Authors: Mark Wheaton
“What’re you waiting for?” Patrick cried. “Let’s get out of here!”
But all the color had drained from Dan’s face.
“What is it?” Ruthie asked.
“The keys,” he began, his voice wavering. “They were in Ruthie’s pocket.”
“What?!” shrieked Patrick.
Jess looked out the window to the creature still waving Ruthie’s lower half over its head. It shifted gears, slamming the legs on the ground like a knight trying to pulverize an opponent with a flail. Only this animal seemed to do it solely for the joy of hearing the wet slap the severed limbs made each time they struck the ground. The chances that such violence hadn’t knocked the keys loose, sending them flying into the dirt, the nearby trees, or even the fire, were slim.
“Release the parking brake!” Jess yelled to Dan. “And put the car in neutral!”
“Wait, what?!” Dan asked.
“You’ve got one of those keyless remotes. When Ruthie drove your car, I’d see her unlock the car, hit the power button, put the key in her pocket, and drive like that. She said she was always forgetting to leave it in the ignition when she had to valet.”
Dan realized what Jess was suggesting and turned to stare at the monster pulping his girlfriend’s legs, a loose femur already beginning to show out of the top of her blood-soaked jeans.
“You’re crazy! You know how close we’d have to get for it to pick up the sensor?”
“No, I don’t,” Jess retorted. “And neither do you. But I don’t see what other options we have.”
She pointed out the window. The bipedal monsters had toppled a tree onto their campfire and were celebrating by tearing Ruthie’s arms off her upper torso. But they were being joined by several others of the towering beasts, who had concluded their business at the other campsites and were meeting up with the main group. These newcomers, their maws dripping with blood in some cases, weren’t content to rest on their laurels. They peered into the Mazda with eyes half-hungry, half-angry. Whatever their motivation, the one closest to the car opened its mouth to reveal strips of human flesh hanging from its canines as its lips twisted up at the corners in a sick parody of a smile.
“Oh, shit…” Patrick whispered.
The beast raised itself up to its full height, stomped its feet, and issued a mighty roar. A moment later, it charged.
Jess didn’t wait for Dan to react. She kicked her foot past his, released the parking brake, and jerked the gearshift down to neutral. The Mazda was on a slight incline, but it didn’t move.
“Now what?” Patrick bellowed.
“Hold on!” Jess cried.
The car was actually struck by two of the monsters at once, once from behind and the charging beast on the driver’s side. The side impact was so great that without the attack from the rear, the car would’ve surely rolled on its side, imprisoning its occupants. Instead, the blow struck to the Mazda’s rear balanced the two attacks, causing the vehicle to lift off its left wheels, only to be shoved forward at the same time. This pitched the front end ahead, slamming it down on its front bumper. Though the collision threw Dan, Jess, and Patrick around the inside of the car, smashing Patrick’s face into a window as Jess’s forehead smacked into the dashboard, it also rolled the car forward a few feet.
Jess recovered enough of her senses to see they were that much closer now to the creature waving Ruthie’s legs. She jammed her finger onto the car’s power button to see if it would come to life, but the symbol of a yellow key was illuminated on the dashboard instead.
“Shit!” Jess exclaimed. “We have to get closer!”
“
Jess
,” Dan snapped. “If we stay in the car, we’re sitting ducks!”
As if to drive this point home, the Mazda was hit again, this time from three sides at once. Jess’s door was bashed toward her, the window showering the front seat with broken glass as it exploded inward. The rear window shattered as well, but as it was safety glass, it landed in one heavy piece on Patrick’s head, opening up a gash over his left eye.
“Goddammit!” he shouted, trying to push the broken pane aside. “Somebody help me!”
Patrick looked up in time to see one of the monster’s fists flying straight for him. Aimed at the center of a bull’s eye created by the splintering windshield, the punch cratered both the glass and Patrick’s face, shattering his nose, right eye socket, right cheekbone, and upper jawline. As his head flopped backward, he felt pieces of his shattered teeth sliding toward his throat on a river of blood.
“Aw, fubbbb…” Patrick gurgled.
Dan jabbed his finger onto the power button, only for the yellow key to reappear. The car had slowed to a stop again, but worse, the monster carrying Ruthie’s legs had wandered farther away.
