Predatory Animals

by Gabriel Beyers

  “Here’s the plan,” Casper said. “I’ll go out first and cover you all with the rifle while you make a run for the woods.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “We’ll all go together.”

  Casper patted his bad leg. “I’m too gimpy to keep up.”

  “I’ll carry you,” Patrick suggested.

  “Through the woods? No, that will just slow the group down. Besides, I need you to watch out for my kids. With a little luck—” Casper should have specified good luck for at that moment Lucy wandered over to the table where the dissected creature still lay. She let loose a blood curdling banshee cry that echoed in their rampaging hearts long after the sound died away.

  Maggie ran to her daughter, saw what lay on the table, and had to swallow her own scream. She pulled Lucy away from the table, hugged her close and placed her hand over the child’s mouth. Casper looked out the window, praying that the walls of the pole barn were thick enough to dampen the scream. But to his dismay, the group of men was now advancing up the gentle hill. Then came the gunfire.

  The walls of the pole barn were composed of sheet metal, insulation and drywall, and were not much of a barrier against bullets. The only thing that saved them was that their attackers were shooting on the run and aimed too high. The bullets only missed the group within because Casper’s military training had kicked in and he had ordered them all to drop to the floor.

  Casper rolled onto his back and swallowed the thunderclap of pain blazing from his leg. He pulled the rifle to his chest and chambered a round. A Molotov cocktail soared through one of the broken windows and exploded upon the floor. Maggie’s soft eyes reflected the flaming tendrils.

  “You know what we have to do,” Casper said.

  Two heavy tears spilled down Maggie’s cheeks. “Kids, I want you to stay behind Patrick. When I say run, take off for the woods and don’t stop. No matter what.” She led them to the door, which was now riddled with bullet holes, looked to Casper and nodded.

  Casper forced himself to his feet and bent at the waist just below the window. With every bit of mental strength within him he willed the men not to shoot again while they were standing there. He took a deep breath, held it, then popped up and shoved the barrel of the rifle out of the window.

  Countless hours of military training and battle experience came to life within him. His breathing slowed; the world took on a crisp clarity. All doubt fled. All fear dissolved. There wasn’t time to use the scope, so he shot from the shoulder. The rifle’s report cracked like thunder, bringing a familiar coldness to his heart. His shot caught one of the men in the chest and knocked him off of his feet.

  At the same moment he fired, Maggie wrenched open the door, took two steps out and dropped to one knee. She fired three shots in quick succession, hitting a man not more than twenty feet away. Her marks were true, catching the man twice in the chest and once in the head.

  “Run,” she screamed. “Now! Go, go, go!”

  Patrick ran out of the pole barn using his giant’s frame to block the children from any shots fired. The sudden assault had stunned their assailants, allowing Patrick, the children, and Maggie to run around the side of the pole barn. From there, they hustled towards the woods. Casper fired two more shots to keep the remaining men at a safe distance.

  Wexxel, Coining,” a man called out from the dark. “Go after them. I’ll keep him pinned down.” Casper started to shoot again, but another round of machine gun fire forced him to the ground.

  “You killed my brother and my wife,” the man yelled between shots. Hearing this, Casper now understood who he was dealing with. “After you cook, I’m going to cut your children into pieces while your wife watches. Then, before I cut her throat, she and I can have a little fun.”

  Gordon Pummel was just baiting him, hoping he’d show his face in one of the windows, and Casper wanted to do just that. His rage bubbled over. All he needed was one clean shot. Casper tried to get to his feet, but he had fallen on his bad leg and now couldn’t balance his weight long enough to stay standing. On his third attempt to get up he teetered over and fell into the six-wheeled propane ATV he had purchased to use for hunting. He sat against the middle wheel, panting and watching the fire as it crawled along the wall.

