14
Brian Bartlett wished he’d stayed at the station house with Mary. Or better yet, that they’d both barricaded themselves in their market and waited out this mess. Although the place was called Soucey’s after Mary’s deceased father, and as a result everyone always thought of it now as her place, the store had become Brian’s home, too.
Mary had wanted to leave Refuge, and if she had, Brian would have followed her. But they had stayed and made a life here. And now something—some crazy thing that sent their town to horrific places—was threatening their lives and home.
Brian liked the life they’d made, even if he didn’t much care for his fellow New Englanders. He’d never told anyone—not even Mary—but he’d always planned to get out of town, too. But not without Mary. Not a chance.
Now, looking out at the dark night ripped alive by the soaring flames of the bonfires, he wished he’d grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off to California or Hawaii. Hell, Siberia would be an improvement.
He stood on the town line with four other men. He’d known them all his whole life, but he’d only ever really been friends with Jim Calloway. The others were guys he’d known, but never liked much. Frank Billings, Ted Drake and Billy West had all been jerks in school. As adults, they’d gotten worse. The only good thing about each of them was that their present circumstances had made them all serious and quiet.
The asphalt ended just past Brian’s toes. Below him, the eerie city of this world lay at the bottom of a sloping hill of dirt and rock, cast in high contrast black shadows and orange fire-light. The city was probably two miles away, cut off from Refuge by strings of rocks—if they were rocks—that ground up and down through the sediment, like giant whack-a-moles. He could hear the screaming. Despite coming from a great distance, it sounded loud here. Close. It sent a shiver up his spine every time he heard a fresh bout of the wailing on the breeze. This close to the city and the fires, the smoke was thicker, like a foggy morning before the sunrise. But the light from the fires illuminated the smoky haze, like lighting effects at a rock concert.
He could make out the walls of the strange labyrinth in the distance. Twisting and turning in and around, with protrusions here and there, like towers. Curving structures swept up and over the walls in places and dropped back into the maze in other places. For the first two hours of their watch, they hadn’t seen anything moving down there.
But that had changed.
A lone figure walked out of the main avenue of the labyrinth twenty minutes ago. They could see him through a telescope. He wore a white helmet of some sort. The details were lost in the smoke. He carried what looked like a long pipe, dragging it on the ground as he walked. Whatever it was, it looked heavy. He looked strong, but his arms were wrapped in some kind of dark sleeves or maybe armor.
Only one thing was certain; the man was headed in their direction. He never wavered in his trajectory. He strode forward, straight as an arrow, and would soon arrive at the parked Humvee, where five terrified men stood watch.
When the man reached the halfway point to the town’s border, Billings asked whether they should radio it in.
In typical fashion, West pointed out that it was only one guy, and even though he looked big, they were each armed with M-16s. They could take him if it came to that. Drake suggested the man might be a messenger, but the way he said it sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. The puffing of chests had begun.
Brian said nothing, and Jim stood next to him, likewise lost in his own thoughts.
The big man continued toward them, one trudging step up the incline after another. Jim forgot that he had the telescope in his hand, and Brian took it from him, zooming in on the guy.
The lens focused on the man’s chest. He put Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame. The muscular pecks looked like a solid wall of flesh. Brian shifted the view sideways. Dark, twisted coils of rope, or resin or something like that, covered the man’s arms. It looked like a roiling mess of snakes had crawled up onto his arms and frozen in place. They didn’t move.
Thank God for that
.
The man’s pants were linen or cloth, but his feet looked like they were clad in boots made from large reptile feet with claws on the ends—
or are those his feet?
And holy shit! Is that a tail?
Brian pulled the telescope away from his eye and looked unaided for a second, then brought the scope back up. Yes, the man had a long tapering tail like… Brian shivered. Like one of those strange fire-breathing Gila monsters that had invaded the town. Although this guy’s tail looked bluish. Not orange and black. Different species maybe, but still reptilian.
Brian could see now that the long thing the man dragged behind him was a black lance or pike. It looked heavy.
