Now, Ricky Martin figured, he was a victim, pretty much a certainty. No reason for everyone to be eaten or torn apart or have their soul ripped out of their body. Or, whatever was about to happen to him.
So, instead of “help,” Ricky now yelled, as loud as his tired lungs and terrified body would allow him: “RU-U-N!”
Flower turned and started sprinting back toward the sound of Ricky Martin’s initial shriek. She stopped at the area they had agreed on. Almira and Conner were already there.
Almira stood by the flashlight, in a semi-squatting position, as if waiting to be handed the baton. She rocked back and forth on her feet, filled with adrenaline and anxiety.
Conner shook himself, wriggling his arms just out of site of the flashlight’s cold glow, as if he were warming up for either a fight club or a dance-off.
Ricky Martin veered into sight, if you could call it that in this murky underworld of deep darkness. Ricky pumped his arms madly, his mouth open but no sounds coming out. His eyes bulged from fright and from the thing behind him, which the others had yet to see, still squeezing and releasing the boy’s neck.
No other signal was required.
The other three were up and running, motivated by fear, survival instinct, and a dreamlike sense that this was the end, the end of their short lives.
Flower ran with tears streaming down her cheeks and rippling behind her, as if running through the rain.
Almira sprinted with her tongue out, squinting to see but with glazed-over eyes, almost as if she had already resigned to her fate, given up to the inevitable death that chased so close behind her.
Conner ran like a man with an intense case of diarrhea and an equally intense need to find a bathroom, now! He ran in an odd, up and down, pattern. Because he couldn’t see in front of him and wasn’t sure if he was about to run into a wall, over a cliff. Or up to another shadow monster. As the inadvertent leader, he had to blaze the trail. So he ran fast, but carefully.
Almira followed his back and his blue shirt.
Flower followed Almira’s red shirt.
And taking up the rear, Ricky Martin on drums. At least, based on the way his heart was pumping, he may as well been playing snare, hi-hat, bass, and cymbal.
They were a band on the run, an American band, and they were running out of time. Possibly even out of space, too in this dark hell.
And then, Ricky went silent.
Conner managed to look behind him. He didn’t want to, he didn’t want to see or to know.
But some instinct, some ancient habit, made him look back as he ran.
He saw Ricky Martin. His white, horrified face. His scream-less mouth. His bulging eyes. And the black thing behind him, tall as a house and billowing like a pirate sail.
Then, Ricky Martin vanished into nothingness.
And the black Shadow thing did, too.
Conner kept his odd gait, galloping along at top speed in a hurky, hoppy run as what he just saw slowly registered. Entering his brain over the noise of the flight, the fear, his own heart beating in his ears.
Then he skid to an awkward stop, causing Flower and Almira to crash into him. All three crashed to the black surface that they were accepting was the floor or ground of this place they were in.
“Ow, shit!”
“Fuck!”
“Dammit!”
For a moment, they tumbled in a knot. When they stopped, the three untangled and weakly stood, rubbing knees and necks.
“What the fuck, Conner!” Almira said.
“Are you both all right?”
“No, we are not all right, all right?”
“Ricky. He’s gone,” Conner said, ignoring the complaints.
The girls stopped complaining and turned to look into the black morass, the inky fog of nothingness.
They couldn’t make anything out, but they could tell that Ricky was no longer behind them. Neither was that thing, whatever it was.
“What should we do?”
“I don’t know,” Conner said. “Shit, I don’t know.” He blinked nervously, then cracked his neck by giving it a sharp twist. He sighed. “Go find him, I guess?”
“He might already be dead,” Almira said. “Our rescue party might just end up being the main course after the Ricky Martin appetizer.”
“Almira!” Flower said.
“Sorry.”
“Well, we need to make a group decision,” Conner said. “We need to either go save him, or save ourselves and get the hell out of this place.”
