Genaro L. Zamora’s
“The Found”
Copyright by Genaro L. Zamora, 2009
Smashword edition
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This is a work of fiction. Although some events and characters are inspired by reality, the characters and events in this book are completely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Niyorco
P.O Box 1618
Groves TX. 77619
http://www.myspace.com/niyorco
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Dear reader,
First off, I give my personal thanks to you for showing interest in my works. It is a fun experience for both you and me to kick back and take part of a story. With that being said, let me tell you, that this is a short tale, different than many other novels that are almost three times longer.
I chose to keep this story as an enjoyable fast paced read in where hopefully, you can visualize it as if it were a movie excluding too many details, fattening the story and making it drag.
This tale is of a darker, suspenseful genre. I hope you enjoy it, and I would love to hear your opinions on it, rather you love, like, or hate it. Your opinion is important to me. So now, let me step out of the way, allow the characters to take the scene, and carry you through a shiver in which you are about to experience.
Hope you enjoy.
Genaro L. Zamora
(Niyorco)
Beneath the moon and upon the earth,
caw the birds who carry souls.
Upon the earth, are those who crawl
and await the call,
of the caw.
To find their peace,
in which they yearn.
For being doomed,
and damned their turn……
…………Genaro
Prologue
The scream of sirens roused him. He opened his eyes, slow and painful, and could see flashing blurs of red and blue emergency lights come into focus. He could feel something wet trickling up the side of his head. Blood, he thought with panic rising in his chest. It didn't make sense though. The world seemed wrong and then he realized that he was still in his truck, strapped into his seatbelt, hanging upside down. Gouts of crimson dripped from his head and pooled on the interior of the truck's roof.
He tried to suck in a deep breath, but the pain was too much. Broken ribs, he thought. The way his body jerked and twitched when the truck flipped was a wonder of how he was still alive at all.
"Sir," a voice called. "Sir, are you okay?"
The little strength he had left allowed him to nod slightly.
"Help is on the way! Don't move." This was another voice, he thought. It had a different tremble.
Motherfucker must've been drunk. In his mind, he relived the vision of the tiny Honda Civic fly into his lane and slam into the Chevy, sending him and his wife flipping and bouncing out of control. He could almost hear the echoes of crunching metal and shattering glass.
The voice came again. The second one, he was certain. "Don't move, Sir. Help will be here soon."
He didn't care about help, not now. He craned his neck so he could look into the passenger seat. She was unmoving, limp arms splayed above her head, legs pushed into the windshield. He watched her chest to see if it would rise and fall, to show some signs of life. He watched for what seemed like an eternity, but she didn't breathe.
His wife was gone, nothing but a human ball of flesh and bone. As grisly as it was, she looked peaceful, and he told himself that she had died instantly, that she didn't feel any pain.
"Thank you," he whispered through quavering lips. Saying goodbye was too hard. "Thank you for not letting her suffer."
His tears dripped into the pool of blood above his head. Gritting his teeth through the pain, he reached out and grabbed her hand. "I love you, Olivia . . . I promise to always take care of our boy. Always."
Chapter One
Three months later
Life must endure no matter the depth of the tragedy. Though it seemed impossible at times, and although he sometimes doubted himself, Antonio "Tony" Mendez was doing everything he could to make a normal life for his son. Six-year-old Ricky seemed strong in the face of his mother's death, and others commented on what a strong little trooper he was. Tony knew different. His son's mind had not been at rest since the night of the accident. A father knows.
The fishing trip to the Sabine, a beautiful stretch of Texas river, was meant to help both of them cope with the past while trying to move on with their lives. The calm, flowing water reflected the huge oaks and surrounding shrubs that lined the sides of the river. Tony hoped the river's current would pull away he and Ricky's sorrow, send it downstream and out of their lives. It was a fanciful dream but a man could hope, couldn't he?
A smile creased Ricky's dimpled face every time he felt a tug on his fishing line. Tony hadn't seen that smile in what seemed like an eternity, and it brought a deep grin to his own face.
"I almost caught him!" Ricky would yell whenever he thought he had a nibble on his line. He would then jerk the pole upright, believing he would reel in a huge catch. He hadn't quite managed to snag an actual fish. Ricky had snagged quite a few rocks and branches though, and lost five hooks in the process.
