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When I woke, I was certain I’d only been asleep for a few minutes. I could hear the fire crackling and feel the heat outside the blanket, the cabin doing a great job of keeping everybody inside warm and protected.
But like the night before, I hadn’t awoken by accident. There was a reason, and while my confused, sleep-deprived brain struggled to figure out what it was, I was hit with the intense aroma of rotting flesh, carried on a hot burst of air.
I opened my eyes.
A pair of pale blue eyes, lit by firelight, were leaning over me. A bloody mouth sneered.
I screamed violently, my voice carrying loud, and quickly tried to push the person off of me. But they were already retreating, making a strange growling, snapping noise like a hungry dog. It ran awkwardly across the cabin, as naked as a jaybird, as blue white as snow, and jumped out through one of the front windows, shattering the glass all around it, before disappearing into the night.
All at once the cabin was plunged into chaos. Do
“I don’t believe it,” muttered Tim, pulling on his coat and boots, grabbing his gun and following Jake out the door. Hank and Isaac were silent, sitting up in their beds. They both had the most unsettling, matching smiles across their faces, as if what had happened was a good thing.
“Are you hurt, did he do anything to you?” Avery kept repeating until I brought my attention back to him.
I shook my head. “Was it a he?”
“I think so. It was dark. It was hard to tell. What was he doing?”
I blinked a few times, trying to get my bearings. “I don’t know. He was just staring at me. I…you know, I don’t know. I don’t know.” I kept saying it because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Someone had been in the cabin with us, and while Do
While Do
Soon, Jake and Tim came back into the cabin. I tried to tear my eyes off Jake and his long johns that conformed to his massive body, but it was hard. It was the only thing that momentarily took my mind away from what happened.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Jake and Tim had formed the same opinion as Do
And just when they were staring at his escape route, I was hit with another smell. I got out of bed and looked at the window. There was a thin trail of blood leading from the broken glass all the way to my bed. I looked around and saw a few drops of blood on the hides and quickly examined myself to see if I was bleeding. I wasn’t.
“What the dickens?” Avery exclaimed as we saw the trail lead away from my bed and over to Meeks. We all stared at the jolly, plump man in horror as he lifted up his arm. Soon his eyes were just as wide as ours as rivulets of shiny blood ran down his sleeve.
Mervin Meeks was missing his pinky finger.
Chapter Five
The silence stretched out until it was shattered by Meeks’ scream. Avery and Jake jumped to attention, rushing over to him, trying to calm him as he launched into hysterics. I couldn’t move, couldn’t take my eyes off of him. My brain filtered through the last five minutes and brought up the image of a bloody mouth inches from mine.
My Lord. That person, that pale thing, had bitten off Meeks’ finger. He must have been in shock when it happened. How on earth could something like that even happen in the first place? It was unheard of.
“Savages,” Jake snarled, holding up the hand and inspecting it while Avery and Tim were now trying to hold him down. He eyed me with hate. “Your kind of savages.”
I was too dumbstruck to care what he said about me or my kind. As savage as some Indians could be—believe me, I’d been exposed to all the stories—I also knew that none of them would do such a horrible, inhuman thing. Indians would never consume part of another human being. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing so, no matter what color they were or what they believed. They were people, not animals.
Do
Curiously I got up, slipped on my boots, and followed them out the door. Everyone else was so preoccupied with the disfigured Meeks that they didn’t even notice.
Outside it was crisp and cold, and I wasn’t surprised to see a few flakes of snow starting to fall from the sky. It wasn’t very heavy—just sprinkles—but I knew come morning there would at least be an inch or two on the ground. I was grateful for the ramshackle lean-to on the other side of the cabin where the horses were being kept, sheltered from the elements. I should have gone over and checked on them, but on this moonless night, I stayed by the dim glow of the cabin.
Isaac and Hank were nowhere in sight, but I had a feeling they were trying to track the way the person went. I could smell the person’s boots rising up from the scuffled footprints on the ground along with the scent of Meeks’ attacker, a mixture of blood and rot.
I went as far as I could into the forest without losing sight of the cabin and then stopped. I was better off with the horses than with Isaac and Hank in these dark, unending trees. As much as I wanted to find out what happened, why the pale man had attacked Meeks (and why he hadn’t done the same thing to me), my curiosity needed to be reined in before I did something idiotic.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” Jake said from behind me, his feet crunching on the fallen twigs, the air around me becoming more earthy and pleasant as he came closer. “It’s dangerous.”
I turned around to see him a few paces back, still in his long johns, and with a cigar in his hand. I quickly turned my head away—he was not leaving anything to the imagination. His body was massive, broad lines and hard muscle that seemed like it was going to burst out of the red wool.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked, wishing I felt less embarrassed.
“Naw. You ain’t ever seen a man in his drawers, have ya?”
“A proper lady shouldn’t see that until she’s good and married,” I replied, wondering what wanton, caveman town he was from where folks were seeing each other in their undergarments. Texans were something else.
“You’ve said many times you aren’t a lady.”
He started walking toward me until I shot him a warning look to stay right where he was.
“I only said that once,” I retorted indignantly.
He puffed on his cigar, a few sprinkles of snow coming through the boughs of the trees and settling in his dark, lush hair. “True, but you’ve demonstrated your word many times before. No proper lady comes ru