by Chad Morgan
Daniel bolted up, his brain taking a moment to catch up with his skull. He pawed at the half-inflated airbag. “Beth? You okay?”
He heard Bethany moan as he craned around to see her. Bethany was waking up, rubbing her head. As she looked around, dazed and reorienting herself, Daniel looked her over for signs of trauma. There was no blood from her ears or nose, and other than a welt on her head she looked unharmed. She blinked away the fog in her head and snapped her eyes to him.
“Daniel?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” he said. “You alright?”
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said. “What happened?”
“There was someone in the road . . .” Daniel said, his thoughts trailing off. What had happened to him? Did he miss him? He turned back around but a sharp pain stabbed him in the neck. He clutched at it as if expecting to find a knife sticking out between his vertebrae.
“Daniel?” Bethany called.
“I’m okay,” Daniel said, turning his stiff neck. It felt like a pulled muscle, nothing serious. He reached down and tried the key to the car, but only a clicking sound came from the engine. He fished out his cell phone from his pocket, each movement rippling pain through his body as all his muscles were tight and aching. The effort was for nothing as he tried to make a call but couldn’t even get the phone to ring. He looked at the phone.
“I’m not getting a signal,” he said, more to himself than to Bethany.
“Daniel?” Bethany said again, her voice crawling higher in pitch.
Daniel looked at her in the cracked rear-view mirror and saw Bethany wasn’t looking at him but staring out the car window. He followed Bethany’s gaze to see the lumbering humanoid figure he had served to miss, now lumbering towards them. It was still deep in the fog, but while Daniel could only make out a dark bulbous shape he could see enough to know the silhouette was wrong. For one thing, it was uneven, asymmetric. The right side of the body seemed bigger and more swollen. For another, it walked hunched over like it was doing a bad imitation of Quasimodo. Several conflicting thoughts raced through Daniel’s mind. Was it another of those creatures, like the dog monsters? Or was it an innocent pedestrian, and the odd gate because Daniel had clipped the man with the car? He wasn’t sure, but he needed to be prepared for either case. He reached over to the passenger seat where he had laid the gun, but it wasn’t there. When the car was flipping, the gun had been tossed. He undid his seatbelt and padded around the empty seat.
“Did you see where the gun went?” he asked. “I need the gun.”
“Daniel, let’s go,” Bethany begged. “Let’s just go.”
“Bethany, this car is dead,” he said, frantically feeling around for the gun. “If we want to get out of here, we need to go out there, and that means I need to deal with whatever that is.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the figure, coming closer to them with every limp. He turned back to his search for the gun. “Bethany, I need the gun. Do you see it?”
There was no reply. Daniel looked back to Bethany, his heart skipping a beat, for a moment afraid something had snagged her. Bethany sat there, her gaze transfixed on the thing coming towards them.
“Bethany!” Daniel snapped, pulling her out of her trance. “Look for the gun!”
Bethany blinked, but even as she reached along the seat her eyes were reluctant to let go of the thing coming towards them, pulling on her gaze like a magnet. Daniel felt around the floorboards and his hand fell onto his coat. He pulled it up, hoping the gun was under it, and Anna’s diary fell from the inner pocket onto the passenger seat. Feeling around, his hand touched something cold and metal and for a split second his heart pounded with joy, but it was only the tire iron. He dropped it on the passenger seat next to Anna’s diary. If he had too, he’d face the thing with that, but the pain in his left arm reminded him how well that plan had worked the last time.
“Daniel!” Bethany cried. “It’s getting closer!”
Reaching under his own seat, his fingers touched the barrel of the service revolver. He gripped it between two fingers and slid it out until he could get his hand around the handle. He sat up and held it in his hand, frowning at the damn thing, and part of him wanted to drop it back under the seat and forget about it, but one glance out the window reminded him he didn’t have the luxury of choice. He handed his cell phone to Bethany.
“If something bad happens to me,” he told her, “lock the doors and keep trying to call.”
