Night Terrors: Savage Species, Book 1

by Jonathan Janz

  “You think there was a natural disaster, a flood or something?” Emma asked.

  “There was indeed a flood, but why wasn’t the land resettled after that?”

  Jesse waved a hand over the river. “Because it’s surrounded by marshland. The state had to build up the road in half a dozen places to make sure people could get in and out.”

  “Ah,” Greeley said, “but people are here now, aren’t they?”

  Emma frowned impatiently. “What are you saying, Mr. Greeley?”

  “I’m saying that something other than the white man killed the natives. I’m saying that whatever it was—and I’m not talking about marshland, Mr. Hargrove—slaughtered the whites who ventured into this valley, as well.”

  Emma leaned forward. “And that was…?”

  The speculative look returned to Greeley’s face, and with it a shrewd gleam that Jesse didn’t like. “Let’s save that for later, Miss Cayce. You’ll be staying through the weekend, won’t you?”

  She clicked off the recorder. “We leave first thing Sunday.”

  They moved back toward the road, Greeley producing and holding aloft a glowing iPhone. “I know we’re in the lowlands, but this is ridiculous.”

  Emma regarded him sourly. “What a shame.”

  Greeley went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “Another sign that they rushed this place.”

  Jesse glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “The road into the park has already started to dimple, a sure sign it’ll crumble into the marshes within the next few years. There’s no first aid station and only one bathhouse. And to top it all off, they didn’t even bother to put up a cell phone tower to make sure people could stay connected to the outside world.”

  Jesse shrugged. “I’m sure there’s a landline in the check-in booth.”

  “Doesn’t help me a bit,” Greeley muttered. He shook the phone again as if it would respond to physical abuse. “Damn thing. Come on.”

  Emma said, “Guess you’ll have to interact with us.”

  Greeley looked at her dubiously. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a prejudice against modern technology.”

  “Maybe I think people should spend more time with each other and less time gazing blankly into machines.”

  They reached the road, and as they did Jesse spotted several figures forming in the darkness. He heard laughing voices, perceived the glint of bottles reflecting the starlight.

  “That Greeley?” one of the figures asked. There were seven or eight of them, and as the group neared, Jesse realized a few of them were wearing skimpy bikinis.

  “Hey, Marcus,” one young man said, his handsome face grinning over a beer bottle. Jesse took in the guy’s spiky blond hair, his washboard stomach, and felt his insecurity flare. “What’s going on? You leave Cavanaugh back at the campsite?”

  “Done swimming already?” Greeley asked.

  “Gotta be fresh for breakfast club,” another guy said. This one had shaggy black hair and a goatee.

  “What’s breakfast club?” Emma asked.

  “Everybody wears costumes and gets drunk,” Jesse explained. “They had it at WIU when I was there.”

  A small smile. “You ever go?”

  “Once,” Jesse said. “Most of the time I slept in on Saturdays.”

  One of the girls asked Greeley, “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

  Greeley shook his head matter-of-factly, as if big-breasted coeds flirted with him every day. “I doubt it.”

  “We’ll be at the playground,” the goateed guy said.

  Another guy stepped forward from the darkness. This one was strong as hell, his crew cut giving him the look of a soldier or a professional fighter.

  “What about you?” he asked Emma. He took a swig of beer, grinned.

  “We might,” she said, “after we do an interview.”

  The muscular guy stepped closer. “You can interview me.” An aroma of beer attended him, and he wobbled as he spoke.

  “We better get going,” Greeley said, reaching for Emma’s arm.

  “What, she yours or something?” the guy asked.

  Jesse’s flesh tingled. An atmosphere of violence had arisen around them, and he suddenly longed for the quiet of his stinky tent.

  But Emma surprised them all by taking Jesse’s arm. “I’m with him,” she said.

  Greeley stared at them in stunned silence. Jesse tried to remove his amazed look, but didn’t succeed. Emma’s warm body pressed against him. The grip of her fingers sent delicious ripples of heat up his arm.

