Nightwalk 2 Read online

  Only consequences.

  If I didn’t want to end up something’s dinner, I would be well served by remembering that.

  “Let it go,” I whispered to myself as their torch vanished. “It already happened, and she’s actually been dead for two years. Just let it go.”

  Then I took the path to the north.

  ###

  Twisting my light to full brightness, I did a cautious creep up the jogging trail to the north. I didn’t want to go to my primary light until I had covered more distance from the cell tower.

  The narrow asphalt path stretched ahead into the darkness. Tall wooden backyard fences bordered one side and a tree-lined drainage ditch ran along the other. It was as I remembered, but had already started to get more alien during the time we had spent at the cell tower.

  My light didn’t extend far, but I didn’t need it to see the glowing shape making its slow way beneath the black waters of the creek. Its shape vaguely reminded me of a hammerhead shark, but it trailed several tendrils from both its head and tail. It was also surprisingly large considering the confines of the waterway. I froze and waited for it to sluggishly swim past me and to the south.

  Once I could no longer see the thing, I started forward again. The claustrophobia caused by the darkness pressing so close was beginning to really get to me, so after I had covered about fifty or sixty yards I decided the time had come to put a little more light on the subject. While the cover of darkness offered some advantages, a lot of the creatures roaming tonight actually shunned the light, or judged a creature’s strength by how bright it shined.

  As far as those creatures were concerned, I was about to grow a whole lot.

  I reached into my backpack and pulled out a pack of six fifteen-minute road flares. I also had a pack of six thirty-minute flares, but I decided to start with something that wouldn’t be as big a loss if I had to snuff it in a hurry. As far as this little suicide mission went, I had more than enough light to get by until the bomb fell.

  I popped the cap on a flare, used the abrasive end to strike it alight, held it aloft… and discovered I was not alone.

  The brilliant light of the flare filled the area with its red glow. The jogging path became an arched, tree-lined hallway with the trunks and fence-line glowing pale in the harsh illumination. Somewhere to my right, something scuttled away from the glare and over a backyard fence on the other side of the creek. And not fifteen feet in front of me a small group of softball-sized beetle-like creatures did a U-turn and fled back away from me.

  But they didn’t go far.

  They clambered up the legs of the ghastly figure standing about thirty feet down the path.

  I honestly don’t know if the man was dead or not. I hope so. He stood wearing nothing but a pair of black socks and boxer shorts, which told me he had likely met his fate in the act of getting ready for bed. Judging by his slightly pear-like shape and hirsute legs, I got the feeling he might be my age or older. But it was just a guess.

  I couldn’t tell more about him because, from the sternum up, he was nothing but a mass of big bugs.

  They started somewhere near the bottom of his rib cage and covered his upper parts so completely that his head and shoulders were nothing but a rounded mass of black bodies. And based on the rivulets of blood running down his belly and legs, they were feeding as they rode upon him. But even that wasn’t the worst part.

  As I watched, several of the bugs’ backs split open at a crack where I thought the wings met. Instead, those cracks opened to reveal larger than human-sized eyes that stared back at me with mad hate. Then those eyes would close and the backs of other bugs would split open to reveal the same thing.

  Going by its stance, this blasphemy of nature had been shambling toward me and rocked to a stop when I lit the flare. Now it constantly opened and closed different eyes in an effort to keep sight of me yet not be blinded by the dazzling radiance. I realized the large bugs had to act as some kind of collective organism when together on a host, but were perfectly capable of acting independently as well.

  I took advantage of the horror’s pause to draw my pistol and take aim, but then I hesitated. Would shooting this thing kill it, or make matters worse? If the body these things rode on still lived, would they abandon it in a swarm if I dropped it? They had already sent scouts in my direction once. I certainly didn’t want a whole mass of the things coming after me.

  I needed to be smart about this, but I needed to do something fast. The creature took a couple of steps in my direction, almost causing me to shoot it right then. The only thing stopping me was the aforementioned threat of a swarm. Mainly because when I ran from that swarm, I would be leading it right back toward the cell tower. Simply shooting the creature didn’t amount to a viable strategy.

  What this situation called for was a Molotov cocktail.

  And take a wild guess what I had forgotten to pack in my little backpack of goodies.

  But the memory of the way the first individual bugs had fled at the sight of the flare gave me an idea. There might be another way to get out of this. If this didn’t work, then Plan B would be me attempting to bolt past the swarm and running blindly into the darkness to the north. Not exactly a move promising longevity on a night like this.

  So with exaggerated care, I did an underhanded toss of the road flare so it would land about halfway between us. The creature stopped and seemed to consider this new development, with half of its open eyes turning to the flare and the other half remaining focused on me. I took that as a hopeful sign. Holstering my gun, I quickly pulled three more flares from the pack. The creature stopped and then restarted its approach each time I lit one and tossed it to a specific spot.

  A half-minute later I had a blazingly bright line of four flares between me and the creature.

  Then without further ado, I pulled my gun, took careful aim, and shot it in the knee.

  The creature’s leg buckled and it collapsed over sideways. It never made a sound, leading me to hope the man underneath had been well and truly gone. At the same time blood gushed from the wounded leg, so I knew at least the body remained alive. But that was what I had been hoping for.

