Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  “Where are the bodies?” I asked.

  Detective Link looked at me and then at Chavez who nodded, indicating that it was okay for him to show me the corpses.

  The father had apparently been gunned down by the police when they responded to the call. His body lay crumpled in the hallway leading to the master bedroom. His bullet ridden carcass was being photographed as we shuffled past it on our way to the master bedroom. There must have been thirty or forty bullet holes in his body.

  “He wouldn’t drop his weapon.” It was all Detective Link offered as an explanation.

  Chavez knelt down and took a close look at the body. I followed his eyes. There were claw marks on the man’s face, chest, and arms and what looked like a huge bite had been taken out of his upper left thigh. I met Chavez’s eyes and I could see the fear growing there. I could see my own terror reflected in them as well. He rose and we all walked into the bedroom.

  The twins lay in a tangled mess on the master bedroom floor riddled with bullet holes, bludgeoned, and lacerated with cuts. I could distinguish little or nothing of their facial features. Both of their skulls had been crushed. The broken shards of a lamp and a large mirror were mixed with the blood pooled around their corpses. One of the CSU guys was stuffing a large work boot caked with blood into a plastic bag. Obviously the bullets hadn’t been enough.

  Detective Chavez knelt down and examined the baby’s closer. He examined the corpses, picking through the remains with his rubber gloves. He grabbed one of their legs and stretched it out. It was roped with striated muscle and seemed much too long and the muscles seemed to go in odd directions, not just up and down but at angles. Rigor mortis had not yet set in and when Chavez bent the leg at the knee it went easily in both directions. Bending backwards like the legs of a dog or more like a grasshopper or kangaroo.

  “What the hell?” Detective Link asked.

  “And look at this.”

  Chavez peeled back the other twin’s lips revealing rows and rows of sharp needle-like teeth.

  “What the hell are they?”

  “We don’t know. Every time I’ve tried to examine one, the Feds have swooped in and locked us out. They’ve completely shut us out of the investigation. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get some pictures before they show up here and believe me they will.”

  “What is this? Some sort of government experiment?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. The government is definitely trying to cover it up whatever it is.”

  “Well, no one is going to take this case from me.”

  Chavez nodded solemnly but didn’t reply. They both knew it was just bravado. When the feds swooped in, Link would have no say-so in the matter.

  “What about the wife? Is she able to talk?”

  “She’s in ICU right now. She’s had some massive internal damage and they had to rush her into surgery.”

  “When will she be conscious?”

  Detective Link shrugged.

  “It could be hours.”

  “Were you able to get a statement from her?” Chavez asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know how much sense it makes.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “Well, I haven’t written the report yet, Ramon.”

  “Can I read your notes?”

  “Sure.”

  Daryl and I crowded around Detective Chavez, reading over his shoulder as he rifled through Link’s notes. The woman’s name was Margaret Ellington. She was thirty-one years old and had been awake watching Jay Leno when what she described as monsters with dark black skin, black eyes, and fangs like a wolf slipped into the house without making a sound. They walked upright and wore what had at first looked like hooded cloaks but were actually part of their skin. Their hands and feet looked like alligator claws. They didn’t speak and when she screamed they shot her with some sort of tranquilizer dart. She said it was a blow gun or something, but she didn’t see it. She heard a puff of air and then the dart was just there, sticking out of her chest. She said it looked like a slender piece of bone that had been whittled down and sharpened. When she woke up she was strapped to a table and the “monster men” as she called them were sliding some sort of hose attached to a machine up inside of her. She said that there were doctors there too, human doctors. They were checking her vitals on a computer and examining her, taking blood, taking her blood pressure and pulse. When they were done they brought her back to her house.

  “Some crazy shit, huh?” Link said.

  Chavez didn’t reply. His eyes were wide and he swept them slowly from the notepad down to the infant’s corpses.

  I leaned over and whispered to Daryl.

