Okay, I approve of how your mind is working now, champ. Hitting on all eight cylinders, there. You know where it is.
Where what is? Greg fought to keep the image of the neat rifle from his mind; instead, he thought about the Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats—any cartoon that came to mind.
Oh, Greggy… Let’s not be coy with one another! You know what I’m referring to, and I know you do.
Greg continued to run through cartoon characters in his head, even going as far as pretending to hear the jingle that started each show.
Oh. I see. You don’t need my help after all.
No, I do! I need your help, but…
Well, if you don’t want to use the obvious solution, I guess we might find an alternative.
Greg imagined he sensed a smug satisfaction behind his invisible friend’s words. Alternative?
I don’t know… I don’t know if you want it bad enough. I don’t know if you’re willing to make the sacrifice to save the ones you love.
Greg’s belly did flip-flops, but besides that, a strange sense of calm enveloped him. Tell me.
It seems to me, boyo, that if you were to lead her away from the lake, she might lose some of her power. She might…she might even become stoppable.
Hope dawned within him, and a grim resolve settled over him. What do I have to do?
I knew you’d see it my way, sport. That’s why we get along so well. We think so much alike.
Greg tried not to feel pleasure at the words, but it burned within him, nonetheless. Tell me what to do.
And you’re sure you don’t want to use…the other thing?
I don’t even know where it is. Or how to use it. Greg pulled his clothes on.
Such a shame. That way would’ve been such fun. Here’s what you need to do…
3
Stellan ran. He ran and ran. Footfall after footfall, he ran. The things behind him trumpeted their victory as they herded him toward the deepest part of the forest. He had a sense of great amusement from somewhere around him—and great hunger.
The boy’s mind was numb, but his feet weren’t. His feet shrieked with each step, screamed with each slip, bled with each root he tripped on. His arms flopped uselessly at his sides—he no longer had the energy to hold them up. Stellan’s eyelids drooped, his mouth hung open, and his tongue was as dry as fresh kitty litter and tasted about the same.
The Lady in the Lake… He darted a glance over his shoulder—roughly the thirty cajillionth such glance since he’d crossed the road that separated the woods from his house—to check. Sometimes she was there, chasing him, and other times she was missing. She wasn’t as fast as the four-legged creatures, but she was just as relentless.
He turned his attention to the front, gaze twitching from side to side, from tree to tree, trying to find a place to hide, a safe place to rest. He saw only trees and darkness.
Stellan’s eyes ached with exhaustion, and his throat burned. His lips had chapped sometime during the day’s brutal marathon, and his mouth…his tongue tasted like some foreign thing, an old dead lizard that had crawled inside his mouth without him knowing.
He staggered across a knot of roots and slapped at the tree, pushing himself upright to steady himself. He darted yet another glance over his shoulder, trying to gauge how much of a lead he had over the dog-things chasing him.
Stellan gasped and lost his breath. Even looking at her inspired new fear in him. The Lady in the Lake was back, scowling at him. Her midnight-black form seemed off, like a bad copy of a person, and though her legs pumped as a running woman’s would, her feet didn’t touch the ground. She winked at him, and her feet touched down without a sound.
She opened her mouth, exposing too many sharp fangs. Her irises shifted from bright green to black to a blazing crimson as blood ran from the corners of her eyes like gory tears. Her wet, muddy skin appeared loose, and weeping pustulent sores added the greenish sheen of slime to the wetness of the mud sliding down her body.
One of the dog-like things chasing him yipped, then made a peculiar sound that Stellan thought was meant to be laughter. The Lady in the Lake grinned in hideous fashion and dropped her hand to pet the dog-thing’s head without missing a step. The two ran in perfect synchronicity, as though they’d run together for eons.
Stellan ripped his gaze away from the gruesome pair, snapping his head back to the front moments before he ran head-first into a thick tree trunk. He threw himself to the side to a cacophony of dog-thing laughter behind him. His feet tried to slip from beneath him, and he jinked and juked like a dancer having a convulsion, banging his elbow against the trunk in the process.
