by David Wong
A shadow flicked across the hood.
I stomped the brakes, the Bronco spun out, skidded, plowed ass-first into a bumper- high snowdrift alongside the road. Silence for a second, then the apocalyptic sound of eighteen wheels skidding on ice.
The semi jackknifed, the front end stopping and the heavier rear still pushing forward, toward us. A giant cartoon plumber, a red “X” through him, loomed in the windshield.
The trailer skidded to a stop about six feet from the bumper, then rocked threateningly back and forth, deciding whether or not it wanted to tip, clumps of snow spilling off the roof with each sway.
Silence, save for the tick of the engine and the rushing of the wind. Finally, Amy said, “Are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah.”
I was scanning the sky for shadows. I glanced at the red cab of the semi, could see somebody moving inside. An elbow.
A hand clamped on my arm. Amy whispered, “There. Over there.”
She was pointing, with her handless wrist, God bless her, at a black shape growing on the side of the semi, several shapes, molding together, forming something like a spider. Sitting there on the white wall of the trailer like a piece of black spray- painted gang graffiti.
The little hand clamped tighter on my forearm, hard, like a blood- pressure cuff. A low growl from Molly, who had backed up all the way to the rear wall of the Bronco, pressed against the rear door like she was trying to escape by osmosis.
“David, go. Go.” Amy was whispering it hard, harsh hisses of “GO GO GO GO GO . . .”
I slammed on the gas. The tires spun. Spun and spun and spun. Four- wheel drive. Two wheels buried in packed snow, two wheels spinning on ice.
The shadow spider moved, blurred, flicked across the length of the tractor trailer and appeared right next to the cab. Just a few feet from the driver inside. I threw the Bronco into reverse, then forward, rocking out of the ruts dug by the spinning tires, praying for traction.
“David!”
I looked up. The spider shape was gone.
I heard screams, curses. Rage. The driver had stumbled out of the cab, a big guy, tall and fat, a goatee.
The man was ranting, spit flying from his mouth, staring us down, fists clenched. Face pink with the effort of it. He turned his eyes on us. A rabid dog. “Cunt blood fucking cunt motherfuckers—”
Maybe he thinks we’re plumbers . . .
He stomped toward us and I could see them now, shapes moving around him, shadows wrapping around him like black ribbons twisting in the wind. And his eyes. His eyes were pure black now, the pupils and the whites gone in coal- black holes.
A few feet away from us now, trudging toward us like a robot. I slammed on the gas again, spun again, felt the rear end shift and then settle in, the tires making a pathetic, wet whine against the slush. A thin arm shot across my chest and it was Amy, reaching over and slapping the lock shut on my door a millisecond before the truck driver started clawing at the handle.
Crazed curses muffled by the door, his breath steaming up the glass. Tires whirring against ice. “FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS EAT YOUR FUCKING—” A meaty hand smacked the glass.
The curses were replaced by a long, howling scream. The man stumbled back as if shot, a hand flying to his forehead. He stumbled, went to a knee, screeched like a saw blade on metal plate.
He exploded.
Limbs flew, flecks of red splattered over the windshield, Amy screamed. A head tumbled through the air, landed on the road and bounced out of sight. The tire sounds stopped. I realized I had let off the gas, was gawking at the looping remains of the man’s intestines, steaming in the frozen air.
The shadows, restless again. Crawling over the truck and the snowy ground around us, the things as stark as black felt in the snow- reflected moonlight. A tall one grew in front of us, almost the shape of a man but without a visible head and with too many arms. Molly went wild, barking and barking and barking, then melting into high, breathy whimpers.
I stomped the gas pedal one more time, got the tires spinning, heard bits of ice and dirt smack the fenders. The shape moved toward us, melting into the hood, walking through the engine block, moving across the hood like wading into a pond. It reached up with an arm, an arm as long as a man, then plunged it into the hood. The engine died instantly. The headlights went dark.
Shadow everywhere now. Movement, hints of it through the moonlight. Amy breathing next to me, quick, nervous gasps. For a long time, nothing happened.
She mumbled something, too low to hear. I glanced at her; she leaned in and said, “I don’t think they can see us.”
I didn’t get it at first but it almost made sense. Whatever they were, they didn’t have corneas and pupils and optic nerves. We couldn’t see them, normally. They were sensing us, feeling us out, searching without seeing.
I looked up, saw one shape flit away and disappear into the sky. Another, floating past the semi trailer, crawling over the plumber logo, then dissolving into the darkness.
I nodded, slowly, whispered, “They don’t belong here, in this world. They’re flying blind, with no eyes to—”
A soft thump on the window. Amy screamed.
Outside my window, inches from my face, was the severed head of the truck driver. A six- inch hunk of spinal column dangled from his neck, hanging in midair. His eyes were wide open, no sign of lids, two orbs twitching this way and that, taking us in. Amy was still screaming. Some lungs, that girl.
“Amy!”
The head pressed up against the window, squishing its nose, cramming its eyeball against the glass to get a look in. Its mouth hung open, lips pressed against the glass, teeth scraping.
“Amy! Plug your ears!”
