by Dan Padavona
The monsters would come. Eventually there would be nowhere in Storberry to hide.
Peering out at the gloom spreading across the meadow, Tom stood in the dappled light of the sun’s last stand.
“They would have waited for us. If the situation were reversed, they would have stayed until we returned.”
“And if they don't return?” asked Jen.
“What if they do?”
“We can get to Winchester Road inside of fifteen minutes,” Renee said. “If we are lucky, we'll hit the interstate before nine o'clock.”
Jen joined him at the window.
“Tom?”
He had promised to keep her safe, to never leave her. When he had first said it, he had meant that he would not leave her alone until her parents returned. So much had befallen them since. He now knew that he had intended much more—a larger promise had been made. The deep blue of twilight spread out of the eastern sky, demanding that he answer.
“Let's go.”
The coolness of the air surprised them. The temperature had dropped considerably since before the storm. False summer had departed, leaving them alone under the darkening sky. As the ground squished beneath their feet where the deluge had saturated the terrain, the humidity remained thick like an invisible mist. A northwest wind chilled their skin, a reminder that winter was never too far away at this time of the year.
As they climbed into the front seat of Doug Masterson's truck, Tom handed Renee the keys. The engine roared to life. Fear gripped Renee, imagining a monster’s decrepit form bursting from the open barn.
As Renee cast one final look at the old farmhouse, regret flowed through her. She realized with a sadness which struck her deep in her belly that she’d fallen in love with Evan Moran. Now she was abandoning him.
He's gone.
The cavernous farmhouse looked down on her with empty eyes, darkness engulfing the home's interior. The neighboring barn faded into obscurity with the dying light, and a chill feeling of being watched came over her. When the truck pulled out of the driveway, she was relieved to leave the farm behind.
Five
When the dirt had swallowed the sun whole and the land was awash in gunmetal gray, another window shattered from the backyards of Maple Street. Something vile entered the night to hunt. The vampire was free to roam the land again, the sun's fire fully extinguished.
Cutting through the evening chill, the heat of the crawlspace fire followed the shifting winds toward the sidewalk. The orange glow of the blaze consumed the garage, a Halloween pumpkin crumbling earthward. By now there should have been a throng of firefighters on the scene. From the high elevation of Maple Street, the blaze would be visible throughout the town, yet no one came. Not so much as a fire alarm blared in recognition.
“There’s no way that thing escape unscathed. It has to be hurt. Otherwise it would have come for us immediately,” Evan said.
His grim features were muted in the fading light.
“You're going to open that wound of yours again,” Greg said. “It's time to get you off your feet. We can't face this thing at night, whether it's hurt or not. I say we get the hell out of here while we still can. Before more of them appear.”
A tree branch snapped behind a nearby house. Swinging her head toward the noise, Mary watched the shadows of the night expand toward them from all directions.
Evan clutched his head in frustration. “We'll never get another shot at it like this. If we press after it—”
“We'll be killed. Hell, Evan, you don't know that it is injured at all. What you saw could have been smoke off the garage.”
“The light injured that thing. I'm sure of it.”
“It was strong enough to survive. That's all I need to know. Now let's go.”
Mary followed Greg without argument. Sensing the evil awakening throughout the neighborhood, the cross thrummed in her pocket. Hairs stood on the back of her neck. Evan relented, apparently feeling the vampire’s presence, too.
But they were already out of time. A loud thump came from above their heads, several houses east, like a large animal pouncing.
Then another, this time closer. A third thud and then a skittering sound across the roof shingles.
The outline of man took form above them. As the flames crackled through a hole in the neighboring garage roof, casting the figure in ocher, they saw him perched atop the roof like a crow, a long object in his hands.
The end of the held object exploded with a brief burst of light, and the rifle’s bullet ripped through Greg’s kneecap. As he shrieked in pain and fell to the sidewalk just ten yards from the police truck, Evan rushed to cover him, the suppressing fire forcing him to his stomach. Mary was somewhere near the front of the truck, prone on the pavement.
