Poisoned Soil: A Supernatural Thriller Read online

  Ozzie groaned and grimaced but managed to right himself.

  “Atta boy, Ozzie!” Hal said with wild enthusiasm. “Let’s drink to that!”

  Hal gave Rex a few slurps of shine and then took a swig for himself from the same cup. He stood up, a little too quickly as it seemed to Ozzie that he had lost his balance, and then made his way over and plopped down next to Ozzie. Rex crawled behind Hal’s neck, as he was unsure of Ozzie’s character. Hal put the cup to Ozzie’s lips. He took a small sip and was able to really taste it for the first time. Hal started to remove the cup to check Ozzie’s bandages, but Ozzie wanted more.

  “All righty then,” Hal said. “Let’s set you up, boy! Barkeep,” Hal called to himself as he walked to refill the cup. He gave the full cup to Ozzie who, partly out of hunger, partly out of thirst, but mainly out of the need for remedy, slugged every last drop. Hal burst out laughing. Ozzie appeared a little dazed, as if he was either unsure what he had done or not sure what happened to the moonshine. He just stared into the empty cup.

  “Hell, Rex, that boy can drink!”

  “Looks like you’re getting ’round better every day there Oz. Hell, it’s only been...well let’s see, don’t much have a calendar ’round here. I’d say about five or six weeks from your death bed to you scampering around camp during the day. Yep, moonshine, moss, and rest, that’s the recipe.” Hal leaned over and poured Ozzie a little more ’shine, which Ozzie slurped with enthusiasm. “C’mon boys, let’s have ourselves a party!” Hal said as he picked up his guitar and started picking. “We need us some women folk, though. It’s a sausagefest around here—uh, no offense there, Ozzie,” Hal said.

  Ozzie didn’t get Hal’s meaning but it didn’t matter. He had no words to describe the steady shuffling of the twelve bar blues that came from the Martin guitar, but he couldn’t stop tapping to it. His entire body bobbed and shook uncontrollably, his eyes transfixed by the glow of the fire that cast its spotlight on Hal dancing and singing with Rex on his shoulder. The beat flowed into Ozzie’s blood.

  Da dum dum da dum dum,

  da da da,

  Da dum dum da dum,

  “We need an electric guitar to rip a solo and get this party rolling!” Hal said, stopping just long enough to take a swig from his cup and to refill Ozzie’s cup. The music kept playing in Ozzie’s ears even when Hal stopped. Ozzie had never felt so good, so free. So alive! Warmth from the evening campfire, warmth from Hal’s liquid concoction, and music that lifted his soul. Ozzie grinned his biggest grin and watched Hal make the amazing sounds. They had been hootin’ and hollerin’ around the campfire for hours, rendering Hal’s voice somewhat raspy, but it was the best singing Ozzie had ever heard.

  “Don’t know why the hell they call this the blues,” Hal said. “Hell, this will cure anybody’s blues!” Hal ripped into the final chorus:

  Well now they call me the breeze,

  I keep blowing down the road

  Ozzie bobbed and weaved to the beat.

  Da dum dum da dum dum, da da da,

  Da dum dum da dum

  I ain’t got me nobody,

  I don’t carry me no load

  “Hot damn!” Hal screamed, wiping sweat from his brow. “That there’s some mighty fine Lynyrd Skynyrd, ain’t it Oz?” Ozzie kept bobbing his head, the music alive within him, comforting him. Hal took his guitar off and leaned it against the cabin, sat down by the fire.

  “Hell, that’s all you need right there, fellas,” Hal said to Ozzie and Rex. “Whiskey, rock and roll, and a couple of pals. Don’t need none of that other bullshit.”

  Ozzie still heard the beat of the blues rocking in his head and kept bobbing as Hal spoke, his rant sounding much like singing to Ozzie anyway. He didn’t know if it was the moonshine or Hal’s voice, but the combination of drink and Hal’s rambling captivated Ozzie. To him, this was the happiest place on the planet. Hal seemed so free and so carefree that Ozzie couldn’t remember why he had ever wanted to go back home. Hal seemed to take his mother’s place each passing day. Feeding him, protecting him and caring for him. He’s living the life! Ozzie thought as he watched Hal. All I want is right here!

