by Adam Cesare
“Don’t worry, they can’t hurt us,” she said.
As insane as the creatures’ appearance was, Julia couldn’t help but feel relief. A full-sized human attacker, and the sinister designs he could have in targeting a single mom and her daughter, was much more worrisome than some pint-sized fairy-tale creatures.
Julia took her eyes off the creature scaling the fridge to search for the other one, but she’d lost track of him. She pressed against the sink, then picked Susan up into her arms. She could remember telling the girl just yesterday that one day she would be too big to pick up. Julia had only been partially joking with Susan, because now her arm seemed to strain from the weight. The burst of adrenaline she’d experienced in the woods earlier seemed to be the only one she’d had in storage.
Susan shrieked, and Julia turned to her daughter just in time to see one of the creature’s hanging from her ponytail with one hand, stabbing at the girl’s shoulder with the other.
Julia dropped the knife to the counter and swatted at the creature. In her conscious mind she knew that the animal was too small to do her hand any real damage, but grabbing at it felt like attacking a large insect, the irrational part of her brain that squirmed when she thought of earwigs taking control of her hand.
After a second attempt, she connected and smacked the tiny body off Susan’s back, and it landed in the sink with a metallic clang.
Pinpricks of blood welled up under Susan’s cotton dress. It wasn’t the amount of blood but the fact that the creature had harmed her child that made Julia do what she did next.
Turning on the faucet full blast, she directed the stream onto the tiny figure. The creature was unable to stand on the slick stainless-steel surface, slipping as he tried, water raining down on him and sopping his fur. Using her bare hand, she scooted him down the drain, his fingers trying to find purchase on the rubber disposal guard but failing.
There was a brief moment when she wondered if it was the right thing to do, whether it was unfair or inhumane, but then she felt the coolness of Susan’s tears drying on her neck and flicked the switch.
The disposal coughed up a miniature geyser of red before continuing smoothly, the remnants of the creature moving through the plumbing as the water from the tap rushed down the drain.
There was a sound, almost too small to hear but still full of feeling, from further down the countertop.
The other figure had finished scaling the fridge and stood on the counter now. His spear clenched in one hand, he picked at the top of his head with the other. His features were tiny, but Julia imagined she saw an expression of anguish written upon his face.
She picked up the knife and approached the end of the counter, her shadow falling over the creature.
He set down his spear and waved, then pointed at the doorway with both hands. He was motioning to the hallway, to the body that they’d been carrying.
“Mommy?” Susan asked, her voice thick with post-sob phlegm.
Julia looked at this little man, saw the violence he seemed capable of, and buried the knife in her new countertop.
***
The brother had tried to tell her, tried to explain, that he could have left with his father’s body, that nobody else had to die this night.
But she wouldn’t listen.
As he lay there, bifurcated by the giant blade, he thought of the rest of his clan, the rest of his village. He thought of how good their sense of smell was, what proud hunters they were, their undying memory and ability to hold a grudge.
Lastly, before the light left his eyes, he thought of how sharp their spears were, and how many of them they would raise in anger.
Intermission #1
Bob had killed two people tonight, and the only thing keeping him from the police gathered outside were four hostages—his crew—and eleven bicycle locks.
The day had started out so innocuously. He’d begun by asking his boss, Brenda Cartwright, whether or not he could schedule a block to run some of his tapes next month. She told him that there was no room in the schedule (which had been her response for the last year) and then called him into her office later in the day and told him he was fired.
Now Brenda was dead, and it didn’t make Bob feel any better.
The first movie was nearly over, and they all stood in the control room watching the playback together. Fred, the only one among them who really knew how to work the board, had his eyes closed to the movie, quietly weeping into his mustache.
“You’re missing the best part, Fred,” Bob said, trying to channel his Count Mort character, and nudged Fred with the muzzle of the gun.
Nobody else seemed to think Count Mort was funny.
“Okay then, let’s get ready to go again. Get the second tape queued up.”
From the control room they could all hear the police bullhorn, but the studio itself was windowless and soundproof, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the microphone picking up anything or a smoke grenade getting lobbed in while he was on-air.
During his first introduction he’d been worried that he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it. Part of him wanted to wave hello to the audience and then put the barrel of the nine millimeter in his mouth, but after watching that first flick, he felt reinvigorated.
He was bringing horror to the people, doing God’s work. By now the word had probably gotten out that there was a crazed gunman on TV. He had an audience.
It was time to dig deep into his archives and give them a real show.
War of the Cryptid
The creature attacked the city, leaving a path of twisted metal, broken concrete, and mangled bodies.
There was no warning or apparent motive. His curved horns broke from beneath the waves, slicing their way out of the East River with the devil’s speed.
The legends called him Skorp, and before today, there existed only a handful of blurry photographs and alleged sightings to foster belief. And none of those had ever placed him anywhere near New York City.
He was a cryptid as far as the scientific community was concerned: a creature whose existence had been rumored but never officially documented.
***
He sprung from the water with dexterity, smashing a crater into the concrete upon landing.
