Just an Old Legend

This was originally written in shorter chapters, but for readers here, I'm taping three together for today. There are several women in this and I need to introduce you to two of them here. They don't ever meet, I don't think. There's a short shift in the middle part of one as the reader is taken to another place on the globe for a little while, but I need to do that, so try to get through it if you can.

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"It's just an old legend around here, really," said the portly and tired-looking old realtor. "I'm sure a modern young woman like yourself would have no interest in some of the backwoods silliness that passes for wives tales around here."

But Helen was intrigued by that point, and insisted. The realtor mopped his sweaty face. It had been a long walk up the rocks from the dock with one of her suitcases and he sure was glad now that she'd taken the place. And anyway, he had her summer's rent in his pocket already.

"Well," he began, "there are a few bears on the island, so keep that in mind regarding how you keep your trash locked up in the shed out there and not in here. You've got the burn permit, so once a week maybe, use the fire pit or the composter, whatever makes sense to you. I'd suggest the pit, since bears aren't interested in eating ashes."

"The story, Mr. Beamish," she reminded him.

"Oh yes," he said, "The story goes that this old farmhouse is haunted and is protected by a really large black wolf, as dark as the night, and he runs the bears off whenever they get it into their heads to maybe check out the place. It can't be true, of course, since the story is older around here than any wolf lives." He nodded in gratitude at the cold can of cola that his new tenant offered him from her small travel cooler, "I heard it from my father when I was a boy."

"Go on, Mr Beamish, please," she said, "I'm an artist, as I've said, but I'm also a writer, and I'm always collecting old stories, well mostly ghost stories. I've loved them since I was a little girl."

Stan Beamish came to a decision. If she wanted to hear it that bad, he'd tell it all then. He smiled and chuckled, "Well, there are curses to all the tales around here it seems, and this one has a couple. The first is for telling the story, if you can believe the foolishness, and the second is told by young girls around campfires about looking into his eyes - I'm sure you've heard those kinds of stories yourself."

He went on to tell of the young man who had laid out and built the small farmstead on the island. "He was from a very rural part of Eastern Europe, and wanted to bring his frail wife over to live here. She survived the trip, but didn't live long after her arrival. It seems, as the legend goes, that she was in fact a werewolf. Once her husband found her out, he killed her in the typical silver bullet sort of way, but his love for her had caused him to hesitate, and before she died, he was bitten himself."

"Her remains were found where they'd been burned, but the husband was never seen again. The police found a note with an explanation of the murder. The township took the place over, and my office eventually bought it. I try to rent it out most summers, but the locals won't go near it, The really odd thing is that somebody comes here to farm a little. I've found some crops, but no farmer would come here - or at least that's what they tell me."

Stan turned to go, "The aluminum motor boat tied up at the dock is for your use to go to town for groceries or whatever. Oh, one thing. If you hear the bears rooting around, you can turn on the yard lights by the switch there. It seems to drive them off, and if that doesn't work, the steel doors will keep them out and the lower story windows are barred as you can see, You're quite safe inside, but my suggestion to you is not to get caught outside after nightfall."

With that, he took his leave and headed back down to the dock.

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Lia's muscles ached and complained to her from the many hours in the cold damp of the long night spent on the ground with no movement.

She was used to it. She'd long ago learned how to compartmentalize the sections of her mind.

For long term discomfort such as this, she just closed the door on that section until later. She had other compartments set aside for things like her thirst and the irritation from the mosquitoes which had been happily gnawing on her back and bottom the whole night long.

What was really bothering her was the solitary ant who insisted on going for its morning constitutional stroll across her nose here, since she couldn't allow herself the motion of brushing it off. Damn, she thought, the little things must deserve their reputation for busyness if they were up and on the job this early. There was still some of the night-time mist hanging in the air and this one ant just had to go for a walk now.

