02 WHAT IS happening now?’ Jade asked, still crouching behind the same tree. ‘Where’s Tupper?’

‘Get going!’ Dayden yelled, hauling Jade to his feet and pushing him towards the drovers’ camp. ‘We don’t have time for this! Go, now!’

Dayden had to keep pushing Jade, not even worrying about the kid, who trailed behind them. The three cut through the chuupas that, now in the commotion of near-constant gunfire, were up and about. Dayden thought they looked on the verge of a stampede, but that was really the least of his problems right now. Some shit was going down at the camp, two dead drovers and a brythm down the track, and he was babysitting these two idiots.

‘Here,’ Dayden said, pushing Jade so hard he fell to his knees. ‘You stay here, watch the herd. Make sure they don’t stampede.’

‘Sta… stay? Here?’ Jade quaked, but Dayden didn’t answer.

Instead, he took off as fast as he could towards the drovers’ camp. He hoped the kid would stay with Jade and the herd, but he didn’t have the time or the energy to tell him to.

‘Light those barrels!’ came a yell from the camp as Dayden rushed from the bedding ground. ‘Hurry up!’

A fire was struck in one of the rusty barrels near a cluster of temporary metal tents, the warmth from it quickly felt. But the light emanating from the fire was most desired. Dayden looked towards it for a split-second, before running into something in front of him. He was knocked down into the cold snow with a jarring thud. His rifle fell from his hands, and the flood lamp cracked on his kneecap, shorting out.

‘Watch it!’

‘Sorry,’ he replied, getting up in a hurry. He grabbed his rifle up and hit the flood lamp, but it wouldn’t reactivate. ‘Shit.’

‘Sorry, man,’ said the man he ran into, a solid drover named Phol. ‘Where were you just now?’

‘Checked out the original gunshots, down a’ways,’ replied Dayden. ‘Thom and Tupper are dead, something got’em.’

‘Shit,’ Phol said, shocked. ‘What the hell’s going on, Dayden?’

‘Hell if I know. We’ve gotta get all those barrels fired up, get some light out here.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Spread the word, something’s out there. Make sure everyone you see’s armed.’

‘I gotcha.’

Dayden moved on, shaking his rifle and trying to reactivate the flood lamp. More spreads of red activated across the camp, more fires lit in the barrels scattered around the clusters of tents.

‘Get your lamp on, Dayden!’ someone called.

‘Shorted out!’ Dayden yelled back. I ain’t a rookie, asshole, he thought about yelling instead.

pop pop pop. pop pop pop

‘Get some drovers out to the herd!’

‘We don’t need a stampede!’

‘Watch the remuda, get to the brythm!’

Commotion and disarray blanketed the camp, the vast majority of these drovers green enough to not to have enough experience for when the shit hit the fan, and Dayden and the other drive veterans could only manage the impending flood of absolute disorganised panic for so long.

pop pop

Dayden slipped in some slushy snow near a fire barrel, recovering on one knee, when he heard what he thought was a scream from the far side of a tent cluster. He couldn’t be sure, maybe it was a popping of firewood in the barrel? A series of gunshots? Was it a scream, really? He headed towards where he thought the maybe-scream came from, rifle at the ready, eyes scanning the darkness.

There, another scream -- a scream for sure -- further off this time. He sidestepped around the tent cluster, about where the first scream had come from, and peered off into the distance. And he saw two orange harsh-environment gear piles in the snow, one nearly at his feet and the other a bit far off, nearly no firelight picking it out in the darkness.

‘No… please no.’

The one at his feet was face down, as he had found Tupper to be. Dayden refused to roll the drover over, he knew what he’d find, and he had no desire to see another of his friend’s throats sawed nearly straight through with some type of bonesaw.

The noises of the camp’s disarray seemed to be still in his ears as he backed away from the body, panic and adrenaline pumping through his body in equal amounts. When he made it back into the firelight, Dayden called out as loudly as he was able, ‘Two drovers down! Dead!’

Another scream from across the camp, too far away for him to get to, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to see another orange-clad body facedown in the snow.

A fire barrel went out in the corner of his eye.

‘Get that barrel relit!’ someone yelled, but Dayden found he suddenly could not move.

Another barrel went dark, another scream.

pop pop pop pop

Behind Dayden, he heard a faint sound, shuffling maybe, crunching.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

‘Wasn’t dead?’ Dayden asked himself aloud, disappointed in himself for not checking the drover. He turned towards the sound, silently cursing Phol for knocking him down and cracking his flood lamp inoperable.

As he turned his back towards the fire barrel near him, it suddenly went out, darkening the entire area in the vicinity around him. The wet, sopping sound of snow being dumped on the fire echoed in his ears.

Put out, he thought. Not went out.

Dayden stared into the darkness in front of him, panic overtaking his body. He felt now that he was, perhaps, a bit too hard on Jade in that moment of frustration on the rush back to the camp. Try as he might, he was having the hardest time raising his rifle to his shoulder and his body was shaking so badly, he doubted he would be able to shoot straight even if he could.

The snow falling was really pretty, he thought, the fat white flakes falling from the darkest purple sky he’d ever seen. At least it’s a pretty night to die, Dayden thought. He was shaking so badly now, it was as if he had the palsy; when the crunching snow came closer and closer, he could barely see the greyish-white form materialise out of the darkness because of the shakes.

Like a flash, it was on him, and all he could do was scream.

THE KID could hear the gunshots mixing with his fellow drovers’ screams of horror, but was too terrified to move any closer to camp. All he could do was dart his panicked stare from Jade next to him, the scared drover reeking of his now-piss soiled coveralls, to the camp, where he could see flashes of orangish light coming and going in a confusing rhythm.

