by Dima Zales
Williams glanced over at Zion.
“I think …” Zion hesitated. “I think that’s actually her. Yes. Yes, that’s her.”
Justine could turn into a deer? I turned back to look again, then leaned over to Graham. Guess he was still the go-to guy for questions, in this crowd.
“That’s a working, right? She’s changed herself fully into a deer — that’s why I can’t see through it?”
“No,” he said, watching the animal’s increasingly desperate escape attempts. “There’s no sign of a working.” He glanced at me, clearly at a loss. “So far as I can tell, it’s just a deer.”
“Looks that way to me, too,” Zion said, “but that’s what I’ve been tracking. It’s her. How do we catch her?”
Williams pulled his shotgun out of its scabbard.
“Hey!”
He ignored me. I didn’t have time to take more than a couple steps toward him before he raised the gun, aimed, and fired. The deer went down, bawling and thrashing. His hand twitched, and she stilled.
I stood there in disbelief. Why had he done that?
Williams walked over and began trussing the deer up with a coil of rope he produced from his jacket. I advanced slowly and saw that the deer was still alive. Her large, shining eye looked up at me, panicked. It took me a few seconds to speak without letting out the sob that was lurking somewhere inside.
“Why’d you shoot her? We’re supposed to bring her in.”
“Beanbag ammunition,” he said, without bothering to look up.
I looked the deer over more closely. Her left shoulder was twitching violently, but I didn’t see any wounds. Thank god.
I knelt down and took her head in my lap. I stroked her face, speaking softly to her.
“What are we going to do with her? We can’t travel with her this way.”
Williams sat back on his heels. “Beats me.”
He touched the deer’s side, apparently dissolving whatever barrier had been holding her down. She thrashed a few times, but all her legs were bound together, so she wasn’t going anywhere.
“She knows you,” Zion said. “See if you can get through to her.”
Calling the deer “Justine” and asking her to change back didn’t do anything. Telling her that her husband and children missed her didn’t have any effect, either. Saying that we were there to help her wasn’t any better.
We were all just gathered there, wracking our brains, when we heard a strange noise. Something like a laugh, but weird.
Williams drew the shotgun and turned to face the direction we’d come from. Graham turned the other way. Looking perplexed, Zion drew her gun and faced out as well. I stayed down with the deer, out of the line of fire.
“There,” Graham said, pointing at a tree about a hundred yards east. I could see something dark and hunched clinging to the trunk.
“Green man,” Williams said.
“Son of a bitch,” Zion swore, bring her gun around. “Why do I always get the FUBAR assignments?”
Suddenly the hair all over my body stood up. There was a flash and a deafening roar. The tree the green man was on exploded into burning splinters.
My god, had that been lightning? Out of a blue sky? I looked up and saw the leading edge of a massive, anvil-shaped storm cloud thousands of feet above us. It must have been moving really fast — it hadn’t been visible a few minutes earlier.
Zion started shooting. The green man was skittering toward us on the ground, unharmed. It ran on two legs, but strangely hunched forward. Its movement had a spastic, random quality that turned my stomach. Lightning struck twice more. Each time the thing leapt and contorted itself out of harm’s way.
I could finally see why it was called a green man — it looked dull black most of the time, but when the light caught its skin just right, it flashed brilliant green. The effect was like a hummingbird’s gorget.
Zion came up empty and started reloading. Williams, who’d held back, started firing the shotgun. The green man evaded, twisting and moving bonelessly. Williams switched to his pistol.
The thing was really close. A huge, protuberant mouth full of small, sharp teeth took up half its face. A thick gray tongue hung out, bobbing to the side of its head. Its nose was almost non-existent — just nostril slits. It was laughing, its eyes gleeful and insane.
Williams got off one last shot. The thing jerked to the side, then screeched and fell. Trying to dodge the bullet, it had stepped in a leg-hold trap. I processed the metallic clang a few seconds after the fact.
A big-game trap? Set out in the middle of a field on public land? What were the odds?
