Moni scanned their minds, searching for Aaron and Ramona. What she found sent an ice pick into her heart. Thousands of the possessed formed an army, spreading from the western edge of town outward. More joined the gathering, flying and crawling and running from all corners of the desert. Their minds emitted ferocity. Within minutes, there were more of them than humans in little Columbus.
“Get ready for a fight. The alien mutants are all over this town,” she projected into Blake’s head. “If anything gets in our way, run it over or shoot it.”
He raised his rifle and lifted the brim of his cowboy hat as an acknowledgement. She overheard him wondering whether she was trying to take his focus off the real danger just over his shoulder. His lack of trust pained her. He’d see the horrendous truth soon enough. Moni wished he would’ve stayed on patrol, clear of her disaster.
Suddenly, her head started spinning and her stomach clenched up. They yelled inside Moni’s head as loud as the sky splitting open.
“If you enter this town, you die with everyone here! Except the man you love. We’ll make him one of us.”
The sea of snakes surged across the driveway toward Aaron’s feet. Aaron tried retreating through the doorway. Nina’s gun nudged at his back.
The purple-eyed demons didn’t hiss or rattle. Many of them didn’t even slither – they sprang like mouse traps. Others convulsed, tangling with their brethren. They all massed toward the house.
Screw her gun.
“Get inside! Board up the doorway!” Aaron shouted as he turned and faced Nina.
Temporarily mesmerized by the advancing mass of scales and fangs, Nina lashed out at him the moment he broke her trance. Nina seized him by the collar with one hand, jutted the barrel of her weapon under his chin and slung him around so he tripped over her foot. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he couldn’t break his fall. Aaron’s head crashed hard into a wooden chair. His world went black.
The sound of gunfire returned first.
They blasted away outside the house. Bullets shattered the tile. Heavy footsteps rumbled up the stairs and Patty screamed for them to follow her.
Aaron tried opening his eyes. They couldn’t focus. He heard scratching from high outside the house, now in more than one place. Then the wooden porch creaked. It sounded like a hundred ropes were being dragged across it.
Finally, Aaron’s vision returned. He caught a glimpse of the FBI agent watching from halfway up the staircase with the old marker-colored sofa wedged at the bottom to block it off. The frantic agent hoisted Ramona by the arm. Crying, the girl slapped at the agent’s wrist. The invading serpent army piled up behind the table placed over the broken doorway until they swarmed over the barrier and inside. The people disappeared up the stairs, leaving Aaron alone downstairs.
Struggling to upright himself with his hands restrained, Aaron scooted to a sitting position with his back against the wall. He found his bearings just in time to witness purple-eyed snakes spilling through the doorway.
56
As the pickup rolled into town, Moni felt the ravenous multitude of destroyers swarming around them. The dry air hung still in the night. Not a leaf rustled. A wind chime sounded, its shrill bells fading into the suffocating silence. She couldn’t see a one of them, yet she detected them lurking in the cold darkness and creeping behind the houses of unsuspecting townspeople. They moved parallel to their path, closing in with every house they passed.
They might as well dive into a lake full of piranhas.
Heavy hooves galloped their way from a field to Moni’s left. A pair of purple eyes emerged, and not just any eyes. They were massive, as big as oranges, and brimming with unbridled rage. Moni shuddered to think what was attached to them. It rushed at the truck’s path with startling speed for such a hulk.
“Stop the truck!” Moni projected into Ranger Blake’s head. “We’re about to get rammed.”
Through the mirror, he eyed her skeptically. He thought she was setting up an escape.
“Look left! Stop!”
He slammed the brakes, but not in time. The headlights flashed off the metallic horns as they gored the truck.
The horns smashed the left headlight and tore off the fender. Slowing down had spared Blake a more direct impact on his door. The pickup truck lilted on its side, straining its suspension until two wheels lifted. Moni jumped left, shifting her weight so the vehicle banged back down, bucking as it hit the ground.
