by John Inman
He knew Jonas was safe in the cellar. If everything worked as it was supposed to, the switch on the generator would electrify the metal posts on the outside of the cabin, including the front door. A separate switch downstairs lit the posts protecting the blood room alone. He would throw that switch after the drop-down door was locked behind them both and they were safely sealed inside the cellar.
Again, the cabin gave a massive shudder as the queen battered the outside wall. She had worked herself into a real fury now. The front door all but danced in its frame. Floorboards cracked and rolled beneath Terry’s feet, and the staircase leading up to the loft ripped free from its moorings with a horrendous screech of tearing nails and snapping lumber. Billows of dust flew up when the staircase crashed to the floor below. Another window shattered, and shards of glass sprayed the room like buckshot.
Barely able to see or breathe, Terry threw the switch on the generator. The walls around him and on the ceiling above, lined with metal posts, all connected by a maze of wire, sparked to life. Tiny blue flames danced from post to post, circling the room in a heartbeat.
Terry dove for the cellar door, leaping down the stairs below. He spun around with his feet on the bottom step. With his head poking up through the hole in the floor, he looked out one last time. He was staring right at them when two of the posts used as crossbeams to seal the front door suddenly bowed inward. One snapped free with a twang and clattered to the floor while the other gave a metallic scream and shot across the room, impaling the couch like a lance. A second later the front door came off its hinges and went spinning through the air. The queen stooped her great head through the empty doorway to peer inside, her massive body framed by moonlight.
She gave a victorious roar and lumbered inside, squeezing through on her crutchlike wings. The metal posts around the door sparked and crackled, carrying electricity to every square inch of the cabin walls. The queen brushed against the doorframe, and the electricity flowed from the jamb to the fragile black flesh of her vast wing. As the current struck her skin and burned its way through her, her beady eyes opened wide and her teeth and dewclaws flared in blue flame.
The queen threw her head back and keened a piercing, mournful wail of pain.
And at that precise moment, the generator died. The metal slats around the cabin walls ceased to glow. Terry blinked, staring at them.
“Fuck!” he screamed, still cowering inside the trapdoor with his head poking up through the cabin floor to watch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The queen gave herself a shake and stepped the rest of the way through the front door, having to stoop to do it. Once inside, she unfolded her broad tarpaper wings, satiny black, and stretched them wide as far as they would go. Giving her head a shake, she looked at each wing in turn as if wondering where the pain had gone. Her vast wingspan dwarfed the room around her and blocked the moonlight behind.
Her flat, moist nose squelched and flexed, and her black eyes immediately focused on Terry peering up through the floor, staring at her. She bellowed in rage and Terry ducked below, slamming the trapdoor shut behind him as he went. Blinded by the darkness, he groped around and slid the metal posts across the trapdoor, sealing it shut above him.
The bars hadn’t worked on the cabin door, and Terry suspected they wouldn’t work on the trapdoor either. Not for long anyway. The queen was too strong and far too motivated. But what the hell else was he supposed to do?
“This is a pickle,” Jonas muttered from the shadows.
“No kidding,” Terry muttered back.
“Where’s the shotgun?”
“Upstairs,” Terry said. “Where’s the .38?”
“Upstairs,” Jonas said.
So there it was, Terry decided. He and Jonas were trapped, they were unarmed, and the generator was dead. They still had their sense of humor, but that wasn’t going to help them much. There was a five-hundred-pound something-or-other wanting to gobble them up for dinner, and here they were stuck in a hole in the ground with an enraged pug who was still barking his brains out and giving Terry the biggest headache he had ever had in his life. For all the work he had done to make the cabin secure, they weren’t any safer than they would have been upstairs, facing the queen head-on with maybe a flyswatter and a can of Raid. On the bright side, even if they did survive, the cabin was pretty much a wreck, so he wouldn’t have to worry about removing all those stupid fence posts. Heck, they were probably the only thing holding the cabin together.
