Steiger switched on his flashlight, wielding it like a club, laughing as the beast screamed.
The light, he realized. The devil can't stand the light.
He began shining the light at it, staying away from the thing's reach, from the grasping hands that were there one moment and gone the next, laughing all the while.
The mindless cackle turned to a stunned shriek, though, as a vine-like appendage sprung from the demon's body. It hit the flashlight. Hard.
Steiger felt a strange jarring.
He looked down.
The flashlight had been rammed back. Straight through him. He was reminded of a comic book he had read once, before they stopped letting him have books. A hero named Iron Man, who had a brightly lit nuclear power source embedded in his chest, always alight with a pale blue glow.
Steiger was no Iron Man. The flashlight had impaled him.
“But...the universe is on my side,” he said plaintively, and then the darkness took him.
SUPERGIRL
Becky saw the thing somehow punch a hole in Steiger, and ran as far from it as possible. She cringed in the corner of the room, screaming, holding her hands partially over her eyes, too frightened to look at what came next but equally terrified of not seeing what was nearby.
The monster reared up as Steiger fell and roared triumphantly. Becky knew she would never be afraid of someone like her daddy again. Not after this. If she made it through this she would be a Supergirl, not afraid of anything.
But she didn't think she was going to make it through this. No Supergirl. Nothing.
The monster moved toward her. It reached the center of the room.
It roared again....
And then the world exploded.
FLAME
Paul felt Vince's truck pitch sideways as he crashed it through the wall, and caught the briefest glimpse of Crane's pet as the truck hurtled into it and through it, splashing dark ichor and body mass all over the front of the truck before the airbag deployed and he couldn't see anything.
He got out of the truck and heard the other door swing open as Rachel got out of the other side. For a minute outside he had been afraid that the truck wouldn't start, and once it had started he had been worried that it wouldn't have enough traction to break free of the snow that held it in an icy grip, but both fears had proven unfounded.
Now he looked at the beast, which was half-splashed across the hood, half pinned between the truck and the wrecked wall that had once led into Crane's office but which had now largely disintegrated. The monster wasn't moving. He hoped it was dead.
“Becky!” cried Rachel from the other side of the truck. Paul ran as fast as he could, leaping over debris to see the young mother straining to lift a piece of wood from off of something.
A small hand.
“No, no, no!” screamed Paul. He had done it again; had killed the child he was trying to save.
He pushed Rachel aside, then threw the detritus off of Becky. He forgot all his medical training for a moment...
(Please don't be dead, don't die, not again Sammy, not again...)
...and lifted her into his arms. “Don't be dead,” he whispered. “Don't be dead, don't be. Oh, please, honey, not like Sammy, please.” He felt at her neck for a pulse.
“Anything?” asked Rachel, one arm limp and the other reaching for her daughter.
“I can't tell,” said Paul. “I can't. Please, honey, please.”
Paul felt the enormity of the destruction he had wrought crash down on him like the wall that had crashed down on Becky. He felt himself drowning in a sea of death. Jacky. Darryl. Mitchell. All the guards. All the inmates.
Sammy.
It was too much, too much. He felt himself surrendering to the abyss of death that surrounded his life, then heard as from far away a voice asking, “Please, Dr. Whiteman, please check again,” and realized that the girl's mother was pleading for him to save her.
Paul touched Becky's neck...and at that moment the girl coughed and began to cry.
He clung to the sound like a dying man to a life preserver. “Cry, baby,” he said joyously, and felt like he was talking to Sammy again, talking to an angel who had never left him alone, not for a second. “Cry, Becky.”
All was right. All was good.
They were safe.
And then he saw the beast move.
STAIR
On the top of the stairs that led to the basement, the flare that Paul had dropped sputtered and burned brighter as the first trace molecules of gas made their way up to the first floor.
The flare kissed the gas, and grew brighter for it.
Soon the fire and the gas would join completely and utterly, and The Loon would be but a memory.
