“I can’t keep this up!” he said. “You boys get going! I’ll catch up.”
Cal made a sound like a strangled laugh. “No way! No way we’re leaving you.”
Someone behind them screamed. Turning Ryan saw a woman point down the hill toward the waterfront where harbor lights illuminated a thick, black fog rolling in toward the docks.
The Silent Ones were coming.
“You’ll never make it with me.” Ambrose dropped to one knee, palms flat on the sidewalk. He looked beat, finished. “Go! Leave me!”
The black mass roiled as it reached the land, its pace slowed a bit as it began to spread tendrils of death. Ryan hesitated, looked up at Cal, who looked equally conflicted. Could they just run off and leave Ambrose like this? On the other hand, he’d just met the man.
“No…” said Ryan, looking around. “There’s got to be–”
His searching gaze stopped at a car parked half a dozen feet away at the curb. He leaped to its rear door and yanked on the handle. It opened.
“Quick! Inside!”
“That won’t save us,” Cal said, opening the driver door and peering inside. “No keys.”
“It’s all we’ve got!”
As they helped Ambrose onto the rear seat, Ryan glanced downhill. The cloud was close now, rolling their way like a black tsunami, gradually overtaking the horde of panicked lycans fleeing before it. Many of them had transformed into wolves but still couldn’t outrun the cloud. He leaped in beside Ambrose while Cal slid behind the wheel. They slammed the doors shut and crouched, waiting.
Cal shot Ryan a grim look. “I fear we’ve just locked ourselves in a wheeled coffin.”
The fleeing lycans reached the car just as the cloud enveloped them, plunging everything into darkness.
45
A blur of images and sensations dizzied Emma.
As the wall of black fog advanced, she felt herself being grabbed around the waist and heaved upward. Then she dangled over the shoulder of the creature that had attacked her.
The creature that had been Dillon.
Is this how it ends? Is this how I’m going to… die?
No!
She pounded her fists against the creature’s back but she might as well have been punching a wall for all the notice the Dillon-beast took. It ran upright and with each long jouncing stride, she could feel their speed increasing. As it raced up the long incline of the city street without seeming effort, Emma noticed the sounds of devastation gradually receded.
And still the creature ran.
For how long or how far, she had no idea. Most of the lights of the city had failed and they moved in gradations of shadow and deeper darkness. Then, without warning, her captor stopped and lowered her to the base of a low, stone wall.
This was it. This was when it was going to finish her. Cringing in heart-racing terror, she imagined the foul smell of its breath as curved fangs ripped out her throat–
But the beast, still looming tall above her, seemed to whither. It dropped to all fours, then slunk away. She watched it until it slipped beyond the corner of the nearest building.
Get up! Run! Get away from it!
The thoughts ratcheted through her as she tried to get to her feet. But she felt dizzy, disoriented, not able to make sense of what had just happened – a part of her refusing to believe it, another demanding she must.
Turning, she tried to orient herself in the dim ambient light and gradually realized she stood at an intersection at one of the city’s higher elevations. Far below, a symphony of screams still rose from where the killing black mist of the Silent Ones flooded the streets of Balmor.
Ryan had been down there somewhere, lagging behind her. The attack had come on so fast, she couldn’t imagine how he could have possibly outpaced it… how he could have survived?
Ryan, where–?
“Emma,” said a voice from the shadows. “Are you all right?”
Raspy, out of breath, she didn’t recognize the speaker.
“Ryan, is that you?”
A figure leaned around the corner of the building, partially obscured by shadows. Despite that, Emma caught the blond highlights of a boy’s hair.
“Dillon?”
“It’s me…Emma, listen – I’m so sorry. I must have scared you so badly back there.”
She felt her pulse quicken. Should she be afraid of him? She backed away until she felt the rough stone wall of a building touch her shoulders.
“Dillon? What happened? Why are you–?”
