by Ronald Malfi
“I think it would be smart to round up some backup,” he told her. “Do you agree?”
Brandy said nothing but continued to look out the passenger window at the encroaching darkness. Here, the trees blotted out the mountains and any hint of daylight that was working its way up over them. It could have been the middle of the night.
Ben slowed the car as they passed a series of small brick houses that flanked the right side of the road. All the lights in the houses were off, making it appear as though the entire block had been evacuated.
Or worse, Ben thought.
He pulled up in front of Mike Keller’s house, which was the last house at the end of the road before the road dead-ended into dense woods. The place was as dark as an underground mine. Mike’s police car was still in the driveway. Moonlight limned the shape of what appeared to be a pair of boots pointing up out of the overgrown grass of the front lawn.
Christ…
He popped open his door and Brandy did the same. “No,” he told her. “Wait her for a sec.” Then he snatched his cell phone out of the console and tossed it into her lap. “See if you can get a signal. If you do, call 911.”
The girl glanced at the cell phone. “There’s no bars.”
Ben climbed out of the car and hustled across the front lawn in the rain. At the side of the house, Mike’s live-in girlfriend, Judy Janus, had parked her Chevy Blazer. One of the Blazer’s doors stood open but no interior light was on in the cab.
The figure on the lawn was Mike Keller, still in uniform. He lay with his face down on the lawn. Someone had unzipped the back of his head, leaving behind a ragged split in his skull which was already overflowing with rainwater.
Ben unholstered his gun and approached the Blazer next. The driver’s door stood ajar and the keys still dangled from the ignition, though the engine was off. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the vinyl seats and dark, soupy matter congealing in the footwells.
When he got back in the car, he was breathing heavily. He sat for a few moments behind the wheel, not speaking.
“What happened to your backup?” Brandy asked. She sounded nervous, her voice as taut as a rubber band stretched to its limit.
“I changed my mind.”
She set his cell phone back on the console. “No signal. I guess the storm knocked the towers out or something.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he pulled back out onto the road.
3
The sky had just begun to lighten when Ben swung the car onto Gracie Street. To the left, the cornfield that flanked the road had been pulverized by the power of last night’s storm. To the right, the muddy swamp and stoic, empty houses that made up the abandoned part of town looked now like a prophecy. When they motored by the old house where Brandy had discovered her brother yesterday evening, the girl hung her head low, brownish tangles of hair covering her face.
According to the GPS, the tracking device—the bat—was located on the other side of the field, past the husks of the empty houses. Brandy looked up and out the window and Ben followed her gaze. The razorback silhouette of the eastern mountains stood in sharp relief against a sky that was brightening to a bland yellow at the horizon.
And then he saw it and he knew.
“There,” he said.
“I see it,” Brandy answered breathlessly.
The turret that climbed almost three stories into the air was that of the old grain silo off Gracie Street. Weather-rotted and the color of bone, it was like the beacon of some lost dystopian civilization. This monster was comprised of wood staves that were gapped and split and bleached from decades in the sun. The cupola resembled a Chinaman’s hat, capped with an ancient weather vane that did not appear capable of turning in even the strongest wind. Bats hovered around the top of the silo like giant flies and more of them clung from the railing that encircled the structure just beneath the cupola. A few more darted in and out of rents in the staves.
“Jesus Christ, look at them all,” Ben mused.
Brandy said nothing. The expression on her face was one of unmitigated terror.
“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked her.
After a couple of seconds, she nodded…but said nothing. She looked about as fragile as fine china.
Ben cut the wheel and bounded over the muddy field. Twice, the car got stuck and he had to switch back and forth from Drive to Reverse to jockey it loose. Finally, he turned onto a paved yet potholed slab of roadway that curled up an incline toward the silo. When they got to within a hundred yards of the structure, Ben geared the car into Park.
“What do we do now?” Brandy asked. Their commingling respiration was fogging up the windshield.
“I guess I go in there.” He was peering through the windshield and up at the silo. Sunlight had just begun to strike the eastern side of the structure.
“I’m coming with you.”
“I think it’s probably best if you—”
“No. I’m not sitting here alone. I can’t. I’m coming with you.”
He said nothing more.
Surprisingly, Brandy got out of the car first. Ben followed. He went around back and opened the trunk. He took the shotgun out of its rack then filled the pockets of his uniform with extra shells. He handed some to Brandy and told her to fill her pockets, too.
“You know how to use this thing?” he asked, hefting the shotgun. “Just in case something happens…”
“Yes. My dad taught me.”
He nodded sharply. “Okay. Good.” He took the bolt cutters out of the trunk then slammed the trunk closed. Wincing, he looked across the field at the looming cylindrical structure. The rain had lessened to a hazy drizzle but the air had turned bitterly cold. Storm clouds hung low to the ground. “If I tell you to run, to get the hell out of here, I want you to do it. Understood? No arguments. We won’t have time for it.”
“Understood.” She looked as insubstantial as a mirage standing there in the lightlessness of a predawn drizzle. Ben thought that if he closed his eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again, the girl would have disappeared. “What do you think we’ll find in there, anyway?”