She looked at me, saw me pull out the gun, pressed her forearms over the side of her head. I started rolling down my window.
I created a gap of about six inches when the head tried to ram into the opening, jaws working, teeth snapping. I jammed the gun in its mouth and squeezed the trigger.
Thunder. The head disintegrated, became a red mist and a rain of bone chips. I glanced at the gun, impressed, wondered about the loads the stranger had sent me. I leaned to the window and screamed, “You should have quit while you were a—”
“David!”
I turned. Darkness was falling around us now, pooling, the clouds over us vanishing behind living shadow. Suddenly it was dark, cave dark, coffin dark. I opened my mouth to tell Amy to run, to run and leave me behind because it was me they wanted and not her, but nothing came out.
I twisted the key, the engine turned over, stalled. I tried again, it fired to life, I stomped the gas. I floored it and we went nowhere, nowhere, nowhere and then lurched forward, across an unseen street, smacking into the drift on the other side of the road. I threw it in reverse, floored it again, spinning out and then crawling forward—
We were off. Out of the blackness and into the night, eating up the street, my hands strangling the wheel. The speedometer crept up, tires floating under us, like driving a hovercraft. I felt a hand on my arm again, Amy, breathing, whipping her head around, trying to see everything at once through the ridiculous cardboard glasses.
The night outside got darker and darker, shapes swirling around, blackness closing in, swimming in it, like being downwind from a forest fire.
And suddenly, Amy was gone. An empty seat.
And then I felt stupid.
Of course the seat was empty—I came out here alone and we had never found Amy; the house had been empty and we all knew she was actually wrapped up in a tarp in my—
The darkness swallowed me. The passing scenery outside was gone, no houses or grass or snowdrifts, like driving in deep space.
Shadow poured into the Bronco like floodwater. A blade of ice pierced my chest, cold flowing in like poison. My heart stopped. It was like strong, cold fingers reaching behind my ribs and squeezing.
And then I was gone, out of the truck, out of anywhere. A storm of images exploded in my
head, crazed mental snapshots like fever dreams:
—looking down, a black crayon in my hand, drawing pictures of three stick figures. One drawn with long hair, one shorter with a spray of red at the top—
—under my car, my old car, my Hyundai. On my back, another guy next to me, long blond hair. I’m holding up a muffler and he’s threading in bolts, and I tell Todd we’re missing a bolt, that it rolled away, and he’s saying that the jack is tilting and GET OUT GET OUT BECAUSE THE CAR IS FALLING—
—running, breathing hard, through a ballroom in a Las Vegas casino. Chaos, then seeing Jim and knowing what I had to do, raising and firing and watching him go down, clutching his neck—
—blue canvas, knees in the snow, rolling a body, rolling it up because somebody could show up any second and it’s sooooo hard to move the deadweight—
Back. In the truck again, fingers clamped on the wheel. Plowing through deep snow, a mailbox flying toward me.
“David!”
I was driving in somebody’s front yard. I cranked the wheel, ground through a drift and landed in the street again. I saw Amy was back, in the passenger seat, pale as china. I reached over and grabbed her by the arm, pulled her over, like I could somehow stop her from getting sucked out of reality again if I hung on really, really tight. She screamed, “The light! Go to the light!”
No idea what she was going on about. Then I saw it, a pool of light in the pitch blackness just ahead. A flat of parking lot, a hint of an unlit red sign.
It was getting darker, blackness eating up the landscape around me, a power outage during a lunar eclipse. I cranked toward the embankment and jumped the curb, climbed over a little hill then landed with a lurch. I slammed the brakes, spinning on a white plane as flat as a hockey rink.
THUNK!
We smacked a pole, light bathing the interior. I saw out of the rearview mirror the sign for a new doughnut shop, the place still under construction but the parking lot lights on. And then I saw nothing at all, because blackness settled over everything outside the little island of lit snow we had settled in. In a second we were cut off from the universe, nothing in any direction, like we had submerged in a lake of oil five hundred feet under the ocean floor. Just black and black and black.
Silence. The sound of two people breathing. I felt a wet nose at my ear, saw Molly poking her head up, wagging her tail, bouncing back and forth on her paws, growling low under her breath.
Amy said, “They can’t get us! They can’t get us in the light! I knew it!”
“How did you—”
“David,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they’re shadow people.”
She rolled down her window, poked her head out into the night and screamed, “Screw you!”
“Amy, I’d prefer that you not do that.”
She pulled back in and said, “My heart’s going a thousand miles an hour.”
I looked out into the nothing, found the gun in my lap and squeezed it. A good luck charm at this point, and barely that.
Amy said, “Ooh! Look at that. What is—”
Little bits of light, moving around in the darkness in pairs. Twin embers, small as lit cigarettes, floating slowly around us. There were a few and then a few more, until dozens of the fiery eyes were peering in at us. And then, through the windshield, I saw color. A thin line of electric blue across the darkness, like a horizon. Then the blue line grew fat in the middle, expanding, widening like a slit cut in black cloth. It expanded until blue was all that was visible through the windshield.