GO
Paul watched in abject horror as the beast began to reform, pushing itself like animated Silly Putty over the hood of the truck, then laying in a loose puddle before it began to rise.
Paul thrust Becky into Rachel's one good arm. Rachel moaned in pain, but he couldn't spare a thought for that right now.
“Go,” he said. "Get to the generator shack!”
“What about you?” said Rachel fearfully.
“It'll follow you out there if it doesn't have something to keep it busy,” he said. And he kissed her. Not the kiss of lovers on a moonlit eve, but the kiss of friends, of partners in terror that would forever lash them together.
As long as forever lasted, which for them might not be very long at all.
“I don't want to leave you!” said Rachel.
“Go!” screamed Paul, and shoved her away just as the beast started to lunge at him.
Rachel ran with Becky into the snow. The monster started lurching after them, but Paul kicked it. “Hey!” he shouted. “Pick on someone your own size!”
It was a lame line, right out of a cartoon or a terrible made for TV movie, but it worked: a dozen seeping eyes erupted like blisters and stared at Paul for an instant, and then the beast lurched after him.
PURSUIT
Paul ran into Crane's office.
He heard a snapping noise and a searing pain gripped his right buttock. He looked down and saw a pseudopod there, hungrily gnawing at him with buzzsaw-like teeth. Paul screamed and yanked the thing out of him and then kept running.
He limped through the door to Crane's first floor living area, hearing the ponderous beast – large from its gorging in the prison – lumbering after him, only feet away.
He ran through Crane's makeshift living quarters. Ran to the secret door that he had come through earlier with Jorge.
The door was stuck. The truck must have shifted the walls enough to jam it when it crashed into the lobby.
Paul turned around. The monster was right there.
It hissed, and a pair of toothy mouths opened in wide, hungry smiles.
Paul didn't mind dying, he found. But he hoped that the gas would blow before the creature got to him. Otherwise he would have failed to save Rachel and Becky, just as he had failed Sammy.
The monster reared back for its final strike.
And Steiger erupted from behind it. Paul was shocked at the man's appearance, and at the fact that he had a flashlight sticking out of him. The man should be dead, but madness gave him strength.
“I'll kill you, demon,” Steiger shouted. “You can't kill me, devil, I serve the universe!” And with that, Steiger knocked into the beast, body-checking it and pushing it over.
Time slowed.
Steiger and the beast fell, the beast below the madman.
As soon as they hit the floor, the beast's shape lost whatever traces of cohesion it might have had. It turned into a loose jelly, a gel that Steiger hit...and sank into. The madman shrieked, then the shriek became a gurgle as he disappeared into the monster's body.
Sizzling. Paul heard sizzling and smelled an acrid, ammonia-like smell.
Silence.
The monster began to reform.
Paul turned and slammed into the door to Crane's s
ecret lab as hard as he could. Panicked strength surged through him, and the door caved in.
He ran down the stairs. Through the lab.
The door in the lab that led to the secret passage to the generator shack had a dead bolt on the outside. Once through, Paul clicked it shut.
He heard the beast screaming, and immediately the door started sizzling; melting. And bits of flesh started to push through the cracks around the door. It was still coming at him.
“Can't...you...just...die!” he screamed, and ran again.
EXPLOSION
The flare was still burning, crackling over the hiss of escaping gas.
The gas finally crawled up the stairs.
WHOOSH!
Flame shot through the rooms of The Loon like a living thing, a terrible thing that would bring destruction to anything in its path.
SHACK
Rachel got to the wrecked shack, still holding onto Becky, just as a dull WHUMP sounded behind them. She turned and saw flame gouting from the second story windows of The Loon, and felt tears run down her face.
“Paul,” she whispered.
FLAME
Paul heard the explosion and ran for all he was worth down the tunnel.
He heard screaming, but did not look back. Not until the screaming grew louder. Then he looked back.
And wished he hadn't.
