Two more creatures landed just outside.
Another was ambling through the elevator doors. It was looking at the body lying atop Tommy. Its expression changed. There was confusion in its wretched face, then understanding, then something like anger. Its eyes locked onto Tommy’s and that was when he pulled the trigger. The large.45 caliber round entered in through the creature’s right eye and tore half its face away. The animal fell to its knees and then tumbled forward. Tommy kicked the body of the first creature off of him and scrambled to get up.
Three shots left, he thought wildly. Three shots left before I have to reload.
Outside there were at least six creatures on the ground and who knew how many more flying above them. They had heard the shots, no doubt..45’s just a bit louder’an a squeaky old vending machine.
The next creature was older than the others. Its graying fur was mottled and even. Tommy was standing now, Zippo in one hand, Colt in the other. Its saucer-plate eyes were locked hypnotically on Tommy.
Tommy’s first two shots hit the creature in the chest. It stumbled back, its movement eerily human-like, then it caught the edge of the elevator doors and kept coming. Tommy dropped it with his last bullet. He had more. He’d brought over twenty in all, but there wasn’t time to reload. He had to get out of here. Any thought of making a run for it was dashed, however, when two more of those things touched down and began ambling towards the elevator doors. Tommy held up his gun, as if to scare them off, but they didn’t even flinch. He might as well have been holding up a cheeseburger. They were coming in single file.
The lower jaw on the first fell open and out rang a shrill cry. Tommy reached into his pocket and fingered three bullets out. His fingers were shaking something awful and the bullets spilled to the ground. The creatures sank on their haunches, ready to spring, and then the room exploded with an ear shattering boom. Both creatures’ heads came apart like ripe melons dropped from a ten story building. Tommy looked up to find Buck, climbing down from the open hatch.
“I leave you alone for five minutes and you nearly get yourself killed.” Buck looked genuinely angry.
Tommy saw that Buck still had the blue duffel bag. Buck followed Tommy’s gaze. “Course I didn’t have time. Barely got my arse up halfway when I heard a whole Fourth of July going off down here.”
The two men hustled out and into the open. They were heading toward the vending machine and the bolted door. Above them, the ceiling was swirling as though some great waltz were in full swing.
Buck slowed and then skidded to a stop. “She’s up there, Tommy, I can see her.”
“Forget about her,” Tommy said desperately. “We gotta get outta here, there are too many of them!”
Tommy grabbed Buck by the arm and tore him away. When they arrived at the barricaded door, Tommy began pulling at the vending machine. Buck’s attention was still fixated above them. The mass was descending. They would be landing soon, the lot of them.
Buck removed the stack of dynamite and fingered the timer switch. “Fifteen minutes should be enough, no?”
Tommy looked back in horror. “What? Buck, you’re not setting that thing! We don’t even know what’s on the other side of this door!”
“You’re right,” he said. “Better make it ten.”
A dozen or so birdmen were splashing down by the elevator. Tommy tugged at the door, the vending machine skidding a few inches away with every pull. He glanced over his shoulder.
The room was dim as Buck—with the only light between them—was using it to set the dynamite. Each time Buck glanced up, Tommy could see the creatures getting closer, their red soulless eyes gleaming.
There were so many of them, Tommy thought. A few were still circling overhead.
The old man held the shotgun in the crook of his arm and Tommy took it from him now. He leveled it and fired. A few of them staggered back, one or two fluttered into the air and then landed again, but on they came, faster now as though they could sense the fear in the air, or the blood.
“They’re too far,” Buck said without looking up. He put his ear to the clock on the dynamite, listening for a tick. It was working.
They bundled it back in the bag and slid the package atop the vending machine. The creatures were nearly on them now.
Tommy took Buck’s helmet, strapped it on and squeezed through the narrow opening into the long hallway. Right behind him was Buck.
Tommy was about to close the door when Buck spotted ‘Mama’ touching down not ten feet from the vending machine.
“Give me the gun!” Buck shouted. Maybe it was the light playing tricks, but for the first time Tommy could see dark rings around Buck’s eyes.
