Authors: Tim Curran
Wenda tried to unwind, but she was as tense as a spring. She gripped the seat, trying to control her breathing. She felt like she was on the spiky edge of a panic attack. The bus jerked as it plowed through first one drift then veered slightly off to the right as it plowed through another. Snow enveloped the vehicle like sea fog, whirling and white, sounding like blowing sand against the windows.
“Take it easy,” Morris said.
Bailey was close to freaking out and once again, her voice got that shrill squeak to it that went right up Wenda’s spine like the tines of a fork. Megga was speaking quietly and soothingly to her, holding her hand. It was so out of character for Megga, who was not very different from the character she played on TV. She was just as morbid, just as cruel, just as twisted, maybe a little less horny, but that was about it. But Bailey and she had bonded. They were just as close off-screen as on. Geometric opposites in every way…but they were like sisters. Go figure. Megga had very little sympathy for anyone or anything, but she was more than sisterly with Bailey, almost motherly.
And maybe a little more than that,
Wenda often thought.
The bus moved on
down the road, which was greasy with the snow lying over sheets of blue ice. The tires were having trouble getting traction. Burt was swearing as he tried to get it under control, but the bus seemed to be moving of its own volition now—hydroplaning over the road and getting far too close to the encroaching snowbanks.
“Shit,” Morris said.
Bailey muttered, “Oh God, oh God.”
“YEAH!” Reg cried out. “POUR IT ON, MAN
! WOO-HOO!”
Morris told him to shut the hell up. Doc Blood mused on the fragility of life on the earthly plane. Wenda gripped her seat like it was the bucket of a Ferris wheel coming over the big loop and careening earthward. The bus jerked and thumped, bursting through drifts and each one made it swerve uneasily while Burt fought to get it under control. Nobody was saying a thing as they punched through another drift and the windshield was covered in snow. The bus began to
swerve again, Burt swearing as it started to go sideways into a spin and they all were thinking the same thing:
we’re going to roll, we’re going to roll right over and be trapped in this goddamn iron coffin.
But, as before, Burt got
it under control so they were moving in a straight line. The only problem being that the road was so slippery coming down the caning hillside that the brakes were pretty much useless to slow it down, its own weight pushing it forward and making it gather speed.
Then the road leveled out and the bus slowed incrementally and Burt sighed. “Jesus H. Christ, that was close,” he said.
Everyone took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly, deciding that they might indeed live through this one. The town was maybe a half a block away now and they were honest-to-God going to make it. The tension bled off them like steam from a pressure cooker.
And then Burt cried out:
“HOLY SHIT! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?”
No time for speculation:
the bus hit it, whatever it was.
The bumper smashed into it and there rose up a manic, unearthly squealing of rage and agony as it was dragged beneath them, the tires thumping over it
.
Bailey let out a
short, sharp, economical sort of scream.
And Burt lost control of the bus.
Trying to pump the brakes and work the wheel at the same time, the bus swung to the left and right, bumped off one snow bank then the other, spinning around and throwing anyone not belted in. Cameras and equipment not packed away went airborne, clattering to the floor. People were shouting. The bus did a complete 36
0
°, then blasted through a snow bank in an eruption of white, found a ditch, and came to a jarring rest.
“Is anyone hurt?” Morris said as he got out of his belt.
“No, just banged around,” Doc Blood said.
“We’re okay,” Megga announced, speaking for herself and Bailey.
“What a fucking rush, man!” Reg said.
Mole didn’t think it was much of a rush because his laptop had taken a good beating and it appeared as if its days of surfing were over. Burt was digging under the dashboard for the
emergency kit, which was about the size of a suitcase. He got a flashlight out.
“What did we hit?” Wenda asked.
“Some kind of animal,” he said.
“Can we be more specific?” Doc put to him.
Burt just shook his head. “Don’t ask me. I grew up in fucking Brooklyn. What do I know of animals? I don’t know tit about nature.”
“It wasn’t an animal,” Megga said.
Everyone looked at her. In the dim overhead light her eyes were almond-shaped, wet and dark. “I saw it. It came running across the road. It was a woman.”
Bailey gasped.
“It weren’t no fucking woman,” Burt said. “It was running on all fours. It had a mane like a fucking wolf. That’s all I saw…before we hit it.”
“Then it could be manslaughter,” Mole said.
Reg whistled. “Whoa.”
Burt glared at him, but before he could say a thing, Morris intervened. “You shut the fuck up with that talk,” he warned Mole.
“It was a woman,” Megga maintained.
“It was a fucking animal,” Burt said, getting red in the face and ready to start swinging.
Morris stepped in front of him. “You just thought it was a woman.”
Megga shook her head. “No, it was a woman and
she was running on all fours.”
5
Burt did not like where any of this was going and if they thought they were going to hang him for running down some fucking animal, then they had another thing coming. But he
was
scared. He was scared bone-deep. He was sure it had been an animal. He’d only seen it for a second or two, maybe less, but it had been an animal. It had hair like an animal and right before the bus hit it, he had seen its eyes flash up at him in the headlights, silver and feral. No, he had not hit any woman regardless of what that fucking hot-shit little whore said.
Yet, he was scared.
He was confused, mixed-up, doubting what he had seen and he could see the others were, too. And that scared him. Scared him because when he was nineteen he’d been involved in a hit-and-run and almost went to prison because of it. The guy he’d run down—some shit worthless drunk who staggered out into the street—had been all right. Leg broken but that was about it. The only thing that had gotten Burt in trouble was the fact that he’d panicked and drove off. Three hours later, he turned himself in. The bulls at the precinct had not gone real easy on him about it, telling him he’d be doing hard time and that was because Burt had half a dozen traffic violations on his record by that point.
