trail left by the prey and the bitter scent of
the Spider.
Too
late. Too far to run to make it to the valley and Benny before dawn. Screaming
with frustration, Leda slowed.
The
Uohali slowed, waiting for the
dog-leg curve that headed down along the mountain into Sandy Valley and
safety.
Benny
shivered despite the jacket. The Ride moved with just enough speed to keep her
from vapor lock. He strained his ears, waiting for the sound of some drugstore
cowboy on his way home from the bars, too drunk to know the roads weren’t
Interstate Eighty.
Benny’s
eyes were strained, tense, seeking out the inevitable deer that came to feed
on all that crown vetch the gods of Harrisburg decreed should be planted to,
what else, feed the deer. And cause dozens more wrecks every year than
normally would occur. At least
you didn’t see deer running the mountains with gangrene from broken legs any
more. The coyotes killed them.
The
old motorcycle choked. Benny let the Uohali
pick up more speed. Both were eager to get home and get it over with.
“Morons,”
he grumbled, thinking about all the money wasted planting vetch when kids went
hungry in this State, and shivered in the chilling mist.
“Freekin-A.”
A
big doe, corn fed by tourists, loomed out of the fog. The headlamp blinded and
dazzled her and she froze, staring into it.
Screaming
curses in two languages, Benny slued around the doe, barely staying erect on
the slick tar of the road. The Uohali
sputtered in protest.
She
bounced over the rocky, crumbling berm and in one heart-stopping moment they
were going to hurdle over the edge of the mountain and into the jumble of
stone below.
In
a roar that sounded like the winds of all Holle,
Two Swords ripped Heart-a’-Fire from her scabbard and slashed at the cliff.
Momentum
threw the rear end up sharply. Benny was pitched violently forward. His upper
body hung over the bars. The bars and the bulge of the headlamp crushed into
the battered muscles of his guts. Benny tried not to scream and bit his tongue
to stop it. The tail end slowed, then paused. No emotion but a jagged, icy
hollow in his guts, Benny stared wide-eyed and with aching bladder into the
misty darkness below.
The
tail thumped down, jarring his teeth hard.
For
a short eternity, Benny was as frozen as the doe . . . staring off into the
gray-black of the pre-dawn above the Pocono Mountains, the cups held in a
death grip.
His
tongue slid out of a dry mouth, to moisten dry, dry lips. Slipped back in.
Close.
Way
too close.
‘Bout
browned my shorts on that one.
Suddenly
his head went back and he laughed. The thrill of near-death was like being
reborn. The dying, then not, shot through him like a death-row bolt of fire
that spasm into hysterical choking.
“Man,
what a night.”
Behind
him, the doe shook off the unnerving shock at seeing a one-eyed monster. She
snorted at such indignant behavior and stamped a trim hoof.
He
was stopped cold. Liquid brown eyes stared at him. The doe’s nose went up.
Hmmp.
But what can one expect from riff-raff that walks upon two legs, ‘stead of
all four? Oh, how very gauche.
Calling
her twins from the laurel thickets at the base of a towering, brush-covered
colm-bank, she tossed an elegant head at Benny and that . . . that nasty
smelling horror he rode. Moving away at a sharp - but highly dignified - trot,
she muttered to herself and to the Eagle:Woman about what a terrible, and so
obvious a mistake it had been to create humans.
Terrible,
simply terrible.
Benny
turned and stared in awe at the old doe. Benny’s mind was open to her every
thought and he howled with laughter as she presented the picture of an aging
matron in a high flummox, even to the point of having her pretty nose held
skyward. He saw that more than a few times with the ancient, foul-breathed
battle-axes haunting old man Ryan’s parties in the hope that some of his
youth might rub off on them.
Catching
himself before he fell out of the saddle, Benny subsided into weary giggles.
He
gestured weakly. Benny needed to hear a human voice, even if it was only his
own.
“Yo.
Guess this kills evolution, man. Ik:ha:wa,
for a fact.” He gave a dry snort. “Been what? Better’n a hundred deer
generations getting offed by headlamps and car lights. Deer jacks with spot
lights. And still the freekin rats-with-hoofs lose it when they see a
light.” Contempt for those in the scientific community that still subscribed
to the religion of evolution filled him. Benny shook his head with a laugh.
“Guess
they just don’t get out much. Hain’a, pretty lady?”
Very
slowly, very painfully, he swung his leg over the saddle.
Benny
limped to the edge of the cliff and peered over. He couldn’t see the bottom
of the strip-mine because of the fog, but knew it was a long, long way down
like he knew the guts to his ‘cycle.
With
a careful, searching stretch of muscles and joints, he breathed deeply of the
bitter-spicy scent of pines and dawn and mist-rich grasses.
Man,
he felt like he could live forever, yo . . . .
He
had explored this whole valley by the time Mom sliced old man Greylov’s
heart in two at the ‘Stone. Plenty of times he had to leave the house and
hide from that old pedophile. Benny growled softly. How many times he had
gotten caught by Greylov and ‘punished?’
So,
yeah, he knew what lay down there. And man,
but was it a close one. The wreckage of more than one vehicle lay amid the
boulders down below, slowly being buried by the rock and dirt that every
spring rumbled down the massive banks of rip-mine tailings that overshadowed
the road and the very lives of the people.
Unbuttoning
his jeans, Benny relieved his aching bladder on the black and deadly menace
far below.
That
prerequisite to his continuing survival done, he spat over the edge for good
measure.
Benny
hobbled back to the Uohali. He
pulled his leg back over the saddle and tried to ease the motorcycle out of
the hole. Shoving hard with his legs, he grunted, cursed and sweated, but it
was a no-go.
Sweat
popped out on his forehead, ran stinging down over scrapes and cuts to burn
his eyes. Benny slumped. He shivered at bruises and bloody marks that chafed.
“Freek
this squat.” Forcing himself to stand, Benny kicked furiously at the starter
several times until the old Charger gave a roar.
Muffled
by the fog, the echo hit the far mountain and came back. Benny allowed the
anger to flicker away. He added the might of the Uohali to his own strength.
She
roared and bellowed. Then in a sullen mutter choked down and refused to
restart.
“Geez-us
-”
Benny
clamped his mouth shut and stumbled over the rocks to the front of the
motorcycle. He stayed slightly back from the crumbling edge. The cliff top was
only a flattened part of a more massive colmn bank.
The
dark shadow of it rose above him in cold, embittered disdain for anything man
might do.
He
crouched, feeling through the bleak darkness, his hands trying to find what
his eyes could not see. His hand clutched the front tire. The left moved,
wary, through the weeds and red-black stone. “No use getting bit by a
grasshopper with an attitude, y’know? Or by a grass-hopper hunting baby
copperhead, either. Ouch.”
Benny
let a grin tug at his lips.
His
hand discovered the problem and he groaned.
“Of
all the crummy tricks.”
A
chunk of red rock split in two. In all likelihood it tumbled from the colmn
bank that hung over the road. Maybe last spring, or sometime in the last
century. His wheel bounced hard, hitting with enough force to make the pieces
close up like the jaws of a trap.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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