The Last In Town

Mattie stood at the bow of the caravan as its solar sails retracted and the momentum carried the enormous vehicle the rest of the way into town. She ran along the rail and cheered as the wheels that were as tall as her father rolled within an inch of the wooden sign that read “Welcome to Hazelmoor”. She bounced in place, then ran from side to side to look at all of the buildings as the vehicle slowed more and more.

The caravan finally came to a gentle stop in front of a tavern. Hanging high over the double doors was a bronze sign, now fully green and leaving no hint of its original color, introducing the establishment as “The Proud Nugget”. Mattie giggled at the name.

She ran across the deck, climbed down the first two steps, then leaped down to skip the rest of the distance.

“Did I hit it?” her dad asked as she entered.

“It was so close this time! The closest yet! Like this far.” She held up her hands to demonstrate.

“Aww. I’ll get it next time,” he said, laughing. He scooped her up and carried her to the door that led below.

“Honey, you coming?” he yelled down into the depths of the ship.

“Come on!” Mattie yelled with him.

After ten days of driving with nothing to see but desert and the occasional butte archipelago and nothing to do except torment or be tormented by her little brothers, Mattie couldn’t sit still any longer.

“Can we go without her?” she asked.

“You can go explore a little, but stay close. Remember what to tell the officials?”

She was already running for the door and kept moving while yelling, “We sell farts in a jar.” She was out of the door and couldn’t hear her father’s response over her own laughter. She held a hand on each side of the ten-foot ladder that led from the deck to the ground, wrapped her feet on each side, and slid down in one slick motion.

It was unusual that no one had greeted them yet, but not the first time. “In heat like this, it is sometimes all a person can do to keep from melting,” Mattie’s mom said one time when Mattie asked why everyone was moving so slowly.

Mattie spotted the book store across the street and sprinted to it. Her mind ran wild with wonder about what sort of new books she might find. She loved anything set in a forest. How wonderful it would be to see real, living trees to climb and lush forest moss to roll in! She tried the door but found it locked. No matter. Sometimes the bartering process took hours. Surely the bookstore would open before they left town.

Mattie then ran to the tavern, exploded through the double doors, and skidded to a halt. Her scream brought her dad running in a panic. He scooped her up and covered her eyes, but it was too late to block the permanent imprint of the image she had seen.

As her dad carried her back up onto the boat, they were bombarded by questions from Mattie’s mom.

“Is she okay? What happened? Is she hurt? Can I see her? Set her up here, right here. Can I see her? Mattie, honey, what is it? Are you hurt? Can you even hear me, sweetie?”

The questions were suffocated under the mountain of body parts and drowned by the sea of blood that Mattie had seen in the tavern. She didn’t cry yet; that would come later. For now, she could only nod her head.

“I wanna see,” her younger brother Roger yelled and ran for the ladder.

“No!” The whole family jumped at her father’s booming shout. It was rare that he used it, and that made its use effective. Roger ran to the doorway and clung to it, unsure of how much danger he was in.

“No one leaves the caravan. I’ll look around myself,” Mattie’s dad said.

“Gideon, what was it?” her mom asked. “Tell me, please!”

“Alianor, I love you, but trust me on this. I don’t know what’s happening here yet,” he said. He leaned in and whispered. Mattie’s mom gasped, her hand shot to her mouth, and her eyes grew wide.

Mattie’s dad herded the family inside, armed his wife’s trembling hands with a repeating rifle, considered handing Mattie the revolver she had practiced with, then changed his mind and tucked it back into the cupboard. He put on his bandolier and opened the door with both of his pistols drawn.

“You don’t open this door for anyone but me, understand?”

Mattie’s mom nodded and locked the door behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, her father returned.

“Honey, it’s me. I need a hand. There’s a man alive out here.”

Mattie’s mom looked over the kids and said, “I’ll be right back.”

In a minute, Mattie’s parents were both back inside the ship. They carried an unconscious man, took him below deck, and laid him on Mattie’s bed. His clothes were shredded, splattered with dried blood, and barely clinging to his body. His skin was dry, cracked, and horribly burned from sun exposure. A handful of papers were tucked into the man’s shirt.

Mattie’s dad ran back to the cockpit and deployed the solar sails. The whine of the electric engine grew to a gentle hum, and the caravan slowly built up to its cruising speed. Mattie’s mom joined him once she felt the ship moving. Mattie followed them and hid as close to the door as she could get without being caught.