People on the ground stared up and screamed as he inched forward and crushed a host of them beneath a heavy foot.
He craned his elongated neck from one side to the other, slashing through a skyscraper and raining broken concrete shards onto a panicking city street. Those caught in his horn’s path were raked along with it and swept, screaming, off the building’s side. They fell twenty stories to their deaths, splattering on the sidewalk like flies on a windshield.
He went inland on all fours, while the city’s denizens scattered like ants pouring from every escapable orifice.
Skorp found these sights and sounds overwhelming. He screeched his displeasure, and the windowpanes wobbled as he passed. With a lowered shoulder, he busted smaller buildings to pieces and brushed others aside like jungle fronds.
Artillery rounds plunked off his scales and eye-level fighter jets rocketed past, his only reminders that there was any resistance at all. Dancing tentacles lifted from his back and sides and swatted them away. The fiery scraps showered down on the city like meteors.
Those wiggling appendages lashed against the nearest building foundation, and he rose onto his haunches. His front legs, a combination of arm and fin, tore through the steel and concrete as he lifted off the ground and climbed midway up.
He sent a claw crashing through the wall, and a poof of concrete dust irritated his nostrils. He scooped up a handful of scurrying victims and pushed them, kicking and screaming, into his mouth.
They turned to ground and bloodied bits between his teeth, and he felt satisfied with today’s haul. An entire torso wedged itself between an incisor and a canine, irritating his gum line. He lapped the obstruction with his serpentine tongue, but to no avail.
Now that th
e deed was done, he hopped free of the building and plummeted back toward earth, flattening a gathering of soldiers with a stomp and turning them to lumpy paste between his toes. He left their remnants in crimson foot stomps all the way back to the sea.
The dashed and battered combatants gave chase, but he found no threat in their actions. Tanks rolled along and attempted to follow on impassable roads, while infantry trailed even further in the distance. Helicopters drifted carefully outside the range of his flailing tentacles.
The creature let forth one final roar—more of a warning than a victory cry—and the ground quaked as he jumped for the waves.
They perhaps did not understand him, but he was certain they feared him.
That’s all he wanted.
***
Shane FitzRoyce was more than three hundred miles away, gnawing on a black-licorice twirl and watching the water fizzing against the ferry’s hull. If he focused, he could see his career down there.
The ride, bridging Burlington, Vermont, and Plattsburgh, New York, was supposed to be work, but it felt more like a burial at sea.
Come on, you bastard, think.
His producer gibbered on, but Shane had stopped listening after the ultimatum. Instead, the words echoed: Give us something, or forget everything.
At his back, passengers launched into a volley of frenzied declarations, passing smartphones and tablets back and forth, with excited eyes and emotional voices.
Shane might’ve been more curious if he wasn’t certain his career was over.
“Champ,” he said. It fell from his mouth in a rain of licorice shards, and the tone was beyond contemptuous. “Is that all you guys want? How about tasking me with finding Jesus Christ while you’re at it?”
“You wanna hop a plane to Golgotha, FitzRoyce? I’ll arrange it,” his producer said.
Shane didn’t care for that humor. Not when the fate of Monster Raiders was on the line. “You want a sure thing, who the hell doesn’t? If it were easy, we’d have great footage every time out.”
He remembered reading a criticism titled “And You Thought Ghost Hunters Offered Mythical Blueballs?” He knew then that his viewership was tiring of speculative documentation. They’d need to find something soon, even if they had to fake it.
Shane tossed the licorice into the water and fished another one from the crumpled bag in his pocket. “Champ’s been out here since 1883. You figure I’ll just go down there, knock over a few rocks, and voilà, right?”
“Perhaps season four will be your last, then. You sound burnt-out.”
It was the worst thing he could’ve heard, and Shane was certain that’s why it was said. A day didn’t pass without the show’s interest being his first thought in the morning and his last one at night.
Heck, it was too easy to remember life before Monster Raiders, and he couldn’t go back to it.
It was a problem he would’ve given anything to have five years ago. Worrying how to keep a successful show alive and well. Back when he hung his hat in a beachfront lean-to in South Carolina. It was hard enough finding three squares a day then.
Now the notion of losing his mansion gave him a serious case of acid reflux. Stung so bad he didn’t go anywhere without an overstock of Tums and Pepcid chasers.
The ferry travelers were whipped into a fever that became impossible to ignore, and Shane turned to ask the closest person what he had missed.
A woman in her sixties made the sign of the cross. “Some kind of demon!”
He wanted to tell the lady her marbles were rolling off the ferry’s deck when his phone beeped.
A text from Jessica: They’re saying over 5000 people dead. Find a TV. You have to see.
Shane ran to the Jeep as the ferry docked. Around him revving engines sounded frantic to get off the water.
Social media was on fire. A dozen hashtags were trending, from #GodzillaIsReal to #PrayForNewYork, while both Republicans and Democrats were blamed in equal measure.
A million people had captured shots of this cryptid and posted footage to every social site imaginable.
