Boondocks Fantasy

Fantasy author Anton Strout writes the popular Simon Canderous urban fantasy series, which includes Dead To Me, Deader Still, and Dead Matter. He was born in the Berkshire Hills, mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and currently lives in scenic New Jersey (where nothing paranormal ever really happens, he assures you). In his scant spare time, he is a writer, a sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the world’s most casual and controller-smashing video gamer. He currently works in the exciting world of publishing and yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.

Stay awake, I thought to myself as I jerked my rental back onto the dark stretch of lonely Texas highway. Stay awake or you’ll crash in the goddamn desert and no one will find you for months and months. I reached for the giant cup of coffee in my cup holder. It was barely warm now, since my folks had brewed it for me before saying our goodbyes back at their restaurant, but it was still delicious.

I pulled out my cell and hit the first number in my speed dial. As I waited, I settled back into my seat and focused on the road. It stretched out into infinity through a landscape of small hunched brush shrubs that dotted the roadside, looking like a massive army of tiny sleeping hedgehogs.

“Tough,” I said, “but despite my parents opening this place in the middle of freaking nowhere, they still know how to run a restaurant. Maybe there’s something their West Texas lifestyle could teach us city boys about flavor. God knows our restaurant doesn’t brew anything close to this.”

“Not so much rough,” I said, “as it is boring. The roads out here go on forever. They never end. I’ve been in the middle of nowhere for an hour or two and the only indicator that I’ve moved at all is a slight shift of the mountains off in the distance. It’s creepy . . . like I’m in The Twilight Zone or something.”

I caught a blur of something streaking across the pools of light coming from my high beams. Something big. There was a flash off dull pupils as whatever it was turned towards the car, but I was powerless to do anything with so little time for reaction. Immediately I dropped the phone, my hands grasping for the wheel, and I hit the brakes hard. If this had been a movie, there would have been much screeching of tires and spinning out of control, but the reality of the car’s antilock braking system refused to let that happen. The car decelerated quickly, but not fast enough to avoid a collision. A solid thump caught the car’s front bumper, followed by the feel and sound of something passing underneath the vehicle with a series of sickening hits.

The car finally stopped, but my mind kept racing, an unbidden nonsensical thought filling it. Please let whatever I hit be of this earth. Damn my mother for even putting that thought in my head. I could chastise myself about it later, but for now, I killed the engine and reached for the door with a shaking hand.

“Don’t let the aliens get you,” my mother had moaned eerily. Well, as eerily as a fifty-something woman with big blonde Texas hair can at five in the morning. It was still two hours before opening and she and my father were busy prepping for the morning rush of mustachioed locals, migrant workers, and the few business folks who walked the sleepy streets of Marfa, Texas. Marfa, the sign leading into town read, the way the West was.

My mother was in the middle of dicing potatoes for hash browns, but stopped to look at me from behind the service counter of the restaurant. “You sure you’re awake enough to drive?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I just rarely see the waking side of five in the morning. Sure, I’ve seen it occasionally returning home after a hellish night at the restaurant, but I’m still not used to early rising.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll rally and be off in no time. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the Marfa Mystery Lights.” I couldn’t help ribbing my mother about the local fascination with aliens around these parts that bordered on a near Roswellian proportion. Not that my mother limited herself to just extraterrestrial oddities, mind you. “I’ll make sure to stop by the Lights observation area on my way out of town with Sasquatch, Nessie, and the Donkey Lady, too. Maybe I can catch a lift from the mothership.”

“Now don’t sass your mother,” my father said with a laugh from the food prep counter. He was almost always laughing these days since they had moved. Western living agreed with him. “You just mind yourself on the road.” I watched him cutting thick slices of bacon from a chunk of pork belly, using the same technique he had taught me years ago.

Although it was early, my father was dressed as if they were already open. He wore his restaurant whites underneath his apron, his collar buttoned to the top and the knot of his black tie perfectly square and centered. As usual, my dad was overdressed for their simple mom and pop operation, which consisted of slinging hash and runny eggs. Years as a cook in the military—a job he had taken very seriously—had led him to fastidiousness.

