by Hunter Shea
“No one will ever doubt you again,” I add.
I’m not sure if it’s physically possible to smile from ear to ear, but Rob gives a good go at it.
“I’m in.”
Chapter Sixteen
I must have been screaming, because when I wake up in a tangle of soaked sheets, Austin and Henrik are standing over my bed. One of them had turned on a light, and it stings my eyes.
“Oh, hey there.”
Austin sits on the bed, rubbing my arm. “Wow, that must have been a good one.”
I roll over to grab a fresh towel from the floor. “Oh, aren’t they all. I’m sorry I woke you guys up.”
Henrik looks uncomfortable. He keeps looking away from me, arms crossed tight across his chest. “Are you all right?”
I look down and notice one of my boobs is slipping out from under my shirt. Austin doesn’t see it, thank God! I adjust myself quickly, getting out of bed so I can go to the bathroom and change.
“No, but this is normal for me. Go back to sleep. It never hits twice in the same night.”
“Maybe what you’re planning to do, when it’s finished, will give you peace.” Henrik smiles weakly. His eyes are puffy, his normally neat hair askew.
“One can only hope.”
I splash water on my face and the back of my neck, change real quick, and pad back into my bedroom. I can see Henrik hunkered under a blanket.
Austin is still in my room. He’s lying in the bed, reading something on my tablet. When he sees me, he pats the bed.
“Come on, I’ll help you get back to sleep.”
“I don’t think that’ll work anymore.”
“You never know until you try.”
My brother is no stranger to my night terrors. He suffers from them as well, but nothing as severe as mine. The memory of our parents dying will swell up and knock him for a loop a handful of times a year. He says it’s getting less and less with the passage of time.
Me, I’m stuck. Zero progress. Of course, my current living condition indicates I have some ways to go before I move on.
“I can just stay up. It’ll be dawn soon, anyway.” I get back in bed and lay on my side, facing away from Austin.
“There’s no rush. We’re not farmers.”
I feel a tug at my hair. I know he’s twirling the end between his fingers.
“Remember when you buzzed all your hair off?” he says.
“It was the cool thing to do back then.”
“No, it wasn’t. You looked like a little boy going to summer camp. You only did it to piss people off.”
I can’t help smiling as I recall the look of abject horror on my aunt’s face when I came back from my friend Cindy’s house. Cindy’s father had a set of professional clippers. Cindy’s skills were less than professional, but I didn’t look like I had mange.
“Maybe,” I murmur.
When we were younger and barely coping with what had happened, I developed a nervous habit Rob Rayman would have envied of twirling my hair so I could fall asleep. Then, one night when I woke up too terrified to close my eyes, Austin lay beside me and twirled my hair for me. Something about the warmth of his presence and the strange comfort of my hair being twirled put me at ease enough to fall back to sleep.
It had been a long time since Austin had been the Natalie whisperer. To my amazement, it was working. My eyelids felt heavy as full-grown Nessies.
He whispered so softly, I couldn’t tell if he was speaking or if I was dreaming. “Henrik’s right. When this is all finally over, you’re going to sleep like a baby every night. Mom and Dad are always with us. And I know they’re proud.”
I was drifting when I hear something heavy shuffling outside the RV. I open one eye. Austin drops a strand of hair. I feel it fall onto my neck.
There’s a deep snort, then the sound of something being dragged through the leaves.
I have enough time to sit up before the RV is rocked so hard, I worry it’s going to tip over.
Chapter Seventeen
Austin and I slip right off the bed. The RV cants, then settles back with a mini sonic boom, the shocks creaking like hell. It sounds like half my possessions went crashing to the floor.
“Crap, crap, crap!” I run to the front of the RV, passing Henrik who is reaching into his duffel bag for something.
After our earlier conversation with Rob, I should have known better.
“Take this,” Henrik says, handing me a gun that’s so heavy, I almost drop it.
Austin is right behind me. Henrik gives him a gun as well. I’m very glad we didn’t load everything on Vindicta earlier.
