“He’s going to take us out to kill our friends eventually. Maybe even kill us. We have to leave before he makes us go against all of our community’s beliefs.”
“Where will we go? How will we survive on our own?”
“We have each other. We’ll go back to the commune to be with our people. Live the way Mom taught and wanted us to live.”
“I miss her.”
“Me too, and we can’t let him nullify all of her ideals with one of his hunting trips.”
“We’ll probably have to ki—”
“No. It won’t be us. It will be them. And it will only be what he deserves. He’ll have brought it on himself.” Acer cupped his brother’s face with both hands and leaned in until his forehead rested against Ash’s. His identical twin raised his hands to mirror Acer’s act.
“For Mom,” Ash whispered.
***
Wesley had known his boys were up to some unnatural shenanigans in the woods, often heard them, voices raised in song. He’d paid it no mind as long as it didn’t interfere with their chores and schooling, glad they liked being outdoors instead of in the house playing video games or watching TV like most of their peers. It was one of the only redeeming qualities they’d carried with them from the commune.
Except he’d had no idea they were up to this!
They didn’t have on a stitch of clothes! Standing in some cultish circle made of stones, their joined hands raised to the sky, some incomprehensible chant spilling out of their mouths like a meth addict’s teeth.
Stark naked.
He couldn’t help staring at them, entranced the same way he had been by their mother thirteen years ago. Her with her big dark eyes, long wavy black hair, and cinnamon-brown skin—as iridescent as their sons’ light caramel complexions beneath the full moon.
She’d bewitched him. Then she left.
And these boys were the product of their union. Engaging in some heathen rot their mother had taught them in that highfalutin commune she’d taken them away to. Damn cult.
He’d thought he’d gotten them away from those people in time, that their teachings hadn’t been so ingrained. But by the time their mother had died—God rest her soul—they’d been twelve, the well already poisoned. And it didn’t seem these last six months they’d been with him had changed much.
It wasn’t enough she’d given them some persnickety pansy names and raised them to be tree-hugging vegan hippies. What else had she taught his boys to make them gallivant out in the woods, peckers out for all the world to see?
He shook his head, tearing through the brush from where he’d been watching the pagan spectacle, and grabbed each of them by their scrawny biceps. Both seemed underfed from not eating any meat or dairy or anything else that vegans didn’t eat. Looking at him like he’d killed their mother, trying to make him feel guilty whenever he grilled a steak or had a burger. “This just tears it! You’re both going out with me tomorrow. Participate in something useful in these woods. Learn to hunt like real men instead of playing at devil worship!”
“We’re Wiccans!” The boys chorused, voices a musical lilt. They sounded and looked so much like their mother it was painful to be in their presence sometimes.
She’d left him like some cheap trick, holed up somewhere and had the boys like a cat dropping a litter under a bed and spirited them off to raise on her own…in a cult.
He and his ‘conservative, prehistoric views’ weren’t good enough for her or their boys.
It didn’t have to be this way. They’d forced his hands. Much like their mother had.
“I won’t have my children raised by a Neanderthal!”
Neanderthal. Hmph. A Neanderthal she hadn’t had any problems fornicating with.
He had finally found her with the help of a P.I. and by then she was six months pregnant with his sons!
She’d had the upper hand because what rights did he or any man have when it came to their unborn back then? Not like today with so many states thankfully limiting what a pregnant woman could do with her unborn child.
And like a deer senses a predator in the woods, Calanthe had disappeared again before he could confront her after he’d gotten her address from the P.I.
He would have been good to her and the boys, if she had only let him. He had more than enough money, a nice secluded place in the woods the way she liked. What had been so bad about him?
He stared at his boys now, almost shuddering at their defiant brown glares. Demon children. “I don’t care what persnickety names your mother and that commune call what you do. It ain’t proper behavior for God-fearing Christians.”
Acer sneered. “We’re not Christians.”
“You think you’re better than a Christian? Better than me?” It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten the sense these boys looked down their liberal commie noses at him. Their damn mother had taught them that along with all their other pagan ways.
“No, sir.”
Wesley stared at the boy, not believing one word out of his mouth. This one was stubborn and confident like his mother. He’d teach both of them a thing or two about respecting their elders. He’d been soft on them so far. But no more.