Such a collision would have snapped the neck of a normal animal. Not this possessed bull. It swelled up 50 percent larger than any head of cattle Moni had ever seen. Supported by a muscular neck, its head had a broad iron plate across it. The beast’s bulbous eyes oozed out of its mask like it’d been fitted too tightly.
“Stay in the back. I’ll shoot it,” said Blake, who kept cooler than Moni despite her experience with this freakish carnival.
Moni shredded the chain of her handcuffs with her iron nails and stood in the truck bed. The bovine badass raked a horn against the truck, puncturing all the way through and almost skewering her. She swiped at the bull and it backed off, but not for long. The bull took a long stride and leapt with surprising agility. The bovine brute’s upper torso landed in the truck bed. Powerful hooves dented the truck bed while the weight of the bull’s brawny chest tilted the carriage toward its horns. Moni slid beneath the beast’s head.
Its roasting breath hit Moni’s face like an open furnace. The bull drove its iron snout into Moni’s stomach and thrashed its head from side to side. Seizing its horns, Moni fought with every ounce of strength to prevent them from mauling her like they did the truck bed.
A clash of metal on metal released a piercing shriek. Sparks showered her. Moni kicked at the bull’s neck from her back. It made no difference. Her arm, the one with fresh scars from the coyote bite, grew weary. For an instant, her grip slipped and the horn stabbed at her neck. Moni squirted away. It plugged a hole into the truck, instead of her.
Suddenly, a gunshot rang out.
“You broke my first rule.” Blake pointed the smoking rifle through the open rear window. “Don’t fuck with my truck.”
Purple blood sprayed from the bull’s hide as the ranger’s bullet found its mark. He blasted the mutant with the rifle a second time, tearing into its hind leg. The bull hoisted its head off Moni and glared at him, purple eyes bulging out of their sockets with growing rage. Steam rose from where the bull’s blood ate the truck’s metal. The mutant showed no signs of pain, only an eagerness to kill.
Blake shot the thing straight between the eyes. The bullet pinged off the mask.
“Get out of here,” Moni warned Blake. “This isn’t a normal bull.”
“I know what it is. When my tribe defends their land, retreat is worse than death.”
Intent on making Blake’s words come due, the possessed bull pushed off from the truck and circled around, putting some distance between it and the ranger. Blake trained his rifle on it, seeking a neck shot. Even if he could deliver it perfectly, Moni knew the aliens could keep the beast charging long enough to drive a horn through his skull and out the other side.
The bull rushed Blake. Moni jumped down from the truck and shielded him.
His hands cuffed behind his back as he leaned against the wall, Aaron tilted down on his side and propelled himself away from the doorway by kicking against the floor. He didn’t move fast enough. A snake launched at him from a coiled position. Aaron booted it with his shoe catching its head. Another possessed serpent slithered across the tile as rapidly as a tumbleweed. He posted himself up with his elbow and stomped on its head. The snake’s body wrapped around his leg and squeezed so hard that his foot tingled.
Aaron knelt forward and sprang to his feet. He drove his heel hard against the floor until the snake’s skull crumbled and its limp body fell off him. By then, its brethren had completely surrounded the front door. A tangled mass of snakes slithered toward him, i
n a race to see who could sink its fangs into him first. Aaron kicked a lamp off the side table into their path. They swarmed over the ceramic and glass shards without a care. He rammed his shoulder into a bookcase full of children’s trophies and photo frames until it crashed down. It caught a few snakes underneath. The rest kept coming. They had no shortage of backup.
“Aqui! Aqui!” Ramona shouted from the staircase.
The girl climbed over the sofa that had protected her from the serpent death trap.
“No! Go back!”
She waved the key to his handcuffs. She must have lifted it from the FBI agent.
“Stay upstairs. I’ll come to you.”
