Nightwalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  “I’m trying to get a better view of things closer around us. I see some stuff.”

  I guess that made sense. Since she had already gone up there, I couldn’t argue the logic of checking for nearby hazards. I also couldn’t imagine what she could see in the surrounding blackness.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I can see fires. I see the one Tommy started, but there are others out there too. A lot of them.”

  Which shouldn’t have surprised me. Not counting defensive arson and helicopter crashes, there was no telling how many people had used some form of flame as a defensive weapon only to have it get out of control. And with the way things were warping in places, who knew how many pilot lights had gone out, or gas lines been compromised.

  “But I also see a street light!”

  “Wait, here in Coventry Woods?”

  “Yes!” Her voice receded again and I knew she climbed even higher. “And it’s not far! That’s why I couldn’t see it earlier. The trees were blocking it. It’s near the front of Stratton Park. It’s…it’s at the playground! Next to the duck pond. And I can see people there! I think they are…”

  And that’s when we lost her.

  A sudden whip-crack noise snapped from the darkness above, and Ashlyn screamed.

  “Ashlyn!” I screamed myself, forgetting my fear of heights and struggling up toward the nearby ladder.

  Another agonized shriek floated down and the sound of her cries spurred me to greater efforts. I couldn’t see a thing up there but I knew something had her, and that something was hurting her terribly.

  It probably only took about ten seconds, but it seemed an eternity later I finally grasped the bottom rung of the ladder in my hand. I wasted no time in using it as a brace to scramble up onto the horizontal bar where Ashlyn had sat earlier, and then began my own ascent.

  The wind had grown louder in the blackness around me, although I didn’t feel it as much as heard it. More whip-cracks sounded as well, each accompanied by another tortured scream.

  But the sound of those latest screams brought me up short and I squinted up into the darkness in confusion.

  The tower’s sides were angled as it tapered toward the top, but it sounded like Ashlyn struggled directly overhead. That didn’t make any sense at all. How could she be in the sky above me?

  “Ashlyn!” I called again, trying to make sense of what I heard overhead.

  Something white fluttered down out of the blackness, landing on my arm and almost causing me to lose my grip when I jerked away. Then I recovered at the last instant and snatched the object out of the air before it fell past me.

  It was a strip of Ashlyn’s pajamas, partially soaked in blood.

  I stared in horror at the cloth, then back up into the blackness where her cries had begun to recede.

  She must have somehow twisted in the grip of whatever had her, for now I could see the yellow splotch of her glowstick. It didn’t reveal much, only enough to confirm she no longer clung to the tower. Otherwise the light simply hung in the air, slowly gaining altitude. I tried to imagine what could have her and failed.

  But that’s when lightning flared across the sky, revealing the obscenity that had caught her.

  I’m not sure how to describe the creature, other than to call it a large, fleshy mass that looked more like an excised tumor or polyp than any animal I had ever seen. This thing was a true abomination. It hung suspended in the sky like a grotesque balloon…one with bulbous growths and large pulsing veins covering its surface. Short insectile legs clutched Ashlyn’s tiny form against its underside while long, ropelike tendrils whipped at her in a mad frenzy. Dark slashes crisscrossed her pajamas and I knew she must already be badly hurt. At the same time I also saw several other fleshy cords hanging limp beneath the monstrosity, and a couple of those rested against the tower above.

  But before the light faded I saw something else that made my blood run even colder.

  Above the tower, the sky crawled with other horrors. Myriad forms floated, flapped, and glided under the heavy clouds, each one more nightmarish than the last.

  Then the light faded, returning the world to darkness around me. Only Ashlyn’s glow stick remained as a distant beacon in the black night.

  Yelling her name, I raced up the ladder in desperation. I’m not sure what I intended to do, and I’m pretty confident I had no real plan, but I remained focused on the spot I remembered the creature touching the tower. There it could be reached, and I had to get there before the thing floated high enough for those tendrils to pull away. I would figure out the rest when I got there.

