[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Between the long Mississippi and the mighty Rockies sprawl the Great Plains, where the wind moans eternally and the skies yawn wide. This land, beautiful and scarred, was home once to herds of buffalo that could darken the face of the Earth, and make the hills thunder with their passing. Dozens of Native nations lived and died there, generation upon generation, until false promises and relentless brutalization decimated their people and suppressed their culture. The golden grasses are steeped in blood and nourished on bone, witness to murder, abuse, and genocide, to bloody border skirmishes and long-simmering hatreds, to a thousand iniquities both open and secretive—and to every horror born therefrom. And while it may sleep, the land never forgets. These are the darker pastures of America…

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode One: Butcherbird.

(Sounds of insects chirping, common nighthawk calls)

NARRATOR

To Gabby Verdugo, the stars seem like a million eyes, opening one at a time in the great dark face of the night. Below, their lesser, more ephemeral twins return their gaze from the undulating surface of the wide lake.

The two young women lie in the empty bed of an old and weathered red Toyota Hilux, beneath tall cottonwoods that sway and whisper in the August evening breeze. Behind their heads, tucked against the pickup cabin, are five suitcases stuffed with clothes and sundry other personal items.

Gabby asks the other girl if they should get going, since they still have many miles of road ahead of them, but Claire shakes her head and says she likes it here under the trees, listening to the water, the wildlife, and the wind. She adds that they’re already going to be driving until well after midnight, so another hour won’t make much difference. Gabby is secretly pleased by this. Her father and her used to camp here sometimes, on their eastbound birdwatching trips, and the memories stirred by being back at the lake are pleasant.

Claire asks her what she’s thinking about, and Gabby tells her. The words spill out of her surprisingly easily, more easily than they ever have with anyone else—except, perhaps, her father. She talks about how the two of them used to go hunting, until Gabby grew older and began to be disturbed by killing things, by how easy it was, and how that had gradually transitioned into their other favorite outdoor pastime.

And then, somehow, she ends up talking about the stories her father would tell her on those nights of camping, or on the road. She was pretty sure most of them had been impromptu creations, made up solely for her benefit, and they had flowed like beautiful dreams.

A brief silence stretches then, and Gabby doesn’t dare to glance over at the other girl, feeling suddenly self-conscious. An itch of nervous anxiety settles into her scalp, and gesturing broadly at the sky, she asks Claire if she knows any stories about the stars, remembering one in particular that her father made up long ago and which remains one of her favorites. Claire props herself on an elbow and asks crisply if Gabby thinks old Indian stories are carried in the blood, that she was born with ancient wisdom preinstalled in her brain.

Gabby flushes and fumbles for words, but Claire laughs, a sound that makes Gabby think of silver moons rising. Claire admits she was teasing Gabby, says she doesn’t have any such stories, then leans over Gabby and kisses her. The kiss is gentle and sweet, like an unseen turtledove’s call, like the night breeze over the spring grass. Gabby feels enveloped, lost within it, as within a vast, dark-gold ocean, the timeless womb of the wide universe. When their lips finally part, Gabby’s fingers are tangled in the other girl’s long hair.

Breathlessly, Gabby tells Claire she is beautiful. Claire smiles, kisses her again.

Voices blossom in the dark, coming from the direction of the beach. A group of young men, sounding drunk, are walking in their direction.

Hey babes! one of them yells. Got room for a few more?

The girls both freeze for a second, looking at each other. Gabby asks Claire quietly if the young men are talking to them, and Claire shrugs, then says that they should probably leave now. Gabby nods. Standing and leaping over the side of the pickup, Claire lands with a felid grace Gabby cannot match, and envies. She descends more cautiously, but still quickly enough, from the rear of the pickup, slamming the tailgate closed behind her. Then she climbs in behind the wheel, brings the engine stuttering into life, and rolls off of the sandy beach and onto pinkly graveled roads. There are more shouts behind them, but they are muffled by space, wind, and the materials of the pickup, and Gabby is relieved when they reach the narrow highway that wends eastward through the arid hills of southwestern Nebraska.