  And with the rest looking on, Jesse and Emma headed toward the campsite.

  Chapter Six

  Charly rose through the fog as if on a slow-moving conveyor. She listened for Jake’s screaming, and sure enough, there it was: shrill, heartbreaking, endlessly grating. She opened her eyes and turned her head on the off chance Eric had come to bed, but of course he hadn’t. There were nights lately he’d never come to bed at all, instead crashing on the basement sectional. While she walked the carpet between the master suite and the nursery until she finally gave up and took Jake into bed with her.

  And when Eric did sleep in the same room, he invariably crammed fluorescent orange plugs in his ears to muffle Jake’s cries. She asked him once if he felt guilty that she did all the work with Jake.

  Eric just looked at her blankly and said, “Why would I feel guilty?”

  Charly glanced at the clock, saw it was past two in the morning. Groaning with frustration, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and ambled slowly to the communicating door. She was about to open it and repeat the nightly exercise in futility when something made her stop. She pictured Eric as he’d been earlier that afternoon at the kitchen table: skin healthy and brown from golfing with his friends, his soft hands and his long limbs at ease. None of the strain she noticed around her own eyes, none of the baby mileage. And his belly wasn’t a shriveled white sack of loose skin either. If her older sister was to be trusted, Charly’s full breasts—the one feature she felt had been improved by child-rearing—would eventually droop like windsocks on a breezeless day.

  Charly let her hand fall from the doorknob, her lips a white line.

  By God, let him take a turn.

  Coming fully awake for the first time since swallowing the pills, Charly experienced a galvanizing jolt of elation. She felt almost giddy imagining the look of stupefaction on his face when she demanded that he—gasp!—actually parent his son.

  It had been a relief, she thought as she reached the foyer and headed for the basement door, to learn they were having a boy. Charly suspected Eric would have, like some medieval king, continued inseminating her until she produced a male heir.

  At the top of the basement stairs she stopped and listened. It looked dark down there, but that didn’t mean anything. His man cave was tucked safely within the recesses of the basement, presumably so he wouldn’t be troubled by domestic matters.

  Moving into the darkness, Charly rehearsed what she would say. Rip open the door and greet him in a booming voice: It’s your turn, honey! Remember the child we had in January? Well, he’s been screaming for over nine hours now, and I had this crazy idea that you might try to comfort him. I don’t want to cut into your technology use or your recruitment of alluring assistant coaches—oh yes, honey, I noticed—but it’s time to get your ass upstairs and pretend to be a father.

  Charly squinted into the murk, thinking she’d see a narrow sliver of illumination under Eric’s office door, but the darkness of the basement was impenetrable. She grasped the knob, took a deep breath, and pushed the door open.

  Empty.

  The only illumination from within was provided by the blinking lights of the modem and the wireless Internet device. Even Eric’s laptop was closed.

  Charly frowned. Then where was he?

  Disquieted but—and this made her furious at herself—a little relieved, she left the basement and returned to the main floor. A quick pass around the fam
ily room, the kitchen, told her Eric wasn’t here either.

  From above, she heard a floorboard creak.

  Charly’s skin misted with goosebumps. It wasn’t so much the creaking that unnerved her, but the lack of her son’s wailing. She’d become so used to it over the past six months that its cessation was startling.

  The floor groaned again.

  Charly tiptoed into the foyer and gazed up at the ceiling, as if the answers might be written there. Kate often got thirsty in the middle of the night, and for that reason Charly usually made sure to place a glass of water on her nightstand. Of course, Charly hadn’t been there to furnish her daughter with water tonight, so perhaps Kate had stolen across the hall to slake her own thirst.

  Charly mounted the stairs and began the slow climb. It was also possible, she reminded herself, that Olivia had gotten scared—she’d been suffering lately from what the parenting books called night terrors—and had perhaps climbed into her mother’s bed only to find it empty. The idea made Charly’s chest ache with guilt.

  She ascended the steps faster, sure now that Olivia would be standing bewilderedly in the middle of the master suite. Where were you, Mommy?