Tony heard a soft sigh followed by an, "Oh, man."
"Another one bites the dust?" Tony asked.
"Huh?"
"Need another hook?" He said.
"I'm caught on something . . . maybe it's a real big fish."
"Maybe," Tony said, grinning. He dug into his tackle box only to find there were no more hooks. He didn't want the fishing trip to end though; he didn't want Ricky's smile to end. "Hold on a minute. Don't break your line just yet."
Tony hurried to his white pickup, another Chevy, and pulled out a pair of hip waders. He would follow the fishing line and retrieve the hook himself. Even if he weren't able to get the hook, he figured that at least Ricky might get a kick out of seeing his father waddle into the river like a duck.
Tony brought the waders back to the riverbank and slipped them on, hoping they would keep him dry. Stepping slowly into the river, he traced Ricky's fishing line. Through the waders, he could feel the cold of the water and the surprisingly strong current pushing against his legs. He looked over his shoulder at Ricky standing on the bank to make sure he wasn't too close to the water's edge.
"Do you see it, daddy?" Ricky asked, kicking the soil at the river's edge with his shoe.
"Don't you go and get wet, your grandmother will have my head," he said. Ricky giggled and Tony smiled, as he continued to follow the fishing line into the water. "I'll find it for you, I promise."
A parade of caws and squawks erupted from the trees across the river. Tony looked up to see more than a dozen of the large black birds as they settled into the limbs of the old oaks and elms. He tried to recall what one called a group of crows, and then it came to him. A murder of crows . . . yes, he was sure that was the term. He had never liked crows. They always seemed too watchful, easily agitated.
As he looked up at them, their eyes seemed to fix on him. He did not like them at all. Not that he really thought they would come after him as if he were an extra in a Hitchcock film. Still, he didn't like them watching him as they did.
Tony suddenly realized that his legs were getting wet; he'd gone in a bit too deep while watching the birds and now the river was sloshing into his waders.
The water was colder than he had thought it was going to be, and as he looked at the fishing line and how it angled even deeper into the river, he knew it was about to get a lot colder. He was going to have to submerge most of his body to get the hook free from whatever rock or branch had snagged it.
He plunged his arm into the frigid water, following the fishing line until he reached the river bottom. Only his head, the arch of his back, and his left arm were above water as he groped and clawed among the stones and tried to free the hook.
"Come on, come one," he whispered as he continued the search. Finally, he felt where the hook had lodged beneath a stone. It wouldn't budge.
Figuring that he was already soaked to the bone, he reached into the water with his other hand and tried to move the stone. He finally managed to wriggle the stone free of the river's muddy bottom and the hook came loose.
Standing up too quickly with the stone in one hand and the fishing line in the other, he nearly lost his balance. His arms spun in wild circles and almost fell backwards into the river. Ricky was laughing, and the crows seemed to be doing the same.
Tony found himself laughing too. He turned to tell Ricky to reel the line in when another sound caught his attention. The constant caw of the crows suddenly turned into shrieks, hideous sounds he did not even know a crow was capable of making. The sound grated on his eardrum like fingers down a chalkboard.
The sound stopped as quickly as it had begun. Tony turned to where the birds had been perched just moments before, but they were no longer in the trees. Instead, he found the crows splayed out on the marshy ground beneath the canopy of the trees. They were all dead.
Tony shivered, and he was sure it was only partially because he was drenched in cold river water. He wondered what could have happened to the crows and hoped that it had not scared Ricky.
As he stood looking at the stiff feathered corpses, the clouds began to blot out the sun. A wind whipped and howled through the trees and then seemed to funnel down the river, sending an even deeper chill through Tony.
Tony looked back to Ricky. The child stood there frozen in place, a statue with wide, unblinking brown eyes. He was not looking at the birds though. His small hand slowly raised and pointed at the stone Tony held in his hand.
Tony looked down at the stone and suddenly realized what had Ricky so scared. He lifted the stone and turned it around in his hand. It was no stone. Instead, he held in his hand a small, jawless human skull. The orbits that once held eyes stared up at him.
