by David Wood
She really didn’t want to look, but needed to know if she was even shooting at something. She glanced over her shoulder.
The thing was there.
Right there.
Just feet behind her, raising that giant blade over its head.
Rule shouted and dove to the side. The sword came down hard, just missing her legs. Sand exploded away from the impact, stinging her face. She thrust her weapon up, aimed for the thing’s eyes and fired twice. She stopped after the second shot when the telltale ping of a bullet ricocheting off something solid accompanied a spark on the monster’s bulbous eye.
Not an eye, she realized. Armor. A helmet.
She scrambled up the hillside while the man-thing lifted its sword for a second strike. The sand fought her all the way, but her fear emerged as the more powerful force, and she managed to out-distance the blade as it whooshed through the air behind her. She didn’t see the missed swing. Her eyes were locked on to the top of the dune. But she had the distinct feeling the strike was meant to sever her legs. Even a glancing blow from that monstrous sword would spell her end.
She fired over her shoulder three more times as she crested the dune, hoping the shots would at least slow the thing down. But when she glanced back, the giant was loping up the hill after her, its broad feet—two black-skinned digits spread in a wide V, with a translucent membrane stretched between them—acting like snowshoes in the sand.
Gunshots turned her attention forward again. From the top of the dune, which led back to the town’s border, she could see Frost standing on the pavement’s end, firing her weapon at a second large form rising out of the sand. On the ground behind Frost was Monty, once again clutching his girls. Dodge and Winslow were bent over the trunk of her squad car. She knew what was in there, and she willed them to hurry.
Rule charged down the dune toward the newly emerging creature. Not because she wanted to attack the thing, but because she had no choice. There was already another monster at her back, and the distant church bell was now sounding out a near constant chime. The air around the town had begun to waver as well.
She knew what it meant. Whatever brought them to this Godforsaken place was about to happen again, and if she didn’t make it back in time, she’d be left here to die.
Running down the hill was faster, but less controlled. She fought against gravity and the slipping sand to run at an angle, taking herself to the side of the still emerging body, not just to avoid it, but to give Frost a clear shot.
“Behind you!” Frost shouted, adjusting her aim. Three shots sizzled past Rule, each pinging off something metal. Her pursuer was right behind her again. Not knowing what else to do, Rule stopped hard, threw herself down and crouched into a tight ball.
The thing’s long leg struck her just half a second later, but it hadn’t kicked her. It careened into her. Its double-jointed knee bent backwards, and the monster pitched forward. With a grunt Rule recognized as surprise, the monster fell. Its fingers lost hold of the giant sword as its arms swung forward. The massive blade arced through the air toward Frost, but she saw it coming and ducked. Just as Dodge and Winslow closed the trunk, the black sword impaled the hood of her patrol car, no doubt destroying the engine.
The giant slammed into the sand and slid several feet before coming to a stop. Seeing the thing laid out like that gave Rule some hope. They weren’t perfect hunters. They made mistakes.
But there were two of them now. She saw the second reaching back for its big sword as she ran right over the body of the first. As it pushed up from the sand, she leapt from its head, using the creature’s upward momentum to give her a boost. As she soared toward Refuge, something snagged her ankle. She jolted to a stop and hit the sand hard. A crushing weight began squeezing her ankle. She rolled and looked back. The fallen monster had her leg in its powerful hand.
She fired the remaining rounds in her gun, but the thing didn’t even flinch. Nor did it move. But the other monster did. It stepped toward her, raising its giant sword up, planning to execute her right here in the sand. She dropped her side arm, drew her taser and fired. The prongs attached to the loose fabric covering the thing, but found no flesh beneath. Useless.
Gunfire erupted from the road. Frost had reloaded her weapon. Dodge held a pump action shotgun from her trunk. And Winslow had found her .45 ACP handgun, which had significant stopping power. But the hail of lead did nothing to stop the creature. It was oblivious.