The cellar was pitch-black. Dust sprinkled down as the creature crashed and banged around above their heads, still bellowing in impotent fury. She must have been swinging her great wings about, using them to batter Terry’s belongings to pieces, flinging them everywhere in rage. The sound was deafening.
“The generator died, didn’t it?” Jonas quietly asked.
Terry could hear the fear in his voice. It was almost drowned out by the great beast tearing the cabin to shreds above their heads.
“Dead as a doornail,” Terry answered. “I’m sorry.”
To Terry’s surprise, Jonas stepped close, still unseen in the shadows, and squeezed himself into Terry’s arms. Terry clutched him tight, with Bruce in between. All three heads swiveled up to the trapdoor. Waiting for what they knew would come next.
As if Bruce wasn’t making enough noise already, he launched into an entirely new set of barking. This time it was even louder than before. Unable to hold him, Jonas set the little dog on the floor before sliding back into Terry’s arms.
“Hang on, baby,” Terry murmured, fearing what was about to happen.
Jonas nodded, pressing his face to Terry’s chest.
Judging by the sounds upstairs, the queen had at long last focused every ounce of her attention on the trapdoor. As she pummeled it, it rattled and banged above their heads. Bruce was howling and spitting and snarling, and up above the queen was smashing and stomping and squeaking in fury.
Somewhere in the midst of all that racket, another sound emerged.
It was a thumping sound. Like percussive smacks of wind in the night sky outside. It drew closer and seemed to hover directly over the cabin.
Terry and Jonas both lifted their heads and stared upward. Terry was still shaking, but not as much. He was starting to wonder if he was imagining things.
“Is that what I think it is?” he hissed.
“Sure sounds like it,” Jonas hissed back.
Bruce wailed and howled and snapped and snarled. His little toenails tippy-tapped their way up the cellar steps like Fred Astaire on meth. They could hear the dog repeatedly banging his head against the trapdoor now, trying to barge through it so he could get at the creature outside and show it who was boss. If Terry hadn’t been so terrified, he might have laughed at the little dog. As it was, he could only salute the pug’s courage. Misplaced as it was.
“Listen!” Jonas snapped.
Terry froze. He had heard it too. Voices. Human voices. One particular voice stood out among the others. It was Colonel Briggs. He was yelling into the cabin through a bullhorn from somewhere outside.
“Anyone still alive in there?” he boomed, his voice loud enough to wake the dead.
Terry and Jonas started screaming and hollering and dancing around like Bruce, as happy as they had ever been in their lives. “Yes! We’re here. We’re trapped in the cellar. Help! Help!” Even Bruce got into the act, yipping and yapping and bouncing up and down.
Their laughter died the moment the trapdoor received a horrible whack from above, bursting into splinters and shattering in front of their eyes. Light poured into the cellar, and Terry realized the helicopter was hovering overhead, shining a great floodlight down through a hole in the cabin’s roof.
Directly above, they saw the queen turn away from the trapdoor and focus her attention on the shattered front door instead. The human voices were closer now. Just outside, Terry thought. A lot of them.
Then he knew it beyond all doubt as Colonel Briggs called out from what s
ounded like the front porch, or what was left of it. His words were distorted by the bullhorn he was yelling through. Above and behind and around him, the helicopter’s rotors thumped, and its engines wailed. The wind from its blades tossed tree limbs and roofing shingles everywhere. There were other machines out there too. Terry could hear their engines rumbling. Troop carriers or something. Briggs must have brought his whole Army with him.
Terry later speculated that the queen at that moment decided to ignore the soldiers and go with her original plan of eating the two gay guys who blew up her nest. Big mistake.
She poked her huge head down through the shattered hole where the trapdoor had been. Opening her great jaws, she emitted a horrific scream of outrage. Terry and Jonas stumbled back to a distant corner, still holding on to each other for dear life, and snatching the dog out of harm’s way at the same time. The queen’s foul breath filled the cellar, and Terry retched, tasting bile. Jonas railed at the beast to go fight the Army and leave them the fuck alone.
