J. G. Passarella - Wendy Ward 01

by Wither

  She looked up, and the thing that had once been Rebecca Cole let out a roar.

  Art said, “The little girl is inside the barn. I know it.” The sheriff listened gravely, checked his shotgun, glanced up at the menacing clouds as a farmer might before making a decision about his crops.

  “We’ll wait till the old man comes out. I don’t want any shots fired in the dark if that little girl’s inside.”

  “Okay, but—”

  Blam! The plank wall between them splintered outward as buckshot ripped through the rotten wood. Art fell back, his ear ringing from the blast, and saw the sheriff roll across the weeds and come up in a crouch.

  Blam! A second shotgun blast widened the exit wound created by the first. The sheriff didn’t return fire, unwilling to risk a random shot into the dark where a child was hidden. He crouched, waiting with the shotgun held high,… waited until the old man materialized from the shadows and peered out through the hole he’d blasted in the barn wall…

  Then the sheriff swung around in a single lethal arc, smashing the butt of the shotgun into the ancient face.

  The old man’s leer split in a ragged cleft the fissure of nose and lips. He dropped his shotgun and raised his hands to his ruined teeth. With a gravelly curse he lunged at the sheriff through the hole in the barn wall.

  But the sheriff was ready. He stepped clear and swung the shotgun in an uppercut that snapped the old man’s head back and sent him staggering across the weeds.

  Only now did the sheriff level the business end of the shotgun at the old man.

  “Stop right there! Don’t move!”

  In the cloud-smothered moonlight, the old man’s bloodied grin looked black, like a hole punched in a rotten tree. He shambled forward.

  “I said don’t. Fucking. Move!”

  The old man kept coining. The sheriff fired into his chest. At this close range the sound was deafening. The old man was staggered but remained standing. His shirt was shredded by the blast; the blood that came from the dozen fresh entrance wounds flowed sluggishly.

  The old man kept coming. Some trick of the moonlight transformed his bloody mouth to a leer.

  “Stop!” the sheriff said, and when he didn’t, fired another blast. This one stopped the old man less than a yard away from the sheriff. But still he didn’t fall, only lowered his head as if in prayer and let out a long sigh. He took another shambling step, this time shorter in stride.

  Blam! A final blast, fired from point blank range. The old man’s hand closed gently around the barrel of the sheriffs gun, not to wrench it away from the younger man but rather simply to steady himself…the way any old widower might pause in midnight relief after the long journey from bathroom back to bed with his hand upon the doorknob.

  The two men, old and young, stood connected by the shotgun for several long heartbeats, the old man’s eyes downcast, the young man’s disbelieving. The old man was dead long before the sheriff gave him the nudge that toppled him.

  Wendy shoved the rifle into Wither’s jaws and pulled the trigger. Black mess exploded out the back of the witch’s long head, and Wendy felt a distant pain echo in the back of her own head. Far from fatal, the wound seemed only an annoyance to the witch. And the stomach wound was already beginning to heal. Wither whipped her head from side to side, tearing the rifle from Wendy’s grasp, crushing the stock and flinging it aside.

  Wendy jumped in the car, slammed her door shut. “Now would be a good time to get out of here!”

  From where she sat hunched over the steering wheel, Frankie gave Wendy a brief panicked look, and she desperately twisted the ignition key. She pounded the dashboard. When the engine finally spurted to hesitant life, she was so startled she almost forgot to put it in gear. She stomped the accelerator repeatedly, as if she were keeping time to some weird song of destruction, coaxing the sputtering engine into a roar. The Gremlin leapt forward.

  Wendy looked back out the hatchback window, saw nothing. “Where the hell is she?” Then she remembered the witch could fly.

  “Jesus!” Frankie said.

  Wendy looked out the windshield just as Frankie swerved the car, narrowly avoiding the witch’s descent. She almost drove past Elizabeth Wither—but glass shattered as the back of the Gremlin dipped like an overbalanced seesaw. Both rear tires blew out with twin, deafening concussions. Wendy looked back at the black, leathery arm that had driven through the wide hatchback window like a railroad spike through a china plate.