  “Actually, of all the stories we’ve heard tonight, this one somehow seems to make the most sense.”

  “How the hell does monster men make sense? How the fuck does that explain what happened to my wife and child?” Daryl asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s just like Chavez was saying, this might be the story that somehow ties everything together.”

  Daryl thought about it for a minute.

  “It does sort of tie the other stories together in a way. I mean, if the kidnappers aren’t black dudes but some kind of mutant freaks artificially inseminating women for whatever reason, then I suppose that would make more sense than Satan worshippers making these chicks fuck bulls and snakes. But just about anything makes more sense than that shit. On second thought, no, that shit doesn’t make more sense. That shit is even crazier.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t think it was. Something about this story made sense to me. It fit the facts of the case better than all the others. We knew the babies were some kind of monsters so why wouldn’t the people who were creating them be monsters too? Maybe I had just seen too many Sci-fi flicks, but I could easily imagine a bunch of genetically altered mutant scientists or alien researchers with women strapped to a gurney while they fertilized them with turkey basters filled with mutant sperm. Yeah, it did sound crazy. Perhaps I was losing my mind. I just nodded my head, agreeing with Daryl. Then I let the matter drop for the moment. I was almost certain we would be finding out the truth soon enough.

  We looked around a little more. There was blood everywhere, the bed, the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. I looked back down at the shredded and broken bodies of the infant twins and I felt an overwhelming sadness sweep over me. More dead kids. I had killed one earlier tonight and now there were two more lying dead at my feet. I had found more than my share of dead children in my years as a volunteer but never more than one in a single day. Now they were beginning to stack up like cords of wood. I was surrounded by the bodies of infants.

  The room began to blur and the floor beneath my feet felt unstable like I was riding a skateboard. I staggered through the crowd of detectives and police officers, making it outside onto the front lawn just before everything went black. I felt the cool grass against my cheek as my face hit the lawn. Seconds later I woke up in my own vomit. I rolled over onto my back and saw that I wasn’t the only one throwing up. There was an officer on his knees beside me giving up his lunch to fertilize another patch of lawn.

  “That is fucking awful. Who would do that to their own kids?”

  My thoughts were completely different. Whose kids were these? Who or what was creating these little monsters. I had to find out before I lost my mind. Before the next Amber alert sounded and I had to look at another twisted little body or see another woman bleed to death, another family destroyed.

  I had just crawled to my knees when Daryl and Chavez came rushing out of the house.

  “SWAT just busted down the door over on Raeburn Street where we got the first call. The hostage just gave birth to . . . something.”

  “Something?”

  “That’s what the Sergeant on site said. Something. And whatever came out of her is tearing shit up over there.”

  Daryl helped me to my feet and we raced over to Detective Chavez’s car. Chavez drove back across town as fast as he could wit
hout killing us. None of us knew what to expect when we turned the corner onto Raeburn Street.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  It was all I could think to say. All hell was breaking loose.

  Chapter 6

  Cops were shooting in all directions. A bullet shattered the windshield and burned a furrow along my neck an inch below my carotid artery.

  “Ow, shit! I’ve been shot!”

  Another bullet hit the engine and then another came through what was left of the windshield. Chavez whipped the steering wheel sharply to the left sending the car into a tailspin. He stomped down on the brakes as the car fishtailed and the tires squealed. Chavez’s car slid across the asphalt sideways and slammed into a parked patrol car. Bullets continued to whiz past the vehicle.

  “I’m bleeding!”

  I slapped my hand to my neck and it came away wet. Blood trickled down my neck and stained my shirt. Chavez leaned over and checked the wound as I began to whimper and hyperventilate. I heard myself whine and felt like a punk as I fought back tears. I didn’t want to die.

  “It just grazed you. You’re fine.”

