The garage doors…Shit!
How was she supposed to open them without any power?
If this were a movie, she would probably just start the car, rev it up, and burst through them before speeding off into the darkness. This wasn’t a movie, though, and the shuttered metal looked pretty strong to her. There must be some way to manually open them, she reasoned. After all, what would happen if there was a power outage? Were people expected to be locked out of their garages?
“Stay in the car, kids,” she said, turning to face the children. “I’ll be right back.”
Emily took a deep breath to steady her breathing and exited the vehicle, her heart thumping in her chest. She made sure the SUV’s door was ajar, then checked that the door leading from the interior of the house was still closed securely; she didn’t want the Simon-thing creeping up behind them.
A large plastic box was fixed to the ceiling right above the Durango’s roof. A thick chain, much like the chain of her bike, ran from the box along a metal beam to the door. Fixed to the garage door was a curved arm that extended upward, connecting to the pulley system that raised and lowered the door. That was how the door would open normally, but how the hell was she supposed to raise it now? She spotted two aluminum handles at the base of the door, near the floor. She grasped one and gave it a gentle tug. The door rattled, moving up about an inch but then hit resistance and refused to budge any farther. Looking up at the arm attached to the door and the pulley illuminated in the beam of the SUV, she could see there was some kind of hook attachment that meshed into the chain like the spokes of a gear. A nylon cord with a red plastic handle at the end hung from the arm, swinging back and forth gently.
The handle screamed, “Pull me!”
Again, she found herself holding her breath as she grasped the plastic handle in her hand and tugged. There was a very distinct click as something disengaged from the chain, but there was no other indication of anything else happening. Was that it? Only one way to find out, she told herself. Emily moved back to the door and, ever so gently, pulled the same handle.
This time the door continued to move past the stop, rumbling and rattling along its tracks. When the door was a foot off the ground, she stopped. What if Simon was outside right now? Waiting for her. He could grab her legs and pull her under the door, and that would be it. She let the door drop to the floor with a clang of rattling metal.
There was no doubt in her mind that whatever controlled Simon was going to hear them trying to escape. When it did it would do whatever it could to get to them. What would happen if she opened the garage door and it was waiting outside? She would have a matter of seconds at most to get to the vehicle, figure out how to drive it, and get out of there. And then what? Where would they go? They had no supplies. Everything, including her bike, backpack, and sat-phone was at the other house.
That was the least of her problems.
She needed to figure out whether she should lift the garage door first and then hope the car started before Simon found them. Or did she start the car first and hope the garage door would open?
“Jesus,” Emily hissed. Despite the cool night air, she felt sweat trickle down the insides of her arms.
It made no sense to raise the barrier between them, she reasoned, only to find that the Dodge would not start. That would leave them completely exposed. Car first. Then worry about the garage doors. She climbed back into the driver’s seat and looked at the kids. “Okay, you two, here we go.” Reaching for the ignition keys, she twisted them all the way forward.
Nothing happened.
“Shit,” she cried and thumped the steering wheel. The engine was dead. They had been through all this only for the fucking SUV to not start? You had to be kidding.
“You have to step on the brake,” said a voice from the backseat. Emily flashed around to face Rhiannon, trying to keep the anger and disappointment from her voice.
“What?”
“You have to step on the brake to start the car,” Rhiannon repeated. “It’s a safety feature,” she added proudly, probably repeating some tidbit of information she had learned from her dad.
Emily looked down at her feet. Which pedal was the brake? It had to be the larger of the two, she reasoned and pressed her left foot down and twisted the ignition key again.
The big V-8 engine of the Dodge Durango exploded into life. It was incredibly loud in the enclosed space of the garage. Emily flipped around and shot a huge smile at Rhiannon, all anger dissipating with the deep roar of the engine. She could already smell the acrid stench of the vehicle’s exhaust seeping through the open driver’s door and gave a little cough. It wouldn’t do to breathe this crap in for very long, but she needed to leave the door open, every second would count. Sorry, kids, she thought as she leaped from the driver’s seat and ran over to the garage door.
She grasped the metal handle again and began pulling with all the strength she had. If there had been any doubt that Simon would not be alerted to their escape attempt, it was quickly dispelled as the door rattled along the tracks, even louder, it seemed to Emily, than the rumble of the SUV’s engine. With the door halfway up, Emily dipped her head under the gap and scanned the area beyond the garage. The light from the SUV illuminated the ground directly in front of the garage, pushing the darkness away. There was no sign of anything waiting outside to grab her. Thank God.
Flipping her grip on the handle she began pushing the door up rather than pulling it. The door was almost at its zenith when Emily heard the clattering of dislodged roof tiles as something huge scrambled over the roof toward her.
“Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”
What was she supposed to do now? The door was still only three-quarters of the way up. She let go of it for a second and watched as it began to slowly slide back toward the ground. She grabbed the handle again and began pushing. There was no way she was going to get back into the car in time to figure out the controls and get out of the garage before the door closed on them again or the thing scrambling across the roof reached her.
Run, her frightened mind screamed. Just leave the kids and run.