Fire was rushing down the tunnel, straight at him, ready to overtake him in seconds.
And in front of the fire...was the beast. Laughing an insane, wheezing laugh out of many different mouths, sounding like a legion of devils, a chorus of demons as it burned from behind and ran after its prey in front.
Tongues of fire licked at Paul's heels, partially overtaking him as he lurched up the stairs. He went through the door to the generator stairs and ran up, falling on the floor only moments before a gout of flame was vomited forth from the passageway.
The beast erupted from the flames. Still burning. Burning and dying. But not yet dead. And it wanted to take him with it, Paul could tell.
He was tempted to just lay there and let it happen. He was so tired. He missed Sammy. He had done his best.
Then someone yelled, “Paul! Move!”
It was Rachel. The sound made him reach deep into himself to find a strength he had not been aware of. He stood, the beast burning and panting in front of him and gathering itself to make a final lunge that would overtake and engulf him.
Then he spotted something: the gas cans that were used to fuel the generator. One of them was sitting at his feet, knocked over during one of the many struggles that had taken place here during the night.
He grabbed it and swung around, throwing it at the beast.
As it had done with Steiger, the beast did not move or attempt to dodge, but rather just engulfed the object. But it hesitated then, probably not liking the belly full of gasoline inside it. Paul ran at the thing, and said grimly, “Time to die,” before launching at it, spinning his feet up in a flying kick that was awkward but nevertheless managed to push the beast back.
It teetered on the edge of the stairs that led down to the secret tunnel, where flames still burned.
Paul raced to the girls, grabbing one of them by each arm and pulling them out into the snow.
He turned his head.
The beast fell.
Another explosion.
And it was gone.
EPILOGUE:
REUNION
This is how the man found a family.
They were together in a snowstorm, a storm that surely would have frozen them alive were it not for the massive flames that surrounded them and kept them warm. State troopers, summoned by the explosion and the brightness of the blaze, came soon, and picked them up in vehicles that took them together to a hospital, where they stayed in one room together and recuperated and told their story to journalists until they were too tired to go on and asked to be alone.
The man lay in a bed, and so did the woman, and every once in a while he would reach out and she would reach out and they would hold hands. The lights in the hospital shone brightly around them, surrounding them with halo-glows. They smiled together. They also cried together over friends lost. But the smiles were more present, and more often apparent.
Outside, a storm still raged, but it was a new storm, and not nearly as bad as the one that had brought them together. It was a perfect winter storm, with lace doily snowflakes and warm linens and warmer herb teas that the nursing staff brought to them regularly while they stayed.
Nearby them, always nearby, a little girl sat and read from various picture books purchased at the hospital gift shop. Sometimes she would read aloud, and the man would laugh in delight at her beautiful little girl voice and her smile. He loved her. He loved them both, and they loved him back.
How could some people say there is no God? he wondered.
And had no answer.
Acknowledgments
There are far too many people for me to properly thank here. Suffice it to say that if you know me, I probably owe you thanks...for putting up with me if nothing else.
Special recognition, however, must go to my father, Dr. Michael Collings. In addition to being my first and best writing teacher, he also supplied the wonderfully evocative poetry in the beginning of each part of this book.
"Visitor by Starlight," "...Is Death," "'Night's Plutonian Shore,'" and "In the House Beyond the Field" all come from his book of poetry entitled In the Void: Poems of Science Fiction, Myth and Fantasy, and Horror (Borgo Press/Wildside Press, 2009); "Secret Shadow (from Aiken's 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow')" comes from Naked to the Sun: Dark Visions of Apocalypse (Starmont House, 1985); and "Christmas in Elba" and "The Little That it Takes" are as yet unpublished but I have no doubt they will eventually find homes. As a "plain-ol' poet" (i.e., someone who writes understandably as well as "correctly"), my father has always been a source of inspiration to me. I urge you to check out his books, which are available at amazon.com and wildsidepress.com.
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The Loon Page 26