by Jeremy Bates
These thoughts came and went in the time it took Rex to withdraw the pistol from the waistband of his pants. He aimed three times and squeezed the trigger three times: pop, pop, pop.
The head of each creature—pupae?—exploded in blood and puss and goo, and their obscene bodies slumped forward onto poor Daisy’s corpse.
***
Everything was coming together inside Rex’s head at an almost nauseating pace, everything was ticking, clicking, and making sense. It’s why it guts you. No major veins or arteries in your stomach. That means no hemorrhage, no wasted blood. It guts you to incapacitate you, so it can carry you down here. At least large prey like humans. Smaller stuff—birds, rodents, chickens maybe—it just slaughters on the spot. But for something big—a human has one and a half gallons of blood inside it, a deer or bear much more—it brings it down here so it can suck away at its leisure. Not to mention offer up a blood buffet to its greedy little offspring.
That’s what happened to his mom. Probably his dad too.
And the Petersons? And the Ryersons? Were their skeletons—their leftovers—down here somewhere? The Ryersons had two girls. Were they down here? Had they been exsanguinated? Perhaps while they were still alive? Because that’s another reason it gutted its prey, wasn’t it? It takes a long time to die from a stomach wound, days sometimes, and as long as your heart’s pumping, your blood’s getting oxygen, staying fresh.
Oh Jesus—was that why Ellie wasn’t gutted? So she could be served fresh?
These thoughts filled Rex with not only disgust but insensate rage, and right then in the heat of the moment, he almost wanted the adult creature to show its hideous face.
He wanted revenge, hot, hot revenge.
CHAPTER 19
Tabitha was worried sick. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t sit still. Her thoughts were racing, her stomach twisted inside-out. She’d spent the last forty minutes pacing, crying, talking to herself, bemoaning ever letting Ellie out of her sight, acting like a certifiable crazy person.
The behavior wasn’t helping Bobby’s temperament any. When she cried, he cried. When he asked her a question, she either ignored him or snapped at him. She couldn’t help herself.
Her daughter was taken. Gone. Maybe dead. Yes, maybe dead, because Rex should have been back by now. He should have been back with Ellie in his arms. Her Ellie. Her spunky little girl. Her baby.
I’m never going to see her again, am I?
It was a reasonable question, asked matter-of-factly, and it fueled her despair, and right then she hated herself. Hated herself for letting events come to this. She was Ellie’s mother. She was her protector. She failed her little girl.
Tabitha sank to the sofa, curled up, and rocked and cried.
Bobby was speaking to her. She looked at him through itchy, bleary eyes. She didn’t know how long she’d been crying for, only that it had been a while. She wiped her eyes and nose with the backs of her hands. She needed to pull herself together for his sake.
She tried a smile that felt like the saddest facial gesture she had ever made. “Come here, Bobby, I’m sorry, come here.” She opened her arms.
Bobby seemed hesitant, but he came to her, and she drew him into her embrace.
They had never hugged before. He had always been too standoffish. His small body against hers felt so much like Ellie’s, so soft and fragile and young, and she thought, Why couldn’t the creature have taken you instead?
The thought startled her, and she shoved it promptly aside, ashamed of herself.
Why couldn’t it have been me? That’s what I should be asking. Why not me? It should have been me.
She began to cry again, silently this time, tears only. Bobby didn’t say anything. He just held on to her. She bit her bottom lip. It continued to tremble. She tried thinking about anything but her daughter.
It was impossible. She couldn’t do it.
The darkness inside her became overwhelming.
She eased Bobby aside. She tried another phony smile. “You’re such a brave boy, you know that?” she said, the words coming out of her mouth before she was fully cognizant of what she was planning on saying and doing. She thought she knew. The plan was there, in her head, vague, yet taking shape quickly. “You’re so brave, Bobby, and when your dad comes back, you’re going to be brave for him too, okay?”
What are you doing? she thought, a niggle of panic cutting through the despair. Don’t set this in motion. Don’t set this up. You might go through with it.
She kept talking. “I want you to go upstairs and hide under the bed and stay there until your daddy returns. Can you do that for me, Bobby?”
He looked terrified at the idea. “I want to stay here with you.”
“It’s best you go upstairs.”
“But that’s where the monster got Ellie!”
Hearing her daughter’s name spoken aloud broke Tabitha’s heart all over again. “The monster’s not coming back,” she said tightly. “You’ll be safe up there. Just until your daddy comes back.”
“But I don’t want to go!”
His refusal strengthened Tabitha’s resolve to commit to her plan. She sat up straight. “We’re not going to argue about this, Bobby. You do as I say.”
Bobby frowned, then slid off the sofa.
She nodded. “Go on now.”
He departed to the other room, and the last of her reservations went with him. She gasped, as if she had been holding her breath for the last minute or so. She covered her mouth with her fingers. She was really going to do this, wasn’t she? Yes she was. She couldn’t live without Ellie. She couldn’t live not knowing what happened to her, or, perhaps more accurately, knowing what happened to her, because there was only one reason the creature took her.
So how are you going to do it?
