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he d rather avoid. He waited for one of the smaller ones to circle
around.
But while he watched, the& wildebeest?& raised its massive
head and sniffed the air. Alex knew it was going to bolt, and so
would the rest of them, and he might not catch them again before
dawn.
Alex rushed forward, moving so fast that he d be a blur to the
human eye. It confused the deer thing too, because it didn t take
alarm until he was right next to it. It saw him then, but by that time
it was too late. He was already swinging the log like a baseball bat.
It cracked against the buck s skull, loud and hollow sounding. The
blow jarred his arms to the sockets.
Alex could see the rattled confusion in the deer thing s eyes. It
hurt, but it didn t fall. Instead, it charged.
Alex scrambled backward, keeping one bare step ahead of the
coat hooks of death.
Alex didn t experience any moments of spiritual clarity during
this brush with mortality. It sucked. It sucked profoundly as he
scampered for his life. He wanted to live. But he also knew it was
funny. Fucking hysterical that he should die naked out here in the
sticks, skewered by a really pissed deer-like thing.
Funny until his back slammed into a cold, rattling wall. A
cheap aluminum storage shed. The buck rammed the shed with a
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deafening, metallic crunch, its antlers encircling Alex like a cage,
the short points bruising flesh and bone.
An elk! Alex realized in a moment of perfectly clarity,
memories of some long gone nature show returning to him in a final
blessing. That s what it is! I m being killed by a goddamn bull elk.
The elk pried its horns from the aluminum to come at him
again. Just before he was impaled Alex wrested the log up and
brought it down right between the elk s eyes.
It dropped like a sandbag.
He jumped on it, straddling the shoulders and leveraging the
horns back to stretch out its throat. The carotid arteries and the
jugular veins throbbed deep beneath the elk s thick, black ruff. The
rest of its body was covered with lighter-colored, shorter hair, but to
get what he wanted Alex had to rip his way through that coarse,
musky mane, growling with frustration until he found flesh and
pierced the carotid.
A fountain of blood struck Alex s cheek. He opened his mouth
and drank as fast as he could. The elk struck out with its legs and
tried to raise its head, but Alex shoved its head back down to the
ground and kept drinking. The elk heaved a huge sigh of
resignation, one that lifted Alex like a swelling wave, and then
subsided.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The heat of its dying body soaked into his chilled, needy bones.
Its massive, pumping heart sent mouthful after mouthful of hot,
gamey blood down his throat. As fast as he swallowed, he could not
take it all in. It flowed out of his mouth and down his chest.
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Evie Byrne
In the back of his mind he knew that someone might come out
of the house to see what the noise was about, but he just didn t care.
All that mattered was feeding.
Alex had never gorged on a single victim not once in his
whole life.
And he d never killed to eat, either, except for the vermin the
night before. Their squirmy little lives he d gulped down as fast as
he could, just trying to get it over with. But taking this noble
creature, this adversary, into death swallow by swallow seemed both
an honor and a sin.
When the blood slowed to a sluggish trickle, Alex began to
weep. He knew he was blood drunk. That is, overfed, over
stimulated and prone to melancholy as well as violence. He knew
the symptoms, had seen it in the newly converted, but knowing
didn t make him feel any better.
The elk gasped over and over, trying to draw oxygen into its
collapsing system. Its drum-like heartbeat turned erratic. He
clenched the elk s thick hair in his fists, lapping and sucking until he
couldn t pull fresh blood up anymore. Then he just lay still, marking
the last, fluttering protests of its mighty heart.
When it was over, he slid to the ground. Droplets of frozen
blood studded the snow around him like rubies. Icy, pinpoint stars
winked in the sky above him. He d never been so sated in his entire
life. It seemed possible he might never move again. But eventually
the blood on his face began to itch. He rubbed some of it off with a
handful of granular snow and found his way to his feet. Even dead,
the elk was still regal. Alex bent down to touch it one last time, then
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walked away, dazed and lost. For a time he followed the twin tracks
of the other elk, but then he veered another direction, his sense of
Helena guiding him home. At first he walked slowly, then he began
to jog as a surge of unexpected energy buoyed him up.
As a test, he decided to run flat out and see how far he could
go. He thought he could run maybe fifty yards. Instead he ran all the
way back to Helena s house, one thought beating over and over in
his brain, I m going to be okay.
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