by TJ Park
She took another glance back at the track behind her. It stayed an empty track. She decided to ease the mare down from a full gallop before the poor thing’s heart gave out. “Whoa, Garnett. Whoa.” Their breakneck pace began to slow.
A last glance back – just a feeling that she should – made her look again.
Far behind her, just before the grey of the receding dirt track could converge fully with the night … a dark stain marred it.
Another glance back, and the stain had soaked up more of the track. Much, much more of it. Her collective glances told her it was something hunched over and running along on all fours. An animal. Much like a bull. Solomon? The thing’s approach was eerily quiet. Its approach was not heralded with a trumpet of doom as might be expected, especially after Doug’s outburst back at the far fence.
The mare sensed things were not right. Grotesquely, in its own fashion, the animal tried looking back, head arched, eyes white and rolling. Janet tugged the mare’s head front again. She flicked the reins hard and kicked in her heels, urging the horse to renew her full gallop. Then Janet glanced behind to see if they had gained any ground on what was after them.
The track was clear. Empty.
Disbelieving, Janet swapped shoulders for another look. The dark stain was there on the track at her side, keeping pace.
It was huge. She knew that Garnet was unaware of its presence, because the mare would otherwise have kicked out wildly and veered away in the opposite direction, spilling her off without a thought.
Their escort was far too quiet. Janet had to look twice before she was sure it was really there at all. It was like watching a movie with the sound turned down.
It possessed as much body mass as the mare, but it was more squat, compact. It moved as if it was a solid thing, although she could see the pumping outlines of its muscles extending and contracting … yet it also looked like it was dug out of the landscape rather than added to it. It could be a hole that was keeping pace with her, a tunnel dropping into the earth. It stayed so close she could have leapt onto its back.
God, what was it? It was a children’s puzzle where the animal had to be guessed from its silhouette. It had the rolling-boulder gait of a bull, yet moved too effortlessly to possibly be one. It travelled close to the ground, limbs tucking in and flying out again as smoothly as a sprinting dog. The head was massive, joining the shoulders without benefit of a neck. The limbs had bulk, like a bear’s, but she had never seen any bear move with this much sleek and silent grace. It had a tail, a long, serpentine tail.
Not Solomon, not like anything she’d ever known.
For a few moments all she could do was stare at it in stupefaction. And, then, perhaps her eyes had adjusted or the light was better, because it wasn’t so much a void any more. She saw markings. Terrible ones. The thing’s black hide was crisscrossed and cratered with what looked like bloody cuts and scrapes. There were so many of them, so brightly fresh and glistening. She should pity the beast, not fear it, but contemplating them only made her more frightened. Somehow – perhaps because of its spirited run – she sensed this thing not only endured these mutilations, but enjoyed them.
Then came a notion that made her react. It was the impulsive, certain feeling that the void’s squat head was turned to the side, watching her even as she contemplated it.
She jerked the reins away, breaking the mare’s course. The black void deftly moved with them, then surged ahead effortlessly, as Doug had done. Was it intending to chase him down instead?
Too late, Janet found out.
The void leapt and seized the mare’s throat, swinging under and clambering up its breast upside-down in the one smooth motion. It was an impossible feat. How could the mare carry such weight? Of course, she couldn’t. She was brought down, head first.
Janet was catapulted from the saddle, at first landing on her feet then tossed forward again, momentum not done with her. By fluke rather than design, she rolled to a stop on her side, arms over her head and legs together, saved from broken bones by the cushioning of the thick grass.
The breath knocked from her, she rolled onto her back and lay still, looking up at the night sky, registering stars, waiting for the shock to settle. She felt confused. She knew she should get up, but that was the last thing she wanted to do, and wouldn’t have for a long while, except for the frantic cries of the mare.
Janet turned over slowly and propped onto her elbows. She saw Garnet a short distance away, whinnying, struggling to get up. The void had rolled apart from the horse when they’d fallen and was now nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was hurt.
The mare tried to run before it was fully upright. She stumbled forward a little, nearly falling again, then stood still, appearing to go into shock, legs visibly trembling. She bled from countless lacerations around her neck and flanks.
“Steady, girl,” Janet called, trying to get up before the mare could regain enough of her senses to gallop away. But it was the void, not the mare, that answered.
From nowhere, it leapt onto the mare’s back, arriving so fast the weight to match its size had not caught up. The mare stood a few seconds before the load settled and then she collapsed with a broken scream.
The void rolled over and lifted Garnet high into the air with impossible ease – the mare’s legs cycling senselessly in the night sky – before slamming the animal down on the other side of the track, away from Janet’s sight.
Janet stood, thunderstruck, listening as shapes thrashed together, obscured by both grass and dark. Garnet issued no more cries. From the place she had disappeared came sounds like the muted cracks of gunshots.
Cattle were Janet’s livelihood and certain unpleasantness came with the territory. She was familiar with slaughterhouses, and well-acquainted with the sound of wet, snapping bone. But this was something else entirely. She turned and fled.
