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Welcome to the Wordsushi.com FREE SUMMER READING program. Because I love entertaining y’all, I’ve decided to post the text of SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS online in serialized form because what could be better than to escape into a horror thriller for your summer reading fun.

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In short, and not to give too much away, SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS is about an ex-soldier who wakes up in his jail cell on the day of his hanging to find everyone dead around him. What he discovers will take him on a journey to find out exactly who he really is. The prologue, takes place about 150 years before the events of Badlands. Let’s just call it an important teaser, if you will.

If you like the prologue to SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS, (or find any typos!) please leave a comment or two.But without further adieu, let your summer reading commence!

SHADOW FALLS: BADLANDS

PROLOGUE

It was the year of the Lord, sixteen hundred and ninety-two on the ninth of August, on which the brig Majestyk docked in the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, having made the crossing from Portsmouth just over a fortnight past due. Those who had made the journey had learned the hard way how coming to the New World would be more difficult than anyone could imagine. The crossing had been marked with hard work, plain food, and seas which at times had nary a want for them to pass.

It had also been marked with death.

Of the 51 men, women and children making the voyage, only 43 would leave the boat, the other eight having had their bodies committed to the sea once the mortal coil had left behind nothing but the husks of their former selves.

Two had been brothers—elderly gentlemen of great wealth who had attempted the trip despite the protests of friends and loved ones back home who warned both that they were too frail for such an undertaking. After the first brother’s passing during their initial month at sea, the second, older brother fell violently ill. Some supposed it was out of grief for his sibling. He never recovered, lasting only a scant few days before himself succumbing to natural causes. It was during this time that young master Miles Lawton, age ten, on board the Majestyk with his parents, his older brother Thomas and baby sister, Alyson, realized there was only one thing he feared more than dying.

While his mother Corrine volunteered to bring water below to the moribund elderly man, it was Miles who followed her into the hold where the man lay breathing his last. Back in Portsmouth, Corrine Lawton had been a nurse for a period of time before her children were born. Aside from the Majestyk’s Captain, whose idea of treating an open wound included a sharp rub of gunpowder, Corinne Lawton was the only qualified caregiver on board. Though in this case, as in most life-threatening conditions while crossing open ocean for weeks at a time, treatment consisted of little more than offering comfort, blankets, and muted prayer.

The other five men and women, and one child—a girl no more than three years old—their deaths had not been so simple to explain but as Miles would later learn, they were no less mysterious.

Before disembarking from the Majestyk, Miles’ father, William Lawton, donned his familiar frock-coat, silk cap, and kid gloves while his mother and sister both wore dresses they had carefully kept in storage during the entire voyage. They ventured from the lower harbor into the town of Duxbury where a hot meal on land awaited. As the children sat for their supper, they all bowed their heads in silent prayer for on the morrow they and the other travellers of the Majestyk would head North towards the land they were to settle. To the promise of new lives.

In the dark that night, as Miles and Thomas shared a bed in the inn above the city’s finest tavern, it was the older of the two brothers who recounted the screaming death of the old man on the ship. It was enough to cause Miles a sleepless night of gazing at the ceiling in the dark instead of enjoying finally being in a bed that did not pitch from side to side all night long.

The next week was as difficult as any of the worst days at sea. From Duxbury, fourteen covered wagons filled with supplies and people ventured away from civilization into territories as yet uncharted by Western man. It was William Lawton who had led this group, for he had negotiated the land purchase based upon a map brought back to England by some trappers who had made their own fortune in the New Country. The parcel they were headed toward had not been settled by anyone and, given its location near a lake and what had been described to him as “virgin soil fertile enough to grow trees a thousand feet high”, there could not be a better spot to begin a town based upon freedom from the religious persecution they had suffered back home.

Or so they believed.

That night, Thomas came to Miles as the young boy was gathering twigs and sticks to be used as kindling. Thomas had something he wanted to tell, but the younger brother had been too excited that he blurted out a secret of his own.

According to Miles, the local guide who spent his days on his horse riding ahead of the party, and his nights by himself sleeping near a campfire with a rifle close at hand, had a deformity. It was Miles who recoiled once from the guide’s stare, for the man had one eye, which normally was hidden under a leather patch, but for this moment was in plain sight. In the place where Miles had expected to see an eyeball was an empty socket, the flesh around it was gnarled and scarred. Miles quickly turned away, too frightened to even speak. It was two full days before he could even muster the courage to mention it to his brother.

