Why would she have to escape, Brad? It was just an earthquake, his mind said. The loaded shotgun now made him feel slightly stupid. Why would he need a shotgun? What was he thinking?You weren’t thinking, Brad, that’s what. You panicked and you’ve seen one too many movies and you thought the worst because ever since Dad killed himself, it seems like that’s all you do these days. Think the worst.
He wondered how would it look when he got to the center of town, holding the shotgun with a smile on his face, asking, ‘Need a hand? What about a shotgun?’
People were trapped, buildings had caved in, roads split. This wasn’t the fucking zombie apocalypse; he couldn’t dig anyone out with a damn shotgun. They’d need rope, ladders, shovels, pickaxes—that kind of stuff.
But the screaming…I heard someone screaming like they were getting murdered.
Of course people are gonna scream. You did so yourself when the earthquake hit, didn’t you? his mind said.
He looked north, toward Stone Park, where that damn void was. A bloody glow illuminated the sky from over that way. Another fire? Maybe, but he thought not. He thought the void was getting bigger, that it was hungry and swallowing up the entire world as he stood here debating with himself.
The urge to run into the house and put the gun back in his dad’s closet, to not look like a fool, was strong, but he resisted.
It was a good thing, too.
He turned and headed up the street. Three doors down was a couple named the Russells; they had just moved into the small Cape Cod last fall. Brad remembered the house being an off-white, but now it was a coral color. Pretty in the daylight…unsettling in what would become the beginning of the apocalypse. Brad was close enough to see that the house was ruined—split right down the middle, as if Zeus himself had sent a thunderbolt down from the heavens as a belated housewarming gift.
He was passing the mailbox with RUSSELLS stenciled on the side when another blood-curdling scream drowned out all the other chaotic noises of the premature night. The scream had come from the coral, cracked-in-half house on his right.
He clutched the shotgun tighter; so tight, in fact, he thought it might slip from his grip like a wet bar of soap.
For a second, Brad Long was frozen to the spot. That scream…
“Help!” a woman said. “Help me!”
That snapped Brad out of his trance. He rushed up the front lawn, nearly losing his footing in the moist grass. As he approached the front door, he heard something else, something equally terrible: the low growls of some beast.
A rabid dog? he thought. A bear? What in the hell is going on?
The front door was locked. Brad didn’t bother knocking. He took a couple steps back then rushed forward and kicked at the knob with all his force. What he expected was to get bounced backward, trip over his own feet, and then fall on his ass down the two steps that led to their front door; people only kicked down doors in the movies. That stuff didn’t happen in real life.
But surprisingly, the door gave way beneath the force of his Nikes. This made him feel pretty good about himself. Pretty strong.
That feeling didn’t last long, however, because crouched in front of him was the source of the terrible growling.
All the newfound strength flooding his nervous system drained away. He suddenly felt very, very small. The noise this…this creature made wasn’t right. No, this creature wasn’t right.
He closed his eyes tightly—I have to be hallucinating this can’t be real I’m asleep somewhere dreaming up a horrible nightmare this just can’t be real it can’t—and then reopened them.
The creature was still there.
It stood on four legs, much like a bear. Its back was hunched. The color of its skin was a complete black, so dark it almost shimmered. Somewhere in Brad’s subconscious, his brain connected the dots: the color of the creature’s bumpy and scaled flesh matched the inner workings of the void in Stone Park, as well as the rest of the voids all over the world. This creature was a product of that thing. Had to be. There was no other explanation.
It was only after the same woman’s voice who’d brought him here yelled, “Shoot it! For God’s sake, shoot it!” that Brad snapped out of his fugue state.
The creature hadn’t noticed him; it was busy. Yes, he had saw it stood on four legs, but a fifth limb dangled from the middle of its torso, too. At the end of this limb was what looked like a human hand, though disproportionate to the rest of its body. This hand scooped something from the floor and shoveled it into its gaping maw.
When Brad realized what the creature was feeding itself, he nearly fainted.
