“Get in,” Clevenger said.
Ron nodded and hastened back to the grass. Jesse rolled down his window to see what the man was doing. God, he wished they’d get moving again. Fifty or sixty yards beyond them the red truck was outpacing the pursuing creatures. Soon, they’ll get tired of chasing Austin and realize we’re still here. Fresh meat. Sitting—
Jesse visored his eyes from the deluge and discovered one of the creatures had indeed given up on the pickup and was heading their way. It looked fierce.
Have you seen one yet that looked friendly? a voice in his head demanded.
“Hurry!” Clevenger shouted out the window. Jesse turned to see what Ron had gone back for.
Linda Farmer.
Tenderly, he lifted her from the sodden grass. If he’d seen the beast approaching yet, he was being awfully nonchalant about it.
Emma screamed. Ron whirled and gasped. Panicked, the DNR officer bolted for the Buick.
“The window,” Clevenger called.
Ron nodded as he ran. The creature strode after the fleeing pair, Linda’s unconscious body flopping in Ron’s grasp.
The creature bore down on them. Ron reached the Buick, swung Linda headfirst toward the open window. Jesse had time to be grateful that the windows weren’t childproof, were the kind that rolled all the way down, when Ron’s gaze shifted behind him. The half turn was just enough to throw off his aim.
Linda’s head rammed the closed door.
“Oh shit,” Emma said, a hand to her mouth.
Ron turned with a look of comic surprise as Linda Farmer’s unmoving body thumped down on the concrete. Ron made a move as if to pick her up and try it again when his eyes shuttered wide and he was lifted into the air. He drew his pistol and fired twice at the creature, which dropped him from a height of ten feet. Ron plummeted to the grass and landed badly, one arm trapped beneath his broad frame. Jesse heard a sick crunch and winced.
Clevenger was out of the Buick at once. At first Jesse thought the professor would wade into battle with the creature, but the balding man was lifting Linda Farmer, shouting at Jesse to open the back door.
Should have done that anyway, moron. Ron might still be alive.
He is still alive, Jesse tried to argue, but at that moment, the creature clamped its bony hands over Ron’s head and lifted him high into the air.
Clevenger rushed across his vision carrying Linda Farmer, but despite the obstruction and the torrential downpour, Jesse still witnessed far too much.
Ron’s face scrunched in exertion as he strove with his unbroken arm to pry the creature’s hands off his face. His expression descended into agony as the creature’s shoulders began to tremble. Jesse realized the thing was smashing Ron’s head between its hands. Ron’s legs began to kick.
“We’ve got to…” Jesse muttered feebly, but he knew it was too late.
Ron emitted a high-pitched howl. His face seemed to elongate. Runnels of blood spilled over his bottom eyelids. More blood dribbled over the creature’s flexing knuckles. Ron’s nostrils let loose as well, and the drumming of his legs diminished. Then, as if it were sampling from a waiter’s tray, the creature drew Ron closer and bit off the man’s face.
It turned to the Buick.
Clevenger pushed Linda Farmer’s body into the front of the car, where Colleen drew her the rest of the way in. He shoved the Buick into drive just as the blood-spattered creature darted at them.
Please go, Jesse thought, but he was too numb to speak. So much death, so much horror…and they couldn’t even try for the exit. He shot a look at Emma and saw the tears rimming her eyes. She probably felt just as he did, that there was no hope for them.
“Is she alive?” Clevenger asked, glancing at Linda Farmer.
Colleen nodded. “Brain-damaged, but alive. Of course, she was slightly brain-damaged already.”
Ahead and to their left, the red pickup bounced over campsites, a legion of creatures in pursuit.
Clevenger hunched over the wheel, struggling to make out the road through the freshets of rain sweeping the windshield. Emma’s wiper blades were worn out, but Jesse doubted even brand new ones would’ve done much good today.
“Can’t you go faster?” Emma asked.
Clevenger glanced at her. “Not safely.”
From their right a creature came crashing through the forest, its face maniacal with hunger.
“Floor it,” Colleen shouted.
