Greeley nodded.
Emma was casting restive glances around the yawning cavern. “So…where are they?”
“All over the place, would be my guess,” Greeley said. “This is the perfect environment for bats.”
Emma’s face had gone slack with dread. “This isn’t the perfect environment for anything.”
Greeley started, an animation permeating his face that had been absent since the playground. “Actually, this is positive for us too.”
“For a professor,” Red Elk said, “you sure are a dumbass.”
Greeley seemed not to hear him. “Don’t you see? Bats are cave animals, but they do their feeding outside.”
Clevenger nodded. “There’s a way out of here.”
Greeley flitted his flashlight beam over the walls. “Must be some…means…of egress…”
“There,” Emma said.
They crowded around her—too hastily, Jesse thought. He could just imagine the whole group tumbling over into the abyss, shrieking and gibbering the whole way down. Cautiously, he joined them.
He leaned forward and gazed where the others were gazing.
To the left and perhaps eight feet below the promontory, there was another, narrower foothold which wound to the right before disappearing into what appeared to be a good-sized tunnel. Jesse studied the black opening with a mixture of hope and dread. It might lead them back to the surface, or at least to the main tunnel. But it was just as likely that a hellish tide of vampire bats would come shrieking out of the darkness for some wholesale bloodletting.
“I had no idea it would be this beautiful,” someone behind them said.
They turned and found Ruth Cavanaugh gazing around the cavern with something akin to ecstasy. Jesse noted with unease that her face had continued its uncanny alteration. Longer, the chin was now a ghastly witch’s caricature, the nose narrow and protuberant, almost—Jesse tried but could not escape the word—like a snout.
Emma said, “There might be a way out, Ruth. There’s a tunnel—”
“No one will be leaving.”
Colleen turned to Ruth, her eyes baleful. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I saw this place last night,” Ruth said dreamily, “I saw it, but it was fragmented. Diffuse.” Her voice went thick and unnaturally low. “My eyes weren’t refined enough then…but now…” The rough, meaty sound of her voice, as though there were wet stones clogging the back of her throat, made Jesse’s arm hairs stand up. Emma was very close to the little woman now, though Ruth Cavanaugh seemed to have grown taller. Last night she’d looked a few inches shorter than Emma. Now it seemed Ruth was a head taller. But that, Jesse thought as the acid of terror began to eat away at his composure, could have been because of the frizzy black hair, which was now a glorious mane that spread over her shoulders, all the way to her waist. Her ears also—what the hell?—had grown freakish and pointed, the ears of some fairy-tale elf. Only there was nothing friendly or playful in Ruth’s bearing anymore. Nothing meek, either.
Emma shined her light in the little woman’s eyes. “Ruth?”
“So beautiful,” Ruth said, her voice an alien buzz.
“Ruth?” Emma repeated, crowding into Jesse.
Ruth’s lips spread in a grin that devoured the bottom half of her face, which was now a goblin’s face, the stuff of a child’s nightmare. Her eyes had taken on a swirling, pinkish hue, the crazed gleam penetrating Jesse’s mind.
You thought you knew, the voice rumbled. But you had no idea. Now watch. Watch what I can become…
A sound like ripping paper came from behind Ruth. Emma sucked in frightened breath, her body rigid against Jesse’s. The ripping sound echoed through the vast chamber, its quality both harsh and somehow pulpy. At first he was sure something had followed them through the tunnel, was coming out of the tunnel now to murder them where they couldn’t escape.
But the sound wasn’t coming from the tunnel. It was coming from Ruth’s back.
Dark tendrils poked out of the sides of her green shirt, the fabric tearing in fitful tremors. He caught sight of her right armpit, now exposed.
The flesh there was as black as polished obsidian.
“Shoot her,” Jesse said.
“That’s madness,” Clevenger said. He took a step toward Ruth, but she was swaying on her feet, listing drunkenly toward the drop-off.
“Jesse’s right,” Emma said, squeezing his arm. “We have to shoot her.”
“Ruth,” Clevenger implored.
She staggered toward Clevenger. He caught her, held her tremoring body, which now—Jesse fought to override his senses, but he knew his eyes weren’t deceiving him—dwarfed the professor’s. Ruth had grown as tall as Marc Greeley, who was all but melting into the cave wall to escape from the mutating woman.
