A shadow moved close to him. Garnet. “It does. It should have cut in by now. It must have been taken out, too. Look, Josh, I don’t know you very well, but – no offense – what I’ve seen so far hasn't really impressed me. I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all, but….”
“Don’t worry. I’m not always so nice.”
“Well, thanks for that uninspired bit of machismo, but I’m still not impressed. I’m just saying the security team here is good but I don’t think they can stop the demon.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Jared said. “You’re talking like they’re going to fail. Like we’re all going to die. We can’t think that way.”
Josh lifted the bottle of water to his lips and gulped half of it. Then he shook his head clear off the last of his uncertainty.
“You’re right about one thing, Garnet,” he said. “You don’t know me very well. Let’s move.”
“Where are we going?” Garnet started after him, then paused. “I mean, where do you think you’re going?”
Josh smiled and started walking toward the door. “We are not going to just sit here and wait for that thing to take us down. Whatever it is, we outnumber it. We may have to be sneaky about it but we are going to take this demon down.”
Chapter Seventeen
David rolled over in bed, on the verge of waking. He needed to go to the washroom, but it was so warm and numb under the blankets, he balked at leaving. The last few days had been lazy. He’d spent hours talking with Todd and Bethany but most of his time was spent alone in his room. He read Robert Jordan novels on an ereader, making sure he didn’t touch the walls.
He pushed himself up slowly. A strange feeling was building in his stomach. It was like the fear that settled over him when he was immersed in a scary movie. Dread. The room was still fully lit; he still hadn’t found the light switches. He could see everything around him. There was not even the hint of a shadow anywhere. Still…
He quickly searched the edges of the room again, listening for any sound, any movement.
Nothing.
He pushed the sheets away. Beads of sweat accumulated along his forehead. The veins in his temples throbbed violently, like the onset of a migraine. He massaged the back of his neck, trying to coerce the pain away. It was no help.
He heard a loud bang followed by a scream.
Trickles of dust fell from the ceiling.
He rubbed the sweat from his palms against the lower edge of his t-shirt and crept tentatively toward the front door. Each breath he took seemed very long: exaggerated. He was very aware of the sound of his exhalations, the beating of his heart and the pounding in his head. He could not stop blinking and his mouth was dry.
“I keep this up and I’m going to hyperventilate,” he whispered to himself.
‘They’ve found us’, he thought. It was the only explanation for the way he felt and the things he had heard.
He ran a hand through his hair. When he brought it down, it was soaking wet. A slow survey of the room confirmed what he believed: no weapons. One step at a time, he approached the door, opening and clenching his fists, not sure what to do. He couldn’t just walk out into the hallway, not without knowing what was going on. But he also could not ignore the scream and just hide under the bed.
He heard a young girl call out for help.
David inched toward the door, his breaths short and shallow now. He turned the knob and let the door swing open.
Jessica fell onto the carpet just inside the room. She must have been lying on the ground, her back pressed up against the door. David grabbed her by the shoulders, dragging her completely into his apartment. She cradled her left arm. Jagged bone jutted out from the top of her left shoulder. Her clothes were charred as if she had run through a fire. A large bruise was forming around her eyes. It looked like her nose was broken.
“Amy,” she said. Tears streamed down her face. Her lips were coated with blood.
“Where is she?” David asked.
He looked up in time to see something fly through the air. He howled, a primal scream, when he realized it was Amy. She flew like she’d been thrown, like a ball. He peered out the doorway to see where she landed. She hit the floor thirty feet away. She did not get up.
Then shadow sprayed up from underneath her, a fountain of black ink that spread out over the hallway and covered her body. As quickly as they appeared, the shadows retreated. In their absence there was no sign of Amy.
“She’s gone,” Jessica said. “I can’t feel her anymore. I think they killed her. We’ve got to…” She pushed against the ground with her right hand. “We’ve got to get away.”
“What about the others?” David knelt beside her and searched for a part of her body that wasn’t wounded. With his help, she got to her feet. He led her to one of the sofas, then rushed back to look back into the hallway. “Are they safe?”
“Close the door. Quickly.” Jessica rubbed at her eyes with her fingers. Then she took a look at how filthy her hand was and stopped. “They took most of them. Killed the rest. I can still feel Bethany, though. I think she’s hiding in her room. Todd … I think they’re doing things to him right now.”
“Who is it?” He bolted the lock on the door. Then he ran to one of the larger sofas, dragged it over to the door, and pushed it until the entrance was blocked off. He was thankful the living quarters did not have the rollaway round doors he’d seen in different parts of the underground city.
Jessica glanced at the bone poking out of her shoulder. She bit her lip. “Those guys with wings. They followed us. Somehow. I was…” Tears fell down her face and she sobbed. In that moment, she looked just like the little girl she really was. She shook her head, becoming cold and impersonal again.
“I was in the sitting room with Amy. We both got up early. We always do. A bunch from the other classes were out there talking to Echo, trying to get more information out of her, I think. Todd was there, too. Next thing I knew, something picked me up. I slammed into the ceiling and I felt something crack. Then I fell. When I hit the ground, I think that’s when I dislocated my shoulder. Her face went slightly green. Before David could reach her, she coughed up blood.