“Go back up to the house, put your pajamas on and go to bed. We’re getting up bright and early tomorrow for an overdue hunting trip.”
***
The next day dawned with an early spring chill, the morning crisp and energizing, still dark outside by the time Wesley and the boys clambered into his SUV.
He drove a ways down the road, parked the vehicle at one of his favorite spots and ushered the boys out.
The first thing they did was tilt back their heads to admire the quarter moon visible against the starry night sky. The sun wasn’t due to rise for another hour.
Just for a moment, he regarded the look of wonder on each boy’s face while they paused to enjoy their environment. Their mother must have taught them to smell the roses around them, enjoy the little things. It wasn’t a completely bad way to be.
The boys moved as one toward a tree at the threshold of the forest proper, squatted to play with a scurry of chipmunks. The animals chirped as his boys petted their striped coats, all of them seeming to communicate with each other on a level beyond speech. His boys were a couple of Doctor Dolittles.
Wesley grabbed the rifles from the back of the vehicle, tossed the boys reflective vests to don over their outer gear. Safety first. Though giving his sons loaded weapons after the little row they’d all had last night, might not have been the safest idea.
They wouldn’t dare!
“What now?” Acer asked after zipping up his vest.
Wesley handed him, then Ash a rifle.
He watched as they skillfully checked and loaded their weapons, proud they knew how to do that much. They weren’t bad shots either, but shooting at inanimate objects like a bottle wasn’t like shooting a living thing. He’d tried to get them to shoot a watermelon to give them the sensation of putting a bullet into something with soft flesh, but even that was repugnant to them, as much as it was a waste, they’d said.
Wesley’d had more practice with putting a bullet into human flesh than he cared to admit. Sometimes, killing was just necessary. To protect family, home, and country.
Had they been old enough during the draft, his boys probably would have been conscientious objectors who spit on returning war vets in the street.
The boys protested killing for any reason, but especially hunting for sport. They didn’t understand death by hunter was on average far less painful than death by predation. He was doing the animals a favor. Not to mention hunting preserved the precious ecosystem they were always going on about.
He’d explained to them one could kill without having hunted and hunt without having killed. He’d known some unlucky hunters that went season after season without bagging an animal. Personally, when he killed an animal he felt a somber union with and respect for the natural world, not pleasure. Not that his boys believed that. They thought only the worst of him, that he was an idiot redneck and only they and the people in their commune understood and valued ecology. If that wasn’t the meaning of arrogant—what they always accused him of for killing sentient beings—he didn’t know what was.
Wesley now led the boys deeper into the mixed hardwood-conifer forest, past babbling brooks, appreciating the mystical aura of the aspens’ signature dance in the wind as much as the boys did. Sometimes there was something to be said for all the woo-woo drivel.
He settled behind an old live oak tree, peering into the clearing ahead as his boys settled on either side of him. It didn’t take long for a huge buck to appear about thirty yards away, a clear-cut target.
The boys were perfectly still beside him, staring at the animal in awe for entirely different reasons than Wesley stared in awe, he knew. He recognized they were too mesmerized to act without a nudge and quietly touched Acer’s shoulder. Though the boys were identical twins, Acer was the older by a few hours and the natural leader. Sure enough, he heeded Wesley’s signal and raised his weapon.
“Now get him in your sights,” Wesley whispered and waited as Acer followed his instructions. A long moment went by with Wesley holding his breath before he realized the boy wasn’t going to fire his weapon.
“Pull the trigger, boy,” he growled.
“I can’t, sir.”
“You have him in your sights. Do it now or you’ll—”
“I won’t!” Acer turned on him, pointing his weapon to the sky and firing.
The buck darted off, as majestic a sight departing as he had been standing still.
“Dammit, boy!”
“I’m sor—”
Wesley had back handed the boy with such force, his slim body flew through the air before landing hard on the ground.
Ash crouched beside his brother, giving Wesley a hateful look over his shoulder.
The baleful glares from both boys made his skin crawl but he dared not let them know that they got to him.
There’d always been something eerie about them from the first time he’d met them when Child Protective Services had brought them to his home from the commune. Maybe it was because they were twins and had that fabled connection where they silently communicated with each other without saying a word. The same way they had communicated with the chipmunks.