  “Look at us,” Hal continued. “Where’s the heat? Right here in the fire. Where’s the air conditioning? Right there in them leaves. Ain’t no cost for HVAC and ain’t nothing to repair. Ain’t no cost for refrigeration neither, not with this cool mountain stream. Ain’t nobody to pay taxes to. My flatscreen TV is up right up yonder on the Milky Way channel. Almost every plant out here is medicine or food. Don’t need no General Mills or Johnson & Johnson. Hell, boys, we don’t need a blasted thing!” Hal stopped for a moment and reflected on what he had said, was saying. He had uttered these thoughts aloud to no one for years. The last person he had shared these thoughts with was his wife, Connie, before she became ill. The flickering campfire lured him back to another world, a world that now seemed as surreal as an alien landscape. He knocked back a slug of ’shine and got lost in a memory.

  He had owned a small business with Connie, a bakery in Athens. They got by fine for years, but as he got closer to retirement age he grew disillusioned with the government, the Federal Reserve’s money printing machine, and how unfair everything seemed. Every time he earned another dollar it was offset by rising food or energy prices. Or taxes. Yes, retirement had begun to weigh heavily on him, although he took comfort in the modest 401K they had accumulated.

  He didn’t know it then, but within three months his world would completely collapse.

  It was just after Christmas in 2008 when Connie first complained of a constant headache. At first she described it as a normal headache, similar to others she had endured as of late. Hal attributed those to stress from being tied down to the bakery 24/7 with no end in sight. Connie took acetaminophen. When the headache persisted, she switched to Aleve. On New Years Day the headache became so excruciating that Connie complained of a stiff neck and told Hal her vision was blurred. Hal quietly panicked and prepared to take her to the emergency room at Athens Regional Hospital. He should have taken her to the emergency room. But Connie was fiercely independent and afraid of hospitals. “I’ll go to my doctor first thing in the morning,” she had insisted. Hal sat on the sofa holding her, his fingers caressing her forehead. As Hal dozed off, Connie drifted to sleep in his arms. She never awoke. When Hal found her motionless, apparently lifeless, he shook her violently and screamed her name. “Connie! CONNIE! Wake up!”

  To Hal, it was as if everything that happened from that moment on happened to someone else. An old, horrifying movie that Hal vaguely remembered watching as an observer, not a participant. The 911 call, the paramedics, the doctor’s apologies, sympathies, and exhortations that “she should have gone to the emergency room when the headache persisted...”

  She was gone. Hal was left to wander, sentenced to drift without a rudder in a sea of isolation and misery. He never made a conscious choice regarding his own fate. He felt an invisible hand guide him through the fog of Connie’s funeral and open his eyes to how pointless his business of baking bread was. Hal put a “closed” sign on the door, walked away, and never returned.

  As the nation’s banks collapsed and financial markets plummeted over the next month to a twelve-year low, Hal watched his meaningless 401K dwindle to less than half its value while the government bailed out those too big to fail. It was all too much for him to take in, with or without the guiding hand. He cashed in what was left of his 401K and fumed some more when the government took its penalty for taxes and early withdrawal. All that was left for him was to make trips to a few stores. Army surplus for survival supplies, Barnes & Noble for some wilderness books, and finally a camping store. Hal drove north, unsure of his destination. The hand guided him to the mountains and down Warwoman Road where he found what looked like the most isolated and dense jungle on the planet. A place where he could hide, get lost and die, and be beholden to no one.

  The doctors had offered no reason to satisfy Hal’s need to un
derstand Connie’s sudden death. How could she have been here so alive, so much a part of him one moment and then gone, poof, the next? Just a ruptured aneurysm, that’s all. It happens. More and more often, they said. One doctor even suggested the increase in incidents of aneurysms had to do with the factory farming methods that leeched essential minerals such as copper from the soil and, ultimately, from the bloodstream. Hal heard little of it, consciously. Subconsciously, the doctor’s indictment against factory farming just piled on top of the bailouts, the finger pointing, the concrete jungles, and the sense of entitlement that increasingly everyone exhibited. Entitled to a job, entitled to a home, entitled to cheap food and fuel. It was an artificial world created by a parasitic invader—man. Hal was able to survive in that world with Connie because he and Connie created their own little world, their bubble. Without her, the bubble burst and deposited Hal in a world he wanted no part of.

