Free Creatures by Billie Sue Mosiman Page A

could hear the sound of the whip striking at a pants leg fading as his father moved across the yard.
    He shivered with fear and with self-pity.
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    The attack had occurred June sixth. Must have been nine o'clock with the days so long Joey fell into bed from fatigue as soon as he entered the house those days. He had not an inkling of premonition something watched, waiting for a strategic time to ambush him. His tired mind could take in little more than the lonely call of a whippoorwill he heard from the woods and the thankful evening breeze that was beginning to dry his sweat.
    He shut off the engine of the old Massey-Ferguson tractor and climbed wearily down at the end of the last row, moonlight full shimmering across the flat symmetrically-tilled land. In the morning he'd have to climb aboard old Massey again and finish the field, or his father would, of course, be angry. It was acres and acres of land and he had so much more work to go.
    Then without warning from out of the thick trees came the sounds of a disastrous whirlwind that broke limbs and crashed through bushes as it came. Joey halted, his head snapping up, his heart lurching in his chest. He opened his mouth to scream, the first ever scream he had made in his adult life, a scream that began high and was drowned by the rush of wind and the pouncing of a thing upon his right side that sent him sprawling with a hard thunderclap of pain against the perfect rows of freshly turned soil.
    The Thing, not a wolf, larger than a wolf, stronger, more lethal, but with a head bearing some awful resemblance to that animal, reared above him like a giant in the moon-splashed sky. It howled from deep in a long throat, scaring Joey beyond terror, dripping silver streams of saliva upon his wildly beating chest, and then it swooped down with a last terrifying growl, its teeth bared and ivory, sinking fangs to the bone, and tearing away a chunk of meat before bounding away again to the protection of the forest.
    Joey shuddered, remembering. He struggled for release from the nightmare, shambled through the door of the barn into the deepening twilight, and went to the pump to wash the farm dirt off his hands and face. He thought he felt eyes on his back at once and turned lightening quick, but nothing was there. Yet it was there, that Thing was out there somewhere, always waiting.
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    During the dinner meal he felt ill. He tried to explain, but his words were garbled. First a mental confusion came over him and he could not make out the sense of words--what were they all saying to him? Then he thirsted like a man dying, yet after grabbing a glass of water he couldn't bring himself to drink. Finally he fainted and thrashed about on the floor, suffering convulsions.
    He didn't hear what his family said about him while so sick and he didn't know when they took him up the stairs to bed, throwing him across the mattress fully clothed.
    He woke after midnight leaking sweat and blood into the sheets. The train passing in the distance rattled clackety-clack over the rails and the high, shrill, screaming whistle from the engine called to Joey to get up, move now, it's time.
    He stumbled from bed, his head filled by a mass riot of white noise. He took the stairs from the attic two at a time to the ground floor of the old farmhouse. He heard an animal growl and turned his head, cocking it to listen. Where was the animal? Where was it?
    "Who's there?" called his father, floundering through the shadowy dark to where Joey stood fearlessly in the moon-streaked room.
    Joey didn't know him, only knew he was an enemy, that the object in the man's hand would cut into him if he didn't take it away and tear it to shreds.
    "Joey?" Querulous and wondering, his father stood with the leather whip hanging loose from his hand. Then knowing and expectant: "Oh my God, Joey?"
    Joey hunched then vaulted, using his back legs to propel him across the room, leaping now into the air like an archaic bird with wide wings,