by Geoff North
“Sorry boys. These gravel roads go all to hell when it pours. I’ll try and take it easy.”
They pulled into the Feerce farmyard ten minutes later. Stewart stuffed the Funtak back in the best he could as Allan led them towards the front porch.
“Is he just going to stand out in the rain all night?”
Stewart missed the first part. Rain alright? “Pardon me?”
“The kid—he’s standing by the truck getting drenched. What’s the matter with him?”
Stewart looked back at Ethan and felt his heart break. He was only ten-years old. This is insane, Stewart thought. He remembered Halloween and the humiliation Leroy and Brian had suffered through. Ethan wasn’t ready for this. The Goon Squad hadn’t been ready. No one could ever prepare for that kind of twisted abuse. He was about to shout at the boy, to scream at the top of his lungs to run and keep on running, but Allan shouted first.
“Get up here, kid! Now!”
Ethan plodded through the puddles and joined them on the front porch.
“I’ve cleaned up since you were here last, Stewy.” They entered a relatively tidy living room. “It wasn’t me actually. Sheila’s always on my back about the mess so I started getting folks from town to come in and do it. I don’t pay them but they don’t seem to mind.”
The witch was spread out on the couch, resembling an ancient mummy without all the wrapping, her black hair splayed about wildly. The skin on her face was white with dark rings beneath her eyes. Stewart thought she was dead until he caught the slow steady movement of her chest rising up and down.
Allan had started to giggle. It was getting easier to read his lips. The more you watched one person, the quicker it was to pick up on their style. “Why did you bring us here?” His hands were already in his pockets, the knife handle gripped firmly.
“See those empty milk jugs?” Stewart looked from his mouth to the grey finger pointing towards a couple of empty four-liter containers sitting on the floor by the kitchen. “You and your little friend are going to follow me into the woods. I’m going to introduce you to the creature responsible for messing your dad over, and then we’re going to fill the jugs with its blood and empty it into the town’s water reservoir. I’d do it myself but I don’t want to get any of that gunk on me. Everyone’s going to die, Stewy… everyone but me, my girl, and the two of you. Once you’ve done that little job, you’re free to go.” He smiled and his lips cracked open, leaking blood over his brown gums. “See? I’m not that bad of a guy.”
Stewart and Ethan nodded.
“Well what are you waiting for?” He pointed at Ethan. “Go grab the jugs, kid. Let’s get this party started.”
“We’re going to party?” Ethan asked.
“Are you fucking stupid? Get the jugs.”
Ethan went for the milk containers and Allan headed to the front door. Stewart drew the knife from his pocket and pulled the blade open. He lunged at Allan’s back, but Allan was faster. He spun and grabbed Stewart by the wrist. The knife fell from his fingers and clattered against the hardwood floor.
“Oh, Stew. Poor, pitiful Stew… A jack knife? Seriously?” He forced Stewart to his knees and looked directly into his eyes. “Take that ridiculous rubber crap out of your ears. I spotted it the second you got in the truck.” He slapped Stewart across the face. “I saw you that night at the Christmas concert covering your ears. Did you actually think you could get away with this?” He smacked him again with a backhand.
Stewart’s head started to ring and he could taste blood in his mouth. One piece of Funtak had fallen out, the other popped out easily enough with his finger. “Don’t hurt us… please.”
“What’s the kid’s name?”
“Ethan.”
“Hey, Ethan,” Allan called over his shoulder. “Looks like you and me are doing this ourselves. I can’t trust ol’ Stewy here anymore.” Silence. “Ethan! Grab the jugs and get your—”
Something sharp and cold entered Allan’s side. The pain came a second later as Ethan twisted the ten inch butcher knife around, slicing into Allan’s lung and intestines.
“Deaf,” the boy whispered into his ear. “I’m not fucking stupid… I’m deaf.”
Chapter 27
The last half mile was the hardest part of their journey. Abe stopped twice to vomit. When a third wave of nausea overtook him, there was nothing left to bring up. Becky knelt over him as he dry-heaved into the dead grass. The rain was cold and stinging, the thunder a constant rumble.