She looked to Frost in what would be her last moment, hoping to communicate a message with her eyes, but the visual distortion surrounding the town now made it hard to see her. But Rule could still hear the others shouting, and then a car horn, honking a warning.
The gun fire ceased.
The blade came down.
A streak of silver flew out of the wavering air and struck the swinging creature before its blade could complete its path through the air. The sword fell away, and the monster was pinned beneath the front end of Griffin’s Ford Fusion.
The driver’s side door was flung open, and Griffin emerged. If he was shocked by the desert and the giant monsters it contained, he did a good job of hiding it. He leapt over the car’s hood, drew his side arm and aimed it at her leg. He fired just once and the pressure on her ankle disappeared. He’d shot the thing’s exposed hand. A shriek of pain exploded into the air, so loud that she couldn’t hear the constant ringing of the church bell for a moment.
“Hurry!” Frost shouted from the other side of the visual distortion. Her voice sounded wrong, too, like she was shouting through a window fan.
Rule got to her feet and shoved Griffin toward town. She chased after him, glancing to the side as the pinned giant began hefting the car up like a power lifter.
She looked forward as a pulse of light shimmered through the distortion. She shoved Griffin forward. He disappeared through the now flashing wall of light. She dove through behind him, her hand still on his back, just as the church bell stopped ringing.
Chapter 18
I ate the pudding too fast, Avalon thought, sidling up next to the metal barrel. Her stomach was roiling, but after a few minutes of waiting for the pudding, water and pills to return back to the world, she realized the nausea wasn’t physical. It was emotional.
She still felt like shit, but her mind had returned, and along with it came the memory that she’d returned to her hometown and father for help. She’d hit rock bottom out in California. Did and saw things she would never forget. Four days ago, she’d seen a friend die from an overdose. A dead body, it turned out, was what it took for her to break and run for home.
Right now she wanted her father more than the Oxy, and that said a lot. If anyone could pull her out of the darkness, it was him. He was a rock. Maybe not after mom died, but he just needed time. So did she, but instead of dealing with the pain, she had hidden from it. Cloaked herself in a fog of mental smoke so thick she barely knew the world existed.
Despite her thoughts beginning to clear, the world around her was going insane. She knew it was night. She had a vague memory of the setting sun. And Radar had no reason to lie about the time. But the sun was definitely rising. The purple light filling the back room was growing brighter by the minute. She would have thought she was still tripping if Radar hadn’t also seen the light.
And then there was the church bell. Who was ringing it at night? It felt so loud in her throbbing head. She just wanted it to stop, but the clanging was repeating faster and faster.
She felt a rumble beneath her. She’d grown accustomed to earthquakes in Los Angles. They were more common than most people realized. But they weren’t supposed to happen in New Hampshire.
She was about to shout to Radar, ask what was going on, but then Lisa screamed. The shrill cry made Avalon wince, but the pain she felt was quickly replaced by concern. The scream sounded familiar.
She heard her own voice in her head, high pitched and sharp, screaming at the sight of her friend, naked and dead in the tub. It was a scream o
f abject horror.
A vibration rattled through the walls, coupled with the sound of breaking glass. A shriek followed next, but it wasn’t Lisa. It was too loud and too...primal…to even be human.
“What the...”
Shouting followed. Radar’s voice. Afraid, but commanding.
Another impact.
Another shriek.
“Radar!” she shouted. “What’s happening?” Her own booming voice stabbed her head with pain, but she ignored it as a flood of adrenaline entered her bloodstream. The natural drug tricked her body into thinking it was getting high, and she felt some of the withdrawal effects slip away. They’d be back, she knew, but for now, she felt almost normal again.
The room shook once more, and the sound of breaking glass filled the back room loudly this time, as Radar flung the door open. Lisa ran in first. She was a mess. Whimpering. Shaking with fear. Radar wasn’t much better, but he was still acting. Still with it. Whatever was outside that door, presumably inside the office, terrified them both.