Doug was astride the bike at the next gate, his hand on the latch, when he heard the mare’s scream. He heard it over the bike’s low idling, but did not recognise the source. He thought it was Janet. He spun the bike hard around, banging his leg against the gatepost. He didn’t feel it. He sped off the way he had come.
He nearly went right by her.
Janet’s pale blouse registered in the corner of his vision. She was running away from the track, plunging through the field. He turned into the long grass and went after her, thinking she must have been thrown off her horse. Where was she going? Was she chasing after the horse or running to escape him?
He caught up to her and she twisted round in the middle of her run, uttering a short scream of fright. He thought he’d have to chase her down, but she did an about-turn so suddenly he nearly ran her over. She clambered up behind him.
“Go!” She beat at his shoulders. “Go! It killed my horse!”
“What?”
She shoved at him so hard he nearly fell off the bike. “Go! Get out of here!”
He was shocked by how quickly their roles had reversed. He pulled the bike into a tight circle and shot across the field, arrowing ahead to join up again with the track. Janet pressed against him, throwing terrified glances behind. She had no qualms about touching him now. It was this more than anything that convinced Doug he’d been wrong about what was coming. His imagination wasn’t nearly dreadful enough.
A rear-view mirror jutted from his handlebar. He snuck quick glances, although it revealed nothing. The bouncing bike made every reflection jerk and writhe with a life of its own.
“What’s back there?” he shouted into the slipstream. “What did you see?”
Janet shook his shoulders in the negative. She wasn’t about to tell, or couldn’t.
Doug steered the bike onto the track and caught sight of a shadow on the mirror. It startled him, making him think something had veered onto the track right behind them. He reached out and clumsily swiped at the smudge. It only got larger.
“It’s coming!” Janet screamed into his ear.
He looked back over his sho
ulder, something in him insisting he had to see it for himself. Janet obscured his view, but what he had managed to catch was not reassuring. The oncoming shape only seemed real when it made contact with the track, churning up dust with its footfalls. Otherwise it was a black hole punched into the landscape. The night above it had more density.
He kept his eyes front from then on. He had not pushed the bike to its top speed, mindful of wheel-yanking gullies. He didn’t bother about that any more. He opened the machine up full throttle.
Doug rose from his seat to reduce the battering his lower half received, while the juddering headlight struggled to expose what lay ahead before they were upon it. His eyes darted to the mirror and the large blemish growing larger. He shouted back at Janet. “What the fuck sort of animals you got on this farm?”
The bike had no speedometer, but Doug could not imagine any beast keeping up this pace for long. And yet the thing behind them was gaining. He had the bike as fast as it could go. They were almost flying. If possible, he pushed it even harder. Then he spied the shine of the gate up ahead, narrowing on them fast – and remembered he had yet to open it.
He had only seconds to make a decision. He could hit the gate full tilt; with any luck they would be thrown over it and not get crushed by the bike. If they could get the fence between them and the thing pursuing them, they might be safe … if they survived the crash first.
The alternative was to leave the track and go across the field, but doing that meant making a steep turn. They could skid, or their pursuer could cut across their arc, intercepting them. It was the saner option, but the fast approaching gate was more appealing. He would slam on the brake just before they hit, to lessen the impact.
Then he spied the cattle ramp – and earthen mound shaped with timber, where animals could be walked up onto the back of a truck – and swapped one suicidal act for another. Doug didn’t have to look to know their pursuer was nearly on top of them. He felt Janet’s shoulder dig into his back as she turned, heard her shocked cry straight after. He aimed the bike squarely for the foot of the ramp.
He had not been on a motorbike in years, and quit doing stunts on them when he was a teenager. What a way to be reintroduced.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
The front wheel hit the ramp and compacted his insides. The pain was quickly dismissed as the bike climbed the incline far too slowly. He hadn’t factored a pillion-passenger into the equation. Then they were in the air, too late to take it back. The headlight pointed high, Doug had no idea if they were clearing the fence or not. He rose out of his seat, instinctively preparing for a hard, hard landing. Janet was lifted up as well, clapped to him like a piggyback rider.
For a moment there was nothing, but sweet, weightless freefall. Then gravity kicked in. Grass zoomed up at them.
It was a hard landing.
Doug was thrown into the handlebars, Janet’s added weight nearly tossing him over the front. He was staring upside-down into the headlight for a dazzled moment before he pulled himself into his seat again.
The bike bounced up and down, then began to settle down into a normal run. Doug could not believe they were still upright and still on. He was jubilant. Then the front wheel dropped into a hollow, and the handlebars tore from his grasp.
It was Janet’s second spill of the night, and her second save from serious injury, primarily because she landed on top of Doug. With the grass acting as a skid, he slid out from under her, letting his body go limp, going with the momentum, not fighting it. He felt Janet land on top of him once more before they both slid to a stop against each other. Doug was so keyed up he jumped to his feet on the instant. He promptly fell down again. The field swung round and round his vision. He had to wait for it to slot back into place before he could even sit up. From there he saw a sight that made him want to lie right back down again.