  Frankie floored the accelerator, but the Gremlin only swerved side to side, metal squealing in protest.

  “It’s pinned,” Wendy said, amazed at the brute strength of the witch.

  “If she lets go, even for a second, I’ll drive on the fucking rims!”

  But Wendy knew they wouldn’t be able to outrun the witch, even if the Gremlin still had rear tires. “Maybe noise,” Wendy said. “Try the horn!”

  The sound of metal and cloth tearing was almost completely muffled by the shrill horn. But Wendy felt the car tremble, smelled a blast of foul air, and looked up as clawed hands peeled back the roof of the Gremlin in a single jagged strip. Wendy’s own fingernails throbbed in sympathy. When the dark hand reached for another ragged section of metal, Wendy pushed off the seat and raked her nails into the witch’s exposed skin, gouging deep furrows. The witch howled, either startled or in pain, and snapped back her oversize hand.

  “We’ll have to run for it,” Wendy said. “Head for the trees, anywhere she can’t fly.”

  “Here goes,” Frankie said and pushed her door. She pushed again with a grunt of effort. “Shit! It’s stuck.” The battered roof had crimped the metal doorframe.

  Wendy tried her door, managed to shove it open with a protesting squeal of metal. “This side,” she called. “Give me your hand.”

  Wendy edged around the door, pulling Frankie by her arm. “Hurry!” But Frankie’s feet got tangled up, and her disposable camera fell out of her jacket. She scooped it up, pushed off against the edge of the door, and started to run, but was spun around forcefully. She looked back, saw the witch’s ruptured face, dripping black blood and gore as it leered down at her, an unnatural hunger in her eyes. The clawed fingers of her long reaching arm had snagged Frankie’s jacket.

  The witch tried to haul Frankie into the air, but her claws ripped through the fabric of the jacket, and Frankie fell hard, bruising her ribs. Wendy pulled her to her feet as the witch tugged her other arm free of the debris in the back of the hatchback. Black blood speckled the length of that arm as well as the one Wendy had clawed. Maybe if she loses enough Hood, she’ll pass out.

  “Come on,” Wendy shouted. With a quick nod, Frankie scooped up the camera and raced down the hill with her. They veered toward the tree line, but Frankie’s chest burned with the effort of the run, as her lungs strained her sore ribs. Her stomach became dangerously queasy. Wendy slowed to help her.

  She looked back in time to see the witch lift the Gremlin onto its side and roll it down the embankment. The crumpling sound of metal was punctuated by the loud cracks of trees snapping until the car slammed into the trunk of a red maple.

  Wendy noticed the camera in Frankie’s hands. “Is the flash still good?”

  “Think so,” Frankie said.

  “It’s the only spell that’s worked tonight,” Wendy said. “Keep it ready. Quick, into the trees.”

  Wendy glanced back, but the witch was already floating down from among the trees right in front of them. “Hurry!” she screamed, almost losing her balance as she pulled up short. “The flash!”

  “Smile!” Frankie yelled insanely and took another picture as the witch swooped low, ragged cloth fluttering behind her. The flashbulb made a short popping sound as it lit the night.

  Wither shrieked, lost her bearings, and toppled from the sky, crashing into the trees on the rising embankment. As the witch struggled to her feet, eyes staring without focusing, Wendy and Frankie veered around her.

  Wendy staggered, strangely blind
as well. As the phosphorous green supernova faded from her retina, she saw two young girls running downwind of her, running from her; a moment’s disorientation and she realized she was one of those girls … Her mind had overlapped the witch’s when the flash disoriented her. The line between them seemed to blur. It had to be very close to midnight. Time was running out.

  “Are you okay?” Frankie asked, her arm on Wendy’s as she stumbled around, confused.

  “Run!” Wendy yelled, too late. With Frankie hobbled and Wendy blinded, they had barely made it across the road to the tree line.

  The witch was loping toward them, reaching out with long clawed hands. She struck down a sapling with a sound like a rifle shot. Wendy ducked under the swiping arm, but Frankie’s reflexes were slower, diminished even more by her bruised ribs. The camera fell and Wither was quick to stomp on the cardboard and plastic contraption, pulverizing it. Frankie screamed as the witch hoisted her into the air and shook her like a rag doll.

