by Tim Curran
Mickey continued to lead us on, threading us through the wreckage. Five minutes into it, both Carl and I lit cigarettes to calm our nerves. “You know she could be leading us into a trap, don’t you?” he whispered to me as he cupped a match to light my smoke.
It had occurred to me, of course.
A sleek, attractive woman like her. How easy it would have been for her to draw in men and then use their own raging hormones and that very male need to protect women-especially sexy ones-against them. But I didn’t really doubt her. I had a good feeling about her. Maybe her motives weren’t entirely altruistic, but then again whose were? I did not get the sort of bad feeling from her I’d gotten from Gremlin after he hooked back up with us. And that had probably not been any sixth sense on my part, but maybe an intuition planted in my head by The Shape.
We walked on.
The bridge canted slowly upward and leveled out beneath the arches where it ran flat for about two city blocks before canting back down to the other bank. The closer we got to the arches, the more wrecked vehicles I saw. The entire thing was nothing but a vast junkyard. It made me nervous. With all that scrap metal lying around, we could have walked right into an ambush at any moment. It would have been tricky in full daylight, but at night…just death waiting to happen.
So when Janie stopped walking and said, “I think there’s something out there,” I was not really surprised. Maybe I’d been feeling it for awhile, too, telling myself that it was nothing but shellshock, post-traumatic stress from our encounter with the beast. But as I stopped, yes, I was feeling it, too.
Carl and Texas looked around, then looked at each other. They were not convinced.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. “Maybe you got the jitters.”
“Sure,” Texas Slim said.
“No, it’s not that,” Janie assured us.
Mickey was hugging herself, looking troubled. “She’s right, Nash. I feel it, too. Like a hundred eyes are staring at me.”
Well, by that point I had learned to trust Mickey’s intuition. Janie’s was pretty well developed, too, but Mickey’s was practically a sixth sense. I decided we’d wait a moment. We got up by the arches, sidled around a fuel tanker, and then kept an eye on what was beneath us, that strip of bridge running back towards the bank we’d just left. The moon had abandoned us. It was rafting through clouds high above. The tension inside me was like hot metal. I was waiting for the moon to come back out. Without it, all those cars stretching out below were just shadows heaped upon shadows.
“Let’s move,” Carl said.
“Wait,” I told him. “Just a few more minutes.”
A few more minutes became five and then ten before the moon broke free of the clouds up there and illuminated the bridge. I saw the wrecked vehicles, but I also saw other shapes down there in-between. I thought one of them moved.
I handed Carl my Savage. “You see that minivan with the crushed-in side? Right there by the Land Rover? There’s a shadow on its right side that don’t belong. Put a round in it if you can.”
Carl was more than happy to. He stepped away from us, balanced the rifle on the roof of a Mazda, sighted, and squeezed off a shot. The report was booming, echoing out across the silent river. But a split-second after I heard it, I heard somebody down there scream.
“Shit,” Texas said.
There were lots of moving shadows down there, all mulling about like worms on tasty roadkill. And there was no doubt who and what they were: Hatchet Clans. And they were coming.
We all spread out and got ready to start shooting. The Clansmen were moving up through the wreckage and I had to wonder how long they’d been dogging us. In the moonlight, I could see the masks they wore, the shine of the eye pieces. They were no longer practicing stealth. They were shouting and screeching, letting out that wailing war cry I knew so well. Down at the foot of the bridge I saw what looked like hundreds of them. Maybe it wasn’t that many, but it was more than enough to overrun us even with the guns.
I told the others to hold their fire until they had something closer to fire at.
Carl was firing at them indiscriminately, trying to kill a few, but mostly trying to drive them back. My plan was to have Carl hold them off while I got the others away. Maybe it would have worked…but we never got the chance to find out.
“They’re here!” Mickey screamed. “They’re here!”
And they were. About a dozen of them had slipped up on us, probably crawling amongst the smashed cars on their bellies. They waited until they were in range and then leaped up, brandishing spears and axes and clubs with spikes driven into the ends. Strictly Stone Age shit, but lethal at close range.
They charged.
We started shooting with wild abandon, putting rounds in them, over their heads, to all sides. We put up a manic defense and our firepower was enough that they didn’t make it within ten feet of us. A wounded one dragged itself off. And another with no less than six smoking bullet holes in it dragged itself at our position and Texas killed it with a headshot.
“We won’t stop the next wave,” Carl said.
And I knew he was right: I could see them advancing on us, ducking low and slipping amongst the cars and trucks, staying low so we couldn’t draw a good bead on them. I was guessing there were thirty or forty of them. And behind them, at least three times that many.
“We have to run for it,” I told the others.
But Texas Slim had other ideas. “What we need here is something that will tip the odds in our favor. Something like a down-home barbecue, if you catch my meaning.” He was staring up at the tanker truck just behind us. He was smiling. “That is…if you catch my meaning.”
“Carl?” I said. He had driven trucks for a living once upon a time.
