She was almost within arm’s reach when she froze and stared past both her father and brother into the deeper darkness that lay just behind them. A smell, powerful enough to make her want to throw up, permeated the air and wafted to her on the cool evening breeze. Transfixed, Rhia saw the shadow shift, saw the three thick tubes running from her father back up into the darkness pulse and flex in synchronicity. Instantly, the arm holding Ben relaxed, dropping her brother the final inch or so to the ground and sending the boy coughing and spluttering to his knees. The other hand shot out toward her, grasping her upper arm in an iron grip that was far stronger than her father would ever have contemplated using.
Rhiannon stared helplessly as Simon’s face drew closer to her own; then he sniffed her. He drew in a deep breath through his nose, his head moving first to the left of her and then to the right, like a wolf scenting its supper.
Simon’s lips, laced with the same threading of black veins, drew back in a wide smile as he pulled Rhiannon and her brother to him. He wrapped one malformed arm around her waist and the other around Ben’s, scooping them both off the ground as he turned and carried them into the darkness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As Emily rounded the final bend, the high beams of the SUV pushed back the darkness and revealed the house they had fled from directly ahead. The garage door was still up, but there was no sign of the children inside. She guided the SUV around in a slow turn, sweeping the area in front of the garage with the headlights, her eyes searching for any clue to where the children might have gone.
A flurry of motion off to her right caught her attention. A shadow was running across the open space toward her from the darkness of the woods: Thor!
He bounded across the yard in a few powerful lunges and was at the passenger door before she had managed to bring the SUV to a full stop. Emily fumbled for the door switch, found it, and heard the thump of the locks releasing. Unfastening her seat belt—no way was she ever driving without it, after tonight—she leaned as far across the passenger seat as she could and pulled on the door release handle. The door popped open, and she pushed it with the flat of her hand until it was open enough for the malamute to clamber, rather ungracefully, she noted, up into the passenger seat. She had to fight her way past his furry body and the excited licks and slurps of his tongue to pull the door shut again before slamming a clenched fist down on the Lock button.
No sooner had she clipped her safety belt back on and she was off again, slowly maneuvering the SUV around the perimeter of the house, trying to saturate every inch of the night-blanketed property with the high-intensity headlights.
Thor seemed unusually quiet. As soon as the SUV had begun moving, he had stepped off the seat and curled up in the leg space under the passenger side of the console in the equivalent of a doggy fetal position, his eyes never straying from her face. She didn’t think he was hurt; he just seemed…afraid.
She passed the open garage and swung the vehicle around the farthest corner of the house. Slowing to a crawl, she carefully navigated the SUV around the blind corner, almost dislodging a drainpipe with her mirror.
Beyond the corner of the house was a clear stretch of field several acres deep and at least as wide that spread out toward a copse of trees on the farthest border. Just outside the umbra of the headlights’ reach, Emily caught a brief flash of movement. It was too quick for her to be certain she had actually seen what she thought she had seen. She began to accelerate gently in the direction she thought she had seen the movement, then braked hard as the lights revealed Simon, moving away from her, a limp bundle tucked under each arm as he scuttled across the open field toward the trees.
Emily accelerated a little more until her lights fully illuminated Simon and his load. She was right; he had the children.
But there was something else with him, too. Something massive that seemed to shrink from the touch of the SUV’s light. Emily had a sense of thin pale limbs that disappeared into the nearest shadows when her headlights played over them.
Simon halted midstride as the light engulfed and surrounded him. As Emily pulled closer, she could see the three black tentacles she had noticed earlier. Now that she could see them more clearly in the headlights, she thought they reminded her more of umbilical cords; rotting, serrated umbilical cords from some monstrous birth. They flexed and arced as the thing they were attached to maneuvered deeper into the shadows.
Simon turned and faced her, his eyes boring through the darkness to her.
