by Gina Ranalli
“Something either completely new or just never discovered before, and I’m more apt to go with the former because how could something like this have remained hidden? And if it had, why did it choose to emerge now? “When Collie made no reply, she went on. “And until we know more, I’m wondering if all of us who have contact with it should be quarantined.”
“Oh, no. Definitely not. We’re perfectly fine and it won’t do anyone any good if the sheriff, deputy, three other officers, the M.E. and a bunch of E.M.T.s are locked up. We need to be able to help, all of us.”
“The CDC probably won’t see it that way.”
“Who said anything about the CDC?”
“I’ll have to call them, Steven. We have no idea what we’re dealing with.”
He saw in her eyes there would be no talking her out of it. He said, “Please, Andrea, just give us a little more time before you start calling in the big guns. This is my town, my people. My responsibility.”
“I understand, but we could be dealing with a very serious health hazard. Possibly fatal and perhaps even contagious. We just don’t know at this point.”
“Another couple hours,” he pleaded. “You finish the autopsy and then we’ll talk about this again. Please?”
There was a long pause where the doctor didn’t answer. Collie thought for sure he was fighting a battle he couldn’t win, but then she said, “I wish I could take this thing apart from about twenty feet away.”
“Just be careful. Don’t get any of that dust on you.”
She nodded grimly. “If my hands melt off, Collie, you can be sure I’ll find some other way to kick your butt.”
He smiled weakly. “Trust me, I’ll be kicking my own butt and then some.”
Before he left, he told her to stay in touch and let him know anything she discovered about the creature, no matter how small.
Back in his car, he noticed the eastern horizon was beginning to blush a pale pink and he prayed the new day would bring answers and an end to this horrific night.
Chapter 15
Regan was beginning to feel like a complete fool for dragging Paul into the woods for what was turning out to be no reason at all.
Her theory about the things hiding in the forest surrounding Lockwood apparently had no basis in reality. The most they had come across were a few squirrels, a dozen of birds, and plenty of insects. No bat-like ETs, that was for sure.
Paul, for his part, was being a relatively good sport about the whole thing once he’d stopped his initial complaining.
“I don’t understand,” she said as she stepped over a moss-covered log. “They should be out here. I mean, where else would they hide?”
“Maybe they just came and went again,” Paul suggested through a yawn. “Like, they were sightseeing, bought a postcard, maybe a T-shirt, and then went on their merry way.”
His yawn made her yawn as well. “Well, I guess you were right. This was a pretty lame idea.”
She felt embarrassed and guilty she had dragged him along on this ridiculous journey, but loved him even more for putting up with her silly shenanigans. She knew she’d been unreasonable, thinking only of getting a photo or two to make her famous instead of being the practical, rational person she liked to think she was.
“Let’s head back,” she said. “I’m starving and there’s obviously nothing out here.”
They reversed direction, but as the forest began to brighten around them, Regan suspected they might be going the wrong way.
“Is this the right direction? Everything looks different for some reason.”
“Babe, we’ve been walking in pretty much a straight line the entire way. We’re good.”
She offered him a smile as they stepped around tree roots and stones. “Thanks for coming out here with me, Paul. I know I was a little crazy for thinking—”
“A little?” he said and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. “You don’t have to thank me. Just give me a free pass the next time you feel the need to drag me out to see a chick flick, okay?”
Regan laughed. “Deal.”
They walked on for another few minutes before she decided to snap some photos anyway. It would be dumb to waste this trek and get absolutely nothing out of it. The scenery in the growing dawn was quite spectacular, so she took her camera out of her bag and began photographing whatever caught her fancy. A woodpecker they heard before they saw; Paul posing atop a particularly large boulder; and a mossy tree that had to be close to four hundred years old given its height and girth.
When they passed through a particularly overgrown area of the forest, she started to use the flash feature on her camera, as the tall treetops blocked out nearly all the morning light and turned the woods back into night again.
“I don’t remember coming this way before,” she said, gazing at their surroundings through a lens.
Paul glanced around. “We’re still going in the right direction, but it was dark then and it’s dark now, so there’s probably nothing that would seem very familiar anyway.”
Regan felt a tiny twinge of worry, but dismissed it as fatigue. “Maybe you should turn the flashlight back on.”
He did and they continued on, Regan occasionally stopping for a moment to snap a photo. She was busy focusing on an especially beautiful patch of wildflowers, made even more gorgeous by the immediate darkness, when a soft scratching sound caught her attention.
She lowered the camera. “What was that?”
Paul shrugged, shining the light upwards into the treetops. “Probably a—”
He was unable to finish his sentence and Regan followed the flashlight beam with her gaze.
Two hundred feet above them, hanging from the boughs of the ancient trees, were what had to be dozens of cocoons. Maybe more.
“Wow,” Regan whispered in total awe.
Paul’s reaction was much more colorful and he continued to swing the flashlight around. “Looks like some of them might be empty,” he said. “See how they’re ripped open on the bottom?”
