Hag Night, page 4
“We gotta get back to the bus,” Morris said. “We gotta use the OnStar and call in some help here. Somebody’s got to deal with…with that thing.”
They moved off towards the bus, still staying together, Reg tagging along behind and that’s when he hit the ground. “FUCK IS THAT?” he cried out.
Everyone stopped. They were looking in all directions, knowing not what they might see next.
Mole and Doc got Reg to his feet, helping him stand in the wind that was beginning to take on the roaring sound of a freight train. He brushed snow from his face. “Something flew over me,” he said. “I mean right fucking over me. Like a big bird or something.”
He was panicked, his eyes wide and unblinking as he tried to look in every direction at the same time.
“There’s nothing,” Morris said.
“I SAW IT!” Reg shouted into the storm. “I FUCKING SAW IT!”
Megga hugged herself against the cold. She knew without a doubt that he had seen something. Pure imagination does not inspire panic like that and Reg, a real easy-going calm sort of guy, was nearly coming out of his skin.
Mole picked up his camera and handed it to him.
“We’re going back to the bus to wait this out,” Morris announced. “We’ll get the OnStar going and get the State Police out here. I’m not dealing with any more of this shit and neither are any of you.”
Megga almost laughed. As if we have a choice.
10
“Burt! Hey, Burt, come back! Come back!”
He heard the voice calling him out in the storm, but he was no longer listening. In blind panic, he was running…or attempting to. Slipping and sliding, the wind punching into him, his boots skating on the snow-covered ice, he fell down, got up, fell down again and just started crawling. He didn’t give a shit. Forward momentum was forward momentum in his book.
He had to get away.
Let those idiots sit around and look at that thing from hell all they wanted, but not him. No way. No goddamn way.
He heard the voice call to him again and he thought it might be Doc, but fuck Doc and fuck the lot of them. Chambers of Horrors. Jesus Christ, it sure was that. That’s what this whole damn night had turned into.
Breathing hard, the icy wind seeming to crawl right down his spine, Burt pulled himself to his feet, standing uneasily in the storm. He couldn’t even see the others now. The blizzard was throwing snow in every direction, surrounding him in a rushing glacial whirwind of white.
Fuck.
He couldn’t even be sure where the bus was.
Despite his panic, he waited. No sense wandering blindly in the storm. It would be so very, very easy to get lost in it.
The voices of the others were gone.
He was alone.
He waited there for what seemed minutes, though, realistically, it had only been brief seconds. And as he waited…he heard something that was absolutely impossible: the buzzing of flies. Well, maybe it wasn’t flies. No, not that stupid and directionless. This was angry and directed. More like the buzzing of hornets. It was there and then it was gone.
A voice in the back of his head told him, The wind, it was just the fucking wind because it could not be anything else. Not in this storm. Not in the cold.
He had to move but the blizzard was raging.
He had the most unpleasant notion that it was toying with him. That the storm itself was not just the elemental wrath of nature blowing cold and fierce, but something more. Something sentient.
There was a sudden inexplicable blast of hot reeking air that swallowed him in a pungent envelope of heat. It brought a nauseating stink of sweet decay. A concentrated stench like that of a woodchuck trapped in a dry well, rotting to hair and bones in dark, warm silence. The stink covered him. It was sucked into his nose and crawled down his throat like an engorged brown-gray carrion worm.
It was horrible.
Unbelievably horrible.
Burt tried to fight free of it, but it surrounded him, filling his head and pushing him down to his knees where he vomited into the snow, a hot steam blowing back into his face. He regurgitated until there was nothing left, dry heaves making his abdomen jerk like it had been kicked. Then it passed. The smell thickened, grew almost moist and gamey in the air, then it, too, was gone as if it never was in the first place.
What the hell?
Before he could properly wrap his mind around it or try to make sense of it, he heard that buzzing again. It was the low, rising drone of hundreds of hornets coming at him out of the storm. And that was bad enough…but as he listened, it seemed to become a wavering, shrilling voice…a voice that was the buzzing of thousands of insect’s wings: Burt…over here, Burt…I’m waiting for you—
And with a breaking hysterical terror, he looked in the direction of that loathsome voice and he saw a figure…a gray figure at the perimeter of the wind-driven snow. He thought at first it was a woman, because despite the buzzing tone of the voice there was some very unnatural female caliber to it. And the shape…the gray, leaning shape…it looked like a woman. A wraith that was blowing and billowing and fragmenting, the wind blowing right through it and making it flap and flutter.
Here I am, Burt…right…here…
He let out a scream and ran towards where he thought the bus was. For all he knew, he was charging deeper into the storm. Then he tripped, lost his footing, and the ground fell out from under him…and he was rolling down into the ditch, the shape of the bus appearing before him, tail lights blazing red like huge, hungry eyes.
11
Morris was the voice of reason as always.
And that was something that was badly needed, Wenda knew, because everyone was scared, everyone was quite near to freaking out (all except Megga who not only had freaked out but seemed to be fascinated by it all), and they had to get it together. Because regardless of what Reg had seen or thought he’d seen and regardless of the horror in the road, with the storm kicking up its heels they were very much in a survival situation now. They were trapped and they wouldn’t survive it by losing control.