The tanker had stalled out or been stopped just as it had reached the first bridge arch, which meant that its hind end was not perfectly level, but sort of hanging down on the canting road way. The cant was slight, maybe 12? at most, just a gently sloping incline you had to drive up until you reached the arches and the perfectly vertical plane of the bridge itself. I had some crazy idea of popping the emergency brake on the tanker…but it would only have rolled twenty feet before crashing into more wreckage.
We needed something better and Carl had it.
23
“There’s a discharge valve at the rear of the tank,” he said. “It’s where you hook up the hose for unloading. Manual. Strictly gravity feed.”
As the girls and I watched the Clansmen picking their way toward us, our hands sweaty on our guns, Carl and Texas went at it. I didn’t watch what they did. I heard the doors to the truck cab open and shut a few times. I heard them argue. I heard the clanking of a dropped wrench. I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off what I was seeing below: the Hatchet Clans. I wondered how many there were in Gary. What I was seeing was not only horrendous but amazing. They were literally everywhere-creeping amongst the vehicles, crawling over the tops, massing like a swarm of hornets. There were so many that it was absolutely ridiculous to pick a target. It reminded me of when I was a kid and I stomped an ant hill and the ants, black and angry, literally boiled out.
There were that many.
Mickey was next to me and she was trembling. “C’mon, Nash…Jesus Christ, we have to get out of here!”
Janie didn’t say a word. Oh, she was scared, too, but she wasn’t saying a thing. She was just waiting as death moved towards us, either with absolute faith in what the boys were doing or maybe accepting her end. You could never be sure with her.
I smelled gas.
“Okay,” Texas said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Time for a very hasty retreat…”
We pulled back and I had him take the girls and get moving while I stood off to the side. Carl looked at me. Gas was dripping from the discharge valve. It smelled very sharp, very pungent. I gave him the thumbs up and he opened the valve. The gas didn’t just run from the outlet, it sprayed. It came out in a gushing, high-pressure stream t
hat shot forward a good five feet before striking the bridge. It hit with such force that it washed away the corpses of the dead Clansmen, catching them in a rolling stream and pushing them beneath cars. The smell of raw gasoline was so overwhelming, I started to get dizzy from the fumes.
“Let’s go,” Carl said.
We retreated with the others. I told them to keep going until they were off the other end of the bridge. They didn’t like it, but it had to be. I didn’t know what was going to happen when Carl put a bullet in the spilled river of gas. His plan was fairly simple: he’d shoot into the gas. The bridge was metal. The slug from my Savage would kick up some sparks when it hit and that’s all it would take. The gas should ignite, but the truck would, too, and when that happened it might be like ground zero on the bridge.
Carl and I climbed up atop the cab of a flatbed truck loaded with lumber. We had a good view of the tanker and the gas flooding down through the vehicles. The Clansmen stopped when it hit them, several were washed right off their feet, more falling as the gas rushed past them. Some retreated. Others came forward. Most were just confused, mulling around, wondering maybe what it all meant.
The gas had been running for over five minutes at that point.
It had flooded right down the bridge and I could see the swirling lake of it on the road where you drove up. Carl raised the Savage. His face was glistening with sweat. He sighted in and fired. Nothing. Swearing, he did it again, aiming down farther in-between two cars right into the gas. He squeezed the trigger. The shot rang out and this time I saw the sparks fly as the round chewed into the steel plating. I saw the spark and then a wall of flames was rushing towards the truck and right through the legions of the Hatchet Clans. They screamed and threw themselves around as the fire enveloped them. There was no escape from it.
We jumped off the cab, landed on the hood, found the bridge and started running. We made it maybe twenty feet when the world exploded into daylight and the aftershock threw us to the bridge. Behind us, it was an absolute inferno. The explosion had tossed the tanker into the air about forty feet and then it came back down, a flaming mass that erupted on impact in an ocean of fire that engulfed the bridge, ran right up the farthest arch, and flooded everything in a blinding blaze. Twin fire balls about the size of two-story houses went rolling up into the sky. A wave of heat hit Carl and I, singing our eyebrows. The Hatchet Clans were incinerated, I was guessing, because nothing could have lived through that cremating firestorm. From the first arch right down to the road below was nothing but a rampart of fire that rose twenty feet into the air. I saw burning Clansman leaping off the bridge or blown right off it. I heard their death cries as they roasted in hell.
We were quite a distance from it, yet the consuming heat was like standing before an open oven door. We got to our feet and ran, gasping for breath. The air was foul with smoke and fumes and it was hard to breathe as if the explosion itself had sucked all the oxygen from the air.
When we reached the others, we were dizzy, out of breath. We fell to our knees and they pulled us to our feet, got us off the bridge.
Lying on the grassy riverbank, I watched the bridge burn. It was so bright you could have seen it for miles, just blazing away as Dresden must have after it was fire-bombed. As we sat there, watching the pyrotechnics, all those cars and trucks started going up as their gas tanks caught fire. I saw a propane truck shoot straight up like a burning missile before coming down into the river below, a huge puddle of flames spreading over the surface of the water. It expanded right to the far bank and started the grass and trees on fire.
It was quite a show.