From the light around her, she reckoned that it must be getting close to seven, the start of another business day for many millions of the planet's inhabitants. If everything worked out, it would be a non-starter for one in particular. She swiveled her eyes to take in the watchtowers within her field of view. The suddenly growing brightness from the approaching beam of one of the lights caused her to close her eyes in order to save her vision from the glare.

This has been going on since dusk, she thought. Wasn't it about time to turn the damn things off?

As if the man in the tower had heard her thoughts, the beam stopped abruptly a few meters to her left and disappeared. With a slow smile, she realized why the lights had been kept on well into the dawn. It was so that the boss could see that they were on the job. With that thought tucked away, she knew it must almost be Show Time and very slowly brought the rear objective of the scope to her eye while tightening her hold on the grip of the rifle as she eased the safety off.

Bullets kill by passing their kinetic energy to the target as a physical shock which does the damage. The system that she was using was a three part one, and the characteristics of the ammunition was the key part. Everything was built around one particular rifle cartridge, the 7.62 millimeter NATO round, known for its flat and predictable trajectory across long ranges and for its hitting power when it got where it was aimed.

The rifle and the scope were designed for each other from the outset, and one was not available without the other. The graduations in the scope were marked off at the proper rise of the flying bullet at any given range. It only worked with that cartridge, so you selected your distance, and the graduation at that range became clear. Center that on your target, and other than the effect of wind, that's where the bullet would be when it had gotten that far away. Simple.

Mated at the factory, the two parts together were a marvel of German efficiency produced for one purpose. It was a sniper rifle for use exclusively by law enforcement agencies against other snipers.

Lia wasn't after another sniper with her rifle, but it would do the job nicely for her this morning if the target would only get his ass out of the door.

The low weedy shrub that she lay behind outside the fence had been planted here the year before very carefully. She'd selected the species for its bushiness and rapid steady growth. It could stand being cut back by weed trimmers and shears, and would quickly grow back. The only thing that it had no defense against was a defoliant, but she hadn't been worried about that. Using a chemical like that would have turned the green belt outside the fence into an unsightly wide stripe of brown earth, and that could not be tolerated, could it?

She knew all that there was to learn about this target, and still she wondered what drove him. He'd built something of a criminal empire around himself and running it seemed to give him the occupational high that he thrived on. It was a little unusual for what he was, she thought. He'd surrounded himself with carefully chosen people. Nobody got close to him without passing through a rigorous screening process designed to keep him safe. His armored limousines couldn't even be gotten close to most times and they were swept for explosives several times a day, the times of the inspections being staggered at odd and unpredictable intervals. This was the one predictable part of his day - the walk through the hedged garden to the garages to get into a limo.

The other odd thing here was that all of the people who surrounded him were human, as though they were all that he believed that he could trust, for some reason. She mentally shrugged. Everybody needs a hobby, she thought as the door opened and he left through the side door to walk along the elaborate decking adorned with planters full of flowers of every description.

Her problem was that he had another hobby. Every so often, he'd bite somebody - usually a plaything that he'd grown tired of. Before that one had gotten through the change, they were dumped someplace to spread their misery as a new and temporarily insane werewolf. It would have been far better for everyone if he'd just had them killed, but it was the way he did things.

She had a window of only a few seconds here. Over a year of preparation on her part boiled down to this thin slice of time. He was only in the clear for about ten meters. After that, he'd be screened by all sorts of foliage and vegetation until he was safely inside the large garage complex. He liked his toys and had quite a collection, far too many to try to keep track of and have any hope to look for opportunities.

Lia had her crosshairs on him now and worked to control the timing of her breathing. She willed him to turn to face her. Across the 530 yards between them, she waited for a clear view of his chest. It had taken her since early in the afternoon the day before to crawl into position here and everything came down to her getting a heart shot. She would settle for nothing less. He was just about to turn, and her finger had already taken up the slack on the calibrated match trigger. Anticipating his turn, she was at the bottom of her breath to achieve maximum stillness for the shot. One step more and he'd turn...

