by Brian Rowe
“They’ll be OK. We have to keep moving. Come on.”
They started climbing another hill. Brin turned to her right, sensing this was the spot from earlier that she had seen the mysterious figure by the frozen lake.
“What is it?” Chace said. “Do you see something over there?”
“No,” she said. “No. It’s nothing.”
“There’s not any wolves or bears or coyotes in this part of the country, are there?”
‘You’re asking me? I have no idea.”
“I mean, we’re safe out here, right?”
Brin chuckled to herself again, trying to stay positive in such an unfortunate situation. “Is the star quarterback scared?”
“I’m not scared.”
“It sounds like you are.”
Chace finally moved ahead of Brin, changing his pace from a leisurely walk to a jog as he climbed to the top of the hill. Brin followed behind him as fast as she could. The adrenaline kept her going. It would keep her going all the way to the freeway.
“Chace! Slow down!”
“What’s that up ahead?”
As they reached the top of the hill, Chace pointed forward at a sign in the distance.
“Yes,” Brin said. “I think that’s the three-mile sign. We’re almost to the paved road.”
“That means…”
“We’re three miles in. Thirteen more to go.”
“Thirteen? That’s not so bad.”
“We need to get to Bridgeport. That’s the only town near here. We’ll get help. We’ll get someone to save the others.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Chace said, sporting his first smile in the last hour.
“See? We made the right decision. We’re gonna get out of here.”
“Amen to that.” Chace started running.
“Where are you going?”
“I want to read the sign!”
She shook her head and refrained from running. She trudged through the snow, trying her best to stay positive.
Brin tried not to think about Sawyer and the van explosion. She knew in her heart that Sawyer wouldn’t make it through the night. She hadn’t thoroughly inspected his burnt body, but she knew he was a goner; his survival would take a miracle.
But then Brin wondered why Sawyer had lost control of the van in the first place.
There’s something not right about that town, she thought.
“I see the paved road!” Chace shouted up ahead. He hugged the Bodie sign like it was one of his many girlfriends.
“Be right there!”
Brin took a few more steps forward, then abruptly stopped. She felt it; she was sure of it. Someone, or something, brushed past her from behind.
“Hello?” she said.
“What are you waiting for?” Chace shouted.
“Hold on! I think I heard something!”
Brin set her hands on her sides. She tried to listen for another strange noise. Nothing. She figured the sound had been her imagination.
But then the figure passed by her again.
“Oh my God!” she screamed.
A tall figure appeared to her left, dressed all in black, a red glow emanating from the top of his trench coat. He started growling.
Brin blinked a few times. She couldn’t believe her eyes.
“Chace. There’s somebody here.”
He hadn’t noticed the figure. He was jumping and cheering up ahead, happy they had made it this far. “What’d you say? What’s the hold-up?”
“There’s a…”
“What?”
Brin looked down in terror, her mouth agape, as the ground below started shaking.
“Oh my God!” Chace shouted. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know! Oh my God! Hold on to that sign!”
“Is it an earthquake?”
“It can’t be!”
Brin turned back toward Chase. He had a death grip on the sign and was cowering on his knees, like he was three years old again, terrified by something his mom or dad couldn’t explain.
She could barely stand up, the ground shifting beneath her with no rhyme or reason. But she tried to run anyway.
“Stay there!” Brin shouted, running toward him.
“Trust me! I’m not going anywhere!”
The ground started caving in, and Chace started crying.
“Oh my God!” he shouted. “What’s going on?”
Brin was almost to the Bodie sign, maybe ten feet away, when she first noticed it: the ground caving in, a dark red light emanating from below, as if she and Chace were standing atop a thousand-year-old volcano primed for its big eruption.
“Chace! Hold on!”
“The ground!” he shouted. “It’s gonna… oh God… it’s gonna swallow us whole!”
Brin tried to make it to Chace, but she stopped; to run a step further would have been suicide. Brin looked down at the crumbling ground and started running back the way she came.
“Brin! Where are you going?”
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
“Brin! Don’t go! You can’t leave me here!”
Brin tried not to start crying as she raced past a small bed of bushes, all the way up to the lake. She fell to her side, slamming her arms against the frozen ice, and turned around to see Chace in the distance.
He was no longer alone.
“Brin! Come back!”
He was surrounded by not just the one mysterious figure, but several. Standing around Chace were over a dozen of them, all dressed in trench coats, all with eyes of bright red.
“Oh my God,” she said.
They started covering the young man as the ground continued shaking and collapsing in on itself.
Brin wanted to shout for Chace, but she also didn’t want to reveal her whereabouts.
What the hell are those things?
Chace shouted one more time for Brin before he and the sign and the twelve spooky creatures sank down beneath the ground, disappearing from sight.
The ground shook for another five seconds. Then it stopped.
And then there was only silence.
Chapter Sixteen
Brin wanted to shout for Chace, but she knew that screaming a word of any kind would likely bring twelve more of those scary creatures to her.