But, hell, his driving record had been spotless since then.
He knew he had to calm down. He got funny when he was put up against the wall like this. He got pissed-off and irrational and his first instinct was to take a poke at somebody.
Just cool off, take it easy. That was no woman and you know it.
He slapped the flashlight against his leg. “Listen, Miss,” he said to Megga, keeping his voice modulated, his tone even. “I don’t know what you saw, but I saw an animal. People don’t run on all fours.”
“Normal people anyway,” Morris put it.
And Burt could see it in Megga’s eyes:
Who said it was normal?
“Dude,” Reg said, “why the fuck are we debating this? Whatever it was, it ran out in front of us. It’s nobody’s fault. Just an accident.”
“Ah, the voice of reason,” Doc said.
Wenda nodded. “Let’s just go look for godsake. This is stupid.”
Morris opened his mouth to concur with that, but he never said a word because it was at that moment that a wailing rose up…eerie and unnatural, not the sound of an animal or a woman, but maybe—as incredulous as it sounded—the wailing of an animal
imitating
a woman. Whatever it was, it was in pain, shrieking out its death throes. The sound was hysterical and piercing, chilling. The last sort of thing anyone wanted to hear in the desolation of a blizzard now that night had come on.
Burt was shaking.
It was warm in the bus, but he was still shaking. The sound of that…that
thing
out there was getting down inside him and filling him with brittle white ice. His flesh was creeping from his belly to his throat and he figured the last thing he wanted to do was go out there and look at something that made sounds like that.
“C’mon,” Morris said, stepping towards the door. “Let’s go see. Whatever it is, it’s still alive.”
Everyone pushed towards the door with him and that keening cry rose up again, echoing off into the desertion of the storm.
6
“What the hell?”
Megga was staring at it, the thing they had not only hit, but dragged and stretched over the road. She had been at Morris’s side as they climbed up out of the snowy ditch and onto the icy pavement. She was one of the first to see it.
“Damn,” Reg said.
“Oh my God,” Bailey said, turning away, making gagging sounds like she might throw up.
The rest of them were not too far from that themselves.
They stood in a loose semi-circle, the wind moaning and blowing snow down the road and into their faces, biting and cold, bleaching the color from their cheeks. The road itself was like a long tunnel with the snowbanks rising up six feet or more to either side.
What the bus had hit was spread out an easy thirty feet. The snow was red with blood and it was easy to see the point of original impact where the
animal
had gotten struck, then caught under the bus, pulled apart, dragged, and finally released to die on the icy road. The blood patterns were very specific. Already, the falling snow was covering them, but there was a lot of it, plenty to raise the gorge of the staunchest stomachs.
What they had hit should have been dead.
But it did not appear to be as close to death as it should have been: in fact, despite the degree of mutilation, it was unpleasantly alive, filled with a shuddering diabolic vitality.
Bailey had to hang back as did Mole.
Morris and Megga, Doc and Wenda stepped forward with Burt right behind them. He was hesitant, as if he simultaneously wanted to see and he wanted anything but. Reg came pounding up behind them, brushing snow off himself. When he had caught sight of the thing he had jogged back to the bus for his HD camcorder. This, in his thinking, had to be captured for posterity.
As Wenda looked at the
creature, bile coming up the back of her throat, she could only think:
What in the fuck is that?
She saw the furry hindquarters of what looked to be a dog, a very
large
dog. Its legs were still kicking with reflexive action, tail slapping the snow with jerking motions. The fur was patchy and silver, almost threadbare in places and she could see skin beneath that…a smooth alabaster skin that looked very un-dog like. But what disturbed her most, made something in her head feel like it wanted to take wing and fly right out of her skull, were the hind paws. They didn’t look much like paws at all but feet, human feet…they were too long to be the paws of a dog and the black talons seemed to be sprouting from what could be nothing but human toes. Or something quite similar.
Morris swept the light up and they saw that the dog just ended above those hindquarters. It had been cut in half like someone had taken a scissors to it and snipped it neatly. There was an explosion of gore that had soaked into the snow and splattered in all directions, creating something like cherry ice. The flashlight beam revealed that the hindquarters, though sheared from the rest of the animal, were
not disconnected. Slimy, bloody ropes of tissue and bowel connected them to the rest of the creature a good distance away. The snow was dyed red, bone and organ and assorted meat tossed about. Morris followed the train of tissue to the front quarters of the animal and it was even worse.
This can’t be,
Wenda thought, as the light revealed a ladder of spinal vertebrae that had been broken and scattered like a child’s blocks.
I can’t be seeing this…I can’t be.
She kept staring. Her eyes felt like they were painted on and she couldn’t have blinked if she wanted to.
The front quarters looked much like the rear—the same patchy silver fur, the white skin showing through—but the paws were absolutely hairless and they ended in very human fingers that clawed in the snow.
The rest of the carcass was not dog, it was human…it was a woman.
It was a thing that had been severed at the waist, the anatomy tangled up with the kicking animal hindquarters farther back. Her flesh was perfectly white, tufts of fur greased with frozen blood standing up like clocksprings.
The left side of her ribcage was smashed flat, the right set with a small round breast with a jutting nipple.
Her shoulders were broad, almost athletic, the neckline sweeping almost elegantly to a head that was not completely human and not completely canine, but a combination of both.