“
Why are we running in the rain, son?” my father asked.
“
There’s a giant beast called a Wendigo trying to eat me, and I was wondering if you two could help me distract it.”
“
You know we are holograms, right?” my father asked.
“
The Wendigo doesn’t know that, though.”
“
Oh, darling, don’t get eaten by the Wendigo,” my mother said, concern in her tone.
“
I’m trying not to, Mom,” I said. “I’ve got a stun grenade, but he isn’t going to let me throw it into his mouth a second time.”
“
Stun grenade? How very nonviolent of you,” my father said sarcastically.
“
Now’s not the time, Dad.”
I wove and dodged through trees, trying to stay parallel to the road. I couldn’t outrun the Wendigo to the lake, but I could at least slow him down.
“
Should we tell him a story, or what?” my father asked.
“
We’re so proud of you,” my mother said.
“
Still not the time, Mom. Pretend you are attacking him or something. Just confuse him.”
My mother and father slowed down. They couldn’t stray more than a forty yards from the ring I was wearing, but if nothing else, they could warn me of attacks so I wouldn’t have to keep glancing over my shoulders.
I could hear my father taunting the beast. “I’ve never seen a creature as ugly as you. What’s your secret?”
My mother was more diplomatic. “Would you like to talk about your anger?”
The Wendigo swatted at each of my parents, but they moved effortlessly out of the way. While I leapt through underbrush and over slippery fallen logs, I set the delay on my pen grenade to a second. My plan was simple: when the beast got tired of trying to kill my parents and finally went for me, I’d toss it straight into his face. The other stun grenades had at least slowed him down and I hoped for the same result with this one. I didn’t have far to go now and all I needed as a little more time.
“
You shall not pass,” my father yelled dramatically.
The Wendigo swiped at him, and I chuckled.
“
Have you ever considered becoming vegan?” my mother asked. “It’s a very healthy lifestyle.”
That was apparently the last straw for the Wendigo. He ripped a tree from its roots and swiped at my parents. I couldn’t help glancing back to watch. The tree went right through them and the beast roared in frustration and tossed the tree at me.
I tried to move clear, but as I wasn’t watching where I was running, I stumbled as the ground dipped downward and dropped my pen. One-one-thousand, I counted automatically.
Boom!
I didn’t have time to cover my eyes or ears and the stun grenade worked on me instead of the beast. My parents might have tried to run interference, but I couldn’t see or hear and so could only hope. It took me a few seconds to get to my feet, valuable seconds I didn’t have, and the Wendigo uprooted another tree and belted me. He broke every rib in my body and rearranged a few of my organs. I tumbled to the bottom of a ravine.
I heard water gurgle nearby. It wasn’t a deep river, more of a creek, but I willed my broken body to move and half-crawled, half dragged myself into the water. The Wendigo charged after me.
The water was only waist deep on me, but the Wendigo hesitated on the shore. The creek was fifty feet across, and I struggled to the other side, my torso aching both with injury and the healing. The Wendigo picked up large rocks and hurled them at me, but they went wide.
I lay on the far shore panting for a few moments. When I sat up, I saw the Wendigo looking up the creek bed at a bridge. He took giant strides through the foliage toward the bridge.
I rose painfully and ran through the forest in the direction of the lake.
Chapter 32. Miranda
Max might have a stupid male brain, but he was right about needing a way to deal with the Wendigo. I could move much faster than John or Max, and so I bounced away down the road through the rain. I could cross a mile in a minute, and so I quickly came to the edge of Silver Bay where I found a semi truck broken down with a huge tow truck parked in front of it. The tow truck driver was talking to the guy who had broken down. He was about to have a bad day.
I leapt past him without him noticing, but he definitely noticed when I pulled away in his vehicle. In a big city, they’d send helicopters and highway patrol after me, but out here in the sticks it might be twenty minutes before the local officers could respond—and I was going to use every one of those twenty minutes. I whipped the truck around and headed back toward Max and John.
I didn’t make it far when I saw a pickup truck driving the opposite direction with John in the back. When he saw me and banged on the side of the bed for the driver to pull over. John climbed slowly from the pickup bed and limped to the tow truck. My gut tightened at the fact Max wasn’t with him.
“
Move over,” he ordered.
“
Where’s Max?” I asked.
“
He’ll be running this way soon, and we have to be ready. Move over.”
“
I’ve got this,” I said.
“
I know you do, but I think my arm is broken. I can still drive, but you can use a weapon and I can’t. You take shotgun so you are ready to get in the action.”
John’s arm hung limply at his side, and so I pulled some bandages from my pocket and created a quick makeshift sling. Then I moved to the passenger seat and let him drive. He didn’t go far before he pulled over. There was a bridge right ahead.
“
This bridge is likely the only spot the Wendigo will pass, and so we’ll wait here to make sure we don’t miss him if they go into the woods,” he said.
Chapter 33. Max
I scrambled up a wet hill to a dirt road. To my left I could see Lake Superior through the rain, and to my right I could see a massive tow truck parked on the side of the freeway. Then I watched the trees being pushed aside near the dirt road between me and the tow truck.
