[Follow these links to catch up with the #10 stupid thing, #9 stupid thing, #8 stupid thing, #7 stupid thing, #6 stupid thing, #5 stupid thing, and #4 stupid thing I survived growing up in Texas.] By this point, you know we’re getting stupider and stoopider each week. Not to disappoint, I’m bringing back everyone’s favorite reptile, the rattlesnake.
When I arrived in Idaho some two decades ago, locals warned me of all the rattlesnakes slithering around the backcountry. “You be careful hiking out there in them Owyhee Mountains,” I would be told. “It’s rattlesnake season out there.” It didn’t matter whether it was April or October or anywhere in between. You could bet your sweet bippy it was gonna be rattlesnake season out there. After all these years of hiking, fishing, and rockhounding all over the Owyhee Mountains (and many other places in southern Idaho), I can confirm that there are indeed rattlesnakes. I’ve seen/heard two. Both were in the same canyon, on the same hiking trail…in Oregon. (But it was really close to Idaho!)
All you Idahoans, don’t get your panties in a wad. I’m sure there are rattlesnakes. I’m sure they are gonna be out to get me now that I’ve taunted them. But I don’t think folk up here in the Northwest understand what “Watch out for rattlesnakes” means in Texas. When someone in Texas tells you to watch out for rattlesnakes, it means they have personal and recent experience with rattlesnakes in the specific spot being discussed. It means they stepped on one outside the back door five minutes ago.
During my four years working on the family ranch (from the age of thirteen to seventeen) I encountered rattlesnakes as they slithered out of pipes I was actively carrying, as they woke me from naps by licking the air next to my ear, as they interrupted my fishing, as they uncurled from the base of gateposts, as they rattled their warning in darkened feed and tack rooms…and as they rattled from deep inside hay bale mazes.
For those of you who have never played in hay barns, allow me to detail the game all us cousins found most entertaining. Creating 3D mazes in large stacks of hay bales requires a combination of creative stacking and selective removal of bales. The end result is the ability to squeeze through dark tunnels the width of a single hay bale that might go on for twenty yards with multiple bends before you poke your head out the other side of the stack.
To enhance the experience, the participants could split into two teams and utilize BB guns, pellet guns, or in later years, paintball. (The latter had the distinct disadvantage of revealing your transgression to the adults, and was thus dismissed after one ill-fated event.) I’m sure this all sounds like healthy, childlike behavior to you readers out there. Nothing stupid about crawling around under tons of hay bales and shooting at each other, right?
Oh, did I forget to mention all the rattlesnakes? I did, didn’t I? Yeah. There were lots of rattlesnakes. Hay bales mean mice and rats. Mice and rats mean snakes. Some of those snakes were bound to be rattlesnakes. I probably never even knew about the rat snakes and bull snakes. They don’t make any noise. But when you are ten yards from open air, surrounded by suffocating hay, and you hear that muffled rattle (you know it’s gotta be close, or you wouldn’t be able to hear it at all) that get’s your heart racing for sure. Don’t get me wrong, the hay fever has your heart racing already. But hearing that rattle pushes it to the next level. That’s when you’ve got to make a decision. You either gotta inch forward or inch backward based on where you think the sound is coming from. If any of us would have ever had the misfortune of stumbling upon a mother and her babies, I’m guessing it wouldn’t have mattered.
But hey, as far as I know, all the cousins made it out.
At the Desk This Week
I got more good stuff written this week. I’m cruising toward the completion of season 3 of the Green Ones. I think I have a few scenes left to finish out the final climactic showdown and then resolve a few things while also setting the stage for the next book/season. I like how it is coming together. I was convicted this week that I’ll need to go through the entire season (but mostly the last few episodes) specifically for the purpose of dialing up the inter-character conflict. They’ve pretty much been agreeing with each other and going along with the plan…which is totally not realistic at all. Plus, it’s boring. Now that I’m confident in the plot stuff all coming together, I can go back and ramp up the characterization. That will be next!
Twitch and Die! Hot Damn, Scene 3 - 5
[Click here for an introduction by Jim Buckner]
[Start with the introduction to the series.]
“What the devil’s holding ‘em?” Vezzoni crept onto the porch and waited for the smoke to thin. Nothing moved, neither twitcher nor man, save the wafting flakes of snow. After striding into the street, Vezzoni realized the depth of the irony in which he now stood knee-deep and rising. “Sarò maledetto.”
The rim of the hill had been put to flame—all three hundred and sixty degrees around him. Trapped. But how? He should have seen twitchers flooding over the fence. He would have noticed—he swore again as the truth struck him. He looked down at his feet and scanned the ground as far as he could see in every direction.
