“I hope you brought earplugs,” Mac jokes, as they round a corner and the construction site comes into view. The noise of the equipment is almost deafening now, a steady drone that pounds against the inside of Austin’s skull.
“I wish,” he mutters, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Well, let’s see what we can do about the noise, then,” Mac says practically.
None of the construction workers seem to notice her and Austin’s approach, even once they’re right on the edge of the construction zone. Austin watches quietly as Mac sticks two fingers in her mouth, and lets out the loudest, shrillest whistle he’s ever heard, one that pierces the ear even worse than the noise of the construction. The effect is comical - the construction workers all stop to stare at Mac, who arches her eyebrows and calmly flashes her badge at them.
“COULD YOU TURN OFF YOUR EQUIPMENT, PLEASE,” she says at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking a little as she raises it. The construction workers scramble, and the noise level steadily lowers as those in vehicles turn them off, and those with tools lay them down for the time being.
“Can you teach me to do that?” Austin asks under his breath, impressed. “The whistle thing?”
“Sure,” Mac says, with a self-satisfied grin. “It’s easy, once you know how.”
She steps over the concrete barrier separating the construction zone from the rest of the motel property, and Austin takes that as his cue to hop over as well. He assumes there’s a proper entrance somewhere, but the barrier is low enough that jumping it is about as low-effort as walking through a gap in it would be.
“You both look a little young to be working for the Sheriff,” one of the construction workers says, as Mac approaches the site proper, Austin right on her heels. Judging by the clipboard he’s carrying, and the way he didn’t seem to be doing much before they strolled up, Austin would guess he’s the foreman.
“I’m older than I look,” Mac says. Austin has no doubt about that - she looks like she’s fresh out of the academy, but he would guess she’s in her mid-to-late 20s. “And my friend here is just a consultant. We’re here to find out more about the animal attacks that have been happening on motel property.”
“Figured,” the foreman says. “We were wondering when the cops would come sniffing around.”
“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” Mac says, glancing around. Most of the other workers are slowly gravitating towards her and Austin, probably curious about what the two of them are doing here. “Have any of you seen any unusual activity around the motel or this site recently? Maybe animals acting strangely, or people hanging around that shouldn’t be?”
“Well, a couple of us have seen some weird shit in the woods,” one of the other workers pipes up.
Austin frowns. “What kind of weird shit?”
“Just weird shit,” the worker says, shrugging. “Sometimes the birds’ll just divebomb us for no reason, if we go back there. Sometimes the deer come up way too close, even if you’d think the noise would scare ‘em off. Swear to God, one almost charged my car when I was leaving the other day.”
The other workers glance around at each other, murmuring their agreement. Austin’s surprised to see them all taking the story seriously - they don’t exactly look like the most superstitious bunch. But he can hear them all muttering similar stories, about seeing the deer do something strange, or the birds attacking them.
Austin looks to Mac, unsurprised to find her meeting his gaze. Deer again. A buck, or something with antlers, attacked Myra and Jeffrey, and now the deer around the construction site are acting strange? That definitely warrants checking out.
“Have any of you been injured?” Austin asks. “By the animals?”
“Not especially,” the foreman says. “But nobody’s been here for the big attacks that have been happening. We pack up and go home when the sun goes down.”
“Do you mind if we have a look around in the woods?” Mac asks.
The foreman shrugs, gesturing towards the treeline with his clipboard. “Be my guest.”
Mac heads across the construction site almost instantly, leaving Austin in the dust, struggling to keep up. He finally catches her just as she steps into the woods, the din of the construction equipment already stuttering back to life behind them.
“We might have wanted to prepare, before coming in here,” Austin tells Mac. “Not that I ever prepare for this kind of thing, but you should”
Mac laughs. “I’ve got my gun. I hope that’s enough.”
Austin hopes so, too. The farther they get into the forest, the farther away the construction site sounds, the banging and droning replaced with a stillness that’s almost eerie. Almost as though the trees are swallowing up the noise. Occasionally a bird or a cricket chirps, but nothing else underscores the dense silence but the sound of Austin and Mac’s boots crushing leaves underfoot. The sound of the footsteps becomes so prevalent, so familiar, that Austin nearly doesn’t notice when a third set of footsteps joins them.
When he does notice, it comes all at once, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling, nausea washing over him like a wave. Austin has noticed that this happens when his body is trying to alert him of danger - his sixth sense picking up on things outside of his usual perception, maybe. Still, he’d love it if he didn’t break out in a cold sweat every time.
“Mac,” he says as quietly as he can, out of the corner of his mouth. “Someone’s here.”
