Along a stretch of straight highway deep in the Missouri Ozarks, Ryan Gurley’s car suddenly died. There was no smoke or burst tires. The old sedan just coasted to a stop in spite of Ryan’s continued pressure on the gas pedal. On any other day, he might have considered himself lucky to have made it so close to his destination. But not this day. Today, Ryan knew that this twist of fate would cost him his job. Worse, it would cost him his freedom.

              After twisting the key in the ignition and getting no response and then saying several 4-letter prayers, he slammed his hands down on the wheel and breathed out a single choked sob. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up high, cranking at the window handle with his other hand. He stuck the “refurbished, condition: fair” device out into the humid morning air. No signal.

              “No shit,” he said and dropped the useless hunk of plastic in the center console. Post cards rarely do the Ozark scenery justice. They also fail to mention the non-existent cell service. He may as well have been on the moon.

              With nothing to be done for it, he rolled the window up, got out, stretched, and closed the door with more force than was strictly necessary. He had been driving for about 10 minutes. That left him halfway between home and work. He could turn and walk back, use his neighbor’s phone, and hope like hell that his boss would be patient with him one last time as he worked out a ride.

              Or he could hoof it the rest of the way to work. Without a map or GPS, he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he could cut through the woods to his right and get to work less than half an hour late. That was if his guess was correct and if he didn’t get mauled by a mountain lion or a bear on the way through the treacherous terrain.

As if on cue, a great roar sounded from somewhere in the woods behind him. He spun, trying to gauge how far away the mountain cat was. A useless exercise. The topography made judging such things nearly impossible out there. Regardless, he was still staring into the dense vegetation whenever the cry came again. He stood stock still, not even breathing.

It is fairly well-known that mountain lions sound like screaming people. Having grown up two towns away, Ryan was quite aware of that. So, as unnerving as the cry was, the sound was no shock. Except—

“Help!”

Eyes bugging out in disbelief, suddenly, he was moving. Staring over his shoulder, he wrenched at the door handle. He may be a felon, forbidden by law to own a firearm, but that didn’t stop him from carrying a large-bladed knife and a small-caliber pistol with him anytime he travelled those treacherous ways. Only a fool would go without. Problem was, he had locked himself out.

“Shit!” He yanked at the handle as if his will alone could open the door. It didn’t. The blood-curdling cry came again. There was no mistaking it. A human throat was making that awful noise.

He turned, cupping his hands around his mouth and cried out in futility. “Hey!”

It was then that he noticed the stillness. Every creature within earshot had fallen utterly silent. The forest had gone quiet, listening just as he was to the sound of the violent death of an apex predator. The cry came again, even more anguished now. He didn’t think that was possible, but there it was.

Frantic, unthinking, he snatched a stone from the side of the road and used it to bash in one of the car windows. Moments later, he was leaping old, barbed wire fences and sprinting toward the cries for help, his long legs chewing up the distance in great strides, a .22 pistol in one hand, a gleaming 6-inch blade in the other.

Between one hollow and the next, at the peak of a stony rise, he heard something else. Not a scream this time, but moans. A man’s moans. Something about the sounds left his ears feeling slick with grime, like he’d stuck his head in a septic tank; like the entire world was full of sewage. The origin was somewhere to his left and behind him. He had accidentally skirted around the source and passed it.

Without much thought at all, Ryan slid his way down the rocky slope of the hollow, skinning up his left leg through his jeans as he did. He didn’t notice even as the blood began to trickle into his sock. At last, he swung around an old cedar and tripped over something meaty, nearly falling but catching himself on an old oak.

In the dim light diffusing through the canopy overhead, he could barely make out the form. As his eyes adjusted, he wished it was darker. It was a pale woman, naked from the waist up, pants pulled down past her knees. She scrabbled feebly, jerkily in the gloom, not unlike a deer that had been hit by a car. And there was blood. Christ, he could smell it.

He dropped to his knees next to the woman. Shakily, he extended a hand, not sure what good he could do. Most of the blood seemed to be coming from her head and throat. She had been brutalized unmercifully. Head bashed in; throat savaged. Against his will, his eyes travelled to her sex. More blood.

He gasped, choked, wretched down his shirt and into his lap. Then he heard more. Sound had escaped him as his mind tried to protect him from the gruesome scene before him. But he heard it now. Someone, some thing, was running away. Running on two feet.

The woman fell still, a rattling gurgle rising from her throat, and then the only sound was the clomping of feet on leaves and rocks and twigs. The smell of shit reached his nostrils, and he knew the woman was gone, or would be soon. He couldn’t carry her back through the woods. Even if he could, he had no way of getting help, save for the off chance that a car would pass by and deign to stop for the bloody pair. Not a chance. Not out there.

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Gasping, he turned away and listened. Whoever was fleeing the scene fell and let out a grunted curse as they slid over stone and dirt. Ryan grimaced and rose to his feet using the old oak as support. He had grown up in woods like these. He could catch them if he tried. But did he want to?

His mind produced images that he knew were untrue. Images of a fanged, horned, venomous beast that only vaguely resembled a human. They hadn’t fallen. No, that was their wicked, scaly tail dragging behind them. And they weren’t running away; they were luring him in.

Cool, damp air scratched his throat as he breathed in an increasingly frenetic pace. No, he thought. The fleeing beast was no otherworldly monster. He knew that. He knew exactly what he was hearing, and he knew before he took his first step what he was going to do.

***

CLYDE COLLINS HAD never felt so alive. He vaulted back to his feet at the bottom of the hollow and ran like the wind. No, not the wind. The wind had never felt such freedom. If he wanted to, he could have leapt into the air and flown back to his cabin. Just the thought set him to giggling. What had kept him from doing this sooner? Sure, he was young, barely 22 years old by the county’s reckoning. But he had been nothing before today. He had never truly tasted life until he’d finally convinced that bitch to give him a chance. His mouth opened in a maniac’s grin, exposing his few remaining nubs of teeth. Wrong move, bitch, he thought, wrong move.

