“So, it’s Virginia Tech today? What happened to Boston College?”
“I go back and forth. It’s a nice luxury to have when multiple schools offer you free rides. Christ, it stinks!”
“Excuse me?”
“Not you, baby. I’ve been on the road for like five minutes and there’s this awful smell all over the woods. It keeps getting worse. Like something died.”
“I hope it doesn’t stick to you. Sweaty can be sexy. Smelling like roadkill? Not so much.”
“It’s just, I can’t describe it. I hope whatever it is died quick.”
“Let’s not end things by talking about dead animals, big guy. I’ll leave you with this. I’m going all Anne Hathaway today. It’s a good thing the paparazzi aren’t waiting around to photograph me stepping out of my car. It would be quite the naughty picture in the school paper.”
“You are such a tease—I love it. See you in ten.”
“Bye, sugar.” And she was gone.
Travis pumped his fist. He’d reach second base in the morning and throw touchdowns that night. Howard Stern prattled on satellite radio in the background and Travis noticed the temperature outside was in the thirties, appropriate December coldness. Dirty remnants of a freak Thanksgiving snowstorm littered the landscape. There’d be no respite from the white stuff. A blizzard was set to blanket the tristate area come evening.
What a gyp, Travis thought. Why couldn’t the damn thing wait to start Sunday night? It’d wipe out school on Monday, maybe Tuesday too. What a waste.
The road was clear, save for the occasional salt stain, and he stayed under the forty-miles-per-hour speed limit. He wasn’t going to let a deer leap from the shadows and smash into his early graduation present from Daddy. Maybe a dead deer’s stinking up the place? They infested northern New Jersey and he regularly hunted them with his father and uncle. It wasn’t a skunk’s scent, the lingering kind that eventually dissipates. This alien reek intensified.
He decelerated when the first of two stoplights that punctuated his journey came into view, and that’s when the shriek shattered his ride. The Mazda’s closed windows blunted what seemed to be the screams of prey being mauled by a pack of beasts.
Just put it out of its misery, please, he thought.
And then the wails ceased. Travis stopped at the red light and turned off Howard Stern. Curiosity led him to lower his window and he was arrested by the odor and silence, broken only by his breathing. He counted five Mississippis of quiet before an anguished scream rippled through the air and then devolved into a growl. Travis swore he heard a chain clanking every time the thing drew breath to resume its gnarling.
“Some kind of guard dog that escaped?” Travis asked aloud. His nerves spiked the way they did the first time he saw police lights in his rearview mirror—his dad was mayor—no speeding ticket that day.
“Turn green. Turn green already,” he commanded the light.
The snarling persisted from afar, but from where? Travis fumbled through his glove box and found his emergency flashlight. He acted like a high school quarterback and scanned the forest to his left. Eyes darting back and forth, the beam danced from here to there, and instead of finding an open receiver he spotted huffs of condensed breath puncturing the darkness, as if some unseen bull was preparing to charge his red Mazda.
The light turned green and Travis floored it. He had to trust that no deer ahead of him would jump into his path. A pickup truck passed him going the opposite direction, as did a couple of school buses out to retrieve their loads of kids. He’d traveled ten miles since leaving home, and his headlights illuminated the final stoplight, meaning he was five minutes away from school.
The howling resumed and grew louder as Travis approached the light.
“Jesus Christ, what is that?” he blurted.
He looked in his rearview and swiveled his head over his shoulders, looking for something trailing him. Nothing. But the howling, brewed deep in the bowels and belched skyward, would not die, nor would the smell.
Travis had to slow down. The cross street always had some school traffic this time of morning and he’d be crazy to blow through the red light that greeted him.
“Just keep it together,” he told himself. He scanned left and right and saw a school bus in the distance, traveling toward the light from his right. Travis despised this signal because of the length of time it took to change. The bus would pass him, and perhaps another would too, before the light turned green. He’d felt on edge before, when two-hundred-pound linemen were bearing down on him. But that was a game.
His shaking grip on the steering wheel at the ten and two positions made it appear as if he were bending an iron rod. He wanted to be at school. He wanted his green and white football jersey that he wore under his varsity jacket to broadcast to the world that he and his teammates were superior specimens within a sea adrift with regular students. He’d even French-kiss and cop feels off his girlfriend—who admitted she wasn’t wearing a shred of underwear—before the homeroom bell, all of it five minutes away.
The school bus headlights approached. He kept his window down despite the putridity. He neglected to turn on Howard Stern. He wasn’t in the mood to find out how old the Kardashians were when they all lost their virginity. Instead, he heard earthmoving footfalls and a growl erupting into an otherworldly roar.
Travis turned to his right to see through the passenger’s window a dark mass burst through the forest. Screw the light, he thought. Just go! But it was too late. The thing barreled into the side of the Mazda, lifting it off the ground. The bellowing thing repeatedly rained down a heavy chain with watermelon-sized links—the kind that could lower drawbridges—onto the Mazda’s hood, crushing the vehicle’s engine into a stall.
Travis went to unbuckle his seat belt but again was too slow as the creature’s hairy right hand smashed through the window and began to thrash and grab. The Mazda’s headlamps and dashboard lights still worked and illuminated dark tangles of grimy fur attached to a log-thick forearm.
A meaty, calloused hand with crescent-shaped talons raked though Travis’s seat belt. The hand grasped through Travis’s jacket and jersey, talons slicing into flesh on his chest. Its grip firm, the thing pulled Travis across the passenger’s seat and out of the window. It disregarded the pain Travis felt as it dragged his body over jagged edges of the remaining window glass, its shards wedging into his thighs.
Now fully extracted, Travis remembered a long tongue waggling around fangs, and his six-foot-two-inch body reduced to being a rag doll’s, tossed by hand over the beast’s head and into what Travis surmised was a wooden crate strapped to its back. His skull cracked against the crate’s base, dazing him. Now he knew what a notebook felt like in a backpack.
Jesus, how big is this thing?!
And then running. Travis’s legs jutted out of the crate and his head smacked against wood as his kidnapper bounded through the forest’s dead leaves and snow. And the running stopped, but not the movement. Gliding? His stomach churned as if he were plunging on a rickety amusement-park ride.
Besides the beast’s howls, the last bit Travis remembered before losing consciousness was the smell that started the nightmare: the odor of a malevolent force that invaded New Jersey twenty days before Christmas.
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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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Twelfth Krampus Night
Co
pyright © 2015 by Matt Manochio
ISBN: 978-1-61923-132-0
Edited by Don D’Auria
Cover by Scott Carpenter
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First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: December 2015
www.samhainpublishing.com
Twelfth Krampus Night Page 12
