Blood Brothers

In the early morning hours the sun had not yet sent its firey fingers through the starlit sky... Wisps of smoke from a small spent campfire curled crazily into the trees... a tiny flame flared for a brief second and a spark shot out with the crack of a rifle shot... it was strangely quiet... The white moon shone its rays through a glassless window onto a human form all curled on the dirt floor in agony...

A tortured face squinted in the pale moonlight, writhing in

inexaustable pain, clutching at anything and nothing.

A terrifying scream split the air... followed

by a series of gasping sobs... little forest animals scurried about the forest floor... stopping only for a moment when another painful scream agonized through the misty morning air...

"Please God please !!" followed by another tearing scream....

The sun was about to triumph over the night once more... Darkness changed into light...

There was one more blood curdling scream and the

forest froze in silence... there would be no more screams... But a new sound filled the air.. a sound that repeated itself again and again....

Miles away a family was about to wake... for them I was another glorious early summer day... The rooster announced the beginning of the morning and activity was stirring around the yard. The aroma of fresh coffee sifted through the air, the shower sprayed its delightful pulsating blasts, and chickens clucked around the yard pecking at imaginary grains...

Three weeks ago, Jamie and Roxanne had packed up their belongings and kids and moved into this small home in the mountains. Shortly after they arrived, the snow melted... Now everything was quickly turning green and even the early flowers blossomed in the bright morning sun...

''I have got to be in town ten minutes ago." Jamie said to his wife as she stepped from the shower... He kissed her wet face and smiled into her soft blue eyes... She bore him two teenage boys, and she was as gorgeous as ever... The droplets of water glistened on her rounded breasts and she was the very picture of fertility... He felt himself stirring, and thought himself to be a lucky man...

"Don't forget to stop at the post office." she said to him, and kissed him back...

The truck roared to life with a turn of the key... Within ten minutes Jamie rolled off the bumpy trail and was on a smooth paved highway, headed into town... "We should have moved here months ago." he thought to himself... Roxanne's father had owned the property for twenty years... He had a good Life, living so close to Nature, so close to Heaven, as he would say so very many times... But one day they found his body, or at least what was left of him... Someone had tied him to the gate and shot him with a shotgun... He was not critically wounded, but he would be left to bleed to death... and he did just that...

The funeral had been attended by Roxanne and her family, Jake, the old guy at the general store and a few of the town folk... The local Police asked everyone if they knew anything, but no one hardly knew who Roxanne's dad even was... and though the case was not officially closed, no one was asking any more questions... The killer vanished without leaving a trace. Not a finger print, not even a spent shell... nothing.

Now it was over half a year later, and most of those memories had been forced from everyday memories... The snow had come and kind of purged the countryside from this evil deed... Everyone went about their lives. What was the buzz of the community, on everyone's lips, every single day, just vaporized, and soon no one mentioned it any more...

Jamie glanced nervously at his watch. Not much traffic in the early morning hours... people over there, coming over here, and other people over here, going over there... The small town had one basic industry, they kept that stretch of the highway through the mountains clear... it was a nice tight community, where everyone knew everyone, usually by their first names... There were a few trappers who drifted in and out of town occaisionally, and even more rare were the prospectors... some of 'those' guys just never even came back... they just disappeared in the mountains... So when Roxanne's father met his untimely end, everyone just sort of let him disappear with all the others. No one really knew him anyway. He was a batchelor who lived by himself, kept to himself, and only came into town for supplies.

The rays of rising sun flashed through the trees

causing Jamie to squint his eyes as he navigated the smooth highway... He had worked late on the blueprints he was bringing into town... If this worked out okay, well they could stay the year for sure, maybe longer. And by then he would be on another project. There was a small school in town and their two boys were brand new teen agers. "They would be sheltered from the vices of the big city Life," he thought to himself... nothing ever happens in this little out of the way place... Well, nothing except the shooting... that was the worst thing to happen in the town's history...

and it was just so strange... Someone had to be very angry at Roxanne's Dad... angry enough to blast away his genitals... and leave him to die tied to the gate... He wasn't robbed... his bloodstained wallet was found in the hip pocket of his jeans with over two hundred dollars in it... His watch, his diamond ring, were all there... and he was stone cold dead...