“Well, I could have left yesterday,” I said, “but I really didn’t think running off on Christmas Day was going to make anyone happy. And, besides, I have to work tonight.”

I shook my head and she frowned. “It’s my restaurant. I can only force Carlos and Jean-Paul to cover for me so much before their families come after me. I have to go back today. Without me, they won’t be serving food at all. I have to be there.”

She gave me an all too familiar I-don’t-buy-it-for-asecond-buster look. I withered under it and gave up any attempt to explain myself further. Instead, I walked over and laid down in one of the booths nearest the open kitchen area.

Overhead, the holiday tinsel twinkled in the darkness like a thousand stars and I began to wonder how many meals over the holidays had been returned with tinsel in them. My folks were freaks for holiday decoration and the restaurant looked like a Santa piñata had been knocked senseless in here. The steady thump thump thump of my mother’s dicing rung out repeatedly and my mind began to drift off to sleep once again.

“Don’t you dare fall back asleep,” my mother warned. I sat bolt upright in an effort to seem like I hadn’t been about to doze off, but after nearly three decades of knowing me and my ploys, I knew my mother wouldn’t buy it. “You do that on the road and you won’t have to worry about hitting an animal. You’ll drive off into a field and wrap yourself around a fence post.”

Even though I lived with a seventeen hundred mile buffer between us, I was surprised to find myself still feeling like a teenager at his scolding. It had less power now, but the fact that I had in some way disappointed my father still stung me in a way I thought it couldn’t anymore.

“Must be that city living,” my father said, easing the tension with a fresh bout of laughter. He finished with the bacon and laid it out neatly in a shallow pan with a film of plastic wrap over it before walking it over to the cooler. When he returned, he wiped his hands and looked out through the service window at me. “You know, son, you could always open up your own place right here in town. You know that, don’t you? Give your mom and me some competition. Heck, we do all right here. I’d even front you the money for the space. There’s a spot that would be perfect for an upscale hotshot from New York City, right up by the Palace.”

I smiled politely but shook my head. “I don’t think so, Dad, but thanks. I’m doing OK in the city, and besides, I’d hate to pit myself against your culinary talents’round these parts.”

“I see,” he said, and I could see the tiniest hint of hurt in his eyes. I sighed. It wouldn’t be the holidays without making someone feel bad on some level now, would it? It seemed to be my second greatest skill outside of the culinary arts.

“I know you love it out here,” I said, “but honestly, small town life doesn’t really do it for me. Nice place to get away from it all for a while, but with the nearest movie theater thirty miles away and the closest four-star restaurant three hours, I’m pretty happy with my life in New York City.”

He nodded, but remained silent for a few moments before checking his watch. “Well,” he said, pouring me a tall cup of coffee to go, “You should probably get on the road. It’s three hours to Midland, plus returning the rental and check-in, and like your mother said, you want to take it easy on the road until the sun comes up. Lot of . . . critters out there.”

I rolled my eyes at the mention of the local extraterrestrial phenomenon. “It’s touching that your greatest fear is that I’m going to be abducted by aliens, mom. Why didn’t you guys just throw in for the big show and move to Roswell?”

“Son,” my father said, warning in his voice. He looked at me, then at my mother with concern on his face. “We don’t mention New Mexico in these parts. It’s bad form.”

“Fine,” I said, getting a little testy. Sometimes I didn’t understand why he humored her obsession with life’s woo-woo oddities. I kicked myself for not having left earlier to avoid all this. I loved my mother, but her interest in otherworldly things drove me crazy. It was cute when I was ten, this weak spot for mysteries of the unknown. Hell, I had even bought her the entire Time-Life series about it for Christmas one year, but that was long ago and since then at least one of us had grown up. “I promise I’ll be more than cordial if I run into the Moth Man, a chupacabra, the Donkey Lady, or your close personal friends the Marfa Mystery Light aliens, OK?”

My mother put down her knife and crossed over to where I stood, pulling something from her pocket. It was a small knit pouch on a leather strap, which she hung around my neck without waiting for my approval.

I grabbed a hold of it. The bag itself felt heavy for its tiny size and was a mix of red, yellow, and green threads that were woven into an intricate design I was unfamiliar with. “And this would be?”