“We don’t have time, Buck, close the door!”
“Tommy!”
“We don’t—”
Buck snatched the shotgun out of Tommy’s hands and tried pushing his way back into the room. Tommy grabbed him around the waist, pulling with everything he had. The gun went off and fired wide. Lead ricocheted around them. Tommy clenched his teeth, stuck a foot against the door frame and leaned into it, flinging him and the old man backwards. There was the sound of tearing metal and glass as the vending machine was swept aside and in that moment all Tommy could think about was the dynamite.
Don’t let it detonate early. Oh please.
Then he thought about the door. If they couldn’t close it in time, they would be overrun. Tommy scrambled to his feet and leapt for the door handle. As he grabbed it, a large clawed hand sprang out and closed around his arm. A shot of vicious pain tore through the left side of his body.
“Move!” Buck shouted.
Tommy dropped and Buck aimed the barrel of his shotgun at the creature’s arm and fired, point blank. There was a terrible scream. Blood, the color of old milk, painted the door and the faces of both men. The mutilated arm retracted, but the clawed hand remained, blood still pumping out in mucousy white jets. Tommy shook it off and it fell with a wet plop onto the concrete floor. Tommy then snapped the door closed and bolted it shut. He looked at Buck and found his friend’s eyes filled with bloodlust.
The silence between them was broken by a shattering boom. The door shuddered. The creatures were battering the door, trying to get in and it wouldn’t be long before they succeeded.
Buck looked up from his wrist watch. “Less than eight minutes,” he said matter of factly. Tommy straightened, swallowing hard. The two men began running down the long hallway, the sound of clawed hands scratching and hammering behind them.
Detonation: 7 minutes 5 seconds
When they arrived at the nursery, it was empty. The bodies were still there of course, but every single last one of them was completely deflated. If Tommy had seen a Looney Tunes steam roller tearing around, flattening everyone into a pancake, it wouldn’t have surprised his beleaguered brain one bit right about now. But this wasn’t a good sign, Tommy realized dully. Those worms had gone somewhere and they sure as hell didn’t slither up the stairs after him and Buck. So where…
Both men looked at each other with the same realization.
“Allan!”
They ran for the narrow passage, Tommy limping in the lead, light and shotgun in hand. They crawled through the slime and the stench. Tommy realized his mistake only after it was too late. They were about to drop through the ceiling, headfirst. There was no time to inch back. Tommy let the shotgun drop through the opening onto the floor. It landed with a clang and he wiggled until he too dropped, feeling like a giant turd being squeezed into a toilet bowl. His hands took the brunt of the punishment, smashing and scrapping against the pyramid of concrete blocks they’d set up earlier. Tommy finished up with an awkward looking cartwheel and landed on his ass. Buck came next and was no more elegant.
Tommy snatched the shotgun and started for the room Allan was in. When he arrived, the blood in his veins froze. A crude kind a barricade of old busted furniture had been erected at the end of the hall, sealing off the room with the trapped door. A por
tion of the barricade had collapsed, where it had been breached. Buck and Tommy approached carefully, uncertain of what they might see, and yet at the same time, deathly certain of what they would find.
6 minutes 15 seconds
Peering over the barricade, they saw Allan. What was left of him. He lay in the midst of dead larvae. A terrible last stand had played out here not long ago. The floor was ankle deep in white gore. A few of the creatures looked as though they’d been shot. Others clubbed. The stained butt of Allan’s rifle gave quick proof of that. Tommy and Buck approached their friend. Part of his left hand was missing. Around the stump he had wrapped a strip of cloth torn from his shirt. By the looks of things, he had beaten them off one at a time as they had tried working their way through the barricade, but at some point there had been too many of them and he had been overwhelmed.
Tommy reached down to wipe the blood from Allan’s face and that’s when Allan’s eyes snapped open.
Tommy jumped back. Allan was scrambling for his gun.
“Easy, Allan, it’s us!” Buck shouted.
