Hag Night (5 page)

Rabies
vaccine.

The cure is worse than the curse, they say.

The needles felt red-hot as they pierced her stomach lining…

Megga came out it, trembling minutely and muttering under her breath.

The wolf-woman snarled as Reg videoed her, teeth gnashing from blackened gums as a speckled and very dog-like tongue licked away the blood and discharge that came bubbling up its throat. It growled at him, making guttural noises that were not exactly bestial but more like a wolf attempting speech. Its eyes locked with Burt’s and it growled out a string of garbled, phlegmy-sounding utterances.

“She said my name,” Burt said, nearly out of his mind with it. He began to back away.
“She said my fucking name.”

By this point, everyone but Reg and his camera had backed well away from the thing.

“It can’t speak,” Morris told him. “It’s a…it’s a…it ain’t fucking human.”

Megga
could have disagreed, but she didn’t.

She didn’t have the heart to.

Maybe what came out of the thing’s mouth was choked and garbled with the fluids filling its throat, but she had heard words, too. She was nearly certain of it.
Burt,
it had said.
Burt, Burt…BUUUUURRRRT.
If she needed more reason to come apart there it was.

The wolf-woman looked at her again.

And there was no denying it this time around: her mind, however briefly, brushed against Megga’s own and the pain was gigantic and terrible…it was not so much psychic invasion this time as a seam of pure, almost electric agony drilling right into her head. It felt like a cat had entrenched its claws in her brain and drawn them over the surface of her dura mater. The pain was beyond anything she had ever known or imagined could exist.

This time she did scream.

Involuntarily, her mouth sprang open and a shrill, piercing cry came out and by the time it did, it was simply too late to stop it. The others momentarily forgot about Burt’s panic attack and the horror in the snow and turned their attention to her.

“Dude…take it easy,” Reg said.

Wenda and Doc were holding onto her.

“It’s okay,” Wenda said. “Really.”

What a consummate bullshit artist. Okay? Okay?

“There are things in this world and those out of it,” Doc said as he gripped her firmly. “We have seen the latter. We might consider ourselves fortunate this night to see something very few have ever seen.”

Oh, that voice. That golden voice. Whatever weird psychic trip she’d gone on this time evaporated as Doc spoke. She felt immediately better, stronger, her legs sturdy beneath her. She shrugged off Wenda, but not Doc.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really…I don’t know…I freaked out or something.”

The wolf-woman flattened her ears against her skull and let go with a shriek of her own that was nearly hysterical in tone…not a human scream exactly, but more like that of a cat heard squealing in the dead of night. Megga knew it was directed at her. The thing was mocking her. It stared at her with lunatic hatred, its eyes huge and glistening.

Burt was standing there, swaying from side to side.

He had stuffed a fist into his mouth so maybe he, too, would not scream. The wolf-woman reached out a semi-human hand in his direction as if she wanted to sink her claws into him and tear him apart like an especially juicy slab of liver. He took two steps backward, tottering and weak. A gagging sound came from his throat that was thick and suffocating in tone. He looked, if anything, like a little boy paralyzed with fright. His fist fell away from his mouth and he looked at everyone there with glazed, tear-filled eyes.

Then he
broke free and ran off in the direction of the bus.

The creature was chewing on its own tongue
in its death throes by that point, the head whipping from side to side and spraying gouts of pink saliva and blood into the air.

She’s dying and you felt her pain,
Megga thought.

Burt was shouting as he stumbled away.

Nobody tried to stop him. They had nearly forgotten about him. They simply, almost casually, backed away from the thing. The snow was coming down heavier by then and visibility was down to fifteen feet at most and the creature faded into the storm, letting loose with a pained howling as they abandoned it. The wind was blowing so hard that they were bunched together now. Maybe fear had a little something to do with it. Maybe the stark desolation fused them together.

“We gotta get back to the bus,” Morris said. “We gotta use the OnStar and call in some help here. Somebody’s got to deal with…with that thing.”

They moved off towards the bus, still staying together, Reg tagging along behind and that’s when he hit the ground.
“FUCK IS THAT?”
he cried out.

Everyone stopped. They were looking in all directions, knowing not what they might see next.

Mole and Doc got Reg to his feet, helping him stand in the wind that was beginning to take on the roaring sound of a freight train. He brushed snow from his face. “Something flew over me,” he said. “I mean right fucking
over
me. Like a big bird or something.”

He was panicked, his eyes wide and unblinking as he tried to look in every direction at the same time.

“There’s nothing,” Morris said.

“I SAW IT!” Reg shouted into the storm. “I FUCKING SAW IT!”

Megga hugged herself against the cold. She knew without a doubt that he had seen something. Pure imagination does not inspire panic like that and Reg, a real easy-going calm sort of guy, was nearly coming out of his skin.

Mole picked up his camera and handed it to him.

“We’re going back to the bus to wait this out,” Morris announced. “We’ll get the OnStar going and get the State Police out here. I’m not dealing with any more of this shit and neither are any of you.”

Megga almost laughed. 
As if we have a choice.

10

“Burt! Hey, Burt, come back! Come back!”

He heard the voice calling him out in the storm, but he was no longer listening. In blind panic, he was running…or attempting to. Slipping and sliding, the wind punching into him, his boots skating on the snow-covered ice, he fell down, got up, fell down again and just started crawling. He didn’t give a shit. Forward momentum was forward momentum in his book.

He had to get away.

Let those idiots sit around and look at that thing from hell all they wanted, but not him. No way. No goddamn way.

He heard the voice call to him again and he thought it might be Doc, but fuck Doc and fuck the lot of them.
Chambers of Horrors.
Jesus Christ, it sure was that. That’s what this whole damn night had turned into.