“Turn the wheel!” Jess shouted, even as she grabbed the wheel herself. “Get us rolling!”
But as soon as they jerked the wheel left, it locked, and they couldn’t move it anywhere.
“Shit! What now?!” Dan asked.
“Heeeelb me!!” Patrick yelled from the back seat.
Two of the creatures fought their way to Patrick, shoving each other aside in order to claim the prize. Jess wheeled around in her seat, hitting at the closest monster’s paw as it tugged at the safety glass blanketing Patrick. Without a hint of anger, the creature backhanded her in the face, smashing her head into the roof of the car. Stunned by the blow, Jess knew exactly the emotion behind it:
Wait your turn.
That’s when a curious thing happened. The fight at the rear of the car sent both creatures slamming into the rear bumper. This moved the Mazda forward, as if by design. But as they kept at it, bouncing off the vehicle as they seemed to forget about the humans’ presence altogether, the car continued to roll.
Dan took a breath, and then punched the power button again. Still nothing.
“Come on, come on…” he whispered.
Jess felt eyes on her and looked right. Standing beside the dying fire was the largest beast yet, easily twelve or thirteen feet. Given its hairless, pendulous breasts, Jess guessed it was a female and, perhaps, the leader of the group.
And it stared daggers into Jess.
“Um, Dan?”
Dan’s eyes went wide as the beast let out a guttural war cry and charged at the car.
“We’re dead,” he sighed.
The other beasts joined in, abandoning their current tasks to focus on the three people in the car. Jess thought she heard Patrick crying and saw in the rearview mirror that the monsters behind the car had stopped fighting and were now staring directly at the young lawyer, saliva dribbling from their open mouths. The other creatures at the campsite lumbered closer until the car was surrounded, their eyes staring in through the smashed windows.
All the other creatures, that is, except the one holding onto Ruthie’s legs. This one continued to bash its trophy against the ground, thoroughly amusing itself in the process.
“This is rich,” Jess groaned, but then got an idea. “Hey, motherfucker! You done playing with yourself?!”
“Jess!” Dan protested. “What’re you doing?!”
“You really think it understands English?” Jess snarled.
She honked the car’s horn and flashed the high beams.
“HEEEEEY!!!” she cried, smacking the horn over and over.
The other creatures looked confused at first, but their fury grew. The large female gritted her teeth in anger, raised her fists, and brought them down
hard
on the roof of the car. The other beasts followed suit, raining punishment on the little compact, each blow denting the steel frame.
“Jess…?!” Dan whimpered, rattled to the point Jess thought she smelled piss.
“Wait!” Jess demanded.
And then it happened. The monster holding Ruthie’s legs got to its feet and lumbered over, staring blankly not at the humans, but at the blinking headlights. It pushed past a couple of the other creatures until it stood directly in front of the car. Its eyes became slits, focusing on the bright lights as if trying to blind itself.
“The rocket scientist of the bunch,” Dan muttered.
Jess ignored him, reaching again to honk the horn. It took only one blast of the horn to enrage the beast. It raised the severed legs and slapped them onto the hood with tremendous force.
“Hit the button!” Jess cried.
Dan pressed it over and over again, but the legs were already aloft again.
“
Shit
!”
Jess punched the horn again, hitting it over and over until the monster raised Ruthie’s legs again.
“Get ready!” she said to Dan.
But he responded by screaming. The horn honking had enraged the other creatures, causing them to break ranks. The one nearest the driver’s side had grabbed Dan through his shattered window and was actively trying to yank him out. Only his seatbelt kept him in place.
“Dan!” Jess cried, grabbing for her friend.
“Grab my hand!” he said, gripping the belt tightly in hopes that it would stay in place while reaching for Jess’s arm.
Jess coiled her fingers around Dan’s wrist as she hit the hazard lights with her other hand and continued to pound on the horn. The pissed-off behemoth now beat the car with abandon, Ruthie’s ruined lower half spraying its remaining blood on the windshield, thankfully obscuring the sight of torn flesh.
But Jess had a new problem. Every time she released the horn to try for the power button, it threw off the monster’s rhythm. It momentarily broke away, taking Ruthie’s jeans with it. Jess tried to come up with a solution, but between the roars of the monsters outside the car and the screams of Patrick and Dan on the inside, she felt as if she were being driven out of her mind.
