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  “Annie?” Gail sat up, put her left hand on Annie’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I need you to help me. I need you to wrap my arm.”

  Annie just stared back at her with glassy eyes. She again checked her right arm. Blood dripped onto the sand in way too steady a patter. She needed to do something or she’d go into shock soon. She shook Annie’s shoulder a little roughly.

  “Annie! I need help. Can you just tear a strip of fabric and bind up my arm?” She put her face close to Annie’s and looked in her eyes. “Now, Annie.”

  Annie blinked and seemed to regain some focus. “Yeah, okay.” She looked down at her T-shirt, gripped it and tugged fiercely until it began to tear. She kept at it until she managed to rip off a ragged strip.

  Gail gritted her teeth and lifted her injured arm with her other hand, just high enough to give Annie room to loop the strip around it and tie it in place. She lowered her arm and saw the blood was still seeping at a pace she didn’t like.

  “Cinch it tighter. It’s not stopping it.”

  Annie complied, her mouth set in a way that betrayed her squeamishness. Then she sat back, her face pale in the wash of the headlights.

  Gail looked again. Still some seep, but it would have to do. “Thanks.” The word seemed so inadequate given what had transpired in the last few minutes. Cradling her injured arm, she tried to think of what to do next.

  The guys would be at the campsite waiting for them, but even if they could find the damned site, she needed prompt medical attention. They’d just have to tell someone to find Paul and Evan and let them know what had happened.

  But what had happened? Gail knew she was attacked by a coyote, and she had the bite marks to prove it. So who was the man, and what happened to the coyote? She didn’t know what to think, let alone what she was going to say, but she did know she needed to get to the ER.

  She pushed herself to a standing position, teetering a little from wooziness. She glanced back at her Camry and realized she’d left it running all this time. All what time? Time seemed to have unfurled into some long strip, but really, she didn’t think that many minutes had passed.

  “Come on, Annie. Let’s get to the ER. I need stitches—at least.” She offered her left hand to help Annie up, then thought better of it, given her own legs were hardly stable.

  Annie stood, looking almost as wobbly, then bent to retrieve her gun. She stared at it for a long moment, almost as if she didn’t recognize it as hers. Then she put on the safety, gave a weak smile, and followed Gail back to the car.

  29

  Officer Hanford stared at the pale young woman lying on the gurney as he stood in the treatment room after taking the most bizarre report of his long career. The ER doc confirmed she had sustained a good number of bites on her arms, the marks consistent with a coyote attack. And there was the bullet wound from her friend who shot the animal and saved her life.

  But after that, the story got weird. If only Ms. Grady, the one with the wounds, had made such a statement, he’d have chalked it up to shock, sure enough. But he’d interviewed the women separately, and their outlandish stories matched.

  He eased his hat back a little and scratched his balding scalp. They both claimed they got lost, got out to approach a parked truck and suddenly this coyote comes out of nowhere and attacks one of them. The other one had a legal firearm with her, and had the presence of mind to use it. She nicked her friend in the process, but killed the attacker.

  And there was the kicker. Both of them claimed—with absolute consistency and apparent certainty—that suddenly there was no coyote, but a man. And they were damned insistent about it. Not only that, they also both insisted this all happened next to a Joshua tree decorated with glowing green animal skulls. Yeah, right.

  Well, maybe they got themselves both convinced of this story on their way to the ER. That was the only rational explanation—they’d have been traumatized enough to come up with something crazy like that and it would have been enough time for them to get themselves believing the same story. It was that or drugs.

  They’d been out in the boonies with no cell reception, and they’d transported themselves right to the ER, rather than stopping for help first. Pretty self-sufficient of them, even if they had foolishly gotten themselves totally lost in the first place without any GPS or maps.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he excused himself and went back out to his car to radio in. He asked dispatch to have the rangers responsible for the area locate and notify the boyfriends.

  The rangers would also have to help locate the site of the incident. Given the unprovoked nature of the attack, the doctor wanted the coyote’s carcass tested for rabies. They only had a short window to find it, or they’d have to administer the vaccine to be on the safe side.

  Officer Hanford chuckled as he started the car. It’d be easy to find—just look for the glowing green skulls.

  30

  The next day, Officer Hanford received word that the site of the attack had likely been found, and there was both more—and less—there than anticipated. He wondered what that meant after he’d arranged to meet the ranger there.

  Later in the afternoon, as he bumped along the rutted dirt road in his police cruiser, he wished he’d arranged to take a vehicle more suited to the terrain. Better yet, he wished he weren’t driving on the lousy road at all. He didn’t see why the police needed to be involved in a case of a wild animal attack in the first place, and the jarring ride grated on his nerves and put him in an even worse mood.

  He followed the directions closely to make sure he didn’t get lost. Even in the light of day, with all the different forks in the dirt roads and the lack of useful markers out this way, it was clear just how easy it would be to get lost, especially at night. At least he could radio for help if he did get lost, but he didn’t want to endure the embarrassment and ridicule that would surely follow.