The queen seemingly didn’t like that idea. She dropped her crutchlike wing down through the cellar opening, groping in the dark for the prey she knew was cowering there in the shadows.
Outside the cabin, Colonel Briggs, without his bullhorn now and far closer than he had been before, was bellowing orders left and right. Even to the creature upstairs. He sounded like a man used to being obeyed, when he screamed, “Leave those boys alone, you fucking cow!”
A second later, the night exploded in a storm of gunfire.
The queen, halfway through the trapdoor, trembled and danced and squawked and shook as the bullets struck her fat, fetid body. Her death wail ripped through the night. Around her, a thousand pinholes of light sprang through the cabin walls as bullets came from every direction. Above it all, the floodlights from the helicopter lit the scene below.
Terry shrank farther back into the cellar corner, dragging Jonas and Bruce with him. Blood from the dying creature above spilled down the stairs, dribbling to the cellar floor.
In one last burst of anger, the creature reared upright, propped erect on her black pterodactyl-like wings. She flung her head back and screamed in futile horror as bullets ripped broad swaths of flesh from her face and chest. Her nose erupted in a spray of blood. Her bottom jaw tore loose, dangling uselessly, torn apart by gunfire. The bones of one wing snapped, and losing her balance, the creature shifted to the side, landing pitifully on the cabin floor. From her throat erupted a faint mewling sound that sounded remarkably like the cries of her fat, white young before the napalm lit them up like roasted marshmallows.
Even after the queen went down, the bullets kept flying. Briggs wasn’t taking any chances. Terry and Jonas crouched in the shadows, smelling the blood and the cordite and the carnivorous stench of the queen’s foul organs as they spilled out of her dying body and crept across the cabin floor.
Terry held his breath and kept a death grip on Jonas and Bruce until the shooting stopped.
When it did, he opened his eyes and saw the floodlight shining unimpeded through the trapdoor in the cabin floor. Motioning for Jonas to stay where he was, Terry crawled up the blood-spattered steps and poked his head through the opening.
The first thing he saw was the bloated, savaged body of the queen filling practically every square inch of the room. The second thing he saw was Colonel Briggs, with a smoking AR-15 still clutched in his hands. A chewed-up cigar was poking out of his mouth, and he was grinning through the cabin door at the destruction he had wrought. Behind the colonel, lit up by the floods from the hovering helicopter, a line of soldiers in tactical gear stood waiting. They hadn’t just been enjoying the view. Their guns were smoking too.
When his eyes fell on Terry, the colonel laughed out loud. The moment he did, the front porch roof behind him collapsed in a cloud of dust. He ducked through the front door just in time to avoid being beaned on the head by falling timber.
He shot Terry a friendly wink, as if it was no big deal.
“H-how did you know?” Terry asked, eyeing the huge blood-soaked body that dominated the entire interior of what was left of his cabin. Which wasn’t much.
Briggs smiled. “How did I know she was coming for you, you mean? Simple. We’ve been monitoring her with drones ever since she escaped the fire and left the research facility through a basement tunnel. Wasn’t sure what she was up to at first. Thought maybe she’d lead us to some more of those flying fuckers. But she didn’t. That’s when we realized she was coming after you. Where’s your buddy?”
Jonas popped his head through the trapdoor alongside Terry’s. “I’m here, sir.”
Briggs gave him a grin. “Your friend keeps asking for you.”
Jonas tore his eyes from the dead queen and stared at the colonel. He looked confused. “Uhh. That’s good. But which friend is that?”
“The little girl,” the colonel said. “Jilly. The one you rescued.”
Jonas’s hand tightened around Terry’s arm. “She’s okay?” he asked, his voice suddenly weak with emotion.
The colonel spit out the remains of his cigar, nudged the queen’s dead body with the toe of his boot, and grinned. “Okay doesn’t quite cover it,” he said. “I saw her eat most of a meatloaf and three baked potatoes not an hour and a half ago.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Jonas smiled, every tooth flashing white in the floodlight’s beam.
