The Grip

by Griffin Hayes

  The floor at his feet was now slick with blood. He shuffled over to the table, careful not to slip on any of it and reached for a strange-looking bust. Lifting it in the air, he paused for a moment, admiring it, and then brought it arcing down onto his own face, crushing the bridge of his nose, releasing a fan of blood and bone. The bust rose and fell, again and again, until there was nothing recognizable of the man left. A stranger was destroying himself before Lysander’s very eyes. He was utterly disgusted by the spectacle before him. But Lysander couldn’t turn away.

  There was a crater now where the man’s forehead once was. Shrieking, the man staggered and then collapsed to his knees. It was finally over, Lysander hoped, but he was wrong. The thin man’s fingers crawled up his face to where he could look at them and plunged them into the soft tissue between his eyeball and what remained of his nose. There was a sound like boiled eggs being plucked from their shell. He pulled his hands free and Lysander could see he was holding something in each hand. They were jiggling in his grasp. He had plucked out his own eyes, Lysander realized with horror. Dangling down the man’s blood-stained forearms like sinewy bits of rope were his optic nerves. At last, he collapsed and lay still.

  Lysander suddenly felt an intense chill grip him. A gray mist began forming on the floor. The ghost, the creature, whatever the hell it was, was leaving the thin man’s corpse and moving purposely toward the other form lying prostrate on the floor. They united and the fingers of the shadow’s left hand began to do a subtle dance. The movement went up to his arm, then to his head. He propped himself up on his shoulder, admiring his work. Suddenly, the shadow’s head snapped in Lysander’s direction. His head perked up and for a moment it seemed as though he was sniffing the air. Sniffing for a scent he had found floating past him in the breeze.

  Invisible icy tentacles began snaking out, probing blindly like something used to dark and damp places.

  Lysander began to back away, but the tentacles were closing in.

  Just then he felt another presence, a sound. He tried listening in spite of his gnawing fear. It sounded like a wolf, snarling low, vicious and threatening.

  The tentacles approached and the growling turned to vicious snapping. Lysander swore he could hear the sound of jaws clamping shut, gnashing at dead air.

  Someone was calling his name. Lysander… Lysander… Lysander. Sudden movement. Then blackness and pain. The pain racked his whole body with such intensity he couldn’t remember when he ever felt anything so real. His eyes opened to a dim room. Dim was good. Anything was better than orange. Later he would remember only flashes.

  Samantha was above him, talking to him softly.

  Malice available for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Sony, Apple.

  To contact Griffin Hayes or to read samples of his other work, visit his blog:

  http://griffin-hayes.blogspot.com/

  An excerpt from Bird of Prey by Griffin Hayes.

  Tommy ‘the tank’ Hodgkins skidded his Firebird into Lucky Lonie’s parking lot going about twenty miles faster than he really should have been. The Bird’s tires locked in a high c before they kicked up a thick rubbery cloud of smoke.

  Buck Sanders was pacing out in front of Lonie’s, oblivious to the fact that Tommy nearly sent him careening over the hood, off the windshield and into a thicket of Yellow Cedar.

  A shaft of sunlight had come down through the trees, illuminating Buck like a spotlight. On the door, Tommy could see the sign to the bar was flipped to CLOSED. Buck’s balding head was slick with sweat. On his skull, three mosquitoes were sucking away merrily. A surprising sight coming from a man who took such immense pleasure in squashing those ‘little bastards’ dead whenever he could.

  Buck came to his open window.

  “So where is this thing?” Tommy asked.

  “Stay right there, we’re going to Keisel’s.”

  There was a blood stained hanky wrapped around Buck’s left hand.

  “The Keisel steel factory?” Tommy asked. “What on earth for? It’s abandoned.”

  Buck threw him a look that people do when they’re not in the mood to repeat themselves and crossed to the passenger side door and climbed inside, mosquitoes and all.

  “Take the A3,” Buck began, pulling a hand across his forehead and wiping it on the leg of his jeans. “It’s quicker. Get off just before Harmond Avenue and hang three rights. Steel Works is a big bitch, can’t miss her.”

  Tommy pulled out and headed for the A3.

