The Beasts Of Stoneclad Mountain Read online

  “What about me?” Mia asked.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want a gun.”

  “I do know how to shoot,” Mia replied, almost indignant.

  Ethan searched through the locker and found a twenty-two-caliber pocket gun.

  “It’s small, but it should suit you just fine. If anything, the noise should scare them off.” He handed Mia the five-shot pistol and a small box of bullets.

  Mia took the gun and shells, and put them in her jacket pockets.

  “You might want this as well,” Ethan said and handed her a folding pocketknife.

  Ethan grabbed a few boxes of ammunition to take along and gave them to Clay to put in one of the bags. He searched and found a few more items that he thought they would need: a first aid kit, two battery-operated headlamps, a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, a cord of rope, waterproof matches, two ponchos, a pair of binoculars, a coil of snare wire, a slingshot for killing birds, and a double-edged machete with the blade hooked at the top for cutting down overhead branches.

  Ten minutes later, they were stepping out of the cabin, each wearing backpacks, Ethan and Clay carrying their rifles.

  Ethan led the way around the cabin as they headed toward the edge of the forest that stretched up into the mountain.

  Clay and Mia watched Ethan as he held Blu by the collar and dangled the baby blanket in front of the dog’s snout. The coonhound sniffed the fabric and began to bay.

  “Okay, boy. Go find Casey!” Ethan ordered and released Blu.

  Ethan, Clay, and Mia raced after the dog into the woods.

  12

  Clay had no way of gauging how long they had been trudging through the woods as it was still dark even though the sun had risen on the other side of the mountain. His best guess would have been an hour though his body was telling him that it was much more like twice that amount of time. And they had just started.

  The effort had been slow as there wasn’t a path to follow, just Blu howling up ahead, squeezing through chokeberry bushes and seemingly impenetrable patches of briar with sharp, spiked thorns. And if that wasn’t enough, the landscape had taken a gradual incline, enough to cause them to have to lean forward under the load of their backpacks as they made their way, sometimes having to place their hands on the ground so as to steady themselves and not slip and fall on their faces.

  Having taken up the rear, Clay could hear his uncle’s machete up ahead, whacking away, carving a crude trail that they could follow. Mia was in front of Clay and was doing her best to slog through the deep bed of leaves on the forest floor. The muddy earth below sucked and clung to the soles of their boots making each weighted step laborious with the clinging mire.

  “I don’t get it,” Mia said, pulling her foot up to take another step. “There’s no way they could have gotten through this.”

  “Blu seems to think they did,” Clay said, placing his hand on Mia’s back to give her a push to get her going.

  “I think he’s lost the scent.”

  “You could be right, though I think Uncle Ethan would know if he did.”

  Up ahead, in the thicket, Blu let out a yelp.

  “What’s going on?” Mia called up to Ethan.

  “Stay close,” Ethan replied.

  Clay could see his uncle swinging the sharp machete, blazing a tunnel through the wall of thick brush, pushing in the direction of the whimpering dog. Mia and Clay hunkered behind Ethan as the big man stooped to forge through the dense barrier.

  The thoroughfare was a gauntlet of jutting thorns and dagger-like branch tips, snagging their coats and scratching at their faces as they pressed on.

  Finally, Clay saw his uncle stand erect as he came out of the undergrowth onto a small patch of flat ground where Blu was sitting, licking at the blood-oozing scrapes on his side.

  “You poor thing,” Mia said, taking off her backpack. She opened the top flap and took out a shirt. She applied pressure to the worst cut.

  Ethan knelt beside his dog and kneaded the back of Blu’s neck, which seemed to calm him. “You’re no good to us all cut to ribbons,” he said.

  “I hate to say it, but is this even the way?” Mia asked.

  Ethan glanced around before his eyes fixed on a small tuft of brown hair stuck on one of the outer twigs of a nearby shrub. He stood and went over to the bush. He retrieved the fur swath, came back, and handed the matted bit to Mia. She looked at it and put it up to her nose. “Ew, smells just like those things that were in the cabin,” she said with disgust and threw the lump of hair on the ground.