It was a stupid thing to say and he knew it. The cell phone had no signal and with most of the windows shattered locking the doors would do little good, but he had to give Bethany something to do so she would feel like she had some control. In most cases, control was an illusion, but the belief that you had control was calming.
Daniel shoved open the reluctant door, the bent frame trying to keep it pinched closed. He crawled out of the car and his knees nearly buckled as he landed on the pavement, but he held onto the car door and pulled himself up. He willed his weak legs to stand him up as he closed the car door and aimed his revolver.
“You there!” Daniel shouted. “Stop! Identify yourself!”
His police training taught him to only use matching force. The strange events of the past few days had put him on edge, but that was what the training was for, so he could follow procedure instead of his panic. He wasn’t sure which would be worse, shooting the figure to learn it was an injured person or not shooting and being attacked by some new horror.
The figure continued forward, and the gun shook in Daniel’s hand. He shouted, “Sir, I said stop!”
The figure began to emerge from the fog, and Daniel could get a sense of color from the figure, a similar patchwork of flesh and burns and blisters he had seen on the dog monster. Daniel aimed for center mass as he was trained, but as he peered into the fog he realized he couldn’t make out a head.
“Don’t come any further!” he shouted, cocking the pistol and mustering his courage. Was he convinced it wasn’t a person now? Almost. Just a bit closer and he could be certain, and he had to be certain. He couldn’t handle killing a person, not again. “I’ll shoot! I don’t want too, but I will if you don’t . . .”
The right arm dropped and unraveled like a hose. All doubt this thing wasn’t human was gone, but now surprise kept him from firing as Daniel tried to figure out what he was staring at. The appendage on the ground slithered toward him like a snake, it’s hand-like head crawling out of the fog. It reminded him of a game his dad had played with him when he was a kid, making a puppet mouth with his hand and calling it a “tickle snake,” giving him pretend bites that made him laugh uncontrollably. Only this took the idea to a horrific extreme. The fingers fused from four to two, and between the knuckles yellow eyes peered at him with narrow slits for pupils. The thumb was swollen and dislocated to form a kind of jaw, and fangs protruded out of the fingers like jutting bits of broken bone.
“What the hell are you?” he gasped.
The snake-arm receded, and Daniel thought about the ocean drawing back right before a tsunami. He made the connection a moment too late as the distorted figure leaned back then lurched forward, it’s snake-arm flung at Daniel like a whip. It’s mouth-hand open, Daniel pivoted to the side in the last second, avoiding the thing’s fangs from sinking into his shoulder but not soon enough to dodge the thing completely. It smacked Daniel on his left side, knocking him to the ground. He rolled onto his back, bringing the gun to bear, but as he tried to line up a shot the arm swiped so fast it was a flesh-colored blur. It smacked the gun out of Daniel’s hand and sent it skittering across the asphalt. The snake-arm reared up like a cobra, hissing and swinging from side to side, but just as the snake head struck, the arm was pulled off as the limping owner kept walking on towards the car. The arm struggled against the main body, trying to get back to Daniel, but the body kept plodding forward, and Daniel remembered the words written in blood on the clinic ceiling.
“Bethany,” he said to himself, his eyes wide
. Daniel pulled his aching body to his feet and waved his arms, side-stepping towards where the gun had slid to a halt. “Hey, ugly! You with the lisp! Over here!”
The monster ignored Daniel and cracked its whip-like arm over the top of the car. The cracked windshield shattered into small bits of safety glass as the dented roof crumpled further into the cabin of the car. Daniel heard Bethany screaming from the floor of the car. Daniel snatched up the gun and no longer hesitated. He fired a single round into the back of the monster. It froze, then turned back towards Daniel with slow and angry steps, the snake-arm coiling and hissing at him.
“Got your attention now, didn’t I?” Daniel taunted. He had to keep its – their - attention off Bethany.