“A lycan?” He sighed. “Because I am, that’s all. None of us can help what we are. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to… scare you, or risk you… not liking me.”
“Things are happening too fast. I can’t make sense of this!”
He hadn’t moved from his position beyond the corner of the building. With only one shoulder and his head visible, he appeared to be hiding or keeping his distance not to alarm her.
“I’m so sorry it happened like that. I ‘transed’ right in front of you – it must have been terrifying, I know. But I couldn’t let you die down there.”
“Why…how?”
“It’s not just the moon with us.” Dillon looked away, as if ashamed. “It can happen if we get stressed or threatened. If we had stayed down there, we would’ve been killed.”
Emma couldn’t help thinking of that poor man being chased through the woods…
“But why didn’t you kill me?”
“We’re only out of control with the full moon. When we trans at other times, we can keep our heads. Does that make sense?”
“I don’t know…as much as anything else, I guess.” Which wasn’t a whole lot.
“When I felt it starting, I knew I couldn’t stop it. And I knew I could save us. I promised your brother I’d keep you safe, so I just… I just grabbed you and started running.”
“Yes, you certainly did.” Emma paused. “Why are you standing around the corner like that?”
“I don’t want you to run away.”
“I…I won’t.”
Slowly, he stepped into view. His clothes were torn in places. Lots of places. They were little more than tatters hanging on him.
He looked so helpless standing there. Hard to believe he’d been the sinewy beast that had carried her off like she’d been a rag doll.
Before she could say anything, a new wave of screams echoed up from the black-fogged streets of the lower city. And a new spike of horror passed through her.
“Ryan!”
46
For an instant the darkness around the car was complete… no sound… as if they’d been sucked into a vacuum, a terrible endless void.
But only temporarily. Lights began to flare in the cloud, like lightning flashes in a storm, and along with the chittering din, the howling and screaming began.
“Look!” Ambrose pointed beyond Ryan’s shoulder.
He turned to see what had caught the old man’s shocked attention. The flashes revealed several lycans milling around the car in the dark. One of them, a short stocky male, had begun to change into his lupine form. Ryan caught a glimpse of his elongating snout. Others had already changed.
“Is that it?” Ryan said, peeking out at the panicked forms feeling their way through the black fog. “It’s just a cloud. What’s the big–?”
And then a flash revealed a ripple moving along the sidewalk, as if the concrete had turned to liquid. But no, the concrete wasn’t moving – a carpet of countless little crablike creatures, transparent and no more than an inch across, was scuttling toward the fleeing lycans.
With blurring speed they engulfed the lycans, swathing them in a living blanket of thousands, weaving and swarming. The terrible chittering grew louder as it melded with the cries of the victims.
Ryan watched the lycans’ flesh shred, devoured to the bone in an instant as the tiny scuttling things turned red. And then even their bones were gone, leaving only piles of empty clothes.
And whe
n all the lycans were gone, the things, now blood red, swarmed the car. Ryan saw their tiny clawed legs scraping and scoring the glass. Fear and horror boiled up as all the windows collapsed in a shower of tiny fragments and the relentless horde flowed through the openings. Helpless to stop himself, he vomited a hot thick column of bile onto the crablike things but that didn’t deter them in the least.
The invading wave broke over them and Ryan felt the whispery tingle of tiny pinpricks all over his body as myriad tiny claws dug into his flesh.
He did the only thing he could do…
He screamed.
47
He’d been sweating so hard from his run up the hills to the north end of the city that Ergel could barely stand his own stench. But no argumentations about the need to escape the attack.
He’d heard stories of what it was like when the Silent Ones showed up, but seein’ it was another slap to the head altogether, wasn’t it? Oyez, another slap entirety. As used to pain and ill-treatment as Ergel might be, what he’d witnessed tonight had shaken him. The screams and agonizations! Never had he heard anything like it.