  “I’d say we’re on the right track,” Ethan said. He reached around to a side pocket on his pack and pulled out a ten-foot long leash. He clipped one end on Blu’s dog collar. “This is going to slow us down some, but I can’t take a chance Blu further injuring himself.”

  Satisfied that the bleeding had stopped, Mia folded her bloodstained shirt and stuffed it back in her pack.

  Ethan pulled the baby blanket out of his coat pocket and waved it in front of Blu’s nose. The dog immediately took off, towing Ethan with him up the sloping terrain of the thick forest.

  ***

  They reached a point where they were forced to scale a steep section that stretched up to a leveler portion of the mountain.

  Ethan looked up and assessed the thirty-foot incline of composite dirt and roots jutting out of the sheer earth. It looked more difficult than it was. There were plenty of roots that could be used for handholds, and the hillside was loose enough to drive the tips of their boots for decent footholds.

  A few short-leaf pines were along the way, and a large fallen chestnut oak at the top that looked as though it had been there for decades as it was decayed and rotted into various-sized logs.

  “Watch me as I go up and do what I do. Clay, you’re going to have to bring my rifle and pack up as I’m going to have to carry Blu.”

  “Sure thing,” Clay said.

  Ethan slung the rifle off his shoulder and let his backpack drop to the ground.

  “I can carry the rifle,” Mia said.

  “Come here, boy,” Ethan said. He still had the end of the leash looped around his wrist. He picked Blu up, and held him around the rump so that the dog faced backward and could drape his front legs over Ethan’s shoulder.

  “You sure you can climb up like that?” Clay asked.

  “Well, I certainly hope so,” Ethan said. He reached up for the nearest root and pulled himself up, planting the toe of his boot into the dirt wall. He raised his other boot and stood on a bulbous knob. He pressed Blu’s back against the embankment and used his free hand to grab a protruding root to anchor him as he reached up with his other hand for another grappling.

  As Ethan continued up, both Clay and Mia looked on in amazement. Once Ethan was at the halfway mark, Mia started her ascent. Clay waited until she was a couple feet above his head before he followed.

  After a few minutes, Ethan finally reached the bottom of the fallen tree. He lifted Blu up and turned him around. The dog got the jest and clambered up the rough bark onto a sectioned log. Ethan removed the leash from his wrist and tossed the leather tether up.

  When Ethan grabbed a thick bough which slowly dislodged from under the log, he immediately realized he’d made a fateful mistake.

  “Look out!” he yelled, having released the brake under the set log as it began to roll downward.

  Blu barked and leapt backward off the rotating log.

  Ethan slid feet first down the embankment as the log picked up speed, spinning after him.

  “Get out of the way!” Ethan yelled, skidding toward the couple. He latched onto a low-hanging branch and swung himself against a tree trunk.

  Clay reached up, grabbed Mia, and pulled her out of the path of the tumbling log as it careened down and flattened some saplings and crashed into a patch of blueberry shrubs.

  It wasn’t until a few minutes later when everyone was brushing themselves off and resting on flat ground near the gap where the hickory log had
detached itself, that Ethan said, “That wasn’t an accident.”

  “What do you mean?” Clay asked.

  “That was a booby trap.”

  “Certainly those things couldn’t…”

  Ethan held up his hand. “It wasn’t them. This was manmade.”

  “By who?”

  “I think I have a good idea. From here on out, we’re going to have to be extra careful.”

  13

  Mason Payne knew what death warmed over felt like because that’s the way he felt at the moment, sprawled on his sofa, his mind fogged from too much moonshine and weed from the night before. He looked like a big black bear in boxers, with his wooly beard, furry chest, and hair legs.

