Savage Species

by Jonathan Janz

  He cast about looking for Emma. The fires spat out sufficient light, though their lurid glow danced and undulated with the fighting. Jesse stepped past one of the fires and squinted into the maelstrom of bodies. A sudden dread that Emma had already been borne away for a private dinner fell upon him with dreadful certitude. The shifting bodies all looked the same, the earsplitting shrieks and the withering stench of the creatures blending in a hellish uniformity.

  Something seized his ankle.

  Jesse bellowed in horror and twisted away, but the monster held on. He was going to fall, and once he was down the things would close over him like a horde of marauding ants. Only, he thought as his back slammed the cave floor, he was the ant, not them. And being small hadn’t helped a goddamn bit.

  Whimpering, Jesse kicked out with his free leg, heard a grunt of pain and felt the grip on his ankle loosen. A voice made him freeze.

  “Don’t leave me!” was all the voice screamed, but it was enough to get Jesse’s attention. He rolled over, peered through the orange firelight, and beheld Marc Greeley facing him on his belly.

  Or at least, what was left of Marc Greeley.

  Jesse experienced a moment of clarity. In zombie movies people were always being ripped apart and munched gradually, far too gradually to sustain Jesse’s suspension of disbelief. The human body, he’d always reasoned, could not survive when its guts were being strung all over the place like police tape.

  The sight of Marc Greeley disabused him of this belief.

  Where before the Night Flyers had limited their damage to those leech-like commas of scooped flesh, they had since graduated to some serious desecration of Greeley’s dying body.

  The man’s lips were gone, resulting in a grisly, sardonicus grin. Equally horrifying was the excising of the man’s eyelids. Greeley’s brown eyes now bulged from their messy crimson sockets like some horny cartoon wolf’s. The scalping had been consummated. One Night Flyer’s head was buried in Greeley’s groin.

  “Please,” Greeley moaned, shaking Jesse’s ankle like a weary puppy.

  Jesse tried but could not tear his eyes off the glistening black bat’s head tremoring as it chomped through Greeley’s sexual organs.

  “Please kill me,” Greeley wailed.

  Jesse covered his mouth, coughing with revulsion. He knew he’d lose his nerve if he thought about it. He sat on his knees over Greeley’s ruined body.

  With a moan, Jesse plunged the knife into Greeley’s neck, just under the ear. Then, with the man’s huge eyes goggling at him, he yanked the knife hard, unzipping the man’s throat.

  For a moment Greeley’s Adam’s apple bobbed, a gurgling cough chuffing from his grinning mouth. Then the eyes took on a bleary glaze. Sobbing, Jesse clambered away.

  The Night Flyer rose from Greeley’s mid-section and stood on its muscular hind legs.

  It tensed to spring. Jesse brought up the knife, but it shook in his hand and felt absurdly small, like entering a swordfight with a plastic spork. He fancied he could see a diabolical grin darken the already black face.

  Then the most frightening sound Jesse had ever heard thundered through the arena.

  Sam thought, This isn’t happening.

  His dad answered, You keep telling yourself that, Sammy. Right up until that thing kills you.

  The thing his dad was referring to had to be forty feet tall. More, probably. It was like the Children, only on a larger and far more sinister scale. The legs rose as high as two-story houses, though the way the monster moved made judging difficult. It strode upright a few paces then lowered to all fours and ambled forward like a panther for several more. The arms were slender but terribly muscled, the thing’s physiology endowing it with a strength no other living creature could boast. The waist and torso were shockingly thin, which no doubt allowed it to navigate tight spaces. The fingers reminded him of crane claws, the long-toed feet of white pergolas. The entire monster filled him with a childlike dread that threatened to undo what remained of his composure.

  But it was the face that made Sam want to scream.

  Superficially, it was constructed similarly to the rest of the pale monsters. Green eyes—these the size of manhole covers—a vaguely vulpine facial structure. The ears had the same pointed tips. The mouth was crammed with teeth like those swords samurais used to carry…katanas, he thought they were called. One bite from that mouth would puree a man.

  The Old One, Red Elk had called it.

