Roads of Reckoning 

 

    Folks said the deer are bad this year.
    They said it like a sickness had blown in and settled on Madison County, like a heat you could not break. Every week somebody in the county, was getting pulled out of a truck or pried out of a sedan. Headlights full of fur. Windshields shattered with bone. Sheriff’s office put up more caution signs and the preacher at Gordon’s Chapel started adding “safe travels” right after “Miss Eloise’s leg” and “those in need of guidance.” Did not change a thing. People kept dying.
    At first I thought it was just numbers. More deer, more cars, more chances to meet ugly in the dark. But after a while I started to see a pattern, and once I saw it I could not unsee.
    They were doing it on purpose.
    My name is Victor Lewis. I live in Madison County at the end of a red clay driveway cut between two pastures that ain’t mine. My trailer leans in the dirt like it’s had a long day. Nights, when the air sits heavy and low, I can taste the chicken houses. Sour rot that sticks to the back of the tongue. Used to be I’d hear coyotes from time to time, or a barred owl talking nonsense in the pines. Lately I hear deer. Deer aren’t supposed to be heard. They’re supposed to flicker and vanish.
    The first time I knew something was off was a Tuesday night, real late, when I was coming back from shift at the feed mill. My eyes were killing me, so I cut the headlights and just let the truck roll the last hundred yards. There was enough moon to steer by.
    That is when I saw them in my yard.
    Not just one or two, a whole small herd waiting on me like I was late to a meeting. They were not grazing. They were not nervous. They were just standing there, looking at my trailer like they were waiting on me to get home so we could talk about something unpleasant.
    I let the truck idle, my hands sweating on the wheel. I watched them and they watched me. I felt this cold wrongness sink into me slow, like when you wake up sure there’s somebody sitting on the edge of your bed in the dark and you can’t see them yet. That kind of wrong.
    “Y’all go on now,” I said, kind and low, like I might talk to a stray dog that had wandered in looking for a handout.
    The buck raised his head like he understood English and led the herd off into the darkness.
    In the morning, I found hoof gouges in the mud by my driver-side door. Not prints. Gouges. Deep. Angry.
    You tell yourself lies at first. Coincidence, I told myself. I didn’t believe that. I told myself that anyway. You do that because the other option is worse.
    By the end of October we had five wrecks in seven days, all after midnight, all people driving alone. The story was the same every time. Deer in the road, not darting across in panic, not exploding out of the ditch like they do. No. A deer would wait until a vehicle was too close to brake and then hurl itself straight in. A full-body slam meant to kill both of them.
    One of the pulpwood boys out of Carlton didn’t just hit a deer. An EMT said the deer came through boy’s windshield still alive and braced both hooves on his chest. Drove him back against the seat and stomped until his sternum split clean.
    That is not panic. That is intent.
    It got worse.
    On November third, about eleven at night, I was heading home on Sanford Road. The trees were black walls on both sides, and the only light was my headlights and the red blink of the cell tower over by Neese-Commerce. You know that late-hour quiet where even the crickets feel far away. It was like that.
    I came around a bend and slammed my brakes so hard I thought my tires were gonna bust.
    There was a line of deer across the road. Not milling. Not scattered. A line. Shoulder to shoulder, blocking both lanes like a barricade.
    Does on the outside. Bigger bodies in the center. A buck in the middle with a rack like a crown. They stood steady in my high beams. They did not flinch at the light, they just stood there and stared into my truck.
    I should tell you what it felt like: it felt like walking into church and realizing everyone in the pews is looking at you.
    Before I could stop myself, I whispered, “What in the hell…” That was when I saw the other thing. It stepped out from behind the buck in the center and at first I thought it was another buck.
    It wasn’t.
    It was standing upright.
    It was tall. Taller than any man I had seen in Madison County. Taller than any man I have ever seen. But not stretched skinny like something starved out. It had weight. Its legs bent like a man’s legs. Its arms hung long. The first thing my eyes locked on were its eyes, because they burned red in my headlights like live coals, bright enough I could see the curve of them. Too big for a man. Too forward-facing for any animal that lives around here.
    And above those eyes, growing out of its skull, were antlers.
    Not tied on, not decoration. Growing.
    Something in me tried, and failed, to tell me I was looking at a man in a suit. Somebody playing a joke. But you cannot fake the way light lands on flesh. Its skin wasn’t right. Where the light hit true I saw a pale, grayish hide stretched tight over muscle. Not fur. Hide.
    It stared at me, and all the deer held still the way soldiers hold still when an officer is present.
    I felt something touch the inside of my head.
    It wasn’t a voice like talking. It was more like a hand laid flat against my thoughts and pressing down. It pushed visions and feelings of pain into me. Deer in the beds of trucks. Piles of antlers in sheds. People laughing. Kids learning.
    That thing showed me things we had done to deer in Madison County and how we called it sport.
    My stomach turned. I gagged into my own palm.
    The deer did not move.
    The thing with the antlers took one slow step closer to my truck.
