Husk

by Hults, Matt

  It smiled.

  High aloft, lightning crackled across the heavens in erratic bursts, adding horrific detail to its butchered shell of a body.

  “You—you’re not human,” the boy mumbled.

  “No.”

  Without averting its gaze, it seized two handfuls of the tattered sweatshirt and tore it in half, revealing the dozens of dark holes that marked the bloodless skin of Brad’s chest and abdomen. While the teen gaped in horror, it utilized its total control over Brad’s corpse and made his torso explode.

  Skin and bone erupted with an annihilative force, ejecting a shower of gore into the night. Multiple tentacles of intestines launched from Brad’s abdomen and lashed forward, wrapping around the shotgun’s barrel before yanking it from Fuller’s grasp and heaving it away.

  The boy teetered on his feet, looking ready to faint.

  The organs retracted, sucked back into Brad’s chest cavity, and the splintered ribcage slammed shut like a gargantuan mouth.

  Spattered with blood and screaming, Fuller turned and sprinted toward the driveway, running so fast he threw off a shoe.

  The entity watched him go, savoring the moment.

  Walking on Brad’s dead legs, it reacquired the shotgun and loaded fresh rounds into the pump-action magazine, chambering the first shot. The Lexus’ engine once again revved to life. It seated Brad’s shredded corpse behind the wheel and swung the vehicle around.

  It caught up to Fuller in no time, coating the back of his fleeing form in the car’s headlights. Rapidly losing ground, the boy tried again and again to find a route off the road, an egress into the woods where he could escape the oncoming vehicle.

  He lunged to the right, and a fence of broken sticks sprang up in his path.

  He dodged to the left and found himself in a whirlwind of gravel.

  If only it could’ve used its telekinetic abilities to rip out one of his leg bones; that would’ve been a treat. But flesh couldn’t be directly harmed by its powers any more than the force around the cemetery could be breached without consequences.

  The boy made another dash for the trees, and this time the ground split open like a gaping maw. The boy teetered at the brink, then rushed onward.

  Though the entity’s magic wouldn’t work to injure his living tissue, his attempts to flee mimicked the futile thrashing of a fish already trapped in the jaws of a shark.

  CHAPTER 42

  Frank turned onto County Road 19 and sped for the intersection of Highway 55.

  He marveled at the dismal night around them. Turbid clouds had turned the heavens into such a deep and impenetrable murk that the transition between the silhouetted trees beside the road and the rain clouds in the sky appeared seamless. Thunder bellowed from above.

  Frank angled his gaze to the right, looking to the darkened plot of land where the vacant Patterson farm stood.

  “Frank, look out!” Melissa shrieked.

  He jerked in surprise, shocked to see a teenager boy run into the road. He slammed on the brakes. The Blazer’s anti-lock system groaned beneath his feet. At the same time, he swung the vehicle right, trying to avoid the boy, when he caught sight of another car blasting out of the trees to the left, off a narrow dirt road hidden in the brush.

  “Hang on!”

  The scrambling juvenile thumped into Frank’s door, clawing at the window. Beyond him, the other vehicle screamed into a slide. Its rear end spun around ninety-degrees, spraying gravel, and smashed broadside into Frank’s Blazer, catching the boy between them.

  Blood sprayed across the side window.

  Oh, Jesus!

  Frank’s air bag deployed. It sounded like a gunshot over the moan of stressed metal, tortured suspension, and the noise of bursting glass. Both vehicles jolted to a stop on impact, rocking on their shocks.

  Frank shakily pushed the airbag out of his face. Dear God, what have I done?

  He looked out his broken window, searching for the teen, and—

  “Fraaaank!”

  —locked eyes with the driver of the other vehicle.

  Tremors of terror rippled through his body, his gaze locked on the grinning horror staring back at him.

  The shredded skin. The protruding bones.

  The collision had been fierce, but certainly not bad enough to produce the extent of damage he saw on the thing in the other car. Then he heard the guttural utterance of his name, saw the light beaming from the eye sockets of the driver’s near-skeletonized head.

