Shelby was screaming now. No words, just animal shrieking, raw and awful. It reminded Malcolm of the time his uncle Marlon had shot a rabbit. The thing had been eating Marlon’s cabbages and the bullet had severed its spine, leaving it to drag itself through the rows of tilled earth as it squealed and squealed in high-pitched agony. The worst sound he’d heard in his life before the last few days.
“Just keep walking,” said Jo. “It must not want to get too close. Keep walking. Don’t listen.”
“I’m so cold,” the thing whimpered. Malcolm caught a glimpse of something at the edge of the lamp light’s circle. A glimmer of white fire reflected in huge eyes. The shine of spit on teeth as long as a woman’s manicured fingernails. “Please don’t leave me. I can’t keep up, you guys. Shelby … John … Please…”
They kept moving. Malcolm felt sick to his stomach. His arms burned with the strain of holding the lantern up, but he didn’t dare lower it. He could almost feel the thing’s jaws closing like a vise around his throat. He could feel its claws unzipping his belly. The Cuckoo couldn’t chase them, but it had sent a little part of itself after them, a guided missile of flesh and fat and bone streaking out across the flatlands, keeping out of the sun because the thing it was made of hated the sunlight, feared the cancerous blaze that baked the desert by day.
After a while the pain no longer seemed so urgent. The thing’s pitiful whispers and entreaties became just white noise like his grandmother’s The Healing Sound of Rain CD. Greasy grimy gopher guts, he thought, and almost giggled. At the light’s edge the thing still lurked, pacing them effortlessly. John was red-faced and sweating bullets. Shelby had gone silent and let Felix lead her by the hand. Malcolm wondered how long they’d been walking. It might have been an hour. It might have been five minutes. He was so tired. The night seemed to swim around him. The starlight gleamed in the oiled barrels of Jo’s shotgun.
This can’t be happening, he thought, remembering the thing that had sniffed at the door of his cabin, the thing that had scratched at the planks. Had it been the dog? He missed her horribly. Gabe said she’d died, that Corey—or whatever the thing that called itself Corey was—had killed and eaten her. Had she belonged to someone? A stray lost in the trackless waste, or maybe abandoned by the side of the road. Or maybe there were other dogs out there, hunting gophers and hares and sleeping in big matted piles to stave off the cold, and they were mourning her right now, howling at the moon together.
I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
Mary’s hand in the door. Later he’d snuck her some of his Halloween candy, had told her jokes until she laughed and threw her arms around his neck and forgot the throbbing pain in her little fingers, which still didn’t close quite right. Hairline fractures. Reese’s peanut butter cups. Her little face against his shoulder. You got your boogers all over me! Thanks. Now I’ll have a snack for later.
Ewwwww.
She’d called him Mallum when she was little. She couldn’t make the hard C sound, not until she was almost six. He wondered as he took what felt like his millionth step of the night if he’d ever see her again. The lantern swayed at the end of his shaking arm.
The thing slunk along with them, smiling, drooling freely. Sometimes its claws caught at the edges of the light. Brown and cracked and curved, like the raptors in Jurassic Park. Click click, click click. He could see its humped back and the line of thick, bristly hair running along its spine.
“Shoot it,” he begged. It felt like days had passed, slipping by in drips and dollops. His arm was on fire. He switched the lantern to his other hand, the light shuddering over clawed fingers too much like a person’s. Snout a nightmare combination of weasel and girl, blond tresses dragging in the dirt. Lips wrinkling back from pretty little teeth. Rows and rows of them, all moving slowly, rasping at the air. “Shoot it. Please, Jo.”
“Quiet,” said Jo. She kept backing up, each step slow, steady, and deliberate.
“Mommy’s hurting me, Malcolm.”
Mary’s voice.
“Kill it,” Malcolm begged. He felt like he was going to lose his mind. “Kill it. Shoot it. Shoot it.”
“She shut the door on my hand again. She caught me touching myself and she held my hand there and she slammed the door like Grandma Ella did to her. You remember when she told us that story? You remember her eyes?”
“Stop, stop,” Malcolm sobbed. His hand shook. The lantern’s light danced wildly over that smug grin, those glistening eyes and under them the slow, meticulous shifting of something like a spider’s mouthparts, palps rubbing against each other, mandibles clicking excitedly. Long ropes of drool shone bright.
“Mommy,” it simpered in Malcolm’s voice, pursing fleshy buds that came together into something like a pair of lips. “Mommy, why’d you do it? She’s just a little girl, Mommy. She doesn’t know anything.”
“Easy,” said Jo. “It wants you to freak out.”
We’re all going to die.
“Don’t know how much longer I can … go,” puffed John. His face was red, his back bent. Gabe showed no sign of stirring.
How far have we come? How long has it been?
