Jane’s hands gripped his arms, her fingernails digging into his flesh, drawing blood. He didn’t feel it. The gruesome image in front of him had entranced his mind, and he knew he needed to move, needed to do something.
There sat Brooke, looking at him with dead eyes… He couldn’t explain it, and that was the worst of it. How could someone dead sit up and look at you? Dead was dead. There was no coming back from it.
Then Brooke’s mouth dropped open, and a fat, swollen tongue lolled out from between her lips—Or is it a worm? he thought crazily. A thick strand of yellowish saliva, like pus, hung to her chest and dripped onto the shirt she had died in.
Her jaw popped as it unhinged, opening so wide, Logan thought her face would tear in half.
Then some unspeakable thing was coming up from her rotting bowels.
Logan couldn’t even blink.
At the same instant that this thing traveled out of her mouth, shot like a projectile, her midsection tore wider in a burst of red and pink. The tentacle had brought along a friend: another tentacle.
Now Logan shifted away. The spray of blood garnered a reactionary movement of retreat from both he and Jane, and they stumbled backward, hitting the door and knocking it into the wall with enough force to leave a hole in the plaster. Derek was already in the hallway, but Brad just stood frozen, allowing himself to be sprinkled with his mother’s red rain.
“Holy shit,” Logan wheezed. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
A collection of black cords, like snakes, were slithering out from Brooke’s stomach, squirming and slapping the bed. From her throat came another thicker cord, one Logan immediately identified as the same type of tentacle that hung from the monstrous creature that had strolled down Chestnut Road. At the end of the tentacle, set in the dark reptilian flesh like a diamond set in an engagement ring, was a circular orb, another eye, this one bigger than the others.
The eye opened and focused on Logan, looked through him.
Then, in an explosion of blood, muscle, and sinew, Brooke’s arms shot out to the side. Glass broke as a mirror on the wall fell forward.
Logan couldn’t catch his breath. Each one he took was short and raspy.
Brooke’s gnarled hands were on the carpet, leaving a trail of blood behind them, but they were attached to more black ropes, more worms, more tentacles, and they crawled toward Logan.
The last of her human flesh ripped.
What was left of Brooke’s body pulsed and squirmed. Her legs—if you could still technically call them legs—went up, bringing the sheet with them so it looked like a ghost floating in front of the group, a ghost drenched in blood and bile and God knew what else.
He knew it was impossible, but so were monsters invading the Earth and dead bodies coming back to life and diamonds in the skies that thrummed with a red violence…right?
The sheet fell to the floor, and now they could see the abomination on the bed in its entirety. They could see this was real; as real as they were.
It looked like a blob, like a pile of sick from a giant’s mouth. Hardly any part of what Brooke had been was left. Logan saw pieces of torn shirt and pale flesh and bits of bone, but for the most part, the pulsing, black and gray mass had taken over completely. From this blob, the tentacles coiled and twanged.
Derek held the shotgun.
Where did he get it? Logan wondered. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that it was here.
Logan reached out and took it from him, switching off the safety, ready to pump lead into whatever this alien organism was.
Just as he put pressure on the trigger, Brad yelled, “NO!” and threw his weight into him. The shot went wide, the spray of bullets blew a hole in the ceiling, and more plaster rained down on the scene. “That’s my mom!” Brad screamed.
Logan pushed Brad out of the room, into Derek’s arms. “Get him out!” he said. “Get him out right now! That’s not his mother. Not anymore!”
Derek dragged Brad away, kicking and screaming, and Jane and Logan were left alone to face the monster.
Logan whirled on the creature, the abomination, the whatever-the-hell-it-was, and aimed the shotgun.
His aim was true, but he really didn’t have to aim at all. The creature was growing. Growing.
Oh God if you’re seeing this help us please God please—
But if God was watching them, He had decided the matter was out of His hands.
The shotgun blast rocked the creature, taking a chunk out of its massiveness.
