Yet. That made him angry too since he knew that there was no chance he’d ever be back to what he was.
He picked up the tool bag again, his frustration lending him some strength. “Let’s get this stuff into the house and—”
“I got hit by a car when I was just a little boy,” Isaac blurted out. “The tire ran over my head.” He wasn’t looking at Dale as he spoke, his hand going up to touch a scar on the side of his head. “That’s why I’m . . . different.”
He then looked at Dale, pulled the wood up tighter in his arms, and turned to leave the garage. “Gotta get this stuff into the house,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen.
Without a word, Dale followed, dragging the tool bag behind him.
Dale was much slower at navigating the stacks, and Isaac was already out of sight when he heard a tremendous crash from the direction of the kitchen door.
“That’s okay, Isaac,” Dale said, trying to quicken his pace, thinking the young man had dropped his armload of wood. But as he maneuvered around an old washer and dryer he’d been hoping to get up on Craigslist, he didn’t like what he saw.
Isaac was on his back at the foot of the stairs, pieces of wood scattered about him. The young man’s body had gone completely rigid, his hands like claws moving up toward the sides of his face—to his ears—but hesitating.
“Isaac,” Dale said, dropping the tools and lurching toward the youth. He had no idea what he could do, but he had to at least try. “It’s okay, buddy, everything is going to be okay.”
Isaac’s mouth was moving; he was trying to speak, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“What’s wrong? What did you do? Did you fall and hit your head? What . . . ?”
He was convulsing now, as if he was having some sort of seizure.
On a small workstation table covered with cans of paint, Dale saw a stack of old towels that he used as rags and drop cloths and made his way toward them. Grabbing a handful, he returned to where Isaac still thrashed and twitched and managed to lower himself to his knees beside the boy using his cane and the stair rail. Then he placed the towels beneath Isaac’s head.
“It’s all right,” he said, trying to reassure the youth. “Everything is going to be okay.”
Dale had no idea if the kid was prone to seizures, but without phones to call for help, there was nothing to do but sit with him and wait it out. He patted Isaac’s chest with a comforting hand. “You just lie there for a bit, and we’ll see if you feel any better in a while.”
Isaac’s hand shot out, wrapping painfully around Dale’s wrist, pulling him closer as he looked into Dale’s eyes.
“The bad radio,” Isaac gasped. “It’s getting . . . louder.” His hand hovered clawlike and horrible around the hearing aid in his right ear and the scar on the side of his head.
Dale had no idea what the young man was experiencing, but the look on his face told him it was something awful.
* * *
The bad radio in Isaac’s Steve ear was telling him to do things . . . horrible things.
He couldn’t understand what was happening as the static crackled, and the sound tried to worm its way inside his head—inside his brain.
The bad radio wanted to take over, to push him so far down that he—Isaac—wouldn’t exist anymore.
He didn’t want to go away . . . didn’t want to listen to the bad radio and the horrible, horrible things it was telling him to do.
But the bad radio was loud—strong—filling his head with a powerful message of violence and terrible images of what it was doing out there in the storm.
It forced him to look through its eyes . . . its many, many eyes . . . so many eyes.
It forced him to see—
Everything.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Where again?” Officer Isabel asked as she turned the corner onto Bennett Street, the driving wind and rain pummeling the police vehicle.
“It’s off of Lansdale,” Sidney said, trying to see through the deluge of water.
“Got it,” Isabel said over the hissing rain and the rhythmic back and forth of the wiper blades.
A gnawing nervousness was growing in Sidney’s belly. She wanted to tell the officer to hurry up, but she knew they were going as fast as they could in the dangerous conditions.
“Hey, slow down,” Rich suddenly spoke up, his face practically pushed into his window as he struggled to see in the storm-swept night. “Do you see that?”
Officer Isabel brought the car to a halt and stared through her own window. “Where are we looking?”
Sidney slid across the seat and tried to follow Rich’s gaze.
“What are we looking for, Rich?” Cody asked as he leaned toward Isabel, attempting to look past her shoulder into the darkness.
“I . . . ,” Rich began, still searching. “I thought I saw . . .”
And then.
“There!” he said, tapping his index finger on the glass. “It looks like a truck . . . or maybe an SUV. Oh God, please don’t let it be the K-9 truck.”
A sudden, solemn silence descended on the group. Two other groups from the police station had escaped just ahead of them in two more department rides. Sidney guessed that the little girl Amy and her mom were in the K-9 vehicle.
“Where?” Cody asked, looking all the harder. “I still don’t—”
“Shit,” Officer Isabel cursed, and that was when Sidney saw it. It was indeed the police SUV, and it was lying about ten feet into the woods, on its roof.
Isabel was trying to bring their vehicle closer to the wreck when something surged up from the road in front of them. The police officer let out a shrill scream as the headlights illuminated what was in the road ahead.
It looked almost like a wave of water about to flow over them, but where would a wave of water come from on an old backwoods road?
But as it flowed closer, Sidney recognized it for what it really was.
She wanted to scream too, but it was too late.