Both children hung limply from the arms that cradled them. Emily had no idea whether they were alive or dead. Their arms and legs draped limply toward the ground like they had been caught trying to touch their toes. Then both kids’ heads lifted—first Rhiannon, then her brother’s—and Emily could see their faces grimace as they looked directly into the light.
Alive! They were both alive.
In that split second of recognition, Emily saw a smile spread across Simon’s face. It was like he was tempting her, taunting her to try, just try to get the kids. Come and get them, that smile said. Try to take what’s mine. Come and see what they see.
Emily knew the sane thing to do would be to turn the vehicle around and head back to the other house, pack the supplies waiting there, and leave. But she could not leave these kids to a fate decided by the hands of a father controlled by an alien mind.
“Fuck that,” she spat and floored the accelerator.
She felt the power of the V-8 engine surge up through the steering column, along her arms, and set her head ringing. She welcomed the pain this time; she embraced it and allowed it to fuel her anger as nearly a ton and a half of made-in-Detroit gas-guzzling metal and leather leaped forward like a bull with a matador fixed firmly in its sights.
The Durango sped from zero to forty-five, racing across the open space and devouring the distance between them in just a few seconds. By the time the speedometer hit fifty, there was less than ten feet separating her from Simon and his captives. She saw Rhiannon look up again, her attention drawn by the roar of the oncoming SUV. Emily saw the glint of the headlights reflect off the girl’s eyes and the look of sheer terror when she realized how fast the SUV was bearing down on the three of them.
This close, Emily could see that Simon no longer looked completely human. His skin was tinged red with lighter blotches here and there that made him look like an oddly colored cheetah. His chest rose and fell in rapid succession as though he had just run a marathon. Dark varicose veins, plump and seemingly close to bursting, crisscrossed his face just beneath the skin and the exposed flesh of his arms, pulsing obscenely. Despite the imminent impact, Simon’s expression did not change.
“Sorry, Simon,” Emily whispered.
When there was less than five feet between them, Emily threw the steering wheel hard left. Instead of Simon, she aimed for the darker shadows where the alien hid, and she yelled in triumph as the lights finally illuminated the monstrosity.
It was balanced on six impossibly thin legs that hung like wilted, wet stems from an elongated corpse-pale body. An extended compound eye stretched around its bulbous head.
There was no mouth that Emily could see in the brief flash of time the thing was visible in her headlights, but she could see the three tentacles attached to Simon as they writhed and flexed their way back to three nodules extruding from just above the insect-like eye.
The Durango tore through two of the creature’s fragile legs with a satisfying crack like snapping branches that she could hear even over the roar of the engine. Black liquid splattered across the windshield as chunks of the creature’s legs, the color of dried wheat stalks, bounced off the hood and spun off into the darkness on either side of her.
From the corner of her eye Emily saw the thing stagger sideways, illuminated by the bloodred paint of her taillights. She pulled hard on the steering wheel while stomping on the brake, swinging the SUV around to face the direction she had just come.
Emily cautiously edged the SUV towar
d the group. Emily could see the creature, Simon, and the kids he still held firmly under his arms. She had managed to smash through the creature’s two front-left legs, tearing them from the body about two-thirds of the way up. More of the black liquid spewed from the open wounds, cascading to the ground as the creature silently writhed and bucked, sending a spray of its blood over the three figures beneath it.
The tentacles suddenly detached from Simon with three wet pops and a spray of liquid, rewinding back to the creature like a power cord on a vacuum before disappearing into the nodules on its head. Instantly Simon collapsed into an unmoving heap on the ground, the children spilling from his grasp next to him. Emily saw Rhiannon pick herself up and glance at her father’s still form with a look of horrified despair, then at the towering wounded creature blocking the route to Emily, the SUV, and safety.
Emily could see the cogs working in the girl’s brain. Could she risk it? Could she make it past the thing to Emily? No, Emily thought, run, just run.
