Wings In Darkness

by Gregory Kay

  Bringing himself back into focus with an effort, he muttered “Fine,” although at the moment he felt anything but. The room was spinning and he felt like puking. “What happened?”

  The boy waved his hands helplessly before gesturing with his gun muzzle at the thing on the floor.

  “That.”

  Luke slowly sat up and eyed the creature that had almost killed him. He had been a hunter and nature aficionado all his life, but he had never seen anything like this.

  The thing was big, a good five-hundred pounds and probably more in weight, he guessed, but the size wasn’t the strange part. Charcoal in color with a wild, horse-like mane of long black hair extending from its ears to its shoulders, it was otherwise hairless, its bare skin clearly showing the dozens of bullet holes that riddled it. With padded, clawed front feet and a profile that sloped downward to the powerful hooved hindquarters in the rear, he couldn’t place exactly what it looked like; it was as if someone had crossed the bastard offspring of a warthog and a hyena with an African lion. The head was the real horror; looking far out-sized even for the huge body that carried it, its beady eyes, now glazed in death, and the broad black nostrils on the end of a long, broad snout seemed to be afterthoughts in a skull that was built entirely around a mouth crammed full of tusks and fangs, some longer than his fingers.

  It was easy to see the thing’s dental hardware, because its maw was wedged open by the butt-stock of Luke’s shotgun; the rest of the weapon was out of sight somewhere down the creature’s throat, where it had obviously been when he'd pulled the trigger.

  A chill ran up his back when he realized what that meant, and Sam clapped him on the shoulder.

  “I think you cut that one a little close, buddy. Can you get up?”

  He could and did, slowly and painfully, but desperately looking around all the while.

  “Fiona!” he called out, but got no answer.

  Fiona and Alison landed on the ground amidst gray wiry grass and jagged rock in a darkness that wasn’t quite dark. There was no moon, and no light source other than the distant, unfamiliar stars that speckled the sky, but there seemed to be a soft glow from somewhere, leaving the world in faint, dim twilight and dark shadow. They knew it was not their world, but they didn’t have much time to think about it.

  There was a roar of fully automatic assault rifle fire, sounding strangely distant, and the pair frantically rolled aside from the copper-jacketed bullets that came howling out through the distortion in the air behind them, and chewed up the grass within inches of their bodies.

  A moment after they got out of the direct line of fire, they lunged to their feet, ready to run, and the noise of the weapons died, replaced by a faint shouting of orders.

  They’re coming after us. They’re soldiers, and we’ll never outrun them...and I’ve put up with about all their shit I intend to put up with! People wear those ‘What would Jesus do?’ bracelets; well, this is a case of what Uncle Pat would do!

  Fiona waited next to the portal, revolver in her hand. The first two came through, one with his weapon pointed to the right, covering that direction, and the other to the left, directly toward her.

  Fiona already had her weapon aimed, and shot the one looking at her from only five feet away. She had pointed at the center of mass like Luke had taught her, but the man was crouching and she was certainly no expert. Instead, the round went high, and the jacketed hollow point hit him directly in the right eye and bored a tunnel through his skull, showering his partner’s face with blood, brains, and splinters of bone.

  She kept firing, screaming the whole time, and when another round found the living man’s shoulder and shattered the joint, he panicked and sprayed the area around them with a burst of wild, one handed fire that sent her rolling for cover before throwing himself back through the portal.

  “Allie! Are you alright?” When she got no answer beyond wild sobs, Fiona looked at her companion, her heart went up in her throat when she saw the blood soaking the blond hair on the side of the girl’s head. “Can you move?”

  “I-I-I’ve been...shot.”

  “No kidding!” Quickly giving the wound a once-over while trying to keep one eye on the distortion at the same time, Fiona sighed with relief. “It’s just a graze; that hard head of yours is still in once piece!” Actually, her words were bluff and she knew it; her stomach churned when she saw the bloody scalp peeled back to reveal a three-inch gash showing the white bone beneath, but the girl didn’t need to know that right now. “Now come on! You’ve got to get up! We’ve got to get out of here before they come back or they’ll kill us!”

