Ravenous

by John Inman

  While he stared at this unholy horror, Jonas clenched the catwalk railing, no longer heeding the dried feces, not caring that it covered his gloves, was sprinkled across the front of his jacket.

  “What is that?” Terry hissed in his ear.

  As if proudly answering the question for him, the creature lumbered out of the shadows enough to expose itself completely.

  It was massive. Heads taller than a man. Its slavering jaws opened wide, and some sort of evil liquid dribbled out. It unfolded both wings at once and the wingspan was enormous. Eighteen feet, maybe. Or more.

  Jonas and Terry both froze when the creature lifted its head as if staring right at them. The face called up every horror movie Jonas had seen as a kid. Long fangs sparkled among the filth, beady small eyes squinted upward, as if not really seeing much of anything. It was then that Jonas understood. Like the flying creatures, this beast was almost blind as well.

  Most of its understanding of its surroundings, Jonas realized, came from the sprawling flat nose that lay squashed across its face. That nose, the flesh pale and puckered, quivered in anticipation as the creature breathed, sucking in the scents around it, drinking up the incoming data, analyzing everything it could learn about the two trespassers it smelled on the air.

  And, Jonas was absolutely sure, homing in on them, placing them exactly where they were, these two human intruders, on the catwalk directly above its head.

  Jonas was about to warn Terry that the creature knew where they were, but before he could speak, the great animal down below, which no more resembled a bat than a rhinoceros resembles a gerbil, reared its head back and open its fanged jaws. A bellow of pain or fury or bliss screamed up from its bulging throat, and from beneath its great abdomen, a bag of squirming life erupted. Spilling out onto the floor. Writhing and wriggling inside the placental sack, baby creatures, white and wormlike, tried to escape, to draw their first breath of air, to free themselves of the afterbirth. But they were too weak.

  With a single claw from the end of one eight-foot wing, the mother creature tore a gash in the side of the placental sac, and a torrent of foul liquid and small pale bodies gushed out across the floor.

  There must have been a dozen or more creatures inside. They crawled away on trembling appendages and were immediately lost in the sea of young already fighting among themselves on the factory floor for their scraps of human flesh.

  The mother raised her head one last time, and from her vile throat, another cry erupted. This one victorious. And again Jonas knew the creature’s attention was drawn back to the two humans standing on the catwalk above her head.

  “Bats don’t breed like that,” Terry said, his voice a hush of rattled nerves and fear.

  Jonas nodded. “These aren’t bats.”

  “No, they aren’t. But what the hell are they?”

  “I don’t think they have a name.”

  “Can we kill them?” Terry asked.

  Jonas turned and stared at him. “We can try. But we have to get out of here first. We have to make a plan.”

  “Plans are good.” Terry gulped, his eyes falling back to the enormous creature below. “Let’s do that. And getting the fuck out of here sounds even better.”

  Jonas’s eyes were locked on the monstrous mother. His mind raced. He studied the giant beast through the visor on his crash helmet. The visor was smeared with specks of blood from when the creatures flew over earlier. He had to squint to see through it. “That’s the queen, I think. Like with bees. She’s the one who breeds these things.”

  The queen stood among the mass of newborns spilled from the most recent placental sac. Occasionally she took a step forward, using her broad wings like crutches, and as she did, one or more of the infants were crushed beneath her weight. She didn’t seem to care. Nor did the other young. They simply slithered in and consumed the body while it was still twitching, rending and gnawing with tiny teeth and claws, emitting a high-pitched whine of pleasure as they fed.

  Without warning, a scream tore through the air. A human scream!

  Stunned, Terry and Jonas spun around. From behind the catwalk staircase leading down to the floor below, a different swarm of creatures appeared. These creatures were struggling in flight. Their wings almost incapable of carrying the cargo they held aloft among them.