For days and weeks they’d dug. He hated himself for underestimating the animals. Now he and his men would pay the cost, if he had any men left. What about the autos?
He sprinted around the corner of the house. The ground beneath the Model Ts had collapsed, sinking them into a jumbled mess below the surface. His Packard was among them. He returned to the center of the street and waited until the silence pissed him off. “Report!” His voice blasted through the falling snow before being dragged to earth.
He counted five beats of his heart before the first man responded. “Wilhelm, sir.” A dozen others followed stiltedly.
“And now you infected bastards. Show yourselves!”
The ground began to rumble as a low growling intensified until a single screeching blood cry burst forth like oil gushing from its ancient burial. Gripped by raw emotion, Vezzoni rent his shirt in two and pounded his chest in response. Slowly, forcing great restraint, a ruddy twitcher clothed in only tattered trousers, hoisted himself from a hole in the opposite end of the street.
Twitching only slightly, the former man, Anglo by descent, shuffled forward. After several long, cold seconds, the twitcher stood twenty feet away. Vezzoni knew him. He’d been a miner. He searched his mind and came up with the only possible answer—a man he’d hated since before the twitch. A man who had apparently refused to stay buried. Serge Marcon.
Vezzoni cracked his neck. “I see you’re just as ugly as ever, Marcon.”
Serge’s body rippled as surging muscles racked his frame from head to foot in a blur of sudden movement. The horrible effect gave Vezzoni pause, and he swallowed hard. A wave of subdued blood cry swept through a circle of twitchers that had formed without Vezzoni even noticing. Wet and dripping with snow, a crowd had formed for a show.
Vezzoni recognized he and Serge were at the center of it. “So, it’s a fight you want.” He tore the rest of his shirt from his body, exposing his scarred left side from waist to face. “Then it’s a fight you’ll get.”
Serge stomped the earth with a gnarled foot and threw back his head. He ignited the air and shattered crystalline flakes with the raw rage coursing from his lungs. He turned toward the twitchers closest to him. As he raked his chest, they erupted into screams. Around the circle he lifted them into a blood-borne frenzy.
From both the weather and their shattering cries, Vezzoni shivered. Desperate to begin, he fought back the shrieks with angry words of his own. “Last we met you landed a cheap shot, Marcon. If I recall, you were worked up over your brother sleeping with your wife.”
Serge slammed the ground with both fists. Leaping ten feet in the air, he landed within striking length of Vezzoni so quickly the superintendent stumbled backward in effort to ready himself. But before the first blow could fall, a high-pitched shriek silenced the gathering raucous.
Vezzoni traced the sound to a slim female twitcher standing two steps inside the circle. She stared into his soul with yellow eyes. He growled and shook his head. “Sanders.” He stepped in her direction, but the circle closed around her before his weight could transfer. The tension on the hill nearly exploded.
Yellow Eyes, known previously as Gayle Sanders, lashed those around her cruelly and emerged again into the open circle. She extended a single hand toward Serge. She beckoned him, and he returned. Kneeling before her, he tore the frozen mud with his boney fingers and smeared it across his oozing chest. In utter quiet, snowflakes drifted to earth through the encroaching shroud of an early night. She sniffed the air above his head.
With a long, sad howl she stepped out of the circle and disappeared. Vezzoni stamped the ground, now chilled to the bone. He gripped his arm above his head and stretched the tightening muscles of his upper body. He wasn’t called Lightning Lorenzo for nothing. But he wasn’t naive enough to think his quick reflexes could compare to those of a twitcher.
More than once he’d scrapped with the infected. It had always come down to hatred versus hatred. Serge was faster than him. That speed gave him strength. But it was brittle. Vezzoni had almost a hundred pounds on Serge. Fueled with anger, that bulk would be his advantage. But he needed the smaller man close.
Serge flashed halfway across the circle in a blur. Vezzoni checked his footing, cracked his neck, and popped his knuckles. That’s right. Fast and sloppy, Marcon. He baited him. “I see you got yourself a new bitch. A little scrawnier than the last.”
He knew not to bother with his lower body, and he was right. There wasn’t time. Serge flew across the ring, swallowing the distance in the time it took Vezzoni to brace for the contact. Just don’t let go.
But the first blow came with too much force. Vezzoni reeled. Slamming onto his back, he plowed a path through the snow and mud for several feet before coming to a stop. His left forearm had been broken from the impact. “You and your cheap shots.” He spit and readied himself for the second volley. This time he moved in anticipation.