Either she didn’t listen or she didn’t understand because Ramona landed on the floor and scampered to Aaron with the key. Before he could free himself, they targeted her. A snake that moved like it was hopped up on crystal meth gyrated in the girl’s direction with its fangs bared. Aaron squatted down, grabbed a pillow behind him and spun so that the cushion smacked the snake away. The snake’s venom injected into the stuffing, making the pillow smolder and smoke. Aaron threw it down and hooked the girl’s shirt sleeve with his restrained hands. He dragged her into the next room, the kitchen. They had nowhere else to go. He knew this wouldn’t buy them much time, but he needed every extra moment he could find for their lives.
The girl tried unlocking the handcuffs. Her hands shaky and her face strained, she couldn’t hold the key still.
“Gracias.” Aaron snatched the key and inserted it into the hole. As he struggled to bend his wrists, the girl turned the key for him, freeing Aaron. “Stand against the back wall, as far from the door as possible.” He pointed toward the far wall, near the laundry room and back door.
Petrified by the emerging wave of reptiles, she didn’t move so he picked her up and placed her there. By the time Aaron turned around, the snakes had clogged the entrance from the living room and were advancing across the black and white kitchen tile.
Searching for a weapon, Aaron found a block of kitchen knives. Slice them apart and their acidic blood would scold his skin. Aaron threw open the cabinet beneath the sink. Jackpot. Two bottles of bleach spray.
He blasted the serpent mob with double streams of bleach. They winced, the purple lights in their eyes flickering, and recoiled like weeds sprayed by herbicide. As the bleached snakes raked their faces on the walls and floor, a second wave of mutants slithered toward the kitchen.
Aaron spotted an industrial-sized blender on the counter. Someone was a juicer in this house, Iña he guessed by her tight body. He resolved to buy her a new one after this, assuming he survived.
He plugged in the blender and grabbed a pair of plastic tongs from near the oven. The infected snakes surged into the kitchen and Aaron doused them with bleach. While they writhed in pain, he snatched a snake with the tongs and deposited it into the blender. He twisted on the lid and cranked the blender up to the max. The blades shredded it into a toxic cocktail of scales, bones and acidic purple blood. Steam erupted from the blender, but the acidic blood hadn’t destroyed the motor, yet.
“Now that’s what I call a snaky smoothie,” Aaron said.
Aaron added four more stunned snakes to his alien bacteria shake. Peering into the living room, he saw enough slithering bastards to fill ten blenders. One bottle of bleach was already three-quarters empty.
Moni, if you’re anywhere near me, please hurry here, Aaron thought. We don’t have much longer.
Something outside frantically scratched at the second-story window, sounding like a thousand steel bristles scraping over the glass. The young Mexican boy screamed and pulled his blanket over his head, like that could stop anything more than a kitten. Taking shelter in the child’s bedroom, Cam Carter remembered when he had hidden under the sheets as a boy. His parents had played their disco beat at deafening volumes to drown out the sounds of their drug-fueled orgies. He could still hear their moaning, and that of their random partners. Escaping that house couldn’t have come soon enough.
“Stuff him in the closet at least,” Carter told Nina.
Nina had asked him to quiet down once, but he only cried louder. This time, she scooped the dark-haired orphan up and stashed him behind the double sliding doors.
Carter couldn’t smirk at her obedience anymore, not after she’d left their most valuable asset in a snake den. He trained his gun on the closed bedroom door. The lesbo couple had run into different rooms with other lost kids. He didn’t hear anyone dare set foot in the hallway.
“Why the hell did you abandon our perp?” Carter asked. “He’s our best lead on Moni.”
“Look around. Moni found us.”
He met her with a stern glare for not answering his question.
“I just, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.” Nina replied not with defiance but with shame for crossing him.
He’d make her squeal like a dirty pig for that later, assuming they lived to see another fed-funded hotel room.
“I couldn’t kill her damn boyfriend.” Nina dug her nails into her palm. “So let him get ripped into cutlets down there.”
“I don’t hear him screaming,” Carter said. “If Moni sent the snakes, as you said, maybe he’s the only person in this house who’s safe.”