"Shit!" He tossed the skull away and dipped his hand back into the icy water, wanting to get the feeling of death and contamination off his skin.
The skull landed near the shore, and Tony watched in horror as Ricky set his pole down and walked over to the skull.
"Ricky," he yelled.
Ricky bent down and picked up the skull. He held it up to his face, looking intently at it.
"Put that down," Tony said. Ricky seemed not to hear, transfixed by the skull. "Put it down!"
Tony sloshed out of the water and to where Ricky was standing, still looking into the skull's empty eyes. He saw gooseflesh begin to rise on Ricky's arms.
"Put it down," Tony said, as he reached out a hand to take the skull away.
"Do you hear the whispers?" Ricky asked. He finally looked away from the skull and at his father. "Do you hear it, daddy? It says, "help"."
Tony grabbed the skull and tossed it farther up the bank. He knelt in front of Ricky so they were eye to eye.
"You okay?"
Ricky said nothing. It seemed as though he was unaware his father was even there.
"Hey," Tony said. He squeezed Ricky's shoulders gently. "Hey, it's okay. You don't have to be scared of that thing okay. You don't worry about that."
Ricky nodded in silence.
***
"My name is Detective Sal," said the burly man as he offered his hand to Tony.
To Tony, Sal looked like the typical, hardened police detective. He was tall, at least an inch taller than Tony's own six feet, and he outweighed Tony by a good forty pounds or more. The smell of cigarettes wafted off the man, and his eyes looked dark and tired. Tony didn't envy the detective's life.
"We've already given our statements to the other officers," Tony said. He just wanted to get Ricky home, where he could be warm and safe and forget the day.
"I know, but I've got a few questions too," Sal said, grinning. "You were just out here fishing, huh?"
Tony nodded. "That's right. I have some time off work and my boy and I thought we'd try to land a few fish. It isn't as if we were looking for something."
"Unlucky you," Sal said. "Must've been a hell of a shock, huh? How's your son."
Tony shrugged. He honestly didn't know how Ricky was doing. The child had been so quiet.
"You see anything strange on your way out here? Anything that struck you as out of place or odd?"
"Just the skull," Tony said. He hesitated a moment and then said, "the birds."
"What birds?" Sal broke out his notepad and pencil.
Tony pointed across the river. "You see those birds over there, on the other side?"
"Dead crows, yeah. What about them? You and the boy get in some target practice before you went fishing?"
"No, nothing like that," Tony said, shaking his head. "It's just . . . God, I wished I was the one that killed them because at least then I would know how they died."
Sal cocked his head. "What do you mean?"
Tony took a deep breath. "Well, they were all gathered on the branches there, cawing up a storm. The next thing you know, they let out a . . . scream. Then they dropped to the ground, dead."
"Screamed?" Sal raised his eyebrows, and Tony almost wished he had kept quiet about the crows.
"It sounded an awful lot like a scream, all of them at the same time. They all died at the same time. That's not normal, right?"
The detective turned his head back toward the birds on the far side of the Sabine where the ebony bodies lay motionless. "No, that isn't normal. Maybe they were poisoned. Small farmers will sometimes poison crows to keep them out of their gardens."
"Maybe," Tony said, unconvinced.
"I don't know what I can tell you other than not to worry about it. I can only investigate the skull."
"What happens now?" Tony asked.
"You go home and stop worrying about dead birds," Sal said. "Watch something funny on the television with your family and try not to think too much about that skull. We have some great folks in the forensics department, and we might get lucky enough to match it to a missing person's report, give some family some peace of mind about their child at least."
"Child?" Tony said as a sick feeling started to creep over him.
Sal nodded. "The skull was very small. It's almost certainly a child's skull."
He had held a child's skull in his hands. It made him ill to think about it, and he wiped his hands on his still wet jeans. He wondered if his hand would ever feel clean again.
Tony looked over at Ricky, who was sitting on the tailgate of the truck. He was immediately thankful that he had his boy.
"Go home. Mr. Mendez. If I have any further questions, we have your information."
Tony couldn't wait to get home with Ricky and forget the whole day. He wondered though if it would fade from Ricky's mind so easily.