“Perfect,” she said. She wiped her chin with her right hand and then scraped it clean against the fabric of the couch. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how they snuck up on us. I didn’t even feel them coming, and I always feel them coming.”
“They’ve come for you guys before?” Breathing heavily, he lifted and twisted the couch until it was flush against the entrance. From the other side of the door, he heard a man scream out in pain. It sounded like Todd.
“They’ve poked around before. Or something has. Many times. Never as bad as this. Usually they just watch us. When they attacked in Toronto, that was the first time they ever came into a building. Wisdom has been moving us around. At least he has since I got here. We never spent more than a few months in one building. It must have been Madeline. Maybe they made her talk before they killed her.”
Something pounded on the door.
“We are so dead.” David slowly backed away from the door. He pounded his fists against his head in frustration.
The pounding came again. This time, the sofa moved back an inch.
***
“No!”
Bethany screamed as an Edimmu grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her face down toward the sitting room. Reptilian hands dragged her over the carpet. Her chin slammed repeatedly into the hard floor as she bounced along. She was certain her back was going to break at any moment.
Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dead body and she stopped screaming. It was a teenage girl from one of the other classes. Bethany didn’t know her name. The girl’s face was frozen in a scream; eyes wide and face ridged with burn marks. The side of her neck had been chewed open, but there was little blood. As if something had sucked the blood away. She saw dozens of other children dragged into the shadow, disappearing.
Bethany
felt numbness shoot through her.
Then her chin bounced against the floor again and everything went black.
***
It only took Echo an instant to realize she couldn’t stop the Edimmu from taking the children. So she ran. Before most of the Anomalies registered what was happening, before the first of them fell to the ground with broken bones only to be swallowed by darkness, she warped the spatial field and jumped into the light. She closed the circle as quickly as she had summoned it.
Silence.
She looked around, not sure at first where her panic had taken her. The air was clear, clean and brisk. Below were thick, green forests of healthy trees; above, snow and ice hung to the ridges of untamable mountains. It took her brain several seconds to confirm what her body knew instinctively.
“Home,” she said. She did not know if this particular mountain had a name but she was somewhere in the Jeseníky mountains in northern Moravia. “I was born not far from here.” The village no longer existed, of course. Everyone she had known in that old life was dead and buried. Even their graves were long forgotten now.
“Mother would have loved the view from here.” She sat down on a nearby rock, took deep breaths and stared out over the wilderness below. It was strange for her to think how old she was, far older than the trees. Most of the years slid through her memory, mercurial and jumbled, but her childhood stayed with her. Playing games by the river. Days watching clouds and birds. And the day Wisdom took her. He had been a different person then. Violent and cruel. Now he genuinely seemed to care about her. It was easy, sometimes, to forget what he had done to her. To her family. Now, it was all she could think about.
Echo covered her face with trembling hands and tried to push the memory of screams away. Somewhere in the world, people were dying because she had run out on them. In and of itself, that was no concern to her. Humans died every day, after all. But she had made a promise. A promise to Wisdom to keep the children safe. If they died on her watch, he would be angry. Or worse, disappointed.
She shut down the voice of instinct and rose to her feet. She opened another circle of light. Echo looked back once more on the mountains and forests of Moravia. Then she was gone.
***
Something pounded against the door again.
The sofa moved back another inch.
“We have to do something.” Jessica said. She brought her right arm up to her head and squinted her eyes.
“What?” David licked his lips. He slapped himself across the face several times. “I can’t die like this.” He ran forward and slammed his body against the sofa until it slid firmly back up against the door.
“Not that way,” Jessica said. “Use your EFHBs. They’re stronger than your body.”
“I don’t know how!” His voice came out in a shrill and broken fashion. The realization that this little girl was handling the situation far better than him embarrassed him. The only thing that infuriated him more than his own weakness was having someone else recognize it. He howled and slammed his fists against the floor. “I’m flippin’ useless! Damn!”
“Stop it!” Jessica shouted. She tried to push herself off the couch with her good arm but the effort made her woozy again. “Stop your whining or they’re going to kill us! Quit being a baby and fight back!”
Radiant rage and a kind of hush crept through David. He turned to Jessica. He wanted to slap her. Then he set his jaw in determination.
“Good. I’m angry,” he said. “Now I can fight back.”
He stood up, moved away from the couch and focused his mind on the other side of the door. Beads of perspiration built up along his arms as the temperature in the room rose sharply. The air around the door rippled. Sweat dripped off his face and fingertips.
The pounding stopped.
On the other side of the door, something hissed.
Then it began to scream.
***
Echo stepped out of the portal just as an Edimmu grabbed Todd by the throat. The lizard with wings stood over eight feet tall. It slammed Todd’s head against the ceiling several times in quick succession until the stone was dark with blood. The creature turned at the flash of light as the portal opened. Before he could focus on Echo, though, Elaine stepped from the portal and started shooting.
