by Lis Wiehl
Reese felt something grab him by the wrist.
It was George, struggling to keep from being pulled from the car through the windshield. His fingernails scratched Reese’s arm as he flew from the car, yelling for help. His scream ended with a loud thud.
Reese ducked as the creature in the backseat swung at him. With his head below the steering wheel, he knew the accelerator was close, so he pushed on it with his hand, all the way to the floor, steering as best he could without being able to see.
Just as suddenly, he took his hand off the gas pedal and slammed on the brake, hard. Something growled in pain.
He pulled himself up into the driver’s seat and saw that the creature in the backseat was half out the door. He couldn’t tell where the first one had gone. Villanegre was dead, his body, what was left of it, torn and broken, the old man’s skull crushed by the animal’s jaws.
Reese saw, beyond the gruesome scene, a large tree illuminated in the red glow of the brake lights. He shifted the car into reverse and floored it, steering with his right hand while looking over his left shoulder. The creature behind him slipped farther from the car, lunging for the roof rack.
Reese couldn’t tell how fast he was going when the beast hit the tree. The car kept going another twenty feet before Reese could apply the brakes and stop.
In the glow of his headlights, the creature, stunned and blinded, stumbled toward the roadway.
The boy shifted into drive and floored the accelerator again, steering directly at whatever it was, making impact with his left front bumper. Even in the full glare of his headlights, the beast was difficult to see clearly; it was black and shaggy, with large white canine fangs and eyes that flashed with reflected light. Reese heard an audible crunching sound and felt the station wagon thump twice as he drove over whatever was left of the thing.
But there were two of them.
Where was the other one?
He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out and sped away, only to see something fly through the air and land on the front passenger side fender, grabbing the vehicle by the A-pillar and the windshield wiper.
He steered hard right, braked sharply, sped up again, steered hard left, braked, then accelerated, trying to throw the thing off. He swerved again, left, right, left, steadily accelerating, slamming on the brakes again, to no avail.
Ahead he saw a rocky outcropping close to the road. The beast, centered between the headlights on the hood of the car, was trying to pull itself forward. There wasn’t time to come up with a better plan. There wasn’t time to fasten his seat belt either, but Reese hoped and prayed that the driver’s side air bag would deploy.
He steered for the rock and hit it head on.
The next few moments were lost to him—a loud sound, a jolt, a white flash—and then he awoke to a ringing in his ears, his brain buzzing and jarred.
As full consciousness returned—how long had he been knocked out?—he smelled smoke and felt heat. Something was burning. He pulled on the door handle. The door was wedged shut from the collision. He pushed against it with his shoulder. The door wouldn’t open, but the glass in the window had shattered. He pulled himself through the opening and rolled on the ground in case his clothing had caught fire. He got to his feet and ran from the car just as the gasoline from the tank ignited.
The explosion knocked him off his feet, and the fireball lit the woods with an orange glow. He rolled once and then sat up, turning to see the car burning.
He sat a moment to catch his breath.
On his feet again, he turned full circle to survey the road and the woods. He was alone, at least for now. It took a moment for him to get his bearings, his head still throbbing from the noise and the confusion. The body of the creature he’d killed crashing into the rock was no doubt lost in the fire, so he walked back up the road in the direction from which they’d come. He found George Gardener’s body crumpled in a heap on the shoulder, his neck bent at an unnatural angle. Farther up the road he found the body of Dr. Julian Villanegre, an arm and part of one leg missing, his face mangled and barely recognizable.
Reese felt his stomach rising up against him and took a moment to steel his resolve, drawing a deep breath and then another, his eyes closed. It was more than he wanted to bear, but he reminded himself that he had no choice. He had to figure this out, and he had to get back to Tommy’s house. He searched his pockets for his cell phone but couldn’t find it, and he realized it was still in the car, which was on fire.