The thing that chased them … it had cleared the fence, and was only waiting for Doug to see it before it went for him.
He saw.
It went for him.
Doug’s first coherent thought was, It’s fucking big.
And stuck: it hadn’t escaped the fence after all. It was caught, its head pushed through the barbed wire. Entangled. But instead of backing up and wriggling free like any sane creature, the thing secured its grip on the ground and tried to bull its way through. Which made some sense; its head was massive in proportion to the rest, like a buffalo, too big to pull back through the wire.
Though he was looking right at it – and it at him – Doug could not make out its features. Its shaking head gleamed red and wet in places. But it was impossible to tell whether those raw glints were fresh wounds or flashes of a snapping maw.
He needn’t worry. It might be able to keep up with a motorbike, but there was no way it was getting the better of the fence. All he had to do was sit where he was, trembling like a leaf, and wait for the thing to exhaust itself.
Then the fence post to the left broke away with a grinding crack. It bounced up and down on its sling of wires. The post on the right started to tilt, then slid out of the earth whole, squealing as it went. The thing in between reached ahead one limb after the other, seeming to screw them into the ground. It painstakingly, but inexorably, pushed forward, hind legs churning the ground behind it, forcing out chunks of earth like a harrow blade. The wires squealed as they were drawn through the eyelets of the next posts in line. They began to cant over in turn.
Doug couldn’t move. It was all he could do not to wet himself.
The posts further along screeched and splintered, and snapped from their places. The creature coming for him was more bulldozer than bull. Doug found he didn’t have the will to escape. He found it impossible to try, not until he could see the thing’s face. Somehow that would explain everything. To see its face would give him the answers.
The third set of posts started to give over, groaning, and Doug was about to shut his eyes tight even if that meant he wouldn’t see the thing’s face after all, when he felt the slide of the rifle’s leather strap before it was yanked up in his armpit.
He saw the rifle barrel extending past his face. It fired.
He had forgotten about the rifle. It had remained slung over his shoulder even after his tumble. The muzzle flash might have revealed the thing to him if he hadn’t been blinded in the same instant. He didn’t hear the shot. His eardrum on that side suddenly shut down, invaded by a loud whine.
The thing was driven back by the shot, then again by the straining wires it was thrusting against. The forepaws tore out grass and earth as it went, leaving behind two deep channels.
Doug barely felt the rifle being pulled off him. He was senseless on that side, the whine in his ear receding into a thin, drilling shriek. His pants pocket was pulled inside out; what spare ammo wasn’t taken went bouncing off his lap. Janet marched past him. She worked the bolt on the rifle and fired again and again at the thing. An easy target since it was bound up in the wire.
Stop wasting bullets, Doug thought dazedly. The first shot had surely done for it. If he could make out little else he had seen the thing’s head split wide open from the first blast. But even as he watched, the thing’s head closed up again. Another explosion and the head fell apart to clamp together again even more tightly.
Then he figured it out, though his mind was slow to accept it. Janet kept shooting over and over, while the thing just kept opening its huge maw in return, to snap at the bullets as if they were pebbles tossed at it.
The thing hunkered down in its snare of barbed wire for another spring forward, this time aimed at Janet. She held her ground, fired. It fell back again.
Doug didn’t question why it hadn’t died yet. He only hated being left empty-handed. He looked around for something to arm himself – a rock, a branch – and saw the tipped-over bike. He scrambled over to it, staying low by habit when bullets were flying. The bike was a sorry sight, cruelly used and stuffed with pieces of turf, but it seemed to be in one piece. He stru
ggled to lift it upright, shocked at how weak he’d suddenly become.
Behind him, Janet snapped back the bolt, reloaded, fired.
He heard little of it. His head was still encased in a high ringing tone. But that horrific thing must be roaring too, not only the rifle. He couldn’t imagine that it would remain silent at such an assault. Hell, even snakes hissed.
The bike started up on the third kick. He only knew it by the sudden vibration under him. He turned a tight circle, opening up the throttle too soon, the bike nearly spilling him off. He got it tamed in time to scoot over to the fence and pull up behind Janet. The headlight had briefly splashed over the fence, but Janet was in the way. What light did fall on their attacker seemed to get sucked up rather than reflect anything. All that was laid bare was its ferocity, the slung posts thumping up and down in crazed spurts on either side.
Perhaps there was no need for him to whisk Janet away any more. Despite its mayhem, the thing was surely dying. Over a dozen bullets had been pumped into it.
Even as he watched, he saw his wish coming true. The thing was withdrawing, dragging tangled barbed wire and snapped-off fence posts with it as it backed into the dark, crawling away in what must be mortal agony.
At the sight of its withdrawal, all the outraged bravado in Janet was spent. Her arms dropped loosely from their firing stance, the rifle left to dangle. She swayed on her feet. Doug waited for the thing to die, preparing to take a spiteful pleasure in seeing it brought up short in its retreat by the wires still caught on it.
Then a revelation struck him. A bad one.
He yanked Janet back by the collar, tearing the seams under her arms. He pulled her onto the seat behind him. “Get on!”