by Hults, Matt
“Look out!” Tim screamed.
Before she knew what was happening, he yanked her through the church doorway. His quick action gave her only a second to glimpse the twelve-foot long log that hurled out of the darkness toward them. It smashed through the steps and tore the whole staircase off the building, leaving a dusty cloud in its wake.
Mallory rushed back to the opening to find her father already climbing the ruins.
“Get inside,” he shouted. “It’s coming!”
Mallory didn’t hesitate this time. She joined Tim and dashed through the entryway.
Beyond lay a large, open room, lit only by fragile threads of outside light that stitched together the two opposing rows of boarded-over windows set in the building’s longest walls.
Another object rocketed toward them, this time a bolder the size of a car tire. It hit the church two feet above the double doors, punching through the forward vestibule and out the opposite wall, leaving two enormous holes in the building’s skin. Mallory and Tim ducked into the musty interior under a hailstorm of debris. Wood exploded across the one-room sanctuary, clattering over the rows of old pews and off the floor.
Mallory spun around, searching for her father.
He hurried close behind them. “Come on, kids, keep going.”
A second rock tore across their path. It shot through one of the windows, obliterating the wooden frame and covering boards, pelting them with more hazardous debris. It struck the end of a pew only two rows ahead of Tim, reducing the long bench to shattered kindling, simultaneously causing the one beside it to jump upward like a catapult.
“It’s trying to flush us out,” Tim said over the noise of destruction.
The upended pew crashed to the floor.
“All the way to the back,” her father cried.
They waded through the mess of splintered timbers as if navigating a jungle full of booby traps, but after the last rock, an ominous calm had settled over the scene.
They reached the halfway mark of the main chamber when an enormous, bone-jarring impact rattled the entire building.
Mallory glanced behind her and gaped in silent horror at the sight of Derrick’s Mercedes bulldozing through the ceiling, smashing apart the overhead crossbeams, barreling straight toward them.
* * *
The entity watched the Mercedes stab into the church, no longer caring if Mallory died before it had a chance to resurrect Kane and access her energy. She’d evaded its grasp again and again, and now moved too far out of its reach. It would rather leave with Kane to begin again knowing she’d perished in the one place she thought was safe.
The car blasted through the sanctuary’s roof, its rear bumper chased by the bell tower and most of the forward rooftop when those sections of the building caved in behind it.
Though it couldn’t detect even Mallory’s extraordinary life force from within the hallowed walls of the Other’s domain, it couldn’t imagine the girl surviving such an attack. She was only human, after all.
Turning from the ruined church, it reached out and grabbed Frank, savoring his cries of pain when it seized him by the arm.
“Stay alive a little longer, old man,” it said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss this. Kane’s going to be so happy to see you again.”
It hauled him across the parking lot to the music of his anguished screams, dragging him toward the graveyard.
* * *
Frank battled to remain conscious while the creature hauled him across the clearing. Dozens of bites had shredded his shirt, leaving hundreds of bleeding tooth marks in his skin. His strength waned with the loss of blood, and his awareness had become muddled by pain and exhaustion. The world around him distorted at the edges, and it took him a moment to recognize the devastated church when they passed it.
The creature halted at the graveyard’s iron boundary, where it dropped him face-down in the dirt. Spasms of pain rippled throughout his body. Groaning, he rolled clumsily to the side in an effort to distance himself from the beast, gaining only a few meager feet before the agony of his wounds immobilized him.
He lay there on his back for a second or two before the clang of metal and the sharp crack of breaking bonds drew his attention to the right. Beside him, the vile heap of animated body parts tore away a large section of the graveyard’s fence and cast it away.
Kane’s coffin lay just several feet away.
“At last!”
The beast took up another ruined section of the fence and used it to hook the end of Kane’s casket, pulling it within reach, free of the graveyard.
“Time to complete it, Frank. Time to put things back the way they were. Beg of us, and maybe we’ll allow you be part of the New World, host to one of our own. How does that sound?”
“Go to hell, you piece of shit.”
The monster’s rotten façade loomed closer. “Better yet, Frank, I’ll bring a part of it to you.”
The beast held its two largest hands over the filthy funerary box, and a sudden surge of energy charged the air. Amber light began to seep out from within the flimsy coffin, sizzling through the seams of its second-rate construction.
The box began to shake.
The thing inside was fighting to get out.
* * *
Mallory had trouble orienting herself in the church’s havoc-strewn darkness. To her right stood a thick iron cross that had chopped through the floorboards like a lumberjack’s ax; at her left lay a shingle-covered portion of what used to be the roof. Over her back came the tick and thunk sounds of loosened rubble still dropping to the ground.
She shuffled around and sat up. Five feet behind her, the hood of Derrick’s Mercedes had vanished into the floor’s splintered decking, buried up to its nonexistent windshield in debris.
“Mallory,” her father’s voice called. His good hand closed on her shoulder.
