I felt a surge of shame when I met his eyes. We’d failed him today.
Harold grabbed my hand and tugged me towards the gaping door of the long, two-story office building. “You gotta kill it. It’s horrible. What it did to Bobby and Glenda…” He glanced over at two tattered, dirty tarps in the doorway. One tarp covered something the size and shape of a man. The other tarp covered several scattered lumps. I swallowed down bile when I saw what was left of an arm sticking out from under the blue plastic. The arm was nothing but bones with a few chunks of flesh stuck to it.
Harold made a small sound of protest and looked away briefly when Zoe crouched down, jerking aside the tarp. The rest of the body was a skeleton, smashed, torn, and tossed aside. There wasn’t much flesh left, but what there was of it looked chewed up.
The other body wasn’t as damaged. He’d been a man, probably in his late fifties, living rough, his clothes grubby, and his skin dull. The gaping wounds around his neck and bloodstains on his shirt were probably the result of the attack.
Zoe sat back on her heels. “Harold, what did you see?”
Harold rubbed his face. His eyes were red-rimmed and dirt smudged his cheeks. “I came out here because I’d heard Bobby and Glenda were camping out and panhandling. This isn’t a safe area. Too many folks out here don’t like us and aren’t afraid of saying so.” He looked around the lot. “I was about a block away when I heard screaming. I thought it was someone hurting Bobby and Glenda, so I ran to stop them.” He shivered. “What I saw…” His eyes filled with tears. “I’ve seen a lot, living on the streets, but this was the worst. Glenda was gone, dead from what was attacking Bobby.” He stopped talking, his mouth opening and closing a few times, apparently at a loss for the words to describe what killed Bobby.
“Go on,” I prompted gently. “Anything you can tell us will help us stop it.”
“Okay,” Harold drew a deep breath and spoke quickly, “it was like a mass of, of black…something, and I swear it was chewing on Bobby just inside the building. I yelled and ran forward, but it didn’t stop. Bobby saw me and started crawling out of the doorway. When he got into the sun, it was like the thing didn’t like the light or the heat and it tried to pull him back in, but I grabbed his hands and dragged him into the light. The thing sort of melted back inside.” Harold gave Bobby’s still form a bleak look. “I was too late. He couldn’t even tell me what happened before he died.”
I scrutinized the dark doorway apprehensively. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting whatever killed Harold’s friends. Kevin drifted closer to the entrance, peering in and holding his sword at the ready.
“See anything?” Zoe stood up, unclipping her whip and giving it a snap.
“No, it’s probably gone deeper inside.” Kevin looked at his sword critically, maybe wishing it were a gun. Supernormals rarely carried guns – bullets didn’t work on most supernormals, human or beast. And, for some reason, it was harder to hide behind a Glamour while holding a gun. Aunt Kate told me it was probably because normals are wired to be afraid of a gun pointing at them. A sword or a whip was more of a curiosity, so they didn’t react to those weapons through the Glamour.
I gripped my sword tightly in my right hand, but I also turned the palm of my left hand over, balancing a ball of fire, both as a light and a weapon. Even though my eyes could see in the dark better than normals could, I figured the light-hating creature inside wouldn’t like the ball of flame.
Harold gave me a faint smile. “It still amazes me when you do that.”
“Yeah, me too. Okay, we’re going inside. Harold, please don’t follow. And stay away from the door. If we’re not back in thirty minutes, call Aunt Kate.” I gave Zoe an uncertain glance. “Should we get Uncle Dan out here to help?”
She snorted, insulted. “No. Come on, Olivia. Don’t be so lame.”
“Yeah, yeah, stupid idea.” I shrugged. Uncle Dan used to come on more hunts as a trainer but not so much anymore. Aunt Kate rarely hunted – she compared herself to James Bond’s Q, more suited to providing weapons and gadgets for the rest of us.
I joined Zoe and Kevin in front of the doorway, standing side by side holding our weapons. Harold moved further back, shifting from foot to foot anxiously next to a rusting truck.
With a look to make sure my cousins were ready, I held up my ball of flame and stepped into the darkness.
