Jesus Christ, he thought.
Glenn.
But still he ran, knowing there was little he could do now.
Coward.
No! he thought. He had to protect the women.
More like them protecting you.
Duane set his lips in a grim line, told himself he’d done what he could do. He hadn’t acted cowardly.
Had he?
Glenn sacrificed himself for Mike, and they were long-time enemies. Glenn’s your best friend, and you’re just going to leave him back there to die?
Duane skidded to a halt. Savannah, who was perhaps twenty yards ahead, threw a glance at him. Then she too stopped. “What in the hell are you doing, Duane?”
“I’ve gotta get Glenn,” he said.
“Are you completely insane?” she demanded.
Joyce stood watching them. Duane felt a rekindling of dread, though of a different sort this time. It was almost like Joyce no longer possessed a healthy fear of the beast. She could have been out stargazing for all the concern she was showing.
“Hey!” Savannah said, grasping him by the shoulders and giving him a rough shake. “Do you have a brain or not? Because if you do, you’ll get your ass up that trail with us and get back to town.”
Duane wanted to be persuaded. But the image of Glenn stepping between the beast and Mike Freehafer dominated all. For all his faults, for all his womanizing and selfishness, Glenn had come through when it mattered most. And while Duane had done better than, say, Dalton Green, who’d abandoned his wife to have her throat ripped out by the monster, Duane still reckoned he ranked pretty low on the heroism scale.
He had to go back.
Duane looked deep into Savannah’s blue eyes, noticed the lighting out here was just strong enough to reveal the tiny freckles on her nose and her cheeks. Her strawberry-blond hair swayed fractionally in the midnight breeze. Duane studied her full lips, which were slightly open now, her concern for him plainly written in her expression. He reached out, slid his arms around her, leaned forward…
“Duane?” she asked.
He closed his eyes, brought his lips—
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” she snapped. She shoved him away, glowering.
Duane smiled lamely but could think of no good answer. Kissing her had seemed the natural thing to do. He might be going toward his death, after all.
She sighed. “Well, good luck. I still think you’re being a dumbass.”
And with that, she took off down the trail.
Duane turned back toward the woods where he heard shots being fired, raised voices. Hopefully the hunters would keep the beast away from him.
With a shuddering inhalation, Duane set off to rescue his friend.
Chapter Nine
The distance to the clearing didn’t seem as vast this time, but his body still felt taxed, the stitch in his side like a blade some Spanish inquisitor was slowly twisting. The sounds of the hunters and the occasional howl of the beast were now somewhere to his right, either at the farthest reaches of the forest or the cornfields beyond. Once he’d heard screaming of the sort he’d heard earlier, that high-pitched caterwaul that bespoke of mortal terror and incalculable pain.
He hoped Savannah and Joyce had made it out alive.
Duane was maybe fifty yards from the clearing when he heard a soft whimpering to his immediate left. It sounded like a small animal, the really pitiful sort of sound a puppy made when it was first taken from its mommy.
He ducked below the bough of a maple tree, shouldered his way between a couple saplings, and discovered the figure curled up on the ground. It was a woman, and there was blood on her right side. It looked oily and black, and it glistened in what little starlight filtered through the overhanging trees.
“Hey,” he whispered, bending closer to the figure. “You okay?”
He knew it was a stupid question, but making conversation was difficult with a bloodthirsty monster roaming about.
The girl uttered another one of those pitiful whimpers. Duane knelt and placed a hand on her arm.
She gasped and scuttled away. He got a brief glimpse of her face this time—it was Melody Bridwell—but she didn’t seem to recognize him. She was gaining her feet, stumbling toward a thicket of spruce trees.
He chased after her. “Wait a second,” he hissed. “It’s me, Duane!”
She kept going, blundering through the brush and exhibiting a serious limp.
Duane stopped, sighed. “It’s Short Pump.”
Melody froze. She looked back at him with mascara-streaked eyes. “Short Pump? You promise it’s you?”
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed.
With a moan she launched herself toward him. Duane caught her and almost stumbled backward. She let loose a gush of words into his chest. She really was a tiny thing.
“It hurts, Duane.”
He frowned at her, then remembered the blood on her shirt, her hip, her upper leg.
“Let me see it,” he said. He had no medical training, hadn’t even taken a course on first aid since college. If she needed a Band-Aid, he supposed he could stick one on her, but if any measures were required beyond that, she’d better look elsewhere.
Duane saw her wounds and felt his stomach lurch.
They weren’t fatal. At least he didn’t think so. But they were extremely gross, and there was a hell of a lot of blood. Duane prided himself on never squirming during a gory movie scene, but in real life he was pretty squeamish. The sight of Melody’s leg wounds, which were deep enough to reveal gristle and the pale gleam of bone, made him want to toss his cookies.
He unbuckled his belt.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she gasped.
He stared at her. “Stopping the bleeding.”
She blew out trembling breath.
He slid out his belt, cocked an eyebrow at her. “What’d you think I was doing?”
A tear gathered in the corner of one eye, dripped down her cheek. “I’m not used to chivalry.”