  I was overwhelmed with relief. It didn’t last long. The three of us looked out of the car window and this time I screamed. The cops were under attack. There were more than a dozen of those little demon babies and they were tearing the SWAT team apart. They scampered on all fours across the hoods of nearby cars, hopping like frogs, springing at the police officers and lacerating them with razor-like fangs and claws.

  A plain clothes officer ran past the car with one of the things clinging to his head, its legs wrapped around his throat like some sort of submission hold as it cannibalized the detective’s face. Blood spurted from his head and rained down around him. His screams were horrible. As we watched, he aimed his pistol at the baby and fired. The bullet went through the baby’s back and into the detective’s own head, killing him instantly. The man’s body crumpled to the street where it lay there convulsing as the baby continued to eat his face, heedless of its own injury, lapping greedily at the fountain of blood spurting from the fresh bullet wound in the detective’s head.

  The baby was no more than a newborn. It still had its umbilical cord attached and its skin glistened with amniotic fluid and blood, though most of the blood had come from the detective. Its eyes were black sunless pits and those same needle-like teeth we’d seen on the dead twins bit into the detective’s nose with a sickening crunch. The detective’s nose and upper lip stretched and ripped then disappeared down the infant’s throat. It bit down again, cracking the detective’s skull like an egg, and began scooping out tiny fistfuls of the man’s brain and cramming it into its mouth.

  Chavez stepped from the car and fired three more shots into the baby, point blank range, nearly tearing the little creature in half. The thing yelped and then hissed at him. Chavez fired one more shot into the thing’s brain, finally silencing it. I pulled my own weapon and stepped from the car.

  There were less gunshots now as some of the police ran and others died. A sudden volley of automatic weapon’s fire drew my attention and I turned in time to see the last of the SWAT team laying down a hail of bullets at a group of cloaked figures at the end of the block. Apparently the guy who’d taken his wife hostage wasn’t the only one on the block whose house had been visited by dark men in black hoods. Daryl, Chavez and I stood and watched, waiting to see if SWAT would take them down and we’d finally get to see who or what they were.

  The babies that had not already been killed rushed toward the SWAT team and were shredded by M-16 rounds. Their tiny bodies reduced to lumps of bloody meat. That’s when I heard the roar. The shrouded figures at the end of the block opened what I first thought were hooded cloaks but were actually flaps of skin, some sort of vestigial wings. They creatures dropped down on all fours the same way the babies had and attacked. Only they were bigger than the demon babies, stronger, and much more terrifying. The minute I saw them, I knew those policemen were doomed. A few bullets were not going to stop those things. I wasn’t sure I could think of anything non-military that would. A grenade launcher maybe?

  They looked like prehistoric dogs or wild boars, yet there was something reptilian about them. Their hands, feet, and faces were layered with obsidian scales, glistening with some foul unctuousness and a thick layer of black hair that covered their arms and legs and bristled along their backs like enraged hyenas. They had the arms and torsos of men, and they had been walking upright until they had dropped their hoods. Their faces had tusks, over-sized fangs that jutted from between their lips. Their eyes were wide empty chasms blazing with a fiery red and yellow luminescence like candles in the eyes of Jack o’ lanterns. As they charged forward their heavy clawed hands raked the asphalt, their mouths opened revealing even more rows of serrated teeth and I could understand why the one woman had said they looked like alligators. There were no comparisons to any earthly creatures that did them justice. They looked like exactly what they were . . . demons. I was certain of it.

  The SWAT officers held their ground, raking the demons with gunfire. One of the creatures went down with the top of its skull shorn off, then rose just as quickly to continue the attack. When they reached the police officers they tore them apart. Limbs and heads were viciously amputated, organs and intestines were ripped out and consumed. I was screaming long before I was aware of it. I wanted to curl up into a fetal position, shove my fingers into my ears to muffle the agonized shrieks and the sounds of tearing flesh, close my eyes and wish it all away. I wanted to wake up in my own bed and for someone, my mother, to hug me and tell me it was all just a bad dream.

