They radiated with all the hate and frustration of its species, determined to avenge their betrayal and raise the banner of their slimy kind on this planet. Once it trampled her, the beast would plow straight into Ranger Blake. If she ran, he’d have even less time to escape.
She burst into a sprint, straight at its iron head.
“Stay back,” Moni beamed into Blake’s head. “If I can’t kill it, promise me you won’t try. Run and save Ramona.”
“Get out of my line of fire!” shouted Blake, still not accepting that anything could shrug off that many bullets.
With her legs propelling her forward, Moni realized that her plan for confronting this beast might be even more naïve than his. The bull lowered its horns, presenting a solid iron dome. No way could she meet that straight away. She could try jumping or swerving, but it was faster than it looked. They must have assembled this monstrosity specifically to kill her.
Now let’s see how smart they made this beef slab.
Moni kicked out of her sprint with a juke to the left. The bull followed her even faster than she’d feared, slowing its charge yet staying on target. When Moni planted her left foot firmly and leapt back to the right, the hulk couldn’t shift its momentum so quickly. Its business end just avoided grazing her. Moni wasn’t content with an olѐ. She lowered her shoulder and clipped the side of its front knee out from under it. Its tendons and bones were never meant to support that much weight at such a speed. With a snap, the bull’s knee dislocated from its socket.
The beast’s snout broke its fall, shifting its powerful momentum upon its neck. The bull plowed into the dirt like a backhoe. Moni couldn’t believe the spine didn’t snap right there. Instead, its head lodged into the ground.
Moni approached the fallen bull, which thrashed its hind legs at her, socking her in the thigh with a hoof. That blunt impact felt like a steel pipe.
Enough of this bullshit!
She rolled the crippled bull onto its side and punched a hole in its fleshy underbelly with her iron nails. From that opening, Moni dug and tore and clawed her way inside its body. She hurled its intestines into the air like party streamers. She squeezed its organs to jelly. Finally, she got her hands on its spine. With her arms shoulder-deep in the bull and purple blood gushing all around her, making the ground smolder, Moni ground its spine to pieces. The alien invaders abandoned its brain once the bull was beyond repair.
Moni stood up, purple blood drenching her and dripping on the ground so that it blackened. Hungry from that burst of energy, she raised the remaining handcuff to her mouth and chewed it off. Steam bubbled from her lips as the metal dissolved in her acidic saliva.
Blake stared at her with his mouth open.
If this isn’t what a skin walker looks like, I don’t know what else the tribal ancestors could have seen that’s any worse, he thought.
Moni stopped eating. She looked at the bull carcass, as ravaged as if a pack of wolves had scavenged it. She had done that. She thought of how a man would view her gruesome appearance, more savage than a Neanderthal.
“Sorry,” Moni projected into his head. “I forgot my table manners. I normally prefer steak well done, not so bloody rare.”
“I knew you weren’t human, but I didn’t know you were this.” Blake shook his head. Under his breath, he mumbled “Witch woman.”
“It doesn’t matter. You want to save this town and so do I. Let’s start with Ramona and the orphanage.”
He hustled back behind the wheel of the truck. Moni hopped in the damaged truck bed, this time without pretending that he could restrain her there. After roaring past the empty town center, they reached North Boundary Road, where Patty’s house was. Moni searched for Aaron’s mind. She found many others, more inhuman than not.
The sound of breaking glass in houses all around shattered the night’s silence. Screams followed. Then smashing and blinds tearing. Some struggles ended in whimpers, others in gunfire and some in chases with people racing from room to room. Not a single house on the street had been left undisturbed.
“Damn it, you’re one of them.” Blake said. “Talk to those aliens of yours, tell them we’re a proud people. We’re fighters. I don’t care if it’s a city of 2,000 or 2 million. You can’t have it.”
Before Moni could answer him, they did. The road ahead filled with eyes, hundreds of purple pupils casting their fury upon them.