“You have to kill her!” Greeley shouted.
“Kill her?” Clevenger said, his arm around her. “She’s sick. My God, can’t you see that?” His watery eyes darted pleadingly from person to person.
“We gotta shoot her, Professor,” Red Elk said with finality. “Better step away.”
Ruth was mumbling something into Clevenger’s shoulder, but Jesse couldn’t make it out because of all the black hair in the way.
“What?” Clevenger whispered to her. “What’s that, Ruthie?”
“…wanted you,” she muttered. “…wanted…”
“What, dear?” he prompted tenderly.
She drew back and Jesse bit his knuckle in fright at the buzzing voice.
“Wanted you to like me,” the thing that could not be Ruth said as its face swam into view. The face was a discolored triangular mask, the eyes blood red. Slowly, it rose to its full height, rising, rising, seven feet tall now. Eight. Jesus Christ, Jesse thought. Jesus Christ.
“What happened to you?” Clevenger whispered.
The red eyes beamed at them, the lurid expression simultaneously coy and obscene. Jesse realized with horror what the ripping sounds had been.
Giant, veined wings were expanding from the Ruth-thing’s back.
“You’re not…” Clevenger said, his voice scarcely audible above the squishy, popping noises emanating from the transmogrifying body. “You’re not…”
“Ruthie?” the creature asked, the underjaw yawning wide in an unspeakable grin. Slaver drooled from the serrated teeth.
Colleen started forward and gripped Clevenger’s arm.
“BACK!” the Ruth-thing rumbled.
Colleen jerked her hand away as if stung.
A gunshot exploded to Jesse’s left. He whirled and saw Red Elk aiming the Ruger at the Ruth-thing’s face. It was impossible to tell if he’d struck the creature or not because it was already a riot of folds and recesses, shifting darknesses and crimson splotches. The gun jumped again, but the creature barely reacted. Red Elk had to have hit it; Jesse had seen him shoot other targets at considerably farther range. Clevenger, who appeared as though he were in a trance, gawked at the ever-rising figure.
“Come on, Frank,” Emma called. Jesse felt a tug at his arm and turned to see Colleen and Emma creeping toward the edge of the drop-off. They meant to leap down to the narrow ledge, he realized with sudden misgiving.
Red Elk nodded like he needed no more convincing. The pistol trained on the Ruth-thing’s grisly face, he extended a hand toward Clevenger’s shoulder. “Better come along, Professor. This isn’t going to turn out well.”
Clevenger peeled his eyes off the Ruth-thing. When he regarded first Red Elk, then the others, his lips quivered and his eyes were rimmed with tears.
“I can’t,” he said.
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Red Elk growled. “Get your scrawny ass—”
Jesse’s insides went cold.
Some thick, black, wormy-looking appendage—the Ruth-thing’s tail?—had coiled around the Professor’s right leg. It covered the upper half of the leg from bare, white knee to the upper thigh of his khaki shorts, and its sluglike tip was swishing threat
eningly over his crotch.
“Oh my God,” Clevenger said in a trembling voice. “Please do something.”
The creature lowered its head, then the wings snapped out like a pair of wind-caught sails. Before anyone could react, the Ruth-thing swept Clevenger over the drop-off, flapping its tenebrous wings, and hung suspended in the air before them. The wings beat in great whooshes, reminding Jesse of the illustrations of prehistoric birds he’d been fascinated by as a child. The appendage coiling around the professor did indeed appear to be a tail. Jesse watched in revulsion as the Ruth-thing’s feet—three claws with a single heel talon—curled toward Clevenger’s hovering frame.
“Come on,” Emma said, her face steeled in grief. “We can’t help him.”
Jesse saw the grim truth in her face. But he wasn’t keen on jumping down onto the narrow strip of rock below. What if they fell? What if the creature dropped the professor and swooped down—
His thoughts cut off when Clevenger began to scream.
Chapter Ten
Though the beast hovering in the air looked like some artist’s sinister creation—a demon from a Bosch painting perhaps—the animal it most resembled was a bat.
The Ruth-thing began to rip Clevenger to pieces with its taloned feet.