“It’s a talisman,” she said, clearly disturbed that her own son didn’t know better. “I had one of the Mexican women who comes into town make it up for me. It’s to protect you on the road lest any harm come to you.”

My father handed me the coffee. He put his arm on my mother’s shoulder. “Don’t worry the boy, honey. He’s got enough on his mind what with driving and making his flight. Son, you just keep your eyes on the road, and you keep driving if you wanna make it on time, y’hear? You don’t let nothing distract you, got it?”

I nodded and gave him a firm handshake. I hugged my mother and headed out the front door of the restaurant and into the night chill of air to my rental car, all the while listening to my father give me one last run through of directions.

As I pulled away, my dad still spouting directions, I waved for a moment before rolling up the window to keep the chill out as I passed a row of thrift shops. While I didn’t want to move here, there was no denying that the old saying “Home is where the heart is” meant that a part of me would always be where my family was, even if that home’s inhabitants were waiting for Bigfoot to take them away on the mothership. Still, I left with a warm feeling that kept me going until the car’s heater kicked in.

I turned off my car and stepped out. My heart pounded in my chest, part adrenaline from the accident and part all the crazy shit my mother talked about racing through my head. Alone in the middle of nowhere, my mind couldn’t help but entertain the possibilities of the impossible. A bout of fear and uncertainty grabbed me out on that lone dark stretch of highway and I leaned into the back seat to open my suitcase. I fished around inside for my knife roll. I unfolded the thick black material before sliding out the weightiest knife I had with me—my stainless steel meat cleaver. Its heaviness felt reassuring and gave me the courage I needed to step out onto the pavement.

Despite my blood pumping wildly, I was freezing out here in the desert. Having to dress warmly was the last thing I had expected to do in Texas, but thankfully I had smartened up and wore flannels underneath my one purchase from town, a T-shirt reading “Where The Heck is Marfa?” on the front with “West Texas, of course!” on the back. I stepped away from the car and shut the door.

I heard something chuffing and wheezing from behind the car, but the rear taillights were not enough for me to identify the shadowy shape from where I stood. With caution, I made my way toward it, feeling along the side of the vehicle for support as I went, not relishing the notion of putting whatever it was out of its misery. I had hated live butchering from cooking school years ago and the idea of ending this creature’s life had me sick to my stomach. The only thing I feared more was rolling it over to find one of those black eyed aliens that were all over the souvenir shops out here. Normally it was a laughable idea, but not after all the fool thoughts my mother had put in my head.

I stared down at the dying animal, not having any idea what the hell I was looking at. My mother’s voice filled my head. An alien? Had it looked like it had been waiting for the mothership, my mind might have snapped right then, but no. It was vaguely pig-like, but not like any variety I had ever seen when I was shopping for fresh cuts over in the meatpacking district. Chupacabra? I wasn’t even sure what one exactly was. I seemed to recall a piggish creature from my mother’s Time-Life series that might have been one, but was this one of them? Its head was large with a long snout and its entire body was covered in thick, bristly hair. A ring of white fur ran across its shoulders, tusks protruded from its somewhat broken face, and it gurgled blood as it lie there panting frantically.

“That’s a shame, really,” a woman’s voice spoke from off to my right. Had I not been so distracted by this strange creature lying before me, I might have noticed the old woman standing by the side of the road before I screamed, but some things you simply don’t expect out in the middle of nowhere.

In the red glow of the taillights, this woman looked absolutely terrifying. Her face was a mass of road-weary dips and crags topped by a wild tangle of white hair. She was old, but there was no frailness to this figure, just a calm stillness. I tried to meet her eyes, but it was no use. They were hidden in the shadow of her pronounced brow. At her side stood a slack faced donkey, silent and carrying a burdening pile of saddlebags.

The old woman seemed to be amused at that and let out a cackle as dry as the desert itself. “I suspect I’m the one a lot of mommas in these parts tell their younguns about.”

The cleaver was shaking in my hand. I didn’t want to drop it, but I couldn’t steady myself. As I watched the woman checking me over from the side of the road, I couldn’t help but babble, as if somehow talking would improve the fear I was feeling. “My mom goes on about you,” I said. “Among a lot of things, really, but she’s mentioned the Donkey Lady. She goes on about you. People talk about you almost as much as they talk about the Mystery Lights out on 67.”