He only recognized the man by the thick beard on his face. He’d seen Mr. Russell just a day or two before, mowing his front lawn. Brad had waved and the man had waved back. Now Mr. Russell lay dead on the living room floor, next to a destroyed glass coffee table. His midsection had been nearly sliced in half, and blood and entrails poured from the fatal wound. The carpet drank it up almost as greedily as the monster did, becoming spongy and swollen. Each of the beast’s movements brought forth a splash of red.
“Please shoot it!” the woman said again. Brad recognized her as Mrs. Russell, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties.
Mr. Russell, on the other hand, was the furthest thing from pretty. He had been eviscerated, ruined. White ribs poked through the gore, and Brad saw the knobs of his dangling spine.
The creature groaned low; a sound of pleasure. It now caught a piece of Mr. Russell’s intestines between its teeth and slurped it down like one might do with a spaghetti noodle.
Brad flicked the shotgun’s safety, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The force of the shot nearly drove him back out of the front door—would’ve, too, if he hadn’t caught himself on the wall.
The scattershot took the creature in the side. A hole as round as a dinner plate appeared in the tough flesh. The creature tilted its head back and bellowed in pain and anger.
Brad was already cocking the shotgun again, preparing for a second shot. This time, he’d brace himself properly. This time, he’d aim for the head.
He was dimly aware of Mrs. Russell screaming and babbling incoherent words, words that he could barely hear because of the heavy ringing that had invaded his ears upon the first shot.
Brad aimed again, but the creature turned its face toward him, and he faltered. Hesitated. On the beast’s face was not two eyes, but a circular crop of them. Each one a different color. Violent red. Bright gold. A black deeper than that of the skin of its body.
The mouth parted and another noise, more of a screech than anything, escaped from the back of its throat. Hot breath enveloped him, stinking like an animal’s carcass rotting on the side of the highway during a scorching summer’s day. Brad took another step back. Righted himself.
The creature turned and bolted out of the shattered sliding glass back door it had undoubtedly used as its entrance, its screeching screams fading into the night as it disappeared into the copse of trees behind Chestnut Road.
Brad held the gun up toward the door for a long moment, shaking, unsure of what had just happened. Had he gone crazy? Was he in a mental asylum somewhere, dreaming all of this up? He let the gun fall, and it made a squelching, sucking noise as it hit the blood-bloated carpet.
Mrs. Russell was sobbing over her husband’s torn body, cradling his head. Deep gouges raked across the man’s face. One eye dangled from the socket and danced on his cheek in sync with Mrs. Russell’s deep, shuddering cries.
Brad didn’t know what to say. He felt like falling down and crying himself. Then he thought of his father and his mother, how they were always strong even in the face of adversity, and he decided that breaking down wouldn’t be the best course of action. The best course of action would be to stand up straight and get Mrs. Russell out of here before that thing came back.
He knelt down next to her, his knees crunching in the glass from the ruined coffee table. “Mrs. Russell, we should go.”
“I can’t leave
him…” she said, and the way she spoke caught Brad by surprise. Her voice was calm, steady.
“He’s gone. I’m sorry,” he said. He’d never been good at this comforting thing. In this instance, what else could he say? ‘I think he’s gonna pull through, just let me call the ambulance, and they’ll get him all put back together again like Humpty-Dumpty?’
No. Better to be real. No need for sugarcoating. They were far past that point.
“That thing could come back any moment. I didn’t kill it. Just wounded it.” Brad now looked at the puddle of blackish blood the creature had left behind. It looked like tar. Smelled foul.
“I can’t…I can’t leave him,” Mrs. Russell repeated. “He’s my husband. I l-love him.” The tears came again, this time choking up her voice.
She bent her head and kissed Mr. Russell atop his. She came away with a smear of red across her lips like lipstick. Tears rolled down her face and cut tracks through the blood.
The only way Brad was getting Mrs. Russell out of this place was by dragging her, and by God, if that’s what it took, that was what he would do. He couldn’t, in good conscience, leave her behind with that creature roaming around the neighborhood. The earthquake had ruined her house, whereas his mother’s was still intact—a little messy, but intact. No sliding glass doors, either.
