by Tim Curran
“Yeah, nice place to die,” Gremlin added.
I fanned my flashlight around, picking out old refrigerators and heaps of tires, the rusted and pitted remains of an old swingset rising from the sand. And bones, of course. They were everywhere. The light glanced off ribcages and femurs and spinal columns. And skulls. Dozens and dozens of jawless skulls that had been picked clean. Bones rose up in great ramparts through which rats scurried.
When we hit dead center of the pit there was really nothing but skeletons. Some still dressed in rags and articulated, but most blackened and broken and tossed around. I started seeing a lot of small bones and skulls which must have belonged to kids. As we cut around some termite-pitted dock pilings, there was a little baby buggy with weeds growing up through it. I put the light on it out of some ghoulish curiosity and saw that the carriage was all rusted and black, the bonnet burned to flaps. Inside there was a tiny skeleton with jaws wide in a scream.
“Oh God,” Mickey said.
More derelict cars and piping, bones and shattered hills of concrete. I was moving everyone along faster now, needing to get out of there. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was something else but I was getting very apprehensive. It felt like there were needles in my belly. I was sweating. I could feel the beat of my heart at my temples. Rats squeaked and bats winged overhead.
“We should find the trail up and out in a couple minutes,” I said, either to reassure the others or myself.
“I hope so,” Mickey said. “I don’t think we should be down here.”
“Oh, shut up,” Janie told her. “Don’t be so damn dramatic-”
But her words were cut right off…for somewhere out in the shivering darkness that filled the pit like the blackest oil, there rose up a roaring which sounded positively primeval.
“I’m guessing we’re fucked here,” Texas Slim said.
21
The roaring came again and this time it was closer.
And there was a smell on the night breeze: sharp and vile like rotting hides piled in heaps.
It became a matter then of making a run for it or standing and fighting. The beast was out there and I figured it was the same one we’d heard last night. I had the most unpleasant feeling that it had been following us, scenting us across the city. Maybe that was just my imagination working overtime, but I had the strangest feeling that it was right.
“What do you think, boss?” Carl said.
“Let’s go,” Janie said. “Please, Nash.”
There were a few other mutterings on the subject, but the one person who seemed to have no opinion was Gremlin. The first to complain, the first to bitch, the first to interject his opinion on any subject…but now he had nothing to say. Sure, maybe he was scared but I was not so sure.
“Let’s draw it in and fucking waste it,” Mickey said.
And that’s what I was leaning towards. I just didn’t like the idea of making a run for it with that thing…whatever it was…at our backs. It was stalking us. And only now had it announced its presence because it had us here in this pit and it knew we were not going to escape.
“C’mon, Nash, this is crazy,” Janie said, just riven with fear. “Let’s just-”
“Sshhh,” I told her.
Nobody spoke; they just listened now.
The beast was coming. We could all hear it picking its way towards us in the darkness. The crackling of leaves and sticks, the crunch of bones, the thudding footsteps of something very large like an ogre in a fairy story coming out of a dark wood to eat children.
Another sound now…a grunting, sniffing sound like a rooting hog.
I didn’t bother using the flashlight. Not yet. It knew where we were and it was coming. I’d wait until it got in close, close enough to shoot. I motioned the others forward to some concrete pilings. They got behind them and spread out, guns held in sweating, shaking fingers. And there we waited as that monstrosity out there edged in closer, stealthy like a jungle cat hunting its prey. There was so much junk and refuse in the pit that there were dark shapes rising all around us. Everyone watched, waiting for one that moved. I thought more than once that I saw some hunched-over shaggy form of immense proportions.
Maybe it was my imagination.
We waited for five minutes, then ten, sweating bullets. Everyone was tense. There was nothing but the sound of our breathing, the distant sound of wild dogs barking, tiny creatures rustling amongst the wreckage.
I kept my. 30.06 up and ready. Janie was trembling next to me only I didn’t feel it so much because I was trembling myself.
“Anybody in the mood for a nice quiet ghost story?” Texas Slim said.