  “I-I...” Alison stammered, obviously stunned, but Fiona dragged her to her feet anyway.

  God, she must have a concussion and I’m really screwing things up, but I don’t know what else to do! We’ve got to get the hell away from here!

  “Let me get the big gun from the dead one, then...”

  Then Alison, looking in the direction of the portal, screamed right in Fiona’s ear.

  Thinking the solders were coming back and realizing she had at most two or three shots left before reloading, Fiona turned and desperately pointed the pistol, then froze.

  It’s the Mothman! It’s real...there are two of them!

  A pair of the winged creatures swooped down and landed by the dead soldier’s body, one right after the other, and immediately began tearing at it, squeaking at each other as they competed for the food. A third, smaller individual, not much larger than Alison, landed at the spot where the second man had been wounded, and bend over, putting its head to the ground and nuzzling the grass, slurping at it.

  Yet another creature, a three-feet tall pale thing that looked like a scrawny, half-shaved ape with sharp bristles on its back, owl’s eyes in a cat-skull head, and a gibbering, drooling mouth packed full of long, sharp teeth joined the fray, snarling and snapping while the Mothmen squeaked and beat at it, flogging it with their wings and clawing with their hind feet, defending their prey.

  Oh, my God, they smell the blood!

  Then they noticed the gnawed human skeletons to the left of the portal.

  Both women turned and ran. The staggering Alison, with her hands still cuffed behind her, was supported by Fiona’s arm hooked through hers. All they could think about was getting away from the horror, but, in the back of her mind, Fiona knew that the wounded girl was bleeding heavily, and knew what that meant here, where monsters wanted blood.

  Shitshitshitshitshit!

  CHAPTER 30

  Once he regained consciousness a few seconds after Luke, Colonel Davis, the lone survivor on the other side, proved willing to answer questions. Not at first, despite his pain and their threats, but once Kathy grabbed his injured ankle and began twisting it back and forth, rubbing the shattered bones together while screaming, “Where’s my little girl, you son of a bitch!” at the top of her lungs in a performance that made all of them blanch, he couldn’t seem to tell them fast enough.

  “She went through the portal – both of them!”

  “What portal?” Sam demanded, poking him with the still-hot muzzle of the submachine gun to emphasize his haste. In response, his spirit broken by the trauma and blood loss, the wounded man waved toward the frame work.

  “There! They went through there!” He paused just long enough to take a rasping breath. “It’s...a gate.”

  “A gate to where?” Luke asked, having just picked up an M4 assault rifle after giving up his effort to get his shotgun dislodged from the dead creature’s gullet without taking a chance on losing his hand if the jaws closed in the process, “I don’t see any gate.”

  Without waiting for the man to respond, Whitey picked up an MP3 player lying on one of the desks and tossed it at the dark distortion within the frame, and it promptly disappeared.

  “What the hell...”

  “It’s a star-gate!” Kathy exclaimed in a loud voice, “Like in the movie!”

  Joe started to say, “That’s science fiction
!” when he saw their prisoner jerkily nodding his head.

  “Like that, yeah. It’s a dimensional gate; it goes to the space between the dimensions, the stars, the worlds, whatever, and you can access any place from there if you know how.”

  Luke assumed from the man’s pale face he was going into shock, which wouldn’t be surprising, considering the deputy had half-amputated his foot with a 12 gauge in addition to beating the hell out of him in the process of subduing him, but he was distracted by Sam’s sharp intake of breath, and the way his eyes widened with a revelation.

  “You said ‘any place.’”

  “Yeah, if you know how to find the opening you want.”

  “So you can put troops in the middle of Tehran or a nuke in the Kremlin with no warning whatsoever?”

  Despite his agony, the soldier nodded enthusiastically.