  A white scar ran down the left side of his face from the middle of his forehead, intersecting with the black patch where his eye once resided, as it stretched over his cheek down into the tuff of his beard. It was the fine work of the paternal Payne, a demonic man that loved nothing better than to instill fear into his four sons. Mason’s personal family brand had been by the jagged end of a broken whiskey bottle.

  He opened his good eye and stared over at the coffee table cluttered with an overflowing glass ashtray filled with cigarette butts, bags of weed, his Ruger P85 nine-millimeter double-action automatic, a near-empty Mason jar of hooch, and a bunch of crumbled wrappers and sacks from a take-out diner, that at the moment, he couldn’t quite remember the name of.

  That’s how wasted he was.

  So he certainly wasn’t in any condition to acknowledge the three strangers standing in his living room that were looking down at him like he was some kind of road kill that they couldn’t quite identify.

  “Looks like you came up a couple toes short playing ‘this little piggy,’” said the sleaze with the prison tats on his neck, referring to the two missing toes on Mason’s foot.

  The interloper was standing on the other side of the coffee table, pointing the business end of a large bore riot gun.

  Standing by the door, another scuzzbag holding a sawed-off shotgun by his hip let out a laugh like it was the best punch line he had heard in years.

  The skinny guy in the long coat by the kitchen doorway didn’t seem as amused and just stood stolid, pointing his pistol.

  Mason pushed off the cushion and sat up, planting his bare feet on the sticky carpet. “So…what are you peckerwoods doing here?”

  The skinny guy didn’t find Mason humorous either. “You better shut your mouth or we’ll do it for you.”

  “That right.” Mason leaned forward to reach for his cigarettes, which were in equal distance of his handgun.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  “I just want a smoke.”

  The sleaze with the tats picked up the Zippo lighter and the pack of Marlboro lights and tossed them onto Mason’s lap. “Think of it as your last request.”

  Mason plucked a cigarette out of the box, put it between his lips, flipped open the lighter, and ignited the tobacco tip with the first spin of the Zippo. He snapped the lighter closed. After taking a long drag, he let out a slow stream of smoke, and said, “Aren’t you fellas on the wrong side of the mountain?”

  “Not by where we stand. You’re the one that’s crossed over the line. No one does business in Porterville but us.”

  “From what I’ve heard, it’s a free country. Man has a right to free enterprise.”

  “Not around here he doesn’t,” the skinny guy said, emphasizing with the wag of his gun. “If you haven’t guessed by now, we’re here to put you out of business. Permanently. Clive, you want to do the honors?”

  Clive stepped away from the door, and sauntered across the room, all the while lifting his short barrel scattergun.

  Mason tensed his muscles, shooting a sidewise glance at the Ruger on the coffee table.

  A loud engine steadily approached outside which caught everyone’s attention as tires crunched up the gravel driveway out front and came to a grinding stop.

  The engine switched off.

  Clive went over to the nearest window and peeked out the slit between the curtains. “It’s Landon Payne and the other dipshit twin.”

  “Well, won’t the boss love this? Looks like we’re going to put the Payne brothers out of business, once and for all,” the skinny guy said, and looked at Mason for some kind of reaction, but the man on the couch seemed as calm as could be.

  Clive stood off to the side of the front door, aiming his shotgun shoulder-height to blast off the head of the first person to step inside.

  The skinny guy aimed his gun, ready to fire on the next fool to enter.

  The sleaze with the tats kept his muzzle pointed at Mason’s chest.

  Mason just sat there, staring at the front door.

  Soon came a knock.

  Mason didn’t move.

  Then came another knock.

  “Why’s he knocking?” the skinny guy asked Mason in a whisper.

  Mason turned his head. “Because this is my house.”

  “Then tell him to come in.”

  Mason looked at the door but didn’t say anything.

  “Mason!” came a voice from outside.

  “Yes,” Mason answered.

  “Get out here!”

  “I’m not ready. You best come in,” Mason shouted.

  “Is the door latched?”

  “Yes!”

  There was a sudden blast and Clive was propelled across the room, a large smoking hole in the wall where he had been standing.