“Shut up.” I sighed. “I think someone should go have a look. How about you, Gremlin?”
“Fuck that. I ain’t going out there.”
“You afraid?” Texas Slim said. “You didn’t seem afraid of that thing last night.”
And it would have been interesting to hear Gremlin’s rebuttal to that, but a wild screeching noise came scraping out of the darkness and it sounded almost like laughter…shrill, hysterical laughter. The laughter of something that grew fat on fear and sharpened its teeth on human bones. The stink was overbearing…high and hot. I thought I saw two huge eyes shaped like crescent moons reflected out there.
“It’s coming and we’re going to kill it,” I said.
I tried to swallow but my throat was so dry that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Something moved out there. Something made a hoarse guttural noise that became a slobbering sound like the beast was drooling.
“Get ready,” I whispered.
I couldn’t have imagined a more tense, threatening situation. That ugly bastard out there, whatever in the Christ it was, had our number. It had been following our trail and now it had us right where it wanted us. Yet…it was hesitating out there. It could have jumped out at us at any time and started killing, but it didn’t. It was cautious. Careful. Predators were like that. They wanted the upper hand. Even a tiger in the jungle or a great white shark in the surf aren’t as gutsy as most people think. They want to take their prey, yes, but they want to do as easy as possible without harming themselves. And like them, this creature wanted a sure thing, a clean kill, the upper hand. I could almost sense its hesitation out there.
“Come on, you fucker,” Carl said under his breath.
The waiting was hell. We couldn’t go on like that. We had what I thought was a perfect killzone: sheltered by the concrete pilings, there was a sandy clearing right in front of us and wreckage piled up in a rampart behind. If that thing wanted us, it’d have to charge through the clearing. And I wanted it to do that. What I didn’t want was to play cat and mouse with that fucking horror. I didn’t want it sneaking in on our flank or getting ahead of us and lying in wait when we tried to make our escape. No, we had to draw it in.
“We have to bait it in,” I said. “Gremlin, take a walk out into that clearing.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Why not, Gremlin?” Texas Slim said. “He won’t hurt you, will he? You’re his friend.”
At the moment what Texas was getting at did not occur to me, but later I understood perfectly: we had been set up. Gremlin had set us up.
“Give me the AK,” I told Carl. I handed him the Savage. “I’m going out there.”
Janie’s hand on my arm was like an electrical wire juicing with current. I had to pry it loose.
“No, Nash,” she said. “Rick…”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mickey said.
Nobody did except, of course, Gremlin. But it had to be done. “Carl? I’m going to draw it in. Aim for its head, its eyes. Killshot.”
Carl got ready with the Savage.
Texas said, “Still say we send Gremlin here.”
“No, not him,” I said. “We’re going to need him tomorrow night when the moon comes up.”
He made a whimpering sound in his throat because he thought I had just selected him. Maybe I had, but
if so then I’d selected him many days before. I said it mainly to shake him and it worked just fine.
I stepped out into the clearing with the AK. My knees were shaking. Beads of sweat rolled down my face. Yet, despite the fact that I was ready to have kittens, I walked out there very casually. I did not even hold the AK up; I kept it at my side as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I reached into my breast pocket, took out a cigarette and lit it. I was shaking, but I was doing everything I could to give the impression that I was perfectly at ease. Then I waited. The holes in my plan were many. If that thing had sniffed us across the city, then like any other predator it might be able to smell the fear on me. If it was intelligent-and I suspected as much-then it might suspect the trap I had laid. All I had going for me, I thought, was the fact that it wanted us bad. And such animal desires often cancel out common sense.
I had almost finished my cigarette when I sensed, rather than heard, motion out there. A chill went up my spine and there was a sudden hot, reeking stench of putrescence that nearly put me to my knees. Then it charged, leaping out of the shadows. I had a momentary glimpse of something massive, muscular, and distorted. I threw myself backward and a split second after my ass hit the ground I opened up with the AK on full auto, just spraying rounds into the shadows.
I saw it clearly as it came at me in the moonlight.
