Stoneskin's Revenge

Stoneskin's Revenge by Tom Deitz Page A

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Authors: Tom Deitz
Tags: Fantasy
need to get his ass in gear, and Calvin flopped against his tree and scanned the article.
    His hair stood on end as he read it. Not only had one Evelyn Mercer been found dead outside her trailer, but that selfsame trailer was apparently right off Lebanon Road, only a mile or two from where Calvin and his friends had camped on their way from Sandy’s to Stone Mountain the Sunday night just past. As for the “mysterious circumstances,” they remained frustratingly obscure. All Calvin could piece together from the article’s oblique language was that the woman had risen early to fix breakfast for her husband, stepped outside to feed the chickens, and simply not come back in. Her husband had found her in the yard hours later, with the chickens pecking at her body. There were a few veiled references to mutilation (“The body, dressed in a housecoat over a T-shirt, appeared to have been tampered with in an unconventional manner, resulting in unconfirmed reports of possible removal of some viscera. When questioned, the local coroner had no comment,” was the way the paper put it), but nothing really concrete. The rest of the article was a brief bio of the late Ms. Mercer and the usual rejoinder about further information being withheld pending investigation. There was no actual mention of murder, though that was certainly implied, and was what the dead woman’s husband was quoted in print as suspecting. Bizarre stuff, all right.
    Calvin suppressed another chill as he refolded the paper and stashed it inside the rapidly collapsing asi. Still, he supposed, sensationalism, no matter how un-sensational, had never yet failed to unload a few piles of pulp. Maybe when he got to town he’d pick up another and see if there was a follow-up.
    *
    It took Calvin perhaps thirty minutes to make his way through the woods to the road that led into Whidden, but he miscalculated his trajectory slightly, so that when he slipped out of the brush and slogged across an unexpectedly marshy bit of right-of-way and onto the shoulder of the only major highway around, he didn’t recognize the place at all. The so-far-unseen metropolis had to be fairly close, though; he could just make out a pair of steeples and what looked like a clock tower looming above the treetops to the right, no more than a mile or so away.
    Fortunately the terrain looked a little dryer across the highway, so he crossed it at a lope and headed north beside one of the ubiquitous pine plantations, with the sun mercifully hidden behind a puff of clouds that might be vanguard of an afternoon thunderstorm.
    He was not thinking very hard about anything at all—or thinking so hard about so many things at once that it amounted to the same thing—when he became aware of the crunch of tires behind him. That was strange, too, because he was facing traffic. Whoever it was would have had to whip across four lanes to come upon him from the rear.
    Trying not to appear alarmed, though he was—with some reason, given his looks and circumstances—Calvin risked a glance over his shoulder and saw more or less what he expected: one of the bronze Chevy Caprices that belonged to the local constabulary—probably a County Mounty this far out. Whether there even was a city police force, he hadn’t a clue.
    A whirr/whistle/buzz of siren, and the car ground to a halt, whereupon a public address speaker broadcast a rattly “This is the Willacoochee County Sheriff’s Department. Please remain where you are and turn around slowly.”
    Calvin obediently stopped in place and eased around to face whatever music might be playing, having no desire to do anything to upset these people, who might, after all, have perfectly good and reasonable intentions. Nor was he surprised when both the Chevy’s front doors popped open and a pair of mirror-shaded officers climbed out, each of whom outmassed Calvin by at least forty pounds of—in the driver’s case particularly—solid muscle. Indeed, though both

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