by Matt Hults
The window exploded in a hailstorm of glass.
Blood-splattered arms reached through the frame.
Jimmy shrieked as the attacker clutched fistfuls of his shirt, each hand a skeletal mess of torn flesh and exposed bone, as if the person outside had recently clawed his way out of a grave—or through a stainless steel door. Then, in a split-second moment of hyper-awareness he saw that the assailant’s smallest left-hand finger ended in a clean, circular stump.
The missing stiff from the morgue, he thought. Oh, Jesus, it can’t be!
He punched at the restraining limbs, struggling to break free. Several of the meatless fingers tore through his shirt, and he mewed in disgust when the cold bones touched his skin.
Then the man leaned through the window, into the light.
And Jimmy’s shouts of repulsion died in his throat.
Somewhere in his brain the information being sent from his eyes failed to find a rational point of emotional reference, and terror, bewilderment, humor, and awe collided together with a paralytic affect.
Unlike before, the corpse was no longer headless.
At the point where the man’s neck should’ve started, a railroad of thick stitches connected the severed head of a coyote to the human skin of his torso.
Jimmy shook his head in denial, unable to escape the glare of the animal’s yellow gaze as it stared down at him over a lipless snout filled with jagged white fangs. It pulled him to the edge of the window, inches from its reeking flesh, where a legion of maggots explored the bare patches of skin that dotted its fur.
“It was an accident!” Jimmy heard himself repeating again and again.
The chemical stink of formaldehyde wafted out from the thing’s dripping maw when it opened its jaws, and a new degree of terror pushed Jimmy’s mind to the edge of insanity as the monster started to laugh.
“Yee-nadlooshii!” the undead nightmare declared, speaking each syllable with perfect clarity despite the mouth that produced them.
Its putrid breath gusted into Jimmy’s face, but the ghastly state of the creature’s physical composition no longer compared to the terror of facing an intelligent being with supernatural strength and a malevolent spirit.
Suddenly the back of his head crashed into the wall.
A swarm of fireflies swirled across his vision, but when they cleared he saw the monster towering before him, still only halfway through the window, holding two equally shredded halves of his tee-shirt in its boney hands.
Jimmy patted his bare chest, just then realizing that he’d braced both feet against the sink in an effort to escape the creature’s grasp and must have torn clear through his clothes!
The coyote-headed horror roared, spraying spittle through the air.
It gripped the edges of the window frame and with the gunshot noise of cracking timbers it yanked a five-foot section of the wall into the night.
Sparks hissed from a severed electrical line and the bathroom lights went out.
A ruptured pipe shot water at the ceiling.
But Jimmy was already through the door and across the bedroom, fleeing from the building wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.
Behind him came another thunderclap of destruction. Another downpour of rubble.
Outside, in the parking lot, a blue convertible sat idling in the space reserved for the room next to Jimmy’s, trunk open, front end facing away from the building.
Jimmy jumped into the driver’s seat without even touching the door and left twenty feet of burnt rubber smoking on the asphalt as he peeled away from the motel with the accelerator mashed to the floorboards.
8.
Stuart’s house emerged out of the murk.
Jimmy drove the stolen car right up on the lawn and left the engine running when he hopped out and hurried to the door. No lights glowed in any of the windows, but he pounded on the door and franticly thumbed the ringer.
When no one answered, he kicked the door open.
Inside, he found Stuart sitting in the living room with a double barrel shotgun.
What remained of his head was still dripping from the ceiling.
9.
Jimmy pushed through the police department’s front door at ten minutes to midnight.
Deputy Vern Ferguson was eating a late dinner behind the long counter that separated the lobby from the offices, and Jimmy ignored the kid’s muffled commands to halt as he tried to speak through a mouthful of ham sandwich.
“Hey!” the young officer shouted when Jimmy let himself through the partition.
He found Sheriff Picket sitting at one of the desks in the open central area of the building known as the bullpen, and even from a distance Jimmy noticed the frown beneath his storm cloud of a mustache.
And he wasn’t alone.
A tall American Indian man in blue jeans and a suit coat (cop casual, Jimmy called it) stood off to the left. A roadmap of fresh cuts crisscrossed the man’s face, some linked by dozens of black stitches that looked all too reminiscent of the patchwork monster he’d faced at the motel. The sight stopped him in his tracks, and he had to make a cognitive effort to refocus his thoughts on what he’d come here to say.
“Want me to cuff him?” Ferguson asked from behind, but the Sheriff merely motioned for the kid to go back and finish his food.
“Sheriff, we got trouble,” Jimmy said.
Pickett stood, repositioning his pistol belt as he did. “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he answered. “After what you pulled yesterday—”
“Forget that shit!” Jimmy rushed on. “I’m the reason that dead guy disappeared from the morgue today!”
Pickett let out a short bark of laughter and raised his hands as if surrendering to Jimmy’s statement. “What a surprise!” he added with sarcastic flare. “Tossing a feller outta the john with his pants around his ankles and stealing his phone wasn’t enough fun, was it? Ya just had to find something more interesting! Alright, then, Cooley, enlighten us; what the hell did you do with a half-mutilated corpse?”