His only regret was that he hadn’t cut her throat sooner. Those fuckin’ screams had been heard. Who the hell was out there so goddamn early? His wild grin twisted into a snarl as he thought of the mother fucker who had cut his playtime off early. Just as quickly, the rictus grin was back, and he let out a laugh that sounded alien even to him. He didn’t care. Today was the first day of the rest of his life and nothing was going to spoil it. When he got home, he was going to celebrate with his special shine and a shot of that anhydrous he’d lifted from his cousin’s wife last Tuesday.

“Look’t’chu, boy,” he panted, wild-eyed, “Look th’fuck atchu now.”

He reached the brush that he’d laid out to mark his path back home and swung around a rotten tree: hollowed by ants and squirrels, more sawdust than tree. It creaked and then snapped under the strain. He careered and landed in a patch of blackberries.

“Fuck!” He cried out, not in pain, but at the inconvenience. Pain was for mortals and, from this day on, Clyde was a fuckin’ god. He grabbed fistfuls of thorny limbs and untangled himself. In the relative silence that followed his resurrection, he listened. His head snapped back in the direction he’d come. Someone was following him.

He sucked in an annoyed breath and growled it back out. He reached into his waistband and brandished the vicious blade he’d stuck there after cutting that pale throat to the bone. No one ever told him that cutting a throat was so goddamn hard. You really gotta want it. Luckily for him, he’d really wanted it. Never before had he wanted something so badly. He swooned at the memory of the vibrations he’d felt as the teeth of his fang tore at the gristle of her windpipe. He thought he might cum again right then and there. But whoever was following was getting closer.

He ducked out of sight behind the bramble he’d tumbled into and waited.

***

RYAN came to a halt halfway down the slope of a hollow and listened. Some birds flapped their wings and squawked overhead. Small mammals skittered up and down trees, in and out of bushes. Aside from his own labored breathing, all else was still and silent. Out of instinct, an instinct borne of many seasons of hunting game, he crouched beneath a nearby evergreen and tried to slow his breathing. He held his hand up, the one gripping the pistol, and was surprised to find that it was steady. His entire body was as tight as a steel string, but right then, he was as steady as a surgeon.

“Fuck!”

His breath caught in his throat, and he went from surgeon to statue. Whoever had yelled that couldn’t be more than a hundred yards away. The chances of it being anyone but the murderer were slim to none. Unless, of course, the beast had found another victim in some hapless hunter.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he picked his way through the brush, avoiding dry leaves and twigs as much as he could. Patches of moss-covered dead wood dampened his footfalls like walking on sponges. Every muscle in his body screamed at him to move faster, but he couldn’t afford to be louder than his quarry.

Outside looking in, a lone, convicted felon acting as a sort of bounty hunter was beyond inscrutable. Truth was, Ryan had done plenty that he wasn’t proud of during his short life. Theft, assault, even attempted murder, though, the official charge had been attempted vehicular manslaughter. (Never try telling him that attorneys aren’t worth their weight in gold.)

Yes, he’d gotten himself into some bad situations, hung out with bad folk, made some bad decisions. But he never believed that he was a bad person. He knew right from wrong, even if some strong shine and a few unmarked pills had hidden that fact from the world at the worst times. The parole board must have agreed with him because they’d let him out after a scant 3 years of his 17-year sentence. The fact that the judge had only given him 17 years was another testament to his apparent redeeming qualities. He had been looking at upwards of 30 years for his sins. The thought of walking out of prison well into his 50’s still made his skin crawl.

He spotted a rotted tree that had fallen under its own weight—No, not under its own weight. Pieces of the soft wood were scattered like arterial spatter over the forest floor. Had a deer run into it? Not likely, he decided. If one had, it would have snapped off closer to the ground. That meant—

“Rye?”

Ryan spun, clenching everything from his asshole to his grip on his pistol. His next few breaths came out like he was at a Lamaze class; like he was about to jump off a cliff. He quickly lowered the weapon, however.

“Clyde.” He said and took a few calming breaths, “What are you doing out here?”

Clyde showcased his winning grin. Well, it would win in a meth-mouth competition, at least. He raised his empty hands, palms out. “Foragin’, brother,” he said, and gestured at the bushes, “Them blackberries is ‘bout as plump as’ey come.” He darted a nervous glance at Ryan’s hands. “Fuck ya doin’th’at piece? Jussabout made me piss m’self.”

“When’d they let you out?” Ryan asked.

Clyde hesitated and then grinned again. “Well, now. Sometime a man gotta let himself out afore he o’erstay his welcome.”

Ryan nodded but remained silent. He’d met Clyde in the pin, and he hadn’t been shy about what had gotten him thrown in: aggravated sexual assault along with a laundry list of lesser offences. And those were just his most recent charges. Clyde was a year younger than Ryan, but he wasn’t going to be eligible for parole for another 2 decades. Given his general attitude toward authority, those 20 years were looking more like 35 or 40. Truth was, Clyde belonged in a cell. Even Ryan could see that. That’s why he’d made nice with the firebrand for as long as they’d shared an address.

“Wanna help?” Clyde asked, snapping Ryan out of his brown study. “Whole mess of ‘em. More’n I can carry, fer sure.”

“Should’ve brought you a bucket or two.” He replied, noticing the way Clyde’s hand kept twitching toward his waistband, watching the sweat run in rivulets down his hollow cheeks.

Clyde set his jaw and nodded once, realizing the jig was up. He lunged, his hand darting to his side.

Ryan raised his gun.