  This was no hallucination.

  This was it; the thing he’d stared down five years ago in Kane’s basement, the malevolent entity that had been inside the madman’s body. But now, facing the beast for the second time, Frank’s remaining courage faltered. He shook his head at the thought of confronting the progenitor of five years’ worth of nightmares.

  Half the skin around the creature’s mouth hung in torn strips, and it clacked its bare teeth in the parody of a smile. It opened the door to get out.

  Shaking, feeling his muscles stiffen with fear, Frank panicked and slammed his foot down on the gas pedal. Tires howled on the pavement, and white smoke billowed up from the ground. But the two vehicles had locked together in the crash, held by bonds of reshaped metal. The Blazer wouldn’t budge.

  He was trapped.

  * * *

  “Freeze,” Melissa bellowed.

  She jumped out of her seat and pulled her gun, aiming it over the Blazer’s windshield.

  She’d seen the sedan’s single occupant step out of the car, and she wasn’t about to let the man flee the scene.

  Weapon held forward, she started around the Blazer’s passenger door to the front of the vehicles. Frank remained in his seat. She didn’t think he’d been injured, but when she called to him, he didn’t reply. He just stared through his window at the other car, his complexion the color of wax paper—

  Frank tromped on the gas and tried to pull forward.

  Melissa gasped. The Blazer lurched at her like an enraged animal, stopped short by its contact with the other car. She leapt backward, off the road. What the hell’s he doing, didn’t he see me get out?

  She opened her mouth to scream at him when a gunshot shook the night. The Blazer’s windshield imploded, spraying glass across her left side.

  “Shit!”

  The acrid stench of burning rubber fanned out in all directions as she ducked down behind the right fender. She fired four blind shots over the hood, but the silhouetted gunman started around the two cars undeterred. Not giving her attacker a chance to gain ground on her, Melissa backed around Frank’s Blazer, keeping the vehicle between them. She dropped to a knee near the rear bumper and fired again when the man came into view.

  She squeezed off four shots with perfect precision, planting the bullets in the attacker’s gun arm and shoulder. Despite the damage, the gunman didn’t drop his weapon or cry out in pain. He didn’t even slow his stride.

  Then he emerged from the fog of tire smoke, and she saw his mangled face.

  This can’t be happening.

  He strode forward, shotgun pumped and ready. She fired her last six shots with lethal accuracy, pulling the trigger even as the gunman sighted her over the shotgun’s barrel. She planted four rounds in his chest and two in his head. The last two bullets exploded through the man’s teeth and opened a dark hole in his forehead. Both projectiles hit at point-blank range and thundered through his brain with enough force to hollow out his skull.

  The gunman staggered back a few steps, then regained his balance.

  Melissa’s mouth hung open. Impossible!

  Her hands shook as she ejected the pistol’s spent clip. In the vehicles’ headlights she saw that the back of the man’s head had been split in two by her last shots. Double doors of bone swung back and forth on skin hinges.

  She pushed off the ground, drawing one of her spare clips as the walking monstrosity once again raised its weapon. Her trembling hands worked faster, desperate to load her pistol, but the clip
hit the gun’s handle and fell to the ground.

  Melissa looked up.

  Lightning flickered across the sky, but the roar of a shotgun replaced the ensuing blast of thunder.

  Melissa jerked at the sound. The gunman’s firing arm blew apart at the wrist, and the weapon flew from his grasp as if snatched away by an invisible thief.

  She flinched when another shot boomed, coming through the passenger-side window of Frank’s Blazer.

  Frank!

  The gunman lurched to the side, cloth and flesh spraying from his back.

  Frank kicked the door open. “Shoot it!” he hollered.

  He fired low and partially severed the gunman’s right leg at the knee, following up with another blast to the man’s torso. Muscle and bone exploded from an exit wound the diameter of a softball. Amazingly, the attacker got back on his feet! His splintered leg snapped back together with a horrible crunch.

  The bullet-riddle assailant swung toward Frank and bellowed an inhuman roar.

