Salting The Earth

A Story by felioness

Her brother was changing ... and she knew she had to do something about it.

The wind had an edge to it and cut into her neck, slicing into the tender smoothness of slender wrists protruding from the outgrown sleeves of last year's jacket. Above, the moon was an angry eye, seeming to pass judgment on the woman-child below. Quinn's heart beat in tandem to the skittering leaves that danced wantonly across the pavement and gravel. They seemed so wild and restless, going nowhere fast like her courage. Nonetheless, squaring her narrow shoulders, she moved on; the double barrel shotgun hanging heavily in her girlish hands.

It had to be done and it had to be done by her alone because she loved him and her heart was pure. Consequences be damned, the girl wept, twin rivulets coursing down each thin and lightly freckled cheek. She could taste their saltiness.

It was still hard to believe. She didn't want to believe it but in her heart she knew it was true. There were signs. He had become distant and secretive and although Quinn knew young men could be that way sometimes, something was off. You might say it was instinct or maybe intuition, but whatever you wanted to call it, something told her that something very wrong was at the root of her brother's personality change, so she made it her mission to find out what the hell he was up to.

Bad things had been happening in town. Kids were running away from home, girls had gone missing and several homeless man had been mauled to death by dogs. People were on edge. Quinn was finding it almost impossible to get a good night's sleep. Initially she wrote it off to worry. Her concern for Hunter was profound. It rankled her that her parents just kept saying "it was a phase he was going through". This is no freaking phase, she hissed to herself, something is up. Especially when she discovered that Hunter was sneaking out of the house at night. She was worried he was doing drugs. Then the nightmares started. Terrible dreams where Hunter was not who he seemed to be. He would morph into monsters, or a rampaging killer. Quinn would wake up chilled to the bone, and covered in sweat. She just knew that this summer things had changed. Once they had been so close, now Hunter was almost a stranger.

It was the second week of school. Summer was definitely at an end. Quinn was busy preparing to write her first essay of the year. The subject matter was Myths and Mythologies. She was having a hard time picking her subject matter when she overheard her grade seven teacher, Mrs. McAdam, talking to her gym teacher, Mr. Blair. They were both yakking about what a hectic day they were having, when Mr. Blair looked at Mrs. McAdam and with a wry smile said, "well, there IS a full moon tonight!"

"Oh, no wonder then" laughed Mrs. McAdam, following Mr. Blair into the staff room, "that doesn't surprise me at all!

Quinn stood motionless in the busy school hallway, quietly pondering exactly what it was about a full moon that caused "a hectic day." I'll Google that tonight, she mused, as she walked to her locker.

After several hours of research, Quinn had an epiphany and it was this "epiphany" that ultimately led to Quinn discovering that Hunter was a werewolf. At first, she thought she was crazy and knew she could never tell a soul or they'd lock her away in a nuthouse. Man, she thought, I'd lock me away in a nuthouse! However insane it seemed, the truth revealed itself when she started following Hunter and kept tabs on his coming and goings. The facts correlated with the missing people, the maulings, and the full moon. When she saw him sneak in to shower at the crack of dawn, she was convinced. It had been a full moon and his hands and face were covered with blood. The next day another bum was found dead; ripped apart said the news. Citizens were demanding that stray dogs be culled but in her heart Quinn knew what it was that really needed culling.

Quinn knew what to do. After all her essay was all about werewolves, but now she also knew the horrific truth. Werewolves were really not a myth at all, and there was no cure. She loved Hunter too much to allow his affliction to run unchecked and ruthlessly kill. Quinn spent the next few months

It wasn't easy to make buckshot out of pure silver, but Quinn knew how. Her dad always made his own, and she had watched him do it many times. She used a 00 buck die. It had a nominal pellet diameter of.33 caliber. Melting down her mother's silver serving set, passed down to the oldest daughter of the family, was even harder though. Armed and ready, Quinn tied back her straight brown hair and clipped a small sack of sea salt onto her belt.

She waited until she heard Hunter leave and then followed him for a bit to get the general direction he was in. Time seemed to stand still as she waited for nightfall. Finally the moon swelled full and round above her. Quinn stood silently until she heard a howl, and then the backyard dogs went crazy. Quinn called out his name, hearing it echo into the darkness. When she heard leaves crunching beneath moving feet, she called out again, her heart constricting with fear. "Hunter?" A long, low growl answered back and suddenly Quinn was staring into his face; so transformed ... so ... foul... yet, the eyes were still his. Tawny brown irises ringed in black. The monster glared into Quinn's baby blues, then leapt, but silver buckshot is much faster. With an agonized howl the beast hit the ground.

Impassively Quinn poured salt into the gaping wound. Then she saw him begin to change. Naked now, he looked so very white beneath the liquid pearling of the full October moon. As Quinn watched him transform back into the big brother she once idolized and adored, her innocence drained away ... emptying with his blood, now salting the earth.

© 2018 felioness

Author's Note

1042 words

href="https://larumland.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/ten-ways-to-kill-a-werewolf/">https://larumland.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/ten-ways-to-kill-a-werewolf/

9) Pour Salt in the Wound
This method, without a doubt, is the most challenging to employ.[3] Difficulty number one: wound the werewolf while remaining unscathed yourself. Difficulty number two: get close enough to the wound to pour salt in it without getting killed in the process. The mid-evil Slavic heroine Kandek seems to be the only one who has successfully pulled this one off and it required all the courage and craftiness she could muster. But in the end, she successfully defeated the Hag Werewolf of Armenia.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SaltTheEarth

Salting the earth is an act to curse the land and render fields incapable of crop growth, often used in ancient times as a symbolic act on top of various other scorched earth tactics to indicate the desire of the victor to completely eradicate the enemies' ability to reconstruct themselves after the war, or by those being forced into retreat to ensure that their would-be conquerors would have to put more effort into rehabilitating the land if they won.

So as a trope, characters will often have an analogous action, sometimes literally salting the earth, which performs as a symbolic act to indicate their embrace of scorched earth tactics and the increase of hostilities beyond it. The act can be a movement across the Moral or Despair Event Horizons, increasing the threat of a character, making the stakes truly a matter of survival and making the lack of forgiveness or remorse clear. So it is that the act can occur at a pivotal moment in the middle of a war or as the final blow at the end of one.