Nightwalk 2 Read online

  They weren’t the whip-like cords of the beast that had taken Ashlyn, but whitish ribbons of flesh interspersed with more string-like appendages. They descended in silence until they hung about four feet off the ground. There they stopped, gently undulating in the dim quiet. The nature and color of the tendrils reminded me of a jellyfish’s tentacles, and I could picture the creature hovering in mindless patience up there in the darkness.

  The thing must have been big, too.

  “So much for going back the way we came,” I whispered.

  “Shit. This means if we run into something ahead, we’re gonna be trapped.”

  “It sure narrows the hell out of our options, but we could still go over the wall if worse comes to worst.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she sighed, and glanced up at the wall beside her. Darla stood a couple inches taller than Casey, but that still put her at about five-six. And since she didn’t strike me as having anywhere near Ashlyn’s gymnastic skills or Casey’s tomboyish vigor, it might be iffy whether she could make the climb unassisted.

  This realization naturally led to a mental image of me struggling to help the scantily clad Darla over a wall while trying not to grab anything inappropriate as a horde of slavering monsters closed in.

  Sometimes I hate my life.

  We resumed our trek down the alley, now paying even closer attention to the carnivorous sky above us. The next two spaces between trees were crossed with even more alacrity. And to my alarm we watched another curtain of tentacles silently descend after we crossed the second one and checked behind us.

  It almost felt like we were being herded, although I suspected it was simply a matter of a brainless creature being triggered into a response as we walked beneath it. Or so I hoped.

  Fortunately, right about then we reached the spot where the alley turned to run behind the stores facing the highway. Since we had been hanging close to the graveyard fence, this left us standing in the corner where our wall met the one separating the back alleyway from the school grounds on the other side.

  Unfortunately, the rear wall appeared to be made of wood and stood a good foot taller than the graveyard fence. I guess the school on the other side didn’t want any hint of the alleyway behind it to show. Coventry Woods could be like that.

  I peered as far as I could up the length of the back alley, trying to assess the situation.

  “Hey,” Darla whispered behind me, “check this out.”

  I turned to see she had found a cinder brick lying on the ground and now stood on it to peer over the graveyard fence.

  “What is it?”

  “I think the other group… the other you… is leaving the graveyard.”

  She stepped down and I hurriedly took her place to get a peek for myself. There wasn’t much to look at. I could barely make out the glow of the lantern since the others had already turned south from the cemetery gate and started down the highway.

  But that was all I needed to see. Due to the timing, it couldn’t have been anybody else. Which meant Casey and “former me” were now heading toward the Crossroads gas station, and the man in white. They were now officially out of danger from fallout caused by any further actions by me.

  Hallelujah!

  Free at last.

  “Well then,” I announced expansively as I turned and stepped off the brick, “maybe now we can get this show on the road! How about we start by putting a little real light on the subject?”

  I pulled the half-spent flare from my back pocket and lit it once again. In its crimson glare, a much bigger swath of the alley now lay before us.

  It also revealed a couple of creatures resembling three-foot-long scaly cockroaches clinging near the top of the restaurant’s wall nearby. Dammit! They had been quiet and motionless, so I had missed them in the much dimmer light.

  Fortunately, they didn’t appear to be hostile. They both flared their own bioluminescence, but then scurried up and over the edge of the roof and out of sight. I felt a surge of relief at seeing them flee, but it unnerved me how I had allowed myself to get so close.

  Looking back the way we came, I could now see the pale tendrils of the sky monster still hanging like a curtain. West was no longer an option. To the north I could see nothing but more store backs, more cracked asphalt, the occasional dumpster, and more weeds growing along an even taller fence.

  “Well, it’s brighter,” Darla observed in a gloomy tone, “but the subject still looks like crap. All we need now is a dead wino next to the dumpster to make the picture complete.”

  Yeah, okay.

  At least it sounded like she had started to recover a bit of her equilibrium.

  “Come on.” I gestured for her to follow. “You know, it may not be as grim as all that. We’ve still got over an hour and a half, but if we get lucky and don’t run into any more surprises, we can be to the pond and have you on your way out of here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  Darla fell in line behind me without reply.

  She obviously had a low opinion of our chances when it came to avoiding any more surprises. Considering our track record so far, I didn’t have much hope of it either. Two years ago, Casey and I could have walked from my house to the Crossroads in about half an hour as well… but instead it took most of the night with us leaving a trail of dead companions behind. Hell, normally I could have walked from the cell tower, through the graveyard, and to this spot in less than fifteen minutes but tonight it had taken almost an hour.

  All encouraging assurances aside, I was worried.

  For one thing, I had left out the fact we would have to survive to get there… early or not. And every minute that Chandra’s machine continued to warp the world around us, things would continue to get worse.

  We slunk forward, hugging close to the wooden fence, for the narrow band of protection from the sky it afforded. The school had planted trees close together on the other side so we didn’t have the open spaces to cross like before, but these trees were smaller and didn’t overhang the fence nearly as far.