It was an eye. The eye. Vibrant blue with a dark, vertical reptilian slit of a pupil. The hand on my forearm again. I thought Amy was going to break the bone with her grip. The eye twitched, taking us in. Then it blinked, and was gone.
The shroud of blackness was gone, too. Just the night now, shrouded stars and moonlit snow and a sad, dormant doughnut shop.
Amy said, “Are—are they gone?”
“They’re never gone.”
“What was that?”
Well you see, Amy, it’s like this. We are under the eye of Korrok. We are his food, and our screams are his Tabasco sauce.
Instead I said, “I’m not leaving the light.”
“No.”
Amy craned her head around, looking in all directions again, then took off the cardboard glasses. I looked down at the Smith and realized something, probably several minutes too late. I grabbed the barrel and offered it to Amy, butt- first.
I whispered, “Take this.”
“What? No.”
“Amy, that thing, with the truck driver? You saw how they took him over, used his body? Well that same thing can happen to me.”
And don’t ask me how I know that, honey.
“No, David—”
“Amy, listen to me. If I start acting weird, if I make a move at you, you need to shoot me.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to—”
“It’s not complicated. The safety is off. Just squeeze. And don’t get cute and try to go for my arm or some shit like that. You’ll miss. Just aim for the middle of me, jam it into my ribs. Shoot and get out, run for it. Don’t, you know, keep shooting me. Please, take it.”
To my surprise, she did. She turned the pistol over, the gun looking huge in her little hand. She said, “Well, what if it happens to me? What if they take me instead?”
“I can overpower you if I have to, get the gun away. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Not with you.”
“Why?”
I leaned back, suddenly feeling lighter without the gun. I swear the things generate their own gravity.
“It’s just a theory I have.”
Amy pulled her feet up on the seat and scrunched against me, shivering. The gun was in her right hand, laying across her hip and pointing vaguely at my crotch. There would be some real symbolism there, I thought, if this turned out to be a dream.
I said, “Besides, I don’t need the gun.” I held up my hands and said, “They passed a law that said I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets. Do you know why? Because they would become concealed weapons. I can kill a man with these hands. Or just one of my feet.”
She snorted a dry, nervous laugh and said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll watch out for you then.”
I again gripped the steering wheel with both hands, tendons tensing across my forearms like cables. I sat like that, in silence, for an eternity of minutes. A whole bunch of words trapped behind clenched teeth.
Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Okay. Look. You need to understand something. About this situation, who you’re trapped in here with.”
“Oookaaaay . . .”
She twisted around to face me. Those eyes were so damned green. Like a cat. “Don’t, just—just listen. Do you know why I was in the special school, why I was in the BD class in Pine View?”
She said, “Sort of. The thing with Billy, right? The fight you got into with him? And then later when he—”
“Yes, that’s right. Listen. Men are animals. Get us together, take out the authority figures, and it’s Lord of the Flies. Billy and his gang, a couple of guys on the wrestling team, they used to make these videos. The kid, you know the Patterson kid, kind of fat? Anyway, they got him after school and tied him to a goalpost and shaved his head and all that, and it was hours before somebody found him, and by then, you know, the skin on his face was all blistered from the contact with the feces . . .”
Maybe you can cut back on the details a bit, hmmm?
“. . . and they have this party and they show the tape, show the tape of them torturing this fat kid and him just screaming. And they sat there with their beers and watched that tape over and over and over and that’s the way it is in high school. Shit that would get an adult put in a straightjacket is just brushed off. ‘Boys will be boys.’ ”
I hesitated, scanned the night for something, anything. I saw a lone bird on a power line, flapping its wings, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
“Anyway, the Hitchcock guys, I ha
d gym with them and they picked me outta the crowd. It became this daily thing. Little shit at first but they kept pushing it further and further and it took more and more to keep them entertained. And the coach there, he hated me, so he would make sure and not be there. I mean, I literally saw him turn his back and leave the room when they came after me one time, made sure I saw him do it. And one day they got on me and took me to this equipment room in back, this little storage area with shoulder pads and wrestling mats stacked all around and it’s hot as an oven and there’s this moldy smell of old sweat fermenting in foam padding. And things got crazy. Like, prison yard crazy. And eventually it ends and they leave me there and they’re walking out through the locker room and . . .”
Hmmmm . . . would she notice if I suddenly changed the subject?
“Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two- inch blade on my key chain. It was all I had. And I get this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice him, right up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine. It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor. And I got on him, sat on his chest and I started jabbing at his face, cutting, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and . . .”
I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way. I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open.
Filling in the silence, Amy asked, “What did they do to you?”
“Let’s put it this way. I’ll never, ever tell you.”
She had no answer, which either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well familiar. I pressed on.
“So, I wound up—”
—cutting out his eyes—
“—hurting him pretty bad, he lost his eyesight. I mean, like, legally blind. I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synonyms for aggravated assault. The school was talking a permanent expulsion. My dad—my adoptive dad—he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of meetings with the school and the prosecutor and it was a mess. They wound up testing me for mental illness, which I knew even at the time was a way to get me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy from me, should have diagnosed me, whatever. I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at inkblots and role- play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world. . . .