Jack

Chapter Ten: Moss...and Murder

He must be quiet. He couldn’t let them hear him. The men from town who had arrested his father were here, he knew that—he had to see what they did in this cave of theirs.

            Anxious child eyes darted around the blackness, draped in the thick smothering quilt of the unknown, and the fear of it. Hot breath from his small lips misted against the wintry cold air. Muffled footsteps—barefoot—padded along the ground. He rounded a corner.

            Dread filled his nerves. In his mind’s eye, Jack saw the crude iron mallet the man with the fancy shoes wore on his hips. There was always a dark substance on it, challenging him to come closer, to really see what it was.

            Earlier, he was glad to reach the shade of the caverns. Now he longed for the heat, the desert dust in his throat, the sun. Heart hammering in his tiny chest, he fought himself. He had to turn tail and run! He could not survive here. Curiosity said no, of course. He must stay. He must know. He must understand.

            Kendrick Traceter, he called himself—the scary man with the fancy boots. Jack remembered him looming over him, a frayed beard dominating his face. Jack remembered the merciless smirk below the sarcastic twinkle of his eyes. He remembered him saying, “Your daddy’s gone and got himself drunk again…knocked the lights out the mayor…”

            He remembered the cloud of dust from the wheels of their departing wagon, and all it hid: hate, ignorance, revenge. His mother had always told him that Mr. Traceter was full of crap, and always had been. Every word out of that outdated peacekeeper’s mouth was venom, spat uncaringly from the tail of a hornet, poisoning and ruining reputations and lives left and right.

            He wasn’t all bad, however. He’d saved the President’s daughter from a horde of bandits out west—whoever the President was—and it had been all over the papers. That’d been how he’d become so highfalutin’ and famous, mama said.

            Everything he said his father had done was all lies. His father was a drunk and a pathetic, horrible sack of laziness, but he was smarter than to actually do what Traceter said he had done.

            At least, that’s what mama said.

            Jack was jerked back to his senses by echoes from deeper in that skittered and danced through the darkness. Watery drips fell from the ceiling and burst themselves upon the threadbare fabric of his shirt. Something crawled up his wrist. He frantically shook it off, seeing a minute flash of white and the clattering of many legs as it re-entered its midnight domain.

            Despite what his father had told him to do, despite what anyone had told him, little 7 year old Jack was determined to get the drop on mean old Kendrick Traceter. So, he had stowed away on their wagon out of town and followed them into a yawning chasm, a dark hole in the sandy earth cut deep into a monstrous outcropping out in the heart of the desert.

            Now here he was, blind and stumbling, his small 7 year old hands sliding across the slimy walls to guide him forward into a haunting oblivion of noise and living shadow.

            The tunnels seemed to go on for hours. Blistered formed and eventually popped on his tired feet; he had long since eaten the candy mama had bought him after supper in town.

            Father said Traceter was corrupt, using his status to torture enemies of the “regime”—whatever that was. He would use his spies to find them, smoke them out, and arrest them as opponents of the peace. His father was supposedly among these. However, mama said that it was more likely that Traceter was a common bounty hunter, gone insane long ago from the desert heat and believing in strange governments and higher powers. His posse was nothing but a bunch of drugged out thieves and rapists.