They Feed

by Jason Parent

  Dakota had to make the blaze bigger. She nearly stumbled over the vegetable oil. Perfect. As if God had sent her a message. She popped it open and squirted the curtains, the carpet, and the couch then the tip of her third paper towel roll. It flamed, and she threw it onto the couch.

  The fire spread rapidly up the back of the couch and onto the drapes over the window. Dakota hadn’t noticed that the window had been cracked open until the fire illuminated it. And that wasn’t all the fire revealed. A small horde of leeches pushed through the crack, their midsections twisting like balloon animals. When the fire hit them, they shrieked in unison, unable to back away quickly enough. The fire caused something in them to boil. Blood, Dakota guessed. They swelled and burst like gorged ticks beneath a match.

  That gave Dakota her first solid idea. One of the cupboards had someone’s personal hygiene items in it, including hairspray. Just like in the movies.

  After igniting her fourth flaming paper towel roll, she used the aerosol can like a blowtorch, charring the door and exploding a half dozen leeches. Unlike her first movie-inspired trick, the hairspray worked, but it ran out quickly. The fire was spreading too slowly. While she battled with the creatures at the door, those still alive at the window got smarter. They propelled themselves through the glass.

  Dakota dashed back behind the counter. The carpet and cabin wall were burning well now. Some of the slug things rolled in to find death. They popped like water balloons, black juices evaporating in the flames. Others, though, wiggled around the patches of fire.

  They were moving in on her. With nowhere to go, Dakota’s final stand had come.

  She dumped most of the vegetable oil across the counter and, after lighting her last two rolls of paper towels, set it ablaze. Creatures bobbed and hissed behind a wall of flame. They shrieked and fled where the flames burned brightest. Dakota aimed to make the biggest, brightest fire those slimy fuckers had ever seen.

  She doused the floor with what was left of the oil and stood one roll in it to burn. The other she rolled onto the carpet and added to the spreading flames and screeching worms.

  They were dying. Some of them at least.

  Dakota coughed. Her eyes stung. The fire, growing tall and strong, was feeding off the very air she needed to breathe. In spite of the danger, a sense of pride washed over her. She’d die by her own hand before those squirming hell spawn could feed on her.

  She grabbed the kitchen knife and curled up inside the damp refrigerator. Smoke swallowed the ceiling. She found herself wondering if she’d suffocate or burn. Whatever her fate, she resigned herself to it so long as the creatures never got their fill.

  In another room, a smoke detector raised its alarm. Dakota closed the door, shutting herself into the darkness as the leeches pressed closer and the fire raged on.

  Chapter 23

  Morning.

  The sun rose over Galveston State Park, its face beaming brightly, unaffected by the events that had transpired while it slept. Abigail had never seen a finer sight.

  Of those who had shared a night in hell with her, she alone seemed to have survived. She’d only witnessed a handful of deaths, her husband’s among them, but she had to conclude the worst for them all, even if she hoped otherwise. If any others had survived, she assumed that like her, they now had a greater appreciation for all that was light and good in a world so terribly out of balance.

  Even the swirling reds, blues, and whites of the police and emergency vehicles—a procession of noisy, epilepsy-inducing strobes—were beautiful to her eyes, and their light was but a sliver of the sun’s brilliance. The police officers were her protectors, but the sun was her savior.

  She hadn’t told them much, only what she knew they would believe. People were dying. She had seen a few murders and suspected several more. Her husband had been taken from her by a vicious killer, which she couldn’t describe because it kept to the dark. Four were dead, she told them—two boys from the local college, a parole officer, and her husband. Others had been hunted in the dark and were lost in the woods.

  What else could she tell them? They would have to see those creatures themselves before they’d believe in monsters. Even as the officer examined her back—stinging, ruined flesh, raw and exposed—Abigail knew the truth would not satisfy him. Instead, she told them the half-truths that would get them moving—not giving them much information at all.

  A young man had found her twelve miles from the park’s entrance, still running, her pace snail slow but her mind unwilling to relent. She had told that young man the truth, every bit of it. He looked at her as though she were crazy and dropped her off at the nearest police station without a word. As soon as she was out of his car, he drove away.

  Even without a description of the killer or killers, Abigail had told a wild story. Frenzied panic still ran through her, and her eyes watched every corner, waiting for shadows to spring from shadows. The policemen seemed ready to dismiss her as some jonesing junkie until one of them noticed her back. Their speculation as to what might have caused the wounds—they talked to each other in front of her as if she weren’t right there—might have amused Abigail had she any capacity for amusement left.

  “A cleat,” one had said, a conclusion that the others had solemnly approved as fabulous police work. A fucking cleat!

