The country road was racing toward them. The asphalt strip seemed perilously thin. If they didn’t slow now, they’d skid right over into the cornfield opposite, and then there’d be no escaping the Old One, who’d snatch them up one by one like a bird plucking worms from the ground.
“Emma,” Charly moaned.
“Almost there,” Emma shot back.
Jesse spun and saw the Old One’s knobby knees pistoning nearer, the groping hands now directly over the bed of the Chevy.
Emma cut the wheel left. They skidded sideways, their back end whipsawing through the muck. Jesse was thrown against the passenger’s door and had a moment to wonder why he hadn’t put his seatbelt on. Then the Chevy jounced over the lip of the road and began to tilt.
“Come on,” Emma pleaded through clenched teeth. She spun the wheel back, fought the skid, and for one horrible moment Jesse was sure they’d overturn.
Then the truck’s tires gripped the road and they shot forward.
Jesse smiled in amazement. Emma grinned back at him, her expression equal parts joy and disbelief. He was about to compliment her on her driving when Charly screamed, “Look out!”
Moving so fast Jesse scarcely saw it, an enormous white hand loomed in the driver’s side window and exploded through it, glass shrapnel pelting their faces and chests. The jagged yellow fingernails passed within an inch of Emma’s face and clawed over the seatback. Before Jesse realized what was happening, Charly’s oldest daughter was rising toward the gaping window, one of the Old One’s dirty nails snagged in her purple shirt.
“NO!” Charly shrieked. She wrapped her arms around daughter’s waist, but the Old One’s fingers plunged deeper into the cab and seized the screaming little girl by the torso. Charly squeezed her daughter tight, but the Old One began dragging both daughter and mother out the driver’s side window.
Jesse pawed the seat for the carving knife, but it wasn’t there. Where the hell had it—
“Take the wheel!” Emma shouted.
Jesse glanced at her confusedly, but Emma was already twisting in her seat, on her knees facing the Old One’s hand, which had already dragged Charly’s oldest daughter half out of the cab. Charly hung on desperately, but she too was sliding headfirst through the window.
Jesse grasped the wheel just before they veered off the road. Left foot on the accelerator, he guided the pickup away from the muddy shoulder. Something silver flashed in his periphery. He turned just in time to see Emma slash the Old One’s index finger with the carving knife. From outside the cab there came an unearthly roar, a sound somehow high-pitched and deep at the same time. Emma immediately hacked at the Old One again, this time gouging an ugly trench down the monster’s middle finger, the flesh over its knuckles splitting. Its grip on the little girl loosened enough for Charly to haul her back inside the cab.
Jesse jerked the wheel to the right, hoping to remove them entirely from the Old One’s reach, but one of the jagged fingernails sank into the beige ceiling, spilling fragments of white foam from the lacerated fabric.
Emma grasped the carving knife with both hands, drew the handle even with the side of her head, then slammed it with all her might into the Old One’s middle finger just below the nail. Severed, the top of the Old One’s finger thumped onto the seat between Emma and Jesse, but Jesse scarcely noticed.
Because the quality of the Old One’s bellowing had altered, and somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind Jesse understood the power of the creature’s rage. Though the noxious black fluid was spurting from the stump of its severed finger, it was not blinded by its pain or its fury. Jesse had no idea how he knew this, but he knew that if Emma didn’t get down now…
It happened in an instant. Jesse had scooted across the seat to hold the wheel with his right hand and pull Emma away with his left when the Old One’s dripping fingers jerked at Emma’s face. Jesse grasped the side of her shirt, but before he could tug her out of the Old One’s deadly range, the powerful fingers crashed into Emma’s face, propelling her backward into the steering wheel. Her head snapped back with a dull crunch, the back of her skull smacking the windshield with brutal force. As she rebounded off the steering wheel, the Old One’s hand turned sideways and with astonishing speed lashed out at Emma’s face. Blood sprayed everywhere, and then Emma was slumped in Jesse’s lap, her broken body twitching senselessly. Jesse screamed and without thinking relinquished his hold on the wheel. The Chevy arrowed toward the cornfield, decelerating. The Old One’s fingers no longer scrabbled inside the cab, but that didn’t matter. If Jesse didn’t get them going again, they would be dead within seconds.
With Emma’s limp body lolling in his lap, her face a bloody ruin, Jesse leaned over, gripped the wheel and tried to steer it back onto the road. He struggled to get his foot on the accelerator, but the console and Emma’s body were both in the way.
“Jesse!” Charly pleaded.
“Trying,” he grunted.
Thunder filled the cab as the roof crumpled.
Since seeing Sam murdered by the Old One, Charly had vacillated between a state of sorrow and horrified confusion; the only thing keeping her sane was her determination to shield her children from the monsters.
But when the Old One damn near wrested Kate from her grasp, Charly’s trance broke. She took baby Jake from Olivia’s arms.
“Get down,” she said to Olivia and shoved her roughly between her seat and the front seatback. Moon-eyed, Olivia did as she was told. Charly commanded Kate to join her sister on the floor as well. Charly handed the baby to Kate. Maybe, Charly reasoned, looking after Jake would take Kate’s mind off of how she’d nearly been snatched from the truck by the Old One.
