Bill slept uncomfortably for the better part of the afternoon. His wounds seem more superficial than first realized, partially due to the cunningness exemplified using the shade of the trees to his advantage. Although rest quickened the healing process, wounds like those would heal at a more prolonged rate. Bill needed to feed if he intended to regain his strength for the fight ahead of him.
He had gone to sleep hungry. When he awoke shortly before dusk, his hunger pains had intensified considerably. Once again, he felt as if he was starving, although Bill now knew it was the trick of his beast and shrugs it away. Still yet, he would not be able to shrug off his brothers so easily, and they are coming for him as Malsum had promised.
The sun had already passed its highest peak in the fall sky. Bill presumes he had no more than two or three hours before he would have to leave the safety of the barn. He intends to move far north from Derrylin. The last thing he wants is an epic battle erupting anywhere near Abigail or his hometown. The way Bill figured it, if there is a chance he is going to die tonight, he would at the very least lead his brothers further into northern country and make his stand there.
Bill was swifter than Nuke and Adlemeyer and more cunning than all three of them, yet Blaster was easily faster and more tempestuous than the other two. He could feel the mental bond he and his brothers shared dwindling; although faint, Bill could still sense them. They were within three miles. To wendigo, that meant they were within minutes, possibly even seconds of him. Bill needs a plan that would outsmart them, allowing him to keep ahead of Blaster. He is not prepared to kill his brothers or forfeit his life either, at least not at Malsum’s whim. The sun began its decent behind the western horizon around five thirty. Bill spends his last few minutes without a strategy. He stands just inside the barn’s entrance, restlessly pacing back and forth while waiting to spring into action.
The engine of the old step-side truck, clanking and sputtering, makes its way up the east-bound dirt road. The sudden barking of a dog alerts Bill; it senses his supernatural presence and tries to warn its master of the dangers lurking within the barn. Bill moves to the barn’s wide entrance easing back into the shadows, taking cover behind old bails of mildewed hay as he studies the approaching truck. In another few minutes, the sun will have set, and the chase would be on. He quickly needs to dispose of this newly risen situation. There would be no time to properly stalk and procure his prey’s savory parts; Bill intends to take what he needs to heal him and not a bite more.
The truck halts twenty feet from the barn. Earl Keegan opens the truck door, placing one foot on the ground while commanding his blue heeler Barney to shut the hell up. Keegan is a haggard-looking man and genuinely appears to be in a constant state of inebriation. He is dressed in blue overalls, a faded sweaty T-shirt, and an equally faded Kansas City Chiefs football cap. Keegan is short-legged, round at the midsection, and has stubby sausage-like fingers at the end of short hairy arms. He always seems to lick his lips as if anticipating his next meal. Bill was anticipating his meal.
Barney tears across Keegan’s lap and hops to the ground where he immediately circles around the front of the truck, pauses, and then starts to bark. Within the darkness, just beyond the barn’s wide opening, Bill carefully watches Keegan, ignoring the annoying dog.
“Damn it, Barney. What in Sam’s hell has gotten into you?” Keegan scorns the dog, climbing out of the cab and slamming the rusty door. Shaking his head, Keegan elects to ignore Barney’s nonsense and reaches into the back of the truck, pulling up an old wooden milk crate filled with six empty brown whiskey bottles. Barney continues barking nonstop.
“What’s got you all spooked, ole’ boy?” Keegan wobbles to one side to pat Barney on his head. “We come out here three… four times a month, and you haven’t, not once, acted this way before.”
As Keegan strolls toward the barn, Barney bites down on his pant leg and rears his hindquarters, viciously growling as he tries to pull his master away from the barn.
“All right, dagnabit, I’ve just about had enough of your antics.” Keegan pulls off his ball cap, revealing a bald, flustered, and wrinkled dome; he swats at the air above Barney’s head. “Heel, boy, heel—” Barney immediately goes down to his belly, releasing his hold, and whimpers. He places his paws out in front of him and stares timidly up at his master.
“There’s just isn’t any sense in the way you’re acting. I’ll be a couple of minutes.” Keegan reminds the dog before disappearing into the barn. Barney immediately turns tail under the truck and waits for his master to scream.