  As he watched, the fire consumed a wooden shelf containing cardboard boxes full of old clothes. The flames lapped at the air like demons’ tongues, spitting out smoky venom. The heat baked his face, drying his eyes while drawing his skin tight. Pummel shot wildly a few times and he said something, but Casper could no longer hear him. A strange silence had settled around him and his vision darkened. Was he dying? Maybe this was what smoke inhalation felt like, or perhaps he’d been shot and was going into shock.

  But within the darkness he saw a blur that he recognized as the passing of trees at a high speed. Vertigo removed the floor beneath him, and Casper closed his eyes in fright. Trees and bushes continued to pass all around him in a psychedelic collage. The trees fell away and he saw three identical houses, each engulfed by a resplendent inferno.

  For a moment, Casper wasn’t sure what he was looking at. But then he realized he was looking at three different views of his own burning house, and he smiled.

  His dogs had come home.

  To the Cave

  Maggie’s heart split in two the moment she stepped from the pole barn. She had to lead her children to safety, but how could she leave her husband behind? Casper was a battle hardened soldier, but an injured one. It was a death sentence; they both knew this. Her heart begged her to stand and fight with him, to remain at his side until the end. But the mother within rose up stern and austere, reminding her that the children’s safety came first . . . above all else.

  An icy calm fell over her, blotting out all fear and dismay, and brought a frightening clarity to her mind. A man stood before her. His hair was tussled; his face flushed from the heat of the fires. His eyes were wide and menacing, set like sparkling jewels in the bust of a statue. When Maggie opened the door, an almost unseen twinge of shock lit on his face, but he choked it with his killer’s smile. The barrel of his gun started to rise. Maggie dropped to one knee without thought and shot him three times.

  Patrick and the children spilled out of the door and ran around the side of the pole barn. The burning house painted the night a devilish red, turning the clouds above to giant stains of blood. Maggie turned and followed her family before the gunfire had a chance to break out again.

  Tad took the lead, followed closely by Beth. Patrick carried Lucy before him while using his bulk to block all three children from any bullets that happened their way. Maggie sprinted to catch up. Her ragged breathing and raucous heart roared in her ears and she didn’t hear Pummel’s orders to Wexxel and Coining.

  “Come on,” Tad yelled. “I know where we can go.”

  “Wait,” Maggie called, but they had already vanished into the forest. Even with a bright half-moon high in the sky and the world behind her engulfed in flames, she still had trouble locating the narrow path at the rear of the property. She ripped through the thin branches of a honeysuckle bush and it lashed her across the face. She stumbled through the underbrush, until she finally spilled out onto the path.

  She knew where Tad was leading them. She ran down the path without a glance backward. Had she taken the time to look back, she would have seen her two pursuers.

  * * *

  Gordon Pummel’s name had once been Victor Konovitch. Victor, along with his brother Izan and wife Anna, had faked their deaths to avoid retributions from the Russian mob for various deeds too long to list. With a pile of stolen money, Victor, Izan and Anna escaped New York and arrived in Shadeland newly reborn as the Pummel family. These false identities were quickly accepted mostly due to the liberal amounts of cash they pumped into their new backwoods wasteland. It had taken large sums of money and years of work to get St. Francis built up. Gaining the people’s trust, building the hidden labyrinth, hiring a trusted private army, and promoting the events to h
igh rollers had all meant nothing.

  Nan was dead. Art was dead. He’d have to start all over from the beginning. But not before spilling the Marine’s blood.

  Gordon fired another round of shots into the pole barn with his Uzi. He hoped that he hadn’t hit the Marine. He wanted him to burn, dying in slow agony. He took Art’s duffle bag off of his shoulder and set it on the ground. The pole barn wasn’t burning fast enough. It needed a little more help.

  He unzipped the bag and took out one of the two remaining Molotov cocktails. He retrieved his lighter from his pocket and prepared to set the bottle alight. Before he could set the flame to the fuel-sodden rag a thundering of growls sounded behind him. Something very powerful hit him in the back and the impact was so intense that his first thought was that Penelope had snuck up behind him. Gordon flew forward face first onto the ground and the bottle full of accelerant spun across the grass, but remained intact. His lighter landed close by, still lit.