The RV has a kind of picture window with a plastic shade. I grab the cord to the shade. “We don’t go out there until we see what we’re dealing with.”
The RV is slammed again and I topple into Henrik.
“You really need to put in a bell so people don’t have to knock so hard,” Austin says, holding on to the table.
I rip open the shade.
We can’t see much at all. It’s still night, the rain hasn’t stopped and we’re surrounded by dense trees.
But we can hear the creature – or creatures – moving about.
“Do you have a light for outside?” Austin asks.
“I did, but it broke.”
“Flashlight,” Henrik says calmly.
I rush to the console between the two front seats. It’s filled with maps and junk. I dig like a frantic dog until I find the little flashlight that’s been in there since I bought the RV. I hope the batteries aren’t dead.
Pressing the flashlight to the window, I look back at Henrik and Austin. My brother looks like he’s either ready to jump out of his skin or beat someone out of theirs. Henrik just looks ready.
“Here goes.”
The flashlight clicks and miracle of all miracles, a harsh shaft of light stabs the darkness.
“Holy flipping Christ!”
The creature’s vile face is right outside the window. It looks like something from an old-time freak show, an animal inbred to the point of utter deformity, a pickled horror guaranteed to scare the ladies.
If a donkey fucked a flounder, and its baby was forced to sit next to a microwave for a year, you’d get what’s staring back at me. Its flesh is gray-black, with brown speckles that look like melanomas. The eyes are bulging black marbles, one drooping much lower than the other. There’s one nostril, leaking a custard-like fluid that I just know smells like the devil’s armpit. It has a perfectly round parasitic mouth with saw blades for teeth. Before it smashes its ungodly head into my window, I also spy floppy ears, the ends appearing to have been chewed ragged.
The glass spiderwebs but doesn’t break.
“Don’t shoot through the glass!” As thin and fragile as the barrier is, I don’t want it gone entirely.
Henrik is already unlocking the door. “Keep the light on it for us!”
The creature turns away, dashing back to one of the cow carcasses. And that’s when I see the other one.
“It’s not an it. It’s a them,” I shout back.
Austin snaps his head around to me. “How many?”
I shine the light all across the field of bait. As far as I can see, it’s only the two.
Yeah, only two.
They’re massive. Their bodies are built like undulating dragons, minus the wings. Their strong talon-tipped flippers propel them with almost the same ease as gliding through the loch.
I hear the RV door open.
Now the darkness is lit by brief flashes of suppressed gunfire. I hadn’t noticed that all of Henrik’s guns have silencers. I wonder if the Germans have an equivalent of the Boy Scouts. Henrik would have graduated with all of the merit badges and then some. The last thing we need is to wake up every soul in a mile radius.
I don’t dare move from the window to join the boys. If I do, they’ll lose the light. Even a couple of seconds could be deadly.
The beasts flee from the shots. One of them carries
an entire cow in its mouth with the ease of a cat toting around a ball of yarn.
They’re exceedingly fast. So fast, they escape the reach of my flashlight in no time.
“Don’t go after them!” I shout, but it’s too late. Henrik and Austin are right behind them, unloading their clips.
I run into the rain. What if one of those things decides to stand its ground? It’ll kill them before they can kill it. Handguns won’t be enough.
“Austin! Henrik!”
I’m not sure they can hear me through the rain and the stampede of the fleeing Loch Ness Monsters. I see bursts of light and run toward them.
One of the creatures cries out, a strangled whine that sounds as off and irregular as it looks.
“Got it,” I hear Austin cry out.
“Look out,” Henrik shouts.
My heart falls out of my mouth. My eyes blink in response to the flare of rapid gunshots to my left. “Austin!”
A root snags my foot, but I don’t go down like some hapless horror movie scream queen. Instead, I leap over a bush and land next to my brother. He’s on his ass, panting, holding the gun in both hands. Henrik has taken his shirt off and is wrapping it around Austin’s calf.