“Mayhap it was an Indian that done it?” was Thomas’ reply. It then became Thomas’ sole mission to himself see this injury. The next day, during a brief respite for the sake of the horses, Thomas saw the guide nearby drinking from a canteen. Carefully, he approached from the side desiring a clandestine look, but the guide lowered his canteen and turned away. Thomas approached slowly, taking one step before the guide turned toward him, his patch lowered over the eye in question, and stared back at Thomas.

“Best keep near the wagons, boy,” barked the guide. ”There are things in these woods that you might not want to meet face to face.” The guide let out a harsh laugh, one that Thomas didn’t find amusing at all. He decided seeing the guide’s deformity wasn’t worth being close to that man anymore.

On the second week of the trip, the party stopped for the night in a green valley. Two of the men, ardent hunters, were able to catch and slaughter deer for a stew. It was this evening that William and two other men went to the guide and soon after a heated argument broke out. It was Corrine who kept her children back, far enough away as to not be able to clearly hear what was being said, but not before Miles was able to understand the gist of his father’s concern.

The guide had taken them away from their intended route; a long ways away from their destination. And though he told no one, William Lawton was going to compel the guide to take them to where they needed to go no matter what he had to do to the man to make it happen.

The voices of the men rose higher as tempers flared. It was true. William Lawton was accusing the guide of misdirecting the party. According to his own map, they were several days off course.

“Ye do not know these lands,” intoned the guide. He tried to explain his rationale for the detour but the men of the party wanted nothing of it. Their journey, which had been delayed at nearly every juncture, would not be delayed any further. The path on which the guide was taking them mysteriously went around a wooded valley instead of through it. A valley which, as far as anyone could figure, would provide easy crossing, fair shelter, and abundant natural resources and game.

As the guide lowered his voice to a hush he explained again the words William Lawton refused to believe.

This was not land one wanted to cross, not at any time during the day or night. True, it was a valley abundant with lush green but his years of trapping and hunting these parts taught him to avoid the areas that the Indians themselves avoided. These were people of the Earth. They communed with its spirits and lived in concert with the animals who roamed the land. If an Indian refused to go somewhere because he or she believed it to be bad ground, it was best to do the same.     But William Lawton insisted they be taken through the valley. Summer was nearly over and there were still many preparations that would have to be made before winter set in. Houses to be built, larders to be filled with game. Time was not a luxury they could afford to waste anymore. Again, the guide refused.

“I shan’t do it,” he said.

In the morning, the party woke to find the guide gone and William Lawton was forced to tell the others the man, obviously a charlatan, had lit off in the dead of night. By the guide’s normal campfire was the satchel containing the silver pieces which Lawton himself had paid the man back in Duxbury.

“We shall continue on our own,” William told the others. The map he’d carried all the way from England proved accurate so far so there was reason to believe their destination did not lay just on the other side of the valley.

That morning they descended below the rim. William told the others he thought the guide a fool. Another man was convinced the one-eyed guide had been a drunkard though no one ever recalled seeing him take a single drop of whiskey or wine. That first day they made a fair amount of distance from their previous night’s camp. Come evening, as the wagon train came to a halt, two of the men who had spotted ruffed grouse a few miles back turned on horseback with guns. One of the men kissed his wife and promised her fresh fowl for dinner.

By nightfall, neither of the two men had returned.

Their families grew concerned as the hours passed.  Several others volunteered to go searching for the two lost men.

“No,” William told them. A night with no moon was not one to go on a search party. “We can’t afford to have more men go lost.”

He reassured the others the two men had just gotten misdirected. With the sun down from the sky, it would be difficult to know which way you were headed. Lawton said he knew these men. They were smart enough to stay in one place until sunrise when they would be able to find their way back to camp where a good ribbing by all awaited.

The disappearance of the two men was the talk of the entire camp though kept in hushed tones. It was Corrine who forbade her boys to speak of it at all, which is why Thomas quietly turned to Miles in the night as the two boys pretended to be sleeping.

“I never told you what I saw back on the ship,” his voice trembled as he whispered into Miles’ ear. “But I must because though I try to remember, it is like this memory wants to evaporate from my brain like morning dew drops. If I don’t tell you, I fear I may forget entirely.”