  As it turned out, I would never get the chance.

  The clouds lit up again, once more illuminating the ghastly skies.

  The sound of wind howled around me, but I now understood it to be noise generated by the beast. We had been listening to the monster the whole time we climbed toward it. After that night, the sound of wind would forever give me nightmares.

  But right then it was another sound that brought my climb to an end. As I relocated the spot where the fleshy strands rested against the tower, I heard the unmistakable hiss of an arrow rip through air past me. There followed a sickening “thok” and Ashlyn’s cries cut off like somebody had flipped a switch.

  I tore my gaze from the nearing tendrils just in time to see the life leave her eyes.

  Ashlyn’s mouth worked once, twice, and then she went slack. She was gone. Her small body hung limp in the monster’s grasp, with one of Tommy’s arrows protruding from her chest…right next to the glow stick he had attached to her.

  I screamed her name once more, knowing full well she would never hear me.

  Then the darkness returned, leaving me to cling to the side of the massive tower and stare helplessly at the diminishing yellow glow as it ascended into the night sky

  Chapter Twelve: Fallout

  Nobody spoke as I released the beam and dropped the final two feet to the ground.

  “What did you do?” I snarled, stalking toward Tommy.

  The boy didn’t answer. He simply stood there, slightly apart from the others, still staring at the sky.

  “What the hell did you just do!?”

  I screamed it as I strode up to face him. If I was right, I now confronted a cold-blooded killer who also had the advantage of youth, size, strength, and God only knew what else, but that hardly entered my thinking. I was still lost in the fury of knowing Ashlyn had needed our help and this bastard had shot her instead.

  “Answer me, goddamn you!”

  This didn’t elicit much either, but at least he finally responded.

  “I missed,” he replied softly, still gazing at the sky.

  “You missed?” I goggled in disbelief, “What do you mean, ‘you missed?’ Look at me, dammit!”

  Tommy stared at the sky for a second or two longer, then dropped his gaze to meet mine. He regarded me with a slow, puzzled expression, like a dreamer unsure if he were awake or asleep.

  “I missed,” he repeated in a whisper.

  “Like hell!” I exploded. “I’ve never seen you miss before, and that damn sure wasn’t a miss either! It was a perfect shot! Right in the heart!”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit! She hurt your poor little feelings when she told you to stay on the ground, and that’s when you decided to kill her.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, I’ve got to admit the little stunt with the glow stick was inspired. It made it look like you were being cool about the whole thing when what you were really doing was hanging a nice glowing target on her chest. Then you could have an ‘accident’ if the opportunity arose, or wait till later if it didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “And you know what the really sick part is? She actually urged others to be nice to you! She was your…”

  I never got to finish, because right then my diatribe got interrupted from a most unexpected quarter.

  “What part of ‘no’ are you not getting!?” Darla
suddenly appeared in my face, shouting at the top of her lungs. “He said he missed!”

  Caught by surprise, I took a step back.

  “Darla, this isn’t the time,” I growled, “You don’t seem to get what happ…”

  “Oh I get what happened,” she cut me off. “I get what happened just fine. This is the second time you’ve gone off in the darkness with somebody and came back alone. Only this time you’ve got the nerve to point fingers at the man who actually kills monsters instead of throwing other people to them!”

  “What?” I gaped at her, “Now wait a minute…”

  What the hell? Was I being accused of something now?

  “You heard me!” she snapped. “That’s twice now. I haven’t forgotten how Sid was being eaten but you were already at my front gate.”

  “I tried to help Sid,” I gasped, now taken utterly aback.

  “Oh yeah? Like you were helping Ashlyn? Funny how when the lightning flashed we could see the monster had her, yet you were still at the bottom of the ladder. You care to explain that to us?”

  The sudden change from Sid to Ashlyn caught me flatfooted, and I realized with horror how it must have looked to people on the ground. They wouldn’t have seen how I had just reached the ladder when the lightning flashed.