But the Police could not find anyone who knew him well enough to offer up even the tiniest of clues... and he might have been hanging there still had not a father and son team been hiking up the bumpy road...

The coroner said he had been hanging there for two weeks and hung there for agonizing hours before he died... Other than that, no one knew anything... but that would change soon... Too soon for Roxanne and her husband Jamie...

Back at the home,Roxanne was cooking breakfast for her two boys... "Time to rise and shine," she encouraged them, "Let's go."

But the boys needed no encouragement today... for today they were going to climb up the mountainside...

They scrambled for their clothes, washed their hands and faces and wolfed down their breakfast... They still had some chores to do, they had to clean the stable where the horse was kept, and the hen house, but other than that they were on their way... Peter was the oldest by a year, and his brother Paul just turned thirteen last month... They had heard so many stories from their grandfather about the gold that was secretly hidden somewhere up in the mountain... and indeed there were many facts to substantiate these tales.

A hundred years ago two prospectors had struck it rich finding a Mother Load. They had brought their little bag of samples back to be assayed and their gold was found to be 99% pure... But the two prospectors kept the location secret, never revealing to anyone where it might be... They came into town frequently with large amounts of gold which they converted into women and liquor... Then away they would go again...

until one time, when only one of them came back... The other was never heard from or seen again... and shortly there after, even the remaining prospector completely disappeared...

Well so far, there must be hundreds of stories like this... but herein lies the difference... As the story goes, the two prospectors had found gold alright, but it was located in an ancient Indian burial ground. To mine the gold, the two prospectors would have to violate the sacred burial grounds. And that is exactly what they did for about a year. Then it was believed that one prospector killed the other, and kept digging out the gold and hiding it...

Of course there were hundreds of prospectors migrating into the area, eager to find this golden location, but it was never found. At least none of them ever lived to tell about it... and then, when the 'other' prospector disappeared, it is believed that the Indians had found him... and that was the end of his story...

The gold however, remains hidden to this day... and there still are prospectors hoping to change their luck, and find that evasive stash of gold...

And that is what Peter and Paul had their sights on this day as they scrambled through their chores, eager to take on the mountain...

They would find something, but it wouldn't be that gold... It would be a day which they would never forget...

Jamie turned into the driveway of the developer's complex... He Loved his Wife, he Loved his two boys, he Loved his Life... and he Loved his job... He parked beside the only car in the parking lot in the stall marked with the name, Dale Carrington.

Dale Carrington was a business man with a developer's dream... This little unheard of town had some powerful history... Nestled in the Rocky Mountains, away from any industry except fruit trees, it was a vacationers paradise...

All it needed was someone to put it on the map... If Jamie lived up to his reputation, a developer's dream was about to become a reality...

Back at the home, Peter and Paul finished

their morning chores and started up the mountain... The first stop would be at that deserted trapper's cabin up opn the ridge... they had been told to not go there because there were abandoned mine shafts and such and it was dangerous to walk through the woods in that area... some of the boards that had covered the mine shafts had long ago rotted out, and covered over with vegetation... One wrongly placed foot, and one could tumble into unknown depths, and most definite dangers, and perhaps never be found again.

Slowley the two boys made their way to the trapper's cabin... The sun had risen in the early morning Spring day.

In the distance they could hear a strange sound... The mountain air is funny like that, how it can carry a faint sound for miles sometimes... and this sounde like a baby's cry... hard to tell... but a newborn baby sounds like no other sound... and that was what they thought they heard... it was still a bit of a distance to the ridge where the trapper's cabin was... but an hour of difficult climbing they were close enough to know for sure, that those were the cries of a baby...

Carefully, they made their way over the jagged rocks... And then there they were... The baby's cry was much fainter, as they crossed the small clearing...

The entrance door had long fallen away from the one room shack, and the roof sagged as though it would collapse any second... the silvered wood glistened in the shimmering heat.. They peered into the darkness...

There was a baby alright, still attatched to its dead mother by its umbilcal cord... The two boys stared in total disbelief at the poor woman who had died in horrendous agony giving birth to her child... They had no way of knowing that they were related by blood to this tiny whimpering infant...

to be continued...