Nightwalk 2 Page 7

  Its grip tightened and I knew I was in trouble. I had no idea if this bastard was poisonous but constriction obviously played a big part in its game. Only the fact I had been reaching back over my shoulder kept me from being doomed right then. As things stood, I had one arm both gripped in the thing’s jaws and pinned to my side above the elbow. It had also twined around both my legs, although each in their separate coils as opposed to being lashed together. I could move them, but I wouldn’t be able to get back to my feet.

  There was also the matter of it starting to become hard to breathe.

  My hand fumbled around and finally closed over the handle of the machete. I pulled the weapon from its sheath and attempted to bring it into play. That’s when I learned things were even worse than I thought. One of the monster’s thick coils circled my chest and went under the armpit on that side, which meant I couldn’t really swing effectively. The best I could manage were short, choppy swings by bending my arm at the elbow fast. They didn’t appear to accomplish much. Seeing this made me realize I had gone for the wrong weapon. I should have pulled the knife on my belt earlier and sawed at the monster’s spine. Now I could neither see nor reach my belt, so the knife didn’t count as an option anymore.

  I groaned aloud as I strained against the creature’s tightening grip and rolled over on my side. If I didn’t figure something out fast, I would most likely die. The creature had me half beat, and the only thing I had in the form of cavalry was Darla.

  Darla with her shotgun.

  Oh shit.

  The spine-chilling thought of Darla emptying her 12-gauge into the pair of us as we struggled on the ground had me squirming with renewed vigor. She didn’t strike me as the type to know much about weapons, nor what a bad idea that would be. Plus, I didn’t know for sure where her head was at the moment.

  With another tremendous effort, I managed to change my angle enough to allow me to arch my neck and look in her direction. I half expected to be looking down the barrels of the gun when I did, with her finger already on the trigger.

  That didn’t turn out to be the case, but the sight that greeted my eyes still made my blood run cold.

  At least I had the finger on the trigger part right.

  Darla clutched the shotgun to her chest, with the barrel pushed up against the bottom of her jaw. Her face was drawn, and her eyes huge and showing lots of whites. It only took one look at her to see the gun could go off any second.

  “Don’t you dare!” I snarled, and struggled even harder. “Goddammit, I got this!”

  Brave words, yet if I didn’t change things fast they would also be my last.

  The monster had my gun pinned and useless. My weak flailing with the machete hadn’t accomplished anything either. The knives were unavailable and anything I might have had in my backpack couldn’t be reached. Tommy’s duffel bag lay pinned under a couple of coils so I couldn’t reach it either. Not good. Not good at all. As if to emphasize that fact, the thing’s coils tightened again and my sight began to go red around the edges.

  But then I realized I still had one more weapon available.

  If I could reach it.

  Arching my back, I struggled anew and rolled over on my stomach. This didn’t really help anything, but I wasn’t going for position. Besides, breathing had just become a thing of the past and I didn’t have the time for another prolonged effort to fight free. I concentrated on bringing my knees up a little and trying to rock my way over again.

  It took three tries, and I now had large black planets floating in front of my eyes, but I finally succeeding in rolling over on to my side… and then to my back…

  …and right on top of the road flare.

  That caught its attention.

  Those flares burn hot, and I could feel the heat of the thing through the creature. But obviously not as much as the monster felt it.

  It released a piercing whistle and thrashed wildly. Some of the coils loosened, allowing me more maneuvering room with my non-trapped arm. I immediately took advantage of this to drop the machete and use that arm to help me roll back on my side. It gave the creature a momentary respite from the pain, but at the same time it allowed me to twist around and grab the flare in my hand.

  I didn’t waste a second in ramming the burning end straight into one of the compound eyes of the skull biting my arm. The whistle rose in volume to the level of a shriek. But the skull also bit down harder, causing me to scream as well.

  For one long, agonized instant we stayed locked in that position; me driving the fire ever deeper into the thing’s eye socket, and it trying to bite my arm off. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t even focus enough to appreciate the fact the monster had to be hurting worse than me. All I could do was sing my part in our little duet of agony.

  Then things went really crazy.

  The monster’s jaw unhinged and my savaged arm fell free… followed by the skull and every bone in the monster’s body. I had no idea what happened. One second I had been straining to breathe against a powerful constricting body like a corrugated pipe of hard leather, and the next I was covered in bleached bones while something flapped and whistled around me.

  I waved the flare around in a frantic attempt to keep the flapping thing away. That only helped so much. Then, realizing I could feel it squirming beneath me as well, I rolled over next to the mausoleum on the left side of the track and scrambled back to my feet.

  I stared wildly at the spot where the monster and I had fought. Nothing but a skull and scattered bones remained. But then a motion caught my eye and I turned to see something dark slithering along the ground around the corner of the other mausoleum.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” I growled and strode after it.

  Holding the flare aloft, I came around the corner to see the shape slither up against the wall of the mausoleum. It appeared to flow up the wall like a shadow, obviously probing for a crack or some other means of entrance. Then, realizing I now had it cornered, it narrowed and twisted to face me.