Claire rolls down her window, rests her arm so that the cool winds roll over it, ruffling her vellus hairs gently. A tire iron rattles mutedly on the floor between her feet. She gazes up at the stars. She has no stories about them, either traditional or of her own creation. This is a new realization, and brings a vague, melancholic ache – an inner vacuum of which she had heretofore never been aware.

She imagines their future in Omaha, she living with her father and Gabby rooming on the campus. They are both planning on psych degrees and have two first-year classes together, so they will still see each other almost every day. The thought excites Claire, but also terrifies her. There are the old, familiar concerns about money, despite the fact that her mother has assured her they can afford tuition. Then there is the other fear, that Gabby will meet someone she likes better, that they will drift apart.

Trying to drive away these thoughts, reaching for any topic of conversation her brain can muster and remembering the other girl’s talk of birdwatching trips, Claire asks Gabby what her favorite bird is. Gabby shifts behind the wheel, and Claire sees her face dimly lit by the backwash of the pickup headlights. Her brow is furrowed in thought, and she hums a sound of uncertain consideration.

She finally says that barn swallows have always been a favorite, but that she is also very fond of little burrowing owls, and of nighthawks.

Claire nods, and suggests that maybe sometime, the two of them might go birding together. Gabby smiles and agrees, clearly liking the idea. This enthusiasm reassures Claire a little, but not entirely. She hates this new desperation and anxiety within her, this dread of a loss she neither foresee nor forfend.

She remembers one of her father’s texts from earlier in the day, an invitation to take them both out to brunch in the morning, whenever they wake up, and mentions it to Gabby. The other girl does not respond right away.

Gabby feels clamminess blooming on her palms. She asks how much Claire has told her father about her, and Claire answers that she has told him everything. Gabby can’t decide whether that makes her feel less nervous, or more.

The man looms mythically in her mind, a towering shadow both awe-inspiring and terrifying. Claire speaks about her father so often and with such obvious admiration: about his youth on the Winnebago Reservation, his years as a touring guitarist with a well-regarded if little-known blues band, the book he’s published on the intersections between deep ecology, spirituality, and decolonialization. Claire even gave her a copy of the latter, called The Sacred Roots, but Gabby has not yet gotten past the first chapter, intimidated by the profundity of the theme and by the poetic flow of his writing.

Gabby finally manages to say that brunch sounds great and that she looks forward to meeting him, hoping that her terror isn’t audible.

Claire smiles, her eyes and teeth glistening faintly in the light of the newly risen gibbous moon, and Gabby feels that familiar ache of longing and affection, that disbelief that someone so wholly beautiful in body and spirit could be interested in her.

Claire, feeling momentarily reassured, turns on the radio, spins the dial, looking for music. All that she finds are two country and four religious talk stations, and she turns it off in disgust. Gabby jokingly observes that it’s just like their hometown in western Colorado, and Claire agrees with a disgruntled oath, not expressing the rest of her thought—that her erstwhile home is exactly what she is trying to escape. She is tired of feeling out of place, of that feeling that followed her throughout grade and high school: the feeling that every gaze is a whispered slur, aimed either at her sexuality or her ancestry, like the ugly two-word epithet that Caleb Aarons called her when he tried to touch her after gym class, and she slapped his hand away.

Claire looks at her shadowy reflection in the passenger sidemirror, and wonders if anything will be different in Omaha. She wonders if her father, accomplished and thoughtful, has such names hurled at him in darkened spaces and hushed voices, and feels a sinking certainty that he does.

She looks out the passenger window at the countryside, craggy hills of scrub pasture broken here and there by cedar stands, by old deteriorating structures, timber bleached a wan and ghostly grey by sun and wind.

The pickup engine gurgles, stalls.

Gabby swears and brakes instinctively. Coasting, she pulls over onto the side of the road and tries to restart the engine. After three failures, it reluctantly rumbles lifeward. Gabby creeps back onto the road, gently accelerates.