The wave—yes, it was a wave, but not comprised of water—was alive, made up of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of living things, warm-blooded and cold—insect, reptile, amphibian, and mammal.
Life, large and small, merged together into an undulating wall, surging toward the vehicle as if it was one single entity. If it wasn’t so damn horrifying, it would have been fascinating.
“Hold on,” Isabel shouted, swiftly putting the car in reverse and flooring the gas. The tires screeched and smoked as they spun upon the wet road, finally gripping enough of the tarmac to send them racing backward.
They were all screaming, and Snowy barked viciously, aware again that they were under attack.
Cody pounded the dashboard, screaming a single word over and over again as if it could somehow make them move faster. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”
And for a moment Sidney thought they had managed to outrun the wave, that it was going to fall like real waves upon the beach, but the wave defied all logic as it surged up, growing impossibly larger, towering over the vehicle, before crashing down upon the road and flowing beneath the SUV. They could feel it through the floor of the police vehicle, striking against the truck’s underside, before flexing its terrible, singular self, pushing off from the ground and lifting the truck from the road.
They screamed together as the SUV flipped, the windows exploding inward as the vehicle came to rest in the road upon its side. Sidney and Snowy fell in a heap atop Rich, pressed against the car door.
“Sorry,” she said, trying to reposition her eighty-pound dog and get herself off of her friend.
“It’s okay,” Rich said, lending her a hand. They all carefully righted themselves, amid sounds of the living wave sliding across the SUV, probing, seeking a way inside.
Seeking the life within.
Rich peered over his seat as Officer Isabel frantically searched for her shotgun, and Cody struggled to stay out of her way.
Sidney attempted to find the
proper handhold to haul herself up through the shattered window now above her. She planted her feet against the back of the front seat and started to push herself up toward the opening when a shape moved across the window.
The wave probed at the edges of the shattered window frame, fingers made up from what appeared to be the pink, hairless bodies of moles and baby mice about to spill over inside the vehicle.
Sidney dropped back down as Snowy began to furiously bark. She searched the inside of the car for some place that they could go, believing that it was only a matter of seconds before the mass of life flooded the vehicle to get at them.
“Can we crawl out the back window?” Sidney asked as Rich tried to maneuver himself over the seat.
But it was too late.
The living mass started to extend down into the overturned SUV, and Sidney came to the sickening realization that she might not survive the night after all.
The blast from the shotgun was deafening within the enclosed space, and the tendril comprised of insects, mice, moles, and hundreds of earthworms exploded spectacularly to spatter them and everyone inside the SUV.
“Get out, get out now!” Officer Isabel screamed.
Sidney didn’t need to be told twice. She climbed up the back of the front seats, grabbing hold of the window frame to haul herself outside. Isabel was already out, sitting atop the front passenger door, shotgun aimed.
“Move it, Sidney,” she commanded.
Sidney spun around on her knees and leaned back in through the broken window. “Push Snowy up to me!”
Rich and Cody managed to get the dog up, her legs scrambling wildly for purchase as Sidney pulled her through the window, nearly falling off the SUV in the process.
The shotgun fired again, and then again.
“Move it people!” Officer Isabel screamed, and it was then that Sidney noticed her voice sounded strange. She looked at Isabel and saw the small puddles of blood forming on the door of the SUV where the officer knelt with the gun.
“You’re hurt,” Sidney said, moving toward her as Rich leveraged himself out of the window. Something must have cut her when the SUV flipped.
“We don’t have time for this,” Isabel said, firing again. Her shots hit their targets, but the undulating mass of life slowly reformed each time it was hit. “We’ve got to make a run for it.”
Cody crawled up and out of the window next to Isabel, giving her a handful of shotgun shells. “Here, thought you could use these. I picked them up from the floor.”
Isabel reloaded the gun methodically and shoved the extras in her pockets. “How far to your dad’s place?” she asked.
Sidney looked down the length of road. “Not that far,” she said. “Maybe a five-minute walk—less if we’re running like hell.”
“Then you three need to run like hell.” The police officer fired the shotgun again at the advancing mass.
The wave had pulled back into the darkness of the forest beside the road, and Sidney thought maybe they actually had a chance, but she was quickly proven wrong when it exploded from the woods, bigger and nastier than before.
“Watch it!” Officer Isabel roared, managing to get off another shot before the living wave crashed into the back of the SUV. The impact spun the vehicle and sent its passengers flying from their perches atop it.
Sidney landed in the center of the road, rolling to her feet, trying not to think about how badly her body ached. She quickly looked around, finding Cody and then Rich. Snowy was beside Officer Isabel, who looked as though she was having some difficulty standing.
The living mass lifted itself up from the ground, swaying like some gigantic poisonous snake, readying to strike.
Isabel got to her feet, using the shotgun as a crutch. She petted Snowy’s head vigorously, and then motioned for the dog to go as she raised her weapon.
“C’mon!” Sidney yelled to Officer Isabel as Snowy and the guys joined her in the road.
Isabel turned toward them, swaying slightly, and Sidney was shocked by the amount of blood she saw on the front of the officer’s uniform.