  It was the skin of the monster.

  No… wait… the skin WAS the monster!

  The thing rose before me like an empty cloak, with an inner lining thick with hanging threads and strings. I could see the bullet hole from my earlier shot along with a larger hole burned through by the flare. And now that I saw it for what it truly was, I understood how it operated. Apparently it could co-opt the bones of its enemies and use them for a skeleton of its own.

  Not exactly the kind of creature I wanted to leave hanging around a graveyard for others to come across.

  Nor did I intend to.

  I had discovered this monster’s weak spot and wasted no time in going straight for it. Pulling one of Tommy’s Molotov cocktails from the duffel bag, I lit it with the flare and smashed the bottle against the mausoleum wall directly beside it.

  The fuel splashed, ignited, and the air filled with the whistled shrieks of the creature as it went up like a torch. It flapped, thrashed and burned against the mausoleum. There was something almost piteous in its convulsions. But since this thing had just finished trying to kill me, I was a little short on pity. I didn’t waste time watching, instead running around to the path to scoop up the machete before returning to finish the job.

  It was short nasty work, and by the time the thing stopped burning I had hacked it to pieces.

  I panted from both shock and exertion as I probed a couple of the larger pieces with the tip of the machete. They were now like stiff pieces of charred leather. Even so, I did not allow myself the relief of accepting its death until I had checked every piece. By then the pain, along with the blood running down my arm, had let me know a little first aid was in order.

  Not to mention, I still fumed over a different matter and it needed dealing with as well.

  “Alright Darla,” I snapped as I came back around the mausoleum and onto the path, “what in God’s name were you…”

  At that point I stopped due to an obvious lack of Darla.

 
; ###

  “Darla?”

  Nothing.

  I received no answer other than the flare’s hiss and the distant death throes of Coventry Woods. I now stood alone in a puddle of red light in the middle of a dark cemetery.

  What the hell? Did something else lurk in this graveyard? Had something else snatched her while I had been busy finishing off the skin monster? Why hadn’t I heard it? Why hadn’t she screamed?”

  “Darla!” I called down the path toward the rear of Woodlawn Gardens.

  Had she run? Had she decided to try and rejoin the other group? The latter thought made me slightly queasy since it hadn’t happened last time, and I had just gotten mauled in an attempt to patch history back to a semi-close semblance of its earlier self.

  Yet at the same time, it didn’t really make sense. I couldn’t imagine Darla going out into the darkness alone, even if it were to join others.

  “Darla!” I slowly turned, peering out into the darkness around me, “where the hell are… OH SHIT!”

  That’s when I spotted Darla.

  She hadn’t retreated from the graveyard at all. As a matter of fact, she had gone farther into it. She must have somehow slipped past me while I focused on finishing off the monster behind the mausoleum.

  Dimly visible at the edge of the flare’s light, she stared blank-faced back at me from where she sat at the end of the bench under the Mother Mary statue.

  Yeah, that bench.

  The very same bench where her savaged body had been displayed before.

  Truthfully, I could have lived without seeing that. It probably ranked right up there in the top three creepiest sights I had ever witnessed. I think every hair on my body went erect. And for just a split second, my mind superimposed the memory from before on the scene in front of me, giving me a brief illusion of the woman sitting down at the feet of her own mutilated corpse.

  The impression struck with enough force to make me take a step back, shake my head and look again.

  Nothing. Nothing but Darla sitting on an empty bench.

  “Yeahhhh… okay.” I recovered and stalked toward her. “So tell me something Darla, what the hell was that back there? Your idea of providing backup? That’s just great! Now I not only have to concentrate on not getting eaten by whatever we run into, but I get to wait in suspense for the sound of you blowing your brains out behind me?!”

  She looked up at me, her jaw clenched and face tight.

  “I was scared,” she grated.

  “You were scared, so you were going to shoot yourself?”

  “I thought you were going to die!”

  “Right,” I eyed her doubtfully, “and I’m just so damn lovable you couldn’t bear the thought of going on without me.”

  “God, no! I hate you! I never knew I could hate somebody so much until I met you! But… but you’re… oh goddammit! Just shut up!”

  Well, there’s gratitude for you. At least I could take comfort in knowing my amazing people skills still operated normally. But since I’m only marginally conversant in the language of crazy, I decided to let her alone for the moment. It’s not like I had any particular fondness for her either.

  On the other hand, I did have other matters to attend to.

  I tossed the flare onto the ground nearby so it still illuminated the area but wouldn’t bother us with its fumes. Then I sat on the bench beside her and fished the first aid kit from my backpack.

  According to the man in white, I would either die in the next two hours or reappear completely unscathed on my back porch… so the main things I needed to concern myself with were staunching any bleeding and alleviating pain. This would be over, one way or another, before infection could become a factor. Still, I smeared antibiotic ointment over the bite before beginning the awkward task of wrapping my own forearm.