It doesn’t matter, she thought. They know I’m here. They know it was two people out here, not one.
She surveyed the area, and even though she couldn’t see anyone, she could sense that at least one of those figures had stayed behind.
Brin peeked through the bushes, her feet so close to the lake that she could taste the ice on her tongue. She didn’t hear a figure moving.
She heard a figure growling.
It sounded like the growl of an angry wolf, and not of anything close to resembling a human being. But she knew it wasn’t an animal. She knew it was one of those creatures.
“There’s no use in hiding,” a low, ominous voice whispered, beyond the bushes.
Brin covered her mouth and crept down so that her back was touching the cold ground.
It talks? This thing talks?
She heard footsteps up ahead. The figure was apparently walking away. She kept her hand shoved over her mouth as she breathed through her nose, and she turned her attention to the black sky. She hadn’t noticed until now, but the snow had stopped falling, and the clouds were separating. Brin could actually see the stars.
Then she noticed the footsteps had stopped.
She lifted her head up and looked out beyond the bushes. Dead silence hovered around her. Even the wind had stopped.
The red glow hit her legs first, but she didn’t notice it until it hit her hands. She looked forward. The creature was inches from her face.
“Hi,” the figure said.
He jumped from the bushes for Brin as she screamed, jumped to her feet, and started running across the lake. The figure followed, but slipped and slammed his head against the ice. She didn’t. She always had good balance. An
d she, unlike him, knew the ice was actually there.
But the figure caught up to her, anyway. As she reached the edge of the ice, the figure leapt for her, all the way from across the frozen lake. She looked back, a wave of shock sweeping across her face. It was like the figure could fly.
“Oh my God!” she screamed as the creature crashed into her chest. She slammed her body against the ice and tried not to scream from the pain.
The figure grabbed her by the neck, and she stared up into his face.
Lit by his red eyes, the pasty white visage was one that only a mother could love. His teeth were yellow and pointy; his ears were large and lofty.
He didn’t say a word. Instead, he pressed his body against hers, and licked his slimy yellow tongue up along Brin’s neck, all the way up to her eyelids.
“Mmmm,” the figure said. “Tasty.”
He brought the tongue back out again, but Brin didn’t wait to see what he would do with it this time.
She hooked her fingernails against his tongue and ripped it right out of his mouth.
The creature screamed in pain, louder than any normal human being ever could, and limped to his side. Brin scooted back and escaped his grasp.
She stood back up, her aching feet striking snow again, and started running. She didn’t look back. She raced to the top of the hill behind the lake.
“Come on,” she said to herself. “Please be dead. Don’t come after me.”
She still had the slimy tongue grasped in her fist. She didn’t want to let it go. She wanted proof of the encounter. She didn’t want the others to think she was crazy.
When she reached the top of the hill, she looked down into Bodie to see the burning van. It wasn’t roaring with fire like before, but the orange glow was still lighting up the night sky.
Brin started running down the hill, where muddy dirt and ice had been replaced with sharp rocks, when a hand grabbed her hair from behind and launched her forward. She landed chest first on the rocks and rolled down the side of the hill. She watched as the same creature, again, leapt toward her, flying in the sky.
But this time she was ready.
She clutched the creature’s tongue with her left hand, and grabbed a sharp, heavy rock with her right.
When the figure landed on top of her, Brin swung the rock upward at his white ugly face and struck him hard against his chin. He catapulted right up over her and smashed the back of his head against the ground.
He rolled over on his side, loudly grunted, then stopped moving.
Brin stayed still, her eyes wide, her breathing heavy.
Did I kill him?
She examined the rock—there was a chunky black splot of blood on its sharp side—and then slumped over on her stomach. She wanted to drop the heavy rock, but she didn’t want to be stupid. She kept a tight grip on it and started pulling herself toward the figure’s motionless body a few yards away.
Part of her wanted to see if the creature was dead. Another part of her wanted to see just what the hell the creature was. He clearly wasn’t human; she understood that now. But she still didn’t know where his evil beating heart came from.
She crept closer and closer, so close she could see if he was breathing. He didn’t appear to be.
Brin reached out to grab his trench coat. She wanted a better look at his face.
Who are you? What are you? Where the hell do you come from?
As her fingers grazed the top of the trench coat, she felt something brush up against her hand: warm breath.
The figure grabbed her arms, thrust her backward against the rocks, and got on top of her, again, so fast and efficiently that Brin didn’t have a chance to stop him. And this time he didn’t try to use his tongue.
He shoved her head back, roamed his mouth around the upper part of her body, and sunk his teeth deep into her neck.
The creature started drinking her blood.
“Owww!” Brin screamed. “Get off me!”
The figure stayed put, chugging her blood like it was Gatorade, a smile forming on his face between the loud, revolting slurps.
Brin felt like fainting, but she knew she couldn’t; that rock was still in her hand. She grasped it as hard as she could and swung it, again, at the figure’s head. This time, the rock struck not his chin but his left eyeball, causing it to explode all over her face.