It stopped moving, stopped wiggling, as the echo of the blast hung in the air.
“Is it—is it dead?” Jane asked.
Logan stepped forward. How was he supposed to tell if something like that was dead? Did its heart stop beating? Did it even have a heart?
“We have to get out of here,” Jane decided. “Out of this house. Out of this fucking town!”
For a while, the two of them just looked at the gelatinous mass that had once been Brooke Long. Logan followed the length of the tentacles that had sprung forth from the corpse’s midsection.
Then—
The tentacles started twitching.
No God please let me wake up from this nightmare please—
He stumbled backward, tripped. Falling, he felt, for the moment, to be completely weightless, detached from Earth’s gravity.
The shifting beast shook like a rocket ship about to blast off.
Oh God please help us—
“It’s going to explode!” Jane shouted over the rampant thrumming.
And she was right.
21
Fighting to Live
The explosion took out the bedroom wall behind the headboard. Logan lost the gun, but rolled over in time to cover himself from the raining debris. His ears, which had been assaulted enough by the blast of the shotgun, rang, and he couldn’t hear much of anything anymore.
Slowly, he sat up, dazed. A cloud of dust hung thickly in the air. The room smelled like spoiled meat.
Logan first looked toward the door—or where he thought the door had been. Right now, his vision spun too much for him to be sure.
Then he saw it.
Saw what he didn’t want to see.
The explosion hadn’t been much of an explosion at all.
The explosion, instead, was a mutation. The thing was now bigger than the bed. Much bigger. It swelled, swelled, and swelled, swallowing up the mattress and the box spring.
Brooke Long was screaming.
How? How is she screaming? She’s dead—
Against the feeling of weakness in his legs, Logan rose up. He wobbled and nearly fell over, but he couldn’t stay in here any longer.
As he rose, he saw the eyes. Dozens of them on the underside of the tentacles. All of them looked his way; all of them saw him.
He didn’t think he could move. If he hadn’t heard Jane’s low, raspy voice saying, “Logan,” he probably wouldn’t have.
But that was the power of love; it could bring you back home, even in the most terrible of situations.
The abomination roared. Logan trekked across the room.
Now it seemed so much bigger—an endless desert.
The thin tentacles slashed at the air, but somehow, Logan dodged them.
He reached the door, which had been blasted off its hinges and now lay across the toppled-over dresser. A tentacle smacked downward at him, seeming even bigger than it had just a few seconds ago. The limb came like a sledgehammer. It cleaved the door in half and smashed the dresser into pieces.
Logan dove out of the way.
Jane grabbed his hand, pulling him over the threshold of the doorway. Logan looked back over his shoulder. The mass of shiny meat pulsed again. An electrical current of light raced beneath the surface layer of its flesh—if you could call it flesh—and the limbs gyrated, wiggled, slashed back and forth.
“We have to get out of this house!” Derek yelled. He stood in the middle of the stairway, holding back a frantic and so
bbing Brad.
“The Honda’s ruined,” Logan said, descending the steps. “Brad, do you have a working car?”
Logan assumed he did. Though his head was fuzzy when they’d first arrived, and the night was so dark, he remembered seeing at least one car parked off to the side of the drive.
A tentacle came through the doorway, slithered down the steps. The black thing searched the hardwood.
Logan didn’t think.
Again, acting on instinct, he stamped a foot down and stepped on the tentacle hard enough to nearly sever it. From inside the bedroom, the creature screeched. It was a sound of sharp blades raking against a dry chalkboard.
“Go!” Logan said to the others now frozen at the bottom of the steps. He jumped the last four and landed with a boom that shook the house.
Brad, Jane, and Derek finally moved forward.
That was when the creature fell through the floor and landed in the hallway. It made its horrendous shrieking scream again—not in pain, but in triumph.
With horror, Logan thought, It’s getting bigger and bigger by the second. It’s gonna swallow up the whole house soon.