Several nights after the eldest of the two old men died on board the Majestyk, Thomas had awoken in the middle of the night with an urgent need to relieve himself. From his berth he crawled out and carefully felt a path toward the gangway to the upper deck. It was not uncommon for any of the men on ship to urinate overboard, always taking care to be both on the leeward side away from the wind and out of view of female folk. Thomas relished this as being the only good thing about life aboard a ship, the ability to pee freely into the sea As Thomas settled at the stern rail, hidden behind several casks of fresh water, about to do his business, he froze. Several yards away was his father, pushing a young woman over the starboard side rail. The woman appeared not to protest or even move and fell like a lifeless doll into the darkness of the water below. Struck with fear, Thomas crouched behind the large barrel and watched as his father looked around and descended back below deck, wiping his hands on his coat as if dirty.

Thomas’ voice hitched. His body was shaking. With both hands he clutched Miles’ arm, digging his nails into his brother’s skin. “I think father killed her.”

Miles froze as if dumbstruck, then began battering Thomas with blows from his tiny fists.

“Take that back!”

Thomas grabbed the younger boy’s wrists. “Shhhhhh,” he hissed quickly.

“You lie.”

“Why would I lie?“Have I ever lied to you?”

It was a question Miles had only one response to: No. His brother had always been truthful with him. Not once had he ever told a fib to Miles. His brother had always been a very serious boy, a fact not lost on anyone in the family. And now, with something as grave as two men missing, their families worried. And with the deaths of several passengers aboard the Majestyk, this was not the time to think Thomas had changed his ways.

“How do you know it was father?” Miles asked, growing scared. “It could have been one of the sailors who pushed that woman overboard.”

Thomas shook his head. Everyone on board was quite familiar with the attire of the ship’s crew: loose duck trousers, checked shirts and tarpaulin hats. Their father, with his frock coat, would have borne a completely different silhouette than your average jack tar sailor.

“For what reason would he have to cause them harm?” Miles asked, his voice raising too much, causing Thomas to react as if struck.

“Boys!” A voice growled. It was their father. “Get to sleep.” William had been only a few feet away, cradling a gun in the crook of his arm. He waited until Thomas had lain back down and closed his eyes before turning away. A closer look would have revealed Thomas’ body trembling in fear, wondering just how much his father had heard after all.

By daybreak the two missing men had not yet returned to camp and William organized a search party consisting of himself and three other men. Taking four of their best horses, they set out back through the valley in the direction the others had vanished. William promised they would find the missing men.

They didn’t have to look very long.

No more than a mile from camp, they came across the first man. Initially, he appeared to be standing in a hole up to his chest, slumped over onto the dirt, fast asleep. It wasn’t until the search party got closer that one of the men on horseback realized there had been no hole. The missing man, a young carpenter who had come over to the New World with his young wife, had been literally cut in half, his body shredded at mid-chest. Trailing behind what was left of the man’s upper half were entrails and blood. Quite a lot of blood.

“Looks as if he was dragged.” One of the men pointed. It indeed did and all eyes followed the line of ground-soaked blood toward the bramble where it disappeared.

“We must look for the other man—” William cut himself off in mid sentence. A crackling sound had come from the thicket. It was a sound a hunter would never mistake for anything else: a footstep.

Quickly, the men of the search party dismounted. William drew a musket pistol from his belt and put a finger to his lips. An older man to his left cocked his head to the side and sniffed the air. It was there in the breeze something bad, coming from the bramble ahead. At his feet, William could see the trail of the dead man’s blood was going to lead them to whatever was hiding in the thicket. With a slight movement of his hand, William gestured for them to proceed quietly. As he stepped closer he could hear it, a growling, feral and unafraid. The gun, which had been loaded and primed back at camp, came up to his shoulder as William thumbed back the hammer.

The older man to his left nodded. He would flush whatever it was out of hiding. “Yah! Yah!” he yelled, waving his arms.

From the bramble it came, baring teeth, the throaty growl blaring from its mouth making no mistake of its intention. The older man recoiled but it was no use. The beast’s bloodshot eyes locked upon its prey as it launched from its rear haunches into the air.

Blam! The shot from the musket found its mark in the skull of the beast and it dropped like a stone onto the dirt, its shattered head lolling backwards.

The older man turned, his face ashen. “Good Lord!” His hands shook furiously, then he turned, stumbled against a tree and threw up his breakfast onto the ground.

One of the other men approached the prone lump of black fur on the ground. The great beast was no bigger than a large dog.

“Don’t touch it!” William commanded him. He approached slowly and poked it with the barrel of his musket.

“Nice shot, William,” the young man said to him.