Ramona groaned in disgust as Aaron dumped the blender full of snake chunks and purple goo into Patty’s sink, scalding the pipes. If he could speak Spanish, he’d explain that they weren’t real animals. It’s not like he was shredding bunny rabbits. Then Aaron remembered that she’d lost her mother less than 24 hours ago. The poor thing couldn’t find a peaceful moment to mourn.
It wasn’t just the snakes that terrified her. If they overwhelmed him, her guardian would have fallen once more. This time, she’d have nowhere to run.
No one so young should face their mortality like this.
“Hang on Ramona.” The girl cowered against the kitchen’s back wall. “I’ll find a way out of this.”
The moment he turned around, another gaggle of snakes poured through the doorway. Aaron sprayed the last couple bursts from his remaining bleach bottle at them. Three snakes evaded the chemicals and slithered for him.
“Ayi, los serpientes!” Ramona screamed.
“Shit.” He seized the heavy block of the blender and hurled it at the snakes, crushing one of them and cracking the glass. The two survivors neared him faster, and even more scaly biters sprang into the room. Aaron took Ramona’s hand. “Come on!”
He dragged her toward the narrow laundry room. There, he found a wide broom. That’s old school, but it’d have to do. Placing Ramona at his back, Aaron grabbed a bottle of bleach off the washer and poured it on the floor. He swept the bleach at the gathering snakes, which at this point were thick as a pile of leaves on the forest floor. The beasts recoiled so they didn’t snap at him.
My arms can’t keep this up all night. Anyway, they’re out of bleach.
He cleared a path from the laundry room to the rear door leading outside. Too bad that wouldn’t do them much good. It wouldn’t matter whether the horde overwhelmed them indoors or out.
Ramona tugged on his shirt. Figuring he might as well offer her some comfort before the end, Aaron turned around for a second and presented the best half-hearted smile he could muster. She ignored it. Ramona pointed at something hanging on a rack above the drier. It was a tall step ladder. Between that and the hard plastic laundry basket, Aaron had an idea that would either kill them faster or just might save them.
First, he had to sweep harder.
He snatched the step ladder and had Ramona carry it. Then he set one foot in the laundry basket to shield him from ankle biters. Aaron arms went into hyper drive, shoving the snakes back far enough to reach the back door. He had a good idea what waited on the other side. He knew the roof sloped low because he could see it out the window, but he didn’t exactly have time to properly measure for this stunt.
Aaron threw open the rear door. Immediately, a snake darted its head after him from the other side. He slammed it shut, crushing its scaly neck.
When he opened the door again, Aaron saw about eight feet of pure dirt before the next wave of purple-eyed biters. That was too close. Too bad. He’d already committed past the point of backing out.
He grabbed Ramona’s hand, pulled her outside with him and closed the door behind them, leaving the kitchen full of snakes without their after-midnight snack.
Aaron heard them slithering through the dirt, more than happy to turn this into a backyard picnic. He placed the sturdy laundry basket upside down on the ground and set up the four-level step ladder atop it. He hoisted Ramon first, delivering her on the third step so the snakes couldn’t get her. The snakes reached the far side of the basket. Aaron grabbed the broom and swept them back. One coiled around the handle and slinked up toward his hands.<
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There went that. He tossed away the broom and leapt onto the elevated step ladder with Ramona.
After the girl climbed on his back, Aaron stood on the top step and stretched his hands upward for the roof’s edge. The back portion of the house above the kitchen was only one story, as it rose to a second story above the living room. Pulling himself up there with a child backpack wouldn’t be easy, but he preferred it to battling a room full of snakes.
Nothing up top could possibly be as bad as that den of horrors on the first floor, right?
58
The chilly desert air wafted through the house, carrying with it the rotten stench of the alien infection. Children cried for help from the other side of walls.
“I can’t stand it!” Nina exclaimed. “I’m helping them.”
“That’s not our mission,” Carter said. “We’re going after Moni. If we don’t stop her, a lot more people will die than these kids.”