“I know I got it,” Austin says. I flash the beam on his face. He’s pale as milk, his eyes beginning to glaze.
“What happened?” I ask Henrik.
“It lashed out with its tail. Swept him off his feet, but he never stopped firing. He’s right, he did get it.” He cinches the shirt on the wound. There’s so much rain, it’s hard to gauge how much blood Austin’s lost.
“I know I did. I didn’t miss.”
“Let me check.” I walk toward the water. The slip is only a twenty or so yards away.
“Don’t go alone,” Henrik says.
It’s too late for that. I’m scared witless, but I can’t stop my legs from going deeper into the dark, right where those things were headed. Maybe I am the dumb blonde scream queen after all.
I sweep the light back and forth, eyes on the ground because I’m pretty damn sure they won’t be hiding in the trees. I hold the gun in my other hand, worrying that if I have to shoot, will it have a kick that’ll knock me on my ass?
There are fading ripples in the water, a rapidly fading marker pointing to their escape.
Then I see it, wet and bloody and reeking like a month old fish fry.
Henrik and Austin catch up to me.
I keep the flashlight on the bizarre parting gift. “You got it all right.”
Chapter Eighteen
We carry what one of the Loch Ness Monsters left behind in a tarp. Rainwater rapidly fills the little bowl, sloshing over the sides. Some of it gets on my shoes. I’m going to have to throw those sneakers out. No way that funk is ever coming out of them.
“Let’s get it inside so we can have a better look,” Austin says. He’s limping, but it’s not slowing him down. He’s way too jazzed to even feel the pain.
“No way, Jose. Not in my house.”
Henrik starts to unwind the awning outside. “It is a bit…repugnant, Austin. I have a lantern in my van.”
He dips inside to get his keys. I grab a folding chair for Austin to sit down.
“Here, pop a squat. Take some pressure off your leg.”
“Nah, I’m good. It was just a scratch.”
Henrik’s T-shirt is dyed crimson. Blood is leaking in little rivers down his leg.
“Yeah, a scratch from a twenty-foot monster. Sit.”
Henrik arrives with a battery-powered lantern that could light up a gymnasium. I have to shield my eyes for a moment. When I open them, Austin is still standing. Do big brothers ever listen to their little sisters?
We stare at the dismembered flipper for what seems like hours in stunned silence. I can’t take my eyes off it. Those sharp finger thingies make me want to hurl.
Austin pokes at it with the tip of his sneaker. “The big question is, is it technically surf, or turf?”
Henrik squats close to it, pulls a pen from his pocket, and prods the gray, splotchy flesh.
“If it were a steak on the grill, I’d call it well done. The musculature here is incredible.” He offers the pen to me. I hold back my gorge and give it a try. Even through the pen, it feels as if the flipper is made of Kevlar.
Although the series of bullets that tore it free from its body say otherwise.
“How in the hell did you manage to do this?”
Austin shakes his head. “Lucky shots. I was just shooting as fast as I could before they got away.”
“Annie Oakley should have been so lucky.”
Henrik takes the lantern and walks away from the flipper, lighting up the ground filled with cow bodies. “I wonder if they’ll come back for it.”
“Even dumb animals are smart enough not to return to the place they got fragged,” Austin says. He finally takes a seat, his eyes glued to his prize.
Something that’s been bothering me since they showed up at my doorstep needs to be said. “I wonder if they found this place because of all the fresh, odiferous meat we have lying around, or if they tracked my boat. Because if they can track my boat, they’re going to know when we’re coming.”
I can tell it hits it a nerve with my brother and Henrik. The three of us stand in the rain, oblivious to the fact that we’re getting soaked, that Austin needs medical attention, that we’re surrounded by rotting meat and are now in the possession of a Loch Ness Monster flipper.
Henrik tilts the tarp so the rancid water runs into the dirt, making sure not to get any on us. He wraps the flipper like a tidy Christmas present and secures it to the rack on the roof of his van with some rope. He then moves the van so it’s downwind of us.