The hovering creature’s arms clutched the professor in an almost loving embrace while the feet did their gruesome work. Clevenger thrashed his head in agony as the digging talons dug gaping trenches in his sides. The blood began to spray in a messy cloud, and it was at that moment that Jesse heard the new sound, the cave seeming to spring to life around him, the very walls rustling.
Emma had been on the verge of leaping—Colleen had jumped and was safe on the lower ledge and screaming for them to follow her—when Emma too paused and looked around at the noises. Jesse chanced a look back at Red Elk, who’d aimed his beam at the ceiling and was staring open-mouthed at what he saw.
Jesse saw too.
They weren’t stalactites.
They were winged creatures.
“Night Flyers,” Emma whispered.
“Jump,” Jesse said. “Now.”
She jumped to the lower ledge. He was about to follow when something whipped by his right side, nearly toppled him over the verge. A thump and grunting noise told him Greeley had made the leap too.
Jesse cast another look up and beheld the dangling creatures, their bodies much larger than the Ruth-thing’s. They appeared to be well over ten feet long, their wingspan even greater than that. Their wings were unfurling now, the membranous rustling making Jesse’s guts roil.
“Get moving,” Red Elk commanded.
Jesse tore his eyes off the creatures and jumped. He made it easily, though his knees cracked painfully on the unyielding stone surface. He crouched on all fours and shot a look ahead. The walkway wound down for perhaps thirty feet before the tunnel swallowed it up. He didn’t know if they’d be safe from the Night Flyers in there, but he knew if they didn’t find shelter soon they were going to end up like Clevenger.
“Come on, Frank!” Colleen yelled.
Red Elk stood poised on the lip of the promontory, his feet braced far apart, the Ruger bobbing erratically as he took aim at the creature annihilating the professor in mid-air.
“Put your head down,” Red Elk commanded, the Ruger coming to rest.
Jesse had been sure all awareness had left the professor, but now Clevenger surprised him by straining his head lower to give Red Elk a clean shot.
Red Elk fired, and the Night Flyer’s gnashing teeth unfastened from the professor’s shoulder. It snarled at Red Elk, the professor’s blood dribbling from its fangs in soupy rills. Red Elk popped off another shot, this one nailing the Ruth-thing in the forehead. Jesse watched with new horror as its talons loosened their hold on Clevenger’s bleeding body, the man slipping down its black frame toward a blacker abyss.
“Um…” Red Elk said.
“Do something,” Colleen shouted.
“Like what?” Red Elk asked. “I left my cape back at the house.”
Clevenger’s body slipped farther, only one talon snagged in his cotton shirt.
“Frank,” Emma said in a scared voice.
“I know,” Red Elk said impatiently. He made a helpless gesture at the Ruth-thing. “Uh, bring him over here and I won’t shoot you anymore.”
The winged creature pumped its wings in foggy, drunken whooshes.
“Shit, man,” Red Elk said, “just don’t…drop—”
Clevenger fell.
“Noooo!” Emma screamed.
Jesse’s throat boiled, the rest of his body numb.
The professor’s body plummeted in nightmarish slow motion, the torso dipping lower and the legs describing an almost graceful somersault. Dimly, Jesse was reminded of water ballet.
Then a dark shape spiraled down from the ceiling. Jesse held his breath in awe. The professor’s body disappeared into the gloom, and a split-second later, the twisting black projectile followed. There was a pregnant moment in which no one spoke or even breathed. Then a screech ripped the silence of the valley and the enormous, bat-like creature arose from the depths, clutching the professor’s body like it was some overgrown rabbit. It swept past Red Elk and veered toward Jesse in a jarring loop. So swift was its passage and so powerful were the beats of its wings that Jesse and the girls were slammed against the wall. One wing tip cracked Greeley a glancing blow on the shoulder, spinning him off his safe haven and sending him tumbling to the thin ribbon of rock on which they stood. Greeley rolled, his momentum and the grade of the walkway working in ghastly collusion. He tried to stop his progress, but it was too late. He went over the edge, and was just able to avert the fatal drop by catching the rock lip with his fingers. Jesse knew he couldn’t remain dangling there for long, had actually taken a step in that direction to give him aid, when the rustling noises morphed into a fiend’s chorus of blood-freezing shrieks. The Night Flyers were falling toward them, their red eyes agleam with insatiable need.