The fourth man in the party looked at the dead beast. “What is it?”

“Wolf,” William said. “We must have surprised it.”

“William!” The older man was calling to them. The others rushed to the sound of his voice. He pointed. In a pile next to his sick on the ground, was what was unmistakable. “It’s… it’s a leg.”

It was obvious to all the leg belonged to the dead man they had found on the path. Upon further inspection, it was also obvious the wolf had been chewing on what was left of it. Talk turned to the one man still missing. The consensus was that wolves may have gotten the first man but it left the question of what had happened to the second man and even the horses since there appeared no sign of either.

“I am no expert,” the older man said, pointing to the upper half of the dead man’s torso still on the path. “But I have never heard of wolves doing that.”

They knew back at camp the mood was somber. It was agreed by the men of the search party that William would inform the wife of the man they had found of his demise but not of their suspicions of how he had died. “‘Tis best not to alarm the women and children,” he said. The others knew he was right. The second man, William would say, was still missing and he hoped the others would pray for his safe return. He knew different though. The second man was not coming back either and the longer they stayed, the more chance there was that whatever was out there might decide to come calling again. That night, Miles slept poorly, thinking of the dead man in the woods somewhere in the darkness. At one point the exhaustion overcame him and his eyes finally closed, only to be jarred out of slumber by the feeling of something hovering over him.

Breathless, he opened his eyes… his heart pounding. Before he could make a sound, a hand clamped over his mouth. Leaning over him was his father. William Lawton brought his mouth to Miles’ ear and whispered:

“Listen to every word I tell you and don’t make a sound or you will perish tonight like the others.”

Miles was so struck with fear that he couldn’t even blink.

The boy nodded as his father continued to whisper to him. What was being said seemed impossible but this was his father speaking. Miles glanced over toward his brother but Thomas was fast asleep. As far as he could tell his mother and baby sister Alyson were inside the wagon as usual in perfect slumber. There was nobody watching them. Miles considered what Thomas had told him, the story of his father tossing the woman overboard back on the boat. He refused to believe it at the time but the things his father was now telling him, well, they amounted to murder.

His own father, a killer.

“Please, Miles, you must trust me,” William said. “There are lives in great peril. You must get dressed now. I will explain more as we walk.”

Miles wanted to scream. To warn the others. His father had become, at what point he wasn’t sure, a complete and raving lunatic. It was his father’s hand on his shoulder, the hand of a disciplinarian, that prevented him from doing so. If he screamed he was sure his father would kill him as well. In the dark, he slipped on his clothes, hoping, praying that his brother would wake up and see him but Thomas lay still.

“We must go. Hurry!” his father whispered.

And under the cloak of night, with only the sounds of the valley and woods around them, Miles and William Lawton crept off into the darkness. At the edge of camp, Miles turned to look back at his brother. It would be the last time he would see Thomas as he remembered him.

Miles decided that once in the woods he would flee from his father under the cover of darkness but as they ventured further down the trail he became aware of sounds coming from the woods and brush around them. Noises. Scurrying. Breathing. Footsteps padding just outside of the arc of firelight from the torch his father carried. The journey the past couple of weeks, sleeping outside, had rendered his ears accustomed to the noises of the great outdoors, especially those after sundown—crickets, owls, the occasional bump in the night—but this was different. With every step the noises grew louder, a symphony of movement unseen, until the sound grew so great Miles thought he would surely go mad.

In the darkness ahead, Miles would see small glints of light appearing briefly, then disappearing.

‘Tis nothing but fireflies, he thought. But part of him knew better. The glints in the darkness always appeared in horizontal pairs.

They were eyes.

Eyes staring back at him. Watching him. Sizing him up from somewhere in the dark.

Run! his brain commanded him, finally breaking through to his conscious mind. He pulled away from his father, about to bolt when the old man’s hand wrapped around the back of his neck, his father’s rough skin feeling hot as a flame against his soft, bare flesh.

“Do not pull away from me,” his father hissed. “You do not want truck of what is beyond this path.”

Miles’ eyes fell upon the pistol stuck through his father’s belt. William took his hand off the boy’s neck and put it back on the butt of the gun, as if ready to draw.

Miles fell back into step. He dared not disobey. If there was a chance to escape the clutches of his father, this was not it. Especially not with the gun at his old man’s side. He would wait and when the time came he would run as if being chased by lightning.