I saw my rounds pepper its chest, saw it flinch and draw back. It was much larger than a man and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it stood eight feet in height. A hulking thing with skin like oily leather, threadbare with twisted tufts of gray hair or bristles. Its misshapen hide was split open in a dozen places with knobs and rungs of bone protruding out. A mutant. One arm was longer than the other, the right shoulder high and ridged, the left almost flat, the chest a rack of bones. It lacked any sort of body symmetry.
And it had claws, huge curving claws.
It moved with incredible speed. Carl fired and missed and in that split second, it jumped at me, standing over me. I could feel the acrid, pungent heat rolling off it in waves. Smell the rank decay of its hide. Tiny crawling things fell off it and skittered over my face and bare arms.
I heard Janie scream, Mickey cry out, Texas shout.
It looked down at me and why I didn’t fire the AK again I did not know. I guess I froze. Its face was an obscenity: gray and seamed, almost like some demonic version of a wild boar with a flattened snout and huge maw filled with gnarled yellow teeth and what might have been tusks. One eye was huge and staring and the other drawn into a slit, everything out of sync.
The way it stared at me with those glistening red eyes, I got the sense that, yes, it was going to kill me, but it would not be a quick, merciful affair. My death would be sport. Amusement. Like a cat torturing a mouse. No more, no less.
I remember wondering why Carl didn’t shoot again, thinking that this had been going on for minutes. But later they told me that it was probably less than five seconds from the time I went on my ass to when it stood over me.
Then Carl did fire.
He caught the beast right in the head, his round right on target despite the shadows. It punched through that slit eye and exited with a spray of meat and blood. It was a killshot. A perfect fucking killshot. That thing should have fallen over dead as a stump. But it didn’t. The impact of the bullet tossed it backwards and it stumbled for a few feet, but instead of dying it raised its taloned hands to the sky, threw back its head and let out a shrieking cry that nearly deafened me. It wasn’t a roar or a baying, nothing like that. Not the sort of thing you’d expect from a monster like that. No, it was a high, piercing wail that sounded very much like a woman in utter anguish. Inhuman, yet definitely female.
Then it darted into the shadows.
By that time I was crawling madly towards the concrete pillars and hands found me and yanked me to my feet. I was nearly delirious with terror. It took me a moment to screw my head on straight.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I finally said.
Mickey instantly took charge. With a flashlight borrowed from Carl she found the trail and led us out of there. Texas Slim was at her side with his Desert Eagle. They got us through that maze of bones and junk and found the trail leading up the hillside. Carl and I took up the back door, Janie and Gremlin sandwiched in-between.
Out in the enshrouding darkness of the pit we could hear the thing.
It was wailing with that shrill unearthly sound, its voice echoing out all around us. It seemed to come from behind us, then off to the left, then the right. We stopped dead twice in our climb because it sounded like it was right in front of us. It must have been the echo. Once, when we paused, I swore that I heard it sobbing out there pitifully. Then, seconds later, there came a maniacal screeching that went right up my spine and that, too, dissolved into a cold, dry, hysterical laughter like the braying of a hyena.
We kept moving up the sheer face of the hill, Mickey’s light picking out skulls and ribcages, a few fully articulated skeletons in rags rising from the sand. Half way up we heard more of that grisly, fragmented laughter and it was directly behind us. There was no doubt of it. We froze again, weapons drawn.
It was there, but we couldn’t see it.
The moonlight in the pit was uneven with all that heaped refuse down there casting jagged shadows in every direction. Every time we heard a noise, our flashlights revealed nothing.
But it was coming. Getting closer, tightening the noose around us.
We came to a halt, bunching together in a circle, weapons pointing in all directions. But on whose flank it would attack, we did not know. My mouth was dry as sawdust. I couldn’t even summon the spit to swallow. It felt like every muscle and tendon in my body had drawn tight like wires.
We heard it, seemingly in several different directions.