The hideous creature started shaking with pain as he slumped back over again, but Brin wasn’t going to leave her wellbeing up to chance this time.
She grabbed the rock with her left hand and applied pressure to her neck with her right.
“A vampire? You’re a vampire? Are you freaking kidding me?”
She straddled the figure and pounded the rock into his face. Twice. Three times. Five times. Ten times. She kept pounding it into his face, for a minute or more, until everything above the figure’s neck was a spaghetti sauce mash of flesh and brains.
Brin tossed the rock down the hill. She sighed, fell backward, and tried to catch her breath.
She didn’t notice until now that she had tears in her eyes.
She applied pressure against the neck wound again. She felt nothing but pain from her chest up. Her head was pounding fast, her heart was pounding faster, and the neck wound, while not bleeding out as much as she thought it would, felt like it had been violated not with two sharp teeth but an entire mouthful.
Brin turned toward Bodie Ghost Town. She couldn’t stay up top this hill. She had to keep moving. She had to get back to the group.
She crawled her way up to her feet, with difficulty, and took a few steps forward. She kicked the figure’s legs as hard as she could.
“Vampires? Really?”
She stepped on his gooey mashed potato face and started heading down the hill. The farther down she went, the faster she ran. She grabbed hold of her neck, tried to keep from crying, and raced toward the ghost town, hoping deep down that she wouldn’t be the last of her group alive.
Chapter Seventeen
Ash sat cross-legged at the edge of his bed, sorting through his DVDs, which were out of alphabetical order again. He noticed that Jagged Edge was mysteriously in the “G” section, as was Jurassic Park. Making him angrier, one of his favorite classic films Sunset Boulevard was in the “B” section and not the “S.”
“How did this happen?” he said melodramatically, as if he had just screwed up a brain tumor operation.
His DVD shelf took up a quarter of his bedroom. It was jam-packed with titles, so many that when he had to move houses two years ago he needed eight boxes to pack just the DVDs (he needed two more for his Blu Rays and one extra for the DVD player). He was also a freak about keeping things organized, especially when it came to his precious movies.
It was 10 P.M. on Saturday night, and he was bored out of his mind. He had been calling Brin for hours, but she wasn’t picking up the phone, which to him meant that she was ignoring him—obviously she would’ve been back from Bodie Ghost Town by now. He had a hundred or more DVDs he was thinking of putting on, but because he had so many choices, he couldn’t bring himself to pick anything. So, as had happened many times before, he found himself organizing his collection for most of the evening.
He finished the “L” section, then took a deep breath and set his head back against his bed frame. He sighed and looked up at the clock. 10:01.
“I’m so bored!” he shouted. He shook his head and looked at his phone again. “Where the hell are you, Brin?”
Ash sat up when he heard a knock at his door.
“Ash?” A pudgy man with a goatee and a shaved head opened the door.
“Hey Dad.”
“Everything OK in here?”
“It’s fine,” Ash said. “I’m worried about Brin. She’s not answering her phone.”
“Don’t you call her every day?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. So?”
“Maybe? Well, honey, it’s possible she wants some space.”
“She wouldn’t ignore me, thou
gh. We’re friends. She would at least text me. Confirm with me she’s alive and not dead in a muddy ditch somewhere.”
Ash’s dad pursed his lips. “Or maybe she left her phone off.”
Ash shook his head. He was disappointed by the fatherly advice. “I don’t know. Something doesn’t feel right. This isn’t like her.”
His dad pointed at his movie collection. “You gonna watch something?”
“Nah,” Ash said. “Just organizing.”
“I see. You know, honey, if you sold some of your DVDs, you could make a huge profit on eBay, or at our garage sale next weekend!”
“No way in hell,” Ash said.
His dad stepped forward and perused the right side of his shelf. “You have I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. You can’t give up I Still Know What You Did Last Summer?”
“No.” Ash held the DVD close. “It’s too important to me.”
His dad shook his head and walked back to the hallway. “We’re gonna watch Green Lantern in the living room if you want to join us.”
“No way,” Ash said. “That got terrible reviews. Why would you watch that?”
“We don’t care about the reviews. We care about the star.”
“Ryan Reynolds?”
“Exactly.” His dad looked up at the ceiling and sighed, happily.
“Ugh… dad… gross.”
“Have a good night,” he said. “And don’t worry about your friend. She’ll turn up sooner or later.”
“I know,” Ash said. “But what if she doesn’t?”
His dad didn’t respond. He had already shut the door.
But then another knock on the door followed.
“Yeah?”
Ash’s other dad opened the door. “Hey honey. Everything OK in here?”
“I’m not having the same conversation with you, Dad.”
“Why not? I don’t want to be out of the loop.” This dad was tall and more handsome than the first one, with smoldering dark eyes and a full head of brown hair.
“Dad, please. I need to get back to work.”
“Work? It’s Saturday night! And you’re sixteen! Go get into some trouble for God’s sake.”
“Like what?”