24
I came awake to the sound of a horn blaring. It tore me out of some crazy, almost hallucinogenic dream about The Medusa. I jumped up and nearly elbowed Texas in the face. I didn’t know where the hell I was or what was going on.
“It’s okay,” Janie told me.
“Must’ve been quite a dream,” Texas Slim said.
I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Slowly, it all came back to me and I slid back down in the seat of the Jeep, relaxing a bit. We had found the Jeep in the garage just like Mickey said. It was a good vehicle. Well-maintained. Battery charged. Full tank of gas. We’d driven out of Gary last night, crossing the Indiana state line into Illinois and, cutting well south of Chicago, got onto to Route 80 which was our ticket west. The highway was a mess with stalled cars and trucks, overturned buses and you name it. We’d been on it all day, creeping along, and now it was night again.
Mickey was driving. Carl was snoring in the passenger seat.
“Hell we at?” I asked.
“Signs say we’re outside some little dive called Utica,” Mickey told me. “Road’s been clear the last twenty miles or so. How long you want to keep going?”
That was a good question. All I knew is we had to hit Des Moines on our way west. That’s what The Shape had said inside my head. Then again, maybe I’d imagined it, but I didn’t think so because the need to reach Des Moines as fast as we could was overpowering. It’s hard to explain. But when that voice whispered in my head-and I can’t honestly be sure it really was a voice as such-and pointed me in the right direction, it became an obsession to get there. It was almost a physical need. Like getting to a toilet when your bladder is full to bursting, if you can dig that.
“Why’d you hit the horn?” I asked.
“Your girlfriend thought a giant bird was attacking us,” Janie said.
“I didn’t say it was a bird,” Mickey told her, practicing great patience, I thought. “Something swooped us. It was big and it was dark. It came out of the air, hence, I’m assuming it had wings.”
“I’d say that’s a good assumption,” Texas said. “And blaring horns are known to frighten off giant birds.”
I looked out my window, watching the moonlit countryside passing by. There was mist or smoke hanging in the sky as if something nearby was burning. I could see streaks of color that were pink and almost luminous. I don’t know what they were or what could have caused them. Then I saw the moon. It was full. Everything inside me dried up at the sight of it. Full moon and no offering for big bad Brother Shape. A selection would have to be made some way and somehow. It filled my belly with poison just thinking about it. I saw a flock of winged creatures pass over the face of the moon. They looked kind of like giant bats, but maybe they were witches out on a lark. Nothing would have surprised me. Mickey definitely wasn’t seeing things.
“We need to stop sooner or later,” Janie said at my side. “These people need to rest, Nash.”
Sure, rest. Like food, one of those things the human body just had to have sometimes. Janie was not stupid. She knew it was the night of the moon, she knew what that entailed. I got the feeling from her that she was nursing a secret joy inside her that I had nothing to offer up. That my feelings for the others would prevent me from choosing from their ranks. This is what she wanted. To tell Big Brother Shape to fuck himself or herself or itself. No more free lunches. No more offerings. We’re better than that, we will no longer sink to the dehumanizing, uncivilized depths of offering one of our own to some malignant horror from the pit.
But, once again, sweet and kind as she was, she was also naive.
The Shape would come.
I would have to make a selection.
We drove on for another hour. We saw a few wrecked vehicles but no more giant birds or much of anything else, unless you wanted to count the pack of wolves or coyotes or whatever the hell they were that cut across the road in front of us. We had to slow down so we didn’t hit them. They watched us as they passed. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness.
Finally, Mickey said, “There’s a turnoff for Utica. Something about a campground, Nash.”
“So what?” Janie said.
“You think that’s the place to crash for awhile?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Then pull us in there.”
Janie was boiling next to me in the dark
but I didn’t really have time to assuage her ego. She was feeling very threatened by Mickey. I understood that. I sympathized with it. Unfortunately, Mickey’s intuition was so well-developed that it was nearly prophetic. I would have been a fool not to use a tool like that to safeguard us.
The place was dead. No fires burning. No vehicles. The campground had gone wild, most of the sites grown over. There were lots of rock formations and a big river. I figured it was a pretty nice place back in the day, the perfect getaway from Chicago. Mickey scouted us out a spot on a hill that overlooked most of the park and we stopped there. We found some wood at a ranger station down the way and started a blaze in the firepit. It was nice. All we needed were some marshmallows and hot dogs.
No such luck.
We ate Chef Boyardee ravioli and canned mandarin oranges. But outside like that by the fire, it tasted pretty damn good. Nobody was saying much of anything. They were all tired. Nobody had slept much in the past few days. Carl was just staring into the flames. Texas Slim did not regale us with crude stories. Janie kept her eye on Mickey who kept her eye on me. Meanwhile, I watched the moon and it watched me.
I could feel The Shape out there like some malefic dark star orbiting around us, each pass bringing it a little closer. I sat there and chain-smoked. I had no idea what I was going to do. It was the night of the full moon. There was a possibility The Shape might wait until tomorrow night before making an appearance, but there was no guarantee of that.