by Jeremy Bates
And Ellie speaking calmly and omnisciently to her: Mommy, I’m safe. I’m okay. Don’t die, okay? I’m coming home now. I want to see you. Don’t die. Please come back, please open your eyes, please be there for me—
Tabitha opened her eyes. Choking. Vomiting brackish water. A man pushing on her chest, then rolling her onto her side, patting her back, talking to her.
She tried to speak but only made a strangled noise.
On her second attempt she managed, “Ellie?”
“She’s okay,” the man said.
CHAPTER 25
“Yuck!” Bobby said, pinching his nose closed with his fingers.
“I told you,” Ellie said. “It smells like a toilet.”
Bobby leaned forward hesitantly again to smell the monster-stench on Ellie’s tee-shirt. He scrunched up his face. “Like a wet toilet. Why didn’t the monster eat you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was full? There were bones everywhere.”
“Human bones?”
“Maybe.”
“Were you scared?”
“A little bit. You would be too.”
“Maybe.”
“You would be. I promise. It was real dark too.”
“When’s my dad coming back?”
“He said he’d meet me here.”
“Are you sure he killed the monster?”
“Pretty sure. There was a big boom. It was so loud it made me fall over.”
“Sound can’t make you fall over. It’s invisible.”
“Well, it did.”
“Can I try on the policeman’s jacket?”
Ellie clutched it tightly around her neck. “No. He said only I could wear it.”
“Just for a second.”
“He’ll get mad.”
“Please?”
“It’s too big for you.”
“It’s too big for you too!” Bobby reached for it.
Ellie shrieked. “Stop it! You’re not allowed!”
Bobby gave up. He didn’t want the policeman to get mad and lock him up in jail. “Do you think we’re allowed downstairs now?”
“I don’t know.” She raised her voice. “Mr. Policeman?”
“Yeah?” a voice came back.
“Can we come down now?”
“You’re better off up there.”
“But we’re bored!”
“Stay there!”
The policeman kept talking, and it took Bobby a moment to realize it was no longer to them. “I think my dad’s back!” he said.
They both hopped off the bed and ran to the top of the stairs.
“Ellie?” a woman called. Her voice was so high-pitched and hyper Bobby didn’t immediately recognize it as belonging to Ellie’s mom.
“Mommy!” Ellie cried out. She raced down the stairs.
Bobby hesitated a moment, then followed.
When he reached the bottom, Ellie’s mom was on her knees and had Ellie in a big hug, kissing her about a thousand times all over her face.
“Baby baby baby baby,” she kept saying over and over again between kisses.
Ellie was giggling madly. “It tickles! Stop! It tickles!”
Bobby noticed the two policemen. They had just pushed past the afghan and entered the room. The older one was soaking wet.
Ellie’s mom said, “Where’s Rex, baby?”
Ellie shrugged. “He stayed back in the cave to fight the monster.”
“What?” She looked at the policemen. “Where’s Rex? Rex Chapman? He’s my boyfriend. He saved my daughter.” She looked back at Ellie, confused. “How did you get back here without Rex? Where is he? Where’s Rex? Where is he?”
***
Tabitha listened in stunned silence to Ellie describe what occurred in the cave, myriad questions immediately demanding answers. Had Rex defeated the Mosquito Man? What was the bang that knocked Ellie to the ground? Why wasn’t Rex back already? Was he injured? Lost? Dead?
Tabitha turned to the policemen. “We need to find Rex. We need to help him. He could be injured or lost or… I don’t know! But we need to help him.”
The older officer with the short black buzz cut and grizzled jawline said, “We don’t know where this cave is. It will be light shortly. When the rain dies down—”
“There were train tracks in the cave,” Ellie said. “But I didn’t see a train anywhere.”
Train tracks? Tabitha thought. Then, “A mine! She must mean Rex is in an old mine.”
The cop nodded. “There are plenty of abandoned mines around these parts. That certainly helps. But without a map—”
“I know you don’t believe her,” Tabitha said, cutting him off. “But she’s telling the truth about this creature. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s real. It took her. And she says there’s more than one. So Rex is in real danger—” The older policeman began to say something, but she spoke over him. “You don’t have to believe whether the creature is real or not. It doesn’t matter. But Rex is in danger. You can believe that, can’t you? He’s out there and he’s in danger, so we can’t just sit around here and do nothing until morning comes.”
The younger cop—her age, maybe, and smiling sympathetically—cocked his head, as if he could hear something no one else could.
But then Tabitha heard the ambulance siren too.
The older cop said, “Excuse us for a moment.”
They left the room.
***
The paramedics—Rahul Garcia and Andy Macmillan—loaded Paul Harris onto a portable stretcher and carried him to the ambulance parked at the end of the driveway.
Andy, who was as skinny as Rahul was stocky, said to Constable Stephen Garlund, “Watch yourself, Steve. Whoever made that cut has got something big and sharp. Sick sonofabitch.”
Garlund asked, “How far behind you is backup?”
“Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“Better get going then.”
