Predatory Animals Read online

  In the town of Shadeland, people are vanishing.

  The Pummels, a most beloved family and benefactor to the exotic cat rescue center, are guarding a secret—one they will kill to keep quiet. Stranger still, retired Marine Casper Brown suffers a near-death accident that gives him a deep connection to three stray dogs while filling his nights with dreams of unearthly creatures.

  Something is hunting the townspeople of Shadeland and nothing in Casper’s training can prepare him for what he finds lurking in the shadows.

  Predatory Animals

  by Gabriel Beyers

  River Sacrifice

  Casper Brown sat at the round breakfast table of his sun-filled kitchen eating a plate of microwaved bacon, drinking a cup of bitter re-warmed coffee, and reading USA Today. He turned his ear upward, listening to the events unfold upstairs. Lucy, his bright-eyed and rambunctious five-year old, was awake. He knew this by the thump of her feet hitting the hardwood, the random spatter of her early morning dance then her zigzagging trail down the hallway to her siblings’ rooms.

  He sat back and smiled as he listened to the rest of the routine. He heard Lucy throw open Tad’s door. Her words to her brother were excited, but Casper couldn’t make out what was being said. Tad, the oldest at twelve, was not as enthused as his youngest sister to be awakened at 7:14 A.M. Something soft thudded against the wall; Casper assumed it was a pillow. Next Lucy wound around to Beth’s room. Beth was ten, and though not a morning person, she handled her zealous sister with more diplomacy. Beth extended some kind of an invitation for Lucy stomped across the floor and jumped on Beth’s bed.

  In the midst of the commotion, Maggie Brown came into the kitchen in her crisp white nurse’s uniform. Casper smiled at her. She leaned down and pecked him on the lips, but he wasn’t about to let her off that easy. He gave her a kiss that he wouldn’t have dared in front of the children. She returned the passion, breaking the connection only when Lucy’s feet clapped on the stairs.

  A little fairy with blonde hair and blue eyes scampered into the kitchen, threw up her hands and yelled, “Daddy!” Casper opened his arms, she leapt into them, and though she weighed no more than a helium-infused feather, he playfully grunted as though she were a behemoth. She laughed while wiggling around dislodging a few more grunts.

  Maggie patted Lucy on the head. “Be gentle. Daddy’s old and brittle.”

  “Thanks a lot.” Casper kissed Lucy on the forehead then lowered her to the floor. “Bub and Sis up?”

  Lucy nodded. “Tad threw his pillow again and I didn’t even jump on him this time.”

  Casper shook his head. “What a grump.” She nodded then did a little dance around the table before finding her own seat.

  Maggie placed a bowl of psychedelic colored cereal in front of Lucy and she dove in like a starved beast. After a few bites she looked up and asked, “We’re going today, right, Daddy?”

  Casper shook his finger. “Not with your mouth full.”

  “It’s sunny today,” Lucy continued after swallowing. “Can we please go?”

  It was mid-April and in the one month they had lived in Shadeland it had rained almost non-stop, but this week had been sunny and warm. Casper had been promising to take the kids on a hike to the river for a little fishing, maybe a bit of early mushroom hunting.

  Casper looked out the window with mock-skepticism. “I don’t know. Do you think you deserve it?”

  “Of course I do. But not Tad.”

  Casper let out a short, full throated laugh. “Okay, we’ll go, but Tad has to come, too. Deal?”

  Lucy considered it for a moment. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Tad and Beth came down to the kitchen a few minutes later looking as if they belonged in a George Romero movie. Maggie kissed them both in turn. They merely nodded.

  Casper sat his newspaper aside. “Y’all ready for a hike today?”

  Beth nodded, but Tad said, “No.”

  “Too bad,” Lucy said, her mouth full again, “cause we’re goin’.”

  Tad scowled at his youngest sister. “Where are we going?”

  “I was thinking we could hike on down to Rogers River,” Casper said. “I hear there is a pretty neat spot on the way. A strip of pine trees.”