The door of the house opened, and one of the housekeepers called to him, She couldn't believe this. In only a second or so, her heart would beat strongly to counter the drop in the dissolved oxygen level of her bloodstream. That heavy pulse would mean a difference of up to a foot at this range, she knew. If she inhaled now as well, the difference would be far greater.

But he had no time for whatever the housekeeper wanted. He didn't even listen as he waved her off brusquely. She held off her eye blink for just a moment longer, and, ...

There it was, a wide-open window for her which was already closing. Her index finger squeezed the tiny amount of pull remaining in the trigger and the shot was away as the stock of the rifle pushed against her shoulder. The rifle ejected the empty casing and stripped another round from the magazine for a follow-up shot. It would have been nice, she thought, but the nature of this hunt precluded one.

Her ammunition wasn't what the weapon had been designed for. While everything about the dimensions, weight, and balance exactly matched the military round, hers was not a steel bullet covered by a full metal jacket. The copper jackets on her rounds were scored to peel back on impact, just like a hunting bullet. Hunting bullets peel back to allow the lead core to deform into a larger shape in order to maximize the energy transfer. But instead of the usual hunting bullets made by the millions for hunters the world over, hers would peel back to reveal something different, something that fit the game that she hunted exclusively.

As the bullet crashed into his chest just to the right of center at well over twice the speed of sound, it penetrated his sternum and the copper peeled back to reveal a core of silver alloy which smashed into his heart before tearing out ten pounds of meat, bone, and other tissue on its way out through his back.

She watched as he stood for an instant on his toes and then crumpled almost backward with a groan that she'd never hear. The face there sideways on the decking went through three changes in an instant. She saw the long canines, but they returned to an almost human size as his life left him. She missed the rest of it.

By the time the crack of her rifle shot had reached the guards' ears almost a second and a half later, She was already up and on one knee, sighting on the nearest tower. She didn't adjust the scope, she didn't really need to. The guard there landed on the ground without most of his head. With the closest threat to her removed, Lia ran like a stripe-assed gazelle for the trees.

All eyes were on their fallen employer, but the guards with more mental horsepower began to look toward the fence frantically. Two of them saw her dash toward the trees and one began to call out and point, while the other keyed the button on his radio. The guards in the remaining towers opened fire and Lia ran through a cloud of tormented wood bark and splinters from the tree to her left.

She ran through the first band of trees, headed for the thick woods beyond but stopped just long enough to do several things at the far edge of the trees. Stepping quickly out of her shoes, she tore at the Velcro seams on her clothes. They went into a heap in a dry part of the stream-bed there with the rifle laid across the top. The waxed paper tabs came off the adhesive tape that she'd prepared the afternoon before, and with that, she taped a small incendiary charge to the rifle and pulled the pin the last of the way out to arm it. She began to run along the stream-bed again over the rocks and stones. She was more than fifty yards away when the charge hissed to life and began the small, intense fire which would destroy the rifle.

There were no guards in the band of green space beyond. At this particular time of day, they were closer to the long drive as a security screen. She splashed along the stream as she heard the dogs baying right about where she'd lain the whole night long.

She didn't care. If any of them even caught a glimpse of her they wouldn't continue their pursuit if they had a brain. If not, she'd just kill them long before the men arrived. She left the stream just inside the heavy woods beyond. She had a long way to go yet, but she already knew that she was pretty much home free.

What moved through the forest now was not recognizable as the female sniper that the guards had shot at. Once she began to pound along in the dark forest on all fours, her speed increased to a point where she could have left all but a cheetah in her dust on the cheetah's best day.

Her mouth opened and her long pink tongue flopped against her teeth a little as she grinned. This had been all about getting to know her target and for that, Lia was the best at this game.

It takes one to know one, she thought.