Well, that sucked, Claire says, and Gabby readily agrees. About ten seconds later, the engine dies again, and with a more vicious curse, Gabby pulls turns off onto a small dirt road that branches northward from the blacktop. She hops out of the cab and, using her phone as a flashlight, peeks under the hood. Claire exits the vehicle and slowly moves toward Gabby’s side, asking if she has any idea what’s wrong.

Gabby has only a passing knowledge of automotive mechanics, and glosses over this by replying that it could be a lot of things, but that she really doesn’t have the tools to fix it, regardless.

Claire gives a soft laugh, and says they might just have to walk to Omaha, trying unsuccessfully to cut the tension. Gabby pulls out her phone, sees she has no reception, asks if Claire does, to which Claire reluctantly replies that her phone died about an hour ago, and that her charger is tucked away somewhere within their luggage.

A wind rises, cool despite the season, the near-desert air not retaining any of the day’s heat. To Gabby, it feels like the draft from a freshly opened tomb.

Gabby peers into the pickup’s innards a while longer, hoping that some insight will float up from her subconscious, and Claire wanders away. She is looking out over the dark pastureland that sprawls toward distant hills in the east. Something limned faintly by the moonlight catches her eye, a small shape upon a rusty strand of barbed wire, dangling from a neglected, weathered fence. Moving closer, she slowly recognizes it as part of some tiny animal, likely a rodent. She utters a small sound of surprise and mild disgust.

Gabby turns from the truck, comes to her side, and shines the flashlight in the direction Claire is looking. It takes a moment before she sees it too, and Gabby says it looks like the work of a loggerhead shrike, explains the little bird’s feeding habits of impaling larger prey on barbs and thorns, sometimes caching them for later.

Claire is about to respond when headlights cut through the darkness, coming from the highway in the opposite direction they had been traveling. The vehicle slows as it comes near, begins to crawl, turns off the highway and stops beside them. It is a silver pickup, quite new, with a long cabin, oversized tires, and a camper shell. Gabby notices that it has South Dakota license plates, sees Claire stiffen with the same realization.

The passenger rolls down his window, peers out at them. He is much older, probably around fifty. Resting his right forearm on the black window seal of the door, he asks if they’re okay.

Hesitantly, Gabby begins to say in what she hopes is a polite tone that they’re fine, but he cuts her off almost as soon as she starts speaking. He asks if anyone is coming for them.

(Threatening music)

NARRATOR

Claire lies and says yes, that they are probably only minutes away. The man nods and says alright, but his tone is disbelieving, and sets Gabby’s teeth on edge. The passenger turns and exchanges a few words with the unseen driver, his voice too low for the girls to make them out. Then he turns back toward them, smiling, his eyes untouched by the expression. They are grey, lifeless in the twilight backwash of the pickup headlights. He asks them, so firmly that it is not really asking, to hop in, says he and his friends will give them a ride wherever they want to go.

Again politely declining, Gabby takes an involuntary step back toward her dead truck. She hears Claire open her door, apparently moved by the same shelter-seeking instinct. Gabby says that her father is on his way, will be there any minute now. The man insists that it’s no trouble, that there’s plenty of room, and that they’ll be gentlemen.

Gabby repeats falteringly that her father is on his way, and to this the man replies that she should call him and tell him not to bother. His hand moves out of sight, and Gabby feels certain he is reaching for something tucked under the seat.

Claire is suddenly back at Gabby’s side, saying they don’t need any help. Where Gabby’s had wavered, Claire’s voice is as stark and unyielding as cold iron, and Gabby’s admiration for her blossoms like a supernova in her chest even as her throat constricts with dreadful anticipation.

The man’s smile changes, becomes keener. This time it lights his eyes hideously. He says, No means no, huh? and laughs in brutish mockery.

The sound of his door latch working open cracks the night, a sound soon echoed twice as two younger men also emerge, and the three subtly form a circle – a communal hunting behavior Gabby recognizes from her many experiences with wildlife. In the dimness, she is sure for a second that she sees their faces lengthening, sharpening, shifting away from humanity.