“Yep.” As soon as she had recovered from her surprise, she began prepping her best camera for action. “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen! Can you believe it? Not a wasted trip after all.”
“Uh huh.” Paul started to say something else, then cursed again instead. “Regan!” he hissed, touching her arm. “Check that out.”
Again she followed the flashlight’s beam and her breath caught in her throat.
Not quite as high as the cocoons themselves, one of the creatures perched on the side of a tree trunk, unmoving, barely visible, its body black against the dark tree, round-edged wings slightly spread away from its torso.
From this angle, it was completely obvious what they were looking at: an extraordinarily large moth. With the light on its back, Regan even made out some sort of pattern on the wings, though its detail was hard to distinguish due to the pattern itself also being dark. Most likely a shade of brown, Regan guessed.
“This is messed up,” Paul said.
“It’s perfect,” she replied, using her camera to zoom in as much as possible on the man-sized creature and clicking off sixteen shots in a matter of seconds. She took pictures of many of the cocoons as well and soon disappeared into the artistic zone she often found herself in when she was engrossed in her work. It was as if the rest of the world ceased to exist.
Her trance shattered abruptly when Paul, shouted, “Get ready, baby!”
She jumped and turned just in time to see him waving the flashlight wildly around the moth creature. “Wake up, ET!” he shouted gleefully.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
“Getting you a Pulitzer Prize. Get a few shots of that thing flying and you’re golden for life.”
“Paul, wait—”
Whether it was the wildly waving light or Paul’s consistent yelling, Regan didn’t know, but suddenly the woods around them came to life.
She counted at least four creatures, including the first one, that were abr
uptly airborne, diving towards the ground at their target.
Paul.
Before she even had time to react, the things were on him and Paul’s joyous shouts turned to screams of agony. The entire scene turned into a writhing ball of black and red and, shocked, she wasted several precious seconds staring in disbelief.
Heart quickly racing to life, survival instinct kicked in along with adrenaline-charged bravery. She dropped her camera and scanned the ground for something to use as a weapon. She spotted a rock a little larger than her fist. It would have to do. She snatched it up and raced to where Paul was being slaughtered—she already knew he was going to die, she could tell by his weakening screams—and she fell to her knees and began to bash the stone against the creatures’ heads or any other part she could connect with.
She was stunned to discover the creatures appeared to be made of something intensely brittle—their bone structure, if they even had one—crunched beneath the weight of the stone and she felt confident she would somehow win this battle and save herself, if not Paul.
The moth creatures were utterly silent in their attack and silent, too, when they were injured. It was as if they had no mouths with which to make a noise.
One of the creatures slashed a gouge across her back and she screamed loud enough to wake the dead, rolling over onto her back in an attempt to defend herself.
The scream seemed to further enrage them, but Regan refused to give up. She held onto the stone with all of her strength and bashed it against anything that came at her. Tears gushed forth as the realization hit her she might die in these dark woods, daylight and civilization so close.
If it had not been for the fragile construction of the creatures, she was sure she would have lost the battle, but when she was finally able to scramble to her feet, holding the stone at shoulder height, she noticed none of them fought anymore. They lay in a crumpled heap, two of them not moving at all, while the other two flapped their arms, legs and wings slowly, uselessly.
She watched in terrified amazement as their glowing orange eyes grew dim and dimmer until they extinguished completely.
She wanted to collapse with relief and grief, trying not to look at Paul’s ravaged body—which had been reduced to red, raw meat—but she didn’t have the luxury of dropping to the ground and sobbing in pain and anguish.
She glanced around, praying she would not encounter any more of the creatures, and began moving in what she hoped was the right direction back to her car and town.
Covered in gashes that burned like fire, she slowly became aware she was bleeding quite badly from half a dozen wounds, at least. She tried to increase her pace, limping, but an odd warm tingling sensation began in her hands. At first she assumed it was from the tension of holding the stone so tight, but then it spread to both hands and she squinted in the dark to examine them.
They were both black with what appeared to be soot; both her cheeks, forehead and chin began to tingle as well.
The tingle quickly became a burning sensation, which in turn became something more excruciating than any pain she could have imagined. Stabs of sharp heat seared her skin.
She watched in horror as her hands began to melt, bubbling black blisters that quickly burst like tiny volcanoes of blood only to bubble black again.
Dropping the stone, everything else forgotten, Regan collapsed to the ground. Whatever was happening to her hands, she felt it also in her face. Soon, she was blinded by burning black goo rolling down her forehead and into her eyes.
She wanted to scream, but could only muster a very faint gurgling sound before the blackness took her mind as well as her body.
Chapter 16
After tossing and turning for too many hours, Jason gave up on trying to sleep and jumped on his computer for a while. He had a lot of time to kill before Chuck came over and he took him to see that thing in the woods.
Once he’d checked his email and various social networking sites, he went back to browsing the web, searching for some indication of what the heck that cocoon thing could really be.