  “She…she went ahead without me. I told her to wait.”

  “Who’s talking bullshit now?” she snarled. “Why would she go alone if she had the option of you following happily along with her? The only possible answer is she didn’t have that option. And you know damn well why! You got scared, and you froze. And that forced her to go up there all alone and get eaten.”

  My fury had now completely evaporated as I found myself on the defensive. Darla was doing it to me again. She was cutting me to ribbons.

  “Okay, I was scared. But it didn’t happen that way.”

  “Oh really? Funny how the end result is still the same. People seem to have a way of dying around you, and now you’re trying to pass it off on Tommy.”

  “It was his arrow in her chest!”

  “Because he missed!” she screamed in my face. “Are you an archer? Do you know what’s involved in shooting at a distant target almost straight up? How much practice do you think he spent doing that?”

  “I…”

  “You don’t know! You’re just shooting off your mouth about something you don’t know a damn thing about so you can spread the blame. Yeah, that’s his arrow in her chest, and it’s probably lucky for her since the thing was tearing her to pieces anyway. And guess whose fault that was, asshole! I’ll give you a hint; it damn sure wasn’t Tommy’s!”

  I stared at her, utterly stricken. I couldn’t refute a single point she had made. Hell, I couldn’t even be sure she wasn’t right.

  Could Ashlyn’s death have been my fault? Or Sid’s? Could I have done something else? Had I been taking the easy way out and trying to avoid guilt by pinning it all on Tommy? The fact I no longer felt sure left a sick feeling deep in my gut.

  I stared helplessly at Darla’s snarling face as she obviously prepared to heap more condemnation on me…but then it was her turn to be interrupted.

  A loud “smack” sounded from nearby, cutting her off. It was followed by another, and then another.

  I turned to see Casey giving an exaggerated slow clap as she walked up beside me and favored the older woman with a sullen glare.

  “You’re good, Darla,” she growled. “You are really, really good.”

  It obviously wasn’t a compliment, nor taken as one either.

  “Why don’t you mind your own business,” Darla spat, obviously taken by surprise as well. “You should let ‘Daddy’ take care of himself. He seems to have a real knack for it.”

  I don’t know if Darla had any idea what a sore topic she now tread on, although at this point I wouldn’t put anything past her. She was in fine form and definitely not pulling any punches. But if it was a deliberate attempt to provoke Casey, the ruse failed.

  Casey didn’t react to the jibe at all.

  “I bet lots of people who know you think you’re nothing but a dumb ho,” the girl continued in the same low voice, “but they would be wrong. We know better, don’t we? There’s nothing dumb about you. You are a real pro, and you’re as cold as they get.”

  “You don’t know shit, kid.”

  “Oh really?” Casey shot back, “I know what you’re doing right now, and I think it’s pathetic. By the way, how long have Sid and Happy Harry been dead? An hour? Maybe a little more? A girl’s gotta be practical, right?”

  The look on Darla’s face was almost frightening. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much hatred packed into one pair of eyes in my life.

  “Like I said,” she hissed, “you don’t know shit. But I can see you’re the same type of finger-pointing, holier-than-thou asswipe that he is. C’mon Tommy, you did your best and you damn sure don’t deserve this kind of crap from the likes of them.”

  Tommy, who had gone back to gazing up at the sky sometime during Darla’s intervention, now gave her the same puzzled look he had bestowed on me earlier. It almost seemed as if he had lost interest in the whole encounter. Yet he offered no complaint when she took him by the hand and led him away.

  The pair of them moved to the far corner of the enclosure. Once there, Darla laid a hand on his shoulder and started talking to him in a low voice. Moral support I suppose.

  I stared at the two of them for a second, then down at the bloody strip of cloth I still clenched in my hand.

  So much for my little crusade for justice. I didn’t even know who the bad guy was anymore.