Fortunately or not, the decision was made for them. Because a deep growl, like a motion picture T-Rex from the ’90s, filled the jet-black air around them. The three could feel a crushing presence approaching them from three sides.
“We run!” Ricky croaked.
CHAPTER SIX
Like Milk From An Overturned Plastic Bottle
There wasn’t any time to think, any time to calculate options, escape routes, best laid plans.
Once again, the group turned and fled the scene.
This time, luck was with them. They slammed through the nearly invisible curtain separating the Dead world from the land of the Living.
The three crashed to the ground hard, branches and thorns scraping them on the way down. They lay there, moaning a bit, breathing hard.
Conner was the first to sit up. He looked directly back at where they had broken through.
Nothing.
No opening. No gap. Not even a seam. Just bushes and rocks and trees.
“Shit,” he said. “Wh-what was that all about?”
He turned to look at Flower and Almira who were getting up now, too. Almira rubbed her chin. Flower just held her head down, still on her hands and her knees.
“It wasn’t like this the first time, I swear,” Almira said, quietly. “We just fell through, completely by accident. We ended up in that pitch-black place. We freaked, turned around, and jumped right back out.”
“Yeah,” said Flower. “That’s why we wanted you with us this time. We wanted to explore it a little bit.”
“How in hell did you find it the first time?”
Both girls were silent. Flower dropped her eye contact from Conner and pursed her lips.
“Well?”
Another long pause. He looked to Almira, whose cheeks flushed red. Finally she replied. “You won’t believe it . . . ”
“Maybe not,” Conner said. “But it’s going to be hard to surprise me tonight. Don’t you think?”
“Well,” Almira twisted her hands together. “We were, well—we were chasing a bunny—”
Conner blinked. “A what?”
“The cuuuutest white bunny you ever saw,” Flower interjected.
“A baby bunny!” Almira said, almost squealing.
“We had just pulled over for a sec so I could, uh, check my makeup,” Flower said.
“On the side of the interstate?”
“She’s full of shit, Conner,” Almira said. “She dropped the joint.”
“What?”
“We were getting high,” Flower said. “I dropped the joint, so what? But it was still lit. So we like pulled off the road and onto the grass here.”
“That’s when we saw the little baby bunny,” Almira said.
Conner sneered. “Was it carrying a pocket watch by any chance?”
Flower tilted her head. “What?”
“Never mind.”
“Anyway,” Almira continued, “that’s how we fell through, to the other side.” She shrugged. “Just a big accident. We got right back in the car and got the hell out of Dodge. I can tell you that.”
“I see, I think,” Conner said.
“Anyway,” Almira went on, “that’s why we wanted you here with us. To make sure we weren’t crazy. And to maybe explore that side a little bit.”
“But we had no idea . . . ” Flower said, shaking her head.
“That we could get killed?” Conner asked. “Mauled to death by some freaky shadow monsters?”
Flower looked at Conner and then down at her hands. Her frown was pathetic, really. Suddenly, her face lifted quickly back to Conner’s.
“Oh-My-God,” she said, her eyes wide and her face turning pale.
“What?”
“Ricky!” she shouted. “Ricky’s still in there!”
The cops rolling up the interstate couldn’t help but notice the Camaro parked on the shoulder, up against the trees, a few yards off the highway. It was noticeable for two reasons.
First, the driver’s door wasn’t shut all the way, so the interior light was on, like a beacon in the night. Second, when people have car trouble, they just pull over. They don’t pull over and over, half way into the woods. No, this situation was odd. It gave every appearance that someone was in trouble.
Officer Nagley tilted his head slightly to acknowledge the Camaro glowing in the dark up ahead about half a mile. His partner, Ed Crenshaw, smiled wryly. “I’ll call it in,” he said.
Officer Crenshaw leaned forward, unhooked the mic, and pressed the button.