“Do they now?” the woman asked, with a cracked maniacal grin. She left her donkey at the side of the road and shuffled toward me. Her feet scuffed loudly across the old worn pavement, and now that she was in motion, I noticed the strange quality of her clothes. Her body was hidden in a massive accumulation of rags, fragments of hundreds of unmatched tatters. Some, I noticed, were even chunks of what looked like matted animal fur. She stopped a few feet from where I still stood with my back against the trunk of my car. “Tell me, what do these people say?”

A foul stench rose off her, one that I had experienced before from working in several downscale New York kitchens over the years. It was rotting meat. With that scent in my nose, my mind went blank. All Christmas vacation I had listened to my mother go on and on about this crazy stuff, and now that I actually needed to recall what she had said, I couldn’t.

I took a deep breath, counted to five, and then let it out as it all came flooding back to me. “The details of the story change,” I said, trying to remember. “From what I’ve heard, most say you’re an old rich lady gone crazy, wandering the highways with her donkey and a saddlebag full of money with a gun to protect it. Others say you’re the spirit of an old jilted prospector.”

She laughed at that, a dry ragged sound rising from her chest. I found it unsettling, and so did the dying creature lying nearby. It let out a long pained howl that shivered my spine with the sheer sorrow in it. The woman turned away from me and approached it.

My entire stay in town people had been telling me that, “You’re in Marfa.” Coming out of the old woman’s mouth, though, the familiar phrase was tainted with a bit of terror to it. There wasn’t a witness for miles out here and God only knew what an old desert survivalist like her was capable of. I tightened my grip on the cleaver but let out a long slow breath to calm my nerves.

The woman circled around the injured creature, turning her head this way and that as she went, sniffling and snorting. She looked up at me. “You’re really not from around here, are you, kid?” she asked.

I shook my head as I stood there feeling the chill of the desert slowly settling into my bones. “No, ma’am,” I said with as much politeness as I could muster. Somehow using manners kept the surreal craziness running around in my head at bay.

The old woman stopped and smiled at that. “Polite. I like that. Anyway, this here is a javelina. More hippo than pig, really. Can’t go but five goddamn feet in any direction out here without trippin’ over one of these things.”

I couldn’t look at the suffering creature any longer. I turned away from it and instead looked at the woman’s poor bedraggled donkey still standing at the side of the road. As comical as these creatures normally were, there was an eerie stillness to it. It was absolutely silent, its tail swishing gently back and forth as it stared at me with that goofy grin and sorrowful look that all donkeys seemed capable of.

With an agility that did not fit her age, the old woman disengaged herself from the animal and was suddenly mere inches from my face. The hot stink of her meaty breath was instantly in my nostrils and I had to fight back a sudden wave of nausea that mixed with my fear.

I wanted to get away, but I felt rooted in place, unable even TO raise the cleaver. Everything my family had told me came back to me. I shouldn’t have stopped, my mother was right to have been worried, and all I could imagine was how the police would find me, years from now, half decomposed in an unmarked grave somewhere just off the side of the highway. The momentary idea that I might have to take my cleaver to this crazy woman in defense entered my head, but I pushed it aside as my rational mind tried to take control.

As quickly as the woman had erupted, her wild anger was gone and replaced by the quizzical old lady once more. “So you’ve been to Jack-assic Park?” she asked with good humor in her voice.

I nodded, finding her sudden shift in personality more unsettling that her angry outbursts. Back in New York, nothing frightened me more than the unpredictability of people and their mood swings.

I nodded again and this time I almost laughed as the memory hit me. The whole setup at Jack-assic Park had been surreal: from the donkeys you could have your pictures taken with, to the gift shop, and finally the back-room which was a tribute to all things alien, including an X-Files-ish tribute to the Marfa Mystery Lights. My mother even had several bobble-headed aliens back home from her many pilgrimages there.