  I only knew my hands were far from spotless.

  ###

  Ashlyn’s death hung like a shroud over the enclosure.

  We now huddled in three distinct groups.

  The Treadwells nursed their own pain in the shed. Allen had been at the door and saw the whole event, along with the showdown afterward. He never said a word, simply opting to retreat back inside. I suppose I couldn’t blame him.

  Darla and Tommy still remained in the far corner. She spoke to him in a low voice, obviously trying to make a point. I had no idea what she said, although I felt pretty sure it would be nothing I wanted to hear.

  That left me, Casey, and Ed sitting around the little fire can at the base of the tower. Ed leaned back against the tower’s corner support with his eyes closed. He looked exhausted. Casey stared into the flames, although I could tell she didn’t really see them. I could only imagine the effect watching one of her friends die so horribly had on her. And the fact it had been somebody like Ashlyn…

  Damn.

  I guess it’s just that those kinds of things weren’t supposed to happen to people like her. They shouldn’t happen to anybody, but Ashlyn had been the type you would have assumed to be the last girl standing if this had been a horror movie. I really didn’t know much about her, but she had come across as “the good girl”…smart, funny, pretty, but still compassionate to the point it even extended to a guy who made her nervous.

  But that hadn’t meant a damned thing tonight.

  She had made the mistake of being too incautious, as well as choosing the wrong man for backup. And those mistakes had killed her.

  To make matters worse, I had been that man…and I wouldn’t even get the luxury of slinking off in shame. This wasn’t over yet, and I would probably get plenty of other opportunities to fail somebody who counted on me. I couldn’t let that happen. Not again.

  I would have to put off trying to figure out how to live with myself until later.

  For now I needed to soldier on and be there for Casey and the others.

  “Hey, Casey,” I whispered, “you okay?”

  “I guess so…sort of. You?”

  “Same here.”

  “Yeah.”

  We both gazed at the little fire in silence. Distant gunfire echoed through the darkness but we ignored it. This ragged march for survival was beginning to numb us to all
dramas but our own.

  “By the way, thanks for stepping in with Darla. I’m beginning to learn you’re a pretty good person to have on my side.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Funny thing is, it turns out I’m the one who needed rescuing, although in this case I’m not sure I deserved it.”

  She looked up from the flames, her face drawn and solemn.

  “That’s just more of Darla’s crap, Mark. Don’t listen to her. Don’t let her do that to you.”

  “Easier said than done,” I sighed. “She made a pretty strong case.”

  “She didn’t make a case at all,” Casey snapped back. “She just saw an opportunity and made a play. Darla never gave two shits about Ashlyn. That was the first time she ever called her by her real name instead of ‘Smurf’ or ‘Thing Two’. She just worked up a big show of outrage so she could be the good guy to your bad guy. That whole production was for Tommy’s benefit.”

  I considered that doubtfully.

  “C’mon. I know how she comes across, but I doubt she’s really hunting a new boyfriend under circumstances like these.”

  “Ugh,” she sighed. “You don’t get it. It’s not what you think. I’ve met a few other girls like her—at least kind of like her—but she’s taken it to whole new level. She actually plays the slut because the truth is worse.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mark, to women like Darla, it’s not about caring or companionship. It’s not even about sex. Those are just the cards she plays in an obvious way so you don’t see the other cards coming. To her, it’s all about protection…security. And men are what she puts between herself and the world. She wears them like a tool belt.

  But right now she doesn’t have that. Happy Harry and Sid weren’t the kind of protection who could do her any good tonight. She needed a shield of a different sort. The problem was you and Mr. Treadwell were obviously taken, and she probably figured Uncle Ed was way too old and wise to fall for her schtick. So there stands Tommy, but he’s not exactly seduction material which meant her normal strategies would probably be a mistake. And Darla’s way too smart to make a mistake like that. But when you called Tommy out like you did, you gave her a different angle to get in with him.