The easiest method would be to hang herself. She could use the sash from her bathrobe as the ligature. Tie one end around the horizontal metal pole in the closet. Stick her head in a noose, kneel, and lean forward. The pressure on her carotid artery would cause her to black out in seconds, even if the lack of blood to her brain wouldn’t kill her for another half hour.
Yet that was the problem.
Rex might return before she could die properly, or Bobby might come downstairs. Either one of them could “save” her—which would probably leave her with serious brain damage, or in a vegetative state. More than that, she simply didn’t want Bobby to be the one to find her. He was five years old. After tonight, he was going to have enough issues to last him a lifetime; she wasn’t going to dump anything more on him.
She’d need to do it outside, she decided. She would have to get far away from the cabin, not to mention finding a branch that was the right height and would not snap under her weight. Doing this would be uncomfortable in the storm. She would get cold and wet—
You’re killing yourself! she thought indignantly. It’s the last thing you’ll ever do. And you’re worried about getting cold and wet?
Tabitha stood on suddenly shaky legs. Adrenaline coursed through her veins. Every object in the room came into angelic focus. She went to her suitcase robotically, withdrew her bathrobe, snaked the sash free from the loops. She had bought the bathrobe at a shopping mall last June while visiting her younger sister, Ivy, in Olympia. They’d spent the morning browsing the shops for a present for Ivy’s husband’s upcoming birthday. They’d had coffee in a pleasant little café, and lunch at an Italian eatery, where the waiter had hit on both of them. It had been a fun weekend.
You’ll never get to see Ivy again. Or Beth. Or Rex for that matter...
Yes, all of that was true, but she would never see her little girl again either, and that was the harshest reality, the one she could not live with.
Tabitha left the cabin as quietly as she could. As soon as she stepped outside into the night, the storm iced her skin and chilled her to the bone. She set off in an arbitrary direction, her hands shielding her eyes from the slanting rain.
A bla
st of lightning stabbed the sky purple. And in that brief moment, through the silhouetted, swaying trees, she saw the vast, dark expanse of the lake, its previous calm surface now boiling with whitecaps.
She made her way toward it.
CHAPTER 20
Moments after Rex returned to Ellie’s side, a high-pitched whine filled the air.
“It’s coming!” Ellie cried.
Heart thumping, Rex aimed both Maglite and pistol into the void above them.
He caught a glimpse of the creature.
It strafed right. He tracked it. Squeezed the trigger in panic.
Did he hit it?
The whining receded but didn’t fade completely.
“Where is it?” Ellie cried.
“Run!” he said, barely getting the word out of his fear-shrunken lungs.
She took off ahead of him. He followed, scanning the darkness. He could still hear the whine of the creature’s wings. It was either on the other side of the chamber or very high above them.
Had the bullet struck it? Was it injured? Or had the shot merely scared it off?
He shouldn’t have slaughtered the pupae, he realized. They hadn’t been a threat. And now there were only three rounds left in the pistol’s magazine.
Ellie tripped and fell. Said “Ouch!” when her hands and knees slapped the ground. Before Rex could help her she was up and running again.
The whining increased in volume and intensity from somewhere directly in front of them.
He shouted, “Ellie! Stop!”
She skidded to a stop and whipped her head around to look at him, her loose black hair falling across her childish face. He moved in front of her and aimed the flashlight and gun straight ahead. The whining changed in pitch and direction. Confused, he aimed up, straight, right, left, up again.
Where the hell was it?
The whining stopped.
“Stay behind me,” he whispered harshly.
Blinking perspiration from his eyes, Rex crept forward, keeping his back to the rock, his arms outstretched in a shooter’s position, his trigger finger slick with sweat.
Don’t get spooked. Don’t fire again until you have a sure shot.
He heard a noise at two o’clock, a shifting of rubble, or bones.
He aimed the flashlight beam accordingly.
The man-sized insect was thirty feet away from him, standing perfectly still, its compound eyes unreadable, its antennae twitching as if smelling or tasting the air, its proboscis jutting from its face phallically. It stood erect on its two long legs. Its pinchers were raised before it, the concave jaws snipping silently at the air.
“Eat lead,” he said quietly, aware of the absurdity of the comment as he squeezed the trigger.
The shot—both deafening and gratifyingly powerful—struck the thing square in the thorax. It squealed and twisted its vertebrate-esque body sideways. Its translucent wings sprang open from where they had been folded closed behind its back and buzzed frantically.
Rex fired again and again. The last two bullets both hit their mark.
Nevertheless, the creature was gaining lift fast, disappearing into the void above them once more.
Rex’s ears rang hollowly. His pulse galloped. His eyes stung with sweat.
Ellie was screaming.
He spun toward her, crouching at the same time.
“I hit it!” he said. “Now’s our chance! Run!”
She clamped her mouth shut and ran.
Rex stuck right behind her.
They reached the exit to the chamber quickly. Rex’s spirit soared, and he experienced the closest thing to hope since entering the mine.
They could do this. They could escape alive.
Tossing aside the now useless pistol, he scooped Ellie into his arms so they could move faster. A strange calmness fell over him as he selected without hesitation or error each tunnel leading them back the way he had come. When they reached the spot where he had fallen through the timber boards to this Dantean lower level, he hiked Ellie onto his shoulders.