I wondered how much she knew when it came to the Marfa Lights. For all I could tell, this wild woman had been dropped from the mothership herself, but even that didn’t seem quite right in trying to explain her away in my rational mind. There was something remarkably earthy about her, but I didn’t dare ask the question. Instead, I clung to my cleaver and watched her shuffle closer to the animal.

“It’s a goddamn shame what happens to these animals,” she said. “That big ol’ bitch of a highway don’t care, though. Just takes what life she can. Brings a little more suffering to this world.”

The animal’s breathing changed, becoming more and more labored. The woman leaned over the creature, moving herself entirely over the animal until the rags of her outfit enveloped it like a sleeping bag. She lowered her head down into the bundle of rags and her body erupted into a violent fray of feral action like a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy. The rags of her outfit flapped into such a blur of motion that I lost track of the woman within them. The crunching of bone and a sickly wet slurping rose into the night air. Fear and horror kept me pressed in place against the trunk of my car. I couldn’t move. I could only watch in dark fascination.

Soon—but not soon enough—the sounds died down and the old woman rose to her feet once again. I looked down at the ground. Not a trace of the wounded animal remained except for a dark stain against the pavement, but that wasn’t what worried me most.

The woman had transformed into something otherworldly. Her face was like dried leather stretched over broken glass, twisted and distorted with a maw of teeth that still had bits of the animal’s flesh and bone hanging from them. As she turned her head back to me, an inhuman growl rose up. Her legs drew down into a crouch before she sprung toward me. Blood pounded in my ears as my heart raced and I raised my cleaver to protect myself from the monstrosity she was.

I brought the blade down as hard as I could, but I was too slow. The creature had already landed in front of me a few seconds sooner with a meaty thud and brought her left arm up as mine came down. It knocked the blade from my hand, and it clattered on the pavement a heartbeat later. I kept my eyes on the monstrosity that was about to tear into me.

The stink of the dying creature was thick as she lunged for me, but just as she reared back to strike, she stopped. Her breathing changed from wet and animalistic to something calmer, and within seconds she transformed back into the old woman. There was still a wild anger in her eyes which had settled on a spot along my neck.

My mind was still wrapped up in fear, and I had no idea what she was talking about. I reached up and felt my neck. My fingers followed along a thin cord lying against my chest—the bag my mother had given me earlier for good luck. My hand instinctively wrapped around it and the woman shrunk away from me.

The woman’s eyes remained on the bag around my neck. They were black, unblinking, and wouldn’t look away from it. It didn’t take a fancy city boy chef to realize that there was hunger in those eyes.

I wasn’t going to argue. I nodded and backed myself around to the driver’s side, keeping my eyes on the old woman the whole time. As soon as I was in the car, I locked the door, hit the gas and was off as fast as the squeal of my tires could take me. I didn’t need the last of my now-cold coffee to help keep my eyes open any more. As long as I could keep the car in one piece, I wasn’t stopping for anything. God help any poor gophers, javelinas, Texans, or aliens that accidentally darted out in front of me at this point. I could only hope that anything I might hit now was covered in the insurance I’d signed off on.

“Sorry, mom,” I said, already feeling more relaxed just by being in New York once again. “I was in a rush to get home. I even got them to bump my flight up when I got to El Paso.”

I ignored it. “I just wanted you to know I was OK,” I said. Surrounded by the comforts of my chosen home, the madness of a few hours back was already fading and part of me wondered if it had even really happened at all. I debated whether to tell her about what I had seen in the darkness of the desert, but I decided against it. I’m not sure I could have described it if I had wanted to.

“No, mom,” I said. “Just wanted you to know that my flight went real smooth and I thought maybe this little bag of yours might have factored into that.” I hated lying to her, but it was better than worrying her. She had her superstitions, and it was enough to let her keep them without confirmation from me. We said our goodbyes and I caught the first cab I could to get out of the airport, heading to my restaurant. I was short a cleaver now, but the price of my life was certainly worth that loss. Nothing I couldn’t pick up at Chelsea Market with Jean-Paul during my quest to perfect my dad’s home-brew coffee. Maybe I’d pick up a little something heftier too for my next trip down Texas way. How does the saying go? “Don’t Mess with Texas”? I wasn’t going to mess with it, unless it messed with me . . . and next time, I was sure to at least be properly armed.