“Are you finished?” She asked.
Abe rolled onto his side and coughed some more. “It wasn’t this bad the first time… never felt so sick in my life.”
“You were right… It’s waiting for us. It’s always been here.” A final knot of dead forest lay ahead. “Somewhere in there, dead ahead.”
Abe made it to his knees and gasped for a full breath. The air smelled like rotted meat—and something else. Urine. “Yeah… This is definitely the place. How do you feel?”
“My teeth still ache.” She spit a stream of saliva and blood to the ground. “The buzz is getting worse. I can feel it behind my eyes.”
Abe kissed her lightly on the temple and rubbed her shoulders. “Go back. Make sure Adam is safe. It was my idea to come this far, let me finish it.”
“My big hero. After all this time, still treating me like a defenseless girl.” She helped him to his feet. They held each other and listened to the wind rustling through the grey grass and blackened branches. “We see it through together.”
“You’ve been too good to me, put up with so much over the years. Maybe we should’ve stayed in that jungle back in the beginning. It would’ve been a good life for Adam. We could’ve been happy.”
She silenced his lips with a finger. “I love you, Abe. Always have, always will. I am happy.”
They entered the twisted mass of tree limbs and the rain drove down harder. It got colder and the drops turned to hail. Pellets of falling ice blinded them, the sound it made against the branches like a billion marbles bouncing off of a hardwood floor. They were forced to their hands and knees, crawling through a forest petrified and suddenly frozen. Abe’s fingers and arms grew numb. He opened his eyes and discovered he was clawing through a foot of snow. Becky was no longer beside him.
He called out for her. Nobody answered.
“Abe!” She screamed his name over and over. He was gone. Becky was buried in snow up to her waist. It was falling harder and she struggled to pull herself free, clinging to the branches for support. One of the smaller limbs snapped and Becky fell. She landed on dirt, dry and hot. She wiped moisture from her eyes and stared up into a bright sun. Not a cloud in the sky but the rumble of thunder continued. The sun was moving, she realized, streaking through the sky at incredible speed and leaving a billowing column of grey smoke in its path. There was a final surge of blinding light and it was gone. She felt the earth shudder under her feet.
The forest was gone. Abe stood and tracked the massive fireball across the sky. Something big on the ground was moving towards him—something with a terrible head and a mouth filled with teeth. Its great, clawed legs churned up the ground. Through the dust Abe saw more creatures behind it, running in a herd.
Dinosaurs.
Tyrannosaurus Rex, followed by a mate and five lumbering Triceratops. They thundered past him and Abe saw the wave of fire and disintegrating earth at their tails. There was nowhere to run, no place to take cover. It enveloped the horizon before him, a mile high and pushing forward at a thousand miles an hour. He closed his eyes.
Becky watched the earth burn and all life upon its surface die. She had seen the dinosaurs, and the meteorite that had caused their extinction.
I’m travelling through time. She looked at her fingers and saw they were vibrating. Her entire body buzzed. Something like a punch made her stagger. I’m moving—no… the universe around me is moving—ahead… It’s started to move ahead.
Abe was swimming. He was underwater and pu
shing up into the light. Something huge and grey swam past with fins the size of airplane wings. Abe continued up and it came by a second time. He saw its black, filmy eye regard him with mild curiosity and it was gone again. I’m in a lake… a lake in the distant future covering the Plains where Manitoba and Saskatchewan once were.
Becky broke through the lake’s surface and gasped for air. She was still paddling with her arms and kicking with her legs but she was back on solid ground. The soles of her bare feet were burning. She hopped from one foot to the other, over the cracked brown earth until she found the smallest bit of shade behind an outcropping of scorched rock. The sun hung red in the sky like a great, bloody tumor, growing larger before her eyes. This is it… This is how the world will die.
Abe witnessed the sun go super-nova. He saw the moon puff away in an instant, and felt the ground evaporate and atomize beneath him. He was floating in emptiness, twirling end over end in outer space, surrounded by a billion distant stars and galaxies.
