Abner

6

Abner leaned back against the hood of his truck and waited. The cold air seemed thin as it filled his lungs and his lungs burned more with each breath. The strobe lights from his vehicle fired out flashes of white light against the trees, but all around him was silence. He reached down and felt the horse's neck with his bare hand. It distressed him to see such a beautiful animal killed for nothing, and for the first time in a long time, Abner was afraid.

The troubles with the Horse People began like this: In the middle of the night, a man wakes up to the sound of someone pounding on the glass of his front door. He hears a woman screaming like she's being murdered. The man grabs his 12-gauge shotgun and turns on the front porch light. When he looks through the peep-hole, he sees a disheveled meth-head woman staring back at him like she sees right through the door.

"Who the hell are you?" He shouted, keeping the locked door between them.
"I need help!" She cried. "They're coming this way!"
"I'm not opening this door," the man said. "I'll call the cops. Stop beating on the glass."

By the time the first deputy arrived, the woman was gone. Dried blood from her hands was smeared across the face of the door. The deputy was a 21-year old named Evan who had recently graduated from trainee status.

Evan followed the country roads around the incident in series of ever-widening circles for several hours. Just before the first beams of morning light started to creep over the horizon, Evan thought he saw the woman running across the road about a hundred yards ahead of him. When he got to the location, he shined his light against the tree line and saw the outline of the woman standing perfectly still with her back to him. Evan rolled down his window.

"Hey!" He shouted.
No response. She didn't even flinch.
"Hey - turn around!"
Nothing.
Evan got out of the truck and drew his pistol with his free hand. With the other, he kept a powerful beam of white light on the woman at all times.
"Put your hands behind your head!" He shouted.
The woman said nothing. But she slowly began to look up above her, gazing high into the trees. The position of her head was fixed at an unnatural angle.
"Hands behind your head!" He shouted again.

Her gaze remained fixed on the trees above her.

Evan slowly angled his flashlight up, directly above the woman's head, higher and higher. What the hell was she looking at?
Affixed by a snaking line of cords and nails to a great tree branch above the woman was the severed head of an animal. It was an obsidian-black horse with charcoal eyes gazing back at Evan.

The young deputy leapt backwards and dropped his flashlight. When he recovered, the woman was gone.