They walked down the path for what seemed like ages until coming to another clearing. Up ahead in the rim of dim light from his father’s torch, Miles could see something. It looked like…

A hand.

“Do not look,” his father said. It was impossible. Given the choice of looking out at the eyeballs glinting in the darkness or ahead on the path, Miles decided on the latter.

As they got closer, Miles gasped.

William attempted to shield him but there was no keeping the boy from seeing the man torn in half. The same man he himself had found earlier. William clamped his hand over the boy’s mouth.

“Do not scream,” he whispered. “If you must look, do not scream.”

The man, who Miles had remembered from the months they had all spent in close quarters together, did not resemble a human being anymore for his body had been mostly stripped of skin and flesh. From the man’s face came the grimace of bone and teeth.

“Animals,” William said, preempting Miles’ obvious question. “By the morrow there will hardly be anything left of him.”

“D-d-d-did we come to bury him?” Miles blurted out.

“No,” his father said and from the inside of his frock coat he drew a dagger.

Miles’ breath caught in his throat. He saw the blade and froze, expecting the next moment to be his last.

He’s going to kill me, Miles thought but instead of turning the blade on him, William crouched next to the dead man and cut a small lock of hair from what was left on his head.

“Hold this and follow me,” William said, handing Miles the torch. Carefully, he followed his father to the bramble a few feet away and that’s where he saw it.

Another man, naked, curled up on the ground and judging from the fact that half his head was missing, very dead.

“Animals didn’t do this,” Miles whispered.

“No,” William responded, crouching down next to the body of the naked man. “I did.”

A chill ran down Miles’ spine.

“This man attacked us earlier,” William said. “I had no choice.”

Miles looked down.

“He was one of us.”

“Was. Not any longer. He had turned. I’m positive he killed the other man.”

“I… I… I don’t believe you.” Miles was stunned. That he’d just said this to his father shocked even himself.

“Please, Miles. I don’t expect you to understand quite yet.” His father cut a lock from the body of the naked man as well. “Bring the torch over here.”

Miles did as told. He dared not disobey as long as his father still had that pistol.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim arc of light, William paced a circle once, then drew it in the dirt with his dagger the second time through. From there he drew several lines, crossing and connecting. Miles had seen this before, back home, but was always told by his mother he was too young to know of such things.

“It’s a pentagram,” William said, wiping the sweat from his brow. “Back home we were persecuted for our beliefs. Shunned, ridiculed, even murdered. This is why we came to the New World, Miles. To find a better place where we are free to practice our religion as we see fit.”

William positioned Miles in the middle of the pentagram.

“Be still,” he told the boy. “And watch.”

His father began by circling the pentagram.

“Some dare call us Pagans. Heretics. Worshippers of Darkness. Let them. From whence we came, it is the self-proclaimed duty of the self-righteous to judge us based upon the fact that our beliefs do not match theirs. We have chosen the master we wish to worship and it is He who has delivered us to this place. A place of our destiny but it is obvious that before we are to claim that which is ours, we will be tested first. Tested by the obstacles others choose to put in our path to challenge our faith. Tested by people who dare stand in our way. Like that one-eyed hoodlum who wanted to hold us up for more money and tried to scare us with tales of spooks and spirits. It was I, however, who had the last laugh on him. He will not be extorting monies from gullible travelers anymore. I made sure of that.”

Miles swallowed hard. He thought of the woman going overboard. He thought of the man lying dead with half his skull blown off.

“For years,  I have had visions of this place. Visions of what we will find here and before my very eyes, these visions have been true. Every last one of them.”

A sound started in William’s throat starting first as a low whisper then turning into a low growl—the chant coming from his mouth melting into words and phrases in a language Miles had never heard before. A language so guttural and primitive, yet at the same time hypnotic. William’s arms drew back and forth in a way that reminded Miles of the conductor of a small orchestra he had seen back in Portsmouth. Back then the conductor had been summoning music from the musicians, here his father was summoning, but what was anybody’s guess.

As the chanting grew louder and more intense, Miles looked up and saw that in place of his father’s eyes were now shocks of white. Miles couldn’t scream, he couldn’t move. It felt as if bands of iron had wrapped around his body. The terror inside him swelling to the point where he felt as if his sanity were being torn asunder from his very body.