He searched the body and found the Englishman’s cell phone, then used the light from the phone to search the woods for the body of the beast he’d killed against the tree. There was no sign of it, either on the road or in the underbrush. With every passing moment, his mind grew clearer. He was quite certain he’d hit it, twice, and almost as certain he’d killed it.
He searched the phone’s contact list for a number for Tommy Gunderson or Dani Harris but didn’t find anything. A scan of the call log was equally fruitless. He walked back up the road to search the body of George Gardener, but if the man owned a phone, it wasn’t on him. He dialed 411 but was told neither Tommy nor Dani had published numbers.
Reese took a deep breath and tried to think. He estimated he was four or five miles from Tommy’s house. He didn’t think the car had made any left or right turns off the main road. He could walk back, but there was a chance that there were more of whatever had attacked them waiting in the darkness. He needed a ride, preferably from someone armed.
He dialed 911.
“There’s been a car accident,” he began.
As he waited for the police and the ambulance to arrive, he examined the scene of the “accident” more calmly now, using the cell phone’s flashlight app to light the screen. Near where the body of the art historian lay, he bent down to get a closer look at what he’d thought at first was an oil slick. He touched the slimy substance with his fingers and rubbed them together to gauge the viscosity, and finally he smelled it. It was indeed oily, but it was more like oil paint than motor oil, a greasy substance that stained his fingers. From the oil, he extracted and eyed a single long black hair, holding it up next to the light from the phone, but then it dissolved in front of him.
He heard a distant siren approaching and paused to practice the story he would tell.
“I was asleep. We must have hit something …”
2.
December 20
11:51 p.m. EST
“Polar bears?” Quinn McKellen said.
Tommy Gunderson shook his head. “I seriously doubt we have polar bears. But they’re big, whatever they are.”
The two of them were in Tommy’s kitchen, speaking in low tones in front of Tommy’s computer monitor so as not to wake the others. That included Dani Harris, a childhood friend of Tommy’s and high school crush whose work as a consulting psychiatrist for the district attorney’s office brought her back into Tommy’s life. It included his Aunt Ruth, the town librarian who’d come under attack for her unwitting association with the Curatoriat, and Cassandra Morton, an actress to whom Tommy, in an earlier life, had been engaged. Quinn, a neurochemist and Dani’s ex, had arrived, as had Cassandra, to test Tommy and Dani’s relationship, but now they were all holed up, along with Arlo, Dani’s cat, and Otto, Quinn’s bloodhound, behind the walls of Tommy’s house to fight an unknowable enemy who was stronger than they were, but not stronger than their combined faith.
“What I’m trying to understand is why we’re getting such a faint heat signature and nothing for a visual,” Quinn said.
The imagery on the computer screen was telling them that the property was surrounded by perhaps as many as two dozen creatures. They were indeed the approximate size of polar bears, though oddly, their thermal signatures were minimal and they were invisible to Tommy’s night vision cameras, looking more like holes than positive presences.
“Are there any cold-blooded mammals?” Tommy asked.
“Not in a true sense,” Quinn replied. “Ther
e are some species that have to stay active to maintain a body temperature or else aggregate to share body warmth. Bats. And moles, I believe.”
“Things that live in the dark,” Tommy said. “Or go bump in the night. Did you know that no matter how hungry a polar bear gets, he will not eat a penguin?”
“I did not know that. And why is that?” Quinn asked.
“Because polar bears live at the North Pole and penguins live at the South,” Tommy said.
“I imagine penguins don’t get married because they have cold feet,” Quinn replied. “Why do you have such an elaborate security system, anyway?”
“Came with the house,” Tommy said. “The guy who owned this place before me inadvertently swindled a Mexican drug lord named Cabrera who was the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel. I’m surprised the guy didn’t install automated machine gun turrets.”
“You’re not afraid some of the drug king’s henchmen might come here looking for him?” Quinn asked.
“I wasn’t, but just in case, I sent Cabrera a letter telling him the Ponzi guy wasn’t living here anymore,” Tommy said. “Also the forwarding address of the prison where the guy was incarcerated. Cabrera sent me a box of his mother’s tamales to thank me. But back to the polar bears surrounding my property … you got a theory?”
