Chapter 13 - Sliding Beneath the Surface

Chapter 13 – Sliding Beneath the Surface

March 19, 2013 by Doug Dillon 787 0 0

Sliding - blog The St. Augustine Trilogy: Book I

Young adult, paranormal/historical

13 A Cloud of Vultures

Oh man, at first when I took my hand away from the coquina, I thought I had somehow touched a live electric wire. After that brilliant white light and the pain going up my arm, I knew there had to be high voltage connected to the pyramid somehow. Thoughts of underground power lines leaking electricity and fallen electric wires resting on the pyramid wet from the rain earlier in the day flickered through my mind.

Not likely, I said to myself, since I was standing and conscious. No matter what though, I still couldn’t see. That’s what really scared me. My eyes moved, but my field of vision showed nothing but pure, eerie white.

“Carla?” No answer. Why wouldn’t she answer? “Uh, something just happened.” My voice sounded as shaky as I felt. “Carla? I … can’t see.” Even as I spoke, I noticed the white in front of my eyes slowly starting to fade—a hopeful sign. Again, no answer.

As I listened desperately for a response, I thought I smelled pine needles and something else—not very pleasant. Pine needles? “No way! Don’t start this again,” I whispered to myself.

Pine needles were not what I needed to be sniffing at that moment. “Carla, talk to me,” I yelled. “This isn’t funny. I really need your help.” I tell you what. When she didn’t answer that time, I really freaked. I knew if she could answer, she would. Either something had happened to her, or she just wasn’t there. Both choices scared the hell out me, and I stood there not knowing what to do.

Slowly, vague images started appearing in the white I was seeing. When I lifted my hands in front of my face, I wiggled my fingers until I finally saw them—blurry, but there. “All right!” I shouted, and when I did, my vision suddenly snapped back to normal. My hands stood out perfectly in focus.

What I didn’t see though, is what made my insides do a flip-flop. Carla, the pyramids, the cemetery, and the rest of St. Augustine were … well, gone. Spread out in front of me was nothing but pine trees and palmetto bushes extending out as far as I could see. Across the cloudless sky above, a big bunch of vultures drifted around in soundless, lazy circles. Yeah, vultures. “Damn!” I whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

All those pine trees and palmettos cast long, deep shadows running away from me in the yellowish, orange color of either a sunrise or sunset. I swallowed hard as sweat trickled down my left side, and that stupid headache returned. “Lobo, where’s your protection?” I wailed loudly. My voice sounded strange, as if it didn’t belong to me.

Realizing I was barely breathing, I inhaled deeply and got an intense whiff of that bad smell again, in addition to the scent of pine needles—a really weird combination. Deciding to turn around, I found more pine trees, palmettos and shadows. On the horizon, half a sun glared in my direction. I still couldn’t tell if it was rising or setting. In the sky right above the sun floated a few high, wispy clouds the color of gold. I felt like I had been tossed into a vast sea of vegetation ruled by a one-eyed god.

“This can’t be happening,” I kept saying to myself. With each passing second, the reality of what my senses continued relaying to my brain told a different story.

As a light breeze rippled through the treetops, a red winged black bird stared at me from his perch on a dead branch lying on the ground about ten feet away. With a squawk, it flew off, heading off over that endless wilderness. Into the clutter of trees and bushes on either side of me, someone had long ago hacked out what appeared to be a wide path or a small road. Weathered tree stumps, rotting logs and dried-out palm fronds littered the opened up landscape in both directions as far as I could see.

Frantic to bring some sort of sanity into everything around me, I closed my eyes for a couple of minutes, hoping that when I opened them again I would somehow magically be back in the cemetery with Carla. Yeah, right. No such luck.

When I opened my eyes again, something had changed all right. The yellowish, orange light from the sun had disappeared and so had the shadows. “No,” I whispered hoarsely, but the sun had sunk out of sight. “No, no, no. Don’t do that,” I pleaded, but of course, the sun didn’t listen. The idea of me being there, wherever there was when it got dark, shook me up even more than before.

I got so desperate I even pulled out my cell phone, but the thing wouldn’t turn on even though I had charged it that morning. Did I really think it would work so far from everything? No, not really. But for it not to even turn on startled me.

The shrill hoot of an owl echoing through the pines didn’t help my jittery nerves one bit.