Allan stopped fumbling for his rifle. Tears welled in his eyes. His face was deathly pale. His lips beryl blue.
“He’s lost a lot of blood,” Tommy said. “Allan, can you walk?”
Allan nodded, made a strained effort to get up and then shook his head.
“Staying here and tending to him like Florence Nightingale ain’t a luxury we have,” Buck said and scooped the fat man up and over his shoulder, rocking back on his heels as he did so.
Allan moaned in pain.
“Can we make it down that ladder with him like this?” Tommy asked.
Allan was reaching for his gun.
Buck said to Allan: “It’s no good to you anymore, Allan. You can tell your ma it misfired and nearly took your hand off. Maybe she’ll go easy on you. Tommy, get the bloody door, will ya?”
5 minutes 30 seconds
Blocking the trapped door were three cinderblocks and the bodies of two larvae. Tommy kicked the corpses aside with disgust—the feeling was very much like kicking a wet pile of laundry—and then heaved the cinderblocks out of the way. He reached down, pulled the trap door open and down they headed.
2 minutes 15 seconds
When they reached teraferma and no birdman had attacked them, Tommy was beginning to feel hopeful. He took Allan from Buck, Buck in turn taking the shotgun and helmet, and the three men wove though the maze of slab casters and old blast furnaces.
1 minute 45 seconds
It was dark when they finally got outside. They were running now, as fast as they could; Allan feeling more like a sack of hardening concrete than a man of flesh and blood. Even so, the sound of the wind playing gently with the leaves and the faint odor of pine and gravel was better than Tommy had ever remembered it. He was about to smile, hell, he was gonna shout at the top of his lungs, when his ears caught something just beyond the rustle of leaves.
Whomp, whomp, whomp…
Both men looked up. A dark streak moved rapidly overhead.
Their car was nearby. Another twenty seconds and they’d be safe. Buck turned, searching the sky for it, shotgun poised, but it was gone. Not entirely gone, since they could hear it, hear it wheeling around, but they couldn’t see it. Tommy glanced up in mid stride and saw the moon blink. The flapping of wings grew louder. Buck reached the car and was getting inside.
Whomp, whomp, whomp…
A giant hand pushed Tommy to the ground. He fell, sliding into the gravel. Falling alone. Allan was gone, he realized sickly. Tommy looked up and saw the great bird flapping low to the ground with Allan’s struggling form in its claws. They were headed for Buck. Tommy scrambled to his feet and ran after them. Buck stepped out and leveled his shotgun, but Tommy knew he couldn’t pull the trigger. Not with Allen in its grasp. At the last moment, as Buck ducked under the approaching bird, it released Allan, who went tumbling into the Firebird’s windshield. The car rolled back from the impact, knocking Buck to the ground, bits of broken glass all around him. The creature turned up into the night, flapping its enormous wings. Buck sprang to his feet, his face covered with beads of blood and he fired into the air. The shot hit empty sky. Tommy got to Allan first and turned him onto his back. He felt for a pulse. It was faint, but there.
“This place is going super nova any second now, Tommy!”
The sound of wings pushing at great big pockets of air made the hairs on Tommy’s neck stand on end. He rolled Allan toward him and then pulled him onto his shoulder. Buck started the car, the engine coughed, stuttered and then roared to life.
60 seconds
Tommy jerked the door open, slid the seat forward and tried dropping Allan into the backseat, but the fat man wasn’t cooperating. Buck got out to help.
The creature was coming in low again, its red eyes blazing.
“I’ll do it,” cried Buck. “You just drive.”
Tommy went to the driver’s seat as Buck wrestled to fit Allan into the Firebird’s tiny backseat. “This sonofabitch squeezed himself in here before, he’ll do it again!”
“Buck, we don’t have time, she’s almost on us!”
Buck gave a final and desperate heave-ho and Allan’s limp form flopped in.
“We’re outta here!” Tommy cried and hit the accelerator.