  Then to make matters more interesting, a distant clatter of metal came from the darkness in front of us.

  We froze, and peered ahead. It was a natural reaction, although judging by the sound it came from far away at the other end of the alley, and way past the reach of my flare. On any other night I would have just written it off as a raccoon knocking off a trashcan lid or turning over a bucket. But once again, this wasn’t any other night.

  On the other hand, it hadn’t been close and we couldn’t be stopping at every sound we heard out in the darkness. Besides, if it was rooting around in the trash then perhaps it was merely a scavenger and would pose us no threat as long as we left it alone.

  Still, I kept my senses strained forward from that point on.

  Which was why I nearly jumped out of my skin when Darla touched me on my shoulder and whispered next to my ear.

  “Door,” she mouthed almost silently, and pointed at the first rear door in the back alley to appear in our light.

  “What?” I tried not to squeak as I caught my breath.

  “The door. It’s open.”

  It took me a moment of squinting at it in the dim light to see what she meant. At first I thought she might be seeing things, but then on a second look I saw the crack of black down one side.

  It was open, if only by an inch or so.

  Further study suggested how that came to be. The metal around the level of the latch looked a little warped in a couple of places. Bent.

  “You’re right. Somebody took a prybar to it,” I whispered back. “Somebody broke in there.”

  “You mean there’s people in there?”

  I heard a hopeful tone rise in her voice and hurried to tamp it back down. We needed to stay on course and avoid any entanglements or distractions.

  “Maybe. Or maybe something already waiting in there ate those people when they broke in. We don’t need to know, and it’s too dangerous to find out. Our goal is the flood pond. Rememb
er?”

  She didn’t reply, but I could tell from the set of her jaw she didn’t like it. Darla equated people with security; safety in numbers. But she also wanted out of here and understood we were operating with a time limit. Besides, she knew my scenario of something awful and carnivorous being in there might be true as well.

  A big enough chance to worry me in fact.

  “Do me a favor and keep an eye on that door once we’re past it,” I added. “We’ve already got those tentacle things hanging around behind us, and I don’t need something sneaking out of there and trying an ambush.”

  She made a grouchy noise I generously took to be assent, and we moved on.

  The next two doors we encountered were closed tight and silent in the gloom.

  Following those we reached a stretch of wall that was blank except for one thing…the patch of thick, rootlike vines clinging to the wall about fifteen feet past the last door. They covered an egg-shaped area of about eight to ten feet wide with the thick end just touching the asphalt at the base of the wall. Clusters of pale, yellow fruit resembling oversized bunches of grapes hung from the vines in various places. They were translucent, and I thought I could see something tiny wriggling within each golden orb.

  The fruit made me nervous, yet as long we didn’t get close I could see no immediate threat from them. They simply added one more thing to keep an eye on as we crept past.

  But we didn’t creep far, because right about then the clatter from the other end of the alley came again. This time it sounded more like a lid to a large dumpster being repeatedly raised and dropped. It clanged once… twice… then a third and fourth time, immediately followed by a massive scraping noise as if something dragged the big container itself across the asphalt. Then another two clangs came from the darkness before silence fell.

  What in the hell?

  The pair of us stood petrified, hardly daring to move.

  “What is doing that?” Darla whispered.

  “Well, it’s definitely not a raccoon.”

  I gotta give her credit, when Darla looks at you like you’re an idiot, she looks at you like she truly and passionately believes you’re an idiot.

  “Well, what do you think it is?” I continued, albeit a tad defensively.

  “I don’t know,” she breathed, then stared wide-eyed back into the darkness and swallowed, “but maybe you should get a new flare and light it with your old one. Then throw what’s left of your old flare down there so we can get a look at whatever it is before getting any closer.”

  Hmmm, not bad. It was a solution, and only five or ten minutes remained of my old flare anyway.

  I had her fish another thirty-minute flare from my pack and hand it to me before holstering my gun and lighting it as suggested. Having done this, I drew back, took a couple of running steps, and then hurled the old flare as hard as I could down the alley.

  It wasn’t a bad throw. It travelled eighty or ninety feet...

  …and it was probably still over ten feet off the ground when it bounced off the side of the creature.

  Yeah.

  The beast lifted its great head from the dumpster it had been rummaging in and turned to stare at us. It didn’t look exactly happy.

  And the worst thing was I recognized it right away.

  I could only gape in helpless disbelief at this new insanity revealed before us. Chandra’s machine must have slipped and found a new gear. Or maybe a device capable of fusing dimensions didn’t have any problem plucking something from the far end the fourth one. I had no idea. I thought by now nothing could surprise me, but I never expected this. Words completely failed me.

  The same couldn’t be said for Darla.

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” she whimpered. “It’s a goddamned T-rex!”

  ###

  Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  The Tyrant Lizard.

  The Big T.

  When you absolutely, positively want to ruin somebody’s underpants, just drop them in a dark back alley with one of these bad boys and consider your mission accomplished.

  I almost lost the ability to breathe.

