Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) by Elliott James

Author:Elliott James [James, Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-05-19T03:00:00+00:00

I picked up the weird scent within two hundred yards of the pickup truck. It was thick and slightly sour and somewhat avian. Birds might look great when they’re flying, but there’s a reason foul and fowl are homonyms. I’m just saying. It wasn’t a normal scent trail though. I would pick up a scent, lose it, and pick it up again ten or thirty feet later. Maybe the thing I was chasing hopped or fluttered. Then I picked up another similar but unique scent following the same irregular pattern, and then another. So maybe the three things I was chasing hopped or fluttered. Come to think of it, sirens often hung out in groups in the old stories, and these specimens left large three-clawed marks in the soil when they did so. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought I was tracking some land birds the size of ostriches.

At least sirens didn’t have any special immunities or regenerative capabilities, not that I knew of, so I was carrying a plain old double-barreled crossbow. I also had a katana sheathed between my shoulder blades, a Ruger Blackhawk holstered at my right hip, a small hip quiver with six quarrels on my left, and some really harsh language on the tip of my tongue. If none of that worked, I still had my most reliable weapon, a silver steel knife sheathed on the side of my combat boot.

The birds in the vicinity went quiet as I moved through the woods, and I was afraid sirens might pay particular attention to the sound of birds, but there was nothing I could do about it. If I’d been on my own, I might have stayed still at the outer perimeter for hours until the local wildlife had a chance to acclimate to my presence, but there was no way Samuel was going to be able to sit still that long, so I just kept shadowing the road.

Soon, I saw a place where a graveled trail branched off, and when I stepped back out onto what passed for a highway, I saw fresh tracks where a Jeep had recently turned. It looked like a rural driveway to me, and I followed it for about half a mile before I smelled something else worrisome: the faint trace scent of a decomposing body long dead and buried.

This is something most people don’t ever have to think about: A corpse buried underground will break down over time and provide nitrogen that soil desperately needs to feed plant life. This creates weird air pockets in the ground as gases expand, causing small fissures as the stuff tries to work its way up through the dirt. There is also downward movement as the roots of plants extend into the area where the enriched soil and the body are intermingling, creating more slight crevices and cracks. When the roots and the gas pockets connect, the plant releases more faint chemical traces into the atmosphere than just carbon dioxide.

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