It was silent inside. Even the faint noises from the highway faded as we moved further into the grain elevator. The interior had been two floors once, but now holes gaped in the ceiling and the second floor carpet dangled down like hanging moss. Rain and wind through the broken windows had done their work on the moldering office desks and chairs. Only the remnants of door frames and piles of torn sheetrock suggested there’d ever been walls. The place smelled of rotting leaves and moldy furniture with an undertone of something faintly vile.
The only light filtered in through the broken windows and holes in the walls and ceiling.
I saw evidence of Bobby and Glenda’s stay where they’d cleared space for a bed of blankets in a sheltered corner. Two loaded backpacks leaned against the wall. I made a note to grab them for Harold if I could. He would want to recycle among his community what he could of their belongings.
Zoe held up a hand, and I stopped. She turned her head from side to side. I mimicked her motions, my breath catching in my throat when I heard a faint skittering sound.
Kevin pointed to the darkest part of the building where sagging sheetrock half-hid several broken urinals. Light from my ball of flame glinted off the broken mirror on the adjoining wall.
Without a word, my cousins and I moved in the direction of the sound. I craned my head to see past the remnants of the bathroom wall.
An undulating, dark blob seemed to fill the entire space between the urinals and the broken wall, an area about the size of a small car. My nose twitched. The terrible smell that had been so faint by the door grew stronger the closer we got to the mass.
Zoe directed me to the left and Kevin went right. With Zoe in the middle, we moved forward, quietly slipping through gaps in the walls. I could have tracked the creature by the ripe smell of garbage and old blood emanating from its body.
Moving slowly and with barely a whisper of sound, Kevin sheathed his sword and opened the large fabric bag Aunt Kate had handed us before we left the warehouse. Back at the warehouse, the bag had looked huge, large enough to hold a horse, but now I wasn’t so sure the bag was big enough to contain the beast. Kevin seemed to have the same doubts, holding up the bag as if measuring it against the bulk of the creature.
We crept closer, Kevin holding the bag while Zoe gripped her whip and I held my sword. Kevin crouched slightly, leaning forward, ready to toss the bag over the wall onto the creature. He glanced at us, and seeing we were both in position, he gave one quick nod before flinging the fabric over the creature.
For a breath, I thought we might get lucky and contain it without any trouble.
The monster erupted in a seething mass of bugs, ripping through the strong fabric as if chewing it apart. As bugs skittered towards my feet, I squealed and scrambled back, waving my sword in front of me and extinguishing the ball of flames in my other hand to hold the sword with both hands. Then I realized my sword was useless against the bugs, so I dropped my weapon and called flames to both hands, casting light on the scene. The creature (or was it creatures?) flowed away from the flames.
A shiver went through my body – the bugs looked like large cockroaches. Ever since I saw the movie Damnation Alley, where cockroaches ate a guy in a car, I’d had a creeping horror of the black scuttling things, even though no cockroaches inhabited the chilly Pacific Northwest.
“Holy shit,” Kevin said, as he tried to shove the boiling mass of bugs back into the shredded bag. But he couldn’t contain them. Cockroaches poured over his hands and up his arms. He yelped and backed away, banging into an old post. Bugs swarmed up his body as he screamed and swatted at them. Blood seeped from a
growing number of wounds on his arms, pooling on the dirty ground.
“Kevin, get away!” Zoe raised her whip, helplessly trying to find a way to stop the roaches without hurting Kevin.
Kevin gasped and sank to the filthy floor, in too much pain to use his ability to bounce away from the attack. I ran towards Kevin’s prone body, crunching as many bugs as possible under my sturdy boots. He was fading into unconsciousness, his eyes rolling back in their sockets. He bled from cockroach bites all over his body. I hesitated, uncertain how to help. Setting the bugs on fire while they were on Kevin was too risky. He could recover from burns more quickly than a normal, but if he were too burned, he might die.
“Go for ice,” Zoe yelled as she ran over to stomp on the bugs threatening me while she tried to help Kevin. “Freeze the things off of him.”