  Yes, Abigail had been stepped on by an angry track star. The lesions had become infected. Abigail shook her head and listened. Anyone with even a general understanding of anatomy and medicine could have disproved their theories a dozen ways over, but she didn’t argue the point. All that mattered was that the officers had decided she wasn’t a drug addict and that her wounds weren’t self-inflicted. That meant they would need to investigate. They would need to go to the park.

  On the off chance that Abigail’s hysterical tale turned out to be true, they brought the whole damn squadron with them.

  As the police car Abigail rode in pulled into the park entrance, smoke billowed across the parking lot and engulfed the cruiser in dark gray clouds. The officer driving clicked on the fog lights just in time to avoid a collision with the police car in front of them, which had stopped short. The fire truck whizzed by them on the right, heading toward the ranger station, or what was left of it.

  Abigail edged forward in her seat. She squinted out the windshield. It looked as though the fire had started at the ranger station. The building was little more than charred rubble. The flames raged through the woods, with the parking lot acting as a buffer zone, blocking the fire’s spread to the west, and the wind direction blocking it from the south. A blaze raged northward into the forest, devouring all life in in its path, reducing lush green and dry brown to cleansing black ash.

  Abigail smiled. The fire was burning exactly where it needed to.

  Smoked rolled across the lot as the firefighters quickly doused the last smoldering patches in the station. The sun turned the smoke pink and purple where it couldn’t shine through. As the smoke began to clear, Abigail took a hard look at the ruins, wondering who or what had started the blaze and whether anyone else had survived. Only a few appliances, including a blackened and tipped-over refrigerator, its door ajar, sat in a mound of soot and cinders.

  While everyone fought the blaze, Abigail sat in the patrol car. The officer to whom it belonged had been kind enough to crack open her door before dashing away to help the firefighters. Not for the first time in the last twelve hours, she found herself alone in a place where she had no desire to be.

  With hesitant steps, she got out of the car. She slid her shirt up over her nose and mouth, her lungs rejecting the air, which was thick with fumes.

  “Over here!” someone yelled.

  “He’s got a gun!” another shouted.

  Abigail ran toward the voices, her hands stretched out in front of her like antennae. Smoke clouds plumed over her, drying out her eyes, then dissipated before the next wave came. In those rare moments of sunshine, Abigail caught glimpses of officers with service pistols r
aised. As she approached, she saw the man at whom they had taken up arms: a park ranger who looked like he had battled with the Devil and lost.

  “Stop!” Abigail yelled. “He’s a victim.” She flagged down the nearest officer. He seemed hesitant to believe her, a reluctance she understood. Merwin looked like a vagrant, his wiry beard in tangles and full of grime. Thorns and twigs stuck to his clothes. A rifle hung by its strap over his shoulder. Merwin let it slide off his arm and fall to the cement. He raised his hands in the air.

  “Stand down,” the officer beside Abigail said at last. He gave Merwin a last cursory look then turned to Abigail. “You stay with him. See to it that he gets medical attention if he needs it. We’ve got to stop this fire from spreading out of control.” He holstered his gun and ran toward the fire engine, waving the other officer nearby to follow.

  Abigail ran to Merwin, threw her arms around him, and wept. Slowly, he raised his arms and accepted her into them.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said, her tears washing a circle of dirt from the ranger’s shirt.

  “Define ‘okay.’”

  “Well, you’re alive, anyway. And it’s morning. That has to count for something.”

  Abigail needed something good to cling to. Karl was dead. There was no changing that. She had to assume the rest of them were gone, too. In Merwin’s case, she had been wrong to assume. She wasn’t alone. He was her silver lining. Maybe, just maybe, there was still reason to hope.

  “I suppose you’re right.” Merwin smiled, but the movement of facial muscles seemed painful for him, and the smile transformed into a grimace. He closed his eyes and rubbed his neck.

  “What happened? Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t rightly remember. One moment, I was driving us out of here—”

  “Us? Are the others all right? Where are they?”

  Merwin squinted. He shook his head. “I don’t remember. I was with Tyler and Dakota. I must have crashed, or something hit me. The next thing I remember is waking behind the wheel, the car folded against a tree. I’ve got a whopper of a headache. My skull is rocking harder than Metallica.”

  Abigail let go of Merwin. She stepped back, eyeballing him for wounds. Her mind conjured an image of the human puppet those things had sent in to destroy the light inside the cabin.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Nope, but I might ask you the same thing.” Merwin shrugged. “Can’t say for certain, but if those things are in my belly, they won’t be busting out until the sun goes down, I reckon. Plenty of time for an X-ray.”

  He pointed at an ambulance. Another had arrived with two more fire engines. “You coming?”