She is opening her mouth to say something – she knows not what – when Claire pulls back her arm, hurls a long, dark object through the air. It flies with a barely audible whisper, reverberates dully as it connects with one of the young men’s faces. The man falls with a gurgling utterance that makes Gabby’s stomach lurch, and the thrown tire iron clatters on the dirt road.

Claire grabs her hand and hisses for her to run. Gabby obeys instantly, following the other girl down the unpaved road away from the blacktop.

One of the men – Gabby thinks it is the older passenger – screams at them, swearing and calling them little whores, and promises that they will be sorry.

Claire lets go of her hand and lengthens her gait. Gabby strains to keep up with her. After they have run about twenty yards, Claire leads her off of the road, stretches the barbed wire of a fence for Gabby to duck through. As she does, Gabby notes that the silver pickup has not moved yet.

 Claire crosses behind her, and the wires sing as they spring back into place. The headlights are starting to shift. Gabby repeatedly, almost involuntarily, swears under her breath. Claire tells her to follow her and keep close, her tone so certain and direct that it pulls Gabby out of the panic that threatens to swallow her mind.

They run through the pasture. Half of the night’s stars have disappeared behind a shelf of invisible cloud, a cold front coming out of the northwest. There is no moon; the clouds have swallowed it. Gabby is at once grateful for the sheltering darkness, and terrified of tripping and breaking her leg in their blind flight.

But as her eyes adjust to the darkness, she realizes that Claire is not leading her blindly. A darker mass rears against the grey of the prairie grass, a cluster of trees that bespeaks habitation.

Claire pulls her through a sparse stand of hackberries and cottonwoods, dead Siberian elms, past a pair of struggling blue spruces. The two-story farmhouse within the ring of trees reminds Gabby of a bleached skull, the boards weathered brittle and grey, with only a few remaining chips of white paint. The windows are vacant, their panes all removed or broken.

The girls hear the low rumble of an engine, growing steadily louder.

Claire moves toward the house, tries the splintered door. It is resistant at first, then gives way, long fibers of wood falling away from its surface.

Claire hisses a curse, pulling a splinter from her hand. Then she ducks inside, motioning briskly for Gabby to follow. Gabby hesitates an instant, disliking the thought of entering the house, the blackness within.

Then a man calls to them, in the old hide-and-seek singsong taunt: come out, come out, wherever you are. Yellow light spills across and through the trees.

Gabby follows, pushes the door shut as firmly as she can behind her. She jumps when Claire takes her hand, stifles the cry that claws up her throat.

Claire whispers that they’ll have to go upstairs, and Gabby protests that upstairs is a trap if the men enter the house, but Claire assures her that they can jump out a window, that the fall won’t be too hard.

She wants to argue, but the image of the men creeping toward the house rears starkly in Gabby’s mind, and finally she whispers reluctant agreement. She can hear the susurrus of Claire’s palm passing over the wall as the taller girl feels her way through the house. The boards squeal, groan, and crack alarmingly under their feet, and Gabby is sure that each passing moment will bring the men bursting into the house, tearing at them with hands like claws.

Claire stops. Ahead of her, Gabby thinks she perceives a deeper darkness, but is unsure if she is only imagining it in her near-blindness of the house’s interior night. She feels Claire shift her weight, hears a sharp intake of breath.

Claire swears, exhales, is silent a moment. Then she says that they’ll have to go down instead, into the cellar stairway that yawns before them. Gabby begins to say that a cellar is an even more definite deathtrap, but Claire cuts her off, saying anywhere is better than out in the open. Realizing she does not have a better suggestion, Gabby acquiesces.

Claire steps forward, tugging Gabby’s hand a little as she descends. The top step creaks threateningly, the second step is even louder. With a slightly shaky voice, Claire warns Gabby that the steps are sketchy, that she needs to be careful.

Taking a timid step, Gabby prays silently to no one in particular that the steps will not give way beneath their feet. A second, and a third, and with each step downward she feels like the air is growing denser, like the house’s weight is shifting from its foundations onto her body.