  Gordon rolled to his back without hesitation, reaching for the Uzi hanging over his left shoulder. Before he could close his hands around the gun they were all over him. There were snaps and snarls everywhere as their eyes, glowing green in the fire light, passed before his face. He held up his arms, doing all that he could to guard his face and neck from the platoon of sharp teeth. Though his first thought was of the massive ligress Penelope, Gordon spied from behind his arms that they were dogs.

  A yellow lab clamped down upon his right arm, rendering it immobile. An Australian shepherd with otherworldly eyes stood upon his chest. Its wet nose pressed against his cheek as it released a fearsome growl. But it was the small black dog that shocked him most. As Gordon lay petrified awaiting his throat to be torn asunder, the small dog walked boldly up, pulled the Uzi off of his shoulder by its strap and dragged it off into the darkness. It returned moments later and sat on his left arm as if its miniscule weight could hold him down.

  The garage door in the pole barn rolled open and the Marine drove out of the smoke and flame in a six-wheel ATV. He stopped near the lighter, leaned over, picked it up and extinguished it, then reached out and grabbed the Molotov cocktail.

  The Marine pointed his gun at Gordon, but his eyes shifted between the dogs. “Move.” The dogs released Gordon and walked away. “Stand up,” he said, this time speaking to Gordon.

  Gordon stood to his feet with his hands laced together atop his head. The Marine placed the Molotov cocktail on the seat next to him then pointed the pistol at Gordon’s head, steadying his aim with his left hand. The Marine had a look of numb indifference in his eyes. It was a look Gordon knew well—killer’s eyes. The Marine held his breath in preparation of the shot; his finger flexed upon the trigger. But before the Marine could squeeze off a round, the trio of dogs began to growl and bark as if they were mad with rabies.

  The Marine glanced in the direction of his burning house and his placid face wilted into a mask of terror. Even in the orange firelight, the man’s face looked gray. The gun went slack in his trembling hand and droplets of sweat glistened on his brow like tiny diamonds. Gordon chanced a glance over his shoulder. The three dogs stood side by side, their tails tucked low, kicking up grass and dirt as they snarled in the direction of the burning house. Gordon followed their gaze and his heart stumbled mid beat. Something was quickly advancing up the hill toward them. But what they were exactly, Gordon couldn’t say.

  There were four of them. He tracked their movement by the stirring of the grass, and the psychedelic swirling of light—a kaleidoscopic illusion made even more visible by the resplendence of the blaze.

  The Marine fired his pistol, but either he was a terrible shot or the approaching entities were bullet proof. The four phantoms seem to understand that their cover was blown for all at once they shed their disguises.

  Gordon looked down on Hell’s refugees and a scream rose into his throat.

  * * *

  “Stop, Tad,” Maggie screamed.

  They had run down the thin path at a full sprint, ignoring the twigs and limbs that slapped their faces. They were now in the open area of tall grass around the quarry pond. The half-moon reflected off of the water’s surface lending the area a supernatural glow. Maggie had twisted her right ankle on a hidden root, but she had kept running through the pain. Now that she had stopped she could feel it swelling within her shoe. Her arms and face stung as though she had been in a losing battle with a house cat and her eyes burned with sweat.

  “You need to wait, Tad,” she scolded her son.

  He was already around the corner of the square man-made pond, on his way toward the rising stacks of rejected limestone. Though he slowed his pace he continued to press for the cave.

  “Come on,” he said exasperated. “We need to hide.”

  Maggie goaded Beth forward and Patrick, still carrying Lucy, followed. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said. “It’s too bright here. Too open. We need to stick to the woods.”

  A wave of distant gunfire cut through the night, and Maggie recognized it as a pistol being rapidly fired and not the mechanical buzz of the machine guns. There was a short pause, another round of the tight-popping pistol fire then the night went quiet once more. They stood frozen and in the absence of the gunfire the world seemed void of sound.

