Prophecy by David Seltzer Read Free Book Online

struggled, with everv b’t of logic she could summon, to make sense of it. Diet was the key. But what, in their diet, was causing the biological havoc?
     
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    She knew that the diet of the Masaquoddy people had remained for centuries virtually unchanged, with the exception of canned goods, which were new to this generation. The canned goods were all bought from the same store, the only one in Manatee that catered to Indians. Was it possible that the Masaquoddy were being poisoned? No. The cans were sealed.
    She never knew how close she had come to making the connection when her quest for knowledge was suddenly cut short. Overnight a sudden storm of violence had erupted between the Indians and the townspeople; it became dangerous for Romona Peters to venture into town.
    A group of lumberjacks had happened upon an Indian in the forest whose behavior was stuporous and disoriented. He was somehow lost in the midst of everything familiar to him, literally turning in circles, bumping into trees. They had laughed at him and taunted him, provoking a rage. He attacked them and they beat him within an inch of his life. The beating led to a reprisal. Ten days later, the body of a lumberjack was found, in similar condition, beaten by a group of Indians. The word spread quickly: the Indians were drunk and spoiling for a fight. The lumberjacks were only too happy to give it to them. In retaliation, they raided a small Indian fishing village. Shortly after that, two lumberjacks failed to return from a night crew. They had vanished in the forest. And it was said that the Indians had killed them.
    After thousands of years of living in peace with their environment, the Indians now lived in a state of fear; afraid to go to their nets in the morning, dousing their fires at night, listening to the wail of two bloodhounds that searched the Manatee Forest for some sign of the missing lumberjacks.
    As Romona Peters sat in the darkened silence of her grandfather’s encampment, she listened to the
     
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    cacophonous duet of the bloodhounds and watched the three searchlights of the rescuers who followed them. They looked like tiny fireflies on the distant mountain, dancing and darting through the trees. Every night for a week she and her grandfather had followed the progress of the rescue team. They knew tonight that something was different. There was an urgency in the sound and movement that had not been there before.
    From the Indian village two miles away, the entire population of the Masaquoddy people also watched, sensing, as Romona and M’rai did, the sudden build-up of tempo. In fact, the movements of the rescuers were being monitored by thousands of pairs of eyes. The animals of the night, predator and prey, huddled in silence, tensing with the increasing crescendo.
    The rescuers themselves felt it, too. After a week of listless wandering, the dogs had suddenly been seized with the kind of hysteria that meant their goal was near. A scent had wafted by them at sundown and they had taken off like cannon-shot, their voices shrieking with eagerness, their massive bodies straining against the harnesses that linked each to a human rescuer, tied to it at the end of a forty-foot leash.
    When excited by scent, the bloodhounds were hard to control: their two-hundred-pound bodies functioned as mindless extensions of the nose. The eyes ceased to function, the mind ceased to work; the animals were enslaved, seeking union with the source of the scent like drug addicts following the lure of opiate. In their frenzy, darkness had no meaning, nor did obstacles. Were thev not literally tied to human masters, they would have smacked blindly into barriers or sailed off cliffs.
    As the dogs’ voices now rose with heightening urgency, the men behind them lurched and staggered, branches lashing at their faces as they were dragged across the perilous terrain. They were on unfamiliar territory hP—a M-rV. m the mountains and moving dangerously fast; but