Dog Days of Summer (Damned of the 2/19th Book Four) - Finished

Fey Favored

Western Wheat Field

McDaurn Family Farm

Lewis County, WA, USA

10 August 1986

2340 Hours

The thick hemp rope was looped around my shoulders, wound down my arms, to tie off around my wrists. A leather strap was around my throat. Another hemp rope went between my legs, across my waist, to provide a harness to take my weight. It was smashing my balls, but no worse than the rigging for rappelling down a cliff or the gear-up for an airborne drop.

The cold wind played over my rain slickened skin. I was completely nude beneath the cloudy, stormy sky, and when lightning flashed it lit up the wheat field around me.

They'd forced four different types of tea down my throat, then walked me out to the wheat field and put me up on a scarecrow's frame. The rope made sure that I didn't suffocate from leaning forward and putting too much pressure on my chest.

The paint had washed off before the sun had gone down, and my skin prickled from where I had been sunburnt but now the rain was leeching all the heat out of the cells. I'd explosively vomited twice, pissed myself three times, and let it all go when my bowels had loosened from all the poison I'd ingested.

The rain had washed it all away, along with all the blood.

I was cold, but not by much. It was still summer, the temperature was only at about sixty degrees even with the wind and the fact that I was wet and naked, the wind hotter than I was used to, hot and warmly humid.

The wheat rustled in the wind, and the lizard shriekingly told me that there were large predators in the wheat. My intellect might have cleared up, but something in what they had given me had made the lizard freak out, turned him completely paranoid. Between being unable to see beyond the flashes of lightning, how exposed I was hanging up on the scarecrow frame, and the fact I was pinned down, he was completely crazed.

Something huge moved in the wheat field, the lizard screamed and pointed, drawing my attention to what he assured me was a massive creature moving through the ripening wheat.

Consciously I knew it was just shadows and wind, but I screamed with the lizard and tried to get free of the frame, smacking my head against it, trying to arc my back, trying to get my feet loose to kick at it.

The girls had tied me too firmly.

All I could do was scream in terror through a raw throat.

Lightning flashed and a raw rough beast raised his head from the field and roared in a thunderclap that shook the entire world.

The lizard and I screamed in terror.

It was just shadows and light. I knew this intellectually, but instinctively I knew that a huge monster was coming to eat me. To rip open my belly, pull out my intestines, and chew on them while I screamed in agony.

Time went by, the storm gaining in volume and intensity, and I was starting to get cold, shivering on the framework, screaming at the monsters that only existed in shadows that set the lizard off.

In these fields I had seen rituals take place, had seen disobedient boys punished in the same way I was and even further. I'd seen wickermen burned each fall in these fields to cleanse them and hope for a fuller harvest the next year. I'd seen girls dance wildly, clad in nothing but body paints, as they came of age and I was too young to understand what I was seeing. I'd helped spread bowls of blood through the field in order to enrich the next crop.