  It drifted through the cavern like a terrible white god, its lambent green eyes seeing everything at once, penetrating every creature’s defenses and exposing each one’s secret heart. Sam knew this because of the knowledge in its ageless eyes and the ghastly, rasping voice rumbling in his mind. He shook his head against the onslaught. It wasn’t until he’d started to cover one ear with a quaking hand that he remembered he held the child, that he’d retrieved baby Jake, was maybe the child’s only chance at survival.

  No survival, the voice buzzed, like a cloud of raging hornets. No survival for you or the child.

  The Old One was a hundred yards away, watching them. Then it halved the distance in three seconds.

  Sam clutched Jake, who was baying feebly, and willed his body to cross to where Charly stood. She too had been arrested by the entrance of the monster, but when she heard her baby, her trance broke and she lunged toward Sam. As he handed Jake to her, Charly began to sob. Despite the tears and the snot, she was the prettiest he’d ever seen her at that moment. He longed to enfold her and her child in a steely embrace and spirit them away to some safe corner of the world where monsters were only in fairy tales, and green-eyed devils could not read his mind. But the buzzing voice shattered the tranquil moment and paralyzed his body with its malevolent promise.

  YOU’LL FAIL HER, SAMUEL, the ageless voice assured him. YOU’LL FAIL HER LIKE YOU FAILED YOUR WIFE AND KIDS. YOU’RE AS GANGRENOUS AS YOUR DEAD MOTHER’S TOES, SAMUEL BLEDSOE. YOU DESERVE AMPUTATION.

  Sam glanced back at Charly, and when he saw her eyes flutter wide, then flit to something behind him and above him, he knew it was the end.

  Sam Bledsoe turned and stared up at the monster who had lived for a thousand years.

  Part Five

  The Old One

  Chapter One

  Jesse scrambled away from the approaching figure and gibbered breathless obscenities. He backed right into a Night Flyer, whose beady, vermilion eyes didn’t blink, but instead continued gazing up in awe at the monster Red Elk had called the Old One. Turning his gaze back to the Old One, Jesse recalled the other name, the one that described the creature who made men cannibals.

  The Wendigo.

  He could feel the horrible intelligence crawling around his mind like some bloated and persistent sewer rat, uncovering his insecurities and his frailties and reveling in them.

  Time to jump ship, eh, Jessie? it wheedled in its guttural, droning voice. You get a little uncomfortable or a little inconvenienced, and you split town?

  No, Jesse thought, scuttling away from the approaching monster. He thrashed his head from side to side to shake free of the voice, but it only deepened, lost its specious jocularity.

  YOU’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE, ARE YOU? YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ENDING TO THIS STORY, AND IT DOESN’T END WELL FOR YOU, DOES IT, JESSE?

  Jesse collapsed on the cave floor, barely noticing the black pool of liquid in which he lay.

  He became aware that his sobs and the baby’s cries were the only sounds in the cavern, a preternatural stillness having taken hold.

  He ventured a look around him and saw that every face in the arena was upturned to the Old One. The Children had left off their campaign to gain possession of Emma, whom Jesse still had not located. The Night Flyers, too, were transfixed by the impossibly tall monster, who had risen to its full height and was surveying the scene.

  The Old One’s huge, green eyes took in everything and everyone. Its impassive gaze swept the dead creatures and the live ones, the people held captive b
y the creatures and those who had not yet been taken. For the briefest of moments its ancient pupils lit on Jesse. The effect was singularly disturbing.

  The Old One closed its eyes.

  And a deep humming sound began to fill the cave. The noise was unlike anything Jesse’d heard before. It was like a dissonant musical note transformed into a tactile sensation. Jesse’s ears, teeth and body vibrated with the sound of it, the unearthly bass thrum. He thought at first it was coming from the Old One, and so it was—the creature’s colorless lips were pressed together in a parody of musical ecstasy. But it also came from the Children and the Night Flyers, the races who’d moments earlier been adversaries but were now closing their eyes in rapturous communion. The Old One spread its interminable arms and the hum intensified, teeth-rattlingly loud and crackling with a baleful electricity.

  Jesse heard a woman’s voice behind him. He whirled and saw who was making the noise, and moreover, why she was making it.