He cried out and slowed, wanting more than anything to stop, to lie down and rest, to give up the insane chase. An exhausted sob escaped his lips, and though he felt like crying—felt like he was already crying—no tears wet his cheeks. Glancing back, he slowed further, his steps becoming hesitant, but before he could stop, a monstrous dog-thing sprinted toward him, mouth open, slobbering a gruesome, viscous liquid that sizzled and popped when it struck the ground. With a start, Stellan realized the thing had no eyes and terror provided the energy to sprint.
He ran on, ignoring the pain in his feet, the yipping things behind him, the cramping in his sides. He ran because he had to.
4
Mason Harper stood in his grandmother’s flower bed, sheltered by the shadows dropped by the eaves of her house, and watched. He knew the brat would come out soon. The Lady in the Lake had said as much, and she was always right.
She’d given him a task, and he was bound and determined to do it right. Her rewards were…
He shook his head, banishing the thought of rewards as something stirred in his belly. The last thing he wanted was a hard-on.
Next door, the screen door opened and closed with almost no sound. Mason held his breath, leaning even farther back into the shadows. Just as Mason’s lungs began to burn, Greg Canton crossed the gravel road and slipped into the woods.
Mason lounged against the side of his grandmother’s house. He had a few more minutes to wait, then the fun would begin.
5
With a full belly, Tom slid behind the wheel of his cruiser. A belch lurked far down in his guts, but he couldn’t coax it out into the open. He reached in the glove box for the roll of Tums and made a face at the horrible chemically induced fruit flavor.
In his rearview mirror, he saw John Morton back out of his parking spot and flip his headlights. With a merry little beep, the Cottonwood Vale police car turned out onto the highway.
Tom drew a deep breath and let it gust out of him. Sometimes, his job rested on his shoulders like an insufferable weight bearing down on him, grinding him to dust. Usually, he felt that way when the case wasn’t going well—and, no question about it, the Stellan Stensgaard case wasn’t going well at all.
He cranked his cruiser to life and threw it in reverse, but then sat there with his foot on the brake and his hand on the gear selector. Not for the first time, Tom entertained the idea of retirement. Not for the first time, he looked up in his rearview mirror and sneered at himself for what he considered weakness.
Tom backed out of the parking lot and put Jenny’s Diner in his rearview mirror. He considered going home, making an early night of it—the Lord knew he had gotten little sleep in the past couple of days—but he would only lie there in bed, staring at the darkened ceiling, mind going approximately ten million miles an hour.
He turned onto Lake Circle, his tires squealing a bit as he took the turn a mite too fast. Tom shrugged. Won’t hurt to take a little patrol—a little extra protection for the residents of Lake Genosgwa.
It wasn’t late, but he and John had gotten to reminiscing and laughing about times long past, and the time had gotten away from them. He glanced down at his Seiko. He thought about calling home, but since it was after ten, chances were his wife was already asleep. Janet understood that with a case such as this, she may not see him for days—and although that
made him feel guilty, it was what it was.
He drove at a slow pace, high beams on, searchlight stabbing into the forest on the side of the road opposite the lake. He cruised down the asphalt road, right above an idle, the powerful eight-cylinder engine in his cruiser throbbing.
Not surprisingly, no one was out walking, and most of the lake houses down the ridge on his left were buttoned up tight, though lights blazed inside the homes and in the yards. Tom nodded to himself—it would be hard for someone who was up to no good to sneak around down there by the lake.
He turned his attention to the forest, his eyes trailing the bright white beam from the spotlight. It splashed across the trees and underbrush, stabbing into the dark spaces between them.
Unlike in movies or television, it wasn’t stimulating. No boogeymen leaped out of the dark shadows to threaten him. No mysterious misty white lights guided him deeper into the forest.
I don’t know what I’m expecting to see, Tom thought. What the hell, it’s better to be out here doing something than lying in bed or sitting in my office…waiting.