The sky seemed a little lighter, the stars a little fainter. Would it stay with them once the sun was up? Malcolm kept moving. The thing had fallen silent. Only its smile showed in the deep dark, a ruthless Cheshire Cat grin. Then, suddenly, the lantern flickered with a sucking hiss. The pilot light guttered, dark and light stuttering over the ground and the others around him. Shelby let out a long, terrified moan.
The voice came again. So small. So vulnerable. Malcolm wanted to scream. He wanted to die.
“I’m scared of the dark.”
“Off, then on,” Jo hissed.
He stared, uncomprehending. The flame flickered again. Outside its shrinking circle, the thing smiled and stole a little closer, sinking lower to the ground.
“Off, then on again!” Jo screamed.
Malcolm twisted the lantern’s key. The flame went out. He fumbled for the igniter, found it, punched it twice, three times, dry coughs from the pilot light, a shriek from the dark as claws scrabbled over stone and soil, the fitful hiss of gas, and then light, light like a star, and an earsplitting boom as Jo fired both barrels into the huge shape plummeting down on them like a pouncing cougar from above. It struck the ground near John, thrashing and squealing in agony, claws slashing at the air, the huge hairy duster of its tail sweeping clouds of grit into the air as it slobbered and vomited. It must have been ten feet from its pointed muzzle to the tip of its tail, its coat long and matted and patchy with something like mange. The others stumbled away from it. John fell, Gabe sliding from his shoulders to sprawl in the dirt, and Shelby was screaming again. Blood covered the ground, black in the dwindling light, and Jo was loading one last shell into the shotgun’s breach. She shoved both barrels right down the thing’s throat, ignoring the little fleshy digits and bony claws that scratched at the polished metal. She fired. Malcolm dropped the lantern to instinctively clap his hands over his ears. Glass shattered. The flame roared, licking at the breach, and then went out.
The echoes of the last shot faded. The thing fell still except for a slight spastic twitching in its eight gnarled and bandy limbs. As Malcolm’s eyes adjusted to the starlight and his pulse slowed to a dull, distant roar he could make out the human eyes set far back on its skull, and see the little traces of freckled skin, the hints of thin-lipped mouth pulled taut over alien bones. Had it been Corey? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.
He took a few unsteady steps back from the carcass and heaved up his guts. More wasted water. When he straightened, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his filthy flannel, the others were helping Gabe to his feet. The skinny boy was pale and shaken, tears shining on his cheeks, and as Malcolm watched he threw his arms around John and the two held each other tight, crying, and he realized for a fleeting instant of embittered clarity that he’d let something slip through his fingers, and that he might never touch it again.
They went together down a slope of scree and loose red earth into the town of Resolution. A single main road cut through ten or fifteen side streets, a dull little grid of boxy stucco houses with flat roofs. Jo had never really thought about it, but with no snow to worry about you could pretty much build whatever kind of shoddy little box you wanted out here. No need for an incline or tight shingles. Just ugly shoebox rectangles of varying sizes, bigger the closer they got to the main drag, smaller the farther away from it you went.
At the base of the slope Jo paused to look back up the way they’d come, watching the eddies of sand and rock fragments. In a few moments it had all ceased, their tracks already starting to fill in as the wind wailed across the incline. She could still see the thing thrashing madly out there in the dark, its voice Nadine’s one moment, her mother’s the next. Bad girl! Bad girl! The way her mother spoke to her when Jo had really pissed her off, as though she were a dog that had piddled on the carpet.
If it heard me calling Oji, this is all for nothing.
They crossed a stretch of empty ground and passed into a cul-de-sac framed by three houses. Heavy red curtains hung in every window. Lawns were overgrown, fleshy stalks of sumac swaying over salt-eaten fencing and pushing up through the sidewalks. Hummingbirds danced in the morning chill. No one was out. It all felt half-real, the way things did after staying up all night; like seeing the world through one of those mounted binoculars they had on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The big blocky kind you had to pay a quarter to use.
They’ll be waiting at the feed store. They’ll take us back.
Fremont Street to Thornton Avenue to Rumfitt Parkway. More red curtains. More greenery. More silence. There were no cars. Dawn was breaking now, pale pink and rosy red and a thin blush of gold, and Jo wondered half numbly when the things inside the houses would wake up. The houses on Rumfitt were nicer than the others they’d passed, big two-story sprawls with terra-cotta tile roofs.
Even if it hasn’t been able to get word out here, they’ll smell us. They’ll see us. Even if they don’t, even if we make it another day, or two, or a week, what if Oji isn’t coming? What if he couldn’t get out of that place? What if he couldn’t get a car?
They turned onto Ransom Court Road, passing a shuttered pizza parlor and a corner store with a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. Inside were metal shelves of chips and candy, engine oil and shaving cream. A revolving rack of videotapes in black plastic cases, the names of the movies written in magic marker on strips of masking tape. She could just make out the names. The Last of the Mohicans. Single White Female right below it, and then something obscured by the edge of the front counter and the big plastic cases of scratch tickets atop it.
