OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology by Dean Francis Alfar

Author:Dean Francis Alfar [Alfar, Dean Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789719606888
Publisher: Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.

#

So it was that Ren Dela Cruz, ex-businessman, schoolteacher, forty years old, found himself following a young, winged, bipedal-optional girl up a steep, winding trail.

He could not see in the dark as well as Leylin, and often stumbled. He fell and cut his hand on a rock, and when a shaft of moonlight came through a break in the trees and set her fangs shining he could see her nostrils flare and eyes go red. Yes, she was not just a precocious teen from a small town. She could eat him alive. She would have, if she had not grown up in a time after Gram had laid waste to the countryside.

The smell of the rot was back.

His sanguine state of mind eroded. The forest was alive, awake with noise. Leaves rustled, branches creaked, and there were the drums that LL said were hags’ drums, and howling she said was just some dog-types running, pretending to hunt.

“Don’t worry about those brats. They’re just kids. They wouldn’t know how to bring down a rabbit. It’s the ones you can’t hear who are dangerous.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

Was he walking up a trail in an alternate land, hoping to find something of his grandmother’s? A kind of gunslinger-sorceress? Or was he completely nuts, following a hallucination?

“Don’t fall behind!” Leylin’s wings flapped when she was agitated, lifting her even when she meant to stay on the ground.

Hour after hour. When he rested, breathing harsh and loathing the extra pounds, she waited.

After Ren had received a dozen mosquito bites and three more cuts from falling and getting whipped in the face by branches he didn’t see, she stopped and said, “We’re here.”

The trees leaning in over them opened up into a clearing.

“Fantastic,” he said, panting. Bent over, hands on his knees.

“Uh. There’s someone waiting for you though.”

Yes. He had known it, expected it. The smell had been growing thicker. Foul as Ren thought a mouthful of maggots might be. He remembered weeks spent growing houseflies in jars with a mash of rotting bananas for a science project. It’s why the smell was so intimately familiar.

Reeeeeeen.

“Hello, cousin.”

Youuu rmmembrrrrr.

They had met once before, in a dungeon cell. Ren on the dark, cold, wet side of the bars. His cousin on the other.

A Mayores cousin. A son born from a daughter born from what Gram had never spoken of, but Ren now suspected was either rape, or a highly inappropriate relationship between a young girl, and Araya, a privileged Mayores scion.

If Ren looked worse these days, balding and pudgy, Danilo was a corpse that just didn’t care about that state of being. The blackened flesh was putrid and crawling with beetles and other wriggling life. The sockets were empty.

Ren sensed, somehow, that his cousin only saw through the bugs crawling in him, only spoke through their coordinated buzz.

“You didn’t need to do that. Back then.”

Nooot faaair. Frooom heeer blood, gooot enough gifffft to liiive for a whiiile. Nooot enough tooo liiive weeeell. You haaad so muuuch mooore, and dooon’t eeeven uuuse iiiit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.