“This is Car 28. Possible 11-24, abandoned vehicle. Suspicious vehicle just past mile marker 72, highway 57. Looks to be recently abandoned, as well. Interior lights on and vehicle nearly into the trees. Vehicle does not appear damaged. However, we suspect possible 594: malicious mischief.”
“Copy, 28. Proceed with caution.”
“10-4.”
Car 28 rolled to a stop on the shoulder parallel to the Camaro. The officers stepped out. Nagley unsnapped the holder of his standard issue, .40 Glock. Crenshaw didn’t yet follow suit, but kept his hand on his pistol.
They stepped up to the car and peered in from behind the rear windows. The vehicle was empty. Nothing inside looked out of the ordinary.
Crenshaw proceeded to the driver’s side door, while Nagley moved up to the passenger’s side.
“Door’s open a crack here,” said Crenshaw.
The two turned and looked around. Crenshaw unsnapped his holster, pulled out his gun, and surveyed the scene around the car.
“A little early for weapons, isn’t it?” Nagley, Crenshaw’s superior, said. “Probably just kids getting high. Don’t want to hurt any innocents.”
“I’m getting a strong feeling, sir, that this isn’t so innocent.”
“Keep your safety on just the same. At least until we’ve investigated further.” Nagley pulled out his own weapon at this time, too.
Guns wouldn’t have done much good. Not against the black ghost as tall as a tree that emerged then from the brush, growling and gliding like a vision from Hell.
The officers had no time to react, even if they’d taken their safeties off. Their heads left their bodies as if a giant chainsaw had crossed the air in front of them. Their bodies fell like bloody rags to the ground. One of the heads rolled towards the Camaro and became lodged under the chassis. The other head merely looked up at the starless sky, as if genuinely curious to learn more about the constellations above.
The Shadow continued to the highway, overturning the cop car and sending it hurtling back toward the Camaro. The police vehicle skidded and rolled. When it finally connected with the other car, the Camaro was crushed perfectly under the weight of the squad car. The Camaro crashed into the brush, dragging the bodies of the two cops with it.
To the casual observer, a terrible accident had taken place. Almost as if the dark, deadly thing had staged the scene to look just that way.
Almira Fuerza’s mother, Nita, was a widow now. Since her husband’s odd and unexpected death in the hospital from what they called, “unexplained cancer.” It was too much to adjust to, and all too quick.
Since his death, she would swear to anyone who asked that she’s seen Jesús in the house, in the yard, fixing things. She could only see him in the corner of her eye, never straight on. For when she turned quickly with a start to see him, Jesús would vanish, as if he’d never been there. But she knew different. She believed love is forever, but death is not. Love is eternal. Death is only temporary. She knew they would be reunited in the afterlife.
Meanwhile, she would try to raise their difficult daughter by herself. A daughter who had taken the loss of her father very hard. Further, Almira then appeared to bury all her emotions. At seventeen, she was already a bit wild. Hard to please. And now there was this new sadness.
Now, here Mrs. Fuerza sat, 1:30 in the morning. No call from Almira, even though Nita had left at least a dozen messages on Almira’s voicemail.
Nita had called everyone she knew, too. Even relatives out of state, on the off chance that Nita and some of her crazy friends had driven to an aunt’s house. Everyone had reported in, sleepily: no Almira.
Nita, who didn’t have a license, did not have the option of driving aimlessly around town hoping to spot her daughter somewhere. Her daughter could be hooking or shooting drugs, for all she knew. Nita closed her eyes. She didn’t mean that. Of course not. It was the worry doing the talking, not the mother.
In the dark, in her deep loneliness, Nita Fuerza gave in to sobbing.
“What the hell was that?”
Conner, Almira, and Flower stood up and dashed back toward where Ricky had parked the car. As they got closer to the highway, Conner smelled gasoline and other strange smells. When they emerged from the brush, the stench of heat, gasoline, rubber, all made sense.
“Shit!”
Conner stopped and stared at the wreckage.
