by Hunter Shea
It was too late. Ann flung the door wide open.
And immediately wished she’d listened to her father.
Because what she saw outside was impossible. She had to be asleep. Or maybe she had gone outside during the storm and something had hit her head.
Two massive green iguanas were lounging in the front yard across the street. They each had to be at least twenty-five feet long. They looked more like something out of a bad science fiction movie than actual living creatures.
The Roberts’s house was in shambles. Either the iguanas or the storm had ripped the roof off, the garage in tiny pieces.
What she saw on the lawn knocked the breath from her lungs.
There lay Milly Roberts, the morning shift waitress at the luncheonette for the past forty years. Only it wasn’t all of Milly. Just her head and shoulders.
One of the lizards bent forward, wrapping its tongue around her remains, scooping it into its mouth.
Ann used to think the phrase, “I was so scared, I pissed myself” was an exaggeration.
Now she knew from experience it could happen.
Someone pulled her back and slammed the door.
Ann spun around and came nose to nose with her father. “I told you not to go out there.”
“It’s . . . it’s real?”
“Come on.”
Her mother got on tip-toes to look out the small diamond of glass set in the door. Her shaking hands flew to her mouth. “They heard the door,” she said.
“What?”
“You closed it too hard. They heard it and they’re coming this way!”
Her father stood holding Ann’s hand, breathing too heavy, eyes darting around the inside of the house. He reached out for her mother. “The back door!”
They bolted to the kitchen, her father nearly tearing the door off its hinges to get out.
The moment they stepped outside, it sounded as if a bomb had gone off in the house. Ann looked back and saw a lizard standing atop their collapsed roof, staring down at them. They raced across the slick lawn. Ann lost her footing and went down, losing her father’s grasp and sliding between her mother’s legs, tangling her up until she fell.
Scrabbling in the mud, they glanced back. The lizard had disappeared, but the cacophony of the house coming down to its foundation increased.
Ann helped her mother up. Her father stood staring at them, his face deathly pale, eyes bulging.
“Are you all right?” Ann asked.
He went to grab his left shoulder, collapsing as if his knees had suddenly turned to mush.
“No!” her mother wailed.
They dropped beside him, Ann begging her father to open his eyes, her mother feeling for a pulse in the rolls of his neck.
“Wake up, daddy. We have to go,” Ann pleaded, gripping his hand.
When her mother looked at her with eyes swimming in tears, Ann’s heart broke.
“He’s gone.”
“No,” Ann said, shaking him by the shoulder. “We . . . we need an ambulance. I’ll go next door and call for help.”
A lizard slunk along the side of their ruined house.
Ann cast her eyes down at her father, the man who would never again pinch her cheek or joke about what a bad driver she was.
No one was coming to save him.
“We have to go,” her mother said.
She reluctantly let his hand fall from her own. The lizard had spotted them. It made a hissing noise that chilled her blood.
They splashed through the mud, banging into the wooden fence in the back of the yard.
“I’ll boost you up,” her mother said, cupping her hands.
Ann slipped her foot in them, glancing back at her father. The lizard sniffed his still body.
“Dad,” she snuffled.
Her mother lifted her all the way up, turned and said, “Get the hell away from him!”
Ann straddled the fence, her hand reaching out. “Come on, Mom! I’ll help you up.”
Instead, her mother charged the lizard. It looked at her with dead eyes, its mouth wrapped around her father’s legs.
Ann didn’t see the other lizard leap over the house until it was too late.
Her mother never even had a chance to scream.
Chapter 18
Now how the fuck was he supposed to do this?
Wiping rain from his eyes, Frank crouched behind a van, watching the dino-lizard attempt to crush the car in its jaws. With each squeeze, the metal compacted a little more. Now that he was closer, he could hear the woman screaming.
He noticed there was another in the car, but she was either passed out, hurt, or dead.
If he couldn’t figure out a way to get that thing to drop the car, she might be better off dead. It would save her the agony and horror of being eaten alive.
He scanned the litter-strewn street. The hurricane had dumped everything that wasn’t nailed down onto the town. Aside from parts of trees and other vegetation, he spotted a lawn gnome with its red hat bashed in, a twisted bicycle, broken glass, patio umbrellas, a battered lawn chair and tons of garbage flung out of trash cans.
Unfortunately, the storm hadn’t plucked a machine gun from someone’s gun safe and deposited it near him.
“That would be too easy.”
But there were chunks of concrete scattered about. It looked like part of the drug store across the street had come apart.
Before he’d become a low level Mafioso—very low level—Frank had been a pitching prospect at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. By his junior year, he had college scouts coming to games, trying to woo Frank and his parents into coming to their schools.
By senior year, he had discovered the glories of weed, knocked up his girlfriend (who lost the baby in her third month) and was kicked off the team for failing to show up for practice. He never got that scholarship or a chance to walk on some fancy campus.
That didn’t mean his arm wasn’t still strong.