  “That where you left it?” Tommy finally inquired when they hit the interstate. He could practically see the whirlwind of thoughts tussling around inside Buck’s head. Buck nodded absently.

  “Buck, I gotta ask. What in hell’s name were you doing over there in the first place?”

  “The leak was getting real bad…”

  “Huh?”

  “I was gone to get siding to fix the leak in the roof.”

  Lonie’s was certainly no Taj Mahal; this Tommy knew without a doubt, but metal siding, ripped from an abandoned steel factory? The place was already on its way to looking like something out of a 1930’s shanty town, it sure as hell didn’t need any help.

  “Buck, I’ve never seen you like this in all the time I’ve known you.”

  Buck looked at him and then fell into a moody silence, his face the color of raw chicken. Something had the old man scared bad.

  When Tommy wasn’t tending bar at Lonie’s, he and Buck were usually out hunting or dreaming up quick and easy ways to strike it rich. But in all that time the strangest thing they ever came across was a five legged deer: nothing any self-respecting cryptozoologist would even blink twice at. And even the deer they had let amble back into the thick brush that day, partly because, as Buck had put it, ‘when mother nature fucks up that bad, it’s best to leave the poor thing be; she’ll have a hard enough time getting on without two yahoos trying to blast it to bits.’

  The sudden sound of Buck’s voice startled Tommy. “First time I seen the thing, I didn’t think much of it. Looked to me like one of them birds… like an eagle. Wingspan eight, maybe nine feet. And it was circlin’ overhead, right above me, the way eagles tend to when they’re lookin’ for somethin’ to eat.”

  “No shortage of rats at Keisel’s,” Tommy said, “that’s for sure.”

  Buck glared at him with frightening intensity. “Damn right! And that’s when it hit me that something was wrong. Where the heck were the other birds? I mean, I can’t remember ever seeing less than a dozen bald eagles flyin’ over the steel works.”

  Tommy exited the A3 and made a right.

  “At the time,” Buck said, “I tried not to give it too much thought. Jesus, I’m no small man, Tommy.” Buck’s forearms were flexing almost on queue, the muscles in his arms bunching up like taught cords. “There’s not a lot of worrying needs to be done when a bird looks like its eyeing me for dinner. Matter of fact, at the time I was sure it was lookin’ for something else, like some dumb squirrel that had got its head stuck in a hole somewhere.

  “So I got my crowbar with me and I’m jimmying a nice piece of paneling off one of those small depot sheds when my hand slips and I slice a strip the size of Bethany Elroy’s ass crack.” Buck held the outer edge of his left hand in the air. The blood-stained hanky fluttered into his lap. It looked to Tommy like a shrapnel wound from one of those fancy Hollywood war movies: a jagged and meaty gash dripping red. But there was something else there as well. Something that made Tommy’s mouth go dry. Stitched in a crescent pattern on the back of Buck’s hand and across his palm was a set of teeth marks. At least they looked like teeth marks, but not from any set of jaws Tommy had ever seen. Hundreds of tiny pinpricks set neatly in a curved line.

  Tommy’s attention snapped back to the road and he realized with a jolt of panic he had wandered over into the oncoming lane. The tires squealed as he veered back. “Buck, your hand!”

  Buck studied his hand, turning it over in his lap as though he were trying on a pair of expensive glo
ves. “It was right after I sliced her open that I heard this scream, high pitched like a woman’s scream, but from far away and when I looked up that thing was diving down at me, wings folded. Its eyes blazing. Two blood red chili peppers is what they looked like. There was something cold about them. Something prehistoric.” Buck drew a fresh hanky out of his back pocket and held it against the wound. “It was the blood, Tommy. I didn’t realize at the time, but it was the blood that it smelled.”

  “Like a shark,” Tommy said, feeling suddenly not so sure about what he was getting himself into.

  “Truth be told, I wanted to run. I won’t bullshit you, Tommy. We’ve known each other too long for that. I wanted to run so bad I could feel my legs twitching under me, but it felt like one of those dreams, where your legs are pumping like hell but you’re not going anywhere. I’m telling you this, Tommy, cause I trust you’ll never breath a goddamn word of it so long as you live. But facts are facts and the fact is, I nearly crapped in my pants. Happened so fast too, only real memory I have is putting my arm into the air, like for protection. And then it slammed into me, latching onto my arm, sending me ass backwards into the dirt.” Buck looked down at his hand.