But before he could answer, Pickett’s eyes narrowed to two suspicious slits that focused on Jimmy’s boxers.
“You didn’t fuck it, did you?”
Jimmy stared at the man. “What? No! Jesus, Sheriff, I ain’t like that; I just ate one of the fingers—”
Pickett’s bushy eyebrows seemed to fly off his forehead. “Christ, almighty, son! Now you’re mixed up in cannibalism?”
Deputy Ferguson laughed through a mouthful of his drink, expelling spurts of orange cola out his nose.
Pickett glared at the younger officer like an executioner with one hand on the power switch, ending the amusement. He then redirected his attention at Jimmy with equal intensity.
“This is Detective Riverwind,” Pickett said, motioning to the American Indian with the lacerated face. “He’s the one you’re going to have to make friends with if you don’t want to spend the next decade in prison.”
A phone rang at the desk. Vern answered it.
“Now listen up, Cooley,” Pickett continued. “If it wasn’t for the detective’s investigation I’d can your ass right now and Judge Morton would put it on the shelf ’till winter. So if you have some serious information—and I mean it better be a goddamn treasure map with a big fuck’n X at the end of it—then start talking.”
“Hey, Sheriff!” Ferguson said. “We just got a call from that rescue shelter over on route nine. The neighbors say some nutjob broke into the place and hacked up all the animals with an ax. Sounds real messy.”
“Wonderful!” Pickett exclaimed. “Has the whole world gone crazy?”
“I think it would be best if I questioned Mister Cooley alone,” detective Riverwind said. “Do you mind?”
It was the first time he’d spoken since Jimmy arrived, and the power of the man’s voice sent a shiver down his spine.
Pickett waved them away. “You can have him!”
10.
A scarred, coffee-stained table sat in the center of the police stat
ion’s only interview room and Riverwind gestured for Jimmy to have a seat as he closed the door.
“Look,” Jimmy said once they were alone, “this is a waste of time, man. That psycho you’re after ain’t dead! He’s walking around right now, looking for me!”
Riverwind nodded his acknowledgement of Jimmy’s predicament, but didn’t reply. Rather than sit down, the man took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.
“The ‘psycho’ you’re referring to is a Navajo witch,” the detective explained, now rolling his sleeves up as he talked. “My people call them Skinwalkers because they have the power to assume the shape of an animal to avoid our detection. Seven days ago I beheaded the one you encountered, trapping its spirit inside its body, but the confrontation left me severely wounded and unable to fully dispose of the remains.”
Jimmy gaped at the man’s words, looking to his ravaged face and recalling the coyote-headed corpse ripping out the bathroom wall of the motel.
“I could tell you the whole history of how they came to be,” the detective went on, “but as you said, there isn’t much time. All you need to know is that by consuming the Skinwalker’s flesh, you’ve given it the power to thwart death and seek a new body.”
“Me!” Jimmy gasped. “But how—”
“Your friend Stuart isn’t very good at keeping secrets,” Riverwind answered. “He told me about your little scheme when I questioned the morgue staff about the disappearance of the Skinwalker’s corpse. He mentioned how you’d inadvertently swallowed the creature’s finger. Now it’s using your energy, your life force, to stay in our world until it can transfer its spirit into your body.”
“So how the hell do we stop it?” Jimmy asked. “I mean, you can stop it, right?”
“There are two options,” the man answered. “One is to completely destroy its physical form, either by force or simply by waiting until the creature’s body decomposes to the point of being useless. The only problem is that you’re now linked to the Skinwalker by the same magical bond that reanimated it, which will allow it to follow you wherever you go. It will anticipate our moves.”
“Great! So it could be here any second?”
The man nodded.
“What’s choice number two?”
“I cut off your head.”
Jimmy blinked. “What?”
Riverwind reached behind his back and pulled out a knife large enough to reflect Jimmy’s whole face in the blade. It glinted in the light of the overhead fluorescents.
He jumped to his feet. “You can’t kill me! You’re a cop!”
“Decapitation is a proven method of separating a host’s spirit from his life force. You and Mister Wyllie have left me no choice.”
Jimmy shivered as a sudden pang of understanding ripped through his brain. “You killed Stuart!”
“An act of necessity,” Riverwind admitted. “I had to be sure he wasn’t lying about which one of you ate the finger.”
You stinking motherfu—”
The detective slashed, and Jimmy leapt backward. He dodged death by scant millimeters, but the tip of the blade still managed to plow a red trench across the skin of his chest.
Jimmy dropped back in his chair and kicked upward as the wild-eyed detective lunged over the table. This time Jimmy was faster. His heel slammed into Riverwind’s face, popping loose a score of fresh stitches and peeling back a section of cheek.
The man roared in pain, clutching the wound.
Jimmy ducked under the table and scrambled to the door, throwing it open as six consecutive gunshots blared through the building.
He froze in the doorway.
Across the main room, past the bullpen, the Skinwalker rammed the front desk, demolishing the boards like a runaway wrecking ball. Pickett stood less than ten feet away, frantically reloading his sidearm.