Nina grimaced and shook her head. “What about you? What happened to the kidnapping victim who might know Moni’s hideout?”
“I helped the girl upstairs. She preferred the first floor.”
She looked puzzled.
“I can’t help it if she has a death wish.”
Nina rolled her eyes in disgust. She got on with kids as well as crabs with fish, but he could see in her anguished eyes that the yelling and sobbing of the children in the rooms around them haunted her.
“We already drew Moni out and obtained her blood,” Carter said. “At this point, our objective is to survive. I have a call to make. Cover the doorway.”
Carter backed into the corner near the window, hopefully so he could shoot whatever was scratching and now pecking at it determinedly. Nina peered at the dark glass uneasily. Forcing her eyes in the other direction, she focused her gun on the doorway, where she’d shoved a blanked underneath. The blockage could hold off a snake or two, but not a horde of them.
Carter called up Colon and told him they needed the full force of TERU in Columbus.
“Lift us out of here, then save the town,” demanded Carter, not that there was much town to salvage. “You’ll need helicopters. You can’t take one step outside.”
The orphan in the closet started wailing. He wanted out. Between that and the racket at the windows all over the second floor, Carter couldn’t hear Colon’s reply.
“Shut up, all of you!” Carter shouted. “If you want the U.S. military to save your asses, no matter which country you’re from, I need some--”
The window shattered, spraying glass into the room. Carter shielded his face, letting his arm take a slashing. He realized his error in an instant. He’d neglected to shoot the creature.
A blur of black feathers and needle-like brown hair pummeled him, knocking him into the corner. The gun flew from his hand. A spasm shot up his back as he thumped down.
No, not like this. Carter shoved it with both hands, buying a foot of distance. Only then did he comprehend the sight of the monstrosity that’d come to harvest his flesh.
Its pinkish wiry neck stretched as high as a man’s. The vulture head wielded a beak adapt at cleaving meat from bone, alive or dead. Between its flapping wings, a bicycle tire-sized tarantula body was attached to its stomach, as if a mad scientist had sewn the two detestable creatures together. Each of it eight legs were as thick as a toddler’s arm and covered with rigid brown hairs. Carter nearly choked on its stench, like a cave full of decaying corpses.
It pecked at him, smashing the gold watch on his raised forearm. There went his ten-years-of-service gift. All Carter could do was shove its neck, trying to keep it from cracking ope
n his skull and inserting the alien sludge into his brain. He’d prefer death to that.
“Cam! Hold still, I’ll shoot it!” Nina shouted as the boy in the closet burst out and fled the room, not bothering to close the door behind him. She’d do anything for him, if only she had some common sense.
“It’s too close. You could hit me too.” Carter smacked the spider legs away from his ribs. They were as prickly as cacti, making his palms burn red. “Get it the fuck off me!”
Nina barreled across the room at the feathered freak. She seized its vulture neck in both hands and swung its body around like a tetherball. Nina walloped it into the wall over and over, cracking through the stucco, until the mutant’s unholy marriage of a body lay motionless.
Now that’s devotion. He’d trained her well.
“Took you long enough,” Carter said. He studied his sweaty face and flushed cheeks in his camera phone. Not a good time for a selfie. “You’re lucky I didn’t get my face cut.”
“Oh, I couldn’t live if your masterpiece was tarnished,” Nina said. A girl shrieking in a nearby room rattled away her smile. “These kids, do you hear them? Colon’s boys need to swoop in now.”
A window on the neighboring room exploded inward, followed by children screaming. He recognized Patty barking orders as gunfire rang out. Another window across the hallway burst, followed by terrified cries.
Carter retrieved his gun. “We can’t stay here a moment longer.”
57
Whatever plan Moni had formulated before she leapt in front of the charging possessed bull disintegrated faster than butter over a camp fire. All that existed in her world were its eyes, those fist-sized purple orbs of loathing.
Silence the Living Page 29