“I have no idea, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” he said honestly. “All right. Let’s go.”
Together they crested the gradual incline toward the ancient, weather-ruined grain silo. It had stood there for all of Ben’s life, the familiarity of it tantamount to the streets of the town he had navigated since childhood or the various rooms and hallways of the old farmhouse on Sideling Road. But there was a sinister darkness cloaking it now, like how maturity brings with it a certain clarity of distinction between good and evil, and with each step that carried him closer to the thing, he felt his heartbeat amplify and quicken in his chest and his flesh, despite the cold, begin to perspire.
“Do you smell that?” Brandy asked. “It smells like chemicals.”
Indeed, that ammoniacal stink was growing stronger the closer they came to the silo.
It seemed to radiate from it like waves of heat off a desert highway.
There was a single wooden door at the base of the silo that slid open on an old, rusted track. The door was bound shut by a length of chain and a padlock, much like the door on the old plastics factory. Looking at it, Ben guessed that door hadn’t been open for the better part of a decade. When they approached it, Ben handed the shotgun over to Brandy—“Be careful,” he warned—then clipped the chain with the bolt cutters. The rusty chain fell away from the doorhandle and coiled at Ben’s feet like a cobra. He set the bolt cutters against the side of the structure then took the shotgun from Brandy.
“I’ve got this, too,” she said, showing him the string of black rosary beads she wore around her neck. “They were my grandmother’s. I don’t know if they work or not but I guess it couldn’t hurt.”
He wanted to tell her that he did not believe in vampires—even now, he did not believe in them, or in any other type of monster—but he could not find his voice at that moment. Instea
d, he just nodded succinctly and readied the shotgun with one arm. With his free hand, he gripped the bracket-shaped doorhandle. He clung to it for seemingly an eternity without breathing.
“You ready?” he whispered eventually.
“I guess so.”
“Okay.”
He shoved the door open.
4
Absolute darkness greeted them. The chemical smell was unbearable, striking Brandy like rancid breath. Warmth surrounded her and, when she looked up, she could make out slivers of sunlight burning through the gaps in the staves at the eastern-facing wall of the silo, all the way up the channel to the top. Both she and Ben took a few steps in. A faint rectangle of light spilled in through the open door and projected onto the opposite wall, framing their distorted shadows. One of her sneakers sank into something.
The sense that they weren’t alone was pervasive and all-encompassing, as if the walls of the structure themselves were alive and dangerous.
“I’m stepping in something,” she whispered very close to Ben’s face.
“So am I.”
Ben clicked on a flashlight and directed the beam at the ground. The entire floor was covered in heaping, reeking mounds of bat shit. She had her right foot in it up to the ankle. A sickly heat puffed up through the collar of her shirt and she held her breath and tried not to think about it. Ben turned the flashlight up toward the ceiling and Brandy snapped her head back to look up…
At first, it seemed there was nothing but shadows up there, darkness swimming across darkness through inky, liquid space. But then she realized it wasn’t darkness at all, but the dark, fur-cloaked, squirming pods of thousands and thousands of tiny bats. It was an entire colony of them, so many that the whole ceiling was completely covered with them, bulging and rippling like a great beating heart. They crawled over each other, clung to each other, writhed like maggots covered in bristling, brown hair. The susurration of their bodies swarming over each other created a sound like the shushing through dead autumn leaves. The sight of them nearly made her gag.
Like the parting of the Red Sea, the bats at the center of the flashlight’s beam began to spread outward, expanding away from the light as if disturbed by it.
What they revealed as they cleared away would haunt Brandy Crawly until her dying day.
5
“Jesus,” Ben breathed.
What had been hidden behind the wall of bats was revealed to him not all at once—for the human brain could not comprehend such madness in one unified punch—but piecemeal, like glimpsing individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which helped prevent his sanity from shattering like a pane of glass.
The hairless boy from Wills Creek hung suspended in the air, his nude body a pallid fetal question mark. He was suspended in what appeared to be an enormous web that stretched across the ceiling of the silo. The web itself looked organic, comprised of living tissue, the spokes of the web made of thick veins and arteries that, even as Ben stared, seemed to pulse with some preternatural blood flow. Something was at the center of the web—or perhaps it was part of the web itself, the way the body of an insect is attached to its wings or a turtle is affixed to its shell—that seemed to alter its physical appearance the longer Ben stared at it. It was vaguely humanoid…but then it resembled a mollusk…and then some tyrannical insect. Something akin to a segmented tail unfurled from the—
(scorpion)
—thing. It was twice as long as a grown man’s arm and concluded in a rough bulb that bristled with spiny, black hairs like porcupine quills. Four distinct hooks protruded from the flattened side of the bulb. As Ben watched, the tail came around and encircled the fetal boy in a mockery of a lover’s embrace. Clear fluid dripped from the four prong-like hooks as they came up to meet the boy’s arched back. Like the teeth of a zipper fitting neatly together, the four hooks inserted themselves into the four puncture marks that ran down the hairless boy’s spine. A moment later, a gush of fluid could be seen pumping through the semitransparent flesh of the thing’s tail.
