The sun beat down with hellish force. Rick laboured beneath it, feeling it cook his well-weathered skin. The blade of his pickaxe flashed as it swung through the air and crashed into the ground before him. Rick grunted with approval at the crack that appeared in the rock. He used the flat end of the pick to lever half out of the ground, and heaved the chunk into the trailer hitched to his battered Land Rover. He leant on the pick, caught his breath, and surveyed the large patch of freshly churned dirt before him. Beyond that there stretched an area twice the size, where rocks jutted out of the earth’s surface like sharp, vicious teeth. He still had a lot of work to do.
*
His Grand-pappy put the rocks there, according to Rick’s own Pa. A whole section of field, perfectly fertile, senselessly buried beneath a layer of jagged stone.
"I still dunno why he did it," his Pa said one night, many years ago now. Rick remembered the moment vividly: his Pa sitting in his old wicker chair, a limp hand-rolled cigarette between the fingers of his left hand and a bottle in his right. They sat on the back porch of the farmhouse that Rick now occupied alone, the breeze whispering through the surrounding ears of corn. Pa looked up at the starry night sky as he spoke, as if the old boy were up there now, and could tell him why. "I dun’ even know where he got ’em. Some of ’em were pulled from the fields, sure. But all of ’em? Doubt that." Pa took a long pull on his cigarette, the tip glowing orange in the night before dying away again. "A course, the old man went crazy not long after. Coulda just been the start of the illness."
A crazy act or not, Pa left those rocks there all his life. Rick probably would have done too, but he could no longer afford to waste good land.
One particular rock was slowing him down, though. Bigger and thicker than the rest, it laid flat across the ground, vaguely central within the patch. He grabbed a long, thick wooden post and managed to drive one end underneath the colossal thing. This one was too thick to crack in half, and too heavy to lift into the trailer whole – this one was destined to be flipped into the hedgerow.
Rick grabbed the other end of the pole and lifted. The rock didn’t budge. He readjusted and tried again. Nothing. He heaved with all his strength, and felt the faintest movement. With his knees feeling like they would pop and his spine feeling like it would snap he managed to lever the thing up out of its earthly prison. It was even thicker and heavier than he thought. Up and up the thing slowly came, until finally with one last push Rick managed to toss it away. The momentum made it flip again, carrying out a full rotation and coming to rest nearer the hedge.
Rick stretched, his hands at his lower back, and tried to make his spine crack a little. There was a hell of a strain there, which he knew he’d feel every morning for the rest of the week. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a dirty hand, and for the first time looked down at the revealed ground.
It was different to everything else he had uncovered. The gargantuan rock hadn’t just been buried in the mud, it had been the roof of what looked like a small dirt cave.
"That’ll dig over easy enough," Rick muttered aloud. "Probably an animal crawled in there and dug it."
And there, right in the centre of the hole, Rick thought he could see the animal in question. There was a shape there, buried beneath a light coating of dry and crumbly dirt, that didn’t fit with its surroundings. Rick gave the shape a prod with the end of his levering pole and some of the dirt fell away.
"What the…"
The entire thing was hard like a skeleton, but from the look of it there was still flesh on those bones. Skin, hard and taut, still covered its limbs. It was preserved like a desert burial.
Rick stepped down into the hole, his boots now two feet below the ground’s surface. He bent down and brushed off the rest of the dirt.
He very slowly straightened up again.
This was no animal. No animal that Rick had ever seen, anyway. It was curled up in a loose foetal position, with its hands up by its head. The hands were small but its fingers were long. The nails were dark, elongated and sharp – more like claws than fingernails. The arms looked eerily human. So did the curve of the spine, and the legs, which were pulled up towards the chest… But those hooked feet were not human, and that long and bony tail was like nothing he had ever seen. What he could see of the face was scrunched up, like it was either angry or in pain, but even with its pointed features, it was almost human. Almost. The skin, pulled tightly across the body, was a dark and muddy maroon. It was probably about three feet long from one end to the other, not including the tail. The whole thing was perfectly preserved. Only the stiffness of the creature made it apparent that it wasn’t freshly dead.
It was unworldly. Rick knew it as soon as he brushed off the dirt. Exactly what it was – mutant, alien, demon – he didn’t know. It made him uneasy, though. He knew that for sure.
Rick clambered back out of the hole and took a few steps away, a confused storm of questions raging in his head with no answers in sight. An irrational fear swept over him in an instant as he stood with his back to the hole. An image of those claw-like hands reaching up and grasping onto the edge burst into his mind, he saw that scrunched up face appearing over the rim of the hole, the reptilian tail flicking up into the air.
He whirled around.
The hole looked exactly the same. He hadn’t really expected anything else, he told himself, but he still felt a surge of relief. He walked closer and there it was, lying as it had before – a bizarre and mysterious being, dead in the ground in his field.
I need to get this thing out of here, Rick thought, with a certainty that he couldn’t explain. Get it inside, somewhere.
Rick was reluctant to touch it with his hands again, but an idea was forming in his head, and his desire not to cause any damage to the thing was greater than his displeasure at touching that leathery skin. He climbed back into the hole, and with a grimace, he lifted it from the ground. It was light, probably from the preservation process, but there was still some weight to it that proved the existence of bones within the hard skin and wasted flesh. He carefully carried it to the Land Rover, and stopped. He didn’t want to be trapped in the same vehicle as this thing. He made sure the rocks in his trailer were stable and then laid the dead thing on top. Very slowly and very carefully, he drove back towards the house.