The monster swung its arm at Daniel again, but while he had expected a striking bite of a viper, the thick arm wrapped around his body like a python, pinning his arms to his side. The whole arm was a mass of muscles and everyone was contracting to crush him. The mouth thing hissed in Daniel’s face, its breath the same smell of decaying flesh the dog monsters had been. He expected the thing to try to swallow him, but the monster lifted Daniel into the air. Daniel had a brief moment of seeing the town from an additional six feet in the air before the arm slammed him down on the top of the car. The hand-mouth hissed, staring down into Daniel’s eyes, and he could almost see a grin on the thing as the coils shifted and slid over him. The coils tightened, squeezing all the breath out of his lungs, his brain swimming in a red haze as blood was squeezed into his head. His arms here immobile, squeezed against his body, but the shifting coils had let the barrel of the gun pull in between the coils. Daniel squeezed the trigger and a bullet ripped through the body of the snake arm. Chucks of rotten meat flew into the air, spurting black inky blood over the car and the street below.
The monster screamed in pain, the coils relaxing as it retreated, spinning Daniel against the roof of the car. He fell against the fiberglass, gasping for breath as the red haze around his eyes started to fade. Daniel crawled off the roof and fell onto the broken windshield, the cracked safety glass bowing under his weight like a jagged hammock before rolling onto the hood. Daniel looked around, his head clearing, but before he could train his gun on the monster again he saw the head of the snake-arm coming down at him again. He rolled to the side, hearing the head bang against the hood with a solid thud. Daniel rolled back and grabbed the snake-arm by the neck and pinned it to the hood under him. Aiming the gun at the main body, Daniel fired two rounds center mass. The body collapsed, black ooze pouring out of it, but the arm kept shaking to get free. Daniel pressed the barrel against the snake head and squeezed the trigger again. The head exploded, black blood pouring out of the arm like the hose it resembled.
Daniel slid off the hood of the car, grabbing his ribs. Leaning against the car, Daniel made his way around to the driver’s side door. He motioned for Bethany to come out, then opened his own door. He leaned in, pulled out his jacket and put it on, then slid Anna’s diary back into its pocket. Pulling himself out of the car, he looked to his right to see Bethany poking her head out of the open door.
“It’s all right,” Daniel said, caught off guard by how hard talking was. “I got him.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Daniel nodded. “Yeah, just a little hard to breathe, but I’ll be okay. Let’s see if we can’t find a new car and get the hell out of here.”
Bethany came out of the car, holding her doll, Chrissy, against her chest. “You sure you’re okay?”
Daniel felt his chest and nodded. It hurt to breathe, but he could breathe. He wasn’t spitting up blood so he hoped that meant he wasn’t hurt too bad. In a gasping breath, he said, “I think that thing might have cracked a rib. Hurts like hell, but that’s all. Just give me a minute.”
Over his labored breath, he heard faint growls and hisses coming from the fog. He stood up as straight as he could, looking around.
“Daniel?” Bethany said in a tight voice.
Then he saw them, dark forms coming towards them through the fog. He pulled Bethany close to him and aimed the gun at the silhouettes, but the shapes were encroaching on both ends of the street, pinching them in. He didn’t have to count them to know there were more of them than he had bullets. Some of the forms were of the whip-arm monsters he just fought, and still others had the low stalking profile of the dog monsters, but there were much more that he couldn’t guess what they were.
“Aw, shit,” Daniel said.
“Daniel?” Bethany asked, the pitch of her voice rising with her anxiety.
The forms were starting to grow in color as they came closer. Daniel spun to one side, then the other, looking for an exit.
“Daniel?” Bethany asked again, her voice so high it could shatter glass.
“I’m thinking!” Daniel snapped.
“Think faster, please?”
Searching frantically for an exit, he spotted something in his peripheral that was so out of place that, for a moment, he forgot about the monsters encroaching them. Standing in front of the medical clinic, right in the open door, was a gray wolf. Hadn’t he dreamed about a gray wolf when waking up from the wreck? He turned and grabbed Bethany by the shoulder, but as he pointed her towards the clinic the wolf was gone.
“The clinic,” he told her. “The windows are already boarded up. We’ll rush in and secure the door, then we should be safe.”
As if predicting their move, three of the whip-arm monsters shambled between them and the clinic, their headless forms bumping into each other as the snake-arms coiled and hissed. Daniel squeezed two shots at the nearest one at center mass. It reared back, the snake-hand screeching like a metal steam pipe bursting.