Duane cinched his belt around her thigh hard enough for her to yelp.
“Does it have to be this tight?” she moaned.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “It looks to me like you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
She made a pitiful humming sound and tottered on her feet. Duane put a steadying arm around her. “I’ve got one more thing to do, and then I’ll get you out of here.”
She seized a handful of his shirt. “Don’t leave, Short Pump! What if that thing—”
“It’s not going to come back,” he said. Not unless you bring it back with your screaming. “Now just sit over here,” he said, half-carrying her to a spruce tree with a slender vertical gap near the ground, “and wait for me.”
“You can’t go!”
“I’m coming back, Melody, I promise.”
“But—”
“Glenn’s still in the clearing,” he explained. “I’ve got to get him out of there.”
“But Glenn is an asshole.”
He nodded. “Be that as it may, he’s still my friend. Now,”—he forcibly detached her fingers from his shirt—“I’m hiding you here so that thing won’t find you.”
She peered at him from the shadowy place in which he’d stashed her. “What if it does come back?”
Then you’ll be ripped to shreds?
“I’ll only be gone a minute.”
She stared up at him hopefully and even ventured a smile, and in that moment Duane felt bad for all the things people had ever said about her. It was common knowledge she’d known a lot of guys.
Not that Duane had ever enjoyed the privilege.
His eyes traveled to her blood-soaked clothes, her meaty leg wound. She was in wretched shape. He hoped the doctors wouldn’t have to amputate. Of course, that assumed Duane woul
d get her back to a hospital.
With a nod of encouragement, he set off down the trail. It occurred to him he hadn’t heard any gunshots since finding Melody. He tried not to attach too much significance to this, but it sure as hell brought back his fear of being eaten. He remembered Carrie Green’s anguished screams, recalled the way the monster had eviscerated Mike Freehafer.
Pushing the images away, Duane hurried along the trail, hunched over and listening for any sound. Why he was hunched over he wasn’t quite sure; he was too damned huge to be overlooked should the beast come prowling. But it did make him feel better to create a lower profile, the way soldiers did in movies.
He spotted Glenn.
His friend was on his hands and knees, crawling out of the clearing like an inquisitive infant testing his boundaries. As Duane hustled over and squatted beside Glenn, he glimpsed his friend’s arm wounds, which were bloody but perhaps not quite as deep as Duane had first assumed.
“Looks like you’re gonna make it,” Duane said.
“I’ve been better,” Glenn grunted. “Arm hurts like hell.”
There were four stripes on the meat of Glenn’s forearm, which reminded Duane of the creature’s wicked talons, which reminded him the thing was still out here somewhere, and it was no longer revealing its whereabouts to him or anyone else. The hunters weren’t firing either, not even intermittently.
So they killed it, he thought.
Or it killed them.
The little hairs on the back of Duane’s neck prickled.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You think you can walk? I’m a little antsy to get out of this forest.”
Glenn winced. “That thing rang my bell pretty hard, but I think I can get up. Here…” he said, and Duane took his good arm. Together, they hoisted Glenn to his feet. He stood there swaying a moment, then leaned against Duane for support.
“Ready?” Duane asked.
“Just about,” Glenn said. “But there’s one more thing you gotta do.”
“What’s that?” he asked and cast a fearful look into the forest.
“Weezer’s over there,” Glenn said, nodding back over his shoulder.
Duane stared at Glenn for a moment, amazed he’d forgotten about Weezer. Then again, things had been so insane that Duane felt he could be forgiven this oversight.
He nodded, his hackles absolutely tingling now. “Okay. There are already two of you I’ve got to get out of here. Melody’s hidden in a tree up there a ways.”
Glenn squinted at him. “She’s in a tree?”
Duane gestured impatiently. “No, not literally in a tree, but sort of tucked beneath—ah, to hell with it. You wait here and don’t get eaten. I’ll get Weezer.”
He left Glenn and hunched down again, his movements quicker than ever. Because now he wasn’t just being compelled along by pants-shitting terror, he was being spurred by the growing notion that he’d pushed his luck as far as it would go. He hadn’t heard a howl or a gunshot for so long now he was growing certain that the beast had picked off the hunters one by one and was now circling back to continue his rampage on the unarmed partygoers. If the hunters had killed the beast, Duane reasoned, they would be celebrating their triumph, perhaps even trying to parlay it into some sort of notoriety—an article in the paper or even some conquering-hero sex. But the forest was silent, save for the crackle of the bonfire.
Duane scanned the clearing for Weezer.
Duane spotted Mike Freehafer, or what was left of him. He looked away before the sight could nauseate him. He saw several other carcasses lying about, but none of them was Weezer.
He whirled, heart pounding.
No sign of the beast.
Duane clenched his fists, made his legs move forward.
“Weezer?” he said in a hushed voice. “Weezer, you there?”
Maybe the beast took him.
Duane shook his head, crept around the bonfire. He performed a slow, trembling revolution, his eyes scouring the woods. But there was nothing.
He was about to scamper away when he spotted them, the black soles of two work boots. Even though he could only discern a fraction of them through the weeds, he knew they belonged to Weezer. Duane stepped that way, and as he did, he distinguished the denim cuffs of Weezer’s jeans, the faded red fabric of his friend’s shirt.