“That’s good indeed,” the colonel said, a proud glint in his eye. “You did well, boys. You made a difference. I’m proud to say I know you.”
Both Jonas and Terry blushed.
Between them, a third head popped up. It was Bruce. Apparently he was still keyed up. He growled at all the soldiers staring at him. Then for good measure, he growled at the colonel.
Briggs shook his head with righteous indignation, muttered “Pugs” with a grimace, then turned and walked away.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Six Months Later
THE NEWLY constructed cabin on the side of Terry’s mountain was the same as the previous cabin. Only this one had an extra bedroom added on the ground floor behind the kitchen, and there wasn’t a single metal fencepost in sight.
The work on the replacement cabin had been completed only the week before. Most of the labor had been donated on weekends by a long string of Colonel Briggs’s men, who were still monitoring the area. Each and every one of them was a little awed, Jonas thought, to think a couple of fruit cups could be brave enough to take the risks he and Terry had taken to help wipe out the creatures and battle their queen. Not that the soldiers had anything against fruit cups, as they constantly reminded one another.
Colonel Briggs had stopped by every couple of weeks to see how the work was going on the cabin and to offer advice here and there. Since he confessed to building birdhouses for a hobby, he assumed he was qualified to oversee the construction of an honest-to-God building. The men under him usually listened to his suggestions politely, nodded their heads understandingly, saw him off with a snappy salute, then went back to doing what they were already doing anyway.
On the day the construction was finished and the last shingle nailed in place, Terry and Jonas immediately began moving in furniture. Being the romantic slobs they were, they had decided to live on the mountain rather than in town, because that was where they fell in love. Terry’s notary office would remain in Spangle. Jonas was still a writer, of course, and Jonas reminded Terry that he could write up a tree if he had to. It didn’t matter where he was. He had earned the right to brag a little about his chosen occupation. He was deep into chronicling the story of how they had helped slay the creatures, and at the latest count he had three—count them, three—publishers nibbling at his manuscript with interest.
At the moment, Jonas and Terry were sipping Budweiser out of a bottle at the same little kitchen table they used to sit at and drink Budweiser from before. The table was the only piece of cabin furniture they were able to salvage after the queen and the US Army converged
to destroy the place. When a platoon of soldiers take it into their heads to aerate a structure with bullet holes, they don’t dick around. Terry found puncture wounds in everything he owned. Even Jonas’s beloved portable typewriter had been blown to smithereens. He now worked on a brand-new Mac.
With the cabin finished and a roof over their heads again, it was nice to sit and do nothing for a change. Their lives had been a whirlwind of activity since the queen fell dead on their living room floor six months before. Not to mention the months of terror they had endured before that.
Two weeks earlier, dressed in brand-new suits and as nervous as cats, they visited the Spangle courthouse. They filled out marriage papers and, shortly after that, exchanged vows in front of a guy with the worst hairpiece they had ever seen in their lives. The ceremony took place in the shade of a ratty-looking plastic arbor draped in plastic flowers in a back room behind the courthouse cafeteria, which reeked of Tuesday’s meatball surprise.
They had giggled their way through the service while Jilly stood behind them in a frilly little summer dress with a gigantic straw bonnet, cradling a spray of posies and fidgeting like crazy because she was giggling, too, and had to pee.
That was another reason the last six months had been so busy. As it turned out, after the death of Jilly’s parents, the child had no one willing to accept responsibility for her. Not that Jonas minded. He set about doing everything he had to do to start the process of adopting Jilly, and he knew how blessed he was that Terry loved the kid as much as he did.
The judge was leery of awarding Jilly to unmarried adults, gay or otherwise. Terry solved that problem by proposing on the spot, and Jonas accepted. Jilly was already living with them in town on a foster care basis while the other problems were being ironed out. Still the judge was not eager to permanently turn the child over to two men who had never cared for a child in their lives.
After twenty minutes in the judge’s chambers with only the judge and Jilly present, the judge had a change of heart. Jonas never found out what the girl told the judge, but whatever it was, the three were pronounced a family on the spot.