    Up close, the eyes weren’t just red. They were alive. Lit from inside. Like coals when you poke the fireplace and they flare back up bloody orange. It tilted its head, and I realized that was not curiosity. That was judgment.
    I grabbed the little crucifix that hangs from my rearview. The one Mama gave me. I pressed it hard to my forehead.
    The air in the cab changed. I felt pressure all over, like standing too close to speakers at a concert. The thing paused. For a second, something like a ripple went across those eyes. The deer shifted, hooves scraping the blacktop in a little unified step. All of them at once.
    And then, just like that, they broke. Turned and vanished into the dark brush. One breath they were there, next breath they were gone. My headlights hit nothing but empty asphalt and pine trunks.
    I sat in the road shaking until somebody came up behind me and hit the horn, and that snapped me loose.
    Sleep did not happen that night. Every time I shut my eyes I saw those red eyes and the antlers set like a crown.
    Next day I drove to the Danielsville library and dug. Old papers, microfilm, the stuff nobody but bored kids and old men bother with. I found an article clipped from a 1978 Danielsville Monitor about what they called “unusual deer aggression” out near Smithonia Farm. The paper said “possible aerial phenomena were observed,” like it did not want to print the word UFO. People in the article swore a group of whitetail surrounded a stalled pickup and rammed it until the doors bent in. One man said the buck stood upright. Sheriff at the time blamed poachers using homemade fireworks. Reading it, I felt that same cold crawl I’d felt in the road.
    That evening I went to Gordon’s Chapel. The sanctuary smells like old hymnals, and the varnish has been worn smooth on the first pew from so many nervous hands. I walked down that center aisle and I said, out loud, “You listen to me now.” And I wasn’t talking to God.
    My voice echoed strange in the empty church.
    “I don’t know what you are,” I said. “I don’t know what you call yourself. But you don’t get to keep doing this. You don’t get to kill folks on these roads.”
    The air changed the second I said that. Went heavy. The little hairs on my arms stood up. I tasted metal in the back of my throat.
    One blink I was alone. Next blink I wasn’t.
    It stood in front of the altar like it belonged there. The red eyes burned steady. The antlers rose and branched and caught the light from above the altar the way real bone does. Up close I could see detail I hadn’t on the road. Marks on the hide across its chest looked like scar tissue. Old scars, lots of them, layered over and over. It had endured harm. It had survived harm. It carried harm like armor.
    When it looked at me in that church, I felt the pressure in my head again.
    Protect, it pushed.
    Protect the herd.
    The meaning came in my mind all at once, not in words. It wasn’t hunting us for sport. It wasn’t random. It was here to defend. It had chosen sides, and we were not on the side it chose.
    “People are dying,” I told it. My nose had started to bleed. “You can’t keep doing it like this. You hear me?”
    The answer hit like a hammer in my skull. It pushed visions and feelings into me again. Of pain and panic so sharp it felt like drowning. I saw trucks throwing light through the trees at 2 a.m., heard men laughing, tasted blood on dirt. I felt a doe trying to crawl while boys filmed it. I saw pictures taken for bragging, hands gripping antlers, faces grinning, blood running black in the flash. I felt a fawn’s last kick against a bumper. Then I felt its rage.
    Then one clear thought cut through like a blade.
    You started this.
    It wasn’t angry. It was stating a fact and daring me to argue.
    I felt dizzy. There was a hum in the chapel lights, or maybe only in my head. I tasted copper.
    “That’s not all of us,” I said. “That’s not everybody here.”
    The thing tilted its head again, like it was judging me.
    It stepped in close. I could feel heat rolling off it, a forest heat, musk and leaf-rot and something electric like the crackle of a storm about to break. One long hand lifted. It did not touch me. The hand hovered an inch from my chest, right over my heart.
    Protect, it pressed again. But this time I understood the rest of it.
    You protect them from your kind, or I will.
    Then it was gone. No sound. No step. No fade. Just not there anymore. I stood in that empty sanctuary with my shirt front sticky from a nosebleed and my hands shaking.
    I heard a sound from outside, faint and far off, the scream of twisted metal and a man screaming.
    After a while I wiped my face on my sleeve and sat down on the front pew, right where the varnish is worn smooth.
    I know what that thing is now. Folks around here would call it a devil because that is the nearest word they have. It is not a devil. It is a guardian. Mean, merciless, old, and not human. It came here to defend the deer, and it will break bone to do it. It is willing to start a war because it knows exactly what we have done.
    You can argue with a law. You cannot argue with a verdict.
    On Sunday I got to Gordon’s Chapel early. Sat through the whole service instead of slipping out after the first prayer. When the preacher opened the floor for requests, I raised my hand.
    “Yes sir, Brother Lewis?” he said, careful.
    I said, slow and steady so everyone could hear me, “I’d like to ask the Lord to help us drive careful. And I’d like to ask folks round here to quit treating deer like they ain’t a part of God’s creation and stop killing them just for a trophy to hang on a wall. They got somebody speaking for them now, and he ain’t near as patient as God.”