Buck barely had a foot in the car and grabbed the edge of the crumpled windshield and the passenger window to keep from falling out. He fell into his seat with a thud and then slammed the door. The spidery cracks in the windshield webbed out from where Allan had landed, making it nearly impossible to see where they were going.
“We’re going the wrong way, Tommy! It’s back there.”
Tommy turned the wheel and punched the accelerator. The car did a 180, sending dirt and gravel out in a stream behind them. Up ahead was the aluminum shack that Buck had come to pillage and beyond that, the road. Just then came a wild boom and the sound of tearing metal. The roof of the car was sagging in.
“It’s on top of us!” Buck shouted. Tommy accelerated. Then a clawed hand broke through the windshield. It latched onto the roof, yanking at it viciously. It was trying to peel the roof back, Tommy thought with a panicked chill, remembering the minivan, opened up like a can of sardines. They could see the stars now.
If I never had a sunroof, I’m getting one now, Tommy thought skittishly.
Tommy punched the brake and the creature slid forward and onto the hood of the car. They could almost see it clearly now, its red piercing eyes gleaming back at them. Tommy hit the gas and the creature came toward them, the force pushing it in on them.
3… 2… 1…
The roof of the old Keisel Steel Works opened up in a giant yellow ball of flame, spilling its guts out like a dying volcano. The great smoke stacks that had once sent hundreds of pounds of toxic bile billowing into the air, were now themselves airborne. In front of them, the door they had come out of not a minute ago was sent flying off its hinges, chased by an enormous fireball. The shockwave jolted the car, sending it fishtailing. Tommy struggled to keep control. The creature was looking up at the roof, the roof where its children had been, both of which no longer existed. When its head snapped back at them, Tommy could have sworn he saw rage there. It was then that Buck jerked the wheel and reached across with his foot and pinned the accelerator to the floor. He was sending them right into the aluminum shack. He was going to kill them all. Then the creature’s clawed hand was around Tommy’s neck before he had even seen it move. The pressure was unbearable. Tommy’s face was filling with blood, looking like a ripe tomato. Buck had problems of his own. The creature had closed its other hand around his face and was trying to crush his skull. But all the while, his hand remained on the wheel guiding it toward a certain collision with the small hut. Just then, the barrel of a shotgun emerged from the back seat and fired a single blast into the creature’s face. It reeled back, perhaps just as surprised as Tommy and Buck were. The car then slammed into the aluminum hut. The last thing
Tommy remembered seeing before the world went black was a piece of metal siding divide the creature in half, thick white blood spurting out at them from it’s lower torso.
6 months later
Tommy angled his head. “I think it’s gonna look great,” he said.
“You think so?” Buck didn’t sound so sure.
“Oh, I know it will.” Tommy nudged the old man. “Anything’s better than that patchwork you had before. That roof was starting to look like an old pair of work jeans.”
They laughed.
Buck turned behind him. “What do you think, Allan?” Both men became aware of the off beige prosthetic hand by Allan’s thigh. It still took some getting used to.
“I’d have to agree with Tommy,” Allan said. “The place was beginning to look like a junkyard.”
Allan laid the hand on Tommy’s right shoulder, his other on Buck’s left. They looked like three men who had spent time in the trenches together. Above them, a half dozen men in overalls were working away. The old roof over Lucky Lonie’s had been completely torn away and now sat resting in a dumpster. The new roof was the latest corrugated steel and it was costing Buck a small fortune.
“I wish Tig were here,” Allan whispered.
Buck’s gaze came away from the roof slowly. His eyes narrowed. The exact nature of his expression was hard to read but Tommy wondered if the creature hadn’t left the old man permanently changed in some deep, unknowable way. He had changed them all though, hadn’t he? And perhaps in ways they would never completely know for years to come. Then Buck’s face cleared as his gaze went back to the roof. Tommy pulled Allan close to him.
“We miss him too,” Tommy said. “We miss him too.”
An excerpt from Malice by Griffin Hayes. Available where eBooks are sold.
Bird of Prey: A Horror Novella Page 5