  “Those fingers it had were long and thin with pointed claws and its feet were just the same, like one of those orangutans. And all over its body were wispy grey feathers… and the smell. God awful. Like when they found Jed Peterson in his favorite recliner, dead nearly a month. Maggots crawling all over his face.”

  Tommy could feel Buck’s eyes burrowing into him. “But it was the mouth that I remember most…”

  Tommy made another right and in the distance he could see the very tip of the abandoned Keisel steel factory, looming above the tree tops. His eyes made a quick scan, but the sky above it was empty.

  Buck followed Tommy’s eyes and then fell back to his throbbing hand. “That’s when it bit me. And I’ll guarantee, you’ve never felt pain like that in your life. Like a thousand tetanus shots all at once. Its jaw latched on as if I was holding a piece of steak out to a vulture.

  “I screamed, Tommy. I’m not afraid to admit that. Maybe for the first time since I was a little pissant in diapers, I screamed and I wasn’t gonna stop until I felt the cold steel of that crowbar still in my other hand and I brought it down as hard as I could. I was aiming for the thing’s head you see, but you have to understand, it didn’t really have a head, not like you and I at least. Its head came out of its shoulders, almost like a moth. Hell, a lot like a moth. A giant moth with red eyes and two sets of hands.”

  Part II

  ‘Introductions All Around’

  The Keisel Steel Works’ main building looked like a red barn on steroids. It rose into the sky nearly two hundred feet. Six smoke stacks jutted from the roof in a neat line. Around this main building were a collection of hodgepodge structures, some of them large enough to park a fleet of Buick Eldorados, others no bigger than an outhouse, and yet everything here bore the unmistakable aura of decay. Seventy brutal Alaska winters have a nasty habit of doing that to a place. Tommy and Buck walked along a gravel path strewn with debris; bits of rusted piping, metal girders. There was even a porcelain toilet propped up against a wall, a healthy crack right down the middle.

  Buck raised the hand wrapped in the bloodied hanky and pointed straight ahead. In the distance Tommy could see the depot shed with a patch of side paneling that looked as though someone had been yanking at it. This was Buck’s handy work.

  “You’re sure it was dead, right?” Tommy asked, trying to ignore the squeak in his voice.

  “I can guarantee you I bashed its head in with a cinder block. Trust me, it’s deader’n a doornail.”

  A minute later they arrived at the shed. On a patch of yellowing grass was a cinderblock caked and crusted in blood, just like Buck had said. And on the metal siding was a thin red line that ran down one of the grooves. The place where Buck had cut himself. Again, just like he had said. But the creature was nowhere to be found.

  Tommy looked over at Buck. The stunned look on the old man’s face slowly twisted into alarm.

  “There’s no way it could have survived that…” Buck was mumbling as he scanned the ground for a trail of blood and found none. Neither did Tommy. He was about to suggest that they split up and search for where it might have disappeared to, when something far above them blocked out the sun. A cloud had just passed over. At least that was Tommy’s first thought, but deep down he knew that clouds don’t make a sound like the one he had just heard. Clouds don’t sound like industrial sized fans pushing at the air in great swoops. Both men looked up into the sky, blinking at the sun, and it was then, at nearly the same instant in time, that their jaws fell open.

  What had blocked out the light was no passing cloud, no Jumbo Jet flying far overhead, but the wing of something that defied logic. Tommy tried to speak, but his mouth felt like it had been filled with a bucket of hot sand. Beside him, Buck’s chapping lips formed a perfect O. And for a moment they stood at attention, watching as something inexplicable circled overhead.

  Tommy spoke first. “You seeing what I’m seeing? Wingspan’s gotta be nearly thirty feet. Oh God, Buck, what is that? What is that damned thing Buck? Buck, what in sweet he-”

  Buck grabbed the meat at the back of Tommy’s arm and squeezed as hard as he could. Tommy yanked free with a yelp and for another timeless second both men stood staring at each other, the same thought telegraphed on their faces: “Run!”