  “Frankie!”

  The blond girl flailed at the witch, but Wither hardly noticed the blows. “Run,” Frankie shouted to Wendy through gritted teeth, her eyes wide with fear, brimming with tears. “Get the hell out of here!”

  The witch shook the girl again, viciously—and Wendy suddenly felt her friend’s weight in her own arms, tiny and insubstantial. Wendy felt a sickening hunger for her friend’s flesh, and a deeper hunger, a hunger ripe with ecstasy and power…

  Instead of trying to screen out the witch’s sensation, Wendy drew on it, opened herself to the connection, and in that moment felt herself gain enough control of Wither’s limbs to force the witch to drop Frankie.

  Wither looked over at Wendy and roared in indignation at being so easily manipulated. Wendy fought to screen out the connection between them but couldn’t react in time to prevent the tidal rush of pure demonic rage. The witch glanced down at Frankie’s helpless form, the power to snuff out her life in a heartbeat all too clear in the disparity of their sizes.

  Wendy had to distract the witch, get her away from Frankie once and for all. “Here, Wither! I’m here,” Wendy called. “You want me? I’m right here!” The towering witch took a step in her direction. Wendy backed away, luring the witch away from her friend. Glancing back a moment later, she saw she wasn’t being pursued. The witch stood over Frankie, was reaching down, her mouth opening wide to expose long yellow teeth, thick strands of bloody saliva.

  “No! Right here! Here damnitl”

  The witch towered over Frankie, who was too petrified to even crawl away from her.

  “You want me! Remember!” Wendy screamed. “I’m your fucking battery!” And, with those words, she opened the circuit wide.

  Wither turned to Wendy.

  Dizzying flood of sensation, her vision split in two, this hideous, bullet-scarred body superimposed within the outlines of an eighteen-year-old girl, like the shape beneath the shadow, the woman this monster had once been, this young girl about to become a monster. She felt a great petrified strength within her young limbs and a swooning freedom from the pull of gravity. She imagined Wither’s inky poison within her own veins pulling her down to a warm place where she could breath water or soil as she slept in silent darkness, where she could listen only to stones and the heartbeat of the earth itself… She let herself go, and it was as effortless—this consumption—as rest, easy as two opened palms, simple as sleep. Wither had begun to feed.

  Karen had just managed to drag herself to the exit of Birthing Suite D when she suddenly doubled over again, wracked by another fierce contraction. From the skylight overhead she heard the witch bellow in sympathetic agony. The pain was so intense this time she almost blacked out. She clutched her abdomen.

  The witch, trapped in the narrow frame of the skylight, reached out to Karen in a gesture that seemed almost imploring. As the black claw opened like some spiky desert bloom before her Karen felt the baby lurch violently. She heard the witch’s curious warbling, saw the raven eyes fixed on her abdomen…and understood finally that it was her baby the witch wanted.

  “No!” Karen said, and crossed one arm protectively across her middle. The witch hissed, lips curling back from a hundred glistening teeth.

  Karen pulled herself up into a crouch, steadying herself against the dizzying rush of blood to her head. She staggered, supporting herself against the wall. Overhead, bits of ceiling plaster were falling. The walls shuddered as the witch thrashed.

  She scanned in desperation for a weapon. Nothing. Only hospital equipment, heart monitor, ventilating machine, oxygen tanks, defibrillator…

  She grabbed the crash cart, wheeled it around. Began tugging open its drawers looking for anything sharp. As she scattered the useless contents of each drawer, her eye fell on the canary yellow defibrillator unit. Printed along with the instructions on top was a warning: danger! explosion hazard if used near flammable anesthesia or concentrated oxygen.

  The shock paddles had fallen off the top of the unit and dangled at the end of their long cords.

  Karen turned, scanning the room, finally spotting what she was searching for: the oxygen tanks attached to the ventilator. She hurried—doubled over, cradling her stomach with one hand—to the nearest tank and cranked open the valve. She could feel the tight little funnel of pure oxygen on her face. She tipped the tank onto its side and rolled it, hissing, to the crash cart.