  “That’s why...this is so important! It’s a matter of national security; it will secure our position as a superpower: the only superpower. No one will ever be able to challenge the United States again.”

  “No!” Luke barked, “This is a matter of two kidnapped girls. You say they went through there?” Their prisoner nodded, and the deputy looked at the others.

  “Then we’re going after them; we’re wasting time.”

  “How do we know it’s not a setup?” Sam asked, “That thing could be fatal just to pass through.”

  All of them looked at the portal, then Whitey looked at Luke, and something passed between them.

  “There’s one way to find out.”

  Whitey and Luke promptly grabbed Davis by the arms and dragged him to the portal.

  “Wait!” he wheezed in terror, “What are you doing? Please...AAAHHH!” His voice turned into a shout when his shattered ankle hit the corner of an overturned chair in passing, and he was still screaming when they thrust him headfirst into the roiling darkness, when the sound abruptly distorted. They held him there for a couple of seconds, looking at one another, then jerked him back into the room, the volume of his screams instantly reappearing along with his head.

  “They’re out there! They almost got me!”

  “Who? Who almost got you?”

  His answer came in the form of a feathered head and a pair of huge red eyes thrusting out of the darkness at them, squeaking loudly, blinking at the light.

  There was a chorus of startled yells, shouts, curses, and screams as they all involuntarily stepped back at the thing’s sudden appearance, then Whitey and Luke dropped their prisoner and reached for their guns, but they didn’t have time to use them.

  A roar filled the chamber simultaneously with a quarter of the thing’s head detaching, painting the portal’s uprights and overhead with black ichor. The thing collapsed forward, half-in and half-out, its massive wings fluttering as its body spasmed.

  Everyone looked at Johnny, standing there pale and angry with the smoking shotgun in his hand. Seeing their eyes on him, the boy gulped and attempted to shrug.

  “That’s the son of a bitch that smashed my car,” he told them with surprisingly little emotion in his voice.

  Kathy yelled and pointed.

  “Look out! It’s moving!”

  It was, but not under its own power; instead, the Mothman’s body was being dragged back through the portal by unseen hands. Lubricated by the flowing black liquid that served the creature for blood, the speed of its departure grew quickly, and within three seconds it disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind a black smear.

  Joe’s voice was hushed in a combination of disgust, awe, and fear for his daughter.

  “There are more...more...somethings, whatever the hell they are, over there, just on the other side, just waiting for us to come through.”

  “Well, let’s not keep ‘em waiting!” Sam declared, “Those girls won’t be close by if those things are there.” He didn’t add the obvious ‘unless,’ in part because he didn’t need to, because, if they were, they wouldn’t be alive. “Everybody; take aim on the dark space there. Be careful not to hit the framework. We’ll fire on three – three shots each – and then go in rolling hot. One. Two. Three!”

  All of them opened up at once, pouring a stream of lead into the portal before plunging through themselves. Sam and Johnny grabbed Davis as an afterthought and dragged him along too.

  They exited into the same twilight world as Fiona and Alison had, only their first view was carnage. Two of the Mothmen were down, one still and the other squealing and beating its wings on the ground, while the smaller, big-eyed, spike-backed creature hissed and snarled and snapped at its own shattered hind leg. Still other things were fleeing or flying or crawling away, rapidly fading into the poor light, startled by the unexpected violence.

  Joe raised the pistol in his left hand and put a .45 slug in the still-moving Mothman’s head. The noise attracted the other wounded creature’s attention, and it jumped at him from the right, springing off its one good leg, mouth open and gaping. Instinctively Joe met it with a right punch, slamming the fiberglass cast into its face and knocking it back, and before it could leap a second time, Johnny stepped around his girlfriend’s father and hit the thing in its skinny neck with a shotgun blast, decapitating it.

  “Thanks,” Joe told him, and Johnny only nodded absently, his attention focused on what else was on the ground. Abruptly the boy began to cry, prompting Joe to follow his gaze, then to fall to his knees, whispering, “Oh Jesus, no!”