No way! There was not a chance in hell that she was going to do that. She would rather just—
She felt the metal garage door click into place. Looking up, she could see the hook had engaged itself again onto the stud on the pulley. She let go of the handle and the door settled back slightly but stayed exactly where it should be, suspended above her head.
“Thank you,” she sighed and sprinted back to the SUV. She was about to clamber into the driver’s seat when a cascade of adobe-colored roof tiles fell to the concrete just outside the entrance of the garage, shattering like broken plates across the drive. Before the last broken piece had skittered across the concrete, a shape dropped from the roof, landing low to the ground just on the other side of the door, red eyes staring unblinking into the lights of the SUV.
“Simon,” she whimpered as she leaped into the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind her.
“Rhiannon,” Emily yelled. “Cover your brother’s eyes…now!”
Emily pushed the accelerator to the floor and slipped the gear stick into the drive position. There was a squealing noise, and, in the rearview mirror, Emily saw smoke begin to fill the garage. What was she doing wrong? Why weren’t they moving?
Through the windshield, Emily could see Simon, and for a second her heart seemed to stop. He had undergone a stunning metamorphosis. His arms had rotated 180 degrees in their sockets and now jutted forward from each elbow. His legs were impossibly twisted at the knees, so he now walked on all fours rather than upright. The tentacle trailing from the back of Simon’s head pulsed once as it pushed something dark and viscous down its elongated length. Whatever that stuff was had an instant effect on Simon; his neck began to stretch inch by inch until, finally, it had grown in length by six inches or more.
“Oh no,” she squeaked as she fumbled with the gear stick, pushing it back into Park. What the hell am I d
oing wrong? What? She chanced another look outside.
Simon’s head arced back on his newly elongated neck, like a snake rising to strike. A trickle of black liquid that could have been blood, or spillover from whatever shit the thing controlling Simon had pumped into him, dribbled from the corners of his mouth. And then he leaped into the air, pushing himself into the air like some weird, alien grasshopper.
He landed with a resounding thud on the hood of the SUV.
Emily screamed and pulled the gear stick back into drive. The screeching of tires and the roar of the engine filled her ears again, but still they did not move, and with only a quarter inch of glass separating them, she stared into the black dead eyes of a monster that had once been Simon Keller.
“You have to take your foot off the brake,” Rhiannon yelled from the backseat just as Emily realized her mistake and yanked her foot from the pedal. The SUV shot forward, and Emily was pretty sure everyone inside the vehicle screamed at the same moment. It was hard for her to tell because her attention was completely focused on Simon; his twisted body blocked her view ahead of her.
He flew forward, hitting the windshield face-first, leaving a smear of black fluid behind as his body rolled up and onto the roof of the SUV. A second later and his misshapen face appeared at the passenger door window, his eyes searching for some way into the vehicle.
“Don’t look,” Emily yelled as she fought for control of the rapidly accelerating vehicle, but the warning came too late as she heard Rhiannon’s sorrowful scream of “Daddy?”
Anger flowed through Emily. She was going to end this…right here…right now.
She took her foot off the accelerator and hit the brake. The Dodge came to a sudden, jarring halt, and Emily saw Simon’s body fly through the air, the three tentacles trailing behind him like marionette strings. He landed on the concrete driveway in front of the car, rolled three times, then flipped to his feet and began to scuttle toward them again.
Emily floored the accelerator, and the SUV lurched forward.
Simon froze midstep, caught like the proverbial rabbit in the lights of the rapidly accelerating SUV. A fraction of a second before the vehicle would have flattened him, he leaped into the air and landed on the hood of the Durango, one misshapen hand clinging to the seam of the hood below the windshield wipers.
And then he was gone, as his fingers lost their grip and he tumbled sideways off the hood.
In the rearview mirror, Emily saw Simon’s body disappear into the white bank of smoke from her tires and then even that vanished as the SUV was swallowed by the darkness.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Emily yelled as the SUV continued to accelerate, careening along the gravel driveway, sending stones and rocks flying into the dark as the back end fishtailed wildly from side to side, its tires scrabbling for grip on the loose rock. The children’s screams from the back row of seats rang in her ears, but they were nothing compared to the screaming in her own head as she careened into the darkness.
Technically she had never learned to drive, never even been behind the wheel of a car or a truck before. But as her mind raced to find some kind of previous experience that might help her out, she remembered a visit to Coney Island and the bumper cars attraction. The principle had to be the same, right? Press the pedal to go and release it to slow down while using the steering wheel to point the SUV in the direction you wanted to go.
In the fear-induced clarity of the moment, her mind seized that little bit of knowledge and held on to it like a shipwreck survivor holding on to a life preserver in the middle of an angry ocean. Who had she been trying to fool all this time? How freaking hard could it be to drive one of these things? After all, it was just an oversize bumper car at heart. Right? She glanced down at the speedometer; the arm was just below the forty-five miles per hour mark. In the second or so that she stared at it, the speedometer climbed up to just under fifty miles per hour.