Turning, she found her dad and Tim, dust-covered and haggard-looking but alive. She roped her arms around her father and hugged him tight, regarding Tim over his shoulder with a teary gaze. “Thank God you’re both alive.”
Tim opened his mouth to speak, then closed it when the foggy darkness encasing them begin to recede, revealing greater detail of the devastation heaped around them.
They stood and hurried to one of the tall, glassless windows, where her father knocked loose a trio of old planks to reveal a full view of the cemetery.
Mallory gasped.
The creature stood at the churchyard fence, a blazing amber light radiating from something at its feet. Mallory squinted against the glare, trying to make out the nucleus of the blaze, when Tim uttered, “It reached the coffin.”
And the moment he said it, the rectangle of light broke open.
CHAPTER 62
Melissa spotted the amazing lightshow through countless arms of outstretched tree branches, but nothing could’ve prepared her for what she saw once Jimmy guided the truck into the clearing.
“What is that?” he howled, gawking at the huge figure silhouetted in front of the firework’s incandescent origin.
Melissa knew. She had no time to explain, but she knew what it was doing, what the light meant, and what had to be done next, before the creature’s sorcery could be completed.
“Hit it,” she ordered, remembering the beast’s only known weakness.
“What?”
“We have to stop it. Ram the damn thing. Now!”
“No way!”
“Do it,” she shouted. She slid across her seat and tromped her foot down over Jimmy’s, smashing the gas pedal to the floor, propelling the truck forward.
“Shit, lady, you’re nuts.”
Melissa held her position, pinning the accelerator all the way open. Even in their present gear, they closed the gap between the driveway and the monster with surprising speed. She spotted Frank crumpled at the creature’s feet, dangerously close to where they were headed.
She didn’t let up.
Amber light filled the cab.
Th
e colossal figure pivoted, twisting around to greet them with three outstretched arms and a thunderous bellow of rage.
Jimmy pushed and squirmed, finally heaving Melissa off him. Screaming, he slammed both his feet down on the brake pedal, mashing it to the boards. The truck slid. Pneumatic screams joined the beast’s call while the semi’s air brakes strove to slow its advance. But regardless of its stopping power, the cab’s front end collided chest-level with the entity’s towering body, hitting the thing head on, propelling it into the one place she’d been told it couldn’t go.
Through the fence and into the cemetery.
* * *
Sprawled on the ground, Frank watched in semi-conscious wonderment when the two imposing juggernauts clashed together, the massive truck overcoming the entity’s humanoid configuration of flotsam with its inexorable momentum, launching the monster into the graveyard at the same instant one of its giant forward tires rolled over Kale Kane’s blazing coffin, crushing it like a snail shell and smearing its festering cargo.
The amber light vanished.
* * *
Mallory cheered along with Tim and her father when the hulking creature dropped to its back, smashing three grave markers to rubble beneath its bulk.
But, what next? Mallory wondered. Won’t it just switch bodies again?
The church shook.
Mallory backed away from the window, looking to Tim and then to her dad. With the light from Kane’s coffin extinguished, the old sanctuary had reverted to a cavern of shadows.
“Now what’s happening?” she cried.
“Look at that,” Tim shouted.
A glowing light had appeared within the cemetery, shining upward from the gaping pit of Kale Kane’s open grave. Mallory moved closer to the window, gripping its frame with tense fingers. Black light spilled skyward from the earthy excavation outside, impossibly black light.
The eerie luminescence began to expand across the churchyard. The soil piled around the parameter of Kane’s grave suddenly collapsed inward, the walls crumbling away like sand falling through the neck of an hourglass.
Inch by inch, the grave began to widen. Slow at first, then faster.
The killer’s headstone tilted and fell forward, vanishing into the fissure.
“I think we’d better move,” her dad said.
The hole continued to broaden. Clusters of weeds dropped out of sight, followed by two flanking gravestones, and then a third, fourth, and fifth.
They turned from the windows and hurried through the building’s wreckage, making their way outside.
* * *
Jimmy’s truck still shifted from side to side on its massive shocks. Melissa dropped out of the cab and hurried around its front end to look for Frank.
She rounded the bumper and came to a skidding halt at the sight of the odd glow rising from Kane’s empty grave.
Tentacles of electricity leapt out of the hole where Kane’s coffin once rested, lashing through the air. They sparked off the nearby fence posts in a series of blinding flashes. She threw herself backward against the dented grill of the semi when one jagged tendril sputtered across a portion of fencing not far from her feet, scorching the metal, leaving it steaming. In its wake, the sturdy iron bars appeared cracked and colorless; even the grass around them was now ashen and brittle.
The lightshow ceased a moment later, replaced by a pallid mist that billowed out of Kane’s dilated gravesite. It flowed between the rows and swirled amongst tombstones. In seconds the churchyard vanished within the haze, leaving only the entity’s giant legs visible at the edge of the phenomenon.