He reached out for Mrs. Russell’s arm, but she ripped away from him, shrieking.
What happened next happened so fast, Brad could hardly comprehend it.
Mrs. Russell snatched a piece of jagged glass from the ruins of the coffee table, cutting her hand. Blood seeped through her closed fingers and turned the milky shard a pinkish color.
“I can’t end up like this. I can’t,” she said.
Brad stepped forward, his hands up. “Whoa, what are you doing? It’s all right. We’ll be all right.”
“No. No, we won’t. They’re everywhere. Those things. They’re all over the world. They’ve come for the Earth. I’ve seen it in my nightmares. Ever since that diamond came to Stone Park, I’ve seen many terrible things.” She brought the glass up higher now.
Brad knew what was going to happen next, and though he tried to stop it, he couldn’t.
“Dead is better,” she said.
Then, with a grunt, she stabbed herself in the neck and ripped the glass across her throat. Blood didn’t spurt out so much as it bubbled in a great wave that slapped down her chest, turning her already bloody blouse dark red.
Mrs. Russell let loose a series of strangled cries and then collapsed next to her mutilated husband. Their eyes were open, but they saw nothing; they would never see anything again.
Brad couldn’t catch his breath. He thought he might puke. His skin prickled as fat beads of sweat stood out all over his body. Numbly, he picked up the shotgun and shuffled out of the house. Though he left the macabre scene behind, it was forever etched into his mind, and he would see it in his nightmares for as long as he lived.
Outside, Brad fell to his knees in the grass. The screams and cries from the town square had since grown louder, but he hardly noticed. He vomited for a solid minute, until his stomach was empty and he could only dry heave. He felt blood vessels pop in his eyes. He saw stars.
What is happening? Please God let this be a nightmare let me wake up soon—
He heard the shrieking sound of tires on pavement. Up ahead, a white sedan—a Honda, by the looks of the headlights—swerved, coming toward Chestnut Road. The high beams swept over the neighborhood. In that brief moment of clarity, Brad saw more dead bodies. They were strewn in the street, discarded there like trash; they were on the sidewalk, crumpled and bleeding.
The earthquake, he thought, the earthquake did that, had to have.
But another part of his mind knew that was impossible; it knew that whatever had been in the Russells’ house—whatever had torn Mr. Russell to shreds and caused Mrs. Russell to slit her own throat with a piece of glass from her coffee table—had done this, too.
The Honda moved jerkily, out of control. Brad could, for the moment, only watch and cringe. All around him, the world was falling apart… How could one act when the end seemed so close?
He shut his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he saw the Honda sideswipe an SUV parked crookedly on the side of Chestnut Road. Tires screamed again. Rubber burned. The Honda cut right, the headlights blinding Brad for the moment. He raised his arm, shielded his face.
He watched helplessly as the Honda plowed into a tree just across from the Russells’. Luckily, the car had slowed down enough for the crash not to be fatal. Or at least he thought it had.
He’d been so enthralled by this accident that he didn’t notice the monster, the same one that had been chasing the Harpers’ Honda, coming right for him… Not until he heard the whip crack of the beast’s growl.
In one smooth motion, smoother than he had any right to move, Brad swept the shotgun up and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. No blast.
Frantically, he reached in his jeans pocket for a shell.
The monster moved like black lightning.
Thirty feet away.
Twenty.
Fifteen.
Brad snapped the barrel and ejected the empties nearly eight feet behind him. Now two dark holes were visible. He shoved a shell into the top hole, then the bottom hole, and snapped the gun back in place. This action turned the safety back on, and Brad flicked it off without even thinking about it. It seemed he wasn’t doing much thinking anymore, just acting on pure instinct.
Ten feet away, now.
Five…
The creature’s mouth hung open. Teeth sharper than any shard of glass. Blackish drool spraying everywhere. The clinging smell of rot and death.
