Keep it in the Family
Journalist Martin Walker discovers something he wished he hadn’t. His Grandfather whom he had thought to be a Jewish refugee liberated from the death camps was not all he seemed. As Walker pursues the truth of who he was, he follows a trail from England into Germany that leads from suicide to murder and finally into a terrible darkness that he could never have comprehended that threatens his sanity and very existence. Because something indescribably evil is trying to prevent him from discovering the truth. And that something may not even be human.
Here, for your reading pleasure is a short extract from Keep it in the Family….
Walker had never felt so alone, so afraid.
Totally disorientated, he was unsure if he was even standing on solid ground, let alone where he was, or how he had come to be there. Unsure as to anything…. Except the stench.
An all too familiar odor, the heavy scent of musk he had smelled before, never to be forgotten. He had been covering a story, in his younger days, sent to safari park that had to run into financial difficulties. The assets were liquidated and the animals shipped out to other locations; the luckier ones at least. Amongst the less fortunate ones were the wolves for which no safe heaven could be found. No warm and protected compound in a zoo or a reserve for them, only death from high velocity bullet.
The protests had been unexpected in their intensity and the police and soon to be redundant park security had had a hard job holding the protesting groups back from the slaughter ground. Walker was there to witness it all.
He had watched the wolves as they had huddled together in a protective group, the males appearing to try to protect the females with a living shield made from their own bodies, the females in turn, protecting their cubs. It had sickened him, the smell of musk clogging his throat; the way the small steel projectile could tear through flesh, organ and bone with such impunity and impersonal function.
As the group realized that the combined strength of the pack which had served them so well for millennium could not save them; they had gone berserk….the dominant males desperately trying to attack the pale creature with the strange smoking stick, protected by the high chain link fence.
He that would be so very vulnerable with his weak teeth and claws in their environment yet was so powerful with his technology in his own.
At last the killing was almost done, except for one lone female, cubs already shot, wounded and bloodied she hopped and crabbed around the fence, the look of fear and desperation clear in her feral eyes; but the light of panic was extinguished by a final heavy bullet, which had knocked her tumbling over and over, and then she was still. He could understand the animal’s terror now. That trapped horror filled moment when one realizes that escape is impossible, like seeing a car hurling toward you down a road and rabbit like, caught in the headlights in a frozen awareness, knowing with certainty that death was upon you equally certain that there was no escape. His sphincters loosened as he heard a low growl, which seemed to emanate from all directions at once, impossible to be certain in the stygian blackness.
Then with numbing speed, it was there, in front of his face as if illuminated by single, powerful spotlight. The red eyes; a hot breath laced with the stink of a fresh kill, white fangs, a maw that salivating copiously.
His heart pounded in his neck, as two huge paws settled on his shoulders.
Then the real horror and his heart stopped.
It’s pink tongue lolling grotesquely, the animal spoke.
“TAKE IT.”
© Ian M. Faulkner
dark tales from the mind's eye 