  “Maybe we should check out the cave,” Patrick said cracking the silence. “You’re not going to be able to keep running with your ankle all messed up. Besides, it’s not very safe for us to be out in the woods right now.”

  “My ankle is fine. Besides, we don’t even know how deep that cave is. It might be standing room only or it could make a straight thirty foot drop. We could get in there and get lost or, worse yet, get trapped and have no one find us for days.”

  Patrick switched Lucy from his left shoulder to his right. “All right. But what if we just climb up there and hide out by the cave? We would have the high ground to see if anyone was coming and could make off before they saw us.”

  Maggie looked up at the stack of colossal stones. Each one stood at least chest level, if not higher. It would be slow climbing, but with her swelling ankle it would be just as arduous to rove in the wilderness.

  “I guess we could check it out,” Maggie replied.

  As she climbed the limestone blocks toward the cave, she stopped periodically to catch her breath and listen. Occasionally she caught the sound of movement, as if something was rustling the tall grass or disturbing the scree at the bottom of the stack, but when she searched all she found were restless shadows.

  She looked out over the glassy pond, watching the moonlight glitter off of the surface. The night was now utterly quiet. The stars dusted the night sky behind the half moon. The air smelled fresh and green and alive, and it suddenly seemed hard to imagine that anything in the world was amiss. A subtle stirring toward the bottom of the stack caught her eye, and though the darkness at the base of the limestone mountain was thick, she recognized instantly what she was looking at.

  “Oh shit.” Maggie’s voice echoed through the night and sounded loud enough to crack the rocks themselves. “Someone’s coming! Get to the top!”

  * * *

  It happened fast.

  Casper had his gun trained on Gordon Pummel’s forehead with every intention on killing the man. Then the dogs started barking. No, not just barking, but having an all-out fit. Then he saw them coming up the hill, their camouflage ruined by the dancing fire, and knew without even an atom’s worth of doubt what he was looking at.

  Casper brought his pistol up and fired, but his hands had gone rubbery and every shot missed. He couldn’t see the creatures themselves, and the firelight refracted off of their cloaking creating a nauseating rippling pattern in the air. He reached into his back pocket for another clip, but they were gone. The creatures charged up the hill and, as if by magic, became fully visible. Gordon Pummel took one look at the four monstrous insects, screamed as though he was being castrated, and then ran for the trees.

  A paraly
tic numbness washed over Casper, an experience that dwarfed all of his times of combat. He felt as if he had phased almost completely out of existence—like he had become a ghost forced to stand and watch the destruction of the world. Gordon Pummel made it to the trees, stopped long enough to glance back then vanished into the forest. Casper wished he had shot the man, or ordered the dogs to rip him to shreds. But now it was too late. He was once again alone, trapped in an impossible nightmare.

  Well, not quite alone.

  King, Sky and Shadow fanned outward, teeth bared, fur bristling. The bugs separated and rushed headlong into the dogs. Shadow poked her vulpine head into the air and uttered a short howl. King and Sky zeroed in on the bug to the far right, moving with a speed that Casper had never seen before. In one instant they were standing, snarling and barking, then, as if a moment in time had skipped, they were on top of the terrible insect clawing and biting.

  King and Sky ripped the bug to pieces, but not before the creature landed a blow to King’s side with its sharp tail. King yelped, but paused only a moment before grasping the thing’s tail in his mouth and tearing it out. One of the remaining three bugs leapt high into the air over Sky, its dangerous mantis-like claws reared to strike, but Shadow collided with it in midair knocking it off course.

  Shadow and the bug landed in an exchange of snapping claws and cracking bites. King and Sky intercepted another bug as it attempted to strike Shadow from behind. The third bug, however, didn’t engage the dogs. Instead, it had turned its attention on Casper, still sitting stunned in the seat of his ATV.