  Beth looked up in shock. “The Pine Belt? We can’t go there. That place is haunted.”

  Casper smiled. “Who told you that?”

  Beth shot her mother a nervous glance. “Ms. Reid.”

  Maggie’s jaw clenched at the mention of their across the street neighbor. “What did she tell you?”

  “That it’s a place for ghosts,” Beth said after a brief hesitation. “She said bad things happen to people that go there.”

  Tad rolled his eyes. “You can’t believe her. She’s a crazy old bat. I bet she has a thousand cats living in her house.”

  Maggie tapped him on the back of the head. “You shouldn’t talk about people like that. Just the same, she shouldn’t be trying to scare children. Maybe I’ll go have a talk with her sometime soon.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Casper said. “We’ve only spoken to the woman once, and you remember how well that went.”

  A faint flush nestled in Maggie’s cheeks. “Well, I don’t want you kids going near her anymore. Just stay on our side of the street.” She turned to Casper. “And remember, these are your children, not your soldiers. You don’t need to take them on a ten mile excursion.”

  “Shoot, I was planning double that,” he said with a smile.

  Beth poked at her breakfast. “I still don’t want to go to The Pine Belt.”

  “We’re just gonna pass through the narrow part,” Casper said. “I promise, nothing bad will happen.”

  * * *

  After breakfast the kids went upstairs to get ready for the hike. Casper walked Maggie to the garage. She got in the Jeep Wrangler, leaving him the Navigator since he was spending the day with the kids.

  “I’m sorry I can’t join you guys,” she said. “I just need to get some more time in to get adjusted. I wouldn’t be a very effective instructor if I didn’t know my way around the hospital.”

  Casper gave her another kiss that he felt in his hips. He waved and watched as she backed out of the garage, turned down the circle roundabout, and drove down the long gravel driveway. As she turned onto the main road, Casper spotted their neighbor across the street, Rebecca Reid, watching them from her front porch. Normally he would have waved, but his first encounter with her still left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  Casper went back into the house to check on the kid’s progress. Lucy and Beth were ready, but Tad was less than jazzed about hiking. His preferred method of exercise was texting, surfing the net, or playing Xbox. To be fair, the boy did like sports. He was no slouch when it came to soccer or basketball. He was just in that stage when anything “family” was lame and embarrassing.

  Casper went into his office to wait. On the first floor, down the hall from his and Maggie’s bedroom, was the small room where he did his work. Although, since retiring from the Marines, to call what he did “work” was laughable. A deep cherry, handmade roll-top desk stood against the inside wall. The only thing showing was a small laptop. All papers and accessories were in their place, stored in cabinets or drawers. A plush black leather couch lounged beneath the room’s one window. A series of three built-in bookshelves, side by side, spanning wall to wall, and floor to ceiling, stood at the back of the room. Casper stood in front of the center bookshelf with his hands resting on the third level down from the top—the one just at his eye level—looking at the books as if interested, but really staring through them.

  “We’re ready,” Lucy said from behind him, and he flinched away from the shelf as if it were hot. He
turned to the beautiful pixie floating in the doorway, dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt with a glittery kitten on the front. He hadn’t heard her sneak up behind him. This wasn’t good. Either he was losing his edge, or the girl had inherited her father’s surreptitious nature. Neither was a very encouraging thought. “You ready?” she asked when he didn’t reply.

  Casper held his hands out and turned in circle showcasing his own raggedy cargo shorts and flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Sure am, darl’n. All I need is my boots and hat.”

  She giggled. “Not that silly hat. It makes you look like an old fisherman.”

  “It keeps the sun off of my face and neck. Besides, I am an old fisherman.” He hunched over and twisted his hands into hooks, then hobbled toward her while curling his lips to appear toothless. Lucy squealed at a pitch that would make a dolphin cringe then ran out of the room.

  Casper led his children across the back lawn toward the metal pole barn that served as extra storage. It was now a bit after nine and the sun was strong and bright, chasing away the few wispy clouds that dared to show themselves. The grass was a thick carpet of green that could rival any golf course. A bright red cardinal chased his more modestly colored mate. The air smelled of sassafras and wild dogwood blooms. They passed the pole barn and crossed the three acres of open ground, stopping on the edge of the forest.