Brad pulled the trigger two quick times. The bottom barrel blew away a chunk of the monster’s head; the top barrel evaporated what was left of it. The creature hit the road wetly, twitched once, twice, then stopped moving altogether. The dim red light coming from the Honda’s backend illuminated the monster. Brad saw that this one did not possess a fifth limb protruding from the middle of its torso. And wasn’t the color of its hide different? Tinged with red like volcanic glass? He thought so.
This may be a different beast, but it’s just as deadly, his mind screamed.
His heartbeat sped up, so fast that it may as well have become one continuous thuuuumpppp.
If this thing didn’t possess a fifth limb, if its skin wasn’t pitch black, if it didn’t already have wounds from when Brad had shot it the first time, then that meant there was more than just one, and if there were two then there were three and four and five and so on…
This isn’t an incident; this is an invasion.
Someone moaned to his left, inside the Honda. Brad turned. He reached into his pockets and grabbed two more shells. That was the last of what he had brought with him. The rest were at home. So was his mother. He needed to get back, but he couldn’t just leave these people here. If he did, they’d die. One of those things would do to them what they had done to Mr. Russell.
The front passenger’s side door opened. Out stepped a man much too tall to be seated in a Honda. He was well over six feet. Maybe six and a half. What he possessed in height, he also possessed in build. Either he knew his way around a gym or he’d worked a job that required him to move boulders. Even with the shotgun in his hand, Brad felt vulnerable. This man could probably grab the barrel and tie it in a knot like you’d see in an old Looney Tunes cartoon.
A sheen of blood dripped down the man’s face, and this made him look even scarier. If you’d asked Brad then, he might’ve said that seeing this large man emerge from a car wreck was more frightening than one of the alien creatures chasing him down.
“Jane?” the man said.
He moved drunkenly around the Honda and came to the driver’s side door. As he opened it, his left leg gave out on him, and he fell to his knees, not gently. Wincing with pain, he began working at unbuckling the driver’
s seatbelt.
Brad rushed over, swallowing down all the confusion and fear currently flooding his system.
“Here, let me help,” he said.
The man looked up at him. Brad saw by the greenish glow of the dashboard that the man had a nasty gash across his forehead. Deep. It would probably need stitches.
No way we’re getting to the hospital, Brad thought bitterly.
“T-Thanks,” the man said. Suddenly, his eyes ballooned as he looked past Brad, getting nearly as big as his face. “Is that—is that…?”
“What was chasing you, yeah,” Brad answered. “What the fuck it is, I don’t know, man.”
The woman in the driver’s seat stirred and moaned in pain. This snapped the big man’s attention away from the monster currently bleeding its tar-like blood in the middle of the street.
Above them, jets tore through the sky. Brad looked up; he couldn’t see them, but he heard and felt them. At the town square, what sounded like an intermittent burst of gunshots had picked up to a steady ratta-tatta-tat, drowning out the screams.
The woman’s eyes fluttered open. Like the man, her face bled, but not nearly as bad. Brad worked the deflated airbag out of the way and helped pull the woman from the seat. He sat her on the ground, and the large man began stroking her face, wiping away the blood that dripped into her eyes.
“Another one in the back,” the big man said. His voice was strained with pain and confusion.
Brad cupped his hands around the glass and peered in. He didn’t see a body, just a pile of luggage. He was about to ask the man where this other person was—the fact the man may be delirious and imagining another person crossed Brad’s mind—when the suitcases rose, and a guy’s head popped out. Unlike the others, he wasn’t bleeding, but he looked dazed.
Brad struggled with the back door… The crash had somehow crushed the lock. The big man stood up with a grunt, and then ripped the door off as if it were made of plastic and not metal.
The guy in the backseat spilled out. “My neck,” he said. “I think I got whiplash.” He rolled his head in a circle. Then he looked down at the big man and the woman. “Oh, man, Logan, are you guys okay?” His voice lowered to a hoarse whisper, and he brought up a shaking finger. Even in the darkness, Brad could see how much the guy had paled. “What—what the hell is that? Is that what—”
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 11