“Stay down,” she told her girls and climbed into the passenger’s seat. Jesse was settling in behind the wheel, moving them from the grassy shoulder back to the road. The Chevy leapt forward as he depressed the accelerator, but the Old One’s fist bashed down again, this time right over Jesse’s head.
“Jesus!” he shrieked, the torn metal slicing into the back of his head, the windshield spiderwebbing so badly the road before them became a ghostly mosaic.
Charly sucked in air and looked out the rear window. The Old One had dropped back a little, the Chevy topping fifty now, but its fists were raised for another attack. Jesse goosed the accelerator, and the Chevy’s rear bumper evaded the plummeting fists by a matter of inches.
“Faster,” Charly told him.
“I know,” he said, pushing the Chevy up to sixty, then moving briskly toward seventy. The asphalt road wasn’t in perfect condition, but it was smooth enough. Charly glanced back and discovered the Old One still in pursuit.
Go faster, she almost said, but she didn’t have to. Jesse had the Chevy up to nearly eighty now, and they were leaving the monster behind. Jesse sat hunched over the wheel, the torn metal shards poking down around him like gleaming stalactites.
Charly remembered the cave. Remembered Sam…
Something in her periphery caused her to turn.
“Can’t take it too fast,” Jesse said in a low voice. “The road’s still wet.”
Charly didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. She watched the sky above the road with horror.
“What’s wrong?” Jesse asked.
But then he saw it too. He eyed the side mirror in dread.
The Night Flyers were drawing nearer.
Chapter Nine
Charly strained with the effort of dragging Emma’s body toward the door.
“What are you doing?” Jesse asked her.
“What’s it look like?”
“You can’t.”
“She’s dead, Jesse.”
“But you can’t just…” He swallowed. “What if she’s still alive?”
“Look at her.”
Jesse kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.
Charly hated herself, but said it anyway. “Look at her, Jesse.”
Reluctantly, he did. His eyes only remained on Emma’s lifeless face for a
moment, but that was more than enough to see what Charly already had: the cheek torn clear off, exposing the jaw like a medical anatomy book; a bloody trough ripped through Emma’s temple, the gouge deep enough to expose a pale swath of skull; worst of all the dangling eye, the socket black in the darkness of the cab.
Something peculiar flitted across Jesse’s face. Something not sorrowful and certainly not indignant. It was almost like desire, but that was absurd. With a psychic shiver, Charly pushed the thought away.
Charly positioned Emma’s dead body against the door.
“Stay down back there,” she told her girls. Then, in a lower voice, she said, “I’ll wait till those things get right up on us. Then I’ll shove her out to distract them. Hopefully they’ll take the bait.”
Jesse’s voice was thick. “I don’t think that’s necessary. Look how far back they are.”
“Put as much distance between us as you can.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“The road turns gravel in another mile.”
Jesse stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”
“Wish I was.”
The Chevy moved up to a rattling ninety.
“Are we safe, Mommy?” Olivia asked.
“No,” Charly said. “Stay down and cover your head.”
“How far until town?” Jesse asked.
“Haven’t you been out here before?”
“We came another way. Emma…” he said, but broke off. He cleared his throat. “Emma said it was faster.”
“To the campground, it is,” Charly said. “But this is the quickest way from our house.”
“So how long?”
“Ten more minutes.”
Jesse was quiet a moment before he asked, “Are we doing the right thing?”
“What, trying not to die?”
“Leading them toward town.”
Charly didn’t respond.
“If they follow us…” Jesse said. “Think of all the people they’ll—”
“I’m thinking of my kids,” she said, an edge to her voice. “They’re the only people I’m concerned with.”
Ahead, the gravel loomed like a gray specter.
You’ll want to slow down, Charly was about to say, but Jesse beat her to it. The Chevy decelerated to a shade over sixty. It was still a dangerous speed on wet gravel, Charly knew, but what choice did they have? If Jesse lowered their speed too much the Night Flyers—and the Old One—would overtake them, and dying in a high-speed truck accident was infinitely preferable to being eaten alive by monsters.
“How long is it gravel?”
“Three miles?” Charly guessed.
“Damn.”
The tires barreled over the last section of asphalt and crunched over gravel. Jesse grimaced with the effort of keeping her straight, but the Chevy still began to slue wildly.
“Better slow down,” she told him.
Jesse brought it down to fifty-five, but the Chevy still yawed erratically.
A silvery snatch of moonlight skittered across Jesse’s face. Charly didn’t like what she glimpsed there. Wan, sallow, and an ill-defined impression that his face had elongated. Had to be her imagination, she knew. Jesse was fine. Was doing all he could do get them out of here. But still… The disquiet lingered like the taste of bile after a violent bout of vomiting.
Jake began to cry. Charly could hear Kate back there, bouncing him in her lap and trying to quiet him. Good girl, Charly thought.
She glanced through the back window.
No sign of the Night Flyers.
“Think we’re okay?” Jesse asked.
“Drive.”
“I am driving.”
“Then drive without talking.”
“Are you always this mean?”
Charly smiled at him, and he brightened a little.