  It was a young woman. A girl, really. A teenager. She was naked. Her clothes had been stripped away. Her arms and legs were scratched and torn, pulled wide by the claws and fangs of the creatures swarming around her. Rather than tearing her to shreds, they were transporting her. Carrying her toward the queen and the squirming mass of young.

  Six feet from the floor, the hovering creatures released the girl. Arms flailing, she screamed again as she fell. The mass of baby creatures writhing below became a frenzied, hungry swarm as soon as the young woman landed among them. She tried to pull herself to her feet and run, but she slipped in the bloody mass of bodies and afterbirth. She fell, landing hard, and the instant she did, the infants closed in, climbing all over her.

  “No!” Jonas cried, as the creatures tore with their tiny pale jaws at the girl’s flesh. She wailed in pain and struck out in terror, trying to fight them off, but it was hopeless. For in the end, it wasn’t really the baby monsters she needed to worry about. It was their mother.

  The queen dragged her bloated body across her writhing young and, bending her head, jaws wide, fangs dripping, tore the life from the young girl with one horrible swipe of the dewclaw at the base of her giant wing.

  The queen stepped back as her young rushed in again, smothering the girl, lapping at the fresh blood, tearing in a frenzy at the wound in her throat. In their midst, the girl’s vacant eyes stared lifelessly at the two men watching in horror from above. The squirming mass of young gnawed at the flesh of the lifeless girl in tiny nips and clawings until there was nothing human left of the girl at all.

  Turning away, Jonas pressed his face to Terry’s chest.

  “Look!” Terry whispered, his lips at Jonas’s neck. “The queen is going to feed.”

  “I can’t. I can’t look.”

  But in the end, Jonas turned, still fighting back a sob. The scene down below was almost beyond imagining. The poor girl’s flesh was ribboned and torn, the bones exposed, her organs scattered about her. She lay motionless, a pale stick figure among the slithering mass of ravenous young still squirming all over her.

  The queen stepped forward toward the girl’s body, her massive belly engorged with more young. She dipped her great head and sniffed at the corpse of the girl on the floor. Opening her jaws wide, she bellowed a cry that sent the little hairs on the back of Jonas’s neck climbing all over one another.

  Jonas realized quickly enough that Terry was right. The queen was going to feed. But not from the pitiful remains of the dead girl at her feet. The queen’s appetite was centered elsewhere.

  She stepped across the body on the floor and lumbered on her crutchlike wings to one of the great copper vats still standing upright. The vat was connected to a maze of piping that crisscrossed the factory wall. At one point the pipeline had broken. And it was from this broken length of pipe that a gelatinous white mass seeped into the vat below.

  The vat was man-high, but the queen was tall enough to bend her head over the lip of the vast cauldron. From their vantage point up above, Jonas and Terry could see everything the creature did from that moment on.

  Dipping her heavy head into the copper vat, she began to lap at the white substance that had gathered inside. Like a kitten with a saucer of milk, her great body trembled in bliss as she consumed the food.

  Terry’s fingers tightened around Jonas’s arms. “That’s the source!” he hissed. “Whatever that substance is, that’s what created all this! It must be some sort of growth hormone, or some other weird chemical concoction they were working on here. Maybe it was innocent enough back then, but leaving it inside those pipes for all these decades did something to it. The chemicals changed.” He extended a
long arm to the creature below, still lapping at the cheesy, bubbling mass inside the vat. “And when a regular bat ate from the vat, it created her!”

  “How could one breeding female create all these creatures in a matter of months?”

  Terry shook his head. “Who knows? If it is a growth hormone, maybe it has some sort of accelerant in it that speeds up the process. Plus you saw how many live births can be accomplished at once. More than a dozen tiny creatures came out of that thing.” To prove his point, he pointed to the infants still writhing on the floor below in the pool of afterbirth and blood.

  They watched as one of the flying creatures, so much smaller than the queen, landed on the lip of the vat beside her dipping head. It leaned down to sip at the white mass too, and the moment it did, the queen roared in fury. With a swing of her massive wing, she knocked the creature across the room. It struck the wall and slithered lifeless to the floor, where more of the young slithered in to tear it apart.

