Exodus (15 page)

“Rhiannon,” Emily yelled. “Cover your brother’s eyes…
now
!”

Emily pushed the accelerator to the floor and slipped the gear stick into the drive position. There was a squealing noise, and, in the rearview mirror, Emily saw smoke begin to fill the garage. What was she doing wrong? Why weren’t they moving?

Through the windshield, Emily could see Simon, and for a second her heart seemed to stop. He had undergone a stunning metamorphosis. His arms had rotated 180 degrees in their sockets and now jutted forward from each elbow. His legs were impossibly twisted at the knees, so he now walked on all fours rather than upright. The tentacle trailing from the back of Simon’s head pulsed once as it pushed something dark and viscous down its elongated length. Whatever that stuff was had an instant effect on Simon; his neck began to stretch inch by inch until, finally, it had grown in length by six inches or more.

“Oh no,” she squeaked as she fumbled with the gear stick, pushing it back into Park. What the hell am I doing wrong? What? She chanced another look outside.

Simon’s head arced back on his newly elongated neck, like a snake rising to strike. A trickle of black liquid that could have been blood, or spillover from whatever shit the thing controlling Simon had pumped into him, dribbled from the corners of his mouth. And then he leaped into the air, pushing himself into the air like some weird, alien grasshopper.

He landed with a resounding thud on the hood of the SUV.

Emily screamed and pulled the gear stick back into drive. The screeching of tires and the roar of the engine filled her ears again, but still they did not move, and with only a quarter inch of glass separating them, she stared into the black dead eyes of a monster that had once been Simon Keller.

“You have to take your foot off the brake,” Rhiannon yelled from the backseat just as Emily realized her mistake and yanked her foot from the pedal. The SUV shot forward, and Emily was pretty sure everyone inside the vehicle screamed at the same moment. It was hard for her to tell because her attention was completely focused on Simon; his twisted body blocked her view ahead of her.

He flew forward, hitting the windshield face-first, leaving a smear of black fluid behind as his body rolled up and onto the roof of the SUV. A second later and his misshapen face appeared at the passenger door window, his eyes searching for some way into the vehicle.

“Don’t look,” Emily yelled as she fought for control of the rapidly accelerating vehicle, but the warning came too late as she heard Rhiannon’s sorrowful scream of “Daddy?”

Anger flowed through Emily. She was going to end this…right here…right now.

She took her foot off the accelerator and hit the brake. The Dodge came to a sudden, jarring halt, and Emily saw Simon’s body fly through the air, the three tentacles trailing behind him like marionette strings. He landed on the concrete driveway in front of the car, rolled three times, then flipped to his feet and began to scuttle toward them again.

Emily floored the accelerator, and the SUV lurched forward.

Simon froze midstep, caught like the proverbial rabbit in the lights of the rapidly accelerating SUV. A fraction of a second before the vehicle would have flattened him, he leaped into the air and landed on the hood of the Durango, one misshapen hand clinging to the seam of the hood below the windshield wipers.

And then he was gone, as his fingers lost their grip and he tumbled sideways off the hood.

In the rearview mirror, Emily saw Simon’s body disappear into the white bank of smoke from her tires and then even that vanished as the SUV was swallowed by the darkness.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Emily yelled as the SUV continued to accelerate, careening along the gravel driveway, sending stones and rocks flying into the dark as the back end fishtailed wildly from side to side, its tires scrabbling for grip on the loose rock. The children’s screams from the back row of seats rang in her ears, but they were nothing compared to the screaming in her own head as she careened into the darkness.

Technically she had never learned to drive, never even been behind the wheel of a car or a truck before. But as her mind raced
to find some kind of previous experience that might help her out, she remembered a visit to Coney Island and the bumper cars attraction. The principle had to be the same, right? Press the pedal to go and release it to slow down while using the steering wheel to point the SUV in the direction you wanted to go.

In the fear-induced clarity of the moment, her mind seized that little bit of knowledge and held on to it like a shipwreck survivor holding on to a life preserver in the middle of an angry ocean. Who had she been trying to fool all this time? How freaking hard could it be to drive one of these things? After all, it was just an oversize bumper car at heart. Right? She glanced down at the speedometer; the arm was just below the forty-five miles per hour mark. In the second or so that she stared at it, the speedometer climbed up to just under fifty miles per hour.

Outside the rapidly accelerating vehicle, it was as though someone had dropped a curtain of black all around them as it plummeted through the darkness. She could see nothing on either side of her but vague shadows; the only light was the swath cut ahead of her by the powerful headlights. Emily had no idea where she was going, but for now the gravel path led only one way: forward. Away from the house and the Simon-thing that she had left there.