“Is it a bear?” she asked, but she knew it wasn’t. Bears don’t shriek. “A mountain lion?” There hadn’t been mountain lions in New England for a long time, but she thought she remembered a few reported sightings in the years before she left. And the shriek did have a kind of cat-like quality.
But Radar just shook his head and produced a set of keys in his nervous hands. He was going to let her out. The thing in the office was making them abandon the police station.
“Thanks for not leaving,” Avalon said.
“Hurry,” Lisa urged. Her legs shook in time with her hands. Her eyes were red and watery. She looked like an addict. Looked like Avalon.
A shriek from the front office made all of them jump.
“That’s not a mountain lion, is it?” Avalon said, growing still, listening to the creature rampage through the office, the sound of its movement partially drowned out by the church bell, which rang at what seemed like an impossible speed.
The light in the room had gone from purple to red, wavering from dark to light like they were inside a giant lava lamp.
“It’s happening again,” Lisa said.
Radar ignored her, focusing on the key ring, trying one key at a time on the cell lock.
“What’s happening?” Avalon asked, feeling like she’d lost her mind and partially believing that this was all a withdrawal-induced hallucination.
“The...the shift,” Lisa said. “When everything changed.”
Avalon had no idea what Lisa was talking about, but Radar found the key, twisted the lock and slid the door open. Avalon sprang for the door, but was knocked back. She stumbled and wound up sitting on the cot. A complaint formed on the tip of her tongue, but made it no further.
Radar hadn’t been setting her free.
He and Lisa were now inside the cell. He slid the door closed, reached through the bars, twisted the key in the lock and then retreated to the back of the cell with the keys. He shrank into the back corner with Lisa, his arms wrapped protectively around her.
The rampage continued in the front office. Avalon spun on the huddling pair and shouted. “What the fuck is out there?” The words came out more forceful than she meant, but her imagination was conjuring nightmares similar to her father’s dark surrealist paintings.
Radar looked up, shaking his head back and forth. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
His head continued shaking. “It’s not...it’s not...”
“What?” she shouted.
“It’s not from this planet.” The words shot from his mouth rapid fire, like it was the only way he could bring himself to say it.
“Like...alien?” Avalon felt her fear abate just a little. This had to be a hallucination. And if that was the case, it was one of the most vivid she’d ever experienced.
“Yes,” Radar said, now speaking confidently. “It’s alien. Has to be.”
Avalon smirked. “Are you guys screwing with me? Is someone out there making all this noise and shining lights in the windows to teach me a lesson about drugs?”
“What?” Radar said, like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever head. She’d seen Radar in a school play once, before she skipped town. He was young, but he was such a bad actor, she didn’t think it was possible for him to pull off the range of emotions she was seeing.
This was for real.
They were terrified of something otherworldly tearing apart the police station.
Shit.
The door to the back room shook from an impact, bending inward in a way that left no doubt the next strike would knock it free from its hinges.
“Get down!” Lisa implored.
“Hide!” Radar said.
Hide? Avalon looked around the cell. There was no place to hide. Then she saw the pillows and blankets. A person might recognize the abstract shape of three people hiding beneath a blanket, but an animal might not make any sense of it. She tore the blanket off the cot, sat in the corner beside Radar and tossed the blanket over all three of them.
“Stay still,” she urged. “Stay quiet.”
Their silence meant they’d heard her requests, but none of them could fully squelch the tremors of fear twitching their muscles.
Avalon found a small hole in the blank and peeked through. Just as she spotted it, the door exploded inward, slamming hard against the cell bars. The monster came next, and it was so unexpected and vile that she nearly screamed. Radar must have sensed it because he grabbed her arm and squeezed.
She worked hard at controlling her breathing. It was shaky and loud, but she didn’t think the creature could hear her over the now constant clang of the church bell. It was just one long and very loud tone. The red light shifting through the room became more violent. Almost urgent. And it gave the beast the look of something that emerged straight from the depths of hell.