William reached out and grabbed Miles’ wrist with one hand, raising the dagger in the other. With one quick stroke he sliced clean across the boy’s palm. Then, clutching it inside his own hand, balled them both into a fist and squeezed. Miles felt as if the bones in his hand would shatter, being crushed inside his father’s hand but instead blood poured out onto the ground as if he were juicing an orange. The blood, which pooled at Miles’ feet, quickly disappeared into the ground as if being sucked down like water into a drain. And as quickly as it started, William dropped Miles’ hand and it was over. The invisible bands holding Miles in place were gone and the boy, drained physically from the ritual, fell to the ground at his father’s feet.

“You are ready,” William said, catching his own breath. “To do that which needs to be done.”

In silence, they waited for sunrise to come. William mouthing some kind of unholy prayer to himself.  Miles had become too scared to even move, feeling as if something were sitting next to him, but anytime he’d look, there was nothing. It was a presence he could feel but not see. To Miles, there was something oddly comforting because he did not know anymore who his father was, though this presence next to him felt oddly familiar. At some point during the night exhaustion overwhelmed Miles and sleep enveloped him.

It was his father who shook him awake.

“Time to go,” William said. He didn’t even wait for Miles to get up before starting off down the path back towards camp.

Miles bolted to his feet, his limbs stiff from the way he had been sitting. He glanced down at his hands, looking for the deep cut his father had put there with his dagger but it was nowhere to be seen. His eyes darted from one hand to the other. Nothing. So certain he had been of the gash, his father squeezing his closed fist like…

“Miles, please hurry!” his father called out. Miles tried to remember what had indeed happened last night but the memory seemed foggy. He vaguely recalled what Thomas had said about how the things he’d seen on the boat evaporating from his mind like morning dew. Miles turned back to look at the spot where they had been and that’s when he saw it. In the woods, through the bramble and thicket, were eyes.

Hundreds upon hundreds of eyes, staring back at him from hiding. And those eyes seemed…

Hungry.

“It isn’t possible,” Miles whispered to himself but when he turned back the eyes were still there. Watching him.

Miles picked up the pace of his feet until he had caught up with his father, grasping William’s hand for comfort.

As they approached camp, Miles could see the clearing up ahead through the trees. The wagons were still circled in the same way they had always made camp. Miles wanted to run toward them, to his mother, brother, and baby sister.

“Wait,” his father said. “One thing I must tell you before we go back.”

Miles waited in anticipation. The evening had been long enough; he just wanted to be back at camp.

“You could say part of my vision for this new land and our future was drawn in blood.”

His heart beat faster. Miles didn’t like the sound of this.

“We live in a time of great peril,” William began. “War, pestilence, greed. We are at the verge of a great reckoning. Just because we walk on this ground now, does not mean we always shall for I have foreseen this with mine own mind’s eye. The evil of man, persecution, genocide, has pushed this world to the brink of Armageddon. The end of days will soon be upon us.”

Miles began shaking. His father had long ago abandoned the pulpit of the church in which he’d been a pastor. Miles had been three years old at the time and had barely a recollection of it, though at night, in secret, Thomas would talk about it on occasion. Their father had “lost his faith”, claiming he had seen the truth about his beliefs. Miles was beginning to think these visions he was just learning about consisted of what his father claimed to be “the truth”. He had become aware of the strange rituals he would sometimes secretly hear his mother and father performing late in the evening but chose to believe they were just things he was too young to understand. He thought of the secret moans and sounds coming from his parents’ room at night that he would often cover his ears not to hear.

“I did this for us, Miles,” his father said. “I brought us here to be with Him. To serve at His right hand when the day of reckoning arrives for this is the place from where He will emerge to reclaim the throne He was denied.”

Miles closed his eyes. In his mind was an image from an old church primer of his youth, a book that had been long banished from their house. The image, a horned beast trapped in a pit of flame, seemed to burn itself into Miles’ mind.

“I brought Him the sacrifice he wanted, Miles. I brought it to Him all the way here.”

His father turned his head and gestured toward the clearing. Toward the camp.

Pulling away from his father, Miles bolted down the path.

“Miles, come back here!” William shouted. “You’re not going to like what you find there.”

Miles ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet pumping against the hard dirt. His lungs burned but he kept running, finally breaking free into the clearing.

His heart felt like it was going to explode but he kept moving toward the wagons.

“Thomas!” he called out, gasping for breath. “Thomas! Mother!”

It was then that he saw the bodies.