“Stand up,” he instructed her, transferring his hands to her ankles to support her. “Can you reach the boards?”
She was standing full height. “Yes!”
“Okay, hold on tight. I’m going to push you up higher.”
He slipped his hands beneath her sneakered feet and pressed upward, like he was using the shoulder press machine at the gym. Almost immediately Ellie’s weight lightened as she wormed up onto the jutting planks, her feet kicking.
Then her head peeked back over the hole. “Come too!”
“I’m coming. I just need to find—”
The words died in his mouth. Killed by the whining of wings.
Everything inside Rex wilted. He had run out of time. He was trapped and unarmed.
I don’t want to die, he thought. And a split second later: Everybody dies eventually.
He looked up at Ellie. “You have to go without me.” Standing on his tiptoes, he passed the flashlight to her. “Just keep choosing whatever tunnel leads up.”
“No!” she whispered breathlessly, and in that moment he saw the beautiful woman she was going to become. “No! T-Rex! Please!”
The whining was drawing closer, shrill, like an angry dentist’s drill.
“There’s no time for this, Ellie!
“But—”
“Go! Get away! Go!” he said, realizing sickly that he was repeating verbatim what his mother had told him thirty-eight years earlier. “Get back to the cabin! Your mom’s worried sick about you! Go!”
The mention of Tabitha clearly struck a note within her, because the fear in her face hardened into resolve. “See you later, alligator,” she said, grinning expectantly.
“In a while, crocodile,” he replied, swallowing hard.
Her head vanished. The light receded. Blackness cocooned him.
Exhaling deeply, resignedly—I did my best, let it be enough—Rex turned to face the hellish abomination approaching him in the uncompromising dark.
CHAPTER 21
Teeth chattering and body shivering, arms folded across her chest, Tabitha stood at the start of the dock, staring out at the frothing lake.
She no longer noticed the rain slapping her face or the wind tearing at her clothing and hair. She wasn’t even really seeing the lake. She was staring inward, asking questions that had eluded philosophers since the beginning of recorded history.
What’s the point of it all? Why are we here? Why give us the awareness that life is fleeting, that we’re going to die? Why make us love others when it’s so easy to lose them?
She didn’t have answers to these queries, of course. But suddenly existence seemed absurdly comical. One big joke that a higher being was having at humankind’s expense.
No, not a joke, she amended, an experiment. We were nothing but curious bacteria under a God-like scientist’s microscope. We were insignificant in the big picture of things and thus our individual lives were not deserving of meaning.
Because if God the Joker cared about us, if God the Scientist cared, He wouldn’t make life so cruel. He wouldn’t give Tabitha a husband who was a lying cheat, or a teenage daughter who hated her guts. He most certainly wouldn’t have allowed a giant insect to steal away her innocent baby.
It used to make sense. Life. It used to make perfect sense. Wake up, make the girls their lunch, drop off Ellie at school, fly the short-haul route to Olympia and back to Seattle again, smile at the passengers, serve them their snacks, pick up Ellie from the daycare, make dinner, try to engage Vanessa in talk, speak to Rex on the phone, watch some TV, go to sleep, do it all over again the next day.
Mundane, maybe, but it made sense. There was a purpose to it all. Being a good mother. A productive citizen. A compatible partner. All small steps, agreed, but steps that felt like they were going in the right direction.
Yet it was all bullshit, wasn’t it? All a charade. A façade we imposed on life to give purpose where there was no purpose, meaning
where there was no meaning.
Without Ellie, without her baby, this all became strikingly clear to her.
Thunder growled. Lightning flashed. Rain fell. Wind blew. The lake roiled.
Tabitha picked up the large stone at her feet. She had found it on the way down to the lake. It weighed at least ten pounds or more.
She carried it to the end of the dock. She stopped. Stared down at the choppy water.
Vanessa would be okay. Tabitha had life insurance and a modest nest egg. Vanessa would get that. And she would finally get her wish to live with her father. She would…graduate high school, graduate university, get a job, get married, have kids…and die too.
Jesus Christ, what a joke.
Tabitha inched forward so her toes cantilevered over the water.
She thought about the end of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo thinking Juliet was dead and killing himself only for Juliet to wake moments later.
What if Ellie was in fact okay?
What if she returned and found her mother dead?
This was only wishful thinking, of course. Rex had been gone for more than an hour now. If he’d somehow caught the creature and rescued Ellie, he would have been back long ago. The fact he hadn’t returned meant only two things. He was either still searching the forest for Ellie (and if this were the case, Ellie was as good as dead), or he had fallen victim to the creature himself.
Tabitha scuffed another inch forward. The weight of the stone was already causing her arms and shoulders to ache. It was either now or never.
Another inch. Only her heels remained planted on the dock.
She felt herself tipping forward, falling.
The water smashed her face. Her lungs shucked up at the coldness of it. The stone threatened to slip free from her grasp, and she gripped it more tightly.
She sank.
CHAPTER 22
The whining stopped.
The creature had landed. Probably no more than ten feet away from Rex. He could smell a repugnant oily scent.