From his back, Vezzoni launched both feet into thin air. The moment before his legs extended fully, that same air filled with Serge’s blurred body. With a satisfying crunch, Vezzoni launched Serge over his head as the twitcher’s momentum flipped the superintendent back onto his feet.
He spun in time to throw a stiff arm. Instinctively, he used his left. This time the bone snapped completely. A shockwave of pain untethered Vezzoni from the ground and left him vulnerable to a quick series of blows from Serge.
Finally recovering, Vezzoni locked Serge’s head in his right arm and pinned it against his chest. Without a left arm to work him over, he used his knees to punish Serge’s fragile body. On one leg, Vezzoni lost balance. Serge bulled him over and slammed the back of his head into the ground.
Summersaulting, Serge wrenched free from the bigger man’s grip. He staggered to his feet and sundered the darkening sky with a cleaver of blood cry. Vezzoni rolled onto his knees and pushed himself up with his good arm. He’d lost his chance. Breathing heavy, he knew he hadn’t done enough damage. He’d probably do even less next time around.
There was only one option left. All or nothing. He only hoped the fight had been a sufficient distraction. Filling his lungs, he bellowed over the clamor, “Give it to ‘em, boys!”
As fast as a human can send a signal from brain to nerve ending, the shrinking ring of fire that encompassed New York Hill lit up with the spark and roar of gunfire. Equally as fast, Serge was on top of Vezzoni, ready for round two.
Gunfire rained down on the twitcher circle from rooftops and second floor windows. But before triggers could be pulled a second or third time, the surging mass dissipated like sea foam driven by hurricane winds. As bullets tore up the bloody slush of the road, door jams shattered under the brunt of surging twitcher shoulders—including the one behind which Chancho, Chloe and the rinche, had barely caught their breath.
Thrusting his pistol into the splintering mess of a door, Chancho used the .38 like a syringe filled with hot lead. On contact he pulled the trigger. As the bullet plumed inside the twitcher chest cavity—radiating shockwaves into heart and lungs to create a fountain of pulsing pink mist—Chancho’s body recoiled from the force of the contact. He flailed backward over the couch and hit his head on the low table.
The interior of the home swelled with gunfire. Chloe and McCutchen aimed at the gaping hole where the door had been. Chancho rolled onto his knees in time to see both front windows explode. A blur of twitchers poured into the room.
“Chloe!” He shoved the table in front of her, tripping the lead attacker. Dipping sideways, she yanked her knife from her boot and split the lunging twitcher open lengthwise before catching a second one in the chest. The demon pinned her to the banister and paused to shatter the air with blood cry.
Chancho clutched a splintered board, leapt from the table, and plunged the board into the twitcher’s neck. A burst of spray blinded him as the demon flung him through the balusters and onto the stair. Chancho struggled to lift himself. A piercing pain between his shoulder blades immobilized him. Desperate, he called a name he’d never spoken out loud, “McCutchen!”
Two more twitchers, injured upon entering the home but certainly not done, rushed toward Chloe. Gunfire rang from the top of the stairs. Both demons dropped at Chloe’s feet. “Here.”
“Santa Maria, how did you—”
McCutchen cut him off, “We’ve gotta keep moving. Can you get up?”
“I tried.” Chancho struggled to gain a better view of Chloe. She was moaning at the base of the stairs. “Chloe?”
“Wait. You’re not going to like this.”
“Que? Not going to like—”
McCutchen pinned Chancho against the wall. He kicked downward, and pain shot into Chancho’s spine. Electricity radiated through the muscles in his face. He sagged before realizing he could move again. “What—”
“You were kabobbed on a baluster. You’ve still got a piece of it in you. Think of it as a fat arrow. Now come on.”
“A fat arrow?” Chancho’s head swam. He knew the trauma threatened to override his voluntary responses.
“Just move. Think of Chloe.”
Chloe. Chancho’s vision cleared, and he scrambled down the steps. As he reached her, a high-pitched scream rattled the porch of the bungalow, knocking pieces of glass from the edge of their shattered frames.
“Out the back. Go!” McCutchen leapt over Chancho. He bolted for the front door with a piece of railing in his hand.
“Wait!” Chancho grabbed at him. “It’s Yellow Eyes!”
Two gleaming yellow orbs floated into the opening. The outline of a slight twitcher appeared in the failing light. She deflected several of her kin with a shriek. Then slowly, with unusual control, she stepped forward while sniffing the air.