“Were there any others?” Mattie’s mom asked.

“No. The whole town was wiped out. He’s the only one. The tavern was the worst. It looked like they packed in there as a last line of defense against… something. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Poor Mattie. She’s too young to have seen that.”

“So am I.”

“Was it recent? Do you think whatever did it is still out there?”

“It had to have been some time in the last few days. I can’t tell for sure. God, I hope we never find out what did this.”

“Aren’t you turning around?” Mattie’s mom asked. “The map says the next town is twelve days away. It was ten here from Gloomrest. I don’t know if he will survive that long.”

“If he can survive ten, he will survive two more. Don’t tell the kids, but I’ll be surprised if he lasts until the end of the week. He was lying out in the sun for who knows how long. He probably fled from the tavern and what happened inside there. With burns like that, I doubt he will ever recover.”

Mattie tiptoed back down to her bedroom. She checked again to make sure her parents weren’t watching, then slowly crept up to the bed. Moving an inch per second, she slipped the papers out of the man’s shirt and ran to the storeroom at the back of the ship. She stashed the papers behind a crate and returned to her family.

That night, Mattie was to share her parents’ bed. They fell asleep soon after the sun sank below the horizon, and the caravan drifted to the place where it would rest until the sun rose and renewed its solar power. Mattie snuck out of bed shortly after that. She peeked into the room that her brothers shared and saw that they were sleeping, then snuck further back into the depths of the ship to the storeroom. Once inside, she turned on the light and began reading the papers she had taken from the unconscious man.

If you’re reading this and I’m still alive, there may still be time to save yourself. Drop these papers and run. Drop all the business you were doing and flee. Trust me when I say there is no prize worth the cost you will pay if you linger near me while I still draw breath.

If instead, I have finally found the end of my curse and am securely tucked away in the fiery pits below for the crimes I have committed, then it may be safe to read this note and discover what has transpired here.

It began with me, standing alone under one of the countless islands that pock our desert world, watching my ship sail away without me. I was the victim of a mutiny, one that I admit I deserved. I wasn’t a terrible captain. I navigated the sands with skills that rivaled any navigation system. I had an eye for picking out lucrative targets, and I paid my men handsomely. But I did not pay them enough.

They discovered that I had been skimming a bit off the top, taking too large a share before splitting the rest with them, and they figured they would be better off without me. It was perfectly reasonable, and so was the punishment.

I knew the routes well, so I knew the hopelessness of my situation. No one would be coming within a day’s travel of my location. Even with the islands providing shade, even moving purely under the light of the moon, I could not hope to hop from one to another and make it back to civilization before I succumbed to the intensity of the elements.

One thing I’ve learned during my travels, is that there is no situation too dire to force a living creature to completely give up all of its basic survival instincts. And so I found myself circling my rocky island, always keeping it between me and the sun. I spent most of my time chasing the desert lizards, hoping desperately to catch one and have some brief relief from the thirst that had become my sole point of attention.

It was during one of these chases that I stumbled upon a loose rock that covered a small hole that led into the ground at an angle. With the little bit of strength I had left, I rolled the rock to the side and slid into the tunnel it revealed.

I can’t be certain how far down it took me. By this point, I was nearly delirious from a lack of water and nutrition. But at some point, the tunnel widened enough for me to crawl on my knees and eventually stand. At the bottom, I found an open area twenty feet across, lit by strange glowing fungi along the walls. On the far side was a small stream that came up from under one rock and went back underground at the opposite wall.

I staggered to the stream and collapsed into it. I drank the cool water until my lungs screamed for air, then lifted my head, gasped a breath, and drank again. When I was so full that I feared my stomach might reject it and make me worse off, I finally rolled over and fell asleep.

When I next awoke, I was lying in a bed with the evening sun patting its last rays across my brow from a window nearby. I tried to sit up but lacked the strength to do so. A kind and gentle nurse greeted me and told me how a caravan had discovered me on the route between Gloomrest and Hazelmoor and brought me along with them. I was surprised, since by my calculations the closest point of the route to the underground stream was no less than three days travel, but I set aside my disbelief in favor of gratitude for having escaped my certain doom.

The true terror, which you have obviously now seen if you have found me, began that night once the sun set. A terrible beast stalked the town, tore through the wooden door of a house in the town, and fed upon the family living within.