  Almost to her bedroom door, Charly heard another sound and stopped, her heart suddenly galloping, because it came not from the girls’ room, or even from her own, but rather from the nursery. She stepped closer to the nursery door and felt a muggy breeze whisper over her bare toes.

  Someone had opened the window.

  Had her husband been in Jake’s room the whole time?

  As preposterous as the notion seemed, it was the only explanation. Jake’s screaming had ceased entirely, and the window had, indisputably, been opened. In fact, Charly thought, nose wrinkling, there was a fulsome odor seeping through the nursery door, a scent that reminded her of dead leaves and wormy soil.

  A caul of dread lowering over her, Charly reached out, opened the door.

  Across the room, no more than twelve feet away, she discerned the figure stooped over the crib, her husband soothing little Jake with weird clittering sounds. She’d never heard Eric make those sounds, and she’d never noticed how pale he appeared in the moonlight. God, almost luminescent. And when she padded quietly into the room the stench swam over her like an opening coffin. Her gorge rose, and the hot breeze brought instant perspiration to the base of her neck.

  But that didn’t explain the undeniable sense of wrongness that made every cell of her body vibrate with terror, nor did it answer the question of why her husband was naked, why his back was far too long and steepled with protruding vertebrae, why when he stood erect his head reached nearly to the nine-foot ceiling.

  As the figure turned, its lank, sparse hairs trailing over its bony shoulders like black wire, Charly clapped a hand over her mouth.

  A creature with huge and leering green eyes was clutching her baby. She took a step toward little Jake, whose body didn’t move at all.

  The creature’s mouth twisted in a hideous grin, the eyes widening in lunatic hunger. A viscous drop of slaver strung from the curved, elongated teeth and pooled on her sleeping son’s forehead.

  Before Charly could lunge forward and reclaim her child, the creature took two long strides and lifted itself onto the open windowsill.

  “Jake!” was all Charly could say as she rushed forward.

  The creature cradled her baby to its muscular white chest and leapt through the window.

  Chapter Seven

  They drove to Frank Red Elk’s house at around 7:30 the next morning. A few of the college kids had migrated over to the playground, but thus far breakfast club seemed pretty subdued. Give it a few hours, Jesse thought. If the rain holds off, the place will be good and loud by midmorning.

  “How bad is the storm supposed to be?” Emma was asking Colleen.

  One wrist resting on the steering wheel, Colleen said, “About as bad as it’s been in a decade.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “The story is due Sunday night,” Colleen answered. “I don’t feel like hunting for another job, do you?”

  They rumbled past the little path Jesse, Emma and Greeley had taken down to the riverbank last night, and as they continued on, the forest on either side of the Buick grew wilder and wilder. Jesse thought of Greeley’s cryptic talk about the Algonquins and the whites, wondered what the hell the man had been getting at.

  The Buick jounced over the potted road. The pavement had ended, and the surface on which they now traveled made Colleen’s speed more than a little frightening. He reached out, grabbed hold of the seat to steady himself. The car dipped in a deep crater, the muddy water spraying the windshield.

  “Is someone chasing us?” Emma asked. “Slow the heck down.”

  “Quit being a wimp,” Colleen said. “This car’s a dinosaur anyway.”

  “The engine was rebuilt last year.”

  “So there’s nothing to worry about.”

  The Buick juddered again.

  “Never met a person so bullheaded,” Emma grumbled.

  “You couldn’t live without me,” Colleen said as they splashed through another pothole.

  Jesse buckled up.

  Colleen guided the big white car smoothly around a curve. When the road straightened out again, Jesse discovered a long section of it had been inundated by rain.

  Jesse said, “We’re turning around, right?”

  Colleen said into the overhead mirror, “I thought men were hell raisers. Didn’t you ever do donuts in an icy parking lot?”

  “You can’t drown in icy parking lots.”

  The Buick hurtled toward the swamped stretch of road. Jesse estimated it was underwater for at least fifty yards.