“I’m a neurochemist, not a zoologist … but a friend of mine was involved in a study in Alaska to determine what effect developing the North Slope oil fields would have on the polar bear population. They thought they could fly a survey plane over the area with infrared cameras like yours and get a good count of the bear population. Do you know what color a polar bear’s fur is?”
“I’m guessing this is a trick question,” Tommy said. “I’m going to say white?”
“It looks white,” Quinn said, “but each hair is actually clear as glass. The fur conducts the sun’s light directly to the skin. To below the skin, actually, where the bear stores the heat. My friend thought the bears’ body heat would show up on the infrared cameras, particularly against the snowy frozen background. But in fact, they give off no heat whatsoever. They keep it all in. The Eskimos, by the way, figured out a long time ago that if you leave a polar bear fur skin-side down on the ice in the sun, the fur will conduct enough sunlight to melt the ice beneath it. On the other hand, when my friend used ultraviolet sensors that could detect places that absorbed light, the bears appeared loud and clear. To seriously mix a metaphor.”
On his computer screen Tommy saw the vague outline of one of the creatures beyond the stone walls surrounding his property. It seemed to be pacing on all fours, occasionally rising up on its hind legs.
“You think these things are white?” he asked.
“They’re probably black, but like polar bears, they aren’t giving off any heat,” Quinn said. “Or light. When you combine every band in the light spectrum, you get white light, but when you combine every color of paint in the paint box, you get black. Whatever is out there is absorbing the darkness the way polar bears absorb sunlight. We can’t see them, but we can notice the absence of light when they pass in front of something we actually can see. If we could get a light source behind those things in the woods, or something really bright directly on them, we might be able to see the shadows they cast, or maybe their outlines in silhouette.”
“Huh,” Tommy said, thinking. “But they’re physical beings, right?”
“As far as I can tell, yes.” Quinn nodded. “The data says they’re corporeal. Which doesn’t mean I understand exactly what they are.”
“If they’re flesh and blood, we can kill them,” Tommy said. “Let’s see what my aunt’s arsenal has to offer.”
Tommy’s Aunt Ruth was not a typical librarian, in the sense that she was also the owner of a substantial gun collection she’d inherited from a policeman she’d once dated. Tommy went to the mudroom and opened the storage locker they’d taken from his aunt’s house, and after a moment’s consideration, selected a .45-caliber magazine-fed Ares “Shrike” light machine gun with a sixteen-inch assault barrel and an M203 grenade launcher fixed to the lower receiver.
Quinn stared at the weapon, wide-eyed, as Tommy walked back into the kitchen.
“Wow,” he said. “Are you sure we need this much firepower?”
“Nobody needs this much firepower,” Tommy said, examining the weapon to make sure the piece was operational. “But considering who—and/or what—we’re up against, I’m going to hang on to it for a while. Any activity?”
Quinn turned back to the computer screen as Tommy set the weapon on the food island in the middle of the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Quinn said. “No movement at all. They’re just watching us. It’s like they’re waiting for something.”
Tommy frowned. “Aren’t we all?”
He opened a door to a large closet off the mudroom. When he re-emerged he was carrying a portable Helios 9000 spotlight, along with its waterproof machined military-grade black metal battery case, which contained a pair of lithium batteries. The 9000 was capable of generating a hundred watts of power and 25,000 lumens from the HID bulb in its ten-inch reflector.
“That’s the biggest flashlight I’ve ever seen,” Quinn said.
“Thank you,” Tommy said proudly. “I’ll be honest—I have a flashlight problem. Every time I think I’ve bought the biggest, brightest one there is, another one comes along that’s bigger and brighter, and then I have to have it.”
“Why?” Quinn asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Tommy said. “I told myself I needed this thing so that I could work on the house at night, but I might have been fooling myself. On the other hand, this baby can boil water from fifty feet.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I want to see what we’re up against.”
