The Yaak House, Part Three

(Originally published on my main blog, Andi and I Write, on April 4, 2020) 

Gerald kicked damp pine needles over the fire hastily, Jasper doing the same. The flame consumed some, but the two continued to kick more damp leaf litter over until the fire didn't even smoke by the gasps of moonlight that filtered through the clouds, Jasper stomping the last traces of life from it just to be safe.

Thaz'ra had since hopped up on her stump once more and was straining her ears, eyes shut as her head turned, trying to focus in on the direction of the sound, the jar half open in her hands. Her momentarily blind gaze settled in the direction of the cabin, and Gerald felt sick.
"Stick close to me," Thaz’ra ordered the two men as she hopped down, alert and starting to pour the salt around their tent liberally. Gerald followed her with one hand on her back, Jasper following him the same way.
"Guys, what's up out there?" Boris asked from inside the tent in a soft voice.
"Hush," Thaz'ra ordered softly, "get down," the jar was nearly empty when she finished, ushering Jasper and Gerald into the tent before she threw the last of the salt around the area of their camp, scattering it all around the entrance of tent as best she could. Some salt rained down the sides of it with a soft hiss, and Thaz'ra stood for a moment, facing the woods from the entrance of the tent.
Gerald’s heart had curled around a gnarled knot in his chest, fear. He too again faced the old cabin with the untouched carcass.
Thaz herself felt something uneasy stir in her chest, her heart skipping a beat or two. She pressed a hand over it with a shaking sigh, it wasn't an unusual sensation for her, her usual involuntary anxieties, heightened perhaps by the events of the last hour. Her hands brushed against the pendant around her neck, a magnificent piece Jasper had made her of small, interlocking columns of Rose Quartz and Obsidian. She clutched at it, feeling the curve of the expertly carved halves. She twisted them and they interlocked, smooth as ever. She imagined it acting as a lock of sorts, two beautiful stones, opposite one another, acting as a single barrier. She found a comfort in it.
She left the jar outside as she zipped the flap shut upon creeping into the sound of whispers from within the tent.
"What did you hear?" Hazel asked softly, "I heard-"
"Shh," Thaz'ra hissed, "Boris, turn your hearing aids up, what can you hear?" She murmured. The six of them didn't have much room to move, Rin and Hazel huddled together in the back, Boris in the middle, tallest even sitting down. Jasper and Gerald flanked him, and Thaz'ra sat at the entrance of the tent.  Boris sighed, and she heard Hazel's surprise before Rin hushed her.
"...All I pick up is breathing, everyone hold breath for a moment," Boris' susurrus voice filled the tent, and the breathing hushed for a long ten seconds.
"...Footsteps?" Thaz asked.  He nodded, "turn them down again Boris, thank you," she heard him sigh, saw the dimmest shadow of movement as he did so; she felt Hazel's shiver in the air as she exhaled.
"I didn't know you had hearing aids, sorry I always say you don't listen," she whispered to Boris.
"Forgiven, isn't a defining factor of who I am," he murmured, shuffling her to the middle of the tent, "safer here," he said softly. Hazel murmured her thanks as Thaz'ra hushed the group again, clenching a fist to pop her knuckles pointedly. They hushed like fawns, hiding beneath their mother in plain sight.
She could hear it clearly now, the footfall outside. She wasn't alone in this, as Hazel huddled down further in the center of the tent, Jasper doing the same.
"Get down. Down, down, down," Thaz'ra hissed softly at the rest of the group, taking the rifle from where it had been slung over her shoulder.
"Thaz!" Gerald warned in a whisper.
"You said yourself these are your Grizzly rounds in here," Thaz breathed back. An exasperated huff met the words, but Thaz'ra knelt before the entrance of the tent still; a bulwark against the ever-approaching footsteps.
It sounded like an elk or deer, hooved with a steady four-legged gait. The pattering rain outside stopped again and the moon, full, lit the outside world, the grey edges of the tent were nearly glowing under the feeble light.
Still the footfall approached. Thaz'ra shuddered when she heard the warning call of a deer, a loud, whistling huff, from the direction of the footfall, though the gait didn’t change.
If it sounded like a deer, why did it make her so nervous?
In that case, why hadn’t she seen deer sign up here?
Why hadn’t there been any predator sign?
What would it be running from if there weren’t predators?
Why wasn’t it running?
Thaz'ra gripped the stock of the rifle tighter at the implications of that last thought.
Was it even... what it sounded to be?
She tried to tune the questions in her head out as the footfall drew closer, thunderous in the still woods, even against damp leaves.
Where had the questioning of her own senses come from?
The humid air rippled with the sound of the footfall slowing, and the tent shuddered. It was as if their nerves were the strings of a violin being expertly played by what they hoped was mother nature.
Thaz’ra could feel the shaking of her group as she thought of their every vulnerability. Jasper, a hemophiliac, was in the center with his body curled around Hazel. Hazel herself was a petite, fragile thing in an unforgiving world, with hip dysplasia, frail bones, and rods in her spine. Boris was mostly deaf, of their group, only Rin and Gerald knew how to sign fluently while Boris struggled with reading lips. Rin had beaten leukemia at a young age, part of his short stature, though he fell ill easily. Gerald had seen the horrors of war; it had almost cost him an arm, and the sandbox haunted him in the present from the past in the shape of PTSD. Thaz’ra was physically sound, though her mind was a wavering, unstable thing at best.
Rin, Boris, and Gerald surrounded Jasper and Hazel as best they could, their bodies shielding them from the edges of the tent, Thaz’ra sat before the entrance, remaining a bulwark against the darkness.
She was no stranger to fear, to danger... danger had brought her and the boys together; survival had made them family. They'd survived human trafficking together, they'd survived investigations, survived therapy, they'd survived, always. They were a team. They'd survived in dance competitions, they survived Hazel coming on as a new member of the troupe. They had always survived; they had done so together.
"We're going to survive this," Thaz'ra whispered to the group. Heads lifted to her.
"Promise?" Hazel questioned as clouds slid over the moon, leaving the glow along the edge of the tent to fade once more.
"Beyond that, I know it," Thaz'ra soothed, hearing the steps outside slow at last to a stop at the perimeter of the camp.  She strained her ears beyond the hushed breathing in the stifling tent for a moment. She turned her gaze to the narrow gap between the two zippers of the tent flap.
Regret rose in her racing heart like bile in her throat as the moonlight again broke through the clouds like a swimmer taking a gasp for air; she herself almost did the same.
Instead, the wind left her sails with a shudder as she recognized the antlers.