by Jeff Strand
Barbara turned around and saw what was on Tommy. A fish. A fish with translucent skin, allowing her to see the skeletal structure, and a head full of oversized teeth like those horrific fish that swam at the very bottom of the ocean and never saw light.
It also had tiny wings. A flying fish should've been a comical sight, but this one was about as funny as an infant's funeral.
Lee crouched down and jabbed his walking stick through the fish's side. It came out the other end, and he wrenched the fish away from Tommy's shoulder. Three teeth remained lodged in the little boy's flesh as Lee tossed his stick aside. Christopher plucked them out.
"It hurts!" Tommy wailed.
"I know it does, sweetie," said Barbara, wincing at the vicious bite marks on his shoulder. "But we'll be out of here soon, I promise."
"It hurts it hurts my leg it hurts!"
Barbara gasped as she saw that an identical fish was on Tommy's leg, biting through his jeans. Lee grabbed for it. The fish snapped at him, taking off Lee's index finger at the first knuckle.
The old man did not scream, though it looked like it took every ounce of self-control that he possessed to keep from doing so.
Eddie's voice boomed over the megaphone again. "I repeat, this is Eddie! I'm hovering over the building where I left you! If you're still there, come out so I can see you!"
"Run!" Lee shouted at Tina. "Go get help!"
Tina nodded and sprinted off.
"Help me roll him over," said Christopher. He and Barbara rolled Tommy onto his back, and then Christopher raised the boy's leg and smashed it onto the ground, hard, crushing the fish underneath it.
He raised Tommy's leg. The fish was still squirming, so he repeated the process. It stopped squirming.
"You okay, Lee?" he asked.
Lee cradled his injured hand to his chest. "Better than you still, but no."
Tommy was still screaming and sobbing. There wasn't much they could do about that. Christopher and Lee pulled him to his feet while Barbara got in position to give him another piggyback ride.
Up ahead, Tina had just about disappeared from sight. She was nothing more than a shadow.
Then another shadow with glowing eyes leapt at her, bringing her down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Captain Charles Buchanan looked around the area and scowled. He was supposed to start clearing out what Colonel Tyson euphemistically called "the new growth." Sounded like a fucking rash. He braced himself as he saw a tree break through the roof of a house not thirty yards away.
New growth. Yeah, right.
"Henderson!"
"Sir!" Henderson was a smart boy. He didn't panic and he always answered.
"We need chainsaws, Henderson. Lots of chainsaws."
"Excuse me?"
"I said we need chainsaws! Are you deaf, soldier?"
"But where?"
Buchanan shook his head. "The proper fucking answer is sir, yes sir! Go hit that hardware store and take every last one of them! Send out two boys to start taking them from garages! Now move!"
Henderson screamed out a proper "Sir, yes sir!" and ran.
"New growth my ass! Time to clear a fucking forest."
* * *
There were trees ripping the world apart. Devlin Hopewell had watched his house torn asunder by the trees and nothing he could do would stop them. But he was smarter than any plant, any day of the week.
He found the perfect hiding place, in his tree fort. He sat up in the well-crafted fort his father had built for him and rocked back and forth, looking at the flaming wreckage that had been his house only ten minutes earlier. His parents both worked, and he was home alone. Well, if you didn't count Mr. Tom, the fat old cat his family had had since before he was born. Mr. Tom had gotten out of the house and gone somewhere else. He had to hope the old cat was alive, same as he did with his mother and father.
He was still shaken, but he was alive, safe from the new trees in the place where he'd had a billion adventures over the years. The one place in town where he figured the new trees would leave him alone.
The tree under him let out a scream of protest as it split from base to crown, making way for the new tree coming up from below. Devlin screamed too, as he held on to the wall of his fortress and braced for the impact. Gravity was kind, and the fort house slid slowly down, giving him a lot of time to scream and holler and pray on the way to the lawn below.
He waited until the house was almost completely on the ground before jumping clear of the wreckage. Alive! He was alive!
Devlin was still celebrating that little victory when the pincers lopped off his head.
* * *
Chainsaws roared and screamed in defiance of nature gone mad. Soldiers went to work, cutting savagely at the trees as quickly as they grew. Some of the trees actually fell; most did not. The things that came with the trees saw to that.
Chainsaws roared and screamed.
Monsters roared too.
And soldiers screamed almost as well as their tools.
* * *
"I did not sign up for this! I just wanted to kill some goddamned terrorists!" Corporal Everson wasn't really happy with the way his day was going. He held onto the chainsaw and groaned as it hacked into the dense wood of the black tree in front of him. The sap was thick and purple. No tree should have purple sap. It wasn't natural.
"Did I just hear you complaining, Everson?" Sarge was being a dick, as usual.
"Yes you did!" He spat out a plume of sawdust. He wasn't very good at chopping down trees, and the damned stuff was trying to get into his eyes like it already had his nose and mouth.