The sound reminded me of the dark fog on Lobo’s porch and I shivered with the memory. “Well, at least there isn’t any fog here,” I said, trying very hard to make the best of a really bad situation. Night was coming and I had to do something. Even so, nothing came to mind except Carla. What if somehow she actually came with me to this place, I wondered, but was somewhere else on the road. “Carla!” I shouted at the top of my lungs knowing that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort. No matter what, it felt good to yell. I think it was just the idea of taking action, any kind of action.

When I shouted Carla’s name, a strange, tremendous whooshing noise like soft, distant thunder came from up the road to my right. As I stared in that direction through the treetops, I saw a huge cloud of vultures rising up into the air. There had to be hundreds of them. The whooshing noise was all those wings pounding the air.

Vultures usually mean only one thing. “Dead critters,” I said to myself, using Carla’s word. That’s when I started getting scared for her. Could she have come to that place with me but ended up somewhere else? Could she be in trouble? Did those vultures attack her?

My mind raced with all the possibilities.

“Carla!” I ran up the road towards where the vultures had risen from the ground. The closer I got, the more that strange, nasty smell filled my nostrils. It was so disgusting I finally realized it must be whatever the vultures had been eating. Reminded me of opening a package of rotting chicken once. Really gross. The air around me on that road though, had that old chicken smell beat by a thousand times. I covered my mouth and nose with both hands.

“Carla!” I yelled again, taking my hands away from my face just long enough to get the word out. No response, but even more vultures rose up into the air not very far away up the road. Frantic, I ran even faster. Problem was, I found it difficult to breathe through my hands.

As I stopped for a second to catch my breath, I spotted a shoe lying in the sand and pine needles ahead of me. A short distance away stood a large pine tree. On the ground scattered near its base, I saw little slivers of wood. Bypassing the shoe, I walked quickly up to the tree and stared at it. From the bottom of the trunk up to seven feet high or so, much of the bark had been ripped away. In the bare wood, exactly as I had felt on the tree in the dark at Lobo’s place, jagged holes oozed sap. “No way,” I whispered.

The woods by that time were darkening quickly. Vultures filled the dimming sky above me as they silently circled and circled. At first, I couldn’t help but stare at them until I forced myself to look away. When I did, I saw a man lying on his back up a little farther up the road. I hadn’t noticed him at first, I guess, because of my focus on the shoe and tree. On his chest, sat a huge vulture with flies buzzing all around. It didn’t register in my mind right away what the bird was doing until I saw the thing pecking and pulling at the guy’s face. I mean, I was so surprised to find anybody else around there except maybe for Carla, you know? And then to see that! God it was awful

“Get off !” I shouted once I got over the shock of that scene. The stupid bird turned its ugly head and looked directly at me, but with something in its beak. I won’t tell you what it looked like. Believe me, you don’t want to know. Even though I yelled at that damned bird, the thing didn’t move. Well, that made me mad and without even thinking, I ran right at him, yelling and waving my arms. When I got about half way there, the vulture made this weird squawk, and dropped what was in its beak. With wings flapping, it slowly hoisted itself into the air and flew off.

Once more I clamped both hands back over my nose and mouth. In my anger at the vulture, I had taken them away from my face. Looking at the poor guy’s mangled head, I knew he had to be the source of that really putrid smell.

When I heard noises coming from up ahead, I decided to bypass the dead guy and get away from the stink. As I walked by him, I avoided looking at his face, but noticed he wore what looked like a light blue or gray uniform. Gold buttons ran up the front of his jacket. White belts crisscrossed his chest and one went around his waist.

Uniform? Carla’s words about me possibly being haunted by one of Dade’s soldiers flashed into my mind. Oh man, what am I seeing here? Instantly, my stomach started to rebel. I had to get far away from that body, so I walked away quickly only to run into what I thought might be the back end of a large, partially burned, wooden wagon. Resting on their sides, just in front of the wagon, I saw three very large cows, rust colored, with big horns.

Beyond the wagon as far as I could see, lay more men dressed like the first. On top of the cows and men, vultures ripped flesh, buried their heads into bodies and flapped their ugly wings. In the distance, there was a barricade of some sort, made out of logs.

“Oh God.” I tried hard not think about all those dead people being the source of that horrible stink. It didn’t work. What little I had left in my stomach fired out through my mouth.

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Trilogy Graphic - blog For a brief description of The St. Augustine Trilogy, click here.