He fed the iron beast under his hood a little more of the go juice, and the tires ate more ground. Tom alternated his gaze between the darkness deep in the forest and the road ahead.
He drew a deep breath, and the tension in his neck and shoulders eased out of him. He let his head fall back against the headrest, and his jaw opened wide, cracking with the force of his yawn. The chief blinked and shook his head to wake himself up.
He never saw the thing bolt from the forest and smash through his passenger window. Snarling and snapping as a wild animal on the attack would, the thing hung half-in and half-out of the car, saliva spinning in the air between them.
Tom slammed both feet on the brake pedal, and the car slewed to the side, sliding toward the edge of the road, the edge of the ridge, and the ten-foot drop to the shore of Lake Genosgwa. He ripped his gaze away from the snarling thing hanging in his passenger window and fought the car, wrenching the steering wheel to the left. His training kicked in, and he peeled his feet away from the brakes, goosing the gas pedal only enough to break the slide, then braking with less force.
As the car came to a stop, Tom turned toward the wild thing. It had the shape of a dog—at least in the torso and head—but it was as if their forms had been created by a surrealist. Nothing seemed right about the thing’s shape, but with the size of a large breed working dog—a German Shepherd or a Rottweiler—and with large fangs glinting in the moonlight, the snarling beast represented a mortal threat. His mind turned to his service weapon—a Smith & Wesson Model 28 chambered for .357 Magnum rounds. He’d taken some good-natured ribbing in the last few years about his refusal to “modernize” and switch to a semiauto, but he was glad he hadn’t at that moment. A 9mm slug would have pissed off the thing hanging in his window, nothing more.
Tom slid his shoulders to rest against the driver’s side door while unsnapping the leather strap that secured his Magnum. He eased the pistol from his holster and leveled it at the thing that had smashed his passenger window all to hell.
The misshapen thing stopped its frantic attempts to pull itself into the front seat and hung there staring at Tom…except Tom realized the creature had no eyes in its head. It didn’t even have eye sockets, only smooth bone covered by black fur. “Well, fuck,” Tom muttered.
The dog-thing cocked its head to the side almost as if it could understand the sentiment.
Tom cocked his Smith & Wesson, and for a moment, it was as if the world had stopped. The dog-thing switched its attention back and forth between Tom’s face and the huge pistol he leveled at its head.
The tableau shattered as something smashed into the rear passenger quarter panel of the car, pushing the vehicle closer to the ridge. Tom glanced out the back window. The impacts had buckled the quarter panel upward as though struck by another vehicle, but other than that, nothing.
He returned his attention to the dog-thing hanging in his passenger window, and he would have sworn on a stack that the thing smiled at him. One of the dog-thing’s deformed ears swiveled toward the back of the cruiser, and its human-like paws pushed its bulk back out the window.
“Yes, do that,” Tom said. “I don’t take pleasure in killing dogs, even if they are misshapen mutant bastards such as the likes of you.”
The dog-thing cocked its head, then made the creepiest sound Tom had ever heard—a cross between laughter and a train derailing. The thing slid away from the window, and Tom breathed a sigh of relief.
He lay the Magnum on the seat next to him, resting his hand on it, but lightly, as he tried to calm his racing pulse. The road ahead of him was clear, but with the damage to the rear of the car, he didn’t know if the cruiser was drivable. He shook his head—already doubting his memory of the thing that had smashed through his window. Tom lay his hand on the door release, but the memory of that dog-thing was still too fresh.
He swiveled the spotlight until it lit up the woods across from his passenger window. A row of the mutant dog-things sat as still as if carved from marble, the posture of each matching the stance of every other dog-thing at the edge of the tree-line. Tom snapped the Smith & Wesson into firing position, and he leveled the gun at one of the things.
As if they’d been awaiting that cue, the entire row of dog-things charged at the side of his cruiser, coming on in eerie silence—no howls, no barking, only the sound of the footfalls. Tom squeezed off a shot, the report of the Magnum sounding akin to a demolition charge in the tight confines of the cab, and then another. Two of the dog-things stumbled and fell, but the others came on as if they understood he had only four rounds left.