She turned to gaze out the back window.
Her smile evaporated.
The Night Flyers had reappeared. Not only that, but they were angling off the road as though to cut across the cornfield. Charly remembered, her stomach plummeting, that the road ahead did indeed veer right.
They’re heading us off, she thought.
They’d ticked off about a mile of gravel, Charly estimated. But there were hills and curves ahead, the gravel loose and hazardous.
Charly thought for a moment, thought hard. Then she came to a decision. “When we get to the blacktop again,” she said.
Jesse glanced at her. “Yeah?”
“There’s a gravel road about a half mile up. Through the woods.”
The pickup shimmied a little. Jesse gritted his teeth. “You want to drive on more gravel?”
“The road it leads to is County Road 1200.”
“So?”
“1200 leads to Highway 65.”
“You wanna take the highway?”
“The longer we’re on this road, the more they’re gonna gain. The faster we can get to 65, the better we can outrun them. Plus it’s less populated than town, at least at this time of night.”
“Then let’s take the gravel road,” Jesse said. “I don’t see the problem.”
“The gravel road goes back toward the campground.”
Jesse’s mouth hung open. “Charly…”
“You said yourself you don’t want to lead those things toward town.”
“Anonymity is looking really attractive right now. We could park at a gas station, hide inside a bathroom.”
“They’ll find us.”
“Not necessarily, they could—”
“Can’t you hear them?”
Jesse stared at her a moment longer, then fixed his eyes on the road. It was all the answer she needed.
It was a sensation unlike any other, like tuning into radio stations from countries that spoke other languages. They hit her in bursts, sometimes faintly. She knew these voices came from the Night Flyers. First the voices were garbled in that alien tongue—clicks and weird choking sounds. Then it was like her mind adjusted to the language barrier and the English translation kicked in.
Get youuuu…going to get youuuu…
But the voice that came through the clearest was the voice she hadn’t heard until Sam’s death. She was able to mark it so clearly because it had begun at the exact moment that the Old One had turned to watch the truck after biting off Sam’s head. As if the monster was implanting a trace in her mind, one it could follow no matter how far she roamed.
Since then she’d come to understand all too well the pained expression on Sam’s face earlier, during the passage through the tunnels. For whatever reason, the Old One had marked him and had tortured him up until the confrontation on the lane. And when Sam’s body had been flung into the crowd and butchered by the Children, the Old One had fixated on her.
She cringed as another thought missile ripped through her brain.
YOUR BABY IS GOING TO BE ONE OF US, CHARLY. AFTER WE EAT YOU AND YOUR DAUGHTERS, YOUR BABY BOY WILL BECOME ONE OF US.
No, she thought weakly.
JUNIOR WILL BE ONE OF US.
That did it. She tightened the muscles of her legs and squeezed her fists until they ached. She would not allow the Old One to touch any of her children. She wouldn’t allow it to take her baby. Not again.
The cornfields disappeared ahead, the forest taking hold. She thumbed down her window, squinted through the night to locate the mass of slowly flapping wings. She leaned out into the chilly air to better see, the wind blasting the side of her head, her blonde hair streaking against the side of the Chevy. She thought she could make out…
Yes. The prehistoric-looking beasts were nearly to the forest. The Chevy would beat them there, but not by much. Plus, the road trended right, toward the creatures, before it serpentined left. Then there was a long descent, a series of ravines and rises. Then they’d hit blacktop again. Moments after that, they’d turn onto the gravel lane that’d lead to 1200. A minute or two after that, they’d be on 65.
A total of five minutes, she es
timated. No more than that. If they could survive the next five minutes, they’d make it out of this nightmare.
Jesse was eyeing the impending forest warily.
“The road is pretty straight until the trees,” Charly said. “Things get kind of wild after that, like an amusement park ride. Kate and Olivia always want to go this way because it’s so up and down.”
They were almost to the woods.
Jesse swallowed. “This is it, isn’t it?”
“This is it,” Charly agreed.
“We make it through here and the other gravel road, we’ll be safe, won’t we?”
“We’ll be safe,” Charly said, and was amazed to find she believed it.
Five more minutes, she thought. Five more minutes.
Chapter Ten
The forest swallowed them up.
The headlights illuminated the gravel lane, which might as well have been a tunnel. The overhanging boughs of the great oaks and sycamores formed what amounted to an unbroken canopy of branches and leaves.
Charly thought of the bend looming ahead, the place where the Night Flyers might attack them. “Step on it, Jesse.”
“If we wreck, we’re done,” he said.
“If they catch us, it’s not gonna be pretty either. Did you see how many there were?”
“I saw.”
It was tough to tell with the darkness and the shifting mass of wings, but to Charly it looked as though there were easily fifty of the flying beasts.
Another thought from the Old One blasted through her mind, but she was able to focus on the road despite the glancing pain the telepathy brought on. Jesse was accelerating. If they could make it through the stretch where the trees were sparse…
The thought struck Charly like a club blow.
It was almost as if the Night Flyers had led them to this spot.
Impossible, she thought. They weren’t even awake until the last couple days or so—how could they know the terrain aboveground that well?
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