Free Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days by Claudia Hall Christian Page B

had shifted away from the
most ill -- the pregnant mare and a stallion. I wouldn’t have
selected these creatures as the most infected. We had to trust the
horses’ instinct around illness. George and I led the pregnant mare
and stallion away from the others to the other side of the Pen.
    I shot the mare just under her ear. And she
didn’t fall over dead. She was not affected by the bullet. Instead,
her soulful eyes flicked to look into mine as if the say, “Is that
the best you could do?”
    George mewed his horror. He shot the mare
full of his salt load, reloaded, and shot her again. She jumped at
each impact but didn’t die. She continued to look at us, almost
begging us to do better.
    I took her tattered rope bridle and led her
to a soft area of earth. I was able to get her to lay down. With a
nod to George, George severed her head with a blow from his razor
sharp axe. Four more blows and the head released from the body.
    I was moving the head away from the horse’s
body when human-looking hands reached from inside her body to grab
at the head. An entire being -- not quite horse, not quite human,
100% wasp -- unfolded from inside the mare. What we thought was
pregnancy was merely the mare acting as a kind of cocoon for the
wasp.
    The creature screamed and snapped. He tried
to bite through our animal skin clothing. I kicked him away from
us. The creature knew no fear. It did not hesitate to come after us
again. George shot it with salt.
    At that moment, the Pen was attacked by
wasps. The wasps hurled themselves against the electrified fence.
The wasps screamed with rage. Scores of wasps bellowed in pain and
terror as they were electrified in the fence. All the while, the
fence buzzed and clicked with electricity. The cacophony shook us
to the bone.
    My eyes and ears were clear. I saw the
spirit of the mare waiting for release. Using the sickle, I lopped
off the head of the wasp-horse progeny that had lived inside the
mare. I dragged the creature’s body to the fire pit and threw it
in. The creature’s body writhed as it was consumed by the fire; its
head, a foot or two away, screeched with rage and pain. George
threw a layer of hay over the burnt wasp-horse progeny and threw
the mare’s carcass into the pit.
    We took no chances with the stallion. We cut
off his head in such a way as to not disturb the progeny we assumed
was growing inside. We burned him without ceremony. We heard the
wasp-horse progeny cry and scream from inside the burning stallion,
but it could not get out.
    Bloody, exhausted, and heartbroken, we
returned to the horses in our prison yard. The wasps continued
their screams and chants. Looking out into the night, there seemed
to be thousands of them, if not millions. I averted my eyes. I
did’t want to start the 500 day count again.
    We will have to wait and watch over the rest
of the herd. Of the original herd, we lost two mares and two
stallions. Four horses remain. They seem only marginally effected.
They are hungry for salted oats. Their droppings contain piles of
what look like shelled pinon nuts. We assume they are some kind of
wasp egg. If so, it’s possible these horses will shed the wasp. We
burn their droppings in our fire pit.
    We’ve decided to wait until dawn to make the
decision about the rest of the herd. For safety’s sake, it would be
smarter and safer for us to dispatch the entire herd. Neither
George nor I had the heart to kill the rest of the horses tonight.
We brought them inside to the old dining area where they would
spend the rest of the night.
    Returning to the women’s cell, we found them
in a state of panic. The pregnant woman had collapsed, most likely
from the interaction between the salt and the wasp inside her.
    While George went to the infirmary, I
pretended to want to calm and comfort them. When George returned
with syringes and phenobarbital, we injected the women with enough
medicine to nearly kill them. I smiled, held, and hugged the women
as they weep;