Maybe the kid was psychic or maybe she was just smarter than Emily gave her credit for, but she grabbed her little brother’s hand, pulled him to his feet, and began to run back toward the house, pulling her stumbling brother behind her, his free arm windmilling through the air as he struggled to keep up with his sister.
The thing could barely stand; its legs splayed out wide to counter the loss of the two front limbs as it teetered for a moment, regaining its balance. Emily was sure it was going to fall, but somehow it managed to stabilize itself. Its head swung from side to side in a weird caricature of Simon’s earlier head movement; the single eye focused on Emily, then swung back to the fleeing kids. It was deciding which it had a better chance with, Emily thought.
It made its decision, and, with ridiculous agility for something that had just lost two of its six legs, spun around and began to limp after the children, its remaining oh-so-thin legs undulating across the ground in a wave of motion. Emily had no doubt that if the thing had its full set of legs still, it would have caught up with the fleeing kids in a matter of seconds. While it was certainly slower, it still moved with a swift rolling flow that reminded her of the graceful movements of the tai chi practitioners she sometimes saw in Central Park. There was no way the kids were going to make it to the house before the thing caught up with them, no way.
Emily gunned the engine and drove straight at the thing. Its head swiveled momentarily in her direction as she accelerated toward it, that single extended eye boring into her with a dark malevolence that far outstripped the expressionless features of the creature, sending her stomach into free fall.
It was closing on the kids fast. Ben’s legs just couldn’t move quickly enough, and Rhiannon was half dragging her brother as they raced toward the house. Rhiannon must have heard the monster’s click-clacking footfalls closing on her because Emily saw her throw a glance back at the creature. Then her head whipped left and right as she searched desperately for somewhere else that would give her cover. She suddenly dashed to the left, almost pulling her brother’s arm from the socket as she tugged him along after her. She was heading back toward the driveway. Did she think she could make it to the forest beyond it? Rhiannon might have made it on her own, but Ben was slowing her down; they would never make it to the trees before the creature caught up to them.
The SUV was rattling and bouncing over the rough ground as Emily fought to keep the vehicle under control. Within seconds she was alongside the thing; the broken stumps of its reed-thin legs still spurted black liquid as it chased indefatigably after the kids. It was too close to the children now for her to try to get between it and them, and if she hit it, it could careen right on top of them. The best she could do was feint at it. She pulled the wheel to the left and swerved the Durango at the creature, pulling back just before she hit it, all the time hoping she would not inadvertently run over the kids. If she could just get enough room to get the SUV between them and it, she could buy them some time to get to the woods.
Emily saw something flash from the head of the creature and crack through the air like a whip. It was one of the tentacles the thing had used to control Simon. The tip of the tentacle fell just short of the back of Rhiannon’s head, spraying liquid across the shoulders of the two stumbling children. The thing wasn’t trying to kill them, Emily realized, it wanted to capture them. Use them like it had Simon. Maybe it thought it could use them as some bargaining chip to control Emily?
Wrong. She hit the accelerator of the Durango and swerved sharply into the path of the creature. It swerved away from her, momentarily slowing its pace, giving Emily the opening she needed. It was now or never. She wrenched the steering wheel hard left and forced the SUV between the advancing monster and the children. Pounding her foot down hard on the brake, the SUV fishtailed over the grass and came to a stop directly in front of the monster.
The creature tried to stop. Apparently realizing it wouldn’t make it in time, it tried to use its remaining legs to vault over the SUV. Emily stared through the open window as the thing passed overhead; its smooth underbelly flashed by and its trailing legs almost cleared the Durango. Then one slammed into the top rim of the passenger side door, sending Emily diving for cover and the thing crashing to the ground on the opposite side of the SUV.
Emily raised herself up and stared out the passenger window. The creature had come to rest about eight feet away from the right side of the SUV; the leg that had crashed into it was bent and useless as the thing tried to push itself upright again.
The children had come to a stop and now stood about twenty feet from the crumpled monster. Ben’s arms were thrown around his sister’s waist as he clung to her; Rhiannon’s arms held her brother close.