***
Later that night, as Tony sat in the kitchen and drummed his fingers along the rim of a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, he found that he could not do what the detective had told him to do. He couldn't get the thought of that skull out of his brain.
"Not the nice, quiet day you wanted, huh?" said his mother, Flora, as she came into the kitchen. After the accident, she moved in to help look after Ricky and to help with other household chores. Tony had said it was unnecessary, but she had insisted and said she wanted to be able to see Ricky more.
He had to admit that he liked having her around. It was good to hear her comforting voice. She had said that it was only temporary, but her idea of temporary was far different from that of most. In fact, Tony already started building another room that would be hers.
"It sure wasn't the day I imagined," he said.
She placed a plate of peppered meat and rice in front of him. He looked at the food and pushed it around his plate with a fork. All he could think about was the skull and the dead birds. Food seemed unappealing.
"You know," he said, "everything was going great and then . . . bam . . . Ricky's worse than ever."
He got up from the table and peeked through the door into the living room. Ricky sat in front of the television watching Dora the Explorer. Tony wondered if Ricky were still thinking about the skull as well. He watched Ricky for a moment more and then returned to the table.
"He was smiling today, Mom," Tony said. "You know how long it's been since he's smiled."
"I know, son," she said. "He'll find his smile again. He did it once."
Tony sighed. "I know, it's just that –"
The volume on the television in the living room suddenly increased. He could hear the local news rambling about the recent finding of a skull in the Sabine.
"What's he doing on that channel?" Tony was up and into the living room in a heartbeat. "Hey, let's turn that off, kiddo."
Ricky sat Indian style on the floor, eyes fixed on the television.
"Off," Tony said, as he reached past Ricky and turned off the television's power button. He looked down at Ricky, whose breathing was rapid, causing his small stomach to bounce up and down. Beads of sweat gathered on his face and glued his dark hair to his forehead. Ricky looked up at Tony. His small eyes suddenly rolled into the back of his head, showing only the whites.
"Help me, da-da-daddy," he said between quick breaths.
Tony reached down for his son and screamed for his mother. "Call an ambulance. Hurry!"
Chapter Two
Sal took a huge gulp of his lukewarm coffee, black and sugarless, and then pulled another menthol cigarette from his pack of Marlboro's. It was his third in the past half hour. He was taking the frustration he felt about the investigation out on his lungs.
I hate head cases, he thought, and then grimaced at his own unintentional joke.
Sal glanced up at the clock on the wall above his desk. It was well past midnight, and he realized that he was getting tired. His eyes felt heavy. He stood up, stretched his arms over his head and then gave his face a few slaps. There was no time to sleep, not on a case like this.
Sal was used to not sleeping, and he was used to spending most of his time down at the station. He liked it the best in the late hours, when fewer people were around to interrupt his thoughts.
With a bit of renewed energy, he sat back down at the computer and continued browsing through the missing persons files. With the little information that he had on the skull there was not much he could do. In fact, he'd only seen the skull briefly, when forensics bagged it at the scene.
The one thing that struck him about the skull was its size. It was small, obviously a child. He wondered how young the child was though. Until he got more information from the lab, it was going to be hard to find a starting point. It was a sad fact, but there were hundreds of missing children reports in East Texas.
His stomach churned when he thought about it. So many missing children . . . so many parents left to wonder what had happened to their babies. He knew that feeling all too well, knew the feeling of being the parent whose whole world vanished.
He took another drag off his cigarette and tried to push away the pain of losing his little Mona. Sometimes the work would help, sometimes he could focus solely on an investigation and his mind would feel at ease. Other times it was bad.
"Shit," he said, slapping the side of his computer monitor as a name came to him. He typed the name into the database. Billy Reynolds, seven years old, went missing on a fishing trip out to Sabine Lake. But that was a good thirty miles through trees and marsh from where the Mendez fellow found the skull and the body would have had to float upstream against the current. It just wasn't possible. Even if a gator had snatched the kid, it wouldn't bring him thirty miles up the Sabine to dump him. Dumping bodies was the kind of thing that only another human being might do.
He stared at the picture on the screen. The kid had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes, a big smile and would have had a nice future ahead of him. It was a damned shame the way the world worked sometimes, a real damned shame.