I didn’t bother to answer as I aimed the palms of my hands at Kevin. I extinguished the flames and called on the other side of my ability. A stream of ice issued from my palms and I ran my hands over Kevin as if I was running a flashlight across his body.
“Hurry,” Zoe urged, cracking her whip on some outlying bugs, snapping them in half.
I jerked back as a roach jumped on my arm and bit me. It burned like acid, but I lowered the body temperature on my arm and it dropped off. I stomped on it while continuing to freeze the bugs off Kevin.
Kevin moaned as bugs fell off his bleeding body. He was pale, either from shock or from my freezing touch. On the plus side, the cold slowed the bleeding.
As the last of the horrible bugs fell off his body, I swept the area around us for good measure – hearing Uncle Dan’s voice in my mind, telling me to deal with the threat first, then feel free to fall apart later.
I bent over Kevin, ignoring the crush of dead and dying bugs under my boots. Too many wounds to count marked his arms, face, and neck and I was glad he’d passed out. I felt for his pulse, relieved it was strong. Scanning his body for any remaining bugs, I carefully put my hands under his arms and lifted him up. Dead bugs rained off his body in clumps. My involuntary shiver made Kevin’s body shake in my grasp.
“Zoe, take Kevin out of here.” I thrust him her way, seeing a few straggling bugs trying to get together…maybe to form another attack? She grabbed him while I used wider streams of ice to freeze the roaches. Zoe lifted Kevin over her shoulder and ran towards the door.
I saw roaches scrambling back to the old bathroom, and I followed, ice crackling and falling from my hands. I lifted my hands, flexing my fingers as I prepared to kill any remnants.
Cackling laughter from the darkness in the destroyed bathroom stopped me. My breath hitched in fear, the sounds creeping down my spine.
“You Brighthalls, you always think you’re ready for anything.” If a voice could sound like countless scuttling legs, this one did. “But you weren’t quite ready for me. I almost got you.”
“Who are you?” I switched to flame. Ice felt too passive to deal with the horrible voice. I preferred flames anyway. The light caught the edge of a face made out of seething cockroaches. It was roughly human shaped. My mouth went dry as I stared with repulsion. “What are you?”
“You think I’m the worst that’s coming your way.” The thing cackled again. It moved closer, keeping its form in a synchronized movement of roiling bugs.
I took an instinctive step backwards. The firelight flickered and I realized my hands were trembling. “Don’t come any closer,” I warned it.
“I don’t matter. You’ve destroyed too much of me.” The mouth was a hole in the boiling bug face. The remaining bugs surged at me. “But I’ll try to take you with me!”
“No!” I threw fire at center of the bug face, gasping in relief when it crisped into pieces, bugs turning to ash from the middle out to the sides of the awful pseudo head. Then, “Oh crap.”
I’d set the room on fire.
I turned and ran from the blaze. The fire wouldn’t hurt me, but I wasn’t sure if Zoe and Kevin had made it out in time.
As I dodged through missing walls, I tried to fight the fear threatening to deaden my legs. What in the hell was that thing? What did it mean by “the worst was coming our way?”
Chapter 3
I staggered out of the building, wisps of smoke foreshadowing the fire behind me. Zoe straightened from her crouch over Kevin’s body. Harold stayed bent, his hand on Kevin’s bloody shoulder.
“Is he…” I asked through fear-stiffened lips.
“He’s bad off,” Zoe answered, looking down at our cousin. “We’ve got to get him back to the warehouse so Uncle Alex can try to help him. I don’t think he’s healing.”
“Huh?” I blinked at her. What could cause a supernormal’s powerful healing ability to fail? Nothing I knew of, that was for sure. I turned back to the building as if the answers were there but saw flames licking through the roof. “Oh no! We need to get away from here.” I flapped my hands for Zoe and Harold to grab Kevin. The sound of flames roared from inside the office.
As if emphasizing the urgency of my plea, something exploded inside the depths of the building.
Zoe grabbed Kevin and dashed to the other side of the parking lot so quickly I only saw a black blur. Harold shook himself, blinking with surprise when she stopped and laid Kevin down on the grassy median.