Another blast flattened the passenger-side front tire. The windows of the truck exploded. Evan realized the figure's intentions. It meant to strand them here.
When there were no more shots for it to fire, the figure threw the rifle down and leaped from the roof, as Evan crawled to the fallen police chief.
Greg didn’t move.
Evan reached Greg just as the figure landed catlike on his feet in the front yard. As the chief stared back at him with lifeless eyes, Evan saw that there was a hole in his forehead, blood following gravity down the sides of his face. When did that happen? There had been so many shots that he hadn't seen the bullet which found its mark with impossible precision.
Mary shrieked out of his line of vision. It might have been a scream of horror had he not recognized the loathing which pervaded it. Paying no heed to the sniveling woman prone in the street, the figure had made a beeline for Evan. The figure hadn't underestimated her as much as it had completely disregarded her. It never expected her wrath.
As Mary plunged forward, driving the stake deep into Doug Masterson's heart, the force of her momentum slammed him into the waterlogged earth. Blood poured out of his mouth. Razor-sharp teeth snapped toward her neck, but her forward momentum saved her, and she tumbled over him.
His own stake retrieved, Evan drove the sharpened end through Masterson's skull, at precisely the same location that the thing's bullet had torn Greg's life away. Masterson’s legs convulsed, and then he lay still.
Evan rolled to his back, his breath coming in short gasps. Kneeling in the grass several feet away, Mary lowered her face into her hands and began to sob.
Overhead the clouds shifted, and the pearl beam of the moon shone brightly upon them. As he lay panting, surrounded by death, Evan looked into the glowing face and wondered what god it served.
Six
The sound of tree branches snapping behind the houses alerted Evan and Mary that they had to move. It wasn't the thin racket of twigs but the gunshot echoes of small tree trunks fractured by a monster. They knew what came for them.
As she pulled him to his feet, Evan straightened his back, feeling a severe burning sensation as though the flesh across the small of his back was afire. Footfalls grew louder, moving down the slope from somewhere near the Barrows' yard. The crackling red of the crawlspace glowed between the houses, burning like the gates of hell.
They ran eastward. The way ahead was dark and foreboding, blackness dispersed by shallow pools of lamplight at regular intervals. Between the pools lay dangerous shadows. Tree branches were gnarled claws, leaning bushes ghosts that could detach themselves from the gloom. Soulless houses whirred past in a blur of gray.
Following parallel and maybe three or four houses behind them, the beast cut across the backyards. Thunderous footfalls were interrupted by irregular crashes, and Mary imagined swing sets and picnic tables being thrown aside.
As Evan ran on instinct alone, there seemed no hope for escape, not with so many monsters haunting the neighborhood. Yet none had come for them since Masterson, as though they too cowered from the ghoul that had slept within the garage crawlspace. So he continued to run, despite the burning in his lungs and the tearing sensation from his reopened wound.
Something made of glass shattered in the yards behind them as the creature followed. The monster was further back, Evan thought. They had opened some ground between it and them.
At the end of Maple Street, a faint sliver of gray in the moonlight marked the pathway to Becks Pond off to the right. The pavement wound left toward the sharp curve atop Blakely Hill. Ahead stood a thicket of trees and undergrowth, maybe one hundred yards deep.
“This way,” Evan said.
He pulled her toward the thicket, not believing they could traverse the entire expanse of dense foliage in the dark. His hope was that they could lose the thing within its concealment. It was a risk he felt he had to take. Their lungs would not support the speed of their flight much longer, but if they were found crouched within the trees, there would be no escape.
Desiring to stay within a reasonable distance of Blakely, he angled to the left. The hill was their eventual path toward escape if they could elude the thing a little longer, but the ground beneath them was waterlogged from the thunderstorm, and the mud threatened to suck their sneakers into its depths. For the first few minutes Evan thought he had made a grave mistake. But they slogged through the muck, their hearts pounding through their chests from overexertion.