There is the splitting crack of failing wood fibers, and Claire’s hand is ripped from hers, followed by the soft and horrid sound of flesh colliding with a hard surface.

Gasping, Gabby hisses Claire’s name into the night. No answer comes. A sob bursts out of her mouth before she can bite it back, and she hoarsely repeats the call.

There is a sharp breath in the darkness, and Claire answers, her whisper harsh and strained. She says she’s hurt, that there’s a large splinter in her leg.

Gabby’s mind reels, grasps for a solution. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her phone, shines the light below her. Claire lies sprawled on a crumbling cement floor. Six inches of fragmented wood protrude from a bloody tear in her jeans.

Feeling helpless, a small whimper escapes Gabby’s throat: a sound she might be ashamed of if she were not so terrified, so worried for Claire. Claire tells her sharply to turn out the light, but Gabby ignores her, steps across the gap in the stairs, and kneels beside Claire to inspect the wound. The shiver has burrowed into her lower thigh, the blood flow slow, but steady.

Claire repeats her command harshly, but Gabby shakes her head, insists they have to deal with the wound. Saying they have to avoid getting murdered first, Claire reaches out and takes the phone, kills the light.

Opening her mouth to argue, Gabby begins to say they should try to call the police or an ambulance, that they can’t afford to delay, but that very moment, there is the sound of creaking from above, of footfalls poorly muted. She thinks it sounds like two of the men. There is a hoarse whisper, on the very edge of hearing, and then more movement.

(Unsettling music)

NARRATOR

The driver coos to the girls that they are dead, that the men are going to make them scream, make them bleed. One of the younger men murmurs something that sounds like protestation. The words are too muffled for Gabby to clearly make them out, but she thinks she hears the words sell them in Sioux Falls. The older man says something curt and angry, and then silence falls, heavy and thick with deadly potentiality. The girls hold each other in the dark, hardly daring to breathe lest the sound betray their presence.

There is a short, sharp scream from outside.

The younger man above them swears, says that Carl must have found them. Hurried, heavy footfalls mark the men’s exit from the house. The girls do not move, do not speak. Gabby’s ears are so stimulated that they seem to pop with heightened blood flow, with the minute workings of her facial muscles.

Another brief cry, farther away this time – then, silence. A minute passes, and another. Gabby shifts her weight, reaches for where Claire’s hand had been, the one that clutched her phone before the basement went dark again.

It’s still there. Claire does not resist as Gabby pries the phone from her fingers. There is still no service and the battery is almost drained.

Gabby asks Claire if they should go up, and Claire vehemently refuses, saying the men could be waiting for them to do just that. Gabby asks how long they should wait, and Claire’s answer is however long it takes to be sure. Suddenly angry, Gabby says they cannot wait, begins to say Claire could bleed to death, but a third cry drowns out her words.

This one is not cut short, but lingers, long and shrill and rising unnaturally in pitch. There is another sound too, like a sudden tornadic wind is sweeping overhead, and beneath that, something that makes Gabby think of hunting with her father long ago, in the years before a growing aversion to killing made that uncommon. It is the sound of flesh being separated, but where her father is careful and respectful when he dresses down a deer carcass, this is loud, brief, and messy.

She sweats, even as she feels frozen through to her bones. Claire asks her in a bare whisper what the hell that sound was, but Gabby cannot muster an answer. They wait. Another burst of that powerful windy rush, and then there is only the silence of the old cellar. They sit and wait.

Finally, Gabby begins to move, crawling on all fours to keep quiet, to feel surer of her way in the dark. In a strangled voice that breaks her heart, Claire begs Gabby to stay with her. Gabby promises she will be back, and Claire doesn’t argue, says nothing at all, leaving Gabby to guess at what might be playing across her face, through her mind, in the blackness.

Feeling her way across the chill, rough cement, she crawls in the direction she believes the stairway lies. After what she guesses to be about eight feet of distance, she becomes sure she has taken the wrong direction just as her fingertips brush against the rough wooden planks of the lower step. Gingerly, she feels her way up, having to stand to cross the broken step, then returning to all fours. She tells herself that this will distribute her weight more evenly, but does not really believe it, expects with each movement to hear that awful snap of rending wood.

