September 13 - Occurrences on the Border

There was one stoplight in town. It blinked red at night and dangled in the wind.
Other than that, on a moonless night all you could see was an endless pure black expanse scattered with stars twinkling like diamonds.
During the day time it was red clay desert with scrub brush and dried out river beds. A few watering holes for cattle.
The two-lane state road that ran through town stretched out arrow straight all the way to the horizon, lined on both sides by chest high rusty barbed wire fencing.
There was one gas station in town. Staticky tejano crackled out of old speakers dangling from the rafters. You had to wake the night guy if you wanted gas after everything closed.
There was no Internet. No cable. No newspapers.
More Spanish than English.
You could get high school football, the farm report, and talk on am radio, and tejano from the Mexican stations.
There was an eastbound freight train that ran by the outskirts of town at 2:10 every morning. The westbound ran every morning at 4:13.
Other than that, the nights were quiet. There were lightening storms, but no rain and no thunder, only lightning.
It started with the cattle.
The morning after a moonless night, rancher Jack Hawkins found a dead cow in the middle of the pasture. No flies. No blood. Just dead.
He couldn't find any cuts on the cow, no signs of bludgeoning or gunshots or anything. Just a dead cow that looked like someone had let the air out of her.
The other cows chewed their cud obliviously.
Jack chewed on a weed and looked around. Then he went to his truck and got a hunting knife and cut the cow open at the midsection.
There wasn't a drop of blood in her.
More animal deaths turned up the morning after every moonless night thereafter. Sometimes they were cattle, sometimes horses. But the bodies were always completely bloodless and there was never any indication of how the blood was lost. It was just gone.
It was a few months after that that the border patrol found the first humans: A coyote and two of his charges. Same deal: Not a drop of blood in their bodies, no visible wounds.
After a few more dead coyotes turned up after the next few moonless nights, the other coyotes got wise and took their chances crossing in the moonlight.
The next month a calf was born with its front legs fused together.
And then another one was born with its stomach outside its body.
More animal bodies.
It got to be that on every moonless night, the ranchers would try to stay up and watch over their cattle but they never saw anything. The closest any of them got was when Ruben Garcia saw four silhouettes outside his house looking at his daughter's bedroom window. Smaller than men, bigger than children. He got his shotgun and chased them off. The following morning one of his horses was laying in the yard dead. No blood.
A few weeks later, Marta Fernandez went into convulsions at her Quinceanera and was rushed to the hospital where she miscarried a two-month old fetus.
She was a virgin.
Given everything that had been going on in town, opinion was split among the Catholics. Half of them thought it was a miscarried Second Coming.
Half of them thought it was a miscarried Antichrist.
Next month: two more Quinceanera, two more virgin miscarriages.
Someone suggested that if there were any more miscarriages after that, they should hold on to the remains and test them.
"For what?" someone asked.
Nobody knew.
Nor did they wait for another miscarriage. Most of the wives and children of ranchers left town and went to live with relatives in other parts of the state.
And as soon as they were able to, the few ranchers that were still there moved their herds and left too.
Nobody's been back since.