And they were still goin’ on…though getting less and less as the black mist had finally begun to retreat and fade back to the sea. But as far as it went for any of the fugitivators he was chasin’… well, he was pretty sure they was all goners. Anybody down by the harbor had been chewed up, and he’d tracked his quarry to that very spot.
So the good thing was: he could go back to Armagost Farm, get back to his regular jobs, and forget about the runaways.
But there was a bad thing, too… how was he going to tell Master Simon about Dillon?
Ergel pondered this as he turned north.
How exactly do you tell a father that his son is dead?
end
of
Book One
Afterword
Okay, so how did we decide to start writing a series for middle-schoolers and that more nebulous audience the publishers call “YA”?
How, indeed…
A few words from Tom:
More than a few years ago, at a horror convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, called Rock & Shock, I met a truly visionary and energetic soul named Nick Psaltos.
This was the first year the organizers had attempted to stage the event – planned to be a dual-attraction weekend of rock bands at the DCU Center and horror vendors, filmmakers, and writers at the Worcester Palladium. We were told to expect up to 20,000 people for the weekend, which sounded like a great place to introduce a whole new potential audience to Borderlands Press.
Just one problem – nobody showed up.
Well. Almost nobody. The Worcester Palladium was a huge convention space that looked like a vast concrete vault. When I reached our vendor’s table, I was surrounded by hundreds of other entrepreneurs – the ubiquitous T-shirt guys, DVD bootleggers, movie paraphernalia hucksters, jewelry-makers, Halloween costumers, and even a few booksellers and publishers. Which is to say: hundreds of vendors did show up and they all worked furiously to set up their displays before the Opening Bell.
But somebody forgot to tell the fans we were there.
Whether it was lack of publicity, or poor organization, or a lack of headliner acts and attractions, we will probably never know, but the bottom line was the interior of the Palladium was as hollow and empty as a pharaoh’s skull. As Friday afternoon waxed into Friday night, many of the vendors were standing around staring across the empty aisles at each other with expressions that can only be described as very nervous. I mean, aside from the fee to rent table space, they faced the expense of food and travel and the freighting of their wares to Worcester. All red lines on the balance sheet until the fans showed up and started buying stuff.
Everyone was supposed to stay open until 9:00 p.m. because that was when the first of the many bands would start playing across the street. By 8:30, it was very apparent to all of us sitting behind tables and displays that nobody would be coming tonight. It was eerie as well as unsettling. I can honestly say I saw fewer than ten patrons walking through the tomb that was the Palladium.
Just as we were packing up for the night, a squad of event organizers fanned out among the hundreds of vendors to assure us that Friday night wasn’t the “actual” opening of the show, and that since most of the people would be showing up on Saturday, we should “brace ourselves” for the big crush the following day.
Now you all know where this is going, but I have to take you there because there is a point to it all.
Saturday arrived and I manned the Borderlands Press table along with the rest of the vendors filling this big-assed building. For the first fifteen minutes the place was alive with the hum of pre-sales set-up activity.
And then it went quiet. The hours stretched like cheap taffy, and still practically no one was showing up. It grew so alarmingly silent that whenever someone entered the huge edifice to begin the long walk among the many aisles of tchotchkes, vendors could hear the solitary slap of shoe-leather on concrete – like listening to the sad journey of a prisoner heading for his last meal.
Time spent in the Palladium made everyone feel like the condemned. A circle of hell Dante somehow forgot to write about. With no windows in the vast high-ceilinged construction, and without a watch, we had no way to tell if it was day or night. By late afternoon, fewer than 100 patrons had paid their entrance fee to Rock & Shock, and many of the vendors resorted to taking turns through the exposition to check out the wares of their competition.
I’d run into a few writers from the New England Horror Writers group and had been hanging with them for a while. A couple of their guys manned the Borderlands Press table while I relieved some boredom by walking the aisles.
And that’s when I met Nick Psaltos.