He stood in front of the others as another tentacle made its way out into the hall. Small barbs jutted from it, undeveloped, but developing.
“Car, Brad!” he shouted, never taking his eyes off of the slithering limb.
“T-the Camry. There’s a Camry in the garage,” Brad said. “It’s our closest and best option.”
Jane breathed a sigh of relief.
“Then let’s go!” Derek yelled.
Logan gritted his teeth. He took a step back into the hallway, poising himself to turn and run. But he didn’t really want to turn his back on this thing.
It was growing bigger still, stretching from wall to wall. The tentacle’s eyes sprang open, each one popping. They looked at Logan, looked through him.
“Go,” he whispered. “Go!”
Now a different tentacle rose. It was as thick as the trunk of a pine tree. At its apex, the tentacle tapered to a point, a sharp point.
“Logan! Come on!” It was Jane. She sounded far away.
Something like a mouth yawned open in the middle of the blob. One of Brooke Long’s screams, dim and distant, escaped.
Logan stepped backward again, then turned and ran toward the others in the kitchen. Behind him, the floor rose in a swell, like a tsunami wave, and he rode its momentum to the threshold.
The beast was coming, moving faster than it had any right to.
Jane was screaming. The walls were cracking, and glass was breaking somewhere. It was madness.
An insane chorus of shrieking enveloped the house.
Thud-thud-thud—
These were not the thunderous footsteps of the behemoth they’d seen earlier; it was the sound of legions of creatures running into the house’s siding.
They had been called. The transformation of Brooke Long must’ve acted as a beacon.
Logan felt a pang of sadness for her and Brad buried deep beneath the fear and the adrenaline pulsing through him.
They were all in the kitchen now. Brad went to the garage door and opened it, disappearing within the darkness.
Lucky, because a tentacle struck out for them, trying to prevent their departure.
If Logan was a weaker man, he would’ve given up, let the tentacle take him… Lord knew he was tired and scared and in pain. Lord knew the allure of the sweet relief of death was strong in moments like these.
But Logan was not a weak man; he wanted to live. Not for himself, but for Jane. She needed him as much as he needed her.
This was not the end. He would not let it be the end. Not yet.
Before the tentacle landed, he pushed Jane and Derek out of the way, toward the garage door. The creature’s limb raked a fresh gash in the kitchen’s floor.
Logan rolled, but not quick enough. A different tentacle gripped him around the ankle. Yanked him.
“Logan!” Jane yelled.
“Go!” he shouted. “I’ll catch up.”
But his wife was stubborn. She picked up a fallen chair and came at the tentacle like a bolt of lightning, bringing the chair up and then down, up and then down.
Grayish slime sprayed from the little—but growing—eyes. They closed permanently, blinded, and the main part of the creature bellowed loudly as Jane turned its tentacles into mashed potatoes. That main part was closer now, though moving like a glacier and taking out everything in its path.
“Let—him—go!” Jane was yelling, each word punctuated by a strike to the tentacle.
Logan felt the grip around his leg loosen, and he pried himself free. Derek rushed across the fractured floor, jumped over the cracks, bent down, and helped Logan up.
Jane dropped the chair.
“Fuck, I can’t find the keys!” Brad shouted from the garage.
The creature was almost to the kitchen, the gelatinous blob made up of pulsing, throbbing slime. Protruding all around it were the tentacles with the seeing eyes, easily fifteen feet in length. They varied in color; some were transparent gray, while others were the same violent red that ran around the edge of the voids. Logan saw at least one onyx-colored tentacle that seemed to suck away the house’s meager light.
He was frozen, and it seemed like his friends were, too. Derek was the closest to its wrath, and if Logan could’ve switched places with the kid, he would’ve.
But it was too late.
The scene played out in slow-motion.
The tentacle bent and then extended, the movement reminding Logan of a bullwhip.
Derek screamed, and somehow it was worse than the sounds the creature made, the guttural rumbles and roars.