Two of them on the ground, their limbs sprawled at unnatural angles. Miles approached, slowly, his whole body shaken. The man and woman on the ground had been torn apart by something, their bodies seemingly thrown to the ground as if they were nothing but rag dolls. Her clothing had been ripped apart, her skirt mercilessly dragged up over her face. The man next to her had no face to speak of, for the flesh had been torn off of it, His skeletal jaw hanging open in a never-ending silent scream.

Miles turned. “Thomas!” he yelled. “Mother!”

No sound greeted him in return. He turned past the first wagon and looked inside. The flies had begun to light already on the dead woman, landing on the bloody gash alongside her neck. In her arms she clutched what appeared to be a bundle wrapped in a blanket. Miles remembered these two as the woman who had given birth in their hometown just two months before they boarded the Majestyk.

Miles ran to the next wagon. He did not have to look inside to know what had happened. Dripping from between the wooden slats of the undercarriage was blood. He took two steps and found another man, laying face down, his legs severed above the knee exposing denuded bone. Miles knew without question, those legs had been chewed off.

And then behind him he heard a sound.

He spun to find the three coyotes gnawing the flesh of another dead body on the ground just under the next wagon. The scavengers were oblivious to Miles as he approached and when one of the coyotes looked up, exposing its victim, that’s when Miles saw it.

Thomas’ face.

Or, more accurately, what was left of it.

“No!” Miles screamed. “Noooo!” He ran toward the coyotes shrieking and waving his arms like a wild man to shoo them away. The beasts looked up and scattered, disappearing into the woods at full gallop. Miles fell to his knees next to his dead brother.

“Thomas! Thomas!” He grabbed his brother’s limp arm, his shirt torn and soaked with blood. At the end was a gnarled stump where Thomas’ hand had been chewed away.

The tears exploded from Miles as he clutched Thomas’s body to his, crying into the sky, sobbing hard to the point where he was no longer making any sounds, just deep hitching breaths.

“I’m sorry, Miles. ‘Tis the sacrifice we must make.” William’s voice came from behind him. Miles squeezed his eyes shut and held his brother’s lifeless body closer.

“Miles.”

William reached out to him but Miles pulled away, leaping to his feet, dropping Thomas’ body.

“Please, boy.”

Miles backed away from his father’s reach. He bumped into a wagon. Behind him, he heard a thud and a hand fell upon his shoulder. His head shot around to find the outstretched arm of his mother, barely recognizable with her lower jaw having been torn away, the rest of her face frozen in a grimace of agony. Still clutched to his mother’s breast was baby Alyson, a cry bursting from her tiny lungs.

“She’s alive,” Miles said, relief washing over him. “She’s alive.” He reached for her but his father grabbed him from behind and spun him around.

“Please understand, Miles.”

“You did this!” Miles sobbed. “You killed them all!”

“No. It was not my hand.”

“But you knew. You brought us here to be slaughtered!”

Baby Alyson’s cries cut through the air. Miles wanted to grab her and run but his father’s hands clutched his shoulders.

Miles could hear someone else sobbing from an adjacent wagon. A girl’s voice. Most likely the twelve-year-old daughter of fellow travelers whom Miles had barely spoken to during the entire journey.

“There are others still alive, we must help them,” Miles pleaded.

William reached down to the pistol by his side, drawing it from his belt.

“In this world we are the persecuted, in the next we will be one with His power. His time is coming, Miles. And when that day is upon us, it will change everything. We will rule by His side.”

“Whose side?”

“The Coyote.”

William stepped back from Miles. “I have known for a very long time of our family’s legacy and have tried to deny it, even trying to find refuge in God. But the truth cannot be hidden any longer. What God created is not worthy. Their time has passed. It’s time for the darkness to return to this world.”

William raised the gun. Miles wanted to run, but couldn’t.

“Close your eyes, Miles.”

“No.”

“Then keep them open.”

His father thumbed back the hammer on the pistol.

Miles’ voice trembled. “Y-y-you’re the Coyote.”

“No, my boy,” William said, a serene smile crossing his face. And that’s when Miles could feel the pain in his hand. He looked down and the gash his father had sliced with his dagger split open once again and began to bleed. And as the blood poured from the wound Miles could see a light inside, growing from a point into a glowing ball. The vision came to Miles, endless images flashing by his eyes as if time were rocketing past him while he was standing still. There was flame and smoke. An Earth scorched. The sky opening. A battle of darkness and light.

“I’m not the Coyote,” William said as he pressed the barrel to his own temple. “You are. And you will be victorious.”

And with a steady hand, he pulled the trigger.

*****

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