Nick was an athletic-looking guy with short almost buzz-cut hair. Not a tall guy, he looked like he would be perfectly cast as the catcher or the pulling guard or the Friday night club fighter at Max’s gym. He was sitting behind a table festooned with regalia touting something called “The Horror Channel.” T-shirts, posters, refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs and other promotional items filled his display. He was like the rest of the vendors, sitting alone and staring off into space. I walked up and introduced myself and listened to Nick launch into his vision for a channel that did not yet exist on any of the national cable providers.
Long story short, we got along well and became fellow-visionaries in terms of creative content for The Horror Channel. Nick had been looking for ways to enlist horror writers to his cause, and I figured I could help him meet just about anyone in the genre. We ended up hanging out for the rest of Rock & Shock because the attendance seemed to have peaked at around 116 people. Even though business had been abysmal, I was glad to have made a new genre friend who might someday see his dream a reality.
As time passed, Nick stayed in touch with me, and when the channel was exploring some small original content entries, Nick asked me if I had any ideas for programming that could conceivably debut at five minutes but could eventually evolve into more standard-length shows. That’s when I brought Paul into the mix for a package that was based on something he and Matt Costello had originated for another cable channel.
Paul here…
It calls itself Syfy now, but it started off as the Sci-Fi Channel.
FTL Newsfeed was the first – and for a while the only – original programming on the network. An interstitial show, a daily one‑minute news blurb from 150 years in the future that ran at various times during the day Monday through Friday, and repeated on the weekends. In fact, an FTL segment was the very first piece of programming broadcast by the channel.
It started in the summer of ’92 when I got a call from a guy named Bob Siegal from USA Networks saying they were launching the Sci-Fi Channel soon and could I design a world 150 years in the future? I said sure. Then he said he needed it all done and set to go in 6 weeks. I was finishing The Select at that time, trying to get it ready for the
upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, and knew I couldn’t deliver. Matt Costello and I had shot the bull a few times at various NECONs and I’d been impressed with how bright and quick and versatile he was; I’d also gathered that he had a work ethic similar to mine (which is, simply, sit down and do it). Plus he lived only an hour outside the city. (The Sci-Fi Channel was Manhattan-based.) So I gave his name to Bob Siegal.
Matt called me back and asked if I was sure I didn’t want it. I reconsidered and suggested we split the work. We slaved our butts off and delivered a future scenario detailing the socio‑political‑economic‑technological status of the entire globe and near space for the year 2142 that, quite frankly, blew them away.
Not only was it hands-on experience in screenwriting for us – the equivalent of writing a four-hour-and-twenty-minute movie every year – but we got to work with great people on both the talent and technical ends. We had Gilbert Gotfried, Timothy Leary, Peter Straub, Jeffery Lyons, and others doing guest spots. Rhonda Shear (remember USA’s “Up All Night” movies?) was a regular as Bimbetta Mondaine; so was a fellow-writer we cast as a future mafia capo. Who? Tom Monteleone.
In December of ’96 we were canceled after a run of a little over 4 years. The network wanted the FTL budget for its own movies and such. (Yeah… like Sharknado.)
Fast forward a few years as Tom introduces me to this fellow New Jerseyan, Nick Psaltos. We’d meet in places like the Tick-Tock Diner and spitball ideas. Remembering my days with FTL Newsfeed, I suggested we offer news broadcasts from another dimension where all the classic nightmare monsters are the norm, where they all have their own nation states. A place called… Nocturnia. We could call it Nocturnia News Network – or N3. Tom and I would script the newscasts and people them with creatures from Nocturnia. The ’casts would be tongue in cheek and even a bit campy – a zombie anchorwoman with bits and pieces flaking off, a mummy science nerd with horn-rim glasses and a pocket protector sticking out of his wrappings. That sort of thing. Nick immediately warmed to the idea and the discussion turned to whether we should use live or animated characters, etc., etc.
Definitely Not Kansas (Nocturnia Book 1) Page 22