Once Upon a Sunset

Chapter 1: In Which Chris is Attacked

Once upon a sunset, when the premature summer made the nights warm and an unpopular war raged in the land of Nebuchadnezzar and Abram, a young man strolled down a railroad in the middle of the forest of Northeast Texas. His clothes were dusty and worn down by the long journey past. The soles of his boots were beginning to come off, and his jeans were riddled with thin spots and a few holes. His flannel shirt was a faded blue, and held on only by two buttons, but this was more of a personal choice on his part rather that necessity. The air was still rather hot. He shifted his old Army bag, jingling with the few possessions he cared to bring, to let some air onto his back.


A highway ran parallel to this leg of the railroad, now headed toward a town called Redwater. As he passed the sign several miles back, he shook his head. Rednecks and place names don't mix, he thought. Not a very imaginative group sometimes, are they?





The rail underneath him began to vibrate. He hopped down the embankment and waited. The train moved closer. He watched it come with suddenly blazing eyes. His breath came in shorter gasps. There was a strange, vaguely sexual longing deep in his being. He'd always been fascinated by trains. It had something to do with why he chose to travel by the tracks. The train went everywhere and, with no place to stop permanently, nowhere all at once. With its construction, it brought life and joy to the towns that sprung up around it, death and decay to those that were bypassed. He found that, in some odd way, the train was a steel representation of Divinity on Earth: indifferent to the problems of the world (including those it causes) yet fundamentally a necessary part for the survival of all involved.





Focused as he was, he still noted a small white face peering out at him from the darkness in one of the cars. Black eyes regarded him fiendishly, and the crooked smile pulled upward. The mirage (he couldn't imagine it to be anything but) passed as the train wound on, fleeing down the tracks into the far horizon. He shrugged it away, but the image struck a chord that reminded him of long-forgotten fears of shadows and monsters in closets.





He trudged along just as he had for miles, climbing the embankment and stepping from cross tie to cross tie. More trees grew between him and the highway, blotting it out of sight completely. The muted sounds of the highway and the darkening sky made him feel, for the first time on his long journey, very much alone. He hummed a tune to himself, barely aware he was doing so. His pace picked up, his gaze at the tracks below him.





He was almost running before he noticed the singing. The voice was distinctly male, floating on a breeze out of the trees up ahead. Such a beautiful sound was surely not of this world, and it filled him with a mixture of delight and dread. He scanned the trees to his left and right.





“Sebben, crudele, mi fai languir...”





He could only assume he was getting close. The voice grew louder as he progressed. He wondered how far it was to the next town, if there was a shed somewhere so he didn't have to fight the mosquitoes all night—





He almost walked right into the graveyard before he realized it was even there. The place was obviously abandoned. The stones were ravaged by time, many broken in half and strewn about. Here and there were pieces of trash, even a pair or two of boxer briefs. A driveway full of trenches curved down the hill across from the tracks. But he noticed none of this. In the middle of the graveyard stood an astonishingly pale young man in a t-shirt and light brown shorts. The girl before him was staring with glazed eyes. A bouquet of flowers hung limply from her hands. She was dark and beautiful, with her hair falling down around her shoulders in curls.





The young man glanced over at him, and the smile on his face grew wider. The girl reached up with her free hand to finger the brown curls protruding from under his ball cap. The young man’s teeth glistened in the pale light of the moon, and though it could’ve been a trick of the light that made them seem to grow, the boy with the backpack and holey pants didn’t think so. The young man in the blue ball cap looked back into the eyes of the black girl, and the other boy ran faster than he knew possible and tackled her.


The young man snarled. Before he could even touch the ground, the boy was knocked into another direction.





“What are you doing here?!” the young man yelled. At his feet the girl began to groan.





“Uh……where am I?”





The young man sighed. “Sebben crudele, mi fai languir—”





He stopped the song when a rock crashed into his temple. He was abruptly facing the opposite direction. “You really want to die tonight, don’t you?”





“RUN!” he yelled to the girl on the ground. “Run before he can—”





The young man suddenly had him by the throat, holding him in the air. “Why do you care? What’s she to you?”





The boy couldn’t speak, not that he much cared to. He saw spots dance before his eyes. The pain was exquisite, crushing into his larynx and trachea. The young man threw him back to the train tracks, some twenty yards away.