Becky could see the arms of the Andromeda Galaxy spiraling about as it came closer and closer. It collided soundlessly and without circumstance into the Milky Way, becoming one. This is what the thing in the woods sees. This is what it sees all the time… all of time… all at once. It lives in some kind of vibrating, buzzing energy field… waiting to be rescued… trapped in eternity.
The galaxies wandered off into endless space and disappeared. The most distant stars winked out. Abe watched the lights of the universe drift away and turn off—one by one until there was nothing but Abe.
I don’t want it to end like this. I don’t want to see this.
I don’t want to be alone.
All was empty and dead. Black turned to grey, and Abe’s vibrating body turned cold. He reached out, grasping with frozen fingers, searching… for something… anyone.
Becky felt the edge of eternity with her fingertips. It was soft and warm. Skin against skin. A hand taking hold of hers.
Blinding light and an eruption of energy.
“Becky.”
Abe held her and they collapsed together into the dead grass back among the twisted mess of trees. Becky kissed his rain-soaked lips, the end of his nose, and whispered into the damp of his forehead. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“I think you did.”
They crawled through the last of it and saw the thing waiting. It was still hanging half out of its craft tangled in poplar branches. The soccer ball was stuck against its chest, bulging out and threatening to burst along its plastic seams.
You should have stayed where you were. You should have spread the virus and accepted the fate of your species.
Abe looked beyond it and saw a familiar building in the distance through the trees. “We’re home, Becky! That’s my house. We are home!”
Becky moaned. “Adam.”
Your son remained in the past. He’s been dead for over seventy-thousand years.
She made a run for the creature but Abe pulled her back. Becky tried slipping free and struggled towards the trees the way they’d come. “Let me go! If I can’t kill the damn thing let me at least go back and see if he travelled with us.”
“Becky, no… Don’t make this harder.” Abe pushed her to the ground and rushed the alien. He made it to within ten feet when a single word in his head brought him to his knees.
Stop.
“Let us go back,” Abe pleaded. “We’ll spread the virus. Just let us go back to our son.”
You will not go back.
“Abe?—is that you? Becky?” A woman was stumbling through the trees. At first Abe thought it was Sheila. But she was far too thin to be his sister, anorexic almost. Her skin was deathly white and drawn back on her pinched face. He could see the hollows beneath her cheekbones, the dark rings beneath her black eyes. She appeared more like a heroin addict in her fifties than the seventeen-year old twin he hadn’t seen for seven years. But when she spoke again, Abe was certain.
“I knew you would come back… both of you. I never gave up hope. I’ve brought people that can help us.”
Abe finally noticed the man trailing after her.
Hank White stepped out from behind Sheila and whistled softly when he saw the strange cube and its lone passenger. “Now this was worth coming to Birdtail for.”
He pulled out his gun and pointed it at the back of Sheila’s skull.
Chapter 28
The sound of voices awoke him. Allan tried to move but the pain in his side had other plans. He collapsed back into a blanket of blood-soaked leaves and broken branches. Something made a dull crunching sound beneath him. Allan pulled the collapsed milk container out and laughed weakly. It all came back to him; beating Stewart, the other kid—Ethan—pushing the knife in past his ribs and whispering. His breath had smelled like chocolate ice cream.
Brought down by a deaf ten-year old.
He remembered the two fleeing the house, the sound of the truck starting and tearing off down the lane. Why did I leave the keys in the ignition? He remembered staggering out into the backyard, falling to his hands and knees and crawling to the forest’s edge. He had a job to finish, a final command to fulfill. He’d struggled along on his stomach, dragging his way through the trees on bloodied elbows. And then he decided to rest.
Allan was having trouble breathing. He’d lost too much blood, probably going into shock. His body was cold and wracked in agony.
He rolled onto his back and gulped the fresh air. It had stopped raining but the clouds were still heavy grey and rolling, scraping the tops of the trees along their way. It made Allan dizzy but he didn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t afford to pass out again. This was it.