She feels lighter, breathless, when she reaches the top. Her eyes, adjusted to the deep dark of the cellar, function much better now in the relative light of the ground floor, and she can make out vague, grey detail in the empty room. Waiting a moment, she listens, but hears only the rustle of the wind through the open door, in the trees beyond.

She stands and moves to the door, cautiously, peering outside. The pickup is parked at the mouth of the overgrown driveway, the headlights still on. This sight makes her heart lurch, a bilious burn rise up from her stomach, and she takes a half-step back from the opening, breathing shallowly.

She listens longer this time, but there is still not a single sound of movement, aside from the faint sounds of boughs and foliage shifting, and the moaning of air.

Once more, she looks outside, sees no sign of human movement. She casts her gaze towards the trees, imagines a feeling of intense malice radiating outward from them, imagines all the spaces that a man might hide himself in them: below, behind, and above.

(Threatening music)

NARRATOR

Slowly, she shifts her gaze up, and speckles dance in her vision as she sees one of the men staring down at her, eyes glinting dully in the faint diffusion of the pickup’s headlights. She freezes, like an animal caught in the harsh glare of an approaching truck, knowing she is doomed but powerless to act.

The man does not move, does not even blink. And it is only after she notes this that she also notices there is something in the sight that her brain cannot quite place into a rational framework, of which she cannot quite make sense.

She can see the outline of the man’s head, sees hints of features around the sheen of the eyes, even one arm braced limply against the trunk of the great dead elm. But there is not enough outline for a man to be hiding there, there is too much of the night sky behind him.

For a long moment, she remains in place, trying to compute what her eyes are absorbing, coming to no conclusions.

She thinks now of Claire, of her leg, wonders if she is slowly bleeding out, alone and sightless. This thought steels her, and she strides out into the night, toward the tree where she begun to doubt that a man is hiding. She is debating whether to dare risk discovery, risk draining the last of her phone’s battery, when she feels something thick and wet drip onto her the back of her hand. She rubs at it, instinctively sniffs at it, recognizes the coppery, rich scent.

(Doomful music)

NARRATOR

She does not debate anymore. Raising the phone, she shines the light up into the tree. The driver’s head and part of his torso rest there, impaled upon a broken bough.

Gabby drops the phone, doubles over, and vomits noisily on the ground. Even after her stomach is emptied, she retches, and afterward she crouches and huddles into herself, shivering, feeling faint and unreal. Her fear of the driver’s companions has evaporated, she has almost forgotten about them. Hesitantly, she looks back up, then hurriedly away from the horror in the tree, towards the other skeletal elm nearby. Something glistens wetly in the branches, and she dares not shine her light up to investigate it.

On unsteady legs, she walks back to the house, illuminates her way down the stairs. Her mind has gone blank, refusing to process any new information. Claire has to repeat herself several times before Gabby hears her. The wounded girl is asking if the men are gone, and Gabby shakes her head, not knowing what to say. Claire hisses for her to turn off the light, that they’ll be spotted, and Gabby finally manages to say that they are dead. Her voice is hoarse and very soft, a mere rasping in the night, but Claire falls silent.

After a while, Claire raggedly repeats the word dead, and asks how. Gabby shakes her head once more. The wind gusts violently, sends a howling draft through the upper levels. The front door rattles in the sudden disturbance.

Claire asks her what has happened up there, and Gabby says she doesn’t know. Washed in the unfriendly hues of the cell phone light, Claire tries and fails to gain her feet.

After a second failed attempt, she asks Gabby to help her, her voice sounding angry and hurt for having to ask. Gabby moves to help, not even thinking to protest now, her mind still wiped blank by the awful, ravening, lethal mystery outside. She does not dare to prod at that blankness, knowing that what lies underneath it will devour her and leave her in pieces.