  Melissa could only stand and stare in shock. The monster’s eyes flared white, and the Blazer exploded off its tires as if hit by a bomb. It rolled across the road, crashing up and over the Lexus. Glass and steel and shattered plastic sailed into the air with each bone-jarring rotation. The crumpled remains finally slammed down on its wheels thirty feet away, half buried in the trees along the roadside.

  Her mind raced. She knew Frank was still inside the vehicle, that he probably needed her help, but before she could run after him, she noticed something else.

  From the corner of her eye, Melissa saw the gunman stumble.

  Even as the SUV came to a standstill, the man sagged and slumped toward the dirt, his limbs flexing as if boneless. Half his skull fell apart in a shower of gory fragments, and fluid streamed from the countless wounds on his body. The sight went beyond any crime scene horror she’d ever beheld, and the pure ghastliness of it almost got the better of her when the man’s torso flopped open and his organs splattered on the asphalt.

  He’s falling apart … literally falling apart!

  She swayed, but fought the urge to flee.

  Though she still couldn’t believe what was happening, she knew she needed to act now, while the fire in the gunman’s eyes was dimmed to mere sparks.

  She looked down.

  The ammunition clip still lay at her feet. She snatched it up and slapped it into her pistol.

  Bullets blazed in quick order. Chest. Hip. Legs. Feet. She shot at any part of the gunman that hadn’t already collapsed to shreds.

  She fired the gun empty, ejected the clip, and reached for her final spare when the pistol flew out of her grasp.

  It shot across the space between her and the gunman’s remains, smacking into its hole-speckled hand. The man had fallen to his knees but still moved with the agility of an athlete.

  And he was already rebuilding itself.

  Melissa gasped.

  She wanted to deny it, wanted to pretend she wasn’t seeing the strips of skin and muscle defy gravity and reattach themselves to shattered bones. But they did, and in the space of only seconds the bullet-riddled attacker stood upright, glaring hellfire from its eyes.

  Melissa shivered, aware she had nowhere to run. Not that she could even move. She stood transfixed in awe as she watched the attacker’s midsection change. With the noise of churning minced meat the tissue of the thing’s open abdomen rearranged itself, constructing a cavernous mouth. Broken bones sprouted from the inside like teeth. She staggered away, gagging at the discharge of fluid that spilled forth when it spoke.

  “You think that what stands before you is from a dream?”

  It was the same terrible voice from the Damerow basement.

  Melissa glanced at the Blazer. “Frank!”

  “I’ve seen inside your mind,” the monster continued. “I’ve felt your hatred of mankind, and basked in your conflict with what awaits after death.”

  The thing continued to change, skin and muscle and bone collecting into a worm-like creature that sprouted dripping tentacles of flesh. Melissa could only gape in terror.

  “Rest assured,” the thing rasped, “I shall show you what comes next! But not before I treat you to the unimaginable agonies of this worl—”

  SPLAT!

  The beast flinched on what was left of its mutilated legs when a green canister smacked into the soft flesh of its side. Half buried in the meat, Melissa almost didn’t see word ‘EXPLOSIVE’ written across the side in capital letters.

  “Oh, shit!”

  She dove behind the back of the Lexus the same instant the night lit up in a blinding flash.

  The explosion’s shockwave shook her bones and knocked the air out of her lungs. At the same time, a searing heat washed over her skin, followed by an inhuman shriek that managed to cut through the ringing in her ears.

  Then it was over. She lie flat long enough to realize she hadn’t been hit by any shrapnel or set ablaze, then staggered to her feet. White light bathed the road. It burned with such intensity that she had to shield her eyes against it, squinting over the hood of the car to make out a hissing column of flames where the monster had stood.

  Something banged behind her and she jumped. She spun to see Frank emerge from the Blazer, attaching another canister-like device to the end of his shotgun.

  “What the hell was that?” she cried.

  Frank nodded to the device on the end of his gun. “White phosphorus.”

  “Not the grenade. That … That thing!”

  “You know damn-well what it was, Detective.”