“Go . . . ,” the police officer said, waving them away. “Get out of here!”
She spun around to the organism as it seemed to notice her, what could have been millions of eyes all zeroing in on the woman who stood defiantly before it.
“Officer Isabel, please!” Sidney called out frantically.
“You heard me! Get the hell out of here!”
Rich took Sidney’s arm, trying to pull her along, but Sidney tore it away. The living mass seemed to sense their movement and turned in their direction.
“Hey!” Officer Isabel screamed, moving closer to its writhing body. “Hey, right here!”
The thick tendril of life spun toward the police officer, rearing back and studying her as she brandished her weapon.
“Yeah, that’s it—right here—you ugly freak of nature.”
“No!” Sidney cried. “You can’t do this!”
“Get out of here! Save this island!” Isabel shouted as she turned and made for the back of the overturned SUV.
Cody and Rich began to drag Sidney away, even as she fought them.
“You do your part,” Isabel said. She aimed the shotgun at the SUV’s gas tank. “And I’ll do mine.”
With that, she fired a single shot, setting off an explosion that consumed her whole and engulfed the monstrous organism in hungry fire.
The force of the blast blew Sidney, Rich, and Cody backward.
Sidney could hear only ringing in her ears. She opened and closed her mouth and moved her jaw about painfully, hoping to return the sounds of the world. She stared at the burning wreckage of the SUV and the piles of flaming animal bodies littering the ground up ahead. Something warm and wet touched her hand, and she let out a scream that she could not hear, looking down to see a cowering Snowy. Realizing what she’d done, Sidney bent down, wrapping her arms around her dog’s neck and speaking into her thick, wet fur.
“It’s okay,” she said, the vibration of her voice allowing her to communicate with her best friend. “Everything is going to be okay.”
But as she said this, she knew the words were wrong—a lie. Rich and Cody had come to join them, and they all stared at the flaming wreckage, seeing movement from the woods beyond, Officer Isabel’s sacrifice merely a pause in the night’s horror.
It wasn’t okay at all.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
He jumped at every sound, his imagination getting the best of him.
Was that breaking glass? Was that the door swinging open?
Dale sat uncomfortably by Isaac’s side, hoping that the seizure, or whatever it was that the poor kid was going through, would pass.
“C’mon, buddy,” he said, laying his hand upon Isaac’s shoulder.
A noise startled him, a thumping sound that he couldn’t quite place. He turned enough to peer up the stairs and through the open doorway. The sound most definitely came from somewhere up there.
He looked back to the youth. He seemed to have calmed a bit, his body no longer as rigid. Dale suddenly remembered a kid that he’d gone to elementary school with. He’d had epilepsy, and after he had a few seizures in class, they’d never seen him again. He figured the kid’s parents had taken him out of school.
It was kind of sad. He didn’t think that Isaac had ever gone to school, certainly not on the island. Dale’s recollection was of Isaac and his mother, always together. He wondered about the life the boy had led, feeling bad that he’d never reached out in any way, even to just say hi or how are you today.
Another noise from the house interrupted his thoughts. This one was louder and more forceful.
Dale immediately imagined that it was Berthold, back to the finish the job. He couldn’t just sit there. Glancing past Isaac’s body, he focused on the bag of tools that he’d dropped.
Using his cane, he managed to push himself up far enough to grab hold of the stair rail, then used that to haul himself to his feet. The
exertion left him winded and disgusted. He leaned against the railing, catching his breath and listening to the sounds of the house. He heard everything now, every bump, tick, patter—
And crash.
It was the front door; he was sure of it. He grasped his cane, and using it to steady himself, lurched toward the tool bag, managing to avoid Isaac’s body and the boxes piled all around them.
Using the end of his cane, he parted the opening in the bag, relieved to find what he sought right on top. The banging sound came again, only this time it was louder, as if someone—something—was trying to force its way inside. Bracing himself, Dale attempted to bend his knees, but only one obeyed. Thankfully, it was just enough to let him grab hold of the claw hammer and pull it from the bag.
Hefting the hammer in his stronger hand, he hobbled back toward the steps, remembering the days when he hadn’t needed a weapon, when no one was stupid enough to break into his home.
But now . . .
He squeezed the handle of the hammer with all his might, attempting to will some of that long-lost strength back into his beleaguered body, as he made his way toward the stairs. Wishful thinking, he thought, unsure of how much of a threat he would be, but he had to do something. He wasn’t about to cower in the dark as somebody attempted to break into his home.
He was pathetic, but he wasn’t a coward.
It seemed to take forever, and most of his strength, to make it up the three stairs and through the kitchen to the front door. It was still closed. Cautiously approaching, he leaned against it, listening, but all he could hear were the sounds of the storm still going on outside.
The doorknob rattled, and he gasped, jumping back, almost tripping over his own feet. He managed to stop himself with his cane and hold on to the hammer.
The doorknob rattled again, followed by the nearly deafening sound of the lock sliding back, and then the door began to open.
Dale was wild with fear and anger. If he was going to strike, he had to strike first—and hard. He doubted he would have much of a second chance. He raised the hammer.
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