One last thing to do.
***
Sheila turned and locked eyes with Hank. “Drop the gun.”
It slipped out of his fingers and fell noiselessly into the grass. “You promised you wouldn’t do that again. You said if Mike stayed behind, you wouldn’t get inside my head.”
“I said I’d bring you here. Putting a gun to the back of my head wasn’t part of the deal. Now call your people, whoever the hell they are, and get rid of this thing—like you promised.”
Sheila went to her brother as Hank placed the call. “It tried to make me forget you, made me destroy everything, I had to send Mom and Dad away. It’s been so horrible… the things it made us do.”
Abe held her, still finding it hard to believe the emaciated body in his arms was that of his sister. “Slow down. What happened to you? Where are Mom and Dad—where’s Allan?”
“I wouldn’t let it win.” Her face was less than six inches from his. The blackness of her eyes started to recede. Abe saw the white return, and then blue. It was if she were awakening from a deep, hypnotic state. “The picture—I saved the picture—the one of us sitting on the dock at Clear Lake. Do you remember, Abe? What you said about Becky?”
“I remember.”
Becky came to them and sank into their arms, weeping. “We have a son, Becky. We named him Adam. We’ve lost him…we’ve lost him forever.”
Vehicles were moving through the muddy field beyond the forest. Black SUVs and unmarked cars began to secure the area. Men in cumbersome white body suits and head coverings picked their way through the trees.
A monstrous helicopter came into view above the trees and started to circle slowly like a great bird of prey. Hank had to yell to be heard over the thunderous thumping of its rotor blades. “The chopper will land in a few minutes, Miss Feerce. I want the three of you to get inside when it does. You’ll be taken to a secured location for more questioning. After that, you’re all free to go.”
“Bullshit,” Sheila replied.
Hank grinned. “Yeah, well maybe just a bit.”
Sheila felt a sharp pain at the back of her neck, like a mosquito on steroids biting in. She started to sink towards the ground, her grip on Abe and Becky going cold. She saw the man they’d left back at the house squatting in the trees. He was holding some kind of rifle.
Sheila tried to make one last command but the tranquilizer took hold first.
“We won’t hurt her,” Hank said as he reached down for his gun. “And since you haven’t tried getting inside my head, I’m guessing the two of you don’t have her power of persuasion.”
This wasn’t how Abe pictured his final showdown with the creature. He stared at its featureless, vibrating head and yelled. “Are you just going to sit there and let them take you? Get inside his goddamn head and make him stop!”
We are not going anywhere.
Hank turned towards the creature. “Oh you’re coming with us, alright. We’ve been after your kind for years, tagged and bagged half a dozen or more all over the world. Sure, you could stop me in my tracks, maybe even take Mike out over there, but you can’t get in all of our heads at once. There are over sixty agents on the property now—the whole goddamned agency turned out for this one. If I go down, you do, too.”
The thing stopped vibrating. The buzz in Abe’s brain ceased. The black slit at the center of its featureless grey face started to turn up at the corners.
The others are here.
The heavy thumping above their heads ended. Becky pointed to the sky. “The helicopter!” They watched as the blades slowed and the craft dropped. It smashed belly first into the field and exploded. A wave of heat and burning debris punched through the trees. Abe wiped the sting of smoke from his eyes and saw the clouds pushing down from above. A vessel a mile wide and twice as long started to descend through the grey. Its flat underbelly pulsed dull purple and snot green.
Becky was tugging at Abe’s arm insistently. “They’re everywhere.”
Grey figures emerged from the trees behind the man that had shot Sheila. One of them touched his face with its worm-like fingers and he surrendered his rifle without struggle, without uttering a single word. Everything and everyone was silent. More creatures appeared in the field, touching agents and scientists and lowering them to the ground. They trudged out on little legs from the distant forests as the smoke lifted, their black-slit faces bobbing back and forth in unison. The SUVs and unmarked cars rose slowly into the air. The unconscious bodies of the agents floated up after.