“You’re going out there?”
Tommy nodded. “Keep recording on all three systems. When I turn this puppy on, it’s going to overload the night vision cameras, but we might be able to see something on the other spectrums, or at least get data we can analyze. Anything that looks directly at it is going to be blinded temporarily. Maybe permanently.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“No,” Tommy said, “but it’s my idea and I’m sticking with it. I’ll be right back.”
Otto, Quinn’s bloodhound, followed Tommy to the back door, hoping to be let out. It had been Otto’s keening, after George and Julian and the boy left for the airport, that had led Tommy and Quinn to realize there was something outside the house.
“Out of your league, fella,” Tommy told him. He donned his barn coat and boots. It was cold enough to warrant wearing a down ski jacket, but he worried that the heat from the powerful halogen bulb might melt the nylon.
He crossed the courtyard, heading for a large exposed pluton of Precambrian granite, the highest point on his property. The snow-dusted ground was frozen; the grass crunched beneath the soles of his boots. Tommy had his weapon slung over his right shoulder by its strap, safety off.
The surface of his pond had begun to freeze. He saw where he and Quinn and George Gardener had laid sandbags to dam up the stream that drained from the pond into the deeper waters of Lake Atticus, a man-made lake half a mile away that fed into the other reservoirs supplying the greater metropolitan New York area with drinking water. They’d dammed the stream because Tommy’s pond had been poisoned—contaminated with a drug that was more dangerous than any known toxin.
Tommy climbed to the top of the rocky outcropping, affording him the high ground overlooking the woods to the south and east. He paused to listen but heard nothing. The sky had been overcast for the last two days, and the air smelled heavy with the promise of new snow.
He donned his night vision goggles. He saw, deeper into the woods, the outline of trees and the forms of rocky outcroppings and tree stumps, and then a series of darker shapes on the ground. They could be anything. They could be nothing.
The Helios 9000 had a sh
oulder brace and a front pistol grip with a trigger. Tommy took off the goggles and flicked the 9000’s standby switch. He heard the soft hum as the device powered up. He had about thirty minutes of illumination at full power, 25,000 lumens, and two hours at low power, when the light generated a mere 2,000 lumens—still bright enough to hurt, but not blind. Were he feeling charitable, he might use the lower setting, but he was feeling anything but charitable. People he loved—Dani Harris, in particular—were asleep in his house. As the lord of the manor, so to speak, it was his job to keep them safe.
The light on the Helios 9000 changed from orange to green, indicating it was ready to use.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You! Whatever you are. You smell bad and your mother … does too.”
He wasn’t exactly sure how to trash-talk beasts from hell, or wherever they came from. Trash-talking had never been his strong suit, even in his playing days in the NFL.
“I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not gone by the time I reach three, I’m going to … count to ten!”
His only thought was to provoke whatever they were to step out from where they were hiding so he could get a head count.
“One …”
He heard nothing. He saw nothing.
“Two …”
He raised the spotlight.
“Three!”
He braced himself and pulled the trigger.
Remote-controlled versions of the Helios were commonly mounted on the bottoms of helicopters used in search operations. According to the literature that came with the 9000, it could cast a beam three miles long.
The literature, Tommy thought, wasn’t kidding.
The light from the Helios was intensely bright. It was hot too, like the sun in the tropics, warming his skin even though the temperature was below freezing.
He swept the woods, turning slowly. The light cast deep shadows. To his right, some of the shadows moved, scampering for cover. He focused the light in that direction and then froze.
When Tommy walked the grounds at night carrying a more reasonably powered flashlight, he’d shine it in the woods and see, reflecting back at him, the eyes of various animals. He could tell what they were by their color. The eyes of deer reflected blue. Coyotes and occasional stray dogs reflected green. Raccoons’ eyes were orange, and the eyes of foxes were yellow. Tonight, as he shone the spotlight into the woods, he saw eyes reflecting red. Dozens of them. No. Hundreds.