Red Elk was the first to be lifted. The beast that seized him and hoisted him screaming into the air was obscenely large, fifteen feet or more across with a body like a black pterodactyl. In a moment the air swarmed with the swooping beasts, their trenchant squalls vibrating his eardrums like lunatic teakettles.
Something rammed him and Colleen. Jesse struck the wall hard, rebounded and landed with his head dangling over the walkway’s rim. He twisted his head back and discovered the revolver lying next to him. Unthinkingly, he crammed it into the knapsack.
Merciless talons clamped over his shoulders and jerked him effortlessly into the air. He hung facedown as the thing soared over the fathomless canyon. To his left he distinguished a pair of flailing bodies borne screaming into the darkness.
Colleen and Emma.
The former dangled by one leg, the Night Flyer clutching her sneakered foot the way one would a briefcase. But the sight of Emma being swallowed by the inky darkness was somehow worse. The bat creature cradled her like a lover, and for a fleeting moment, Jesse was reminded of Fay Wray and King Kong. The last thing he saw was her fists pummeling the Night Flyer’s hideous face, in her pluckiness perhaps forgetting that if the thing dropped her she’d fall screaming to her death.
It was the sound of her shrieks that smashed through Jesse’s trance. He swiveled his head as far as physics would allow and in the lucent gleam of the mining helmet—thank God for the chinstrap; he couldn’t imagine losing his only source of light—he beheld the iridescent underbelly of the Night Flyer, the vulnerable-looking, ribbed flesh.
Both his Night Flyer and Frank’s were arcing back toward the place where they’d initially been ensnared, and from there it would be the same monolithic darkness into which he’d seen the others disappear.
For no reason at all he recalled one of his first assignments at the newspaper.
He’d been sent with a disgruntled grad student to the local YWCA to do a story on a self-defense course being given by the state p
olice. None of it had been very interesting until a woman had asked, “What if a guy pulls a gun on you and tells you to get into his car?”
The state cop said, “You don’t get in.”
The woman smiled as though he’d gone crazy. “But what if he shoots you?”
The cop didn’t smile. “If you get into the car, you’re dead anyway. Maybe worse. If he shoots you in some parking lot, at least you die right away. If he gets you to an out-of-the-way spot—say a cornfield or maybe his basement—he’ll rape you and torture you. Then he’ll kill you.”
On the heels of this memory, which careened through Jesse’s mind at warp speed, he thought of the whole ceiling becoming a sea of black wings. Even now he could hear the throng of Night Flyers filling the valley with their screeches and slowly throbbing wings. If he let himself be taken to a place where all of them congregated, the possibilities were endless and unutterable.
Jesse glanced again at the ribbed, iridescent underbelly. Then he reached into his knapsack and fished out the cleaver.
His eyes happened on Frank Red Elk and the creature clutching him. The pair flew parallel to Jesse and his airborne host, with Frank and his creature about ten feet above and to Jesse’s right. Frank had evidently come to the same decision Jesse had, for he was twisting in the creature’s taloned grasp, the Ruger sweeping toward the thing’s fleshy torso. Without hesitation, Red Elk squeezed the trigger, and the Night Flyer let loose with a howl so strident it made Jesse cover his ears. The thing spiraled up and over Jesse and his captor. The creature lunged down as if to chomp the man’s face off, but Red Elk was too quick. He whipped his head to the side, thrust the Ruger into its large, pink earhole, and popped it again. The Night Flyer’s red eyes became glowing moons; its klaxon bray penetrated Jesse’s head, made it vibrate like a malfunctioning power tool.
It finally dropped Red Elk. For a moment, the dark man was breast stroking in the air toward the Night Flyer that carried Jesse. Then the creature jolted, and Jesse realized Frank hadn’t fallen after all, had landed on the thing’s back, on which he now sat astraddle. Immediately, the Night Flyer pitched sideways and veered toward the canyon wall. Though Jesse’s view was obscured by the creature’s body, he heard all too well Red Elk’s oomph of surprise as he was driven into the wall and scraped savagely along its coarse surface.
Savage Species Page 24