Shane was horrified. Not because Skorp was real, or that it had just killed thousands of people, but because the footage was everywhere. Even fucking MySpace.
Every bystander in New York had documented its existence, rendering Monster Raiders obsolete.
But there was one striking shot lensed from someone’s high-rise: the creature’s red eye lurching past a blown-out window and stopping dead at the sound of the photographer’s whimper. There was mostly silence—gunfire and explosions were ambient fireworks in the far-off distance—as the thing turned toward the camera with a familiar expression.
Skorp performed the closest thing it could to a smile, and Shane’s face flushed.
This wasn’t the opportunity he wanted, but it was one he could use.
Because he’d killed one of these things before.
***
Five years earlier Shane had encountered something similar off the coast of South Carolina.
Myrtle Beach and the rest of the coastline had reported an increase in incidents. A drastic reduction in marine life had the fishing industry up in arms. Boats returned to harbor with badly damaged hulls. And half a dozen college-age disappearances fueled plenty of speculation.
The tourist and fishing industries shriveled as word got out that something was in the water.
The Coast Guard wouldn’t act because no one had actually seen anything. A few self-respecting hunters ventured off the coast for the prestige, but their efforts were fruitless. And the bodies of the disappeared remained that way.
The tourist industry, unwilling to sit idly by, knew what needed doing. Up and down the coast, local business owners pooled their resources and sought to hire someone with the know-how to solve this mystery.
Shane FitzRoyce was an unlikely choice for nautical heroics, and he knew it was only because of his father that he’d been given the offer. The son of a thrill-seeking shark documentarian who’d fallen victim to his subjects, Shane never felt he shared that blood.
Instead he drove a small boat that was often chartered by deep-sea fishermen. He moonlighted as a personal fitness instructor, which didn’t offer much pay beyond bored and willing MILFs.
He needed the money.
Shane chartered a boat called the Razorback, captained by a salty prick called Richie, and recruited two hired hands for good measure.
Jessica was barely twenty-one and a local graduate from USC with a degree in communications. In a terrible economy, this was the closest thing she could find to documentarian work.
Gunny served three tours during Operation Enduring Freedom and swore they could sink this thing to the ocean floor and be home in time for breakfast. So he carried three duffel bags onto the Razorback, each of them loaded the kind of illegal weaponry you’d find at an arms bazaar.
The Razorback drifted toward Bermuda, and each day was more fruitless than the last.
They used sonar to chart changes in the seabed. Since fish congregated around shifting elevation, Shane hoped they would find their culprit there as well.
Shane came to the surface on the fourth morning, peeled the wet suit from his body, and left it dangling from the mounted harpoon turret.
With a quick radio check-in, he figured out that Bermuda was suffering from its own rash of inexplicable mishaps. More ships with damaged hulls, and a group of Italian tourists missing from a swinger’s yacht washed up onshore, looking like a plate of chicken bones.
He found Jessica shooting the open water off the tip of the bow. He tapped her shoulder and smiled.
“Wanna take a swim?”
She glanced at the waves. “Uh, not really.”
“Well, that’s kind of it. This thing we’re chasing—he seems to be drawn to couples.”
“Then Gunny can borrow my bikini and the two of you can have at it.”
“No way. Have you seen his back hair? Besides, can you shoot an M60?”
�
�Sure, I can shoot a camera just fine. Why not a gun?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important. We all need this payday. And the guys aren’t going to let anything happen to us.”
“Shit, Shane. I don’t know.”
“I’ll throw in half my take too.”
She agreed after a dozen more assurances that Gunny and Richie could, in fact, shoot. They took a few shots of whiskey to take the edge off, and then it was time to put up or shut up.
They changed into bathing suits while Gunny and Richie lay beneath tarps on the bow and aft, armed with every conceivable weapon on board.
Shane and Jessica had considerably less protection—just the dual machete sheaths draped over the boat’s rear. It wasn’t much because Shane felt they needed to be convincing as frolickers. Best he could tell, this thing preyed only on the unsuspecting.
They swam in nervous circles, making forced and uncomfortable conversation.
But the monster remained overdue for the party.
Jessica made the first move, inching through the water with shivering lips and pruned appendages.
Her body was curvy, and Shane embraced her slick skin.
“You just keep your eyes open,” she whispered in between licks of his earlobe. “I’m not going on a list of casualties. And this doesn’t go much further than this.”
Shane felt his thinned blood rushing full on toward his little head. This was apparently the only action these quiet seas were getting tonight.
Something thumped the Razorback’s hull, and the starboard side lifted out of the water so high it nearly capsized. Water poured down on them like a rainstorm.
He had never felt more vulnerable.
Shane gave Jessica an unintentional slap on the ass, pushing her toward the stern, and eyed the machetes, which looked a hundred miles off.
They swam for the aft, and as soon as they reached it, Shane pushed Jessica up the rung and to temporary safety. Then he unsheathed the blade hanging off the back, turning to see what had bumped them.