The creature began to crawl toward the two children, pulling and pushing itself forward with its remaining legs. It looked like a broken grasshopper, she thought as the creature’s legs scissored back and forth in the dirt.
But it was still moving and the kids weren’t.
“Run!” Emily yelled through the open window.
Pulling her brother behind her once again, Rhiannon began to sprint for the house. Emily pushed the gear stick into reverse and pulled the SUV back until she was sure she was where she wanted to be. Slipping the gear back into drive, she aimed directly at the crawling monstrosity and accelerated toward it.
Emily knew it must have sensed the onrushing vehicle, must have known that she was going to send it back to whatever hellhole of a planet it had come from, but the thing didn’t even glimpse at her, it just kept crawling toward the kids.
As the SUV’s four twenty-inch wheels rolled over the back of the creature, crushing its miserable life, Emily saw a tentacle flick out from its head into the darkness…and both kids tumble to the ground.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The SUV had barely come to a stop and Emily was out, sprinting to where she had seen the children tumble into the darkness. She was vaguely aware of something black and sticky smeared from the front wheel well all the way along the driver’s door. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she took deep satisfaction in knowing she had caused such grievous harm to the creature.
“Rhiannon? Ben? Where are you?” she yelled, her flashlight dancing through the darkness.
An almost silent whimpering came from just up ahead, and Emily flicked the beam of the flashlight to the source. Benjamin and Rhiannon were huddled together in the open mouth of an aluminum drainpipe used to direct flash floods along a culvert and away from the house. Rhiannon had the little boy pulled close to her, his head pressed to her chest as they cowered in the shadows.
They were both alive. Thank God. They were alive.
“Are you both okay?” she asked, her voice breathless. Ben’s head swiveled to focus on Emily, his big eyes like two bright moons above dirty, tear-streaked cheeks. “The bad thing hit me,” he said. Then, “Where’s Daddy?”
How do you tell a little boy his father is most likely dead? She couldn’t be sure if Simon was, but she wa
sn’t about to go over there right then and find out. So she chose to ignore the question, instead offering her hand to the children. “Why don’t you two get out of there and we’ll go back to the car, ’kay?”
Emily pulled them one by one from the mouth of the drainpipe. Ben flinched a little as she pulled him to the grass beside her, but Thor instantly began licking the boy’s face, which seemed to brighten him up a little.
“Did the”—she searched for the right word—“the bad thing hurt you, Ben? Let me see.” She gently took the quivering boy by the shoulder and turned him around, lifting the back of his shirt. She could see a small bruise just below his right shoulder blade, a small red bump at its center, barely visible in the light of her flashlight. It wasn’t anything serious. She pulled the boy’s shirt back down and tucked it back into his pants.
“You’ll be fine, kiddo. We have to get back to your house now and pick up the stuff we left there.”
“I don’t—” he began to object.
“It’s okay, dweeb,” his sister interjected, her voice rattling from her throat as she choked back tears. “We have to go with Emily and help her.”
“Don’t call me that,” the boy snapped back. The insult from his older sister seemed to pull him back to reality. “You’re the dweeb.”
“Am not.”
“Are too.”
Emily took a hand of each of the children and walked them back to the waiting SUV, leading them to the passenger side so there was no chance they would see the dead creature, then bundled them inside. Thor jumped in with them and sat between the two kids, who had lapsed back into a stunned silence.
Emily climbed into the driver’s seat, glimpsing back at the shadowy outline of the dead alien, its limbs sticking up like huge broken twigs from the ground, a faint steam rising still from its spilled fluids.
Beyond the creature’s remains, Emily could see the outline of Simon’s body. He was lying in the same crumpled position as when the creature had released him. One arm rested across his stomach, the other was draped across his face, his legs splayed on the wet grass. She stared at his still form. She knew she should get out and check whether he was still alive, but she knew already that Simon had been dead long before she’d found the kids.
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