Clevenger stomped on the accelerator and the big car jumped. The beast lifted its arms as if to swing them down King Kong-style and flatten the roof. Jesse watched the muscles rolling under its taut skin and wondered again how a creature so emaciated could generate so much power. He thought of the one who’d murdered Light Blue Bikini, the way it had swung her body through the air and dashed it on the ground…
The creature thrashed its gnarled fists down. Colleen and Emma screamed and leaned away. Just when he thought the knobby fists would punch through the roof of the Buick, the big car gave a lurch and scuttled by.
“Good driving,” Jesse said.
Clevenger didn’t respond, kept guiding the Buick toward the approaching gap in the trees, the stand of woods that separated the two main camping areas. We’re going back by the playground, Jesse thought. I can’t believe we’re actually going back to that slaughterhouse.
As long as you’re putting distance between yourselves and the Big Nasty.
The Big Nasty is dead, he reminded himself. I don’t think it’s walking away from that hole in its head.
Don’t be too sure. How many of their corpses have you actually seen?
“Impossible,” Jesse muttered aloud. Emma glanced at him, and he opened his mouth to explain. Then he realized how stupid it would sound.
Still…he turned in his seat to peer behind them. The rainfall cast a leaden blanket over the entire RV section, but here and there he could still make out a few landmarks. The overturned Seabreeze where they’d almost died. The bathhouse beyond that. He’d shotgunned the Big Nasty to the left of those things, beside the winding road unspooling behind them. It was there he focused his gaze.
The rain was so unrelenting that the day had gone a bleak, gunmetal hue. Nevertheless, something in the general area where he’d shot the Big Nasty drew his attention. Jesse scrunched up his eyes to see better. It was crazy, but he’d sworn…
A new species of dread awoke deep inside him. Despite the staccato machine-gunning of the rain on the roof, despite the roars of the creatures and the wails of the dying…despite all of it he still heard the thump of his own heartbeat, felt a febrile pulse in the pit of his throat.
He wanted to believe the shape he discerned was his imagination. He wanted desperately to persuade himself it was a mirage, a trick of the precipitation, the white contours just the natural dance of the storm.
“What is that?” Emma asked beside him.
She’d joined him on her knees staring out the back window, her face slack with disbelief. Jesse suspected his face looked much the same way.
The figure strode on legs as tall as extension ladders, the gaunt body towering above the other creatures, towering above the few RVs still upright, towering ten feet above the bathhouse.
Jessie thought, I’m not seeing this.
So you and Emma are witnessing the same illusion?
Jesse swallowed and squinted into the rain. The figure kept coming, but rather than pursuing its current course, it stopped, lowered its great head. Then, looking like an albino salamander, it descended onto all fours to examine something. The Buick was almost to the woods now, the great creature at least a football field behind them, but Jesse could still see the freakishly long fingers reach out. Then something on the ground stirred. Before Jesse could see what it was, the woods swallowed them up.
Chapter Three
“Something smells,” Clevenger said.
“It’s our forest ranger,” Colleen answered. “She’s fertilized herself.”
Jesse peeled his e
yes off the back window and beheld the limp body lying facedown across the professor and Colleen, the woman’s head turned sideways on Colleen’s right thigh. Linda Farmer’s makeup had bled in clownish streaks, giving her the appearance of an over-the-hill prostitute after a really bad cry. There was indeed a chocolate-colored stain in the middle of her tight brown shorts.
“Mind if I open a window?” Colleen asked.
Emma said, “For God’s sakes, I think you can live with that after all we’ve seen.”
Colleen made a face. “You’re not sitting here at Ground Zero. It’s like I’ve got the world’s largest toddler in my lap.”
Clevenger shook his head in irritation. “Help me watch for them. They might come out of the forest at any moment.”
Colleen pinched her nostrils. “Peaceful Valley, my ass.”
Jesse glanced at Emma, who looked as if she might cry. He put a hand on her leg for comfort. She didn’t pull away, but she didn’t seem comforted either. She looked like she wanted all of this to be a bad dream from which she’d soon awaken.