  The bones from several skeletons were gnawed and slightly scattered, but still fully recognizable as human.

  Luke went numb as he stared at the freshest one, and then felt a surge of elation when he saw the strips of heavy woven cloth.

  “This isn’t her – either of them!” Pointing, he said, “Look! This one is a soldier! He’s still wearing his web gear!” Twisting his head back and forth, he rapidly looked around. “He’s the only fresh one; they haven’t had time to strip him down completely yet. These others...” In his excitement, he picked up an almost clean tibia from another corpse and sniffed it without thinking. “This one, these others, have been dead for at least a day or two.” Realizing what he had just done when he saw the wide-eyed stares of the others, he quickly dropped the bone and wiped his hand hard on his pant leg. “They’re not here.”

  Looking down at the soldier they had dragged through with them, Sam asked, “How long ago did they go through?” When the man didn’t answer, the former Green Beret kicked him hard in the ribs, but with no effect other than the jarring of the body. Keeping the muzzle trained on him, he reached down and touched the side of his neck.

  “He’s dead. Shit!”

  “Allie! Allie, can you hear me?” When Kathy got no response to her shouts, not even an echo, she looked at each of them in turn with a panicked gaze, like a deer in the headlights. “Where are they?”

  Luke didn’t answer; he was bent almost double, looking at the ground, studying the signs among the sparse tufts of grass. Suddenly he squatted and touched his fingertips to the ground before holding them up and examining them, while hope and despair warred inside him. Rising and pointing, he announced, “They went this way.”

  “How do you know?”

  Gesturing at the dead creatures, he said, “These things all bleed black goo, right? There’s a blotch of red here, and a blood trail going this way.”

  Without waiting to see if they were following, he set off at a fast pace, following the broken branches, the smashed wiry grass, and the occasional blotch of red. Through a sheer effort of will, he kept his concentration on the job, and not the dizziness or the pain, or on what the blood meant and what was probably waiting at the end of the trail.

  Sam quietly said, “Alright, let’s go. I’ll watch forward, over Luke’s head. Johnny, watch the right flank, Joe the left, and Rhonda and Kathy, keep your eyes peeled overhead, since some of these bastards can fly. If you see anything, shout it out. Whitey, take drag and watch our asses, because God only knows what might be following us.”

/>   The Ra’aki meat puppet known as Mr. Smith – and the Ra’aki who controlled it – knew something was very wrong. The distant Ra’aki knew it logically, since, not only had the other meat puppet disappeared close to the same time their instruments registered the inevitable ripples in the void as some yet-to-be-known other passed between the worlds, but now their human military contingent had abruptly broken off communication with everyone, and had remained silent, despite the portal having been open for several minutes.

  The meat puppet in his tattered black suit full of bullet holes knew it by instinct; he could smell the appetizing stench of freshly-spilled blood inside the chamber, of both human and void-creature. If he had been given to human gestures, he would have shrugged; it didn’t matter to him, other than a vague sense of animal curiosity, like one animal approaching another’s kill. He was engineered for a purpose, and those from either plane would offer the excitement of the kill and food for his always-hungry belly, if his masters who had urgently dispatched him to investigate allowed.

  Regardless of the numerous projectile wounds he had taken earlier, his engineered body was still running at over 92% efficiency, and already healing, just as it had been designed to do. It was more than enough to allow him to finish the job.

  Gingerly, ready to leap in any direction, either to avoid an attack or make one, he entered the chamber.

  His only emotion was a pang of jealousy that he had missed such a great slaughter. Human carcasses lay everywhere – some eviscerated, some dismembered, some simply shot – along with the body a karvok, the latter being a beast particularly hard to kill. He knelt beside it for a moment, thrusting his hand into a large wound and ripping away a piece of meat with the unnatural strength of a machine before stuffing the dripping hunk into his mouth.

  Still chewing, he walked to the portal and stepped through. He had no time to waste; he was on the hunt.