  She opened her mouth to deny it, then didn’t.

  “Are you okay?” Frank asked.

  She took a breath. “I guess so. You?”

  He gave her a wordless grunt she took as a yes, then returned his stare to the flaming remains.

  Behind them, the wail of approaching sirens floated out of the night.

  Melissa looked over her shoulder to see two sets of headlights flash into view when the cruisers crested a hill, but then her gaze fell on where the fleeing teenager had been smashed between Frank’s SUV and the Lexus. The teen’s intact upper body rested in a heap beside the car, his pelvis and legs crushed flat.

  She spun around. “Frank, what about that one?”

  Frank turned from the burning corpse and came to her side, shotgun ready. They moved forward in tandem, trigger fingers tensed. The stink of spilled blood and ruptured colon enveloped them.

  Melissa hesitated, then reached forward to check the kid’s pulse. Frank hovered close with the shotgun.

  After a few seconds, she leapt back. “Dead. Does that mean he’s going to come after us next?”

  “No,” Frank replied. “There wouldn’t be any point. Besides, it’s Kane that thing wants, not us.”

  The two squad cars cut off their sirens and braked to a halt. Melissa faced the officers when they got out of the vehicles.

  “Ma’am, what—”

  “Call for backup,” she said. “We’ve got two people down here, and the killer got away.”

  “I’m on it,” the first man answered.

  “We heard gunshots,” the other trooper said.

  Before she could respond, Frank interrupted. “Does anyone know where this road leads?”

  He gestured to where the Lexus had barreled out of the bushes. Despite being located less than a hundred yards from the Pattersons’ farm, Melissa had never seen the road before now. The other officers were also at a loss.

  “We need to find out where that teenager came from,” Frank said. He opened the Blazer’s tailgate and extracted a battery-pack LED flashlight. He clicked it on and started into the woods.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You want to just go off on foot? What about the train?”

  “This is more important right now,” he replied over his shoulder. “That kid never would’ve outrun the Lexus, so the road can’t be too long.”

  “Wait,” she called after him.

  When Fran
k didn’t stop, she ran after him, glancing back at the bewildered officers just long enough to say, “This is a crime scene; no one touches anything until I get back. And one of you get to that 911 call.”

  Then she turned and followed Frank, who’d already vanished into the dark.

  CHAPTER 43

  Cool night air spilled through the windows of Paul Wiesses’ Ford as he guided the vehicle along Highway 55, back to Loretto.

  Beside him, Rebecca offered an advance warning that her house was a veritable disaster zone, making it sound like she expected city inspectors to come around any day now and condemn it to demolition. He laughed when she added a similar comment.

  Not long ago, after Mallory had called from the fair to tell them she and Tim had a ride home, he and Rebecca decided to take in a movie. Due to the timing, however, most features had already started, and the following shows didn’t end until after midnight. Rather than wait, and because Rebecca had to work early the next day, she suggested they go back to her place, make a batch of popcorn, and select a movie from Tim’s DVD collection—a plan which Paul wholeheartedly agreed to.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve had an evening this nice,” Rebecca said once they entered town. It wasn’t the first time she’d voiced her approval of the night, but with this remark, Paul detected a subtle tone that suggested their time together had been more to her than just a pleasant dinner.

  “Me, too,” he replied.

  On the radio, a female singer sung of ruined love and betrayal, yet the contrastive, upbeat instrumentals fit well with the moment.

  He made a left onto Crestview Lane, and Rebecca’s house came into view a short distance away.

  Drawing closer, they saw her garage door stood open, its neatly kept interior storing only shadow. But the sight of the garage only provided a backdrop for the State Patrol car parked in front of the house.

  “That’s odd,” Rebecca said.

  She spoke the words with less worry in her voice than Paul believed he might have managed. At the sight of the maroon cruiser, Mallory’s previous phone conversation leapt to the front of his mind, particularly her insistence on riding home with her friends. The terrible image of a mangled car and its teenage passengers slipped into his head, but he forced it away.