Rahul lugged his ample weight up into the ambulance’s cargo hold so he could monitor Paul Harris on the drive to Whistler Blackcomb, while Andy got behind the wheel. A few moments later the vehicle was reversing down the driveway, gumballs flashing.
Garlund turned to Dunn. “Wish I hadn’t quit smoking. Could use a cigarette right now.”
“You need to get inside and get dry,” Dunn said.
The rain had lessoned to a hard drizzle, but Garlund was already so wet he hardly noticed. “What the hell’s going on here, Hoops? Cabin’s all barricaded up like it’s Night of the Living Dead or something. Girlfriend nearly drowned in the lake. Boyfriend’s nowhere to be found. Little girl’s running around the woods and spinning stories about a giant insect.”
“I don’t know what’s gone down here, Steve,” Dunn said, “but we’re not going to find any answers standing around out here in the rain. Now c’mon—” He frowned.
Garlund heard it too.
A strange whining sound, getting louder.
CHAPTER 26
When Tabitha finished drying off Ellie with a fluffy white towel, she draped it around her daughter’s shoulders and said, “Baby? A little while ago, did you have…a feeling…that maybe something bad was going to happen to me? Like…I don’t know…like maybe I was going to fall in the lake?”
Ellie frowned. “But I was in the monster’s cave, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“So how could I know?”
She couldn’t, of course. Nevertheless, Tabitha couldn’t stop thinking about those eternal moments while she’d been drowning, and Ellie’s voice had been in her head, telling her that she was safe, that she was coming home, that she needed Tabitha to open her eyes, to be there for her when she returned.
Had those words been the hallucinations of a dying mind? Or had Ellie really communicated to her? Had they shared some sort of mother-daughter supernatural bond?
Tabitha sighed to herself, knowing these were questions to which she would likely never find answers. “It doesn’t matter, I guess, honey,”
she said, kissing her daughter on her ruddy cheek. “All that matters is that you’re safe. And it’s all over now.”
“But T-Rex isn’t home yet.”
“We’re going to find Rex, honey. First thing in the morning—”
Something crashed upstairs.
Wings whined, stopped, whined.
Ellie and Bobby cried out in unison.
Another crash.
No, God, please, no! Why? Tabitha thought in instant hysterics. Without wasting another moment, she grabbed the kids’ hands and ran. She threw open the cabin’s front door and all but tossed Ellie and Bobby outside ahead of her. She had no idea where they were going, only that they had to get far away—
The kids screamed.
Tabitha saw it too.
A dozen yards away one of the hellish creatures was perched on top of the young officer, its proboscis plugged deep into the man’s chest, right where his heart would be, no doubt slurping up blood. The older officer was fleeing from this ghastly scene when suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, a different creature swooped down from the darkness. Its pincers snatched the cop by the shoulders and lifted him, kicking and shouting, a few feet into the air.
Someone was moaning, a sound of utter despair, and Tabitha realized belatedly it was coming from her throat.
We’re not getting out of this alive, are we?
From behind her came another crash. She spun around and found one of the creatures standing in the doorway a scant two yards away.
The kids’ screams jumped several octaves higher.
“Run!” Tabitha shouted to them. “Hide! Don’t wait for me!”
“Mommy, no!” Ellie shrieked.
“Go! Now!”
Tabitha had never in her life placed an aggressive hand on a child, but right then she did just that, shoving Ellie and Bobby away from her with tremendous force. They lurched forward. Ellie fell flat on her face. She glanced back over her shoulder.
“Go!” Tabitha shouted. “Hide!” Without waiting to see whether they obeyed her instructions, she whirled about to face the creature once more.
It was staring straight ahead, and she couldn’t tell if it was looking at her or the kids.
Probably both, she thought frenziedly. Probably can see everywhere at once with those goddamn buggy eyes.
“Hey!” she said, waving her hands over her head while angling slowly away from it. “Leave them alone! I’m right here!”
The creature’s head swiveled on its pinched neck to look directly at her.
“Yeah, me!” she said, still angling away.
It stepped through the door, walking unashamedly upright on its two thick legs, its abdomen dangling between them like an obscene phallus.
Tabitha glanced behind her.
The farthest creature had given up trying to carry the older police officer away and had instead dropped him to the ground, where it now stood over him, stabbing him repeatedly with its pincers. The closer creature was staring at her, its blood meal forgotten.
A few feet from it, the young officer’s pistol lay on the ground.
Tabitha sprinted toward it.
The creature stood.
In one fluid motion she snatched up the gun and aimed the barrel at its hideous face and triple-tapped the trigger, landing three precision shots directly between its antennae.
Before its body hit the ground she was aiming past it, down the sight.
Pop, pop, pop.
The creature atop the older policeman flew backward.
She was already turning, aiming again, finger taking up slack in the trigger.
The final creature that had followed her through the doorway was nearly upon her, coming fast, wings whining at a fever pitch, pincers shearing the air, proboscis erect.
She fired at point-blank range.