I ran for Lake Superior. There wasn’t much hope. It was a half mile run and the Wendigo was almost on top of me. The holograms of my mother and father were running beside me, keeping an eye out for the Wendigo, but they weren’t much help.
Lightning flashed and a split second later thunder boomed overhead. The rain was falling harder now, making the ground slick.
“
He’s almost caught up,” my father said.
“
I know, Dad.”
“
He knows Harold,” my mother said.
“
He said to watch out for the Wendigo, and that’s what I’m doing,” my father replied.
“
Yes, but you don’t need to state the obvious,” my mother said.
“
It might not have been obvious to him,” my father said. “Remember, you didn’t want to tweak the DNA to give him the mental acuity boost.”
“
That’s so unnatural, which reminds me: I think he needs to eat less meat,” my mother said, that note of concern in her voice again.
I tapped my ring and they vaporized. “I can’t take my parents anywhere,” I said to the rain. I pulled out my graviton bars as I ran and set them to maximum reverse. They emitted an ominous hum. If you think of gravity as a rubber sheet that large objects push dents into when resting on it, then the graviton bars were effectively a finger pushing up from the bottom. A ping pong ball rolling on that sheet would naturally roll gently across the rubber until it came too close to a large object and fell into the dip, and the opposite was true with the graviton bars’ hill in that metaphorical rubber sheet—the ping pong ball would roll away from the peak. At maximum reverse, the graviton bars would roughly cancel out Earth’s gravity, creating close to zero gravity in a thirty-foot radius. Of course, there was the small downside to using maximum power—the bars had a decent chance of becoming unstable and forming a black hole right in my hands.
I spun and jumped as straight up as I could. The Wendigo closed on me quickly. I was nearly out of its reach when it pounced. Unfortunately for the beast, he didn’t know anything about zero gravity physics. The two of us were propelled upward. As we rose, I saw that the tow truck was barreling in our direction. The Wendigo grabbed me tightly and seemed triumphant at first until it realized that we were still going up. I held the graviton bars close to my body, figuring that if I ended up as a snack, that he was going to have swallow them.
When we were a hundred feet off the ground, the Wendigo’s grip on me loosened, I locked the graviton bars in space-time. Suddenly, the Wendigo gained a lot of weight. I held onto my bars as I slipped through his grip and he fell like Wile E. Coyote holding an anvil.
“
Beep, beep, mother fucker,” I said.
He landed with crushing force, and then the tow truck slammed into his head. “How’s that for a Tylenol headache?”
I swung in the air as if I were crossing monkey bars, planting the graviton bars at the end of each swing and descending in a spiral. Below me, the tow truck spun around, and I saw Miranda hop out of the passenger seat and wrap chains around the Wendigo’s legs.
When I was twenty feet above the tow truck, I turned off the graviton bars and landed on the truck’s flatbed.
“
Go!” I said.
Miranda leapt onto the flatbed with lightning speed and hammered the top of the cab with her fist. Mud flew as the tires spun, and Miranda and I held on to the tow truck’s arm as we accelerated.
She pulled out her Voltaic Fusion Pistol blasted the Wendigo repeatedly in the head. Her weapon’s bullets themselves wouldn’t have been worse than getting shot by rubber bullets—which do hurt by the way—but they generated huge electrical shocks on impact. The effect was similar to getting struck by lightning. Unfortunately, at the rate she was blasting him, she was going to run out of ammo fast.
We left a trail of yellow-green ooze behind us on the muddy road and then streaked the highway with it. I looked into the cab and saw that John was driving. Wherever he was taking us, we were getting there fast. The rain was coming down even harder now, and we were as soaked as two people can be.
For the briefest moment, I was starting to think we might be winning, but then Miranda’s Voltaic Fusion Pistol made an unfortunate clicking sound. She tucked it away in her belt and tapped on the cab window.
“
We have two minutes at most. Are we almost there?” she asked through the sliding back window John opened.
Before he could answer, the Wendigo began flailing at the end of the chain even as he bounced horribly down the blacktop. He whacked a passing car with his fist and knocked over signs.
“
Crap,” I said. “He’s healing, and he doesn’t look happy.”
The Wendigo grabbed a guardrail as we passed and ripped it free. The creature began swinging it at the tow truck, missing twice before the galvanized steel slashed through one of our rear tires and the truck skidded.
There was a tool box on the flat bed, and I opened it, grabbed a spider lug wrench, and threw it like a ninja star at the Wendigo’s face. He roared in anger when the heavy steel hit him. I found a twenty pound sledgehammer and hurled it. The big hammer made a sickening crunch when it struck him in the nose, but I knew I wasn’t doing any serious harm. I just wanted to provide any distraction I could, but I was out of heavy tools and so I started throwing screwdrivers like knives. My aim was good, even if the tools were ineffective against the Wendigo. He looked like a big metal porcupine had gotten too close to his face by the time I ran out of the screwdrivers.
I was out of things to throw, and the Wendigo was franticly lashing out with his arms, grabbing anything he could reach to hurl at us. A sign reading “Silver Bay Marina 1 Mile” embedded itself into the truck so close to me that I had to pull my shirt free.
“
Keep him busy for a little bit more,” Miranda said. “I have an idea.”