  Overhead, the witch slipped a shoulder through the widening hole in the sky.

  Karen focused on her work, entwining the shock paddles around the hissing oxygen valve. Another contraction, so fierce it dropped her toher knees. She crawled toward the door, sat down against it, and used her body weight to tip it open backward. Maria was crawling toward her now, and Karen helped push her out of the birthing suite and into the hallway.

  Karen grabbed the rolling crash cart and pushed it out through the door, trailing its shock-paddle leads. The leads weren’t very long, only a few feet, and they stretched taut now where they wrapped around the doorframe.

  Karen felt her strength fading. The room seemed darker now. The bright blue flame of fury she’d felt only moments before was dwindling… But she had to finish this thing that had taken Paul from her, and was trying now to take her baby.

  She crawled out through the open door, and heard the door to Birthing Suite D close behind her.

  With a sudden crash, the witch came plummeting down in a shower of debris. Karen cranked the voltage knob on the defibrillator all the way to the right, 360 joules.

  She looked in through the window. Rebecca Cole was standing in the middle of the room, looking back at her. The witch hissed, took a lunging step forward-Karen pressed the two red buttons on the defibrillator simultaneously, discharging the electric shot… A flash. A rush of igniting oxygen…

  Karen was blown backward against the corridor wall by the white-hot flash. The last thing she remembered before the blackness closed over her was the shrieking wail of the witch in flames.

  Art and the sheriff entered the barn. They saw the old man’s shotgun lying in the straw beside the kerosene lantern. Art carried the flashlight, though its beam seemed outmatched by the seething darkness. Far overhead was just visible a ragged hole in the roof, through which they could see the silent drift of moonlit cloud.

  “Abby?” Art called into the shadows, his voice high and trembling. “Abby, can you hear me?” He panned the flashlight beam across the hayloft, the support beams hewn from rough wood. The sheriff walked farther into the dark, craning his head back to peer up into the rafters. He thought he could make out something up there, a knot of deeper blackness.

  “Over here,” the sheriff called. Art joined him. The sheriff pointed, and Art shone the flashlight toward the high ceiling.

  There. The flashlight’s beam found the little girl suspended from the rafters, trussed like a spider’s prey. Her eyes were open, staring down at them, bright in the flashlight beam. She wasn’t moving, and for a moment Art thought they were too late. But then s
he squirmed, and turned her eyes from the painful light.

  “She’s alive!” Art said. The sheriff pushed him aside and called up to the little girl: “We’ll get you down, honey”

  The sheriff began climbing the ladder to the hayloft, still holding his shotgun. Art waited on the ground.

  Once in the hayloft, the sheriff stepped out onto one of the rafters and began edging out carefully across the open. When he reached the little girl she cried out and tried to squirm away from him, but he talked to her soothingly, humming a favorite Rafft song of his own“ six-year-old daughter. The little girl quieted. The sheriff laid aside his shotgun on the rafter and took out a clasp knife. He sawed at the tarry scraps of cloth that bound her.

  Art watched from below. Behind the bandana, his eye throbbed with his racing pulse. “Hurry,” he called up to them. Where was the witch? He scanned the dark corners of the barn, alert to any movement. Why had she abandoned her prize?

  Up on the rafter, the sheriff swore to himself as the sticky goo gummed his knife’s edge. He scraped the black mess off on the rafter and resumed sawing at the tarry cloth. Finally the little girl dropped into his arms. She hugged him around the neck instinctively. “Hold on real tight, sweetheart” he told her, and kissed the blond crown of her head. With the little girl cradled in one arm and the shotgun in the other, he began edging back along the rafter toward the hayloft. When he reached it he lifted the little girl off of him and dropped her gently into the waiting hay. An stood at the base of the ladder and beckoned her down to him. “Just a little farther now, Abby

  The child hesitated at the top of the ladder, giving An a dark look.

  “She’s afraid of you,” the sheriff said.

  “It’s okay, Abby,” Art called to her, trying not to allow his own panic to frighten her. “I won’t hurt you.”

  She looked back at the sheriff a few feet above her, as if for permission. He nodded toward Art and said to the little girl, “It’s okay, sweetheart. Just climb down to him.”