  The front door kicked in.

  The skinny guy fired at the open doorway.

  A huge-framed man stepped out of the kitchen and shot the skinny guy in the back of the head.

  The sleaze with the tats did the classic knee-jerk reaction and turned when he saw the skinny guy’s brains splat out of the ragged hole in his forehead.

  Mason grabbed his Ruger off the coffee table and shot the man holding the riot gun, five times, each shot drilling a gush of blood out of his body until he fell to the floor.

  Landon Payne strolled into the front room. He was carrying an Ithaca Mag-10 Roadblocker pump shotgun. He looked stoic with his buzz cut and goatee, dressed in black like a Sunday preacher. He glanced over at the other twin, Jacob, who was standing just in the kitchen and was the spitting image of his brother.

  “It appears our competition may have underestimated us.”

  ***

  Landon drove his El Dorado through the dust and up the quarry road. Mason sat on the passenger side, taking up more than his share of the seat. When the big man pushed back to adjust his legs, Landon thought for sure he was going to break the seat.

  The cloud of dust expelling out from behind the rear tires of the truck up ahead began to thin out as they reached the stone ridge. Landon came alongside the old GMC long bed truck and parked.

  Jacob climbed out of the cab. He was puffing on a cigarette that seemed like a white speck of food in his unruly beard and was a wonder that the burning tobacco didn’t ignite his face. He leaned against the rear fender and looked around like it was the first time that he had ever been high up on the quarry’s peak overlooking the polluted rust-colored lake below where a person could gaze for miles around and not see a single soul.

  This was the case today.

  Landon and Mason got out of the El Dorado and walked over to the truck.

  “I hope they never decide to dredge this place,” Jacob said.

  “I’m sure they’d find their share of granddaddies down there,” Landon said.

  Jacob turned and tugged the tarpaulin off the bed of the truck, revealing the three dead men, lying on their backs, side by side, with their hands tied together.

  Their necks and ankles were cinched with thick cord rope that was attached to heavy cinderblocks to weigh them down.

  Jacob and Mason walked around to the truck’s rear bumper and leaned their arms over the lip of the tailgate.

  “You boys ready?” Landon asked.

  “Ready
when you are,” Mason replied.

  Landon reached into the truck’s cab and released the emergency brake. He put one hand on the door’s armrest and his other hand on the steering wheel. “Push!”

  The twins put their shoulders into it and shoved the truck forward. The tires began to turn as the truck rolled to the quarry’s edge.

  Landon stepped away as the front bumper dipped and went over. The rest of the truck followed, plunging straight down the two-hundred-foot granite face. It entered the brown water with a thunderous splash, and after what seemed like nothing more than a minute, the truck gradually sunk.

  The three Payne brothers continued to watch even after the truck was finally swallowed up.

  Landon walked back to the El Dorado and got behind the wheel. Mason joined him up front while Jacob climbed in the back seat.

  “After we go back to the house and clean up the mess, I want you two to pack up for a mountain run.”

  “Which one of us do you want to relieve James?” Mason asked.

  “Don’t matter.”

  Jacob leaned over the front seat and flipped open a sharp fold-up knife. He waved the blade in Mason’s face. “What say we decide with a little mumblety-peg?”

  Mason turned in his seat so that he could look at his brother with his good eye. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a pigsticker.

  “Put those away,” Landon said, steering down the steep side of the quarry, the big car hugging the road like a military tank. “I don’t want you two laming each other. You know, on second thought, maybe we should make this our final run as we’re going to need some quick cash. Sooner or later, they’re going to come looking for those jokers at the bottom of the quarry. Means we’re going to have to hide out for a while.”

  “Where to?” Mason asked.

  “After we get James and harvest that crop, somewhere down south. I’ll figure the logistics later.”

  The twins put away their knives and settled back in their seats as they headed back to the house for a major cleanup.

  14

  Finally bright daylight filtered down between the trees and the upward hike wasn’t as dreary.