Slowly and torturously, they make their way up the stairs. Gabby has to stay below and support most of Claire’s weight as she, with obvious misgivings, crosses the gap in the steps. The other girl is both taller and more muscular, and Gabby huffs a little under the strain.

When they reach the top, the moon has risen high above the clouds, and its light spills through the now fully open door. They emerge into its silvery touch, and Claire tightens her grip on Gabby’s shoulder. She asks where they are, and Gabby points vaguely at the trees. Claire’s confusion is obvious. She tries to take a step forward, but Gabby does not move, forcing Claire to remain where they stand.

Choking on her own saliva, which has grown too thick in her throat, Gabby tells her she can’t go, that she doesn’t want to see, and in the moonlight Claire’s mounting alarm is visible. She asks if this is some kind of joke, and from her tone, Gabby knows it is not a real question, but shakes her head anyway.

After a long pause, Claire finally insists that she has to see, has to know. Gabby helps her forward, but the last few paces are too much for her. Taking a fallen branch as a crutch, Claire hobbles forward and studies the trees. Gabby looks not at the trees, but at Claire, and sees the very moment that Claire finds what she’s seeking: a subtle rigidity seizing her spine, her limbs, almost as though an electric current is shooting through her, and all her muscles are contracting uncontrollably.

She does not vomit, does not seem to lose herself the way Gabby did. But when she turns and limps back to where Gabby stands, the taller girl’s features are changed, and Gabby thinks she looks much older and more worn in this moment. When Claire says aloud that she doesn’t understand, her voice is low and sounds distant.

(Doomful music)

NARRATOR

Gabby suddenly thinks again of the loggerhead shrike, which is sometimes called the butcherbird. But the shrike is a tiny passerine bird, able to prey on rodents and small reptiles at the largest. She can think of nothing that would tear apart three grown men so quickly, that would bother to scatter them through the trees. For a moment, she considers that it may have been a cougar, rare but not unknown in those parts. Then she thinks of the powerful, windy gust, of the speed with which whatever killed the men must have moved, and she realizes that no cougar could have done this. The more her mind reaches for an answer, the more it reels at the yawning, bottomless chasm in her understanding.

And suddenly, the numbness is gone, a horrible quivering chill running through her nervous system. The awareness of how exposed she and Claire are, of how much open and unpeopled space stretches around them in all directions, is a physical sensation in her body, a squeezing pressure on her lungs, heart, and brain. She wonders what eyes, what ears, might be focusing in on them, from the treetops, from the wide, dark skies.

She tugs on Claire’s arm, begs her to go back inside with her. Claire complies, speechless.

They stop just through the doorway by unspoken consent, neither wanting to be in the open nor willing to give up all view of the outside, of any conceivable approach on the house. Beneath the stark light of the moon, they can now see surprisingly clearly, but the cloud bank that has swallowed half the sky is already reaching again toward the great white orb that looks like a partially closed eye.

Gabby’s phone buzzes, and she pulls it out as a force of habit, expecting a low battery warning but instead seeing a message that came through in a brief space of marginal reception. It’s from her father, whom she was supposed to text when they reached Omaha.

Where are you, Gabriela? Worried.

Her father only ever calls her by her full name when he is being deadly serious. For a moment, she considers composing a response, but she can summon no meaningful words.

She stands there, lost, her hands shaking and her heartbeat feeling faint and unsteady. When she asks Claire if they should call the police, she hears her own words as though they were being spoken by someone else, very small and very far away.

Claire is staring at the trees through the doorway, silent, and for a moment Gabby thinks she will not answer, has not even heard her.

Then Claire says, very slowly, still in that faraway tone, that if they don’t call it in, and the police find out they were there, they are screwed. And if they do call it in, no one will believe them, and they’re still screwed.

Gabby asks if that was a yes, or a no. Claire stares at her. Her gaze is somehow simultaneously unfocused and penetrating, a look that Gabby has never seen in anyone’s eyes. Claire does not answer.

The wind wails in the bloody trees.

(Terrifying music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please let the world know by rating, reviewing, and sharing. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]