  Darla pointedly ignored the process, choosing instead to stare off into the darkness away from me. That meant I couldn’t see her face, but I couldn’t help but notice how the cords on her neck still stood out. I could also tell she breathed slightly funny, as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath but panted in slow motion.

  General nastiness aside, I sensed trouble forming here. And while I might be good at diagnosing problems for the characters I write, real people are often a mystery to me.

  Fortunately, even though I didn’t have her with me, it was Casey who provided the first bit of insight into the problem.

  “Mark,” the memory of Casey’s words rose in my mind, “to women like Darla, it’s not about caring or companionship. It’s not even about sex. Those are just the cards she plays in an obvious way so you don’t see the other cards coming. To her, it’s all about protection… security. And men are what she puts between herself and the world. She wears them like a tool belt.”

  Right.

  In the past three hours Darla had lost her home, her husband, and her boyfriend to a sequence of hideous creatures. Then when she made a desperate play to get another protector, he had turned out to be a maniac who nearly killed her… who she just recently discovered HAD killed her. Now she sat in a graveyard with nothing but a man she considered an enemy between her and the killers circling out there in the darkness, and I had made it obvious I had other priorities than her. Her entire survival strategy at life had failed her.

  She could probably feel the Grim Reaper’s embrace at that very moment.

  Once again I found myself uncomfortably close to feeling sorry for her. But at the same time, I had a world to save and a ticking clock to whip me forward.

  So what the hell was I supposed to do with her? She shouldn’t have even been alive, but I had made a righteous mess out of that. And weirdly enough, her being alive made me feel somewhat responsible for her. In a strange way it actually was my fault she continued to be in this mess. But I also didn’t relish the thought of towing her along on tonight’s quest. First of all, I didn’t trust her. Secondly, while Casey had taught me to never underestimate somebody merely because of their gender, Darla had nothing in common with Casey. Hell, she embodied a good half dozen of the female stereotypes that drove girls like Casey crazy.

  And this was who I considered having beside me? Especially as I fought my way through a death-filled obstacle course on a race the world couldn’t afford me to lose?

  As if to underscore those concerns, the faint sound of a thousand screams came from the darkness to the north.

  I straightened in recognition as soon as I heard it. It sounded almost like a distant sporting event, but I knew those weren’t cheers. They were the shrieks of the dying.

  The monster the man in white had referred to as a shoggoth had now risen from the duck pond in the park and started slaughtering everybody at the playground. That meant Allen and Agnes Treadwell had just died. It also meant Ed, Casey, and the former me would now turn and head for the very spot where Darla and I currently sat.

  Time to get moving.

  Using my free hand and teeth, I finished tying off the bandage on my forearm. Then I did a swift repacking of the first aid kit in my backpack. After making sure my gun and all blades were secure, I readied myself to stand. I put my hand on the bench beside me to help push me to my feet…

  …and that’s when things truly went off the deep end.

  My hand landed in something wet, causing it to skid slightly and me to instinctively jerk it away. I held it up before me and gasped at the sight. Blood glistened in the harsh light of the flare. It covered my palm and dripped from each finger before my horrified eyes.

  “Shit!”

  I leapt to my feet and wheeled to stare at the seat, expecting to see the entire surface covered in gore.

  Nothing.

  The bench sat clean and ghostly white in the red glare.

  What in the world? It should have been running with blood. I gazed in disbelief at the seat, and then back at my own hand. To my astonishment, my hand now glowed clean and pale in the crimson light as well.

  “That’s not right,” I gasped.
“I know what I saw. Hell, I know what I felt!”

  “What are you talking about?” Darla inquired in a tired monotone.

  “The blood!” I turned to face her. “There was all this… AIEEEE!!!!”

  I screamed like a little girl and stumbled backward onto my butt. This time I nearly had a heart attack.

  Darla’s face was gone.

  Only a gory mass of raw, slashed flesh remained. It seeped and oozed blood that fell to drench her little crop top beneath. And I recognized this handiwork as soon as I saw it.

  This had been the face Jack the Ripper gave his last victim, Mary Kelly… and the very same face Tommy had given Darla two years ago. It was the utter annihilation of everything recognizable in their appearance.

  It represented the work of two madmen who left their victims no humanity in death.

  And then it was gone.

  “What blood?” Darla looked around her in alarm. “What are you talking about?!”

  Only now she looked exactly as before. No blood. No mutilations. No visible injuries of any sort.

  Words failed me. I could only gape at her now unmarked features.

  What in the hell was going on here? Was I losing my mind?

  “What’s wrong with you?” Darla demanded in a shaky tone. “What are you doing?”

  I tried to find my voice, but could only shake my head. Even as I did, it happened again. I saw a dark puddle start to spread from beneath the bench she sat on. Even worse, when I looked back up at her face I saw a red line start to form across her throat.

  And that’s when I got it.

  The answer came more from gut instinct than logic, but I immediately knew it was right.

  I also realized this time the line on her neck would be no illusion.

  “Darla!” I shouted as I struggled to my feet. “Get away from that bench! NOW!”