  “She’s the only one who eats it! She guards it from the others to hoard it for herself,” Terry said, tensing at Jonas’s side. Terry’s eyes grew bright behind the bloodied face mask. And when Terry said what he said next, Jonas knew he was exactly right.

  “If we destroy the factory and whatever that white stuff is coming out of that pipe, we can kill the queen. She clearly needs it to remain what she’s become. The breeder of all these… things.”

  Jonas stared down at the young girl’s lifeless body. It was almost unrecognizable now, so little was left of it. Another piece of the puzzle clicked into place inside his head.

  “The hunters must be drawn to only two scents,” Terry added, his eyes still bright with excitement. “The smell of human blood, which sends them out to kill and feed. And the scent of their queen, which draws them back here to feed her young and to rest until they hunt again.”

  Jonas gripped his arm. “But there aren’t many people left. For everyone but the queen, the food supply is dwindling. They’ll have to move on soon. They’ll have to escape the quarantine zone and find a fresh supply of humans to feed upon.”

  Jonas blinked, suddenly understanding it all. “The authorities! They don’t have to blow up the whole town and mountain. They just need to blow up this one building. This one nest!”

  Terry nodded, excitement lighting his eyes. “We have to tell them.” He tugged Jonas toward the stairway they had descended only minutes before. Not caring that the catwalk was rattling beneath their feet. Not caring that the creatures below could hear them hurrying to escape.

  “We have to tell them now!” Terry hissed, climbing faster.

  Before the catwalk behind them could block their view completely, Jonas stumbled to a stop to look back. There, at the great vat with the white cheesy chemicals seeping into it, the queen stood frozen, her special food smeared pale across her jaws, her furred head bobbing high.

  Her splayed nose twitched and flexed, catching every nuance on the air, as she coldly watched them leave. Something about the hateful tilt of her head and the piercing glare of her weak small eyes, made Jonas think she was imprinting their scent on her memory banks.

  Sickened by the thought, Jonas shuddered and spun away.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THE JEEP barreled through the empty streets of Spangle like a bat out of hell. And that, Terry reprimanded himself with a sardonic grin, was simply a figure of speech, not a reference to the current wildlife situation. Although considering what they had just seen, it certainly could have been. He clipped a tumbleweed with his front fender and sent it flying. A stray dog yelped and scurried across the street to get out of their path.

  They banged into a pothole, and Terry and Jonas both had to scramble to hold on.

  “Do you think they’ll listen?” Jonas yelled, both hands on the dashboard, trying not to be catapulted through the windshield.

  Terry had to bellow to be heard. The wind rushing through the hole in the canvas roof was deafening. “The authorities are there to keep the creatures quarantined. They must know by now they can’t really do that. They have to kill them before they have a chance to escape!”

  “But they already have a bombing run planned in two days’ time, remember?”

  “Yeah!” Terry cried, fighting the wheel and staring furiously at the road ahead. “They’ll be taking out the whole town and an entire mountain when they do. I’m hoping they’ll listen when we offer them a less destructive path to take, yet still get the job done.”

  He glanced at Jonas, who was looking worried. “Maybe we should find a landline in town and telephone it in,” Jonas said. “If we show ourselves, they may not let us return.”

  “If they want us to share the information we have, and if they really want to kill the creatures, they’ll have to let us back in,” Terry answered.

  With the mountain rising up at their backs on the other side of town, the two-lane highway they were traveling that led away from Spangle to the north was flat and dry and cut through desert scrubland. The wind was up, and thick streamers of sand drifted across the asphalt in front of them. The blowing sand was so deep, the yellow lines were already obscured. Route 79 had never been so deserted. There was no other traffic on the road.

  Jonas leaned forward and peered upward through the windshield. “Helicopter!” he cried.