The girl screamed. She turned to run down the winding driveway from whence she’d came, to run away from the demon with an angel’s voice, but her demon caught up with her and she screamed her last.





The boy pulled himself from the tracks. He happened across a crowbar nearby, perhaps meant to harm the gravestones, but he didn’t think. While the creature fed, oblivious to the world around, the boy crept up behind and smashed him in the head.





This did seem to hurt him. The poor girl’s body fell to the ground with limp finality. The young man stumbled around for a moment, hands over his eyes, and when he could think clearly the boy was running down the tracks.





The boy dared a glance over his shoulder. There was nothing there. He half-hoped that he may have dreamt the whole thing in a heat-induced frenzy. The pain in his throat and back told him otherwise. He didn’t slow down or risk another look back. Mercifully soon, he came to a place where a county road crossed the tracks. He could see the lights from houses nearby, and with a jubilant cry building inside his chest he began to feel that maybe it was all over.





Something caught him in the right side and he left the ground once more. When he landed the young man was laying on top of him, glaring into his eyes with such intense hatred that he would have screamed if he could breathe.





“You little bastard…” The young man sounded almost like he was purring. “I’m going to have some fun with you. You are going to wish you never crawled out of your mother’s twat in the first place.” He pulled the boy’s fingers out of the sockets of his right hand one by one. He snapped the boy’s arm with no problem. Screams echoed through the woods. Dogs barked, somewhere a cow mooed, but no one seemed to hear.





Headlights flashed across the young man’s face at that particular instant. He leaped to his feet. The boy on the ground screamed still, while the world grew hazy around him. Car doors slammed behind the lights, and just before the young man could bound away into the night forever an arrow pierced his arm. He screamed again, the sound rose to a roar, and he pounced into the light. Another light, somehow more pure, flashed for a moment, and the monster was cast to the ground howling. The sound twisted as it left his lips, becoming at once deeper and shriller. A mist seemed to rise from his clothes. The young man grew indistinct and transparent.





“IN NOMEN PATER SANCTUS, TU SUBSISTIS!”





The young man screamed again and became solid. A girl walked around the car holding a crossbow. Another, shorter girl emerged holding a crucifix and a Bible, closely followed by a heavyset guy carrying a backpack.





From the driver’s side of the car, another young man approached the writhing creature.





“Oh God, whose only begotten Son, by His life, death, and resurrection, has purchased for us the rewards of eternal life, grant, we beseech thee, by meditating upon these Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we may imitate what they contain and obtain what they promise through the same Christ Our Lord, amen. May the Divine assistance remain always with us, and the souls of the faithful departed, through the Mercy of God, rest in peace.”





He crossed himself then, and points of white light shined briefly where his fingers touched to complete the age-old ritual. He pulled a stake from his pocket when he was done. In his other hand, he held a mallet.





The boy with the backpack faded in and out while he impaled the beast. The shrieks were absolutely horrific. Birds flew from the trees. The dogs howled and whimpered. The herd of cows nearby ran away as fast as their feet could manage. Inside the houses, cats yowled, their backs arched, while their owners, for reasons they could never understand, hid from the windows.





The boy with the backpack became aware that there was a small dog near him. The dog barked at the girl with the crossbow and lifted its front paw. It took him a moment to realize the dog was pointing at him.





“Kim! Jack! Help me get him in the car!”





The dog barked at her again and held its front leg higher in the air, with its paw hanging limp.





“Aw, jeez, poor kid. Careful with him, his arm’s broken.”





The heavyset guy lifted the boy up and cradled him.





“What’s your name?” The crossbow girl was by his side.





“Chris…Townsend……oh, man…” The world spun around. Jack placed him in the back seat. The crossbow girl crawled in the other side and put his head in her lap.





“Is he done yet?” Her voice came to Chris as if from the end of a long tunnel.





“Almost.” The voice had to have been Kim.





“We’ve got to hurry. We don’t know how banged up he is.”





The car shifted and a car door slammed. A deep male voice said, “He’s done. He’s puttin’ the stuff in the trunk.”





“Was there a body this time?”





“I’m not sure. I couldn’t see.” A door opened near Chris’ feet. The car moved a bit. He felt a hand on his shin. The door closed. Chris wearily noted that Kim was sitting on the floorboard.





The car shifted once more and the driver’s side door closed. The car came to life just as Chris passed into darkness.