  Most of the bugs stayed on their mount, although a few did scatter. More importantly, the ones that initially came my way turned back from the flares either returned to the body or fled to the north. Now I just needed to hurry and get out of sight so I would quit attracting them in my direction before some got through.

  I turned and ran back down the path to the south.

  It turned out I would need to take the “safer” route instead. I would just have to make sure and cross Deer Ridge and go to the other side of the street once I reached the part where the jogging path paralleled the road.

  Tommy and Darla had most assuredly reached the fork in the trail and encountered the goatman. If I had put the pieces of the puzzle together right, Tommy would either still be fighting him, or had killed him and now turned his newly released bloodlust on Darla. Either way, it wouldn’t be too long until Tommy concealed her body and returned to hide near the cell tower in order to stalk us. I needed to be on the other side of Deer Ridge when he did.

  So it should be no surprise I was doing something between a fast walk and a jog when I came around the corner and alongside Deer Ridge.

  On the other hand, it came as quite a surprise when I practically collided with Darla.

  I had just trotted around the corner when she staggered out of the darkness directly in front of me. She still held the shotgun in one hand but clutched the side of her head with the other.

  What the hell?! What was she doing down here?!

  “He’s crazy!” she gasped hysterically. “He’s trying to kill me!”

  Shocked almost out of my shoes, I jerked my gaze up to look past her into the darkness. A little over thirty feet away Tommy Murchison, barely visible due to the red glowstick he now wore around his neck, calmly sheathed his knife and drew his bow as he walked toward us. He had al
ready realized his prey now had company, and reacted accordingly.

  Every move he made seemed unhurried, yet somehow swift. He had switched weapons in a little over a second.

  But this time he was too late.

  I had already been carrying my gun in my hand, and those hours I spent at the shooting range suddenly took over without me even thinking about it. I stepped sideways into a two-handed shooter’s stance and shot him as he brought the arrow up to aim.

  Two years ago, Ed had shot him and he had seemed to shrug the wound off. I don’t know what brand of gun Ed used, but I remember it being a smallish nine-millimeter designed for concealment in a back holster. It had been a sensible weapon for a man in his circumstances to choose. Nine millimeters are nothing to sneeze at, even if they don’t exactly sit on the high end of stopping power.

  The Coonan .357 Magnum automatic I held was a very different story.

  The 158 grain, jacketed hollow-point hit him square in the chest, bringing seven hundred foot pounds of energy along with it. This time, things ended differently. Tommy went down without ever making a sound.

  And just like that, it was over.

  There I stood, like the hero in an action movie poster… wearing my fedora, gun in hand, with a hot, scantily clad woman clutching me for all she was worth… only me with my mouth hanging open and the dawning suspicion I might have just screwed up bigtime.

  I looked down at the very alive Darla, then out at the very dead Tommy, then back at the very alive Darla again.

  You walk in sands that are not entirely set, so beware of leaving footprints, the words of the man in white rose in my mind.

  Uh oh.

  I peered desperately back out at Tommy but he stubbornly remained dead. And another look down revealed this was indeed Darla, very much in the living flesh.

  “You did it!” she gasped, still holding tight. “You saved my life!”

  Yep.

  That I did.

  Mark Garrett… tip-toeing through the sands of time like a Sasquatch doing the Can-Can.

  “Aw SHIT!!” I groaned in reply.

  Chapter Three: Temporal Revisions

  “Huh?” Darla looked up at me in confusion

  “Oh no no no nonononoo…” I pushed past her and ran to Tommy’s prone form. “You can’t be dead. Not yet!”

  “Huh?” I vaguely heard Darla repeat behind me, but I barely noticed.

  Tommy lay on the path with his mouth open and his normally empty eyes now utterly lifeless and staring at the sky. Oh yeah, this was dead.

  Dead, dead, dead.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” I breathed as I knelt by the corpse in disbelief. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way!”

  I poked his shoulder for God only knows what reason… yep, still dead.

  “It’s okay,” Darla gasped, apparently still a little out of wind. “He intended to kill ME!”

  “I know that, Darla!” I exclaimed in dismay, now standing up and walking around the corpse, as if maybe there existed some angle where he might be a little less dead. I was pretty much in my own world and just thinking aloud now. “That’s what he did last time. Except I thought he killed you down at the fork in the trail. How the hell was I supposed to know he had chased you this way first?”

  “WHAT?”

  “Aw shit,” I realized aloud. “I gotta fix this. They’re gonna be coming this way in about twenty minutes and Tommy wasn’t lying here last time.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked in a voice creeping toward frantic again. “What do you mean, ‘last time’?”

  I pulled out another flare and struck it alight. Due to my encounter with the bug monster, I had nearly gone through the fifteen-minute flare pack. But since the other pack contained thirty-minute flares, and there would be an earthshattering kaboom going off in about two hours, I still had room for comfort in the light source department.

  Now with a lot more illumination, I looked around and spotted a dead car parked across the street. It would do. Last time, we didn’t cross Deer Ridge until coming back from the park at the fork in the trail.

