There was never a good time to be a farmhand, though there were certainly worse times to be one than a Sunday afternoon. The Tackett farmstead, for all the backbreaking labor that went into it, was a gem among the many farms scratched out in the muggy flatlands. The farm was thirty acres of sprawling countryside altogether, like a great quilt of emerald green squares stitched together by hedgerows and fences. Chickens were scattered all across the farm, preening on fenceposts and pecking at the soft dirt, each clucking contently. The long dirt road leading to the farm went straight to the farmer's front lawn, making a circle in front of the farmhouse from the countless trips cars and wagons had made. An old, twisted oak grew from the center of the circle, with long, sturdy branches that grew like a scarecrow's outstretched arms.
Sunday was the one day a week the men had off, and so the farm was not as buzzing with life as it usually had been. Most of the workers were content to stay in their respective barns whittling bears out of soap and playing cards, and the few men that had gathered outdoors for a game of stickball were on paltry three man teams. It was the second-to-last Sunday of the month, and so very few of the men had funds remaining to take trips to town to purchase anything -- by and large, they had not found themselves working on a farm because they were too good at minding their finances. The plucking of a banjo and the smell of stew being cooked pervaded the air around the colored barn while the chatter of a radio and the sharp smell of whiskey hung around the white barn, some twenty feet away. Had it been dusk, the lamplight peeking through the barn's wooden cracks would have made the two barns almost seem to stare at one another.
In the farmhouse, there were no idle farmhands, nor any of their offensive sounds or smells. The farmhouse workers worked seven days a week, and quietly at that. Farmer Tackett's female uniform employed soft-soled "mary-janes" so that he and his wife would be spared from the sounds of over a dozen pairs of clicking heels in their attic at all hours, and so the maids and cooks glided throughout the house almost silently. The house, in reality, was an old colonial mansion, built in a pseudo-Grecian style that would have appealed to the sensibilities of a slave owner hundreds of years ago. A white porch wrapped the building's three stories, supported with wide pillars on each corner. The pillars were wooden, though they had been expertly carved on all sides and painted white, and appeared almost in the morning haze. Blue shutters and shingles were set against the otherwise uniformly white building, and a single stone chimney on the western wing of the home offset the otherwise completely symmetrical appearance. It was the work of a long-dead commissioned architect, built without the cost of labor or the artistic taste of its viewers in mind. It was an antiquated building, and yet the Tackett mansion was easily the gem of the farm, and perhaps of Cypress Hills.
Approximately fifteen miles away is the Bunce farmstead, owned by Carl Bunce. He had considered himself Henry Tackett's rival for many years, going as far as to attempt to sabotage his crops three years prior and shooting one of his goats dead just a year ago. His workforce was delegated to three former slave cabins, and his farmhouse was a cedar-brown fortress of a house his great-grandfather had built, and it was currently burning to the ground. Carl Bunce was dead, sprawled out on his back across his front lawn with a rifle in his hand. Blood oozed from his chest into a great pool crimson pool around him, still slowly pooling out of the missing chunks of his head, chest, and arms. The three cabins behind him were devoid of life, but not empty by any means. Gore caked the walls and floor of the cabins, littering the dry dirt between them and the burning building. Whatever clues to the terrible fate that had befallen his workers was obscured by the level of animalism. The viscera and bones covering the cabin walls appeared more like the cave of some awful predator, though no such creature lurked about. The sole perpetrator, a woman named Susie, was long gone by now.
Susie didn't remember how she found herself in the forest. She remembered a lantern, and a man with a gun, and eating, but these thoughts came to her like a flickering lightbulb. It didn't matter. She smelled something in the forest. Food. She was always hungry, though she hadn't remembered how long always was. She didn't remember anything, in fact. She held no memories of her former life, and made no new memories. Her thoughts, if they could even be called thoughts, were sporadic and short-lived, and mostly focused on one subject alone. Hunger. Her hunger was maddening. All she could focus on was hunting and food. Warm, life-giving, flesh and blood. She drooled at the thought, continuing her aimless shuffle. She had lost the scent she had picked up earlier, but was now tracking a noise. It sounded living. If Susie could have formed words, "prey" would have come to mind.
Something was moving up ahead.
Susie's head turned ninety degrees, snapping in place almost instantly. Two targets. Loud, screaming, tiny humans. Instinctively, the smell of blood filled her nostrils, as if she had bashed the back of her head. Her vision began to turn red. Her hands sprung open, cracking her joints with tension. She lowered her posture, squatting obscenely in the muck of the forest, wearing nothing more than a torn pink nightgown. She let out a low, gurgling growl. They hadn't seen her and they hadn't heard her, though unbeknownst to Susie, they had began to smell him -- the stench of stale urea and rotting meat clung to her as readily as the clay covering her limbs. ThoughSusie didn't possess the intelligence to consider if her prey could smell him, she knew that she could not afford to lose the two. She was too hungry to lose them. She slowly crept closer, shambling quickly from one patch of bushes to the next. When they would pause and look around, she would stay still. When they loudly advanced through the woods, she would follow.
There was little she understood outside of the hunt, though she understood the importance of surprise, as primitive of an understanding as it was.
Her red eyes blinked with an emotionless intensity, scanning the two children. She was so hungry. So hungry. She grinded her teeth together, now only about sixty yards away. The closer she got, she could feel her adrenaline rising higher and higher, filling her nostrils with the scent of their ambrosial blood and warm, marbled layers of meat. She grinded his teeth more.
She stood up, supporting herself on a tree, staring at the twon with a wolfish gaze. Her stomach rumbled softly as she growled, clenching her hands into fists. Images of violence and nourishment flashed through her mind, instinctively urging her to infect the men. She was too hungry for that. She would eat them, she planned to herself in silence.
Eat them.