“Weezer,” he breathed, reaching his friend and kneeling beside him. Weezer was lying in the weeds, his face buried in the crook of an arm. His head was bobbing and jerking on the ground, giving Duane the impression that Weezer was eating the dirt and the dead leaves under his face.
“Hey, buddy,” Duane said, putting a hand on Weezer’s back. “We gotta go.”
Weezer’s head continued to bounce in that bizarre sewing machine way.
What the hell?
He reached down, jostled Weezer’s shoulder. “Hey, get up, man. That thing’s gonna…”
Duane trailed off as he noticed something he hadn’t before, a reddish streak on the top of Weezer’s head. The brown hair there was matted and sticky.
Nervously, Duane reached down, rolled his friend over.
And sucked in breath.
The slash marks ran the length of Weezer’s face and didn’t stop until his jawline. He’d been disfigured, one of his eyes gone entirely, his lips cleaved into wormlike segments.
Jesus, Duane thought. Jesus God.
Weezer was thrashing his head about, whimpering and uttering garbled words and phrases, almost none of which Duane could make out. Something about a teacher and staying after class and the word sorry at least two dozen times.
Duane reached out to stabilize his friend’s thrashing head, but a gout of syrupy blood slapped over his fingers. Duane pulled back, grimacing.
You have to do this, he told himself. So stop being a wuss.
Mastering his gorge and his revulsion, Duane grasped Weezer by the shoulders, whispered “Shhhh” over and over until his friend’s head stopped whipping. Speaking directly into Weezer’s face, he said, “We have to get you out of here, buddy. You’re going to make it, but you’re really—” He swallowed. “—really banged up.” Duane looked around, licked his lips. Had there been a sound in the forest?
“Look,” he continued, then realized that was a poor choice of words. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to get you on your feet, but you’re going to have to walk out of here. Melody’s got a bum leg.”
He hoped Melody was still alive. He had no idea if his tourniquet had done any good; she might very well have bled out under that spruce tree.
Weezer was weeping silently, his tears and blood mixing into a translucent gruel.
“Okay,” Duane urged. “Here we go.”
He lifted Weezer off the ground and stood him on his feet. His friend was short and wiry, but he still weighed more than Joyce had. He supposed he could carry Weezer if he had to, but moving that way, they’d get out of this godforsaken forest sometime next week.
“Come on, buddy,” he said, and slung Weezer’s arm around his neck. The height disparity made it awkward going, but at last he was able to transport Weezer out of the clearing back to where Glenn stood waiting for them.
A minute after that, he, Glenn, Weezer, and Melody were staggering down the lane like the survivors of some gruesome scientific experiment.
Chapter Ten
The sounds of something scraping. A pencil scratching on paper. Someone was writing something down near him.
Glenn opened his eyes, and though his vision was very blurry, he discovered he’d been right. There was a nurse scribbling on a clipboard.
Glenn waited until the nurse was gone. Then he set about disconnecting the many wires they’d taped to him. The most painful one was the blood drip. He figured he could just slide out the needle, but in his foggy state he didn’t realize the needle was held in place by approximately se
venty strips of tape. At that point he stopped jerking on the needle and examined the thing. He realized he could detach it higher up, and though this caused him to leak blood, he was able to stanch the bleeding by packing a wad of cotton into the tip.
He heard the trickle of water, frowned, and glanced down. The narrow tube connected to the drip sack was pissing liquid all over the floor. Glenn grasped the tube, kinked it, and clumsily tied it off.
He was halfway to his feet when a wave of dizziness bowled him over, sent him slumping on the edge of the hospital bed. He had no idea what time it was, nor did he have any clue which hospital he was in. Lakeview Memorial, he assumed, though it was possible he’d been airlifted somewhere else after they’d sedated him. For all the fuss they’d made, you’d have thought he’d lost all his limbs and a couple vital organs.
Glenn’s dizziness started to pass. His eyes drifted down to his arm, the one without a hundred holes and tape marks on it. There was a thick white dressing over his forearm and dammit, more tape.
A surge of superstitious dread flowed through him at sight of the bandage. But why, he wondered, did the prospect of examining his wounds scare him so much?
You know why, Professor. You’re frightened because when you see the wounds, everything that happened tonight will be confirmed as real, and you’ll no longer be able to cling to the desperate hope that it was all some monstrous nightmare.
But that wasn’t quite true, he realized. For one thing, the arm barely hurt at all. He wanted to attribute that to the painkillers they’d no doubt pumped into him, but why then did his head feel like it was being prised apart from within? Why did his ribs ache from being taken down by the beast? If he was feeling this much pain, shouldn’t his mutilated arm be aching too?
Now you’re getting it, a voice murmured. Deep down, you know what you’ll see under that bandage, and you have a good idea what it’ll mean. Wounds don’t heal like that, Glenn. Unless something unnatural is happening to you.
Glenn raised the bandage, hoping against hope that the wound would be as ragged and ugly as it had been when the beast first attacked him.
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