The slug blew a large hole through the demonic thing’s head. Its momentum propelled it onto its chest, directly at her feet, where its wings ceased beating and its limbs twitched robotically.
Tabitha was about to cry out in triumph when she heard a distant drone, growing louder by the second. She looked up into the night sky and realized it wasn’t a fourth creature approaching.
It was an entire swarm.
***
Bobby saw the broken-down car through the trees. It was the one his dad had shown him the day before. He remembered the trunk, wondering if it held any treasure, and he said to Ellie, “We can hide in the trunk!”
They were both huffing and puffing and ready to fall over, and Ellie didn’t even try to argue with him.
They stopped when they reached the car. Bobby lifted the trunk lid, and they climbed inside one after the other. Bobby cut his hand on a bit of sharp metal while closing the lid over them, and he bit back a cry.
It was wet and musty in the dark, cramped space. There were holes in the rusted metal too, big enough he could probably stick his arm through one and touch the ground.
Bobby thought about trying this, but decided to suck his bleeding finger instead, unbothered by the sour taste of the blood.
Ellie whispered, “Will they find us in here?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “There’s a lot of them now.”
“I want my Mommy—”
“Shhh!” he said.
One of the monsters had landed nearby.
Bobby could hear its wings separate from all the other wings way up in the sky. They stopped beating a moment later, but he knew it was still out there. Coming for them, tiptoeing so they didn’t hear it. Any second now it would open the trunk and grin down at them. They would be trapped. Two yummy human children to eat. It would gobble them up—but then maybe it would be too heavy to fly away. It would have to walk back to its cave. Maybe it would be so tired when it got there that it would go to sleep, giving him and Ellie a chance to escape. They could crawl quietly out of its tummy and fill it up with big rocks instead, so when it woke up it still thought they were inside it. And when it went to get a drink, it would fall in the water and drown because it was so heavy. Didn’t his dad read him some book in which all this happened? Only the monster in the book was a wolf, and the kids it ate were goats…
“Stop!” Ellie said.
Bobby frowned, not knowing who she was speaking to.
She moved, and then he heard something else moving too, something small and quick. It was running around inside the trunk.
It brushed his hand, which he jerked back in fright.
The thing squeaked, then fell out of the trunk through one of the holes. He heard it thump against the ground. A moment later he heard it scuttling away from them, through the carpet of wet leaves.
It squeaked again—which ended abruptly.
Then Bobby heard a kind of slurping, like when he’s trying to get the final few sips of a milkshake with a straw.
This didn’t last long, however, and was replaced by the whining of wings.
The monster was taking off!
He listened as it flew higher and higher into the sky—and that was when he realized all the other wings weren’t as loud as they were before.
“I think they’re going away!” Ellie said.
“I think so too!” Bobby said.
“Should we go look?”
“I don’t want to.”
“But I need to go check on Miss Chippy. I found her hiding in the bathroom earlier. She got out of my pocket, and I think the monster got her.”
“I think it drank her blood.”
“Yeah,” Ellie said glumly. “I think it did too.”
***
Tabitha had fled into the forest when the sky filled with the sound of wings. She had not called out to either Ellie or Bobby, knowing if they responded they would reveal their location to the creatures. Instead she prayed they had found a spot to hide, and she hid too, dropping down beside a fallen tree trunk and shoving herself as far beneath it as she could. For what seemed like an eternity the only sounds were her heartbeat thudding in her ears, and the dr
one of wings above her. But eventually the night went quiet again, and when it did, and she was certain the last of the creatures had departed, she got to her feet and called to the kids.
“Mommy!” Ellie’s voice came back, from not too far away.
***
Hunt hunt, eat eat, drink drink, sleep sleep. These were the instincts the creature experienced on a regular basis. But the nest had been attacked. Some of the hive had been killed. And even if the creature did not understand the concept of revenge, or the notion of justice, or experience emotions such as love and loss and hate, it nevertheless understood the new, urgent imperative ticking loudly inside its head: defend defend.
Which required seeking out and eliminating the invaders.
So the creature continued its patrol back and forth through the night sky, the dark forest below reflected in a kaleidoscope of images on its fisheye lenses, while it used both its sight and scent to search for the invaders or those related to them.
When it could no longer detect any remaining threats, it changed course, following its brethren north. The old nest was no longer safe. They needed to find a new one. Somewhere dark, somewhere underground.
By the time the fiery reds and oranges of dawn began to light the horizon, the creature was no longer thinking any of these thoughts—it had never really been thinking them in the first place, merely acting upon them—and its primitive mind had once more reverted to its usual refrain:
Hunt hunt, eat eat, drink drink, sleep sleep.
EPILOGUE
A FEW MONTHS LATER
For the third time in seven days, Paul Harris drove out to Pavilion Lake.
He parked the aging Crown Victoria alongside the road a little distance away from the RV-like mobile command center, and the caravan of government-black SUVS used to ferry the NASA scientists and engineers back and forth each day from Lillooet, where they were staying in the scattering of modest motels that the town offered.