Its vertical mouth flapped open and closed, testing the air. Was it smelling? The yellow eyes atop its lobster tail of a neck—or maybe head, it was hard to tell—swiveled toward her and came together, pressing against each other so hard that the spheres became ovals.
It can see me, she thought. It sees my eye! But she remained motionless. It still might not have realized she was edible.
It pushed through the room, sliding up against the cell bars. It spread open its bat-like wings and clung to the cell, which darkened beneath the living shroud. Lisa let out a squeak of fright. The yellow eyes swiveled toward her and then returned to Avalon’s eye, peering through the hole. Its head rotated and slipped through the bars.
Avalon tensed. “It knows we’re here,” she whispered. “But it can’t reach us.”
As soon as she spoke the words, the beast decided to prove her wrong. Rather than try to smash its way through the solid metal bars, the thing’s neck extended, one segment at a time, stretching the long jaws even larger. With the elasticity of an anaconda’s belly, it reached for them.
“I was wrong,” Avalon said quickly. “It can reach us.”
Lisa let out another squeak, diverting its attention for just a moment.
“We’re going to have to fight it,” Avalon declared.
“How?” Radar asked.
“I don’t know,” Avalon admitted. “Just beat the shit out of it with anything you can find, with your fist. Aim for its fucking eyes.”
She saw him nod. Lisa would be sitting the fight out.
“Ready?” Avalon asked. “On three. One. Two. Three!”
Avalon flung the blanket up and out. It fell atop the creature’s head, blinding it. It reacted violently, throwing its head up, smashing the ceiling. Then it came down and thrashed side to side. Before Avalon or Radar could land a blow, they were struck by the flailing beast and flung against opposite ends of the cell.
Avalon’s head throbbed with pain. Warm liquid ran over her shoulder. She pushed herself up, half on the cot. The creature shook the blanket free, locked on Radar and lunged for the kill.
Radar, Lisa and Avalon screamed in unison.
A shotgun blast drowned out their voices. It was followed by a loud shriek that was ended by a second explosion. The sound was deafening inside the concrete space, but when the monster fell limp, its head deflating and shrinking back in on itself, Avalon didn’t care about the pain. They’d been saved.
“You okay in there?” came the deep ragged voice of a man who’d spent the better part of the past thirty years with a cigarette dangling from his lips. The words also came out with the slow slur of someone who’d been drinking. A lot.
Avalon didn’t recognize the voice of their rescuer, but Radar did. He stood to his feet, looking just as afraid as he had when the monster was trying to eat him. “Dad?”
The giant bird-bat-thing was yanked away from the cell. It fell in a still deflating heap. The room filled with the scent of its warm insides and exposed guts. Charley Wilson, a rough looking man wearing dirty jeans and a white ‘wife-beater’ tank top stepped over the carcass.
“Radar?” Charley rubbed a hand through his already messy hair and squinted. He lowered the shotgun, and the weight of it nearly pulled him to the floor. “Chu’ doing in jail, boy?”
Radar said nothing. Just stared at the floor.
“You stole something, you gonna have to answer to—”
“Leave him alone,” Lisa said. The words were quiet, but packed a punch.
Charley swiveled his head around, eyes widening for a moment, seeing Lisa and Avalon for the first time. “Look at you boy, locked up with a pair of sluts.” A lopsided grin pulled at one side of his face, revealing a missing tooth.
Avalon realized that Charley might pose a bigger threat than the monster he’d killed. If he decided to get violent with that shotgun, there was nothing they could do about it. She stood, trying to hide her fear, and approached the bars where he stood. He eyed her up and down. In his drunken state, he didn’t recognize her as the girl who’d grown up across the street. Or maybe he did and didn’t care. Didn’t matter. She gave him a look no man could turn from.