“You can’t make us kill our friends, sir,” Acer said.
“Friends?” Wesley frowned at them, as Ash helped his brother to his feet.
Ash spread his arms to encompass the forest. “All of them are sentient living beings. We can’t harm them.”
“What are you, a couple of fairies?” Wesley curled his lips in disgust. “They’re just dumb animals and trees.”
“Just dumb animals and trees?” Acer gawked. “Animals feel pain just like we do. And without trees we wouldn’t have enough oxygen to breathe.”
“Spare me the Science Guy lecture. You let a prime animal get away.”
Acer shook his head. “You just don’t get it.” He wiped the blood from his nose and mouth. “And now you’ve fed them.”
Wesley watched the blood drip from Acer’s hand to the ground as if in slow motion, the dirt and grass seeming to absorb the boy’s life fluid like a sponge absorbed water.
Suddenly, the boys’ gazes locked on something behind Wesley before his rifle was torn from his hands and slammed down against a nearby boulder, breaking into pieces.
Wesley turned to see the large oak, branches spread just a little less wide than earlier. He leaned close to get a better look, heart drumming in his ears.
Impossible. The tree had not just snatched the rifle from his hands!
“Dad!”
Something skewered Wesley from behind and he felt himself first being dragged backwards, then lifted and flung against the tree. He glanced up to see the buck, his blood glistening on the animal’s antlers beneath a suddenly full blood moon.
Impossible.
The boys stood just behind the buck, frozen like woodland creatures caught in headlights.
“You bastards did this,” he rasped, beginning to drown in his own blood.
The boys barely had time to shake their heads before more animals slowly stalked past the children, converging at the oak.
As if the tree is the ringleader. Not my boys.
A mountain lion, a grizzly bear, a wild boar, several more bucks and deer—predators and prey, large and small—all moved toward him as one.
With a single purpose.
***
“I can’t look.” Ash buried his face against his brother’s shoulder.
“It’s okay.” Acer rubbed and patted his brother’s back as he watched the carnage for both of them, his father’s blood-curdling screams echoing through the woods, drowned out by the barred owls hooting, the gray treefrogs singing, the crickets chirping, wild predators snarling. A macabre choir. The nocturnal cacophony like nature’s symphony. Music to die by.
The wild animals ripped their father limb from limb, the mountain lion trotting away with a leg in his mouth like a trophy, the grizzly bear taking an arm and devouring it like a chicken wing. Even the deer and smaller forest dwellers got into the act to stomp and chomp on their father’s near lifeless torso.
Their father gurgled, reaching out to Acer with his shredded, remaining arm as the wild boar tore into his stomach, burying his snout in their father’s entrails to feed.
The live oak towering above them groaned and shifted as if in approval and pleasure, their father’s life blood seeping into the ground, nourishing its roots, making it grow taller and lusher before Acer’s eyes. Grisly sustenance.
“More.”
He shuddered at the ravenous timbre as his father finally fell still and silent at the base of the oak.
“Is it over?”
“For now.” Acer hugged his brother tight.
They hadn’t wanted this. They’d tried to warn their father, so many times, but he hadn’t wanted to listen to their ‘hippie vegan drivel’. He’d brought this upon himself.
The blood of a hunter that had killed so many of the forest’s brethren, better than a drenching rain, richer and more satisfying.
The forest around them moaned like a man pushing away from a table full of rich Thanksgiving fare to pat and rub his stuffed belly hanging over his waistband.
Acer knew, however, their father had only been the appetizer.
This story previously appeared in The Sirens Song eZine, 2024.
Edited by Marie Ginga
A native New Yorker, Gracie C. McKeever has authored several novels, novellas and series most of which can be found at Siren Publishing under multiple sub-genres beneath the erotic romance umbrella. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies Sensuality: Caramel Flava II and Bold Strokes Books’ In Our Words and in Allegory Ezine, The Chamber Magazine, Pink Disco and MetaStellar,and aired on the award-winning horror fiction podcast Nightlight. Find her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more at Gracie C. McKeever and @GracieCMcKeever. Find her books on Amazon.