The hairless boy’s eyes opened. They appeared blind and did not seem to register the flashlight’s beam. As Ben watched, the boy cocked his head at an unnatural angle. The lipless mouth came together to form a crude circle…and then the flesh of his lips stretched to an impossible length until it was less a mouth and more like the tubular proboscis of some bloodsucking insect. The proboscis needled itself into a divot-like opening in the flesh of the mother-creature where it proceeded to pump stark-black fluid into its transparent body.
It was a symbiotic exchange, where the child fed the mother and the mother fed the—
“Run,” Ben said.
6
She burst from the silo and streamed across the muddy field to find daylight cracking the sky. She tried to scream—and perhaps even thought she had—but no sound came out.Yet in her head, she was screaming.
7
Ben aimed the shotgun toward the abomination at the center of the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening. Bats swarmed over the two creatures, which remained locked in their otherworldly symbiosis, filling up the space like darkness in the absence of light. The flashlight dropped and the beam cut off, leaving only the rectangle of pallid predawn light that issued in through the doorway at Ben’s back. Ben fired two, three more shots at the ceiling, the tornado of bats whirring in the muzzle flashes and spiraling like a hurricane down the throat of the silo toward him. Dead ones rained down on him, while others struck his face and shoulders, still partially alive, screeching like tortured cats. He went to fire a fifth round but found the shotgun empty. Stupidly, his mind whirled. Above him, something large was moving through the darkness—had become the darkness—and was descending upon him.
Ben remembered the extra shells in his pockets. He pulled out a handful, losing most of them in his panic, and tried to reload the weapon with hands that shook like seismographs. Bats whipped his face and he threw himself backward, hoping the wall of the silo would catch him. But he was too far away from the wall and he fell backward into a mound of reeking, partially hardened feces.
Something large continued to move down the throat of the silo, its formless bulk temporarily cutting in front of the slivers of daylight that cut through the slats in the wood.
Ben groped blindly at the darkness with both hands, desperate to reload the weapon and continue firing.
It seemed to take him an eternity to realize he had dropped the shotgun.
8
She stopped running by the time she hit Gracie Street. Her lungs burned, as did her eyes, and she collapsed to her knees in the mud by the side of the road where she unleashed a woeful, terrified sob. Her terror was great, but she forced herself to close her eyes and count to ten in an effort to reclaim some semblance of control. It took her to twenty before she began to feel steady again…and to fifty before she was able to open her eyes and stand.
It was her brother she was thinking of, but it was her father who forced her to stay and stand her ground. Unlike him, she would not run away.
She turned and ran back up the hill toward unimaginable horror.
9
Oddly enough, it was the fact that he was thinking of his own father at the same moment that probably saved Ben Journell’s life. He recalled the Zippo he carried in his breast pocket, felt for it…and gripped its solid, heavy, cold frame between two fingers. It ignited on the first spin of the knurled wheel. Dim yellow light illuminated the erratic fluttering of the bats’ membranous wings all around him. He swatted at them and cried out as they battered against him, shrieking in their unnatural, high-octave voices. When he dared glance up, he could make out something pale and formless creeping down the throat of the silo toward him—the extended dual limbs of impossibly long arms and eyes that gleamed briefly like mirrors facing the sun…
The shotgun lay several feet away. The shotgun shells had vanished into the shadows. The hand holding the lighter trembled and the flame threatened to blow out from the air sti
rred by the wings of the bats.
He thought of his father at that moment, in the weeks before his death when the old man had stood out in the back field of the farmhouse off Sideling Road and had held a conversation with a wife who was no longer there.
His hand still shaking, Ben brought the lighter down to the ground. The flame touched a heap of guano and the guano, rich with nitrogen, ignited instantly. The flames wasted no time spreading across the terrain of feces, the firelight a dazzling yellow-white and reeking. Ben rolled over just as the fire rushed toward him, slamming down onto the ground with a shoulder that immediately thronged with pain. One hand shot blindly out, his numb fingers closing around the butt of the shotgun. He slid it toward himself as flames raced up the dry wood of the silo’s walls, the bat shit providing fuel that bested the sodden state of the wood.
He stood and raced out the open door, the entire floor ablaze while flames crawled up the walls of the silo. Cold, wet air struck him like a wall as he burst through the door and into oncoming dawn. He spun around and grabbed the bracket-shaped handle of the silo’s door. He gave it a tremendous yank and it slid along its rusty runners until it closed. When he let go of the doorhandle, he left a bloody handprint behind.
10
He caught Brandy as she came rushing toward him. Her eyes were fearful but there was a set determination to her jaw. She screamed and struggled to break from his grasp, her eyes locked on the silo. Ben hugged her to his chest, cradling the back of her head with one hand.
“Calm,” he told her. “Calm down. I need your help more than ever right now.”
She broke out in tears and began crying audibly against him. He held her while he watched the flames shoot out from the staves at the base of the silo. Columns of thick, black smoke poured out of rents in wood, and the bats, whipped into frenzy, spiraled out of the open cracks, filling the sky in a black blizzard.