The tentacle connected with Derek’s midsection, going right through it. Logan could see the eyes on the tentacle, now smeared with gore, looking right at him through one of his best friends. Derek screamed for about a half-second before his bellow died with him.
A burst—no, a geyser—of blood sprayed from the wound, and Derek’s body went completely limp, suspended about two feet above the floor and hanging there like a rag doll, like something that was never a live, human body.
Logan was dimly aware of his wife’s screaming, but he himself could not scream. He couldn’t even breathe.
Then it got worse. Somehow, the situation, this unholy situation, got worse.
The eyes set into the tentacle currently impaling Derek Fritz swiveled and looked at Logan. They seemed to mock him, to say ‘You thought you could save them? You think you can survive? We are the new rulers of this planet, and you are nothing but the bugs beneath our boots.’
And then—
With a crackle and the tearing of flesh, the tentacle that was burrowed into Derek’s back snapped toward the monster—but it didn’t come alone.
No.
It brought a good portion of Derek’s skeleton—most of his spinal cord, some ribs—and the bones shined with blood and fluids.
Like the rest of them, Brad was wholly transfixed by what had happened to Derek. He saw it through the garage door, saw it all. He hated himself for standing there and doing nothing—But what could you do, Brad? he thought.
He found the keys on top of a shelf with old paint and brushes, and he was going to drive his dad’s car, the one he killed himself in…wasn’t that enough?
“I’m sorry,” he now said, his voice barely audible over the scritch-scratching and squelching the wandering tentacles made, pulling the thing into the kitchen. Fully visible now. And it was coming right for Logan and Jane as they stood on the cracked floor of the kitchen in sheer horror.
The creature that was once his mother shifted and seemed to pulse with an electric energy, more so than before, as if killing had made it stronger.
In the light given off by the blob, Brad saw a glint of metal in the ruins of his house.
The shotgun. His father’s shotgun.
He slapped his jeans pocket and felt two more shells.
Now, Brad
didn’t think about what he was about to do; he just did it.
He ran right at the monstrosity.
Logan threw his body over Jane’s, and she gripped him tightly around the waist. Tried to pull her away. The creature had been reinvigorated by the kill, was now more confident.
The wound on Jane’s forehead had opened, and blood dribbled down her brow. He was somewhat aware that they were both crying.
Derek was dead. He’d been ripped apart. Wasn’t coming back. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Brad darted past them.
“What—” Logan yelled.
Brad plunged into the debris.
The creature was too focused on Logan and Jane to notice.
What is he doing?
He got his answer, as Brad re-emerged from the shadows holding the shotgun that Logan had thought was lost in the madness upstairs.
Brad dipped into his pocket and pulled out two shells. He loaded them as fast as a gunslinger in the Old West.
Then he aimed.
Then he pulled the trigger.
One of the flailing tentacles evaporated right before Logan’s eyes.
Brad aimed again, closing one eye. He moved without a hitch, as smooth as a freshly oiled machine.
It took balls to do what Brad was doing—not to mention that the kid was actually shooting at something that had once been his mother. Logan appreciated that.
A tentacle rose above Brad. He pulled the trigger with not even the slightest hesitation.
This time, the tentacle didn’t evaporate. Only a chunk blew away with the shot, though the creature screeched again. The noise was so loud, glass shattered somewhere distant, and the house’s foundation sank farther into the earth…or at least it seemed to.
“Get out!” Brad said. “Go!”
Logan grabbed Jane’s hand, but she was already up. She didn’t need his help, never had.
“You’re coming, too!” Logan yelled.
“Look!” Jane pointed to the spot where the first tentacle had been blown off. Where she pointed, another tentacle was taking its place.
Brad patted his pockets for more shells. When he realized he didn’t have any, he swung the shotgun like a club. The sound of stepping in wet mud filled the room with each connecting blow.
Ravaged: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 1) Page 15