Jesse could relate.
Clevenger sucked in air, and following his gaze, Jesse saw why. Ahead and to the left a figure wandered along the edge of the road.
“One of them?” Emma asked.
“I don’t think so,” Clevenger said as they neared.
Jesse peered over the professor’s shoulder and wished again that Emma’s wipers worked better. Within the canopy of forest, the downpour wasn’t as severe, but it still impaired his vision. To make matters worse, the inside of the windshield had begun to fog.
There was something familiar about the figure; the way it moved reminded him of horror movies. An awkward shamble more indigenous to an old-school zombie than a real person.
“I know that girl,” Clevenger said.
The figure turned, and Jesse recognized her too.
Ruth Cavanaugh.
She resembled a refugee of some war-torn village. Her shabby clothes hung in dirty tatters, her hair matted and wet.
They crunched to a stop beside her, and Jesse beheld the ugly red slash slanting across her face. The inch-deep trough began at her hairline, plowed through her eye, which was a gaping red ruin, continued through the bridge of her nose, and cleaved through both lips.
Emma uttered a doleful moan. Clevenger covered his mouth. Even Colleen seemed to feel bad for the small woman.
Ruth stared at them without recognition. Jesse half-expected her to pitch forward into the puddled lane. Clevenger seemed to awaken from a trance.
“My God,” he said and threw open his door. With a gallantry Jesse admired, the professor cast an arm about the girl’s shoulders and ushered her around to Jesse’s door. Jesse opened it and scooted over to give her room.
Ruth didn’t seem aware of him, didn’t even seem aware of her surroundings. Clevenger put the Buick back in gear. Thank God, Jesse thought; idling beside the lane he’d felt vulnerable and exposed.
At that moment a large shape thundered past them. Emma cried out, and Clevenger jerked the wheel toward the shoulder. Then Jesse discerned the red tailgate, remembered Austin and his pickup. A figure was huddled in the truck bed.
Greeley.
Jesse thought of how the coward had concealed himself in the closet while Emma and the others were being attacked. He didn’t expect the man to save everyone, but burying himself in a pile of clothes?
As if she’d shared his thought, Emma put a hand over Jesse’s, locked fingers.
He looked at her in wonder. She held his gaze a moment before turning to look out the back window.
Her eyes widened in horror.
“Look ou—” she started to scream.
But the sound of the creature landing on the trunk drowned out her voice.
“Shoot it!” Emma screamed.
“No more shells,” Colleen answered.
Jesse sat up on his knees just as the creature mashed its Caliban face against the back window.
“Swerve or something,” Colleen commanded.
Clevenger gave her an impotent look. Beyond the creature that was now clambering forward onto the Buick’s roof, Jesse could see other figures bearing down on them. A few moved like ghostly marathoners, but the majority were loping toward them like mutant cheetahs.
Daggers lanced the shell of metal above them.
Then a large section of the roof was torn away, the creature casting it aside like the lid of a tin can.
Clevenger stood on the brakes. The creature rocketed over the hood. Jesse, Emma and Ruth were slammed into the seatback. The Buick shuddered violently.
They skidded to a stop. His nose a blood-slicked ache, Jesse peered over the hood and saw the creature somersaulting forward. He turned to see if Emma was okay, but she was staring out the spider-webbed back window.
The creatures were thirty yards away.
The Buick jumped forward. Clevenger overcorrected and sent their back end plowing along the grassy shoulder. The beast that had torn off the roof was gaining its feet, preparing to leap on them again.
“Run the sonofabitch over!” Colleen yelled.
Emma’s eyes flew wide. “No!”
But Clevenger was clenching the wheel grimly, teeth bared in concentration. “Would you both…just…shut your—”
Before he could finish, the Buick’s back end pendulumed into the lane and crashed into the creature’s stilt-like legs. The dull crunches of splintering bones sent a charge of black excitement through Jesse, and when he whirled he saw the monster’s knees had hyper-extended, the creature folding in on itself. Then it was trampled by the shifting mass of pursuers.