Once inside the barn, Keegan saunters along in song and dances over to a dirty weathered planked door, chained and locked with an antique iron padlock. The ditty he sings is of his own conjuring, and he sings out with a drunkard’s boastful enthusiasm. As he lifts a key from his pocket to unlock the door, Keegan gets a whiff of Bill’s decomposition wafting across his nose.
“Good god almighty… What in Sam’s hell is that awful stench?” He uses his forearm to cover his face and then steps on to the wooden floor of a smaller cluttered room. “Whoa… Smells like something took a dump and died on the can.”
The room is quaint, grime-encrusted, infested with cobwebs and filled with crates stacked upon crates containing empty bottles, various drums, and carboys—bootlegging equipment. A large kettle sits on a gas stove at the back of the room. A makeshift stopper hallowed out and fitted with copper tubing and a small digital thermometer plugs the kettle’s spout. The tubing runs at a precise forty-five-degree slant up to a large Coleman cooler, which then spirals down into the bottom of the cooler and out its own spout. Keegan maneuvers around bottles of molasses to get to the large drum below the cooler’s spout. He crouches down and removes the whiskey bottles from the crate, lining them next to the drum filled with a dark brown homemade concoction.
Bill creeps silently across the floor to the open doorway and toward his meal. Intrigued by the bootlegger’s set up, he is prompt to gather a last-minute strategy. Distilling moonshine is a common practice for many rural residences. On few occasions, Bill had been privy to a moonshiner or two and somewhat understood the equipment in front of him. It gave him an idea on how to deal with his brothers. First, however, he needed to satisfy his hunger and heal his wounds.
Keegan scoops up a tin measuring cup off the dirty floor next to a large box containing brewer’s yeast. He opens the spout with his shaky plump hand and, with fidgety anticipation, fills the cup. The smell of potent rum flares his nostrils, and Keegan eagerly takes a sip and, afterward, smacks his lips apart. He indulges himself in another drink and then clears his burning throat while eagerly licking his lips. “Whew-wee,” Keegan says, giggling to himself, “chee-choo-chu-hehehehe… that is some mighty fine rum, if I do say so myself.”
Bill steps on the wooden floor, which buckles down under his weight and gives off a sharp creak. Keegan halts amidst pouring himself a second cup, becoming alert to the disturbance.
“Barney?” he calls behind him to the dog.
Keegan sniffs the air and immediately covers his nose as he catches another whiff of the foul stench emanating from Bill’s pores. “I guess you found whatever crawled up inside the barn and died. It smells like—crappola, get it outta here.”
The floorboard creaks a second time. Keegan now feels the looming presence behind him, and Bill senses that tinge of unsettling fear slowly rising throughout the man. His tongue slips out of his mouth, beginning its morbid dance.
“Barney, ole’ boy, is that you? Whatever you found out there has no damn business in here.”
With the cup still hovering over the spout, Keegan turns slowly to get a look at what Barney has uncovered. Instead, Keegan gets a glimpse of the monstrous wendigo hungrily leering down at him. Bill’s jaws unhinge and expand as the long sickly bluish tongue darts out and across hundreds of thin sharp teeth, malevolence expressed unequivocally across the contortions on Bill’s skeletal face. Keegan’s eyes widen with the extension of Bill’s talons over his face and coiling of Bill’s tongue around his neck. Holy Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were the last words the moonshiner managed to choke out before his head had twisted off and was then bitten into it.
Seconds later, Bill hungrily sucks the oozing red juices from the moonshiner’s neck as Keegan’s body spasms violently against the wood floor. He can hear Barney baying wildly from under the truck as he rips into his master feasting. There is no time to procure the parts of Keegan’s body that Bill’s senses told him were pleasant; he eats quickly and greedily, shoving bits and pieces into his mouth until his wounds heal and he has regained his strength. When Bill is done, he tosses the scarceness outside the distilling room and turns his eyes to the stove and kettle. Bill fully intends to leave Keegan’s corpse there on the dirty floor to bait his brothers—Blaster in particular.
Removing the kettle from the stove, placing it on the floor, Bill switches a back burner to a high temperature. A steady popping from within the gas stove soon ignites a blue flame along the burner. Bill then places three of the large glass carboys filled with the wash on each of the unlit burners. Combustible base-wash reacts violently when exposed to an open flame; it contains pressurized volumes of alcohol that have been fermenting up to a month at a time. Bill carries the fourth carboy with him out of the room.