She glanced in the rearview mirror to check on the kids. She could hear both of them whimpering in the backseat, but she couldn’t tell if they were hurt or just frightened. Looking back over her right shoulder, she saw the two kids huddled together, still strapped in by their safety belts. Thor had disappeared from the seat, and she could not see him. A whimper from somewhere behind the passenger seat told her he had decided the floor of the Durango was probably a safer place to be for now.

When she turned back, the gravel road before them had disappeared, replaced by blacktop that curved away at a ninety-degree
angle to the right. In that split second of recognition, she already knew she was going too fast to make the turn, and before she could even decide whether to hit the brakes, the SUV had left the road and was in flight.

The Dodge smashed through a corrugated aluminum barrier that had been placed there to stop just such a thing from happening, although she was sure whoever had erected the barrier had never anticipated a nondriver with a vehicle full of kids being chased by their late father under the control of some shadowy alien. The SUV exploded off a grassy berm, and for a few long moments Emily knew what Commander Mulligan must have felt when she first experienced the weightlessness of space.

A second later the Durango hit the ground with a bone-snapping thump, teetering on its two left wheels before collapsing back down to the ground with another rattling crunch. The force of the impact lifted Emily from the seat, and, as the screams of Ben and Rhiannon filled the cabin again, her head whipped hard to the left, colliding with the glass of the window.

Her last thought before everything went black was that she was sorry she had not been able to save the children.

One second the world was normal, and the next Rhiannon was weightless, at least until the strap of the seat belt tugged her back down into the leather seats with a jarring slap. She was aware of her little brother next to her, his arms flailing as the SUV bumped and rattled over the ground. Her own limbs were useless to her as she was thrown around like the raggedy doll she had played with when she was little.

The first hint she had that the car had stopped was when she realized that the interior dome lights were on and there was a really annoying pinging coming from the front of the car. That was weird because just a second ago the entire cabin had been dark except for the instrument panel’s glow. She tried to lean forward, but the seat belt still held her firmly in its grasp, pinning her to the seat. The leather squeaked like one of her little brother’s farts as she wriggled her butt to try to free herself of the belt.

Rhiannon pushed against the restraints again, but they still held fast. When she dipped her head to look for the belt’s release
button, her neck spasmed painfully. “Owwww!” she cried, but she strained a little more anyway, until her thumb found the button and pressed. The clip popped from the receiver, and Rhiannon felt the belt’s grip loosen as it slid away.

Using the two front seats as leverage, she pulled herself forward until she could see Emily slumped in the driver’s seat, her head lolling forward, her hands loosely draped at her side.

Even in the dim glow of the car’s interior light, Rhiannon could see a bright splash of blood on the window of the driver’s door; strands of Emily’s hair were caught in the congealing blood. Rhiannon wasn’t sure whether the six-inch stain on the window was a lot of blood or not. It looked like it was a lot, but other than a few cuts and grazes, Rhiannon had rarely seen blood before. She reached out and tentatively touched Emily’s shoulder, shaking her gently. “Emily,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”

There was no response from the still form in the driver’s seat. Rhiannon leaned farther between the seats, ignoring the dull ache in her shoulders and across her chest. Emily’s eyes were closed, and Rhiannon could see a line of blood, already beginning to dry, trickling from the woman’s bottom lip and down her chin, dripping into a small pool that had soaked into her pants.

“Emily?” She gave her shoulder a final shake. Emily’s body slipped slowly sideways until her head once again connected with the bloody window.

A low whine from the backseat dragged Rhiannon’s attention away from Emily. Thor was standing on the ground outside the car, just visible in the umbra of the open rear passenger door. Rhiannon’s shocked mind began to assess exactly what was wrong with the
picture: the door was wide open—that was why the interior lights were on and the annoying pinging was still pulsing through the cabin. The seat next to hers, the one where her little brother had sat, was empty, the seat belt snapped neatly back against the back of the leather seat.

Something was missing.

Ben! He was nowhere to be seen.

How had she not noticed that? How had she forgotten about her little brother? Her head, still buzzing with that really annoying pinging from the front of the car, felt like it was going to explode any second. How had she forgotten Ben? The little dweeb was so annoying, he was going to be in soooo much trouble when Dad got ahold of his butt. He was going to be grounded for—

Thor’s bark cut through the static filling Rhiannon’s head. What had she been thinking? She had to find her little brother right now! She scooted over the seats to the open door. Thor was doing the canine equivalent of shuffling his feet nervously; his tail wagged enthusiastically when he saw Rhiannon moving his way.

The second Rhiannon’s feet hit the soft grass, Thor jumped into the space she had just exited. He sniffed curiously at Emily’s body; first the dried blood that had congealed on her chin, then down her neck and torso, and finally her arm that hung at her side. He gave a sad whine and pawed gently at her unmoving body.