Melissa froze where she stood. To her right, she detected the sound of people moving inside the devastated church building, and to the far left, she registered three separate voices exclaiming words of amazement pertaining to the lightning strikes. She knew she should do something—warn the people to stay back, see if anyone in the church was hurt, find Frank—but when she finally started to turn, a fleeting glimpse of movement redrew her attention toward the misty land ahead.
* * *
The entity lay trapped, unable to vacate its anatomy of interconnected corpses.
Kane was gone. Its powers were gone. All was lost.
The ground vibrated. Fear became a phantom saber cleaving wounds of pure terror to its core.
The time had come to return to the others, to the torment, to the place where numbness would be a sacred blessing.
* * *
Melissa screamed and fled backward when two gigantic, talon-tipped claws solidified out of the mist and lunged toward her with savage speed.
Pinned where she stood by fear, Melissa looked on while the massive hooks dropped down and closed around the entity’s body, clutching it in a ghostly grip. They jerked back, hauling the monster into the impenetrable haze and out of sight before her mind had a chance to contemplate a reaction.
Melissa remained flattened against the big rig, shaking, watching the spiraling plumes of vapor that coiled over the land where the monster’s shape had just been.
“Melissa,” Frank’s voice called.
She jumped at the sound of her name, raking an arm over the truck’s ruined grill, cutting herself and drawing blood. The pain enlivened her. Still shivering, eyes wide and directed forward, she shuffled back along the semi, averting her gaze from the mist-laden graveyard only long enough to sidestep Kale Kane’s extirpated remains. Nothing recognizable remained of the killer, save for a molted green arm that lay in a liquid puddle of half-rotten flesh and embalming fluid.
She found Frank near the cab’s midsection and almost forgot about everything else when she beheld his condition.
She knelt at his side. “Jesus Christ, Frank, you look like you went through a meat grinder.”
He smiled. “Melissa—”
“Keep your voice down,” she warned. “Look, I knocked the entity-thing into the cemetery and something weird happened. Something really weird. I don’t understand this supernatural shit like you do, but I think we better get the hell away from this place and I think we better do it fast. Can you move?”
“There’s nothing to fear,” he answered.
“You don’t get it. Something’s out there, something even bigger than the entity.”
Frank shook his head, wincing from his injuries. “Not anymore, there isn’t. You did it, Melissa. You sent it back to where it came from, back to where it belongs. You saved us… Look for yourself.”
She traced Frank’s line of sight to the stoical slabs of the old churchyard, finding most of them now illuminated by the truck’s headlight. The mysterious fog had already evaporated into the night.
The entity’s body was gone.
A wide trench cut across the ground where the beast had fallen. The scoured trail led deeper into the cemetery, to the vacuous pit of Kale Kane’s grave. Numerous headstones had been knocked flat to the right and left of where the body passed, some crumbled to ruins and imbedded in the dirt.
Melissa heard footsteps approaching. Paul Wiess and two children poked their heads around the front of the semi to gaze at her with questioning faces.
“She did it,” Frank said.
“It’s gone?” Paul asked.
Frank nodded, struggling to sit up. “We’re safe; you, your daughter, all of us.”
“What about you?” Paul asked.
“I’ll live. We’ll all live tonight.”
“Lay still,” Melissa told him. “We have to get you an ambulance.”
Off to the left, three more teenagers made their way out of the woods, approaching cautiously. “Mr. Wiess? Mallory?” a girl’s voice called.
“Becky, is that you?” Paul asked. “It’s all right, kids. It’s over.”
Above them, in the truck, Jimmy poked his head out the cab’s window and glared down at Melissa. “Can I please have my keys back so we can get out of here?”
She tossed the set back to him. “Get on your radio and call for an ambulance. Hurry!”
&n
bsp; Directing her gaze skyward while they waited for backup, she discovered the menacing storm clouds that had been growling overhead for the last few hours had vanished without a trace. The nighttime heavens appeared clear and glowing, filled with glimmering stars from horizon to horizon.
EPILOGUE
September
Mallory met Tim at the usual spot by the lake. She pulled her car into the small parking lot and spotted him sitting in the shade on one of the nearby picnic tables, dressed in his tank top and running shorts. The moment he saw her, he jumped down and rushed over.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, exiting the car. “I suppose you’ve already gone through the warm-up routine, huh?”
“I have to show you something,” he said eagerly. “Follow me.” He took her by the hand, beaming like her little brother on Christmas morning. He led her across the grass, to where his gym bag waited on the table he’d been sitting at.
She regarded him with a quizzical gaze. “I take it we’re not going for our run today?”
“Yeah, sure we can. But you have to see this first.”
He stopped in front of the table and looked her in the eyes. She gazed back raptly, knowing his were the only set of eyes she could ever look into and find the level of trust and devotion she needed to get on with a normal life after their experiences at the churchyard.
“I went back,” he said, not having to specify a location.
Mallory gaped at him, blinking. Her mouth fumbled to make the words that would express her shock.
“It’s okay,” he rushed on. “In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s amazing.”