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It took Helen exactly three days to fall completely in love with the island, and another to come up with an idea of how to word her offer to purchase it from the realty office in town. Stan Beamish agreed in principle over the phone, and they scheduled a meeting for the following Wednesday to talk turkey as he put it. Helen was pleased, and decided to really explore the island as a reward to herself. It was during this expedition that she found a few more of its treasures.

The first were the fields that Beamish had mentioned. They were small, well not small specifically. The area that was cultivated was fairly small compared to what was available. Helen wandered carefully and thought about who might be trespassing here to plant a crop or two. She was worried about crops like corn which might be planted as a screen say, to hide a crop of marijuana, but later on, she found that she could get an overview of them from the rear windows of the house, and it was obvious that there was only the corn there. It just looked like small-scale subsistence farming to her.

The next surprise was the blueberry patch. She couldn't tell if it had been planted or had just grown wild, but she didn't much care. She'd always loved wild blueberries. The discovery alone had made her mouth water, and then her next thought was how much she'd like to bake a pan of Blueberry Boy Bait, the informal cottage-style cake that her mother had taught her to make. She had no idea if it lived up to its name. It had never lasted long enough in the days of her adolescence to attract any boys. Truth be told, it never stayed in the pan long enough to cast much of a shadow as soon as it had cooled from the oven.

But the real surprise treasure to Helen was the hidden little cove. There was a narrow inlet, only wide enough say, for a canoe, or the small aluminum fishing boat that was tied up at the dock on the other side of the island to get in here. The entrance was not only narrow, it was fairly shallow too, but it then opened up and deepened as well. It had surely been formed by a glacier, but there was a small soft sandy beach that started the wheels in her head spinning. Helen had always wanted a secluded place to sunbathe. It had been a pet fantasy of hers all of her life. What she really wanted was a private place to come to relax, take off her cares along with her clothes, and just lie in the warm sun.

She wandered around, looking at all of the driftwood which had accumulated. It would take her a good while to clear it away, working alone. There was a lot of sawing to be done to cut the larger pieces up into manageable size to drag off and pile, but she was determined to do just that if it got her a tan without lines. Plus, she realized, there would be good firewood for the occasional bonfire if she wanted to make an evening of it once it had all dried out.

There was one thing that bothered her a little about all of this, she realized. It was a nagging little thing in her mind. She was overlooking something, and she knew it. The trouble was, she didn't know what it was – some little bit of lore or knowledge there in her mind telling her to be careful, if only she could put her finger on what it was. It wasn't until the another day or two later until she had her epiphany about that.

Helen came back the next day and set about clearing a bit of her beach. She got quite a bit done, but found that it was hurting her hands somewhat, and there was the occasional splinter to deal with – even from this old driftwood. The day after, she returned with a basket and a pair of work gloves that she'd bought in town. It didn't take long at all to almost fill the basket with berries, and she found a bit of shade to set it down in for later when she'd leave.

There had been times as she picked, that she thought she felt herself being watched, as though someone was observing her. The feeling just wouldn't go away, and no matter how quickly she stood up to look around, there was never anyone there. Thinking about that, she noticed that the birds in the area were busy with their flights and songs the whole time. Actually, the only time they were the least bit upset was whenever she stood up suddenly. She shrugged, feeling a bit foolish and continued on.

The beach looked a bit odd to her that day. She looked around, and had the strangest impression that more of the wood had been moved than she herself had gotten done. But in reality, she decided that she just couldn't honestly say that. Shaking her head, she chided herself for being foolish, and decided that from then on, she'd be concerned when she found that she had an actual reason to be.

After about an hour and a half of often hard work, she'd had enough for now and stood back to check her progress. She'd cleared a lot, but the ones that remained now were the dead falls, and these weren't driftwood at all. That was ok for the moment, she decided, she'd be back with a saw if she could find one around anywhere, and if not, well she was a big enough girl to rent a small chainsaw if she had to, because she'd now decided that this was going to get done.