Daniel grabbed the quick-load from his pocket and reloaded the revolver. He grabbed Bethany’s hand. “We have six shots. Run for the clinic. Don’t stop no matter what. You understand?”
“What about you?” she asked.
“I’ll be right by you,” he said. “But if I fall, you leave me, you hear me? Get into the clinic and lock the door. Okay?”
“Daniel?” Her one-word sentence said it all in its tone, the fear of not making it to the clinic, the fear she could be left alone as Daniel fell to the horrors stalking them.
Several dog monsters in the distance had stopped approaching. They were now low to the ground, looking like Olympic sprinters at the starting line, getting ready to leap. They didn’t have time to argue this. “If something happens to me, you keep running. Do you hear me?”
“Okay,” she said unconvinced.
“Run!” he shouted.
Daniel sprinted forward, the gun leading his way and Bethany in tow behind him, who in turn dragged her doll by its hand. Right in his path were the three whip-arm monsters, the wounded one falling back as its black blood dribbled onto the street. Daniel cracked a single shot into each of them, each one rocking back as the small caliber bullet ripped a hole through each monster’s chest. The gun wasn’t large, but any bullet at short range could be lethal or incapacitating. Daniel could attest to that.
Daniel ran between the two freshly wounded whip-arm monsters, with just one more monster to pass and they were in the clinic, but Bethany’s small hand was yanked out of his. Daniel stopped and spun around to see her on the ground reach up towards him, one of the snake-arms from one of the other two monsters wrapped around her ankle and coiling up her leg. It hadn’t sunk its fangs into her as far as Daniel could tell, thank God, but his aching ribs and shortness of breath were all the reminder he needed on what having those coils wrapped around Bethany’s chest could do. He grabbed Bethany’s hand and fired at the base of the arm, below where it had Bethany. A large chunk of scales and meat and black bile blew into the air and the monster recoiled, curling onto itself and raising its head for a counter strike. As it launched itself at Daniel he fired again, and the snake-like head blew apart into large wet pieces that hit the pavement in a plop. The arm fell dead to the ground, it’s dark blood pouring out of it. Bethany s
kittered to her feet and yanked her doll away from the oncoming puddle.
They were in between two of those things now, like some macabre game of pickle. The one to their rear whipped its snake-like arm at Daniel, but he ducked and the massive arm sailed in an arc over his head. The other monster, the one between them and the open clinic door, stumbled towards them, weak from its blood loss but refusing to die. Daniel fired, and the thing stumbled back and fell to one knee. Daniel fired again, but his heart seized as he heard the empty click of the hammer falling on an already spent cartridge. The gun was out of ammo.
What should have been the booming crack of a gunshot was replaced by a cacophony of footfalls and hisses and growls. Daniel spared one priceless second to look back and see that, while the other monsters still trudged toward then at a zombie’s pace, the dog monsters’ patience had been exhausted. They were sprinting out of the heavy mist at them.
“Come on!” he shouted.
Daniel dragged Bethany the last couple of feet to the clinic door. It felt like the fog had thickened and he was running through water, the last few inches feeling like miles. The dog monsters appeared to have no such hindrance, swimming through the fog after them. He stepped inside the door, pulled Bethany past him and into the clinic, and shoved his shoulder hard against the door. The door slammed shut, and Daniel spotted and flipped closed the deadbolt lock just as two of the dog monsters rammed against the clinic door. The frame creaked and the glass cracked on the impact, then the dog monsters reared back and rammed the door again. Daniel pushed against the wooden planks nailed to the door, but he could see the burnt and blistered faces ramming against the glass in between the slats.
“I need boards! Now!” he called out.
He pushed hard against the door as more creatures began to pound and shove. The door wasn’t going to hold for long. He needed the boards, but when he looked over his shoulder, Bethany was cowering in a corner, her arms wrapped around her doll and rocking back and forth. Over the breaking of glass and slamming of flesh against wood and metal, he could hear her sobbing.