The results were the same as he’d turned up last night. The only thing he could find about giant cocoons were giant moths, and that was pretty much the lamest thing he could imagine. Any moth that had come out of that thing would have to be so incredibly massive that it would already be well-documented and he would easily be able to dig up something about it.
Flipping his hair out of his eyes, he rubbed his chin and thought about what else he could search for. A couple minutes later, with no answers forthcoming, he gave up and went to take a shower.
When he finished drying off, he took nearly half an hour styling his hair and applying black eye-liner. He checked himself out in the mirror and smiled at how his face and head looked, but the rest of his body needed work. He was too thin by far and he wondered if he should start going to the gym to bulk up. Maybe then, if he got bigger, the kids at school would think twice about messing with him so much.
Back in his room, he dressed in his usual black clothes and played his guitar for a while. Eventually, he heard movement and conversation happening downstairs, but decided to give it a few more minutes before joining his parents. Until they had their coffee, neither one of them were much fun to be around—even less than usual.
When he heard the monotonous drone of the television, he put his guitar away and ventured downstairs.
Both his parents sat on the sofa, coffee cups in hand, watching the news.
Jason frowned, suspicious. Since when did they drink coffee and watch TV together? They were hardly ever in the same room at the same time, which made this a weird day right off the bat.
Standing in the doorway, Jason said, “What’s up, guys?”
His mother shushed him, her eyes glued to the screen. Jason looked at the TV and saw a female reporter standing with a group of people who seemed pretty excited about something.
The reported shoved the mic she held under the nose of an elderly woman and said, “You actually witnessed the creature yourself?”
The old woman cackled and replied, “I don’t know what I saw, but it was something all right. Ran right across the Sender’s lawn and off in that direction.” She pointed with a gnarled finger before continuing. “Then, once the sheriff and deputy came, all Hell broke loose. They were carrying out Mr. Sender in one of those body bags like you see on TV and then, BAM, that thing flew right out of the sky and started beating on the top of the ambulance. It was the darndest thing I ever seen. Then, before you could get a handle on what was happening, the sheriff and others started shooting at the thing and it went right for that handsome young officer. Tore his face clean off, practically. I do hope that boy is okay, bless his soul.”
The reporter nodded, an extremely concerned expression on her face, before moving on to the next witness and basically getting the same story.
Jason blinked, standing still, his pulse quickening. He interrupted what was on TV to ask his parents, “What are they talking about? What creature?”
But, he knew the answer, of course, and once his mom described the moth-like creature, repeating what one of the witnesses had relayed, Jason stepped into the living room and sank into an armchair.
Now, people would believe him, probably. They wouldn’t dismiss what he said as the paranoid ramblings of a stoner kid with an unhappy family life who desperately wanted attention.
Still, he hesitated to say anything to his parents. He didn’t know why. He was pondering this when his cell burst into a heavy metal song, causing both his parents to glare at him.
He pulled the phone from his pocket, saw it was Chuck calling, and left the living room, going back upstairs where he’d have some privacy.
“Yo, bro,” he said into the phone.
“Dude, have you seen the news?”
“Yeah. Was just watching. Crazy, right?”
“Everyone’s freaking out over here. My older brother keeps saying it’s the beginning of the apocalypse, like in Independence Day
.”
Jason laughed. “Your brother’s a tool.”
“I know, but still. Totally weird stuff going down and I bet it has something to do with that thing you saw.”
“Oh, I know it does,” Jason replied matter-of-factly.
“Good thing you jetted out of the woods when you did, man. You could be toast right now.”
Jason paused, again looking out his window at the woods bordering the backyard. There was nothing to see. Just trees and deepening darkness. He said, “You still want to come over? Go check it out?”
“Are you nuts? That thing almost killed a cop after it had been shot a few billion times.”
Stifling a chuckle, Jason said, “I don’t think it was a few billion times, dude. Lots of things can get shot and keep fighting. People and animals both.”
“You think it’s an animal?” Chuck asked. “On the news the folks who saw it say it was more like a man. With wings, dude. Name one animal that fits that description.”
Oddly, the only thing that came to Jason’s mind were superheroes. “Batman has wings,” he muttered, already knowing it was ridiculous.
“Dude. He does not.”
Jason could sense Chuck rolling his eyes. He quickly went on, “Okay, so do you want to check it out or not?”
“I . . . I don’t know. Seems pretty risky. Like, maybe we should bring a gun or something.”
“I don’t have a gun, man. Do you?”
“Uh . . . no.”
“Well, then that’s a stupid idea.”
There was a long pause before Chuck asked, “You didn’t tell your parents, did you?”
“Nope. Figured they’d think I was full of it last night, but today . . . I don’t know. I guess I think they’ll probably want to keep me locked up until whatever this thing is blows over if they know that cocoon is practically in their backyard.”
“Would you blame them? Seriously, man. I think it’s a bad idea to go messing around in there.”
“You don’t have to,” Jason said. “I can go myself.”
“But what for? You already saw the thing. And besides, what if by not telling anyone, you’re, like . . . what do they call it? Hindering a police investigation?”