Outside the rapidly accelerating vehicle, it was as though someone had dropped a curtain of black all around them as it plummeted through the darkness. She could see nothing on either side of her but vague shadows; the only light was the swath cut ahead of her by the powerful headlights. Emily had no idea where she was going, but for now the gravel path led only one way: forward. Away from the house and the Simon-thing that she had left there.
She glanced in the rearview mirror to check on the kids. She could hear both of them whimpering in the backseat, but she couldn’t tell if they were hurt or just frightened. Looking back over her right shoulder, she saw the two kids huddled together, still strapped in by their safety belts. Thor had disappeared from the seat, and she could not see him. A whimper from somewhere behind the passenger seat told her he had decided the floor of the Durango was probably a safer place to be for now.
When she turned back, the gravel road before them had disappeared, replaced by blacktop that curved away at a ninety-degree angle to the right. In that split second of recognition, she already knew she was going too fast to make the turn, and before she could even decide whether to hit the brakes, the SUV had left the road and was in flight.
The Dodge smashed through a corrugated aluminum barrier that had been placed there to stop just such a thing from happening, although she was sure whoever had erected the barrier had never anticipated a nondriver with a vehicle full of kids being chased by their late father under the control of some shadowy alien. The SUV exploded off a grassy berm, and for a few long moments Emily knew what Commander Mulligan must have felt when she first experienced the weightlessness of space.
A second later the Durango hit the ground with a bone-snapping thump, teetering on its two left wheels before collapsing back down to the ground with another rattling crunch. The force of the impact lifted Emily from the seat, and, as the screams of Ben and Rhiannon filled the cabin again, her head whipped hard to the left, colliding with the glass of the window.
Her last thought before everything went black was that she was sorry she had not been able to save the children.
One second the world was normal, and the next Rhiannon was weightless, at least until the strap of the seat belt tugged her back down into the leather seats with a jarring slap. She was aware of her little brother next to her, his arms flailing as the SUV bumped and rattled over the ground. Her own limbs were useless to her as she was thrown around like the raggedy doll she had played with when she was little.
The first hint she had that the car had stopped was when she realized that the interior dome lights were on and there was a really annoying pinging coming from the front of the car. That was weird because just a second ago the entire cabin had been dark except for the instrument panel’s glow. She tried to lean forward, but the seat belt still held her firmly in its grasp, pinning her to the seat. The leather squeaked like one of her little brother’s farts as she wriggled her butt to try to free herself of the belt.
Rhiannon pushed against the restraints again, but they still held fast. When she dipped her head to look for the belt’s release button, her neck spasmed painfully. “Owwww!” she cried, but she strained a little more anyway, until her thumb found the button and pressed. The clip popped from the receiver, and Rhiannon felt the belt’s grip loosen as it slid away.
Using the two front seats as leverage, she pulled herself forward until she could see Emily slumped in the driver’s seat, her head lolling forward, her hands loosely draped at her side.
Even in the dim glow of the car’s interior light, Rhiannon could see a bright splash of blood on the window of the driver’s door; strands of Emily’s hair were caught in the congealing blood. Rhiannon wasn’t sure whether the six-inch stain on the window was a lot of blood or not. It looked like it was a lot, but other than a few cuts and grazes, Rhiannon had rarely seen blood before. She reached out and tentatively touched Emily’s shoulder, shaking her gently. “Emily,” she whispered. “Are you okay?”
There was no response from the still form in the driver’s seat. Rhiannon leaned farther betwee
n the seats, ignoring the dull ache in her shoulders and across her chest. Emily’s eyes were closed, and Rhiannon could see a line of blood, already beginning to dry, trickling from the woman’s bottom lip and down her chin, dripping into a small pool that had soaked into her pants.
“Emily?” She gave her shoulder a final shake. Emily’s body slipped slowly sideways until her head once again connected with the bloody window.
A low whine from the backseat dragged Rhiannon’s attention away from Emily. Thor was standing on the ground outside the car, just visible in the umbra of the open rear passenger door. Rhiannon’s shocked mind began to assess exactly what was wrong with the picture: the door was wide open—that was why the interior lights were on and the annoying pinging was still pulsing through the cabin. The seat next to hers, the one where her little brother had sat, was empty, the seat belt snapped neatly back against the back of the leather seat.
Something was missing.
Ben! He was nowhere to be seen.
How had she not noticed that? How had she forgotten about her little brother? Her head, still buzzing with that really annoying pinging from the front of the car, felt like it was going to explode any second. How had she forgotten Ben? The little dweeb was so annoying, he was going to be in soooo much trouble when Dad got ahold of his butt. He was going to be grounded for—
Thor’s bark cut through the static filling Rhiannon’s head. What had she been thinking? She had to find her little brother right now! She scooted over the seats to the open door. Thor was doing the canine equivalent of shuffling his feet nervously; his tail wagged enthusiastically when he saw Rhiannon moving his way.
The second Rhiannon’s feet hit the soft grass, Thor jumped into the space she had just exited. He sniffed curiously at Emily’s body; first the dried blood that had congealed on her chin, then down her neck and torso, and finally her arm that hung at her side. He gave a sad whine and pawed gently at her unmoving body.
Exodus Page 10