  “Here.” I handed the flare to her. “Hold this, while I get rid of the body. And stay close.”

  “Oh my God! It IS you! What the hell?”

  “What?” I snapped as I grabbed Tommy under the arms and started dragging him across the street. “You mean you didn’t recognize me without a board slapped up against the back of my head? Go figure!”

  Fighting down the urge to go off on her, I turned back to the business at hand. It turns out dead bodies aren’t so easy to lug around. They are heavier than they look and don’t cooperate at all. Not to mention, Tommy was slightly bigger than me in the first place.

  It took some real effort, but I finally got the body across the street and stuffed between the car and the curb. Under these conditions it would be invisible except to somebody standing right over it. I had no use for his bow because I had never used one, but I took his hunting knife and slid it through my belt.

  Then I hurried back across the street and frantically kicked dirt up onto the bloodstain on the sidewalk. It took a couple of minutes, but after scattering the blood soaked dirt and kicking in some more sand, it looked pretty much like a dirty part of the path.

  Finally, I hustled down the pathway to the fork in the trail to see how things were there. Through all of this, Darla had followed along without saying a word.

  The fork turned out to be pretty much as I remembered it. Blood covered the area, and the goatman’s corpse was nailed to the tree by the spear through its throat. The only difference I saw was Tommy’s small duffel bag lying nearby. Two years ago, he must have come back and fetched it after catching Darla. Removing the bag would leave things pretty much the same as we encountered them the first time.

  A quick check inside showed it contained several torches, three Molotov cocktails… of course… duct tape, rope, and Casey’s rag bag. Again, pretty much as I remembered. I drew Tommy’s knife from my belt and tossed it in with the other stuff. I didn’t have a sheath for it and my belt was already crowded.

  But it was the sight of the torches in the bag that helped me identify the element missing from this scenario.

  “Hey,” I looked up at Darla, “where’s your torch? You had a torch when you were walking with him earlier.”

  “I threw it into the trees when I started running,” she whispered. “I didn’t want him being able to see me good enough to shoot me in the back before I got away.”

  Smart. Darla had a lot of shortcomings, but being stupid wasn’t one of them. Last time it hadn’t made enough of a difference, yet this time it had bought her enough time to reach me.

  “But why didn’t you just shoot him? You had the shotgun.”

  She didn’t reply, but the look on her face told me all I needed to know.

  I actually suspected the answer to my question as I asked it. Lots of people die with guns in their hands every year. Most of them do it for the simple reason that holding a gun and using it on another human being are two completely different things. Believe it or not, even here in Texas a great number of people have never so much as held a gun, much less shot it at anything.

  And truthfully, despite my gunplay in the past few minutes, I couldn’t be sure how I would handle shooting at my fellow man either. The bug monster hadn’t been human anymore, and I’m still not sure if Tommy qualified or not. Besides, in his case it had been a split-second reaction of self-defense. If I made it as far as the end of tonight’s quest, I would have to face that test for real.

  But the sight of the firearm in Darla’s hand bugged me for another reason.

  Something else was wrong here. Something about Tommy and the shotgun. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I knew it was important.

  Then it hit me.

  “The shotgun! Oh shit! Tommy didn’t have the shotgun!”

  “Of course not. Use your eyes! I’ve got it.”

  “No, I mean afte
rward! In the graveyard. Why didn’t he have it then?!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she cried, but once again I had gone off into my own head.

  Last time, Darla initially had the shotgun. And she apparently had it until Tommy chased her down on the path and killed her. So what did he do with it? Throw it away? Not a chance. I couldn’t imagine Tommy discarding such a powerful weapon. He was a psychopath, not an idiot. But if he took the shotgun from her, why hadn’t he had it with him when we faced him in the graveyard later?

  “Because he had been forced to use it on something else,” I realized aloud. “Only this time he won’t get the chance to because he’s dead. And if that something was in the graveyard…”

  Oh shit. This was bad. This was really bad. If something waiting in Woodlawn Gardens had forced a natural killer like Tommy to depart from his usual bow and arrows, I damn sure didn’t want it there when Ed, Casey, and I showed up later tonight.

  Now it was my problem, which meant an unscheduled detour on an already tight time schedule.

  “C’mon.” I stood and slung Tommy’s bag over my shoulder. “Clock’s running and we’ve gotta move.”

  I made it about ten feet before I realized Darla and the road flare weren’t following. I turned to see her standing in the same place, her face drawn and tight.

  “Darla…”

  “No!” she practically shouted. “You tell me what’s going on! Why are you in different clothes? Why isn’t your head bandaged anymore? Where did you get that backpack? Where did you get that gun?! And why the hell do you keep saying ‘last time’ and talking about things that didn’t happen?!”

  Aw shit. I didn’t have time for this.

  “Okay, forget what I said,” I urged. “It was just me shooting off my mouth. Something I’ve been known to do from time to time. Now come on.”

  “I… am not… stupid,” she hissed. “Now you tell me what’s going on or I’m turning around right now and going back to the cell tower.”

  Since she didn’t go back last time, I needed to nip that idea in the bud. Fortunately, in this case the truth would suffice. She needed to hear this anyway.