The sun has nearly vanished, and he now closely watches as darkness gives chase and the last line of daylight quickly scurries for shelter, only to meet the darkness within the barn’s interior. Once his brothers are within range, perhaps a mile out, Bill is positive that the scent of Keegan’s bloody corpse would lead his brothers straight to him; he could barely ignore its sweet enticing scent himself. More importantly, Bill suspected Malsum would be helpless to control the wolf pack if they are distracted by the scent of fresh blood. Bill decided his trap would suffice.
Any explosion of any magnitude isn’t nearly enough to kill the wendigo. The only true death for his kind was a silver projectile through its icy heart. It would, at the very least, put his brothers out of commission for a short while, buying Bill a good day’s head start. However, when they did recover, the wolf pack, along with Malsum, would stop at nothing to destroy him.
As the last inch of the light melds with the barn’s shadows, Bill moves against the far wall ripping out several rotten planks, creating a large enough hole for his escape. He then heads to the distilling room and hovers the fourth carboy above the open flame.
It is time, child. Malsum bursts into Bill’s thoughts; Bill empties his own. They are coming for you, Billy Boy, and your brothers have grown very hungry.
How many times had Bill used that exact same line on his own victims, letting them know the unfathomable extent of a wendigo’s ravenous hunger? Malsum would not shake him; Bill is now unshakeable. Unlike his brothers, he had already eaten. His wounds had healed, and he is at his full strength. He steadies the carboy feeling that his brothers are quickly closing distance.
It’s not too late. You only need to beg me, and I will call off my wolves.
You no longer have the power to do so. Everything they crave, I will give them.
Bill holds on to the carboy, steadying it over the flame, and waits patiently for the last possible second to drop the volatile concoction. Nuke and the others are now in the field; he can hear their thoughts as they race toward the scent of fresh meat.
Blaster, as expected, is the first to enter the barn. The wendigo is completely mad with the scent of Earl Keegan’s blood and pounces downward on the mangled corpse, rolling repeatedly as his jaws close around Keegan’s exposed ribs. Bill gives himself a firm three count, waiting for Nuke and Adlemeyer to catch up to Blaster. When he senses the others are just outside the barn and still in full stride, Bill shatters the carboy over the open flame and slips quickly to the back of the barn; the fermentation ignites, spreading over the top and the sides of the stove and over the three remaining carboys. Nuke’s and Adlemeyer’s movement patterns are concentric, as they zero in on the smell of flesh and blood; they will not evade Bill’s trap.
Billowing flames jump high into the air, snapping and licking. Bill turns briefly to watch as his brothers descend on the carcass. In truth, he regretted what was about to happen, but at this point, he had little choice; Malsum had seen to it. Quickly, Bill vanishes through the hole he created for himself.
What have you done? My children… your brothers, Malsum quickly realizes the extent of Bill’s treachery. no! go back! what have you done?
You forced from my hand, wolf, Bill says coldly as the barn erupts in a large fireball behind him. I told you I was finished. Now it’s going to cost you your pups.
In a furious rage, Malsum recites a litany of thunderous curses in Bill’s mind, all of them swearing his vengeance. Again, the intensity of his will drives Bill to his knees but only briefly; Malsum’s hold on Bill dwindles. He rises to his feet and shakes away the clamor. Bill also shakes away the intrusive psychic pleas of his burning brothers.
He is saddened and ashamed. It was not what he wanted for them. However, for some time now, Bill knew they had grown apart. With every ounce of willpower he could muster, he fights to stay himself—for his humanity and for Abigail. His brothers no longer had that luxury. They left their humanity back on the beaches of Kuwait, forever wandering its desolate platinum sands.
The dog, Barney, cowers low to the ground, timidly approaching after sensing Bill’s distress. When the cattle dog is directly under his lumbering form, he licks the last two fingers on Bill’s devilishly clawed and bloody hand. Bill menacingly stares down at the dog, thinking only of his brothers. When he no longer hears their suffering, replaced by eager crackling fire ablaze, Bill turns away from the engulfed barn and presumes to walk north. Barney follows behind him, wagging his stub of a tail.