Oh, listen to you. You have panic attacks like other people have gas. Since when are you so calm? Since when are you the rational one?
Wenda did not know, but she felt somehow empowered at that moment. As if all the wild, arcing, nervous energy that had always caused so many problems—and only subsided when she was Vultura—had been waiting for something like this. Waiting for something to direct itself against. She was scared, but steady. Her mind was clear and her thoughts were solid. Yes, it was like within the last thirty minutes the world had broken free of its axis and was no longer spinning but wobbling out of control. And yet…she felt oddly focused.
“Morris is right,” she told the others. “Time to act rationally here.”
Megga giggled at that.
And then she screamed.
Several of them did because whatever Reg had seen came swooping out of the storm at them, veering right over their heads. A huge, black, formless shape that came and went quickly. Reg had said it was like a big bird. But that’s not what Wenda saw out of the corner of her eye as it swooped over them. She saw something much more like the wing of a bat, black and shining and almost membranous.
It came again and they all went down to their knees.
Reg crazily tried to get it on video but it was way too fast for that.
Wenda caught its backdraft full in the face and the smell of the thing had been revolting. It stank the way she imagined the satin lining of a buried casket must stink: like dank rot and corpse drainage. Everyone scrambled to their feet.
“Look,” Doc said. “Good God, look!”
They all did and Morris put the flashlight beam out there. There were forms out in the storm. They could not be seen in the heavy snowfall and blowing drift as anything more than shadows, but there were many of them and they were closing in. Their eyes reflected back yellow in the light.
“RUN!” Morris said. “EVERYONE RUN FOR THE BUS!”
They jogged up the road, slipping and sliding, trying to hold one another up as they came within sight of the bus. The wind threw drift into their faces and knocked several of them down. Wenda was one of the first to find her feet. Sheets of snow obscured the bus, rising and falling, whipping away over the snowpack. When it cleared for one brief moment, she saw something standing atop the bus. It looked like a man…the very gaunt shadow of a man that was darker than the shadows around it. It was narrow, leaning, almost skeletal. Like a locust pole mimicking a man. Then…she couldn’t be sure it happened so fast…but it was like that shadow lifted its arms and became something like a billowing black sheet that jumped up into the storm.
Everyone slid and scrambled down into the ditch as the blizzard raged, throwing snow around in spinning tempests. Doc led the way up the steps, calling for Burt, feeling the warmth reaching out to him. Wenda was right behind him. That’s when the windshield exploded inward, breaking apart into a sheet of glass that blew into flying bits. Then the side windows shattered and the rear. A howling tempest of snow and cold and fragmented safety glass came whipping through the bus. Wenda stumbled back into the others and Doc fell on her and they all went down in a heap.
By the time they got to their feet, the bus made a creaking, groaning sound as it was lifted up five or six feet and then dropped, more glass shattering, thin metal bulkheads collapsing. It was lifted again and dropped, more breakage from within.
“THE TOWN!” Morris called out. “EVERYONE! RUN FOR THE TOWN!”
They clawed their way up from the ditch, trying to run in the heavy snow and arching drifts. Falling, getting up, falling again. The town was maybe two hundred feet from them, the houses and buildings clustered together like toadstools under a tree.
Nobody asked questions. This was pure mainlined survival instinct and nothing more.
Wenda raced forward with the herd, trying not to think about what she had seen when she followed Doc up the steps into the bus: the sight of the windshield shattering inward.
She had seen what had caused it.
A single white human hand whose fingers were long and spidery.
It had slapped against the glass until it came apart.
Then whatever it was connected to crawled inside.
12
They were moving too fast and Morris could barely keep up with them.
Even Doc Blood who had fifteen years on him if he had a day was unbelievably spry as he vaulted through the snow like a hare. It was amazing. Morris worked out three days a week, watched what he ate, jogged on the weekends…and Doc was leaving him in the dust. Doc who smoked two packs a day, had a potbelly, considered napping a competitive sport and bacon to be a condiment, was kicking his ass in a footrace. Jesus.
But it wasn’t just him.
It was the others, too.
He wasn’t surprised at Megga or Bailey or Wenda: they were young and in tip-top shape. But Reg was pulling out into the lead, too. Reg who was nothing more than a rack of bones that lived on Doritos, Coke, Red Bull, and take-out pizza, whatever was easiest to consume while he plugged himself into Xbox.
Quit thinking. Run! Run!
Yes, the rational man had no place in a situation like this.
This was survival.
Make sense of it later, for now…run!
Yes, yes, yes, rumination was for later when you were somewhere safe and warm, cozied up by the fire in a good chair with a beer in your hand. So he thought no more about any of it, about the insanity of the entire situation—which was far too much like the movies they showed on Chamber of Horrors for his liking. He kept an eye on the others, though, because he was in charge and these were his people and he didn’t want anything to happen to them…though how much of a taste for midnight horror shows they’d have after this ordeal was open to speculation.