Breathing hard, the icy wind seeming
to crawl right down his spine, Burt pulled himself to his feet, standing uneasily in the storm. He couldn’t even see the others now. The blizzard was throwing snow in every direction, surrounding him in a rushing glacial whirwind of white.

Fuck.

He couldn’t even be sure where the bus was.

Despite h
is panic, he waited. No sense wandering blindly in the storm. It would be so very, very easy to get lost in it.

The voices of the others were gone.

He was alone.

He waited there for what seemed minutes, though, realistically, it had only been brief seconds. And as he waited…he heard something that was absolutely impossible: the buzzing of flies. Well, maybe it wasn’t flies. No, not that stupid and directionless. This was angry and directed. More like the buzzing of hornets. It was there and then it was gone.

A voice in the back of his head told him,
The wind, it was just the fucking wind because it could not be anything else. Not in this storm. Not in the cold.

He had to move but the blizzard was raging.

He had the most unpleasant notion that it was toying with him. That the storm itself was not just the elemental wrath of nature blowing cold and fierce, but something more. Something sentient.

There was a s
udden inexplicable blast of hot reeking air that swallowed him in a pungent envelope of heat. It brought a nauseating stink of sweet decay. A concentrated stench like that of a woodchuck trapped in a dry well, rotting to hair and bones in dark, warm silence. The stink covered him. It was sucked into his nose and crawled down his throat like an engorged brown-gray carrion worm.

It was horrible.

Unbelievably horrible.

Burt tried to fight free of it, but it surrounded him, filling his head and pushing him down to his knees
where he vomited into the snow, a hot steam blowing back into his face. He regurgitated until there was nothing left, dry heaves making his abdomen jerk like it had been kicked. Then it passed. The smell thickened, grew almost moist and gamey in the air, then it, too, was gone as if it never was in the first place.

What the hell?

Before he could properly wrap his mind around it or try to make sense of it, he heard that buzzing again. It was the low, rising drone of hundreds of hornets coming at him out of the storm. And that was bad enough…but as he listened, it seemed to become a wavering, shrilling voice…a voice that was the buzzing of thousands of insect’s wings:
Burt…over here, Burt…I’m waiting for you—

And with a
breaking hysterical terror, he looked in the direction of that loathsome voice and he saw a figure…a gray figure at the perimeter of the wind-driven snow. He thought at first it was a woman, because despite the buzzing tone of the voice there was some very unnatural female caliber to it. And the shape…the gray, leaning shape…it looked like a woman. A wraith that was blowing and billowing and fragmenting, the wind blowing right through it and making it flap and flutter.

Here I am, Burt…right…here…

He let out a scream and ran towards where he thought the bus was. For all he knew, he was charging deeper into the storm. Then he tripped, lost his footing, and the ground fell out from under him…and he was rolling down into the ditch, the shape of the bus appearing before him, tail lights blazing red like huge, hungry eyes.

11

Morris
was the voice of reason as always.

And that was something that was badly needed, Wenda knew, because everyone was scared, everyone was quite near to freaking out (all except Megga who
not only
had
freaked out but seemed to be fascinated by it all), and they had to get it together. Because regardless of what Reg had seen or
thought
he’d seen and regardless of the horror in the road, with the storm kicking up its heels they were very much in a survival situation now. They were trapped and they wouldn’t survive it by losing control.

Oh, listen to you. You have panic attacks like other people have gas. Since when are you so calm? Since when are you the rational one?

Wenda did not know, but she felt somehow empowered at that moment. As if all the wild, arcing, nervous energy that had always caused so many problems—and only subsided when she was Vultura—had been waiting for something like this. Waiting for something to direct itself against. She was scared, but steady. Her mind was clear and her thoughts were solid. Yes, it was like within the last thirty minutes the world had broken free of its axis and was no longer spinning but wobbling out of control. And yet…she felt oddly focused.

“Morris is right,” she told the others. “Time to act rationally here.”

Megga giggled at that.

And then she screamed.

Several of them did because whatever Reg had seen came
swooping out of the storm at them, veering right over their heads. A huge, black, formless shape that came and went quickly. Reg had said it was like a big bird. But that’s not what Wenda saw out of the corner of her eye as it swooped over them. She saw something much more like the wing of a bat, black and shining and almost membranous.

It came again and they all went down to their knees.

Reg crazily tried to get it on video but it was way too fast for that.

Wenda caught its backdraft full in the face and the smell of the thing had been revolting. It stank
the way she imagined the satin lining of a buried casket must stink: like dank rot and corpse drainage. Everyone scrambled to their feet.

“Look,” Doc said. “Good God, look!”

They all did and Morris put the flashlight beam out there. There were forms out in the storm. They could not be seen in the heavy snowfall and blowing drift as anything more than shadows, but there were many of them and they were closing in. Their eyes reflected back yellow in the light.

“RUN!” Morris said. “EVERYONE RUN FOR THE BUS!”

They jogged up the road, slipping and sliding, trying to hold one another up as they came within sight of the bus. The wind threw drift into their faces and knocked several of them down. Wenda was one of the first to find her feet. Sheets of snow obscured the bus, rising and falling, whipping away over the snowpack. When it cleared for one brief moment, she saw something
standing atop the bus. It looked like a man…the very gaunt shadow of a man that was darker than the shadows around it. It was narrow, leaning, almost skeletal. Like a locust pole mimicking a man. Then…she couldn’t be sure it happened so fast…but it was like that shadow lifted its arms and became something like a billowing black sheet that jumped up into the storm.