  Unlike the others, the Big Nasty was not transfixed by the sight of the Old One singing its unholy dirge.

  The Big Nasty was too busy trying to rape Emma.

  Charly tore her eyes off the towering creature and put her lips to Jake’s ear. He was moaning weakly, his little arms paddling slowly against her chest as though he were under water. His legs moved hardly at all, and despite the horror all around her, she yanked up her shirt, pushed down one cup of her bra, and guided a nipple into Jake’s mouth. But the poor little guy didn’t react, just drew in a thin breath and sighed it out. Charly’s shock and terror and worry burned away in a gust of mind-searing rage. God damn them, she thought. Damn all of them. They won’t beat us. By God they won’t. I’ll kill every one of them before they get my baby again. I’ll—

  Her thoughts broke off as Jake latched onto her nipple. Weakly, he began to suck. Her breasts had been engorged for hours and hours, and she’d been leaking milk into her bra. The flow of it was too much for Jake, who immediately began to retch and gag. Charly unlatched him with a hiss, gritting her teeth in self-reproach. Her nipple continued to spray, so she held Jake to her shoulder while he caught his breath.

  “He gonna be okay?” a voice asked.

  Charly turned and saw Red Elk gazing at her baby.

  She nodded. Then Charly saw the girl behind Red Elk, leaning wearily against his broad back.

  “Think you can walk out of here?” Charly asked Colleen.

  Colleen’s eyes flitted lower. She asked, “Can he?”

  Sam knelt beside Charly, both his hands braced on the cave floor. He was breathing heavily, his eyes pinched shut.

  “Sam?” she asked. Against her, Jake writhed more strongly than he had before, his sick-looking face rooting against the flesh of her shoulder.

  “Gotta go,” Sam said, his voice a pained rasp. He grabbed her arm, began leading her back the way they’d come.

  Red Elk turned to Colleen. “You go with ‘em.”

  “Frank,” Colleen said, “I’m not going to—”

  “It’s not a suggestion,” Red Elk said, pushing her on.

  “What the hell is this,” Colleen asked, “Masculine Stupidity Day? I’m not just leaving you—”

  “If I don’t do this, we don’t have a chance.”

  “Do what?”

  “Look, goddammit!” Red Elk shouted and swept an arm toward the Old One. Colleen looked. So did Charly.

  She realized what the song was all about. The Old One’s long arms reached down, the broomstick fingers brushing the prone bodies of the fallen Children and Night Flyers.

  When the fingers touched them, the dead bodies began to stir.

  The sight of the monster’s grinning face, a rictus of depthless cruelty, infuriated Jesse in a way he’d never thought possible. The Big Nasty sat astraddle Emma’s flailing body, flicking its serpent-like tongue at her, muttering garbled taunts. All around the pair the black and white creatures stood immobile in unbroken reverence, yet the Big Nasty carried on with his vile torment, unconcerned with the resurrections occurring around him.

  Already, half a dozen of the corpses had begun to twitch and breathe again, the terrible song coupled with the Old One’s healing touch somehow revivifying the damaged flesh and ravaged organs. Ranged around Emma and the Big Nasty, like a newly made Golgotha, there were severed limbs, decapitated heads. Jesse couldn’t imagine how those pieces could be fitted back together, how the eviscerated bodies could be made whole again. But he didn’t have time to muse on that now. Emma’s shirt had been torn open, revealing the white bra beneath. The bright spire of fury within Jesse glowed hotter.

  Jesse got to them just as the Big Nasty reached down and ripped away Emma’s bra. The sight of Emma’s bare breasts incited Jesse into unthinking action. He reared back and kicked at the Big Nasty’s face, but quicker than Jesse would have thought possible, the creature’s hand shot out, caught his sneaker and twisted. Jesse hit the ground with a rib-crunching whump. He lay next to Emma, each of them with a horrid, clawed hand clamped around their throats. Emma swung her head toward Jesse, and their eyes met. Hers were full of angry tears, but there was a gratitude there too.

  Jesse thrust his face away, got both his hands on the wrist that pinned him down, but the Big Nasty’s corded muscles only squeezed tighter. Jesse writhed beneath the viselike grip and something brushed his hair, something moving and sharp.