They stopped at a large spruce tree. The needled branches were three feet off the ground and offered just enough headroom for them to crouch under. Mary moved to the base of the trunk and wrapped her arms around the trunk, as a frightened child would her father's leg. As they listened for signs of their pursuer, Evan knelt next to her, their bodies vague outlines in the darkened concealment.
The air inside the boughs was rich with sweet pine. Katydids and crickets chirped in a vast chorus across the thicket. A night bird called from halfway up the spruce. There were no other sounds except for their shallow breathing.
Evan felt his heart rate slow. The burning began to subside, but he struggled against a frightening desire to cough. He recalled years of jogging during his youth and how he would cough for half an hour afterward when he was starting out after a long layoff. The sensation tickled in his chest and lungs as if he had swallowed a family of butterflies. If I cough now, it will echo across the thicket as a beacon to our position.
They heard their pursuer. It had followed them into the thicket but turned right where they had veered left. It became difficult to judge the monster’s position due to the sound bouncing off the expanse of trees, but Evan estimated it to be near the pathway to Becks Pond. For a moment the footfalls seemed to be headed right at them, but he realized the echoes were distorting the distance and making the sounds seem to be everywhere at once.
As his eyes adjusted enough to make out her facial features, he thought anew about the woman who, minutes earlier, had saved him from Doug Masterson, her resolve in this nightmare knowing no boundaries. He thought of the police chief and the military veteran. Of Randy. So many friends had fallen. And yet here she was—a true survivor.
He leaned close to her and whispered.
“That thing is almost a hundred yards from us now. I think we can make a break for the road.”
She nodded. “Where are the other vampires?”
“I don't know. It's like they all cleared out. Maybe they fear that thing as much as we do.”
He winced.
“How's your back holding up.”
“It's bleeding. But it's not going to slow me down.”
Regretting the need to leave the concealment of the spruce, he raised himself into a crouch against the lowest bough of the tree. Helping Mary off her knees, they crept into the heart of the thicket.
The prolonged exposure to the deeper darkness inside the spruce had sharpened their vision. Trees and undergrowth were revealed in greater detail despite the overhead leaves which choked out much of the moonlight. The soggy terrain, as uncomfortable as it was, helped to mute the crunch of twigs underfoot.
The way forward was riddled with obstacles. Bramble—nature’s barbed wire—spread throughout, preventing a straight path to the road and forcing them to double back repeatedly. All the while Evan listened for the thing that stalked them through the night. It terrified him that he could no longer hear it. Perhaps the monster was halfway to the hill forest.
Or maybe it is behind the next tree. Waiting for us.
Evan began to worry that the doubling back may have caused them to lose their way, but then he saw the silver glow of the road some thirty yards ahead through a mass of trees.
Mary saw it, too. “There it is.”
Evan nodded. They had indeed lost their path within the thicket. He recognized the sharpness of the curve, far along on Blakely Hill. They must have wandered at least fifty yards to the north of their intended track. Better that they had migrated north, rather than south toward Becks Pond.
The silvery road became a sort of finish line, inspiring them to rush forward to escape the thicket. Still they kept to a slow pace, careful to walk on the wet leaves and avoid branches which would snap underfoot and give them away.
They broke out of the thicket minutes later to the sound of gurgling water within a steep ditch drop-off along the road. Evan leaped across first, and then helped Mary cross.
Encased in trees to each side, the road swung around to the right. It was a half-mile walk until Blakely veered left into a decline which would take them into downtown. For now, there was only the moonlight to guide them.
Two solid strips of yellow ran down the center of the road. Drawn by the memory of work crews and civilization, they walked along the painted divider.
Mary couldn't remember the last time she had seen another vehicle on the road other than the teens fleeing down Blakely.