Again. Boy Scout. Many badges.
“Help me get Mr. Atlas inside.”
“I told you, I’m fine.”
Austin steps into the RV leaving a little trail of blood droplets.
“Go straight to the bathroom, please. And try not to ruin my carpet.”
He sits on the toilet while I take the T-shirt off his leg. The meaty furrow in his calf looks like the San Andrea fault line. He tries to push the edges closed, which only make more blood seep out.
I have to back out of the bathroom. I just saw the raw chop-meat of his leg. I swear everything tonight is conspiring to get me to lose my dinner.
Henrik takes a quick look and says he has to go back out to the van. He comes back with a professional grade first-aid kit in a black plastic case. He starts threading a curved needle.
“Natalie, can you pour the disinfectant on his leg, please?”
I unscrew the cap and look my brother in the eye. “You’re not going to cry like a little girl are you?”
“Just do it and see for yourself.”
There is a sharp intake of breath and his body goes rigid for a few seconds, but he doesn’t cry. The disinfectant bubbles the moment it hits the gaping wound.
“I don’t have anything to numb you,” Henrik says, looking like a tailor about to mend a suit.
“You have everything but that? I can’t catch a break.”
Henrik squeezes the bottom end of the ragged slash and Austin’s eye bug out of his skull. I can hear his skin pop when the needle goes in. I cover my mouth with my hand.
“I think you caught a break when it didn’t hit any major arteries. Please don’t move. It’ll only make this take longer and make the scar worse.”
Crushing a roll of toilet paper, Austin’s already pasty complexion goes a whiter shade of pale. “It’s not the scar I’m concerned about.”
I remember I have a bottle of whiskey in the cabinet. I give the whole thing to Austin. He takes a deep chug.
Henrik pauses his mending to take the bottle out of his hands. “Alcohol will only thin his blood and make clotting even more difficult. When I’m done, he can have some Ibuprofen.”
“Ibuprofen? You out of children’s chewable aspirin?”
Henrik hands me the bottle. Austi
n gives me the puppy dog eyes, made even more pathetic by the pain swimming in them.
Without looking up from his work, Henrik says, “Don’t you dare.”
I don’t dare.
I somehow think the stitches would have been easier if Austin hadn’t gone all muscle bound. Henrik is sewing up the outer layers of his skin, not his muscle, though I’ll never get the image of said exposed muscle out of my head. When it’s over, Austin’s lays his head back and smiles.
“That was fun.”
Henrik tidies up his first-aid kit. “I believe I’ll take this on the boat with us tomorrow.”
“You mean today,” I remind him, pointing at the lightening skies outside my cracked window.
“That damn thing’s tail was like a whip,” Austin says, hobbling to his makeshift bed. “I just hope it wasn’t radioactive or laced with some kind of toxic waste. I could be changing into a monster as we speak, or melting from the inside out.”
“If you start to melt, do me a kindness and take it outside. I have plans to sell this RV when we’re done, and I’ve already lost resale value from the pounding it took.”
Henrik runs his fingertips along the network of fine cracks in the window. “I wonder why they didn’t just take the food and run. It’s as if they wanted us to know they were here.”
“Or even worse,” I say, “they smelled a live after-dinner snack and wanted in.”
Chapter Nineteen
I find what is surely an expired Xanax and give it to Austin so he can catch a few more Zs. We need him to be strong later. Whatever downtime he can get to recover is vitally necessary.
There’s been a pause in the rain, but the weather forecast calls for a rapid return of the great and welcome deluge by late morning. Henrik is outside, studying the flipper. It looks and smells like it’s already rotting. The color is leaching from the flesh, crinkling like old, wet paper.
“It’s as big as my torso,” he says.
“It would have to be to propel that body. Any chance you can count rings to determine how old it is?”
“No, but I can count my blessings that we’re all still here. I don’t like surprises.”