The thing lunged at us, slavering and cackling, but the trap jerked it back.
Williams reloaded his 9mm and started taking rapid, methodical shots at the creature. It didn’t try to dodge, but the rounds seemed to have no effect. By the time he’d emptied his clip, the big man was swearing under his breath.
I glanced at Graham.
“It’s holding a barrier,” he said, “deflecting the bullets back at us.”
The green man grinned up at us, swaying back and forth in its crouch, hissing softly.
“I can’t break that barrier,” Williams said. “It’s too strong.” He scooped up the deer and started backing off. “Come on. Stay together.”
We all followed him, clustered in a bunch. The green man began jumping around in a frenzy, jerking and pulling against the trap. We got a couple hundred feet away before it calmed down and bent over to examine the trap’s mechanism. After a few seconds, I heard the sound of rusty metal scraping.
Williams dropped the deer and grabbed my hand.
I understood. He wanted to use my strength.
The green man or Williams? It should’ve been no contest. Nevertheless, fear surged through me. I fought the urge to struggle and tried to calm myself.
I felt him reach into me somehow. It was like I was a dog-food can, and a big, filthy mutt was sticking its tongue way down inside to get the last bits at the bottom. It was horrible. I held my breath and tried not to fight it. I felt him drag something out of me. Whatever it was didn’t want to go. It hurt tremendously, like he was ripping part of my insides out.
His fingers twitched. This time, I could feel the barrier. It materialized around us, a sphere of compressed, densely packed charged particles. It was both a defense and a weapon. I’d never perceived anything so extraordinary.
A second later, the green man launched into the barrier and rebounded explosively. Through Williams, I could feel the impact as physical pain, though I couldn’t tell what part of me hurt. But the barrier held. The green man landed about twenty feet back and lay there, motionless. It must’ve gotten a huge electrical shock.
I bent over, feeling sick.
Williams jerked on my hand. “Offer it. Don’t make me drag it out.”
“I don’t know how!”
“Let me,” Zion said.
“You don’t have enough.”
“I’ll do it,” Graham said.
There was a heavy pause, as we all considered. Graham wasn’t safe from the green man. Otherwise his luck wouldn’t have come to bear, and it surely had — the leg-hold trap had to be him. He also wasn’t strong enough to defeat it alone. The failed lightning strikes had to be him, too. Therefore, he needed us.
Apparently coming to the same conclusion, Williams reached for him and let me go. Thank god. The barrier vanished from my perception.
We started moving again. Zion and I wrestled the deer along, which wasn’t easy — it wasn’t a big one, but it certainly weighed a hundred pounds. Fortunately, Zion was pretty strong.
There was no sign of the green man pursuing us, but I got the sense Williams was keeping the shield up, anyway.
When we reached the cars, we dragged Kara out of mine and put her in Zion’s backseat. Then we stuffed the deer into my backseat. Williams took shotgun in my car, and we peeled out. I drove as fast as that little Le Mans would go.
The whe
el vibrated in my hands. The temperature gauge was near the red. I’d been going between eighty and ninety for six hours. Even so, Zion kept surging ahead and then slowing down when we dropped too far behind. I was afraid the Le Mans wouldn’t last much longer — if it had ever been built to go this fast, it wasn’t up to it now.
I wished Graham were still in my car. I had some questions I wanted answered. No way was I asking Williams.
As though he could hear me thinking about him, he turned from the window and leaned over toward me. My heart rate sped up, and I shrank away. He looked at the dashboard in front of me, then sat back. I relaxed.
I wish I weren’t so scared of him, some part of my brain said.
I wish he weren’t so scary, the other part answered.
Good point — it wasn’t like I was being unreasonably wussy. He was genuinely terrifying.
He got out his phone and placed a call. Up ahead of us, I saw Zion bring her phone to her ear.
“Get off at the next rest stop,” he said, then hung up.