The helmet—
God, I hope it’s a helmet
—was bone. Elongated, and ridged, with huge incisors pointing down like walrus tusks. The long skull looked far too long for it to be anything but a helmet.
It has to be a helmet.
It appeared to be the skull of some long-dead creature. An oversized snake, perhaps. As he followed the long skull teeth downward, he gasped. The front of the heavy helmet was held in place by the long, curved fangs, which arced down and pierced into the man’s prodigious chest. With each step, the body shifted and fresh blood trickled from the puncture wounds.
All of that was ghastly and intimidating. But something was off.
The scale
, he thought. He focused the telescope on the eyes of the skull-helmet. Rammed into the eye sockets of the monster skull were smaller skulls.
Human skulls.
Oh shit…
Brian pulled the telescope from his eye again and looked down the slope at the thing approaching them.
“The guy is at least fourteen feet tall. He’s massive,” Brian muttered.
“What are you talking about,” Billings snapped at him.
“He has
human skulls
for eyes. We don’t stand a chance.” Brian turned, looking at the road leading back to town. “We should leave. We’re
supposed
to leave. Not fight.”
“Like hell,” Drake said, then he swung the barrel of his M-16 up and fired at the approaching monstrosity.
The others took the cue and raised their own weapons, opening fire with a storm of bullets. Brian and Jim joined in, all of them firing in uncontrolled bursts.
Their target merely raised his free arm, the snake gauntlet acting as a shield and deflecting the oncoming storm of lead.
And then he started running up the slope.
Each footfall shook the ground beneath their feet.
The giant man emerged from the smoky haze and hefted his long pike, raising it up like a sword. The man—if he was a man—stood twice Brian’s height.
Magazines ran dry, and the barking of the M-16s stopped.
Then the slaughter commenced.
As the men fell apart, literally, all Brian could focus on was the man’s fearless skull eyes.
15
“What are those?” Frost asked Griffin, inclining her head toward the keys he jingled in his hand, as he sat in the passenger seat of the cruiser.
“Oh,” Griffin said, as if just realizing he’d been playing with the keys. “Kyle asked me to bring his bike back from the farm.”
Dodge and the Turkette woman were silent in the back. They were heading back out to the farm, an unlikely group ready to confront Ellison, and if they found her, Barnes. Frost still couldn’t wrap her head around the notion that Julie Barnes even owned a gun—let alone shot Cash with one.
They were armed to the teeth, but the weapons didn’t give Frost any comfort. The recent revelation that no one could heal from their wounds in this world, meant that any wound could be fatal. She felt fine, herself, and she was glad that she didn’t have any injuries. But she’d noticed Griffin scratching the still-healing lizard bite on his arm. She wanted to ask him how the wound had been faring before the recent shift, but she dreaded hearing a truthful answer from him.
We have to get home. We’re all dying on this cosmic Ferris wheel. Some just faster than others. It’s time to get off the ride.
She turned the cruiser onto the gravel drive of the farm. The last time she’d been out here, she noticed a beat up pickup parked on the side of the drive. It was gone now. She knew it didn’t belong to Laurie, Kyle or Cash and had assumed Charley had somehow gotten a hold of another truck. She didn’t think he could have made it out here on foot.
She wondered where the man had gotten another truck, but then her thoughts turned to the idea of him charging blindly into the tunnel after Barnes.
Where did Charley Wilson suddenly find courage, if not in a bottle?
She recalled his feat of withstanding torture out at the National Guard depot, and decided to give the man an easier time of it, the next time they met. There was more to Charley than met the eye. Frost glanced in the rearview mirror at Dodge, as she put the car in park and killed the engine. She’d misjudged him, too.
If there’s one good thing coming out of this mess, it’s that people are showing their true colors.
Although with Barnes, that hadn’t been a good thing.
Griffin got out of the car, rubbing one of his shoulders. “So where’s this bunker?”
Dodge slid out of the car on Griffin’s side and pointed across the field.