Gritting her teeth, Nina recalled when her father had told her about the day in Vietnam when his unit happened upon a Vietcong camp that’d been abandoned except for the women and little children. One of his men, this Ohioan they called Buckeye, said they should slaughter the lot of them and bury them in shallow graves. He had pointed at a kid no taller than his waist and said he’d grow up to kill Americans so they better take care of him now. Stateside, such talk would’ve been certifiable, but his men had seen their fellows shot, stabbed and tortured.
Her father understood Buckeye’s point, but he and his unit had rejected it.
Buckeye had opened fire, striking the waist-high tyke dead in front of him. The way that boy wailed, the way his mother cried, how the other children screamed as the rogue soldier sprayed their ramshackle houses with his machine gun, Nina’s father had said those sounds haunted him to that day. Their final cries had invaded his dreams and rattled him wide awake.
Young Nina had asked her father whether he turned Buckeye in. He didn’t have to. He had strangled the man with his own belt while he slept that night. Justice wasn’t enough, he had said. He should have stopped Buckeye the moment he aimed his gun at the first boy, the one who would never grow into manhood.
“This may not be my county, but I’m still a sheriff’s officer.” Nina drew her gun and headed for the door. “Stay here until TERU arrives if you want, but I’m acting like a woman with a badge.”
Nina eyed three other doors in the narrow hallway. Only one of them had been opened, probably where the boy from their room had fled to. A child hollered from inside. She rushed in. The boy and a slightly-older friend were scampering around the room, chased by a hideous vulture with a tarantula on its belly. The smaller boy pelted it with a soccer ball. It seized the ball in its spider legs and popped it with its beak with enough force to puncture a human skull. Nina put two bullets into its head, dropping the creature and spraying purple blood on the wall.
“Come on. Vamanos!” Nina waved the boys out of the room as the blood blackened the wall.
She slammed the door shut, hoping the mutants couldn’t rip their way through it. At least they hadn’t grown hands.
A baby cried from behind a closed door, and then gunfire rang. Nina burst inside and found Iña holding her smoking shotgun. A feathery mutant had been splattered all over the wall like smoldering purple graffiti. Patty stood in the corner cradling the hysterical baby in her arms with a ponytailed preteen girl at her side.
Patty faced Nina with her eyes irate. “You led them right to us! I had a peaceful house. This was a refuge for children. Now look at it.”
Nina restrained her urge to slap the trout-mouthed woman. “Blame the aliens and their conspirators, not me. Now shut up and let’s find somewhere safer for these kids.”
“Watch out!” Iña yelled.
Two more vulture/tarantula hybrids climbed through the broken window. Damn things crawled faster than they flew. One skirted across the wall on its hairy spider legs while the other scurried up the ceiling above their heads.
Nina took out the mutant on the wall with two shots. Iña missed the quicker one on the ceiling, blowing a hole that rained down drywall. The mutant perched itself directly above Patty and the baby, arching its long neck so it could pluck at them. Patty drew her gun from beneath the baby’s blanket and aimed upward.
“No!” Nina yelled.
Patty’s bullet found its mark, making the vulture convulse and flap its wings vigorously. Purple blood rained upon Patty, sizzling on her arm and face like oil straight from the fryer. As she howled in agony, the woman shielded the baby with her back, letting more acidic blood sting her. Patty’s clothes blackened, as did patches of her flesh.
“Patty!” Iña cried as she pulled her ailing lover out of the deadly drizzle.
“Take him.” Patty handed her the baby as her lips and eyes twitched as if by seizure.
Her shell-shocked partner set down her shotgun and took the infant. Eyes welling up with tears, Iña couldn’t stop staring into Patty’s catatonic eyes.
Nina realized those might be her last words before the aliens seize her mind. She finished off the mutant on the ceiling with a headshot that brought it crashing to the floor. Then she approached Patty, who fell to her knees writhing in pain, her throat seized as if in an invisible chokehold.
Nina had seen that look before, just never right in front of her.