The bus was at their backs.
That was a good thing. Despite the pounding it had taken, the battery was still working and the engine was still running and the headlights were directed at the ghost town. That was something. The lights let him see the others, throwing loping, elongated shadows of them over the snowpack.
Morris ran, the others pulling ahead.
Something swooped over his head again and he felt like a rabbit in a field waiting for an owl to descend. The comparison was apt, he knew. He ran and tried to leap a drift, but it was too high and his boots tangled together and he went face-first into it.
Dammit!
He brushed snow out of his eyes and began to run again and something hit him, putting him down and stripping his hat from his head. He pulled himself out of the snow, feeling around to make sure the back of his head was still there. It was. Running again, a sluggish forward jog. Already his legs were tiring. It was like trying to sprint through slush. The cold wasn’t helping. He had no feeling in his face and his limbs felt rubbery and numb.
He tripped over another snowdrift.
Got up, slipped again.
That’s when he knew he was going to die. He just wasn’t going to make it and the realization of that seemed to sap his strength and he fell into the snow, trying to rise, but crawling forward like a child with little inertia.
This is how it ends.
Out here.
At the perimeter of this fucking ghost town.
He stood up, stumbling along, just waiting for death to take him.
13
Above Bailey’s screams and the manic shouting of the others, Wenda somehow heard Morris cry out for help: his voice was shrill and almost childlike. She wanted badly to ignore it, to make for those buildings and get under some cover, but she slowed and turned her head back, looking over her right shoulder.
Shit.
Morris was trying valiantly to pull himself out of a drift. He’d rise, stumble along, fall again like a toddler learning the fine art of balance. A dark shape that looked oddly like an immense black kite in the wind-driven snow soared just over his head and she got the ugly feeling that whatever it was, it was toying with him and that it could take him any time it so chose.
“Please!” he called out. “Someone…someone, please…”
Wenda knew the proper thing to do was to help him just as she knew the realistic thing to do was to run and save herself. None of the others were slowing or even looking back. Maybe they didn’t hear Morris…but she didn’t believe that. And if they survived this, it was a point of contention she was going to ram down their throats.
Because right then, as afraid as she was, she was much less Wenda Keegan—who turned the other cheek and wouldn’t spit if her mouth were filled with shit—and much more Vultura.
You know all the nice toys you have, Wenda? The new Corvette in the garage? The cabin out at Lake George? The trips to Aruba and St. Croix? Well, you have them courtesy of Morris. He created the gravy train you now feed upon. He invented Vultura and all the rest—you just stepped into the job via genetics and circumstance. You just happened to have the looks and were handy so you got it. He’s done everything for you, by God, so don’t you dare turn your back on him now.
She raced over the snow towards him, swearing under her breath.
The wind was trying to drive her towards the ghost town but she leaned into it and fought her way back to Morris who was moving slower and slower now. She tried to keep her head down so what was diving at him wouldn’t take her.
“MORRIS!” she shouted into the wind when she got within feet of him. “RUN! RUN!”
He saw her, maybe realizing he wasn’t the last person on Earth, and jogged over to her. She hooked her arm around his and pulled him forward, making him run whether he wanted to or not. Towing him, she was moving much slower, but she refused to give in. He was dead weight but she was strong from doing an hour of laps in the pool at the Y every day and she would not give up. Something in her demanded that she fight harder now than she ever had in her life. She felt energized and—God help her—really alive, really strong for the first time.
They broke through the last of the big drifts and the running was easier now because the wind had stripped most of the snow away and the pack was less than a foot deep as they neared the drive that circled around the perimeter of Cobton.
They were going to make it and she knew it.
Unless those doors are all locked. Because if they are, you’re fucked and you know it.
The others were already nearing the buildings and they would be with them in a matter of seconds now. Morris started to pour it on, sensing shelter ahead and they ran with renewed vigor. And then something hit them from behind, slamming them both face-first to the ground.
They scrambled to their feet quickly, taking no time to ascertain if they were wounded or missing anything vital.
They ran.
“OVER HERE!” Reg shouted, standing before a tall Georgian house. “DOOR’S OPEN!”
Doc and Bailey were running for the safety it provided. But Megga had already located another house two doors down, a Colonial Saltbox, and she had the door open. She saw Wenda half-dragging Morris and came running over. She shouted something to Wenda but it was lost in the moaning of the wind. She hooked Morris’s other elbow and towed him towards the open doorway. Mole came over to help, slid on the ice, and pulled himself back up again. By then, they had Morris almost to the door.
Behind them, Mole slipped again, shouted something. The wind took him and slid him back another five feet.
“Shit!” Wenda said. “We have to get him!”
Megga got Morris to the door and Wenda called out to Mole. She turned to look at him and he was running in her direction.
But he never quite made it.
A wall of snow was blown over him, making him teeter and take a few fumbling steps off to the side…and then a black form came out of the storm and took him. Took him fast. It seized him and flew up into the blizzard with him.
They heard him scream and a spray of blood spattered the front of the Saltbox, droplets of it splashing Wenda’s face.
He was gone.