The Buick emerged from the forest and sped through the primitive campground. Outside the canopy of trees, the brutal rain drenched the mostly roofless interior immediately. Jesse spied his foul-smelling tent sitting intact, utterly oblivious to the horrors swirling around it. There were a few creatures scattered here and there, and most of them, Jesse noted with nausea, were dragging dead bodies away from the playground. How many victims had the beasts claimed? Two hundred? Twice that number?
“They’ve made it,” Clevenger said, shouting to be heard above the rain.
Jesse frowned and stared ahead just in time to see Austin’s red truck disappear into the forest.
“If we can get to the trees…” Clevenger said.
Colleen gave him a sardonic look. “Yeah?”
Clevenger glanced at her. “You said that man Red Elk lives in those woods?”
“A couple miles in,” Emma said.
“Who cares where he lives?” Colleen asked. “It’s not like he’s going to save us. The guy’s a porn-addicted alcoholic.”
Clevenger shook his head. “He may have some secret route out of here, something they won’t know about.”
They, Jesse reflected. It made him ill trying to figure out how they thought. Did they consider anything beyond the satisfaction of their bloodlust?
The car reached the forest and bounced over a series of potholes.
“Might wanna slow down,” Colleen said. “We’re not gonna have time to fix a flat if one of them blows.”
Clevenger looked ill, but he did as he was told. The Buick was motoring along at just over thirty miles per hour. An awful thought occurred to Jesse, and he glanced at the gas gauge in dread.
Three-quarters full. Thank God.
The bend was approaching, the one where they’d almost wrecked that morning. But the professor was proving a more conservative driver than Colleen had been.
A kamikaze pilot would be more conservative than Colleen.
Clevenger slowed a little as they neared the turn, and despite half the lane being underwater from the downfall, they glided smoothly around the bend.
When they started down the straightaway, Colleen said, “That’s not gonna be good.”
Jesse’s legs turned to ice. Not only was the road flooded far deeper than it had been yesterday, but the red pickup had crashed in the pool, was lying in on
its side with smoke wafting up out of its engine.
They slowed as the water overtook the lane. Clevenger guided the Buick forward through the deepening pool. Emma gasped and said, “Look.”
From around the side of the overturned pickup, two figures emerged, the taller one leaning on the smaller one for support.
Despite himself, Jesse felt his spirits leap.
Austin and Greeley.
His spiked hair was drenched brown, but Austin appeared perfectly healthy. Greeley’s arm was slung over the other man’s shoulders, and though Greeley was limping, he too seemed intact.
Clevenger halted the Buick and got out. Jesse threw a nervous glance behind him, but the lane was deserted as far as he could see. He made to climb out, but paused when he noticed Ruth Cavanaugh’s small frame bunched on the floor. Like him and Emma, she’d been thrown into the seatback earlier, but unlike them she hadn’t bothered rising. She sat there staring with her one remaining eye at nothing in particular. Jesse sidled around her and opened the door.
He joined Clevenger in front of the Buick.
Austin was laughing. Nodding up at Greeley, he said, “Lucky son of a bitch. He hit that water and skipped like a stone.”
Jesse got hold of Greeley’s arm. Clevenger took the other, and together they guided him toward the Buick.
“What made you crash?” Colleen asked over the top of the windshield where the roof had been torn off.
“That thing over there,” Austin said and gestured toward the forest.
Laboring to heft Greeley into the backseat, Jesse spied the long, white body lying motionless on the narrow strip of raised shoulder. The bare buttocks and legs stuck out, but its upper body was hidden by the woods.
“You shoulda seen it,” Austin said, shaking his head. “Thing rose out of the water like a goddamned sea monster. I screamed like a little girl.” He grinned, and Jesse found himself grateful the boy had survived.
Now Greeley…
Stop it, he told himself.
“Need to get moving,” Clevenger said.
Austin’s mirth vanished, replaced by a steeliness Jesse was glad to have on their side. Austin nodded and eyed the lane behind them. “Those sons of bitches don’t quit, do they? Probably coming right now.”
Savage Species Page 12