Running into the street in a crouch, as if the dino-lizard couldn’t see him, he scooped an armful of the jagged concrete.
“Okay, hit a gecko, win a prize.”
Better watch it, you really are starting to sound like a lunatic!
Juggling a rock the size of a softball in his right hand, he looked about for a place to hide once he got the monster’s attention. He had no aspirations of being David, slaying Goliath with a single stone. At best, he was going to piss it off before becoming lizard chow if he didn’t move fast.
His gaze fell on the manhole in the middle of the street.
That would do.
He grabbed a shard of metal that had settled under a car tire, jammed it in the lip of the sewer cap and popped it open. With one eye on the lizard, he pushed it aside.
“You can’t fit in there, big guy.”
Scooting low and seeking cover like a soldier, Frank got within range of his throwing arm.
The screaming woman was now half out of the window. The only thing keeping her from falling was her seatbelt.
“Better make this count. Just pretend its eye is a catcher’s mitt.”
In fact, the eye was ten times bigger than any mitt he’d ever thrown to. However, it was high above his head and moving.
“Fuck it.”
Rearing back, Frank hurled the rock as hard as he could, wishing he had time to warm up a bit. His shoulder popped. The rock missed the lizard’s eye, plinking off its leathery cheek.
He grabbed the next chunk and fired that off, again missing the eye but getting the monster’s attention.
It stopped munching on the car, turning its full awareness on the puny human that was chucking pebbles.
“Come on, Godzilla, put the freaking car down.”
Desperate to run for the open sewer, he laced his fingers a
round another hunk of concrete and let it fly.
“Strike one!”
He held up his arms in victory as it plunged right into its black eye. Its lid slammed shut, head flinching back.
The car slipped from its mouth.
Crap!
He didn’t think far enough ahead to realize the lizard wouldn’t just carefully place the car back on the ground. It hit with a deafening thunderclap, the remaining glass shooting outward like bullets from a Gatling gun.
If that woman wasn’t dead, Frank may just have finished the job. The one that had been screaming was slumped against the dashboard.
The lizard let out a chilling roar, swiveling its head toward him.
As much as he wanted to rush over and get those ladies out of the car, the dino-lizard didn’t look like it was going to let him.
Frank spun on his heels and ran for the sewer.
He pulled up short when he spotted a throng of cars and people pouring into Main Street. A chorus of screams rose up when they spotted the giant lizard behind him.
It looked like the shit was about to hit the fan.
This wasn’t Frank’s town. These weren’t his friends and neighbors. He’d done what he could for those two chicks and most likely had only gotten them killed.
Frank slipped into the sewer, pulling the cap over the hole and hoped no one saw him retreat to the safest place for miles.
Chapter 19
A massive explosion, the leaden sky darkening with heavy clods of earth and the street buckling, caused Don to veer off the road, clipping a mailbox. It clanked over the roof of the car. He skidded to a stop on someone’s front lawn. Half of the house was nothing but kindling.
“Oh my God, there’s more,” Barbara said, barely above a hush. Gary pulled away from his mother’s chest to see what had captured his parent’s attention.
Across the street where there had once been a trio of Tudor homes, there was now only a gaping crater.
Crawling out of that crater were more giant iguanas, each one bigger and nastier-looking than the last. Their hides were streaked with filth, and their tails were as thick as train cars.
One. Two. Three more lizards came from the depths, sliding away from Don’s car, annihilating anything in their path. Cars were flipped or crushed, what trees had survived Ramona were uprooted, houses were shattered to shards.
People fled from their homes on both sides of the street, the explosion alone enough to have them in a panic.
Don watched impotently as men, women and children were sucked up by the lizards—small morsels for the hungry horde. Even more were stepped on or swatted by their massive tails. A man in a track suit sprinted down the street, face steeled in determination to escape the madness.
Fleeing one lizard, he didn’t see the tongue of another until it knocked him literally out of his sneakers. His body careened into a car and he fell into a jumble of broken limbs. Even through the closed windows, Don could hear the man’s bones shatter.
Don said, “Don’t look, bud.” But Gary’s eyes were wide and wet, glistening with a terror that would haunt him the rest of his days.
Don gunned the engine, fishtailing on the wet lawn. He almost hit a man and woman as they darted in front of him, eager to get to their own car.
Just get to the sheriff’s office, he repeated over and over in his head. He needed something solid, something real, to keep from losing his mind. He couldn’t think beyond getting to what he assumed was the safest place in Polo Springs, if there could actually be such a thing.
“Don!” Barbara squealed, jerking the wheel hard to the right. The car banged off a parked SUV and came to a stop.
“What the hell did you do that for?”
Barbara was shaken up from the impact. She rolled down her window and shouted, “Over here!”
Looking to Don, she said, “Open the locks.”
He did as he was told, cradling Gary’s head in his hands. The boy didn’t seem to be hurt. “Did we get in a accident?” he asked.