  “Ow! Jesus Rex, watch it!” Hal exclaimed. With the music stopped for the night, Rex dug his paws into Hal’s shoulder to climb down and go exploring in the darkness. Hal looked across the dwindling fire to Ozzie, either asleep or passed out on the porch. His grin had faded, turned to drool as Ozzie twitched violently.

  Hope he’s having sweet dreams, Hal thought to himself, as he got up and decided to turn in himself. First, he allowed the piss mister to extinguish the fire.

  Hal walked past Ozzie into the cabin with a peace he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Somehow Ozzie was healing him as much as he was healing Ozzie. Getting him back in touch with life and forcing him to process feelings he had never fully explored.

  God, I love that little guy, Hal thought and drifted asleep as rain began to fall.

  On the front porch, Ozzie began to dream. He dreamt that he was floating over the porch and spinning like a feather over the dying campfire. The heat pushed Ozzie above the forest canopy where he could look down to see a trail of smoke from Hal’s smoldering fire climb through the treetops like Jack’s beanstalk. Not far downstream, Ozzie saw a lush garden with an enchanting, black-haired angel standing in the middle with her arms spread wide. Overhead, he saw the swirling eye of an approaching storm, the sullen sky turning almost as dark as the mountain soil itself. Turning his gaze west, Ozzie drifted above another clearing where a winding road snaked up the mountainside. Below, he saw his mother lying on the ground alone, shivering and frightened. A lighting bolt singed Ozzie’s nose, tracing a path from the storm above and striking the ground near Isabella. From the ashes of the lightning strike, a man rose and brandished a steely knife in her face. Ozzie screamed at the man, but no sound came. He flung his arms to fly and save his mother, but the skies opened and—

  “Every man for himself!” Hal shouted in the midst of a moonshine-fueled dream of his own that jolted Ozzie awake from his nightmare.

  Ozzie jumped up on the porch and looked around, not knowing for a moment where he was. He ran inside the cabin next to Hal, trembling, and crawled under Hal’s bed. Before coming to Hal’s, he had never had nightmares. Now, horrific nightmares came nightly.

  Shaking uncontrollably under Hal’s bed, Ozzie peered out the door hoping, praying to not see the men, the coyotes, and the swirling storm that he saw in his nightmares. He thought of his mother, alone, and his father murdered. The feelings tortured him, his love for his mother pulling him back to her, his fear of his enemies keeping him close to Hal. And he thought of Hal, who lived the life that Ozzie wanted. If only Isabella could be with him. But she wasn’t, and Ozzie was scared for her. He closed his eyes tightly and cried himself to sleep.

  Chapter 14

  As the flowers in her secret garden glistened in the morning dew, Angelica regretted giving into her body’s midnight craving and feeding it pork ribs. She knew that eating pork late at night was associated with bad dreams and poor sleep, but she devoured the ribs anyway, feeling sinfully gluttonous in the moment but unable or unwilling to refrain. Baby’s hungry, she had said.

  She slept miserably, tossing and turning and unable to stay asleep. It was hard enough sleeping with her belly bulging more each day, and she needed some rest. Morning couldn’t come soon enough for Angelica, as she had hardly been able to wait to come to her secret garden, the one place that always gave her peace and comfort. Now, she gingerly fingered the branches of Nancy’s Tree as she walked to a hammock that joined twin crabapple trees. She sat on the hammock and threw her legs up with more difficulty than the month before. Angelica pushed off, using one of the overhanging branches, causing the hammock to sway.

  The garden was hauntingly quiet, the air not breathing, the birds not singing. Her eyes were too heavy to stay awake and contemplate the quiet. She needed rest and the hammock quickly soothed her into a deep sleep and she began to dream.

  A drop of rain fell from the heavens and kissed Angelica’s arm. Then another. She smiled at God’s gift of rain and studied the drop curiously. The raindrop was as black as a cave’s deepest secret. She touched the black drop and felt her skin rise, mushrooming into a searing black blister that spread along her arm before bursting and covering her in pus. In the dream, she searched the sky for answers, but instead of seeing God she saw a dark, swirling storm approach from the south. She peered closely at the menacing cloud and saw its shape contort into the shape of Blake’s face. He frowned at Angelica and spewed his black rain over her secret garden. The toxic rain stripped everything it touched as fur, feather, leaves, and flesh melted from trees and drained into the soil.