Suddenly there was a brilliant flare of illumination, and everyone threw their hands and arms up in front of their faces to ward of the hideous glare. When Frost lowered her hand, the smoky air was white instead of dark.
“Holy crap, I think that was just dawn,” Turkette said. The woman squinted and peered across the hazy field.
“As abrupt as nightfall,” Dodge commented.
“But that was just a couple of hours ago,” Frost looked at her watch. “Two and half hours, to be exact.”
“The answers are this way,” Griffin said, gun in hand as he stalked across the field, taking the lead. Frost didn’t mind. She was still getting the hang of filling Becky’s shoes, but she definitely felt more comfortable organizing people than she did on the hunt. She had known all along that she would take a back seat to Griffin when it came time to confront whoever or whatever was behind the shifts.
She raised her service pistol, and walked after him, Dodge and Turkette joining her, each armed with an M-16. It was cold, and despite the smoky haze, a light snow began to fall. At first Frost cringed at the thought of it, after the falling ash in one of the previous shift-worlds, but a flake landed in her outstretched hand and she was sure it was normal snow. The cloud of her breath was more assurance.
Griffin stopped, and Frost caught up with him near the tunnel door. The rusted metal slab was ajar, the mouth to the tunnel yawning open in darkness. Spewed around the area in front of the door were several splotches of dark crimson blood—some of them where Cash had been sitting—but most were new additions to the landscape.
Hideous chimera creatures, part bat, part human and who knows what else, littered the overgrown grass around the concrete structure. Human limbs were merged with three-foot-wide bat wings. The bodies in the center, where the wings came together, resembled feathered birds. Long gums, like raw red meat, pushed through the dark feathers. An odd assortment of oversized teeth—some sharp, others not—erupted from the gums. It was like a wide open mouth that attempted to swallow a giant bat, a raven and two full grown men.
Each creature was different, but each, wounded and crumpled in on itself, occupied no more than a four foot radius. There were seven of them. All dead. One looked like it had been bashed against the inside of the metal door. The others all had small bleeding wounds. She thought of the savage version of Griffin, but the injuries didn’t look like the wide puncture wounds of a javelin. No. Except for the one against the door, the others all had gunshot wounds.
Someone had killed seven of the creatures.
“Charley couldn’t have done this, could he?” Dodge asked.
“Truck is gone. Maybe he made it to safety,” Frost said.
Griffin squatted down, and pulled a black knife from a sheath under his jacket. He flipped over the body of one of the dead creatures. It had two white human legs, about two feet long, like the legs of a short woman. Or maybe a child. Where there should have been genitals and hips, the legs were joined to a spherical mass of black feathers. On one side, a three-foot-long brown bat wing stretched out. The wing on the other side was missing. Like a Mohawk up the center of the thing’s body, was a single row of rotted fangs or claws. It didn’t seem to have any eyes or ears, or even a nose. As far as Frost could tell, it didn’t have a mouth either. Just the spikes.
Griffin looked up at Frost. “When I painted these things, I never thought they could actually fly.”
“Not funny,” she replied.
“Wasn’t trying to be,” Griffin said. “These things are either all dead or if there were more, they bolted.”
He stood up, and the radio on his belt crackled to life. Frost’s did the same, and hearing the stereo burst of static made everyone jump.
“Griffin, come in.” Winslow’s voice, and he sounded panicked.
Griffin holstered his gun, and quickly sheathed the knife, before snatching the radio from his belt. “What’s up?”
“I’m sorry, Griffin. We think something took Lony.”
Frost stopped breathing.
Oh no.
“What?” Griffin said. “Tell me. Where is she?”
“She had gone up to the tower on the roof. But the telescope is smashed, and we found her water bottles. Something took her. The guards at the station’s front door saw her...in the sky. She was being carried. Toward the city. I’m sending more men to meet you at the border…”
But Griffin had already dropped the radio and started sprinting across the field. Frost and the others watched as he mounted the Ducati, jammed the key in the ignition, and brought the engine to life with a roar. The back wheel slid around, spraying gravel at her cruiser and into the field, and then he was gone.