“Oh my God,” Flower said, bursting into tears. “We could have been in that! We would have died.”
Almira stood frozen, all still but for her shaking head. “We could have come rushing out of that evil place and got in the car and been crushed in that collision. It’s only because we sat for a few minutes, thinking about Ricky Martin, that we were saved.”
Conner just looked on in silence, no one speaking, no one moving. Then he noticed something.
“Is that a, um, head?”
Flower sniffled. “What—what are you t-talking about?”
“Sorry, I’m not trying to be gross or anything, but right there, about twenty feet from us on the grass. See?” Conner pointed into the darkness. “It looks like a human head. I mean, it’s pretty dark out here. I guess it could be a possum and my mind could be playing tricks. But it looks like a man’s face, with a mustache. Wearing glasses…”
“Oh, jeezuz,” Almira called out. “You’re right, you’re right!” She shook her hands frantically in front of her as if she were trying to dry them, and did a kind of gallop-in-place.
Flower didn’t move a muscle.
“Flower, you better sit down,” Conner said, taking her hand. He helped her to the ground and thought that this must be what a person who has gone into shock looks like.
Then he got up and went over to Almira and put his arm around her. She moved into him, crying softly into his chest. He wasn’t expecting this, but he should have been. He held her like that for a long time, trying to comfort her. He loved her quietly. Until he spotted something just beyond them.
Under the circumstances, it would not be right to mention what he saw. The girls were too upset already. So Conner just stared, quietly, at the corpse in a police uniform jutting out of the bushes not even ten feet ahead.
Its headless neck leaked blood onto the ground like milk from an overturned plastic bottle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some Kind of Miracle
Ricky Martin lay on what should have been the ground but which was just more darkness. Which way was up, and which down? What were the walls, and what was merely more of the unending blackness of this place?
Ricky came to, slowly, groggily. What a strange nightmare. He opened his eyes, ready to see his bedroom ceiling—ready to wake safe in his own bed and get ready for another day of school-time shenanigans at Kantaby High.
But this was not the case. His bedroom at home was not where he woke up. It was dark here. He tried to force his eyes open again, to awaken from this nightmare, thinking he was still drea
ming. Yet, after a while, he realized his eyes were open. That, unfortunately, he already was awake.
He stood up slowly, his back aching where he had fallen to the ground.
Then, he remembered.
The thing. The thing of shadow and hate that had chased him.
It was gone now. Why it had simply left him, Ricky couldn’t begin to guess. But he couldn’t begin to be thankful, either. For he knew, somehow, that the thing would return.
He wanted to call out for the others, but knew he shouldn’t. Perhaps they were all dead. Perhaps the thing pursues one of them now, instead of him.
Ricky felt around for his glasses and put them back on. He tried to peer into the bleak blackness, but nothing registered on his corneas, his irises, his inner eye. Nothing except nothingness. And blackness. And fear.
The roaring reached his ears faintly at first, like a distant but harsh wind. Building in fury as it approached. Louder now, like a speeding train.
But Ricky Martin could find nothing to focus on, though his eyes darted with desperation in every possible direction. Not knowing what else to do, Ricky backed up. Then, he turned and ran. Whether he was running toward the sound or away from it, he couldn’t tell. But his gut told him he should be moving. Moving or hiding. And since he couldn’t see what he was doing or where he was, hiding seemed out of the question. That left only running.
Running and praying.
Before he could get too far, Ricky felt the hate and the heat of the dreaded thing again. All around him at first, coming from every direction. Then only from the front. Ricky stopped, sliding into stillness. He waited.
The intense heat burned against his face, as if he’d stopped next to a furnace grate or an open oven. Ricky heard the sharp panting, like the sound of a panther or a lion.
Only this predator seemed much larger. And more bent on dumb destruction as opposed to its own survival.
SHADOWS OF DEATH: Death Comes with Fury (and Dark Humor) To a Small Town South of Chicago Page 5