“Just a little one. No big deal.”
The car jounced and the back door shut. Don turned around to see their mayor, Ann Hickok, in the back seat, her eyes red and puffy, hair matted to her head.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Breathing so heavily Don worried she might hyperventilate, Ann could only shake her head. Of course she wasn’t all right. No one was. But she was alive, and that was better than many.
“Where are your parents?” Barbara said.
Fresh tears cascaded down her face.
Barbara caught Don’s eye and he knew there was no way they were letting Ann out of their sight from here on.
“We’re going to the sheriff’s office,” Don said, putting the car in gear. “It’ll be safe there.”
Ann shifted in her seat to gaze out the back window where the worst carnage was taking place. “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice far, far away.
Gary looked up at his father with a look that begged him to contradict Ann.
Jaw clenched, Don said, “His office is solid and armed. We’ll all be fine there. I promise.”
He turned down Rockaway, the half-mile stretch of road that curved onto Main Street. Only a few houses here were in ruins. But a lot of cars seemed to be missing. It was eerily quiet, compared to the mayhem they had just come from.
“Could be a good sign,” he said, not meaning to speak aloud.
No one asked him what he was talking about.
Maybe, just maybe, the worst was behind them. If the lizards were like the skyscraper-sized monsters in all the movies he watched as a kid, they’d lumber into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the town to bury its dead and rebuild.
That was only in movies.
It became apparent where everyone had gone as he got closer to Main. There was a logjam of cars and people, all trying to make their way down the town’s main thoroughfare. It looked as if every surviving citizen of Polo Springs was there.
Dammit. He was too late. The sheriff’s office would be crammed with people. They’d never make it through the mob.
Hell, he couldn’t even get the car close enough to see what was going on without running people over.
He wanted to see for himself, but it wasn’t safe to leave his family and Ann in the car.
Shutting the car down, he said, “Stay close.”
Ann stepped out in a daze.
When people saw her, there were cries of, “It’s the mayor! What do we do?”
“What happened? How is this possible?”
“My children are missing!”
“Have you called the military? We need help!”
“What are you doing about this?”
“We need medical attention. Where are the doctors?”
The words didn’t seem to have the slightest effect on Ann. She stopped short of the unnerved throng, staring at them without blinking. Don was sure they could have asked her for her name and she wouldn’t have known what to say.
He put a protective arm around her. “Look, she’s gone through hell just like the rest of us. Has anyone seen the sheriff? Is he around?”
Don stretched to see over their heads down onto what was normally the quieter end of Main Street where the stores petered out and residential homes began. He couldn’t spy a thing over the crowd.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” an elderly woman with a bleeding gash on her forehead said.
It appeared everyone had fled their homes and had come upon the notion of rousing the sheriff at the same time. Barbara held Gary in one arm, slipping her other around Don. He held on to Ann as they followed the crowd.
Main Street in Polo Springs was shaped like an L. The sheriff’s office was just before the joint where one street made a ninety-degree turn to the other.
As they walked, Don kept an eye on escape routes. Those lizards could pop up at any moment, right from under their feet. If that happened, he needed a place to take Barbara, Gary and now, Ann.
The crowd continued to pepper Ann with pleas and questions, but he wasn’t sure she heard them.
The sheriff’s office was dark, as were all the homes and buildings. Mr. Handler, who owned the gas station on the edge of town, tried the door.
“It’s locked.”
“He’s probably home hiding,” a woman said. The mob got to grumbling.
“Some good our town leaders are doing us,” a faceless man shouted.
All eyes turned to Ann.
“Well, what do you propose we do, Ms. Mayor?” said Kelly, the woman who drove the town’s sole school bus asked.
Ann flinched at the sound of breaking glass. A pair of teen boys had tossed a metal trashcan through the glass door. One of them reached in and undid the lock.
If the plywood was off the door, that probably meant the sheriff had been there. He could be out trying to help people at that very moment.
Don and his family were jostled as everyone tried to cram inside at the same time, looking like the Three Stooges as they got caught in the narrow doorway.
“Get the fuck back!”
“You get back!”
“I can’t breathe!”
Don waded into the crowd, pulling people back by their shirts and collars.
Damn morons, he thought, trying to break up the jam. It’s only taken a few minutes for them to lose all civility. We have to work together.
Someone punched the back of his head. When he turned to see who had thrown it, he realized he’d lost sight of his family. The mob surged, pushing him along with the tide until he spilled into the sheriff’s office.
They found the sheriff.
Half of his head was gone. Not really gone. Just plastered on the wall behind him.
Chapter 20
Nausea woke Nicole up from her stupor. Having no idea where she even was, she threw up in her lap, hot bile splashing all over the car.
The car.
I’m in the car!
Eyesight still fuzzy, Nicole drew in a ragged breath when the destruction of her vehicle came into soft focus. All of the windows had been shattered. The roof of the car was only an inch from her head. Her dashboard was scrunched together like an accordion.