*
He opened the door and flicked a switch just inside. An aged and dusty fluorescent flickered into life on a fitting hanging on thin chains from the roof. He stepped inside, leaning the pickaxe on the floor up against the wall. The outbuilding was little more than a large shed, but Rick thought it would be the best place to store…it. Not only was the shed completely separate from his main house, but it was where his old chest freezer sat, humming faintly, in the corner. Rick swept the accumulation of old paint cans and tools onto the concrete floor and lifted the lid. Ice more than an inch thick caked the sides, and a few packages of pork littered the bottom, wrapped up in plastic from well over a year ago. He took them out and tossed them aside, then went back to the trailer.
Rick didn’t know if the freezing process would damage whatever preservation had gone on beneath the rock, but he didn’t want to risk the thing rotting now that it was out of its tomb and in the open air; he had plans for this thing. He had to chance it in the freezer.
He carried it in at arm’s length, trying not to look too closely at it – at its disturbingly close-to-human appearance, at those fingers curled into angry shapes like it was about to lash out, at the face contorted in either agony or fury. He lowered it into its new, icy coffin, and after one last glance, closed the lid.
*
The day cooled down as the sun sank towards the horizon. Rick sat in his Pa’s old wicker chair in that same spot on the back porch, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. As the setting sun cast an orange hue in the sky and long shadows on the ground, Rick sat staring at the shed. The door was padlocked, but that did nothing to quell the unease he felt looking at the place across the yard. The overhead light was still on in there, and now he could see it glowing out of the cracks between the boards and around the door. It gave the place an ethereal appearance, but it was probably better than having to open that door knowing it was dark inside, and that thing was in there…
While removing it from the ground an idea of how to use it had come to him, and seemed so brilliant in his mind. There were people all over the world who were into weird stuff like this. If he could track some down, he could sell that thing and not have to worry about reclaiming anymore forgotten farmland for growing corn. Hell, if he got enough he could stop farming and live out the rest of his life in luxury. After all, he was only thirty-seven; he could still have a lot of fun with what time he had left. But, while driving back to the house at little more than a crawl, that certainty had begun to slip. Now it was in free-fall. He still believed he could sell it, to either a scientist or an enthusiast, but he wasn’t sure he should sell it. In fact, he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with it at all.
Just what was the thing, anyway? It was humanoid, but it certainly wasn’t human, unless it was the mutant product of some bizarre cross or inbreeding. The thing was skinny, and if it was straightened out, Rick guessed it would stand at around four feet tall, like a child. But it had claws on its hands, and its feet looked more like a bird’s. And that face, although it had the right number of eyes and all the parts in the right places, looked decidedly cruel. The less said about that tail the better.
Rick couldn’t tear his eyes away from the shed, glowing faintly in the growing dusk. Was it an alien? Or an affront to God? And why, oh why, was it buried beneath that rock? He felt sure buried was the right term to use. Had his ol’ Gran-pappy put it there? Was that, in fact, the reason for his sudden and bizarre urge to turn the corner of his field into a rockery?
A voice spoke up clearly from his memory, the voice of his Pa speaking from the exact same chair Rick sat on now. "A course, the old man went crazy not long after."
For the first time, but not the last, Rick wished he had left it in the ground and covered it back over with the rock. Or better yet, had never found the thing in the first place.
*
He woke up in his bedroom, in the dark and momentarily bewildered, unsure of where he was. He slowly sat up as the remains of his strange and uneasy dream drifted away. He got out of bed and crossed to the window.
The shed glowed there in the darkness, weak light shining through every gap between every board that made up the walls and the door of the thing. It made it look a little like there was a fire inside that had yet to consume the building. He watched that light intensely, trying to convince himself that there was nothing moving around in there. It took Rick a long time to go back to bed, and even then he lay awake, eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
*
As soon as he opened his eyes and saw the colour of the light in the room he knew it was late. Far from being weak and watery, this sunlight was strong and bold. His clock told him it was approaching eleven a.m., but that couldn’t be right. Rick had never slept that late in his life.
He tended his pet chickens and tried to think normal thoughts. He found it surprisingly hard. His thoughts irresistibly turned to the shed, and what lay inside. He lasted as long as it took to feed the chickens and collect the eggs before he gave in.
He stood outside the door, key to the padlock in hand, unable to decide now that he was actually there: should he give in to his curiosity and look at it, or stay the hell away? The pull to this place had seemed about as deniable as gravity while he was feeding the chickens at the side of the house, but now that he stood before the shed he wanted desperately to get away. Away from the shed, away from the house, away from the whole damn world. Yet the key was in his fingers, and still he stood there, contemplating.
He held the padlock in his left hand, although he didn’t remember reaching out for it. The hasp was still firmly locked. The metal was cool on his skin, having been sheltered from the sun all day so far.
Cold. Cold skin.
And suddenly he made his decision. He let the padlock go and it swung back to the door with a dull thud. He put the key back in his pocket and went into the house to start his search for a buyer.
After just thirty minutes online, Rick had compiled a list of names and phone numbers of people that might be interested in what he had in his freezer. Some of them would probably want nothing to do with it, but Rick just needed one who did. Rick’s most likely option seemed to be a Doctor Hogan. Based in California, the man spent his time examining strange and unknown samples. He had even examined what someone had claimed to be a bone fragment from a Big Foot, although this had proved to be false. The man’s entire career centred on the bizarre and the unexplained. Rick circled Dr Hogan’s name and number several times on his list, but he didn’t reach for his phone. He thought of that thing out there in his shed.
"Maybe…maybe I’ll leave it one more night," Rick said aloud. Yeah, one more night. That’d be the best thing to do. Leave it another night and then start calling around. If it still seems like the best idea.
Rick was still tired despite his late awakening. He closed his eyes, just for a moment.
CONCLUDED IN "UNLEASHED PART II"
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