We were somewhere in western Ohio. A rest area came up in about fifteen miles. Zion exited and parked at the very edge of the lot. I pulled in beside her. She and Williams both opened their windows. Hers glided down smoothly. His squeaked as he cranked it open in fits and starts.
“Go get another vehicle,” he said to Graham.
Graham got out. He looked a little pale. It had taken us almost fifty minutes to get back to the car with the deer in tow. Maybe he was feeling the strain of having helped power that strong a shield for that long. He walked slowly across the parking lot toward the building.
I saw with a pang that this particular rest stop had a Wendy’s.
When I was a kid, one of the things I’d wished for at every birthday was a Wendy’s in Dorf. Mom explained that Dorf was just too small for a fast-food franchise, but I didn’t really get it. I mean, I would go every day, right?
Graham was gone for about twenty minutes. When he came back, he was driving a late-model minivan. He also had a big pile of Wendy’s bags.
Well, that was one small upside.
“I am not leaving my car behind,” Zion said.
Williams shrugged.
Knowing there was no way to argue for my car, I pulled it off onto the grass at the edge of the lot and got into middle row of the minivan with Kara. Williams settled the deer in the way-back, then got behind the wheel. Graham rode shotgun. We pulled out, and Zion followed in the Porsche.
I wondered if Williams had put some kind of invisibility working around my car. Either way, I doubted I’d ever see it again. The maintenance people would start mowing the grass in a month or so, and when they did, they’d find it the hard way.
Kara, who’d woken up for the change of vehicles, glanced over at me.
“Tomorrow you should call and report it stolen.”
“Yeah.”
She and I rooted through the food and chose our poisons. I got a cheeseburger and fries.
“Kara, did Zion fill you in on what happened back there?”
“Yeah. In between all the swearing, I think I got most of the story. I’m glad I missed it. She’s usually pretty cool about stuff, but she was shitting herself.”
She grinned lopsidedly and looked a little like her old self. She must’ve needed the food.
“Do you think the green man is still following us?”
“Oh yeah. It’ll never give up on your dear sister-in-law. Get it?” She grinned at her own pun and stuffed a handful of fries in her mouth. “Green men are the best trackers out there, and that one’s really strong. Plus, it was totally waiting for us back there in the marsh. I bet it wants to bag us, too.”
I couldn’t suppress the shudder. “So what do we do?”
“Hope it was hurt bad enough that we got a good head start. It’s not like they can fly or something. It’ll have to follow us by car.”
The thought of that spastic thing driving was unsettling.
“Can you tell me anything else about them?”
“Sure. They’re body-snatchers. When they catch you, they spread themselves all over you like a second skin and sink right in. Once they’re in you, they can control you. This one probably planned to catch Justine that way and then walk her right back through the open strait. Probably just means to kill the rest of us. That’s my guess, at least.” She shrugged. “I’ve never actually seen one. You’re getting the textbook version of things.”
She turned to the front seat. “Anything to add, fuckface?”
Both men glanced back, which was pretty funny. Neither one said anything.
“So it would’ve found the nearest person with a car and taken them over, then followed us?”
“Yep. And before you ask, switching cars like we did won’t help.”
“How can we get away from it, then?”
“We can’t. We need to reach Lord Cordus or some other worker who’s strong enough to kill it.”
She settled back in her seat and shot an angry glance at the back of Williams’s head.
“All right, seeing as how I was drained, I’m going back to sleep, now.”
I tried to give her a smile, but my mouth didn’t want to make the shape. The thought of the creature hunting us through the darkness, crazed and inhuman and relentless, was horrifying.
Someone touched me, and I jerked awake. It was Williams.
“Your turn,” he said, holding out the keys.
Groggily, I got out. How long had we been driving? It was pitch black out. I checked my watch. It was after 10:00. The minivan’s GPS said we were in central Pennsylvania, so we were pretty close.
“I have to pee,” I said, embarrassed.
Williams jerked his head at the side of the road. I hesitated.