  Tad sighed. “Isn’t it kind of stupid hiking on our own property?”

  “We own a lot of property and most of it is wooded,” Casper answered. “It’s good to know the lay of your own land. It’s very easy to lose your way in the thick of the trees.”

  Tad didn’t look convinced. “My iPhone has GPS. I can always use—” He halted at his father’s cold stare. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But what if the technology fails? I get it.”

  “I hope so.” Casper tried to filter the harshness out of his voice. “We’re going to go a bit off property. There is supposed to be a quarry-pond somewhere past our land. Then we’ll see if we can find Rogers River.”

  A tiny foot path cracked the forest at the rear of the open yard. Despite the abundant rain and the warmer-than-usual temperatures, the canopy of leaves was still not fully formed. The slower growing trees, like the oaks and maples, were just starting to bud out. Golden beams connected Heaven to Earth and gave the forest the surreal texture of a Thomas Kincaid painting. The underbrush was light, and the ground was still carpeted with last autumn’s dead foliage.

  Casper used a long, thin branch to push aside the mayflowers and ground ferns. He told Lucy that he was looking for mushrooms, but it was the copperheads and timber rattlers that were just starting to awake that he searched for.

  After a bit, the thin path led to an opening in the forest. A small plain of tall grass was choked by a thick scree of broken limestone that bordered the banks of a large rectangular hole cut in the earth and filled with rippling blue-green water. At the far side of this quarry-pond, a small mountain of discarded and loosely stacked limestone slabs blended into the rolling hills of the forest. At the top of the stack a large opening looked down upon them like a dark eye.

  Tad shielded his eyes from the sun. “Is that a cave?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Can we climb up and see?”

  Casper had had his fair share of crawling around in caves overseas and had lost his taste for it long ago. “No, not today. It could be dangerous.”

  Tad kicked at a loose stone. “C’mon. You’re the one that drug us out here, now you won’t let us have any fun.”

  “Those blocks don’t look too stable. If one tilted over, it’d splatter you like a bug. Besides, we didn’t bring the right equipment. I promise we’ll come back sometime with rope and flashlights and we’ll see what’s inside. Today we’re hiking.”

  Casper was thankful Tad didn’t argue. Maybe it was just bad memories, or maybe being retired was already causing him to be over cautious. Either way, he didn’t like the look of that cave.

  A short time later they came to a place where the deciduous trees and evergreens stood against each other as if they were going to war. The locals in Shadeland called this place The Pine Belt. This local relic consisted of a strip of pine trees four miles long and half a mile wide that squiggled through the forest like a dark snake hunting shallow waters. Folk lore, legend, and one too many old-wives’-tales had branded The Pine Belt haunted or cursed. Casper Brown didn’t buy into such nonsense.

  “Dad, I’m scared.” Beth’s voice trembled just a bit. Tad’s silence spoke volumes about his own fears.

  Casper eyed their surroundings. The tall pines with their evergreen needles squeezed the potency out of the sunlight, leaving all in constant twilight. There was a hush to the place—like the reverence of a cemetery—that even the animals respected. The ground was bare and yellow, suffocated by a thick carpet of discarded needles. The tall thin trunks stood like totems to some lost god, spaced in a way that conveyed a vast openness while somehow crippling you with claustrophobia. The air was chilly and damp, and though it never appeared, Casper kept expecting to see his breath plume up before his face.

  He could see why the local residents had spun ghost stories about this place. The atmosphere had a way of dulling your senses. Hypnotizing you. Casper had a sudden urge to walk further in and take a nap upon the carpet of needles.

  The sound of the river brought him out of this stupor. He blinked away a bad case of dry-eyes and he wondered just how long he’d be staring off. Tad and Beth both stood still, passive and starry eyed. Only Lucy seemed unaffected. She gazed up at her father and siblings, not with fear or concern, but with a child’s fascination.