  Tommy looked down and like in slow motion saw the blood dripping from Buck’s hand. A small puddle had collected in the gravel by his feet. And a terrifying thought struck him with the force of a hurricane. He was thinking of the great white shark again, but no sooner had this thought begun to solidify than it was drowned out by the shriek—a nerve shattering sound—so loud it sent the hairs on the back of their respective necks straight up. When Tommy looked up again, the creature had already started to dive.

  Both men spun on their heels. The car couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away. But right now that felt like the longest hundred yards of their lives. They were two men who in all their collective years had never backed down from a single fight. Two men who could hold their own under any circumstance. Two men who were running with everything they had.

  • • •

  Tommy was the first to fall. He tripped over a rusted metal pipe and went sprawling along the gravel path, arms stretched out like Superman. The flapping behind him had become deafening. Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp!

  But he didn’t dare look back, especially when he saw the expression on Buck’s face up ahead as he glanced over his shoulder. The old man’s face had gone the color of sour milk. Tommy scrambled to his feet and it was about then that he felt the intense rush of air and the claws grasping for purchase. Something closed around his shoulder like a vice and lifted him up off the ground. Eddies of powerful wind ripped holes into the gravel path. Tommy threw back his head and when he saw the thing up close, the pain in his shoulder seemed to evaporate. Above him was a great coat of matted grey fur, whipping around in the wind, stinking something awful. Twigs and dried leaves covered its underbelly as though it had been scouring the forest floor when it smelled them coming. When it craned its head down, perhaps to see what prize it had won, its blood red slits found Tommy, and it fixed him with a glare that felt to Tommy like he had just met the devil himself. Then came the explosion of pain and with it the realization that if he let this thing carry him off, he was a goner. He reached for his shoulder and grasped one of the leathery talons buried into his flesh and bent it back until he heard the unmistakable sound of snapping bone. The creature’s grip loosened at once and Tommy fell nearly fifteen feet, arms and legs reeling madly. He landed with a thud on a patch of soft ground beside the path, the tumble enough to rattle every bone in his body. He rolled a handful of times before scrambling to his feet.

  Buck was the next to fall. He had been looking over his shoulder, watching as the creature w
ith the wispy grey fur and the pointed claws had swooped down and plucked Tommy up like an empty beer can. A big part of him had wanted to stop and help Tommy, but whatever aspect of his brain was now in control had pulled an emergency shutdown and refused to take orders. Tommy was five feet in the air when Buck went face first into the gravel. There was a searing bout of pain as his bloody hand was raked over the sharp stones. The hanky had been torn off on impact and now his wound was caked with bits of dirt and rubble.

  The object that had snagged Buck’s foot hadn’t been some rusted pipe or open toilet seat. It had been a human leg, sticking out from the bushes. The body was badly mangled, almost unrecognizable. Almost. But Buck knew right away who it was. Fast Eddy Fick. The hermit who lived in the woods over by Fay’s Crossing. Buck couldn’t tell from the face, of course, since that was little more than a bloody pulp, but he knew by the tan shredded winter coat and the billy boots. The same clothes Fast Eddy had probably worn everyday for the last fifteen years. The body lay face down, arms up over his head as though he had died trying to protect his face.

  Buck scrambled to his feet. Ahead of him was Tommy, free now from the creature’s grip, his legs pumping for the car like it was the all state finals. The right shoulder of his checkered shirt was torn and bloody.

  Buck looked skyward and saw the thing push off with its giant leathery wings. It rose into the air sharply and then barrel rolled like a WWI fighter plane; it was circling back for another go at them. Even from this distance, he could make out those two red eyes, the size of footballs, glaring down at him.

  Tommy was at the car when he turned around and saw it diving for Buck. There was forty yards between Buck and the car. And he could tell by the old man’s glistening face, he wasn’t going to make it. Tommy slid into the driver’s seat and fumbled in his pockets for the keys, only dimly aware of the pain in his shoulder. “Come on you whore! Where are you?” Left pocket… his trembling hand slipped in and found nothing. Right pocket… this time Tommy’s fingers hit a familiar piece of serrated metal. He pulled out the key and shoved it into the ignition, turning until his ears registered what had to be the most beautiful sound he had ever heard; the Firebird coughing to life. He leaned over to prop the passenger side door open and punched the accelerator.