It was casting around out there, cat and mouse. I heard things crunching like it had stepped on skulls and crushed them flat. Something huge fell over and the ground shook. I felt the stomping of its feet. A section of cement pipe came flying out of the darkness, whooshing right over our heads and impaling itself in the hillside.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Carl said, his voice weak with a sort of manic desperation I’d never heard in it before.
“Quiet,” Texas told him
The pit was silent as a crypt suddenly. I could hear the others breathing but nothing else. Sweat rolled down my neck. I could feel the heat rising from the others. It was close, the beast was close. I knew that much. It had been playing games with us, trying to drive us into a state of absolute fear and it had succeeded quite well. Now the end game was at hand. Mickey scanned her light around with a trembling hand and picked out nothing but bones, broken slabs of pavement, the rusting hulk of an old stove. Suddenly, the air was thick with a sickening stench like spoiled meat.
The beast came leaping out of the shadows, roaring with primeval appetite.
We shot at it, but it was like trying to kill a ghost. It was there. And then it was not. Panic set in and we just scrambled madly up the hillside. Mickey led the way, Texas right behind her. Gremlin knocked me aside and then grabbed Janie and tossed her back. She lost her balance and rolled ten or fifteen feet down the hillside.
“Take her!” Gremlin cried. “Take her and leave us alone! She’s the one you want!”
I went after Janie and Carl went after Gremlin. I heard them tussling. Heard screams and cries. I pulled Janie up and fired into the darkness where I heard the beast. As I led Janie back up, I saw that Carl had Gremlin on the ground. Gremlin was screaming and crying and Carl was drilling him in the face. By the time I reached him, he had yanked Gremlin to his feet. Then, grabbing him by the hair and the back of his jacket, he lifted him right up and threw him. Gremlin went airborne about five feet, hit the ground rolling. He rolled right down to the bottom and when he finally stopped he let out a demented scream that was about as close to raw insanity as I’ve ever heard.
We saw him in the moonligh
t.
Just as we saw the grotesque figure standing over him. The beast picked him up with very little effort, hoisting him over its head and shaking him like an offering to the cold moon above. He was squirming, crying, screaming. If I hadn’t have hated that bastard so much at that point, I might have felt sorry for him. The beast brought him down on a sawtoothed plate of exposed metal. His scream ended instantly with a wet, shearing sound.
We ran up the hillside and out of the pit in record time.
Behind us, we could hear the sounds of Gremlin being battered to a pulp.
22
Thirty minutes later we saw the bridge. It stretched about half a mile over the Calumet River and the railroad tracks below. It was a steel bridge with two high arches near the center, sagging and twisted like it had withstood an airstrike. Maybe it had. I estimated that it was probably a good hundred foot drop to the river below. The closer we got to it the more we all saw the wreckage: mangled girders, blackened uprights, overhead beams sheared and hanging, the whole thing crowded with debris, smashed cars and trucks. Everything from big semis to minivans. It almost looked like they had been driven up on the bridge to form some kind of barricade. Many of them were charred.
As we neared it, Janie said, “Are you sure this thing is stable?’
Mickey nodded. “It doesn’t look like much, but it’s safe.”
I don’t think any of us were very reassured. It looked like some kind of war had been fought up there and not that long ago. In my mind, the bridge was the monstrous exoskeleton of some gigantic insect, shattered and broken and rawboned, just waiting to fall into the polluted depths of the river below.
I checked Texas Slim’s wound by flashlight, just to see if all the commotion had torn it open but it was okay. So on we went.
Mickey led the way, seeming to know it quite well as she slipped around the burnt hulks of cars, trucks, and nameless machinery. We saw quite a few skeletons, some cremated behind the wheels of vehicles and others scattered underfoot, birdpicked and disjointed. It was like a graveyard. My flashlight picked out more than one skeleton that was punctured with bullet holes and that made me certain that a war was fought up here, or at the very least dozens of small skirmishes. Several trucks had burst through the railing and hung precariously on the edge, their noses pointed out into the misting blackness. A sluggish, gray-green fog with the consistency of ectoplasm drifted over the river below. Now and then there was an opening in it and I could see the wrecks of vehicles rising from the murky, stinking water.