Chris Holm - The Big Reap

“Do what?”

“Tie us up. Abandon us. Leave us out here to die.”

“Zadie, believe me, you have no idea what you’re talking about. Because, in order, yes I do; no, I hope I don’t; and leaving you out here’s the best way I can think to keep you breathing.”

“If that were true,” she said, “you’d leave us our packs, at least.”

I eyed the backpacks lying at my feet — their zippers open, their contents strewn about. “You can keep your packs, and your food, and your clothes. All I need,” I said, patting my stuffed jacket-pockets, “I got.”

Topher glared at me. “Unless you’re leaving us my buck knife, the whiskey, and our sat phone, consider yourself hella motherfucking fired.”

At that, I smiled. Because I’d be lying if I said my plan didn’t include his buck knife and his whiskey, if not his sat phone. And oh yeah, not just a little bit of fire.

It was full dark now, and the moon was new. This far out from any human source of light, the stars and my conscience were my only guides. And I hadn’t heard much from the latter of late.

“Look,” I told these two forlorn lovebirds, lashed back-to-back before me, “I won’t be long. Unless they kill me, in which case I might be a little while. But either way, you have my word that I’ll come back for you. I won’t let you die tonight — not on my watch. Just stay inside this cave, you hear me? Nothing that means you any harm can breach it.”

“Whadda you mean, either way?” This from Zadie.

“Never you mind,” I said. “Now do me a favor and keep quiet. I’ve got a job to do.”

They didn’t listen. They just kept on screaming their fool heads off. But that was fine. I didn’t really expect them to heed my request. If I had, I wouldn’t have bothered scratching those protective runes into the rock at the entrance to the cave with Topher’s buck knife; God knows the damn thing was more useful to me sharp than dull. But whatever, if the Brethren heard them carrying on, maybe they’d serve as a distraction, because if those same Brethren caught wind of what I had in store for them, they were bound to get a little pissy.

I trudged away from Topher and Zadie’s hidey-hole and flicked open the camera’s view finder and switched the image to infrared night vision. One of the perks of bumming around with cryptozoologists is they’re accustomed to skulking around the forest at night. Meant Nicholas was pretty sure-footed in the dark. Meant his camera was built for it as well.

The night was cold and still and dark before me, but my viewfinder glowed with green-white light. It flared at the cabin’s windows — the light unseen by my naked eye, the ground on which the cabin sat appearing wild and undisturbed — and at the chimney’s outlet. I watched for the better part of two hours, hoping it would also give me some indication of how many creatures waited for me inside, but given that the source of the chimney’s heat was not visible through the walls it was clear the camera was incapable of delivering such a penetrating image. The closest I could come to any kind of estimate were the brief flickers of movement at window’s edge a time or two, as if whatever waited inside was pulling back the curtains to get a peek at me. But it, or they, were careful, and I never managed to catch a glimpse.

That was fine. I had no illusions of sneaking up on them even without my two idiot companions carrying on behind me, we’d made enough noise on our initial approach they couldn’t help but have heard us. And anyways, I wasn’t worried about going in to the cabin blind, because I wasn’t going in at all.

They were coming out to me.

None of Topher’s socks would fit and anyway, he didn’t seem to have any clean ones left in his backpack, which is not to say that clean ones were required, only that they were preferable, since I wasn’t dexterous enough in gloves to complete my task, necessitating bare-fingered handling. But Zadie’s socks — particularly her wicking Rayon underlayer — were so just right, Goldilocks herself would’ve approved.

So I soaked one of them in Early Times and stuffed it into the bottle’s neck to serve as a wick. Then I lit it with the Bic these three morons used predominantly to spark up bowls of weed, and I chucked it at the imaginary viewscreen cabin. It sailed in a lazy arc through the air, and I watched it bare-eyed as it flared against the velvet dark.

And then halted in midair, crashing into nothing.

Not nothing in the viewfinder, mind. On the viewfinder, the white-hot Molotov sun failed to complete its arching descent on account of the ghost-green cabin in its way.

I’ll tell you what: I may not have been able to see the cabin with my — er, Nicholas’s — naked eye, but when that bottle burst, I could damn sure see the flames. In that thin, dry air, that wood went up like so much paper, and suddenly, the house-shaped nothing blazed orange-white. The heat of it warmed my cheeks. The light forced me to squint. The sound as it caught was like a rush of water, a sudden wind. And yet still, the protective juju held, so that the something looked like nothing, even as it burned. It looked like a house made of fire itself. And I stood outside it, waiting, Topher’s buck knife in my hand.

I had no idea how many of them lived here. How many were inside. Ada claimed that there was more than one, which represented the alpha and the omega of my intel. Could be two, or three, or five. Could be zero, I supposed. No saying they stuck around once Ada bailed. But I was guessing they hadn’t. Looking back through a hundred years of local newspapers, the nearby municipalities had seen their share of missing children. I was betting the Brethren had stuck around.

What I hadn’t counted on was them being as hard to see as the house that they called home.

I should’ve. Ada couldn’t describe them, after all. But somehow, I hadn’t considered the greater implications of that fact. Hadn’t squared it with the cabin that wasn’t there. Hadn’t thought one lick about how it affected my approach, until the first of them was on me.

I didn’t realize what I was looking at, at first. When I saw its flaming form burst through the crosshatched windowpane with a snap of wood and a tinkle of glass, I could see it fine, or so I thought. Then it hit the ground and rolled in the chill night air, extinguishing the fire that engulfed it, and before my eyes, it seemed to disappear. Only then did I realize my mistake.

I hadn’t seen the beast itself; I’d seen the flames. Like the house I couldn’t see beneath the flames I saw just fine. Problem was, the house wasn’t capable of putting itself out, nor of going anywhere. The big scary whatever that just leapt out of it, on the other hand, was. Lord knew what kind of big and scary it was. I heard it huff and puff somewhere in the flame-split black as if catching its breath. It neither wailed in pain, nor cried in anger. Just breathed audibly, and rustled as it moved. And, if I’m not mistaken, stalked, circling my position as if attempting to discern its best angle of attack. On occasion I thought I caught a glint of starlit silver fur in my peripheral vision, which vanished whenever I wheeled toward it. I couldn’t help but think that if the moon were high and full, by its light I’d see the creature fine. But I had no moonlight to rely on.

What I did have was the camera.

I held it like a talisman before me, swung it to and fro to no avail. There was simply nothing out there for me to see. My heart sank. My pulse raced. And then, as I gave up…

There it was, a lanky, matted, vulpine thing, naked or nearly so. It was half-hidden by the skeletal trunks of trees still bare from winter. Sucking wind as it sat on its haunches, waiting to strike. Unconcerned to see me facing it, because it was so very certain whatever enchantment kept it hidden from prying eyes remained undisturbed. Unaware it had been bested by technology.