‘Jade…’ whispered the kid, trying to get the other drover’s attention amongst the shuffling of chuupa. ‘Jade, what’re we gonna do?’

The older drover blinked absentmindedly at the kid, but it was clear to the younger man that Jade was not comprehending anything.

‘Dammit, Jade, what’re we supposed to do?’

pop pop pop, then a long silence.

It wasn’t until just after another drover’s bone-chilling scream that Jade looked towards the camp. ‘Go,’ he said, starting off towards the comotion.

‘What?’ the kid asked, not sure what Jade meant.

‘Get the hell outta here, kid,’ Jade continued. ‘You need to go, find someone who can help.’

‘What about you?’

‘I can’t hardly bring myself to stand, kid,’ Jade snorted. ‘You think I can walk in this cold however many kilometres it’s gonna take to find help?’

‘What makes you think I can?’

‘You’re young, you can make it.’

‘I don’t wanna go, Jade,’ said the kid, swallowing hard at the lump that was building in his throat. ‘I’m scared t’hell.’

Jade turned his head slightly to look at the kid, and in the distant firelight, the salty streaks of tears were evident on his face. ‘Yeah, kid, me too. You gotta.’

‘I don’t even know where to go,’ the kid said, panic building in his voice.

‘South, just go due south, you’ll run into one of them Rifle Patrol huts at some point. Tell’m what happened here.’

The kid watched Jade as he pulled the old slug revolver from the low-slung holster at his thigh and took a long, deep breath. The kid reached out for it, thinking Jade was handing it over to him for protection as he moved south, but Jade shook his head.

‘Get going, I’ll buy you some time kid,’ Jade said, waving the revolver at him. ‘If you’re smart, you’ll hit the remuda and grab a brythm. Go on kid, good luck.’

The kid stared at him for a moment or two, not believing what was going on.

‘You hear me, kid? Git!’

The kid stumbled away from Jade, slipping momentarily on a patch of snow-covered ice. He recovered and moved on, weaving between the warm chuupa, each of the beasts of burden more ready to stampede than the kid had ever seen them. He lost his balance crossing the beaten flat line-rider track on the farside of the chuupa’s bedingfield, catching a toe on a mound of ice, and fell face first down a slight decent close to the remuda.

He regained his footing after lifting his body out of a metre-and-a-half of snow, and moved on to the remuda… where he found the bodies of nearly thirty disassembled and thoroughly slaughtered brythm. The kid’s heart dropped into his gut, and panic started to take hold of him again.

One of the brythm bodies lay not too far away from where he stood, and, like some undead being, the kid shuffled his way over to it. It was eviscerated, torn to shreds and leaking litres of blood yet still. Like the one Thom had ridden, and died with, this brythm had its stomach sack and intestines shorn from its internal cavity and splayed across the snow, the warmth lessening from the offal. The kid, as if taken ahold by some invisible kinetic force emanating from the brythm, reached out to touch it -- when he heard the wet crunching just a few metres in front of him.

Down he dropped, nearly tucking himself into the warm cavity of the gutted brythm he had reached out for. The wet crunching sounded closer now, and the kid’s panic was rising to unparalleled heights. The crunching stopped suddenly, and a slopping, gulping sound began.

The kid gathered all his might, and he leaned ever so slightly until the very corner of his eye could see around the dead hunk of brythm enveloping him. There, across no more than a short two metres of barren snow, was a hunched being. At first, the kid thought this being was wearing a white coat of pelts, mottled and stitched together from a handful of white and grey furred animals, but the more the kid drew his eyes over this being, it was easier for him to see that the coat was in fact the creature’s own.

The kid gasped far more loudly than he intended, the noise naturally escaping his tight lips, and he quickly covered the agape mouth with both hands. As if the gasp was a shout in the dark, the being turned around to face the brythm the kid was hiding behind. Only for a split-second did the kid truly see what he was looking at before ducking fully back behind the brythm, but that split-second was more than enough to sear the image into his memory -- the being was long of face, with high and piercing black eyes, all of which was a shining, penetrating black filling the entire eye socket. Its distinctively animalistic face was covered in thick, shaggy fur the same colour of its coat, and great long hair forming a beard hung from its chin. Upon the crest of its forehead jutted two gnarled and dangerous-looking horns, while its back legs, legs it was then starting to stand tall upon, were unguligrade and bladelike, and the legs ended in harshly cloven hooves. Its torso was thick and powerful looking and tapered to a thin, svelte waist; all was covered in steaming blood.

One step towards the kid, then another; the creature shambled as if frozen and reanimated. This creature was just about upon the brythm the kid hid behind, when a flare shot straight up into the air from close… from the chuupa bedding grounds.

Jade!

The creature followed the flare’s ascent into the dark purple of the night sky, when the distinctive pop pop pop of a slug revolver went off.

And then the stampede began.

Chuupa crashed down the slide of ice the kid had fallen down not more than three minutes before, the shaggy beasts fighting each other for footing on the snow as they ran full speed into the remuda of now-slaughtered brythm. The dead steed the kid hid inside was half-trampled by some chuupa, the cattle-beasts running over the thick, green-furred tail and pummeling it into the snowy ground.

The kid took advantage of the commotion of the chuupa stampede, and ran from his hiding place southward. He slid down yet another drop of ice, this time seeing it as he ran close, and didn’t stop to turn and look behind.

Run he told himself. Run, because your life depends on it, and because Jade died in a stampede to give you a chance.