  “What are we going to tell them?” Abigail whispered, tilting her head toward the police car.

  “What have you told them?”

  “Nothing really. I mean, I had no clue how to explain it without them thinking I’m crazy. I just told them someone was killing the campers. I think they all thought I was crazy anyway. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess. But now that you’re here, maybe they’ll listen to the truth.”

  “I’ll tell them Tyler did it.”

  “What?”

  “They won’t believe the truth. They’ll believe that. They did the first time.”

  “What if he’s still alive?”

  “I reckon we can cross that bridge when we come to it. Somehow, I think that bridge done, well…” He sniffed at the air. “Burned.”

  “It doesn’t seem right, Merwin.”

  “I know, and I don’t like it either. Truth is, if he ain’t alive, I hope they never find him. So long as they never find his body, and I’m guessing they won’t, it’ll keep people out of these woods. No one wants to go where a murderer might be on the loose. Tell them it’s a monster, and we’ll have all sorts of crazies out here looking for Bigfoot. Even horror stories about giant leeches will only bring out the skeptics and the curious.”

  Abigail found the plan hard to swallow, but she mulled it over. Keeping the creatures secret, making Tyler a patsy… it all seemed so wrong. But if it kept people away from the park, maybe it was the better course of action. Otherwise, those creatures would continue to feed, and more lives would be lost.

  Silence, though, meant that Karl would not be avenged. That stung. “We have to tell someone. Even if yours is the official version, the truth needs telling. We have to tell someone who’ll destroy those things.”

  “Who?” Merwin asked, stroking his beard. “Who is going to come in here and kill giant leeches that nobody else knows exists? Biologists will just want to study them. Hell, they’ll probably even seek to protect them as an endangered fucking species. Everyone else will just tell us to go pound tar.”

  “I’ll find someone who will listen. I’ll find someone who will do something.”

  “You do what you feel you must. Me? I’m going to the hospital. I’m going to make up an excuse for them doctors to photograph my insides.” He put his arm around Abigail. “You should, too. Come on. We’ve spent enough time in this place.”

  As they hobbled toward the ambulance, Merwin using her as a crutch, Abigail watched the spinning lights atop the vehicle. She wanted those for her room, to guard over her as she slept, if she ever dared to sleep at night again.

  She smiled and pretended to be okay, but she knew it would be a long time before that were true again. She squeezed Merwin around his waist as her tear ducts threatened to burst. “Well, I know one thing for sure. From here on out, I’ll be sleeping with the lights on,” she said, trying to lighten the mood and stop herself from crying.

  Merwin stroked his beard. “You and me both, Abigail. You and me both.”

  Epilogue

  Life for her had ended and begun at the lake. The park remained empty through the summer, closed as the police searched for the bodies of six people who had gone missing and were presumed dead and for the man the police suspected had killed them. Rumors of something foul, something evil lingering at the lake and hiding there, spread throughout the community and the nearby campus. Wildfires fueled the hysteria and hindered law enforcement’s chances of finding anything there except ash and dirt. It seemed that every time firefighters put out one blaze, a new one started in another section of the park.

  Authorities suspected arson. They had yet to make an arrest.

  No one was allowed into Galveston State Park, but she went anyway. Every day.

  “Never have to be alone.” Voices rose from the depths. They were always present, always pleading. “Join us.”

  I’m here, too, Tyler’s voice spoke inside her head. I let you escape. I let you live. We care about you.

  She ignored his voice easily enough. Staring out over the still black water, she felt a certain peace knowing those things were trapped below the surface, at least while the sun ran its course across the sky.

  Be here for us, another voice would say. The creatures were cruel sons of bitches. This voice was harder to ignore, but she had learned to steel herself against it. We were always there for you, Sis.

  On the side of the lake she had selected that day, nature still thrived. Many innocent creatures lived there, plenty for the evil creatures to feed on. She took a long pull off of her cigarette. Ashes blew in the wind, carried with the voices of those the world would never encounter, not if she could help it.

  She flicked her cigarette into the dry brush and walked away.

  Jason Parent is an author of horror, thrillers, mysteries, science fiction and dark humor, though his many novels, novellas, and short stories tend to blur the boundaries between these genres. From his EPIC and eFestival Independent Book Award finalist first novel, What Hides Within, to his widely applauded police procedural/supernatural thriller, Seeing Evil, Jason’s work has won him praise from both critics and fans of diverse genres alike. His work has been compared to that of some of his personal favorite authors, such as Chuck Palahniuk, Jack Ketchum, Tess Gerritsen, and Joe Hill.

  Jason grew up near F
all River, Massachusetts, the setting for several of his novels. He has lived in New England most his life, currently residing in Rhode Island.