Three more Edimmu appeared, one of them dragging a mess of clothing and flesh that looked like Bethany. They stopped, eyes flashing yellow as Elaine fired her modified Mossberg Mariner shotgun in quick succession. Echo stretched out her hands, took a strong grip on the magnetic strings of reality, and twisted them. Bolts of lightning shot through the air and singed the Edimmu’s chests. They dropped the body and rushed toward a pool of shadow that hung suspended in the air a few inches from the wall.
“Not today,” Echo said. She brushed her hands through the air toward the Edimmu’s escape route. She clenched her fingers into a fist. The dark portal warped like a piece of paper, crinkled and shredded. Then, with a soft pop, the shadows disappeared.
The Edimmu stopped mid-stride, wings flapping. They turned as one, joined by a common intelligence.
Elaine emptied her shotgun into one of them. When the creature fell, she threw the shotgun aside, pulled out her MP-5 sub-machine gun and turned it on the other three. Echo rushed to Todd, who now lay slumped atop a table under the body of the Edimmu. Fingers to his throat, she felt for a pulse and let out a sigh of relief. At least the boy was still alive.
The remaining Edimmu each held their right arm outstretched, palms open and outward. The bullets from the sub-machine gun sprayed against an invisible barrier several feet in front of them. They started walking toward Elaine.
“Enough, Elaine.” Echo said. “I’ll take care of these three. Go check on the others.”
With a nod, Elaine stopped firing and rushed toward the living quarters. A few steps later, an unseen force lifted her off the ground and tossed her backwards. She landed on her back with a thud. One of the Edimmu laughed, a mixture of hissing and guttural sounds.
‘I hope I made the right choice,’ Echo thought. ‘Even with Elaine’s help, this isn’t the sort of thing I’m good at.’
From somewhere deep in the living quarters, a scream that was not human filled the air.
Chapter Eighteen
David waited until the scream stopped and then moved toward the door.
“Don’t,” Jessica said. She pulled her tattered shirt closer to her skin, closing the holes in the fabric. “It’s not dead.”
‘I wish I could feel that,’ he thought. He gave his head a single shake but kept moving. ‘It has to be at least incapacitated. I felt the flames hit his flesh. Whatever these creatures are, I know now they can be hurt.’
He bent down, braced his feet, and pushed the couch away from the entrance. When there was enough space for him to open the door just a crack, he stopped pushing. Just in case.
He put his hand on the doorknob and started to turn.
“You’re being stupid.” Jessica was standing now. She brushed sweaty hair away from her face. Whatever signs of weakness there had been when she had broken down in tears was gone. She still looked like a broken doll with her damp, red eyes and the ugly break of her arm. Her stance and the steadiness of her eyes radiated nothing but strength. “It’s stronger than that. It’s stronger than us.”
David turned the knob all the way and heard it click open. “You don’t know how strong I am,” he said. Slowly, he let the door open.
He peeked through.
On the ground, black as coal, was a pile of scaly legs and arms and wings. It twitched, the movement amorphous and subtle like snakes squirming under a black blanket. Then he saw the eyes, white ovals with thin green slits down the middle.
Looking at him.
“Damn.”
As quickly as he could, he pushed against the door to slam it shut. His arms felt heavy and thick like he was moving through water. Before he could blink, the Edimmu was on its feet. It hissed – a forked tongue shoot
ing out through human teeth – and slammed its shoulder against the slightly open door. Pain shot through his forehead where the door hit him. He flew back, falling on his shoulder as the creature charged into the room. Its black, oily wings fluttered back and forth. It grabbed the sofa in one enormous hand and tossed it away like so much cardboard.
David’s anger was gone, replaced again by the fear that made him powerless. He closed his eyes, instinct screaming at him to flee. He pushed and pushed with weak arms that kept buckling at the elbow as he tried to get up. Something smacked him in the back of the head. His face slammed forward, breaking his nose. Somewhere behind him, Jessica screamed.
***
The Edimmu, caught off guard by their colleague's howl of pain, turned slightly toward the living quarters. For just a moment their concentration was divided between curiosity and keeping the shield in place.
“Go!” Echo shouted at Elaine.
Elaine jumped to her feet and ran toward the scream. Echo reached out, twining her fingers within the weave of energy and force that held the atoms of the room together. Then, once again, she clenched her fists. Nosebleeds accompanied tiny hemorrhages she set off in the Edimmu’s brains. Elaine rushed past them as each Edimmu fell to its knees, reptilian hands over the all-too-human faces.
Echo tore at the magnetic strings again. Forks of lightning shot from her fingertips across the dry air. Scaled flesh sizzled. The Edimmu shrieked.
Then, corner by corner, the shadows began to grow.
***
Elaine fought the urge to run down the hallway. The submachine gun hung around her neck on a tight strap. She held it firmly with sweaty palms. Recklessness could be fatal. She inhaled through her mouth to avoid the stench of the scorched bodies and smoldering fabric that littered the hallway. All the doors she passed were open, revealing room after room of carnage.
The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels Page 98