  Terry craned forward to see where Jonas was pointing. It was a News 8 chopper, and it was following them down the road. He could see a guy leaning out the chopper’s open side door with a big camera on his shoulder, filming the Jeep below.

  Terry laughed. “We’re on TV!”

  Jonas rolled his eyes. “We’re lucky it’s a camera lens, and not a gunsight.”

  In the distance, Terry saw the flash of red-and-blue lights strobing atop a row of cop cars blocking the road ahead. A line of armed highway patrol officers with long guns in hand, stood in front of the cars, legs braced wide, watching the Jeep race toward them. Squinting, Terry could make out Army vehicles lined up behind the squad cars. Men in uniform—either Marines or Army; he couldn’t tell from this distance—stood watching them from truck beds with binoculars. The military guys looked a little less freaked out about their approach than the cops did. Terry was glad to see them, though. It was the military guys he needed to talk to.

  As the Jeep drew close, Terry eased up on the gas and laid on the horn. He traveled the last few hundred yards making as much noise as he could. He raised a white hanky through the hole in the canvas roof and waved it around as he drew near since the cops were still looking nervous. Every person on the planet knew that nervous cops were trigger-happy cops. Terry was hoping the military guys would keep the cops in line. He and Jonas didn’t need to get blown away at this point in the game.

  He slammed on the brakes. Jonas gave a yip of surprise, as the Jeep slued around on screaming tires to buck to a stop not ten feet away from the nearest CHP cruiser. When he turned off the ignition, every gun in every cop’s hand was aimed directly at their heads.

  Terry supposed they didn’t like his driving.

  Leaving his shotgun behind, he plucked the .38 from Jonas’s holster as well and dropped it on the floorboard before he climbed out of the Jeep and walked toward the line of policemen. Jonas joined him, and not giving a rat’s ass what anyone thought, Terry wove his fingers through Jonas’s and hung on tight, keeping him snug to his side as they approached. When he reached the cops, he squeezed between two highway patrol guys without saying a word. With guns still aimed at their heads, he ignored the policemen completely and dragged Jonas forward until they were face-to-face with the military men in the back. They were Army, he saw now. And they looked deadly serious, if not a little curious to boot.

  A lean Army man who must have been in his fifties, with far more stripes on his uniform than the others, stepped up to meet them. To Terry’s surprise, the officer stuck his hand out and offered to shake. Terry accepted, and so did Jonas. After that, the cops shuffled their feet, looking disgruntled, but still
kept their weapons raised. Terry didn’t care about them or what they thought. After their handshakes with the officer were over, he reclaimed Jonas’s hand, wrapping it safely inside his own.

  Terry opened his mouth to explain what was going on, but the officer spoke first.

  “We’ve been watching you two.”

  Terry looked surprised enough for the officer to smile. He pointed skyward at one of the drones hovering overhead. “Drones,” he explained. “We’ve been monitoring everything. My name is Colonel Briggs.” He eyed the two up and down, even glancing at the torn canvas roof of the Jeep. “Where’s your little dog?” he asked with a smile.

  “Bruce is back at the cabin,” Terry said without missing a beat.

  The officer nodded, as if he’d expected as much. Piercing blue eyes studied both men in turn. “I’m assuming, gentlemen, that you didn’t come here to surrender.”

  “That’s right,” Terry said. “We didn’t. And no matter what happens in the course of this meeting, when it’s over, Jonas and I are going back across that quarantine line to our home. I just want you to know that.”

  “I could arrest you for your own protection,” Briggs said, but he didn’t appear to be inclined to follow through with that threat. Instead he asked point-blank, “So what are you here to tell me?”

  “You’ve been watching us?” Jonas asked.

  Briggs eyed him and pushed his khaki hat back off his head to rub his forehead. His hair was snow-white and cropped so close as to be almost nonexistent. He made an impatient flapping motion with his other hand, and all the armed policemen reluctantly holstered their weapons. The soldiers behind the colonel had already done so.

  “Yes, son. We have.”