“Come on,” I urged him, taking his arm, glancing anxiously at the building. I kept my ears open for sirens. “We need to leave now.” I didn’t want to take the time to stop the fire before the firefighters arrived.
“Wait.” Harold stared at the tarps covering Bobby and Glenda.
I winced. I’d forgotten about his friends’ bodies. I ran over and started to wrap the tarp around Bobby’s body, intending to carry it away.
Harold stopped me with a hand on my arm. “It’s okay. Can you burn them?”
“What?” I stared at him, disturbed by the idea of deliberately burning a human body. Even one who was already dead. It felt wrong, like an abuse of my ability.
“If you do it, it’ll be an honorable cremation.”
“Oh.” I considered the sad remains of Bobby, a little awed by Harold’s request. “Do you want to say anything?” His belief that I would be honoring them helped me process his request.
The ground shook slightly as part of the building collapsed.
“No.” He clasped his hands in front. “I’ve already said my goodbyes.”
Accepting his request, his need for me to do this for his friends, I held my hands over the body. I could hear the fire crackling as it got closer to the front of the building while flames issued from my hands, quickly turning the body to ash. I sneezed to clear the smell of burning flesh from my nostrils.
Once Bobby’s body was nothing but dust, I nodded for Harold to lift the tarp covering Glenda’s remains. It was easier to burn her body because the chunks of flesh didn’t resemble a person.
“Ollie!” Zoe shouted anxiously.
With a last look to make sure the bodies were gone, I ran over to Zoe and Harold followed slowly at normal speed.
Zoe stood up, Kevin cradled in her arms. “I’ve got to get him to Aunt Kate now. I was right. He’s not healing. He’s getting worse.” He eyes were wide with fear.
Hundreds of tiny bite marks covered Kevin’s body. They should have been closing up as his healing ability dealt with them. Instead the wounds were getting bigger and the edges seemed to be melting.
I stood open-mouthed as Zoe sped away, kicking into hyperspeed, her supernormal significant ability. I knew she’d get Kevin back to the warehouse in under five minutes. But could Aunt Kate help? Kevin needed his father, Uncle Alex, with his empathic healing ability. When I’d been hurt last fall during a fight with a Mongolian Death Worm in the Shanghai tunnels, Uncle Alex’s healing ability was the only thing that had prevented me from losing my arm. But Uncle Alex was impossible to contact at his retreat.
I ground my teeth in frustration. Too many things were wrong. My world felt out of balance.
Siren
s wailed from the distance. “Harold!” I turned around, looking for the homeless man. He stood, staring at the silos now blazing with the fire I’d started. “We have to go.”
He lifted his head, listening for a moment before he said, doubtfully, “Sirens?”
“Yes.” I looked around frantically. There wasn’t a good place for him to hide and there was no way he’d be gone in time. I didn’t want him to face suspicion from the cops for setting the fire. “Okay, you’re probably not going to like this, but I don’t see any other option.” I reached for his hand, but he jerked away.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting you out of here before the firemen get here.” I didn’t have much time. Even Harold could hear the sirens now. I took his arm. “Just try to relax.”
Before he could protest anymore, I hauled him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry and took off running, hoping the Glamor would work enough to hide the fact that a teenage girl was carrying an adult man across her shoulders.
Harold barely moved – didn’t scream or anything – he was either too surprised or knew it wouldn’t do much good.
We passed a fire truck roaring down Highway 30. I ran several more blocks until we were near NW 23RD Avenue. Spotting a building with few windows and a partially hidden parking lot, I stopped and let Harold slide off my back onto the ground.
He staggered a bit before managing to stand. He glared at me. “Warn me next time.” He smoothed his hair with shaking hands.
I gave a short laugh. “I hope there’s never a next time.”
“God, yes.” Harold sighed and brushed at his clothes, seeming to realize how disheveled he was.
I noticed he wasn’t wearing his usual backpack. “Did you leave your backpack at the silo?” I asked, panicked at the idea of running back for it. I winced, only now recalling I’d forgotten to get Bobby and Glenda’s packs out of the building.
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