  At last he spotted the ranger’s truck parked up ahead and pulled up behind it. He got out into the baking heat and joined the ranger, who waited for him by his truck. He had his hands on his hips and was shaking his head.

  “Hi, I’m Ranger Tyson.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for coming out, Officer. There’s some strange shit that went down here. Some of it you might find interesting. Follow me.”

  Officer Hanford highly doubted he’d find anything interesting here. He didn’t care much for the great outdoors, especially when it felt like he’d just walked into an oven, so he didn’t plan to stay a minute longer than necessary.

  He followed Ranger Tyson a short ways. They stopped in front of a Joshua tree festooned with skulls. Beneath it, the ground was disturbed in a way that suggested a serious struggle had occurred there. Dried blood stained the sand in several places. But there was no trace of any coyote, save some track marks.

  “Check this out. Someone’s been collecting trophies.” The ranger pointed at the skulls posted on the tree with their dates below them.

  Officer Hanford was startled to see physical evidence of one of the women’s outlandish claims that he hadn’t believed. “What the hell is that?”

  “I don’t know. Weird, isn’t it? The light must be kind of funny today. They seem a little greenish.”

  Hanford stepped closer, a chill running down his back despite the extreme heat. “The dates are pretty recent. Who would be out here in this godforsaken place doing this?” He wiped sweat from his forehead and wondered again why he’d been summoned out here. “That’s strange, but I don’t understand why you called me out here.”

  “There’s something else here you need to look at.” Ranger Tyson motioned toward the parked Durango. “Looks like there’s been some dumping—and some animal action, too.” He led the way to the two corpses Dominic had left.

  Flies buzzed in a greedy hoard as Officer Hanford approached. He squatted down next to the bodies for a closer inspection. One looked like he’d had his head caved in by something heavy. He couldn’t tell what happened to the other—only
that some animal had fed on it pretty heavily before abandoning the carcass to the flies. The women had made no mention of any of this.

  “I’ll call the coroner to come pick these up. I don’t recognize them offhand. We’ll have to ID them and determine time and cause of death—and I’ll have to reinterview the women to see if they know anything about this.” He wiped a trickle of sweat from his temple and thought about how nice it would be to get back into his cruiser and blast the air conditioning. These boys weren’t smelling too good on top of it all.

  He glanced back at the apparent scene of the attack. Too bad they didn’t find the coyote’s corpse—some other animal must have hauled it away. The doctor would have to play it safe and give Ms. Grady the rabies series.

  31

  Soaring high up on a thermal, the vulture spotted a lump of road kill far down below. He swooped down to it and landed. The hot pavement burned his feet, but he was hungry, so he ignored the pain and sank his beak into the hot flesh of whatever it had been before some passing car had crushed it. The meat was already drying from the hot sun, and was hard to tear into pieces.

  This angered the vulture. The meat he’d had a few days ago had been so much better. Warm, but still moist. That human meat had a unique flavor, a flavor he liked quite a lot. And he felt so different after eating it, in a way he couldn’t quite understand, but that he enjoyed. He’d eaten until he was full in the shadow of the tree of skulls, then the carcass had been dragged off and finished by a pair of starving bobcats.

  He picked at the road kill and ate until only shattered bones remained. He was still hungry, and thirsty, too. He hopped to the side of the road and considered what to do next. At least the sand where he stood was less painful to his feet than the searing black pavement.

  Then he heard a sound in the distance. A car. His vision darkened at the edges and, for a moment, he felt like he was falling. Then his vision cleared, and he found himself standing at the side of the road with his thumb extended.

  The car, a boring little sedan, pulled to a stop. The passenger-side window rolled down and a timid-looking older man leaned toward it and smiled.

  “Need a ride?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He got in the car and closed the door.

  “Where are you headed?” The man checked his rearview and pulled back onto the road.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Where’s your car? I mean, this is the middle of nowhere. Surely you didn’t walk out here?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  The man turned to him, a perplexed look on his face.

  The hitchhiker grabbed the wheel and forced the car off the road and into the sand. Then he twisted the key and killed the engine. The car coughed to a stop and died. Before the little man could react or defend himself, he punched him, hard, in the neck. Then he got out of the car and went around to the driver’s side. He opened the door and pulled the unconscious man out, dropping him onto the ground. He stomped on his neck until the man was dead.

  Then he spread his wings, hopped onto the dead man’s body, and began to feed.

  About the Author

  Lisa von Biela worked in Information Technology for 25 years, then dropped out to attend the University of Minnesota Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 2009. She now practices law in Seattle, Washington.

  Lisa began writing short, dark fiction just after the turn of the century. Her first publication appeared in The Edge in 2002. She went on to publish a number of short works in various small-press venues, including Gothic.net, Twilight Times, Dark Animus, AfterburnSF, and more. She is the author of the novels The Genesis Code, The Janus Legacy, and Blockbuster, as well as the novella Ash and Bone.

  About the Publisher

  DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.

  To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.

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