Letting go of Dan’s wrist wasn’t a decision. One minute her fingers were tight around his arm, and the next they were jabbing the power button. In that half second of time, two surprising things happened. First, the perfectly timed strike turned on the car, Jess’s mad gambit that the remote key in Ruthie’s pocket would activate the vehicle’s sensor paying off. But when she turned a triumphant grin Dan’s way, she saw that his head had been torn from his body.
“What the
fuck
?!” Patrick screeched from the back seat, giving voice to Jess’s thoughts.
Jess glanced out the window, the she-beast still staring back at her, a triumphant look of her own on the monster’s face. Jess stared back a moment longer, then shot a hand over to Dan’s seatbelt. Unsnapping it, she opened the driver’s-side door and kicked the headless corpse out of the car, much to the surprise of the gathering creatures. She hopped into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, threw the Mazda into reverse, and stomped on the gas.
Three of the hairy demons standing directly behind the car took the brunt of the attack, at least one tumbling to the ground on newly broken legs. But the trio was large enough that their bodies still stopped the lightweight compact in its tracks. Jess had anticipated this, however, and threw the car into drive before spinning the wheel, aiming directly for the big female. Again, Jess put her full weight on the accelerator, plowing over the creatures as she raced toward their leader.
The she-beast glowered at Jess, but had the wherewithal to leap out of the way rather than face certain death. The Mazda crashed through the rest of the campsite, clipping other beasts, almost plowing into the downed tree that put out the fire, and running over Jess’s immaculately erected tent on its way back to the main road.
But then it was over.
Jess held her breath as she watched the woods on either side of the car, waiting for one of the monsters to come barreling out from the thicket, but none appeared. In fact, the others had disappeared so quickly in the rearview mirror that Jess momentarily wondered if they had existed at all. The sight of Dan’s blood smeared down both sides of the driver’s-side door shook Jess back to reality. The car was a wreck, and she worried that it would break down before they got to safety. But with every passing second, she put more distance between herself and the ruined campsites. Survival felt less and less improbable.
“You okay back there, Patrick?” she asked as he pushed the spider-webbed glass aside and sat up.
Jess didn’t expect the look of death Patrick shot her in the rearview mirror.
“You let him die? Just like that?!”
“What’re you talking about?” Jess asked, incredulous.
“You let go of his hand. To save
yourself
.”
Jess couldn’t believe her ears.
“I did it to save all three of us!”
“Uh-uh,” Patrick said, blood pouring from several wounds across his face. “You got scared and you sacrificed Dan. That was some cold-blooded shit.”
Jess whirled around so she could look Patrick in the eye as she delivered her retort, but knew from the second she did so that it was the wrong move. Before she’d even opened her mouth, Patrick’s eyes filled with white as they expanded in shock and horror. She turned to see what had sparked such a reaction, fearing the worst.
The Mazda was hurtling down the dirt road at fifty miles an hour when it struck the tree trunk stretched across the track. A pignut hickory, the tree had reached a circumference of twelve and a half feet and weighed over 5,000 pounds. This was more than enough to arrest the car’s motion, then send it flipping end over end into the air, getting at least a baker’s dozen feet off the ground at the apex of its trajectory.
Jess, however, had been launched from the car a second after it hit the trunk, having neglected to fasten her seatbelt. She still hadn’t processed what happened when she impacted with a second pignut hickory, this one upright and alive.
Everything went black.
B
ones was willing to wait all day for revenge.
He’d woken early to a strange smell and tracked it for half a mile before discovering its source, a female porcupine and her brood of porcupettes. The German shepherd recognized the sow’s quills and guard hairs as a threat but decided to toy with it anyway. But as Bones playfully hopped in front of it, the porcupine spun around, swinging its tail at the dog, quills at attention.
Before the larger animal could leap aside, two dozen quills were lodged in his snout. Bones yelped in surprise, tossing his head from side to side. This jogged loose a couple of quills but drove the others deeper. The adult porcupine hastily ushered the juveniles toward a hollow tree trunk and waddled inside. Bones continued to jump in a circle, bleeding and whining as the quills only dug further into the soft flesh of his nose. He dragged his face across the ground and then a nearby tree, but this only exacerbated the problem.