  “Seriously,” Emma said, “you’re stopping before we get to that.”

  Colleen accelerated.

  Emma seemed to sink in her seat. “Dammit, Colleen.”

  The Buick slammed into the lake of water, but rather than going completely under or stalling, the white car plowed forward, tank-like, the water reaching halfway up the tires.

  Jesse realized he’d lifted his rump off the seat, as if that would keep him from drowning. Though they’d slowed down appreciably, they still made steady progress. Beneath the roar of the motor, Jesse distinguished the rush of water, the wet thuds of the tires as they bounced over the rugged lane.

  Emma was shaking her head. “You’re such an idiot.”

  Colleen remained silent, her eyes fixed on the road. Soon they reached dry land. Easing the Buick to a stop, Colleen turned and peered back at the flooded section. “Good thing we came early. By noon, this whole place’ll be cut off.”

  They drove a couple minutes.

  The Buick climbed a gradual rise, had started to follow the lane left, when Emma shouted, “Wait.”

  Colleen depressed the brakes.

  “Back there,” Emma said, pointing. “Didn’t you see it?”

  Jesse and Colleen shared a puzzled glance.

  “The turnoff,” Emma explained. “There were tire tracks leading into the forest.”

  Colleen threw the Buick into reverse. After they’d backtracked a hundred feet or so, Emma said, “There.”

  Jesse followed the faint tire tracks into the woods, and there, just visible from where they sat idling, he glimpsed what looked like an abandoned house. One story tall, its clapboard siding weathered a dingy gray, the structure was little more than a shack.

  “That can’t be it,” Colleen said.

  But Emma pointed. “Look.”

  Jesse followed her pointing finger and spotted a red truck bed.

  “Someone’s there,” Emma said.

  Colleen hesitated.

  “Oh, come on,” Emma said. “You’ll hotrod through a lake, but you won’t drive down a wooded lane? I thought you were braver than that.”

  Though he didn’t want to say anything, Jesse was inclined to side with Colleen. The dwelling reminded him of every horror movie he’d ever seen involving young peopl
e meeting untimely dooms. Well-adjusted members of society didn’t reside in such places. Guys with names like Leatherface and Jason Voorhees did. Jesse half-expected to see a masked killer come charging out of the front door, a machete in one hand and a severed head in the other.

  Emma opened her door.

  “Where are you going?” Colleen asked.

  “To interview Frank Red Elk,” she said and slammed the door behind her.

  As she strode up the lane, her sandals keeping to the grassy strip between the two wheel ruts, Jesse lingered on her sculpted calves, the roundness of her rear end in the jean shorts. He turned and discovered Colleen watching him.

  “You need to disguise it better.”

  Jesse tried to smile. “Disguise what?”

  “Your undying devotion to Emma.”

  He opened his mouth to argue, but Colleen was going on. “I don’t blame you. If I were a guy, I’d be in love with her too. Just try not to follow her around with that puppy dog stare so much. It makes you look unintelligent.”

  Charly hovered above her body, watching events unfold like a passive spectator. The setting and plotline reminded her of a crappy made-for-TV movie, something that might play on the Lifetime network. But the surreal events, the absurdity of it would’ve been better handled by someone like Stanley Kubrick:

  Shot fades from black to an interior view of a newer, affluent home. Protagonist, a blond woman in her late thirties, sits on a white leather couch while people bustle about. The woman was probably once pretty, but now appears careworn, her hastily thrown-together attire—blue jeans and a white tank top she fished out of the laundry—make her look like what she is: a harried, shaken mother whose worst nightmare has just come true.

  An overweight but kindly police officer enters. Unlike the others, he maintains a respectful silence. Unlike the feds in short-sleeved polo shirts and khaki slacks, the kindly cop doesn’t try to ingratiate himself with artificial smiles and platitudes. It’s the difference, the housewife thinks, between doing things by a script and doing things by feel. And, she supposes, the fact that the feds have done this before inures them to the situation. By contrast, the cop doesn’t appear at all desensitized.