The creature reared up on the hind legs of a horse, displaying the new additions it had made to its body. Jimmy recalled Vern’s mention of an attack at the nearby animal shelter, and he now knew the fate of those various creatures.
Or parts of them, anyway.
The Skinwalker had transplanted its torso onto the body of a horse, looking like a mythological Centaur out of the nightmare of a mental patient. Four new arms sprouted from its sides, each freshly skinned and glistening with red muscle. Two of those newer appendages looked to be human, but the last set clearly came from something much bigger.
The monster’s coyote head snarled, now topped with deer antlers and flanked on each side by the heads of a mountain lion and a goat. Each scanned the room independently from the other, seeking new prey.
Deputy Ferguson emerged from the rubble of the desk and squeezed off five shots from his service pistol before the creature turned and struck out with its powerful hind legs, shattering his skull. Blood sprayed the wall.
Jimmy watched it happen with a dreamlike detachment, unable to react even when the beast plunged two of its hands into the deputy’s chest and tore open his ribcage.
“Move your ass, Cooley!” Sheriff Pickett shouted.
Jimmy flinched at the force of the man’s voice, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Riverwind’s knife hack into the doorframe beside him.
The detective surrendered the knife where it imbedded in the wood and grabbed Jimmy by the hair, yanking him backwards even as his other hand drew a gun and fired three shots into Pickett’s chest.
The Sheriff collapsed into a heap.
The Skinwalker roared.
Then Riverwind hauled Jimmy back into the interrogation room, slamming the door shut as the monster charged forward.
Jimmy grabbed for the knife when he passed it, managing to pull it from the doorframe, but Riverwind preempted his action and slammed the pistol-butt down on his wrist.
The knife clattered to the floor.
“Now we end this!” the detective declared.
A moment later, the entire forward wall of the room bowed inward, shattering the sheetrock and splintering the wall studs. A hand tipped with eagle talons punched through the door paneling, snaring a hunk of Riverwind’s skin before he got clear.
The detective howled in agony, losing his grip on Jimmy’s hair as he strove to slip free of the hooks in his back.
Jimmy elbowed the man and made his escape, scooping up the knife when he did.
He spun around to face the trapped Navajo officer.
“Kill yourself!” Riverwind hissed.
The door to the room and most of the wall had fragmented into a spider web of destruction, and Jimmy watched as a furless bear’s paw reached through one of the cracks and clutched the man’s face, instantly crushing his lower jaw into a handful of mush.
Jimmy stumbled away from the spectacle, shivering with terror when he saw that the man’s eyes still gazed with awareness. When the creature released him, Riverwind raised the gun to his head and ended the pain.
The entire building seemed to shudder as the monster pressed forward.
Ceiling tiles rained to the floor.
Jimmy edged into the corner of the room as he watched the wall crumble, knowing he only had a matter of seconds before the creature exploded inside and did whatever pervoid mystical bullshit it wanted to do with him.
Which left him only one choice.
He reversed his grip on the knife and stabbed it into his stomach.
Outside, the Skinwalker bellowed with rage. Jimmy closed his eyes, blocking it out, then suddenly saw an image of himself in his mind, viewed from the other side of the door, as he plunged his hand into the wound to search for the finger.
An alien world of pain exploded inside his abdomen, and he had to reopen his eyes to be rid of the Skinwalker’s viewpoint when a pale blob of intestine slipped out past his wrist.
Darkness began to creep into his vision as his questing fingers slid over the rubbery landscape of his insides, encountering internal juices that felt too hot to be healthy.
The Skinwalker roared again, and he looked up
to see more sections of the wall and door disintegrate in front of him, torn away as if no more than—
Suddenly he had something.
Something ... not right.
He’d located a spongy potato-size mass deep in his guts and pulled it out of the wound amid a river of gore.
The moment he did, the Skinwalker fell apart. The individual components of its morbid construction spilled to the ground in a horrible avalanche, splattering across the floor with a sound Jimmy knew he’d never forget.
He stood quivering in the aftermath, too fearful to move. The pain in his stomach seemed to have dulled from the shock of thwarting an unnatural death, but he knew he desperately needed to haul ass to a hospital.
He staggered forward.
A frightening numbness had crept into his body, reminding him that he didn’t have time to waste being squeamish, and despite the fact he was still barefoot, he quickly waded through the mound off spilled viscera blocking the doorway.
Tissue squished between his toes.
Harder items poked into his heels.
He slipped twice but managed to keep his balance, emerging from the pile only to collapse to his knees as the last of his strength fled from his body.
Clear of the mess, he dropped to the floor and lay there for what seemed like eternity, one hand clamped over his gut, until he saw Sheriff Pickett push to a stand not far away. Riverwind’s trio of bullets dotted the man’s bulletproof vest like medals of Honor.
“You alive, Cooley?” he asked.
Jimmy tried for a “Yes, Sir, I am,” but only uttered a grunt.
The man stepped forward, eyes widening when he beheld the full extent of Jimmy’s condition. “My, God, son ... What the hell happened to you?”
Jimmy shakily removed his hand from the wound for the Sheriff to see, only then realizing that he still clutched the thing he’d ripped out of his body.
He looked down and uncurled his blood-splattered hand.