  Suddenly, Angelica found herself floating on a branch high in Nancy’s Tree. As she reached to pick a ripe fig, its sweet scent faded, replaced by a putrid smell of rotten meat that gagged her. The figs began to rot and turn black as they fell from the dying tree with a splattering thud. Angelica tasted blood and wiped her lip to see blood coming out of her mouth. She looked to the ground and watched the blood wash down her legs, over her feet, drip from her toes, and plunge into the soil, as if the soil was pulling the blood from her. Her eyes grew wide with fear as she hugged her abdomen, realizing she was bleeding from between her legs.

  “No!” Angelica screamed herself awake in her hammock.

  ***

  Ozzie could hardly wait for sunrise. He crawled out from under Hal’s bed and greeted the cool October air, the early morning sun casting long shadows over Hal’s camp. The light was Ozzie’s friend, a blanket of protection, he felt, from the horror of his dreams. Walking downstream, Ozzie wandered aimlessly in the safety of the light. After walking for an hour he stopped by the stream to think.

  A thin fog had risen from the night’s rain to cover the forest floor. Through the fog Ozzie saw a lush clearing at the point where the stream curved. He walked to it through the fog with trepidation and prayed there were no coyotes in the fog! Remembering the coyotes quickened Ozzie’s pace. He ran into the clearing and stopped, able to see well around him.

  Ozzie stared at all the trees, the flowers, and the plants. He had lived his whole life where there was little to eat. Now, he stood in the most beautiful place he had ever imagined, and the fog made him feel as if he were dreaming again. He found himself surrounded by food. Plants came from the ground, mushrooms grew on logs and food had fallen from the trees. He looked up at the first fig tree he had ever seen and was entranced. He dropped his head to see a ground littered deep with figs. They were overripe but it didn’t matter. As Ozzie ate, he grinned and squeezed as many sweet figs as he could into his mouth. He lost himself in a trance as he filled his belly with the most delicious fruit he had ever tasted. A fruit that he figured must surely be forbidden.

  “No!”

  Ozzie snapped out of his trance as he heard a violent scream from a woman. He squinted through the fog to the other side of the garden. A woman shot straight up from a hammock and scared Ozzie back up the stream toward Hal’s camp.

  ***

  Angelica looked over her body and touched her arms to make sure there were no blisters. She felt her abdomen carefully. Realizing it felt
precisely how it should, she breathed a sigh of relief and wiped sweat from her forehead. She threw her feet off the hammock, put her head in her hands, and cried. The tears ran like a summer downpour, there was no stopping them. She was horrified. What did I dream? What does it mean? Is something wrong with my baby?

  The thoughts raced through Angelica’s mind as the tears streamed down her cheeks. Why was Blake there? Why was he creating the suffering? Angelia closed her eyes and calmed herself as she allowed rational thoughts to overtake irrational tears. She felt her abdomen again and held her breath. She waited. The baby moved, ever so slightly, but she was sure. She exhaled. He’s fine, she thought, as she rose to inspect her garden.

  Since she had fallen asleep, the fog had descended on the garden, making it feel as if her Garden of Eden was indeed in heaven. She walked along the perimeter of her medicinal herb garden, inspecting the valerian, comfrey, feverfew and the St. John’s wort. She rubbed her legs against her culinary herbs, releasing a bouquet of mint, oregano, rosemary and thyme into the fog to be lifted to the birds, to God. Angelica inspected the echinacea and the poke, the two plants she used most often in the tinctures she made to keep her immune system strong. She hoped that the benefits of nature’s medicines would wash through her Cherokee blood and accrue to her son, although she had suspended taking the poke, due to its toxicity, the minute she found out she was pregnant. Bending slightly, she picked a few medicinal herbs and tucked them beside the crystals in the deerskin pouch that she wore at all times.

  She walked to Nancy’s Tree, captivated by the glistening foliage that hung from her branches. Nancy was growing into a beautiful young woman already. Angelica allowed her eyes to drop from the branches to the ground to take in the sea of fallen fruit, fruit that...had been almost completely eaten since she had walked by an hour before! Every single one, dozens of fallen figs, now mostly eaten, devoured.