  “Did you hear it, Daddy?” Her soft voice brought Beth and Tad from their stupor.

  “Hear what, darl’n?” he asked, assuming she meant the babbling river.

  “The screaming man.” She offered no elaboration.

  Casper traded looks with his elder two children. “What screaming man?”

  Lucy merely shrugged.

  “You guys hear anything?” Tad and Beth shook no, but each had the look of a displaced memory etched into their faces.

  After a few moments of listening to the silence Casper finally said, “Come on. Let’s go find that river.”

  The pine-needle carpet seemed unnaturally thick and spongy, growing more gelatinous the closer they drew to the center of the half mile trek. There was a moment or two when Casper feared they would stumble across a patch of quicksand or an imploding sinkhole. But then the ground began to firm and soon they were past The Pine Belt. Stepping into the deciduous trees felt like a pardon from torture. They made an almost simultaneous sigh, as though a cool breeze had reprieved them from an unbearable heat.

  When we come back I’ll lead them down river, Casper thought. Walk them past and around the pines. He was not a superstitious man, but his instincts were too highly honed to mistrust. There was something wrong with this little patch of forest.

  * * *

  The sound of rushing water grew louder with every step. The rain from a super-wet spring had swelled Rogers River into a riot of rowdy brawlers. The deep blue water rolled high up the banks, soaking in among the cattails and crownvetch. Swirling eddies frothed in the crooks of fallen trees. Sunlight danced upon the surface, breaking into millions of resplendent stars.

  Tad started forward, but Casper stopped him. “Not here.”

  “Why not?”

  Casper searched the ground around his feet, located a chunk of broken branch three feet long and as thick as his wrist. He hauled back and sent the wood cartwheeling into the water. The branch no sooner hit the edge of the river when it disappeared under the surface. It happened so fast it seemed to be an illusion. Twenty yards down river the branch popped up, skipping over the top of the water for a moment, before continuing on like a bullet-train.

  “That’s some rough water,” Casper said. “All it has to do is lift your feet an inch and then . . .” He pointed at the branch. “Let’s fin
d a place a bit shallower and a lot calmer.”

  He led the kids parallel to the river keeping them at a safe distance from the current. The walking proved to be difficult. They frequently came across miry places that they had to circumvent. The hike was taking more out of them than he had expected and soon he had to carry an exhausted Lucy on his shoulders.

  Old Mill Road—a county road not much better than dirt—crossed Rogers River by way of an ancient one-lane stone bridge. They stopped to rest in the shadow of the bridge. The day was by no means hot, but it still felt nice to lean against the cool limestone of the bridge’s support buttress. They stood in the shade, Beth and Lucy giggling about something, Tad complaining that he was tired and wanted to go home. The conversations dwindled as the clear spring air brought a peculiar sound to them.

  At first it sounded like distant fireworks, firecrackers perhaps, randomly popping. The noise grew steadily louder, reminding them of an unskilled musician playing the drums. Onward it came, and Casper realized it was a sputtering engine.

  The sputtering engine came up fast and screeched to a stop just above their heads. Casper stepped from the shade and peered upward. He could see the cab of an old truck, though what year and make, he was unsure. The paint was baby blue. Just over the asthmatic cough of the truck’s engine he thought he heard the sound of a siren.

  A hand extended from the window gripping a burlap sack tied with twine at the top. The hand hesitated for a moment, as if the owner was waiting for the right moment, then it released the sack. The engine gave guttural roar then sped off as the sack splashed into the river.

  “Oh my God!” Beth screamed. “Daddy, there’s something in the bag.”

  The burlap sack was still above the surface for the moment and picking up speed. The bag writhed as something within fought for its life. The pathetic whimpering and squeals from within the sack was heartrending.

  Perhaps it was his many years of training that taught him to react without hesitation, or maybe it was the horror in the eyes of his children. Whatever the case, Casper took three large steps and jumped into the swollen river like a torpedo. Only then did he recall his warning to Tad.