“I know,” Mac says, through her teeth. She’s frozen in place, looking off to one side, through the trees. Austin follows her gaze quizzically, and finds himself staring directly into the shiny, black eyes of the largest buck he’s ever seen. It’s half his height, if not taller, with huge, many-pronged antlers. More than enough prongs to have made the holes in Jeffrey and Myra’s bodies.
Austin swallows past bile that’s threatening to rise in his throat, every muscle in his body suddenly tense. Was that thing tracking us? Deer aren’t predators, they don’t stalk prey. People stalk them. Why would -
He doesn’t have time to finish the thought before the buck charges at him. It happens in a split second - Austin doesn’t have the time to tell his body to start running, and his feet stay frozen on the forest floor as the buck gets closer, closer, so close he can almost smell its breath right on top of him. Austin screws his eyes shut and prepares to be gored in at least ten different places, but his thoughts are interrupted again, this time by the sound of a gunshot. And then another, and another.
Austin carefully peels his eyes open, and watches Mac empty the rest of her gun’s clip into the buck, now lying on its side on the ground.
“Mac,” he says loudly, then drops his voice again as she runs out of bullets, and the gun begins click-click-clicking as she continues to pull the trigger. “Mac, it’s dead.”
“Holy shit,” Mac says, finally letting her hands drop to her sides. “Holy shit. I’ve never - I didn’t think it would just -”
“Me neither,” Austin agrees. Even though he knows what happened to Myra and Jeffrey, he never expected the buck to just charge him like that. Like it was waiting for him to notice it. He wonders how long the buck was following them through the forest, how many times it could have attacked him in the past few minutes, but chose not to.
“You think it’s rabid?” Mac asks, crouching down to examine the buck. “There’s no foam around its mouth or anything. All animals with rabies get that, right?”
Her voice sounds shaky - no doubt she’s talking to cover up her own anxiety. Austin can’t blame her. He did just almost get impaled in front of her, and he doubts she’s ever had to fire her gun outside of the firing range before.
“I think it was too smart to be rabid,” he says honestly. “I heard it following us, but deer don’t follow people. They don’t even stalk prey. It followed us, and it waited for us to see it, and then it charged. It might even be the same buck that attacked that couple on the road.”
Carefully, Mac leans in to examine the buck’s antlers, her mouth twisting into an expression of surprise and disgust. “It’s all bloody.”
Austin leans in, to get a better sense of what she’s talking about, and finds that what he assumed was the natural brownish color of the buck’s antlers is actually dried blood. It’s streaky and peeling in some places, and he can see the antlers’ actual, bone-white color underneath.
“Probably the same buck, then,” Austin says. “You should bring it back to the sheriff’s department, to get the blood tested.”
“Good idea,” Mac says, nodding. “Will you help me get it back to the car?”
“Sure,” Austin says, already reaching down to grab the buck by its two back legs. Mac pumped so many bullets into its side that it clearly isn’t breathing anymore, and Austin isn’t terribly worried about the buck coming back to life, even though something’s fishy here. Animals acting more intelligently than they should screams possession to him, but he can’t be sure quite yet what’s possessing them. And why animals? Generally, a spirit looking to kill someone would find a human host.
“Are you still going to stay here overnight?” Mac asks, interrupting Austin’s train of thought. She straightens up on her feet, holding the buck’s two front legs, and starts to drag it back the way they came, towards the noise of the construction site. Which is much louder now than it seemed to be before, somehow.
“I think so,” Austin says, struggling to drag the buck and match Mac’s pace. It’s heavy, and they can only go so quickly, though Mac is certainly much stronger than she looks. “I want to know why this is happening. And what attacked the other hotel guests. I don’t think they would have described a deer like this as a wild dog.”
“Right,” Mac says slowly. “I guess not.”
She’s silent for a while, as her and Austin walk, the buck dragging along the forest floor between them, smearing its blood all over the fallen leaves. Then, she pipes up again.
“Just call if you see anything, okay? And don’t get attacked again. Because I’m not gonna be there with my gun.”
Austin swallows, noticing suddenly that the sweat and nausea his sixth sense was providing him with before hasn’t abated. There’s still danger here, even if he can’t quite see the shape of it yet. The buck seemed to know him, or at least know to attack him first, even when Mac had the deputy uniform and the gun. Whatever is using the animals in the forest as weapons has pinpointed him as a threat - which means he’s probably going to be attacked again.
“I’ll be careful,” he lies, putting on his best smile for Mac. If he gets attacked tonight, well, so be it. The only way he’s going to get answers is by getting close to this thing again.
“I’ll be careful,” he lies. what a great lie austin. what a great thing to say that in no way implies bad things will continue to happen to you.