Panic demanded he open his door, that he get out of the car, that he run, but the rational part of him knew that would only lead to one thing. He’d seen the results of a big bastard of a shepherd mauling a man, and the last thing Tom Walton wanted was a mauling by ten or more of the beasts charging the car.
As if they’d practiced the maneuver, each dog-thing in the pack slammed into the passenger side of his cruiser at the same instant, rocking it on its springs at an alarming angle. Tom had no targets, nothing to shoot at, not even the two beasts he’d already shot. The things remained silent, and worse yet, stayed out of sight.
The cruiser slid to the left, toward the ridge and the ten-foot drop. He flung the Magnum on the seat next to him, and Tom smashed the gas pedal to the floor. The rear tires screeched, but the car didn’t leap forward, didn’t race away from the pack of dog-things. It felt as though they held the cruiser in place somehow—and, as if the car had no traction at all, he slid toward the edge at a faster rate.
Tom glanced out his window—all that was visible was empty air. He released the gas pedal and braced himself as the car tipped over the edge and plunged down the ridge. The driver’s side tires caught on something and the cruiser flipped over, barrel rolling down the steep incline.
The car came to rest against a lake house. Blood poured down Tom’s face, and his vision had doubled. Must’ve hit my head, he thought at the speed of sludge. His left shoulder flared with sharp, burning pain, and Tom gasped.
The front door of the lake house banged open, and someone stepped into the beams of his headlights. Shouldn’t be out there. His hand scrabbled against the seat next to him, searching for his service weapon, but not finding it.
“Tom? Tom Walton?” asked Will Seeger peering through the windshield. The man turned his head toward his open front door. “Better call 911, Alison!” he called. “Police Chief’s had an accident.”
Tom’s gaze darted toward the ridge, sure he’d see the dog-things scampering down the incline, coming for him, coming for Will. “Inside,” he said, but his voice was too weak for anyone to hear. Besides, Will was already walking around to the cruiser’s passenger side—the driver’s side doors were pinched against the front of his house. “No,” Tom murmured. “Get back.”
“What’s that, Tom?” Seeger looked at the side of the cruise
r, and his eyes widened. “Dang, Tom, what happened to your car?”
Tom’s gaze flicked back and forth along the ridge, searching for the mutant freaks that had attacked him, but of them, there was no sign.
6
Joe stood right inside his bedroom door, his posture rigid, his ear pressed to the crack he opened between the door and the jamb. He’d heard Greg call out and had come awake at once.
He was almost sure his grandson had yelled something about not letting someone do something, but he wasn’t sure whether he was still asleep when he’d heard that The old Marine waited in the dark, waited for what would happen next. He would die for his grandson—and smiling—if only he could keep the boy from harm.
If that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes.
The idea didn’t scare him, nor did his dedication and willingness to pay that price. He had been prepared to pay that price since he was a young man—since he’d become a Marine.
In the other room, fabric rustled, as if Greg had discarded his blanket and was pulling on his clothes. Joe got dressed and slipped his feet into sturdy boots meant for action—all without making a sound. The M1 was back in its secret hiding place, but he intended to get it if he had time.
He almost missed it. The door to the porch snicked shut almost silently.
Joe slipped into the living room, his eyes roving across the tableau shown by the bay window. Greg was on the path that led down to the dock, standing there staring at the moon on the lake, maybe. Joe let his gaze twitch toward the center of the lake, toward the movement out there.
Greg’s little red kayak seemed to motor toward the center of the lake with no visible signs of propulsion. Against the wind, moving fast enough to leave a wake. Joe shook his head and hurried into the pantry.
When he came out holding the M1, Greg was gone. Panic bit him, and Joe danced from side to side behind the plate-glass window, his gaze streaking back and forth across the small yard, zipping to the end of the dock, searching the water. Greg won’t swim after that kayak—not after the experience he had out in the middle of the lake.
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