“It’s us,” Chancho spoke softly. “The formula. The antidote, we’ll fabricate it.” Gayle spasmed, jerking her head into a sudden blur before regaining control. She nodded slowly. “There’s still hope if you—” she interrupted him with a skull-piercing shriek that vibrated his eyes out of focus.
McCutchen backed up as Gayle inched closer to where Chancho and Chloe were lying on the floor. Chancho held Chloe’s head in his hands. He ran his fingers through her blood-matted mess of hair.
“Chancho?” Chloe tensed.
“Shhh, it’s Yellow Eyes. She’s here to help us.”
Chloe started slightly before relaxing in his arms.
Barely whispering, Chancho addressed Gayle, now less than two feet away. “We’ve evacuated the remaining children. The town is yours, but there’ll be others. They won’t understand, or care.”
Gayle sniffed the air a final time before shifting quickly toward the front door. She gestured for them to follow. With help from Chancho and McCutchen, Chloe found her feet. The three of them huddled behind the smallest twitcher they’d seen yet.
Chancho started, “How did you discover the form—”
With a growl Gayle leapt off of the porch. Chancho crossed himself and hurried to catch up. The diminutive twitcher restrained her movements so the three of them could keep pace by moving as quickly as they could. The slush on the ground was freezing hard, and the snow continued to fall. Behind the shroud of cloud, the sun had begun to set. Visibility shrank to less than a dozen yards.
They stuck close to the buildings. Gayle’s authority overruled the smell of fresh meat. The greatest remaining threat came from Vezzoni’s men, who were proving hardier than Chancho would have thought. They had been armed for a war they knew to expect. Only it had come to them.
“Vezzoni,” McCutchen drew his .45, “I saved one for you.”
A figure wearing a fedora darted toward them through the dark, its movements too erratic to be human. “Wait.” Chancho deflected McCutchen’s arm before he could fire. “It’s Serge.”
“Son of a—” McCutchen holstered his weapon and wiped his face with his sleeve. They were all breathing heavily. With a blood cry, Serge settled into a flanking position a few yards on their left, protecting them from the street. He not only possessed Vezzoni’s hat, but he’d draped the remains of the superintendent’s torn vest over his slim shoulders. “I guess his oldest enemy got to him first,” McCutchen coughed.
As they neared the edge of the neighborhood, roaring flames illuminated their path. Chancho focused on the ground in front of his feet. Moving quickly, it took all his attention to avoid the series of sink holes and sloughs dotting the perimeter. Scattered gunfire continued to pepper the hill, but none of it focused on them.
The remaining twitcher horde, still at least dozens in number, maybe hundreds, seemed to have pulled back. Chancho flinched as a wall of twitchers battered a burning home, toppling it into its neighbor and spreading the flames. They were burning them out.
Temporarily blinded by the raging fire, Chancho nearly stumbled into a hole. Its rim crumbled beneath his feet. Just as Chloe and McCutchen pulled him clear, he spotted something in the hole he recognized—a wooden crate.
They scurried to catch up with Gayle and Serge until they were encased in fire. Chancho had gone from sweat to chill to sweat. The drifting snow hissed as flames licked the moisture from the air. Suddenly Gayle turned to face them. Chancho squeezed Chloe tight. There was no way out. Had they led them here only to finish them off?
Serge rushed the three of them from behind while Gayle swung underneath Chancho’s arm. Together, the couple thrust the whole group through a narrow gap in the flame. They emerged unscathed on the other side where the twitchers dropped them unceremoniously in the mud, blood, and ash.
Chancho hit with a thud. Behind him, two black figures stood silhouetted against the burning remains of New York Hill. In front of him waited the vast darkness of the Texas hill country—juniper, cedar, mesquite, and limitless fresh air. Dizzy with thoughts of freedom, Chancho turned and struggled to focus on the two twitchers who’d just saved him, again.
The air in his ears began to vibrate until the vibrations formed words. “Not finished.” He stared at Yellow Eyes first, then Serge, but couldn’t tell which was speaking, if either. “Another like us, more powerful, wants the formula. Go.” The final word bounced off the insides of his skull with the force of a command. Chancho did his best to obey. Before he could gain his feet, the twitcher saviors were gone.
McCutchen blanched as the haunting words rummaged through his disheveled mind. What wasn’t finished?And who had spoken? He struggled to comprehend the recent series of events, but all he could think was to escape. Go.
He tugged at Chloe and repeated his mantra, “Keep moving.” A drum beat of blood cry rose into the air. It pulsed gradually louder until its volume caused McCutchen’s face to twitch. While the raging fires had served to warm him to the core for the first time in weeks, he longed for the cold isolation of the Texas backcountry now more than ever.