  A Night Flyer talon. It belonged to a severed black foot that had moments before been lying motionless but was now starting to twitch, the blasphemous hum reanimating it.

  “No,” Emma moaned.

  Jesse swiveled his head and saw the Big Nasty fumbling with Emma’s jean shorts, its obscene phallus already tumid and thrusting at her crotch.

  Jesse groped for the twitching Night Flyer foot. He grasped it and felt its scaly flesh squirm against his fingers. Jesse shifted the twitching foot to his other hand and batted it at the Big Nasty’s face.

  The blow was a weak one—Jesse’s angle was bad—but it did the trick. One of the razor-sharp talons gouged a meaty divot out of the Big Nasty’s cheek. It made a hissing sound, sat up and slapped a hand over the wound, and as it did it released Jesse, seemed to forget him for just a moment.

  It was all the time he needed to push to his knees, raise the Night Flyer’s foot—which was now twisting crazily in his grip—and strike down at the Big Nasty’s stupefied face. There was a pulpy squirting sound as two of the talons punctured the Big Nasty’s eyeballs, the barbed tips of the claws harrowing the soft ocular tissue and spilling milky fluid down the monster’s cheeks. It squealed, a high-pitched siren that pierced the dreadful hum echoing through the cave. The squeal pushed Jesse’s rage further, yet even as he rose, intent on finishing the job on the Big Nasty, the sound also kindled an atavistic fear in him very much akin to the one he’d felt at the beginning of the nightmare, when he’d first spied the creatures at the playground. The Big Nasty, he realized as the creature held its ruined eyeballs and wailed, had been one of those original monsters, the ones who’d ignored Jesse and preyed upon the younger people below. Why had they done that? he now wondered. Why had they not killed him first? Because they knew he was no threat to them, that men like Goliath and Musclehead possessed more valor?

  I’ll show you a threat, he thought as he raised a sneaker. I’ll show you a fucking threat! his mind screamed as he shot the bottom of his foot at the creature’s open mouth. The heel of Jesse’s sneaker crunched through two of the Big Nasty’s bottom teeth. The blind creature tilted awkwardly and came down on its side, and Jesse moved with it, bringing his foot up again and stomping on the side of the beast’s head. He raised his foot and stomped again, harder. Again. You ugly—again—vicious—again—motherfucker! The creature’s face was unrecognizable, but he stomped again, again. Die, you—

  “Jesse!” someone was screaming. “Jesse, please. We have to go!”

  Her words finally did it, finally broke through the crimson veil that had fallen over him. He blinked at her, dis
oriented, then he let her lead him back through the tall figures that stood still as statues. But there was a difference now, one that iced his blood and snuffed the sense of triumph that had seconds before coursed through him.

  The creatures’ eyes were open.

  The creatures’ eyes were on Jesse.

  “Run,” Emma said, taking him by the hand.

  He sprinted with her, and as he ran, the venomous eyes watched him, the Night Flyers and Children alike, the red and green glowing eyes now following him with a grim focus that scared him worse than anything had yet. He ran faster, faster; he was towing Emma forward now. Ahead he distinguished Frank Red Elk shoving Colleen toward the slope, the slide down which they’d skidded earlier. Sam and Charly had already begun to scale the slide, and he could tell by the way Charly was struggling that she was too busy trying to cradle her child to climb effectively. She would make it a few feet, then she’d lose her balance and land on her side, her screaming baby clutched against her.

  Jesse and Emma dashed ahead. They were almost upon Red Elk and Colleen when the humming sound altered, a shrill, ululating cry slicing through it. Jesse threw a glance over his shoulder and saw one of the Children toss its head back and cry out with savage intensity. Several others joined in the high-pitched battle cry. The Old One, its huge luminous eyes open now, strode toward the opposite side of the cavern, its endless white arms extended.

  As Jesse and Emma reached Red Elk and Colleen, Jesse realized he’d been in error earlier regarding the carvings in the walls. The figures weren’t carvings at all. They were Children and Night Flyers, dormant but apparently waiting for the Old One to bring them back to life. And as the Old One’s broomstick fingers caressed them, their period of waiting ended.

  And they too stared down at Jesse and the others.