The next night, it happened again.

I had, and still have, no memory of any of the events any stronger than a feeling of deja-vu when I, along with the other townsfolk, heard the news each morning.

Sheriff Cadwell, though short on resources and manpower, was armed with sharp wits and noted, of course, that the murders began on the precise night after two caravans, one of which carried me, had arrived in their previously peaceful town.

The sheriff took no chances and locked the passengers of both caravans in jail cells that night. I, still barely able to walk, was the only person who was overlooked.

That night, two whole families fell to the hunger of the monster that stalked the small town.

Against my nurse’s protests that it might prove fatal to me, the wise sheriff was forced to lock me behind bars. He assigned multiple armed guards to the duty of watching over me and rounded up as many of the locals as he could to station themselves inside the tavern, hoping that the well-armed population would be a suitable defense while all grouped together and expecting an attack. Their six shooters and rifles proved futile.

The next morning, I found myself lying in the tavern among many others, yet I was the only one left alive. I took a crutch from a deceased elderly man next to me and used it to limp through the town, desperate to find some other survivors.

Having found no living soul, I then began my search for an explanation. I returned to the jail cell and found it in utter ruin. The iron bars had held, but the wooden wall that they were built into had not. Whatever had escaped had no difficulty turning the aged pine boards into splinters in its escape.

I realized then what you now have no doubt guessed. That it was I who was the monster. It is the only explanation that could possibly fit. As unlikely, even mystically impossible, as it sounds, I had been transforming in the moonlight into a terrible, hulking, bloodthirsty, ravenous monster.

I know that, as an outlaw, I have not led a holy life. Yet even my crimes had limits. I had never harmed women or children, nor had I ever taken the life of a man who could be safely spared. The repulsion that set in on the realization of what I had done was overwhelming. I immediately attempted to commit suicide but was alive again the next morning, the wounds reduced from fatal to merely critical. Worse still, I awoke back in the tavern, having apparently devoured some of my previous victims in order to recuperate.

I will attempt now to flee the town, in hopes that I will make it far enough away so that the beast will be unable to return and feed before sunrise and will finally lose its strength and starve out its carnage.

I hope, for the sake of all people, that I am never around any of them again.

Yours in repentance,

Victor

Mattie’s hands shook as she attempted to fold the notes. If what it said was true, her family had to be warned immediately.

She ran to the storeroom door and slid it open.

Then, three things happened simultaneously.

Mattie took three steps out of the storeroom and stopped, gaping in horror. Her father stepped out of his bedroom, twenty feet away. And between them, two enormous black hands with nails like railway spikes came out of Mattie’s bedroom door. Slowly, the hallway filled with a dark, vaguely humanoid figure.

It was too tall to stand fully erect in the eight-foot-tall hallway. Enormous, black, leathery wings stretched from the cockpit stairs to within a foot of her. Its yellow eyes locked in on Mattie, and its bear-like maw dripped fresh blood on the grated floor.

Mattie saw the realization of the situation roll down her father’s face, from his wrinkled forehead to his wide eyes to his screaming mouth, telling her to run. As the demon turned toward Mattie, her father ran and leaped onto its back.

Her father’s sacrifice bought her time, but not much. His last scream was over before Mattie could get across the store room. She grabbed the handle to the hatch in the floor and turned as the thuds of the creature’s steps grew closer to the door. She tumbled headfirst through the hatch to the engine bay, just in time to dodge the swipe of its giant hand.

Mattie landed hard on her head and arms.

A long arm reached into the hole.

Mattie tried to dart past the flailing hand and bumped into it.

The eight-inch claws clanged against metal as they whipped around to grab her.

She rolled under it and crowded further behind the jungle of iron.

Pressed into the smallest corner she could find, protected by three thousand pounds of curving pipe and machinery, she watched the arm blindly flail after its lost prey. Each swipe threw small shavings of metal, but there was too much between them.

The creature left.

Mattie’s sobbing covered the sound of the beast feeding. It returned several times throughout the night, throwing its long arm down into the engine bay, hoping that Mattie had ventured out of her hiding spot.

Somehow, despite the terror and grief, Mattie fell asleep. The next morning, Mattie was awoken by the ship as its solar sails extended and its engines hummed back to life. In twelve days, unless someone intervened, the ship’s navigation system would bring Mattie and the monster to the next town.