He and Chloe pulled Chancho to his feet. The Mexican looked as poor as McCutchen felt. The three of them stumbled to the edge of the hill and gingerly started down the slope. They weaved through barren brush by the fading flicker of firelight.
What was it about Villarreal that brought out the worst in him? Made him ignore reason and throw caution to the wind? Stopping the twitcher threat had been his priority—find the logbook, prevent the power brokers from weaponizing the toxin. And yet, he’d lost the book while saving these pathetic do-gooders. He sighed. It was Chancho’s damn contagious hope—his unmitigated confidence that everything would turn out fine. Dreamers.
On top of it all, he’d risked his own neck to help a trainload of children who’d probably all turn in the next couple of weeks, giving him a fresh batch of nightmares to deal with. He paused to look back toward the burning homes on New York Hill. He steadied his head with his hand.
There remained only one explanation for his behavior. He heard his father’s words echo in his head. Life isn’t black and white, son. Someone isn’t either all guilty or none at all. But everyone’s guilty. His black and white world had gone gray in the ash and mud of Thurber.
Chancho put a hand on McCutchen’s shoulder. The touch ignited a strange sort of cautious optimism alien to him. Without the logbook in the proper hands, the likelihood others would continue to victimize his Texas remained high. Without food and water and a safe place to rest, the injuries he had sustained could kill him. Yet, some small part of him wanted to believe everything would turn out alright.
“Amigo, what do you think will happen to them?”
The two sworn-enemies-turned-reluctant-partners supported each other while gazing back on a nightmare they shouldn’t have survived. McCutchen breathed as deeply as his injuries allowed. “They’ll die. If not from the toxin, then from—”
The air pulled away from him, drawing his words from his chest. A tangy crackle curled the end of his nose. For a split second, the orange and red of the fire vanished as a shockwave rushed outward from the center of New York Hill in every direction.
Lifting him from his feet, the force of the rippling air flung him thirty feet into the top of a juniper. The concussion slammed his ears with the roar of raw consumption until the initial surge passed. Finally the explosion plumed upward and outward, followed immediately by raining debris.
McCutchen dangled helplessly from twisted branches. Clods of dirt and God-knows-what battered him until the trunk snapped under his weight. He dropped through several feet of brittle foliage and crashed to the frozen ground. His recently found hope bled out as quickly as it had come.
Exhausted and weak, he couldn’t wrap his mind around what had just happened or why. But as he always did, he kept moving. Say something. Do something. Get up.
“Chancho.” Wobbling, McCutchen grasped a branch and tugged. A hand reached down to help him. “Chloe?”
“I don’t know what you two were doing up there. Roasting marshmallows, I guess.” With a grunt she lifted him to his feet. “Chancho?” she called out.
“I’m alive, I think.”
Several yards away, they found him upside down in a clump of oak. “Good thing it wasn’t a mesquite.” McCutchen turned up the edges of his mouth, impersonating a smile.
“Was that a joke, mi amigo?” Chancho coughed and winced in pain from the baluster protruding from his back.
Chloe looked both of them in the eyes. “What happened? Who—”
“The twitchers,” Chancho spoke in short sentences between labored breaths. “I saw the dynamite.”
“Why?”
Chancho shook his head and fell silent.
In terrible clarity, McCutchen knew the answer. It was exactly what he would have done. Reshape the landscape in your favor. The twitchers were claiming Thurber, making it their own—erasing Vezzoni, erasing the Company. And they were doing all of it while faking their own deaths. “Come on, we’ve gotta keep moving.”
McCutchen also knew if he stood still any longer, his muscles would seize and refuse to unfurl again. “We’ll head for the north shore of Big Lake, then to Steam Shovel Hill. Maybe Nanette’s still around.”
Thanks so much for taking the time to read Twitch and Die!, Season Four of the Lost DMB Files. I’ll be publishing FREE daily scenes from the Lost DMB Files until…I die…or something terrible happens. Seriously, I’ve got over 400 scenes written so far, and I’ll be writing more until the story reaches its natural ending. You are totally welcome to read the entire story for FREE! If at any point you decide you would rather finish the story in ebook or print format, just click the buttons below and you can do that as well. If you enjoy reading the serial releases, BUT you would also like to support me as a writer (my kids need wine!) please subscribe to my premium content for bonus scenes, exclusives, and insider access to my process. And of course, I’d be grateful if you would share this post with any of your reader friends who you think would enjoy the Lost DMB Files. Happy reading!