Sure, he was going to get in trouble, but he was a reservist. He was just the unlucky bastard who had to work the weekend everything went crazy. If he'd been back at home he would have never even heard of Dover's Point.
"Well, don't it just suck to be you!" Sarge came closer, snarling like a baboon. That was being kind, since his face bore a stronger resemblance to the less attractive end of the aforementioned ape.
The chainsaw chose that moment to jam inside of the tree. Everson pulled hard at the blade as the engine roared and sputtered.
The tree pulled back. It was slow, but it was much, much stronger. Everson flew through the air with the greatest of ease and broke his spine as he ran into his commander.
* * *
The soldiers moved as fast as they could, running from door to door and checking for civilians. Anyone found alive was ordered out of their houses and apartments, given time only to grab a pair of shoes, essential medication, and their personal identification.
The command had come down: everyone was to be evacuated, no exceptions. There were a lot of people who wanted to protest. The soldiers were under orders and didn't take no for an answer.
The civilians stopped arguing quite so vigorously when the monsters started showing up in force. It was one thing to think about the hideous things living in the forest down the interstate and another thing entirely to have the living nightmares come looking for fresh meat.
The term free-for-all was designed for exactly the sort of situations that arose in Dover's Point. Flying things swept down from the sky, some with claws and some with even stranger appendages, to pluck new meals from the ground.
The soldiers fought back, and the civilians did their best, but none of them were well prepared for what was happening. Military textbooks rarely included discussions of how one might avoid being stung to death by a human-faced scorpion that was the size of a Doberman.
To make matters worse, the sun was lowering, and the bright day had become twilight. Those creatures that preferred to avoid the daylight were more comfortable, and the people who lived in town were more vulnerable than ever before.
The Wellington family had just gathered together and found each other again when the ogre showed up to play. The Wellingtons lasted exactly seventeen seconds.
On Archer Street, where most of the municipal buildings were found, a giant wyrm spo
rting several nasty wounds came out of the ground and began knocking buildings aside with ease. It bled as it crushed the town hall, but it kept going, warbling out its distress as it thrashed and rolled over stone walls and the occasional vehicle.
It might have done better to leave the Dover’s Point Gas and Power building alone. The electricity hurt, but the natural gas storage tanks did much worse when they ruptured and their fumes made it to a burning car half a block away.
The wyrm and the buildings around it went up in a fireball that could be seen from the edge of the original forest, or would have been if the trees weren't obstructing the view.
The trees that kept rising from the ground almost as fast as the eyes left in town could watch them.
* * *
They came from several bases, jets and helicopters that cut across the twilight and sought to put a stop to the cancerous growth of a nightmare forest that shouldn't have existed.
The jets arrived first, moving over the forest and then to its growing edges, where incendiary missiles tried to remove the sickness. The missiles struck and exploded, igniting acres of fresh growth and lighting up the sky with fresh fires.
All for nothing. Like a phoenix, the trees came back, rising from the burning debris as if nothing had happened. Worse, in some cases they rose higher than before, as if the very fuel that should have destroyed them fed them instead. Hell's little super-fertilizer.
The jets banked around for another run, instructed to stop the new growth and not to fire into the heart of the Haunted Forest. There were still over eighty people unaccounted for and no one was quite willing to be the first to risk using the term "collateral damage" just yet.
As they turned in the skies over the unnatural woods, the forest returned the volley of fire. The first wave came in the form of insects. Not your usual swarm of bees or even plague of locusts, but all new flying things that had never been seen outside of the forest before. They were heavily armored and defied rational physics with their ability to lift off of the ground.
The people who worked at the Haunted Forest Tour called them "Harpies," a name granted by one of the early tourists who noticed that they had almost human faces and rather attractive ones at that. Their full, sensual lips did not move and their delicate noses seemed to serve no purpose, but their eyes—often a deep blue or green—were as complex as the ocular organs on any terrestrial insect. The fact that each of the bugs was almost five feet in length made it possible to see them very clearly.
The thick chitinous exoskeletons were sometimes found in the woods after molting season, and a few of the deeply adventurous types had managed to peel them off of trees and take them back for a careful examination. Said husks were not impervious, but a fair estimate was that they could withstand close range fire from a .22 caliber handgun using standard jacketed shells.
Two squadrons of ten jets each met up with several hundred harpies in the air. The first surprise for the pilots was that the harpies could keep up with them. The jets roared and the harpies screamed as they flew through the air, the movement of their wings giving off a sound "not unlike a young woman's shrieks as she was stabbed to death," at least according to Mark Harper, who many people said enjoyed his job just a bit too much.
The jet fighters were perfectly willing to fight anything that came their way. They were not prepared for the five-foot-long kamikazes that deliberately flew into their jet engine intakes.
Flaming metal and flesh rained down across the forest, scorching the trees and tinkling down to the mulch and dirt.
The remaining harpies flew back to their primary hive, annoyed by the death of one of their colonies, but only moderately so. They were not emotional creatures unless riled.