“I’ll go with,” Kara said, sliding gingerly out of her seat. “You’ll probably have to help me.”
For some reason, that made it less embarrassing.
It didn’t make it any less scary, though. As soon as I went around the cars, all I could see ahead was darkness. Which I now knew contained monsters. You might think turning my back on all that night and dropping trou would’ve been a great “up yours!” moment, but instead it just scared me.
By the time we got back, people had shuffled around. Now Williams was driving Zion’s car and Graham was riding with him. Zion had claimed shotgun in the minivan and was almost asleep already. Kara stretched out in the middle row, and I climbed into the driver’s seat. I hoped there wasn’t too much farther to go. From up here I wouldn’t be able to check on the deer.
We started up. The Porsche pulled out first, and I followed. Driving the minivan hardly felt like driving. It was more like floating along on a cloud. I had no problem hitting ninety and keeping it there.
Unfortunately, my enjoyment of the vehicle was short-lived. We went under an overpass, and something hit the roof with a crash, denting it way in, then swung down hard against the passenger side. The van rocked wildly to the right, and everything slowed down as the world tilted. Then the roof crunched again and we crashed back down onto all four wheels. Zion shouted something, but I couldn’t understand her.
The roof peeled away with a weird tearing noise, showering us with pebbled glass. The air rushed in. Instinctively, I jammed both feet down on the brake. The antilock brakes kicked in with a stutter. Something large and dark flew off us and skidded down the road in front of me.
The green man.
“Go, go, go!” Zion shouted.
She wanted me to run it down.
It righted itself. Its dark form was hard to distinguish from the road, but I could see its teeth glimmering in the headlights, and patches of its skin blazed green as it moved.
I noticed it had talons. “Rip-the-roof-off-your-car” talons.
No way was I driving at that thing. It would tear the van apart. I cranked the wheel left and drove into the median. The minivan took it like a champ, bouncing over the uneven ground without tipping. We came out on the westboun
d side and I hit the gas.
I thought we’d made it. Then the van lurched and the green man’s head popped up outside what was left of Kara’s window, like some sick jack-in-the-box, grinning and cackling. It was clinging to the side of the van. Kara yelled and brought her gun up, but the creature ducked and climbed back along the side. I could hear its claws ripping through the metal. Kara took a couple shots at it, then Zion started shooting toward the rear. The inside mirror was hanging broken, so I couldn’t see where the thing was.
I yelled, “Don’t shoot the deer!”
We were coming back to the underpass. I thought the green man had climbed around to the passenger side — I could see a dark shape in the outside mirror. I veered back into the median and aimed for the underpass’s central pillar.
Zion looked forward and shouted, “Shit! Ryder!”
We reached the pillar. I was a little closer than I’d planned to be, so we not only lost the mirror, but also the door handles. The van rebounded into the eastbound lanes.
“Did I get it?” I shouted.
“I don’t see anything in the road,” Zion shouted back.
“I think it’s still on us!” Kara yelled, sounding panicked.
“Can you see it?”
“No!”
Shit. Plus we were driving the wrong way on the interstate. Good thing it was the middle of the night. A truck barreled past us, horn booming. No one was keeping up our barrier, I guess.
I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel, aiming to do one of those power-slide turns you see in the movies. Instead we spun out and ended up sideways, halfway off the shoulder. Heart pounding, I turned back onto the road and gunned it.
“Where is it?” I yelled.
Zion and Kara were huddled toward the center of the vehicle, one watching the passenger side and the other the driver’s side. I glanced in the only mirror we still had, on the driver’s side. Nothing along the outside of the car, there.
“It’s in! It’s in!” Kara shrieked.
“Get down!” Zion shouted, and opened fire.
Ears ringing, I risked a look back and saw the horrid thing flowing over the ruined rear window, right into the space where the deer was lying. I jerked the minivan into the median and stopped. We all piled out and ran around to the back of the van. Zion had her gun trained on what was left of the rear door. Kara gave her gun to me and got out her phone.