Where had everyone disappeared to? The hardware store had been busy the day after the wind struck. Had those people returned home to perceived safety, and then heard something shift in a darkened closet? Or had the terror begun at sunset? It was possible that many residents still lived, but had gone into hiding once they realized what stalked the night.
As she prayed that they were not the last living souls in Storberry and that a world awaited them beyond the town’s borders, she wondered where Renee and the two teens were now. If they had followed the plan to exit Storberry before sunset, had they found safety?
Younger trees beyond the ditches leaned inward toward the road, giving the impression of walls which might topple over and block their path. As the moon reflected off the wet pavement in shiny rivulets, and the straightaway beyond the curve stretched away until it disappeared into gloom, they watched the trees closely, listening for the monster.
The road crested, street lights ahead revealing where the road veered left and steepened toward Main Street. The familiarity of the scenery reassured them, quickening their pace. Greg had thought the police station eliminated, but Mary maintained a sliver of hope that it was still there. Then the night sounds faded, and Mary tried to convince herself that they were too far from the thicket to hear the shrill insects.
As they started down the decline, they heard the vampire crashing through the thicket, small trees snapping like firecrackers from a hundred yards away. The monster had found them again.
Seven
Renee peered through the windshield at the crumbled remains of the old telephone exchange building along Jensen Road. The deformed ham radio tower lay next to it, a fallen paladin. As the high beams painted their path forward in silver tones, the outline of the hill forest blanketed the rear-view mirror like a humpbacked monster that threatened to swallow the town whole.
County route 16 was less than a mile away, then Winchester Road and a familiar maze of secondary roads and highways which would take her to the interstate. It was not far now.
Seeing the town lights of Storberry fade into distant stars, Renee felt the loss of Evan Moran more sharply now. As she glanced at Jen and Tom, she wondered what lay ahead for all of them. I-95 would take them south to Rocky Mount, but she knew not what they would find there.
; Maybe all would be normal and they would check into one of those chain hotels with free HBO and a continental breakfast. The desk clerk would chalk their disheveled appearance up to the travails of interstate travel, and then they would be surrounded by families making the trek to Cinderella's Castle via Mobil gas stations and The Waffle House.
She wouldn't let herself believe otherwise. There simply had to be coffee shops, fast-food joints, families paying top dollar to ride plastic soap dishes endlessly through Disney World, and umpires yelling Play Ball!
For if Storberry's plight was but a microcosm of what was happening in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles...
…if undead farmers rode through the fields of Kansas upon reapers, striking down rye and children with indiscriminate lust...if the sands off Rehoboth were stained crimson...if Boston’s Callahan Tunnel was permanently jammed—abandoned vehicles like metallic pill bugs that rusted insouciantly within the darkness, fluorescent fixtures buzzing like bees, a path winding aimlessly forward...
She refused to believe the insanity of Storberry awaited them outside its borders. If she began to believe such a thing, she would not be able to will the truck forward another inch.
As the town's lights became a dim glow in the rear view mirror, she turned onto county route 16 with a cold understanding that the truth of the outside world's fate would soon be known to them. The truck traveled through the countryside, the solid yellow line of the single lane road stretching to infinity.
Doing the math in her head, she estimated there remained five minutes to Winchester Road and another forty-five minutes to the interstate. They would be surrounded by traveling families in under an hour, none of them aware of the tragedy which had befallen the speck on the map thirty miles from civilization.
Instinctively, she reached for the radio knob, almost curious to know what Doug Masterson had programmed into his six AM and FM slots. When the radio crackled to life, she was relieved beyond expression to hear that Dolly Parton was still thinking about love. Her excitement growing, she tuned the radio to the left and found an all-news channel out of Raleigh. Tears streamed down her face. The stock market was up today. Straw polls suggested that Margaret Thatcher would win a third term come June. The St. Louis Cardinals had the best spring training record in baseball, and experts projected them to compete for the National League East title.