The Black Hawk helicopters that came in next were better suited for dealing with the harpies. Though the insects were actually faster, the seasoned combat crews on the Black Hawks were very capable with their .50 caliber machine guns, and despite their terrifying size and speed, the Harpies lacked any ranged method of attacking.
* * *
The fire spread, burning a hole in the center of the map of Dover's Point. The trees stopped growing where the worst of the fire was, and the scorched earth and ruined asphalt collapsed in on itself.
Sparks rose high into the air, and smoke soon followed. More of the earth gave way, revealing a new challenge for the remaining people in town. Where there had been a town center, there was now a lava pit, filled to overflowing with molten figures that slid from their plasmic waters and walked the face of the earth.
No one was foolish enough to try speaking with the shambling creatures. Well, one guy was. Briefly.
The figures lovingly touched whatever they could. Everything they caressed burned beneath their eager grasp, and they relished the sensation.
It had been so very long since they’d had new things to play with.
* * *
The H.F. Enterprises building was designed to last. Reinforced walls and shatterproof windows that could withstand mortar fire held off the forest for longer than Dover's Point managed to stay alive, but in the end, even the building designed to be as safe as Fort Knox gave way to the inevitable progression of the Haunted Forest.
The few people foolish enough to stay behind looked out through windows that should have survived anything short of a nuclear blast as the army of nightmares came their way. The first guards in their bunkers fought well, cutting down several ogres, a pack of Gigglers, and three heavily armored things that looked like bald mammoths with horns on the tops of their heads.
They never had a chance against the specters that floated through the air and shrieked out deafening cries of pain as they moved closer. Wavering, constantly shifting figures slid toward the guards through the air and ignored bullets and grenades alike.
What they touched died of fright or was frozen to death.
When the hail of heavy artillery stopped, the other creatures in the forest moved forward.
The doors of the H.F. Enterprises building were solidly reinforced. They were designed to sustain incredible damage and bounce back for more.
The big problem was simple enough, really. A minor oversight that, considering the situation, could be seen as forgivable: nobody locked the doors.
Walls that were meant to survive tremendous damage were left untouched. The reporters and remaining employees were not.
On the winning side of the argument, the William Partneau Construction Company had a ringing endorsement for how well they'd finished their contract. The windows were still unbroken and the floor did not let a single tree rise from below.
Sadly, no one directly involved in the contractual agreements between H.F. Enterprises and Partneau Construction was available to return the construction company's requests for a quote.
* * *
Fire from below, nightmares on the surface, and death from above, Dover's Point went into its final minutes with a series of screams that would have shamed the best heavy metal vocalists in history.
Dover’s Point did not die without a fight, but it most definitely died.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Pestilence was not happy.
He had picked the right human host. Ensured that none of the denizens of the forest would harm the host or allow him to come to harm. Watched him board the vehicle. The host was nervous, anxious, even terrified, but that was understandable. It did not matter. The host had no task to complete except to wait.
But as loath as he was to admit it, Pestilence's power was not infinite...yet. In fact, it was quite weak. He could send a small piece of himself out as what Lee Burgundy called a Proof Demon (how adorable) but he could not watch everything that happened within the forest.
The demon had grown cocky. Amused himself with childish games of torture and temptation. But that was what it was all about. He was weary of drawing blood and screams from those in his own realm of existence. His spell offered the potential for an entire world, a much larger world, filled with playt
hings to torment.
But the host was not supposed to leave the forest.
How could he have predicted that a human would interfere? Or that the host would hesitate to kill in order to preserve the integrity of the spell?
If the host had simply shot the one called Edward Turner when he had a chance, Pestilence would be relaxing in a boiling pool of blood right now, gazing upon the mangled bodies that hung above him like a baby's mobile.
All was not lost. He could persuade the host to return. When he did, Pestilence would complete the spell, and the trees would rise from the earth as one, consuming this entire realm.
If not...well, the sacrifices were enough. His dimension would still completely overtake this one.
It would just take longer.
* * *
Tina lay on her back and gazed into the glowing red eyes of the hellhound above her. This could be it. Sweet, merciful death. An end to the heartache and pain.
Or not.
She wasn't going to die in this forest. It could take Brad from her, transform him into some homicidal mold-man, but it wasn't going to get her. She might not get out in one piece, and tomorrow morning she might decide that a world without Brad was not worth living in, but for right now, she was getting out of this forest alive. That was all there was to it.
Now she simply had to prevent the hellhound from breathing fire on her head.
The hellhound raked her with its claws, but she barely felt it. She wasn't even scared...much. She was angry. Pissed. Tina Landry was too close to rescue to let some devil dog end her life. She clenched her fists, extended her thumbs, and thrust them up at the hellhound's eyes.
Back during her tree-climbing adventure, she'd blinded the panther that chased after Christopher. That was with a branch. This was a little more up-close and personal. Her right thumb missed the target, smacking against the side of the hellhound's muzzle, but her left thumb punctured the orb.