“Don’t let them take you,” Iña pleaded with her lips quivering. “You can wash it off.”
Patty opened her mouth, gasping.
“I’m sorry.” Nina stepped in front of Iña, who shook her head in denial. “It’s too late for her.”
With a squeeze of the trigger, Nina ended Patty’s suffering. Her brain matter painted the pink child’s comforter red.
“No!” Iña screamed and swiped at her with her nails. “You bitch! You fucking bitch!”
“Get a hold of yourself.” Nina seized the corners of Iña’s mouth, pinching it closed. The baby in her arms wailed in shock. “That wasn’t human anymore. Did you want a possessed Patty fooling all the children into running into her arms and then killing them? Huh?”
Iña wiped the tears away with her forearm and lowered her head.
“That’s what I thought. Now, is there a room upstairs without a window?”
“The bathroom attached to…our bedroom,” she said, the anguish in her voice rising as “our” became a thing of the past.
“Take the children there, all of them. Lock them inside. The oldest one holds the baby. If you still have the stomach to fire that shotgun, I need you out here with me guarding their door.”
She heard gunfire from Carter’s room. Nina cursed herself for leaving him alone. He’d have to avoid an acid shower for another minute.
The desert wind chilled Aaron’s bones as it lashed against the roof. He plodded across the first-floor roof behind the house with Ramona clinging to his back. Her grip started slipping so he grabbed her forearms and held them in place across his chest. That left his hands unavailable for defense, or to grab something if he slipped on the shingles.
The night remained still outside, much too quiet given the commotion from above he’d heard minutes ago.
Aaron spotted a trail of dislodged roof shingles. It led to a window and what few shards remained of its glass. The drapes, decorated by rainbows and ponies, streamed outside.
He stopped. Aaron heard the slithering dance of the snakes below, yet nothing up here except for a bunch of birds flapping their wings as they circled the house. He saw their large wingspans and long necks, but couldn’t determine their species as they darted in and out of the moonlight. They weren’t graceful, that’s for sure.
Then footsteps. Desperate screams. The kids were scampering around in there, running from something. Aaron peered through the window. A mosaic of blood covered the bedspread. Red blood.
He sidestepped away from window frame so Ramona wouldn’t see it. The girl whispered something somberly in Spanish.
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They needed to reach the front of the house and make a break for his truck. They could try scaling the second-story roof or they could make good use of the busted windows and sneak through the house and onto the small roof over the front porch. He gazed up at the procession of circling birds. There were more of them now, at least six. They flew unsteadily, losing their balance and having to flap vigorously to maintain altitude. That’s all he needed to see.
Trying a second room, Aaron crept through the broken window frame, using a shingle to knock a few jagged pieces out so they wouldn’t cut Ramona while she rode on his back. They found themselves in a room decorated with sports posters, plus trucks and action figures filling the toy bins. The bed sheets were messy, soaked with sweat. The corpse of something feathery lay in a pool of acid blood that singed the floor black.
Aaron tried peeling Ramona off his back and setting her down. She hugged him more tightly around the neck.
Wish I could tell her it was safer in here.
A gunshot rang out in the neighboring room, sending a jolt through both of them. She started crying. The people in her mother’s company must have fired their guns before they were ripped to pieces.
He heard the curses of FBI Agent Carter. “Get out of here you ass-faced birds! Nina, where are you? I need backup.”
“Hold on,” Nina shouted from the other side of the house. “I’m securing the children.”
Aaron glanced over his shoulder at Ramona. It would be best if she joined the other kids under protection of the armed officers, but the FBI man had a detention center, or worse, in store for the poor thing. She better stick with him.
He dashed into the hallway and found a circular window with a view of the front yard. He saw his pickup truck in the porch light. The vehicle wouldn’t go far with its doors ripped off, its tires punctured, and snakes enwrapping its seats.
They must have been looking for the vial of Moni’s blood. Now, they must think it’s on me. Unless I can steal it back and take it to the lab, everything is hopeless.
Silence the Living Page 30