"It ain't him," Sal whispered. The skull, though he'd only seen it for a second, was far too small to be that of a seven year old. His cop's instinct told him that it was so, and he generally trusted those instincts.
***
On the other side of town and only about a mile away from the Sabine River, the St. Catharine's Hospital stood guard over her patients. Saints and angels were carved into the architecture of the building and gave it felt as much a sanctuary as it did a hospital, giving hope and bolstering the faith of the patients inside.
It was a small hospital, only one floor, but it had most of the amenities as its larger brethren. The east wing held the nursery, as well as several patient rooms. Ricky Mendez lay in one of those rooms, pumped full of drugs to reduce his fever and help him sleep.
"We're going to monitor him for the next twelve hours, but I think the worst is over," said Dr. Morrison, as Tony listened. "From the symptoms you described, it sounds like he had an anxiety attack. Given the day that you've had, it's reasonable."
"Yeah, that's for sure," said Tony, nodding. He rubbed the stubble that was already beginning to sprout on his face.
"Have there been any other incidents recently that might have contributed to this?" the doctor asked.
Tony hesitated. It always hurt to speak about the accident. Speaking the words seemed to make them real, and he hated that.
His mother answered. "Ricky lost his mom in a car accident just a few months back."
"I see," said the doctor. He tapped his hand on his large belly. "I imagine that trauma added to what happened today was just too much. Has he seen a psychologist about his mother's passing?"
"He needs time, and then he'll be okay," Tony said. He did not want to subject Ricky to having his mind probed by a psychologist. It was better, at least in Tony's mind, that Ricky remembered his mother for who she was, not to analyze his feelings. What if the doctor was right though? What if Ricky needed help to find closure?
"I understand," the doctor said. "Well, a nurse will be in to check on Ricky in about half an hour. You can stay in the room with him if you like, but you might want to go home and get some rest."
"We'll stay," Flora said. "If he wakes up he'll want us here."
When the doctor left the room, Tony walked over to Ricky's hospital bed and gently caressed his son's head. It hurt Tony to think of such a small boy with so many terrible things swirling in his little head.
His head was warm, almost hot to the touch. Still, it was not as bad as it had been earlier.
"Maybe he got sick at the river today. Was it cold? Did he get in the water at all?" Flora asked.
Tony barely listened to his mother's words. His hand that rested on Ricky's head suddenly began to get cold. Ricky's head was still hot, but Tony's hand felt as though he had stuck it in a bucket of ice water.
As he was contemplating the sudden temperature shift, he noticed a hum in his ears. It built to a screech, muting out every other sound. He shook his head, trying to shake it away. He wondered if he were getting sick as well.
Tony looked down at Ricky and the boy's temperature rapidly dropped. The heat that had emanated from him a moment before was gone and his flesh turned ice cold. Tony's vision blurred and the room seemed to dim. The humming screech grew even louder.
His vision slowly began to clear and as it did, the room seemed to fade away piece by piece. The walls, floor, and ceiling vanished, followed his mother. Ricky and his hospital bed disappeared next.
Tony found himself standing in the shallows of what appeared to be a river. He could feel the current pushing against the back of his knees. Thick, dark trees with gnarled limbs and twisted trunks lined the riverbanks. Fog undulated around the trees like a serpent. It looked like a hellish version of the Sabine.
His hand, already cold, seemed suddenly colder. He felt something touch his palm and then grasp his wrist. Tony looked down to see a pale hand clinging to him. The arm, covered in deep, gaping wounds trailed into the water. He tried to pull away, but the hand held him in its iron grip. It began to try to pull him down and into the river. Heart racing, he pulled against the dead hand with all his strength and finally he slipped free of the thing's grasp.
He fell backwards . . . and into the metal hospital tray that was behind him. The river scene, the trees and the dead, were all gone. Wide eyed, he looked around the room. Ricky was there in the bed, everything seemed normal. The vision, if that was what it was, had gone.
Flora rushed over to him and steadied him. He had not realized he was shaking until she put her motherly arms around him. He sucked in a deep breath of air.
"What happened?" she asked, patting him on the back as though he were still a child.