  The monster towered in the red glow of the flare at its feet like a vision straight out of some prehistoric hell. And it looked pissed. I don’t know why it was rummaging around in a back-alley dumpster — probably because it damn well felt like it — but now it glared back at the two of us like a Mesozoic eating-machine that had just discovered its dinner came with a side dish and was considering the possibilities.

  I opened my mouth to whisper to Darla but nothing came out. Then I closed it, swallowed hard, and tried again.

  “Darla,” I choked out, “listen carefully. I want you to be very, very…”

  I stopped there because that’s when I heard her running footsteps fading behind me.

  Crap.

  A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that she had chosen her own course of action and now fled back the way we had come. And since prey behaves exactly the same way…

  …the ground literally trembled beneath me and I whipped my head forward again to see the massive saurian stomping its way around the dumpster and starting our way.

  Right then, I would have happily stood still and let it go after Darla for acting like lunch. Hell, I would have tossed it a bottle of ketchup on the way by. But, no. Unfortunately that didn’t appear to be an option. Because for some reason the great predator wasn’t focused on the woman fleeing into the darkness. Instead, its eyes were fixed on the stationary imbecile holding up a bright road flare like a miniature Statue of Liberty with a death wish.

  Yeah, that would be me.

  “Goddammit, Darla!” I wailed and took off after her.

  I ran like I had never run before in my life. I pushed my poor middle-aged body way past the redline, and I feared it wouldn’t be enough. The monster never roared — mainly because in real life predators don’t roar when chasing prey — but I could actually feel it gaining. It would be snatching me up in its jaws in seconds.

  My only chance lay in the hope I could reach my goal within those seconds.

  Ahead I saw Darla, now visible again in my flare, reach the first door we had passed and skid as she grabbed the knob and jerked herself to a stop. I knew she had no idea what might wait inside as she ripped the door open, but she knew damn well what thundered up behind her. She dove into the darkness without pausing one instant.

  The door now stood half open due to bouncing off the back wall and stuck straight out into the alley. Since the opening sat on the other side of the door from me, this was going to make for a tricky maneuver at full speed. Especially since I could actually hear the blast of the Rex’s breath right behind me.

  At the last second I did a controlled skid. I caught the doorknob on the other side just as it became visible, then jerked myself toward the black opening in a desperate dive for safety.

  The titanic jaws closed with an audible “CLOMP” right at my heels as I landed on the floor inside.

  A split second later the door slammed shut as some part of the beast must have rammed into it, but once again it bounced right back open.

  I scrambled forward as if my very life depended on it. About ten feet in I reached where Darla leaned against the door directly across the little back service room that led to the store proper.

  “The flare!” she shrieked down at me.

  I looked up to see her pushing with her shoulder against the barely open door while staring wild-eyed back down at me.

  “The flare!” she screamed again. “Get rid of the flare, you idiot!”

  I flushed with anger and started forming a retort, but then reality broke through…

  Oh crap! Of course, the flare! With the light from the flare shining out through the door, the beast knew we were right inside! I would have to put off discussing with Darla the proper way to address the guy trying to protect her ass until later.

  I rolled over, and as I sat up I threw the flare as hard as I could back out the
open door… whereupon it promptly bounced off the face of the Tyrannosaur looking back in the door and rolled to a stop between my splayed legs.

  Oh holy ever-loving shit!

  The Rex then pushed its massive, eight-foot head into the doorway. Seeing as how this was only a ten or eleven-foot wide room, that meant I had history’s most feared set of jaws pretty much sitting right in my lap.

  And that’s when I lost my mind.

  I had transcended to an entirely new level of scared. I sat wrapped in an ecstasy of fear so intense I couldn’t scream. My brain locked up so hard I even forgot I had a gun to defend myself with. There was no thought, there was no me… just a mindless ball of terror bereft of the ability of rational action, while right behind me Darla screamed at me to do so something. To do anything.

  Anything at all.

  Which probably explains why I grabbed the flare and stuck it up the T-rex’s nose.

  Hey, I did something. Okay?

  Needless to say, this was not a popular move in dino-land. The world in front of me morphed into a fleshy, tooth-rimmed tunnel that unleashed an ear-shattering howl in my face. The smell of rotten meat overwhelmed me, while the blast of the monster’s shriek actually caused me to shield my face from the noxious wind.

  It whipped its head from side to side, then yanked itself out of the doorway with enough force to warp the top of the doorframe where it hit its skull on the way out. Another horrific bellow followed the first. From the ululating sound of it, the creature must have still been throwing its head back and forth.

  Unfortunately, the sound didn’t fade which meant the beast wasn’t going anywhere. And I had an ugly feeling that as soon as he slung the flare out he would be back to have a word with me about that little stunt.

  I didn’t have time for lying around. I scrambled to my feet and joined Darla at the door.

  “Dammit! Something is blocking this thing!” she gasped and pushed harder against the door. “Hey in there! Let us in!”

  I put my shoulder against the door next to her, and joined in the pushing. Under our combined efforts, the inch-wide crack widened a couple inches farther. But we needed it to be a lot wider, and time wasn’t our friend here.