  I still had my gun in my hand. It felt small and useless. I looked over at Daryl who had wet himself.

  “Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh fuck.” He repeated. Struck dumb by the brutal carnage taking place in front of us. Chavez looked no better. He was pointing his gun at the demons and sobbing uncontrollably. A pool of urine had formed at his feet and the crotch of his jeans was dark and wet. Chavez had started out on the Narcotics and Gang Taskforce, had faced down submachine-gun-toting youths who had no conscious and no fear of death. He’d been in gunfights with murderous drug dealers and seen his fellow officers gunned down in front of him. He’d gone under cover on drug deals wearing a wire knowing that discovery would mean death. None of that had prepared him for this. What he saw attacking those officers was proof that hell was real. He now feared as much for his soul as his life.

  I grabbed Chavez and Daryl and pulled them into the car, falling back into the driver’s seat and pulling them down on top of me. I received a few knees and elbows to the chest and stomach as they scrambled over top of me into their seats. I was screaming, my mind fighting for sanity, as I pushed Daryl off of me and into the back seat.

  I sat up behind the wheel and threw the vehicle in reverse, stomping down on the accelerator. I could hear the screams of the SWAT team even above my own as they were dismembered, brutally eviscerated right there in the street by beings that looked like something from a Renaissance portrait of Inferno. I had been right. Hell had risen.

  Chapter 7

  The radio blew up. There were frantic calls coming from all over the city. What was happening on Raeburn Street was happening all over Las Vegas. I whipped the car into a 180-degree turn, then shifted into drive and rocketed forward. Behind me, Daryl was screaming desperately.

  “The whole SWAT team is dead. They’re coming! Those monsters . . . they’re coming after us! Go! Go! GO!”

  The things I saw in my rearview mirror, galloping toward us on hooves and claws, bearing tusk-like fangs stained red with the blood of the fallen police officers, threatened to switch my mind off completely. I could feel the cracks in my sanity as they formed one by one. I forgot all about the kidnapped women, the mutant babies, all I could think about was saving my own ass. The only mystery I wanted to solve was the mystery of how we were all going to survive this.

  I stared in the mi
rror at the creatures bearing down on us in a full sprint, those eyes crackling with the flames of hell raging just beyond the rear bumper, and saw nothing in them that suggested mercy or compassion or any consciousness at all. It was like looking into the furnace of some engine of destruction. I stomped down on the accelerator, pushing it to the floor, desperate to put as much distance as possible between us and the voracious demons. We turned onto MLK blvd. at 70 miles per hour, tires squealing and smoking. Ahead of us, were more mutant demon babies and more of the demons in black hoods. Much more. The entire street was filled with them. They were pulling people out of cars and slaughtering them. I slammed on the breaks.

  “What do we do?”

  Chavez was wild eyed. In his eyes I could see the same cracks in his sanity that were forming in mine. This shouldn’t be happening. None of this. It just shouldn’t have been. But if we wanted to survive we had to do something and fast. Chavez looked up at the street sign and then to the left.

  “Pull the car onto the sidewalk. Get around these things. If you can make it to the corner there’s a gun shop down the street. Maybe we can find something in there to stop these things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. There’s got to be something.”

  “That’s what they always do in those zombie apocalypse movies, they find a gun shop. In every invasion movie or end of the world flick they do that. The survivors break into a sporting goods store and load up on weapons. If it works in the movies why not try it? Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’d feel a whole fucking lot better with a big ass assault rifle in my hands even if it doesn’t kill these things. Maybe it will at least slow their asses down long enough for me to get out of dodge,” Daryl said.

  “Hey, I’m not arguing. I certainly don’t have a better plan,” I said.

  “Then we do it. Something has got to be able to stop these things. Just drive. Let’s get there quick and get our hands on some heavy artillery.”

  “But what if we don’t make it to the corner?” Daryl asked. “What if those things stop us?”